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045 - Rick Doblin and the Psychedelic Storytellers

Jun 12, 2018, 76 min read

Program Notes

Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speakers: Various

Date this lecture was recorded: April 6, 2017

This week we go back to the very beginning of the Blue Dot Tour where Rick Doblin kicked off our event in Boston. Thanks to Northeastern’s Student’s for Sensible Drug Policy for making the event happen and to all the storytellers who came out to share.

 

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Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon

00:00:23 ►

2.0.

00:00:23 ►

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.

00:00:33 ►

And it is my pleasure to begin today by thanking Bradley G., Samuel G., Justin E., and Ian W., all of whom have made direct donations to the salon to help offset some of the expenses associated with producing these podcasts.

00:00:42 ►

Also, I’m pleased to welcome several new supporters of my writing projects through Patreon. Thank you. remind you that every Monday night at 6.30 Pacific time, I’ve been getting together with

00:01:05 ►

any of my Patreon supporters who want to join our little Zoom conversation. In fact, last week,

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Bruce Dahmer joined us and talked about the new scientific expedition that he’ll be leading in

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New Zealand next week, and that’s to continue the work on his origin of life theory that is now being tested at several major universities.

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And speaking of New Zealand, in last night’s Zoom conversation,

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we were joined by fellow Saloners from New Zealand, Australia, and Uruguay,

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in addition to those of us here in the States.

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So if you’re also a Patreon supporter of my work,

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well, I hope to hear you soon and see you soon in one of our regular

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Monday night conversations.

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And now for today’s

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program.

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You know, when Lex forwards me a recording

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to play here in Salon 2.0,

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he usually suggests a

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title for the program, which

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well, I must admit that I don’t always

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follow, but today

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I used his suggestion because he said that it sounded like the name of a band.

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And if you’ve got a strange mind like mine,

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well, you immediately said, of course, it’s a band of brothers.

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And in this case, it’s also a band of sisters as well.

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Which reminds me to tell you about one of the salon’s musical sisters.

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Her name is Cora Venus Lunny,

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and I first became aware of her when she became one of my supporters on Patreon,

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where I usually try to find out a little about them on the net,

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so as to see what they do in the default world.

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And as a result, I’ve discovered that the salon has a very eclectic audience,

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many of whom have excelled in the arts, business, law, and even politics.

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But it’s, well, I have to admit, it’s the musicians who are nearest and dearest to my heart.

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I guess that may be because, well, after a half a dozen or so years of taking piano lessons when I was younger,

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I had to quit because I realized how impossibly hard, for me at least,

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it was to commit to the practice required to play an instrument even halfway decently.

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Or maybe I got hooked on music because in Catholic school,

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the nuns told us that music was the highest form of prayer.

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Or maybe I’m so drawn to music because ever since I bought my first Elvis Presley record in 1955, well, ever since then,

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music has been my lifeline more than once. And so whenever I come across the musician at the top of

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their form, I have to stop what I’m doing and just listen. And the other day, for my first time, I

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heard my Patreon supporter Cora Venus Lunny. I heard her play the violin, and for the next few hours,

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I searched out as many of her performances on YouTube that I could find.

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Then I discovered that Cora also has a Patreon site.

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And there, I discovered that, like many other artists I know,

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she creates and performs for you and me so that we can listen.

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In fact, here’s how she begins her Patreon overview.

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Quote,

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This is truly free music on so many levels.

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You can hear it as often as you want, no strings attached.

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Moreover, it has been freely improvised in free time

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with no expectations or deadlines or agendas.

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It is also free-range, grass-fed, locally produced, and 100% organic.

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End quote.

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And, well, to tell you the truth, it’s that last part that really got me,

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because I value a good sense of humor almost as much as I do intelligence.

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Anyway, since the main thing that Venus is asking for is for more of us to enjoy her music,

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I thought that instead of making a donation, I’d give her a plug here.

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And I’ll add a couple of links to her YouTube performances in today’s program notes,

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which you can find at psychedelicsalon.com.

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And now, let’s join Lex Pelger, who will introduce today’s program.

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I’m Lex Pelger, and this is the Psychedelic Salon 2.0

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This episode of the salon makes me feel quite nostalgic

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On our psychedelic storytelling tour we’re going back to the beginning of the trip

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This is the first stop of the Blue Dot Tour up in Boston

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We only have a couple of episodes left in the tour,

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and the very last episode will be the one from my parents’ barn in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

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That’s what has me feeling nostalgic,

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because this tour started my journey towards fatherhood,

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and now we’ll be returning to Lancaster on August 4th

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to a little old stone church where I’ll be marrying Claire.

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You never know what this life may bring, and thinking about the start of this trip makes

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me want to say thank you to everyone who came and shared and turned it into one of the most

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powerful experiences of my life.

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Today, Rick Doblin leads us off in an auditorium at Northeastern, and then he’s followed by

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a wide array of storytellers.

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This week is especially strong in the power of these drugs to help people’s mental health.

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We probably all know someone who might be helped by psychedelics, and if they’re nervous

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to try, now Michael Pollan’s new book gives us all a new air of legitimacy.

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You’re going to be hearing increased interest in psychedelics because of him, so we all

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have to be ready to share about the power of these medicines. I hope you enjoy.

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This actually is 1985, and this is a story that explains why MDMA for PTSD, in a way, is what we’re doing.

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And so starting in 72, I started thinking, I want to be a psychedelic therapist. But the main thing

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was I needed my own psychedelic therapy. And so I ended up dropping out of college and spending

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about 10 years building houses, building things to get

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grounded in the world, and little by little using psychedelics every now and again. Because I had

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a lot of very difficult psychedelic experiences that were very painful, very self-critical.

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One time I felt that I was resisting so much, I was so scared of letting go that I felt this resistance

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was just building up all this heat

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inside my brain.

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And then I would sort of move my head

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and I could sort of feel my brain liquefying.

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And then I had a nasal drip

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and I interpreted that as my brain

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sort of melting through my nose.

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I was just like,

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it was a terrible experience.

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And so I had a lot of fearful experiences. But I felt there was always something healing in this psychedelics. I wanted to keep

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going. And so I spent this 10 years doing little bits of psychedelics and occasionally big doses,

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preparing, getting grounded. And then starting in 82, I learned about MDMA I went to workshops at Esalen with Stan Groff

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I started learning about the whole breath work

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and in 84

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Stan and Christina

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his wife had a month long workshop

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on the spiritual emergency

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network in a way that’s the founding of the

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Zendo project it was this idea

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that a lot of people have

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experiences that are

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either catalyzed by psychedelics or sometimes

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by meditation or other things that look like borderline spiritual psychotic spiritual emergencies

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and they’re not really able to handle them and our current psychiatry pathologizes them and

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tranquilizes them and so this was a workshop on a different approach of letting the

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symptoms come to the surface, working with people in a different way. So I did this month-long

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workshop. This is now 1984. MDMA is still legal. And I got home a couple days only from this

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workshop. I was still a college undergraduate. And I got a call from a friend of mine saying that he and a girlfriend of his had done MDMA together, which I had sold them.

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And that during this experience, she had remembered horrible trauma from her childhood, from being raped, from being kidnapped, all horrible things.

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And it brought this stuff to the surface.

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And she had sort of been keeping it buried.

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She’d been in and out

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of mental institutions before multiple times in her life. And this brought it to the surface.

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And she was saying, I really can’t handle this. And she ended up checking herself into a mental

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hospital after this MDMA experience. And they gave her the same tranquilizers, the same as before.

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And she got out and she said, I am no better.

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This is not helping.

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There’s no reason to live.

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I’m going to commit suicide.

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And my friend called me and said, look what happened after you gave me this MDMA.

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And he said, I want you to try to help her.

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And so this was sort of like a turning point in my life was what do I do?

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Because I felt like I’m not

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qualified. I am not a trained therapist. This is just something I’m wanting to become. On the other

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hand, the traditional medicine had failed her. There was nothing that she was going to else to

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try. She was suicidal. And I just thought, well, maybe I should try to help because I knew that

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the MDMA can bring things to the surface

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and if you’re not prepared, it can make you feel worse off.

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But if you still keep working with it in a safe place, it could be helpful.

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So I talked to her and I said,

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as long as you promise not to commit suicide when you’re with me,

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that I’m willing to get some of my friends together

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and we’ll create a sort of residential

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treatment facility for you at my house and we’ll be watching you for you know every day for a

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couple weeks all the time we’ll bring in a bunch of women co-therapists to help me and we’ll try

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we’ll I’ll agree to work with you as long as you promise not to commit suicide when you’re with me. And she agreed to do that. And so she came down,

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and the first thing we did was an MDMA experience.

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And it was this eight-hour experience,

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male-female team,

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and it was like a tour of her history of trauma

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from childhood, abusive family,

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being kidnapped later, being raped later,

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all these horrible things

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that had happened in her life and we felt like this was just like the inner emotional biography

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in a way of trauma and it was opening in ways she was able to come to grips with things but it

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didn’t feel like it sort of broke things open so I I said, all right, let’s wait a couple weeks and then let’s try LSD. That maybe would be, now I should also say that the first use ever of psychedelics for

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PTSD was by a Dr. Bastians in the Netherlands, and he did work with LSD with concentration camp

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survivors. There’s an incredible book called Shaviti by an Israeli Holocaust writer who went to the Netherlands in the 70s, I think, actually, to get LSD therapy.

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And he’s written a book about his LSD therapy for being in the concentration camps.

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So LSD was really this first drug tried to be used in psychedelics for PTSD.

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So I thought, okay, maybe LSD would open the door and really help her get healed.

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so I thought okay maybe LSD would open the door and really help her get healed and so in the minute so we tried this LSD and it was it does not have that fear reducing properties of MDMA

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so it was terrifying for her and things were very symbolic and so there was a point where she felt

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that she was on a foreign world with two sons, and she was baking to death.

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But it wasn’t her life.

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It was somewhere out in the galaxies,

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and it was just so totally terrifying that she couldn’t make any progress.

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And so we thought, all right, maybe if we give half a dose of MDMA

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to soften the LSD, that that would be helpful.

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And so she agreed to try to do that.

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And that half a dose of the MDMA really was the transformative ingredient.

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And so it turned from this foreign world with these two sons baking down on turds to actually

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being, after she had been raped and beaten up and left out in the sun, under the sun.

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So it turned from symbolic to her life.

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And she was able to really work through and process it.

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And it turned out it was a date rape story.

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And so the key moment actually was where she was talking about

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how this was somebody that she had trusted,

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and he was not trustworthy.

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And that sort of made it in her mind that she could never trust love.

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She could never trust her own ability.

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She could always doubt it.

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So there was no reason to live because there was no reason to find,

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no ability to find love because she couldn’t really trust herself to do that.

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And so I asked her, well, what made you trust him in the first place? And she immediately started throwing up.

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And then she started saying that he was really kind to animals and that that’s what made her

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think that he would be a nice person. And so then she was able to recognize that that’s not a signal

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of somebody necessarily being a nice person.

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And so she started being able to recover her ability to evaluate people

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and to be more cautious about extending trust.

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But she gained a little bit of confidence that she was able to find love again.

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And so that was sort of the key opening moment.

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She stayed another couple weeks.

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And so that was sort of the key opening moment.

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She stayed another couple weeks.

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She had this period of time where she was looking at me and looking at my feet and seeing my feet were turning into the rapist’s feet.

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And then my face was, so I was going back and forth.

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So she was like projecting her fears onto me.

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And I felt like I was really sincerely trying to help her, that I could accept all these fears and anxieties.

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So it was like a projection screen.

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And it would go back and forth as am I me or am I the rapist or what’s going on.

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And so being able to stand through that and then her also processing.

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And then these other women that were helping us in this therapy.

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And after a couple weeks, she ended up being able to go home and start her life.

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And this was 1984.

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And during this escalation of the demonization of MDMA

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and the one-dose serious brain damage,

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you know, you’re going to be screwed for life if you even try it,

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I just was watching this woman and seeing that it was working and it was helping her to

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forge a new life. And so she decided that she wanted to become a therapist.

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And over the years, she went back to school, she became a therapist. And so I had this sort of

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touchstone from 1984 that it actually can work.

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I sort of knew it from my life, and I knew it from her.

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And so all through this time now, she’s been growing,

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and she’s now actually one of the therapists working on our MDMA Phase III and Phase II studies.

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Yeah.

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So I don’t really have a specific experience to share.

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I more so have a relationship with psychedelics that I’d like to share.

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There are a lot of details in here that involve my personal life and they kind of help to illustrate the story

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of how my relationship with psychedelics changed me and allowed me to really become the happier

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driving person that I am today. So a little bit of background is necessary here. I didn’t

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grow up in the worst neighborhood, but I did grow up in a relatively bad neighborhood in a lower

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middle income city. At one point I had four kids rush into my house and beat my brother

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with a metal bat. I seen him on the floor with blood just everywhere. And there was

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nothing I could do. And it was probably his fault because he was on drugs at the time. But that just illustrates where I come from. I was surrounded by negative influences and I knew

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it. Around 2008, I had my first experiences with psychedelics, psilocybin mushrooms. Some

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mushrooms, friends smoking a couple blunts, music going. Timothy, not Timothy, Terrence

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McKenna talking about the

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war on consciousness and you know god knows what what else so i i was starting to see um

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i remember a cop just got shot in the head behind my my high school the previous year

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it’s crazy things going on the effects of mass the massive over prescribing of opiate medications

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was really starting to take hold of the community i I saw a lot of people going into drug addiction.

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And it was starting to come for me as well

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because I had been prescribed Adderall

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from the age of like eight years old.

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So I had one profound life-changing thought

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on psilocybin.

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And it was that I was intelligent and that if I could just get myself to a happier place,

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there was no limit to what I could do.

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All I had to do was enter a new state.

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This experience alone wasn’t enough to stop me from going down the road of addiction and dependence, but it did plant a seed that gave me the respect for psychedelics

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that led me to the medicine that did get me to the place that I am now.

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Fast forward to 2012.

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I’m now a couple years into college, but I am taking a semester off.

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My Adderall use has evolved into dependence and borderline addiction.

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I’m not robbing anybody for it, but I’m taking a lot of it,

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and it’s just not doing what it’s supposed to do.

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I’m not motivated. I’m not focused.

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I’m going nowhere. I’m at a dead end.

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I’m stuck in a cycle.

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On top of that, a close family member just got out of jail and is using heroin.

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I’m like, there’s got to be a psychedelic for this.

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This is such an obvious difference between people who use

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psychedelics and people who use addictive drugs like benzodiazepines,

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opiates, cocaine, all those things.

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There’s a very, very clear difference. I mean, sure, I had a dependence,

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but I was not, like, you know, I wasn’t out on the street. I wasn’t robbing

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anybody. I wasn’t going crazy.

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There was a very

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different

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thing. So I took to Google.

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I found some articles written by some guy

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who’s smoking DMT once a night

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to fend off heroin craziness. Sounds good,

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but not quite good enough. I hadn’t been able to

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properly vaporize DMT yet,

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so I couldn’t really do that.

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Eventually, I stumbled upon Iboga and ibogaine.

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For those who don’t know, it’s a root found in Africa that is frequently used

00:20:12 ►

for drug addiction. It’s fascinating. I mean, it relieves opiate withdrawal without

00:20:16 ►

actually getting the user high. Not that I needed that particular property, but it

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really seemed to indicate that it had a very specific purpose on this planet for

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growing like that. I mean, it seemed like, you know,

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I told my family like this, because it’s the only way they understand,

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God put this here for us.

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I don’t believe in God, but I say it like that, because they understand it that way.

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So I acquired some, and I attempted to treat myself with it.

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And it felt so weird.

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I’d never been so hot in my life.

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I was sweating.

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It was the middle of winter.

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I had my window wide open, cold air coming in.

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I was so hot, sweating, sweating.

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It’s crazy, and it felt so weird.

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I remember having closed-eye visuals of what appeared to be people’s faces twitching and bugging out.

00:21:00 ►

I don’t know what the significance of that was, but it was really

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bizarre. But the subject material that I pointed on was very interesting. It was mostly related

00:21:13 ►

to human behavior and the repetitive things we do. As usual, it’s pretty hard to describe,

00:21:18 ►

but it felt like we’re all hamsters running on a wheel, and we’re just doing what we’re

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programmed to do to an extent everything

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was predetermined i didn’t take what’s usually used for for addiction treatment called a flood

00:21:32 ►

dose typically 20 milligrams per kilogram body body weight i tried but i didn’t have the proper

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anti-nausea anti-emetic emetic medication to really fend off that kind of nausea i got maybe

00:21:43 ►

one-third of the dose,

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and then you puke the rest. Started the process, though. I’m staying for a while,

00:21:48 ►

and then I decided to wean off the medication. Looking back, I should have just stopped

00:21:51 ►

altogether and just let the Ibogaine really work its magic, which is what I did last year,

00:21:57 ►

January last year. I stopped, flooded, couldn’t take the full dose, so I just took a week off

00:22:02 ►

from my responsibilities, and I just kind of let the medicine do its magic over that week.

00:22:07 ►

A week later, I felt incredible.

00:22:08 ►

I started crushing it at school.

00:22:11 ►

I got a new job, started making decent money, going to the gym three, four times a week.

00:22:15 ►

I started making music and learning how to produce electronic music,

00:22:19 ►

something I had been wanting to do for years.

00:22:22 ►

I finally was able to do that.

00:22:24 ►

I was finally able to, and I didn’t,

00:22:26 ►

like, Ibogaine made me feel

00:22:28 ►

like I was on Adderall without taking Adderall,

00:22:32 ►

and I didn’t need to take anything.

00:22:33 ►

Like, I didn’t need to keep taking Ibogaine.

00:22:35 ►

I was just happy to be sober and be myself.

00:22:38 ►

You know what I mean?

00:22:39 ►

It’s like, it was incredible.

00:22:41 ►

One of my friends saw the,

00:22:43 ►

witnessed the transformation I underwent.

00:22:46 ►

He mentions in late 2013

00:22:48 ►

that one time I helped get him some weed,

00:22:52 ►

short notice he came over,

00:22:53 ►

and I was like,

00:22:54 ►

I was fucking huffing canned air with my roommates,

00:22:58 ►

like, on the ground.

00:22:59 ►

He’s like, what the fuck?

00:23:00 ►

Like, this is like, what are you doing?

00:23:01 ►

And I was like, what was that?

00:23:04 ►

So a few years later, I lost, like,

00:23:06 ►

40, 50 pounds, I’m going to the gym all the time, I’m, like, being productive, like, I go over his

00:23:10 ►

house, and, like, you know, like, they go to shows all the time, they like to party, they’re doing

00:23:14 ►

cocaine, I skipped the cocaine trick, because I’m just, being motivated is way more important, and

00:23:19 ►

to be honest, cocaine’s not, it’s not special anyway.

00:23:22 ►

Cocaine’s not special anyway.

00:23:30 ►

Iboga didn’t do the work for me, but it gave me what I needed to do it myself.

00:23:34 ►

It’s not just that I no longer have a dependence.

00:23:35 ►

It’s like I never had one.

00:23:36 ►

I get no cravings.

00:23:37 ►

I don’t think about my drug of choice.

00:23:44 ►

I don’t, but if I wanted to, I could go out this weekend, do some cocaine, get absolutely wrecked, and resume normal life

00:23:45 ►

back on Monday, which most recovering addicts, if you’ve ever been to an NA or an AA meeting,

00:23:50 ►

they cannot do, they can’t even have one beer. I’ll never get back the time that I wasted, but

00:23:55 ►

it’s an important part of who I am, and it’s immensely shaped both my worldview and the concept

00:23:59 ►

of what exactly humans are capable of. I’m very excited to continue to grow in the future.

00:24:07 ►

Thank you.

00:24:07 ►

Thank you.

00:24:20 ►

So I just wanted to share my extremely positive experience

00:24:24 ►

using psychedelics.

00:24:25 ►

I haven’t had MDMA, but psilocybin is something that was, all the experiences I used it were

00:24:32 ►

the most important, some of the most important in my own personal development.

00:24:36 ►

It started in college, so that was probably eight years ago.

00:24:40 ►

Yeah, it is eight years ago.

00:24:41 ►

And it was a very low dose where just spending time with

00:24:45 ►

friends opened up a connection with nature that had never happened before so i recommend that

00:24:50 ►

any potential first timers out there like you can give yourself a positive experience at a very low

00:24:56 ►

dose and then it’s just start a process the second time was a much higher dose again started out in

00:25:02 ►

nature but the real effects and most meaningful part came later on

00:25:08 ►

when I was alone having the previous two experiences with a group of people,

00:25:11 ►

but all of a sudden alone in my dorm room, I went through a common experience known as ego death.

00:25:16 ►

I don’t know if anybody else is familiar with this,

00:25:18 ►

but it’s kind of an acknowledgment within the self of being one with the world,

00:25:24 ►

but also being okay with your own existence not being infinite.

00:25:29 ►

Basically, you don’t fear death anymore.

00:25:33 ►

At least that’s been the lasting effect that I’ve had.

00:25:36 ►

And it helped me prioritize things in life tremendously,

00:25:40 ►

like it reduced fear in social situations.

00:25:43 ►

Probably that was the number one overall effect.

00:25:44 ►

But it also allowed me to look at my life up to that point with a really clear perspective

00:25:48 ►

and start making much more healthy decisions with my own life.

00:25:52 ►

And that was all around 2022.

00:25:55 ►

I’m now 28.

00:25:56 ►

And after such successes, I’ve been trying to figure out what the next best step is.

00:26:01 ►

And that’s why I asked Rick a moment ago about trying to introduce this type of treatment

00:26:06 ►

into existing therapy.

00:26:08 ►

So that’s where I see my own future,

00:26:10 ►

but I hope you all have a future out there of your own

00:26:12 ►

in this area, either using the substances

00:26:15 ►

or being really supportive of the people

00:26:17 ►

who do choose to use them.

00:26:18 ►

Like I don’t say that everyone should use psychedelics

00:26:20 ►

by any means, but there are people out there

00:26:23 ►

that will greatly benefit from this type of stuff.

00:26:25 ►

So just, you know, have an open dialogue and, yeah.

00:26:28 ►

Thank you.

00:26:32 ►

All right, thank you, Margaret.

00:26:41 ►

So I’m going to apologize

00:26:43 ►

because I get really anxious in public speaking.

00:26:47 ►

But this talk, this storytelling, is actually sort of part of the integration process of this experience still for me.

00:26:54 ►

So that’s why I wanted to do it.

00:26:57 ►

So when I was preparing, I also have some notes, so I apologize if I’m looking at my phone.

00:27:03 ►

So when I was preparing for tonight,

00:27:05 ►

I couldn’t really think of the best way to start this story

00:27:08 ►

because everything I thought of kind of came back to

00:27:12 ►

drugs changed my life, right?

00:27:15 ►

But what actually is what I want to convey

00:27:17 ►

is the fact that psychedelics have allowed me to change my life.

00:27:22 ►

They have been what I think,

00:27:26 ►

so this time last year I was living in Prague

00:27:28 ►

and I went to a talk given by a doctor

00:27:31 ►

named Frederica Fischer who worked with Stan Grof

00:27:34 ►

and she likened psychedelics to a catalyst

00:27:39 ►

and I think that’s exactly what I feel

00:27:41 ►

my relationship with psychedelics are.

00:27:44 ►

I’m studying for the MCAT right now,

00:27:45 ►

and so a catalyst to me is something that lowers the activation energy of a reaction

00:27:50 ►

without changing the equilibrium or the final product, right?

00:27:56 ►

So for me, that’s what psychedelics have been,

00:27:58 ►

is they’ve allowed me to do these things in my life.

00:28:00 ►

So that’s sort of my little caveat.

00:28:03 ►

So the story goes a little bit like this

00:28:05 ►

Jake who actually left, I have permission to use people’s names by the way

00:28:09 ►

so Jake who actually left, he’s the president of SSDP

00:28:12 ►

on December 1st we celebrated his birthday

00:28:15 ►

and I went to this party

00:28:18 ►

with the intention of taking 2C-B

00:28:20 ►

I knew that it was what I was going to do, I’d chosen that for this evening

00:28:23 ►

and I am someone who in the last six months has realized that I love to insufflate drugs.

00:28:29 ►

And so 2C-B insufflation was the way I was going to do it.

00:28:33 ►

So I walk into the party, and this person actually isn’t here, but he was going to be here.

00:28:40 ►

Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Insufflation is uh a synonym for snorting drugs um yeah and yeah a

00:28:48 ►

two c yeah i’ll get into it so um so i get to the party and i find my friend who i knew would be

00:28:54 ►

interested in taking 2cb so i offered to give him some um oops um so i um uh we we are led to the

00:29:04 ►

approved drug snorting room

00:29:06 ►

because apparently not everyone is okay with that being in public.

00:29:09 ►

So we go into the approved drug-taking room,

00:29:12 ►

and I have this thought out loud, right?

00:29:15 ►

Should I weigh out this, or should I eyeball the lines?

00:29:20 ►

Okay, and that was mistake number one.

00:29:21 ►

That was mistake number one of the evening.

00:29:24 ►

There are two. This is one.

00:29:26 ►

So the mistake was not that I thought that.

00:29:30 ►

The mistake was that I listened to the already intoxicated bunch of people in the room who said,

00:29:35 ►

eyeball it.

00:29:36 ►

You got it.

00:29:37 ►

You got it.

00:29:38 ►

So at this point, I’m feeling good.

00:29:41 ►

I’m like, yeah, I can do this.

00:29:42 ►

I’m going to eyeball these lines of 2C-B,

00:29:46 ►

which is bad. Don’t ever do that. So, right, so I cut the lines. I evened them out. I’m like,

00:29:55 ►

all right. I wanted to do about 20 milligrams. This looks good, 20 milligrams. I’m like, yeah,

00:30:01 ►

this is right. I, at that point, had only ever weighed out 2C-B before.

00:30:05 ►

I’d never eyeballed it, and I’d probably taken it like two or three times before this, right? So I

00:30:10 ►

had these lines. I’m like, yes, this is good. This is what I want. I let my friend choose and do his

00:30:15 ►

first as I’m sitting there mentally preparing myself for the absolute punch in the face that

00:30:20 ►

is insufflating 2C-B. It hurts really bad. But obviously people do it for a reason because it’s great.

00:30:29 ►

So I snort this wine

00:30:32 ►

and the moment that my $20 bill

00:30:36 ►

finished going across the powder, I was like, holy shit

00:30:40 ►

that was not 20 milligrams. Definitely not.

00:30:44 ►

And so it wasn’t until the next day that I actually went back

00:30:46 ►

and figured out how much I had had before and how much I had then.

00:30:50 ►

And anywhere between 35 and 40 milligrams

00:30:53 ►

is actually what I insufflated at that night.

00:30:56 ►

So, right, yeah.

00:31:00 ►

So for any of you who don’t really know

00:31:03 ►

or aren’t familiar with 2C-B, for me, it’s really unpleasant for like 10 minutes.

00:31:10 ►

You come up, or I come up, and you hit this wall.

00:31:15 ►

Unlike LSD, that is like waves, to me, 2C-B, and this has been pointed out to me by other people, is like a staircase.

00:31:22 ►

So you hit the wall, and you have to come over it, right? So usually I come over this wall into a really pleasant, when you start it mild,

00:31:29 ►

mildly visual, like pleasant experience is really clear headed, unlike LSD, right? So not what I

00:31:36 ►

experienced this time at all. And so initially, I essentially, sorry, I’ve lost my place in my notes here.

00:31:51 ►

So I’m painting a picture for you, right?

00:31:54 ►

So I have taken this 2C-B and I immediately didn’t regret it because I knew what I had done.

00:32:02 ►

But I was struggling because I my body

00:32:05 ►

was not prepared to take that much I was coming up very quickly when you snort it

00:32:09 ►

comes up comes on a lot quicker coming up very quickly and my body was not

00:32:15 ►

happy I immediately my heart was racing I was sweating profusely I tried to get

00:32:21 ►

out of the room that I was in and want to go outside. Um,

00:32:25 ►

and, and people were smoking a joint. And if you know me, you know that I don’t ever turn down

00:32:29 ►

pot. Um, and, and there was like this voice in my head that was like, don’t fucking touch it.

00:32:34 ►

Like don’t do it. Um, so I, I went back inside. Um, and that was when, um, Jake, who’s actually

00:32:40 ►

not here, um, must’ve like seen my seen my face. And he immediately knew that something was

00:32:46 ►

wrong. And so he brought me into a quiet room and got me water. And I had packed myself some

00:32:56 ►

atezolam, which is essentially, it’s not a benzo, but it works like a benzo. And I took a really,

00:33:04 ►

really low dose of that just to make sure

00:33:05 ►

that I wasn’t having an anxiety attack while I was also on 2C-B. And so essentially,

00:33:14 ►

Jake was great, and his party, so he went back to the party and Owen, who’s not here, came and spent

00:33:27 ►

probably two to two and a half hours with me sitting in the bedroom

00:33:31 ►

while I was dealing with some really difficult shit

00:33:35 ►

and Owen was great because he was so able to hold space for me

00:33:40 ►

and he was able to be compassionate

00:33:43 ►

and kind without dampening the experience, right?

00:33:50 ►

So I have to give a little bit of context

00:33:52 ►

because of what I was dealing with.

00:33:55 ►

So on December 1st, I was still at that point

00:33:58 ►

in a five-year relationship that had become very toxic.

00:34:02 ►

I, like I said, was living in Prague this time last year. I came back from

00:34:06 ►

Prague and I realized that this person that I once thought I was going to marry, there was a ring on

00:34:11 ►

my finger. I realized that this person was not that anymore. I realized that I could not be with

00:34:19 ►

someone whose ideals were so different from my own and who just wasn’t someone that could support me in a way that I

00:34:28 ►

needed to be supported, right? So I came back from Prague and I sort of just lived with it. I lived

00:34:36 ►

with this person at the time. So for six months, I just sort of like let that eat away at me

00:34:41 ►

and let the resentment and hatred and unhappiness and toxicity of our

00:34:45 ►

relationship just sort of like kill me from the inside out. I started spending so much more time

00:34:51 ►

with the guys from SSDP. So thank you because you rescued me and a less time as least the least

00:35:01 ►

amount of time at home as possible. And that’s kind of sad, right? When you don’t want

00:35:05 ►

to go home. And that’s how you kind of know, right? Hindsight is 20-20. I think I probably

00:35:11 ►

should have realized, you know, the first time you get punched in the face and have to call out of

00:35:14 ►

work, that the relationship should be over. But I didn’t, because love, right? And so it got to the

00:35:23 ►

point where I was just too afraid to talk about my feelings with this person

00:35:27 ►

because I had to walk on eggshells because anything could just be an argument.

00:35:33 ►

There was arguments over who was going to change the cat litter box, like stupid shit.

00:35:39 ►

So all these things I had been dealing with, and December was significant because my lease was ending.

00:35:47 ►

I had to make decisions about what was going to be happening with the rest of my life.

00:35:50 ►

And on December 1st, I had about a week to make those decisions, and I thought, yeah, definitely going to take some 2CB and do that.

00:35:58 ►

And so I ended up taking a lot, and yeah yeah I started dealing with those issues um unexpectedly

00:36:05 ►

maybe um not something I wanted to do at a party with 70 other people um so I’m I’m don’t want to

00:36:14 ►

talk too much about the actual trip because we’ll be here for like five hours um but essentially

00:36:19 ►

what happens right so Owen and I um come out this room, the party had ended pretty much, there’s like some

00:36:25 ►

people there, some other SSTP people, and they’re sort of in that like post-party, like we’re all

00:36:31 ►

just gonna chill out and smoke weed and do whatever. So it came up somehow, not really sure how,

00:36:36 ►

so a bit of DMT came up, right? So mistake number two of the night was when I decided it was a good idea to dab 30 milligrams of DMT

00:36:48 ►

um and after like like two hours um two two and a half hours after taking this ridiculous 2cb dose

00:36:56 ►

um and this was the first time I’d ever uh dabbed or taken DMT at all. So I’m not going to talk about the DMT trip.

00:37:08 ►

I probably can’t talk. I can’t really explain it. But what I will say

00:37:12 ►

is that DMT fucking kicked my ass. I want to do it again

00:37:15 ►

and I really plan on doing it again. But that experience, I had been

00:37:20 ►

during the trip, the 2CB trip, I had these thoughts

00:37:23 ►

that have been a problem in my life,

00:37:26 ►

my entire life, of feeling like a burden. I work in mental health. To me, I am the person who

00:37:32 ►

provides the help, not the person who needs the help. And I have a really hard time dealing with

00:37:36 ►

that, dealing with asking for help, feeling like my existence is a burden to people who say that

00:37:42 ►

they love me. A lot of things, right? And I was dealing with all of this during this trip.

00:37:47 ►

And the DMT just sort of like accelerated all of that

00:37:50 ►

to a point where I was really, really overwhelmed

00:37:56 ►

with the sense of the fact that my existence

00:37:58 ►

was burdening the people who I was with.

00:38:01 ►

And so that’s sort of the story. And then I’ll give you the happy ending,

00:38:08 ►

um, because I feel like that was sort of a difficult, uh, story. Uh, so the happy ending

00:38:14 ►

is that a month after I, um, this trip, um, within a month I, um, moved out, I found a new apartment.

00:38:23 ►

I formally ended a relationship that had been over for

00:38:26 ►

probably a year. And I’m nearly 22. I had been with this person for five years. So since I was

00:38:35 ►

single for the first time since I was 16 years old, so I started dating, which like, oh my god,

00:38:40 ►

what is that? And I’ve been really fortunate to meet a lot of really great people,

00:38:45 ►

and one person in particular I’ve had quite a few psychedelic experiences with,

00:38:50 ►

I think probably since December, like eight to ten of them, and I have been able to work through

00:38:58 ►

some of those feelings of my existence being a burden on people, and this person has showed me

00:39:03 ►

compassion and love and

00:39:05 ►

been able to help me reformulate some of my thoughts that are so negative. And the best

00:39:12 ►

part of this story is last, right? So the most ironic part that I didn’t realize until, you know,

00:39:17 ►

when do you find out someone’s last name when you start dating them, right? Like a couple dates in,

00:39:23 ►

right? So a couple dates dates in, um, I realized

00:39:25 ►

that this person’s last name is actually burden. Um, and so the universe was kind of like, fuck

00:39:31 ►

you. You’re dealing with this now. Um, and so, uh, I am, uh, dealing with it now. Um, and so

00:39:39 ►

essentially, um, what I’m going to leave you guys with is this right so I have been dealing with all of

00:39:46 ►

these things and and in the past few months have been trying to reconcile my definition of what

00:39:51 ►

love is with my past experiences because I thought that that was love and I don’t think that it was

00:39:59 ►

as much as I thought once and so I was looking through my notes today

00:40:06 ►

of a presentation that I went to in Prague

00:40:07 ►

given by Frederica Fischer,

00:40:09 ►

and she, at this quote that I have in the notebook that I found,

00:40:13 ►

says,

00:40:15 ►

Love is not a feeling.

00:40:17 ►

It is a state of being in which you can feel truly without fear.

00:40:22 ►

So thank you for listening to me.

00:40:24 ►

Thank you. truly without fear. So thank you for listening to me.

00:40:45 ►

I want to talk about my experience using psilocybin-assisted exposure therapy for the treatment of OCD.

00:40:52 ►

So if anyone doesn’t know, exposure therapy is a known treatment for many things, many anxiety disorders,

00:40:57 ►

and it involves exposing yourself to the thing that triggers the anxiety,

00:40:59 ►

and then working through that.

00:41:04 ►

And it’s like the prolonged exposure that one of the speakers was talking about,

00:41:06 ►

but yeah, it’s like that.

00:41:07 ►

You’re exposed to it, you work through it, you get to the other side,

00:41:10 ►

and the theory is that if you’re exposed to it enough and set those triggers off enough,

00:41:14 ►

it will dampen that heightened response.

00:41:18 ►

It is a vastly used treatment for OCD.

00:41:21 ►

However, it is terrifying and re-traumatizing, as was mentioned before

00:41:26 ►

tonight. So something that I found was that psilocybin can greatly reduce that anxiety and

00:41:37 ►

that heightened response. And there’s a number of, there was one phase one done by, I forget the researchers, but it was a while back,

00:41:47 ►

a phase one study was done, and there’s a bunch of experiential reports about this effect

00:41:53 ►

as well.

00:41:54 ►

So the story goes, this was many years ago, so maybe when I was 17, 18, so I’m like 24,

00:42:03 ►

almost 25 now, so this was a while back, early on in my psychedelic

00:42:07 ►

journey. I was with my partner at the time, and back story, I was diagnosed with severe

00:42:15 ►

OCD. My therapist suggested long-term residential treatment. She was actually hoping to get

00:42:24 ►

me into the McLean’s program, which is a very famous OCD

00:42:26 ►

treatment program. It’s very intensive and very… I had bad OCD, just putting it out there. And it

00:42:34 ►

was very much affecting my life in a very negative way. So fast forward, I’m beginning my psychedelic journey, and I had taken psilocybin with my current partner.

00:42:49 ►

And one of my OCD things was that I couldn’t stand in door frames.

00:42:54 ►

Like, for whatever reason, that really freaked me out, and I thought it was going to cause tornadoes or whatever.

00:43:00 ►

And, like, that’s just anxiety disorders for you.

00:43:02 ►

They don’t make any sense.

00:43:05 ►

But, like, for whatever reason, I couldn’t stand in doorways.

00:43:08 ►

So we’re having the psilocybin experience,

00:43:10 ►

and all of a sudden, they point out,

00:43:13 ►

hey, you’re standing in a doorway right now.

00:43:16 ►

I had gone to get something and paused on the way out,

00:43:21 ►

and I was standing in the doorway, and I was just like,

00:43:24 ►

I stood there, and I didn’t feel anxious and this was very significant for me because usually that would have triggered

00:43:31 ►

One I wouldn’t have stood there too

00:43:33 ►

if I had ended up somehow in that doorway it would have triggered and a huge anxiety response and

00:43:40 ►

so on so forth and so I I

00:43:43 ►

I noticed this moment,

00:43:45 ►

and this is a very significant moment in my life,

00:43:47 ►

being there, having this pointed out to me,

00:43:49 ►

and being okay with it,

00:43:51 ►

and being able to move forward

00:43:52 ►

without much of a negative thought,

00:43:55 ►

only kind of inquiries and positivity

00:43:57 ►

about maybe what this could entail for my future.

00:44:02 ►

So I moved forward,

00:44:04 ►

and after this experience, started doing some of my own research

00:44:08 ►

on the Google and the Arrowhead and all the different sites and I see these other reports

00:44:15 ►

of similar experiences of psilocybin helping with OCD and so I thought to myself, hmm, maybe there’s something here.

00:44:30 ►

I forget how much time actually passed between then and when I started a self-administered treatment,

00:44:36 ►

but it was some amount of time before I decided I was going to go for it. I was going to put myself through this therapy and administer this medicine

00:44:44 ►

so that I could hopefully work

00:44:46 ►

through this debilitating disorder. And just putting it out there, if you’re going to do

00:44:53 ►

any sort of intensive treatment for like a debilitating disorder, you should probably do

00:44:57 ►

it with a doctor. But I was young and that’s not what I did but like

00:45:05 ►

so I had

00:45:07 ►

I began administering

00:45:11 ►

the psilocybin

00:45:12 ►

the medicine on a

00:45:14 ►

semi-regular

00:45:16 ►

basis varying

00:45:18 ►

from moderate to intense dose

00:45:20 ►

range about

00:45:22 ►

I’m not going to say

00:45:24 ►

the exact amount because it was not necessary.

00:45:29 ►

And I did this over several weeks.

00:45:32 ►

And while I was on the psilocybin, I made sure to do these exposure therapies like they

00:45:42 ►

would do in traditional OCD treatment, but I was on psilocybin.

00:45:47 ►

So I would be having my experience,

00:45:51 ►

and I would do things that would normally cause me immense anxiety,

00:45:56 ►

debilitating anxiety, but I was able to move through it fearlessly.

00:46:00 ►

And this was very significant stuff.

00:46:05 ►

I’m just thinking about it.

00:46:07 ►

Like, I don’t know if any of you know anybody or if you yourself experienced OCD.

00:46:11 ►

Like, this is, like, really crazy stuff.

00:46:14 ►

Like, things that normally would have caused me to be, like, rocking in a ball, like, in a corner, like, freaking the fuck out.

00:46:22 ►

I could just move through and get to the other side.

00:46:27 ►

And after some time, I did start noticing these changes carrying over to my normal awareness,

00:46:35 ►

my non, during my time not on psilocybin.

00:46:41 ►

And I continued this treatment for several weeks, and then finally took kind

00:46:47 ►

of like the final dose. Like, I was like, this is it. I knew it going in. I was like,

00:46:52 ►

this is going to be the day that I move past this OCD and move forward with my life. And heroic dose. It wasn’t quite heroic, but it was a nice dose

00:47:07 ►

of this little

00:47:11 ►

zybin. And I went into conservation land

00:47:15 ►

on my hometown by myself.

00:47:19 ►

And I moved through the woods. And these were woods I was

00:47:23 ►

very familiar with because I grew up around them.

00:47:25 ►

So I trusted my, and they weren’t that big.

00:47:27 ►

It’s like the suburbs of Boston.

00:47:29 ►

So it’s like I wasn’t like going to get totally lost, you know.

00:47:34 ►

But I was familiar with these woods.

00:47:36 ►

But I went in by myself and started to have my experience, and I reached a samadhi, like, what children say, maybe, like, a plus

00:47:48 ►

five during that experience, like, total kind of bliss state, and I remember, like, when

00:47:56 ►

I had that feeling, I just, like, looked at the sky and, like, laughed at, like, all that

00:48:02 ►

I had gone through and, like, came together in this loving love for myself,

00:48:07 ►

and for all that was around me throughout the struggle,

00:48:10 ►

and throughout the classic psychedelic stuff.

00:48:16 ►

And I looked at the sky, and I laughed,

00:48:18 ►

and I sprinted up this massive hill,

00:48:20 ►

and I knew at that moment I was free.

00:48:26 ►

And I continued my journey through the woods I was like listening to music and like checking shit out and stuff

00:48:31 ►

but eventually I remember I was on my way out of the woods towards the end of my experience

00:48:38 ►

and I felt these eyes you know when you can like tell someone’s looking at you

00:48:44 ►

you know like you can just someone’s looking at you?

00:48:47 ►

You can just kind of feel it, like you look around.

00:48:49 ►

So I could tell something was looking at me,

00:48:52 ►

but I had some visual impairment.

00:48:58 ►

I had some visual impairment, so I couldn’t really make it out.

00:49:01 ►

But I could tell it was coming from over here in the tree,

00:49:05 ►

and I could feel something looking at me. And as I got closer I moved towards it I can make out the eyes of an owl making eye contact with me

00:49:11 ►

and uh and I got very very close to this owl that was sitting up in a tree branch and we

00:49:17 ►

maintained eye contact for like a couple two tree however many times.

00:49:28 ►

And then the owl kind of final eye contact and flew away. And I don’t know if anyone

00:49:33 ►

knows anything about spirit animals or animal guides

00:49:37 ►

but especially in a Native American tradition

00:49:40 ►

the owl signifies a death and rebirth and a transition. And so that was

00:49:47 ►

pretty cool too. It was kind of like the, like the death of that part of my life and a transition

00:49:54 ►

forward into a, a, a new sector where I could be free of this OCD and, and concentrate on other areas. And so it was pretty cool.

00:50:09 ►

But moving forward, this was, as I said,

00:50:14 ►

closer to a decade ago than not at this point,

00:50:18 ►

and I still remain OCD-free to this day.

00:50:22 ►

Thank you.

00:50:37 ►

So I have a question for all of you.

00:50:40 ►

Does anybody know where I can score some LSD?

00:50:47 ►

Or, or, or, okay, or hook me up with an ayahuasca session?

00:50:49 ►

You’re not being serious, right?

00:50:51 ►

Anybody?

00:50:52 ►

I ask that question because

00:50:54 ►

when you get interested in

00:50:57 ►

psychedelics when you’re my age,

00:50:59 ►

it is

00:51:01 ►

virtually impossible

00:51:02 ►

to obtain the drugs.

00:51:08 ►

Virtually impossible.

00:51:11 ►

It’s funny, I guess I’m on Facebook now,

00:51:13 ►

so I’ve been kind of like peeking out of the psychedelic closet

00:51:16 ►

in the last six, seven months,

00:51:19 ►

so I guess I’m a little further out now than I’ve been before.

00:51:22 ►

But my journey started in around 2014. Actually,

00:51:27 ►

before that, in my family, we had a number of cataclysmic events happen. So we had a

00:51:34 ►

major financial meltdown. My wife got cancer. While I was a public official, I got sued

00:51:41 ►

for defamation by a political opponent. It was a slap suit, strategic lawsuit against public participation.

00:51:47 ►

It was bullshit, but because it was a defamation suit,

00:51:52 ►

the town that I was represented wouldn’t cover me,

00:51:55 ►

so I had to represent myself.

00:51:58 ►

Adding on top of that,

00:52:01 ►

three of my coronary arteries were 99% blocked,

00:52:07 ►

and I’d just spent my last dime and no longer had health insurance

00:52:09 ►

and so I’d arrived at this sort of

00:52:11 ►

Willy Loman moment in my life

00:52:14 ►

where I was worth more dead to my family than alive

00:52:17 ►

and it was miserable

00:52:22 ►

I mean you talk about rock bottom

00:52:24 ►

and I was down there I went, you talk about rock bottom,

00:52:26 ►

and I was down there.

00:52:29 ►

I went down into my septic system.

00:52:31 ►

I was in the bottom of the holding tank with all the shit,

00:52:35 ►

just piling down and piling down and piling down.

00:52:37 ►

And things got really bad.

00:52:41 ►

But in the summer of 2014, there was this whole spate of articles about psychedelic research.

00:52:46 ►

And so when you’re somebody like me, you’re not

00:52:47 ►

hanging out with people, and somebody’s

00:52:49 ►

not coming up to you going, yeah, man, I got

00:52:52 ►

this really cool 2C, whatever the hell is this stuff.

00:52:54 ►

I don’t even know what that stuff was.

00:52:57 ►

Check this

00:52:58 ►

out. It’s going to blow your mind.

00:53:00 ►

Everything’s going to be really great.

00:53:02 ►

So I read

00:53:04 ►

an article

00:53:05 ►

I go back and forth, it was either in Washington Post

00:53:08 ►

or the New Yorker, you know middle age reading right

00:53:11 ►

and I got really curious about it

00:53:14 ►

and as a writer and a teacher, what do I do when I get curious

00:53:17 ►

I do a lot of research

00:53:19 ►

so I’m pounding the hell out of the

00:53:23 ►

I’m pounding the hell out of the Internet about mushrooms and about psychedelic drugs.

00:53:30 ►

And I come across mention of a conference in New York called Horizons, New Perspectives on Psychedelics.

00:53:41 ►

It’s like, oh, I could go to that because I could tell all my friends

00:53:46 ►

and my kids’ parents

00:53:49 ►

and anybody that I know

00:53:53 ►

well, I’m going to this research conference

00:53:56 ►

because, you know, I’m a writer

00:53:57 ►

and I’m really curious about this subject

00:54:02 ►

I really think this is going to be the next big thing

00:54:04 ►

and I want to be informed about this,

00:54:06 ►

and I want to be able to be out ahead on the curve.

00:54:10 ►

So P.S., my real reason for going to Horizons

00:54:13 ►

was I hoped to find somebody

00:54:16 ►

for whom I could get some fucking drugs.

00:54:28 ►

So, I mean, things are really messed up.

00:54:29 ►

I’m dead broke.

00:54:31 ►

I come from New York, so I go, you know,

00:54:33 ►

I scrape together the money for the guests.

00:54:35 ►

I stay at my mom’s house out on Long Island.

00:54:39 ►

I take the, I drove my car in on the first day.

00:54:41 ►

So it was held in two different places. It was Judson Memorial Church,

00:54:44 ►

which is around where NYU is on day one. Day two, it was held at two different places. It was Judson Memorial Church, which is around where NYU is on day one.

00:54:47 ►

Day two, it was held at the New School.

00:54:49 ►

But we’re all in Greenwich Village.

00:54:52 ►

So rather like today,

00:54:56 ►

you have these brilliant researchers

00:54:58 ►

standing up there with their charts

00:55:00 ►

and their statistics and their case studies and they

00:55:05 ►

talk about, oh wow, this stuff is

00:55:07 ►

really great. You’ve got to check this

00:55:10 ►

stuff out. This is going to be,

00:55:12 ►

you know, I got,

00:55:13 ►

all the people in our study, you know,

00:55:15 ►

they used to hate life, now they’re all cured.

00:55:18 ►

People that were dying from cancer,

00:55:19 ►

they thought they were going to lose it, they thought they were losing

00:55:21 ►

their minds, they feel pretty good

00:55:23 ►

about dying now. No problem.

00:55:28 ►

So we’re about midway through the day one of the conference,

00:55:35 ►

and the NYU team has just gotten done giving this whole spiel about end-of-life problems.

00:55:44 ►

And I get up, and Neil Goldsmith runs. problems.

00:55:46 ►

And I get up, and Neil Goldsmith runs this.

00:55:50 ►

He’s this kind of slim guy. He’s probably about my age.

00:55:55 ►

He wears skinny jeans. And he walks around with a microphone,

00:55:59 ►

and he’s got this really deep voice. And so I raise my hand,

00:56:03 ►

and he comes up, and he lets me ask a question.

00:56:07 ►

So I look at the researchers, and I go, you know, what you’re talking about sounds fabulous,

00:56:14 ►

and I think it’s really cool that you’re working with these populations, aka people who have

00:56:19 ►

nothing to lose, and you can’t get in trouble for fucking them up because they’re dying,

00:56:23 ►

and you can’t get in trouble for fucking them up because they’re dying or they’re so messed up with PTSD that it’s okay.

00:56:28 ►

We can give the drugs to those people because we can’t possibly make it work.

00:56:36 ►

I mean to say worse.

00:56:38 ►

I asked them, I said, when are you going to get around to helping somebody like me?

00:56:43 ►

I said, look, I’m not asking where to score drugs.

00:56:46 ►

Now, this is a big room, by the way,

00:56:48 ►

with lots of doctors and MDs and PhDs

00:56:53 ►

and really fucking serious people.

00:56:56 ►

So I go, can you help a brother out?

00:57:01 ►

So they go, harumph, harumph, harumph.

00:57:04 ►

So many worthy subjects to study. So they go, haram, haram, haram.

00:57:08 ►

So many worthy subjects to study.

00:57:11 ►

So few government permits to let us do it.

00:57:13 ►

We’re sorry.

00:57:14 ►

We’ll get to you eventually.

00:57:21 ►

So I kind of shook my head a little bit. I sit down.

00:57:22 ►

There’s this Russian dude sitting next to me with a very heavy Russian accent.

00:57:26 ►

He starts telling me about the dark web.

00:57:29 ►

Well, you can get any kind of drugs you like.

00:57:33 ►

You go and you get the Bitcoins.

00:57:38 ►

You go to the Silk Road.

00:57:41 ►

He writes down the URL for it.

00:57:43 ►

You get the onion,

00:57:46 ►

and you go,

00:57:47 ►

you go, you get it, they ship the drugs to you.

00:57:55 ►

So I’m like,

00:57:57 ►

you’re like, that’s never going to happen.

00:58:00 ►

Well, no, the reason why is that

00:58:02 ►

my letter carrier was one of my biggest political enemies.

00:58:07 ►

She fucking opened up my mail all the time.

00:58:09 ►

That’s illegal.

00:58:11 ►

Yes, it is.

00:58:11 ►

But it doesn’t matter.

00:58:13 ►

You know what’s going on in politics right now, like that matters.

00:58:17 ►

So the last thing in the world I want is for my letter carrier to see a box with, you know, two-eighths of mushrooms

00:58:27 ►

or, like, whatever. You know, it’s the only stuff I really know about mushrooms, mostly.

00:58:33 ►

I know about mushrooms in LSD. So I go, this can’t happen, right? So I’m a little crestfallen,

00:58:42 ►

and then I didn’t go to any of the social events.

00:58:46 ►

And so I went, and then I went back home.

00:58:48 ►

I come back the next day, so now we’re at the new school.

00:58:50 ►

And I’m talking to people, and, you know,

00:58:52 ►

yeah, you know, I’m really curious about this stuff.

00:58:55 ►

You know, my big problem is I can’t, you know,

00:58:57 ►

I don’t know where to get the stuff.

00:58:58 ►

Everybody’s like, eh.

00:59:01 ►

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.

00:59:02 ►

Cool, cool.

00:59:03 ►

You know, it’s just, you’ll find it.

00:59:08 ►

So we get toward the end of the day and this lovely woman about my age

00:59:12 ►

comes up to me and she said

00:59:14 ►

I saw you stand up yesterday and ask that question

00:59:17 ►

I know somebody

00:59:19 ►

but I wanted to meet you first and talk to you

00:59:23 ►

to find out,

00:59:30 ►

to get a feel for who I was before I went and talked to,

00:59:34 ►

before I would go and see if it was okay to release this person’s information.

00:59:36 ►

So I said, okay.

00:59:39 ►

She disappears, the rest of the conference comes and goes.

00:59:42 ►

I’m pumped up with the, you know, this is your,

00:59:47 ►

you know those fMRI pictures where where you got the, where they show, this is your brain not on drugs.

00:59:50 ►

And it’s the dull gray thing.

00:59:52 ►

And they go, this is your brain on drugs. And it’s like these eight slides of Technicolors going, yeah, this is, you know, this is what I want, right?

00:59:59 ►

So I want to take drugs.

01:00:05 ►

So at the end of the conference, she comes up to me and she said, I talked to this person.

01:00:10 ►

Here’s his email address.

01:00:11 ►

She gives me a code word that I should put in the body of the email.

01:00:16 ►

And I say, OK, well, thank you very much.

01:00:19 ►

I send it off.

01:00:22 ►

And I want to be really careful about names and whatnot,

01:00:27 ►

but it’s someone who lives in the city.

01:00:29 ►

So when you’re from New York, when you say the city,

01:00:32 ►

that means Manhattan.

01:00:34 ►

Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island,

01:00:37 ►

those are the outer boroughs.

01:00:40 ►

Yeah, he knows.

01:00:41 ►

Yeah, I’m a queen.

01:00:42 ►

I know, right.

01:00:44 ►

Lisa’s not Staten Island, right?

01:00:48 ►

So, yeah, exactly.

01:00:50 ►

So I call this guy up, and he says, you know, I’d be happy to help you,

01:00:55 ►

but I know somebody in Providence that will be closer to you that could help you out.

01:01:03 ►

So I go, okay, cool.

01:01:04 ►

So I get with this person.

01:01:06 ►

We’re back and forth. Now, by the time I finally get to

01:01:10 ►

speaking with this person, things are really, really bad

01:01:13 ►

for me. I mean, I’m like, people talk about

01:01:15 ►

suicidal ideation. I used to rock climb.

01:01:19 ►

Not anymore, but I used to rock climb. So I’ve got all my gear.

01:01:22 ►

I now had to tie shit that when you tie it,

01:01:25 ►

I can direct force and the knots don’t come out.

01:01:28 ►

So I constructed something in my garage.

01:01:31 ►

I had 16-foot ceilings in my garage.

01:01:33 ►

Put my ladder out there.

01:01:35 ►

Stood up on the ladder.

01:01:37 ►

And I’m getting ready to do this.

01:01:40 ►

And I discovered there’s one thing worse

01:01:42 ►

than wanting to kill yourself.

01:01:44 ►

It’s realizing that you feel so bad

01:01:46 ►

but that you’re not going to kill yourself

01:01:50 ►

and that you’re going to be fucking miserable

01:01:52 ►

and there’s nothing you can do about it.

01:01:56 ►

So I end up having to go to a partial inpatient program

01:02:02 ►

to get my shit together

01:02:04 ►

and they almost didn’t even want to let me out.

01:02:06 ►

But I kind of got myself to where

01:02:09 ►

I promised I would get a therapist

01:02:12 ►

and I promised I wouldn’t kill myself

01:02:14 ►

in the next month.

01:02:16 ►

So they let me out.

01:02:18 ►

And so I call up,

01:02:19 ►

I ring up this person in Providence.

01:02:21 ►

You know this whole set and setting thing, right?

01:02:24 ►

She doesn’t want to deal with my set. So she says, you know, maybe not. So she kind of connects me

01:02:29 ►

with, she bounces me back to the guy that I originally had gotten in contact with. So

01:02:36 ►

when I had talked to her, she wanted me to, she said, well, you know, when you do it,

01:02:39 ►

I want you to take seven grams dried mushrooms. So this is, it would have been, that would have been my second time taking mushrooms.

01:02:48 ►

I took them back in 1980 when I was in the Pacific Northwest, you know, where everybody

01:02:52 ►

does Liberty Caps, right?

01:02:54 ►

So we drank beer and threw back some mushrooms and had a great old time.

01:02:59 ►

So this isn’t what we’re talking about.

01:03:00 ►

So I go to this guy and I say, yeah.

01:03:03 ►

She says, this woman I was talking to

01:03:06 ►

says I should take several grams.

01:03:07 ►

He goes, no.

01:03:09 ►

I said, no. He says, that’s entirely too much.

01:03:14 ►

You’ll be fine with two and a half grams.

01:03:17 ►

So I go, yeah, all right.

01:03:19 ►

So I go there

01:03:20 ►

and I’m scared.

01:03:22 ►

I’m going to somebody

01:03:24 ►

I don’t know.

01:03:28 ►

I had three stents recently put in my heart.

01:03:31 ►

I don’t know if this shit’s going to kill me.

01:03:35 ►

I don’t know if when I get there

01:03:36 ►

he’s going to take my wallet,

01:03:38 ►

roll me and throw me out into the street.

01:03:41 ►

I don’t know.

01:03:42 ►

But I had to go.

01:03:44 ►

I got to that point but I had to go. I mean, it’s just, I got to that point where I had to go.

01:03:47 ►

It was that or we were going back to the ladder.

01:03:53 ►

So I went.

01:03:54 ►

So I took the two and a half grams, I laid back,

01:03:57 ►

caught the wave,

01:03:58 ►

and then I got into some sort of recursive loop.

01:04:01 ►

So he goes, yeah, you seem to be perseverating about,

01:04:06 ►

and I was having this whole conversation in my head

01:04:07 ►

arguing with my Zen master,

01:04:09 ►

who I decided at that moment was full of shit.

01:04:12 ►

So I’m like, kind of talking,

01:04:14 ►

recursively talking about this, and he goes,

01:04:16 ►

you think you want to try a little bit

01:04:18 ►

more? See if we can bounce you out of that?

01:04:20 ►

So, yeah, sure. So I end up

01:04:22 ►

taking five grams

01:04:22 ►

on my first trip. Bam!

01:04:28 ►

But not like you think,

01:04:30 ►

Bam.

01:04:32 ►

I’ve done mushrooms

01:04:33 ►

a bunch of times since then, and

01:04:35 ►

I don’t, I’ve always, when I close

01:04:37 ►

my eyes, I’ve always hallucinated.

01:04:40 ►

So the experience I had

01:04:41 ►

visually with the mushrooms

01:04:43 ►

was very similar to what I’ve done with shamanic journey with drums, what I’ve done with my eyelid movies when I was a little kid.

01:04:54 ►

It was very similar to that, but the emotional content was profound.

01:04:59 ►

And I walked out of there

01:05:06 ►

and it was a different guy.

01:05:09 ►

It wasn’t all better.

01:05:11 ►

Anybody that does this stuff

01:05:12 ►

to better yourself as a person

01:05:15 ►

you know that there’s the whole integration thing.

01:05:18 ►

You get the download and then you’ve got to figure out

01:05:20 ►

what all the symbols mean and you’ve got to

01:05:22 ►

put it into your life.

01:05:24 ►

there was this seismic shift in my consciousness that happened as a result of that.

01:05:34 ►

And so I kind of took that into my therapy.

01:05:38 ►

And of course, like all the, you know, when I was in the inpatient thing, I told them,

01:05:40 ►

yeah, I want to take psilocybin, you know, I want to take LSD, I want to take psychedelics. And that was like giving them reasons to keep me there.

01:05:49 ►

You know, they’re like, no, no, you can’t take that stuff. We don’t know what that’s going to do

01:05:52 ►

to you, right? Yeah, it’s going to make me better and I won’t have to take Zoloft for the rest of my life.

01:05:59 ►

And so I’d

01:06:00 ►

gone from, I had a very, very long dry spell with my writing. And

01:06:03 ►

once I had that shift and I started working again,

01:06:08 ►

so this is probably about 18 months ago,

01:06:11 ►

I’ve written over 2,000 pages of text.

01:06:17 ►

I’m working on three books right now.

01:06:20 ►

It just went, bam, blew me up.

01:06:23 ►

It just blew my brain.

01:06:24 ►

It blew me up. It just blew my brain. It blew me open.

01:06:26 ►

So this is sort of like how the medicine is affecting me,

01:06:30 ►

but I want to kind of go back to this idea

01:06:32 ►

of the difficulties of scoring drugs when you’re my age.

01:06:37 ►

I’ve subsequently gone to three,

01:06:39 ►

two more Horizons conferences.

01:06:42 ►

So my second one, that’s when I met, right, so that’s

01:06:46 ►

when I met Lex.

01:06:48 ►

And he made me a member of

01:06:50 ►

the No Nonsense Club, and

01:06:51 ►

I’m forever grateful that I’m

01:06:54 ►

running out.

01:06:56 ►

No, that’s the first one.

01:06:58 ►

Oh, okay, I thought you were, yeah.

01:06:59 ►

Yeah, so the No Nonsense, so I became

01:07:01 ►

a member of the No Nonsense Club, but

01:07:03 ►

more importantly,

01:07:08 ►

Lex has been sort of like a nice sympathetic ear and a person who’s directed me to different kinds of…

01:07:11 ►

He’s gotten information for me in different kinds of resources and whatnot.

01:07:15 ►

And not of the scoring drugs variety, but just of the intellectual variety.

01:07:20 ►

So the last one, so this last October, I end up going to Horizons again.

01:07:29 ►

And Lex had a party at his house after the event was over.

01:07:33 ►

So we go, and I remember I’m at his place, and he was at Bed-Stuy at the time.

01:07:39 ►

So we’re there, we’re hanging out, and I’m talking to his roommate

01:07:42 ►

and telling him this story about this really wonderful woman that

01:07:47 ►

got me pointed in the right direction as far as

01:07:50 ►

having a psilocybin experience. Turns out, it was her mom.

01:07:57 ►

So, really cool, right?

01:07:59 ►

So, I go, I tell her the story

01:08:04 ►

about standing up,

01:08:05 ►

can you help a brother out?

01:08:06 ►

And she goes, that was you?

01:08:09 ►

We all thought you were a narc.

01:08:15 ►

I thought I was too.

01:08:17 ►

Of course you would have, but you probably still think I am.

01:08:22 ►

So it’s like, oh.

01:08:24 ►

So now the light goes on, because I’m not you guys.

01:08:28 ►

You know, I’m 59 years old. You guys, my daughter’s a junior in high school. You’re the age of my daughter.

01:08:35 ►

And, you know, thereabouts.

01:08:40 ►

So I go, ah, now this all makes sense.

01:08:43 ►

So this is kind of like my last piece.

01:08:46 ►

I’m going to tie this all up in a minute.

01:08:47 ►

So I make arrangements with a friend to hold space for me

01:08:53 ►

because I’m afraid to take five grams all by myself.

01:08:57 ►

I can’t do it at home.

01:08:59 ►

I’m not going in the middle of the woods to take five grams of mushrooms

01:09:04 ►

and walking around going, good golly, because somebody’s going to know me in my town that’s seen me walking around.

01:09:10 ►

And this kid’s going to go, here’s Bob, and I’m going to be on the front page of the paper.

01:09:17 ►

Not going to do that.

01:09:20 ►

So I make arrangements to do this.

01:09:22 ►

But the person that’s going to help me out, another friend in New York City, I go down and meet him.

01:09:28 ►

So he’s going to hold space for me, but he’s involved in anti-prohibition work.

01:09:35 ►

And all the people who do that sort of work have to be really careful about what they do because they can’t be giving people drugs and then writing about drugs.

01:09:46 ►

So it fell on me to obtain the material. So I was really curious about LSD and I wanted to do like

01:09:51 ►

Warner Mikes of the, I wanted to like, my micro dosing told me I needed to, it was time

01:09:57 ►

for like a big, you know, a big thing. So I’m trusting my intuition. So I go, yeah,

01:10:01 ►

okay. So I’m going to do this. So I happen to meet somebody at somewhere and it turns out the drug dealers had business cards. So I had this

01:10:12 ►

business card sitting around. So I call up the guy and I go, yeah, well, this is what I want,

01:10:16 ►

right? So then he goes, okay, but I’m not going to come to the part of the city where you are.

01:10:22 ►

You’re going to have to come and you’re going to have to meet me. So I go, okay. So he gives me a street corner in Harlem. Now,

01:10:33 ►

to you guys, in 2017, Harlem’s kind of like a cool place. It’s one of the places to be

01:10:40 ►

now. My dad was a New York City policeman in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. So in the 60s and

01:10:46 ►

70s, Harlem was where the race riots were. Harlem was where a lot of the 2,000 murders

01:10:51 ►

that happened in New York City happened. It was a scary freaking place for me. So I go,

01:10:58 ►

Harlem, okay. And something just didn’t sit right with me and I thought to myself

01:11:06 ►

there’s no way

01:11:07 ►

I’m going to go put a bunch of money

01:11:10 ►

in an envelope, meet some guy in a corner

01:11:12 ►

and swap envelopes

01:11:13 ►

I don’t know who this fucking guy is, I don’t know who’s watching him

01:11:16 ►

I don’t know

01:11:17 ►

I don’t know anything

01:11:19 ►

so I said this is just not going to happen

01:11:23 ►

so I’m going to end my talk with

01:11:24 ►

do you know where I can score some LSD? So I said, this is just not going to happen. So I’m going to end my talk with,

01:11:26 ►

do you know where I can score some LSD? Thank you. Thanks for watching!

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