138 - The Shulgins at Mind States 2005″

Program Notes

Guest speakers: Ann and Sasha Shulgin

“It’s amazing what children don’t know their parents do.” …Sasha

“Let me tell you, MDMA is an extraordinary psychotherapeutic drug.” … Ann

“I really cannot conceive of a color test that would show positive with 2C-B or 2C-I in urine because the amounts there are so small.” … Sasha

“There are many, many things that are potentially active as psychedelics and have not been assayed, not been tasted. The whole art of taking an unknown compound and beginning to find out what it’s action is going to be sounds naively simple. You just start taking more and more of it until you turn on. But the truth is your turn-on may be a convulsion. It may be sedation. It may be all kinds of other types of action. So you have to sneak up on a new compound. So if you are at all considering looking at these kinds of things, I stress: Be extremely cautious if they have not been taken in humans before. Preliminary animal screening, to me, is worthless.” … Sasha

“The hypnotic trance state is, I believe, fully as good as any drug in opening those doors inside a person’s psyche, and I do believe that instead of risking legal problems, you should go to a good hypnotherapist and find out how to discover yourself that way.” … Ann

“Sasha usually tries to remind people that it isn’t the drug that is giving you an experience, whether it’s one of love or anything else. It is your own psyche, the drugs act as keys to the inner doors. I mean, DMT will definitely open a different door than mescaline, but it’s all still what’s inside you.” … Ann

Books by Ann and Sasha Shulgin:

Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

Tihkal: The Continuation

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:23 ►

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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Well, as I’m sure you already know, our psychedelic community lost one of its founding fathers,

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as Dr. Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD, died yesterday.

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And for all of us, of course, this feels like a great loss.

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Even though Dr. Hoffman lived to be 102 years old, it’s still difficult to accept the fact that he’s gone. And my first impulse was to postpone today’s program and do a special

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tribute to the good doctor. But then it dawned on me that the talk I’m going to play today and the

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one I’d planned on playing all along, the one that was given by Ann and Sasha Shulgin at the

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2005 MindStates conference,

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is even more appropriate because, at least in my humble opinion,

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the only chemist in the last hundred years who is equal in stature to Dr. Hoffman

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is Dr. Alexander Shulgin, or Sasha as he prefers to be called.

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And I’ll have some more to say about how and why I’ve come to that conclusion

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after we hear the Shogun’s talk.

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But first, I want to give my deep thanks to Eric Kay and Kyle N., both of whom sent in donations to help offset the expenses of these podcasts.

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So, a big thank you, Eric and Kyle. Your support means a lot to me and to a lot of other people all around this little planet.

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to me and to a lot of other people all around this little planet.

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Now getting to today’s program, as I just mentioned, it’s a talk given by Ann and Sasha Shulgin.

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And unless you are new to these podcasts, you are already aware that Sasha has undergone

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some major surgery recently.

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And by the way, thanks to all of you who have gone to the caringbridge.org slash Sasha Shulgin site to leave your well wishes.

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Ann has been printing them out regularly and reading them to Sasha.

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So far, there have been over 200 people who have left a comment there, and I’d like to think that many of them are our fellow salonners.

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And since I know that you might be commuting to work right now

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and don’t have access to the net,

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I’ll read Ann’s latest posting, which is from a couple of days ago.

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She says,

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Sasha is getting better every day, but slowly.

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Not from my point of view, but from his.

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He’s pretty tired by the end of the day and doesn’t see why that should be so.

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We all get together and yell at him, in parentheses, not really. And then in all caps, she writes, Sasha, you are repairing fantastically

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well. Please don’t rush it. Remember, the doctor said two to three months, not two to three days.

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And then she continues. In any case, he’s back at work with Tanya on the book, which should be ready

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for editing within a few weeks. He’s happiest when with Tanya on the book, which should be ready for editing within a few weeks.

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He’s happiest when he can concentrate on the book, although the frustration of the macular degeneration gets pretty intense at times.

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After the book is turned over to the editors, he’ll get back into the lab,

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with the help of Tanya and another very good friend who will help read labels and pour liquids from one beaker into another, etc.

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I’ll keep updating every few days if you’re still reading these notes.

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Blessings on all of you, and thank you, thank you, Anne.

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Now, one of the things that you may not be aware of,

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if you’ve only heard recordings of Sasha’s talks but haven’t been with him in person,

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is the fact that he has a truly great sense of humor

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and will tease you a bit if you aren’t watching out for that zinger

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that he’ll send your way every once in a while.

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So when you hear this talk in just a minute,

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it might be helpful to keep in mind that

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Sasha had a huge smile on his face during this entire session.

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Fortunately, Ann came to the rescue with that soft, beautiful,

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and ever so consoling voice of hers to keep

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things on track.

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And yes, to many of you who have written and asked for me to podcast more Ann Shulgin,

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I do plan on doing that soon.

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Right now, the only other recording I have of hers is one that has a loud air conditioner

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hum in the background, but I’m trying to get some more recordings and hope to pass them

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along to you as soon as I can.

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Hmm, now that I think of it, the request for more talks by Ann outnumbers those kinds of

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requests for anybody else, including Terrence McKenna, and, sorry to say, even more than

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requests for Sasha.

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But today we’re going to get them both in a similar setting to the one from my podcast

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number 53, which was in October of 2006, where they had the Ask the Shulgens Q&A sessions

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from Burning Man that year.

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And today’s Q&A was actually held a year earlier at the Mind States Conference.

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I’m going to warn you in advance that this session begins with what I consider some heavy

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duty chemistry.

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And since I remember nothing from my two college chemistry courses, I don’t grok the nuts and

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bolts of what they are saying.

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But it’s quite obvious that these young chemists who are asking these questions aren’t just

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doing so out of idle curiosity.

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These are the people who are now filling the shoes of Dr. Hoffman,

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and fortunately they have someone to ask these questions of

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who is equally as well informed about psychedelic chemistry as was Uncle Albert.

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And so if you’re not a chemist yourself,

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instead of just tuning out the detailed questions and answers about chemistry,

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try to comprehend the fact that these chemists are looking at atomic structures

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Comparing them with other chemicals they know

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And then not only speculating on what would happen if they move a single atom to another place

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But actually build these new molecules and then test it on themselves

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This is truly the great unknown, my friends,

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and these are the people who are opening the gates

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so that us non-chemists can go exploring.

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But please don’t think it’s all chemistry today.

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There are quite a few gems sprinkled in this unstructured Q&A session,

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including something I didn’t know before about testing for some of the two Cs.

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So let’s begin with Susan Blackmore’s introduction of Anne and Sasha.

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Now, what on earth do I say?

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Two years ago, I met Sasha and Anne for the first time,

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and I was so frightened, isn’t the right word, just kind of awed.

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How can I introduce them?

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Well, you were all there, weren’t you? But now I’ve met them and found that they’re, well, human, in spite of all the amazing

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things they’ve done. I mean, surely there’s no couple on the planet like this. Sasha, a chemist

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who has designed more drugs than anyone else on the planet who and both of them who have taken more drugs more

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variety of drugs than anyone on this planet and here they are surviving to tell the tale

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not only surviving but surviving wonderfully and what courage they must have to just go into all

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of these things with an open mind,

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prepared to take the risks, which undoubtedly are great,

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determined to learn from it, to write their books,

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pick-all and tick-all that tell us all about it,

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explain the chemistry, explain the experiences.

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And now here they are to answer your questions.

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So thank you very much for coming again.

00:07:42 ►

And would you please, as before, if you want to ask a question, line up by the microphones and off you go.

00:07:48 ►

You have to make sure that it’s working.

00:07:50 ►

Does this one work too?

00:07:52 ►

Okay.

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Good.

00:07:55 ►

Hello.

00:07:56 ►

How do you do?

00:07:57 ►

Hi.

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Do speak first if you want before we have the questions.

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Does anyone need a summary of who we are and what we do?

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Yes?

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Why don’t you explain because you know better than I do.

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Okay.

00:08:15 ►

Oops.

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Seriously?

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We’ve only got an hour.

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We’ve only got an hour.

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This gentleman, known as Sasha, is, I think at present,

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he’s probably the world’s top researcher in the effect of psychedelic drugs on human beings. Most people who deal in this area are using the drugs or experimenting on animals.

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And, well, there is in this field a term, L-A-B, I think it is. L-A-. LAB, which means… Lab experiments.

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LAB.

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It’s short for large animal biochemistry.

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Right.

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Large animal being human beings.

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Yes.

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The thing we’ve also done at a certain point in the 80s, I think,

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certain point in the 80s, I think,

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Sasha published everything that he had discovered, and that included

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dosage levels and

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their effects in humans, etc., etc.

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He was publishing in the Journal

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of Medicinal Chemistry and other scientific journals who have peer review.

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But at a certain point journals and pharmacological journals,

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were advising the editors not to let human experiments be published unless they had been approved by

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and had been overseen by a research advisory panel of some type.

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And so in our little research group, we decided to be a research advisory panel

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and advise ourselves as to how we should do things.

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And that went along for about two or three years, and then that was felt to be uncomfortable.

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The journals are strictly a little bit uncomfortable publishing human data

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that did not come from known clinical sources.

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Well, everybody was getting cold feet.

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It was the beginning of the war on drugs in general.

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And they decided it was just too risky.

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Actually, our research group did include the kind of people who are supposed to be included in a, what do you call it, advisory panel.

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Psychiatrists and psychologists.

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Lawyers. Psychologists. Lawyers, yeah. Not too many lawyers. panel, psychiatrists and lawyers, psychologists,

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lawyers, yeah, not too many lawyers.

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So anyway, that was the point at which

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we began to think that

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the best thing to do was to put all this information,

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all this knowledge

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into a different form,

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one that did not depend on peer review.

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And so we began writing the first book, which was Picard.

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And we very cautiously indicated that it was a fictional book.

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Yeah.

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So there’d be no complications.

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The chemistry is not fictional.

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Well, maybe it is.

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No.

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Okay.

00:11:46 ►

Nope.

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But the rest of the story, you might say, is nonfiction here and there.

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Let’s put it that way.

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But some of it is fictional.

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And as far as the authorities go, it most definitely is a fictional story.

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And as far as my children go, it certainly is fictional because there’s a lot of sex in it.

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And parents don’t do that kind of thing.

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It’s amazing what children don’t know their parents do.

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They don’t want to know.

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Children prefer not to know.

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So that was the beginning of the writing,

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and I was doing work as a lay therapist at that time,

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and I did that for about two and a half years.

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And that was incredible work.

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Using MDMA before it became illegal.

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And let me tell you, MDMA is an extraordinary psychotherapeutic drug.

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And I’m so happy to know that various places around the world,

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And I’m so happy to know that various places around the world,

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it’s now being used in what I think is going to be its most important way,

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and that is dealing with PTSD, which is post-traumatic stress disorder.

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Especially for veterans of war, I think MDMA is going to save a lot of sanity. And anyway, after MDMA became illegal and the idea of the book became more important, I quit the therapy, having learned a tremendous lot.

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And we began writing Picard.

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We submitted the manuscript to a very good friend who’s a publisher.

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And he sent it back saying, I wish I could, but it’s too political.

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We understood, and we did not submit the manuscript to anyone else.

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And we went ahead and did our own publishing,

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and we have been delighted to have done so ever since. And the second book is Tikal.

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Oh, the first book, Pihkal, P-I-H-K-A-L, stands for Phenethylamines I Have Known and Lo loved. That was Sasha’s idea.

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And the second book is Tryptamines I have known and loved.

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And people who don’t know a thing about chemistry enjoy the first half of the book, which is the story.

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And those who are pure chemists ignore the first half and just go straight to the chemistry.

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And that’s pretty much, for the rest you have to read the books.

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That’s sort of the best summary I could give.

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You got anything more?

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No, I think it’s beautiful.

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Okay, all right.

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Now questions, for heaven’s sake.

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And if there are no questions, we’re in real trouble.

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Yeah.

00:15:04 ►

Hi.

00:15:10 ►

As a chemist, the best way to express my esteem and appreciation is to ask a chemistry question.

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In PyCal, you say that 2CH is likely to be not psychoactive because it would get chewed up by the monominoxidases.

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I’m wondering why substitution at the 4 position would inhibit that,

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as it does with 2CB and 2CD and so on.

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That’s the first question.

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The second is more in general.

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Well, perhaps I should let you answer that, and I’ll ask the second one.

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Okay, the question basically, why are some of these phenethylamines that are presumably destroyed by monamine oxidase inhibitors,

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why are they active?

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Well, there are a number of reasons they might be.

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One is the monamine oxidase enzyme

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could remove the amine group,

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but we don’t know what the functional molecule is.

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It could very well be that the result of that deamination produces a material in a site,

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in a location that is the active component.

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A lot of these, most of these, I have not even looked at the urinary content,

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urinary metabolites to see what is in there.

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For example, I found that I did an experiment with mescaline, which is again a phenethylamine.

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It should, quote, not be active.

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And I made some C14-labeled mescaline

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and divided it into three portions,

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about five microcuries each.

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And one was the pure material that I had made.

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I think it’s about 40 micrograms of material.

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Then I diluted another batch to about two or three milligrams, and a third batch to

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150 milligrams with cold mescaline.

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And to see it over the course of three or four weeks, I took each of the three samples

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and collected my urine.

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And I found in the low, low concentrations and the medium concentrations, the material was almost totally destroyed by the monominoxidase.

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I presume by monominoxidase because I did find the C14 in the acidic fraction.

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In the higher levels, there was about 75% destruction, about 25% went through unchanged or as other demethylated metabolites.

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And I suspect that the large dosage is what allowed the mescaline to be realized.

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And at small levels, small doses, it is totally destroyed.

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I think a challenge to this would be to try some of these compounds using monominoxidase inhibitors,

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sort of an ayahuasca concept, where you have a material that is not orally active or shouldn’t be orally active

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and becomes so in the presence of an inhibitor of that enzyme system.

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So it may well be that these materials that are active are extremely active,

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and in the presence of a monamine oxidase inhibitor, their potency may be much higher than we suspect.

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Thank you very much.

00:18:03 ►

Was there a second part of question uh yeah the the second uh part is um

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or the second question is

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the psychedelics you’ve designed all have their unique character clearly there’s so much more

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going on than just one or two you know different receptors 5ht-HT2C. Why do you suppose that is?

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Would you say there’s just a bunch of sub-subtypes of receptors

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or a symphony of interactions among them?

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Or how would you speculate biologically the subtle differences between a 2CB and a 2CI,

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something like that?

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Well, first of all, I don’t know where the materials are active.

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Since one can look where the serotonin agonists go,

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one can suspect that serotonin, there’s a new subdivision, I think, every three weeks,

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5-HT2, 5-HT2A, 2C.

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They find other compounds that are agonist to another type of serotonin.

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So it may be a display of distribution amongst different serotonin receptors.

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But I believe that the involvement of the neurotransmitters as an explanation is partly jeopardized,

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partly compromised by the fact that neurotransmitters, we can see where they are,

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and we don’t know where these things are in their effectiveness.

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A good example of this is an experiment, I think I wrote a note on it,

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in which DOB is a very potent psychedelic.

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It is a very long-lived, very slow-onset, very long-lived.

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It’s a weekend trip.lived, very slow-on-set, very long-lived. It’s a weekend trip.

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Yeah, a long weekend.

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The causes of DOI, which can be equally long and equally potent.

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But what I did, we were working with some friends up at Lawrence Lab,

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actually at Donner Lab in Berkeley.

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Oh, it was marvellous.

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We were working in Berkeley, and we had access to the cyclot Berkeley and we had access to cyclotron we have access to the gamma scanners anything we wanted the only caution they extended us is when you leave be sure

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you have turned the lights off and lock the door which is beautiful so we did

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all kinds of marvelous things we made some DOB labeled with bromine 77 and

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some with bromine 82 and then we had access to a gamma.

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It’s a bed that goes over a gamma detector.

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And you lie in the bed and you go head first over the detector.

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And it scans the body from the head to the foot.

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And you go back and do it again and do it again.

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And this scanning is put onto an oscilloscope and vertical raster.

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And so you actually then can get a moving picture of the motion of the

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radioactivity in the body you don’t know what what form chemically form that radioactivity is in

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because all you can see is where the gamma rays are coming from but it does allow you to see that

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just to get an injection we took it uh intravenously a little sloppy injection you can see a little bit

00:21:00 ►

of residual c14 around the probably bromine 77 around the area of the injection.

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And we looked with great interest to see how fast it would go to the brain and how long it would stay in the brain, where in the brain it went.

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And my desire was to see it all the way to the final metabolic end so I could determine where the bromine went.

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We never saw ionic bromine.

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The bromine stayed on the molecule.

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To our amazement, the

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material didn’t go to the brain, it went

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to the lung. And the level

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in the lung built up. Not

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very high, but the

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lung is a very potent metabolic organ.

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Probably next to the liver is the most potent

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metabolic organ. And the

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amount of accumulation of

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the radio chemical I presume still do B but I can’t I don’t know what its chemical status is

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built up in the lung and then after a while began dropping down and then it began accumulating in

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the brain so I have a strong suspicion that the DOB goes in it has changed to something else and

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that change is occurring probably in the lung,

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and then that something else by circulation goes into the brain,

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and there it builds up in the brain.

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So you’re seeing a metabolite.

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And I did all the chemistry I could,

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and I could not isolate that metabolite and know what it is.

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So there’s an example of how does it work.

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It works by enzymatic change,

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and yet you can’t argue a mechanism of action of the original compound

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because the original compound may not be contributing to the activity in the body.

00:22:34 ►

But it’s possible that it is, right?

00:22:37 ►

It’s possible that it is.

00:22:38 ►

Okay. How long did it take before the lung, the apparent lung effect started going to the brain?

00:22:51 ►

I remember two to three hours.

00:22:54 ►

Okay.

00:22:55 ►

Thank you so much.

00:22:57 ►

Great.

00:22:57 ►

I’ve got lots of people doing my questions.

00:22:59 ►

I’ll take the next one this side because they’ve been there longer.

00:23:02 ►

After that, I’ll alternate.

00:23:04 ►

Do you want me to?

00:23:14 ►

Yeah, sure. God bless you. I’ll take this one. In taking MDA for about four years, maybe 12 times in that period,

00:23:22 ►

I find that I may have some memory problems in that area. Maybe’m just a blaming MDA on it but I it just

00:23:27 ►

seems like there’s some correlation between those two things is that a

00:23:31 ►

possibility it’s a possibility I really don’t know MDA was originally MDMA I’m

00:23:38 ►

sure you said MDMA or MDA MDMA oh I sorry. I heard it as MDA. I had said that.

00:23:46 ►

I forgot what the word was.

00:23:47 ►

Well, yeah.

00:23:51 ►

I worked on an MDA history.

00:23:57 ►

Seriously, may I ask, are you over 35?

00:24:02 ►

I’m 61.

00:24:06 ►

Okay.

00:24:07 ►

Well, I think what we’ve observed is that anybody over 35 starts having gradual but distinct problems with memory.

00:24:18 ►

It’s part of the aging process.

00:24:21 ►

It just happens. I don’t think it’s got anything to do with MDMA because I went through about one and a half to two years.

00:24:33 ►

This is before we knew that MDMA loses its effect if you use it too often.

00:24:40 ►

And I used it once a week for over one and a half years. In fact most of what my part of

00:24:52 ►

Picard the first book was written under the influence of MDMA because it was my writing

00:24:59 ►

material. It was an extraordinary material for writing. It just kept things flowing.

00:25:16 ►

And my memory is not too hot, but it’s certainly no worse than that of my friends who’ve never tried anything in the way of a drug.

00:25:17 ►

So I very much doubt it.

00:25:22 ►

And I’m even older than Anne, and I have noticed this memory deterioration.

00:25:26 ►

And I’m not a chronic user or a regular user of MDMA.

00:25:29 ►

In fact, I haven’t used it for a decade or more.

00:25:32 ►

And yet the memory is slowly deteriorating. I refer to it by the term of JOA, which is juvenile onset Alzheimer’s.

00:25:39 ►

But there is a tendency, for example, if you have a clue of something, as I did with MDA,

00:25:46 ►

and I begin working out the answer of MDA, and I discover I had heard the wrong thing,

00:25:51 ►

and I don’t remember what the question was.

00:25:53 ►

I mean, this is a blatant example of this memory problem.

00:25:58 ►

You come to the end of a sentence, you have to reread your sentence, know how you started the sentence.

00:26:01 ►

This is bad.

00:26:03 ►

It’s okay.

00:26:04 ►

I remember a time when

00:26:06 ►

it was just not age but stress i was uh uh i was with a group of people i didn’t know and i was

00:26:14 ►

about to introduce my oldest son uh to those people and realized i didn’t remember his name

00:26:21 ►

it took a few seconds you know to relax myself, and it all came back.

00:26:28 ►

I mean, stress will cause that also.

00:26:32 ►

Yeah.

00:26:34 ►

Yeah, there’s many other neurotransmitter systems,

00:26:37 ►

and I was wondering if you were going to be doing any experiments with them.

00:26:40 ►

For example, there’s 14 known currently cholinergic subtypes of receptors.

00:26:45 ►

One of them provides pain relief as powerful as morphine.

00:26:49 ►

Another one is involved in memory,

00:26:52 ►

and especially the cholinergic nervous system is what tends to go out more and more as you get older and older.

00:26:58 ►

Dytran, for example, an anticholinergic, has some fascinating long-term therapeutic effects.

00:27:03 ►

I was wondering if you’re going to be doing any experiments in other neurotransmission systems,

00:27:08 ►

particularly the cholinergic system.

00:27:10 ►

The difficulty with a lot of the experiments that are done, neurological agonist experiments,

00:27:16 ►

are done in animals because you like to be able to give the animal something or other

00:27:22 ►

and then take out the brain and slice it up and see where the radioactivity went and this is not very comfortably done with

00:27:27 ►

humans so the the the difficulty again that I add to this is that I can look

00:27:34 ►

these things not as brain enhancers or brain modifiers but as mind modifiers

00:27:40 ►

and I’m not quite sure the connection between the brain and the mind is something that I find to be

00:27:47 ►

I’m going to get into memes here in a moment.

00:27:52 ►

There is no way of getting

00:27:56 ►

at the human mind easily as an

00:28:00 ►

experiment. And since we can get at the neuroreceptor sites, the various

00:28:04 ►

neuro agonist sites and you tell where they are and where a material goes relative

00:28:09 ►

to them we tend to like looking under the light for the lost keys it’s easier

00:28:13 ►

to see there that may not be here the key where the key is to be found but you

00:28:17 ►

tend to look where things are more easily seen I remember a seminar was

00:28:21 ►

given at Lawrence lab about 10 or 15 years ago, and it said

00:28:27 ►

the explanation of the action of psychedelics, something by someone in a big government office

00:28:34 ►

somewhere back in the East Coast, something National Institute of Health.

00:28:38 ►

And I was very interested because I was curious what action they would, how they explain the

00:28:42 ►

activity of these mind chemicals without going

00:28:45 ►

into animals.

00:28:47 ►

And the experiment, the talk was totally

00:28:49 ►

about animals, brain distribution,

00:28:52 ►

where these materials went, what receptors

00:28:54 ►

they were associated with.

00:28:56 ►

And I went up to the

00:28:58 ►

lecturer afterwards and I said, I understand

00:29:00 ►

you’re going to talk about the mechanism of

00:29:02 ►

action of these materials, and all you did was

00:29:04 ►

talk about the distribution in the brain, in the animal the animal brain well that’s all we can measure so

00:29:09 ►

again the idea this is what can be seen this is what’s reported this is what can people tend to

00:29:15 ►

assimilate as being the the target of the compounds and the truth is maybe these materials

00:29:21 ►

don’t affect neurotransmitters at all maybe it’s a distribution of this lipophilic thing with that hypo something or other thing

00:29:29 ►

that constitutes the structure of the mind and not the brain.

00:29:34 ►

What was that experiment on the understanding?

00:29:37 ►

Oh, yeah, one of the five schizophrenics and five normals.

00:29:42 ►

Remember that I told you about that?

00:29:44 ►

Oh, yeah.

00:29:44 ►

This is a beautiful example of what you know about mind chemistry.

00:29:49 ►

At Donner Lab, oh, something 15, 20, 25, maybe 30 years ago,

00:29:54 ►

it was believed at that time that methionine was a very great aggravator of schizophrenic syndrome.

00:30:02 ►

It did not have any action on normal people,

00:30:04 ►

but on schizophrenics,

00:30:05 ►

it made them more difficult to handle and more difficult to assimilate behavior changes.

00:30:11 ►

And so I made up some S-Densimethionine, as I remember, radio-labeled,

00:30:16 ►

and we had access to the PET scanning.

00:30:20 ►

And we got five schizophrenics from Mendocino Hospital

00:30:24 ►

and five normals from the lab there, which was a bit harder to do, but we did get five.

00:30:31 ►

And gave them enough activity of the S-adenosine methionine that we could get good PET scans

00:30:37 ►

just above the earlobes across the brain.

00:30:41 ►

And we ended up with ten pictures, five of them from the schizophrenics and five of them from the normals. And all ten pictures were totally, totally

00:30:48 ►

different from one another. There’s no connection of distribution that

00:30:52 ►

you could find that would lean toward one or lean toward the other of the two

00:30:55 ►

human groups. And every time people came in from the East Coast to visit

00:31:00 ►

the lab, we’d have these ten pictures on the wall. And we’d ask them,

00:31:03 ►

who do you think, which are the ones of the normals and which of the north winds of the

00:31:06 ►

schizophrenics and we tallied the answers and there was absolutely no total random

00:31:11 ►

response but the fascinating thing is about three or four months later one of

00:31:17 ►

the schizophrenic patients volunteers came in and talked to my friend who’s

00:31:24 ►

one who set up the experiment,

00:31:26 ►

and he saw the ten pictures on the wall.

00:31:28 ►

And he said, are those the ten pictures you took of us?

00:31:31 ►

No, no, one picture from each of you.

00:31:33 ►

Oh, but then I’m one of these ten, right?

00:31:36 ►

He said, yes.

00:31:37 ►

Tony said, yes.

00:31:38 ►

That’s me, he said, pointing at that picture, and he was right.

00:31:42 ►

He picked his own brain scan out of one chance in ten if it’s random,

00:31:47 ►

but he picked it correctly.

00:31:48 ►

So Tony very casually said,

00:31:50 ►

hey, you’re right, how’d you know?

00:31:52 ►

Oh, he said, you see this little

00:31:53 ►

almost star-shaped thing down here

00:31:55 ►

in the lower right corner?

00:31:56 ►

I see it all the time.

00:32:00 ►

And so,

00:32:01 ►

this is the kind of information

00:32:04 ►

that you cannot get from animal studies, but it’s also it.

00:32:10 ►

But also it emphasizes the absolute ignorance we have as to the function, the mechanism of operation of the mind.

00:32:20 ►

Yes, I’d like to ask a question about the dragonfly series of compounds.

00:32:23 ►

I haven’t been able to find too much information on it, so I’ve only learned of it recently.

00:32:26 ►

But can you, in your opinion, tell me the most desirable ring substitution pattern to go between the rings?

00:32:32 ►

And has anyone or yourself experimented with a meaner X-type derivative of that with the oxalone ring on the side?

00:32:39 ►

Could you repeat that slower, please?

00:32:41 ►

No, I’m really not trying to make fun of you.

00:32:45 ►

It’s just that the sound is a little difficult.

00:32:49 ►

I was asking about the dragonfly compounds.

00:32:51 ►

What you would say the most desirable substitution is to go in between the furin rings,

00:32:55 ►

and has anyone experimented with an aminorex-type side chain to go on that compound?

00:33:00 ►

Aminorex side chain.

00:33:03 ►

To my knowledge, the aminorex side chain has not been put on the dragonflies.

00:33:07 ►

You have what I call the pseudoflies, the flies, and the dragonflies.

00:33:13 ►

This is a chemical game of looking at what I call the dirty pictures, the molecular structures.

00:33:22 ►

You take an aromatic ring and you attach a dihydrofurane on one side

00:33:27 ►

and the dihydrofurane the other way on the other side,

00:33:30 ►

you have, in essence, a molecule,

00:33:33 ►

that central molecule with two rings fused on each side of the center.

00:33:38 ►

And that looks like the wings of an insect.

00:33:40 ►

So these were called flies.

00:33:51 ►

So these were called flies, and there are the ordinary flies, the dihydrofuran.

00:33:56 ►

In the para position, there’s a bromine or a cyanide nitrile group or a methoxy.

00:34:02 ►

And in the other position of the chain, there is either a phenethylamine or an amphetamine.

00:34:04 ►

A little bit difficult to make.

00:34:06 ►

Some of them are rather effectively quite potent

00:34:07 ►

they’ve been studied in

00:34:10 ►

Purdue in

00:34:12 ►

Nichols lab as the

00:34:13 ►

relationship to various

00:34:16 ►

serotonin receptors

00:34:17 ►

and I am personally familiar, Ann and I are personally

00:34:20 ►

familiar with only one of them in any

00:34:22 ►

depth and that is the bromo

00:34:23 ►

fly 2CB fly, I should say.

00:34:28 ►

It’s a compound of bromine in the para position.

00:34:31 ►

The two dihydrofurans are opposite, inverted,

00:34:36 ►

so the oxygens are para to one another,

00:34:39 ►

and the chain itself is the phenethylamine.

00:34:41 ►

Active at about 8 or 10 milligrams, I think, level.

00:34:45 ►

Absolutely divine.

00:34:48 ►

Wonderful.

00:34:51 ►

I won’t go into the sex thing.

00:34:53 ►

No.

00:34:53 ►

Okay, fine.

00:34:57 ►

If you aromatize the rings on the side,

00:35:03 ►

the amphetamine chain ups the activity by a factor of about 10.

00:35:07 ►

A dosage of the corresponding 2C,

00:35:10 ►

2C,

00:35:11 ►

B fly

00:35:13 ►

would be active at about maybe

00:35:15 ►

one milligram or early.

00:35:17 ►

If you aromatize the two rings

00:35:19 ►

and make the corresponding hydro,

00:35:21 ►

not hydro,

00:35:22 ►

but the furans themselves,

00:35:28 ►

we call these dragonflies because they are active at about a hundred micrograms but not orally a milligram has no effect orally but at by

00:35:37 ►

parental injection active at about 100 micrograms so the compounds could be quite interesting. Something, as was mentioned, was the Immunorex extension on the chain.

00:35:49 ►

To my knowledge, it’s never been synthesized.

00:35:52 ►

I forget which side that came from.

00:35:55 ►

Hello.

00:35:56 ►

Over there.

00:35:58 ►

Hi.

00:36:00 ►

My question is, do 2C-B, 2C-I, or any of the other 2Cs show up on a standard drug test?

00:36:12 ►

I got 2C-B, 2C-I, and…

00:36:15 ►

Show up on a standard blood test?

00:36:16 ►

Show up… Oh.

00:36:17 ►

Urine test.

00:36:19 ►

I haven’t the slightest idea that Sasha might have an idea.

00:36:23 ►

How do you define a standard blood test?

00:36:26 ►

No, not a standard blood test.

00:36:27 ►

A standard drug test, like a urine test.

00:36:30 ►

Drug test.

00:36:30 ►

Drug test.

00:36:32 ►

It depends when.

00:36:34 ►

No, I don’t even know if they have been standardized for these drugs, 2CB and 2CI.

00:36:41 ►

Yeah, that’s probably…

00:36:42 ►

I have to admit, I’m innocent as to how the two compounds are metabolized.

00:36:47 ►

I’ve never bothered looking at my urine when I was first working with them.

00:36:52 ►

If they are metabolized salic acid, which is a very reasonable metabolic end product,

00:36:58 ►

I would say it would not show it up at all.

00:37:02 ►

I don’t know what a standard urine test, a urine test I presume you had in mind.

00:37:08 ►

The amounts that would be present would be very small.

00:37:12 ►

And I would wager that most urine tests are standardized toward things that are most apt to be seen,

00:37:18 ►

such as marijuana or amphetamine or methamphetamine or cocaine or opium.

00:37:24 ►

Things that you can get color tests for.

00:37:26 ►

And the color test is a presumptive test,

00:37:29 ►

and if it is negative, there is no drug thought to be present.

00:37:33 ►

If it’s positive, it really justifies a more thorough and a more exacting analysis,

00:37:39 ►

because a positive color test can be to another compound entirely than what you think it may be due to.

00:37:46 ►

So a presumptive test, a color test, a test of that type,

00:37:51 ►

is only if positive justifies going to the expense of a more exacting test.

00:37:56 ►

I really cannot conceive of a color test that would show positive with 2C-B or 2C-I in urine,

00:38:02 ►

because the amounts of there are so small.

00:38:04 ►

Okay, thank you.

00:38:07 ►

Yeah, hi.

00:38:08 ►

I was wondering, there’s been some speculation online that may be dubious

00:38:13 ►

as to whether there’s psychedelic aminorex or piperazine analogs.

00:38:20 ►

I’m just wondering if you have any information as to if that’s a possibility,

00:38:24 ►

if there are psychedelic piperazine or aminorex analogs that can be synthesized. I’m just wondering if you have any information as to if that’s a possibility,

00:38:29 ►

if there are psychedelic piperazine or aminorex analogs that can be synthesized.

00:38:31 ►

Are you saying piperazines?

00:38:32 ►

Yeah.

00:38:34 ►

And hydrazine, I think. No, it’s piperazines.

00:38:38 ►

Hydrazine in place of the amine group?

00:38:40 ►

No, I was saying there’s been speculation online that there’s possible analogs of Aminorex or piperazines that may be psychedelic.

00:38:51 ►

And I’m wondering if you can validate that or if you know of any possibilities.

00:38:56 ►

I have to answer the question in a general sense.

00:39:00 ►

There are many speculations as to varieties of simpler molecules.

00:39:05 ►

You mentioned, I think, piperazines, hydrazines,

00:39:09 ►

but also the various benzylamines that are known to be substituted being stimulants.

00:39:19 ►

And a lot of these materials, the materials that are psychedelic,

00:39:24 ►

are based upon stimulant nuclei.

00:39:28 ►

You have amphetamine, for example, methamphetamine, and without substitution is a stimulant,

00:39:33 ►

but with substitution it begins becoming, it falls into the psychedelic category.

00:39:39 ►

And indeed, at a higher level, you may find stimulation there. But the general thing is the art of the substitution on the ring modifies the nature and defines the nature of the action.

00:39:53 ►

Specifically, I don’t know, I cannot be specific to the molecules you’re mentioning.

00:40:00 ►

We’ll probably get to a piece of paper and begin scribbling structures.

00:40:02 ►

So we probably get to a piece of paper and begin scribbling structures.

00:40:11 ►

But there are many, many things that are potentially active as psychedelics and have not been assayed, have not been tasted.

00:40:20 ►

The whole art of taking an unknown compound and beginning to find out what his action is going to be, it sounds naively simple.

00:40:23 ►

You just start taking more and more of it until you turn on.

00:40:28 ►

But the truth is your turn on may be a convulsion, it may be sedation, it may be all kinds of other types of actions, so you have to sneak up on a new

00:40:32 ►

compound. So if you’re at all considering looking at some of these things, I

00:40:36 ►

stress be extremely cautious if they have not been taken in man before.

00:40:41 ►

Preliminary animal screening to me is worthless.

00:40:44 ►

I gave it up

00:40:45 ►

25 years ago

00:40:46 ►

I killed a number of mice and felt very bad

00:40:49 ►

about it

00:40:50 ►

but you have to take yourself

00:40:52 ►

as the test animal

00:40:53 ►

and that means you start at a level that you

00:40:56 ►

are confident will have no action whatsoever

00:40:58 ►

and if you’re not that confident

00:41:01 ►

you start at one thousandth of that level

00:41:02 ►

you start at a small amount and be patient

00:41:04 ►

and all be aware of the fact that confident you start at one thousandth of that level you start at a small amount and be patient and all be aware of the fact that uh if you take an unknown material too frequently

00:41:11 ►

every every day or every two days you may build up a lack of sensitivity to the responses and in

00:41:16 ►

essence you immunize yourself from response it is a it’s a long process fortunately you can do half

00:41:22 ►

a dozen things uh different compounds in at the same, not the same time, but on sequential days.

00:41:28 ►

And the chances of cross-tolerance is small.

00:41:31 ►

But if you are getting into any new materials based upon basic new ring groups, go with extraordinary caution and keep good notes.

00:41:40 ►

Okay.

00:41:40 ►

Can I make one comment in regards to the MDMA and memory that the other person posted?

00:41:47 ►

I went through a period where I probably recklessly used MDMA regularly,

00:41:52 ►

and I never noticed any memory loss due to that.

00:41:55 ►

My father, who’s never done a drug in his life, starting at age 50,

00:42:00 ►

definitely started to decline in memory.

00:42:02 ►

So I just thought that would be a good comment to make in regards to that.

00:42:12 ►

I think that we didn’t quite get the full question about memory loss,

00:42:18 ►

but on the other hand, we should go on to the next question

00:42:21 ►

because otherwise we’re not going to make it.

00:42:24 ►

First, a clarification. I was at the Berkeley

00:42:27 ►

patients group when you spoke and you recommended a research chemical.

00:42:31 ►

I think it was 2CT2. Is that correct?

00:42:37 ►

2CT2 is the first of the active

00:42:38 ►

thiophenethylamines, yes. Okay, thank you. And the second question

00:42:44 ►

is a bit more…

00:42:46 ►

You also mentioned a story about scopolamine.

00:42:50 ►

Does that have any relation with detura?

00:42:53 ►

Scopolamine is a component in detura.

00:42:55 ►

Oh, okay.

00:42:56 ►

Cool, thanks.

00:42:58 ►

There are about half a dozen

00:42:59 ►

quite strangely different plants

00:43:02 ►

that have scopolamine

00:43:03 ►

as a major active component.

00:43:06 ►

Scopolamine, though, is much more of a hallucinogenic than a psychedelic.

00:43:11 ►

In that you see things that are not there.

00:43:15 ►

You do not recall too well what you did see.

00:43:18 ►

And it is a memory loss, an amnesia type of chemical.

00:43:21 ►

Never, never take scopolamine.

00:43:23 ►

Two warnings on scopolamine.

00:43:26 ►

Don’t ever use it if you’re without a

00:43:28 ►

babysitter. Because you’re apt to go

00:43:30 ►

through doors that have never been opened before.

00:43:33 ►

And they’re

00:43:34 ►

still closed when you go through them.

00:43:35 ►

So you have someone to pick you up.

00:43:38 ►

And the other thing is about

00:43:40 ►

one person in maybe 500

00:43:41 ►

is hypersensitive to scopolamine.

00:43:44 ►

So if the person has never tried scopolamine at all before, try it at a tenth of the expected dosage.

00:43:49 ►

And if there’s no action, then you go to a normal dosage.

00:43:53 ►

What is the worst thing that can happen if you’re hypersensitive to it?

00:43:59 ►

It’ll be active at one-tenth the normal dosage.

00:44:02 ►

It’s a potency hypersensitivity.

00:44:01 ►

at one-tenth the normal dosage.

00:44:03 ►

It’s a potency.

00:44:04 ►

Wow, okay.

00:44:11 ►

I’m wondering what your opinion is on ibogaine,

00:44:15 ►

and are there any other molecules, analogs to it,

00:44:19 ►

that might be useful for drug addiction and things of that nature?

00:44:25 ►

On ibogaine, my personal response to it was quite quite negative and I chose not to pursue it very far

00:44:27 ►

but that was 40-50 years ago

00:44:29 ►

I have heard

00:44:32 ►

of the actual ceremonies

00:44:34 ►

the rituals that are

00:44:35 ►

performed in Africa

00:44:38 ►

with the tabernacle iboga

00:44:39 ►

and who’s our Italian friend

00:44:41 ►

Giorgio Samarini

00:44:43 ►

he went through them twice and it’s a message And who’s our Italian friend? Giorgio Samarini, I think.

00:44:46 ►

He went through them twice.

00:44:47 ►

And it’s a message.

00:44:48 ►

They use it as a… It’s a death experience.

00:44:50 ►

It’s a death experience, yes.

00:44:51 ►

They use it as a way of embracing the transformation from the early child to the adult.

00:45:01 ►

And it’s used in that ritual.

00:45:03 ►

to the adult and that is used in that ritual.

00:45:07 ►

The work that’s being done with it in the treatment of drug addiction is, I believe, showing rather good promise.

00:45:11 ►

I know of two or three cases that have been quite successful.

00:45:14 ►

There are a couple of cases in which the person has reverted.

00:45:17 ►

I know of a case where the person reverted to his original drug

00:45:21 ►

that he was addicted to because of his social surrounding and then there’s

00:45:26 ►

the situation of that one horrible

00:45:28 ►

sad thing in France

00:45:30 ►

oh yeah

00:45:31 ►

I don’t know how many

00:45:35 ►

years ago it was, about 5 or 6

00:45:36 ►

there was

00:45:39 ►

a government

00:45:40 ►

approved research study

00:45:42 ►

going on in Switzerland

00:45:43 ►

studying the effects of MDMA.

00:45:47 ►

It was a group of psychiatrists.

00:45:50 ►

And somewhere along the line, one of the psychiatrists, whose name I will not mention,

00:45:57 ►

for some reason took one of his patients.

00:46:02 ►

There was a woman who was severely depressed,

00:46:06 ►

he took her to France, or they both were in France.

00:46:12 ►

In any case, that’s where the experiment happened.

00:46:18 ►

There was no contract made. Now, I wrote as much as I could in the second book, T-Cal, about making the contract with the patient before you start on any trip or any experiment with any consciousness-changing drug.

00:46:42 ►

And the contract, I think, is vital. Well, no such thing was done. And

00:46:50 ►

during, what he gave her was Ibogaine, but it was thought for quite some time afterwards

00:47:01 ►

by various authorities that he’d given her MDMA because he was one of the

00:47:08 ►

psychiatrists in this research project.

00:47:11 ►

So in response to that first impression, they shut down

00:47:16 ►

the Swiss research for quite a while.

00:47:20 ►

In any case, he gave this lady

00:47:24 ►

Ibogaine being in a state of emotional pain and having been there for a very long time,

00:47:34 ►

she apparently saw the death door, which is an experience some of you have had and I have had and it’s always welcoming and it tells you this is the way home when it’s time for you to go.

00:47:51 ►

It doesn’t pull you in.

00:47:52 ►

It’s just there.

00:47:55 ►

And she must have seen it and she went.

00:48:10 ►

Most people, when they are not supposed to go over into the afterlife, are sent back.

00:48:12 ►

But she never came back.

00:48:18 ►

So the psychiatrist had a dead patient on his hands.

00:48:26 ►

And I believe personally that Ibogaine is a tremendously powerful drug,

00:48:32 ►

that it should never be used with a deeply depressed patient,

00:48:40 ►

and that at all times a contract should be made between a psychiatrist and patient.

00:48:47 ►

Why don’t you tell the underlying terms of that contract? No, because we don’t have time for the full thing and they can read it in T-Cal. Get T-Cal out of your library.

00:48:52 ►

And I’ve explained it there.

00:48:57 ►

At the time you wrote Pickle and Tickle,

00:48:59 ►

the analog laws were on the books, but they had never really been

00:49:03 ►

enforced and were more or less kind of theoretical.

00:49:08 ►

In the time since then, a dozen or two of the analogs were commercially available.

00:49:17 ►

And last summer, an Operation Web Trip, the DEA went and arrested a bunch of people.

00:49:22 ►

We’ve got a guy who’s doing a life sentence now.

00:49:23 ►

trip, the DEA went and arrested a bunch of people. We’ve got a guy who’s doing a life sentence now. What do you think the implications of

00:49:27 ►

these cases are for future research like what you do?

00:49:34 ►

Well, in the United States.

00:49:36 ►

In the United States? Yeah.

00:49:38 ►

Well, the analog bill

00:49:41 ►

passed in 1986, I believe it was, the controlled substance analog bill.

00:49:51 ►

It is one of the most legally vague descriptions I’ve ever seen in any law of what a thing is.

00:50:01 ►

Their definition of what an analog is.

00:50:04 ►

No, what the definition of what a controlled substance analog is.

00:50:09 ►

I wrote a letter to the Journal of Forensic Sciences, to the editor,

00:50:15 ►

in which I titled, How Similar is Substantially Similar, was the name of the thing,

00:50:21 ►

because the law does not say that these two things have to be similar.

00:50:25 ►

Are these two things similar?

00:50:26 ►

Yes.

00:50:27 ►

Well, there’s five of these and one of these, and this has low water in it, this has no water in it.

00:50:31 ►

But they are certainly similar.

00:50:34 ►

In essence, you could say they’re substantially the same.

00:50:37 ►

But the law says two things that are of structures in the second part of the law, activity,

00:50:43 ►

and the third part of the law, activity, and the third part of the law, of the definition, intended use,

00:50:47 ►

that is substantially similar to a Schedule I drug.

00:50:52 ►

And I got into this letter as a consequence of being called as an expert witness when I was asked.

00:50:59 ►

What’s not widely known, and I believe it is still correct today, MDMA, for example, is not illegal in California.

00:51:06 ►

It’s not in California law.

00:51:09 ►

MDA is, but not MDMA.

00:51:11 ►

So if someone is arrested for MDMA in California by California authorities, the only way they can process it in court is to treat it as an analog of, say, methamphetamine.

00:51:22 ►

of, say, methamphetamine.

00:51:24 ►

And as an analog,

00:51:26 ►

you have the problem of establishing that it has a structure that is substantially

00:51:28 ►

similar to that of methamphetamine.

00:51:31 ►

And I was in this case

00:51:32 ►

down in, oh, somewhere

00:51:34 ►

toward Los Angeles, and

00:51:36 ►

I was asked

00:51:38 ►

by the prosecuting attorney

00:51:40 ►

if these

00:51:42 ►

two compounds had structures that are substantially

00:51:44 ►

similar, and I pleaded to the judge

00:51:47 ►

and he was very kind, saying, I don’t understand the question. And the judge

00:51:51 ►

asked the man to rephrase the question. And he could not rephrase the question because

00:51:55 ►

he had to use those exact wordings from the law. It was written that way.

00:52:00 ►

And so he said, well, let’s drop that question. Do they have actions in

00:52:03 ►

man that are substantially similar? And so I turned to his honor he said, well, let’s drop that question. Do they have actions in man that are substantially similar?

00:52:05 ►

And so I turned to his honor and said, I looked at him.

00:52:08 ►

He asked, could you rephrase the question?

00:52:09 ►

And I couldn’t rephrase the question.

00:52:12 ►

And that was the end of it.

00:52:13 ►

I left the court.

00:52:14 ►

I couldn’t answer the questions.

00:52:16 ►

I couldn’t understand the questions.

00:52:17 ►

And so I was a worthless expert witness.

00:52:22 ►

And the humorous, sad consequences, they brought another forensic person from

00:52:29 ►

another laboratory and asked her, do you understand the voir dire? Do you understand the meaning

00:52:34 ►

of substantially similar? She said that is a phrase that is known very well by all chemists

00:52:40 ►

and forensic chemists. It’s a very well understood phrase. And he asked her, how would you define two things being substantially similar?

00:52:48 ►

She said, very simple. They’re substantially similar if they’re over 50%

00:52:52 ►

identical.

00:52:55 ►

And that held up and the jury found the person guilty.

00:52:59 ►

But this is the problem of the analog things. Anything is potentially

00:53:03 ►

a controlled substance analog

00:53:05 ►

of a scheduled drug.

00:53:08 ►

If it has carbon in it or if it has

00:53:09 ►

nitrogen in it or has hydrogen or oxygen,

00:53:12 ►

there are many ways that they’re substantially similar.

00:53:14 ►

And except for one,

00:53:15 ►

two cases I know, a very early one

00:53:17 ►

and

00:53:19 ►

the second one was one where they caught

00:53:21 ►

one of the professional

00:53:23 ►

forensic people lying on the stand and dismissed the case.

00:53:28 ►

I don’t know of any controlled substance analog trials that have failed.

00:53:33 ►

They have almost always been successful to the prosecutors.

00:53:36 ►

And I say that the materials that are in PCAL and TCAL are all, in the eyes of the authorities,

00:53:43 ►

substantially similar to a Schedule I drug

00:53:46 ►

and can be treated in court that way.

00:53:50 ►

One thing that is not widely known about the federal controlled,

00:53:55 ►

it’s also the state controlled substance law,

00:53:58 ►

is that they call them hallucinogenics, not psychedelics.

00:54:02 ►

They call them hallucinogenics, not psychedelics.

00:54:11 ►

For hallucinogenics only, the isomers, optical isomers, positional isomers,

00:54:15 ►

and optical, positional, and one other definition,

00:54:19 ►

will apply to these materials that are called hallucinogens.

00:54:24 ►

And so they have, in essence, broadened to say substitution isomers are automatically in the controlled substance law.

00:54:27 ►

They’re not analogs.

00:54:29 ►

And one of my favorite examples of this is what I would call MMDA4, which is 2,3-methyloxy-5-methoxyamphetamine.

00:54:42 ►

It is technically a Schedule I drug because it is a positional isomer of MMDA.

00:54:47 ►

And yet, to my knowledge, it has never yet been synthesized.

00:54:50 ►

No one succeeded.

00:54:50 ►

I’ve tried many ways and failed every time.

00:54:53 ►

And to my knowledge, it’s still not in the chemical literature.

00:54:56 ►

And yet, once a person has completed the synthesis and has the material, he is guilty of a felony.

00:55:00 ►

Even though it’s the first time it’s ever been synthesized.

00:55:02 ►

So it’s interesting to see what might happen there.

00:55:04 ►

I’m sorry, I got rattled off into other topics.

00:55:08 ►

And perhaps it’s entirely up to you whether you want to

00:55:11 ►

make shorter answers and finish all these people or not. We’ve only got

00:55:15 ►

a little under ten minutes left. So, with that warning, I’ve forgotten

00:55:19 ►

which side we’re on. Yes, you are. Well, first of all, deep gratitude to both

00:55:24 ►

of you for all your work and your willingness

00:55:26 ►

to share so much with us.

00:55:27 ►

I have two questions.

00:55:28 ►

The other night, Sasha, we were having a conversation about ecstasy, and you were talking about,

00:55:33 ►

I think you called it sort of that first-time magical effect and how you kind of lose that

00:55:38 ►

with the ongoing use.

00:55:39 ►

I was wondering, Anne, what was your experience around that when you were using it weekly for a year and a half,

00:55:46 ►

and do you feel it’s, quote, safe to use it that often?

00:55:52 ►

Well, the fact is that as I used, it’s not ecstasy to us.

00:56:03 ►

I used, it’s not ecstasy to us.

00:56:10 ►

We refuse to call it ecstasy because the term ecstasy could mean anything these days.

00:56:13 ►

So we call it MDMA still.

00:56:29 ►

As I used it once a week, pretty much that often, yes, I had to gradually add a little more each time. It was when I got to 250 milligrams with a booster of 100 milligrams that I said to myself something like,

00:56:37 ►

hmm, maybe I’d better stop taking this for a while because I’m taking too much.

00:56:42 ►

for a while because I’m taking too much.

00:56:52 ►

About a year later, I tried MDMA again for the first time in a year.

00:56:57 ►

And I have no idea what the meaning of this really is,

00:57:01 ►

but it had an opposite effect than usual.

00:57:08 ►

Instead of that wonderful mellowing kind of thing it was it it depressed me i was quite depressed and i have not tried it since um i think i wrecked it for myself by taking

00:57:15 ►

it uh too often but i do not uh for myself i can only answer for myself I don’t think it had any negative effects whatsoever.

00:57:30 ►

I’m just sorry that I can’t use it anymore, and I’m sorry that it’s illegal.

00:57:35 ►

And then the other question was, in that conversation with Sasha,

00:57:40 ►

he mentioned that you used to work with a hypnotherapist when you were doing your lay therapy with MDMA.

00:57:41 ►

So could you talk a little bit about that?

00:57:43 ►

Very fast.

00:57:49 ►

I worked with a hypnotherapist for about almost two years,

00:57:55 ►

and we discovered that at that time we could use MDMA,

00:58:06 ►

that the trance state and MDMA and other real psychedelics, they work very well together.

00:58:11 ►

But I like to tell people that the hypnotic trance state is, I believe, fully as good as any drug

00:58:16 ►

in opening those doors inside a person’s psyche.

00:58:22 ►

And I do believe that instead of risking legal problems,

00:58:29 ►

you should go to a good hypnotherapist and find out how to discover yourself that way,

00:58:36 ►

at least while the laws are as they are.

00:58:38 ►

Thank you.

00:58:40 ►

Picking up on the last questioner,

00:58:42 ►

I know several people who have been using MDMA for well over 20 years on a weekly basis and have not lost the magical quality of it.

00:58:54 ►

So that’s just a comment.

00:58:56 ►

But my question pertains to the love story part of your writings, which has drawn me in and deeply charmed me. And I found myself

00:59:07 ►

scouring for characterizations of various compounds that related to feelings of love,

00:59:18 ►

to the types of neuromodulation that accompanies that. And I’m wondering if you’d care to just present a brief survey

00:59:28 ►

of what you know about substances that delve into those aspects,

00:59:34 ►

those wonderful aspects of being alive and feeling those types of feelings.

00:59:42 ►

I’ll do a fast answer on this.

00:59:54 ►

of feelings? I’ll do a fast answer on this. Sasha usually tries to remind people that it isn’t the drug that is giving you an experience, whether it’s one of love or anything else. It is your own psyche. The drugs act as keys to the inner doors.

01:00:07 ►

And each, I mean, DMT will definitely open a different door than mesclun.

01:00:14 ►

But it’s all still what’s inside you.

01:00:19 ►

And I think maybe that’s the best answer I can give.

01:00:22 ►

You know, the term I use, and I like it very much, is the drug itself cannot do anything.

01:00:27 ►

It’s just a few milligrams of white crystalline solid cannot open these doors.

01:00:32 ►

It merely catalyzes the opening of the door and allows you to do the opening yourself.

01:00:36 ►

So really, the drug serves as a catalyst, not as an active agent.

01:00:42 ►

Thank you.

01:00:44 ►

We’re not going to be able to, and I’m afraid this will have to be the last question.

01:00:47 ►

I do apologize to those of you who are still waiting over there.

01:00:51 ►

So I had read a review or something where you guys were talking about in the last couple of years

01:00:57 ►

some work you had done with cacti, and it wasn’t mescaline or anything,

01:01:02 ►

any phenethylamine, I don’t think.

01:01:05 ►

And I was curious what that was.

01:01:07 ►

There weren’t any further details.

01:01:09 ►

Could you repeat that word?

01:01:12 ►

Cactus. Cacti.

01:01:13 ►

Oh, cactus.

01:01:14 ►

Okay, one of the ones that I really put a fair amount of effort in is a cactus from Baja, California,

01:01:20 ►

known as Pacacerus pringlii.

01:01:23 ►

It’s a cactus grows in the Table Mountains about halfway down Baja, California, known as Pacasurus pringlii. It’s a cactus that grows in the Table Mountains about halfway down Baja.

01:01:29 ►

And it is a very active cactus.

01:01:32 ►

Anna and I have both used it two times.

01:01:35 ►

And it contains no trace of mescaline whatsoever.

01:01:38 ►

So I’ve been digging into what’s in there.

01:01:40 ►

I have identified about eight or ten compounds.

01:01:44 ►

And I’ve characterized maybe

01:01:46 ►

another dozen compounds

01:01:47 ►

most of them are isoquinolones

01:01:49 ►

and I have synthesized 2 or 3 of them

01:01:52 ►

and tried them and they’re not active

01:01:53 ►

there are some phenethylamines that are present

01:01:55 ►

but they’re known not to be active in man

01:01:57 ►

dimethoxy

01:01:59 ►

dimethoxy

01:02:02 ►

phenethylamine

01:02:02 ►

there’s one in there, methylene dioxy and methylphenethylamine there’s one in there methyldioxi and methylphenethylamine

01:02:07 ►

but they are

01:02:08 ►

if they are destroyed by the body’s

01:02:11 ►

system and I believe

01:02:12 ►

now that the cactus

01:02:15 ►

is active because

01:02:16 ►

the isoquinolones are monamine oxidase

01:02:18 ►

inhibitors and keeps the body from

01:02:20 ►

deaminating the materials

01:02:23 ►

that are normally deaminated in the body

01:02:24 ►

and are therefore not active.

01:02:26 ►

So the cactus is almost like ayahuasca.

01:02:29 ►

Any component alone is not active, but in mixture they are.

01:02:33 ►

And I would like to now continue back over these phenethylamines

01:02:37 ►

using monamine oxidase inhibitors to see if that could be the justification for the activity of the cactus.

01:02:42 ►

I do not know the answer.

01:02:44 ►

Thanks.

01:02:44 ►

But we’re still working on it.

01:02:46 ►

Oh, yes.

01:02:58 ►

Thank you very much indeed, Sasha and Anne.

01:03:00 ►

Long may they continue working at it

01:03:02 ►

and giving us the benefit of their

01:03:04 ►

experience.

01:03:17 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:03:25 ►

Now, if you think you’ve heard this talk before, you may be partially correct.

01:03:32 ►

June 6, 2006 was the approximate anniversary of my first year of doing this podcast.

01:03:37 ►

And so for the program that day, I think it was podcast number 39, I played several short selections from several speakers at this conference.

01:03:42 ►

But today you heard their entire session.

01:03:46 ►

So I hope that now you have a little better idea of the chemist side of the Shulgens.

01:03:52 ►

And should you have sometime in the distant past when these ABC drugs were still legal,

01:03:58 ►

should you have ingested one of these little gems like 2C-B,

01:04:03 ►

you know that a lot of work went into

01:04:05 ►

designing that experience for you.

01:04:08 ►

And yes, Sasha and Ann and their merry little band

01:04:11 ►

of deep space explorers did just that for us.

01:04:15 ►

They designed experiences.

01:04:18 ►

Now most of you, I’m sure, already own a copy

01:04:21 ►

of Ann and Sasha’s books, P. Call and T. Call.

01:04:24 ►

But if you don’t, you can buy copies through Amazon from your local bookstore or directly

01:04:29 ►

from Shulgin’s by emailing their publisher at transformpress, that’s all one word,

01:04:35 ►

transformpress at yahoo.com, where the price is $24.50 each.

01:04:41 ►

And you can just send an email to transform Press and get the details directly from them.

01:04:47 ►

My guess is that once you’ve held a copy of these books in your hands,

01:04:51 ►

you’re going to have to have a copy for yourself.

01:04:54 ►

And if you haven’t already begun to build your own psychedelic library,

01:04:58 ►

these two books are a perfect place to begin.

01:05:01 ►

For one thing, they’re divided into two parts.

01:05:04 ►

And the first part is the story.

01:05:06 ►

Now, they bill it as a novel, but if you read it closely, you’ll discover that maybe you even know

01:05:12 ►

some of these characters, at least the people the characters are based on. And then you’ll

01:05:18 ►

discover that there is, well, at least maybe a kernel of truth here and there in this story.

01:05:23 ►

well, at least maybe a kernel of truth here and there in this story.

01:05:29 ►

And then, if you’re like I was when I first found Pakal,

01:05:33 ►

out in the boondocks with no friends who even smoked cannabis,

01:05:37 ►

working in the system, burdened with debt, hating my job,

01:05:44 ►

and then you read this great story that you somehow just know has to have a lot of truth in it,

01:05:48 ►

and for the first time in many years, you have hope once again.

01:05:55 ►

And then you begin part two and discover some 500 or more pages of chemical recipes.

01:05:57 ►

Do you want to know more about 2C-B?

01:06:06 ►

Just go to page 503 where you’ll find detailed protocol for making it, followed by information about dosage and duration.

01:06:11 ►

And then come the qualitative comments and Sasha’s extension and commentary.

01:06:14 ►

Now, I’m not sure about this number, but there are over 30 index pages with about 40 lines each.

01:06:18 ►

That’s in PICOL, at least, which means there are over 1,000 entries,

01:06:23 ►

and the vast majority of them are names of chemicals.

01:06:27 ►

And these are only the phenethylamines that he created and tested.

01:06:31 ►

The tryptamines are decaled in T-col.

01:06:34 ►

Now think back for a second about some of the things that we just heard Sasha say

01:06:38 ►

about first the problem of figuring out which compounds will be psychoactive

01:06:43 ►

and then building them, but the second problem of figuring out which compounds will be psychoactive and then building them.

01:06:45 ►

But the second problem of human testing and how painfully slow it absolutely must be.

01:06:51 ►

Because if this kind of testing isn’t painfully slow, it most certainly can become painful and maybe even painfully dead.

01:07:00 ►

So if there are any budding chemists out there that are listening to this, please keep Sasha’s words in mind at all times.

01:07:07 ►

Anyway, when you pick up copies of Picol and Tikal and fan through those thousands of pages,

01:07:14 ►

then see if you don’t agree that Sasha Shulgin is a chemist that is truly worthy of a Nobel Prize.

01:07:22 ►

Wow, you know, I’ve been saying that for years now, but just now, just as the words

01:07:28 ►

were coming out of my mouth, I suddenly realized that this is the first time I’ve said that since

01:07:33 ►

Dr. Hoffman died, because I always follow it by adding that Albert Hoffman is equally worthy of

01:07:39 ►

the joint Nobel Prize in chemistry. Of course, the fact that Dr. Hoffman was a member of the Nobel Selection Committee

01:07:46 ►

probably prevented him from receiving the award himself.

01:07:51 ►

But now, dear Albert has moved on to a new adventure.

01:07:55 ►

So I guess the mantle of the world’s greatest chemist is now yours alone, Sasha.

01:08:01 ►

The king is dead. Long live the king.

01:08:04 ►

Can you believe I’m getting so corny today?

01:08:07 ►

All I’m trying to say is that I’m sad that Dr. Hoffman has left the ship, but I’m overjoyed that

01:08:13 ►

Sasha is recovering, albeit at a pace that he’s bristling at. Anyway, get well, Sasha, and our

01:08:20 ►

love also goes out to you, Ann and Tanya and Greg, who are there to help Sasha get back on his feet.

01:08:27 ►

Now, regarding the Shulgin’s talk that we just heard, I want to emphasize what Ann was saying about the potential MDMA therapy has for veterans of war suffering from PTSD.

01:08:39 ►

First of all, if that is you or if you know someone in that situation, you might want to think about contacting Dr. Michael Mithoffer, who has been conducting FDA-approved tests using MDMA therapy with post-traumatic stress disorder victims.

01:08:55 ►

And you can find links to him in our psychedelicsalon.org blog.

01:09:05 ►

say that is because in my own case, at least it’s my belief, that working through some of my Navy issues while with friends and on MDMA, well, that’s the main reason I’m still

01:09:11 ►

alive today.

01:09:13 ►

Now, I was never diagnosed with PTSD, and I really don’t think I had it.

01:09:17 ►

I don’t think that’s the case.

01:09:18 ►

But I can say for certain that the bizarre dreams that frequently woke me up with my

01:09:23 ►

own screaming, well, they went

01:09:25 ►

away after I went through some of these sessions, and now they seem to have gone away forever.

01:09:31 ►

But unsupervised, that is, without some kind of experienced, hopefully professional, help,

01:09:39 ►

MDMA may not be that great of an idea.

01:09:42 ►

Believe me, in my case, I know for sure that it can be a great of an idea believe me in my case I know for sure that it can

01:09:45 ►

be a great party drug in fact since there was no information about it when I

01:09:50 ►

first started using it I seriously abused it seriously until it didn’t work

01:09:56 ►

at all in any dose and believe me I tried some dangerously large ones so I

01:10:02 ►

stopped completely for two years tried again again, but nothing, not even

01:10:06 ►

a tingle. So I stopped for seven more years and tried it again. And then, like magic, it was

01:10:15 ►

almost as good as the first time. And after that, I never used it more than two or three times a

01:10:20 ►

year, and it worked perfectly every time. Now, it’s been a really long time now since I’ve used

01:10:25 ►

it so I’m sure it would work well even though I once was almost a daily user. But now I avoid it

01:10:32 ►

because of the body load. One thing I’ve learned with aging is that it is even more important to

01:10:38 ►

listen to your body as you get older and when your grinding teeth and the second day drop or lull or whatever you call it begin to get to you.

01:10:47 ►

Well, maybe it’s time to move on to greener pastures like ayahuasca, for example, or one of the other bold faced chemicals in the index.

01:10:57 ►

Now, before I run out of steam for today, I’d like to mention a thread from our forum over on the grow report dot com.

01:11:04 ►

It comes from one of our fellow slaughters who goes by the handle Impermanence,

01:11:09 ►

and he brings up a really good point,

01:11:11 ►

one that once we get past the semantics,

01:11:14 ►

is something that I probably should bring up here.

01:11:17 ►

So thank you in advance, Impermanence.

01:11:20 ►

I appreciate your candor.

01:11:22 ►

And I’m not going to read the entire thread,

01:11:24 ►

but I will read part of how impermanence began it,

01:11:27 ►

and then a few bits of the responses.

01:11:30 ►

But if this topic interests you, I recommend that you go to the Psychedelic Salon forum on thegrowreport.com

01:11:37 ►

and look for the thread titled, A Bone to Pick with Lorenzo.

01:11:41 ►

Here’s how it begins.

01:11:43 ►

The bone I have to pick is regarding Lorenzo’s opinion of

01:11:46 ►

cannabis being non-addictive. Sure, cannabis is not physically addictive, and you may have had

01:11:53 ►

no physical withdrawal symptoms, but it is without a doubt incredibly mentally addictive, and I for

01:12:00 ►

one have suffered physical withdrawal symptoms every time I’ve tried to give up cannabis.

01:12:10 ►

Now let me interrupt right here so I can get my little semantic thing out of the way.

01:12:13 ►

And that has to do with the word addictive.

01:12:21 ►

The reason I want to clear the air on that term first is because the rest of what impermanence has to say is something I think we should take very seriously.

01:12:24 ►

But here’s my problem with the word addiction.

01:12:28 ►

And I confess to being a disciple of Jonathan Ott on this.

01:12:32 ►

I don’t have the time to go into it in detail right now, but eventually I’ll play one of his talks about what it really means to be addicted.

01:12:38 ►

But just to give you something to chew on,

01:12:40 ►

how come here in the States, where coffee breaks are actually written into labor contracts contracts and where almost everyone has several cups of coffee each and every single day,

01:12:50 ►

how come we don’t mention the fact that all of these people are addicted to caffeine?

01:12:54 ►

Because that is, in fact, exactly what they are.

01:12:58 ►

And if somebody who drinks two or more cups of coffee a day claims that they aren’t addicted,

01:13:03 ►

well, tell them to quit cold turkey and give you a call around the fourth or fifth day

01:13:07 ►

and let you know how they’re doing with their withdrawal symptoms.

01:13:11 ►

Now, take the same case with daily cannabis smoker, toker, or vaporizer,

01:13:15 ►

and they’ll call you to say that they haven’t had a single physical symptom of withdrawal.

01:13:20 ►

My point being somewhat anally technical,

01:13:22 ►

but until coffee drinkers admit that they are addicts, and see how bad that word sounds?

01:13:28 ►

Until those coffee addicts admit their dependency, I don’t think us cannabis users should give up any ground and allow ourselves to be called an addict.

01:13:37 ►

Even if we are using a non-medical phrase like mentally addictive.

01:13:41 ►

like mentally addictive.

01:13:44 ►

Now, I do know what you’re talking about, impermanence,

01:13:47 ►

but I feel quite strongly that we shouldn’t open the door to creating any more negative impressions of the psychedelic community than necessary.

01:13:52 ►

We’re perfectly capable of doing that in many more creative ways.

01:13:57 ►

Anyway, if we get rid of the addict thoughts

01:13:59 ►

and go with something like serious psychological dependency or something like that,

01:14:05 ►

then the rest of impermanence’s post really resonates with me.

01:14:09 ►

And in point of fact, Impermanence makes the same point a couple of days later when he said,

01:14:14 ►

maybe I shouldn’t be using the word addictive.

01:14:16 ►

What I should be saying is I have a psychological dependence to cannabis.

01:14:20 ►

And I think he also mentioned that he was a little drunk when he made his original post,

01:14:26 ►

which I’ll continue reading now.

01:14:32 ►

I’m a 29-year-old male who has been smoking cannabis since the tender age of 12.

01:14:34 ►

I can’t give up.

01:14:38 ►

In Ireland, it’s mostly indica hash from Afghanistan that we get on the street.

01:14:41 ►

I’ve been smoking this shit my whole life.

01:14:43 ►

I love it and I’m miserable without it.

01:14:51 ►

I suffer headaches without hash. I can’t sleep. I’m incredibly moody, in fact intolerable. I will drink myself into oblivion if I can’t get sorted for hash or weed. But I always do. I get sorted and continue living in my hazy

01:14:57 ►

bubble. Without cannabis, my central nervous system goes to overdrive. I become erratic and

01:15:03 ►

inconsolably moody and depressed.

01:15:06 ►

I have turned to smoking heroin on many occasions when I couldn’t get cannabis over the last

01:15:10 ►

few years. I’m not alone in my addiction. I have seen cannabis destroy the lives of

01:15:15 ►

many friends, rob the strong ones of their passion and motivation, and leave them a shell

01:15:19 ►

of what they once were and lead the weak ones into heroin addiction. I’ve seen them die.

01:15:25 ►

It began with an addiction to cannabis. I think Lorenzo is living in a fantasy world sometimes. I want to

01:15:31 ►

believe it, but on the streets of Dublin, cannabis is not some fucking fairy tale. It’s just relief

01:15:36 ►

from stress. And if abused through unprepared or immature minds, it comes with a heavy price.

01:15:44 ►

I never mentioned my struggle with psychosis that’s left me agoraphobic for 10 years,

01:15:48 ►

thanks largely to cannabis.

01:15:50 ►

I’m hoping ayahuasca will help me deal with that,

01:15:53 ►

because giving up cannabis is not in the cards.

01:15:56 ►

I would rather die than never smoke a joint again.

01:15:59 ►

Now tell me cannabis is not addictive.

01:16:01 ►

Well, as you might suspect, this original post led to quite a few responses.

01:16:07 ►

And a few thoughts I had began with remembering the alcoholic haze I lived in before I found psychedelics.

01:16:14 ►

And as an aside note to our fellow salonners from the DEA and other agencies of note

01:16:20 ►

who may think I just replaced one vice for another. Well, maybe you’re right. But from where

01:16:27 ►

I stand, I feel it’s much healthier for me to participate in a few ayahuasca ceremonies each

01:16:32 ►

year and smoke a joint from time to time than it was to drink myself into a stupor every day.

01:16:38 ►

And in a way, it sounds like impermanence was doing more than his or her share of drinking.

01:16:44 ►

And as for being agoraphobic for 10 years, he says thanks largely to cannabis,

01:16:49 ►

well, maybe you should have quit buying that indica and tried a little Jack Herra instead.

01:16:55 ►

Seriously.

01:16:56 ►

But another little trick that I’ve discovered that might help you daily tokers out there

01:17:01 ►

is to begin each day with a little list of things that you absolutely intend

01:17:05 ►

to get done for the day and do this before your first toke then toke all you want as long as your

01:17:11 ►

list is getting checked off but if you miss getting everything done that day then you don’t allow

01:17:16 ►

yourself to toke at all the next day and if you’re serious about that promise to yourself then you’ll

01:17:21 ►

be surprised how much work you can get done while you’re stoned. You know, the old carrot and stick program.

01:17:27 ►

That said, getting into the rut of being stoned every day isn’t a bed of roses from a psychological

01:17:32 ►

point of view, and over the long term can be very detrimental.

01:17:37 ►

And I should probably interject here that both Ann and Sasha Shulgin strongly warn against

01:17:42 ►

heavy use of cannabis, and in fact, neither of them are fond of it personally.

01:17:47 ►

On the other hand, I admit that cannabis is my closest ally.

01:17:52 ►

Yet, very interestingly, the spirit of that plant,

01:17:55 ►

if you get to know it well and listen closely,

01:17:58 ►

will let you know when it’s time to back off.

01:18:01 ►

Just a few months back, I found it quite fascinating that,

01:18:04 ►

along with myself, almost

01:18:07 ►

a dozen or so of my friends, almost spontaneously, and all without talking to one another beforehand,

01:18:13 ►

well, we all went on a break, an indefinite hiatus from using that wonderful plant. And

01:18:19 ►

I think that most of us didn’t use it again for several months, just quit cold turkey,

01:18:24 ►

because it

01:18:25 ►

seemed like the right thing to do at the moment.

01:18:27 ►

In fact, I can remember thinking during my hiatus that I might not ever even want to

01:18:32 ►

use it again, and in fact I realized that I didn’t need to.

01:18:37 ►

But of course, eventually I dusted off the old doctor’s recommendation and stopped by

01:18:41 ►

the local dispensary once again, mainly because it was getting too painful to sit at my computer for more than an hour or so a day.

01:18:48 ►

But after I started back once again, I realized how much I miss the feeling the way I feel

01:18:53 ►

when I’m high.

01:18:54 ►

Now let’s be honest here, we humans have been altering our consciousness long before we

01:19:00 ►

even figured out how to brew beer.

01:19:02 ►

If you watch, you’ll see even little children spinning themselves around in small circles

01:19:06 ►

just to get dizzy and get that feeling of being high.

01:19:10 ►

It’s in our nature to be high.

01:19:12 ►

At least that’s my unscientific opinion.

01:19:15 ►

So maybe we’re chasing the wrong moonbeam here.

01:19:18 ►

Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about being psychologically dependent upon cannabis,

01:19:22 ►

but instead talk about being psychologically dependent on feeling good

01:19:27 ►

or having a relaxed and peaceful state of mind.

01:19:30 ►

Maybe that’s what this calling to pursue this exploration of inner space is all about.

01:19:35 ►

Who knows?

01:19:36 ►

I for sure don’t know what drives us to have these unusual experiences

01:19:40 ►

and then come back to places like the psychedelic salon and talk about them.

01:19:44 ►

Why aren’t you listening to some good music right now?

01:19:47 ►

And by the way, I hope you do just that really soon

01:19:49 ►

because all this talking can wear you out after a while.

01:19:53 ►

And music’s the perfect break.

01:19:56 ►

By the way, did you know that Sasha is also an excellent musician?

01:20:00 ►

I believe it’s the cello that he plays.

01:20:02 ►

But the question remains,

01:20:04 ►

why are you using some of your valuable time in this life

01:20:07 ►

to listen to a bunch of lectures

01:20:09 ►

when you could be out playing golf or something?

01:20:13 ►

I can’t speak for everybody,

01:20:14 ►

but my guess is that most of our fellow salonners

01:20:17 ►

stop by the salon each week

01:20:19 ►

and are part of the global psychedelic community

01:20:21 ►

because they have no choice.

01:20:24 ►

We’re drawn here like moths to a flame.

01:20:27 ►

So let’s be moths that enjoy the light,

01:20:29 ►

but stay out of the fire.

01:20:32 ►

Well, I’ve got five more things I want to mention today,

01:20:35 ►

but I’m going to save them for the next podcast.

01:20:38 ►

I think we’ve all got enough to think about right now for one day.

01:20:42 ►

And I do want to thank John Hanna

01:20:43 ►

for producing the Mind States conferences and to JT for recording them Thank you. humans. You have all delivered to us the perfect medicine our species needs to continue

01:21:06 ►

on this fascinating journey.

01:21:08 ►

And as always, I want to close

01:21:10 ►

by saying that this and

01:21:12 ►

all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon

01:21:14 ►

are available under the Creative Commons

01:21:16 ►

Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike

01:21:18 ►

3.0 license. And if you

01:21:20 ►

have any questions about that, just click the

01:21:21 ►

Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic

01:21:24 ►

Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org. And that’s also where you’ll

01:21:29 ►

find the program notes for these podcasts. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from

01:21:34 ►

Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you. you

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

138 - The Shulgins at Mind States 2005″

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Program Notes

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