Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake
Terence McKenna: “In the absence of cannabis the dream life seems to become much richer. This causes me to sort of form a theory, just for my own edification, that cannabis must in some sense thin the boundary between the conscious and unconscious mind. … And if you smoke cannabis, the energy which would normally be channeled into dreams is instead manifest in the reveries of the cannabis intoxication.”
Terence McKenna: “And what I really value about cannabis is the way in which it allows one to be taken by surprise by unexpected ideas.”
Terence McKenna: “Alcohol, on the other hand, is demonstrably one of the most destructive of all social habits. What a bright world it would be if every alcoholic were a pothead.”
Terence McKenna: “For the 19th century, and for all of European civilization, cannabis was something that was eaten in the form of various sugared confections that were prepared. And this method of ingestion changes cannabis into an extremely powerful psychedelic experience. … For the serious eater of hashish, it is the portal into a true artificial paradise whose length and breadth is equal to that of any of the artificial paradises that we’ve discovered in modern psychedelic pharmacology.”
Terence McKenna: “To my mind, the whole of Indian and Middle Eastern civilization is steeped in the ambiance of hashish.”
Terence McKenna: “Hashish, cannabis, has an ambiance of its own. It has a morphogenetic field, and if you enter into that morphogenic field you enter into an androgynous, softened, abstract, colorful, and extraordinarily beautiful world.”
Terence McKenna: “There’s a deeper issue which is the zeitgeist, if you will, of cannabis, which carries a certain implied danger to establishment values which put such a premium on clear-eyed hard work and Presbyterian rectitude.”
Ralph Abraham: “It [cannabis] is medicine for cultural evolution.”
Terence McKenna: “If I judiciously control my intake of cannabis, it like gives me a second wind and a third wind to go forward with creative activity.”
Terence McKenna: “It can turn you into a stupor, sort of lazy, loutish person. On the other hand, it can allow you to do very hard work for very long periods of time. So you sort of have to manage it, and I think a lot of people don’t learn to manage it.”
Terence McKenna: “We [the U.S.A.] represent values which are incomprehensible to educated Europeans.”
Terence McKenna: “Governments have always been, and continue to this day to be, the major purveyor of drugs, worldwide.”
Terence McKenna: “The day the Russians left [Afghanistan], the hashish market in Northern California collapsed catastrophically and has never been able to build itself back to previous levels.”
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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.
00:00:26 ►
space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. Well, at least I’m getting this podcast out one day earlier than I did last week. And at this rate, I should
00:00:32 ►
be back up to my early in the week release schedule before much longer. It’s really hard
00:00:37 ►
to believe that half of January is already gone this year. I guess that old saying is
00:00:43 ►
right, that time really flies when you’re
00:00:46 ►
having a good time. I guess I must be having a ball. But before I get too carried away
00:00:51 ►
with myself here, first I want to thank two people who have made recent donations to the
00:00:56 ►
salon. And they are Mona F., thank you Mona, and Victoria T., who has also made donations in the past.
00:01:05 ►
Thank you both for helping to keep these podcasts going.
00:01:09 ►
I deeply appreciate your support.
00:01:12 ►
Well, as I was trying to decide what talk to play today,
00:01:16 ►
it dawned on me that it was way back in November of 2006
00:01:21 ►
that Ralph Abraham loaned me his big box of cassette tapes of the
00:01:26 ►
trilogues he held with Terrence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake.
00:01:30 ►
The plan at the time was to get them all digitized and online in podcast format
00:01:35 ►
as soon as possible.
00:01:37 ►
Well,
00:01:37 ►
Bruce Dahmer and I got the digitizing done in just a few days and nights,
00:01:43 ►
a few days and nights of work.
00:01:45 ►
But I guess I’ve fallen down on my end of the bargain to get them all in podcast format.
00:01:51 ►
Even though we’ve already listened to 29 of them here in the Psychedelic Salon, there
00:01:56 ►
are still about 15 left to go.
00:01:59 ►
So I’ve decided to play some more of the Trilog series we were listening to a couple of podcasts back.
00:02:06 ►
Like the previous two Trilog podcasts, this one was recorded with only the recording engineer present, whose name I believe was Paul.
00:02:16 ►
And the date of this recording is September of 1991, and it may have been made partially for them to use while writing their 1992 book,
00:02:25 ►
Trilogues at the Edge of the West.
00:02:27 ►
Now, this particular trilogue may be out there on the net somewhere,
00:02:31 ►
but it’s the first time I’ve heard it myself,
00:02:33 ►
and I found it to be one of the most intimate and fascinating of them all so far.
00:02:39 ►
The topic Terrence and his friends discuss in this session is cannabis,
00:02:44 ►
and my guess is that you’re going to find this trilogue both interesting and fun.
00:02:48 ►
So let’s join them now.
00:02:54 ►
Well, our subject this afternoon is cannabis,
00:02:59 ►
a subject which is of interest to large numbers of people,
00:03:04 ►
though it’s rarely discussed,
00:03:06 ►
and in fact seems to have attained the status of somewhat of a taboo in polite society.
00:03:13 ►
My interest in it is intense and lifelong, I must say.
00:03:21 ►
I remember when I first encountered it, within a few minutes of my first exposure to it,
00:03:31 ►
I realized that I was going to be able to self-medicate myself to normalcy.
00:03:38 ►
I was, as an adolescent, what’s called a nervous child,
00:03:44 ►
as an adolescent, what’s called a nervous child,
00:03:54 ►
and sort of had a personal style that was very hard-driving and, I’m told, fairly abrasive.
00:03:58 ►
And it really came with the force of a revelation
00:04:06 ►
that the mere smoking of a small amount of vegetable material
00:04:12 ►
could completely invert the structures of my personality
00:04:18 ►
and socialize me, as it were,
00:04:23 ►
into a reasonably functioning member of the community in which I found myself.
00:04:29 ►
I first encountered cannabis in Berkeley in this Easter vacation of 1965,
00:04:50 ►
And it took a couple or three exposures to it before I really sorted out what it was doing for me.
00:05:07 ►
And I brought to it all the programming that my middle class straight parents had given me concerning the subject, that this was the weed of death, that the road to hell was paved with this particular substance. But I also
00:05:16 ►
had been exposed to some of the literature of the Beat Generation, the writings of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and some of those people.
00:05:29 ►
And within just a few months, I had integrated it into my lifestyle as really the central practice of my life.
00:05:46 ►
And it has remained so up until just two or three months ago
00:05:51 ►
when under the pressure of my apparently dissolving marriage
00:05:57 ►
I stopped smoking in order to see really what sort of effect it would have. I was in the sort of absurd position of being in psychotherapy with a woman who I respected very much and who seemed to be a very skilled psychotherapist, except that she had no sophistication whatsoever about cannabis.
00:06:26 ►
And the therapeutic process kept looping back to the issue of my cannabis ingestion.
00:06:36 ►
And she would ask me, well, now, how many times a day do you do this?
00:06:42 ►
I would say, 10 to 14.
00:06:44 ►
And she would say, and how many years have you been do this? I would say 10 to 14 and she would say and how many years have
00:06:48 ►
you been doing this? Well 25, 26, 27 and finally I saw that it was impeding the
00:06:58 ►
therapeutic process not in in its physical, but in its effects on her attitude toward me.
00:07:08 ►
So I determined simply to stop in order to remove this issue
00:07:14 ►
from the menu of issues that we were dealing with in this therapeutic process.
00:07:22 ►
And I’m happy to report that though I was at that time the heaviest
00:07:29 ►
and most continuous cannabis user I have ever known or heard of, it was no big deal. I simply
00:07:38 ►
stopped smoking it and took up reading in the evenings, and it seemed to have no impact on my psychological organization at all,
00:07:52 ►
except that, I must say, my dream life became considerably more interesting in the wake of that decision.
00:08:02 ►
And over the years in my traveling when
00:08:06 ►
there have been times when for just a few days my access to cannabis was
00:08:11 ►
interrupted I noticed this same phenomenon that in the absence of
00:08:16 ►
cannabis the dream life seems to become much richer this causes me to sort of form a theory just for my own edification that cannabis
00:08:31 ►
must in some sense thin the boundary between the conscious and unconscious mind. And I sort of imagine the unconscious as a system under hydraulic pressure.
00:08:49 ►
And if you smoke cannabis, the energy which would normally be channeled into dreams is instead manifest in the reveries of the cannabis intoxication.
00:09:03 ►
of the cannabis intoxication.
00:09:10 ►
The reason that I’ve smoked it so assiduously over the years is very simply that it seems to dissolve
00:09:15 ►
a local and personalistic perspective.
00:09:20 ►
If I don’t smoke cannabis,
00:09:23 ►
I worry about balancing my checkbook, the state of my immediate short-term career concerns.
00:09:37 ►
In other words, all the anxieties of the petty bourgeois pour in to claim my attention.
00:09:46 ►
If, on the other hand, I avail myself of cannabis,
00:09:50 ►
I’m able to rove and scan through a vast intellectual world
00:09:58 ►
that is composed of all the books I’ve ever read,
00:10:02 ►
all the people I’ve ever known,
00:10:04 ►
all the places I’ve ever read, all the people I’ve ever known, all the places I’ve ever been,
00:10:06 ►
in no particular order. I mean, what I really value about cannabis is the way in which it
00:10:12 ►
allows one to be taken by surprise, by unexpected ideas. In the absence of cannabis, my creativity is a kind of brick by brick, linear extrapolation of certain
00:10:29 ►
concerns based on what I’ve just read or heard in conversation. If on the other hand, I smoke
00:10:36 ►
cannabis, I can go in one moment from thinking about Goethe’s color theory to, in the next moment,
00:10:46 ►
puzzling over a particular instance in Mayan historiography or, well, the examples are endless.
00:10:58 ►
And I think that my experience is generalizable,
00:11:05 ►
specifically by looking at, for instance,
00:11:09 ►
the architectural and art historical motifs
00:11:12 ►
of areas of the world where cannabis
00:11:16 ►
has been institutionalized for thousands of years.
00:11:20 ►
What we call Oriental extravagance
00:11:24 ►
is in fact the patina of design motifs and literary conventions that have been laid over ordinary experience in places like Bengal, the Punjab, and across the Middle East.
00:11:42 ►
and across the Middle East.
00:11:49 ►
Islam is a civilization to my mind,
00:11:52 ►
largely, though perhaps unconsciously, under the influence of the visions and the attitudes imparted by Hashish.
00:12:02 ►
When I attempt to analyze in a in the broadest sense what can the
00:12:11 ►
influence that cannabis has on myself and on large groups of people who use it
00:12:18 ►
it is that it seems to exert a kind of feminizing influence.
00:12:27 ►
It’s a boundary-dissolving drug, but a very gentle boundary-dissolving drug.
00:12:34 ►
It doesn’t dissolve boundaries in the spectacular way that the mega-halicinogens do.
00:12:42 ►
Of all the drugs that have been used by mankind over the centuries,
00:12:48 ►
I would venture to argue that cannabis is the most benign.
00:12:55 ►
Certainly more money has been spent trying to find something wrong with cannabis
00:13:03 ►
than has ever been spent on any other drug,
00:13:08 ►
and the findings are woeful.
00:13:16 ►
Well, there’s just no support for the idea that cannabis is anything other than as benign as a drug can be
00:13:25 ►
when you consider that it has to be smoked.
00:13:28 ►
So there is the issue of the generation of tars.
00:13:32 ►
Now it is true that in India, charas,
00:13:35 ►
which is what is smoked as the equivalent of hashish,
00:13:39 ►
is actually a much more complex material.
00:13:44 ►
Charas often contains opium,
00:13:47 ►
nearly always contains detoura,
00:13:51 ►
parts of the detoura plant which contain tropane, alkaloids,
00:13:56 ►
and it usually is held together by resin binders
00:14:01 ►
from various varieties of pine trees.
00:14:04 ►
Nevertheless, apparently, the smoking of charas in India
00:14:09 ►
is also an extremely non-destructive habit.
00:14:16 ►
Alcohol, on the other hand,
00:14:19 ►
is demonstrably one of the most destructive of all social habits.
00:14:26 ►
I mean, I think what a bright world it would be if every alcoholic were a pothead.
00:14:33 ►
What a bright world it would be if every user and abuser of speed and caffeine were a pothead.
00:14:44 ►
of speed and caffeine were a pothead.
00:14:49 ►
It seems to be a plant which has evolved in very intimate association with human beings
00:14:54 ►
from a very early time,
00:14:57 ►
and hence, whatever deleterious effects it has,
00:15:00 ►
we have managed to accommodate ourselves to them very well. One of the most interesting
00:15:07 ►
things about cannabis as a cultural phenomenon, I think, is, first of all, notice how cannabis
00:15:18 ►
is the resin product of the hemp plant. The hemp plant is, since the Neolithic forward,
00:15:27 ►
the preferred source of fiber and cordage.
00:15:33 ►
And I think it’s interesting to note how
00:15:36 ►
the language of story
00:15:41 ►
and the technical language of weaving are very, very similar. In other words, we untangle a narrative, we weave a story. Lies are made of whole cloth all of these words which describe
00:16:07 ►
the use of fibrous materials
00:16:10 ►
are also the words that we use
00:16:13 ►
for storytelling and narrative
00:16:17 ►
and I think it’s because probably these two concerns
00:16:21 ►
weaving and storytelling and linguistic facility, go back and find themselves
00:16:31 ►
in congruence in the hemp plant. The other thing that’s interesting is that in the cultivation of hemp for become contaminated with male pollen
00:17:06 ►
and then produce an inferior drug product.
00:17:11 ►
So hemp literally demands the honoring of the female.
00:17:18 ►
Now I’m not suggesting that this was consciously in the minds of primitive people
00:17:22 ►
because the female hemp plant does not particularly appear female
00:17:28 ►
in any way that can be associated to human femaleness.
00:17:32 ►
But it is nevertheless true that hemp plants come in two very distinct forms
00:17:38 ►
and we now know that one of these forms is the expression of the male plant,
00:17:43 ►
the other is the expression of the male plant, the other is the expression of the female plant.
00:17:48 ►
So waves of Gyalanic resurgence
00:17:52 ►
that have been coming and going since the Neolithic
00:17:56 ►
seem to me in many cases to carry along
00:18:01 ►
as one of the appurtenances of the gylanic sensibility, devotion to
00:18:08 ►
this particular drug and this particular
00:18:12 ►
plant above all others.
00:18:16 ►
Anybody want to jump in here?
00:18:20 ►
Well, only a small question to start with.
00:18:28 ►
Since the leaves of the male plant do have a pharmacological effect, I just wondered if you had anything to say on your experience
00:18:34 ►
of comparing the effects of the two?
00:18:38 ►
Well, only if it has a pharmacological effect, its orders of magnitude are more weakened than the female.
00:18:49 ►
One thing I might say,
00:18:52 ►
we in the 20th century tend to smoke our cannabis.
00:18:57 ►
I mean, aside for the occasional holiday cannabis cookie,
00:19:02 ►
cannabis for us is something that is smoked. On the other hand, for the
00:19:06 ►
19th century and for all of European civilization, cannabis was something that was eaten in the
00:19:16 ►
form of various sugared confections that were prepared. And this method of ingestion
00:19:25 ►
changes cannabis
00:19:27 ►
into an extremely powerful psychedelic experience.
00:19:32 ►
I mean, if you read the accounts
00:19:34 ►
of people like Theodore Gautier
00:19:38 ►
or Baudelaire or Fitzhugh Ludlow
00:19:41 ►
written in the mid-19th century,
00:19:44 ►
they are describing experiences that obviously were for them as powerful
00:19:50 ►
as a 500 microgram dose of LSD proved in our own lifetimes.
00:19:58 ►
And we forget this.
00:20:00 ►
We tend to think of it as a social drug and a kind of a minor drug on a par with smoking
00:20:09 ►
a cigarette or having a cognac or something like that. But in fact, for the serious eater
00:20:17 ►
of hashish, it is the portal into a true artificial paradise whose length and breadth is equal to that
00:20:28 ►
of any of the artificial paradises
00:20:31 ►
that we’ve discovered in modern psychedelic pharmacology.
00:20:37 ►
To my mind, the whole of, by oriental,
00:20:41 ►
I mean Indian and Middle Eastern civilization
00:20:44 ►
is steeped in the ambiance of hashish
00:20:49 ►
I mean the mosque of Omar for example
00:20:53 ►
is a beautiful example of the aesthetic of hashish at work
00:20:58 ►
or Jama Masjid in Delhi
00:21:00 ►
or the interiors of the mosques of Isfahan, this ideal of sensual beauty, of
00:21:11 ►
the richness of abstract design and vaulting spaces and vast concourses of polished marble and travertine. These seem to be the motifs of hashish
00:21:28 ►
in the same way that the Gothic vision
00:21:33 ►
of black ocean waters sucking at haunted islands
00:21:39 ►
is a part of the repertoire of the opium vision
00:21:42 ►
that so entranced the romantic poets.
00:21:47 ►
Hashish cannabis has an ambiance of its own.
00:21:51 ►
It has a morphogenetic field, and if you enter into that morphogenetic field, an androgynous, softened, abstract, colorful,
00:22:09 ►
and extraordinarily beautiful world.
00:22:14 ►
And in our own time, it seems to me the intense hatred of hashish
00:22:22 ►
and the efforts to eradicate it that reach hysterical proportions in our own country
00:22:28 ►
have nothing to do with the pharmacological impact of the drug
00:22:33 ►
or any deleterious effect that it might be perceived to have,
00:22:38 ►
but rather it is sensed as the carrier of a different set of cultural values,
00:22:44 ►
as the carrier of a different set of cultural values,
00:22:54 ►
which I would broadly describe as Gaian, or Gailanic, or feminizing, or androgynous,
00:23:10 ►
and that this is what really brings the opprobrium of the dominator society upon it, it is profoundly disloyal to the values of modern industrialism,
00:23:18 ►
where, for instance, a drug like caffeine, exemplified in coffee and tea, has been made very welcome in those same societies. I mean, no other drug other than caffeine has ever been written into the industrial
00:23:28 ►
contracts of workers as an inalienable right, and yet in the coffee break we encounter contractually defined rights to drug use that seem to work in favor of both manager and worker.
00:23:49 ►
Cannabis is very different.
00:23:51 ►
It promotes a dreaminess.
00:23:54 ►
It promotes an abiding in the imagination that is the stuff of romantic poetry
00:24:02 ►
rather than the stuff of the modern assembly line.
00:24:06 ►
And I’ve used it that way as a tool for creativity. I mean, it’s incredible how just a few puffs of
00:24:14 ►
cannabis can carry you over a creative problem or a block in seeing a particular problem so that suddenly the perspective shifts
00:24:28 ►
and what was previously occluded becomes patently obvious. So I think that there’s a great argument
00:24:37 ►
for above and beyond the well-known and familiar arguments for legalizing this drug,
00:24:47 ►
that it would provide revenue for governments,
00:24:50 ►
that it would decriminalize a class of people who,
00:24:54 ►
if it weren’t for their devotion to cannabis products,
00:24:58 ►
would be seen to be among the most law-abiding of all classes within society.
00:25:04 ►
These arguments are familiar and have been
00:25:06 ►
made very eloquently by other people. But behind that, there’s a deeper issue, which
00:25:14 ►
is the zeitgeist, if you will, of cannabis, which carries a certain implied danger to establishment values,
00:25:26 ►
which puts such a premium on clear-eyed hard work
00:25:31 ►
and Presbyterian rectitude.
00:25:42 ►
Well, I think it’s interesting that in countries like Egypt and India, where cannabis has been
00:25:50 ►
used for millennia and accepted as part of society, that now, both under the influence
00:25:56 ►
of United States foreign policy and of industrialism, there’s no attempt to suppress or stamp it
00:26:03 ►
out.
00:26:03 ►
But countries like Malaya, where it’s accepted as part of camp on life for many, many generations,
00:26:10 ►
now there are strict laws, draconian attempts to stop people smoking it.
00:26:15 ►
Death penalty.
00:26:16 ►
Even death penalties.
00:26:18 ►
So it’s true that there’s a shift in valuation taking place,
00:26:22 ►
imposed by the West, going together with industrialism
00:26:25 ►
which is happening and it’s clear that this is something to do with this change in consciousness.
00:26:32 ►
It’s also clear that in the 19th century there was a very different attitude on behalf of
00:26:39 ►
Western powers and cannabis was not illegal in Western countries and indeed in India.
00:26:46 ►
The British government in India operated a cannabis monopoly.
00:26:51 ►
The cannabis trade was the monopoly of the government
00:26:54 ►
and this continued in parts of India like Uttar Pradesh and in Pakistan
00:27:00 ►
until quite recently, maybe it still goes on. But when I was last in Lahore, in
00:27:07 ►
the bazaar there, there’s a little shop which says over the door, Government Opium Shop,
00:27:13 ►
and this shop deals in cannabis and opium, and is still, or was still, part of the government
00:27:20 ►
monopoly. So different attitudes have prevailed at different times, but it’s clear that the modern industrial consciousness is alien to cannabis,
00:27:28 ►
and I suppose it’s clear that the growth of what you’d call Gaian consciousness from the 1960s onwards is closely linked to it.
00:27:37 ►
Most people I know whose smokey-it has started in the 1960s or subsequently, I know very few who were familiar with its use before then.
00:27:47 ►
There must always have been some.
00:27:49 ►
But it was presumably the explosion of consciousness in the 1960s
00:27:55 ►
was closely associated with the explosion of cannabis
00:27:59 ►
and other psychedelic substances.
00:28:03 ►
Well, given all these facts, and given the strong case you make for its benevolent effects,
00:28:10 ►
what I’m interested in is why Ralph, who was also present on the scene in the 1960s, who
00:28:16 ►
is no enemy of the effect of psychedelics, has spent so many years as a total abstainer.
00:28:25 ►
Hmm. Well, I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you
00:28:31 ►
because I have an extremely positive attitude toward cannabis.
00:28:36 ►
I personally made the acquaintance in 1966,
00:28:40 ►
so a year after Terence, around my 30th birthday,
00:28:44 ►
and I discovered immediately on first smoking, more or less,
00:28:49 ►
some of these beneficial effects,
00:28:51 ►
even though I had no culture around the mythological interpretation
00:28:56 ►
and tradition of cannabis appreciation.
00:29:01 ►
Nevertheless, I saw at once these functions of the deconstruction
00:29:08 ►
of character armor and rigid mental structures opening up for free-roving enormous terrains
00:29:18 ►
of intellectual territory, the synthetic effect of resonance between previously isolated rooms in the mental mansion.
00:29:27 ►
And in 1968 there came into my possession by some miracle a large amount of synthetic THC in caps, which I circulated among friends, many
00:29:49 ►
of whom were mathematicians. This oral ingestion does produce, I guess, what a smoker of cannabis call an overdose basically and a very well benign psychedelic experience then
00:30:14 ►
after moving to Santa Cruz in 1968 where the hip subculture was thriving all thriving, all events were accompanied by smoking joints. And my main impression of it is what
00:30:31 ►
Terence described on the relationship of hemp and stories. I’ve learned this word diaphanous from you, Karis, the triaphanous web that we weave in our meetings.
00:30:51 ►
This kind of strong coupling, enhanced resonance, was in my experience characteristic of the cannabis experience. We started with the chant Om Namoh
00:31:10 ►
Shivaya, and in India, smoking of charas is a most common form of pujas for Shiva.
00:31:22 ►
form of pujas for Shiva.
00:31:28 ►
Danya Lu has emphasized the history of the Shaivite religion as preceding the arrival of the Indo-Europeans,
00:31:32 ►
the Aryans, into India.
00:31:34 ►
It’s associated with the Dravidians,
00:31:37 ►
now they’re in the south of India.
00:31:39 ►
And he identifies also this Shaivite religion,
00:31:43 ►
prehistoric religion, with Orpheism in Greece.
00:31:46 ►
Shiva, Orpheus, this is the same. So the association of cannabis and galony, I
00:31:53 ►
think, is a very reasonable conjecture on prehistory, that cannabis was an important crop in Minoan Crete,
00:32:08 ►
was an important ingredient in the Dionysian revels before alcohol took over.
00:32:14 ►
It was maybe the secret and most important ingredient
00:32:20 ►
in the maintenance of the Gyanic partnership societies of the prehistoric past
00:32:26 ►
therefore the fact
00:32:28 ►
that its
00:32:29 ►
arrival into mass
00:32:32 ►
use, breaking into mass
00:32:34 ►
use through college
00:32:36 ►
campuses in the 1960s
00:32:38 ►
did
00:32:40 ►
give birth
00:32:42 ►
to the hips
00:32:44 ►
of subculture, gave rebirth to the some cultures gave rebirth
00:32:47 ►
to the
00:32:48 ►
to the gyranic
00:32:51 ►
resurgence wave
00:32:54 ►
yet another gyranic resurgence
00:32:57 ►
wave in the 60s
00:32:59 ►
so this is the pretty powerful
00:33:00 ►
benefit for the
00:33:02 ►
argument in favor of the free availability of cannabis
00:33:07 ►
in society.
00:33:08 ►
It has beneficial effects, which are not only a little bit beneficial as, for example, creativity,
00:33:15 ►
enhanced health, or something like that.
00:33:18 ►
It aids the diaphanous web, the communication, the empathy, the appreciation for another view, the possibility of resonance between one’s ideas and other ideas, opening up creativity
00:33:32 ►
on the scale of cultural evolution in personal relationship, the way in which sexual experience
00:33:38 ►
is enhanced, for example, the aphrodisiac effect of cannabis in the right dose.
00:33:45 ►
the aphrodisiac effect of cannabis in the right dose.
00:33:50 ►
Just one example of its overall synthetic role. It is medicine for cultural evolution.
00:33:55 ►
And that’s my experience.
00:33:59 ►
But if you want to know why I stopped,
00:34:03 ►
I think, well, during the time that I did make friends with cannabis,
00:34:12 ►
I was also doing LSD a lot, and then mushrooms a lot, and other psychedelics and so on. So
00:34:20 ►
it was sort of a package deal. I found it convenient, finally, to experience
00:34:28 ►
with the other side an alternate behavior in which there would be a focusing on a tiny
00:34:36 ►
point of consciousness to a kind of focus and concentration maintained over a long period
00:34:44 ►
and concentration maintained over a long period of time,
00:34:49 ►
which brought its own benefit, another kind of benefit.
00:34:56 ►
So after synthesizing and deconstructing armor and obtaining new views over vaster territories and so on,
00:35:00 ►
you want to produce a product, like proving a mathematical theorem,
00:35:05 ►
which sometimes takes seven years of concentration
00:35:08 ►
on a single point in consciousness.
00:35:10 ►
This kind of activity for me seemed to be enhanced
00:35:17 ►
by abstinence from everything,
00:35:20 ►
from newspapers, from other people’s stories,
00:35:24 ►
from dinner party talk talk and so on,
00:35:29 ►
and from large parts of my own consciousness, just focusing on a point.
00:35:34 ►
I found experimenting with every different variation of behavior,
00:35:38 ►
that in order to accomplish my goal, say around 1980,
00:35:42 ►
when I quit all psychedelics for a while.
00:35:50 ►
Trying all these experiments and learning the parameters, I found that the least of
00:35:54 ►
everything, indulging in a process in India they call syncretizing, giving up everything
00:36:00 ►
and then bragging about that, this brought about more and more increase of the performance
00:36:08 ►
from myself of seeking the backhand.
00:36:11 ►
And this is like an elite athlete searching for ultimate performance,
00:36:16 ►
trying to break some kind of world record for focusing on a point.
00:36:20 ►
This evening, what I was doing this difficult and required rigid discipline,
00:36:26 ►
I invoked these ideas of yoga discipline that I had learned in India,
00:36:31 ►
and they’re responsible for a certain kind of ultimate performance.
00:36:36 ►
As cannabis and other psychedelics enhance a completely different kind of ultimate performance. And I suppose this is, I guess you could say,
00:36:56 ►
another binary of focusing and defocusing mental states.
00:37:00 ►
My current state, now more than ten years old, I realize is approaching the breaking point,
00:37:04 ►
and soon it may be necessary for me
00:37:07 ►
to relax on a fairly massive scale in order to regain novelty in my approach.
00:37:17 ►
How does it work for you, Rupert, in the process of relating to the problem of creativity?
00:37:29 ►
Well…
00:37:35 ►
I think there are two things I’d say.
00:37:38 ►
One is that it seems to create a much greater sense of ability to concentrate.
00:37:47 ►
So contrary to your experience that concentration is easier without it,
00:37:51 ►
I found that one of the effects is a greatly enhanced ability to concentrate,
00:37:56 ►
whether it’s listening to music, to concentrate on the music and not be distracted by other things,
00:38:01 ►
or whether it’s reading something and thinking about the idea
00:38:06 ►
as in following a chain of thought, to concentrate on that, or a line of exploration and conversation,
00:38:12 ►
or in writing, to concentrate on the flow of thought and onto the expression of the
00:38:21 ►
words and the way in which the language can express the idea
00:38:25 ►
the tremendous concentration that’s required
00:38:28 ►
in writing something
00:38:29 ►
at least which I find is necessary
00:38:31 ►
for writing books
00:38:32 ►
or
00:38:35 ►
thinking out the structure of
00:38:37 ►
a chapter or of
00:38:39 ►
an argument
00:38:41 ►
I find that it’s a great aid
00:38:44 ►
to concentration, partly because, as Terence
00:38:47 ►
says, it makes it possible to enter a state where these become things of importance, and
00:38:54 ►
the everyday concerns about checkbooks, banks, mailing a letter, this kind of thing becomes secondary importance. So it may be partly by removing the niggling preoccupations of mundane existence
00:39:13 ►
that it becomes easier to concentrate.
00:39:17 ►
The second effect I found, which I have a great deal to thank the cannabis plant for,
00:39:28 ►
is that in relation to places,
00:39:31 ►
the spirit of places, the spirit of trees,
00:39:33 ►
the spirits of plants,
00:39:37 ►
and the spirits of sacred places,
00:39:39 ►
two temples, cathedrals and so on,
00:39:43 ►
that it gives an enormous enhancement of the sense of connection and relationship
00:39:45 ►
which is otherwise normally
00:39:47 ►
filtered out by this chattering internal
00:39:49 ►
dialogue of the banal kind
00:39:51 ►
which goes on much of the time
00:39:52 ►
so that
00:39:55 ►
I suppose would fit with what Terence says about
00:39:57 ►
the dissolution of boundaries
00:39:59 ►
there’s
00:40:01 ►
a much greater sense of connectedness
00:40:04 ►
but there are two other things
00:40:11 ►
that come in and train with this
00:40:13 ►
one, as Terence noted, is suppression of dreams
00:40:16 ►
whenever I’m not a constant smoker
00:40:20 ►
as the kind that you were, Terence
00:40:24 ►
more sort of occasional.
00:40:27 ►
But in periods when I don’t smoke at all, then I notice much greater intensity of dreams.
00:40:35 ►
I remember more dreams, they seem much more vivid.
00:40:38 ►
Periods when I’m smoking, I don’t remember dreams at all usually.
00:40:42 ►
So there is this curious suppression of dreams, and I don’t really know at all usually. So there is this curious suppression of dreams
00:40:45 ►
and I don’t really know what to make of that.
00:40:49 ►
There’s also an effect which I think is a negative effect of cannabis
00:40:54 ►
and which is one of the reasons why governments
00:40:57 ►
and industrial civilisations try to suppress it,
00:41:00 ►
which is that because it produces a kind of physical relaxation
00:41:04 ►
which allows the mind to expand and journey
00:41:07 ►
and the psyche to connect and so on
00:41:10 ►
this I think the other side of that coin
00:41:13 ►
is that there’s a kind of toning down
00:41:15 ►
and tuning down the whole springs of action of the body
00:41:20 ►
so one’s perfectly content to sit around
00:41:22 ►
doing not very much
00:41:24 ►
it doesn’t produce a tremendous urge to go and empty the dustbin
00:41:29 ►
or do chores around the house and that kind of thing.
00:41:35 ►
And indeed it’s this kind of activity which is easily identified
00:41:41 ►
by external observers as physical laziness,
00:41:44 ►
which is the reason for its bad reputation in countries where it’s habitually used.
00:41:50 ►
And in Kashmir, for example, I was staying in Srinagar at one stage,
00:41:56 ►
and I had an agricultural project in Srinagar,
00:41:59 ►
and I was staying with a friend who was studying Kashmiri Shaivism.
00:42:04 ►
So I had my job, and then I was staying with this fellow
00:42:07 ►
and we were talking about this.
00:42:10 ►
And he said, well, have you ever been to one of these shrines,
00:42:13 ►
Sufi shrines, dergahs,
00:42:15 ►
where cannabis smoking was tolerated
00:42:19 ►
as part of the standard pattern of society,
00:42:22 ►
but where you see why there is a negative image of this
00:42:28 ►
hashish smoking in such societies, which you also get in Egypt and so on.
00:42:33 ►
Some of the middle class image of cannabis smoking in India and in Malaya and elsewhere
00:42:38 ►
is a bit like the middle class image of wine-overs and methylated spirit drinkers and so on in the West.
00:42:46 ►
We went to the shrine, which was
00:42:48 ►
the shrine of a Sufi saint,
00:42:50 ►
and attached to it was a smoking
00:42:52 ►
room, and this room was full of people
00:42:54 ►
smoking hashish sitting around the walls
00:42:56 ►
and there was a place there where you could buy it.
00:42:58 ►
So we sat down and had a puff, and
00:43:00 ►
it was a dreadful revelation
00:43:02 ►
to me when the man sitting next to me
00:43:04 ►
spoke to me in Urdu
00:43:06 ►
and he’d got bleary eyes
00:43:08 ►
he’d got several days growth of stubble
00:43:11 ►
he was in ragged smelly clothes
00:43:12 ►
he pulled out a picture of himself
00:43:15 ►
a kind of identity card thing
00:43:17 ►
of himself smart in a uniform
00:43:19 ►
said I used to be a bus driver
00:43:21 ►
until I started smoking
00:43:22 ►
now look at me
00:43:23 ►
that’s what it’s done to me
00:43:24 ►
he said as he took another puff.
00:43:26 ►
I’ve lost my family, I’ve lost everything.
00:43:29 ►
And so there was a kind of the negative, the shadow side of it,
00:43:35 ►
which I saw then more clearly than ever before or since,
00:43:39 ►
which certainly fitted with what rather prim middle class people in Malaya and India
00:43:44 ►
and in other oriental countries had told me about its habitual usages. which certainly fitted with what rather prim middle-class people in Malaya and India and
00:43:45 ►
in other oriental countries had told me about its habitual usages, which made it clear how
00:43:51 ►
it could accumulate this negative image, how it could cause alarm in people who don’t want
00:43:58 ►
the habit to spread in modern efficient industrial societies. And this is certainly associated in my own experience
00:44:06 ►
with the fact that the mental expansion is bought at the price of a certain physical
00:44:14 ►
lethargy. So I wonder if that’s been your experience.
00:44:18 ►
Actually, it hasn’t. I’m interested in the question. it has to be said that cannabis is chemically complicated
00:44:31 ►
it’s not simply one cannabinol
00:44:35 ►
there are a number of these cannabinoids
00:44:37 ►
and various strains have various ratios and proportions of these things
00:44:44 ►
but for instance I find when I’m writing books have various ratios and proportions of these things.
00:44:49 ►
But, for instance, I find when I’m writing books that I can only write for about three hours
00:44:53 ►
and then either the day is finished for work
00:44:59 ►
or I smoke a sheesh
00:45:02 ►
and 20 minutes later I’m ready to go two hours more at it.
00:45:08 ►
And I can do that twice in a day.
00:45:11 ►
If I judiciously control my intake of cannabis,
00:45:16 ►
it gives me a second wind and a third wind to go forward with creative activity.
00:45:25 ►
Now, if you just sit down and smoke into stupor, you’re not going to be able to do this.
00:45:31 ►
But if you just stop this now tiresome and boring activity and have a couple of puffs,
00:45:40 ►
and then you sit and you have a few interesting thoughts, and you feel completely revitalized and able to go back to it.
00:45:47 ►
And I’ve noticed this not only with creative work, but with physical work.
00:45:52 ►
For instance, if I’m stacking wood, I’ll stack half a cord of wood,
00:45:57 ►
and then I’ll either think, well, I’ll finish stacking it tomorrow,
00:46:02 ►
and then I’ll go in and smoke some cannabis,
00:46:06 ►
and a half hour later I’ll say well I wait till tomorrow I’ll just go and finish it right now I think you all know Paul Bowles book
00:46:14 ►
or the statement that a puff of keef makes a man strong as 20 camels in the courtyard. There’s something to this.
00:46:26 ►
It’s not simple.
00:46:30 ►
It can turn you into a stupor,
00:46:33 ►
sort of lazy, loutish person.
00:46:34 ►
On the other hand,
00:46:36 ►
it can allow you to do very hard work for very long periods of time.
00:46:39 ►
So you sort of have to manage it.
00:46:41 ►
And I think a lot of people don’t learn to manage it. One of the
00:46:46 ►
things that’s always put against marijuana is that it destroys short term or it destroys
00:46:54 ►
your memory. Well, I dare say I have a prodigious memory and I’m the heaviest smoker I’ve ever known, and my memory for dates, names of painters, writers,
00:47:08 ►
literary and scientific minutiae, odd vocabularies in specialized areas,
00:47:14 ►
is very great, and I don’t credit cannabis with that,
00:47:22 ►
but I certainly can’t believe that it has damaged my ability to do this now it
00:47:27 ►
is true that sometimes in a conversation you will lose your thread but on the other hand
00:47:35 ►
it gives you an equal power to brilliantly fake the situation and to pick up the thread and re-stitch together
00:47:46 ►
the narrative.
00:47:49 ►
The other point I might make
00:47:51 ►
that we haven’t mentioned yet,
00:47:53 ►
or two points actually,
00:47:54 ►
is that I think it gives
00:47:56 ►
an extraordinary verbal facility.
00:48:01 ►
And this is actually
00:48:02 ►
what won me to it
00:48:03 ►
in the first place.
00:48:07 ►
My reputation as a public speaker is based on my supposedly dazzling oratorical abilities,
00:48:17 ►
but I come out of a peer group, a carass in Berkeley,
00:48:24 ►
where everyone was able to do what I do. Everyone seemed to be
00:48:30 ►
able to hold forth for hours on the most arcane subjects. And in fact, when I got into cannabis,
00:48:38 ►
the style of doing it that I enjoyed most was I ran a kind of cannabis salon, as it were.
00:48:49 ►
And people came and they smoked and they talked and talked and talked.
00:48:56 ►
And this is all we did was talk.
00:48:59 ►
And no recordings exist of that era, but I believe that the conversation was brilliant,
00:49:07 ►
wide-ranging, prescient, to the point, and extraordinarily creative and capable of astonishing.
00:49:19 ►
And I give complete credit to cannabis for that.
00:49:23 ►
of complete credit to cannabis for that.
00:49:27 ►
I remember the second time that I smoked cannabis.
00:49:32 ►
I was a great fan of Herman Melville at that time.
00:49:36 ►
And my friend and I smoked some cannabis and then called on some young women at a dormitory
00:49:39 ►
that we were courting at that time.
00:49:42 ►
And we went into the visitor’s room of the dormitory,
00:49:47 ►
and I was able to hold forth for an hour in a pseudo-Melvillian style.
00:49:55 ►
I created on the spot, without hesitation, a short story in the style of Herman Melville
00:50:05 ►
that was dazzling, apparently, to my hearers.
00:50:11 ►
Well, this is verbal facility of an extraordinary sort.
00:50:17 ►
The other area where I think it has an important role to play
00:50:21 ►
that we haven’t talked about
00:50:22 ►
is in sexual performance and sexual stamina.
00:50:31 ►
When I first became sexually active, and I think this is a problem of many young men simply because
00:50:38 ►
they have so much juice going, is premature ejaculation. All my sexual encounters were haunted by that possibility
00:50:49 ►
simply because I was just so hyped up over the idea of having intercourse with someone.
00:50:55 ►
Well, I discovered that smoking hashish gave me an incredible ability to control my ejaculation
00:51:06 ►
and also my sexual stamina.
00:51:10 ►
So these were invaluable social skills.
00:51:14 ►
It gave me verbal facility, sexual stamina,
00:51:19 ►
control over my ejaculation,
00:51:22 ►
beautiful visions, a prodigious memory.
00:51:28 ►
It did everything but suppress appetite, which it certainly did not do.
00:51:36 ►
The munchies, regardless of what pharmacologists tell us about how this is an illusion,
00:51:42 ►
the munchies seem to be a very real part of cannabis use,
00:51:47 ►
meaning that 40 minutes or an hour after smoking cannabis,
00:51:51 ►
one does find oneself rummaging through the cupboard
00:51:54 ►
looking for chocolate chip cookies.
00:51:57 ►
But this is hardly grounds for hanging,
00:52:02 ►
which is the current legal response in Malaysia.
00:52:06 ►
My impression, Terence, is that your experience is not typical, and most of the things you
00:52:13 ►
described, I would say, are typical of my experience personally.
00:52:18 ►
And mine.
00:52:19 ►
But in Santa Cruz, I remember after the 60s came and went,
00:52:25 ►
I mean, this is a community that was very involved in the marijuana trade in the 70s,
00:52:32 ►
let’s say, there were a certain number of people who were habitual users,
00:52:38 ►
I would say habitual smokers, as you were,
00:52:42 ►
and it seemed as if they couldn’t get their life together.
00:52:45 ►
Unlike you, they were functional, they could stack the wood,
00:52:48 ►
but they never got on to doing what they wanted to do.
00:52:51 ►
And I did begin to associate a certain subtle disorganization
00:52:57 ►
with their habitual smoking.
00:53:01 ►
This is a different, a slightly more mild form of this negative effect that Rupert described
00:53:09 ►
in India, where people are truly addicted and in a subhuman state.
00:53:17 ►
That I think requires taking really deep inhalations of cannabis with a chillum.
00:53:27 ►
But there are, let’s say for the sake of discussion,
00:53:33 ►
that there is a negative side beyond what you have experienced
00:53:36 ►
in case of heavy use.
00:53:41 ►
And even so, it’s, I think, very modest
00:53:44 ►
compared to the negative side of
00:53:46 ►
heavy use of alcohol
00:53:47 ►
and is very insignificant in comparison
00:53:50 ►
with the very
00:53:52 ►
positive effects of cannabis
00:53:54 ►
use in a society
00:53:55 ►
which in the case of alcohol
00:53:57 ►
I don’t know of any
00:53:59 ►
there might be some people can tell
00:54:02 ►
amazing alcohol stories where they
00:54:04 ►
really have been able to work wonderful while intoxicated, but basically I think it’s agreed that while relaxing in small doses is good for your health, it’s basically has a negative influence.
00:54:22 ►
I know you’ve both thought about this.
00:54:28 ►
Why is it, how is it that cannabis, in spite of these beneficial effects, its benignness and so on, is so strongly regulated and forbidden all over the planet now?
00:54:40 ►
One idea I know from the previous, since cannabis is the Orphic drug, it’s associated with the goddess, and then in the patriarchal takeover, of course, it was one of the things that was knocked from the pedestal along with chaos and the goddess.
00:55:03 ►
but even now in this modern society where we have no recourse to these old myths
00:55:05 ►
and people are not really afraid of the goddess re-emerging
00:55:09 ►
there’s this incredibly expensive drug war going on
00:55:14 ►
people are not speaking of cannabis now
00:55:17 ►
I think because the atmosphere for it is much more hostile today
00:55:21 ►
than even ten years ago
00:55:23 ►
ten years ago I used to speak about my
00:55:27 ►
experience with psychedelics in class. Now I wouldn’t. It’s better not to. Not because
00:55:31 ►
the police are going to come and carry me away, but the immediate reaction of these
00:55:35 ►
people I’m trying to communicate with is going to be very, very negative. More negative than if I was alcoholic and put in jail for driving while intoxicated.
00:55:48 ►
So some kind of paranoia about whatever cannabis represents to people,
00:55:57 ►
the significance and the mythological,
00:56:00 ►
this paranoia is on the increase in this decade,
00:56:04 ►
and I wonder why you think that is
00:56:07 ►
well first may I say that I think this paranoia is somewhat polarised
00:56:14 ►
and there is a rising paranoia in the United States
00:56:17 ►
which has partly been exported to countries like Malaysia
00:56:21 ►
the paranoia about cannabis in Europe is definitely on the decline.
00:56:27 ►
Cannabis has been effectively decriminalised in Holland, in Switzerland, in Italy. Even
00:56:35 ►
in Britain, even in the Thatcher regime. There was an article recently in the newspapers
00:56:43 ►
saying that something like 90% of the people the police catch with small amounts of cannabis are now let off with a caution, not even fined.
00:56:52 ►
In Italy, the possession of small quantities of cannabis is not a criminal offence, and even somewhat slightly larger ones is treated on the par with parking offences.
00:57:02 ►
You know, you get a ticket or something, minor fines.
00:57:06 ►
And the movement, even in Britain,
00:57:09 ►
which is probably the most closest to America
00:57:11 ►
in general attitudes in Europe,
00:57:15 ►
there’s been a progressive attitude on the part of the police
00:57:18 ►
and even increasing numbers of legislators and judges
00:57:20 ►
towards decriminalising the use of cannabis.
00:57:24 ►
De facto, in small quantitiesising the use of cannabis.
00:57:28 ►
De facto, in small quantities, this has actually happened.
00:57:32 ►
So rather than zero tolerance being the rule,
00:57:36 ►
there’s in fact been an increasing tolerance in most European societies to the use of cannabis over the last decade.
00:57:41 ►
And full-scale legalisation may not yet have come
00:57:45 ►
this has happened de facto in various parts of Europe
00:57:49 ►
there are streets of Zurich for example
00:57:53 ►
where you can sit in the street at cafes and smoke openly
00:57:57 ►
there are certain streets where it’s tolerated
00:57:59 ►
unwritten agreements
00:58:01 ►
there are parts of Amsterdam where it’s sold over the counter in cafes, even
00:58:06 ►
advertised different brands of it. There are cards up with prices on public display. So
00:58:12 ►
there has been a countervailing move in Europe. And so it’s not as if this hysteria is gripped
00:58:20 ►
everywhere equally.
00:58:21 ►
gripped everywhere equally.
00:58:24 ►
Then we’ll be seeing an increase of novelty
00:58:27 ►
and cultural evolution in Europe
00:58:29 ►
outstripping developments
00:58:32 ►
in the United States,
00:58:34 ►
according to our…
00:58:35 ►
Well, to some,
00:58:36 ►
it may in fact be happening.
00:58:39 ►
I mean, I certainly feel
00:58:40 ►
much more at the center of novelty
00:58:43 ►
when I’m in Germany,
00:58:44 ►
where, by the way, people smoke cannabis in restaurants I feel much more at the center of novelty when I’m in Germany,
00:58:51 ►
where, by the way, people smoke cannabis in restaurants quite openly.
00:58:56 ►
The United States seems to be on a kind of fundamentalist religious bender that carry in its attitude toward women’s reproductive rights and drugs
00:59:02 ►
and all these things that is making us the kind
00:59:05 ►
of pariah in the first world. I mean we represent values which are
00:59:10 ►
incomprehensible to educated Europeans. One thing that occurs to me that I’m
00:59:16 ►
sure Rupert would have enthusiasm for because it involves his grassroots
00:59:21 ►
science thing, this question of does it make you of, does it make you lazy?
00:59:26 ►
Does it give you energy?
00:59:28 ►
Does it destroy your memory?
00:59:29 ►
Does it enhance your memory?
00:59:31 ►
Because I’ve smoked so many years,
00:59:34 ►
so many different kinds of dope, of cannabis,
00:59:39 ►
I’ve come to hold pretty strong opinions
00:59:43 ►
about its various forms.
00:59:46 ►
And I think that, number one, charas is a debilitating drug.
00:59:53 ►
It has opium in it, it has detura in it,
00:59:56 ►
and it has various additives and binders that are not good.
01:00:03 ►
Marijuana, which is how most Americans smoke their cannabis, involves
01:00:11 ►
the incineration of too much inert vegetable material, so that you are getting pesticide
01:00:17 ►
residues, carbon monoxide, tars, all of these things are complicating the question of what does cannabis do.
01:00:28 ►
To my mind, the true test of whether or not cannabis is what the pharmacological effects of cannabis are,
01:00:36 ►
we should almost restrict our discussion to high-grade Lebanese hashish,
01:00:44 ►
to high-grade Lebanese hashish,
01:00:49 ►
which is truly nothing but the compressed resin of the female cannabis plant.
01:00:52 ►
And that’s the classical hashish of the Arab,
01:00:57 ►
and that’s what I prefer and feel almost to be a different drug
01:01:03 ►
from both Mexican marijuana
01:01:06 ►
and Pakistani or Indian hashish.
01:01:09 ►
Those things do carry detrimental qualities
01:01:16 ►
that are not present in the pure, for instance,
01:01:21 ►
three-lion or so-called red Lebanese hashish,
01:01:27 ►
that’s the hashish that we want.
01:01:30 ►
That’s the cannabis product that I would feel is the one that everyone should smoke
01:01:35 ►
before they judge or form a strong opinion about what cannabis can do.
01:01:41 ►
In spite of the increasingly repressive
01:01:45 ►
atmosphere in the United States,
01:01:47 ►
I imagine that
01:01:49 ►
marijuana smoking is still on the
01:01:51 ►
increase. I mean, it’s very widely
01:01:53 ►
used, at least
01:01:55 ►
secretly.
01:01:57 ►
They claim not, but
01:01:59 ►
there’s a decrease. Slow,
01:02:01 ►
slight. Tannage?
01:02:03 ►
Yeah, they claim so.
01:02:06 ►
Still, it’s sufficiently widespread
01:02:09 ►
that a certain amount of grassroots scientific experimentation
01:02:12 ►
could be going on
01:02:15 ►
if there was a way to share the results of the experiments.
01:02:19 ►
Yes, this is something that grassroots,
01:02:21 ►
no pun intended,
01:02:22 ►
grassroots science could tell us
01:02:25 ►
is the relative benignity of various forms
01:02:29 ►
of hashish or of cannabis.
01:02:35 ►
Indeed, yes.
01:02:35 ►
I mean, this would be a fairly easy project to carry out.
01:02:38 ►
I mean, assuming people had access to supplies
01:02:41 ►
of which they could compare.
01:02:43 ►
There used to be testing labs available.
01:02:46 ►
I don’t know if there still are on the streets in
01:02:47 ►
Berkeley or San Francisco, for example.
01:02:49 ►
You could take your specimen
01:02:51 ►
of hashish and find out if it
01:02:53 ►
was opiated or not.
01:02:55 ►
Yes, that is a simple
01:02:57 ►
test, but questions about
01:02:59 ►
tars, pesticide
01:03:01 ►
residues, carbon monoxide
01:03:04 ►
output,
01:03:06 ►
various methods of smoking.
01:03:09 ►
You’d have to have a revival of kitchen chemistry, as it were.
01:03:11 ►
Right.
01:03:14 ►
But I think that the pure resin of the cannabis plant is you would be hard-pressed to design a drug with as
01:03:28 ►
many laudable qualities as that one
01:03:37 ►
so then perhaps we should consider what would happen if the trend that’s
01:03:42 ►
happening in Europe anyway continues, if cannabis is
01:03:46 ►
actually legalized, which is, as I say, it’s already de facto legalized in parts of Germany,
01:03:53 ►
Switzerland, Italy, even to an extent in Britain. So what would happen? I mean, it’s not a prospect I actually ever relished,
01:04:06 ►
because I then imagine, you know,
01:04:09 ►
Philip Morris and, you know,
01:04:12 ►
Anglo-American Tobacco Corporation
01:04:14 ►
moving into this area,
01:04:15 ►
and, you know, there’s no doubt
01:04:17 ►
the restrictions on their commercials,
01:04:19 ►
but the idea that this could then be
01:04:22 ►
a mass-marketed product,
01:04:23 ►
large-scale international corporations
01:04:27 ►
would be in on it, BCCI.
01:04:35 ►
Well, the main high street banks and so on would then be financing these deals rather than they’d take over the role of BCCI quite legally.
01:04:40 ►
I’m not sure that I particularly relish that.
01:04:43 ►
And the other issue which we haven’t talked about, which is no doubt of some concern to you, Terence,
01:04:49 ►
is at what age children might be permitted or encouraged to experiment with cannabis.
01:04:55 ►
And would we want this to be going on in the gazebo here in Estonia, in nursery schools, junior high school?
01:05:04 ►
in nursery schools, junior high school.
01:05:09 ►
If it’s legalized and much more readily available,
01:05:12 ►
the same questions would arise as arise already,
01:05:15 ►
but more so because it would be more available.
01:05:21 ►
Well, I prefer decriminalization rather than legalization.
01:05:26 ►
I don’t think we need to simply say that any entrepreneur can invest in land,
01:05:32 ►
plant cannabis, patent a brand name
01:05:35 ►
and begin to sell it on the open market.
01:05:38 ►
It would be much better simply to decriminalize it
01:05:42 ►
and say something like,
01:05:45 ►
each person could possess ten plants,
01:05:49 ►
but that the transport and sale of it would be discouraged in some way.
01:05:57 ►
So that it isn’t…
01:05:58 ►
You see, we seem to have the attitude that something is either illegal
01:06:01 ►
or we can just go gung-ho with it and turn it into the product of a multimillion-dollar corporation.
01:06:10 ►
It would be much better to just say that the possession of small amounts of cannabis
01:06:16 ►
for personal use pose no threat to society and leave it at that.
01:06:22 ►
So how are you going to get your red Lebanese then?
01:06:26 ►
Well, you would find a way, just as one finds a way today.
01:06:33 ►
It would be easier if there was a government half-shop.
01:06:35 ►
Yes, although I don’t find it difficult to get red Lebanese.
01:06:43 ►
The only thing I would hope is that we might get a price break if it were decriminalized.
01:06:48 ►
It’s currently being sold because it’s an illegal commodity.
01:06:53 ►
It’s being sold at an enormous market for what it costs to produce it.
01:07:00 ►
And this might be something…
01:07:01 ►
It’s a very expensive business.
01:07:03 ►
Right.
01:07:04 ►
Why we have legal alcohol and some of the other things, And this might be something… It’s a very expensive business. But why…
01:07:05 ►
We have legal alcohol
01:07:07 ►
and some of the other things.
01:07:09 ►
Why not simply legal…
01:07:10 ►
So there can be shops,
01:07:12 ►
there can be huge industries,
01:07:13 ►
and there can be
01:07:14 ►
gourmet growers
01:07:16 ►
using special methods and…
01:07:18 ►
Like wine, you mean.
01:07:19 ►
Like wine.
01:07:21 ►
Well, but then you have these problems
01:07:22 ►
which Rupert is pointing out.
01:07:26 ►
That once more it’s handed over to Madison Avenue to be turned into something where they can’t simply say
01:07:34 ►
it’s available to those who want it. Well, people living in downtown New York City are
01:07:38 ►
not going to be able to grow eight or ten plants themselves. I was recently in downtown New York City,
01:07:45 ►
and I examined a pot garden that would have been the envy of any resident of Humboldt County.
01:07:51 ►
Well, real estate is expensive.
01:07:54 ►
Spare bedroom with row light bulbs is expensive.
01:07:59 ►
That’s all right, but I think, why not legalization?
01:08:03 ►
What are the problems?
01:08:04 ►
Well, probably this would come, and then it would be, as far as the question of children,
01:08:10 ►
it would be available, you know, it would be restricted to people below age 18 or something.
01:08:16 ►
Right. No, I think ultimately what we’re going to have to do is legalize all drugs. Now a hidden aspect of this is that governments
01:08:31 ►
make enormous profits out of the fact that these drugs are illegal. A harmless drug like
01:08:39 ►
cannabis, the interdiction, eradication, and the mafias which move it
01:08:47 ►
are all spun into government policy.
01:08:50 ►
I mean, governments have always been and continue to this day
01:08:54 ►
to be the major purveyors of drugs worldwide.
01:08:59 ►
So really, another factor mitigating the drive to legalize cannabis
01:09:04 ►
is where then would
01:09:06 ►
the CIA obtain it would eat into its ability to finance the various rebel
01:09:16 ►
armies front organization yes but what other way? I mean, for instance, when the mullahs took over in Iran
01:09:25 ►
and gained control of the Iranian opium trade,
01:09:30 ►
the CIA turned to cocaine
01:09:33 ►
and brought on the crack epidemic of the 1980s.
01:09:39 ►
So the government then create new synthetic drugs like ice and then peddle them to the public?
01:09:48 ►
Without doubt.
01:09:50 ►
Well, this is just something to realize that governments, you see,
01:09:54 ►
wrap themselves in a mantle of righteousness and tell us just say no.
01:10:01 ►
But in fact, governments are making millions off the illicit, billions off the
01:10:07 ►
illicit drug trade. The entire Mujahideen resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan
01:10:13 ►
was financed with the connivance of the CIA. Hashish was being unloaded on the docks of
01:10:21 ►
San Francisco in broad daylight by the metric ton at the height of the Afghan war.
01:10:28 ►
We’ve never been able to get Afghani hash of such quality
01:10:33 ►
as we were able to get during the period
01:10:36 ►
when the CIA was keen that we buy it
01:10:40 ►
so that they could finance the armed resistance
01:10:43 ►
to the Soviet occupation.
01:10:44 ►
And the day the Russians left, so that they could finance the armed resistance to the Soviet occupation.
01:10:47 ►
And the day the Russians left,
01:10:53 ►
the hashish market in Northern California collapsed catastrophically and has never been able to build itself back to previous levels.
01:10:59 ►
As John just said, the more it’s organized, the easier it is to steal.
01:11:06 ►
See, the more it’s organized, the easier it is to steal. See, the more substances are controlled, the more
01:11:08 ►
shadow space there is for shadow
01:11:09 ►
governments, CIAs,
01:11:11 ►
mafias, and so on, to operate
01:11:14 ►
in the dark.
01:11:15 ►
So it’s better to
01:11:17 ►
let go on all these fronts.
01:11:20 ►
And it’s happening in
01:11:22 ►
Europe, especially
01:11:23 ►
I think it’s much more significant, the decriminalization of heroin.
01:11:30 ►
They’re in the same parts in Switzerland.
01:11:32 ►
You see people sharing needles and so on.
01:11:35 ►
I think that’s a very courageous experiment and we’ll get to see the results
01:11:40 ►
and eventually perhaps it will spread to the United States.
01:11:43 ►
But you wouldn’t suggest that we make heroin so legal that you can flip open Time magazine
01:11:53 ►
to a color ad that says, what’s missing in your life?
01:11:58 ►
Heroin, the drug of choice of the chic young set.
01:12:04 ►
This is not what we want.
01:12:07 ►
That would perhaps not be worse than what we’ve got now.
01:12:11 ►
I think that I feel as badly about tobacco as I do of many of these other things.
01:12:18 ►
Personally, I had a very negative experience with fruit-based cocaine.
01:12:23 ►
I found this material to be very
01:12:27 ►
surprisingly addictive. You know, the tiniest experiment leaves you a total addict. So,
01:12:33 ►
in my personal view, this stuff is extremely evil. Nevertheless, I don’t think that restricting
01:12:42 ►
it by law is an effective strategy to prevent people from getting addicted.
01:12:48 ►
I think that crack is similar, I’m not sure.
01:12:50 ►
It’s extremely toxic material in society,
01:12:54 ►
but simply making it illegal just creates this huge shadow trade where it’s out of control
01:13:00 ►
and people have to experiment here to find out what it is.
01:13:03 ►
The ad in Time magazine
01:13:06 ►
would without doubt say
01:13:08 ►
this material is harmful to your health.
01:13:10 ►
The Surgeon General has found
01:13:12 ►
that shooting heroin is
01:13:14 ►
harmful to your health.
01:13:15 ►
It’s not liable to be very addicting after a single
01:13:17 ►
experience and
01:13:19 ►
some of the information would be
01:13:22 ►
circulated. The shadow
01:13:24 ►
would be eliminated. The secret would be eliminated.
01:13:27 ►
I don’t think that that necessarily means that a lot more people would be addicted.
01:13:32 ►
I think probably fewer.
01:13:33 ►
Well, the drug issue brings up the question of whether societies should organize themselves
01:13:39 ►
along the assumption that citizens are adults or children.
01:13:43 ►
along the assumption that citizens are adults or children.
01:13:47 ►
And if you view citizens as children,
01:13:50 ►
well, then you have to keep various things out of their hands. If you believe citizens are adults,
01:13:53 ►
then you have to believe that certain checks and balances
01:13:56 ►
will keep any negative practice
01:13:59 ►
from simply sweeping through society and destroying it.
01:14:03 ►
I believe that.
01:14:04 ►
I believe that if heroin were legalized,
01:14:08 ►
a very small number of people would destroy themselves with it,
01:14:12 ►
and that’s their business,
01:14:14 ►
and society can absorb the cost of their slow suicide
01:14:18 ►
in the same way that we absorb the cost of the slow suicide
01:14:22 ►
that people undergo with tobacco and alcohol.
01:14:25 ►
So here are some more questions for grassroots science.
01:14:28 ►
Yes, well, in this drug area,
01:14:30 ►
grassroots science could do amazing things.
01:14:36 ►
It’s just that the questions are never asked by big science
01:14:39 ►
because it really doesn’t want the answers
01:14:42 ►
to some of these questions.
01:14:44 ►
To my mind, the Life, Liberty Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness Clause
01:14:48 ►
of the United States Bill of Rights,
01:14:51 ►
if it means anything,
01:14:53 ►
it must mean the right to experiment with psychoactive drugs
01:14:57 ►
as you personally see fit.
01:14:59 ►
What does pursuit of happiness mean otherwise?
01:15:04 ►
Nevertheless, there is enormous and growing problems
01:15:08 ►
of cocaine and heroin abuse,
01:15:13 ►
problems that no one seems to have an answer to,
01:15:16 ►
and which seem to be far worse than problems in the past.
01:15:19 ►
Well, I think it’s a red herring.
01:15:22 ►
I think that if governments would stop dealing with these drugs,
01:15:26 ►
these problems would disappear.
01:15:29 ►
I mean, the entire…
01:15:31 ►
I think it’s very unlikely.
01:15:31 ►
The mafia and the General Noriega’s and the Medellin cartels of this world
01:15:36 ►
don’t get carried on perfectly well without the help of the CIA.
01:15:40 ►
Yes.
01:15:40 ►
I think if the CIA told them that they would be highly at risk
01:15:44 ►
if they disobeyed orders
01:15:46 ►
and that a directive had just come down from the top that this was no longer going to be tolerated,
01:15:55 ►
I mean, much of the American cocaine comes in on Air Force planes.
01:16:00 ►
If you simply deny them the use of the American Air Force, it would pose a major problem to them in moving their…
01:16:08 ►
But not the insuperable one.
01:16:09 ►
They’ve got other methods, boats, trucks across the Mexican border,
01:16:12 ►
all sorts of things.
01:16:13 ►
Well, you’re not going to wipe it out,
01:16:16 ►
but you don’t have to grease the slides for it.
01:16:20 ►
This is what the CIA is doing.
01:16:22 ►
But I think the experiments going on now with the decriminalization
01:16:27 ►
of heroin, which is similar to crack cocaine, I think, in its addictive power, they are
01:16:34 ►
very encouraging that a method other than legal restriction could be successful in dealing
01:16:43 ►
with the crack problem. Well, for instance, take the tropanes.
01:16:47 ►
I mean, these are powerful mind-altering drugs, cause visions, and so forth and so on.
01:16:55 ►
The entire western United States is a range for the Jimson weed plant,
01:17:11 ►
and it poses no social problems whatsoever to anyone.
01:17:15 ►
And it’s as powerful as any drug which exists. And no, it just is not a problem.
01:17:20 ►
So it’s something about focus and glamorization of habits.
01:17:27 ►
There are a number of examples like this.
01:17:32 ►
Opium poppies, for example.
01:17:35 ►
The garden here at Esalen has a wonderful stand of opium poppies.
01:17:40 ►
This is not doing anybody any harm,
01:17:42 ►
and I don’t see people availing themselves of the raw opium,
01:17:48 ►
which is being shed copiously just three steps off the path as you walk to the dining room.
01:17:55 ►
It’s actually the legal restraint that raises the price that creates this economic attraction for the illegal substances.
01:18:04 ►
this economic attraction for the illegal substances.
01:18:11 ►
So the legal restraints actually create the opposite effect than they’re designed for.
01:18:17 ►
Yes, hemp was a major crop in this country up until the 1930s, and it was not discontinued because of the drug potential,
01:18:23 ►
continued because of the drug potential, but because it posed problems for those corporate entities
01:18:31 ►
which had huge holdings in forest timber
01:18:34 ►
that they planned to turn into paper,
01:18:37 ►
and the DuPont Chemical Corporation,
01:18:40 ►
and Standard Oil, which wanted lubricants
01:18:44 ►
and high-petrol distillates
01:18:47 ►
to come from petroleum rather than from a biological source.
01:18:52 ►
So it’s simply the glamorization and restriction of these things
01:18:57 ►
which creates artificial markets.
01:19:00 ►
I mean, airplane glue is an excellent example here.
01:19:03 ►
I mean, airplane glue is an excellent example here.
01:19:07 ►
Airplane glue costs $1.29 a tube.
01:19:13 ►
Powerful drug, hallucinogenic drug, enhances sex, great drug.
01:19:19 ►
Only mad people avail themselves of airplane glue. If you were to drop the price of crack cocaine to $1.29 a gram,
01:19:24 ►
drop the price of crack cocaine to $1.29 a gram,
01:19:28 ►
you wouldn’t see people driving around in their Maseratis with crack cocaine crumbs in their, I mean, with airplane glue in their beards.
01:19:34 ►
No, it would be viewed as so déclassé
01:19:39 ►
that no respectable person would get near it.
01:19:43 ►
Well, now that we’ve got the legalization of cannabis
01:19:47 ►
and probably other things,
01:19:49 ►
and the resurrection of the hemp industry worldwide,
01:19:53 ►
how can we bring this to a conclusion?
01:19:57 ►
Well, I think you just did, Ralph.
01:20:00 ►
There you have it.
01:20:02 ►
Part of the pursuit of human freedom, part of citizenship and responsible adulthood and responsible government means live and let live. here far too little. Somebody is always trying to mess with somebody else’s life,
01:20:26 ►
their sex life, their
01:20:27 ►
drug habits, their
01:20:29 ►
political stances,
01:20:32 ►
so forth and so on.
01:20:33 ►
Long live autism.
01:20:35 ►
Hear, hear.
01:20:36 ►
Hear.
01:20:38 ►
Boom, shiva,
01:20:40 ►
boom, shanka.
01:20:44 ►
Okay, gang.
01:20:47 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:20:50 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:20:55 ►
Okay, gang.
01:20:56 ►
Well, what did you think about that one?
01:20:58 ►
I really enjoyed it myself,
01:21:00 ►
even though a lot has changed in the world since that recording was made.
01:21:06 ►
For one thing, there was only talk about smoking cannabis most likely because in 1991 vaporizer technology was
01:21:13 ►
still a little primitive at least when compared to the volcano which is about as fine a piece of kit
01:21:19 ►
as my friends in the UK say as fine a piece of kit as you can get. Another thing that came to mind when I was listening to this trialogue just now
01:21:29 ►
was that you can now find a wide range of information about cannabis from places like ASA,
01:21:35 ►
Americans for Safe Access, which you can find at www.safeaccessnow.org
01:21:45 ►
I’ve seen some of the pamphlets that they have written,
01:21:49 ►
like Cannabis and Cancer, Cannabis and Aging, etc.
01:21:52 ►
And I highly recommend them as sources of information
01:21:55 ►
that you can pass on to friends, relatives, and neighbors
01:21:59 ►
who are still ignorant about the vast amount of medical benefits
01:22:03 ►
available from the cannabis plant.
01:22:06 ►
In the talk we just now listened to, Terrence mentions the brilliant cannabis-fueled salons
01:22:12 ►
that he participated in during his Berkeley years in the 60s.
01:22:16 ►
And that brought to mind some late-night conversations that I’ve had with friends over the years.
01:22:22 ►
Not that my friends and I were in the same intellectual league
01:22:25 ►
as our three merry trialogers.
01:22:28 ►
We nonetheless made a point every now and then
01:22:30 ►
that sparked other thoughts and spurred us on to greater heights.
01:22:34 ►
And my guess is that you’ve been involved in similar groups,
01:22:38 ►
which finally leads me to the point I’d like to make,
01:22:41 ►
and that is that you might want to think about hosting
01:22:44 ►
and recording your own dialogues, trialogues, Thank you. If you only find one other person nearby that you can get together with and discuss some of the things we talk about here in the psychedelic salon, I think you’ll find that the time you spend in the company of other like-minded people will probably do more for your attitude than 10 years of therapy.
01:23:17 ►
It’s really amazing when you think about it how little discussion there is about psychedelics in our everyday conversation.
01:23:23 ►
little discussion there is about psychedelics in our everyday conversation.
01:23:29 ►
Once you’ve experienced these sacred medicines a few times, I think you’ll agree that the experience is by far the most profound experience you can imagine, and yet we’re afraid to discuss
01:23:36 ►
it in public.
01:23:38 ►
In fact, I was a little surprised just now when I heard Ralph say that ten years earlier
01:23:43 ►
he felt more free to reveal his personal psychedelic history to his students than he did at the time of the recording.
01:23:50 ►
So if you do the math, it was easier to talk about drugs in 1981 than it is today, or at least in 1991.
01:23:59 ►
In other words, here in this great republic, this supposed baston of free speech,
01:24:04 ►
even university professors have to be careful about what they’re saying about psychedelic medicines. here in this great republic, this supposed bastion of free speech,
01:24:09 ►
even university professors have to be careful about what they’re saying about psychedelic medicines.
01:24:16 ►
Which means that, ultimately, even with the vast resources now available on the Internet,
01:24:20 ►
there is mainly widespread misunderstanding and ignorance about what I believe to be the most important physical materials that we know about.
01:24:24 ►
about what I believe to be the most important physical materials that we know about.
01:24:30 ►
Which brings me to an interesting question that I received from Trey.
01:24:31 ►
Here’s what he said.
01:24:37 ►
I fear that the psychedelic community is surrounded by the danger of becoming dogmatic in its thinking due to its isolation.
01:24:40 ►
Do you have any podcasts that involve a psychedelic thinker versus a non-psychedelic thinker?
01:24:46 ►
What I have in mind is the kind of debate that people such as Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins go through.
01:24:52 ►
Putting aside whether one agrees with their beliefs or not, they’re at least willing to put them on the line against others.
01:24:58 ►
So again, do you have any podcasts that involve a psychedelic proponent versus a psychedelic opponent?
01:25:05 ►
Well, Trey, that’s an interesting thought.
01:25:09 ►
But after thinking about it for a while,
01:25:11 ►
I’ve decided that a conversation like that might work on the evening news,
01:25:15 ►
but I’m not going to spend the time on it myself here in the salon.
01:25:19 ►
And here’s why.
01:25:20 ►
First of all, I’ve never heard of an anti-psychedelic person who’s actually used
01:25:26 ►
psychedelics in the past. So any opinions that they might have would have to be without
01:25:32 ►
much value since they would be basing their opinions on what others have told them, not
01:25:36 ►
on their own personal experience. The other thing that bothers me about the idea is that
01:25:41 ►
it reminds me too much of why I’ve quit watching the television news.
01:25:45 ►
And that is their constant, and I think phony, attempt to always present their view of a balanced picture.
01:25:53 ►
Yet one side may have 90% of the people in agreement, and by giving the other side equal time,
01:25:59 ►
the audience comes away thinking the world is equally divided on the topic when that really isn’t the
01:26:05 ►
case. Of course, this opens me up to people saying that I must be afraid of the outcome if such a
01:26:11 ►
debate were held. But that simply isn’t the case. For my part, I just don’t have any time to listen
01:26:17 ►
to the rantings of these religious people who think that anything that gives one pleasure is
01:26:22 ►
to be avoided. Hey, besides all of the great intellectual insights that can be gained from using these
01:26:28 ►
substances, they also provide a significant amount of pleasure.
01:26:32 ►
And we all know that the powers that be don’t want the minions to receive too much pleasure,
01:26:38 ►
particularly if they aren’t spending money and using oil in the process.
01:26:42 ►
So I’m a bit jaded about hosting a debate between a psychedelic intellectual
01:26:47 ►
and someone who is still groping in the dark,
01:26:50 ►
but I’ll tell you what may be more interesting and actually spark a lively debate,
01:26:55 ►
and that is to raise the question as to whether psychedelics should be available for the masses,
01:27:01 ►
or if they should be held back for only the intellectual elite to use.
01:27:06 ►
Now, before you get too excited about such an exclusive way to treat these substances,
01:27:11 ►
I should remind you that no less a psychedelic and intellectual luminary than Aldous Huxley
01:27:17 ►
talked about restricting the use of psychoactive substances to select individuals.
01:27:23 ►
I’m not sure I agree with that, but I think the topic is something worth talking about.
01:27:30 ►
Now that I’m thinking about it, Trey, maybe what we should do is get several fully psychedelic people
01:27:36 ►
to take opposite sides on that question, the question of whether psychedelics should be restricted
01:27:41 ►
to highly trained individuals or if they should be made freely available to anyone who wants to try them.
01:27:48 ►
Maybe some of our fellow salonners will add to this discussion on our blog at psychedelicsalon.org
01:27:54 ►
or on our forum at thegrillreport.com.
01:27:57 ►
But thanks for raising the question, Trey, and I look forward to hearing any other thoughts
01:28:02 ►
some of our other salonners might have about this as well.
01:28:06 ►
And before I go, I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:28:11 ►
are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 License,
01:28:16 ►
which basically means you can use the content of this podcast as you wish.
01:28:22 ►
And if you have any questions about that,
01:28:24 ►
you just click on the Creative Commons
01:28:26 ►
link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon web page.
01:28:29 ►
And for now,
01:28:31 ►
this is Lorenzo, signing
01:28:32 ►
off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:28:34 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.