Program Notes
Guest speaker: Andrew Weil
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
NOTE:
All quotes below are by Dr. Andrew Weil
04:41 “There are no good or bad drugs. Drugs are what we make of them. They have good and bad uses.”
05:04 “I know of no culture in the world at present or any time in the past that has not been heavily involved with one or more psychoactive substances.”
06:33 “Alcohol, any way you look at it, is the most toxic and most dangerous of all psychoactive drugs. In any sense, in terms of medical toxicity, behavioral toxicity, there is no other drug for which the association between crime and violence is so clear cut … and tobacco, in the form of cigarettes is THE most addictive of all drugs.”
08:47 “What could be a more flagrant example of drug pushing than public support of that industry [tobacco and cigarettes].”
12:38 “I see a great failure in the world in general to distinguish between drug use and drug abuse.”
16:25 “Another very common use, in all cultures, of psychoactive substances is to give people transcendent experiences. To allow them to transcend their human and ego boundaries to feel greater contact with the supernatural, or with the spiritual, or with the divine, however they phrase it in their terms.”
17:54 “Drugs don’t have spiritual potential, human beings have spiritual potential. And it may be that we need techniques to move us in that direction, and the use of psychoactive drugs clearly is one path that has helped many people.”
19:59 “Why is it that the human brain and plants should have the same chemicals in them?”
22:39 “The effects of drugs are as much dependent on expectation and setting, on set and setting, as they are on pharmacology. We shape the effects of drugs. All drugs do is make you feel temporarily different, physically and psychologically.”
25:26 “The effects of drugs can be completely shaped by cultural expectations, by individual expectations, by setting as well.”
28:22 “The manner of introducing a drug into the body is crucially determinant of the effects the people experience. And especially of its adverse effects, both short term and long term.”
31:51 “I think it’s unfortunate that in this culture we have fallen so much into the habit of relying on refined, purified durative of plants, in highly concentrated form, both for recreational drugs and for medicine. And have formed the habit of thinking that this is somehow more scientific and effective, that botanical drugs are old-fashioned, unscientific, messy. In fact, they’re much safer, and sometimes the quality and effects are better.”
32:55 “It’s we who determine whether drugs are destructive or whether they’re beneficial. It’s not any inherent property of drugs.”
41:36 “The use of yage, or ayahuasca, in Amazonian Indian cultures is often credited with giving people visions that have valid content.”
50:25 “But I think healing, like religious experience, is an innate potential of the body. It’s not something that comes in a drug. All a drug can do is give you a push in a certain direction, and I think that even there expectation plays a great role in that.”
Chocolate to Morphine: Understanding Mind-Active Drugs<…
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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 ►
Well, I’ve got a real treat for us today.
00:00:28 ►
This is another of the tapes that Jay sent me.
00:00:31 ►
You remember Jay from last week’s podcast, I’m sure.
00:00:35 ►
And thank you, Jay, for this blast from the past.
00:00:38 ►
What I’m about to play is another of the talks that were given at what the label calls
00:00:44 ►
UCSB Conference, May 1983.
00:00:49 ►
And it’s titled, Psychoactive Drugs Throughout Human History.
00:00:54 ►
Now this talk was given by Dr. Andrew Weil,
00:00:57 ►
who at the time was at the very early stages
00:00:59 ►
of what has become quite a notable career
00:01:03 ►
as a professor, writer, and lecturer.
00:01:06 ►
And if you live in the States, you’ve probably seen this big, bushy, bearded doctor on PBS,
00:01:11 ►
and often during their pledge drives.
00:01:14 ►
But don’t get me going about PBS, the propaganda broadcasting system,
00:01:19 ►
because we’ve got a lot more positive things to think about right now.
00:01:23 ►
because we’ve got a lot more positive things to think about right now.
00:01:29 ►
I hope you enjoy hearing this talk as much as I did when I heard it for the first time a couple of days ago.
00:01:35 ►
I know for sure that some of our fellow salonners are going to enjoy it, particularly the ones who were with us at what at the time was billed as the last great mushroom conference of the millennium.
00:01:44 ►
Back then, we had quite a conference, and in case you’re wondering,
00:01:49 ►
no, it wasn’t a conference about psychedelic mushrooms.
00:01:52 ►
Although, if I remember correctly, I think Ken Kesey did his best to bring the subject up a few times.
00:01:59 ►
But it was a fantastic conference, and everyone from Jonathan Ott to Sasha Shulgin gave presentations. And
00:02:06 ►
since it was held during the week of Halloween, we had a costume party that I just now realized
00:02:12 ►
was the most memorable Halloween party of my life. I can’t say for sure if Dr. Weil was
00:02:19 ►
at that party because everybody was in costume that night. But I can say for sure that he’s a really approachable and a very nice person.
00:02:28 ►
And now we get to hear what he was thinking about a quarter of a century ago.
00:02:33 ►
Now, since the emcee from the conference does a great job of introducing Dr. Weil,
00:02:38 ►
I’m just going to turn on the old cassette recorder,
00:02:42 ►
and we’ll join the audience at the Psychedelics and Spirituality Conference in Santa Barbara, California
00:02:48 ►
back in 1983. And as we begin,
00:02:53 ►
why don’t you think back for a moment and consider where you
00:02:56 ►
were at the end of May in 1983
00:02:59 ►
when the following took place.
00:03:05 ►
We are very fortunate to have with us Dr. Andrew Weil,
00:03:10 ►
who is recognized worldwide as perhaps the definitive expert on drugs,
00:03:18 ►
recreational, addictive, and medical.
00:03:22 ►
Dr. Weil is a research associate in ethnopharmacology
00:03:26 ►
at the Harvard Botanical Museum.
00:03:30 ►
He’s an adjunct professor of addiction studies
00:03:32 ►
at Arizona State University.
00:03:35 ►
He is president of the Beneficial Plant Research Association,
00:03:40 ►
and he is the author of Natural Mind, Marriage of the Sun and Moon
00:03:45 ►
and his new book
00:03:47 ►
which has just been published by Houghton Mifflin
00:03:49 ►
Drugs, Chocolate to Morphine
00:03:51 ►
copies of which we hope to have available tomorrow
00:03:54 ►
in the fall he’s going to have a new book out
00:03:57 ►
on health and healing
00:03:58 ►
and I think we’re in every way
00:04:01 ►
privileged and fortunate to have
00:04:02 ►
speaking with us tonight
00:04:04 ►
Dr. Andrew Weil.
00:04:13 ►
Good evening.
00:04:14 ►
I’m going to depart from what the program says I’m going to talk about.
00:04:18 ►
First, because I think many of you have heard me talk about shamans
00:04:21 ►
and use of hallucinogenic plants in Central and South America,
00:04:27 ►
and also because I would rather talk more generally about the role of psychoactive substances in human life throughout history.
00:04:35 ►
I have been involved in the study of psychoactive plants and drugs for over 20 years,
00:04:42 ►
and in that time, there are three things that I have learned about them.
00:04:48 ►
Some of them, the last one in particular, has crystallized only in the past two years.
00:04:52 ►
But I’d like to just tell you what those three things are.
00:04:54 ►
They’re fairly simply stated, but it took me a long time to learn them.
00:04:57 ►
The first is that there are no good or bad drugs, that drugs are what we make of them.
00:05:03 ►
They have good and bad drugs, that drugs are what we make of them. They have good and bad uses.
00:05:06 ►
And that if you look around the world, the clearest pattern that you find is that every
00:05:11 ►
human culture is involved with drugs, with one or more.
00:05:14 ►
The only possible exception are the Eskimos who had the misfortune not to be able to grow
00:05:18 ►
drug plants and had to wait for us to give them alcohol, which they now abuse terribly.
00:05:22 ►
I know of no culture in the world at present or at any time in the past that has not been
00:05:27 ►
heavily involved with one or more psychoactive substances.
00:05:30 ►
But the usual pattern is that a culture will approve the use of one or a small number,
00:05:37 ►
and at the same time disapprove the use of all the rest, especially those that other
00:05:41 ►
cultures use.
00:05:42 ►
But what’s very interesting is that there’s no agreement from culture to culture as to which are the good ones and which are the bad ones.
00:05:47 ►
If you are a Muslim, alcohol is the big bad drug.
00:05:50 ►
But the use of opium may be tolerated, the use of hashish may be tolerated.
00:05:54 ►
There is even an encouraged legitimate use in many Muslim countries
00:05:57 ►
of a stimulant leaf called kat,
00:06:00 ►
which is the closest thing that nature produces to amphetamine.
00:06:03 ►
Some years ago I was in Ethiopia with an anthropological expedition,
00:06:08 ►
which is one of the major growing and using areas of cot.
00:06:12 ►
In that country, it is the Muslim minority,
00:06:15 ►
which is the economic and socially deprived class,
00:06:18 ►
that choose cot, and the dominant Christians drink alcohol.
00:06:22 ►
And the Christians are trying to stamp out the use of cot as an evil drug,
00:06:26 ►
which leads to amotivational syndrome, or however they phrase it, it’s the same thing.
00:06:30 ►
And they have invited the World Health Organization to come in
00:06:33 ►
and solve this terrible drug problem in their country.
00:06:37 ►
If you are a mainstream American today,
00:06:41 ►
alcohol and caffeine and tobacco are accepted drugs to the point that they’re not
00:06:48 ►
even recognized for the drugs they are, despite the fact that alcohol, any way you look at it,
00:06:52 ►
is the most toxic and most dangerous of all psychoactive drugs in any sense, in terms of
00:06:58 ►
medical toxicity, behavioral toxicity. There is no other drug for which the association between crime and violence is so
00:07:05 ►
clear-cut or serious medical toxicity. And tobacco in the form of cigarettes is the most addictive
00:07:11 ►
of all drugs. There is no drug that comes close to the addictiveness of cigarettes in terms of
00:07:16 ►
how fast the addiction forms and how difficult it is to break and what a high percentage of people
00:07:22 ►
who try that substance get hooked. Almost any drug you look at, you can find a substantial number of regular users who are not addicted.
00:07:29 ►
In the case of alcohol, maybe 90% of regular users of alcohol are not addicted.
00:07:34 ►
In the case of heroin and opiates, I don’t know, there’s no statistics,
00:07:38 ►
but I would guess that anywhere from 30% to 50% of regular users are not truly addicted,
00:07:42 ►
although some of them may get to be over time.
00:07:44 ►
50% of regular users are not truly addicted, although some of them may get to be over time.
00:07:50 ►
But how many cigarette smokers do you know who can smoke one or two a day or one or two a week?
00:07:52 ►
They exist, but they’re very rare.
00:07:54 ►
I think probably under 1%. And despite that fact, and despite the fact that that is one of the most obnoxious of drug habits
00:08:00 ►
in that it exposes non-users to the drug, and nothing else does that except marijuana, and there’s very little public use of that.
00:08:07 ►
Despite that fact, and despite the fact that the majority of cigarette addicts begin their
00:08:12 ►
addiction as teenagers, 90% of them, and that is well known, the industry that purveys that
00:08:17 ►
drug is supported by public tax money.
00:08:20 ►
I don’t know whether any of you know this, but the columns on the Senate side of the Capitol building in Washington are decorated with tobacco leaves as a gesture of the economic importance of that crop in the economy of the United States,
00:08:34 ►
which happened after the growth of the modern cigarette industry, which led to addiction because it produced a cigarette that could be inhaled deeply and often,
00:08:45 ►
cigarette that could be inhaled deeply and often, and created an industry whose product was in total demand, led to the economic reconstruction of the South after the Civil War, and that
00:08:50 ►
is where that economic debt was owed.
00:08:53 ►
Well, given that, the extent of that, and the blindness that exists about the nature
00:08:56 ►
of that substance and what it is, you can just see the level of irrationality that pervades
00:09:01 ►
our culture.
00:09:02 ►
All the talk about drug dealing and drug dealers and pushers. What could be a more flagrant example of drug pushing than public support of that
00:09:10 ►
industry? Again, I say there are no good drugs or no bad drugs. I think that tobacco may have
00:09:17 ►
legitimate uses, but in the form of cigarettes, its addictiveness is so great that my advice to
00:09:23 ►
a young person would be that if you’re dying to know what tobacco is
00:09:26 ►
chew it
00:09:27 ►
put some in your mouth
00:09:28 ►
or put powdered tobacco in your nose
00:09:30 ►
that will tell you all you need to know about tobacco
00:09:32 ►
and you’ll have time to decide what you want to do about it
00:09:35 ►
but if you experiment with cigarettes
00:09:37 ►
the chances are overwhelming
00:09:38 ►
that you will be an addict
00:09:40 ►
before you know what’s happened to you
00:09:41 ►
and that’s a very difficult addiction to break
00:09:43 ►
and that’s an example of what I would include
00:09:46 ►
in a real drug education course,
00:09:48 ►
which I see very little of in this culture.
00:09:51 ►
Now, just to go on with this little survey,
00:09:53 ►
if, however, you are in a subculture in this country,
00:09:55 ►
let’s take, say, an Indian in the Native American church.
00:09:59 ►
Alcohol is, again, a terrible thing.
00:10:01 ►
The Native American church,
00:10:02 ►
which uses peyote sacramentally and ritualistically,
00:10:06 ►
is the only approach, other than Alcoholics Anonymous, that I know of that has any success with alcoholism,
00:10:12 ►
which is notoriously resistant to any other form of treatment.
00:10:14 ►
So in that group, peyote is not a drug.
00:10:16 ►
If you call it a drug, that’s a very bad thing to say about peyote.
00:10:19 ►
I mean, drugs are always what other people use.
00:10:23 ►
If you are in the Native American church, peyote is a sacrament or it’s medicine.
00:10:26 ►
And tobacco is also.
00:10:28 ►
Tobacco is considered a sacrament, which is used along with peyote in a ritual setting.
00:10:32 ►
But alcohol is terrible.
00:10:33 ►
Marijuana is likely to be terrible.
00:10:35 ►
LSD is likely to be terrible.
00:10:37 ►
It’s a white man’s drug, not a natural sacrament.
00:10:41 ►
Well, you find this pattern again and again.
00:10:42 ►
If you go around, I know certain subcultures in this country
00:10:46 ►
that value the use of marijuana and all of the psychedelic drugs,
00:10:51 ►
the indoles and phenethylamines,
00:10:52 ►
but are very condemning of things like Quaalude and barbiturates
00:10:56 ►
and medical drugs and sometimes coffee, tobacco, and alcohol.
00:11:01 ►
I know medical doctors that think that any products in the pharmaceutical industry are okay.
00:11:05 ►
They’re medicines, but anything illegal is terrible and damaging.
00:11:08 ►
I mean, this is where the origin of much drug research that sets out to prove the harmfulness of these unaccepted substances,
00:11:16 ►
which has led to terrible blunders in the medical literature,
00:11:19 ►
I think the classic of which was the dissemination of the story that LSD broke chromosomes
00:11:27 ►
that was published in the country’s leading medical journal,
00:11:30 ►
the New England Journal of Medicine,
00:11:31 ►
and endorsed editorially in that same issue,
00:11:34 ►
with a very prominent editorial saying this was a highly important article
00:11:36 ►
that everybody should be aware of.
00:11:37 ►
It was terrible research.
00:11:39 ►
And what was terrible about it should have been apparent
00:11:42 ►
at the time the article was submitted.
00:11:44 ►
And legitimate experiments to test the hypotheses that LSD broke chromosomes were not done until
00:11:49 ►
some time later, and they consistently showed that there was no effect on chromosomes.
00:11:54 ►
That research was difficult to get published, did not generate publicity in the media, and
00:11:58 ►
to this day, ten years later, I meet people that think LSD has adverse effects on genetic
00:12:02 ►
material, which it doesn’t at all.
00:12:03 ►
That just is an example of how even medical scientists
00:12:07 ►
can get involved in the same kind of irrationality
00:12:10 ►
and prejudice about good drugs and bad drugs,
00:12:13 ►
so that the ones that you accept are okay
00:12:15 ►
and the ones everybody else uses are terrible.
00:12:17 ►
Well, this is, as I say, one thing that I have learned.
00:12:19 ►
I don’t think there is such a thing as a good drug or a bad drug.
00:12:22 ►
I think you can use any drug wisely or stupidly. And any drug that you care to name, I can show you people that use
00:12:29 ►
it intelligently. Maybe for some drugs that will be a small percentage of users. And I
00:12:33 ►
can show you people that use it stupidly. Even drugs that have terrible reputations.
00:12:38 ►
You know, heroin has an awful reputation in this culture. I can show you people who
00:12:44 ►
use heroin productively, for whom it reduces anxiety,
00:12:47 ►
enables them to function normally socially, and lead productive lives.
00:12:50 ►
I don’t know what percentage of total users they are.
00:12:53 ►
Obviously, many other people don’t do that, and they use it abusively.
00:12:56 ►
I see a great failure in the world in general to distinguish between drug use and drug abuse.
00:13:02 ►
And that is a variant on this theme of good and bad
00:13:05 ►
drugs. A phrase that’s become very popular in the drug literature is drug of abuse, that there are
00:13:11 ►
such things as drugs of abuse. Well, that’s just a fancy way of saying a bad drug, one that you
00:13:15 ►
disapprove of. And the idea behind it is that anyone who uses such a substance is automatically
00:13:20 ►
an abuser. Well, that is a meaningless definition of drug abuse. I think that a useful definition
00:13:26 ►
of drug abuse, and one that I use, is that it’s the use of any substance, whether it’s
00:13:29 ►
legal or not, or approved or not, in such a way that it seriously threatens a person’s
00:13:34 ►
health or their social or economic functioning in the world. If a use of a substance doesn’t
00:13:40 ►
do that, in my mind, that is not abuse. There are many uses that people have put drugs to in the world.
00:13:48 ►
Everything from just recreation to having a good time
00:13:51 ►
to an excuse for social interaction.
00:13:53 ►
Look at the function of coffee and alcohol in our culture
00:13:58 ►
as providing excuses for people to relate to each other.
00:14:03 ►
Many people, if deprived of those drugs, would be unable to talk to other people.
00:14:08 ►
Having a coffee break is a legitimate excuse for stopping work and interacting with somebody.
00:14:13 ►
That’s very parallel to uses of coca leaves in Andean Indian cultures,
00:14:19 ►
to the use of cot, the leaf that I mentioned in the Middle East.
00:14:22 ►
That is a long tradition for use of psychoactive substances.
00:14:27 ►
In this culture, many people take psychoactive drugs to rebel,
00:14:31 ►
especially the disapproved drugs.
00:14:32 ►
That’s something I think we have created
00:14:33 ►
by the attempts that we’ve made to control substances through prohibitions.
00:14:37 ►
That’s one of the worst effects of drug prohibitions,
00:14:39 ►
is that they encourage people.
00:14:41 ►
First of all, I think they stimulate curiosity about drugs on the part of young people.
00:14:44 ►
The reason the age of experimentation with marijuana and other drugs has dropped so much in recent years
00:14:50 ►
is because we’ve made them forbidden and attractive.
00:14:52 ►
Many kids who would never care to try drugs do so only because we have made them prohibited.
00:14:57 ►
I have been consistently struck in my work with Indian tribes, especially in the Amazon,
00:15:03 ►
where drugs like coca leaf and psychedelics
00:15:06 ►
are available all the time,
00:15:07 ►
but are used only by adults under certain circumstances.
00:15:12 ►
There are no laws or prohibitions governing that.
00:15:14 ►
That’s just the way you do things in that society.
00:15:16 ►
I’ve been very struck at the total absence of curiosity
00:15:19 ►
on the part of children about those drugs.
00:15:20 ►
There’s a tribe of Indians called Kubeos
00:15:22 ►
that I have lived with a lot
00:15:24 ►
on the eastern border of Colombia near Brazil
00:15:26 ►
in the Amazon basin who use coca,
00:15:29 ►
powdered coca, as a daily stimulant and social drug,
00:15:31 ►
but it’s mostly a drug of adult men.
00:15:33 ►
I have asked children in that tribe again and again,
00:15:37 ►
don’t you want to know what coca’s like?
00:15:38 ►
And they say no.
00:15:39 ►
And I said, well, don’t you want to know what it does to you?
00:15:41 ►
And they say, well, we’ll wait until we grow up.
00:15:43 ►
That’s very different from anything I hear up here. And I think that well, don’t you want to know what it does to you? And they say, well, we’ll wait until we grow up. That’s very different from anything I hear up here.
00:15:45 ►
And I think that is very much related to the absence of trying to deal with that
00:15:51 ►
through prohibitions and making things unavailable
00:15:55 ►
and then trying to defend the prohibitions by greatly exaggerating the dangers of disapproved drugs
00:15:59 ►
while not acknowledging the dangers of the drugs that are in current use.
00:16:03 ►
acknowledging the dangers of the drugs that are in current use.
00:16:10 ►
The variants on good drug and bad drug are very frequent.
00:16:14 ►
You hear legitimate drugs, medical drugs, illicit drugs.
00:16:21 ►
I think the attempt to use names like entheogen is really another variant of that.
00:16:24 ►
It may be more benign, but it’s a way of saying that our drugs, say especially the indoles and phenethylamines are okay,
00:16:28 ►
but quaaludes and barbiturates and opiates aren’t very good.
00:16:32 ►
You know, I just don’t believe that.
00:16:33 ►
I think, and especially when you look at the uses of drugs for religious purposes
00:16:37 ►
or spiritual purposes, that is another very prominent theme in human culture.
00:16:42 ►
Another very common use in all cultures of
00:16:46 ►
psychoactive substances is to give people transcendent experiences, to allow them to
00:16:52 ►
transcend their human and ego boundaries, to feel greater contact with the supernatural
00:16:57 ►
or with the spiritual or with the divine, however they phrase it in their terms. And
00:17:01 ►
you may or may not approve of that, but it is a fact of human life.
00:17:05 ►
And the drugs that have been used for that purpose are very varied. There is no one category. There
00:17:10 ►
are many people who claim to have found God and spiritual life through alcohol. That’s a very old
00:17:14 ►
tradition going back to ancient cultures. And it persists to this day in occasional people.
00:17:21 ►
There are people who say they have found God through opiates. And now, of course,
00:17:26 ►
the ones that we hear this most about are the ones that you will be hearing most about
00:17:30 ►
in this conference, which in the past have been called hallucinogens and psychedelics
00:17:34 ►
and now entheogens. I don’t think we can find a totally satisfactory name to them,
00:17:38 ►
because every name is either one put forward by the opponents of those drugs or the proponents of them. And it gets into the same kind of fight.
00:17:47 ►
But at any rate, this is a fact of human life.
00:17:51 ►
Now, it’s also, of course, interesting that people find, have spiritual experiences through
00:17:56 ►
many other techniques that don’t involve drugs at all.
00:17:59 ►
People do it through fasting, they do it through chanting, through praying, through associating
00:18:02 ►
with gurus, through attending
00:18:05 ►
organized religious pageants or procedures.
00:18:07 ►
It seems to me what all that suggests is that drugs don’t have spiritual potentials.
00:18:14 ►
Human beings have spiritual potentials.
00:18:16 ►
And it may be that we need techniques to move us in that direction.
00:18:20 ►
And the use of psychoactive drugs clearly is one path that has helped many people.
00:18:24 ►
Now, because in our culture today, many of the drugs that people use for that purpose are disapproved drugs,
00:18:31 ►
that has led critics of that kind of use to complain that spiritual experiences obtained through drugs are not legitimate.
00:18:38 ►
Well, I think you could make that argument about any other technique that people use.
00:18:41 ►
I mean, why are spiritual experiences obtained through fasting not legitimate? I mean, legitimate and drug use not. It seems to me that the only test of whether
00:18:49 ►
spiritual experiences are legitimate are what effect they have on the person. I mean, if a
00:18:54 ►
person who has, say, who has never thought about the spiritual side of things until they’ve had a
00:18:58 ►
drug experience, then manifests spirituality in their life and pursues other sorts of spiritual
00:19:03 ►
activities, that seems to me that that was a genuine spiritual experience.
00:19:07 ►
If somebody just continues to take drugs over and over,
00:19:11 ►
maybe that was not a legitimate spiritual revelation.
00:19:13 ►
I don’t think it has anything to do with the technique.
00:19:15 ►
I think it has to do with the person and the effect that that technique has had on that person.
00:19:20 ►
I think that it’s also clear that from the latest kinds of research that are going on that are very exciting in brain chemistry,
00:19:28 ►
suggests that the line between what is natural and what is not is very unclear
00:19:33 ►
because it looks as if the brain makes analogs of most of the drugs that people use.
00:19:37 ►
I don’t know that no one has found an analog of THC and marijuana at the moment,
00:19:42 ►
but the one that has, of course, received the most attention
00:19:45 ►
are the endorphins, the opiate analogs that our brains make.
00:19:49 ►
We clearly make our own stimulants
00:19:50 ►
in the form of neurotransmitters like dopamine and noradrenaline.
00:19:54 ►
We make our own downers in the form of chemicals like serotonin and GABA.
00:19:58 ►
We probably make our own antidepressants,
00:20:00 ►
possibly in the form of sex hormones.
00:20:04 ►
We make our own psychedelics, I am sure,
00:20:06 ►
almost certainly DMT,
00:20:08 ►
which is probably produced by the
00:20:10 ►
pineal, or if not it, something very close
00:20:12 ►
to it. I think
00:20:14 ►
we make all these things ourselves.
00:20:16 ►
Now that raises a lot of interesting questions.
00:20:18 ►
Why is it that the human brain and
00:20:20 ►
plants should have the same chemicals in them?
00:20:23 ►
Why are the indoles
00:20:24 ►
and tryptamines so widely distributed in nature?
00:20:27 ►
DMT occurs, you know, these indole drugs occur in everything from mushrooms to higher plants to the human brain.
00:20:34 ►
Why is that? Why are those chemicals so widely distributed?
00:20:38 ►
It may well be that when people have transcendent experiences by means of techniques like fasting and chanting and praying,
00:20:46 ►
that there is a final common pathway
00:20:49 ►
that’s mediated through similar brain neurotransmitters.
00:20:53 ►
Maybe when people wake up feeling spontaneously high one day,
00:20:56 ►
their endorphin system is in high gear
00:20:57 ►
and they’re not bothered by things that ordinarily would get them down.
00:21:01 ►
Maybe the people who are likely to become dependent on opiates are
00:21:05 ►
people who have a deficiency of endorphins, and so experience what the rest of us experience as
00:21:10 ►
the ordinary bothers of life as overwhelmingly painful. Now, if that’s the case, I would suspect
00:21:18 ►
that when you try to deal with that problem by taking an opiate from outside, you probably
00:21:22 ►
totally shut off your body’s own production of those chemicals, and maybe that creates the biochemical basis for withdrawal
00:21:28 ►
and addiction.
00:21:29 ►
And if that’s so, then the most useful approach to treating addiction would be to find ways
00:21:34 ►
of stimulating the body’s own production of that chemical to solve the deficiency, not
00:21:39 ►
to supply it with an external analog of it.
00:21:42 ►
Well, this is clearly an important area of research that we’ll hear a lot more about in future years.
00:21:47 ►
Also, it’s amazing that it’s not just natural drugs
00:21:50 ►
that appear to have analogs in the brain.
00:21:52 ►
We have now found a Valium receptor in the brain.
00:21:55 ►
What does that mean?
00:21:56 ►
Valium is a synthetic drug that was created in a laboratory.
00:21:59 ►
Were Valium receptors always there?
00:22:02 ►
Did people think up Valium
00:22:04 ►
because they had Valium receptors in their brains?
00:22:08 ►
Did, have Valium receptors evolved in response to use of Valium in the world?
00:22:12 ►
I don’t know.
00:22:13 ►
It’s a very interesting question.
00:22:15 ►
There is a PCP receptor that has just been found in the brain.
00:22:19 ►
What does that mean?
00:22:20 ►
Now, this is a very interesting area of the interface between brain and the external world
00:22:26 ►
and drugs that may be the mediators of experiences i think that also is further evidence that you
00:22:33 ►
know you can’t say that because a person has an experience in one way or another that one is
00:22:36 ►
legitimate and one is not that’s not the test as i say i think the only fair test is what effect it
00:22:41 ►
has on the person and what effect that person subsequently has on other people and the world.
00:22:46 ►
Now, this is all to do with the first lesson that I have learned from my studies, namely
00:22:50 ►
that there are no good drugs or bad drugs.
00:22:52 ►
The second thing that I have clearly learned is that the effects of drugs are as much dependent
00:22:59 ►
on expectation and setting, on set and setting, as they are in pharmacology.
00:23:04 ►
on expectation and setting, on set and setting, as they are in pharmacology,
00:23:07 ►
that we shape the effects of drugs, that all drugs do is make you feel temporarily different,
00:23:12 ►
physically and psychologically.
00:23:14 ►
They may alter your perceptual mechanisms,
00:23:16 ►
they may alter your body sensations,
00:23:18 ►
they may alter your level of alertness or wakefulness,
00:23:21 ►
they may give you feelings of butterflies in your stomach,
00:23:24 ►
but that’s all they do.
00:23:26 ►
The experiences that you have on drugs are the product of our minds.
00:23:30 ►
That you take the raw material of that physical pharmacological effect
00:23:34 ►
and turn it into whatever you want.
00:23:36 ►
And you can turn it into polar opposites.
00:23:38 ►
You can turn the same drug into a terrifying experience of being poisoned,
00:23:42 ►
into a divine experience of spiritual revelation, into a divine experience of spiritual revelation,
00:23:45 ►
into a feeling of overwhelming bliss and love for other people,
00:23:49 ►
into paranoia, into depression, into anything.
00:23:52 ►
I could give you example after example of the ways that the mind can shape pharmacology.
00:23:59 ►
I don’t have time to do that.
00:24:00 ►
There’s wonderful Jonathan Ott, who is here,
00:24:03 ►
and I once were interested in cases of people
00:24:05 ►
who ate a mushroom
00:24:07 ►
in Washington
00:24:07 ►
the panther amanita
00:24:08 ►
that maybe he can
00:24:09 ►
say a word about
00:24:10 ►
since this contains
00:24:11 ►
chemicals he’s very
00:24:11 ►
interested in.
00:24:13 ►
And the difference
00:24:14 ►
between people
00:24:14 ►
who ate that mushroom
00:24:15 ►
accidentally
00:24:16 ►
and who experienced
00:24:17 ►
it as mushroom poisoning
00:24:18 ►
and thought they
00:24:19 ►
were about to die
00:24:20 ►
and on the other hand
00:24:21 ►
people who ate it
00:24:21 ►
deliberately looking
00:24:22 ►
for a psychedelic effect
00:24:23 ►
and found that in it
00:24:24 ►
is very striking.
00:24:26 ►
Complete shaping
00:24:27 ►
of pharmacology.
00:24:28 ►
And I think all
00:24:28 ►
drugs work that
00:24:29 ►
way.
00:24:30 ►
The drugs don’t
00:24:31 ►
contain experiences.
00:24:33 ►
We shape
00:24:35 ►
pharmacological
00:24:36 ►
effects into the
00:24:36 ►
experiences that we
00:24:38 ►
are looking for,
00:24:39 ►
and that is not
00:24:40 ►
necessarily a
00:24:40 ►
conscious process.
00:24:41 ►
It has to do with
00:24:42 ►
unconscious expectation.
00:24:43 ►
It has to do with
00:24:43 ►
cultural definition of a drug. That again makes it very difficult. It again points up the folly
00:24:48 ►
of talking about good and bad drugs because the effects of drugs are totally variable.
00:24:52 ►
They vary from culture to culture. They vary from age of history to age of history. Marijuana as
00:24:56 ►
it’s used today in the United States is not what marijuana was a hundred years ago when it was used
00:25:02 ►
medically in the form of a tincture. And if you read the reports of uses of marijuana in medicine in the 19th century, people didn’t
00:25:09 ►
report getting high on it.
00:25:11 ►
There’s very little of that in the literature.
00:25:13 ►
If they did, they probably, first of all, they may not have noticed it because they
00:25:17 ►
weren’t led to expect that.
00:25:20 ►
Or if they did notice something happening, they might have considered it no more important
00:25:24 ►
than the experience that many people get on medical drugs
00:25:26 ►
of feeling drowsy or dizzy or altered in some way
00:25:29 ►
that you just consider that a side effect of medication
00:25:31 ►
and don’t think it’s anything to write home about.
00:25:33 ►
That’s very different.
00:25:34 ►
It’s also very different from marijuana as it was used in ancient India
00:25:38 ►
as a religious sacrament in certain circles.
00:25:40 ►
That has a very different cultural definition of what to look for in that drug.
00:25:43 ►
So the effects of drugs can be completely shaped by cultural expectations,
00:25:49 ►
by individual expectations, by setting as well.
00:25:52 ►
As just an example of the powerful effects of setting on pharmacology,
00:25:58 ►
a colleague of mine, Dr. Norman Zinberg, is a psychoanalyst at Harvard Medical School,
00:26:03 ►
was some years ago commissioned by the U.S. Army,
00:26:07 ►
this was during the Vietnam War,
00:26:08 ►
to study heroin use among troops in Vietnam,
00:26:11 ►
which was a major problem.
00:26:13 ►
Heroin was very cheap, very available, very strong,
00:26:16 ►
and a very high percentage of American men in Vietnam
00:26:19 ►
began using heroin, usually smoking it.
00:26:22 ►
Pharmacologists would have predicted,
00:26:24 ►
based on what they know just of the pharmacology of heroin, usually smoking it. Pharmacologists would have predicted, based on what they know just of the pharmacology
00:26:27 ►
of heroin, that that kind of usage would have resulted in pharmacological addiction, and
00:26:32 ►
that those people, when they came back to the United States, would be heroin addicts,
00:26:37 ►
and that the ranks of heroin addicts in the United States would have swelled enormously.
00:26:41 ►
Well, Zinberg, who is a great, who, like me, is a very great believer in the effects of
00:26:45 ►
set and setting, felt from interviewing lots of heroin users in Vietnam that the main reason
00:26:50 ►
that people got into heroin smoking over there, apart from its availability, was as a way
00:26:55 ►
of dealing with boredom of army life in Vietnam, because for many people over there, the dominant
00:27:00 ►
theme of army life in Vietnam was boredom.
00:27:02 ►
And one of the effects of heroin is to make time pass more quickly in a boring situation.
00:27:08 ►
And he felt that from his understanding of the importance of setting and shaping pharmacology,
00:27:12 ►
that in fact, when most of these men came home, that they wouldn’t have any problem
00:27:16 ►
with heroin because the conditions that caused that usage would have disappeared.
00:27:20 ►
And he was right.
00:27:21 ►
And that was being completely borne out by follow-up studies of army people who came back to the United
00:27:26 ►
States and just left off using heroin. There was no
00:27:28 ►
motivation to use it again. They didn’t go through
00:27:30 ►
withdrawal. They didn’t become dependent
00:27:32 ►
on heroin. The ranks of domestic
00:27:34 ►
heroin addicts didn’t go up. It’s a completely different
00:27:36 ►
prediction from what classical
00:27:38 ►
pharmacology would have predicted. Well, as I said,
00:27:40 ►
I could give you example after example of this, but I don’t
00:27:42 ►
have time. The third
00:27:44 ►
lesson that I have learned, and this has just become much clearer to me in
00:27:50 ►
recent years, is the importance of what pharmacologists call pharmacokinetics.
00:27:55 ►
That is the way in which a drug is introduced and distributed through the body and to the
00:28:02 ►
target organs and tissues that it affects.
00:28:04 ►
through the body and to the target organs and tissues that it affects.
00:28:11 ►
In classical pharmacology, there is a principle that is very well known and taught, and yet I think few people pay attention to the significance of it, and that is that the effect of a drug
00:28:17 ►
is more dependent on the rate of increase of its concentration in the bloodstream than on the absolute dose, so
00:28:25 ►
that a very large dose of a drug given slowly has a much milder effect than a much smaller
00:28:31 ►
dose of a drug given suddenly.
00:28:34 ►
Now, that’s a very well-understood principle in pharmacology, but it has ramifications
00:28:38 ►
that I think people have not followed through.
00:28:40 ►
The manner of introducing a drug into the body is crucially determinant of the effects that people experience
00:28:48 ►
and especially of its adverse effects
00:28:51 ►
both short term and long term
00:28:53 ►
the toxicity of drugs, their abuse potential
00:28:57 ►
their addictiveness goes up exponentially
00:29:00 ►
as you find ways of introducing them into the blood and brain more directly.
00:29:05 ►
Now, I used to think that the most direct way of introducing a drug into the body
00:29:10 ►
was by intravenous injection.
00:29:12 ►
It’s not. Smoking is.
00:29:14 ►
And if you think about it, it’s very clear why that is.
00:29:16 ►
When you inject a drug into a vein in the arm,
00:29:19 ►
it’s diluted in a relatively large concentration of venous blood.
00:29:23 ►
It first goes to the heart, then to the lungs,
00:29:25 ►
then back to the heart, and then up to the brain.
00:29:27 ►
When you smoke a drug, it goes into a small volume of arterial blood,
00:29:31 ►
goes in one pass from the lungs to the heart, and up to the brain.
00:29:36 ►
So the concentrations that are delivered to the brain centers responsive to it
00:29:39 ►
are much higher, and the acceleration, the rate of change of concentration,
00:29:43 ►
which is the crucial factor, is greater.
00:29:45 ►
You can look at drugs, the same drug,
00:29:48 ►
I think the easiest one to see this with is cocaine,
00:29:51 ►
on a spectrum of usages,
00:29:52 ►
ranging from Indians who chew coca leaves
00:29:55 ►
to people who smoke the freebase form of cocaine,
00:29:58 ►
and you see day and night differences.
00:30:00 ►
There is no relationship between what happens to people
00:30:03 ►
who smoke cocaine base and to what happens to people who smoke cocaine
00:30:05 ►
base and to what happens to people who suck on coca leaves. They look like totally different
00:30:09 ►
drugs. And that has to do with, principally, with the pharmacokinetics, with the manner of
00:30:16 ►
introducing a drug into the system. When, just to summarize this very briefly, the reason that
00:30:22 ►
natural drugs, that plant drugs, are so much easier to integrate
00:30:26 ►
into a culture and into individual life
00:30:28 ►
is that they’re naturally dilute preparations
00:30:29 ►
and that the mechanics of them force you
00:30:32 ►
generally to put them into your body through the mouth
00:30:34 ►
and stomach, which is the safest way to introduce
00:30:36 ►
a drug. Not only does that
00:30:37 ►
allow the body time to process it,
00:30:41 ►
it diffuses
00:30:42 ►
slowly into the system. Usually the drugs
00:30:44 ►
are bound up in plant tissue.
00:30:45 ►
They diffuse out slowly.
00:30:46 ►
That is very determinant of what happens to people when they take drugs.
00:30:50 ►
Just one reason for that, and that’s a clear one that I think many users of drugs don’t
00:30:55 ►
understand, is that when you take a drug into your digestive system, there is a large circulation
00:31:00 ►
called the portal circulation in which blood comes from the intestines to the liver,
00:31:05 ►
and the liver is the main processor of chemicals coming into the body.
00:31:11 ►
And it then enters the general circulation.
00:31:12 ►
When you take a drug by injection or by smoking or by snorting,
00:31:15 ►
you bypass that circulation.
00:31:17 ►
So you are introducing drugs in an unprocessed form
00:31:20 ►
directly into the bloodstream.
00:31:21 ►
That greatly increases their toxicity,
00:31:23 ►
their tendency to cause adverse reactions, their tendency to cause addiction and dependence over time.
00:31:28 ►
Again, it doesn’t matter what the drug is. You can form abusive relationships with any
00:31:31 ►
of these things, and taking a drug by mouth doesn’t guarantee that you won’t. But it gives
00:31:36 ►
you a better chance of staying in a stable relationship with a substance over time.
00:31:40 ►
One of the characteristics about traditional cultures who use preparations of plants for socially acceptable purposes
00:31:49 ►
is that they tend not to refine the plants as we do.
00:31:52 ►
They use them in crude form, and they generally put them into their body through their mouth and stomach.
00:31:58 ►
Obviously, there are some very simple reasons for that.
00:32:00 ►
You can’t snort a coca leaf.
00:32:02 ►
You can’t shoot opium into your vein.
00:32:05 ►
That is a natural safeguard about crude botanical preparations of drugs. I think it’s unfortunate
00:32:10 ►
that in this culture we have fallen so much into the habit of relying on refined, purified
00:32:18 ►
derivatives of plants in highly concentrated form, both for recreational drugs and for
00:32:23 ►
medicine, and have fallen into the habit of thinking that this is somehow more
00:32:26 ►
scientific and more effective, that
00:32:27 ►
botanical drugs are old-fashioned,
00:32:29 ►
unscientific, messy.
00:32:31 ►
In fact, they’re much safer. Sometimes the
00:32:33 ►
quality of the effects are better. That’s not to
00:32:35 ►
say we should do away with purified drugs.
00:32:38 ►
They have their place. Sometimes you
00:32:39 ►
want very rapid, immediate, intense
00:32:41 ►
effects, and it’s nice to have those
00:32:44 ►
in your back pocket,
00:32:46 ►
but there ought to be a balance between the two.
00:32:49 ►
And we have lost that in medicine today.
00:32:53 ►
Most doctors wouldn’t know what to do with a coca leaf if you gave it to them.
00:32:55 ►
They wouldn’t know what to do with an aloe plant if you gave it to them.
00:32:57 ►
They wouldn’t know what to do with digitalis leaves if you gave it to them as a treatment for heart failure.
00:33:00 ►
There should be a balance between these two.
00:33:02 ►
Well, as I say, these are the three most important lessons I have learned from my studies of drugs.
00:33:09 ►
And they all sum up, really, to the fact that drugs are what we make them.
00:33:13 ►
That it’s we who determine whether drugs are destructive or whether they’re beneficial.
00:33:18 ►
It’s not any inherent property of drugs.
00:33:21 ►
And you can look at the history.
00:33:22 ►
It’s fascinating to look at the history of drugs and to see how they’ve
00:33:25 ►
changed over time.
00:33:26 ►
Coffee was an entheogen
00:33:28 ►
in the old days
00:33:30 ►
when it was first discovered.
00:33:32 ►
Its first use was by
00:33:33 ►
groups of early
00:33:34 ►
Muslim mystics
00:33:35 ►
who took it up
00:33:36 ►
as a once a week ritual.
00:33:39 ►
Groups of men
00:33:40 ►
would meet,
00:33:40 ►
I think on Thursday nights,
00:33:42 ►
and drink large quantities
00:33:44 ►
of coffee
00:33:44 ►
and stay up all of coffee and stay
00:33:45 ►
up all night chanting and praying until dawn. And it was clearly recognized, this was believed,
00:33:49 ►
coffee was thought to be a magical plant that had special properties. It could induce spiritual
00:33:54 ►
experiences. We didn’t use it all the time. If you don’t use coffee all the time, it’s
00:33:59 ►
a very powerful drug. It’s a very powerful stimulant. Another very clear principle of
00:34:02 ►
pharmacology and drug studies is
00:34:05 ►
that when you
00:34:05 ►
use any drug
00:34:06 ►
frequently, the
00:34:07 ►
effects begin to
00:34:08 ►
disappear.
00:34:08 ►
The body adapts
00:34:09 ►
to it.
00:34:09 ►
You know, there’s
00:34:10 ►
a wonderful, there
00:34:11 ►
was a great
00:34:12 ►
physiologist named
00:34:13 ►
Walter Cannon who
00:34:15 ►
proposed the term
00:34:16 ►
homeostasis in the
00:34:18 ►
early years of the
00:34:19 ►
century.
00:34:19 ►
That is the
00:34:20 ►
principle that it
00:34:21 ►
means remaining the
00:34:22 ►
same, staying the
00:34:23 ►
same.
00:34:24 ►
And it’s the
00:34:24 ►
principle that no matter how you try to throw the body off equilibrium,
00:34:29 ►
it will tend to return to equilibrium.
00:34:31 ►
And the image that I have of that, do you remember those?
00:34:33 ►
I’m sure they still make them, but I remember when I was a kid,
00:34:34 ►
there were these, I think of them as schmooze.
00:34:37 ►
I’m sure they’re all different forms, but these kind of plastic toys that are weighted in the bottom.
00:34:42 ►
And any way you shove it down, it bounces back up.
00:34:44 ►
Well, that’s how the organism is. And any time you shove it down, it bounces back up. Well, that’s how the organism is.
00:34:46 ►
And any time you put a force in and move it in one direction, it tends to move back.
00:34:51 ►
So there’s a reactive component.
00:34:54 ►
And that’s very clear in the case of drugs.
00:34:56 ►
That you give any drug, you give a stimulant, it will be followed by depression.
00:34:59 ►
You give a drug that makes you feel high, Sometime later, you’re going to feel down.
00:35:05 ►
And if you use any drug frequently, the body will neutralize it.
00:35:09 ►
So that as you take a drug very frequently,
00:35:12 ►
the interesting effects you get at the beginning stop.
00:35:14 ►
Look at the way coffee is used today.
00:35:16 ►
Its entheogenic potential has disappeared completely.
00:35:20 ►
Most people drink it only because they don’t feel normal without it anymore,
00:35:23 ►
which is the essence of drug dependence
00:35:26 ►
that’s just what happens, drugs create their own need
00:35:29 ►
the more you use them, the more you need them just to feel normal
00:35:31 ►
that’s how the body reacts to neutralize anything
00:35:34 ►
and I think that’s both a physical process and a mental process
00:35:37 ►
Norman Zinberg again, the study that he’s involved in now
00:35:40 ►
is looking at the ways that the second member of a family to be put on phenothiazines,
00:35:47 ►
that’s tranquilizers like Thorazine, reacts.
00:35:49 ►
So that if one member of the family goes crazy and they’re put on Thorazine, let’s say, often
00:35:53 ►
the response is adequate.
00:35:55 ►
But if a second member of the family later requires treatment with the same sorts of
00:36:00 ►
drugs, it’s much less effective.
00:36:01 ►
There’s a much lower incidence of success in a second person in the family.
00:36:04 ►
It’s as if people somehow learn to compensate for the effect of a drug.
00:36:09 ►
So I think that can both be a learning effect and a physical effect, but it’s a very clear
00:36:13 ►
principle. And with some drugs, that happens terribly fast, as in the case of putting tobacco
00:36:18 ►
into your system by smoking. With others, it may happen relatively slowly. Chocolate,
00:36:22 ►
same thing, was an entheogenic drug. We have the world’s expert on chocolate is sitting over here, Mr. Ott,
00:36:27 ►
who I hope will say something about that.
00:36:29 ►
He’s written a definitive book on chocolate.
00:36:32 ►
The name, the botanical name of chocolate, Theobroma, means food of the gods.
00:36:37 ►
Chocolate was considered a sacred plant by Indians of southern Mexico.
00:36:42 ►
It doesn’t behave very much as a sacred plant today,
00:36:46 ►
maybe for a few people.
00:36:48 ►
And, you know, the same principle holds to these drugs
00:36:51 ►
that we’re calling entheogens here tonight.
00:36:53 ►
They don’t have any inherent potential
00:36:54 ►
to put people in touch with the divine
00:36:57 ►
or the absolute ground of being.
00:36:59 ►
That’s up to us, whether we use them that way
00:37:01 ►
or make them work that way.
00:37:03 ►
And if they’re overused,
00:37:04 ►
and if people take them very frequently, and if they become ordinary
00:37:06 ►
and commonplace, that potential will disappear as surely as it has with all the others.
00:37:11 ►
Tobacco, for that matter, too, when it first came to the old world, it was a magical plant
00:37:18 ►
from the new world.
00:37:20 ►
The Spanish, when they found the Indians smoking, had no word even in their vocabulary for smoking.
00:37:26 ►
They described it as drinking.
00:37:27 ►
They saw people drinking smoke.
00:37:29 ►
There was no smoking in the old world before 1492.
00:37:32 ►
All the hashish and opium that were used in Europe and Asia were eaten.
00:37:36 ►
Nobody got the idea of smoking them.
00:37:38 ►
When tobacco first came to Europe,
00:37:40 ►
it was used as a magical, precious substance.
00:37:42 ►
It was also so harsh.
00:37:44 ►
This is, as I said earlier, that cigarette addiction doesn’t take back very far, because
00:37:47 ►
early forms of tobacco were so harsh you couldn’t inhale them deeply or often. You could just
00:37:52 ►
take one or two tokes on it. But people who did that used it much as marijuana was used
00:37:58 ►
in this culture more recently, that as you took this to have a major alteration in consciousness,
00:38:02 ►
that everything whirled around and you fell over on the ground, and social authorities were horrified at what they saw.
00:38:08 ►
And of course, if you think about it,
00:38:10 ►
who is going to use a new drug when it comes into the culture?
00:38:13 ►
It’s not going to be the establishment.
00:38:14 ►
It’s going to be the deviance.
00:38:17 ►
So the ways that a culture thinks about drugs
00:38:21 ►
are very much shaped by who first gets their hands on it.
00:38:24 ►
And by and large, the people in a by who first gets their hands on it.
00:38:28 ►
And by and large, the people in a culture to first get their hands on a new drug are not going to give it a very good reputation.
00:38:30 ►
They’re going to be very feared by the mainstream culture.
00:38:33 ►
And that happened with tobacco.
00:38:35 ►
And it’s very interesting to look at the history of what happened with laws.
00:38:38 ►
As tobacco went eastward, it first got to Spain and then England and then France,
00:38:41 ►
and it marched around the world to the east.
00:38:43 ►
to Spain and then England and then France, and it marched around the world to the east.
00:38:50 ►
In Russia and Turkey, Turkey of all places which became so closely associated with tobacco,
00:38:56 ►
the death penalty was imposed for possession of tobacco for the first 10 or 15 years after it was there.
00:38:56 ►
That did not work, as prohibitions against drugs never work.
00:39:01 ►
And I think legislatures who still dream that you can somehow affect people’s
00:39:05 ►
drug-taking behavior
00:39:06 ►
in any way except
00:39:07 ►
for the worst,
00:39:08 ►
by passing law,
00:39:09 ►
should go back and
00:39:10 ►
look at the history
00:39:10 ►
of the anti-tobacco
00:39:11 ►
legislation in the
00:39:12 ►
1500s.
00:39:13 ►
It did not work.
00:39:14 ►
What did happen,
00:39:15 ►
however, was that as
00:39:16 ►
tobacco became more
00:39:17 ►
commonplace and it
00:39:18 ►
lost its significance
00:39:19 ►
as a magical plant
00:39:20 ►
and people began to
00:39:21 ►
use it more frequently,
00:39:21 ►
it also lost its
00:39:22 ►
power to alter
00:39:24 ►
consciousness,
00:39:24 ►
possibly in an interesting way for many people.
00:39:27 ►
So the main message I would just like to leave you with at the opening of this conference
00:39:30 ►
is that, as I say, there are no good drugs or bad drugs.
00:39:34 ►
Drugs are what we make of them.
00:39:35 ►
The interesting, what we talk about as the interesting potentials of drugs are really
00:39:39 ►
the interesting potentials of us.
00:39:41 ►
And drugs are one way of realizing those potentials.
00:39:44 ►
And for some people, they may prove to be legitimate.
00:39:47 ►
So I’ll thank you there.
00:39:47 ►
I’d be happy to answer a few questions.
00:39:51 ►
Well, I run a lot, and I’m just curious.
00:39:53 ►
When I smoke, like, Indica, I think it’s Indica.
00:39:56 ►
I may be wrong.
00:39:56 ►
That’s why I’m asking this.
00:39:58 ►
Is sativa a less harsh marijuana, or is there such a thing as a less harsh marijuana that
00:40:03 ►
is a breed or a…
00:40:04 ►
Well, I’m sure there are harsher and less harsh varieties of marijuana,
00:40:07 ►
but I suspect that has as much to do with the way that it was cured and dried
00:40:11 ►
and with tar content and the moisture content as much as it does on resin content.
00:40:18 ►
I don’t know the answer to that, but I think that how harsh the smoke is really varies with a lot of things.
00:40:24 ►
There is research that shows that marijuana smoke has more tars in it than tobacco smoke,
00:40:28 ►
and some people have tried to make that into implying that it’s also more irritating.
00:40:34 ►
I think that the irritation of smoke has a lot to do with how much you take in over time,
00:40:39 ►
and most tobacco smokers take in much more smoke than marijuana smokers.
00:40:42 ►
You know also that the runner’s high, as it’s been called,
00:40:47 ►
has been shown to be neutralized in part or in great amount
00:40:53 ►
by giving people narcotic antagonists, which block the effects of opiates.
00:40:58 ►
And that suggests that the endorphin system,
00:41:00 ►
which are the brain’s own opiate analogs, are at work in that.
00:41:04 ►
And that might be another example of the way that what we call natural highs really may
00:41:10 ►
have the same final common pathway as highs that people experience when they take analogous
00:41:15 ►
substances from plants.
00:41:19 ►
Well, there has been a lot of that research.
00:41:21 ►
I’m not very familiar with the literature. There’s one person who’s done a lot of that is Stanley Krippner.
00:41:29 ►
And I’m sure you could track a lot of that down
00:41:32 ►
through the Association for Transpersonal Psychology,
00:41:35 ►
which is in the San Francisco area
00:41:37 ►
and publishes a journal called Transpersonal Psychology.
00:41:41 ►
Again, I think, you know, that those kinds of potentials
00:41:44 ►
are potentials of
00:41:45 ►
the human mind, and that’s possibly one way of releasing them. Some of the psychedelic
00:41:51 ►
drugs have particularly been associated with that, and the use of Yahé or Ayahuasca in
00:41:56 ►
Amazonian Indian cultures is often credited with giving people visions that have valid content. I spent time with one shaman in Colombia
00:42:09 ►
who was an ayahuasquero, a yajero,
00:42:11 ►
who was a healer who mostly worked with sick people
00:42:15 ►
and would cook up a brew of this plant
00:42:19 ►
that has a group of chemicals called beta-carbolines.
00:42:24 ►
Harmaline is one of them.
00:42:25 ►
They’re related to tryptamines and the other indoles.
00:42:27 ►
And one kind of use that he made of it,
00:42:32 ►
he would often be consulted by people
00:42:35 ►
who had had a missing person in their families
00:42:38 ►
who would come to him with a photograph, say,
00:42:40 ►
and he would then take this drug
00:42:42 ►
and in his vision see the whereabouts of the person. Now I
00:42:45 ►
didn’t get a chance to verify any of this, but he would
00:42:47 ►
give people very specific information about
00:42:49 ►
what had happened to the person, and
00:42:51 ►
in that culture there was great belief in the
00:42:53 ►
validity of these kinds of visions.
00:42:56 ►
Yeah, back there.
00:42:58 ►
Did you speak at some length on
00:42:59 ►
DMT, both synthetic
00:43:01 ►
as used in this culture, and
00:43:03 ►
supernatural as it was discovered? Well, is it natural for us to discover?
00:43:06 ►
Well, I don’t have time to speak at length about it.
00:43:09 ►
And there are other people here who might be better qualified to do that.
00:43:13 ►
Terence McKenna, who is down here, knows more about that than I.
00:43:19 ►
Dimethyltryptamine is one of the tryptamine family of drugs that’s widely distributed in plants
00:43:26 ►
and, as I said, is almost certainly made by the pineal gland in the brain.
00:43:30 ►
It itself can’t be taken by mouth because it’s inactivated by an enzyme in the stomach,
00:43:35 ►
so people usually smoke it, occasionally inject it.
00:43:38 ►
It’s not very common up here at the moment.
00:43:41 ►
It occurs in a lot of plants that have been put to use,
00:43:44 ►
especially in South America, by South American Indians. up here at the moment. It occurs in a lot of plants that have been put to use,
00:43:48 ►
especially in South America, by South American Indians.
00:43:53 ►
It’s often mixed with Yahé, this other drug that I mentioned,
00:43:55 ►
and in that form is orally active,
00:43:59 ►
because the chemicals in Yahé inactivate the enzyme in the stomach that breaks it down.
00:44:02 ►
And in that form, it’s a much longer- drug it has a it is especially
00:44:06 ►
visual, it’s one of the psychedelic
00:44:08 ►
drugs that affects the visual system
00:44:10 ►
strongly, and Indians
00:44:12 ►
in those cultures who value visions and take
00:44:14 ►
these plants, I mean their interest in
00:44:16 ►
taking these plants is not just to get intoxicated
00:44:18 ►
it’s to have visions, that’s what they place
00:44:20 ►
the premium on, and they say that they get valid
00:44:22 ►
information from their visions
00:44:23 ►
and it’s interesting that if you interview these, when this practice first came to light
00:44:29 ►
in South America, mixing leaves containing DMT into a drink that was made from this other
00:44:35 ►
plant, Yahe, the first pharmacologist who learned that said that the leaves couldn’t
00:44:39 ►
possibly have an effect because DMT is broken down in the stomach.
00:44:43 ►
The Indians say they put the leaves in to make the visions brighter.
00:44:46 ►
And if you ask anthropologists and botanists how Indians hit upon that,
00:44:50 ►
when it turns out that that harmaline inhibits the enzyme that breaks down DMT,
00:44:55 ►
so in that combination you produce an orally active form of DMT,
00:44:59 ►
when you ask an anthropologist or botanist how could Indians discover such a thing,
00:45:02 ►
they always answer trial and error.
00:45:04 ►
And somehow when you hear that up in a thing? They always answer trial and error.
00:45:07 ►
And somehow when you hear that up in a university library,
00:45:09 ►
you know, it goes by and it sounds all right.
00:45:12 ►
But when you’re sitting down in the middle of the jungle with these people,
00:45:16 ►
it just doesn’t, I can’t see Indians every day saying,
00:45:18 ►
well, today let’s try this leaf.
00:45:22 ►
And if you ask the Indians, they always give a very consistent answer.
00:45:24 ►
They say that they learned it in visions,
00:45:29 ►
that Yahweh told them in visions to get this leaf and add that to make the visions brighter.
00:45:32 ►
Yeah? Yeah.
00:45:32 ►
Yeah.
00:45:32 ►
Yeah. Did you all hear that?
00:45:57 ►
The question was that how do I reconcile what I was saying about the importance of expectation,
00:46:02 ►
especially unconscious expectation, with the healing power of drugs, especially as demonstrated in a scientific setting.
00:46:08 ►
Well, you know, the healing power of drugs is very interesting.
00:46:10 ►
It also, like the mystical power of drugs, is very evanescent.
00:46:14 ►
There is a famous medical aphorism that I’ve tried to track down,
00:46:19 ►
but it’s been attributed to at least six different physicians of the early part of this century.
00:46:23 ►
One of them was a man named William Osler,
00:46:25 ►
who was a professor at Johns Hopkins University.
00:46:28 ►
And it is, a new drug should be used as much as possible
00:46:31 ►
while it still has the power to heal.
00:46:35 ►
If you look at the history of pharmaceutical drugs,
00:46:38 ►
there is a very clear pattern
00:46:40 ►
that the incidence of favorable responses
00:46:43 ►
is greatest near the time of introduction,
00:46:45 ►
and that over a period of 10 or 20 years, the percentage of favorable responses to the
00:46:50 ►
drug diminishes.
00:46:51 ►
I could give you many examples of that.
00:46:52 ►
I think one that’s a very good one, a current one, is the painkiller Darvon, propoxyphene,
00:46:58 ►
which was introduced into medical practice, I think in the early, sometime in the 1950s,
00:47:03 ►
and was widely touted by its manufacturer as being a big breakthrough in pain relief
00:47:09 ►
because it filled the gap between morphine and aspirin,
00:47:11 ►
which is a real problem in medicine, that we have no intermediate strength painkillers.
00:47:16 ►
We have things that work well for mild pain and things that work well for severe pain,
00:47:20 ►
but the ones for severe pain have a strong addictive potential,
00:47:23 ►
and there’s nothing in between.
00:47:25 ►
So propoxyphene, which is an opiate marketed under the brand name Dargon,
00:47:29 ►
was introduced as being an intermediate-strength painkiller
00:47:32 ►
with a very low abuse potential
00:47:35 ►
and was widely used and enthusiastically taken up by doctors.
00:47:42 ►
About ten years after its introduction,
00:47:45 ►
it first became apparent that it had a significant abuse potential
00:47:47 ►
when heroin users turned out to like injecting it into themselves.
00:47:52 ►
There were also combinations of Darvon that were made available,
00:47:55 ►
some combined with aspirin and some combined with finacidin,
00:47:58 ►
which is another common over-the-counter painkiller.
00:48:04 ►
In recent years, over the past ten years,
00:48:07 ►
there has been general acknowledgement by physicians
00:48:10 ►
that Darvon isn’t a very good drug,
00:48:12 ►
that in fact it doesn’t relieve pain very well.
00:48:15 ►
And I think the general consensus now in the medical community
00:48:18 ►
is that when these Darvon combinations work,
00:48:20 ►
they mostly work because they contain aspirin or finacidin.
00:48:23 ►
And suddenly the drug is looking
00:48:25 ►
not very good. Now it’s interesting that the way
00:48:27 ►
that physicians interpret that
00:48:29 ►
pattern, and the incidence of people
00:48:32 ►
who respond favorably to Darvan has declined
00:48:33 ►
greatly. The way that physicians
00:48:36 ►
interpret that is that Darvan
00:48:38 ►
wasn’t a very good drug to begin with,
00:48:40 ►
but it took us this long to realize that.
00:48:42 ►
Now I don’t think that’s what happened.
00:48:43 ►
I think what happened was that there is tremendous faith,
00:48:47 ►
which is a variety of expectation, in novelty,
00:48:50 ►
and that novel products are able to catalyze healing responses
00:48:56 ►
more effectively than familiar products.
00:48:59 ►
And I think you can see that principle at work in a lot of healing phenomena.
00:49:04 ►
There’s a… I was very interested in… And I think you can see that principle at work in a lot of healing phenomena.
00:49:13 ►
I did some research on what’s been found out about healings that have occurred at miracle shrines.
00:49:16 ►
The one that has been studied most is Lourdes in France.
00:49:22 ►
There are clear-cut cases, although not where the percentage out of total people that go there is small, of people that have had very clear-cut cures of advanced organic conditions.
00:49:26 ►
No native of Lourdes
00:49:28 ►
has ever been cured there.
00:49:30 ►
The chances
00:49:32 ►
of a person being healed at Lourdes
00:49:34 ►
seem to be,
00:49:36 ►
this is based on a statistical study of a lot of
00:49:38 ►
people that went there, are proportional,
00:49:40 ►
directly proportional to the length of the journey
00:49:42 ►
traveled to get there.
00:49:43 ►
Which I think is another measure of the investment of faith.
00:49:47 ►
Now, I don’t think that means, you know, in saying this,
00:49:48 ►
I’m not saying that drugs do nothing.
00:49:51 ►
In fact, as I said earlier, drugs,
00:49:53 ►
I mean, they have intrinsic pharmacological effects,
00:49:55 ►
but what the final experiences are
00:49:58 ►
is a product of the creative interpretation of them by the human mind.
00:50:04 ►
And one of the crucial factors in that is expectation.
00:50:08 ►
And unfortunately, it’s not simply conscious expectation.
00:50:10 ►
That would make it much simpler to specify all this.
00:50:12 ►
You can sit a person down in a laboratory
00:50:14 ►
and ask them what they think is going to happen to them
00:50:16 ►
when you give them an experimental dose of a drug,
00:50:19 ►
and they may reel off something.
00:50:20 ►
And it may have no relation to what, on a deeper level,
00:50:23 ►
they think or fear is going to happen to them.
00:50:24 ►
And it’s on the deeper level that counts, because that’s the part of the mind that
00:50:28 ►
connects up with the machinery of the body that determines physical responses.
00:50:33 ►
But I think that that’s completely consistent with what I see with healing properties of
00:50:38 ►
drugs.
00:50:38 ►
Sure, there are certain drugs that have direct effects that may contribute to healing, but
00:50:43 ►
I think healing, like religious experience, is an innate potential of the body.
00:50:48 ►
It’s not something that comes in a drug.
00:50:49 ►
All a drug can do is give you a push in a certain direction, and I think that even their
00:50:53 ►
expectation plays a great role in that.
00:50:55 ►
An example of that is that look at the, you know, one of the commonest forms of bad medicine
00:51:00 ►
that I see practiced today is the prescription of antibiotics for viral sore throats.
00:51:06 ►
Antibiotics have no effect on viruses.
00:51:09 ►
Often these are given out by doctors who don’t bother to do throat cultures,
00:51:12 ►
and the vast majority of sore throats are viral in origin.
00:51:15 ►
And despite the fact that I deplore that kind of medicine,
00:51:19 ►
because one of the worst reasons is that it makes the antibiotics less effective for the rest of us
00:51:24 ►
because it breeds resistant germs in those people.
00:51:28 ►
That despite that, it’s very easy to collect cases of cures of viral sore throats by antibiotics.
00:51:33 ►
When other methods had failed, people had gargled and done this and that,
00:51:36 ►
and it hadn’t gone away, and they’re given tetracycline,
00:51:38 ►
and 36 hours later they’re cured.
00:51:40 ►
Now, what happened there?
00:51:41 ►
I mean, the drug is an active drug.
00:51:43 ►
It’s not a sugar pill.
00:51:44 ►
So it did something. It might have altered body chemistry. It might have altered bacterial flora
00:51:48 ►
in the body. But I think the healing response that happened mostly had to do with belief in
00:51:53 ►
antibiotics, which is very strong, not just on the part of patients, but on the part of doctors.
00:51:56 ►
And I think it’s the faith of doctors in their techniques is at least as important as the faith
00:52:01 ►
of patients, because that’s communicated on a very real level,
00:52:05 ►
just as a shaman’s belief in their methods are communicated to patients.
00:52:09 ►
On the other hand, you can find equal instances
00:52:11 ►
where an antibiotic like tetracycline fails to cure a urinary infection
00:52:15 ►
that it ought to cure,
00:52:16 ►
where you had germs that were susceptible and it looked as if it should work.
00:52:19 ►
Now, what happened there?
00:52:20 ►
So it’s not just a mechanical matter of a drug doing something purely pharmacologically.
00:52:25 ►
That even in the case
00:52:26 ►
of active drugs,
00:52:28 ►
there is enormous room
00:52:29 ►
for influence
00:52:30 ►
of expectation
00:52:32 ►
and setting.
00:52:34 ►
Yeah?
00:52:39 ►
All a double-blind
00:52:41 ►
experiment can do
00:52:42 ►
is establish
00:52:43 ►
the intrinsic efficacy
00:52:44 ►
of a drug relative to an inactive control.
00:52:47 ►
It gives no information about what will happen in an individual clinical setting when that drug is used.
00:52:53 ►
And in fact, by succeeding in double-blind trials, a drug is going to elicit greater placebo effects
00:53:00 ►
because it will have a thicker coating of belief on the part of the doctors who prescribe it.
00:53:05 ►
Okay, I’ll stop.
00:53:10 ►
You know, I couldn’t help but think while I was listening to Dr. Weil with you just now
00:53:19 ►
what a wonderfully different world it would be if this talk had not only been broadcast on all the radio and TV networks,
00:53:27 ►
but also if everyone who heard it also got it.
00:53:31 ►
It’s really hard to believe how far we’ve regressed in the past 25 years
00:53:36 ►
when it comes to an understanding of the importance of psychedelic medicines.
00:53:41 ►
Personally, I believe that it is a crime against humanity that these drug
00:53:47 ►
warriors are committing. But like all warriors throughout history, from the Huns to the Visigoths
00:53:54 ►
to the Christian Crusaders, all of those bloodthirsty warriors eventually fade into the
00:53:59 ►
dust as we humans once again rebuild our Gaian civilizations. Or I could just be dreaming
00:54:07 ►
all of this. Or maybe the dreamer is you. Or maybe I better remind you once again that
00:54:15 ►
I’ve had the honor of kissing the Blarney Stone, not once, but twice. And that I also
00:54:21 ►
once practiced law in Texas, where my license to lie is still current.
00:54:26 ►
So be really careful about taking me too seriously.
00:54:29 ►
The truth is, I don’t really have a clue about what’s going on or what’s about to happen.
00:54:35 ►
But getting back to today’s talk, I wonder if anyone who has been doing experiments to test Rupert Sheldrake’s theory about morphogenic fields,
00:54:49 ►
has followed up on the anecdote that Dr. Weil talked about when he described how Thorazine didn’t seem to work as well on a second person in the same family.
00:54:57 ►
Doesn’t that suggest Rupert’s theory of morphic resonance?
00:55:01 ►
The mind boggles when you think of the possibilities.
00:55:07 ►
And so I’ll leave it to you to speculate about that on your own. And by the way, one of the places some of our fellow saloners
00:55:14 ►
have been doing their speculating is in the comments section of our Notes from the Psychedelic
00:55:19 ►
Salon blog, which you can find at www.psychedelicsalon.org. In fact, I think of those blog comments as
00:55:28 ►
a kind of public form of email. So if you get the urge to comment on this or any of
00:55:34 ►
the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon, well, that’s a good place to start. And I should
00:55:39 ►
mention that you aren’t just limited to adding comments to podcast topics. You can also start your own topic if there’s something on your mind that you’d like to
00:55:48 ►
pass along or get comments on.
00:55:51 ►
Now one thing about the talk we just heard that kind of stood out, at least for me, was
00:55:57 ►
that I thought some of the comments about marijuana weren’t all that well informed.
00:56:02 ►
But of course, back in 1983, hardly anyone was well informed about cannabis,
00:56:07 ►
least of all me.
00:56:09 ►
So I think it speaks very well of the Internet
00:56:12 ►
that so much good information about this plant
00:56:14 ►
has now been imprinted in so many minds around the world.
00:56:19 ►
And when it comes to information and news about cannabis,
00:56:23 ►
well, my first stop now is the Cannabis Podcast Network.
00:56:28 ►
In case you’ve not been there yet, you can find them at dopefiend.co.uk.
00:56:34 ►
And there you’ll find a podcast for almost any psychedelic taste.
00:56:39 ►
My current favorite on their network is a relatively new program called Lefty’s Lounge.
00:56:44 ►
on their network is a relatively new program called Lefty’s Lounge.
00:56:50 ►
And once you hear him, I think you’ll agree that Lefty has the best voice in cyberspace.
00:56:54 ►
He’s sort of the Bing Crosby of podcasting,
00:56:57 ►
for those of you who are old enough to know who Bing Crosby was.
00:57:03 ►
Now, some of the other programs on their network include Zandor’s Grow Report, which is a must-listen for any medical marijuana caregivers
00:57:06 ►
who are growing plants,
00:57:08 ►
and someone whose show is near and dear to me
00:57:10 ►
is Max Freakout of Psychonautica.
00:57:13 ►
I hope that one day Max will enlarge
00:57:16 ►
on one of the topics Dr. Weil just touched on,
00:57:19 ►
and that is the degree to which our expectations
00:57:23 ►
shape our experiences with these substances.
00:57:26 ►
My guess is that he could add some interesting light on that subject.
00:57:31 ►
I’ve learned a lot from listening to Max, and I really appreciate his commentary.
00:57:35 ►
And then, of course, there’s the flagstone of the network, the Dopecast, hosted by the Dope Fiend.
00:57:42 ►
So by now, I suspect you’re probably wondering whether I’m being paid to give this big plug for the Cannope Fiend. So by now I suspect you’re probably wondering
00:57:45 ►
whether I’m being paid to give this big plug for the Cannabis Podcast Network.
00:57:50 ►
And I was about to say no, because that’s the truth,
00:57:53 ►
but then I remembered that the first time I became aware of this wonderful network of podcasters
00:57:58 ►
was when a package arrived in the mail last year.
00:58:02 ►
It came just a few weeks after I mentioned that I’d lost
00:58:05 ►
my mp3 player and in that package was a brand new mp3 player compliments of a fellow salonner who
00:58:12 ►
called himself the dope fiend. So it really makes me feel good when I hear some of our other fellow
00:58:18 ►
salonners have made contributions to the dope fiends network You know, it kind of makes me feel like I’m indirectly paying him back in some way
00:58:26 ►
by helping to expand his audience as well.
00:58:30 ►
You know, after all, we’re all in this together, you know.
00:58:34 ►
And that’s a very long way to try to explain what seems to be going on with these podcasts.
00:58:41 ►
Not with the podcasters, but with you.
00:58:44 ►
You know, I’ve never met Lefty or the Dope Fiend or KMO or Queer Ninja, with these podcasts. Not with the podcasters, but with you.
00:58:47 ►
You know, I’ve never met Lefty or the Dope Fiend or KMO or Queer Ninja,
00:58:49 ►
but I feel as if I’ve known them for years.
00:58:53 ►
And it’s the same way with you.
00:58:55 ►
You know, if you stop by the salon each week,
00:58:57 ►
well, like it or not, you’ve become connected
00:59:00 ►
to a web of fellow salonners who, in turn,
00:59:03 ►
are interconnected with other webs through other podcasts they frequent.
00:59:09 ►
And while this is obviously nothing more than idle speculation on my part,
00:59:13 ►
I can’t help but wonder whether we’re interconnecting our minds in some new way
00:59:18 ►
that actually could lead to what Teilhard called the awakening of the noosphere.
00:59:24 ►
could lead to what Teilhard called the awakening of the noosphere.
00:59:29 ►
But you know, even if we’re doing nothing more than just creating a new version of pen pals,
00:59:33 ►
well, it’s already quite spectacular for me.
00:59:37 ►
I’ll give you just one more example and then move on.
00:59:42 ►
But one day last week, when I checked my email, I found a message from KMO,
00:59:47 ►
host of the Sea Realm podcast and co-founder with Max Brekout of Psychonautica.
00:59:53 ►
Now, I knew that KMO was in the Amazon at the time, and I was delighted to hear from him.
01:00:01 ►
But what really blew me away, though, was that he’d attached an audio postcard that he’d recorded during a Wachuma session in the jungle. And it was a message from KMO and Pio,
01:00:11 ►
who is also a fellow salonner whose dad and I have probably crossed paths during our Navy days.
01:00:15 ►
I have to tell you that hearing the love and joy in those two voices and knowing that they were in the care of a good ally and breathing the jungle air,
01:00:20 ►
well, it truly did warm the cockles of my heart.
01:00:24 ►
Whatever those may be, I don’t know if I have cockles in my heart.
01:00:29 ►
But I felt good when you guys sent that message, and I do appreciate it.
01:00:33 ►
Another nice surprise came this week from one of our fellow salonners that you’ll remember from a while back.
01:00:39 ►
Bill, who makes his home in Japan, has now completed compiling the program notes for Terrence McKenna’s Valley of Knowledge series, parts 4, 5, and 6.
01:00:52 ►
Now Bill, as you know, also did the program notes for the first three programs in that series.
01:00:57 ►
I hope you get a chance to take a look at them, because my guess is that you’ll be surprised at how many things Terrence said that you may have missed.
01:01:06 ►
Even if you’ve heard those talks a half a dozen times or more like I have,
01:01:10 ►
it really surprised me to read some of the quotes that I have little if any memory of being so thought-provoking.
01:01:17 ►
And besides being a service for you DJs who are looking for easy ways to find McKenna soundbites for your mixes,
01:01:23 ►
who are looking for easy ways to find McKenna soundbites for your mixes,
01:01:30 ►
having such detailed program notes also lets Google do a pseudo-index of these podcasts and thus extend Terrence McKenna’s reach into minds that haven’t yet found him.
01:01:36 ►
So thank you, Bill. Your work is much appreciated.
01:01:39 ►
And speaking of appreciation, today’s podcast comes to you in part
01:01:44 ►
through some fellow salonners who have made generous donations to us.
01:01:48 ►
So thank you, David R., Donald S., and Vepal P.
01:01:52 ►
Thank you again, and thank you all.
01:01:55 ►
Your generosity is greatly appreciated.
01:01:58 ►
And to you and to all the other wonderful donors of this podcast,
01:02:02 ►
particularly those that haven’t yet received a personal email thank you from me,
01:02:07 ►
well, what can I say except I’m a little behind, but I’ll eventually get a note out to you,
01:02:12 ►
and I really do appreciate your thoughts and comments and donations.
01:02:16 ►
And by the way, several of our fellow salonners have mentioned their hesitation at making a donation to the Psychedelic Salon
01:02:23 ►
for fear of what might
01:02:25 ►
show up on your credit card statement and i don’t blame you a bit so uh so i’ve just now sent myself
01:02:31 ►
a donation to see what kind of a paper trail it leaves and next week i’ll i’ll let you know what
01:02:37 ►
i find out but don’t worry about sending donations you guys uh hey i know that a lot of you are
01:02:42 ►
students or have families to feed and that
01:02:46 ►
you also have to support other organizations and podcasts. I’ll tell you what, just having you here
01:02:51 ►
with us in the salon each week is more than enough for me. And if you tell a friend about these
01:02:56 ►
podcasts, well, that’s even frosting on the cake, so to speak. But being here, being a part of this
01:03:02 ►
ever-growing, far-reaching and intertwining network of podcast families is more than enough for me.
01:03:09 ►
So thank you for joining us today here in the Psychedelic Salon.
01:03:14 ►
Well, before I go, I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5 license.
01:03:24 ►
under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5 license.
01:03:27 ►
And if you have any questions about that,
01:03:30 ►
just click the link on the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon page that says Creative Commons.
01:03:32 ►
And if you have any questions, comments, complaints,
01:03:34 ►
or suggestions about these podcasts,
01:03:36 ►
just send them to Lorenzo at MatrixMasters.com.
01:03:40 ►
Thanks again to Paul and Jay for this recording,
01:03:43 ►
to Chateau Hayuk for the use of your music here in the salon,
01:03:47 ►
and thank you to Dr. Weil for all you’ve done to help medicine move into the modern age.
01:03:52 ►
Now next week, in addition to our regular guest speaker,
01:03:57 ►
I’m going to be giving you some details about the Palenque Norte Plyologs
01:04:01 ►
that we’ll be hosting at the Burning Man Festival this year.
01:04:05 ►
And even if you can’t make it to the burn this year, I think the Plyologs may be of
01:04:09 ►
interest to you, so stay tuned. Now before I go, I’d like to ask you to spend
01:04:16 ►
just one minute of your time and send some love to Laura Huxley. As you know,
01:04:21 ►
Laura is 96 years old now, And unfortunately, she took a bad fall that
01:04:28 ►
has required her to be in a cast. And it isn’t going to be easy for Laura to be so confined
01:04:34 ►
because up until her fall, she was still living alone and going full steam ahead every day.
01:04:41 ►
So please send her your love and let’s hope that she moves on through this
01:04:45 ►
little setback with flying colors. And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic
01:04:52 ►
Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you. I’m going to go. Thank you.