Program Notes
Guest speaker: Dr. Cameron Adams
[NOTE: All quotations are by Dr. Cameron Adams.]
“It is not really reasonable from a public health perspective to make psychedelics illegal.”
“[Psychedelics] are biologically safe, far safer than alcohol. Alcohol, ten times the active dose will kill 50% of the people who take it. And something like mescaline, which is the most dangerous classic psychedelic is twenty four times. So that’s two and a half times safer than alcohol. And it doesn’t even compare to things like DMT, psilocybin, and LSD, which have only been predicted to be between one and five thousand times the active dose.”
http://psypressuk.com/2010/11/19/news-breaking-conventions-%E2%80%93-a-multidisciplinary-convention-on-psychedelic-consciousness/
“So there’s this relationship to diet, neurotransmitters, and psychedelics which may be involved how the body regulates itself and builds itself.”
“There might be real biological changes even though it just seems on the surface that psychedelics are working in a psychological way.”
The Psychedelia Collection on the Internet Archive
The Biology of Belief by Bruce H. Lipton Ph.D.http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/1401923119
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:27 ►
And, yeah, it’s been over two weeks since we were last here together in the salon, and I wish I could tell the whole involved
00:00:32 ►
story of what has kept me away, but it really isn’t all that interesting, and so I’ll spare you
00:00:37 ►
and just say that I think things will be getting back to normal now, and so I hope to be more
00:00:42 ►
regular about getting a new program
00:00:45 ►
out to you each week.
00:00:46 ►
But even though I wasn’t here for the past couple of weeks, some of our fellow salonners
00:00:51 ►
kept the flame burning and the servers humming by sending donations to help with the expenses
00:00:57 ►
associated with these podcasts.
00:00:58 ►
And those fine souls are Brian R., Sean G., Shane N., Chris A., our regular monthly donor, Mark C., Chris T., and a friend of the salon who I’ll just call the Shadow.
00:01:16 ►
So, Brian, Sean, Shane, both Chris’s, Mark, and Shadow, hey, thank you ever so much.
00:01:23 ►
I really appreciate your help.
00:01:26 ►
And one other thank you that I’ll save to explain in more detail at the end of this podcast
00:01:30 ►
goes out to our good friend Bruce Dahmer,
00:01:33 ►
who has backed up the entire collection of podcasts from the salon onto the Internet Archive.
00:01:39 ►
And I’ll explain about that after we first hear today’s program.
00:01:44 ►
I’ll explain about that after we first hear today’s program.
00:01:52 ►
And I’m very pleased to say that the talk we’re about to hear also comes from one of our fellow Saloners, Dr. Cameron Adams,
00:01:58 ►
who is with the School of Anthropology and Conservation at the University of Kent in the UK.
00:02:05 ►
This talk was given at a meeting of the Student Psychedelic Society on the 20th of October of this year,
00:02:10 ►
and that’s 2010 in case you haven’t been keeping up with such things.
00:02:14 ►
The talk is titled, How Do Psychedelics Heal?
00:02:20 ►
And as I mentioned in my last podcast, the first two minutes or so were cut off,
00:02:26 ►
but they were only the very basic introductory remarks that psychedelics have been used in the context of healing for a very long time.
00:02:29 ►
So now let’s join Cameron and the Students Psychedelic Society at the University of Kent.
00:02:39 ►
Those traditions use, in some cases, psychedelic medicines or psychedelics as medicinal products or substances.
00:02:51 ►
And in fact, even at some point in the U.S. and in Europe, psychedelics were used for medicinal purposes up until the early 60s.
00:03:05 ►
And then things started breaking down at that point. purposes up until the early 60s.
00:03:08 ►
And then things started breaking down at that point.
00:03:14 ►
At that point, it goes into the point of perspective of sin.
00:03:21 ►
We shall not do these drugs for various reasons.
00:03:25 ►
And a lot of people will argue as to why.
00:03:27 ►
Is it about public health?
00:03:29 ►
Is it about control?
00:03:32 ►
Is it because people started seeing through the veils of illusion that the masters wanted us not to see through?
00:03:36 ►
But it became something of a sin.
00:03:39 ►
Now, if it were not a sin, the arguments don’t really hold up.
00:03:46 ►
It’s not scientifically reasonable from a public health perspective to make psychedelics illegal.
00:03:54 ►
Very few people die using them.
00:03:57 ►
Very few people have problems compared to the population that uses them.
00:04:01 ►
to the population that uses them.
00:04:04 ►
If it was about public health,
00:04:07 ►
those same rates of danger,
00:04:10 ►
actually much more dangerous aspects of driving would be illegal,
00:04:13 ►
and bathrooms would be illegal.
00:04:18 ►
More people die in bathrooms every year than do from terrorism.
00:04:23 ►
So you slip, crack your head, the place is hard everywhere.
00:04:26 ►
So it’s not necessarily about public health.
00:04:28 ►
So there is a moral aspect to it.
00:04:30 ►
So that’s as much as I’m going to say about that.
00:04:38 ►
What this talk here will be about coming back into medicine and what that might mean.
00:04:44 ►
And again, like I said, as I don’t have any real density of emic perspectives, I have to leave that out.
00:04:46 ►
So this is the theoretical stuff about that.
00:04:49 ►
Now, I’m going to start with something.
00:04:52 ►
I’m going to throw out some really funky terms throughout this.
00:04:55 ►
I will make every effort to explain them.
00:04:58 ►
If I don’t and something’s crazy, stop me.
00:05:01 ►
I’m not here to just preach at you.
00:05:05 ►
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please do stop me and I’ll explain myself.
00:05:09 ►
So the first thing I’m going to throw at you is something called biological citizenship.
00:05:14 ►
This is a concept by a couple of authors, Rose and Novas.
00:05:19 ►
But that citizenship is something we engage in.
00:05:24 ►
And to be a proper member of a society, we should engage in these things, much like, for instance, at least be able to speak some English in the UK to function here and work.
00:05:30 ►
Not necessarily, but that’s the idea of citizenship, pay taxes, etc.
00:05:34 ►
Well, there is this idea of biological citizenship,
00:05:51 ►
It’s come about because biology has ceased to be something fateful or maybe something you can worry about.
00:05:58 ►
But we’ve gotten to the point where biology is knowable, mutable, improvable, and manipulable.
00:06:06 ►
Plastic surgery, you can have your genes tested for things various diseases if you have a family history of breast cancer for instance
00:06:09 ►
I read a recent article about a woman who just had her breast cut off
00:06:11 ►
because her mom had breast cancer she didn’t even want to wait to find out if she did
00:06:15 ►
these types of things can happen and it comes right down
00:06:18 ►
into the birth process where pregnant women are
00:06:21 ►
regularly tested for genetic disease or for genetic diseases
00:06:24 ►
of the offspring
00:06:25 ►
and are expected to make a choice about whether or not to go to term
00:06:31 ►
if they have something like Down syndrome.
00:06:34 ►
And so we are becoming engaged in our biology
00:06:39 ►
and we are expected to become engaged in our biology in a particular way.
00:06:44 ►
And we are expected to become engaged in our biology in a particular way.
00:06:51 ►
Now, this leads to something written by these guys, Rosen and Novas,
00:06:53 ►
a political economy of hope.
00:06:58 ►
Because things can be changed, you’re not at the whims of biology.
00:07:10 ►
And this political economy of hope leads to our need to become the activists in biological processes.
00:07:13 ►
It’s not just scientists studying these things,
00:07:17 ►
but those of us with particular diseases need to become involved,
00:07:21 ►
raise money for research, for instance.
00:07:25 ►
But unfortunately, this biological citizenship leads to a situation where you become obsessed
00:07:29 ►
with whatever disease you may have at all times.
00:07:35 ►
And so on the good days, you’re still thinking about it
00:07:39 ►
because you’re out being an activist,
00:07:40 ►
maybe raising money for research
00:07:42 ►
or counseling others with such diseases of cancer, more deadly diseases.
00:07:47 ►
This is more typical.
00:07:49 ►
But you become constantly engaged in the act of being ill.
00:07:55 ►
So your identity becomes a sick person from the beginning of it.
00:08:03 ►
Now this is going to make more sense a little later in the talk
00:08:07 ►
why I brought this up,
00:08:08 ►
but this is something that we need to understand
00:08:10 ►
about modern global society and health.
00:08:15 ►
Now, within this context,
00:08:19 ►
we start seeing an emergence of the reuse of medicinal psychedelics.
00:08:26 ►
And the most salient one that people talk about
00:08:30 ►
as a medicine is ayahuasca.
00:08:32 ►
And I don’t want to limit it to ayahuasca,
00:08:34 ►
but this is what we have most stuff about psychedelic
00:08:37 ►
as a medicine from a user’s point of view.
00:08:41 ►
Now, Schmid et al., in an article that came out just this year, start making
00:08:50 ►
the claim that although referred as a medicine, ayahuasca is clearly not used as an ordinary
00:08:55 ►
pharmacological medicament. Instead, medicine alluded to more holistic concepts of being
00:09:01 ►
a sacrament or a healing plant. So they’re drawing from, say, Native American traditions in these concepts.
00:09:09 ►
And in their study, in fact, people said it might heal you and it might not.
00:09:17 ►
And it’s sort of unpredictable whether this will happen.
00:09:21 ►
Now, they claim that we shouldn’t even think of ayahuasca as a pharmaceutical, the authors
00:09:26 ►
do, as a pharmaceutical substance, but a psychological catalyst, which unfolds within
00:09:34 ►
fields of sociocultural ideas, real fancy work that says it’s a psychological thing, it’s because
00:09:40 ►
we expect it to work in a way, set and setting, some of the ideas of set and setting in psychedelic use.
00:09:46 ►
That the ayahuasca enhanced their emotional and mental states
00:09:51 ►
so they could understand their illness, they could see it.
00:09:54 ►
And this is more of a Carlos Castaneda seeing as opposed to looking type of concept.
00:10:02 ►
And that the psychedelic influenced them
00:10:05 ►
in making positive changes in their life,
00:10:08 ►
which helped them get through the disease process.
00:10:16 ►
And so that was that study.
00:10:20 ►
And this is where a lot of psychedelic medicine seems to be, or the ideas of psychedelic medicine seems to be playing out.
00:10:29 ►
And as an example, some of you might have seen this, maybe, I don’t think most of you have, is my guess,
00:10:37 ►
but it’s a woman by the name of Pam Sakuda, who took part in the Hefter Institute’s psilocybin stage 4 end-of-life cancer anxiety experiment.
00:10:48 ►
And she talks about how the psilocybin had helped her.
00:10:52 ►
And she’s very eloquent about it, and it’s fairly moving.
00:10:55 ►
And it talks about it, it shows this idea of a sacramental healing, a sociocultural type healing.
00:11:03 ►
I know this, but this was indeed metastatic stage 4 cancer.
00:11:09 ►
You realize that this is terminal,
00:11:11 ►
and that this is basically what is going to kill you.
00:11:16 ►
And the general prognosis, or the curve on this, wasn’t very long.
00:11:21 ►
So you start to wonder what’s going to happen and your emotional state, your mental
00:11:28 ►
state totally turns upside down. You no longer have this life ahead of you that you planned
00:11:34 ►
for. All of a sudden you have a very finite and possibly very short time left. So you’re
00:11:43 ►
very anxious about the fact that even though right now you’ve just had surgery,
00:11:48 ►
you’re under chemotherapy and you’re kind of feeling okay,
00:11:52 ►
you know that something’s gonna happen soon.
00:11:54 ►
You don’t know how bad you’re going to feel.
00:11:56 ►
You don’t know what part of the body
00:11:57 ►
this is gonna come back in.
00:11:59 ►
You don’t know how physically you’re going to feel.
00:12:02 ►
And you don’t know how limited your capabilities are gonna become. You don’t know how much pain you’re going to feel, and you don’t know how limited
00:12:05 ►
your capabilities are going to become,
00:12:07 ►
you don’t know how much pain you’re going to have.
00:12:10 ►
And so it becomes a very negative emotional set
00:12:17 ►
where you’re basically living in fear.
00:12:20 ►
Unfortunately, that fear can be to an extent that it paralyzes
00:12:26 ►
the good life that you’re living at the moment
00:12:29 ►
while you’re still healthy
00:12:31 ►
where you’re not sure
00:12:32 ►
well, when is it going to come back?
00:12:34 ►
Where is it going to come back?
00:12:35 ►
What’s going to happen to me?
00:12:37 ►
How is my family going to be able to deal with it?
00:12:40 ►
What are they going to have to do
00:12:41 ►
to help me and support me?
00:12:42 ►
Because my husband is a dear.
00:12:45 ►
We’ve been together, married for 28 years and known each other for 36.
00:12:50 ►
He’s so supportive and loving that I knew this was an enormous amount of pain for him.
00:12:55 ►
There was the guilt of being the source of that pain as well as all of my own fear.
00:13:01 ►
And it becomes almost overwhelming where you like I said it
00:13:08 ►
infringes upon the time that you’re enjoying so crippled by this fear and
00:13:16 ►
this guilt about infringing on other people’s emotions and lives and having
00:13:22 ►
to go and cook with your heart all of a sudden long-term plans meant nothing.
00:13:26 ►
He couldn’t make any plans further than a week.
00:13:30 ►
Who knew what was going to happen?
00:13:33 ►
And so I was hoping that this study would help
00:13:37 ►
and also with the support of the psychiatric team
00:13:40 ►
would allow me to deal with some of that,
00:13:44 ►
to clear it up a that, to clear up a little,
00:13:45 ►
to find a way to achieve a level of peace within myself
00:13:50 ►
and thinking about it.
00:13:54 ►
And your emotions overwhelm you.
00:13:58 ►
So as this session began and as it built up,
00:14:03 ►
I felt this lump of emotions rolling up and forming,
00:14:10 ►
almost like an entity.
00:14:12 ►
And I started to cry a little,
00:14:17 ►
and just to start to feel all,
00:14:20 ►
it was almost like everything was concentrated a little.
00:14:23 ►
And it came up, rolling up up and then it started to dissipate
00:14:28 ►
and I started to look at it differently.
00:14:31 ►
And I think that’s the beauty of having,
00:14:33 ►
being able to expand your consciousness,
00:14:36 ►
change the way you’re feeling about things,
00:14:39 ►
open…
00:14:40 ►
I don’t think the drug is the cause of these things.
00:14:43 ►
I think it’s a catalyst that allows you to release your own thoughts and feelings
00:14:48 ►
from someplace that you’ve found them very tightly.
00:14:53 ►
And so it allows you to open your own mind and your consciousness
00:14:57 ►
and release other feelings,
00:14:59 ►
explore other ways you might feel about these things.
00:15:03 ►
And I began to realize that all of this negative fear and the guilt
00:15:09 ►
was such a hindrance to the actual positive part of making the most of
00:15:17 ►
and enjoying the healthy time that I’m having,
00:15:21 ►
and however long it may be,
00:15:23 ►
that I was basically not utilizing it to the best
00:15:29 ►
and enjoying my life because I was so afraid of what wasn’t there yet. And so I had the opportunity
00:15:37 ►
in this altered state of mind to think about how if I could just let go of that and not focus so much on being afraid of what
00:15:48 ►
wasn’t here today, that I could move more in for today, in the here and now, in the present, and
00:15:56 ►
enjoy the time that I had and take it as a gift, that it was something that was so precious
00:16:06 ►
and that it didn’t deserve to be crowded by these fears,
00:16:14 ►
that there would be plenty of time to be worried about it
00:16:19 ►
and to be afraid when something really happened,
00:16:22 ►
when the disease manifested itself again.
00:16:27 ►
So, I mean, it’s clear that it’s done her some good.
00:16:33 ►
And she is able to deal, like I said, with ayahuasca stuff,
00:16:38 ►
with the process of her illness, of her disease,
00:16:44 ►
in a way that allowed her to go through with her life and not be, like I said, with the biological citizenship stuff.
00:16:53 ►
She wasn’t dying every day of the rest of her life.
00:16:56 ►
She was going to try to live every day of the rest of her life.
00:16:59 ►
And so she’s at this point where she can say, I’m not going to go out there trying to find a cure for cancer anymore.
00:17:06 ►
I’m going to just live
00:17:08 ►
and spend time with my family.
00:17:10 ►
I don’t have to be sick every day
00:17:11 ►
until I’m dead.
00:17:14 ►
And this is similar.
00:17:17 ►
There’s other studies going on
00:17:20 ►
at MAPS,
00:17:21 ►
or MAPS website lists a bunch of them.
00:17:23 ►
Just quickly,
00:17:26 ►
a list of them, MD quickly, a list of them.
00:17:31 ►
MDMA is being used for psychotherapy, cancer anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder.
00:17:35 ►
LSD for psychotherapy, cluster headaches, end-of-life anxiety.
00:17:39 ►
Ayahuasca for substance abuse, hopelessness, and panic.
00:17:41 ►
Ibogaine for substance abuse.
00:17:43 ►
Ketamine for therapy and addiction.
00:17:45 ►
LSA for cluster headaches.
00:17:48 ►
LSA is very similar to LSD. It comes in a few plants.
00:17:52 ►
And psilocybin, cluster headaches, end-of-life anxiety, nicotine addiction, and OCD.
00:17:59 ►
Now, if you look at that list, listen to that list.
00:18:02 ►
I said it really quite rapidly.
00:18:03 ►
But what you see is it’s a lot of sort of essentially behavioral
00:18:07 ►
psychological type issues that people are using these things
00:18:12 ►
for, with the absence, perhaps, of cluster headaches.
00:18:17 ►
And this is telling
00:18:19 ►
of how we’ve approached these medicines.
00:18:28 ►
And part of it is,
00:18:31 ►
and the reason there’s a lot of sort of end-of-life stuff and addiction stuff,
00:18:32 ►
is that the research population has been people
00:18:34 ►
that are already at heavy risk.
00:18:36 ►
Why are we giving psilocybin only to people
00:18:39 ►
that are guaranteed to die on their cancer
00:18:41 ►
as opposed to somebody earlier?
00:18:44 ►
Well, it’s because nobody knows how safe it is or what it’s going to do to individuals guaranteed to die on their cancer, as opposed to somebody earlier.
00:18:49 ►
Well, it’s because nobody knows how safe it is or what it’s going to do to individuals over the course of their life to have had these experiences.
00:18:52 ►
A lot of experiments start this way.
00:18:55 ►
And I’m going to read this a little bit.
00:18:58 ►
I don’t think I really have to.
00:18:59 ►
It’s from my other article.
00:19:01 ►
But basically, it’s establishing, science has established that psychedelics
00:19:07 ►
are physically, I’m talking the standard or classic psychedelics, tryptamine psychedelics,
00:19:15 ►
are exceedingly safe biologically, and your body processes them very quickly, and a lot
00:19:23 ►
of what goes on seems to be your brain is sending its own chemicals just in the wrong way,
00:19:28 ►
or in a different way.
00:19:30 ►
And so, for instance, LSD, which lasts some 12 hours,
00:19:34 ►
is out of your system in a few minutes.
00:19:36 ►
Clearly it’s not the LSD actually doing it to you.
00:19:40 ►
So they’re biologically safe.
00:19:42 ►
They’re far safer than alcohol.
00:19:51 ►
Alcohol, 10 times the active dose, will kill 50% of the people who take it.
00:20:00 ►
And something like mescaline, which is the most dangerous classic psychedelic, is 24 times.
00:20:04 ►
And so that’s two and a half times safer than alcohol. And it doesn’t even compare
00:20:07 ►
to things like DMT, psilocybin, and LSD, which have only been predicted to be between one and
00:20:13 ►
5,000 times the active dose. Nobody’s going to take that unless you’re Sid Barrett, apparently,
00:20:21 ►
but he lived. Now, one of the other questions is, okay, so it’s biologically safe.
00:20:29 ►
Fine.
00:20:30 ►
Is it psychologically safe?
00:20:32 ►
Does it make you crazy?
00:20:34 ►
And studies have been done with long-term ayahuasca users
00:20:40 ►
and long-term peyote users in the various religious sacrament use of these drugs.
00:20:46 ►
And it looks really quite safe.
00:20:50 ►
Something out of the mescaline use data, or peyote use data,
00:20:55 ►
one in 40,000 trips even just goes bad.
00:20:58 ►
That’s a pretty good record.
00:21:01 ►
And schizophrenics do not have heightened presentation of schizophrenia.
00:21:09 ►
In fact, we seem to calm it down.
00:21:12 ►
Folks in the Santo Daime, who use ayahuasca regularly,
00:21:18 ►
seem to have more serotonin receptors,
00:21:20 ►
and they, through various psychological measures,
00:21:24 ►
look like they’re much more stable
00:21:26 ►
than the regular population, the non-users, and less perturbed by changes in the system.
00:21:34 ►
They don’t get freaked out when things change.
00:21:36 ►
They can handle it.
00:21:36 ►
They’re really smooth.
00:21:37 ►
They’re kind of like Zen priests.
00:21:39 ►
Maybe not quite all the way down there, but they’re very relaxed and able to deal with
00:21:43 ►
this.
00:21:43 ►
not quite all the way down there, but they’re very relaxed and able to deal with this.
00:21:53 ►
Now, the abuse potential of them is another question.
00:21:55 ►
Okay, you start taking it. Will you keep taking it?
00:21:58 ►
And this looks actually quite low.
00:22:03 ►
There is an initiation phase where people tend to take quite a bit of it, then use of the classic psychedelics tends to wane off
00:22:08 ►
and is used a couple of times a year.
00:22:10 ►
It’s nothing like you would do with heroin a couple of times a day or whatever
00:22:14 ►
because you have that craving.
00:22:16 ►
You don’t have a craving.
00:22:16 ►
In fact, they don’t really work except for DMT, I think.
00:22:22 ►
But most of them tend not to work very well if you take them too often anyway.
00:22:25 ►
So that’s a self-built-in anti-abuse potential aspect of them.
00:22:33 ►
And then, of course, you get caught with the question of what is actually abuse.
00:22:38 ►
And that is a socially defined concept.
00:22:40 ►
So, yeah, you can say if you use it more than once, you’re abusing it.
00:22:43 ►
And a lot of people will.
00:22:44 ►
So, yeah, you can say if you use it more than once, you’re abusing it, and a lot of people will.
00:22:52 ►
But in terms of a biomedical abuse of addictive-type reactions, it’s simply not likely.
00:23:03 ►
And, okay, so it looks like it’s safe, and it looks like it does this sort of great psychological-type stuff.
00:23:07 ►
And I’ve been using a couple of concepts here interchangeably.
00:23:11 ►
And I’ve purposely sort of done it this way.
00:23:15 ►
Disease and illness, they’re not the same thing.
00:23:17 ►
A lot of people think they are.
00:23:21 ►
And they certainly do overlap quite a bit.
00:23:28 ►
But they are not the same thing. And a fantastic sort of idea of understanding where they come from is this guy, Cassell, who says, illness is what the patient feels
00:23:35 ►
when he goes to the doctor, and disease is what he goes away from the doctor when he
00:23:40 ►
goes home with. Illness is your signs, the symptoms,
00:23:45 ►
and how you feel about what’s going on with you.
00:23:49 ►
And a disease is a biological problem,
00:23:55 ►
an organ functioning improperly,
00:23:57 ►
various injury and whatnot, pathogens.
00:24:03 ►
So, like I said, they tend to overlap at quite a high level.
00:24:09 ►
But they don’t.
00:24:10 ►
They’re not the same thing.
00:24:11 ►
And you can have diseases without having any illness whatsoever.
00:24:16 ►
The classic is asymptomatic high blood pressure.
00:24:20 ►
You don’t feel sick.
00:24:22 ►
You don’t know you’re sick, and the doctor says,
00:24:23 ►
you have high blood pressure, you’ve got to take this pill.
00:24:26 ►
You’ve got a disease with no illness.
00:24:28 ►
When you get an illness,
00:24:29 ►
the doctor tells you this,
00:24:30 ►
and you start worrying about your drug regime.
00:24:32 ►
You can also have illnesses without diseases.
00:24:36 ►
Hypochondriacs are a classic example of that.
00:24:40 ►
And so one is social.
00:24:43 ►
Illnesses are social,
00:24:44 ►
whereas diseases are biological.
00:24:47 ►
And like I said, they tend to overlap.
00:24:48 ►
Now, if we review what we were talking about with these other types of studies of psychedelic medicine,
00:24:55 ►
in particular Pam Sakuda’s stuff and the stuff I said about ayahuasca earlier,
00:25:00 ►
we’re looking at something that is affecting illness in these contexts as opposed to disease.
00:25:08 ►
So somebody might say, fine and dandy, Pam Sakuda feels better about dying,
00:25:13 ►
but she’s still dying, it’s not medicine.
00:25:15 ►
But her quality of life has changed.
00:25:18 ►
And healing has a lot to do with that as well.
00:25:21 ►
has a lot to do with that as well.
00:25:30 ►
And so I would say that psilocybin trip actually cured her of the illness of dying,
00:25:34 ►
even though she will die one day, very soon.
00:25:35 ►
She’s probably dead now.
00:25:39 ►
And so it’s really important to keep this in mind when understanding the idea of psychedelic medicine,
00:25:43 ►
especially as we’re starting to engage with it.
00:25:46 ►
And there is a sense that psychological problems
00:25:49 ►
often have illness,
00:25:52 ►
much more of an illness factor than a biological factor,
00:25:54 ►
though people are starting to investigate
00:25:56 ►
more and more biological factors of psychological issues.
00:26:03 ►
Now, the other video I wanted to show you,
00:26:07 ►
and it’s going to be harder to find,
00:26:10 ►
it’s really just to establish this idea of illness and disease,
00:26:15 ►
and I’ll describe it because it’s going to take me a little while to get it.
00:26:19 ►
It’s this woman named Michelle Rainey
00:26:21 ►
who’s a very strong medical marijuana advocate.
00:26:27 ►
And she has recently been diagnosed stage 4 with her melanoma, which is metastasized.
00:26:35 ►
And she is very strongly talking about the cannabis will cure my cancer.
00:26:41 ►
She’s working in a very biomedical model looking at it to cure a disease. But she
00:26:46 ►
says very clearly, I don’t feel sick. I feel great. I’m healthy. I’m eating organic food. I’m doing
00:26:52 ►
great. But the doctor tells me this. And so this is sort of, again, that illness versus disease.
00:26:58 ►
But she’s looking at this as a, or looking for something to cure the disease as opposed to simply looking at something to cure the illness,
00:27:09 ►
which is understandable, of course, right?
00:27:12 ►
Nobody wants to die.
00:27:14 ►
Not nobody.
00:27:16 ►
But are these things as unrelated in therapy
00:27:20 ►
as they are in terms of our perceptions of these processes. Do they just overlap,
00:27:28 ►
or is therapy useful? Well, in terms of the psilocybin study, they are working on getting
00:27:33 ►
a grant to redo the study for people in earlier stages of cancer because they think the lifestyle
00:27:39 ►
changes might actually make a strong difference in the disease prognosis just by eating better,
00:27:47 ►
getting exercise, going outside, smiling and laughing every once in a while.
00:27:53 ►
But there might be more to it than that. And Sullivan and Hagen came out with an article in
00:27:59 ►
2002, it’s a pretty old article, in a whole journal on evolutionary aspects of addiction.
00:28:08 ►
These guys come up with an exceedingly radical idea.
00:28:14 ►
Most addiction people look at addictions as exposure to something new
00:28:20 ►
that affects us or we respond to with biologically programmed behaviors
00:28:30 ►
from evolutionary processes.
00:28:33 ►
So we have this reward idea wired in our brain.
00:28:37 ►
If it works for you, it makes you feel good, you do it again,
00:28:39 ►
which has something to do with eating high-quality foods, sugars, whatnot.
00:28:45 ►
We see how this idea that if you eat too much sugar, it’s because that craving for sugar
00:28:50 ►
is out of whack with our ability to get sugar, which was rarer in the environment in our
00:28:54 ►
evolutionary past.
00:28:56 ►
It’s the same thing with drugs as the typical idea about addiction research.
00:29:01 ►
It hits this reward center, but we didn’t have heroin when we were australopithecines
00:29:06 ►
walking through the savannah.
00:29:09 ►
So it knocks the whole thing out of whack.
00:29:11 ►
Well, these guys said,
00:29:12 ►
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, wait a minute.
00:29:14 ►
Wait a minute here.
00:29:16 ►
Maybe for some things,
00:29:19 ►
but
00:29:20 ►
probably not psychedelics.
00:29:26 ►
They grow.
00:29:28 ►
You can eat them.
00:29:30 ►
And so we will probably have been exposed to them for a very long time.
00:29:35 ►
Now, Terence McKenna has talked about this as the stoned ape hypothesis,
00:29:39 ►
how he became brainy apes that learned language and stuff.
00:29:43 ►
He actually, I heard a talk where he attributed it to his brother Dennis, who probably just
00:29:47 ►
because of his scientifics said, hey, Terrence, what about this idea?
00:29:51 ►
Terrence ran with it because he couldn’t publish it.
00:29:54 ►
But that’s one guy.
00:29:58 ►
And these guys say something to that effect, but a little bit more carefully thought out.
00:30:02 ►
And the idea is that drugs as food
00:30:06 ►
is not necessarily a metaphor in this context.
00:30:09 ►
If you go everywhere in the world,
00:30:11 ►
not everywhere, but most places in the world,
00:30:13 ►
it’s not us in our particular worldview,
00:30:17 ►
does talk about medicine as food
00:30:19 ►
and they prepare them as food.
00:30:20 ►
These are stuff you get from the garden.
00:30:23 ►
It’s not a pill.
00:30:24 ►
It’s not an injection. The traditional medicines. And they are
00:30:28 ►
made into their foods. And in fact, a lot of the stuff we eat is
00:30:32 ►
medicinal. And we don’t even think about it. Garlic, basil.
00:30:38 ►
Many of the herbs we eat have medicinal properties.
00:30:40 ►
And we’re probably taking low doses of these medicinal things
00:30:43 ►
that are quite helpful to us in our diet. And there are arguments out there that spices, the use of spices evolved in
00:30:51 ►
hot climates because you’re more likely to have bacteria and what are they called? Parasites. And
00:30:59 ►
so these spices help get rid of them. And in cold environments, you didn’t really need that. But of
00:31:04 ►
course, there’s also the problem that spices grow in these hot environments.
00:31:06 ►
So that’s a little bit funky.
00:31:08 ►
These guys say that drugs as food is not really crazy.
00:31:13 ►
In fact, Ballack and Cox note that calcium, phosphorus, iron, vitamins A, B2, and E,
00:31:20 ►
and 100 grams of Bolivian coca leaf exceed the daily recommended U.S. dietary allowances.
00:31:26 ►
This stuff, coca leaf, is really, really, really good for you.
00:31:31 ►
It just happens to also have cocaine in it.
00:31:34 ►
Now, cat contains vitamin C, 150 milligrams per 100 grams of fresh leaf.
00:31:40 ►
Trace amounts of thiamine, niacin, riboflavin, carotene, has iron amino acids, and many alkaloids
00:31:49 ►
are based chemically on tryptophan or tyrosine, which are proteins that we need and become
00:31:55 ►
available after we eat them.
00:31:58 ►
Now, we need foods.
00:32:04 ►
The reason we need to eat,
00:32:05 ►
there’s a lot of stuff that we don’t make ourselves.
00:32:08 ►
And that’s part of the recommended daily analysis
00:32:10 ►
of vitamins and amino acids.
00:32:13 ►
These are things you have to get from outside of yourself.
00:32:15 ►
Your body doesn’t produce them on their own.
00:32:18 ►
And there are neurotransmitters that require
00:32:22 ►
these exogenous, means outside the body,
00:32:31 ►
There are neurotransmitters that require these exogenous, means outside the body, sources of these nutrients to synthesize themselves in our brain. Our neurotransmitters don’t just build themselves, and they require a lot of nutrition, a lot of food.
00:32:46 ►
Now, what better way to get it instead of eating outrageous amounts of eggs and beef
00:32:51 ►
and these wild foods that were really hard to get
00:32:55 ►
than to take something that is a neurotransmitter, essentially,
00:32:58 ►
and breaks down into its constituent parts.
00:33:01 ►
Psilocybin, very similar to serotonin.
00:33:04 ►
All these things look just like
00:33:06 ►
serotonin and they can be metabolized into the building blocks for those things. And
00:33:11 ►
also, while they’re acting in our minds or in our brains, we don’t need our own. And
00:33:17 ►
this is a major, major issue in evolution. If the nutritional or energetic and nutritional intake exceeds what you need, you do a little bit better.
00:33:29 ►
For example, it doesn’t take a lot either.
00:33:32 ►
For example, walking bipedally, like we do, seems to have saved our ancestors one little package of McVitie’s digestive biscuits worth of calories in a year.
00:33:48 ►
And that was enough to make it more valuable to our ancestors,
00:33:52 ►
made them more likely to reproduce, get food, be healthy, than their four-legged friends.
00:34:00 ►
It saved this energy, but not very much,
00:34:02 ►
but it was enough to make a difference over the scale of millions of years.
00:34:06 ►
Now, taking exogenous neurotransmitters would be the same sort of caloric and nutritional change and difference.
00:34:16 ►
So, when we happen to be a little bit down on them, as other food cravings come from lack,
00:34:23 ►
we would crave these things that we knew were in the environment.
00:34:27 ►
Any ape out there that ate a few mushrooms
00:34:30 ►
would know that they do something and their body would know
00:34:33 ►
what that felt like in them.
00:34:36 ►
Now, the…
00:34:40 ►
So depletion of these neurotransmitters would lead to the craving.
00:34:46 ►
And in particular, stress chews these things up.
00:34:54 ►
It just burns your neurotransmitters up.
00:34:57 ►
And so it’s not just lack of neurotransmitters,
00:35:03 ►
which actually act as the buffer to stress when chewing them up,
00:35:07 ►
but that stress also starts breaking down the body.
00:35:11 ►
And so we’re looking at something that might be primarily illness-based,
00:35:15 ►
but due to this nutritional need and the idea that stressors deplete these things,
00:35:22 ►
taking of psychedelics may produce a buffer zone to
00:35:26 ►
help us deal with stress and the stress-based illnesses or diseases, in fact, that not having
00:35:34 ►
them won’t.
00:35:35 ►
And you look at this, and the types of disease processes that they seem really good for are
00:35:40 ►
depression, which is a stress-based neurotransmitter depletion type scenario,
00:35:46 ►
bipolar disease, a whole series of these things.
00:35:50 ►
This was just a theory or an idea based in just evolutionary thought.
00:35:59 ►
And they wanted to start with they were out there and we were exposed to them,
00:36:03 ►
so how can we say it’s maladaptive or bizarre and i really like this little package of information but uh it starts
00:36:11 ►
bleeding in those areas of illness and disease of biological versus psychological processes
00:36:17 ►
in a kind of interleaved and interwoven way that’s really quite interesting.
00:36:29 ►
And when we start looking at other things that are similar, slightly different,
00:36:31 ►
a lot of the stuff that psychedelics are good for and are things that cannabis is good for,
00:36:37 ►
and it turns out are quite the same things that omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids
00:36:41 ►
are particularly good for.
00:36:42 ►
omega-6 fatty acids are particularly good for.
00:36:48 ►
And it turns out that…
00:36:54 ►
Let me sort of show you how I put this together.
00:37:00 ►
Timothy Leary, in 99, it was a 34-year follow-up,
00:37:09 ►
so 98765, did an experiment with giving psilocybin to criminals in jail to try to see if it reduced their recidivism rates.
00:37:13 ►
And when they published their data six months later, which isn’t a very long time to check
00:37:18 ►
for recidivism, but the rates were significantly lower than that of the regular prison population.
00:37:23 ►
Yeah?
00:37:23 ►
significantly lower than that of the regular prison population.
00:37:30 ►
Recidivism, that means recommitting crimes, being a bad guy again.
00:37:36 ►
And most of the people who went back were just violating parole as opposed to doing new crimes.
00:37:43 ►
But over time, these numbers seem to fall down, and in the 34-year follow year follow up it looks like there was really no real
00:37:45 ►
change in the rates
00:37:47 ►
but
00:37:50 ►
these were good results
00:37:52 ►
that were fading over time
00:37:53 ►
and a lot has been made of this
00:37:55 ►
oh that the data wasn’t good
00:37:57 ►
or their interpretations of it
00:37:59 ►
wasn’t good but it might have been a
00:38:01 ►
reducing effect
00:38:03 ►
now they didn’t understand this sort of evolutionary
00:38:06 ►
idea that this guy came up with 35, 36 years later, but rather something that had an effect
00:38:14 ►
that faded over time because they maintained the same nutritional deficiencies that led
00:38:19 ►
to criminal behavior in the first place. This is really similar to a recent study
00:38:25 ►
that they did give omega-3 fatty acids to prisoners,
00:38:29 ►
violent criminals,
00:38:30 ►
who calmed down from just having a better diet.
00:38:35 ►
And there’s this idea that a lot of criminality
00:38:37 ►
might actually stem from a really lousy diet
00:38:40 ►
and the way your body builds itself
00:38:42 ►
and the neurotransmitters it creates,
00:38:44 ►
the cell
00:38:46 ►
walls and all these sorts of things that happen.
00:38:49 ►
Well, it turns out that endocannabinoids are formed from omega-3 fatty acids.
00:38:56 ►
That was really easy to find.
00:38:58 ►
And the effect is quite dramatic.
00:39:00 ►
You can change your diet and your body’s own cannabinoids will change their ratio in your blood.
00:39:06 ►
And it will affect your ability
00:39:08 ►
to deal with,
00:39:10 ►
as an anti-inflammatory
00:39:11 ►
and other kinds of regulatory functions
00:39:13 ►
of the body.
00:39:15 ►
And that’s why cannabis
00:39:17 ►
and omega-3 fatty acids
00:39:18 ►
look like they do almost the same thing.
00:39:20 ►
Because they do.
00:39:20 ►
Cannabis is a little bit more
00:39:22 ►
nutritionally sound
00:39:23 ►
or a bigger chunk of what you need
00:39:26 ►
than the omega-3 fatty acids
00:39:27 ►
because you don’t have to build it.
00:39:30 ►
And in fact,
00:39:32 ►
where is it?
00:39:36 ►
Pigs supplemented with EFAs,
00:39:38 ►
which are these fatty acids,
00:39:42 ►
actually not only had more endocannabinoids, but had more monoamines in the frontal cortex.
00:39:50 ►
Who’s heard the word monoamine?
00:39:52 ►
Almost everybody in this room should have.
00:39:55 ►
How about monoamine oxidase?
00:39:59 ►
Ah, it’s starting to hit.
00:40:01 ►
Monoamine oxidase is something that breaks down monoamines.
00:40:08 ►
This is why DMT is not orally active.
00:40:11 ►
We have monoamine oxidase in our belly,
00:40:15 ►
and so we take it and it breaks DMT down.
00:40:23 ►
That makes DMT and serotonin and all these other neurotransmitters, monoamines. So having more omega-3 fatty acids in your diet
00:40:27 ►
creates more of these neurotransmitters.
00:40:31 ►
And so there’s this relationship to diet, neurotransmitters, psychedelics,
00:40:37 ►
which may be involved in the way the body regulates itself,
00:40:40 ►
the way it builds itself and regulates itself, the way it builds itself, and regulates itself.
00:40:45 ►
So these ideas are, again, like I said,
00:40:51 ►
it’s starting to weave together a little bit more.
00:40:54 ►
There might be real biological changes,
00:40:57 ►
even though it just seems on the surface
00:41:00 ►
that psychedelics are working in a psychological way.
00:41:07 ►
And a good example of this sort of interweaving
00:41:10 ►
is Ibogaine drug therapy or addiction therapy
00:41:17 ►
where you get a deep psychological experience.
00:41:24 ►
The reports tend to be, you know,
00:41:25 ►
oh, I see what my habit is doing to my mom.
00:41:28 ►
You know, it makes me feel really bad,
00:41:30 ►
and I’m aware of why I’m doing it.
00:41:32 ►
And that kind of sort of years of therapy stuff,
00:41:34 ►
it’s coming out.
00:41:35 ►
But it also seems to block
00:41:37 ►
your biological craving for opiates.
00:41:44 ►
And on top of that,
00:41:46 ►
it seems to do something in your brain
00:41:48 ►
which looks like, to me,
00:41:53 ►
it is allowing
00:41:54 ►
near instantaneous habit formation.
00:41:59 ►
So every time you do something,
00:42:02 ►
your brain says,
00:42:03 ►
okay, you did that.
00:42:04 ►
If you do it once or twice, it goes away.
00:42:06 ►
If you do it again and again and again, it’s like a circuit board and the wire gets thicker and thicker.
00:42:10 ►
And it’s harder to unplug.
00:42:12 ►
It’s a habit.
00:42:14 ►
And as you know, if you start practicing a musical instrument or whatnot,
00:42:18 ►
the more and more you practice, then the more likely you will just go to practice and just do it.
00:42:24 ►
The more you’re in
00:42:25 ►
the habit of reading every week for your class assignments, the more likely you will do it every
00:42:30 ►
week. And the less likely you do it, the less likely you’ll get these good habits. So habit
00:42:35 ►
formation seems to be a neurological as well as a psychological formation. It has to do with
00:42:42 ►
networks, brain networks, as far as some people think.
00:42:49 ►
And so Ibogaine seems to do that,
00:42:50 ►
the way your brain wires itself,
00:42:52 ►
a very mechanical process,
00:42:54 ►
a very psychological process, as well as another mediating biological process,
00:42:58 ►
which is the lack of addiction.
00:43:02 ►
Now,
00:43:03 ►
here’s a funny concept.
00:43:11 ►
And this is sort of going into
00:43:13 ►
how we might use these things
00:43:14 ►
and the role they may play in our society.
00:43:19 ►
There’s this guy, Antonovsky,
00:43:21 ►
back in 1979,
00:43:23 ►
came up with a concept.
00:43:24 ►
I’m sorry for the jargon, but it’s out there.
00:43:28 ►
It’s called salutogenesis.
00:43:31 ►
This means the formation of beneficial behaviors or health.
00:43:38 ►
And Antonovsky was really interesting.
00:43:41 ►
He studied survivors, Auschwitz survivors,
00:43:47 ►
and why did some thrive and others didn’t?
00:43:52 ►
And instead of looking at what, at the time,
00:43:54 ►
your general sort of medical model,
00:43:56 ►
which is still quite strong in the main way of approaching things,
00:44:01 ►
pathogenesis, or the pathology,
00:44:03 ►
where does the pathology come from?
00:44:05 ►
And let’s fix that.
00:44:07 ►
He said, well, why did some people do better?
00:44:10 ►
Why are some people healthy
00:44:11 ►
as opposed to why are some people sick?
00:44:14 ►
It’s the opposite point of view.
00:44:15 ►
And in fact, he said,
00:44:16 ►
by simply dealing with the disease process,
00:44:20 ►
why are people sick?
00:44:21 ►
We get rid of the sickness,
00:44:24 ►
but we don’t necessarily make them healthy.
00:44:28 ►
And health is a different thing entirely.
00:44:31 ►
And he wanted to know, how do we make people healthy?
00:44:34 ►
And so he came up with this concept of salutogenesis.
00:44:37 ►
And one of the strong measurements for this was a sense of coherence,
00:44:43 ►
that your life is coherent. It makes sense.
00:44:46 ►
Everything fits together.
00:44:48 ►
If it does, no matter if you’re broke and starving or you’re rich and, you know, eat whatever you want,
00:44:55 ►
if you feel like there’s coherence in your life, you’re more likely to be healthy
00:44:59 ►
than somebody that thinks there’s some chaos, problems, they don’t have social networks, the coherence is lost.
00:45:06 ►
And this is not just in terms of psychosocial coping, but rather, let me see,
00:45:17 ►
weak SOC or sense of coherence was associated with increased incidences of sick leaves for women,
00:45:25 ►
an increased risk of myocardial infraction, fancy word for heart attack, for men in white-collar
00:45:32 ►
occupations, increased all causes of mortality, which is dying, and a poor subjective state of
00:45:40 ►
health, which means how you felt about how healthy you were. So if you weren’t coherent,
00:45:45 ►
it could kill you. Whereas the opposite is if people who had the strong sense of coherence
00:45:54 ►
had fewer of these problems. And so this became his big thing. Now, basically, the idea is that salutogenesis enhances health by improving physical, mental,
00:46:07 ►
and social well-being. It’s integrating all these things, and he’s trying to figure out
00:46:11 ►
what does that mean. There was one study that said, well, the more money you had, the more
00:46:16 ►
of this social coherence you had. In that particular study, it doesn’t play out. It’s not socioeconomic, but in that particular case, it was.
00:46:28 ►
Now, if we start looking at the subjective ayahuasca experiences,
00:46:34 ►
you start seeing this idea of more coherence,
00:46:39 ►
which has biological effects as well as the neurotransmitter stuff.
00:46:45 ►
It becomes a generalized resistance resource.
00:46:48 ►
In other words, you feel like you can cope with things.
00:46:51 ►
And remember I said with the folks using ayahuasca regularly,
00:46:54 ►
did objectively seem to be able to cope with changes in their environment very well.
00:47:02 ►
in their environment very well.
00:47:11 ►
And so this ayahuasca seems to be enhancing sense of coherence on top of enhancing your neurotransmitters,
00:47:16 ►
reducing your nutritional costs for those things,
00:47:19 ►
especially in poor diet situations.
00:47:22 ►
And so this seems to have something
00:47:26 ►
to do with it. Now on top of this, so it’s not
00:47:28 ►
just ayahuasca, again I want to pull it away from
00:47:29 ►
ayahuasca,
00:47:31 ►
many of you probably heard of Roland Griffith’s
00:47:34 ►
mysticism
00:47:35 ►
experiment with psilocybin,
00:47:38 ►
which was a sort of
00:47:39 ►
update of Walter Pankey’s
00:47:42 ►
Good Friday
00:47:43 ►
experiment.
00:47:46 ►
Pankey, he was a study of Leary,
00:47:48 ►
or a student of Leary’s.
00:47:50 ►
He gave a bunch of seminary
00:47:52 ►
students psilocybin and sent them
00:47:54 ►
to church to see if they had a mystic experience.
00:47:57 ►
It’s an interesting
00:47:58 ►
study, actually. It’s quite good.
00:48:00 ►
It’s well done. It was an attempt at
00:48:02 ►
double-blind, but
00:48:04 ►
missed on
00:48:05 ►
a couple of places.
00:48:07 ►
Well, Roland Griffiths,
00:48:10 ►
oh, by the way,
00:48:11 ►
Doblins went
00:48:13 ►
back and looked at this a few years later, another
00:48:15 ►
30-year thing,
00:48:17 ►
and he found that the
00:48:20 ►
effects of
00:48:21 ►
increased sense of spirituality
00:48:24 ►
and et cetera, all the mystic things stuck with them for their life,
00:48:27 ►
and a lot of them said
00:48:28 ►
that that was the,
00:48:31 ►
one of the top five,
00:48:32 ►
if not the most important event of my life.
00:48:36 ►
The people who got it didn’t get placebo.
00:48:38 ►
The placebo was niacin,
00:48:39 ►
which made people flush and feel really hot.
00:48:43 ►
It’s quite interesting,
00:48:44 ►
because the ones who had the placebo thought they had the drug
00:48:46 ►
because they all felt hot and crazy while the other ones felt normal and then it switched.
00:48:50 ►
And so there’s this really kind of wild sort of ride they all went on.
00:48:54 ►
But the Griffith study found that you can induce quite a strong mystic experience with psilocybin.
00:49:06 ►
And this, what is mysticism?
00:49:11 ►
Mysticism is the sense of unity with a bigger purpose
00:49:16 ►
or a bigger thing than you.
00:49:18 ►
It could be called God.
00:49:20 ►
It could be called the oneness.
00:49:21 ►
It could be called ecology.
00:49:23 ►
A lot of people model it in different ways,
00:49:26 ►
but a big mystical experience tends to have this idea of unity,
00:49:31 ►
which, another word for unity is coherence.
00:49:35 ►
And so it would increase a sense of coherence,
00:49:38 ►
which allows you, drops your stresses,
00:49:40 ►
so you’re not chewing up your neurotransmitters in the same way,
00:49:44 ►
adds to the neurotransmitters in the same way, adds to
00:49:45 ►
the neurotransmitters anyway and creates this buffer area, psychological buffer area.
00:49:51 ►
And so this is another sort of thread that ties in to this idea of psychological or psychedelic
00:50:00 ►
medicine.
00:50:01 ►
Now, the last, I promise, crazy, crazy term.
00:50:06 ►
This one’s from way back in 1935.
00:50:09 ►
Gregory Bateson came up with this idea.
00:50:12 ►
Schismogenesis.
00:50:14 ►
And this is very, again, jargony way of saying
00:50:19 ►
forces that drive a community apart.
00:50:24 ►
Okay?
00:50:26 ►
Schismogenesis can come in different ways.
00:50:29 ►
And if they’re not countered by various means, they will drive a group apart.
00:50:37 ►
Symmetrical schismogenic forces would be like fans of different football clubs.
00:50:44 ►
They boast, mine’s the best,
00:50:48 ►
Manchester all the way, no, Gillingham, you know.
00:50:50 ►
You got, you know, people, they’re irrational,
00:50:53 ►
but they start getting really bolstery
00:50:54 ►
and really like, no, mine’s the best,
00:50:56 ►
you won, but ours is still the best, you know.
00:50:59 ►
And this is symmetrical because it’s the same on both sides
00:51:01 ►
and these types of forces can drive a group apart.
00:51:06 ►
Not necessarily, you know, sometimes it is just play,
00:51:10 ►
but sometimes it ends up with people with bricks upside the head.
00:51:17 ►
Complementary schismogenic forces are,
00:51:21 ►
the example Bateson used in 35, mind you, very archaic time in the world,
00:51:28 ►
was the relationships between men and women,
00:51:32 ►
where men tend to have a domineering type of behavior
00:51:36 ►
and an accumulating power sort of position,
00:51:40 ►
whereas women withdrew and became submissive under those contexts,
00:51:47 ►
and that this force, this idea of imbalance in power,
00:51:53 ►
through socially mediated ways of behaving, would drive them apart,
00:51:57 ►
and what eventually led to a women’s movement,
00:52:01 ►
which became something of a complementary or a symmetrical rather.
00:52:06 ►
No, I’m not going to get in your face too.
00:52:10 ►
And these things in traditional societies will drive a community apart.
00:52:15 ►
And so you’ve got a small Amazonian tribe, a couple hundred people, and these rifts just
00:52:22 ►
say, okay, that’s it, I’m going to move away.
00:52:25 ►
And we become two villages it’s a little bit harder for us here you can’t just sort of be like we’ll be britain
00:52:32 ►
number two we try it devolution right uh scotland wales but you’re still under the nation state and
00:52:41 ►
it’s a little bit harder to do this and so so this puts somebody in what you might call a double bind situation.
00:52:51 ►
A double bind is damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
00:52:54 ►
Catch 22.
00:52:57 ►
And in the use of psychedelics, we’ve got this problem.
00:53:03 ►
Those who use them and understand them
00:53:05 ►
intuitively understand that they’re not bad for you.
00:53:10 ►
They can be if used wrong or poorly
00:53:13 ►
or if you’re a complete idiot and think you can fly
00:53:15 ►
and your friends say, yeah, you can.
00:53:17 ►
But the vast majority of cases, nothing happens.
00:53:20 ►
It’s good for you and then it has all this helpful stuff.
00:53:23 ►
The government, on the other hand says no no no no no
00:53:25 ►
it’s really bad it’s going to kill you it’s going to make everybody absolutely insane
00:53:28 ►
it’ll end society as we know it
00:53:31 ►
so you’re damned if you do
00:53:34 ►
because you’re going against the broader society
00:53:37 ►
you’re damned if you don’t because you’re lying against
00:53:39 ►
you’re lying about what you intuitively know inside
00:53:42 ►
and this is a force that would tend to drive a community apart,
00:53:47 ►
but we don’t have somewhere to go.
00:53:50 ►
And this double bind situation leads to stressors
00:53:57 ►
and stuff that can lead to poor health.
00:54:00 ►
So not only can these psychedelics be good for you
00:54:03 ►
and help you in health situations,
00:54:05 ►
but they can lead to stress, which can also help do the opposite,
00:54:09 ►
because of the way society is structured and these schismogenetic forces.
00:54:15 ►
And so it becomes very important that while we engage in sort of the clinical ideas of psychedelic healing,
00:54:25 ►
the communities engage in much more integrative behaviors with the broader society,
00:54:33 ►
which I’m trying through research and science,
00:54:37 ►
though every time I throw out science or somebody throws out science
00:54:40 ►
in that sort of symmetrical behavior,
00:54:44 ►
they get all complimentary and say,
00:54:46 ►
yeah, but my kid went crazy.
00:54:48 ►
So they change the rules.
00:54:50 ►
And so it becomes very difficult
00:54:53 ►
to mediate this schismogenic force
00:54:55 ►
in terms of psychedelic medicine.
00:54:57 ►
So the healing needs to come at a higher level.
00:55:02 ►
And this leads me to sort of talk about this splitting force,
00:55:09 ►
which has to do with the biological citizenship I talked about earlier at the beginning of the talk.
00:55:14 ►
I told you I’d come back to it.
00:55:15 ►
Some of you forgot all about it.
00:55:17 ►
Now you have to deal with it.
00:55:22 ►
The biological citizenship is kind of a schismogenic force
00:55:27 ►
in that you, if you are sick, need to find me the funding,
00:55:36 ►
me and my nice, comfortable lab, to find your cure.
00:55:42 ►
And you sort of fund a chunk of money to me.
00:55:46 ►
And that’s very cynical.
00:55:49 ►
But it seems that the system is geared up in this way
00:55:52 ►
to sort of milk the victims for the medical research.
00:55:56 ►
And I don’t think it’s necessarily, you know,
00:56:00 ►
David Icke dictating membrane lizard men type plots against us.
00:56:04 ►
But, you know, government even more so now is wanting everything we do to have marketable, immediately marketable outcomes.
00:56:14 ►
There have been a lot of weird talks about how they’re going to restructure universities, some of which you probably heard in the news.
00:56:20 ►
And so a lot of small but very horrible diseases and illnesses aren’t money churners.
00:56:30 ►
Right?
00:56:31 ►
So we don’t study them.
00:56:32 ►
Or there’s not money coming in unless we as the population give it to them.
00:56:37 ►
So it’s not invested in.
00:56:39 ►
Now, this leads to the finding of medications that you can sell.
00:56:51 ►
And again, and again, and again.
00:56:53 ►
And you can see this sort of return for investment concept is one of the big strong forces against using plant medicines.
00:57:02 ►
I can grow them.
00:57:03 ►
I can grow them in England if I have a greenhouse.
00:57:08 ►
Now, so if you have something
00:57:10 ►
that not only is somewhat effective and free,
00:57:14 ►
but makes you say at the end of life,
00:57:16 ►
you know what?
00:57:17 ►
I don’t have to make money for those guys to do research.
00:57:21 ►
I’m okay with the fact that I’m going to die.
00:57:23 ►
I’m going to live until I die.
00:57:26 ►
And I’m not going to worry about all that.
00:57:29 ►
Research funding dries up.
00:57:31 ►
Also, you know, you don’t have somebody coming for various other treatments,
00:57:38 ►
which are very expensive and turn money again.
00:57:41 ►
And in my most cynical phase,
00:57:47 ►
I even get down to the nitty gritty about what’s a drug
00:57:48 ►
and what’s legal and illegal.
00:57:50 ►
And I’ve come to this sort of weird idea
00:57:52 ►
that legal drugs are the ones
00:57:54 ►
that you’re productive
00:57:55 ►
while you’re on them.
00:57:56 ►
And you can take again and again,
00:57:58 ►
Prozac, caffeine.
00:58:00 ►
Whereas the ones that might lead
00:58:02 ►
to ultimately more productive behavior,
00:58:04 ►
but while you’re on them, so you can’t have them all day long,
00:58:07 ►
don’t make you necessarily productive.
00:58:09 ►
You’re not going to do a very good job in the factory
00:58:11 ►
tripping balls off and lose your arm in the thing.
00:58:17 ►
But the overall changes in health,
00:58:19 ►
less sick days and stuff might be ultimately profitable even,
00:58:25 ►
but you can’t have somebody taking it again and again and again and again and again
00:58:29 ►
and maintaining that sense or that productivity while they’re on it.
00:58:34 ►
It’s a very cynical point of view that I’ve come to looking at all this sort of stuff.
00:58:39 ►
So these are things we need to get into and think about in re-evaluating our ideas of healing to address these forces
00:58:52 ►
that drive the market against healing and that drive people against doctors and drive
00:58:59 ►
people who want to do something versus the people who don’t want you to do it. And the healing that we can do through this process needs to take into account
00:59:10 ►
all of these broader social forces that are out there.
00:59:15 ►
Next chapter, maybe in a few months, I’ll have the data from people who actually take these things
00:59:22 ►
and talk about them as medicine or healing, and I can tell you more about how they experience it.
00:59:27 ►
Many of them will have biological concepts,
00:59:29 ►
and many will have more mystical, spiritual, illness-type concepts.
00:59:33 ►
I hope to find a nice variety of fun stuff to talk about.
00:59:37 ►
So I’ll fill this out at that point,
00:59:39 ►
and I won’t sound like a white-coat clinician next time
00:59:43 ►
when we have a conference that Dave might want to tell
00:59:46 ►
you about. But other than that, I’m done. You’re listening to the psychedelic salon,
00:59:56 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:00:03 ►
You know, as I was listening to Cameron speak just now and then heard his announcement about his ongoing research,
01:00:10 ►
it really gave me a good feeling that the psychedelic community has at long last found some permanent footing in our societies.
01:00:18 ►
As you know, psychedelics were driven completely underground in the 70s,
01:00:22 ►
and all research into their properties
01:00:25 ►
essentially came to a halt for several decades.
01:00:28 ►
But gradually things have begun to pick up lately,
01:00:30 ►
and not a moment too soon, I should add.
01:00:34 ►
As you no doubt know,
01:00:35 ►
both Sasha Shulgin and Myron Stolaroff
01:00:38 ►
have been hospitalized recently,
01:00:40 ►
and while they are both at home now,
01:00:42 ►
they still have some physical challenges ahead of them.
01:00:46 ►
So while we are very saddened by the fading away of some of our elders,
01:00:52 ►
you know, the women and men who kept the torch alive during the really dark years,
01:00:57 ►
well, we and our elders, I think, should all be very heartened to see young women and men
01:01:03 ►
like those at the University of Kent
01:01:06 ►
who are now building on the foundation that has been laid for us by those great elders.
01:01:11 ►
And so the great work continues, and the spirits of the ancient alchemists are stirring once again.
01:01:19 ►
And should you want to get in touch with Cameron Adams yourself,
01:01:22 ►
you can reach him directly via email at
01:01:25 ►
C.L.Adams
01:01:28 ►
That’s all, essentially, with no
01:01:30 ►
spaces. C.L.Adams
01:01:32 ►
at kent.ac.uk
01:01:35 ►
And he’s also on Facebook
01:01:38 ►
in case you want to connect with him there.
01:01:40 ►
And in case
01:01:42 ►
you can get to Kent this coming April,
01:01:44 ►
that’s April 2nd and 3rd of 2011
01:01:47 ►
there’s going to be a psychedelic conference being held there
01:01:50 ►
with the support of MAPS and our friend Amanda Fielding
01:01:54 ►
the conference is titled Breaking Convention
01:01:57 ►
a multidisciplinary conference on psychedelic consciousness
01:02:01 ►
and I’ll put a link to their website
01:02:04 ►
where you can keep up with the lineup of speakers
01:02:06 ►
as they’re confirmed.
01:02:08 ►
So, great work there, Cameron and friends.
01:02:10 ►
I hope you’ll send us some recordings
01:02:12 ►
from your conference for us to share here in the salon.
01:02:15 ►
And I’m pretty sure that’ll happen,
01:02:17 ►
so stay tuned.
01:02:20 ►
If I wasn’t pressed for time right now,
01:02:22 ►
there are a couple of things I’d like to expand on from Cameron’s talk,
01:02:26 ►
but let me instead just give you one headline here, and that is to recommend, very highly recommend,
01:02:33 ►
that you read a copy of Bruce Lipton’s book, The Biology of Belief.
01:02:38 ►
And I think you’ll find some amazing insights in that that directly tie to some of the concepts that we just heard.
01:02:44 ►
some amazing insights in that that directly tie to some of the concepts that we just heard.
01:02:53 ►
Also, if I heard him correctly, Cameron mentioned something that sounded like schismogenesis or something like that,
01:02:56 ►
the concept of driving a group apart.
01:03:01 ►
Well, I think that’s exactly what happened out here in California last month when Proposition 19, the bill to legalize cannabis, was defeated.
01:03:07 ►
While I was still trying to decide how to frame my own response to the defeat of Prop 19,
01:03:12 ►
I heard another podcaster give a short rap about it, and he said exactly what I was thinking,
01:03:18 ►
but he said it so much better than I could that I thought I’d play it for you right now.
01:03:22 ►
I thought I’d play it for you right now.
01:03:28 ►
And this is a short segment from Dope Fiend’s podcast number 247.
01:03:34 ►
And that’s found at dopefiend.co.uk, number 247.
01:03:36 ►
And here’s what he had to say.
01:03:45 ►
Now, of course, the whole Proposition 19 debate is well and truly dead and buried.
01:03:54 ►
But one person who stood out among the crowd and actually put the opposition’s point of view to the Dope Tribe is Abu. He fought a hard fight over at the forums and did actually in the end decide to go out and vote for Proposition 19,
01:04:01 ►
even though he didn’t think it would do any good.
01:04:04 ►
And you’ve got to say, I guess he was right on that one but at least he had the courage to kind of stand up and go against
01:04:11 ►
what he’d been arguing for all along and he said in this email he says i was very pleased that you
01:04:16 ►
included my comments even though i know you and most of your listeners are unlikely to agree
01:04:21 ►
but i think you did an excellent job of treating my input with fairness
01:04:25 ►
and equanimity, and it deserves to be commended. I have found the Grow Report forums to be one of
01:04:30 ►
the better cannabis boards out there, and I really enjoy the podcasts, especially Xandor and Mrs. Z.
01:04:37 ►
If from time to time, however, I see an opportunity to raise the level of discussion,
01:04:42 ►
I hope you won’t be offended if I express an opinion that might seem outspoken
01:04:46 ►
given the context of the site and the community.
01:04:49 ►
If cannabis is ever to move from being illegal globally,
01:04:54 ►
the first thing that its consumers should do
01:04:56 ►
is make sure that they are behaving like intelligent, responsible people
01:05:00 ►
and not presenting Exhibit A of the stereotypical image of the pothead
01:05:05 ►
so frequently perpetuated in the media.
01:05:08 ►
This is where your program succeeds, in my opinion.
01:05:11 ►
So thanks again, Dope Fiend, and keep up the good work.
01:05:14 ►
Well, thank you very much, Abu.
01:05:16 ►
And I’ve got to say, I was reading a blog post by Jodie Emery last week
01:05:21 ►
about her participation in the yes on 19 campaign and how wandering around oakland
01:05:30 ►
she stumbled into a few crowds of anti-19 stoners if you see what i mean these are cannabis users
01:05:39 ►
cannabis growers some of them who were vocally against proposition 19 and the points that they put
01:05:48 ►
forward and some of the points put forward in the comments on this blog post i’ll put the link in
01:05:54 ►
the dopefiend.co.uk web page were so closed-minded you know they didn’t even come close to Abu’s arguments. They were just selfish, foolish, and, you know, totally unrealistic.
01:06:10 ►
I mean, some people were just saying, look, we’re growers, we’re protecting ourselves.
01:06:13 ►
That’s our right.
01:06:15 ►
We don’t care about anybody else.
01:06:16 ►
We want to make money from this stuff.
01:06:18 ►
And that kind of attitude in a community that’s supposed to be all about sharing and oneness, togetherness, is really quite distressing to me.
01:06:27 ►
You know, it totally goes against what I think the cannabis community is all about.
01:06:31 ►
And I wonder what kind of weed these people are smoking,
01:06:33 ►
because it certainly doesn’t seem to be having much of an effect.
01:06:36 ►
But then there’s people who are saying,
01:06:38 ►
of course we didn’t vote for Proposition 19.
01:06:41 ►
We wanted Jack Harris’ system,
01:06:43 ►
which, you know, allows you to have basically
01:06:46 ►
as much weed as you want and grow as much weed as you want and not pay any tax on it. And, you know,
01:06:53 ►
we’re holding out until we get that. But that is absolutely absurd. I mean, what planet are these
01:06:59 ►
people living on? It’s like saying I won’t vote for lower taxes because I’m waiting until there are no taxes at all.
01:07:08 ►
You know, you’ve got to work within the parameters of the society in which we exist.
01:07:13 ►
And for these people, I mean, I wonder, you know, if they’ve ever come face to face with the real harms done by the war on drugs to human beings.
01:07:27 ►
You know, they must be living in cloud cuckoo land because there are real people out there who have done nothing more
01:07:31 ►
than use a herb that grows naturally on this planet for their own recreation
01:07:38 ►
and they’re in jail for it.
01:07:41 ►
They’ve given up their liberty.
01:07:44 ►
They’ve given up their status as a contributing
01:07:46 ►
member of society they’ve given up their lives and that is disgusting and anything we can do
01:07:55 ►
to stop that happening i think should be done so what if we have to pay a bit of tax we have to pay
01:08:01 ►
tax for so many things in life that is part of what’s called a functioning
01:08:05 ►
society really i don’t have an issue with tax you know if if my putting some money into the pot
01:08:12 ►
means that people who get in trouble are able to get legal aid or people who get in trouble are
01:08:19 ►
able to get a bit of money to help them you know before they find their next piece of work or our dustbins are taken away on
01:08:26 ►
time or you know our local government is run you know in some sort of fashion i’m not saying it’s
01:08:33 ►
perfect of course it’s not but you know we need some sort of a system in place and it can’t be
01:08:40 ►
anarchy it just wouldn’t work and so while we’re within this system we have to play
01:08:47 ►
by their rules to some extent and if we’re gonna get cannabis legalized it has to be within some
01:08:53 ►
sort of framework that applies to this society anyway that debate’s over and done with we’ll
01:08:59 ►
see what happens in 2012 but i just wanted to give a bit of a shout out to abu for standing up to some
01:09:06 ►
robust uh opposition from the dope tribe
01:09:10 ►
well thank you for that dope fiend as i said i couldn’t have said it better myself
01:09:17 ►
so how about it growers medical marijuana people and the overall cannabis community
01:09:24 ►
but growers, medical marijuana people, and the overall cannabis community?
01:09:28 ►
What do you say that we try to get on the same page now?
01:09:33 ►
But, as I said in my personal blog about the defeat of Proposition 19,
01:09:37 ►
well, screw politics and support your neighborhood grower.
01:09:41 ►
But enough negativity from me.
01:09:43 ►
Let’s end on a really happy note.
01:09:47 ►
And that’s the fact that Bruce Dahmer has backed up the entire collection of podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon onto the
01:09:51 ►
Internet Archive at archive.org.
01:09:55 ►
This was a really monstrous job, and it took a lot of time to get done,
01:09:59 ►
so we all owe Bruce a great big thank you.
01:10:03 ►
And one of the reasons I think this was so important,
01:10:05 ►
if we are really going to preserve these recordings,
01:10:09 ►
is that besides being backed up on three continents,
01:10:12 ►
that going forward as audio formats come and go,
01:10:16 ►
the Archive will continue to make them available
01:10:18 ►
in whatever the dominant audio and video formats are at the time.
01:10:22 ►
Also, to ensure that even long after I’m gone,
01:10:26 ►
these talks and workshops will still be available,
01:10:29 ►
the Internet Archive is probably the safest place to store this material
01:10:33 ►
in a way that’s still accessible to anyone who’s interested and at no cost.
01:10:39 ►
And I put a link to the archive on our program notes page,
01:10:43 ►
but you can also find it by going directly to archive.org and searching on psychedelia.
01:10:49 ►
That’s P-S-Y-C-H-E-D-E-L-I-A, psychedelia collection.
01:10:56 ►
And that will take you to a page that begins by saying,
01:11:01 ►
Welcome to psychedelia.
01:11:03 ►
Three organizations are joining forces on this new collection called psychedelia. by saying, and some video resources surrounding the psychedelic experience and thinking that has continued to shape the mind of humanity.
01:11:30 ►
While up to now, all of this has actually been Bruce’s effort,
01:11:34 ►
over time we hope to engage our fellow Saloners to contribute to this archive as well.
01:11:40 ►
As Bruce envisions it, the Psychedelia Collection is meant to grow into the
01:11:44 ►
largest collection of all things psychedelic.
01:11:47 ►
Voice, video, art, writing, and thinking from all ages.
01:11:50 ►
And should you have any audio or video material in digital format that you think would be suitable for adding to this collection,
01:11:58 ►
I would encourage you to contact Bruce about it directly, and he’ll help you get it into the collection.
01:12:04 ►
contact Bruce about it directly, and he’ll help you get it into the collection.
01:12:10 ►
And the best way to contact Bruce is via the contact button on his website at damer, D-A-M-E-R, damer.com.
01:12:13 ►
And you’ll be hearing more about some plans that Bruce and I have for future
01:12:17 ►
salon podcasts and of ways to get our fellow salonners involved more involved
01:12:23 ►
as well.
01:12:24 ►
But that’ll have to wait for a week or so,
01:12:26 ►
because I’ve got miles to go yet before I sleep tonight.
01:12:29 ►
But before I go, I do want to give one more quick shout-out,
01:12:33 ►
and that’s to DJ Pecos the Cat,
01:12:35 ►
who filled in for Bebe in her Episode 39 podcast from Bebe’s Bungalow.
01:12:41 ►
In that program, he featured some old-time American stoner music from the 1920s and 30s,
01:12:47 ►
and it did more to lift my spirits than all the holiday music I’ll be hearing in the weeks ahead.
01:12:52 ►
So, hey, great playlist, Pecos.
01:12:55 ►
Thanks for doing that.
01:12:57 ►
Well, that’s definitely got to do it for now,
01:12:59 ►
and so I’ll close today’s podcast by again reminding you that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:13:05 ►
are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects
01:13:09 ►
under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license.
01:13:14 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
01:13:20 ►
which you can find via psychedelicsalon.org.
01:13:23 ►
And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the salon,
01:13:26 ►
you can hear something about it in my novel,
01:13:29 ►
The Genesis Generation,
01:13:31 ►
which is available as a pay-what-you-can audiobook
01:13:33 ►
that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:13:38 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:13:43 ►
Be well, my friends.