172 - The State of LSD in 2003″

Program Notes §

Guest speakers: Earth & Fire Erowid, Ralph Metzner, Stanislav Grof, Nick Sand, and Dave Nichols

Erowid’s LSD Vault
LSD and Drug Testing
LSD FAQ Part 1
LSD FAQ Part 2

“I believe it’s true to say that everyone who has experienced LSD or another psychedelic would look on that experience, especially the first one, as a major life-changing event.” –Ralph Metzner

“The introduction of LSD and psychedelics into the culture produced a transformation of the entire culture, the consciousness of the culture.” –Ralph Metzner

“The first note in that octave [of our cultural transformation], the do, was the discovery of LSD by Albert Hofmann in 1943.” –Ralph Metzner

“Just as Hitler used the Reichstag burning, the U.S. government now uses the so-called two wars, the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, to fuel fear in the population and establish a police security state.” –Ralph Metzner

“It [the prohibition of psychedelics] puts the industrial civilization in a very unique position. It’s just about the only society in the whole history of humanity that doesn’t have any use for non-ordinary states of consciousness.” –Stanislav Grof

“We have to recognize that spirituality is a legitimate dimention in the psyche. It’s a legitimate dimention in the universal scheme of things. It doesn’t mean that you are superstitious, that you are in to magical, primitive thinking, if you take spirituality seriously.” –Stanislav Grof

The Psychedelic Party of Israel

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Transcript §

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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

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

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And I guess I should apologize for it being almost two weeks since we were last together here in the salon.

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However, this time there’s a good reason for it, which I’ll save until after we hear today’s program,

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which I think you’re going to find very interesting. But first, I want to thank four of our fellow salonners who sent in donations to help offset the expenses associated with producing these podcasts.

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And they are Jason C., Wilma Van T., and my two vagabond friends, Chris and Kai.

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So, Chris, Kai, Wilma, and Jason, thank you ever so much for your love and support.

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It means a lot to me. And while I’m thanking some of the many people who are now also supporting

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these podcasts by linking to us and telling their friends about us, I definitely want to be sure to

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also thank John Hanna and JT. John for producing the

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Mind States conferences and JT

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for making the recordings.

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And if you’ve ever attended one of

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these conferences, you also know that

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they wouldn’t happen without a

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legion of volunteers who prepare

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the art exhibits, chill rooms,

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trade show, and everything else

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that takes place on these weekends

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when 600 or so of our closest friends all get together.

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And that is exactly what the weekend was like when the talks that you’re about to hear took place.

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And if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while, then you may remember already hearing two other members of this panel discussion,

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Nick Sand and Myron Stolaroff.

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That was back in podcast number 154.

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And today we’re going to hear from some of the other members of what was simply called

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the LSD panel.

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Now, if you’ve been hanging around here in the salon for a while, you’re already aware

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that what passes for drug education in our schools today

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and in the media has no connection with reality.

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Unfortunately, the corporate media doesn’t understand the value of truth,

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and so they continue to spread lies about our sacred medicines.

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But if you’re new to the fact that there actually is a worldwide psychedelic community,

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then today’s program might surprise you with its candor.

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I can still remember the first time I heard Terrence McKenna talking in public about psychedelic substances.

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It completely blew me away.

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I guess that’s because I’ve never heard anyone talk about these things in public before,

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and so I guess I figured it must somehow be illegal to even talk about these things in public before, and so I guess I figured it must somehow be

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illegal to even talk about them.

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And it took me a while for me to figure out that, hey, free speech is still allowed in

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this country, at least for the time being.

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And so I still find it very refreshing to hear such honest talk about things like street

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acid, for example.

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And so we begin today with the Erowids talking about the good acid, bad acid debate and the

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quality of LSD on the street when this talk was given back in 2003.

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Of course, it has now been almost six years since these talks were given.

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And so you probably should go right to Arrowids’s website at www.erowid.org and get the up-to-date information about the things that they’re talking about.

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And then after them, we’ll hear from Ralph Metzner and then from Stan Groff.

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And immediately following each of these little short 15-minute presentations is the Q&A session, which I’ve truncated quite a bit.

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And I guess I should mention that in the question and answer session, the first person to answer a question is also Nick Sand.

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So now let’s join Susan Blackmore in Berkeley, California on a fine spring day in 2003 as she introduces the Erowids.

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It’s Earth and Fire Erowid first. As you know, the founders of the

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Vaults of Erowid, they’re both also contributing editors for Trip Magazine.

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Hello. One of the things that’s continually striking about coming to these conferences

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is how much knowledge there is.

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Talking to the people as we stand behind our tables, it’s really striking that so many people know so much,

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and so little of that is really sort of well-documented.

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What we’re going to talk about today is LSD and sort of what’s available on the street in terms of analysis.

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is LSD and sort of what’s available on the street in terms of analysis.

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There’s, you know, celebrating the 60-year anniversary of LSD,

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we now have 60 years of data and published papers and people’s experiences,

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and yet we still don’t really have a very good sense of what it is exactly that’s sold on the street as blotter.

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One of the most persistent discussions around street acid is the sort of what you might call the good acid, bad acid debate. People really have very strong opinions about

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sort of one type of acid that they tried was very different from another type of acid.

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And it’s unclear whether or not that can be described in terms, whether there is reason to

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think that that’s based on differences in the different things which are sold as acid, or whether that really can be boiled down to just differences in dose set setting and individual reactions of the drugs.

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So for the last few years, we’ve been very interested in trying to collect what information is available about,

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specifically about what is sold on the street as acid.

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And so the first question is, when looking at at that why is there so little data available

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the primary reason is obviously related to prohibition that because of the regulatory

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systems that are in place not only do we create a black market but we also impede a great deal

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of research so it’s very difficult to get research done and starting in the early 1970s with the

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passage of the controlled substances act and the creation of the Controlled Substances Act and the creation of the DEA, tight restrictions were put in place

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over who is able to analyze and research controlled substances.

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In the early 70s, there were some labs doing some analysis of street acid.

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And the most prominent of these is probably PharmChem.

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They published a newsletter which collected information that they both did,

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both from their analysis in their lab and also from other labs around the United States that were doing that work at the time.

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But in 1974, they were publishing some quantitative data so that you could get information

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about how much acid was on a given type of water or in a given pill.

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But in 1974, the DEA issued guidelines to PharmChem and all other DEA-licensed labs,

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which required that labs stop providing quantitative data for anonymously submitted

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samples of controlled substances. So they were no longer allowed to do quantitative testing only if

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people were willing to basically walk in and identify themselves as the person submitting

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the controlled substance.

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Although this wasn’t a law, the labs have very little choice about whether they’re going to comply or not because the DEA is the licensing agent for any lab that wants to handle controlled substances legally.

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So any lab that violates DEA regulations or just sort of pisses the DEA off or risks losing their license.

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So not surprisingly, PharmCam and other labs quickly stopped publishing any quantitative data of street acid.

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The second reason why there’s so little data available is that LSD analysis is more complicated,

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is just more technically difficult than analyzing other things,

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partially because of the dosage is so low and partially just because LSD is a more complicated molecule.

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So although there are simple tests for identifying the presence of LSD,

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using thin layer chromatography, for instance,

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detecting and characterizing impurities

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or quantifying the exact amount of LSD present in a tablet

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or on a piece of blotter is very difficult.

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So the next question is what data is available, and there is some.

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First, there’s data from the PharmChem newsletters, which were published between 1972 and 1978.

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Unfortunately, they failed to describe their testing methods in the newsletter, and only

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a small portion of their results include quantitative values.

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We believe, based on talking to Sasha and a PharmChem employee who was there after their anonymous testing program was over,

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that they were probably using TLC, thin-layer chromatography, to do the identification,

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but we’re not really sure.

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There’s no information that we’re aware of published about exactly how they did their quantification.

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exactly how they did their quantification.

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In March 1977,

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PharmChem published a review of street drug analysis

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in the U.S. and Canada

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between 1969 and 1975.

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They looked at a total of 2,200 samples

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submitted as acid or LSD

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and reported that 87%

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of the submitted samples

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alleged to be LSD

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were DLSD with no other

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psychoactive drugs present.

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But in LSD-positive samples,

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they found a range of 5 to 500 micrograms with an average of 75 micrograms per dose. But in LSD-positive samples, they found a range of

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5 to 500 micrograms with an average of 75 micrograms per dose. But one confusing element

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is that their summaries include results from 10 different labs and don’t indicate which test

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results went with which lab or what the methods were for each of the labs.

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One of the sort of interesting things that, in going through all of the PharmChem newsletters

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to look at this data

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was that they reported that with the samples that they got submitted, people had written notes and

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stuff, and people were more likely to have written this contains speed or this contains strychnine

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on samples which had higher doses per unit of LSD.

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The other major source of testing data is the DEA.

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Unfortunately, their law enforcement mission does not necessitate that they provide the public with the vast quantities of information that they do actually collect.

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But the DEA does publish sort of summary data on their website and in publications that they make.

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their website and in publications that they make?

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They have given an average value for dosages of street acid as 20 to 80 micrograms per dosage unit.

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And based on this, they now consider a standard dose of LSD to be 50

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micrograms, where they used to identify a standard dose as 100 micrograms,

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which is sort of an interesting commentary because prosecutions for

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possession are actually based on what is considered a standard dose.

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And so that they’re now considering half the dose to be a standard dose could have

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implications for law. So you can say that what used to be 10 doses

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is now 20 doses. They don’t really care how many

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people actually take as a dose. They also report

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that the LSD crystal that they have seized averages about 62% DLSD,

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with the rest being other isomers or impurities, and they say that some of the LSD crystal that they have seized averages about 62% DLSD, with the rest being other isomers or impurities,

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and they said that some of the LSD crystal they have found is 95% to 100% pure,

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but a much smaller amount of that.

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The other thing we came across in looking for data about LSD was in 1987,

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the DEA published an index by Franz Sosa.

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I don’t know.

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Well, some other guys.

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an index by Françoise… I don’t know.

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Well, some other guys.

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And it’s…

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Where am I?

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It was a catalog of hundreds of designs of blotter,

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a large portion of which they had quantitative values for.

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And this is what it looks like.

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They’re very low-quality photocopies

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of the blotter that they had.

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But it’s pretty interesting.

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And the whole copy of that you can find on our site

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if you’re interested in looking at it.

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That was published in their internal publication,

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which is called Microgram.

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It’s a newsletter that they publish.

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It publishes a wide variety of information,

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but it’s pretty much a secret publication.

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Basically, you can’t get it.

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It was.

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This year, they actually went public with it.

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But prior to this year,

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it has been only accessible to analytical chemists and DEA-affiliated chemists.

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In 2002, an Airwood volunteer filed a Freedom of Information Act request for a 10-year-old issue of microgram to try and get some of their data from the early 90s.

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And they, of course, denied the request.

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We’re currently appealing that.

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We’re currently appealing that.

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The last year that we’ve gotten access to,

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we’ve gotten access to a few older copies of microgram through libraries that have sort of archived them

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without really being, you know, supposed to,

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and some people who used to be subscribed to micrograms.

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So we have a few older copies,

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and we’ve got access to 1996 publication,

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and they’ve published the…

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This was published in…

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In 87, and the doses that they report up to 1996 are an average of 28

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to 78 micrograms per hit

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unfortunately the microgram isn’t

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super scientifically rigorous in the way that they

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report the information so it isn’t really

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clear exactly how they got the values that they

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got and they don’t exactly

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specify which lab

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did the

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analysis so then we’ve got don’t exactly specify which lab did the analysis.

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So then we’ve got data from other countries.

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Other countries have obviously different regulations than the United States

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in terms of who’s allowed to do testing.

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In Europe, some of the testing is a little easier to get access to.

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We know that there’s a lab in the Netherlands that does testing

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and have been told of testing programs in Spain, Austria, and Switzerland,

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but still very little data has been published by them publicly about what their results are.

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So starting in 1999, we became sort of really interested in the question of sort of both what data was available

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and also we were interested because we were aware that there wasn’t all that much data

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about what was exactly sold on street acid,

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we started to try a lab testing program for LSD.

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We have started looking for a lab anywhere in the world, really,

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but preferably in the United States or Canada,

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that would both have the skills necessary and have the legal permission to do the work.

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skills necessary and have the legal permission to do the work.

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So a number of labs that we’ve contacted based on the DEA guidelines that have been issued have told us that they will give us quantitative information for LSD

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if we are willing to walk the sample in and provide them with a driver’s license,

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which they will photocopy with the LSD sample that we’re submitting,

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which they will then keep on file in case the DEA wants to know who it was that submitted the sample.

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We decided not to go with that.

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Our lawyers advise us against that.

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Early this year, we were finally able to find a lab with the skills necessary to begin the

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process of looking at the issue of LSD analysis.

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The lab had access to an LSD analytical sample, and a sample of LSD which they’d had for over

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10 years and had been stored under nitrogen in freebase form, and were also able to obtain

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a street sample in the form of these small brown microdots, which have been around recently

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around the country for the last about year.

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We’ve received many reports from people about these,

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and pretty much all of them suggest that they’re very weak,

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although the reports do vary.

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So it’s believed that the small brown micro dots

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contain 21 micrograms of DLSD.

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They’re selling on the street for $5 apiece.

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$2.50to$5 apiece.

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We had another lab who did a much cruder test, which we don’t have pictures of,

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using just thin-layer chromatography to try and estimate the quantity.

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And they estimated 20 micrograms plus or minus 10.

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So we have two sources that, yeah, exactly, 20 plus or minus 10.

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So we believe that we have reasonably verified results for the brown microdots

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that at least some batches of the brown microdots,

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because of course it can vary from batch to batch,

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contain about 20 micrograms.

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So that’s our first set of recent data that we’ve gotten.

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It’s possible that whoever produced these microdots

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intended to put 50 micrograms on them,

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and they put 50 micrograms of whatever material that they had.

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But that starting material may have been only about half DLSD.

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So where we’re sort of left with this, this is sort of a continuing project

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to try and develop the information around what exactly those things are

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and what different types of acid sold in the street look like using these methods.

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So we’re going to continue to keep trying to get continual more results in the future?

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So where we’re sort of left is that there isn’t really enough solid data to really answer the good-ass and bad-ass debate.

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But we’re working on it.

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Next is Ralph Metzner, who is also a professor at the Institute for Integral Studies here in San Francisco.

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who is also a professor at the Institute for Integral Studies here in San Francisco.

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A name particularly dear to my heart because 30 or 35 years ago, I forget,

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I had a book called Maps of Consciousness.

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And this is the first time that I’ve ever met Ralph, which is very exciting for me.

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He works primarily now on auto-states of consciousness and eco-psychology or green psychology. Ralph Metzner.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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Is this okay? Okay.

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So everyone who has experienced,

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I believe it’s true to say that everyone who has experienced LSD or another psychedelic

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would look on that experience, especially the first one, as a major life-changing event.

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What I’d like to do is to look at collective psychology,

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Look at collective psychology.

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Because the introduction of LSD and psychedelics into the culture produced a transformation of the entire culture,

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the consciousness of the culture.

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You could think of this as mass psychology or collective psychology.

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And I would like to take a look at that and see, it seems to me that

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there’s a certain pattern that can be detected. I’m sure there are many patterns.

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The situation is incredibly complex. But I found it useful just recently to look at the historical development over the last 60 or 70 years

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and of the transformations that the culture has undergone,

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catalyzed by the reintroduction of psychedelic substances.

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And I’m using for a framework of analysis a formulation by the Russian-Armenian-Greek philosopher, teacher, George Gurdjieff,

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who is very influential in my work and my thinking, who formulated a principle that he said that any transformation on whatever level,

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whether individual or collective or planetary or cosmic or microcosmic,

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goes through seven identifiable phases like a musical octave.

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He called it the Law of Seven.

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And as you know, in the musical octave, he introduced this interesting point.

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In the musical octave, when you go from the note me to far,

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the third to the fourth, there’s a half note.

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And so what he said, to make the transition in the transformation from me to far,

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an external shock is necessary.

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And similarly for the transition from C to the next do of the next octave.

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An external shock is necessary to keep the movement going. If that doesn’t happen,

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the movement of transformation kind of degenerates and gets diverted into something else.

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So what I would like to do then, what I’d like to suggest is that to look at the octave process of sociocultural transformation

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and that the first note in that octave, the dole,

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was the discovery of LSD by Albert Hoffman in 1943,

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which was a very peculiar event.

00:20:42 ► §

But we’re very aware of the consequences.

00:20:46 ► §

I know all of you are for yourselves personally. And the one thing I want to just point out about that event

00:20:52 ► §

is the timing of it. 1943 was the height of World War II. And the discovery, the accidental

00:20:59 ► §

so-called discovery of OZD by Adolfman, followed within three months of the triggering of the first nuclear chain reaction by Enrico Fermi,

00:21:09 ► §

which led directly to the discovery and the use of the atomic bomb.

00:21:15 ► §

So, in the 1940s, that’s the dough,

00:21:22 ► §

we see the simultaneous development of atomic energy and a

00:21:25 ► §

psychoactive drug that acts like an atomic explosion

00:21:28 ► §

on the human mind, changing forever the

00:21:31 ► §

worldview and basic life orientation of all who

00:21:34 ► §

experienced it. The first applications of LSD

00:21:37 ► §

were in CIA and military, psychotomimetic

00:21:40 ► §

research and psycholytic therapy in Europe.

00:21:49 ► §

The Ray note, the second note, would be the 50s, the decade of the 50s.

00:21:53 ► §

Saw the introduction into the culture of several mind-expanding,

00:21:56 ► §

plant-based shamanic spiritual movements.

00:22:00 ► §

Robert Gordon Wasson rediscovers the sacred mushroom ceremony of the ancient Aztecs,

00:22:03 ► §

publishing his account in Life magazine in 1957.

00:22:09 ► §

This triggers a movement in which tens of thousands of North American and European hippies start experimenting with hallucinogenic mushrooms, both wild and cultivated.

00:22:14 ► §

The spread of hallucinogenic mushroom use and cultivation connects the psychedelic movement

00:22:18 ► §

to age-old animistic, shamanistic traditions.

00:22:22 ► §

Also in the 1950s, a Brazilian robotapper starts a church,

00:22:28 ► §

one of three eventually, in which the Amazonian shamanic entheogen, ayahuasca, is the central

00:22:34 ► §

sacrament, initiating a grassroots religious revitalization movement that has thousands of

00:22:41 ► §

adherents worldwide to this day and growing.

00:22:46 ► §

Then we come to the 60s, the third note in the octave, the me.

00:22:50 ► §

Experiences with psychedelic drugs, LSD, psilocybin,

00:22:53 ► §

move out of the psychiatric clinics and laboratories.

00:22:56 ► §

Timothy Leary and associates begin their research with psychedelics at Harvard University.

00:23:01 ► §

In 1963, published the psychedelic experience based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

00:23:06 ► §

In California, novelist Ken Kesey and the Mary Prankster staged rock concert acid tests in which

00:23:11 ► §

thousands of people take LSD while listening to music and watching light shows. Thus was born a

00:23:16 ► §

revolution in collective consciousness, in which hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions,

00:23:22 ► §

had one or more profound life-changing psychedelic experiences.

00:23:26 ► §

The renowned philosophers Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Houston Smith

00:23:30 ► §

testify publicly to the religious and spiritual dimensions of psychedelic experience.

00:23:37 ► §

Synchronistically, the 1960s saw the beginnings of environmental movement,

00:23:42 ► §

Rachel Carson’s 1962, The Silent Spring,

00:23:44 ► §

usually considered the start of the of environmental movement, Rachel Carson’s 1962, The Silent Spring, usually considered the start of the American environmental movement.

00:23:49 ► §

A major catalyst, the civil rights, anti-discrimination movements

00:23:52 ► §

inspired by Martin Luther King, the anti-war movement,

00:23:55 ► §

galvanized by the televised horrors of Vietnam,

00:23:58 ► §

the women’s liberation movement, which is consciousness-raising circles,

00:24:02 ► §

the upsurge of creative innovation in music, the arts, fashion, and literature,

00:24:06 ► §

which we’re still seeing to this day,

00:24:09 ► §

the sexual revolution and increased freedom of sexual expression

00:24:12 ► §

catalyzed in part by the contraceptive pill.

00:24:15 ► §

Each of those movements represents an expansion of consciousness.

00:24:18 ► §

I’m not saying they all involve taking LSD.

00:24:21 ► §

Some of the people may have taken LSD, but that’s not the point.

00:24:24 ► §

The point is the pattern of the expansion of consciousness going beyond the accepted paradigm way of looking at things,

00:24:31 ► §

which is characteristic of a psychedelic experience.

00:24:34 ► §

That’s kind of the definition of it.

00:24:38 ► §

Then comes the shock, the external shock, the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

00:24:44 ► §

John Kennedy, 1963. Martin Luther King in 1968, Robert Kennedy in 1968, the humiliating defeat of the United States in Vietnam.

00:24:55 ► §

So then we have Phạm, 1970s, what happens in the 1970s.

00:25:00 ► §

The effect of the shock on the consciousness movement, I believe, was to induce a profound soul-searching and retreat from overt political activism.

00:25:10 ► §

The use of psychedelic drugs becomes a minor footnote in the war on drugs, which swings into higher and higher gear in the Nixon and Reagan years.

00:25:18 ► §

Marijuana is and remains in the middle and hotly contested ground, life-saving, mind-assisting medicine for millions, taboo political football

00:25:25 ► §

for the ruling elites, consciousness development movements of all kinds, Asian yoga and meditation

00:25:30 ► §

systems, new forms of transpersonal experiential psychotherapy, new age spiritual practices,

00:25:36 ► §

neo-shamanic, neo-pagan interests are cultivated and become academically respectable at places

00:25:42 ► §

like the California Institute of Integral Studies.

00:25:44 ► §

Yay!

00:25:50 ► §

Then we have the 1980s.

00:25:52 ► §

The salt, fifth note. All the transformative social movements

00:25:56 ► §

that began in the 60s continue to thrive, deepen, diversify,

00:26:00 ► §

and develop, reaching into all sectors of society,

00:26:04 ► §

varieties of environmental ecological perspectives perspectives such as deep ecology, varieties of feminists and civil rights and social justice movements, transpersonal and non-denominational approaches to religion and spirituality.

00:26:25 ► §

revolution. The spread of cocaine and crack cocaine intensifies the drug war with its rampant abuse and corruption of civil liberties, incalculable profits for the international

00:26:29 ► §

drug cartels, as well as money-lendering mainstream economy systems. Use of the classical psychedelics

00:26:36 ► §

remains almost invisibly underground. Alexander Shulgin creates MDMA, the first of many phenethylamine

00:26:42 ► §

and pathogens, as a valuable tool for psychotherapy.

00:26:46 ► §

It spreads fairly rapidly from the couch to the street, becomes demonized and illegal.

00:26:52 ► §

Rave parties of thousands involving ecstasy begin in England, spread to the U.S. and around the world.

00:26:58 ► §

The new Dionysian rebels spread throughout the suburban middle classes as well as youth culture.

00:27:03 ► §

Mushroom culture and ayahuasca religions continue to spread internationally.

00:27:08 ► §

And we have the 80s.

00:27:10 ► §

La, la, note of the octave.

00:27:12 ► §

The Soviet Empire collapses, leaving the U.S. as the sole superpower, so-called,

00:27:18 ► §

increasingly nakedly dedicated to economic and military imperialism around the globe.

00:27:24 ► §

The dizzying rise and spread of the Internet fosters global interconnectivity in every

00:27:28 ► §

area of life, from crime and commerce to science, education, information, including information

00:27:34 ► §

about drugs, as we’ve seen, and activist solidarity.

00:27:39 ► §

Multinational corporations foster economic hegemonic globalization. Growing global and public awareness of the

00:27:46 ► §

multiple mounting global environmental disasters, climate change, species extinction, overpopulation,

00:27:52 ► §

deforestation, exhaustion of resources loom ever larger. The drug war policies continue

00:27:59 ► §

defying logic, common sense, and civil rights. The psychedelic underground continues, becomes more knowledgeable,

00:28:06 ► §

oriented toward healing, therapeutic, and spiritual values.

00:28:09 ► §

Shamanic practices work with plant and spirit allies,

00:28:12 ► §

herbal and natural medicine,

00:28:14 ► §

organic farming and nutrition expand vigorously.

00:28:17 ► §

New, more conscious non-medical approaches

00:28:19 ► §

to birth and birthing and death and dying

00:28:22 ► §

gain more adherence.

00:28:23 ► §

A living systems worldview emerges.

00:28:28 ► §

The 2000s, this decade, the note C,

00:28:32 ► §

with the election of George W. Bush, the Supreme Court coup d’etat,

00:28:35 ► §

not unlike Hitler’s legal accession to power in 1932,

00:28:44 ► §

the ambitions of world domination, the imperium americanum, stand ever more clearly revealed.

00:28:52 ► §

Fascism internally, imperialism externally.

00:28:55 ► §

Democracy becomes a smokescreen cover word for militarism.

00:28:59 ► §

International treaties and institutions are abandoned with hardly a murmur of dissent or opposition from Congress or the media.

00:29:07 ► §

Free trade becomes a cover word for neocolonialist exploitation.

00:29:11 ► §

The most interesting and progressive political activities occur outside of the U.S., in Europe, some parts of Asia, and countries like in Latin America.

00:29:20 ► §

Then comes the shock.

00:29:24 ► §

September 11, 2001, the attack on the World Trade Towers.

00:29:29 ► §

In the aftermath, the dominant direction, imperialist domination and corporate globalization

00:29:33 ► §

is intensified by vengeful and simplistic militarism. Just as Hitler used the Reichstag

00:29:39 ► §

burning, the U.S. government now uses the so-called two wars, war on drugs and war on terrorism,

00:29:46 ► §

to fuel fear in the population and establish a police security state.

00:29:51 ► §

As of 2003, the United States has turned itself into a loathed pariah in the international community,

00:30:00 ► §

ridiculed for its stupendous ignorance and arrogance,

00:30:03 ► §

and feared only because its hand is on parallel military destructive power

00:30:07 ► §

and its seeming determination to use it.

00:30:11 ► §

Now, whether the external shock, like that in the 60s,

00:30:15 ► §

will have the effect of ultimately strengthening the movements of consciousness transformation

00:30:20 ► §

remains to be seen.

00:30:22 ► §

At this point, the aims of spiritual self-development

00:30:25 ► §

and the demands and needs of the larger society and world

00:30:28 ► §

seem to be coinciding,

00:30:30 ► §

since the ordinary political means

00:30:32 ► §

of stopping the juggernaut of preemptive war

00:30:36 ► §

seem ineffective.

00:30:39 ► §

There’s a high-stakes cosmic game of planetary catastrophe

00:30:44 ► §

that we’re living through.

00:30:47 ► §

The Earth has one or more trump cards.

00:30:50 ► §

Ecological disasters could occur on such a scale that it would force the diversion of all military resources and manpower to address them.

00:30:58 ► §

I confess to sometimes wishing it might happen thus.

00:31:02 ► §

On the other hand, we cannot wait or hope

00:31:05 ► §

for this card to be played.

00:31:07 ► §

The Internet is a wild card.

00:31:09 ► §

It can amplify all other plays

00:31:11 ► §

and create unexpected opportunities

00:31:13 ► §

and openings.

00:31:15 ► §

Those of us beings,

00:31:17 ► §

human and other,

00:31:18 ► §

that are more interested

00:31:19 ► §

in the preservation of life

00:31:21 ► §

in all its astonishing diversity

00:31:23 ► §

and beauty

00:31:24 ► §

than in the enlargement of personal or group wealth and power

00:31:27 ► §

have only the same resources we’ve always had,

00:31:32 ► §

the capacity to move and help each other move

00:31:34 ► §

into expanded, awakened consciousness,

00:31:38 ► §

the purity and strength of our intention

00:31:42 ► §

and the courage and creativity to realize the vision that,

00:31:48 ► §

in the motto of the 50,000 people who attended the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil,

00:31:53 ► §

formulated as, another world is possible. Thank you very much.

00:32:08 ► §

Now it’s my great pleasure next in line to introduce Stan Grof,

00:32:10 ► §

who I’m sure is well known to you,

00:32:12 ► §

one of the founding fathers of transpersonal psychology and currently a professor of psychology

00:32:14 ► §

at the California Institute for Integral Studies.

00:32:17 ► §

Stan Grof.

00:32:18 ► §

Thank you.

00:32:30 ► §

Okay, thank you very much.

00:32:34 ► §

Good morning or good afternoon.

00:32:38 ► §

I’d like to thank first the organizers of the conference.

00:32:46 ► §

It’s really wonderful to be here at a time when some of our old friends from the 60s started dying out.

00:32:51 ► §

These are great opportunities for reunion to see each other.

00:32:55 ► §

So I would like to thank for the invitation and for all the work that went into preparing this.

00:33:02 ► §

When John Hanna asked us what we would like to address in the panel. After a while, I thought I would address something

00:33:06 ► §

that I’ve been struggling for about 45 years.

00:33:10 ► §

I have been doing work with psychedelics

00:33:12 ► §

and with non-ordinary states in general,

00:33:15 ► §

which is the incredible resistance that we find

00:33:18 ► §

in the industrial revolution against psychedelics

00:33:22 ► §

and then non-ordinary states in general.

00:33:26 ► §

So where is this resistance coming from?

00:33:29 ► §

Because it puts the industrial civilization in a very unique position, just about the

00:33:36 ► §

only society in the whole history of humanity that doesn’t have any use for non-ordinary

00:33:44 ► §

states of consciousness.

00:33:46 ► §

All the ancient, all the pre-industrial societies held these states in great respect and honored

00:33:55 ► §

them, and they spent a lot of time and energy trying to develop safe and powerful techniques

00:34:01 ► §

of inducing them.

00:34:04 ► §

And they were using them for many different purposes.

00:34:07 ► §

They were using them as their main vehicle for ritual and spiritual life.

00:34:13 ► §

Whether these were shamanic procedures,

00:34:18 ► §

whether these were rites of passage of different native cultures,

00:34:21 ► §

whether these were the experiences of the initiates in the death-rebirth

00:34:26 ► §

mysteries all over the world, or whether we are talking about the beginnings of the great

00:34:33 ► §

religions. All the great religions started from visionary experiences, what I call holotropic

00:34:39 ► §

experiences, a certain significant subgroup of non-ordinary states.

00:34:44 ► §

It’s a certain significant subgroup of non-ordinary states.

00:34:49 ► §

So they were using it for their spiritual and ritual life.

00:34:55 ► §

They were also using it for diagnosing and for healing various disorders,

00:34:59 ► §

both emotional, psychosomatic, but also for some conditions that we would today consider to be medical problems.

00:35:04 ► §

would today consider to be medical problems.

00:35:11 ► §

They were using them also for activation and enhancement of intuition and extrasensory perception.

00:35:13 ► §

They were using them as a major inspiration for their art.

00:35:19 ► §

And they were using them for a variety of practical purposes.

00:35:22 ► §

For example, locating lost objects, locating

00:35:26 ► §

lost persons, following the movement of the animals of the game that they were hunting

00:35:34 ► §

and so on. So this is in very sharp contrast to the industrial civilization that has no

00:35:42 ► §

use for these non-ordinary states, has rejected them, and has even outlawed

00:35:46 ► §

some of the context or some of the tools of inducing them.

00:35:52 ► §

So it’s a very interesting question, you know, what happened.

00:35:56 ► §

I think we can trace it back to the industrial and scientific revolution where there suddenly

00:36:01 ► §

was tremendous appreciation for reason, the discoveries that

00:36:05 ► §

were made and the technological applications of these discoveries that started changing

00:36:11 ► §

the world.

00:36:13 ► §

And through this era of enlightenment where reason was glorified, everything that was

00:36:21 ► §

non-rational was rejected.

00:36:24 ► §

Everything that was non-rational was rejected.

00:36:30 ► §

And this included not just the irrational, but also the trans-rational.

00:36:39 ► §

So why is there such a tremendous resistance to non-ordinary states?

00:36:45 ► §

Well, part of it has to do with the fact that they lower the psychological defenses,

00:36:53 ► §

which on the individual level means eruption of the deep contents of the unconscious.

00:36:59 ► §

It’s the eruption of the Dionysian, which can bring chaos and terror,

00:37:02 ► §

but can also bring ecstatic states. And both of those ends of the spectrum are objectionable to modern

00:37:08 ► §

society. It violates the order, the discipline, the ability to control things.

00:37:17 ► §

There were also very definite socio-political elements. People in the 60s who were taking psychedelics,

00:37:26 ► §

they identified themselves.

00:37:28 ► §

They were dressing differently.

00:37:33 ► §

They were growing hair.

00:37:35 ► §

They were growing beards.

00:37:37 ► §

And they were involved in all kinds of uncomfortable movements,

00:37:42 ► §

the civil liberty movement,

00:37:44 ► §

uncomfortable movements, the civil liberty movement,

00:37:50 ► §

the sexual revolution, anti-war movement. And they were very easily identifiable as those who were rebels,

00:37:54 ► §

who were violating order somehow.

00:37:58 ► §

So those are all elements that we know.

00:38:03 ► §

Some people that I’ve worked with over the years gave me kind

00:38:07 ► §

of a deeper, very interesting, kind of a transpersonal explanation why psychedelics have met so much

00:38:14 ► §

resistance. And this had to do with the understanding of the universe as a play of consciousness,

00:38:20 ► §

as Leela that the Hindus talk about. And from this perspective, according to these insights,

00:38:27 ► §

the psychedelics would offer too easy insight into the structure,

00:38:34 ► §

and they would kind of spoil the game.

00:38:36 ► §

So when they appeared, this had to be counterbalanced

00:38:40 ► §

by the fear of impact on heredity,

00:38:46 ► §

prolonged reactions, flashbacks,

00:38:50 ► §

psychotic breakdowns, illegality, and so on.

00:38:52 ► §

So it just sort of thickens the plot,

00:38:55 ► §

as Ramakrishna called it,

00:38:58 ► §

but doesn’t sort of destroy the balance.

00:39:03 ► §

But what I would like to look at particularly today is the position of the scientific community

00:39:13 ► §

of psychologists, of psychiatrists, and scientists in general.

00:39:20 ► §

You know, why isn’t there excitement that certainly those of us had who started exploring psychedelics,

00:39:29 ► §

why didn’t it sort of take over the academic community?

00:39:33 ► §

Why did they welcome somehow psychedelics as the most exciting tool that we have in psychiatry?

00:39:42 ► §

that we have in psychiatry.

00:39:48 ► §

Now, Michael Harner, who is a very close friend,

00:39:53 ► §

he is an anthropologist in good academic standing,

00:39:56 ► §

but also somebody who is a visionary anthropologist who participated with the natives when he was doing field work,

00:40:01 ► §

and he experienced a powerful initiation

00:40:04 ► §

with a mixture of ayahuasca and datura

00:40:07 ► §

that he took near a sacred waterfall in the Amazonian jungle with two shamans.

00:40:18 ► §

And he wrote a book called The Way of the Shaman,

00:40:21 ► §

where in the preface he says something very interesting.

00:40:24 ► §

He says that from his dual perspective as a sort of Western-trained academician

00:40:28 ► §

and also somebody who experienced personally shamanic initiation,

00:40:34 ► §

Western psychology and psychiatry is seriously biased in at least two significant ways.

00:40:41 ► §

two significant ways.

00:40:47 ► §

He called these biases ethnocentric bias and cognicentric,

00:40:50 ► §

or we can say pragmacentric bias.

00:40:54 ► §

So we all understand the first one, ethnocentric.

00:40:58 ► §

This means that a group of people,

00:41:02 ► §

which is the kind of scientific elite of the monistically, materialistically oriented psychiatrists

00:41:05 ► §

created a certain understanding of the psyche, of consciousness,

00:41:10 ► §

of emotional disorders,

00:41:14 ► §

and they considered this understanding to be absolutely superior

00:41:19 ► §

to understanding of any other human groups throughout history.

00:41:25 ► §

So behaviorism, you know, psychoanalysis, and the Western approach is superior.

00:41:30 ► §

Everything that the other cultures are doing is seen as primitive,

00:41:35 ► §

as something related to superstition, to magical thinking,

00:41:40 ► §

to primary process, something that we have outgrown with our scientific understanding.

00:41:48 ► §

But what’s more directly related to what we are talking about today

00:41:54 ► §

is what he calls the cognicentric bias or pragmacentric bias,

00:41:58 ► §

which means that we have taken into consideration

00:42:01 ► §

when we were creating our theories in psychiatry and psychology,

00:42:06 ► §

we have taken into consideration only experiences and observations made in the ordinary state

00:42:12 ► §

of consciousness, with the exception of dreams.

00:42:15 ► §

If the dreams don’t repeat themselves, and if they are not associated with anxiety, then

00:42:20 ► §

even dreams are pathological.

00:42:23 ► §

But all the other forms of non-ordinary states are considered pathological,

00:42:28 ► §

something that cannot teach us anything, something that’s not good for anything,

00:42:33 ► §

and the best thing we can do when they appear spontaneously

00:42:36 ► §

is to use tranquilizers and suppress them.

00:42:42 ► §

Okay.

00:42:44 ► §

So from this perspective, the interesting question is,

00:42:49 ► §

what would be psychiatry and psychology that would not be cognizant

00:42:52 ► §

and that would not be pragmocentric, that would be culturally sensitive,

00:42:57 ► §

that would be treating with respect ritual and spiritual life of other cultures,

00:43:04 ► §

and that would include systematically observations

00:43:07 ► §

from the study of non-ordinary states,

00:43:09 ► §

whether they come from psychedelics

00:43:10 ► §

or some powerful forms of experiential psychotherapy,

00:43:15 ► §

study of near-death experiences,

00:43:17 ► §

studies in parapsychology,

00:43:20 ► §

or this study, kind of open-minded study,

00:43:23 ► §

of what we call spiritual emergencies,

00:43:26 ► §

which means episodes of non-ordinary states that people have spontaneously.

00:43:32 ► §

Now, if we look at it, we would find out that if we seriously study what’s happening in these states,

00:43:37 ► §

we would have a radically different psychiatry and psychology.

00:43:42 ► §

And it would be psychology that ultimately would embrace non-ordinary states,

00:43:45 ► §

would embrace psychedelics,

00:43:47 ► §

because it would make eminent sense to use them.

00:43:51 ► §

So what are the revisions that we would have to make

00:43:53 ► §

to have a psychology like that?

00:43:57 ► §

First of all, we have to expand the model.

00:43:59 ► §

The current model is limited to postnatal biography,

00:44:02 ► §

what happened to us after we were born

00:44:04 ► §

until the present time.

00:44:06 ► §

We would have to expand this model,

00:44:08 ► §

include the fact that there is a powerful record of birth,

00:44:12 ► §

of biological birth.

00:44:13 ► §

There is a powerful record in the psyche of the prenatal.

00:44:17 ► §

And there is the Jungian collective unconscious.

00:44:21 ► §

Our psyche makes it possible to identify experientially with other people,

00:44:25 ► §

experience group consciousness, identify experientially with other life forms, even with

00:44:32 ► §

botanical nature. We would have to accept that our psyche and the psyche of each individual

00:44:43 ► §

is ultimately commensurate with the universal mind,

00:44:47 ► §

with the anima mundi, with atman, brahman, or tao, whatever terminology we want to use.

00:44:55 ► §

We would also discover that the roots of emotional and psychosomatic disorders that are psychogenic

00:45:03 ► §

don’t go just to infancy and childhood,

00:45:06 ► §

that they include birth, they include the prenatal, they include the karmic dimension,

00:45:10 ► §

they include the archetypal dimension. We would discover new healing mechanisms that are

00:45:18 ► §

associated with the perinatal level, with the experience of birth and rebirth.

00:45:29 ► §

And the healing potential of past life experiences, the healing potential of mystical states,

00:45:35 ► §

of states of cosmic union,

00:45:37 ► §

rather than seeing them as pathological states.

00:45:42 ► §

We would also embrace spirituality.

00:45:47 ► §

We would have to recognize that spirituality is a legitimate dimension in the psyche. It’s a legitimate dimension in the universal scheme

00:45:52 ► §

of things, that it doesn’t mean that you are superstitious, that you are into magical,

00:45:56 ► §

primitive thinking if you take spirituality seriously. And finally, we would have to somehow radically change our understanding of what

00:46:09 ► §

consciousness is. We would stop seeing it as a product of the neurophysiological processes in

00:46:14 ► §

the brain, but something that’s a primary aspect of existence. So what has changed since the time that psychedelics were first rejected by the scientific

00:46:27 ► §

community? Well, first of all, what was happening in these states looked more like something that’s

00:46:35 ► §

happening in aboriginal ceremonies rather than the kind of disciplined free association or

00:46:41 ► §

face-to-face talks. What was happening in psychedelic sessions

00:46:46 ► §

reminded psychiatrists more of what they were treating

00:46:49 ► §

of psychopathology rather than something

00:46:52 ► §

that could be used for healing.

00:46:54 ► §

And many of the experiences which were happening

00:46:56 ► §

should not happen because they violated somehow

00:47:00 ► §

our materialistic understanding of the world.

00:47:04 ► §

So since that time, things have been changing.

00:47:07 ► §

The first thing that has developed that’s really important,

00:47:10 ► §

powerful forms of experiential psychotherapy without the drugs,

00:47:14 ► §

where we see basically the same spectrum of experiences,

00:47:18 ► §

also the same healing and transformative potential.

00:47:23 ► §

The other thing that has changed or has been changing is the worldview,

00:47:27 ► §

the scientific worldview.

00:47:28 ► §

We have now the development of what we call the new paradigm.

00:47:34 ► §

And when that is completed, then we’ll find out that the experiences

00:47:38 ► §

in psychedelic sessions or non-ordinary states in general

00:47:42 ► §

that could not be understood in the old context

00:47:46 ► §

make perfect sense in the context of these new paradigms.

00:47:51 ► §

A new paradigm would also integrate spirituality,

00:47:55 ► §

would bring together science and spirituality.

00:47:57 ► §

I’ve used my time. Thank you very much.

00:47:59 ► §

Thank you. Next question.

00:48:13 ► §

Okay.

00:48:14 ► §

Thank you.

00:48:16 ► §

I’m honored to say thank you to you.

00:48:19 ► §

And I would like to inquire about

00:48:21 ► §

the intentional evolution of consciousness

00:48:24 ► §

and to get more ideas from you on how can we incorporate memes for our growth,

00:48:32 ► §

how can we adapt our hardware, this vessel, to be a better receptor site,

00:48:37 ► §

to generate a higher vibration, how can we move on to a new octave

00:48:42 ► §

and use our light bodies in a more effective manner.

00:48:47 ► §

Are you asking anyone in particular?

00:48:49 ► §

All of you, please.

00:48:50 ► §

Any concrete ideas?

00:48:51 ► §

Who would like to answer?

00:48:53 ► §

Thanks.

00:48:56 ► §

We’re all as unique and individual as snowflakes.

00:49:01 ► §

The responsibility for our consciousness

00:49:04 ► §

has to be taken just for who you

00:49:08 ► §

find yourself to be, because there is no template that you can use. There are many designs that you

00:49:19 ► §

can use. For myself, I have found that using psychedelic drugs over and over and over, and I have used

00:49:28 ► §

them over and over and over, is after a while unproductive. So I have found that what I needed

00:49:38 ► §

to do was do something that worked my body. I chose yoga. Some people use weights, but you need to use it or you

00:49:46 ► §

lose it. You need to do meditation and you need to do extensive meditation. And as Myron said,

00:49:57 ► §

30 minutes a day minimum. I think that’s absolutely crucial. And so what you have here is a bouncing between action on the outward level,

00:50:12 ► §

where you’re taking LSD and you’re having an experience,

00:50:15 ► §

and then you go inward and you ground it and you work this experience

00:50:20 ► §

so that you can observe all of the unconscious material that has come up and integrate it.

00:50:27 ► §

You must do this.

00:50:28 ► §

Otherwise, you will just keep repeating the same loop, the same tape that has been conditioned into you

00:50:35 ► §

without being able to go on to new areas.

00:50:40 ► §

Now, once you adopt one or more practices that help you ground this experience, you can then go onward with further experiences and you will start to break new ground.

00:50:56 ► §

Does anyone else want to speak to that question?

00:51:00 ► §

No? We’ll move on to the next question then, please.

00:51:02 ► §

My question is to Dr. Groff and to Dr. Metzner.

00:51:09 ► §

It’s about the psychedelic and psychotherapy.

00:51:15 ► §

Suppose it were to become legal now and we could practice it.

00:51:20 ► §

How would you see it practiced differently today than it was before it became outlawed in view of the recent advancements in psychology and psychotherapy?

00:51:34 ► §

Would you see it as being practiced with any particular psychotherapeutic techniques, or what’s your vision of this in general?

00:51:45 ► §

Thank you.

00:51:47 ► §

Well, I think when I joined the group at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center,

00:51:52 ► §

we were using an approach which I wouldn’t change very much in,

00:51:56 ► §

which was involved very careful preparation where you spend a few hours

00:52:01 ► §

with the person going through the life history,

00:52:04 ► §

explaining what the nature of the experience is,

00:52:08 ► §

and then creating a situation where if you use higher dosages,

00:52:12 ► §

it should be internalized because otherwise it’s confusing,

00:52:15 ► §

the input from the environment and your inner experience is kind of mixed.

00:52:20 ► §

So you get a much more powerful situation of self-exploration

00:52:24 ► §

if you internalize the session.

00:52:26 ► §

So we were using headphones, we were using eye shades,

00:52:31 ► §

and there was usually a male-female diet.

00:52:35 ► §

Therefore, for the entire time, we would bring in the evening

00:52:40 ► §

when the person was coming down,

00:52:42 ► §

we would bring a person or persons of their choice,

00:52:46 ► §

have a kind of a reunion, have a festive dinner, a nice carry-out Chinese place,

00:52:52 ► §

a lot of interesting tastes and textures and so on.

00:52:56 ► §

Go watch the sunset.

00:52:59 ► §

There should be nature around.

00:53:01 ► §

If you can, have ocean or a lake or mountains and so on.

00:53:06 ► §

And then still having somebody stay with the person overnight

00:53:10 ► §

and then see the person the next morning before they would sort of return into their everyday life.

00:53:16 ► §

I consider that the most productive, safest, where you maximize somehow the benefits and you reduce the risks.

00:53:24 ► §

And then you combine it afterwards, if it’s necessary,

00:53:27 ► §

with some non-drug techniques,

00:53:29 ► §

like you can help the person to integrate it

00:53:32 ► §

doing a breathwork session,

00:53:34 ► §

doing a gestalt session,

00:53:36 ► §

having them draw mandalas,

00:53:38 ► §

having expressive dancing, and so on.

00:53:43 ► §

Ralph, do you want to answer as well?

00:53:47 ► §

Yes.

00:53:49 ► §

I would say from, you know, observations that I’ve made

00:53:53 ► §

and reports and accounts that I’ve collected over the years,

00:53:58 ► §

two things I would say in terms of individual psychotherapy

00:54:01 ► §

with a sort of psycholytic, psychedelic kind of model,

00:54:05 ► §

I actually think that MDMA is preferable

00:54:09 ► §

to LSD. And when it was still

00:54:11 ► §

legal to do so, I was one of

00:54:15 ► §

several therapists who used it in that way. The reason being

00:54:17 ► §

that the MDMA series and other drugs in that

00:54:21 ► §

series don’t change perception very much. They change

00:54:24 ► §

primarily the emotional attitude or emotional response.

00:54:26 ► §

And so it’s really, I find, ideal for working on issues involving this world kind of conflicts,

00:54:34 ► §

conflicts with family or partners and this kind of thing.

00:54:38 ► §

I even worked with somebody, a Vietnam vet, who had a bad LSD trip in Vietnam

00:54:44 ► §

and who wanted to work on that,

00:54:47 ► §

which is kind of understandable, you know,

00:54:49 ► §

if you understand set and setting.

00:54:52 ► §

But we used MDMA to tune back into that state

00:54:56 ► §

and it enabled him to help us see the tremendous advantage

00:55:00 ► §

of MDMA over the classical psychedelics.

00:55:03 ► §

The classical psychedelics will magnify whatever.

00:55:06 ► §

So if there’s a little bit of fear, they magnify it to big fear or big confusion, whereas the

00:55:12 ► §

MDMA are sort of unitive in that sense.

00:55:14 ► §

So you have this basic kind of empathic approach to yourself, your issues, your home history

00:55:20 ► §

and your relationships and like that.

00:55:22 ► §

So then the other thing that I’ve noticed, that I’ve observed,

00:55:27 ► §

and in my book, the edited book on ayahuasca,

00:55:30 ► §

I pointed out that there are people who have created what I call hybrid ritual forms

00:55:36 ► §

between psychology and shamanic that kind of have some elements of shamanic,

00:55:40 ► §

like sitting in a circle and calling and working with spirits of nature.

00:55:45 ► §

And then they have some elements more psychologically oriented, like preparation and becoming aware of

00:55:50 ► §

questions and intention, and then afterwards integration, which are not usually found in shamanic things.

00:55:54 ► §

So those are the kind of two main models that I’ve observed and have seen.

00:56:02 ► §

Next question.

00:56:01 ► §

observed and have seen.

00:56:03 ► §

Next question.

00:56:08 ► §

Sufis were persecuted in their countries,

00:56:12 ► §

and they developed whole systems of how to do it.

00:56:15 ► §

One of them was they were the local madman.

00:56:18 ► §

No one ever knew what they were really up to.

00:56:20 ► §

It was just this crazy guy.

00:56:23 ► §

We’re in a different situation.

00:56:26 ► §

I can’t imagine that we’re going to do it that way.

00:56:33 ► §

But whatever we’re going to do, I think we need to begin thinking of it. And it’s something,

00:56:37 ► §

if you haven’t experienced it and you haven’t at least known the people who lived in it,

00:56:43 ► §

totalitarianism is just so different from anything you and I are accustomed to that we need to think how we are going to deal with it. Who would like to speak to that?

00:56:49 ► §

Yes, Earth? Briefly, I think

00:56:51 ► §

people have very different views about what to do

00:56:55 ► §

in the world that we live in. My own personal view

00:56:59 ► §

is publish. Publish as if

00:57:04 ► §

there is no world that controls,

00:57:07 ► §

that tries to sort of make these things,

00:57:10 ► §

tries to put people in prison for making choices

00:57:12 ► §

which might be unhealthy for them or might not.

00:57:15 ► §

And so other people that we talk to who don’t necessarily either love what we do

00:57:19 ► §

or don’t think that it’s right for them participate in mystery cults or mystery groups

00:57:24 ► §

where they don’t talk about what they do with anyone outside right for them, participate in mystery cults or mystery groups,

00:57:28 ► §

where they don’t talk about what they do with anyone outside the groups that they participate in.

00:57:30 ► §

And in that way, they protect themselves.

00:57:35 ► §

And I think that each person sort of has to make a choice about how open they are with the people in their family and the people that they know, and how much they want to share with the world,

00:57:38 ► §

and whether they want to post to forums on the Internet, or whether they want to write about it.

00:57:42 ► §

But, and it seems very individual to me

00:57:45 ► §

and that the only, in a lot of ways,

00:57:47 ► §

survival of a meme set is about diversity.

00:57:51 ► §

That if there’s a diverse set of ways of handling something,

00:57:55 ► §

it’s unlikely that any single attack against it

00:57:59 ► §

will completely eliminate it.

00:58:01 ► §

We’ve got less than 10 minutes

00:58:03 ► §

and about a dozen people waiting.

00:58:04 ► §

So from now on, please, can you make your questions very

00:58:07 ► §

short? And I’m afraid the answers are going to have to be short as well. And we’ll try and get as

00:58:12 ► §

many people to have their turn. I’ll just very quickly add something to that question.

00:58:15 ► §

I mentioned in passing in my talk that I’ve recently come to understand

00:58:20 ► §

actually through the starting of the war on terrorism, I understood that war

00:58:24 ► §

on drugs better.

00:58:31 ► §

I now see that they actually both have the same agenda, which I never saw as clearly before.

00:58:33 ► §

They’re both fascistic agendas.

00:58:38 ► §

In other words, the only purpose, the political purpose for both the war on terrorism and the war on drugs is to create fear in the population.

00:58:42 ► §

And in the case of the drugs, for example, the thing that confused me, it’s not

00:58:47 ► §

the education campaigns are beside the point. That’s just

00:58:51 ► §

smokescreen. They’re not trying to create fear in the drug users

00:58:55 ► §

because they already know that there’s nothing to be afraid of in using drugs.

00:58:59 ► §

They’re trying to create fear in the general population that votes,

00:59:03 ► §

that doesn’t take drugs, so that drugs are demonized and can lead to prohibition and can lead to jail sentences

00:59:10 ► §

and control of police state measures can be instituted.

00:59:14 ► §

And so we live in a fascistic society.

00:59:16 ► §

The drug users are actually better protected than, say, Muslims and, you know,

00:59:22 ► §

people from Middle Eastern countries who look the way they look and who have to watch out for that.

00:59:28 ► §

So discretion and caution, it’s always been like that.

00:59:33 ► §

We need some memetic engineering.

00:59:35 ► §

We need to let loose some memes that will counteract that.

00:59:37 ► §

If anyone’s got good ideas for that, be delighted.

00:59:42 ► §

Right, next one, question, please.

00:59:49 ► §

delighted um right next one question please so i have a question for uh i guess uh nichols representing kind of reductionistic science and then stanagroff representing you know this other

00:59:54 ► §

kind of oppositional aspect and you know you said that you can’t you know you shouldn’t view

01:00:00 ► §

the you know consciousness or the mind as arising you know causally out of neurophysiological and neuropharmacological

01:00:08 ► §

processes in the brain, but then how do you propose that we unify these two sets of observations,

01:00:15 ► §

one of these transcendental transpersonal experiences that currently cannot be explained

01:00:20 ► §

by conventional science, and two, of extremely powerful predictive science,

01:00:30 ► §

you know, of neuroscience, systems neuroscience, neuropharmacology, chemistry,

01:00:35 ► §

that we’ve shown to be powerful by our technology and its predictive power for what we can predict things will do to the brain.

01:00:38 ► §

Well, you know, contrary to general opinion,

01:00:43 ► §

we have absolutely no proof that consciousness comes out of the brain.

01:00:48 ► §

Actually, we have a lot of evidence that it is not the case.

01:00:53 ► §

What we have is tremendous evidence from experimental neurology, clinical neurology, experimental psychiatry,

01:01:01 ► §

that states of consciousness are correlated with anatomical

01:01:06 ► §

physiological, biochemical

01:01:07 ► §

changes. But how do you propose

01:01:10 ► §

to explain those correlations

01:01:11 ► §

then is what I’m asking.

01:01:13 ► §

This is what they are, they’re correlations

01:01:15 ► §

but you make a major jump and you say

01:01:17 ► §

this proves that consciousness

01:01:19 ► §

comes out of the brain. Well I understand

01:01:21 ► §

but the correlations still need to be explained

01:01:23 ► §

in some way and you, you know, how do

01:01:26 ► §

you propose to do that? Because it’s an important

01:01:28 ► §

thing to explain them. You know, I mean,

01:01:30 ► §

the physical world

01:01:31 ► §

and, like, what’s going on out there have to have some

01:01:34 ► §

kind of correspondence. I’m sorry.

01:01:36 ► §

No, it’s a perfectly reasonable question. Everybody

01:01:38 ► §

agrees, I mean, they’re daft if

01:01:40 ► §

they don’t, that there are correlations there.

01:01:41 ► §

And the question is, how do these two

01:01:43 ► §

radically different approaches

01:01:45 ► §

presume to explain it?

01:01:47 ► §

So can you have a go at answering?

01:01:48 ► §

We have the same relationship between a television set

01:01:51 ► §

and the television program.

01:01:53 ► §

You see, there are systematic correlations between what’s happening

01:01:56 ► §

with the relays and the condensers and so on,

01:02:01 ► §

and the quality of the picture and the sound.

01:02:04 ► §

This is what they are, they’re correlations.

01:02:06 ► §

We would laugh if somebody would think that this means,

01:02:08 ► §

this is a proof that the program is generated in the box.

01:02:13 ► §

This still leaves open some other possibility.

01:02:17 ► §

We have just an enormous number of observations.

01:02:19 ► §

I don’t have time to go into them, but I’ll give you just one,

01:02:23 ► §

which is a repeated observation

01:02:25 ► §

that people in near-death situations, like cardiac arrest during an operation, consciousness

01:02:33 ► §

goes out of the body, maintains the ability to perceive the environment.

01:02:38 ► §

You can watch your body from the ceiling.

01:02:41 ► §

You can go through the wall.

01:02:43 ► §

You can accurately perceive what’s happening in other parts of the building,

01:02:47 ► §

you can experience something that’s happening a thousand miles away.

01:02:50 ► §

There’s no way the current model, the way we understand the brain, can account for that.

01:02:57 ► §

You don’t have to study medicine to know.

01:02:59 ► §

I’m going to have to stop you there, I’m afraid,

01:03:01 ► §

if we’re going to have a chance for David to say something.

01:03:04 ► §

I think he was also, did you also ask David? Yeah, yeah, I’m afraid, if we’re going to have a chance for David to say something. I think he was also…

01:03:05 ► §

Did you also ask David?

01:03:06 ► §

Yeah, yeah, I did.

01:03:07 ► §

So, again, I provide the opposite perspective,

01:03:10 ► §

or, you know, your perspective, I guess.

01:03:11 ► §

So we need a theory that explains the current observations,

01:03:16 ► §

but also the observations from a modern day state.

01:03:18 ► §

Yes, I understand this,

01:03:19 ► §

but how do you propose, you know,

01:03:21 ► §

directions towards such a theory?

01:03:22 ► §

I think this is too big a question for here.

01:03:25 ► §

I’ll give just a very short time to David if he wants to say something.

01:03:28 ► §

I think Stan was doing a great job.

01:03:31 ► §

I am reductionistic about 80% of the time.

01:03:35 ► §

And certainly I have the view that these chemicals

01:03:38 ► §

can change consciousness.

01:03:40 ► §

Now exactly how that happens I’m not completely sure.

01:03:43 ► §

But I have chemicals that I could give you that would reliably change your consciousness in very dramatic ways.

01:03:49 ► §

They presumably act in the frontal cortex, which is the most recent evolutionary addition to the brain.

01:03:54 ► §

It’s where we make all of our executive decisions.

01:03:56 ► §

And we don’t really know what the cortex does, but as humans, it’s the most important part of the brain we have.

01:04:02 ► §

And I view these chemicals as really being more like a necessary

01:04:05 ► §

but not sufficient switch that turns on a process.

01:04:08 ► §

So if we use the television as analogy, these are like just turning on the power switch.

01:04:13 ► §

What channel you tune to and where you turn the volume and so forth,

01:04:16 ► §

the set and setting and preconception and so forth.

01:04:18 ► §

So I’m basically looking at these as a switch that somehow shuts off ordinary processing

01:04:24 ► §

and allows consciousness

01:04:25 ► §

to change. But where it’s located, I mean, as a reductionist, I’d have to say it’s a product of

01:04:29 ► §

brain, but publicly, that’s what I’d say. Well, predictably, we’ve got far more questions than

01:04:35 ► §

we’ve got time for. And that last voice that we heard was that of Dr. David Nichols, who holds the Anderson Distinguished Chair

01:04:46 ► §

in Pharmacology at Purdue University and has worked in the field of psychoactive drugs

01:04:51 ► §

since sometime around 1969. And while David is also the founding president of the Hefter

01:04:58 ► §

Research Institute that funds much of today’s psychedelic research, my favorite way to think

01:05:04 ► §

of David is as my friend on Facebook,

01:05:07 ► §

with whom I have a dozen or so friends in common.

01:05:09 ► §

And plus, he’s a fellow salonner.

01:05:12 ► §

You know, even though this panel discussion took place over five years ago,

01:05:17 ► §

I think it’s worthwhile to bring back to mind what Stan Groff and Ralph Metzner were saying

01:05:23 ► §

about the role of psychedelic

01:05:25 ► §

medicines in human societies.

01:05:28 ► §

While we can get really dramatic about this if we want, it does strike me as exceptional

01:05:34 ► §

that we happen to be alive at a moment in human history when, after hundreds, maybe

01:05:39 ► §

even thousands of years, psychedelics are re-entering mainstream human civilization.

01:05:44 ► §

Even thousands of years, psychedelics are re-entering mainstream human civilization.

01:05:53 ► §

Maybe we really are witnessing, and more importantly, actually participating in the rebirth of our species.

01:05:59 ► §

Or, and this is equally likely, more likely, some would argue,

01:06:04 ► §

there’s also the chance that we’re just rationalizing our fascination with these substances.

01:06:09 ► §

I can’t say for sure, but I do agree with Ralph Messner when he said, and I quote,

01:06:18 ► §

The introduction of LSD and psychedelics into the culture produced a transformation of the entire culture, the consciousness of the culture.

01:06:26 ► §

You know, I’d already graduated from college by the time that Tim Leary began using LSD.

01:06:30 ► §

And so I have a very clear memory of what those days were like.

01:06:41 ► §

And I’m sure that anyone who was a teenager in the 50s can tell you that once a little acid began to flow through the brains of the kids who were just slightly younger than me,

01:06:44 ► §

well, the world took a turn in a major new direction.

01:06:53 ► §

And my guess is that we are now at the early stages of maybe another jet-assisted takeoff for us and our fellow humans.

01:06:55 ► §

At least I hope so.

01:07:06 ► §

And speaking of jet-assisted takeoffs, our fellow salonner, Allison, sent two more podcast transcripts just before she took off for an adventure in the Amazon.

01:07:13 ► §

So, Allison, when you get back to civilization and hear this, I want to thank you again for these transcripts.

01:07:17 ► §

And they’re already posted on our psychedelicsalon.org blog.

01:07:20 ► §

So thanks again for doing this, Allison.

01:07:27 ► §

By the way, you’ll find a separate post on the blog that mentions the two new transcripts.

01:07:32 ► §

And in the right-hand sidebar, there’s a permanent page titled Transcripts, where you’ll find the complete listing of Allison’s most excellent work.

01:07:37 ► §

Also on our blog, you’ll find the program notes for today’s podcast,

01:07:42 ► §

where I’ll post a link to a couple of videos that were done by fellow

01:07:46 ► §

salonner Ido.

01:07:48 ► §

And Ido is also one of our donors, I might add.

01:07:51 ► §

Anyway, here’s part of what he had to say in a recent email.

01:07:55 ► §

Hi, Lorenzo.

01:07:57 ► §

If you haven’t seen it on Reality Sandwich, I thought you might like to see the psychedelic

01:08:01 ► §

party I have been working on in the past few months.

01:08:04 ► §

you might like to see the psychedelic party I have been working on in the past few months.

01:08:08 ► §

Together with other similarly inclined people,

01:08:11 ► §

we worked on presenting a psychedelic alternative for the whole madness of Israeli politics and the Middle Eastern situation.

01:08:15 ► §

Our last video, by the way, ends with four minutes of Terrence McKenna,

01:08:20 ► §

taken from two of the podcasts on the Salon.

01:08:22 ► §

I keep on avidly listening to the Psychedelic Salon podcast.

01:08:26 ► §

Just wanted to let you know how much your work means to us all.

01:08:29 ► §

Keep on spreading that light.

01:08:31 ► §

Well, thanks a lot for that, Ido.

01:08:33 ► §

And I’ll post a link to that reality sandwich page,

01:08:37 ► §

along with the notes for this podcast.

01:08:40 ► §

And I want you to know how much I’ve enjoyed your work.

01:08:43 ► §

It reminds me of the tactics used to topple the government in what was once called Yugoslavia.

01:08:51 ► §

That kind of in-your-face humor, satire, and truth are significantly better weapons than guns, I think.

01:08:58 ► §

So bravo to all of you psychedelic warriors out there who are each doing your important work, each in your own way.

01:09:07 ► §

Another email comes from, and there’s no way I’m going to say this right,

01:09:11 ► §

Caduceus Mercurius over at the forums at psychonaut.com,

01:09:16 ► §

who is going to help us publicize the salon over there by posting a paragraph about our new podcast when they come out.

01:09:24 ► §

That is, if I can get around to remembering to tell them about my new postings.

01:09:28 ► §

And by the way, to all of you psychonauts over there at psychonaut.com,

01:09:34 ► §

I do plan on eventually getting over there to say hello,

01:09:38 ► §

but right now I’ve not even been able to keep up with tribe.net

01:09:41 ► §

and some of the other social sites that I’ve kind of played around with.

01:09:46 ► §

What I am doing, probably I guess because I’m addicted already,

01:09:50 ► §

is that a couple of times every day I’ll post an update on Facebook,

01:09:55 ► §

and that also echoes through my Twitter followers, telling them what podcasts I’ve heard

01:10:00 ► §

or what the new one I’m working on is about and gossipy kind of stuff like that.

01:10:06 ► §

But I’m finding that with the combination of those two platforms, I can stay in touch with

01:10:10 ► §

a lot of people without spending nearly as much time as email takes. So I’m going to keep

01:10:16 ► §

experimenting with both of them. I’m Lorenzo, Lorenzo Haggerty on Facebook and Psychedelic Lozo on Twitter in case you’re interested.

01:10:26 ► §

But for now, these podcasts are probably

01:10:29 ► §

my best way to keep you up to date

01:10:31 ► §

with what’s going on in my little world.

01:10:34 ► §

Something that took place a few weeks ago

01:10:36 ► §

in the world to the north of me

01:10:38 ► §

was a gathering in San Francisco

01:10:40 ► §

to raise funds for the Timothy Leary Archive.

01:10:44 ► §

And I think it was Alan Lundell who posted a picture he took there at the event

01:10:48 ► §

that had Nick Sand in the center with his wife Usha and Leary archivist Dennis Berry,

01:10:55 ► §

each giving him a kiss on the cheek.

01:10:58 ► §

So I sent Nick an email with a kind of smart-ass comment about the photo and said,

01:11:03 ► §

How come you seem to be showered in kisses wherever you go?

01:11:07 ► §

And a few days later, he replied,

01:11:09 ► §

because they might be the last ones.

01:11:11 ► §

Just had a major heart attack.

01:11:13 ► §

Much better now.

01:11:16 ► §

And that’s how Nick communicates, is in short strokes like that.

01:11:20 ► §

Well, I’ll cut to the chase.

01:11:22 ► §

After a few follow-up emails,

01:11:24 ► §

Well, I’ll cut to the chase that after a few follow-up emails,

01:11:31 ► §

I am convinced that St. Nick has dodged yet another bullet in his adventure-filled life.

01:11:35 ► §

But coming on the heels of recently losing Fraser Clark,

01:11:38 ► §

I’m not ready to accept any more of these quick getaways.

01:11:40 ► §

You know, we still have a lot of work to do.

01:11:44 ► §

It’s like in the Navy when there was a call for all hands on deck. Hey, it’s that time

01:11:45 ► §

now, my friends, and I have a perfect project for us to gather around. Or I should say I’ve got

01:11:52 ► §

another wild idea that one day might actually become a real project. You see, for over a year

01:11:59 ► §

now, I’ve been talking with many of the elders about their plans for all of the papers, photos,

01:12:06 ► §

recordings, and other bits and pieces of our tribe’s history that they’ve collected during

01:12:11 ► §

their lives as psychedelic pioneers. And we’ve talked about the Leary archives here, but there

01:12:16 ► §

are also rich veins of material that have been saved by Anne and Sasha Shulgin, Jean and Myron

01:12:23 ► §

Stolaroff, Gary Fisher, Charlie Grove, Nick Sand, Oscar Janager, and a dozen or more others.

01:12:29 ► §

Now, I’ve had the opportunity to look through some of this material,

01:12:34 ► §

and from a scientific and historical point of view, much of it is priceless.

01:12:40 ► §

But unless something is done to preserve all of this material very soon, I’m afraid that much of it’s going to be lost.

01:12:47 ► §

We’ve already lost the entire Terrence McKenna archive, and shame on us if we let that happen again.

01:12:54 ► §

Now, right now, there isn’t any specific thing that you can do,

01:12:58 ► §

but in the past few days, I’ve spoken with Gene Stolaroff, Charlie Grove, Gary Fisher, and

01:13:05 ► §

Tanya Manning, who along with

01:13:08 ► §

her husband Greg is

01:13:09 ► §

possibly one of the only two people who

01:13:12 ► §

are actually working on a daily

01:13:14 ► §

basis to preserve as much

01:13:16 ► §

of this material as they can.

01:13:18 ► §

But they need help. A lot of

01:13:20 ► §

help. Equipment, money, all

01:13:22 ► §

those kind of things. And the problem

01:13:24 ► §

is that with an

01:13:26 ► §

economic depression looming, our community can no longer expect a few large donors to

01:13:32 ► §

carry the load on all these projects. These people already have a lot of significant commitments

01:13:37 ► §

that are going to be difficult to meet now. And the answer, of course, is to copy what

01:13:43 ► §

the new U.S. President did and go directly to the base of the community and ask for small, very small donations,

01:13:50 ► §

but from a large number of people.

01:13:52 ► §

Now, we don’t have a clear plan yet, but several avenues are being explored,

01:13:56 ► §

and soon I hope to be able to pass along some ways in which you can help with this project.

01:14:02 ► §

But right now, I’d like to read an email that Ann Shulgin sent to me

01:14:06 ► §

and asked me to read to you.

01:14:09 ► §

Dear Lorenzo, this is what we’re involved in now.

01:14:13 ► §

Greg and Tanya are archiving Sasha’s life’s work,

01:14:16 ► §

which includes all of his thesis papers to begin with,

01:14:19 ► §

progressing to GCMS printouts, journal articles, and lab books.

01:14:45 ► §

They are taking them to archive.org to do the digitizing with huge cameras. Thank you. the names of actual people, alive and dead, who had contributed notes and reports on the effects of various compounds.

01:14:47 ► §

There are many lecture notes and correspondence that a friend, and I won’t mention his name

01:14:52 ► §

right now, gave us to digitize.

01:14:55 ► §

Bless him.

01:14:55 ► §

Also, there will probably be available to us a large number of trip reports and personal

01:15:00 ► §

correspondence between Myron and Gene Stolaroff and Sasha and me many years ago.

01:15:06 ► §

I believe that most of the letters will turn out to have been between Myron and me,

01:15:10 ► §

although my memory for those days has faded.

01:15:13 ► §

And let me just interject a personal note here,

01:15:17 ► §

that last year Myron and Gene and I spent several days going through much of this correspondence,

01:15:24 ► §

and if you’re a historian listening to this podcast sometime way in the future,

01:15:29 ► §

you really should make an effort to read this correspondence.

01:15:32 ► §

It provides one of the most colorful and complete pictures

01:15:36 ► §

of the early days of psychedelic research that I know of.

01:15:40 ► §

And Anne goes on in her email to say,

01:15:43 ► §

The collection of all these papers has been in the custody of a friend of the Stolarovs, And Anne goes on in her email to say, treasures back to our home. If so, they most certainly should be digitized too. I heard from

01:16:05 ► §

Tanya today that a friend of ours has volunteered to take pictures of all Sasha’s old glass vials

01:16:10 ► §

on which he carefully drew, in ink, the chemical structures of the newly discovered compounds he

01:16:17 ► §

had put in them. We would like to pay her for her time and effort. Paul Daly and Tanya are

01:16:23 ► §

presently helping Sasha finish the Monster Phenethylamine Index after their work on the Thank you. Ah, yes, the tryptamines. By that time, I hope to again be deeply involved with Book 3.

01:16:47 ► §

Finally, finally.

01:16:49 ► §

By the way, I can’t tell you how weird it feels to be at that stage of life

01:16:53 ► §

where people are collecting, scanning, archiving, digitizing ones,

01:16:58 ► §

our life’s work, and letters and notes and stuff.

01:17:03 ► §

Eventually, I suppose somebody will ask for Sasha’s old tuxedo and maybe my wedding dress

01:17:08 ► §

or just a few aprons, early era.

01:17:12 ► §

So, what do you think Sasha’s tuxedo would go for on eBay?

01:17:16 ► §

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that and that our community will find a better way to collect

01:17:22 ► §

all of this material, digitize it and make it available online,

01:17:26 ► §

and then safely store it somewhere accessible so that scholars and other researchers

01:17:31 ► §

who might need to access the original documents or vial or whatever can do so someday.

01:17:37 ► §

As you can tell, we’re still in the brainstorming stages,

01:17:42 ► §

and that is why I want to get you thinking about these things

01:17:45 ► §

as well.

01:17:47 ► §

There’s hardly a week that goes by in which somebody doesn’t ask me how to get involved

01:17:51 ► §

in psychedelic research as a profession.

01:17:54 ► §

Well, if I was in my 20s right now, unattached and not in debt, I’d become a full-time volunteer

01:18:00 ► §

on a project like this in the hope that it might open the door to all kinds of currently unknown career potentials.

01:18:07 ► §

So stay tuned, and I’ll let you know as soon as there is something more concrete to report.

01:18:13 ► §

In the meantime, this would be a great discussion for somebody to get started over on the forums

01:18:18 ► §

at thegrowreport.com, which is where I’m going to head right now, in fact.

01:18:23 ► §

But first, as always, I’ll close this podcast by saying that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon

01:18:30 ► §

are available for your use under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareLike 3.0 license.

01:18:37 ► §

And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,

01:18:43 ► §

which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.

01:18:46 ► §

And that’s also where you’ll find the program notes for these podcasts.

01:18:50 ► §

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends.