Program Notes
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Guest speakers: James Fadiman and Ayelet Waldman
Mike Margolies, Ayelet Waldman, and James Fadiman
Date this interview was recorded: October 22, 2018.
Today’s podcast centers around microdosing psychedelics, LSD in particular. Much of today’s interest in microdosing psychedelics blossomed after the publication of The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, which was written by Dr. James Fadiman, who has been featured here in the Salon in the past. And we are fortunate today to listen to a conversation between Jim Fadiman and Ayelet Waldman, author of A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life. Their conversation was moderated by Mike Margolies, who you already know from his work a year or so ago on the Blue Dot Tour, from which we heard many podcasts. This conversation is one of a series of live streamed events presented by Psychedelic Seminars, the San Francisco Psychedelic Society, and Simulation.
“I think psychedelics are great for people who don’t like meditation, and I think that for people who like meditation they’re also very good.” -James Fadiman
Psychedelic Seminars
Hosted by Mike Margolies
James Fadiman’s Website
Ayelet Waldman’s Website
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Psychedelic Seminars
Microdosing: The Benefits, Risks, & Unknowns w/ Jim Fadiman & Ayelet Waldman
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
And I’m excited to bring you today’s program for a couple of reasons.
00:00:28 ►
The first, of course, is that the topic is something that I’ve been getting a lot of questions about, microdosing.
00:00:35 ►
But the other reason is that I’m very pleased to play an interview from a major public event
00:00:41 ►
whose producer is one of our fellow salonners, Mike Margolis.
00:00:47 ►
Now, if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while, you’ll remember Mike as part of the
00:00:52 ►
Symposia team who, along with Lex Pelger, did that Blue Dot Tour from which we’ve been able to
00:00:58 ►
listen to many hours of great stories from psychonauts all across this land. Today, Mike is living in San Francisco, where he has helped to launch the Psychedelic Seminars
00:01:09 ►
project, in which he interviews guests in a theater setting that’s also a live stream
00:01:14 ►
event.
00:01:16 ►
In fact, just a few days from now, his next program is going to take place, and I’ll put
00:01:21 ►
a link to that in today’s program notes, which you’ll find at psychedelicsalon.com.
00:01:26 ►
But here are the details. On Wednesday, May 15th, Mike’s guest is going to be Dr. Raquel Bennett.
00:01:33 ►
And the topic of their conversation is going to be ketamine, foreshadowing the psychedelic
00:01:39 ►
medicine landscape. And even if you aren’t in San Francisco in that area, you can at least watch
00:01:46 ►
their conversation on a live stream. And as you’ll hear in just a few minutes, these are really
00:01:52 ►
interesting conversations that Mike hosts. And in fact, the one that I’m about to play for you is no
00:01:57 ►
exception. I remember hearing last year about this woman attorney who wrote a book that’s titled A Really Good Day,
00:02:06 ►
How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life.
00:02:11 ►
And while I’m a lawyer myself, I retired long ago and my children by then were already established
00:02:19 ►
before I took the chance of going public about my own psychedelic use and started these podcasts from the Psychedelic
00:02:25 ►
Salon. But compared to the risk that Aliette Waldman took in publishing a book about microdosing
00:02:32 ►
in, well, during today’s uncertain political atmosphere, well, my own little coming out was
00:02:37 ►
a relative non-event. Aliette’s courage far surpasses that of a lot of people that I know.
00:02:43 ►
Well, yes, courage far surpasses that of a lot of people that I know.
00:02:48 ►
And the other person that Mike interviews here is Jim Fadiman.
00:02:54 ►
For our longtime salonners, well, you’ve heard from Jim in several other podcasts.
00:02:59 ►
In fact, after Jim’s landmark book, The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, was published,
00:03:03 ►
my friend Matt Palomary, who, in fact, we just heard from last week.
00:03:08 ►
Well, Matt came here to the salon, and together we interviewed Jim,
00:03:13 ►
and that interview you can listen to in Salon’s Podcast number 302.
00:03:17 ►
And by the way, if you don’t already have a copy of that book, well, you ought to yourself to buy one.
00:03:20 ►
If you only have one book in your psychedelic library,
00:03:23 ►
Jim Fadiman’s Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, well, that should be it.
00:03:28 ►
And in case you don’t already know this about Jim Fadiman, in my opinion, he is our most senior psychedelic elder.
00:03:37 ►
Just look at who he’s worked with, and dare I say tripped with as well?
00:03:41 ►
Who knows? I don’t.
00:03:41 ►
I say tripped with as well?
00:03:43 ►
Who knows? I don’t.
00:03:45 ►
But who else can say that they’ve had experiences of one
00:03:48 ►
kind or another with the legendary
00:03:50 ►
Al Hubbard, who was
00:03:52 ►
often called the Johnny Apple
00:03:54 ►
seat of LSD back in the 50s.
00:03:56 ►
And in addition to
00:03:58 ►
working with Hubbard, Jim was
00:04:00 ►
also Myron Stolaroff’s closest
00:04:01 ►
associate during the hundreds of
00:04:04 ►
psychedelic experiments carried
00:04:05 ►
out at the Menlo Park facility. Plus, another of the superstars who Jim knew and worked with
00:04:12 ►
was Humphrey Osmond, the man who actually coined the word psychedelic. Well, there’s a lot more
00:04:19 ►
about Jim’s deep connection to our community that I’d like to tell you about. But let me get out of the way right now and play this recording of, I think,
00:04:27 ►
an extremely interesting and timely conversation about microdosing
00:04:32 ►
that took place between two people whose books and other work have played
00:04:37 ►
really significant roles in the current interest in microdosing psychedelic medicines.
00:04:44 ►
We’re ready to get the seminar started. I’m going to bring up your host and your two guests. Current Interest in Microdosing Psychedelic Medicines.
00:04:46 ►
We’re ready to get the seminar started.
00:04:49 ►
I’m going to bring up your host and your two guests.
00:04:51 ►
We have an amazing panel tonight.
00:04:55 ►
Your first host, the host of the evening, is Mr. Mike Margulies,
00:04:57 ►
the founder of Psychedelic Seminars.
00:04:58 ►
Give it up for Mike Margulies.
00:04:59 ►
Yes.
00:05:01 ►
Amazing.
00:05:06 ►
Oh, I thought you were going to just me out.
00:05:07 ►
So, hey.
00:05:09 ►
One more time for Mike Margulies.
00:05:10 ►
All right.
00:05:14 ►
And our first guest of the evening is Ayelet Wallman.
00:05:17 ►
She’s the author of A Really Good Day, How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life.
00:05:22 ►
She was a federal public defender and a professor at UC Berkeley Law School
00:05:26 ►
where she developed and taught a course on the legal implication on the war of drugs.
00:05:30 ►
She’s doing amazing work.
00:05:31 ►
Give it up for Ms. Ayala Wallman.
00:05:34 ►
Thank you very much.
00:05:36 ►
Thank you.
00:05:38 ►
And our final guest, I’m so excited to bring him out, is Dr. Jim Fadiman.
00:05:44 ►
Yeah.
00:05:44 ►
Give it up for Jim Fadiman. Yeah!
00:05:46 ►
Jim Fadiman.
00:05:49 ►
He was a psychologist who’s been involved with psychedelic research since the
00:05:51 ►
1960s. He’s the author of the
00:05:53 ►
Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide, which
00:05:55 ►
popularized the modern wave of microdosing.
00:05:58 ►
And that doesn’t even scratch the surface.
00:06:00 ►
I asked him backstage, what would you like me
00:06:01 ►
to introduce you as? And he said, just tell him
00:06:03 ►
I’ve been doing LSD since it’s been legal.
00:06:05 ►
Okay, that’s fair.
00:06:08 ►
So please, give it up for Mr. Jim Fadiman.
00:06:11 ►
Thank you very much, sir.
00:06:13 ►
Thank you.
00:06:15 ►
Thank you, Neil.
00:06:17 ►
All right.
00:06:18 ►
Well, thank you, everybody, for being here.
00:06:20 ►
Thank you, everyone who’s here in San Francisco and everyone who’s watching online.
00:06:24 ►
Aiel and Jim, thanks for being here. It’s a pleasure. here in San Francisco and everyone who’s watching online. Ayelet and Jim, thanks for being here.
00:06:26 ►
It’s a pleasure.
00:06:28 ►
I’m really a big fan of stories,
00:06:30 ►
so I think a great way to kick us off
00:06:31 ►
would be, Ayelet, your personal story
00:06:33 ►
that you share in the beginning of the book.
00:06:36 ►
How did you end up
00:06:37 ►
into microdosing and connecting with Jim?
00:06:41 ►
I ended up
00:06:42 ►
out of desperation. I didn’t come
00:06:44 ►
to microdosing through psychedelics or an interest in psychedelics.
00:06:47 ►
I came to microdosing through an interest in not killing myself.
00:06:52 ►
I have a mood disorder, and I had a very well-controlled mood disorder
00:06:57 ►
until I went into perimenopause, which is a period before menopause.
00:07:03 ►
And then the medications that I’ve been using on a very strict schedule
00:07:06 ►
to control my mood disorder, which was closely tied to my periods,
00:07:11 ►
just stopped working.
00:07:12 ►
And I explored all sorts of different medications,
00:07:16 ►
traditional pharmaceuticals, and nothing worked.
00:07:18 ►
And I was getting more and more and more desperate
00:07:20 ►
until I found myself evaluating the contents of my medicine cabinet
00:07:24 ►
to see what would kill me most efficiently. And at that point, when you’re a writer, I’m primarily
00:07:30 ►
a novelist, but also right now I’m fiction, when you’re a writer, books kind of come into
00:07:35 ►
your house. You don’t really know why. They just sort of show up. And I taught for many
00:07:38 ►
years. I wasn’t a professor at Bolthole. I taught for many years a seminar on the war
00:07:43 ►
on drugs and did drug policy reform work. so drug books would come into my house.
00:07:48 ►
And Jim’s book showed up in my house.
00:07:51 ►
I must have bought it, I think. I’m not sure why.
00:07:56 ►
But I’ll be honest, the first time I saw it, I was like, I’m not a
00:07:59 ►
psychedelic explorer, so I didn’t look at it. And then
00:08:03 ►
somehow, fortuitously, when I needed it most,
00:08:06 ►
I picked it up in this period that I was so depressed and was contemplating permanent
00:08:13 ►
solutions to my depression. And I was reading through the book, and right away I found this
00:08:19 ►
chapter on microdosing. And I read it very avidly, obviously paying closest attention to the effects of microdosing on depression.
00:08:28 ►
And then I went online and I found this interview with Jim
00:08:32 ►
in which he talked about how microdosing doesn’t cause you
00:08:36 ►
to hallucinate. It’s sub-perceptual. It’s not about
00:08:40 ►
seeing kaleidoscopic colors. The way he
00:08:44 ►
recounted it was the way that one woman
00:08:45 ►
who had experienced it told him, she said that at the end
00:08:49 ►
of the day, she looked back and she thought, oh,
00:08:52 ►
that was a really good day. And that phrase
00:08:55 ►
just resonated for me because I had been all but
00:08:57 ►
anhedonic for months, maybe even
00:09:01 ►
longer, and I had not had anything approaching a really good day.
00:09:04 ►
And I did something that is sort of the height of chutzpah.
00:09:08 ►
I got in touch with Jim, and he’s this incredibly generous, loving person,
00:09:15 ►
and he spoke to me on the phone for a long time about what I was looking for and why I was looking.
00:09:23 ►
And then eventually I decided to try a 30-day experiment,
00:09:27 ►
microdosing with LSD, and to write a book about the experiment.
00:09:30 ►
Amazing.
00:09:32 ►
Yeah, really awesome.
00:09:34 ►
And Jim, actually, there’s an unlikely story you have
00:09:37 ►
of how that chapter ended up in the book in the first place.
00:09:40 ►
That was from a misunderstanding.
00:09:42 ►
Well, I have to admit,
00:09:47 ►
everything that I have written as absolutely the necessities of microdosing
00:09:49 ►
are both I made it up and most of it’s wrong.
00:09:54 ►
In other words, real science.
00:10:03 ►
I understood that Albert Hoffman, who lived to be 102 and at age 100 was giving several hour-long lectures,
00:10:13 ►
had some good ideas about health, aside from having created LSD.
00:10:18 ►
And I understood that he micro-dosed with 10 micrograms or so fairly often,
00:10:25 ►
and that was the secret of his excellent health.
00:10:28 ►
Totally wrong.
00:10:32 ►
He attributes his excellent health, among other things,
00:10:35 ►
to an inversion table every day,
00:10:38 ►
eggs for breakfast,
00:10:41 ►
and a few kind of healthy things like that.
00:10:44 ►
He did take very low doses, 20 or more.
00:10:49 ►
When he would take walks in the woods, they helped him clarify his thoughts.
00:10:54 ►
So it had nothing to do with what I was inventing.
00:10:58 ►
But I told everybody I was inventing it because Albert Hoffman had done that.
00:11:03 ►
told everybody I was inventing it because Albert Hoffman had done that.
00:11:08 ►
So somehow it seemed to me that 10 micrograms was a good amount
00:11:11 ►
that would perhaps have effects because
00:11:14 ►
I talked to several people who had done in that range and they said
00:11:19 ►
it had good effects. So what I do
00:11:23 ►
is kind of what I now have called citizen science, which
00:11:27 ►
is called asking your friends. And a lot of my friends were happy to find out. They said
00:11:35 ►
never took anything that low. So people would take 10 micrograms and they would, as I said, they would feel better.
00:11:45 ►
They would have a good day.
00:11:47 ►
They would have no psychedelic effects, which disappointed most of them.
00:11:56 ►
And gradually, friends talked to friends who talked to people they didn’t know that well
00:12:03 ►
to talk to people in other states,
00:12:05 ►
and I would start to get these reports because that was my request.
00:12:09 ►
And early on, it turned out for many people
00:12:12 ►
that not only 10 micrograms was nice,
00:12:16 ►
in whatever way that means,
00:12:17 ►
and we’ll spend time on it, I’m sure,
00:12:19 ►
but it seemed to have a two-day effect,
00:12:23 ►
which is something which those of you who have had more than 10 micrograms,
00:12:28 ►
and although the lights are out, I can see you.
00:12:34 ►
And a couple of you who came with friends, I can see you too, but you don’t know why you’re here.
00:12:42 ►
But 10 micrograms seemed to have a two-day effect.
00:12:44 ►
but 10 micrograms seem to have a two-day effect.
00:12:50 ►
And then I realized one of the things that us high-dose explorers of many years had always neglected was the fact that a high dose had a many, many, many, many days effect.
00:12:58 ►
You know, all of you know that LSD takes 8 to 12 hours,
00:13:01 ►
psilocybin is 5 to 7, DMT is whoosh!
00:13:04 ►
takes 8 to 12 hours, psilocybin is 5 to 7, DMT is whoosh!
00:13:14 ►
But we all kind of neglected what we all did call the glow, the afterglow.
00:13:19 ►
Now the people doing Ibogaine for getting rid of addiction,
00:13:21 ►
they’re really clear about that afterglow is absolutely critical.
00:13:32 ►
But we kind of ignored it, but the fact is when you take a psychedelic it leaves your body fairly soon but its effects don’t leave you for quite a long time so anyway there was two days at least so that seemed like thrifty to not take it every day
00:13:39 ►
and then since i wanted to know what the effects were I said to people don’t take it on that third day they said why they said because I want you to come down
00:13:51 ►
so you can tell the difference and they said what do you care and I said well that’s my game is I
00:13:58 ►
like to find out what people experience so I would get reports of people who were taking it on day one, perhaps seeing it on
00:14:08 ►
day two. Several people said day two was even better. Day three, they would be down. And day
00:14:14 ►
four, they’d say, whoa, yeah, I remember day one. So I began to develop the notion that people would
00:14:20 ►
tell me stuff. Now, how long would people tell me stuff
00:14:25 ►
who were getting no benefit from it
00:14:27 ►
and were missing that third day from their point of view?
00:14:31 ►
I figured maybe a month.
00:14:33 ►
So I came up with a notion of,
00:14:34 ►
please take psychedelics, various kinds,
00:14:39 ►
LSD, mushrooms, etc.,
00:14:41 ►
on that schedule for a month and let me know.
00:14:45 ►
And after the month is over, do whatever you want.
00:14:49 ►
That has been translated into, and I read it in places,
00:14:52 ►
the Fadiman Protocol locks you into a lifetime of one day on, two days off.
00:15:02 ►
And the dose is limited to whatever it is you read that’s science
00:15:08 ►
and that’s media see it’s really hard for media to grab the extra sentence
00:15:15 ►
which is after the month do what’s correct for your own body that’s not a
00:15:21 ►
very interesting sentence so it rarely appears but while you’re here and while you
00:15:27 ►
streamers are here that’s the way it was developed which is to try and explore the space
00:15:35 ►
the kind of event space of microdosing and one of the most successful spacers is on my right,
00:15:46 ►
because Ayla was as interested in what was going on for her
00:15:53 ►
as in general what was going on in her life.
00:15:57 ►
So she started keeping these wonderful observations,
00:16:01 ►
and I would get these lovely little reports with little boxes,
00:16:04 ►
and this attitude, and I would get these lovely little reports with little boxes and this attitude and this behavior.
00:16:07 ►
Because I have OCD.
00:16:08 ►
You’ve got a very neurotically constructed chart.
00:16:10 ►
Yeah, it was great.
00:16:13 ►
Researchers love OCD people.
00:16:16 ►
I get people that say, I’m an engineer,
00:16:18 ►
and then I know I’m going to get some incredible table of effects.
00:16:23 ►
So that’s really how it started. And as you now know, it’s gotten out of effects. So that’s really how it started.
00:16:26 ►
And as you now know, it’s gotten out of hand.
00:16:32 ►
Yeah, and actually, as you alluded to,
00:16:35 ►
it took very detailed notes.
00:16:37 ►
The book actually tracks your progress one day at a time.
00:16:40 ►
It’s constructed as that 30-day experiment.
00:16:43 ►
I mean, very quickly I realized, I set out just to take notes on what I was experiencing.
00:16:48 ►
Very quickly I realized that I was actually writing a book because I gave myself the month off work.
00:16:55 ►
And I just said, well, write whatever you want.
00:16:57 ►
And so I ended up doing, writing about the history, you know, learning during the course of this month about the history of psychedelics.
00:17:05 ►
So I wrote about that.
00:17:05 ►
Learning about the neurochemistry of psychedelics.
00:17:07 ►
So I wrote about that.
00:17:09 ►
Learning about brain science.
00:17:10 ►
So I wrote about that.
00:17:11 ►
I knew a lot already about the war on drugs because my area of expertise was from a sort of criminal justice reform and the prosecution of the war on drugs in the United States from the very founding of the country.
00:17:25 ►
And I sort of wrote about that and the history of the prosecution of drugs.
00:17:30 ►
Short answer, it’s all about race, as is everything in this country.
00:17:35 ►
So I wrote about that.
00:17:36 ►
I wrote about my marriage.
00:17:37 ►
I wrote about my kids.
00:17:38 ►
And so I ended up with this book.
00:17:39 ►
I always say that this book is like the book LSD wrote because what LSD does, to put it very simply,
00:17:47 ►
one of the things that LSD does in your brain is it seems to cause different parts of your brain that don’t normally communicate to communicate in novel ways.
00:17:55 ►
So this is a book that has lots and lots of pieces that wouldn’t normally be in the same book,
00:17:59 ►
but they are integrated in novel and, I think, interesting ways.
00:18:02 ►
I actually appreciate how you did that, how the book kind of weaves in and out
00:18:05 ►
between what you’re personally experiencing and going into the history of the drug war
00:18:09 ►
and psychedelic history, and it kind of gives people both a personal
00:18:13 ►
and a historical perspective at the same time,
00:18:15 ►
and you kind of take people along the journey with you
00:18:17 ►
as you’re learning about yourself, learning about the back history there.
00:18:21 ►
Thank you.
00:18:22 ►
Yeah, and so how did your experience line up with others that you read in Jim’s research
00:18:26 ►
with the transition day and all that?
00:18:28 ►
Well, I think, you know, I did it exactly as I took it very seriously as a protocol.
00:18:32 ►
For me, it was written in the book.
00:18:33 ►
Got to do it just like Jim says.
00:18:36 ►
So I did the sort of three-day protocol.
00:18:40 ►
And I had, well, first of all, it was kind of amazing.
00:18:43 ►
And I had, well, first of all, it was kind of amazing.
00:18:51 ►
Jim says in his book that one should be very careful and discreet about trying to find drugs, which is very good advice.
00:18:57 ►
But when you’re sort of a middle-aged mom, you don’t have a lot of access to people.
00:19:03 ►
So very quickly I realized I couldn’t be discreet because discretion was getting me exactly nowhere.
00:19:05 ►
So I started being very indiscreet about where I was going to get my drugs and asking anybody who could give me just anybody I could
00:19:10 ►
think of. And then one day, miraculously, I got this package in the mail that was this. It was a
00:19:18 ►
little package with lots of stamps on it. And the return address said Lewis Carroll. And in the package was this lovely poem and a little blue bottle with instructions for use.
00:19:30 ►
And it contained five microgram drops of LSD.
00:19:35 ►
Very high quality LSD, I think, diluted in, I think, probably distilled water.
00:19:41 ►
And I tested it to make sure it really was what it said it was because I’m not crazy.
00:19:44 ►
I don’t just take things that come in my
00:19:46 ►
mail.
00:19:48 ►
Don’t do that.
00:19:50 ►
If you get nothing out of this
00:19:52 ►
event,
00:19:53 ►
the most important message is you
00:19:55 ►
if you ingest it, you are
00:19:57 ►
obligated to test it first.
00:19:59 ►
Nothing that you buy on the street
00:20:01 ►
should be ingested by you without
00:20:03 ►
you making sure that it is what you think it is.
00:20:07 ►
And then I went on to have, you know, like it wasn’t like I had a blissful month where all of my problems were solved.
00:20:14 ►
But my immediate depression resolved very quickly.
00:20:17 ►
And I had a really good month.
00:20:19 ►
I had days that I was more irritable and days that I was less irritable.
00:20:22 ►
I had days that I was more productive and days that I was less productive.
00:20:25 ►
But by and large, I experienced a kind of normalcy that I hadn’t in a while.
00:20:32 ►
Yeah, and so based on your personal experience and all the reports that you’ve gathered,
00:20:38 ►
and a topic we’ll revisit momentarily is that these are not, of course, placebo-controlled trials and all this stuff.
00:20:45 ►
But based on anecdotally, at least, what are some of the benefits?
00:20:48 ►
I know you broke it down into kind of four broad categories, I believe it were.
00:20:52 ►
Did I?
00:20:52 ►
Yeah, there is a chapter in the book, and I believe it was emotional.
00:20:57 ►
Hang on, I wrote some notes here.
00:20:58 ►
Oh, brilliant of me.
00:21:00 ►
That’s very impressive.
00:21:01 ►
Emotion, intellect, relationships, and physical, which was the most interesting I found.
00:21:07 ►
Well, those are the things that I was tracking.
00:21:08 ►
Yeah.
00:21:09 ►
So emotionally, like I said, my depression resolved in the course of that month.
00:21:17 ►
In terms of my relationship, it improved my marriage dramatically.
00:21:21 ►
I mean, for a long time I was saying that my marriage was at risk
00:21:26 ►
because of my depression,
00:21:27 ►
and my husband points out that he wasn’t going anywhere,
00:21:29 ►
but I had the subjective feeling that my marriage was at risk,
00:21:33 ►
which was as painful as if it had actually been so.
00:21:40 ►
Relationship?
00:21:42 ►
Yeah, emotional, intellectual.
00:21:44 ►
Oh, intellectual.
00:21:47 ►
Well, so intellectual, a lot of people are in or do more microdosing we all know because you know better stronger faster right they’re in this
00:21:51 ►
because it makes them enhances creativity enhances focus I found that it did act to increase my
00:22:01 ►
capacity for focus in the same way that an Adderall would or Ritalin,
00:22:06 ►
maybe at a lower dose, the same ability to focus, an ease of entering into that creative
00:22:12 ►
flow that’s fairly hard to access when you’re engaged in a creative endeavor where you’re
00:22:19 ►
just kind of completely focused on what you’re doing and you almost don’t know what’s going
00:22:24 ►
on around you.
00:22:26 ►
And then physically, and this is where I don’t know. So some of the things that are physically are like,
00:22:30 ►
sometimes I would get a stomachache. That’s pretty clear. But also I had terrible pain when I started
00:22:38 ►
this experiment. I had frozen shoulder, which has anybody in this audience ever had frozen shoulder?
00:22:42 ►
Don’t raise your hand.
00:22:46 ►
It’s a nightmare.
00:22:48 ►
It’s this excruciating pain in your shoulder.
00:22:50 ►
There’s nothing wrong with your shoulder.
00:22:56 ►
It’s completely inexplicable why, but you have this restricted range of motion and terrible, terrible pain.
00:22:59 ►
And during the course of this month, the frozen shoulder resolved.
00:23:03 ►
Now, it was probably a coincidence.
00:23:04 ►
It was probably just a matter of timing.
00:23:06 ►
Frozen shoulder does resolve. I had had it for probably a coincidence. It was probably just a matter of timing. Frozen shoulder does resolve.
00:23:08 ►
I had had it for about 18 months.
00:23:13 ►
But it was remarkable that it was during the course of this month that I experienced that resolution.
00:23:18 ►
And it was really, you know, it was very hard for me to disentangle the physical,
00:23:23 ►
the being free from pain for the first time in 18 months, plus feeling better emotionally,
00:23:26 ►
plus my relationship being better, plus I wrote a whole time in 18 months. Plus feeling better emotionally. Plus my relationship being better.
00:23:28 ►
Plus I wrote a whole book in a month.
00:23:29 ►
Right.
00:23:30 ►
So it’s kind of awesome.
00:23:31 ►
Yeah.
00:23:31 ►
Honestly.
00:23:36 ►
And one of the categories in her daily chart was number of words.
00:23:44 ►
And, you know, and there is, I would say there is a connection, a body-mind connection, right?
00:23:49 ►
So it’s not necessarily, it is surprising, I think, to see some of these physical things because we think of psychedelics as these mental processes.
00:23:52 ►
But it’s also not surprising that if you have emotional and mind benefits that the body would follow.
00:24:00 ►
I mean, and Jim, from your research, this isn’t an isolated report, right?
00:24:04 ►
And again, these aren’t placebo-controlled. See, what’s nice is this is an isolated report of which I have
00:24:09 ►
a couple of thousand. Okay. And when you have a couple of thousand, when someone says it’s
00:24:14 ►
an anecdote, you really just want to hurt them. Please don’t hurt me. Because what happens in
00:24:20 ►
real research is you give a drug to someone and then you ask them.
00:24:27 ►
The difference in my work is they give themselves the drug and I ask them.
00:24:32 ►
So when you start counting up the anecdotes and what you find is a lot of different physical symptoms.
00:24:40 ►
Yeah.
00:24:41 ►
Resolved.
00:24:42 ►
Yeah, there were some really interesting ones, right?
00:24:44 ►
Like people reported having improvements after strokes and traumatic brain injuries, cluster headaches.
00:24:51 ►
I don’t know.
00:24:52 ►
Yeah, and the nice thing is if you look at the high-dose psychedelic literature, there’s nothing.
00:25:00 ►
And so there’s something different going on either with the low dose itself or when you’re giving a dose periodically.
00:25:07 ►
And I just actually got a beautiful letter from someone who had accumulated concussions over children’s sports, college level, and then he was semi-pro hockey.
00:25:26 ►
And he finally had enough of a concussion, so he was out for about a month.
00:25:33 ►
And then the coach said, you’re fine, you can go back in.
00:25:36 ►
And he was, that day, he had another concussion.
00:25:39 ►
And that ended his career.
00:25:42 ►
Constant headaches, pain,
00:25:47 ►
dumbing down, a lot of things.
00:25:52 ►
And he had really good insurance and was in a sports league.
00:25:53 ►
And he did all the things that he was supposed to do
00:25:56 ►
and nothing helped.
00:25:58 ►
It’s just a letter I got last week.
00:26:01 ►
And he said, I took a high dose of mushrooms
00:26:04 ►
and for the first time felt one no pain
00:26:08 ►
and two is that my mind was back and then I followed that up with microdosing and within a
00:26:15 ►
month I was again able to take on an intellectually challenging job which he indicated was just amazing. So I wrote him back and said, tell me more.
00:26:28 ►
What’s going on? And what he said is, he’s pretty well done, but he says if I stop microdosing for
00:26:37 ►
a couple of months, I get some small symptoms back. So I don’t want to do that. And I’m also using cannabis twice a day
00:26:46 ►
and I’ve also done some neurological training,
00:26:49 ►
brainwave training.
00:26:51 ►
And I thought the problem with this
00:26:53 ►
is this might be a total package
00:26:56 ►
of an incredible way to get over traumatic brain injury.
00:27:00 ►
But it’s going to be almost impossible
00:27:02 ►
in the scientific system to research it
00:27:05 ►
because he’s doing too much stuff.
00:27:08 ►
And people like him are not going to say,
00:27:10 ►
no, I think I’ll be sure I’ll stop the thing that’s one of these
00:27:14 ►
that seems to make my life work so you can do research.
00:27:19 ►
So we have and we do have some other evidence of people without all this
00:27:22 ►
who have improved after strokes.
00:27:25 ►
And it’s one of the studies I’d love to do or particularly love to have someone in some hospital do it.
00:27:33 ►
But that’s the kinds of things that are coming in that are hard to deal with because they’re not mental.
00:27:40 ►
And particularly traumatic brain injury is, you know, the way you, quote, quote, discover it is you do the autopsy.
00:27:46 ►
And you see the brain is damaged.
00:27:49 ►
Now, why is it that if a brain is literally physically damaged, that 10 micrograms of LSD every couple of days makes the symptoms go away?
00:28:01 ►
The paradigm hasn’t been developed for that.
00:28:04 ►
So we’re really doing edgy stuff now.
00:28:07 ►
And what’s wonderful is just as, I mean, if you think about it,
00:28:14 ►
we’re sitting in a building owned by a hospital
00:28:17 ►
discussing how to best use illegal drugs.
00:28:22 ►
How to best use illegal drugs.
00:28:32 ►
I mean, you know, I don’t want to use illegal drugs.
00:28:32 ►
I really don’t.
00:28:34 ►
I have no interest in breaking the law.
00:28:35 ►
I’m a law-abiding citizen.
00:28:36 ►
I’m an attorney.
00:28:38 ►
I have no interest in breaking the law. I didn’t want to do it then.
00:28:39 ►
I certainly don’t want to do it now.
00:28:41 ►
And what I am interested in is changing the law so that the law is an actual reflection of what harms people
00:28:48 ►
and what doesn’t harm people.
00:28:50 ►
The war on drugs harms lots of people.
00:28:52 ►
Drugs themselves harm some people under some circumstances
00:28:55 ►
and don’t under others.
00:28:56 ►
And whether or not the drug is criminalized
00:28:58 ►
seems to have no relationship to the extent of the harm or not.
00:29:01 ►
But I am eager for there to be, I mean, the most
00:29:06 ►
important thing to me about this recent, and I do think that my book had something to do with this,
00:29:13 ►
the sort of popularization of microdosing is the resurgence of interest in, and of the resurgence
00:29:21 ►
of interest in psychedelics altogether is an interest in testing microdosing
00:29:25 ►
and in studying microdosing. And that’s really what I, I have a lot of questions I’d like to
00:29:29 ►
see answered. Like I’d like to see a real analysis of long-term benefit or any long-term risk. I mean,
00:29:36 ►
I want to know that. I want to know if there’s any risk associated with long-term use of
00:29:41 ►
microdosing. I want to know whether the benefits can be,
00:29:46 ►
I don’t know, this could be a whole, this could be a book about a placebo effect, you know?
00:29:49 ►
Right. And I think this is one of the big questions, right? Like all these benefits
00:29:53 ►
that are being reported. I mean, it seems like, as you’ve said, Jim, that you have enough
00:29:57 ►
anecdotes, then you start to maybe say, okay, we have, we’re onto something here. But, you know,
00:30:02 ►
to be fair, we haven’t gone through like like, the normal placebo control, double-blind, all that.
00:30:07 ►
And we haven’t because of the way that the drugs are scheduled in this country makes that virtually impossible to do.
00:30:13 ►
So we’ve seen, you know, we’ve had research now at NYU, at UCLA Harbor, at Johns Hopkins, other places around the country,
00:30:27 ►
other places around the country, specifically on psilocybin and large doses of psilocybin.
00:30:32 ►
And tracking benefits started with depression and anxiety associated with the end of life.
00:30:38 ►
Now it’s moved on to PTSD and alcohol abuse and all sorts of smoking cessation.
00:30:41 ►
So we’re seeing this research happening, which is really, really exciting.
00:30:45 ►
But, you know, one of the things people always ask me is why psilocybin and not LSD?
00:30:48 ►
So there’s no…
00:30:49 ►
The logical drug to study is
00:30:51 ►
LSD because that’s where most of the research
00:30:53 ►
had been done before. But LSD has
00:30:55 ►
too much baggage. It has too much baggage
00:30:57 ►
from the point of view of the culture.
00:30:59 ►
It has too much baggage from the point of view of the government.
00:31:01 ►
So psilocybin… People don’t know that psilocybin
00:31:03 ►
are magic mushrooms. They just hear psilocybin. It sounds like a medicine to
00:31:07 ►
them. They’re, you know, it’s much easier to get the permits for that. And it really does come down
00:31:11 ►
to that. So, but I would really like to see even psilocybin microdosing studies. I think that would
00:31:17 ►
help answer a lot of questions that I have. Well, there is a clever study that the Beckley
00:31:22 ►
Foundation is running that just recently got launched.
00:31:26 ►
A self-blinded study.
00:31:28 ►
It’s how they’re getting around some of the legal hurdles.
00:31:31 ►
So the idea is they created a protocol where you wouldn’t know whether you were microdosing or not.
00:31:35 ►
This is to kind of attack the – to try to address the placebo problem.
00:31:39 ►
So they created a protocol for you to blind yourself so that you don’t know whether you’re taking a microdose of psychedelics or not.
00:31:45 ►
The problem is inherent in a study like that or like the long-term study that Jim has been
00:31:52 ►
doing with thousands of people involved is you cannot control what you’re giving them.
00:31:58 ►
So as we all know, when something is illegal and you buy it in the black market, you don’t
00:32:03 ►
know what you’re getting.
00:32:04 ►
I mean, sometimes you can do your best to test, and I want you to do your best to
00:32:08 ►
test, but it would be great if we could give people doses
00:32:11 ►
appropriate to their weight, to their size, if we could track all
00:32:15 ►
of these things. I would feel a lot more comfortable speaking
00:32:20 ►
about microdosing, considering microdosing, all those things, if we had that kind of research.
00:32:24 ►
Well, fortunately, that’s what’s happening.
00:32:28 ►
I don’t even like, I don’t really call what I’ve done research.
00:32:31 ►
It’s really called exploration, which is there’s this something out there, and if you sail
00:32:37 ►
to it, you land.
00:32:39 ►
But you don’t know what’s there.
00:32:40 ►
And so when I say the event space, that’s what I’ve been filling in.
00:32:45 ►
You know, there’s palm trees here. There say the event space, that’s what I’ve been filling in. You know,
00:32:50 ►
there’s palm trees here, there’s a waterfall here, there’s fishing here, there’s a great beach,
00:32:56 ►
there’s some rocks. And then the next wave of people already know all that. And they run in and they say, I’m only interested in the beach. And so they do beach research. They do tightly
00:33:03 ►
controlled, double blind beach research. And other tightly controlled, double-blind beach research.
00:33:06 ►
And other people say, I’m only interested in the palm trees.
00:33:08 ►
And so what we’re beginning to get now is the specialists are emerging
00:33:12 ►
who are going to do the very specialized research.
00:33:17 ►
And let me give you one example.
00:33:20 ►
I got a letter a couple of years ago.
00:33:22 ►
It said, dear Dr. Fadiman, I know I owe you a report,
00:33:25 ►
but I thought this would interest you.
00:33:27 ►
It was while I was microdosing for the month.
00:33:31 ►
And this is a woman in her 20s.
00:33:32 ►
She’s an art historian, and she’s English.
00:33:35 ►
She said, I had my period, and for the first time in my life, it was normal.
00:33:42 ►
And I think, I don’t care about the rest of your report at all.
00:33:47 ►
But what’s going on so I wrote her back and said how much are you taking
00:33:51 ►
what are you using you know kind of nice sciencey questions
00:33:53 ►
and what are you doing each month and she wrote back
00:33:56 ►
and she said I only took it that one month
00:33:59 ►
since then my periods have been normal
00:34:03 ►
you have changed my life.
00:34:05 ►
Thank you.
00:34:07 ►
Wow.
00:34:08 ►
Okay.
00:34:09 ►
Now her periods had been painful and crampy and emotionally disturbing.
00:34:16 ►
So I thought,
00:34:18 ►
if that would be something people might want to research.
00:34:24 ►
And then because we got a lot of database,
00:34:27 ►
I called my co-researcher, Sophia Korb,
00:34:30 ►
and said, do we have any other people with menstrual issues in our sample?
00:34:34 ►
It was about 1,800 people then.
00:34:36 ►
And she said, after a few clicks on the phone,
00:34:41 ►
yeah, about 10.
00:34:43 ►
So she then looked at them and a number
00:34:46 ►
of them had reported improvement. So she
00:34:48 ►
called someone
00:34:49 ►
who is a researcher in that
00:34:51 ►
area
00:34:52 ►
and said, would you be interested
00:34:55 ►
in looking at this data because
00:34:57 ►
we have some women who’ve reported
00:34:59 ►
great improvement and other people who haven’t
00:35:02 ►
and other people who take
00:35:04 ►
microdose now once a month a
00:35:05 ►
couple of days before their period and the researcher said well that’s because there’s a
00:35:10 ►
number of reasons why people have difficult menstrual periods so that’s what we’re doing
00:35:16 ►
has been a sense passing that on to the research people who not only know better questions but
00:35:23 ►
are in the system to do the kind of research you’re talking about.
00:35:27 ►
Now, the long-term research, that’s tricky.
00:35:31 ►
The problem that we’re facing is to move this from enough people
00:35:37 ►
so it looks like we have a phenomena, not a unique experience,
00:35:41 ►
into the research system.
00:35:44 ►
And the fact that the substances are hard to research because of the legal issues makes
00:35:50 ►
it hard because researchers really don’t want to find out that there wasn’t a phenomena.
00:35:58 ►
That’s perfectly good research.
00:36:01 ►
And when you are playing the science game, you’re taught that a negative result is just
00:36:04 ►
as good as a positive result,
00:36:05 ►
but everyone else in the world says, don’t ever buy that bullshit
00:36:08 ►
because you don’t get any credit in the world for a negative result.
00:36:13 ►
So we’re now getting studies of creativity with normals.
00:36:18 ►
We’re getting depression studies,
00:36:20 ►
and we’re starting to get some of these specialized physiological studies.
00:36:24 ►
And that’s going to move things forward. and we’re starting to get some of these specialized physiological studies.
00:36:28 ►
And that’s going to move things forward.
00:36:35 ►
This self-blinding study seems to be predominantly to find out if it’s a placebo.
00:36:37 ►
Okay?
00:36:45 ►
Now, placebo is a funny word, and it doesn’t really mean what it should.
00:36:50 ►
The word you want is natural healing response, which is we’re designed to heal.
00:36:51 ►
That’s what we do.
00:36:57 ►
And anything that accelerates that is really cool.
00:37:06 ►
And it turns out that if you’re being given a pill and you’re told that it’s a graduate student,
00:37:09 ►
you’ll have less of an effect than if it’s a physician,
00:37:12 ►
less of an effect than if it’s a famous physician,
00:37:14 ►
less of an effect if it’s a world-famous physician.
00:37:15 ►
Same pill.
00:37:17 ►
What’s the difference?
00:37:18 ►
You.
00:37:22 ►
So that’s a big variable in these studies.
00:37:26 ►
And as someone wrote us, they said, I don’t care if it’s a big variable in these studies. And as someone wrote us, they said,
00:37:29 ►
I don’t care if it’s a placebo.
00:37:30 ►
I haven’t felt this good in 30 years.
00:37:34 ►
That’s worth looking at.
00:37:40 ►
So as an explorer, you’re not worried about the double-blind issue.
00:37:43 ►
The double-blind was invented so you could tell the difference between two pharmaceuticals.
00:37:47 ►
And it dropped away because the pharmaceutical manufacturers very often found there wasn’t any difference between their products.
00:37:54 ►
So they stopped doing it for that.
00:37:57 ►
And heaven forbid some of you are on antidepressants.
00:38:01 ►
on antidepressants.
00:38:05 ►
The data on placebo and antidepressants are that antidepressants are statistically different
00:38:09 ►
than placebo.
00:38:11 ►
Statistically different means if you have a big enough sample
00:38:14 ►
there’s a tiny difference.
00:38:15 ►
They’re not clinically better,
00:38:19 ►
which means they don’t have any more effect than placebo.
00:38:22 ►
And they’re the most bought drugs in the world.
00:38:26 ►
I was used to say when I was on antidepressants
00:38:28 ►
that if you told me
00:38:29 ►
that this was a drug designed to
00:38:32 ►
make you fat and lose your sex drive
00:38:34 ►
and it had the side effect
00:38:35 ►
in some people of occasionally making
00:38:38 ►
them feel a little better,
00:38:41 ►
that was
00:38:41 ►
actually a more accurate description
00:38:44 ►
of an SSRI than the one on the package.
00:38:50 ►
Yeah.
00:38:51 ►
Wow.
00:38:51 ►
And I thought I was mean about SSRIs.
00:38:54 ►
Well, you know, this is an interesting topic too, right?
00:38:57 ►
In some ways, dissatisfaction with currently available pharmaceutical medications is what leads people, including yourself, to try things like microdosing.
00:39:08 ►
Now, if I could go to my physician and get a legal drug that made me feel as good
00:39:13 ►
as I felt during the month of microdosing, of course I would do it.
00:39:18 ►
You know, I don’t want to be breaking the law.
00:39:20 ►
Right, right.
00:39:22 ►
So to switch gears a little bit, I also, the topic we haven’t talked about yet, of course, is the other side of it. We talked a lot about some of the benefits that we’ve seen in moods and relationships. But what about the potential risk? And two categories here. One category is acutely experienced negative effects, let’s say. And then there’s what we maybe don’t know, which is the long term.
00:39:46 ►
So acute, I certainly noticed on the day that I microdosed an increased
00:39:51 ►
irritability.
00:39:52 ►
Not as irritable as I was before I was doing anything, but it definitely
00:39:56 ►
would heighten.
00:39:57 ►
I was more activated and occasionally more irritable.
00:40:04 ►
Stom stomach upset.
00:40:06 ►
What else has been reported to you, Jim?
00:40:08 ►
You probably have a long list of things.
00:40:10 ►
Well, people would be happier if I had a long list, but I have a short list.
00:40:15 ►
The main short list is we now recommend that if your symptom is anxiety, don’t microdose.
00:40:24 ►
Right.
00:40:25 ►
If your symptom is depression and anxiety, which seem to be pretty interwoven,
00:40:30 ►
it looks like for most people it’s beneficial.
00:40:33 ►
But pure anxiety, and here’s two possibilities.
00:40:36 ►
One is it increases your anxiety.
00:40:39 ►
Two is it increases your awareness of your anxiety.
00:40:44 ►
And those are very hard to distinguish.
00:40:47 ►
We also have on our site called microdosingpsychedelics.com.
00:40:54 ►
Microdosingpsychedelics.
00:40:55 ►
And if I was selling something, I’d do very well at this.
00:40:58 ►
But microdosingpsychedelics.com.
00:41:00 ►
On the site, there’s a little tab about drug interactions.
00:41:04 ►
On the site, there’s a little tab about drug interactions.
00:41:12 ►
And we ask people, if you’re on something else while you’re microdosing, let us know any interaction issues.
00:41:20 ►
Well, we have 185 items on that list now that don’t interact with microdosing, that don’t seem to interfere with microdosing.
00:41:23 ►
That includes almost every SRI.
00:41:26 ►
The one we have some question about is lithium. Lithium is an incredibly strong medication. It’s for people with extreme
00:41:31 ►
manic depression. Most people who are on it hate it because they lose their mania. They also lose
00:41:39 ►
their depression. I know people who literally have gone off the medication just so they could, in a sense, go crazy again.
00:41:46 ►
It turns out, at least with one person, that microdosing and lithium were a very bad combination.
00:41:55 ►
Again, we looked through our database and we actually wrote the other people,
00:41:58 ►
and other people on lithium had no problem.
00:42:01 ►
But that’s the big drug, and that’s the big not take now we
00:42:08 ►
also as quote researchers and this is again because common sense dear psycho you know
00:42:17 ►
microdose researchers i’m pregnant should i microdose dear, the general rule of thumb is on everything the answer is no when you’re pregnant.
00:42:29 ►
Is there any information about pregnancy and microdosing or pregnancy and psychedelics?
00:42:35 ►
Yes.
00:42:36 ►
There are a great many fairly important famous hippies who were created.
00:42:42 ►
The night of their creation, so to speak,
00:42:45 ►
was when their parents were very high.
00:42:48 ►
But that’s not good or bad evidence.
00:42:51 ►
That’s just saying we haven’t the faintest idea.
00:42:54 ►
Don’t do it.
00:42:55 ►
We also say if you are wanting to take much more than 10 micrograms,
00:43:03 ►
just please don’t be in the study because what we found is that high
00:43:08 ►
functioning autism, Asperger’s, of which the valley is filled with successful people and
00:43:16 ►
a number of you, reported to us that 10 didn’t do much for them, but 50 was just fine. And we basically said, that isn’t the measuring world we’re in.
00:43:29 ►
We have no quarrel with what you’re doing, but we’re not going to be reporting on you.
00:43:33 ►
That’s a weird one, right?
00:43:34 ►
Well, these are people whose brains have a lot of advantages and some disadvantages.
00:43:42 ►
have a lot of advantages and some disadvantages.
00:43:48 ►
And there’s some wonderful research out on MDMA and high-functioning autism
00:43:50 ►
because a lot of people with high-functioning autism
00:43:53 ►
have difficulty with social cues.
00:43:58 ►
When an eyebrow is raised halfway across the room,
00:44:02 ►
they don’t get it.
00:44:03 ►
When a tone is changed, they don’t get it. Sarcasm, they don’t get it. When a tone is changed, they don’t get it.
00:44:05 ►
Sarcasm, they don’t get it.
00:44:07 ►
So they often have hard social lives,
00:44:10 ►
and the formal double-blind research with high-functioning autism
00:44:17 ►
says MDMA really helps.
00:44:20 ►
It really, like, those films where it starts in black and white
00:44:24 ►
and then one of the characters gets awakened and is in color.
00:44:28 ►
Was that another?
00:44:29 ►
You know, those.
00:44:31 ►
That’s what they report.
00:44:33 ►
So that’s a whole other world which microdosing doesn’t seem to enter into.
00:44:38 ►
Yeah, it’s just interesting how it doesn’t have as much of an effect for people.
00:44:43 ►
Well, that’s what they say.
00:44:44 ►
Okay, right, sure.
00:44:46 ►
There’s another weird one, too, that I remember seeing in your reports,
00:44:49 ►
which was adverse reactions in people with red-green color blindness.
00:44:54 ►
Oh, I forgot about that.
00:44:55 ►
If you’re red-green color blind.
00:44:58 ►
I love this because it’s so geeky.
00:45:01 ►
It’s bizarre.
00:45:02 ►
Okay, here we go, neuroscientists.
00:45:06 ►
People with red-green color blindness report when they microdose for days after they have tracers. And that’s more than
00:45:15 ►
one individual? Yeah. Interesting. In fact, see, this is why I love working with Sophia. We talked
00:45:20 ►
about this because we had three or four of them who dropped out of our study and told us why,
00:45:24 ►
because they didn’t like tracers.
00:45:26 ►
Tracers are when you see a light and then you move your eye away,
00:45:29 ►
but you have a little tracer.
00:45:31 ►
Those of you who have been to Burning Man know what I’m talking about.
00:45:35 ►
Okay, and those of you who haven’t been to Burning Man
00:45:37 ►
know what I’m talking about too.
00:45:38 ►
Okay, tracers usually go away with a conventional psychedelic
00:45:42 ►
when the conventional psychedelic goes away.
00:45:52 ►
Red-green green it lasts so i said to safai does this really make any sense she said let me call you back in a week so call you back in a week she said my friend with red green colorblind has
00:45:57 ►
tried it and yes it’s tracers my boys are both red green colorblind I guess they won’t be microdressing
00:46:05 ►
well
00:46:07 ►
unless and then I have
00:46:08 ►
we have other people that say
00:46:10 ►
I then went back into my files
00:46:12 ►
because I never paid much attention
00:46:14 ►
but one of my early reports
00:46:16 ►
was a person who complained about
00:46:18 ►
what he said is
00:46:19 ►
light problems
00:46:21 ►
with overhead lights and so forth
00:46:24 ►
he didn’t know the word tracer, and I hadn’t paid attention.
00:46:28 ►
But I read his report, and he said, it really is a problem, but I really like the benefits.
00:46:34 ►
So it’s a side effect, and one has to, as you described, antidepressants,
00:46:42 ►
they’re great for certain things if that’s what you want.
00:46:44 ►
I mean, it would be really exciting to know
00:46:48 ►
why. It would be wonderful to have, if we could get to the root
00:46:52 ►
of what microdosing was doing in the brain so that we could really understand what was happening.
00:46:57 ►
Let me actually add another word to brain.
00:47:01 ►
Body. Right. Because
00:47:03 ►
anybody know whether you have more neurons in your gut or in your brain?
00:47:09 ►
Gut. Okay. And the other thing you have in your gut is thousands of species of virus and bacteria,
00:47:16 ►
all not only playing out their survival issues, but affecting your mental health.
00:47:25 ►
So there’s a whole other world that we have the faintest idea,
00:47:28 ►
which is what is the effect of psychedelics on your bio?
00:47:33 ►
And I was just reading a report by someone who’s very excited by the biome
00:47:37 ►
and mental health and did some research or a lot of research papers, and the one that I’m reminded of is people who improved their biome,
00:47:50 ►
probiotics, biotics, and better eating,
00:47:53 ►
depression went down 44%.
00:47:55 ►
44% of them showed a decline in depression.
00:47:58 ►
That’s slightly better than antidepressants and slightly better than placebo.
00:48:08 ►
So we not only don’t know what’s going on in the brain,
00:48:10 ►
we don’t know what’s going on.
00:48:16 ►
And the little bit of research about the body that’s going on with psychedelics is all in the brain, predominantly because they’ve got this great thing
00:48:20 ►
that shows pretty colors when your brain changes.
00:48:23 ►
And we don’t have the equivalent
00:48:25 ►
that shows you know the virus is all going to one side the bacteria going to the other and then they
00:48:29 ►
do this little dance with lsd and they do a different dance with ayahuasca and so forth
00:48:34 ►
we have you know so we’re really at the beginning of a whole other way of looking at science
00:48:39 ►
and the thing about microdosing is what is it going on that affects migraines,
00:48:50 ►
that affects menstrual problems, that affects brain injury, and that affects creativity.
00:48:53 ►
It also, by the way, for lots of people,
00:48:56 ►
and I love when we get results that nobody particularly asks for,
00:49:01 ►
most people in our sample, maybe a couple hundred at least that I’ve looked at, report that as they have been microdosing for a month, their health habits change.
00:49:14 ►
Their sleep pattern improves.
00:49:16 ►
Their eating improves.
00:49:19 ►
My favorite is a guy who lived on junk food.
00:49:23 ►
And he said, I looked at the menu and by God, I wanted the salad.
00:49:29 ►
Yeah, I was really hoping I’d lose some weight, but nope.
00:49:33 ►
I told Jim at some point, I said, if you could just figure out a way,
00:49:37 ►
the microdosing would be a weight loss tool.
00:49:39 ►
You could make billions.
00:49:41 ►
Well, we also have someone who several people have said,
00:49:44 ►
if people knew what it did for libido, you could make billions. Well, we also have someone who several people have said, if people knew what it did for libido, you could make billions.
00:49:49 ►
So other than sex and eating, it also, by the way, people smoke less dope,
00:49:55 ►
smoke less cigarettes, drink less coffee, and have less alcohol.
00:50:00 ►
So if you can think of a larger group of industries who are going to want to stop psychedelics.
00:50:12 ►
I love it that the alcohol industry is now buying into the cannabis industry.
00:50:18 ►
They’re figuring it out.
00:50:22 ►
Don’t follow your customer.
00:50:21 ►
They’re figuring it out.
00:50:24 ►
Don’t follow your customer.
00:50:31 ►
Is microdosing an end to make psychedelics become just kind of commodified and part of this?
00:50:35 ►
That’s certainly something that I’ve noticed.
00:50:41 ►
With this recent boom in psychedelics altogether, there is a kind of corporatization of um you know if if you are fond as i am of the kind of
00:50:47 ►
hippie history there uh there’s a certain nostalgia that and i do think there is a kind of
00:50:54 ►
um sort of microdosing is part of that better faster stronger tech world and i think the
00:51:00 ►
commodification is inevitable i mean jim you were telling me you get calls from people saying, how can I, you know, what’s…
00:51:05 ►
Well, how can I invest?
00:51:06 ►
Are there any good investments in the space?
00:51:11 ►
Now, you’ve got to know the kind of little, you know, hedge fundy world,
00:51:17 ►
the psychedelic, you know, the industry.
00:51:19 ►
So there’s the cannabis space.
00:51:21 ►
And it turns out there are now two companies for profit
00:51:25 ►
in the psychedelic space.
00:51:28 ►
And one guy owns a huge piece of both of them.
00:51:31 ►
And they’re trying to get some kind of a lock on psilocybin
00:51:37 ►
and get it approved for medical use.
00:51:43 ►
Now, the problem in the economics of psychedelics
00:51:48 ►
is if you give something a few times in a lifetime,
00:51:51 ►
that’s not a good drug business.
00:51:54 ►
And I’m aware the chances of microdosing
00:51:59 ►
turning out to be the place
00:52:01 ►
which everyone will hate me for
00:52:04 ►
because it’ll be commercialized
00:52:07 ►
seems highly likely i don’t know about the hating i could manage without that but i’ve seen it in a
00:52:16 ►
couple of the the business magazines that couldn’t care less about drugs they’re saying gee
00:52:19 ►
microdosing you take something often enough so that if you price it a thousand times its manufacturing cost, you could do all right.
00:52:31 ►
So the question is, is there any way to keep commercialization out of anything that could be commercialized?
00:52:40 ►
Right.
00:52:41 ►
Yeah.
00:52:42 ►
Shall we vote?
00:52:41 ►
Right. Yeah.
00:52:42 ►
Shall we vote?
00:52:46 ►
This is actually probably a whole topic on its own.
00:52:54 ►
What’s going to happen now in the world where psychedelics are becoming approved and how does capitalism interface with psychedelic medicine?
00:52:57 ►
And there’s a whole lot of conversation in the community happening around that now. Well, that presupposes a tremendous amount of optimism on your part.
00:53:00 ►
In a world where Donald Trump is president and Jeff Sessions is attorney general, I don’t see psychedelics being decriminalized anytime soon in the United States, even with all the
00:53:08 ►
research that we have. That’s really profoundly compelling research. We may see some states
00:53:15 ►
we’re away, but I believe we’re a ways away even from that. Although, you know, I was doing
00:53:20 ►
medical marijuana work for Drug Policy Alliance many years ago, 20-something years ago.
00:53:28 ►
And if you had told me that in 20 years
00:53:29 ►
we’d have ubiquitous recreational marijuana,
00:53:34 ►
I would have doubted that.
00:53:37 ►
Maps is right on track.
00:53:39 ►
2021 is what they’re saying for MDMA.
00:53:41 ►
We’ll see.
00:53:42 ►
It’ll be amazing.
00:53:43 ►
It would be.
00:53:46 ►
I think we probably are getting close to question time, but there’s one other important topic I did related to the
00:53:50 ►
unknowns and the risks, actually, before we go into that. And I just wanted to touch on
00:53:57 ►
sort of the unknowns related to the long-term risks. Right. And and so and to frame this here right the conventional wisdom around
00:54:06 ►
psychedelics is that okay psychedelics aren’t physically harmful you can have a bad trip but
00:54:12 ►
they aren’t known to be physiologically harmful therefore taking smaller doses also isn’t harmful
00:54:17 ►
however with of course the microdosing protocol the new factor in the equation is that you’re
00:54:23 ►
adding frequency so normally if you’re’re taking a typical dose of acid,
00:54:26 ►
you’re not doing it once in three-day cycles.
00:54:29 ►
But now we’re adding this extra factor of, okay, I’m taking it,
00:54:32 ►
taking two days off, taking it, taking two days off.
00:54:35 ►
In particular, there’s concern.
00:54:37 ►
I know the science around this isn’t really conclusive.
00:54:40 ►
It’s very shaky at best.
00:54:41 ►
But there are concerns around particularly the 5-HT2B for any science geeks out there,
00:54:47 ►
a receptor in the heart, regardless of the dose amount, but it’s that frequency of activation that people are questioning.
00:54:56 ►
Like, hey, is this safe?
00:54:57 ►
So just comments around that.
00:55:14 ►
that? Just a wave of nostalgia of the the terrible dangers of LSD, blindness, chromosomal damage. The blindness was that people who would take psychedelics, would look into the sun and burn their eyeballs out.
00:55:26 ►
Rare.
00:55:37 ►
The chromosomal damage was true, as was true of aspirin and hundreds of other substances, and it has no effect on health.
00:55:39 ►
Chromosomes break and repair.
00:55:51 ►
break and repair. The dangers of microdosing so far are that we don’t have the faintest idea.
00:55:57 ►
Right. And then people say, well, how long have people microdosed? I say, well, the people who I know, that I know very well, 10 years and 20 years are the two that come to mind.
00:56:13 ►
The 20-year one just won a national award in the area of business she’s in for her company,
00:56:19 ►
which sells a product at 30% to 40% above the competition.
00:56:26 ►
And she’s recently, in the last couple of years, moved from 17 employees to 80.
00:56:31 ►
So if it’s brain damage, it sounds pretty good.
00:56:35 ►
And the other person runs a 200 million a year company.
00:56:39 ►
So those are the two I know, but that’s really anecdotal.
00:56:40 ►
That’s genuine anecdotal.
00:56:42 ►
But I would genuinely like to know.
00:56:48 ►
I mean, look, there are 5-HTB2B receptors in the heart, there are receptors in the gut.
00:56:54 ►
I would like to know if there’s, you know, any, if there’s, you know, if there’s one rat study out of, what is it, Finland, Russia, and it’s not a very good study, but I would
00:57:00 ►
like to know more about that.
00:57:00 ►
I would like to have that research done.
00:57:02 ►
I personally don’t feel comfortable doing something regularly that is so unknown. And so one of the things that I’m most
00:57:10 ►
interested in is more research and decriminalization so that we can have real research and that we
00:57:16 ►
don’t criminalize people for engaging in a behavior that affects only them. And to the extent that
00:57:22 ►
affects anybody outside them, I mean, you know, it’s pretty much purely positive.
00:57:28 ►
If you speak to the families of those people who have been driven to microdosing
00:57:32 ►
because of whatever needs they have.
00:57:34 ►
Right.
00:57:35 ►
Sitting on the street corners just hoping for a mushroom to come by.
00:57:40 ►
That’s kind of what I was doing, you know.
00:57:41 ►
I thought, like, Berkeley, California, how hard would it be to get acid?
00:57:46 ►
And I was very impressed she had trouble.
00:57:48 ►
I know.
00:57:49 ►
And, you know, both, and since then, it’s so funny because Jim warned me about this when you publish a book,
00:57:54 ►
is that whenever I do an event or whenever anybody reads my book, I get two kinds of questions primarily,
00:58:02 ►
which is a good segue.
00:58:03 ►
I get, can you get me drugs?
00:58:06 ►
And let me tell you about my acid trip.
00:58:09 ►
And I don’t like either of those questions.
00:58:10 ►
Neither of those here.
00:58:11 ►
We can’t get you drugs, and please don’t get on the microphone
00:58:14 ►
telling us about your acid trip.
00:58:16 ►
But yeah, I think we can open it up to questions now.
00:58:20 ►
Should we raise the lights?
00:58:21 ►
Yeah, can we raise the lights a little bit?
00:58:23 ►
Alan, are you around to do the microphone? And while we’re the lights? Yeah, can we raise the lights a little bit? Alan, are you around to
00:58:25 ►
do the microphone? And while we’re getting sorted for that, other guidelines for questions,
00:58:31 ►
I just want to remind everybody what a question is. So for those of you who don’t know, a question
00:58:38 ►
usually ends in a question mark and usually has an inflection of your voice at the end of it.
00:58:44 ►
So make sure that if you’re coming up here,‘re asking a question please um all right and the member the other part is
00:58:50 ►
no you don’t need to preface your question by saying first i gotta tell you about my trip right
00:58:58 ►
and um all right why don’t we start and if you’re watching online we’re going to take questions from the live stream as well.
00:59:07 ►
If you’re tweeting with hashtag psychsams, P-S-Y-C-H-S-C-M-S, tweet some questions and we’ll take the best ones.
00:59:13 ►
If Elizabeth’s around, check in on those.
00:59:25 ►
where you think that psychedelics rank in the most important items that can help us transcend our ego and progress forward collectively as a civilization.
00:59:31 ►
Do you ask that because you’re planning on slipping Donald Trump a Mickey?
00:59:36 ►
Take it away.
00:59:38 ►
I actually didn’t get the question.
00:59:41 ►
Where psychedelics rank in…
00:59:49 ►
didn’t get the question where psychedelics rank in um in in how we can best transcend our egos and progress forward as a civilization oh i mean if i were an alcoholic you know if i was selling
00:59:56 ►
beer i’d say you know there’s these wonderful beer ads that say more beer more ears something
01:00:02 ►
like that likely um i think psychedelics are wonderful for people that don’t like meditation.
01:00:08 ►
And I think for people who like meditation, they’re also very good.
01:00:13 ►
That is the best quote.
01:00:15 ►
I made a lifetime of magnificent quotes.
01:00:18 ►
That’s my favorite.
01:00:20 ►
Okay, let’s go.
01:00:22 ►
All right.
01:00:23 ►
Hi, thank you for coming tonight.
01:00:32 ►
My question is just if there’s a crossroad between unbounded optimism and realism,
01:00:42 ►
where does that crossroad meet in the future for you regarding this kind of psychedelic unfoldment right now? Well, for me, it meets in my middle-of-the-night
01:00:46 ►
frantic emails to Jim about whether
01:00:48 ►
he thinks there’s anything to these studies that show harm
01:00:52 ►
or these studies that show dramatic benefit.
01:00:54 ►
I think we probably have slightly different answers to that.
01:00:58 ►
I think I am excited by the interest.
01:01:03 ►
I am a little bit trepidatious as well, and I’m eager for more research.
01:01:11 ►
I am pretty much done with exploration, which is there’s the island, go to it.
01:01:21 ►
And the kind of research that I hope we do is the kind of research that produces results
01:01:28 ►
that people can use.
01:01:30 ►
And that’s I know kind of simple-minded and cliché-filled.
01:01:35 ►
But here’s what we’re doing, meaning Sophia and I.
01:01:40 ►
We’ve kind of handled the problem of do people gain benefits and do they tell us
01:01:45 ►
because people who don’t get anything out of it are less likely to write.
01:01:49 ►
So we have an obviously skewed sample.
01:01:52 ►
But our skewed sample at the moment is from 59 countries.
01:01:56 ►
So one of the things we know is it’s possible to get psychedelics everywhere.
01:02:01 ►
Or at least in 59 countries.
01:02:03 ►
At least in 59 countries, right.
01:02:05 ►
And a lot of people send us things that are encrypted, so we don’t know.
01:02:10 ►
But that’s people taking it for a month or less.
01:02:15 ►
And we have some people who have taken it months and months and months,
01:02:17 ►
and if you want to know about them, they’re a very unusual group.
01:02:21 ►
But we’re now doing our final bit of research,
01:02:25 ►
which is we’re writing to the,
01:02:28 ►
I think it’s like 8,000 people
01:02:29 ►
who have written us,
01:02:31 ►
either taken microdoses and told us,
01:02:34 ►
taken microdoses and not told us,
01:02:36 ►
or not done anything.
01:02:37 ►
And we’re asking them
01:02:39 ►
for a simple little one-page
01:02:42 ►
fill-in-the-blanks
01:02:44 ►
of did you benefit or not in here, the following 15 areas.
01:02:49 ►
So we’re doing the long-term study that no one else really can do
01:02:53 ►
because the other studies that are starting, where we started,
01:02:56 ►
with people who have either no experience or have never written it down.
01:03:01 ►
So we’re trying to make that next step more visible more quickly so that the questions of whether it’s useful
01:03:08 ►
or not and where and how can be moved that much faster.
01:03:12 ►
So we’re doing a kind of extra exploration
01:03:16 ►
and then we’re both getting out of the business.
01:03:21 ►
So that’s where it’s moving. The question of optimism and such
01:03:24 ►
is since my first LSD so that’s where it’s moving the question of optimism and such is
01:03:25 ►
since my first LSD experience
01:03:29 ►
let me tell you about my trip
01:03:30 ►
buy my book
01:03:34 ►
it is not
01:03:39 ►
being optimistic
01:03:40 ►
to recognize
01:03:42 ►
the essential unity of human beings, animals, plants, and minerals.
01:03:52 ►
But it sure changes your worldview when you realize that.
01:03:59 ►
And you are much less likely to destroy something that is part of you.
01:04:06 ►
And that seems to me a good idea.
01:04:10 ►
And the way I say it is I’ve never met anyone who says,
01:04:13 ►
I’m going to take a hammer and beat this bastard to death.
01:04:18 ►
Because it’s your thumb.
01:04:21 ►
It’s yours.
01:04:23 ►
When you realize that you’re part of everyone else, you don’t want to hit
01:04:26 ►
anyone else’s thumb either. And when you realize that, you know, all living things are in the same
01:04:33 ►
thing. Alan Watts used to say, your body does not end at your fingertips. So it isn’t a question of
01:04:41 ►
optimism. It’s a question of the people who realize that seem to live differently than people who don’t.
01:04:49 ►
And I’d like there to be more people who live that way.
01:04:53 ►
And that’s about as political as I get.
01:04:57 ►
And I agree 1,000% with every political statement that she says.
01:05:01 ►
with every political statement that she says.
01:05:09 ►
Yeah, I was just prompted by the,
01:05:12 ►
you brought up the commercialization and some concerns about it.
01:05:14 ►
And so I was just prompted to ask that last question I did
01:05:16 ►
to hear how you think like access
01:05:19 ►
and other aspects are going to be best set
01:05:24 ►
in the near future?
01:05:25 ►
If you would want to expand upon that.
01:05:28 ►
Because you made it sound like commercialization in general is bad.
01:05:32 ►
In my mind, there’s an aspect of just accessing.
01:05:35 ►
I don’t think we’re saying commercialization is necessarily bad.
01:05:38 ►
I think we’re saying that it can sometimes lead to troubling consequences.
01:05:44 ►
But that, I mean, I don’t think, you know, neither of us is in the business.
01:05:48 ►
So I think you have to ask someone who’s in the business that question.
01:05:51 ►
I mean, somebody selling something for something is beneficial
01:05:57 ►
if the person gets it at a fair price.
01:06:01 ►
What does it cost to get a cataract?
01:06:04 ►
The little lens.
01:06:06 ►
United States, $200.
01:06:08 ►
India, $2.
01:06:10 ►
Same equipment.
01:06:13 ►
Okay?
01:06:13 ►
So the question
01:06:14 ►
of commercialization
01:06:15 ►
is probably
01:06:16 ►
the problem
01:06:18 ►
that I think
01:06:19 ►
we’re all anticipating
01:06:20 ►
is that the pharmaceutical industry
01:06:23 ►
as an industry
01:06:24 ►
does not seem to have the same
01:06:26 ►
high ethical standards that we would like we should there’s so there are lots of people fine
01:06:34 ►
um this may be personal i’m sorry if i’m assuming but why’d you stop if it because it’s illegal
01:06:40 ►
only if it were not illegal, I would not have stopped.
01:06:48 ►
And would you have the same response?
01:06:51 ►
If it were not illegal, she would not have stopped.
01:06:59 ►
If it were not illegal, I would have probably gone and had some other kind of career.
01:07:05 ►
So I admit that things getting legal, I feel always a little nervous.
01:07:12 ►
Because I don’t know that world terribly well in terms of the consciousness world.
01:07:19 ►
But one of my friends said that enlightenment, one of my teachers really, said enlightenment is always a crime.
01:07:24 ►
And what she was saying, because I didn’t understand it at all is that enlightenment
01:07:27 ►
allows you to see
01:07:29 ►
the weaknesses
01:07:31 ►
and difficulties in your own culture
01:07:34 ►
or in your own mind
01:07:35 ►
in your own family
01:07:36 ►
in your own religion
01:07:38 ►
and so enlightenment always
01:07:41 ►
takes you out of being part of the system
01:07:43 ►
regardless of how good the system is.
01:07:48 ►
So in some sense, the problem has always been for us people in the high-dose world
01:07:53 ►
is we were political radicals, whether we liked it or not,
01:07:57 ►
because we were really saying the whole notion that human beings are superior
01:08:02 ►
makes no sense once you have a
01:08:06 ►
larger view. One of the things
01:08:08 ►
I’ve liked about microdosing
01:08:09 ►
is it has not
01:08:11 ►
led to any political
01:08:13 ►
positions at all.
01:08:16 ►
Really bad
01:08:17 ►
people can microdose.
01:08:19 ►
And they will probably stay healthier
01:08:22 ►
bad.
01:08:23 ►
So it’s like I’m free from a certain set of issues
01:08:28 ►
that I find personally very important,
01:08:30 ►
but professionally, at the moment, no.
01:08:35 ►
All right.
01:08:36 ►
Hey, so we touched on this for just a second,
01:08:39 ►
and I was hoping to expand just a little bit.
01:08:41 ►
The idea of how many neurotransmitters
01:08:46 ►
are now found to be made in the gut,
01:08:50 ►
the lion’s share of serotonin and sometimes dopamine, I guess.
01:09:01 ►
I’m curious about any kind of interaction with either neurotransmitter receptors or neurotransmitters themselves, modulation.
01:09:01 ►
Yep.
01:09:04 ►
Me too.
01:09:07 ►
Again, one of the problems is you have to have somebody who studies
01:09:09 ►
neurotransmitters who wants to work with
01:09:11 ►
these little doses when
01:09:13 ►
the payoff is obviously easy
01:09:15 ►
in the high doses.
01:09:17 ►
But,
01:09:18 ►
recently in a
01:09:21 ►
psychedelic psychiatry
01:09:23 ►
conference in Stockholm I think last week,
01:09:27 ►
someone presented that the same activation of 5-2-A
01:09:34 ►
and some other parts of the brain that occur at higher doses
01:09:37 ►
occur at doses down to, not microdoses, but to around 25 mics.
01:09:44 ►
down to not microdoses, but to around 25 mics.
01:09:53 ►
So the chances are that the same general effects, at least in the brain, are not dissimilar.
01:09:59 ►
And so the question that that raises is, how about when it happens more often? And the answer is, we would love to know, and our little 5,000-person group will help.
01:10:08 ►
But I should let you know something that you probably don’t want to know.
01:10:13 ►
Have any of you taken a medication for more than six months?
01:10:18 ►
Any medication for more than six months in your life?
01:10:23 ►
Okay. Do you know how many studies are done by pharmaceutical companies
01:10:30 ►
that last longer than six months?
01:10:37 ►
Think less.
01:10:40 ►
Whatever number you had.
01:10:43 ►
So we have incredibly little data
01:10:46 ►
on the long-term effects of anything
01:10:49 ►
unless it starts to show up harming enough people
01:10:53 ►
so that people notice.
01:10:55 ►
That’s a really good point.
01:10:56 ►
Yeah, very good point.
01:10:57 ►
So one of the nice things is if we do citizen science
01:11:03 ►
and we say, everyone who’s taken psychedelics for more than 20 years, could you fill out a form?
01:11:08 ►
We could really do some wonderful research pretty fast.
01:11:10 ►
We have tens of millions of people.
01:11:12 ►
Yeah, let me mention the tons of millions because it’s actually not a ton, but it’s millions.
01:11:19 ►
Since LSD was made illegal, this is the U.S. government figures,
01:11:24 ►
which you’ve got to be conservative,
01:11:26 ►
because they’re asking you to fill out a form of what are the illegal things you’ve done over the past month.
01:11:34 ►
And you’re in high school.
01:11:38 ►
Since LSD has become illegal, 26 million Americans, just Americans, have taken just LSD.
01:11:48 ►
Now, my guess is that if I did
01:11:52 ►
the demographics of kind of literacy and education and
01:11:55 ►
power, that there’d be a higher percentage of people
01:11:59 ►
in that more educated, more powerful,
01:12:04 ►
more wealthy, healthier in the LSD group
01:12:07 ►
than in the less educated group.
01:12:10 ►
So that if we then look at what are the people in the United States
01:12:13 ►
that have already used psychedelics,
01:12:14 ►
and why has there been so little pushback in the federal government,
01:12:19 ►
is because the chances of the people in the federal government
01:12:22 ►
that are interested in these things having been like you
01:12:25 ►
is quite large. So we’re dealing with a
01:12:31 ►
remarkable shift in the culture
01:12:35 ►
which is it’s really hard to think of a
01:12:39 ►
counterculture group that relates to psychedelics
01:12:44 ►
since they’re pervasive throughout the educated part of the culture.
01:12:52 ►
So things are happening quietly.
01:12:55 ►
Remember what happened in various places when marijuana became legal?
01:13:01 ►
Use did not go up.
01:13:08 ►
Cool.
01:13:09 ►
So the question I have is regarding some experiments
01:13:12 ►
you, Dr. Fadiman, did in the 60s
01:13:14 ►
was regarding the use of LSD as a problem-solving catalyst
01:13:17 ►
to give LSD to someone having focused specifically
01:13:20 ►
on one problem-solving area.
01:13:22 ►
Oh, problem-solving, yes.
01:13:24 ►
And the question I had for you is like,
01:13:26 ►
has there been any progress in this area for the past years?
01:13:29 ►
And anecdotally, how much success have you seen?
01:13:32 ►
Okay, in the 60s, there was one study done
01:13:35 ►
using 100 micrograms or 200 milligrams of mescaline
01:13:40 ►
for problem-solving of hard-edge scientific problem solving.
01:13:46 ►
Physics, chemistry, circuit design, architecture.
01:13:51 ►
I happen to have run most of that study, so I know it.
01:13:54 ►
And 48 problems, 44 solutions.
01:13:58 ►
Pretty good.
01:13:59 ►
Because you couldn’t get into the study unless you had failed on the problem for over three months.
01:14:06 ►
So that’s what he’s referring to.
01:14:08 ►
What happened with that?
01:14:12 ►
Well, the government, actually that was when the government stopped us.
01:14:16 ►
We got a letter one day which said, as of the receipt of this letter, your experimental exemption to do research is over.
01:14:21 ►
We had four people in our little treatment room who were with eye shades and music and they
01:14:30 ►
were about to get into solving their problems. The government just said your research is over.
01:14:34 ►
Now I committed a crime. I said I was the youngest person there so I could do this.
01:14:41 ►
I said I think we got the letter tomorrow.
01:14:43 ►
person there so I could do this. I said, I think we got the letter tomorrow.
01:14:53 ►
So what happened to that research is a number of people over the years have said to me,
01:14:57 ►
I’d like to replicate your research. Some people in England, some commercial people.
01:15:02 ►
And it hasn’t been replicated in the scientific literature.
01:15:08 ►
But some of you are familiar with Silicon Valley and that there are people in Silicon Valley who know that research.
01:15:15 ►
And there’s an enormous number of companies
01:15:17 ►
who owe their vastly inflated stock values to,
01:15:29 ►
as Ken Kesey used to say, a little dab will do you.
01:15:38 ►
And those of you who have been to Burning Man may have wondered where some of those art projects are envisioned.
01:15:45 ►
Because I remember there’s one small company that phoned me once and said
01:15:47 ►
we’d love to meet with you
01:15:49 ►
and every once a month
01:15:51 ►
we actually get together
01:15:52 ►
and would you like to meet with us then
01:15:54 ►
so this was a company
01:15:59 ►
that kind of put microdosing
01:16:00 ►
onto their schedule
01:16:01 ►
microdosing or macrodosing
01:16:04 ►
well I didn’t push it.
01:16:08 ►
But again, 26 million people have used LSD and some of them have used them for creative
01:16:14 ►
problem solving.
01:16:15 ►
And it’s very helpful because, again, one is able to hold in consciousness more variables
01:16:23 ►
simultaneously so that one can see more of a problem.
01:16:29 ►
And the reason our problem solving was so successful
01:16:32 ►
is people had put everything into the problem.
01:16:36 ►
They were people being paid to solve that level of problem
01:16:39 ►
and they had the answer somewhere,
01:16:42 ►
but they didn’t have it together.
01:16:44 ►
So that the use of microdosing, which is very, as I read all the articles,
01:16:50 ►
it’s incredibly popular in Silicon Valley,
01:16:52 ►
except that I also know it’s popular in high schools in India, where I do get mail,
01:16:58 ►
is that it allows not better creativity, but more time focused.
01:17:07 ►
And that turns out to be beneficial for the people who report it.
01:17:12 ►
And again, the nice thing about microdosing is if it’s helpful,
01:17:16 ►
then so far we don’t know enough of its defects to say you should be too careful.
01:17:21 ►
But we also know if it isn’t effective or pleasant or useful or beneficial, you stop.
01:17:29 ►
And we know that the physical substance leaves the body within a couple of hours.
01:17:36 ►
So inadvertently, that three-day thing turns out to be an enormous safety valve
01:17:43 ►
if there is what’s called tolerance, which
01:17:46 ►
is the buildup in the system.
01:17:49 ►
Hello.
01:17:50 ►
I was wondering, you talked about the importance of testing your drugs, especially LSD.
01:17:57 ►
I’m curious, do you have any websites or any way or any particular device to test for drugs?
01:18:05 ►
The best place I think to get, that I like to send people to get,
01:18:09 ►
and this is particularly for testing Molly, I don’t know if they do LSD,
01:18:12 ►
but is dancesafe.org.
01:18:14 ►
They’re terrific.
01:18:15 ►
They do wonderful work at raves, at parties, at electronic music festivals,
01:18:20 ►
and they do MDMA testing, and they provide MDMA testing kits.
01:18:25 ►
And I don’t know what other kinds of testing kits they have, but they’re the best because
01:18:29 ►
it’s a mitzvah to buy from them.
01:18:31 ►
You can buy LSD testing kits on Amazon.com.
01:18:35 ►
You can buy, yeah.
01:18:36 ►
Any suggestions on any particular one?
01:18:39 ►
You know, they’re not going to be like as good as in a lab, but I found, I just, you know, I ordered the whatever one that seemed like, you know, had the best reviews and it worked fine for me.
01:18:52 ►
Yeah, the ones that…
01:18:53 ►
They’re basically, I mean, Amazon is an interesting place.
01:18:56 ►
One is you can get LSD testing kits.
01:18:58 ►
There are at least two companies.
01:18:59 ►
DanceSafe is one and there’s another.
01:19:02 ►
And it tests whether it’s an indole, meaning an LSD-like
01:19:05 ►
substance or not. And the one dangerous substance out there which is active at the same level,
01:19:12 ►
microdoses, as LSD are called N-bombs, N-B-O-M-D-M-T. General suggestion is don’t.
01:19:21 ►
The problem is slightly more than you, slightly more than an interesting high
01:19:27 ►
has a side effect of death.
01:19:31 ►
For that, you could wait and get some tested.
01:19:34 ►
DanSafe for Molly.
01:19:35 ►
DanSafe has a good test.
01:19:36 ►
If you go to DanSafe,
01:19:37 ►
they’ll give you four different reagent kits
01:19:39 ►
that will test for a different spectrum.
01:19:41 ►
It’s not going to tell you
01:19:43 ►
every substance that’s in there.
01:19:44 ►
It’s not completely foolproof.
01:19:46 ►
But it’s at least one step of harm reduction.
01:19:49 ►
It can rule out some of the more dangerous things.
01:19:52 ►
You just have to sacrifice one of your doses.
01:19:55 ►
Right.
01:19:56 ►
Not a whole dose, maybe a microdose.
01:19:58 ►
Sacrifice a microdose.
01:19:59 ►
Sacrifice a microdose.
01:20:01 ►
Sorry, question from the internet.
01:20:02 ►
Hi, yeah, I’m live tweeting the event on Twitter.
01:20:04 ►
And I’m asking one of the
01:20:05 ►
questions from social media. This is from
01:20:07 ►
atachirohero. This is
01:20:10 ►
addressed to Dr. Fadiman, but we can generalize
01:20:12 ►
it for everyone. Can you, Dr. Fadiman,
01:20:14 ►
talk about your outreach to poor people and
01:20:15 ►
people of color and how you’ve helped their
01:20:18 ►
mental health challenges slash trauma that
01:20:19 ►
are related to classism and racism and just
01:20:22 ►
for some additional context, this
01:20:24 ►
person had tweeted,
01:20:28 ►
as I do my research, I’m amazed at how blasé white people are about talking about this without fear of criminal repercussions.
01:20:31 ►
Let me do this first.
01:20:32 ►
So first of all, Dr. Fadiman does not do outreach.
01:20:35 ►
He does not give people drugs.
01:20:39 ►
He does not encourage people to use drugs.
01:20:42 ►
That would be illegal.
01:20:44 ►
He might a little.
01:20:46 ►
What Dr. Fadiman does is in reach.
01:20:49 ►
So people send him their reports.
01:20:54 ►
In my book, I speak a tremendous amount about the war on drugs
01:20:59 ►
and the basis of the war on drugs in this country,
01:21:04 ►
which has always been about race.
01:21:06 ►
And what’s incredibly important to me
01:21:10 ►
that people understand is that in a very real way,
01:21:13 ►
this is a book of privilege.
01:21:15 ►
And the reason I wrote it
01:21:18 ►
is because I am a person of privilege.
01:21:20 ►
When I was experiencing these benefits from microdosing,
01:21:23 ►
I realized that I was in a
01:21:26 ►
very unique position
01:21:28 ►
I was a financially secure white woman
01:21:32 ►
living in the state of California
01:21:33 ►
for me to write a book about my experience with using an illegal drug
01:21:38 ►
is a very different thing than someone
01:21:40 ►
in a different community
01:21:44 ►
say a young man of color, for example,
01:21:46 ►
would not feel the same sense of security and safety writing that book.
01:21:50 ►
And that’s why I wrote the book.
01:21:52 ►
I wrote the book because I felt like I had an obligation.
01:21:56 ►
And what I’ve always taught my children is that their privilege requires them to act.
01:22:01 ►
And you cannot, because of the myriad things you get because of your privilege,
01:22:06 ►
you are less obligated to take risks that people who aren’t in the same positions of privilege
01:22:10 ►
cannot afford to take. So that’s really what, that’s sort of the most important reason that
01:22:20 ►
I wrote the book. But I think it’s also equally important to stress,
01:22:25 ►
and I stress this over and over again, it is dangerous in the society where Jeff Sessions
01:22:31 ►
is the Attorney General to blithely engage in the consumption of illegal drugs. 29 million people
01:22:41 ►
have done it, but it is very different to do that when you’re white and when you’re black, frankly.
01:22:49 ►
You know, the things that we, when you talk about what behaviors are most likely to get people arrested,
01:22:55 ►
there are millions of people serving time for smoking weed.
01:22:59 ►
You know?
01:23:00 ►
So I think that’s the most important thing that in terms of that.
01:23:05 ►
I know I realize that your viewer was asking a question about access, but I think far more important than access when we talk about race and class on this issue in particular is risk.
01:23:18 ►
And so I just really want to stress that.
01:23:20 ►
Like I say to my son, when you’re a little white kid and you smoke a joint on the streets of Berkeley, one set of consequences can happen to you.
01:23:30 ►
One of your friends who’s black, who’s brown, they can have a whole different set of consequences.
01:23:35 ►
And you have to be constantly cognizant of that disparity.
01:23:39 ►
Now, the others, right.
01:23:42 ►
I bet.
01:23:42 ►
I bet.
01:23:47 ►
fortunately we’re still 4% of the human race
01:23:51 ►
and Jeff Sessions is an even smaller percentage
01:23:54 ►
human race, ok, let’s not push it
01:23:58 ►
ok
01:23:58 ►
our survey actually didn’t ask people
01:24:04 ►
their ethnicity or their income.
01:24:08 ►
And the two popular substances that people talked about were LSD and mushrooms.
01:24:17 ►
Now, mushrooms have a particular property, which is they do not know they are illegal.
01:24:23 ►
which is they do not know they are illegal.
01:24:32 ►
And psilocybin mushrooms grow everywhere.
01:24:37 ►
He gives me such agita because I was a criminal defense attorney,
01:24:48 ►
and I’m always like, he doesn’t encourage you to use, to find, to provide other people people but i have a defense attorney and she just said she’d take a bullet for me
01:24:54 ►
the fact is that psychedelics have been around considerably longer than written language, meaning people using them.
01:25:08 ►
We’re talking a lot of different plants.
01:25:10 ►
I was just reading actually a fascinating article that was saying,
01:25:13 ►
why is it that not only there are well over 150 species of mushroom that have psilocybin,
01:25:21 ►
but they are in different families?
01:25:24 ►
that have psilocybin, but they are in different families.
01:25:30 ►
As if psilocybin was a solution found again and again by nature,
01:25:35 ►
and the article suggests it was to make insects go wee and go away.
01:25:38 ►
Don’t know, that seems to be an assumption.
01:25:42 ►
But these substances exist.
01:25:47 ►
The DMP people like to say,
01:25:53 ►
if DMT is illegal, everyone in the room is in violation since it’s in their cells.
01:25:56 ►
So we’re dealing with some… The laws, I think we all know, have nothing to do with anything remotely resembling science.
01:26:01 ►
As you’ve pointed out, the United States laws have had
01:26:05 ►
a huge amount to do with race,
01:26:08 ►
like a lot of other covert
01:26:09 ►
laws.
01:26:11 ►
As someone has pointed out to me,
01:26:14 ►
the number of people
01:26:16 ►
using psychedelics who happen
01:26:17 ►
to be people of color,
01:26:21 ►
South
01:26:22 ►
America, are many,
01:26:24 ►
as well as a lot of people in Africa and so forth.
01:26:27 ►
So we’re dealing with not a simple problem.
01:26:31 ►
We’re dealing with a complicated biosphere of psychedelics,
01:26:37 ►
a medical sphere of psychedelics,
01:26:39 ►
a legal sphere which includes psychedelics where they don’t belong.
01:26:47 ►
And it’s a mess.
01:26:50 ►
And individually,
01:26:55 ►
it’s quite true. If you’re the kind of person who likely isn’t going to get arrested for existing or for driving,
01:27:00 ►
you’re probably the kind of person that will not be
01:27:03 ►
arrested for psychedelic use. That’s why you’re all here and not busted.
01:27:09 ►
Are we going to solve that by making
01:27:12 ►
psychedelics more legal? It will help. Certainly
01:27:15 ►
as marijuana has become legal one of the things they’re doing is saying
01:27:19 ►
what about all the people who are currently either in jail or have
01:27:24 ►
records about marijuana?
01:27:25 ►
Maybe we should take that away.
01:27:28 ►
There’s a sanity that is starting to pervade the plants that are of more interest than for diarrhea and headaches.
01:27:40 ►
There’s just a level of sanity that is starting to appear.
01:27:44 ►
And it will not appear first in the United States.
01:27:47 ►
Don’t worry.
01:27:49 ►
Yeah, I think we’ve got time for probably one more question.
01:27:52 ►
Why don’t we take another question
01:27:55 ►
and then we’ll take the individuals who have the questions
01:27:57 ►
who’ve been waiting so patiently in line,
01:27:59 ►
just jump up on the stage afterwards
01:28:01 ►
and we’ll answer questions individually.
01:28:02 ►
I’ll let everybody else.
01:28:04 ►
Yeah, that’s a great idea.
01:28:06 ►
And I also would ask, after we answer the last question,
01:28:08 ►
please just stay in your seats for a quick moment so we can say a few words at the end before shuffling,
01:28:13 ►
just so people next to you can hear what the last things are to say.
01:28:16 ►
But, yeah, go ahead.
01:28:17 ►
Good evening.
01:28:18 ►
My name is Sky.
01:28:19 ►
Thank you so much for being here, and it’s an honor to be on this journey with you.
01:28:23 ►
So I have somewhat of a physiological question, the interaction of microdosing with evidence supporting that
01:28:31 ►
psychedelics in general hyperconnect our brains and make us more receptive to information that
01:28:36 ►
our perception can receive and that we can process basically. Does that do the same to
01:28:43 ►
our body such as if we’re like on a juice fast
01:28:46 ►
for instance if we’re microdosing during that juice fast would we absorb more of those
01:28:51 ►
macronutrients just as like an example of what possibly could happen to our bodies if you’re
01:28:56 ►
microdosing during a juice fast would you absorb more that’s just as an example there’s so many
01:29:02 ►
more right of course okay. I get the idea.
01:29:05 ►
For example, during a juice fast, would you absorb more microdoses more quickly or more effectively?
01:29:12 ►
Or if you were on a ketone?
01:29:14 ►
Do microdoses make you absorb more nutrients?
01:29:17 ►
And the answer is?
01:29:20 ►
Who knows?
01:29:20 ►
You know the answer.
01:29:22 ►
We don’t know.
01:29:23 ►
Which is zero research, zero interest in that particular research,
01:29:29 ►
and zero possibility of getting it funded right now.
01:29:34 ►
And citizen science will have answers which you may or may not believe.
01:29:43 ►
Which is, if those of you who want to, you know, basically people,
01:29:49 ►
microdosing just seems to make the system, when it’s working, work better.
01:29:55 ►
It’s kind of like water.
01:30:00 ►
Right?
01:30:01 ►
What’s the effect of water on your kidney?
01:30:03 ►
It makes the kidney work better.
01:30:04 ►
What’s the effect on your toes? It makes your toes work better. What’s the effect of too much bad?
01:30:11 ►
Okay, so we’re dealing with something which may be very simple,
01:30:14 ►
that may just be like a vitamin. You know, take vitamin D. Those of you who are into the vitamin
01:30:20 ►
world, vitamin D affects like 35 different things.
01:30:27 ►
So probably it’s okay.
01:30:31 ►
And if you take too much of it, it turns out very hard to do, but yes, you can take too much of it. You can probably microdose too often.
01:30:36 ►
You can probably do anything. There’s always
01:30:39 ►
a way to harm yourself. And if you don’t believe me,
01:30:43 ►
read Erowid, where people say, well. And if you don’t believe me, read Erwitt. Where people say, well what if you take
01:30:47 ►
carpet cleaner and blow it up your nose and then smoke a lot of dope?
01:30:53 ►
And the answer is you get really sick and then
01:30:56 ►
you write a report and Erwitt publishes it and someone else says, what brand
01:31:00 ►
of carpet cleaner did you put up your nose?
01:31:05 ►
So we’re never going to
01:31:08 ►
have anything that is safe
01:31:10 ►
in the way that
01:31:12 ►
people fantasy something is safe.
01:31:14 ►
There is always risk
01:31:15 ►
and Shulgin
01:31:18 ►
I think said it very nicely
01:31:19 ►
is don’t put anything
01:31:22 ►
into your body that you don’t know
01:31:24 ►
something about.
01:31:26 ►
Well, that’s a great last comment.
01:31:29 ►
I would agree.
01:31:30 ►
So, yeah, well, the rest of you guys can come up.
01:31:33 ►
If you enjoyed this show tonight, please consider becoming a supporter of us on Patreon.
01:31:37 ►
We have a table outside.
01:31:38 ►
You get a free T-shirt if you sign up as a supporter at 15 a month or more,
01:31:42 ►
and you will help us do more of this.
01:31:44 ►
But thank you all for being here.
01:31:45 ►
Thank you, everybody, for watching.
01:31:46 ►
Thank you, Jim and Ayelet.
01:31:48 ►
There’s stairs right there.
01:31:51 ►
There’s a set of stairs off to the left.
01:31:53 ►
Thank you.
01:31:54 ►
Thanks, everybody.
01:32:00 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:32:07 ►
Now, before I say anything else, and since I am a lawyer who has taken an oath to uphold the law of the land,
01:32:15 ►
I am obliged to repeat the warning that even a microdose of a Schedule I substance is a crime.
01:32:22 ►
And who am I to suggest that you commit a crime? I’m really not doing
01:32:26 ►
that. But if you are intent on becoming a criminal, well, then you should probably get all of the
01:32:33 ►
information about what you’re considering as you can. Thus this podcast. And I hope that satisfies
01:32:40 ►
you narcs who also enjoy these podcasts. We’re all in this together, you know, and I realize that you aren’t all bad guys.
01:32:49 ►
Hell, after all, I was once a Republican, but look how well I turned out after I found psychedelics.
01:32:55 ►
Anyway, there were a couple of things that Jim Fadiman said just now that really resonated with me,
01:33:02 ►
and so I want to point them out in case they didn’t stand out to you.
01:33:06 ►
The most important one from my perspective, once the safety and legal issues are covered,
01:33:12 ►
is that after completing the recommended 30-day protocol, you should listen to your own body.
01:33:19 ►
And if you do decide to continue microdosing, well, then you can adjust the protocol to fit your own situation.
01:33:27 ►
I guess that the one little piece of anecdotal evidence about the pros and cons of microdosing
01:33:32 ►
that I can add to the pile is from my own experience with microdosing.
01:33:38 ►
And while I’ve microdosed with LSD a few times when I was writing computer code, my most
01:33:44 ►
extensive experience came when I was completing computer code, my most extensive experience came
01:33:45 ►
when I was completing the final draft of my book, The Spirit of the Internet. Prior
01:33:50 ►
to publication, I sent copies of the manuscript to about 20 people, most of
01:33:55 ►
whom marked it up and gave me some important feedback. I then took that pile
01:34:00 ►
of manuscript edits and used them as a guide while over a six
01:34:05 ►
month period I wrote the final draft, and during those six months I was microdosing
01:34:10 ►
LSD. My protocol was a little bit different from the one we just heard, and
01:34:15 ►
it took a few weeks of experimentation before I settled on a method that worked
01:34:20 ►
really well for me, and don’t bother to ask what that was, because it most likely won’t
01:34:25 ►
be the one that works best for you. Anyway, what you may find interesting though, at least from
01:34:32 ►
the standpoint of how these substances can affect creativity, is to compare the spirit of the
01:34:38 ►
internet with my novel, The Genesis Generation. Now when I wrote the novel, instead of microdosing on LSD while I
01:34:46 ►
wrote it, I smoked cannabis the whole time. So, if you compare those two books, I, well, I think that
01:34:52 ►
you’re going to find it pretty obvious which one had an LSD boost. My novel, however, well, it’s
01:35:00 ►
just the story told by a stoner, and I think it’s a lot more fun to read.
01:35:06 ►
So until next time, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdellic Space.
01:35:10 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.