Program Notes
Guest speaker: Dennis McKenna & Lex Pelger
Dennis McKennaPsychedelic Researcher
Lex talks with Dennis McKenna about the upcoming ESPD50 conference: the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs 50th Anniversary Symposium
Lex also announces Psymposia’s first sale on Patreon & asks for your help to keep bringing people together online & offline. Perks include hemp Psymposia shirts, blotter art & print editions from Lex’s graphic novel series on the cannabinoids.
Psymposia’s contributions to the Psychedelic Salon 2.0 are hosted by Lex Pelger, engineered by Matt Payne, intro music made by Joey Whipp, outro music played by California Smile & this episode is produced by Brian Normand.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
salon 2.0.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:00:31 ►
And this morning I received an email from Lex Pelger where he’s staying in Boulder, Colorado right now on his Blue Dot Tour.
00:00:41 ►
And he tells me that the Symposia team has been quite well received on their tour and I think we can expect some really great psychedelic stories from them in the weeks and months ahead.
00:00:45 ►
Now the program that he sent for today is one that I’m really anxious to hear myself. It’s an interview that Lex did with Dennis McKenna about the
00:00:50 ►
upcoming, and this is a mouthful here, I’ll do my best, the name of this conference is the
00:00:57 ►
Ethnopharmalogic Search for Psychoactive Drugs 50th Anniversary Symposium. And I understand that it’s going by the shorthand version of ESPD-50.
00:01:09 ►
And this is going to take place in England this coming June.
00:01:12 ►
I’ll put a link to the website for that conference in today’s program notes,
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which you can find at psychedelicsalon.com.
00:01:20 ►
Also, I understand that Lex is going to be talking a little bit about
00:01:24 ►
how he and the Symposia team are funding the wide range of their activities that are bringing our community closer together every day.
00:01:33 ►
But since I haven’t listened to their program yet myself, why don’t I just get out of the way and listen along with you?
00:01:40 ►
Now, here’s Lex Pelger and Dennis McKenna.
00:01:42 ►
Now, here’s Lex Pelger and Dennis McKenna.
00:01:52 ►
Hello, I’m Lex Pelger, host of Symposia, and this is the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:01:59 ►
Today, we’re pleased to hear from Dr. Dennis McKenna on his inspiration for pulling together the upcoming ESPD-50, the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs, the 50th Anniversary
00:02:07 ►
Symposium coming up in London. You can find out more at ESPD50.com. But before we start,
00:02:16 ►
I must apologize for the audio quality on this show. Mistakes were made. I am still new here
00:02:23 ►
and getting into the swing of it as we move through the process of upgrading all of our sound equipment.
00:02:28 ►
Now, I don’t want to surprise you,
00:02:30 ►
but running an online magazine about drugs
00:02:32 ►
and traveling around the country hosting storytelling events
00:02:35 ►
is not exactly what you would call lucrative.
00:02:38 ►
At Symposia, we rely on community support through crowdfunding,
00:02:41 ►
and that’s why I’m asking for your help.
00:02:44 ►
If you believe in honest drug education via journalism, podcast, storytelling, Thank you. And now we want to hit $2,000 a month by next week.
00:03:07 ►
So we’re having our first symposia sale.
00:03:13 ►
Starting today and for one week only until the end of Psychedelic Science 2017,
00:03:18 ►
all pledges will be boosted to the next level with even bigger and more beautiful perks.
00:03:27 ►
If you pledge up to $5 a month, you’ll get the first full digital chapter of my new graphic novel, Anandamide, or The Cannabinoid.
00:03:30 ►
Volume 1, How to Shoot an Elephant.
00:03:35 ►
The chemical hunt on what makes cannabis so damn psychoactive.
00:03:41 ►
It took me four and a half years to get this first full installment done, and I’ve never been so proud of anything I’ve done in my life. So for $10 a month, you’ll get a print copy of my other chapter that I completed, the
00:03:47 ►
queer chapter, about how Reagan ignoring the AIDS crisis launched the modern medical marijuana
00:03:51 ►
movement.
00:03:52 ►
On top of that, you’ll get a beautiful piece of our blogger art, too.
00:03:57 ►
Pledges of $17 per month will get you the new Symposia Hemp t-shirt.
00:04:02 ►
These shirts are screen printed with water-based ink, no plastic,
00:04:05 ►
and made of a high-quality blend of hemp and organic cotton, and they fit perfectly. Plus,
00:04:11 ►
you’ll also get a piece of blotter art, too. Finally, we have the Bernie Sanders Special.
00:04:18 ►
For $27 per month, you’ll get a hemp t-shirt, a piece of bladder art, and both chapters of my graphic novel, delivered right to your door.
00:04:29 ►
Our goal at Symposia is to bring people together
00:04:32 ►
in person and online,
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and so we ask for your help to allow us all
00:04:36 ►
to learn from one another.
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If you agree, please help us reach our goal
00:04:43 ►
of $2,000 a month by next week.
00:04:46 ►
You can find more at symposia.com or on our Patreon page.
00:04:50 ►
That’s p-a-t-r-e-o-n dot com slash symposia.
00:04:55 ►
P-s-y-m-p-o-s-i-a.
00:04:59 ►
Lordy, lordy, why would we pick a name that you can’t spell?
00:05:04 ►
And for anyone at the Psychedelic Science Conference this weekend,
00:05:07 ►
come on by our stage and I’ll put you in the No Nonsense Club.
00:05:11 ►
Thanks for all your support, and now here’s Dr. Dennis McKenna.
00:05:24 ►
We are very pleased to be here with the scientist Dennis McKenna.
00:05:28 ►
Thank you so much for being on the show.
00:05:31 ►
Thank you, Lex, for having me. I really appreciate it.
00:05:34 ►
All right. You got all kinds of great stuff going on.
00:05:36 ►
But I think the first thing we want to hear about is the conference that you’ll be organizing.
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Yes, we are organizing. It’s certainly not all me because a conference like
00:05:49 ►
this is a group effort, but the title of it is kind of a big mouthful, Ethnopharmacologic Search
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for Psychoactive Drugs, Part 2, 50 Years of Research the that’s the full title what does all that mean
00:06:09 ►
well it’s a conference that i have wanted to do for many years and and it is about in 1967
00:06:18 ►
the department of health education and welfare, or actually the National Institute of Mental Health, sponsored a conference in San Francisco, of all places, that was called the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs.
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And all the big people of the time were there.
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were there. You know, Schultes, probably the primary figure, Alexander Shulgin, Andrew Weil,
00:06:54 ►
other people probably not widely known to people outside the specialty. But it was a historic conference in the sense that this all happened at the height of the countercultural revolution.
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1967 was the Summer of Love. And that was going full tilt in San Francisco at the time,
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but in some obscure part of San Francisco.
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Actually, it happened in January 1967.
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You know, these scientists were meeting very much on the QT.
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They weren’t paying any attention to the social milieu.
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the QT. They weren’t paying any attention to the social milieu. And this happened at a time probably just before the idea of psychedelics began to be controversial and the public
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campaign to sort of distort perceptions of all that was not quite rolling yet. And there was great optimism and hope in the scientific community
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that by looking at some of these obscure, if you want to call it that,
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psychotropic, psychoactive medicines that were used in indigenous cultures,
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new plants, new substances might be identified that could have medical uses and other useful properties.
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It was a closed conference.
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There was no one invited.
00:08:14 ►
So it was very, you know, exclusive in a sense.
00:08:18 ►
And what came out of that was a symposium volume by the same name, which was published by the U.S.
00:08:27 ►
Government Printing Office.
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And I think it was Public Health Service publication number 1645.
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You can actually download the PDF of this from arrowwood.org.
00:08:42 ►
You can do a search on books and it will show up. It’s there as a PDF.
00:08:47 ►
And, you know, you can download it. Well, the original idea was that this was an active field
00:08:54 ►
of research and that there were supposed to be conferences every 10 years or so, you know, and And it never happened because the war on drugs came along and public perceptions changed.
00:09:11 ►
And probably the government began to feel that they were a bit embarrassed that they had ever sponsored this thing, although it was a great conference.
00:09:20 ►
And it produced this wonderful publication.
00:09:24 ►
But anyway, for various reasons, there was never any follow-up.
00:09:29 ►
2017 is the 50th anniversary of this conference.
00:09:34 ►
And in the meantime, lots has happened in this field.
00:09:39 ►
Lots has happened in this field.
00:09:42 ►
And so I kind of, well, it’s a personal and a professional thing.
00:09:49 ►
That book fell into my hands, the original volume, I don’t know how,
00:09:55 ►
in probably the summer of 2018. And I was just beginning to get interested in psychedelics,
00:10:02 ►
learn about them. And then along comes this book, which represented a whole scientific field that I was really kind of dimly aware of, but
00:10:11 ►
really didn’t know that much about. And all of a sudden, here it is. So I dropped everything. I
00:10:17 ►
devoured that book. And I still have it, actually. And it was a game changer for me.
00:10:25 ►
It was kind of what made me decide to go into the field of ethno-pharmacology.
00:10:31 ►
Wow.
00:10:32 ►
And what year was that again?
00:10:35 ►
That would have been, well, the conference was in 1967.
00:10:40 ►
And I was, but the volume, the book was not published until some months later.
00:10:47 ►
And I probably summer of 2018.
00:10:50 ►
2018?
00:10:51 ►
Sorry, 1968.
00:10:54 ►
Okay.
00:10:56 ►
I got some.
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I can’t even remember how I got it.
00:11:00 ►
But I got it.
00:11:01 ►
And it was a huge influence.
00:11:04 ►
And I thought, wow, this is the cutting edge.
00:11:06 ►
These are the people that are working in this area.
00:11:10 ►
So it opened up to me this whole field, and I got to know who the major people were.
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And so it was influential to me.
00:11:21 ►
So it was influential to me.
00:11:30 ►
And for years, I’ve wanted to do it again.
00:11:34 ►
You know, I felt that there’s lots of information that’s been accumulated.
00:11:38 ►
I should actually maybe give you another part of the backstory.
00:11:46 ►
So, you know, I had this volume and I wasn’t even out of high school i was just a bored teenager growing up in a small town in colorado wishing i was anywhere else but that but especially i wishing i was in san francisco
00:11:53 ►
right where the action was but uh it was not to be but then uh in 19 um 86 i got a fellowship to go work at NIMH, National Institute of Mental Health.
00:12:13 ►
I had sent one of the investigators my first papers on ayahuasca.
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I completed my PhD by that time.
00:12:22 ►
I completed my PhD by that time.
00:12:34 ►
He requested a paper, and I recognized his name because he was a person who had published about endogenous DMT, one of the first papers about endogenous DMT.
00:12:37 ►
His name was Juan Saavedra.
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He requested a reprint.
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I recognized his name from his papers, so I wrote a letter along with the reprint and just basically said,
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can I please come work with you at your laboratory?
00:12:57 ►
And he wrote back, it took some months, but he wrote back,
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he wrote a nice letter and he said, you know, which said basically, well, you know,
00:13:03 ►
there is a program here for people who are outside the discipline to get into the discipline.
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It’s called the Pharmacology Research Associate Traineeship.
00:13:14 ►
He said, you should consider applying for this program and maybe we can work together.
00:13:19 ►
So, in fact, I did apply for it.
00:13:22 ►
And I went to Bethesda in 1986 and I started a two-year program there.
00:13:29 ►
And interestingly enough, I had been in the lab more than a couple weeks when Dr. Zavebra came in, and he pointed to a shelf up in the lab.
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NIH labs are not the neatest places on earth.
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There’s a lot of stuff that tends to accumulate, but there is a lot of stuff on the top shelf.
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He said there’s a box of their chemicals that Julie and I, and he was being Julie Axelrod,
00:13:56 ►
who later won the Nobel Prize for his work on neurotransmission.
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Julie and I were working on this endogenous DMT project, and we
00:14:06 ►
have a lot of chemical standards. You should go in there, take a look, keep anything that you think
00:14:12 ►
is useful, and send the rest of it to, you know, hazardous waste. They’ll come and pick it up,
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right? So, of course, I went right to the box and started, through these old samples of chemicals.
00:14:27 ►
But right beside the box was a mint condition, untouched,
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an unopened copy of the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs.
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And of course I recognized it because I had it,
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but this was a mint edition copy
00:14:46 ►
so that kind of disappeared into my library quietly I still have it uh
00:14:52 ►
aren’t always honest friends right right so both of these are two of my most cherished books and
00:15:03 ►
you know the samples in the box were
00:15:05 ►
somewhat interesting you know actually a lot of tryptamine analogs that uh i’ve never seen before
00:15:13 ►
so i kept those back and the rest of it and i actually never did much with those things i was
00:15:20 ►
afraid to eat them and i you know but i kept them around and did some binding studies with them later.
00:15:28 ►
But that was sort of the second time that this book came around in a significant point in my life.
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And it’s kind of like haunted my life ever since.
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You know, I wanted to do this conference for the 30th anniversary in, what would it be, 1997.
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Well, it never came together.
00:15:51 ►
You know, the combination of venue and funding and the other things you have to do to bring a conference like this about, it never really fell into place.
00:16:02 ►
And so I just sort of actually I wrote a proposal
00:16:05 ►
for it at the time nothing happened with it so I put it on the back burner and
00:16:13 ►
then in what was it 2017 it’s when in 2015 I went to a conference in the UK that was being held by the Turingham Initiative.
00:16:29 ►
It’s a place, beautiful 18th century castle in about an hour and of this range of topics, you know, consciousness, neuroscience, and so on.
00:17:01 ►
So he invited me to this.
00:17:04 ►
They were having a conference on DMT. And so they invited
00:17:08 ►
me and a bunch of other people, you know, far more qualified than I was to be there.
00:17:13 ►
But we had a great conference and I struck up a good relationship with the gentleman, His name is Anton Bilton. And so we decided to, you know, I suggested to Anton at some point that we do this conference.
00:17:33 ►
And he said, yes, sounds wonderful.
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Let’s do it.
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So here we are.
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We are doing it.
00:17:41 ►
And it’s taken a lot of time we have a short time frame you know I look
00:17:50 ►
back and I thought I think well I should have started this six months ago or or
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you know because the time is getting short but I think we can pull it off and
00:18:00 ►
so this is what we’re doing we We have a website, which will be, is functional more or less.
00:18:08 ►
We’re still tweaking it a little bit. The mobile site, I understand, is not so good. But my people
00:18:15 ►
are working on it. People have gotten together to make this happen. So, you know, it’s not just me. I have a lot of great people working on it. And the name of the website is ESPD50.com. So people can look that up. Hopefully by the time this podcast goes up, it’ll be all ready to look at.
00:18:50 ►
That sounds great. And so part of the idea is to inspire students today to get into ethnopharmacology in fields like this, like it did for you.
00:18:55 ►
Yes. And really anyone, it’s going to be sort of semi-closed because there is not
00:19:07 ►
that much room at Turingham. We can accept about 10 to 15 guests who can stay there.
00:19:16 ►
And I have to tell you, the cost is very high, but the place is worth it. And then probably about 50 guests who can stay there and attend on a daily basis and stay close by.
00:19:30 ►
So all those details are on the website.
00:19:34 ►
And we’re going to print this symposium volume.
00:19:38 ►
That’s what’s really going to come out of it to present this to the world.
00:19:46 ►
going to come out of it to present this to the world in fact our plan right now is to print the original one and the new one as a set as a deluxe collector’s edition and we’re going to try to
00:19:57 ►
pre-sell that where you know it’s available now for pre-sales. We’re going to pre-sell it at a reasonable price and hopefully we’ll get revenues to cover some of the costs of this conference.
00:20:13 ►
Now, the way we’re going to let the world in on this, because we can only have a few people actually at the site, but we can now do global with, you know, worldwide streaming on the Internet.
00:20:29 ►
Not an option that was available in 1967.
00:20:33 ►
So that’s what your colleagues are working on to set up the Facebook page where that will be streamed from.
00:20:40 ►
And so anybody can click in as they wish and follow the proceedings.
00:20:49 ►
You know, it will be we’re not charging anything.
00:20:52 ►
We would like people to register, but even that’s optional.
00:20:55 ►
So I don’t know how many people will get, but hopefully this symposium will be seen by quite a few people.
00:21:02 ►
That’s great. Oh, that’s a that’s a beautiful idea as a way to get
00:21:06 ►
people excited about this field. Are there any particular speakers that are coming that
00:21:11 ►
you’re really excited about or topics that the conference wants to focus on?
00:21:16 ►
Yeah, good question. Yes, there is. In fact, there are several that I could mention. One of them is David Nichols, who’s well known to everyone in this community.
00:21:30 ►
He’s going to do a great talk, I’m sure, as he always does. the work that he does, the medicinal chemistry and the relationship to natural products
00:21:46 ►
and kind of how plants, you know, point the way to these molecular templates.
00:21:51 ►
So he’ll give a wonderful talk.
00:21:54 ►
Another person I’m really excited, who will actually not be there except in spirit,
00:22:13 ►
spirit, but he’s submitting a video and a paper and an abstract and so on, is Dr. Stephen Zara, who is the first person to actually determine that dimethyltryptamine was psychoactive.
00:22:23 ►
And he did it in the only way possible
00:22:26 ►
by injecting himself with it.
00:22:28 ►
This was 1957, I think, that he published this paper.
00:22:33 ►
When scientists were scientists.
00:22:35 ►
Absolutely.
00:22:37 ►
And Stephen, you know, was very kind.
00:22:42 ►
He’s 93 or 95. If I’m an elder, he’s an elder’s elder. And he would love to come, but he can’t. He just says he can’t travel. He’s submitting a video that we’ll show at the conference, probably posted on the website. And I’ve had a number of correspondences with him. This man is
00:23:06 ►
completely cognitively functional, and it shows, you know, quite a bright-eyed old fellow. And,
00:23:15 ►
you know, after he conducted these experiments in Hungary, where he was living, but he eventually
00:23:22 ►
came to the state. Ironically, he ended up being the section chief for the National
00:23:27 ►
Institute on Drug Abuse for many years at NIH.
00:23:33 ►
So there’s
00:23:36 ►
that. There’s Mark Plotkin is another
00:23:39 ►
person who’s going to present. And you may know him.
00:23:44 ►
He’s well-known as an
00:23:46 ►
ethnobotanist as author of the the Shaman’s Apprentice many other books
00:23:54 ►
Luis Eduardo Luna Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna is going to present Manuel Torres, Dr. Manuel Torres, who’s an archaeologist who’s been studying the excavating shaman’s graves in the Atacama Desert for many years, is going to talk about ayahuasca and the origins of the, he’s going to tackle the admixture question, you know, the perpetual question.
00:24:30 ►
How did these people figure out how to make this combination of plants?
00:24:35 ►
Well, it turns out Manuel has some very interesting ideas about that.
00:24:42 ►
So there are others, but those are some of the main ones. We have a fellow from South Africa, Nigel Garrick,
00:24:48 ►
who’s talking about kata or scoledium tortuosum,
00:24:55 ►
which has another name that I can hardly pronounce.
00:24:59 ►
Very interesting plant used by the San people.
00:25:02 ►
plant used by the San people.
00:25:04 ►
I have another fellow
00:25:05 ►
from South Africa,
00:25:08 ►
Francois,
00:25:09 ►
Jean-Francois Sobiecki,
00:25:12 ►
who’s been studying a traditional
00:25:13 ►
tribe in South Africa.
00:25:17 ►
So,
00:25:18 ►
you know,
00:25:19 ►
it’s going to be quite an eclectic
00:25:22 ►
gathering.
00:25:25 ►
And I,
00:25:26 ►
you know,
00:25:27 ►
I wanted to,
00:25:29 ►
I wanted to,
00:25:31 ►
I wanted this conference to focus on the,
00:25:33 ►
the unilluminated areas of ethnopharmacology.
00:25:37 ►
You know,
00:25:38 ►
I mean,
00:25:38 ►
a lot of these plants have been very well studied,
00:25:41 ►
just not to say there aren’t things to study,
00:25:44 ►
but I wanted to also pay
00:25:45 ►
attention to some of the more obscure ones that have come to light in the last 50 years.
00:25:54 ►
I’ve only partially succeeded in that. I mean, some of the things, for example,
00:25:58 ►
Salvia divinorum, we couldn’t find anyone that could really present on it. I asked Brian Roth, the pharmacologist that did all the work.
00:26:08 ►
He’s not able to come.
00:26:09 ►
So that’ll have to wait for the next one.
00:26:12 ►
But a number of them, we have an expert on Kratom,
00:26:17 ►
the mitragyna speciosa, who is going to give a presentation.
00:26:22 ►
So it’s not exclusively focused on on psychedelics, not at all.
00:26:27 ►
There are other things as well represented, but a few gaps as well, I have to admit.
00:26:35 ►
Yeah, so many plant medicines, so little time.
00:26:39 ►
Yes, and so little time to talk about it.
00:26:43 ►
And really, we can’t invite more than about 15 speakers, which is what we’ve got.
00:26:50 ►
So three days, over three days, we’ll sort all this out.
00:26:56 ►
It’ll be live streamed.
00:26:58 ►
And then the book, you know, I’ve asked everyone to submit a full paper along with their presentation,
00:27:10 ►
and we will then, some months afterwards, we’ll publish that symposium volume.
00:27:13 ►
It’ll be high quality. It’ll be very cool.
00:27:20 ►
Hopefully people will pre-purchase it,
00:27:25 ►
and we’ll have enough money to actually print it and produce it.
00:27:28 ►
I’m pretty optimistic that we will.
00:27:31 ►
Wow, that sounds like a great project.
00:27:33 ►
Thank you so much for pulling it together.
00:27:35 ►
It would be a privilege to be able to watch that.
00:27:39 ►
Well, it’s a lifelong dream of mine.
00:27:41 ►
I think it was an important event. It certainly was influential to me. So I hope that people like it.
00:27:50 ►
Yeah, we’ll see.
00:27:51 ►
I mean, time is growing
00:27:55 ►
short, but I think we’re going to be able to pull it off.
00:27:59 ►
For one thing we’ve had, I wasn’t originally going
00:28:03 ►
to try to raise funds to cover.
00:28:05 ►
I thought pre-sales of the book would cover everything.
00:28:08 ►
That was a delusion on my part.
00:28:12 ►
But we’ve had some wonderful donors who have stepped up to the plate.
00:28:16 ►
So at least we have enough money to cover everyone’s airfare,
00:28:22 ►
take them to Turingham, get them in a good situation, and we’ll see what comes out of it.
00:28:29 ►
Good, good. And will you be presenting too?
00:28:33 ►
Yes, I will be.
00:28:35 ►
I’m basically going to present a retrospective on, you know,
00:28:40 ►
this whole kind of personal odyssey of mine with this conference
00:28:44 ►
and talk about, you know,
00:28:45 ►
highlight some of the some of the discoveries of the last 50 years.
00:28:50 ►
And, you know, so it will be it will be fluff compared to what producing.
00:28:56 ►
But I’m good at fluff.
00:28:59 ►
Everybody’s got their strong suit.
00:29:01 ►
And that’s great.
00:29:03 ►
And it’s and actually that gives a good spot to change gears a little bit,
00:29:08 ►
just to hear an update about the Hefter Research Institute that you work with and what’s been new
00:29:14 ►
there. Well, I should say, by the way, Hefter, MAPS, and the Beckley Foundation are all sponsors
00:29:24 ►
and the Beckley Foundation are all sponsors of this,
00:29:28 ►
as well as the Institute for Ecotechnics,
00:29:31 ►
which is associated with Synergetic Press,
00:29:34 ►
which is published in the book.
00:29:37 ►
It will be under there in promoter that the book is eventually published.
00:29:39 ►
So that’s all lined up.
00:29:42 ►
Hefter is doing great guns, actually.
00:29:44 ►
We’re in a good place.
00:29:53 ►
You know, as you know, since the last Psychedelic Science 2013,
00:29:56 ►
a number of thresholds have been crossed. And MAPS, as you know, has just received approval to do a Phase 3 study with MDMA for PTSD. So that’s a huge achievement on their part,
00:30:11 ►
just to get the phase three. The only thing separating them from a successful study is
00:30:16 ►
something like $20 million. But I have faith in Rick, and I think he will come up with it.
00:30:23 ►
I have faith in Rick, and I think he will come up with it.
00:30:29 ►
Hefter is focusing on psilocybin rather than MDMA.
00:30:34 ►
We didn’t get together and decide to do this, but the way it’s fallen out is MDMA is MAPS’s thing,
00:30:39 ►
and psilocybin seems to be Hefter’s thing.
00:30:41 ►
and seems to be Hefter’s thing.
00:30:49 ►
And we also, Hefter is also approaching phase three status with some of the studies.
00:30:52 ►
The investigations are more broad than for MDMA,
00:30:57 ►
at least under the Hefter umbrella.
00:30:59 ►
We’re looking at it for, and by we, I should say this is not me.
00:31:05 ►
I’m just a cheerleader at this point for Hefter.
00:31:09 ►
I’m not actively engaged in research, but our researchers, primarily at NYU, under Steve
00:31:16 ►
Ross and Johns Hopkins, under Roland Griffiths, and then Charlie Grobe, Charles Grobe at UCLA,
00:31:27 ►
and then Charlie Grobe, Charles Grobe at UCLA, have focused on psilocybin in a number of ways,
00:31:39 ►
but the most obvious medical application is variously described existential anxiety at the end of life,
00:31:45 ►
to help people come to terms with their existential situation and the fact that they’re dying and who wouldn’t be anxious
00:31:49 ►
and maybe depressed at that prospect.
00:31:53 ►
But it helps people come to terms with this.
00:31:56 ►
And there have been a number of studies of all of these institutions
00:32:00 ►
that show really promising results.
00:32:05 ►
And then other things as well.
00:32:08 ►
Addictions, for example.
00:32:09 ►
There’s been a smoking cessation study out of Johns Hopkins
00:32:14 ►
that showed spectacular results.
00:32:18 ►
And Roland Griffiths and his group have been the group
00:32:22 ►
that sort of pioneered the use of psilocybin to study spirituality, mystical experiences, if you want.
00:32:31 ►
And that’s also going forward.
00:32:33 ►
They’ve published several papers on that.
00:32:36 ►
They’re now working get religious professionals enrolled, thinking that, well, religious professionals should know a lot about spirituality.
00:33:05 ►
FDA protocols that are open, whether it’s MAPS or HEFTA. A valuable resource for people to know about is clinicaltrials.gov.
00:33:12 ►
They can go there.
00:33:14 ►
This is one of the few good things our government does,
00:33:18 ►
one of the few good uses of our tax dollars,
00:33:21 ►
that you can visit clinicaltrials.gov and, for example, search on MDMA, search on
00:33:27 ►
psilocybin.
00:33:28 ►
You can find out essentially what clinical studies are in progress or recruiting or planned
00:33:36 ►
or whatever.
00:33:37 ►
So it’s a good way to get a quick picture of the kind of the state of the clinical studies
00:33:44 ►
in the states, at least.
00:33:45 ►
And actually, clinicaltrials.gov lists, you know,
00:33:52 ►
studies going on in other countries as well.
00:33:56 ►
So not as thorough a coverage, but that’s a good thing to know.
00:34:02 ►
And we’re hopeful uh so uh you know hefter is not quite to the point where
00:34:10 ►
we’re ready to apply for a phase three status but that is going to come um earlier this year
00:34:20 ►
uh both groups the johns hopkins group and the New York University groups, published simultaneously in the same issue of the Journal of Psychopharmacology, published kind of large review papers of this work on psilocybin at the end of life.
00:34:41 ►
Simon at the end of life.
00:34:45 ►
That created a big media buzz.
00:34:48 ►
This did not happen accidentally, that they came out on the same issue,
00:34:50 ►
and that got a lot of attention.
00:34:56 ►
So, you know, these things have been discussed in the mass media in quite a positive way, you know, lately because of these studies
00:35:03 ►
and because of good publicity.
00:35:04 ►
lately because of these studies and because of good publicity.
00:35:12 ►
So that was kind of a landmark for Hefter.
00:35:18 ►
In some ways, Hefter’s always been less publicity-oriented,
00:35:20 ►
kind of, you know, in the background,
00:35:24 ►
but that was kind of our coming out, if you will.
00:35:26 ►
But yes, look at us. We’re doing this stuff too and doing it well so uh so the the research is very promising here
00:35:35 ►
and uh rick predicts that within maybe by 2021 mdma will be available
00:35:47 ►
MDMA will be available to clinicians to treat PTSD or other things.
00:36:03 ►
We’re not so sure about psilocybin, but it may be available for probably the most likely application or use for it that will come up that’s officially sanctioned is maybe hospice use. That seems like an appropriate place to try to, you know,
00:36:08 ►
if you’re trying to open a door to the use of these things in medicine,
00:36:12 ►
maybe that’s the back door, but it’s still a door,
00:36:16 ►
and it’s a way into, you know, mainstream clinical practice.
00:36:20 ►
So we’ll see how that goes.
00:36:23 ►
I always thought that was an intriguing choice by Hefter out of all the different possible mental indications and use that psychedelics have to choose end of life anxiety with people dying of cancer seemed like an interesting choice.
00:36:41 ►
Did you where did that idea come from to start with some resources in that direction?
00:36:47 ►
Well, I’m not sure exactly. I think there have been previous studies back in the 60s before
00:36:54 ►
these things were made illegal, previous studies with LSD primarily, because that was really all that was available for clinical work back then and back in the 60s.
00:37:06 ►
But the mystical experience, religious use of it or the quasi-religious use,
00:37:16 ►
which really overlaps the terminal disease because people who are dying tend to be
00:37:25 ►
concerned about, you know, kind of the major existential questions of,
00:37:30 ►
of life and, uh, you know, they’re dying.
00:37:33 ►
So they have the opportunity to, to, uh, ponder these things.
00:37:39 ►
Uh, and Roland has really, uh, Roland and his group, I should say,
00:37:43 ►
have really taken this and run with it.
00:37:48 ►
And it’s very interesting.
00:37:50 ►
I consider it in some way a revolution in psychiatric medicine, and maybe in medicine in general, because the problem, you know, everybody dies sooner or later.
00:38:07 ►
And so medicine always fails, right?
00:38:10 ►
Ultimately, medicine always fails.
00:38:13 ►
You reach a point where there’s nothing more we can do, right?
00:38:16 ►
That’s what they tell you.
00:38:17 ►
There is nothing more we can do.
00:38:19 ►
But actually, a well-controlled sort of study in a terminal patient with something like psilocybin,
00:38:28 ►
this is something you can do.
00:38:31 ►
This is something medicine can do to help people accept the fact that they are mortal,
00:38:38 ►
they are dying, but it can help them come to terms with that and find peace.
00:38:45 ►
And that is what we’ve seen in these studies.
00:38:49 ►
You know, it’s not that psilocybin is going to cure anyone’s cancer,
00:38:55 ►
you know, and that wasn’t the point.
00:38:57 ►
The point was to help them relieve their anxiety
00:39:01 ►
and their depression about the prospect of dying.
00:39:06 ►
That said, though, a good attitude, a positive attitude,
00:39:10 ►
can help a person live longer, even if they have a terminal disease.
00:39:17 ►
And we’ve noticed that in some of our subjects,
00:39:20 ►
that they have lived after these treatments six or eight months longer
00:39:24 ►
than they were projected to.
00:39:27 ►
But just because their attitude was changed, they have a positive attitude,
00:39:33 ►
we’re not claiming anything beyond that.
00:39:35 ►
The point is, especially in that of these studies of mystical experience,
00:39:44 ►
these studies of mystical experience,
00:39:47 ►
Rowland prefers to use the term personally meaningful experiences.
00:39:51 ►
Personally meaningful,
00:39:53 ►
because mystical has sort of religious connotations,
00:39:58 ►
and not everyone is religious,
00:40:00 ►
but we all seek, I think,
00:40:02 ►
experiences that are personally meaningful.
00:40:06 ►
And in the studies, as you know, probably in his initial study,
00:40:12 ►
this was not terminal patients,
00:40:15 ►
but I think something like 30% of the people said it was the most single,
00:40:22 ►
most meaningful, personally meaningful experience of their lives about
00:40:27 ►
another group said it was among the top five so that’s interesting here we have a compound that
00:40:35 ►
under the right circumstances can help you have the most personally significant meaningful
00:40:42 ►
experience of your life um that’s a huge thing, you know, because especially in our culture,
00:40:48 ►
I think that people long for that.
00:40:52 ►
You know, they find very little in the culture,
00:40:55 ►
even very little in established religions that provide, you know,
00:41:01 ►
that kind of satisfying personal experience.
00:41:09 ►
So here is a substance that could provide that and help a person face their mortality with peace.
00:41:17 ►
And it could be immensely helpful to their families as well.
00:41:22 ►
Wow. That’s really beautiful and it and it leads to a question i
00:41:27 ►
often like to ask which is especially of you is how would you like to see these drugs uh distributed
00:41:37 ►
dealt with regulated in this in this western society especially considering all the different
00:41:43 ►
societies you’ve seen around the world and their solutions to how to integrate these powerful psychoactives?
00:41:51 ►
Right. Well, I think that’s a problem, you know, for our society. I think what
00:41:58 ►
I would like to see happen is borrow from some of this indigenous knowledge. You know, these substances are
00:42:07 ►
always used in the context of ceremony, of shamanism, and of healing, or in some
00:42:13 ►
kind of a, essentially, a sacred set and setting. And we know the importance of
00:42:19 ►
set and setting for the outcome of psychedelic experiences. So I think biomedicine or mainstream medicine would be well advised
00:42:28 ►
to look at how it’s used in Indigenous cultures
00:42:33 ►
and not to necessarily imitate it wholeheartedly,
00:42:37 ►
but borrow from that, build their protocols on that accumulated knowledge,
00:42:44 ►
which spreads back
00:42:45 ►
thousands of years and there is no you know there’s no revenue model for
00:42:53 ►
psychedelics per se right they thought they’re all in the public domain they
00:42:59 ►
are substances that you take maybe two or three times in your life. So big pharma has no real interest in that sort of thing.
00:43:11 ►
There’s no money to be made on it.
00:43:13 ►
And like it or not, that’s a big motivator for big pharma.
00:43:17 ►
They basically want a revenue model.
00:43:20 ►
They want a profitable medicine.
00:43:22 ►
These are not that you know so i think i think that the way
00:43:27 ►
it’s integrated into medicine is in the context of use you know what i would like to see and here’s
00:43:34 ►
where medicine revenue model might emerge is essentially to have centers to have places that you could go to have these experiences under very well-controlled, safe,
00:43:48 ►
structured, supportive circumstances. I even look forward to the day when a terminal patient could
00:43:58 ►
take psilocybin and share that with their family. You know, we might not be there. It may take a while to get there.
00:44:06 ►
But I can only imagine how meaningful that might be for people
00:44:10 ►
and to help not only the person who’s dying,
00:44:13 ►
but their family come to terms with it.
00:44:15 ►
So I think if these centers, if the drug ever achieves an approved status,
00:44:22 ►
I think to have these essentially psychedelic hospice centers
00:44:27 ►
in a certain way will be what you see happen.
00:44:32 ►
And, you know, they won’t look like clinics.
00:44:36 ►
They won’t look like hospitals.
00:44:37 ►
You know, they’ll look like spas or something like that.
00:44:40 ►
They’re a place where people can come and, you know, receive therapy for the
00:44:48 ►
mind and the body. And just within that context, the psilocybin can be available. And I think
00:44:57 ►
that’s where it’s going to go. If we can make that model work in some in a few places then and the drug is approved for use
00:45:07 ►
then i think you’ll see everybody piling on board for this uh you know because the families of
00:45:14 ►
patients are going to demand it all yeah yeah that makes sense yeah maybe you’ll be at the start of
00:45:21 ►
another uh mushroom revolution uh because i i wanted to ask one thing about your Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide.
00:45:30 ►
When you put that out with your brother, did you know that it was going to spark the kind of revolution and response that opening up mushroom cultivation to everyone did?
00:45:42 ►
Well, yes and no.
00:45:51 ►
I mean, I think we suspected that it might and we we would we were hoping that it might you know but i i don’t think either of us dreamed that it would become so widespread
00:45:56 ►
you know the real reason that we do it or we did it or one of the one of the original motivations was that we went to La Charrera, we had all these crazy experiences from the mushrooms, derived from probably too large doses, excess doses, and some pretty wild stuff went on.
00:46:22 ►
We came back wondering, well, is it just us?
00:46:25 ►
Are we crazy?
00:46:26 ►
Or is this typical of the psilocybin experience?
00:46:30 ►
In other words, can other people, did they go to these places and so on?
00:46:34 ►
There was no psilocybin mushrooms in the culture at large at that time.
00:46:39 ►
So we developed that method mainly to get it out to people to say, other people can now do this.
00:46:47 ►
The technique is simple.
00:46:49 ►
They can have the same experience or they can take it to it.
00:46:53 ►
They can tell, you know, they can tell us or tell the world, yeah, the McKenna’s had, you know, a valid experience.
00:47:02 ►
I’ve had similar or they were completely crazy.
00:47:05 ►
you know, a valid experience I’ve had similar, or they were completely crazy. And, you know,
00:47:12 ►
but in fact, people do have these crazy experiences of psilocybin. They’ve opened up kind of this whole world to, you know, to examination by anyone who wants to take the time
00:47:18 ►
to get into it. And you don’t have to be very skilled to grow the uh the mushrooms using using the
00:47:26 ►
methods we described you know now of course they’re even easier methods but yeah so in a certain sense
00:47:33 ►
i think it opened up in the same way that uh you know lsd was a catalyst at the time in society
00:47:41 ►
but lsd for most people was not something that you could, you know, go into your kitchen
00:47:48 ►
and make, you know, you had to get it from an external source and that implied there
00:47:53 ►
had to be production infrastructures and supply matrices and all this.
00:48:00 ►
Psilocybin mushrooms, you know, you could go to the grocery store, buy a few common
00:48:04 ►
ingredients, go home and cook it up.
00:48:07 ►
You know, all you needed was the spores.
00:48:10 ►
And that was one of the things about it that we were really proud of, that it didn’t require, you know, a cartel or, you know, all of these connections to get the chemicals.
00:48:21 ►
It was just a very organic, natural thing. As my brother once described it, you know, an easy,
00:48:28 ►
simple way to get great dope out of mason jars.
00:48:31 ►
In some ways, that’s right.
00:48:35 ►
It is very democratic. Yeah, it’s very democratic.
00:48:40 ►
And now, so I think it had to,
00:48:43 ►
I think it helped, you know, I wouldn’t say it brought psychedelics back into the mainstream.
00:48:53 ►
That took later for this research to open up, but it did keep the conversation alive, you know, for that period.
00:49:10 ►
for that period. It came out in 1975, I believe, which was really a dark era in the world of, you know, psychedelics. I mean, these things were, you know, vilified, marginalized, all of that
00:49:17 ►
for many years, you know, and often, sometimes, at least, it seemed the only person out there continuing to talk about it was my brother.
00:49:29 ►
And I give him credit for his courage for doing that because he did keep the conversation alive. it got through in that clinicians, other people, you know,
00:49:46 ►
decided to circle back on it and take a closer look at it,
00:49:51 ►
starting with Rick Strassman’s work in the 90s, you know,
00:49:55 ►
and Terrence and I, probably Terrence Warren and I,
00:49:58 ►
but we can both claim a certain credit for convincing Rick that he should do this, you know,
00:50:06 ►
because I can remember conversations where we were discussing,
00:50:10 ►
oh, everybody’s crying in their beer about why can’t we do psychedelic research,
00:50:16 ►
you know, and I remember the conversation, and I was like,
00:50:21 ►
well, Rick, you’re an MD, you know, you’re more qualified probably than anybody on the planet to do this work.
00:50:28 ►
Why don’t you do this work?
00:50:30 ►
Go through the hoops.
00:50:32 ►
Jump, apply for permission and all that.
00:50:35 ►
And he did.
00:50:36 ►
And he got permission.
00:50:37 ►
And that really shoved open the door and began to, I wouldn’t say shoved it open, but open to the crack in the mid-90s.
00:50:46 ►
And that was kind of the end of the, you know, the dark age of prohibition for psychedelics
00:50:52 ►
and it built on it from there.
00:50:54 ►
Now psychedelics are poised to revolutionize medicine and psychiatry at the very least.
00:51:02 ►
You know, and my feeling is it’s about time because both of those institutions,
00:51:07 ►
you know, need radical change.
00:51:11 ►
Yeah.
00:51:11 ►
So.
00:51:14 ►
That.
00:51:14 ►
Yeah.
00:51:15 ►
That makes sense.
00:51:17 ►
And that actually is the last question
00:51:19 ►
I wanted to ask before I let you go here.
00:51:22 ►
Just wanted to hear an update about your research
00:51:24 ►
using the
00:51:25 ►
Amazonian medicines for conditions like schizophrenia and other mental health
00:51:30 ►
disorders yeah well my research that that research is essentially over I
00:51:44 ►
think but what’s your for the moment at least,
00:51:46 ►
although there may be another phase, but a few years ago, I got a grant from the Stanley Medical
00:51:53 ►
Research Institute to collect Amazonian medicines that might be useful for treating so-called
00:52:00 ►
negative symptoms of schizophrenia, not psychosis per se,
00:52:05 ►
but some of the associated symptoms that still help,
00:52:10 ►
essentially schizophrenics are still quite dysfunctional,
00:52:13 ►
because even if their psychosis is controlled,
00:52:16 ►
because they don’t think well, essentially, they’re not high functional.
00:52:21 ►
So there’s a search on for new compounds to to treat that I was
00:52:28 ►
able to get this grant they were interested in natural products and for
00:52:34 ►
me it was wonderful because it was a chance to reconnect with my colleagues
00:52:38 ►
in Peru and start going there regularly The significance of the work also was that, you know,
00:52:47 ►
the activity of the kind of what we were looking for in terms of activity
00:52:51 ►
also graded over into the area of dementia and cognitive deficits, essentially.
00:52:59 ►
So some of these compounds are plants that we investigated.
00:53:05 ►
My point toward that as well, we use receptor binding technologies to look at about 350 different fractions
00:53:15 ►
and from maybe 150 different species of plants.
00:53:21 ►
And after all that, there were about six or seven genera that sort of
00:53:26 ►
floated to the top in terms of these look interesting, we should do more work on them,
00:53:32 ►
there should be animal studies, and that’s kind of where the study stopped. But, you know, it’s
00:53:39 ►
out there to do, and, you know, if funds come along
00:53:45 ►
I may take it up myself. In the meantime
00:53:48 ►
people can read the
00:53:50 ►
paper. It was published in the Journal of
00:53:52 ►
Ethnopharmacology so
00:53:53 ►
you can read how far we
00:53:55 ►
got and
00:53:57 ►
yeah
00:53:59 ►
that’s what I’m doing. I’ve lately gotten
00:54:02 ►
very interested in
00:54:03 ►
some of the ayahuasca admixture plants
00:54:06 ►
or some of the plants used in the dietas, some of which were included in this study.
00:54:13 ►
And that’s like a whole area of, that’s a whole pharmacopoeia of plants in a way
00:54:20 ►
that’s closely associated with ayahuasca, but not very well investigated
00:54:25 ►
at all.
00:54:26 ►
So some of these are virtually unknown in terms of their chemistry.
00:54:31 ►
Others are sort of known.
00:54:34 ►
You know, a lot of work still to be done there.
00:54:38 ►
A lot of work.
00:54:40 ►
I don’t know if it will be me, but in fact, I’m pretty sure it won’t be me.
00:54:45 ►
But, you know, I’ve been privileged to work with some young people.
00:54:49 ►
I have a I’m on the committee of a young, young ethnobotanist at the University of Hawaii who’s going for his Ph.D.
00:54:58 ►
Very enthusiastic young guy.
00:55:01 ►
And so. Maybe he’ll make the discoveries
00:55:05 ►
I am
00:55:06 ►
well I guess
00:55:10 ►
I have to say I’m an elder now
00:55:12 ►
and one of the perks of being
00:55:14 ►
an elder is you don’t have to go to the field
00:55:16 ►
and beat yourself up
00:55:18 ►
at least not as often
00:55:19 ►
as I did before
00:55:20 ►
but it’s all good there’s a lot
00:55:24 ►
of research going on.
00:55:26 ►
And I’m still very much into ayahuasca
00:55:28 ►
myself personally
00:55:29 ►
and organize retreats
00:55:32 ►
to South America regularly.
00:55:37 ►
And, you know,
00:55:40 ►
eventually there may be some…
00:55:44 ►
Ayahuasca doesn’t fit into the FDA mold as well as psilocybin
00:55:51 ►
or MDMA because they’re single compounds.
00:55:54 ►
They can be synthesized.
00:55:57 ►
Ayahuasca is a horse of a different color or plant of a different color.
00:56:01 ►
It can be studied that way, but it’s more problematic. And I am sort of lately
00:56:07 ►
inclined to the view that it’s an indigenous medicine.
00:56:12 ►
Maybe it should be studied where it originated. It’s certainly possible
00:56:15 ►
to do this work in Peru, and maybe that’s where
00:56:20 ►
rigorous clinical studies should be done.
00:56:25 ►
So we’ll see what happens, basically, on that front.
00:56:30 ►
Yeah, sacraments are hard to study.
00:56:33 ►
Absolutely.
00:56:35 ►
Well, thank you so much for sharing with us and for putting the time and energy into pulling
00:56:40 ►
together this conference.
00:56:42 ►
Yeah, I’m really looking forward to it, and I appreciate you sharing about it.
00:56:48 ►
All right.
00:56:48 ►
Well, I appreciate you asking, and I’ll look forward to seeing this.
00:56:54 ►
I guess we’ll put it up on the – you’ll put it on the Symposia webpage.
00:56:59 ►
Yep, and the Psychedelics Law 2.0, and we’ll put up all the links,
00:57:02 ►
and the things you’re talking about.
00:57:05 ►
Yep, get it out there. Let people know. Alarm 2.0. And we’ll put up all the links to the things you’re talking about. Yeah, get it out there.
00:57:06 ►
Let people know.
00:57:07 ►
Watch it online.
00:57:08 ►
Perfect.
00:57:09 ►
All right.
00:57:10 ►
Thank you so much, Lex.
00:57:11 ►
I really appreciate your support.
00:57:14 ►
That sounds great, Dennis.
00:57:15 ►
I’m looking forward to it.
00:57:16 ►
Okay.
00:57:17 ►
All right.
00:57:18 ►
Bye-bye.
00:57:21 ►
A special thanks to Matt Payne, who engineered the sound,
00:57:25 ►
California Smile, who made the music,
00:57:27 ►
and to Brian Norman, who produced the show.
00:57:29 ►
© transcript Emily Beynon