Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Charles Grob
Charlie Grob and Lorenzo (circa: 2012)
Today we feature a talk that Dr. Charles Grob gave at the 1994 Transpersonal Association Conference in Killarny, Ireland. The focus of this talk concerns Dr. Grob’s work with ayahuasca users in Brazil.
As far as I know, this was the first government approved human study of the physiological effects of ayahuasca on humans. This study compared 15 long-term ayahuasca drinkers with healthy individuals and found that UDV members had lower levels of anxiety and many had overcome alcohol abuse.
Another study by Grob and Dartiu Xavier Silveira compared 40 adolescent ayahuasca drinkers with non-drinkers. The research showed positive outcomes, such as reduced alcohol consumption among UDV teenagers and improved mood, self-acceptance, and interpersonal relationships in participants. These studies contributed to understanding the therapeutic potential of ayahuasca
ARCHIVE of Dr. Charles Grob on the Psychedelic Salon
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Three-dimensional, transforming, musical, linguistic objects.
00:00:09 ►
Elf machines.
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
Now today we’re going to travel back in time to Killarney, Ireland in 1994,
00:00:29 ►
and listen to a talk that was given at the International Transpersonal Conference by Dr. Charles Grobe,
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or Charlie as he’s known to family and friends.
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And, as you know from the title of this podcast, it’s about an ayahuasca research project in Brazil.
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With all of the information and experience reports about ayahuasca that are available today,
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well, you may wonder why I’m podcasting a 30-year-old talk about it.
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With the rush of news about psychedelics, however, that’s now flooding the internet,
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I think that it’s important to pause and give a little thought to, well, how we got here and who are some of the people who laid the foundation
00:01:09 ►
for the psychedelic work that’s taking place today. What I’m hoping that you will take from
00:01:14 ►
this talk is a better appreciation for the women and men who have risked their careers by being
00:01:21 ►
associated with research into psychedelic plants and chemicals back
00:01:25 ►
in the dark ages of the 20th century’s war on drugs.
00:01:30 ►
Roger Walsh, a colleague of Dr. Grobes at the University of California, Irvine, is the
00:01:36 ►
person that we hear introducing him, and it is not only a wonderful introduction, but
00:01:41 ►
it’s also well-deserved.
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As you will hear, this tape was damaged and parts of this lecture have been lost, but it’s also well deserved. As you will hear, this tape was damaged and parts of this
00:01:46 ►
lecture have been lost, but I think that the part I recovered is worth listening to, particularly
00:01:52 ►
near the end when he provides the specific parameters that were studied while the participants
00:01:58 ►
were under the influence of ayahuasca. If you have ever participated in an ayahuasca ceremony and
00:02:04 ►
wondered how safe the experience would be,
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I believe that this lecture will at least let you know that some serious research has been done about the physical effects that the tea has on a human body.
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Now, let’s travel back in time to lovely Ireland and learn more about how ayahuasca is brewed,
00:02:22 ►
as well as what some of the physiological effects can be.
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One of the recurring themes that I’ve heard from a lot of people over the conference is
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how nice it is to be with like spirits who share the same values and interests, and how
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nice it is to be able to communicate openly about what’s really important to us.
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be able to communicate openly about what’s really important to us.
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And for me, that is certainly, I think for a lot of us, that it’s such a pleasant change because in many cases, the environments in which we work are more conventional and not
00:02:58 ►
open to these perspectives.
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And so it’s really delightful to have the opportunity just to communicate freely.
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And so it’s really delightful to have the opportunity just to communicate freely.
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And certainly for me, also working in a conventional university setting,
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it’s been difficult to find like-minded spirits,
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and I’ve had to be somewhat careful of what I say a lot of the time.
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And so one of the real delights of my academic career occurred some years ago when Charles Grobe came to work in the psychiatry department
00:03:30 ►
of the University of California at Irvine,
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and his resume appeared very straight.
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I mean, we hired him because he had a great academic record
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and he was a good child psychiatrist
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and he’d publish things on child health and this and that. I mean, he was a great academic record and he was a good child psychiatrist and he’d publish things on child health
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and this and that.
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I mean, he was a measure of straightness.
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The only kind of giveaway was
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he had a couple of organizations listed
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which were kind of social service oriented.
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They looked like they did some good to society
00:03:59 ►
as opposed to straight academic societies.
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But then when he arrived
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and I actually sat down to talk with him,
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it turned out that that was just the surface,
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and below that was a man who was deeply interested in a range of topics
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which would not bear mentioning in academic circles,
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but which we spent a week talking about.
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And so it was just a delight to find Charlie
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and to be with him at the University of California
00:04:29 ►
and to watch as he started to openly investigate areas
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that have been very deeply meaningful to him for many years,
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such as shamanism, cross-cultural psychiatry,
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the use of psychedelics in different cultures,
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and bring these interests into his central academic work.
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And I think Charles Grobe represents a fine example
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of a person who’s been able to merge both worlds.
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He is now the Director of child and adolescent psychiatry at the
00:05:06 ►
University of California, Los Angeles. He has published in child psychiatry, but has
00:05:14 ►
also now published widely in the areas of shamanism, cross-cultural use of psychedelics.
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And as I think is clear, one of the, it’s clear that if a lot of the ideas we’re
00:05:27 ►
interested in are going to reach the mainstream, it’s going to require people who are competent
00:05:31 ►
in the mainstream. And Charles Grobe has certainly been that. In fact, he is now the first person in
00:05:36 ►
the United States to gain permission from the Federal Drug Administration to do research studies on human subjects with MDMA.
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And if you know anything about the Federal Drug Administration,
00:05:50 ►
you will bow in deep admiration of just how much work it took
00:05:55 ►
to be able to get this authorization.
00:05:59 ►
He has also helped co-found the Hefter Foundation,
00:06:04 ►
an organization recently established to legitimize
00:06:08 ►
psychedelic research within the academic environment.
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And he has, in addition to his MDMA research, which he’s conducting at UCLA, he’s also done
00:06:21 ►
cross-cultural studies and has been investigating the use of ayahuasca.
00:06:27 ►
And it’s that research which he’s going to share with us today.
00:06:31 ►
Please join me in welcoming Charles Grove.
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Thank you very much, Roger, for that lovely introduction.
00:06:44 ►
Thank you very much, Roger, for that lovely introduction.
00:06:50 ►
And I would like to acknowledge here today the valuable role Roger has played in really encouraging me to go forward with this research.
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When I arrived at UC Irvine some seven years ago, I was not only under deep cover,
00:07:02 ►
but I was also deeply disillusioned with the direction the field had gone,
00:07:07 ►
quite in a different direction than that which I had hoped to do when I started my medical career.
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And I remember distinctly a long talk I had with Roger where he asked me,
00:07:23 ►
where I was telling him how disillusioned I was with
00:07:25 ►
what was going on and really the field in general and some of the specific issues we were dealing
00:07:31 ►
with. And he said, well, Charlie, in your heart, if you could do anything you wanted, what would
00:07:37 ►
that be? And I said, well, obviously it would be to research psychedelics, but I’m beginning to
00:07:41 ►
think that that’s impossible and Roger said
00:07:45 ►
well Charlie if it’s if this is what your heart is telling you to do you
00:07:49 ►
really need to go ahead and do it and from that day on that was the direction
00:07:53 ►
I I’ve gone so I think in many respects Roger should really get a lot of credit
00:07:59 ►
for what’s happening on the other hand things go wrong, he gets some of the blame. So anyways,
00:08:08 ►
at this point, I’m basically conducting kind of a dual role. I’ve worked very hard to establish
00:08:16 ►
my credentials, and I’ve got a full-time academic position at UCLA, but I’ve also found a surprising degree of support from within my
00:08:28 ►
department. I’m located at Harbor UCLA Medical Center, including some in-house research monies,
00:08:35 ►
which are invaluable when it comes to getting research projects off the ground. So my view is
00:08:41 ►
that things are beginning to change, that what was previously a taboo area, that people were not allowed not simply to work in, but even to discuss openly, that the barriers are starting to fall. quite a surprising degree of support, not only at FDA level and DEA and other federal and state
00:09:07 ►
agencies, but also from within the institution, from within my department at UCLA and at Harbor
00:09:12 ►
UCLA. This particular study that I’ll talk with you about today is a study I conducted along with
00:09:21 ►
Dennis McKenna, who is an ethnobotanist and biochemist,
00:09:25 ►
younger brother of the famous Terence McKenna.
00:09:29 ►
I think Dennis doesn’t get as much recognition as his older brother,
00:09:34 ►
yet he really does need to be viewed as quite an innovator and quite a tremendous thinker in this area,
00:09:43 ►
really one of the leading people we have.
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And I was quite honored a couple of years ago when Dennis asked me to join him
00:09:51 ►
in a collaborative study that was taking shape down in the Brazilian Amazon
00:09:58 ►
to do a formal biomedical study of the plant psychedelic ayahuasca.
00:10:06 ►
And what I’d like to talk with you about today, then, is that study, a brief overview of ayahuasca,
00:10:12 ►
and then tell you a little bit of how the study was conducted and some of our preliminary results.
00:10:25 ►
So we’ll just start right off.
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Oh, good.
00:10:28 ►
Okay, slides work.
00:10:30 ►
So ayahuasca has been really used since pre-Columbian times in the Amazon Basin
00:10:38 ►
by the peoples that lived there.
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In the Quechua language, ayahuasca is, it’s a Quechua word,
00:10:46 ►
translation is vine of the dead or vine of the souls. It is known under a variety of names,
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capi, yage, also pinde, napima. Huasca is the Portuguese transliteration of ayahuasca,
00:11:03 ►
is the Portuguese transliteration of ayahuasca.
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And in Brazil, where Portuguese is spoke,
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ayahuasca is referred to as wasca.
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Vegetal is translated from the Portuguese as plant.
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And the wasca is known amongst the group that we worked with in Brazil as the vegetal
00:11:24 ►
and also colloquially referred to simply as the tea.
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It has been used, as I mentioned, from prehistorical context and shamanic context
00:11:36 ►
as agents of divination, magic, as an integral part of the religious spiritual life of the people there.
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It also has been utilized in ethno-medical context by mestizo peoples in the Amazon Basin
00:11:59 ►
as agents of healing.
00:12:02 ►
The group that we studied were part of a syncretic religious movement.
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Syncretic religions are religions that incorporate a variety of different kinds of religious traditions,
00:12:16 ►
a Judeo-Christian as well as perhaps that arising from the early inhabitants of the region.
00:12:24 ►
perhaps that arising from the early inhabitants of the region.
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And particularly in the country of Brazil,
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a number of syncretic religious movements have arisen over the last few decades, and we were invited down by one of these groups, the União de Vegetal, or the UDV.
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União de Vegetal means Union of the Plants.
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And this is a relatively small syncretic church.
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It’s been in existence for about 40 years.
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It is small.
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However, it is extremely well organized with a very disciplined membership.
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It arose within the Amazon basin, first in Rio Branco and then in Manaus, where
00:13:06 ►
a study took place, and spread throughout Brazil into the more cosmopolitan regions in the south.
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Today, it consists of about 7,000 members who stretch across the socioeconomic plane and include a number of professionals of various orientation.
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And the UDV was instrumental in getting the ayahuasca legalized in Brazil in the late 80s,
00:13:37 ►
legalized within the context of religious ceremonial usage. So although a relatively small church, this church is capable
00:13:48 ►
of really exerting significant positive impact in Brazil and was interested in our coming down,
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and Dennis and myself coming down to Brazil to conduct this study. In large part, I think they
00:14:03 ►
had some concern that if the political winds should
00:14:05 ►
ever shift that um they were concerned that the charge may be leveled at them that this was
00:14:12 ►
perhaps a toxic substance and that might be used to make the uh make the the waska illegal again
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and they felt that a very fair objective objective-minded scientific medical study would perhaps lay that issue to rest.
00:14:31 ►
The ayahuasca itself is made basically from two different plants.
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One known by the people in Brazil as the Mariyi is the Banisteriopsis copy,
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which contains beta-carboline,
00:14:47 ►
harmala alkaloids,
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and the other psychotria,
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the leaves of the psychotria viridis,
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known as the chacruna plant,
00:14:57 ►
contains the potent psychedelic substance dimethyltryptamine.
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This is really a very, very sophisticated pharmacology,
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given that the banisteriopsis copy plant, if taken in and of itself, has very, very mild
00:15:15 ►
psychoactive properties. The psychotria viridis, although containing a very, very potent psychedelic,
00:15:22 ►
if taken by itself, is inactivated in the gut by the enzymes,
00:15:27 ►
monoamine oxidase enzymes.
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And somehow over time, the original inhabitants of the region learned that if you would combine these two plants,
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you achieved a very potent effect because the banisteriopsis copy with the
00:15:45 ►
harmala alkaloids has monoamine oxidase inhibiting action.
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So the harmala alkaloids inhibit the monoamine oxidase that would have
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prevented absorption of the dimethyltryptamine,
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thus allowing for a very powerful, visionary, transformative experience.
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How the indigenous people learned of this very sophisticated pharmacology is really a question.
00:16:18 ►
I think when I approach these issues, I utilize my kind of conventional reductionistic scientific mindset,
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and I just assume over thousands of years of trial and error, they learn which combinations
00:16:31 ►
will kill you and which will send you into exalted visionary states. However, the people down there
00:16:37 ►
that I spent some time with tell me that that’s, in their view, that’s not the reason at all,
00:16:42 ►
rather that this information came to the people through divine agency.
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So I guess you can decide for yourself which explanation.
00:16:51 ►
I kind of like their explanation,
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although sometimes I’m a little too reductionistic to accept it.
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So let’s go ahead.
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Okay, I’d just like to show this slide here.
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This is a painting of Yondo Rios, who is the son of an ayahuasca healer in Peru.
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Yondo is actually a friend of mine.
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He lives in Southern California along with his wife, the anthropologist Marlene de Rios,
00:17:19 ►
who is a collaborator I’ve worked with.
00:17:21 ►
And I’d like to show this slide just to point out the tremendous
00:17:25 ►
diversity of life forms that exist in the Amazon. 15% of all the world’s species of animals,
00:17:35 ►
plants, insects exist only in the Amazon basin. And I saw plant life there that I was really quite taken with,
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had never seen anyplace else.
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The diversity of fish that I was served was just spectacular.
00:17:53 ►
And I had encounters with insects that…
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I’ll have to cut something out of my talk.
00:17:59 ►
But I also like to point out here that…
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If you look over here,
00:18:05 ►
you can see what Jan was depicting in this area,
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tremendous devastation has occurred in the rainforest in previous decades,
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and the pace is escalating.
00:18:15 ►
And I was horrified to find in the docks at Manaus large cargo ships actually bound for Japan, packed with high-grade timber.
00:18:31 ►
There are now efforts to build a road across Peru and Brazil, connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific,
00:18:39 ►
which will expedite the removal of high-grade timber from the rainforest.
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expedite the removal of high-grade timber from the rainforest. And I think this is something that we really all need to recognize as a major concern that does not simply affect the people
00:18:51 ►
down there, but ultimately could have tremendous effects on all of us. Here’s another painting of
00:18:59 ►
the Peruvian artist Pablo Amaringo. And I’d just like to point this out as another example of healing
00:19:07 ►
within an ethnomedical context.
00:19:11 ►
And here we have the ayahuasca session occurring, and the ayahuasquero, here’s a patient in
00:19:18 ►
the middle, there are ayahuasquero healers sitting around the patient, and they are summoning
00:19:24 ►
in the deities through their songs.
00:19:27 ►
And by summoning in the deities,
00:19:28 ►
they’re asking for vision into the cause of the malady the patient is suffering
00:19:34 ►
and also calling upon the deities to facilitate the process of healing.
00:19:41 ►
And I think this gives you also a visual frame
00:19:47 ►
of healing. And I think this gives you also a visual frame in which one can get a sense of what ayahuasca visions appear like. Here is the Banisteriopsis copy, the flowering plant,
00:19:57 ►
again, containing the harmala alkaloids. Here we have just the chemical structures of the beta-carboline
00:20:06 ►
harmala alkaloids, harmaline, harmine, and tetrahydroharmine. And here we
00:20:11 ►
simply have some chemical pathways showing
00:20:16 ►
the similarity of the harmala alkaloids to the precursor
00:20:21 ►
of 5-hydroxy tryptameter serotonin and then with melatonin. Again, this is in the same family affecting these neurotransmitter structures.
00:20:32 ►
And here, I’d like to just point out here that there was considerable interest in this plant in Europe
00:20:40 ►
at the beginning of this century.
00:20:43 ►
It had actually first been identified in the 1860s by
00:20:46 ►
the British ethnobotanist Richard Spruce. He had sent samples back. They had not really been
00:20:52 ►
analyzed until the turn of the century, particularly by the famous psychopharmacologist
00:20:58 ►
Lewis Lewin. And Lewin published, again, here’s a monograph of his publishing some of his findings
00:21:07 ►
as to what the chemical constituents of the Banisteriopsis copy plant.
00:21:13 ►
And interestingly, Banisterine, which was what the Germans called the extract
00:21:23 ►
derived from the Banisteriopsis plant, the
00:21:25 ►
hormaloalkaloid. Banisterine, which was actually a
00:21:29 ►
harming-harmoline mixture, was used in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease in the late
00:21:33 ►
20s and early 30s in Europe. Actually, in 1919,
00:21:37 ►
there was the great influenza
00:21:40 ►
epidemic causing considerable encephalitis. There were many post-encephalitic Parkinson’s patients for which there was no treatment,
00:21:49 ►
and they found, very interestingly, that the banisterine containing these harmala alkaloids
00:21:55 ►
was very effective in treating particularly the rigidity associated with Parkinson’s. They also reported as a sidelight that patients experienced a surprising
00:22:08 ►
improvement in their mood that lasted for some period of time. Perhaps not surprising considering
00:22:15 ►
that this plant having monoamine oxidase inhibiting action, we also use monoamine oxidase inhibitors
00:22:21 ►
as conventional antidepressants in psychiatry.
00:22:26 ►
Okay, here we go.
00:22:34 ►
Just a picture of, here, a photo of Schultes just looking at the banisteriopsis vine within an indigenous context.
00:22:37 ►
And here we have a close-up of the thick banisteriopsis vine, a very thick, woody vine. This vine contains the harmala alkaloids,
00:22:47 ►
essential for preparation of ayahuasca.
00:22:51 ►
Here we have a collection of the vine.
00:22:57 ►
When we were down there, the Unidad de Vegetal,
00:23:00 ►
the group we were with, conducted a preparo on our behalf to collect plants and then prepare the actual substance.
00:23:09 ►
And I’ll show you that whole process.
00:23:11 ►
So here we have cutting down the thick woody vine with a machete.
00:23:17 ►
Here a cross-section of the vine shows it’s kind of a unique, interesting pattern.
00:23:26 ►
This is the chemical structure for dimethyltryptamine.
00:23:29 ►
Here we have the Psychotria viridis plant, the Chakruta,
00:23:34 ►
the young lady from the UDV posing for us.
00:23:40 ►
And here we have, I’ll show you now the process by which the plant is prepared.
00:23:45 ►
Here we have the chopped up pieces of the vine first washed off and then collected together.
00:23:53 ►
The vine is then pounded and macerated into fine strips and really threaded to basically allow the active alkaloids to be more accessible to the preparatory process.
00:24:09 ►
And these men here sit for, really for some time, pounding away at the vine.
00:24:18 ►
Here is a close-up of how it looks after being pounded for some time.
00:24:28 ►
looks after being pounded for some time. And on our behalf, they took scrupulous measurements because we were doing really a number of different
00:24:33 ►
kinds of assays and assessments and we needed to know the precise quantity of
00:24:38 ►
the different components that were utilized in the mixture. This man here is one of their maestries, one of their leaders in Manaus, Maestri Florencio.
00:24:50 ►
He’s really the primary leader of this community that we were with.
00:24:55 ►
This man here, Jeremy Oberlander, is a psychiatrist at a university in Rio de Janeiro.
00:25:02 ►
We had excellent collaboration from medical professionals in
00:25:07 ►
Brazil, and we had really actually tremendous cooperation on the part of the members of this
00:25:13 ►
group. And then both the bark of the Banisteriopsis plant, the macerated vine, and the leaves of psychotria are placed in these very, very large metal vats
00:25:26 ►
and then placed over these large open-air furnaces
00:25:31 ►
where lots of water is added
00:25:36 ►
and they are basically cooking there for hours.
00:25:40 ►
This is obviously very, very hard work.
00:25:42 ►
And yet I tell you, these members of this church we were with really throw themselves into their work here.
00:25:50 ►
They really love taking part in this process, although this is their off day from their regular jobs, and it is literally, as you can see, back-breaking work.
00:26:01 ►
This process takes hours. It’s about an eight, nine hour process by which from the time
00:26:07 ►
you start boiling and, you know, boil off and add more water and just continue to boil it off to get
00:26:13 ►
the concentrated extract that this takes place. I think the papara that we attended here was about
00:26:20 ►
a 12-hour papara. We later attended one that went over three days, where there was kind of just a continual process around the clock of preparation.
00:26:30 ►
Here we have it.
00:26:31 ►
It’s a very light consistency.
00:26:34 ►
I should also point out that, in my opinion,
00:26:38 ►
this brew, which they have just prepared,
00:26:43 ►
is one of the most noxious-tasting substances ever known to man,
00:26:49 ►
known to induce severe paroxysms of incipient emesis
00:26:55 ►
at the very sight by heart.
00:27:00 ►
So it is quite an experience there, even to look at this stuff, which is interesting.
00:27:10 ►
Because there’s always an issue of abuse potential.
00:27:14 ►
But given the true reputation for this substance as being so vile tasting and so inducing of just profound gastrointestinal
00:27:26 ►
reactions, I think that will, in certain circles at least, limit its abuse potential.
00:27:35 ►
I can’t quite see it at Grateful Dead concert. Not just yet. Okay, now I’ll show you our study. Again, we did a very, very thorough medical study
00:27:47 ►
looking at a variety of different parameters.
00:27:52 ►
And for this study, we were provided 15 men
00:27:59 ►
who had belonged to this church for at least 10 years.
00:28:03 ►
The criteria was membership for at least 10 years. The criteria was membership for at least 10 years.
00:28:06 ►
And in the church, they drink the tea at least twice a month,
00:28:10 ►
every other Saturday evening.
00:28:12 ►
And although the long-term members often drink on a weekly basis
00:28:17 ►
or even several times during the week.
00:28:19 ►
So in all likelihood, the individuals we were studying
00:28:24 ►
had used this tea on thousands of occasions,
00:28:28 ►
but always, always within the ceremonial religious context.
00:28:34 ►
These people never, ever took it outside of the structures of church ceremony,
00:28:40 ►
and I think that’s a very, very important point to recognize.
00:28:44 ►
And I think that’s a very, very important point to recognize.
00:28:51 ►
We also had 15 matched controls who had never drank the tea,
00:28:55 ►
and we did some of our work up with them, although we did not administer the tea to them.
00:29:05 ►
But for these subjects who had taken the tea, we had actual experimental sessions where the tea was ingested,
00:29:12 ►
and we ran a variety of medical, biochemical, and psychological tests to assess the acute effects.
00:29:16 ►
We also did some further studies to look at chronic effects of this tea.
00:29:21 ►
Remember, our charge was essentially to examine for toxicity.
00:29:23 ►
Is this a dangerous substance?
00:29:25 ►
So this is the area that we were examining in particular. So here we have our first subject ingesting the tea. One of the leaders,
00:29:34 ►
the maestri, this is Maestri Esplinge, he is saying some ritual sayings to telling the subject here that he’s ingesting this tea in a spirit of light and peace and love.
00:29:55 ►
And then we proceeded with the study.
00:29:57 ►
Well, here we actually had on another occasion a couple of other subjects here ingesting the tea.
00:30:05 ►
And this was a full medical study,
00:30:08 ►
so you can see that this was not, obviously, a pleasurable experience for these guys,
00:30:13 ►
as you see what we did with them.
00:30:15 ►
We ran electrocardiograms throughout the study.
00:30:20 ►
We had a medical team from the medical school at the University of Amazonas who worked with us,
00:30:26 ►
so tremendous collaborators.
00:30:29 ►
Basically, what we examined were we did a variety of cardiovascular measurements.
00:30:37 ►
We examined temperature throughout the session.
00:30:42 ►
Okay.
00:30:44 ►
All right.
00:30:44 ►
So, again, this was a very elaborate biomedical study, and we were
00:30:48 ►
looking at cardiovascular parameters. We looked at temperature. We looked at pupillary dilatation.
00:30:55 ►
We had indwelling intravenous catheters and drew blood every 30 minutes for several hours and did a variety of assays on the blood work to determine
00:31:08 ►
effects on neurotransmitter function. On another occasion, we drew copious quantities of blood for
00:31:17 ►
measurements to look at long-term measures. This is one of the places where the cassette tape was damaged.
00:31:28 ►
Yeah, there was music being utilized.
00:31:31 ►
And let me mention also in that context that I have a video,
00:31:35 ►
a 15-minute video that I just received that shows the actual study.
00:31:42 ►
There was actually a film crew down there that filmed this study, and I’ve actually gotten
00:31:47 ►
an okay on using the Mangerton room, which has a video player
00:31:52 ►
at 5.30. So anyone who’s interested in seeing the
00:31:56 ►
film, which will kind of review this study in a video manner,
00:32:00 ►
and you can hear some of the music that was played during
00:32:04 ►
this session.
00:32:05 ►
But again, we looked at a variety of different parameters,
00:32:08 ►
and then we looked at a variety of psychological parameters also.
00:32:12 ►
We’ll see if we can get to those slides later.
00:32:14 ►
But one of the most interesting experiences I had was I conducted interviews,
00:32:18 ►
hour-long interviews of all 15 of these subjects, getting their life stories, hearing with many of these people
00:32:25 ►
how their lives were prior to joining this church and experiencing these altered state
00:32:34 ►
experiences within sacramental ceremonial context, and really getting a sense of real
00:32:40 ►
transformation that these people had gone through through and getting a handle of quite enhancement of psychological health
00:32:49 ►
that they have experienced.
00:32:52 ►
And, in fact, it was this issue that really, I think,
00:32:54 ►
facilitated the legalization in 87. Thank you. that our culture has had towards these altered state experiences
00:33:33 ►
has spread to the authorities down in Brazil as well.
00:33:39 ►
So I think this was a major breakthrough in 87
00:33:42 ►
when this tea was legalized within ceremonial context.
00:33:50 ►
Okay, well, continuing to ad lib. Yes.
00:33:57 ►
Our study, we were down there for about three weeks, and then there was,
00:34:02 ►
under the, the substance induces about a four-hour experience.
00:34:08 ►
It peaks at about 45 minutes to an hour.
00:34:11 ►
It’s quite intense until the two, two-and-a-half-hour period,
00:34:16 ►
and then gradually subsides.
00:34:19 ►
And after about four hours, these sessions are usually terminated.
00:34:26 ►
No, I was a little surprised at that because when you read of the use of ayahuasca in the
00:34:36 ►
indigenous context as well as in the healing context down there, you’ll invariably hear
00:34:41 ►
of special diets.
00:34:42 ►
These people do not have special diets and do not feel it makes much of a difference.
00:34:49 ►
Interesting question.
00:34:50 ►
There is an absolute prohibition
00:34:52 ►
against the use of alcohol or any other drugs
00:34:55 ►
by this church.
00:34:56 ►
And quite a number of these people
00:34:58 ►
had some significant problems with alcohol
00:35:01 ►
and other drugs before entering the church.
00:35:03 ►
with alcohol and other drugs before entering the church. And upon joining and becoming regular participants,
00:35:12 ►
alcohol use terminates altogether.
00:35:19 ►
Hypertensive encephalopathy with…
00:35:22 ►
There was a question of whether or not there was any reports of hypertensive encephalopathy with… There was a question of whether or not there was any reports of hypertensive encephalopathy
00:35:27 ►
with this substance.
00:35:29 ►
The only report I have heard
00:35:31 ►
was in a different context altogether,
00:35:33 ►
an individual who took it in conjunction
00:35:35 ►
with another substance.
00:35:37 ►
But taking the substance in and of itself
00:35:39 ►
does not appear to cause adverse neurological reactions.
00:35:44 ►
What are the primary psychospiritual experiences? appear to cause adverse neurological reactions.
00:35:52 ►
Psychospiritually, they talk about,
00:35:55 ►
they have a whole mythology as part of the church,
00:35:58 ►
and they experience various aspects of this mythology. They see various, they may encounter the leader,
00:36:03 ►
the departed leader who is the founder of this church. There are mythological beings that they may encounter the leader, the departed leader who is the founder of this church.
00:36:07 ►
There are mythological beings that they may encounter. Oh, good, good, fantastic. We lost a few.
00:36:13 ►
Okay, well, this is our, at least we got something here. Our research team, we have Dennis McKenna
00:36:20 ►
on the left, Glaucus de Souza-Brito, a Brazilian physician who was really integral in
00:36:29 ►
organizing the whole process. We have Dr. Elizabeth Andrade of the Department of Internal Medicine at
00:36:37 ►
University of Amazonas. There I am, my last day of my beard. It was very, very hot and humid down
00:36:43 ►
there. Then we have Annalisa
00:36:45 ►
Shinzinger who was our interpreter and Jace Calloway biochemist at the
00:36:48 ►
University of Kupio in Finland it was really an international study okay the
00:36:55 ►
again what what we didn’t show what the slides I guess that we missed showed
00:37:00 ►
again were just a lot of pictures of our subjects having blood drawn, having light
00:37:06 ►
shined into their eyes, or actually measurements of pupillary dilatation, having blood pressures
00:37:12 ►
taken. So you missed all that. So here we have just blood being spun down, collecting plasma,
00:37:19 ►
okay, that we would then freeze in dry ice and bring back to the States.
00:37:24 ►
Here, the plasma pipetted off by Dennis.
00:37:29 ►
And here we have one of the psychiatry residents from Sao Paulo
00:37:33 ►
conducting a structured psychiatric examination with one of the subjects.
00:37:41 ►
And here, basically, is a review of pretty much everything we did.
00:37:44 ►
We did an elaborate workup
00:37:46 ►
medical workup prior to entry into the study looking at a variety of parameters everyone had
00:37:52 ►
a structured psychiatric diagnostic interview we conducted neuropsychological testing which we got
00:37:57 ►
came up with some very interesting results personality testing a phenomenological assessment
00:38:02 ►
the semi-structured open-ended interview,
00:38:05 ►
which was part of the study that I quite enjoyed the most, our acute medical parameters.
00:38:12 ►
We conducted a neuroendocrine challenge test using the UASCA itself as a neuroendocrine challenge,
00:38:16 ►
looking at a variety of neuroendocrine factors, and this was a way to assess a neurotransmitter function on an acute basis.
00:38:26 ►
We did a pharmacokinetic assessment looking at metabolites.
00:38:29 ►
And finally, in order to look at long-term effects
00:38:32 ►
on neurotransmitter function, we did some very elaborate
00:38:35 ►
receptor binding studies, which we’ve just gotten results back on.
00:38:39 ►
And here we just have
00:38:40 ►
our controls and our actual
00:38:44 ►
experimental subjects.
00:38:46 ►
I’ll help you out if your Portuguese isn’t quite up to snuff here.
00:38:50 ►
And basically they match quite well on all parameters, interestingly,
00:38:54 ►
except for income, where our controls seem to have a significantly higher income
00:38:59 ►
than our experimental subjects.
00:39:01 ►
That was a bit of a surprise.
00:39:03 ►
Each of them brought in a friend from work
00:39:05 ►
who had never ingested the tea before.
00:39:11 ►
So also here we did structured psychiatric interviews
00:39:15 ►
of our experimental subjects.
00:39:17 ►
We found a good deal of alcohol use and depression.
00:39:20 ►
This actually, the interviews,
00:39:22 ►
the long-term open-ended interviews I conducted,
00:39:24 ►
I picked up a lot more pre-existing psychopathology than the actual structured interview.
00:39:30 ►
But here you do see an appreciable amount of pathology,
00:39:33 ►
and this was all prior to entry into the church.
00:39:36 ►
Following entry in, the psychopathology seemed to subside.
00:39:42 ►
And here it controls a somewhat lesser degree of prior pathology.
00:39:49 ►
And here we have just some of the acute medical parameters. You see the systolic blood pressure
00:39:54 ►
was pretty stable throughout the four-hour of the session we conducted, about three and a half
00:40:01 ►
hours there. And diastolic blood pressure also reasonably
00:40:05 ►
stable. We see a slight elevation very early on into the session, which subsides.
00:40:12 ►
Heart rate, reasonably stable.
00:40:18 ►
Respiratory rate, also more or less stable.
00:40:23 ►
And the temperature, here we saw a mild elevation in the temperature,
00:40:27 ►
but this in all likelihood was an artifact of the fact that we were conducting these sessions
00:40:31 ►
in the late morning and the early afternoon, and it was late June, early July,
00:40:36 ►
and things got rather hot there.
00:40:37 ►
So actually my sense is that it actually causes a slight reduction in core body temperature.
00:40:44 ►
Actually, my sense is that it actually causes a slight reduction in core body temperature.
00:40:51 ►
And here we had, there is an appreciable rise in pupillary dilatation, which is consistent with some of the work of Rick Strassman at New Mexico looking at DMT, synthetic DMT,
00:40:59 ►
the marked dilatation of pupils during the actual experience.
00:41:05 ►
Here we simply have some of the neuroendocrine findings.
00:41:09 ►
I won’t go into too much detail just to point out that the results we have here
00:41:15 ►
indicate a healthy serotonergic neurotransmitter system,
00:41:19 ►
so we don’t appear to be having any toxic effect on at least acute serotonergic function.
00:41:25 ►
Again, we looked at cortisol, the same.
00:41:27 ►
This would be how a normal individual serotonergic system would respond.
00:41:32 ►
A depressed individual, let’s say, who has a depressed serotonergic system
00:41:36 ►
would have a blocked ride here.
00:41:40 ►
This is in response to using the ayahuasca as a serotonergic challenge.
00:41:45 ►
In contemporary psychiatric research, the serotonergic agonists used such as fenfluramine and L-tryptophan.
00:41:52 ►
Here we actually used the ayahuasca, which was presumed to have a serotonergic effect as the actual challenge.
00:41:59 ►
And here’s some results just looking at the growth hormone.
00:42:02 ►
Again, the kind of results you’d expect to have in a healthy system. This is basically our look at the receptor density, and we found,
00:42:13 ►
interestingly enough, an increase in 5H5-hydroxy tryptameter serotonin receptors, and this was
00:42:21 ►
actually a little surprising. We were expecting a decrease.
00:42:26 ►
So we have an upregulated system here.
00:42:28 ►
And there’s some interesting science.
00:42:33 ►
Unfortunately, that’s about all I can recover from this recording.
00:42:37 ►
But I hope that it’s been of some interest to you anyway.
00:42:40 ►
As you know, I have no medical training myself.
00:42:43 ►
My doctorate is in American law, not medicine,
00:42:45 ►
so I’m not able to fully understand everything that Charlie was saying when he got into the specifics here.
00:42:52 ►
Hopefully you are better qualified in this area than I am.
00:42:55 ►
For me, knowing the specific details about this early research provides me with a confidence as to the safety of using ayahuasca.
00:43:04 ►
Of course, sitting next to Charlie in ayahuasca circles has also helped.
00:43:09 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:43:14 ►
Namaste, my friends.