Hamilton Morris interviews Michael Pollan

well hi everybody welcome to the 92nd street y and thanks for coming out in the rain but it's a very special event my name is sue solomon i'm the senior associate director of 92y talks and we are delighted you're all here for two very special guests i hope you will check out our website at some point there are a lot of other interesting events coming up look i won't i won't do the spiel now our moderator tonight is a filmmaker writer and scientific researcher he's the creator of the documentary series hamilton's pharmaceutical pharma copedia and a correspondent for vice news on hbo a frequent contributor to harper's magazine he studies the chemistry and pharmacology of psychedelics at the university of the sciences in philadelphia and joining him is a man that's kind of a superstar in his world in 2010 time magazine named named our special guest tonight one of the 100 most influential people in the world he's the author of eight new york times bestsellers and a long time contributor to the new york times magazine he also teaches writing at harvard and the university of california berkeley where he is the john s and james l knight professor of of science journalism his new book how to change your mind which is available in the lobby as you all know uh has been described as a triumph a participatory journalism and a brilliant and brave investigation into the medical and scientific revolution taking place around psychedelic drugs and the spell-bonding story of his own life-changing psychedelic experiences please join me in welcoming hamilton morris and michael pollan thank you thank you very much thank you very much thank you thank you thank you for coming out on a rainy night wow and thank you hamilton for doing this yeah no thanks for having me all right well i really enjoyed the book i've read it twice now and i've thought a lot about ways to approach this issue because it's such a politically precarious subject that there's endless debate about how to appropriately talk about psychedelics and one thing that i noticed that you do and something that you note in many of the people that you profile is that you're approaching them from a sort of naive position where you didn't know very much about them at all you were unaware of their potential but then you saw this scientific research and that totally changed your mind and your perception of these substances and and that is the case for a number of the psychiatrists that you profile as well but i've been following your work for a while and you know i think actually in the mid 90s you wrote a piece for harper's that was uh about jim hogshire that i think is one of the best things ever written about the war on drugs so it's clear that you actually have you know harbored a sort of understanding that the war on drugs is a problem for decades and psychoactive drugs appear in most of your books they're described at least in passing in omnivore's dilemma there's a section of botany of desire dedicated to cannabis so and then you mentioned in passing in this book you know i tried mushrooms three times when i was in my late twenties so i guess what i'm wondering is uh were you truly naive did you truly not know or was i pho naive well on the subject of psychedelics uh definitely naive i had i did not use them at the age appropriate stage of life when i was 18 or 20 22 i was really frightened of them uh i came of age when the scare stories were really what you heard i mean i was a little too young for the the height of you know of interest in them but by the time i they were they swam into my consciousness there were the stories about you know people's kids staring at the sun till they go blind and that they lsd scrambled your chromosomes there was a lot of disinformation out there in the beginning in 1965 and i was 10 in 1965 so that's kind of that was my training and uh and i was more credulous than i guess than i am now on drugs in general though i have been you're absolutely right that i've had a long-standing interest in i mean everything plants do for us right which is food which is beauty and which is most curiously of all we use plants and every culture on earth with one exception as far as i know has used some plants or fungus mushrooms to change consciousness and in in different ways subtle ways like you know as subtle as coffee uh caffeine but then in these more profound ways and the article you're referencing comes is from 1997 and it was uh called opium made easy and i was growing uh opium in my garden um which uh i thought was you know okay and legal i mean because they're just opium poppies you see them everywhere but i learned that if you if you know that those opium poppies can be turned into opium that state of knowledge makes you a federal you know that you're you're breaking the law federal crime and so anyone who read this article actually could no longer grow opium poppies in fact anyone who read the first paragraph could no longer grow opium poppies without uh risking uh the dargor and it was at the height of the drug war um 97 and it what became a kind of curious i was looking for a garden column i was writing columns about the garden and adventures i was having in the garden and a friend gave me jim hogshire's book this was an underground press book uh called um opium for the masses right that's right and it was a great little did you know you can grow your own opium and turn it into a tea or a tincture or whatever you want and by the way you can get the seeds at the garden center and you can um uh you know in fact you can even buy dried poppy heads at the flora shop and turn those into a tee and i thought this would be a cool story and an editor at harper sent it to me actually paul tuff and then i interview him and i figure i'll write about him and what's going on in my garden and then he gets arrested and and he's and the feds throw the book at him and all they have as evidence is a box of dried poppy heads that he got at a flora shop in seattle and so suddenly i was really nervous about what i was doing because i had been tied to him and i was doing the same thing more or less and so it became a piece about the drug war and how fucked up the drug war was is and um so i had a political interest in drugs and then i had this ethno-botanical interest in drugs uh and i wrote about cannabis but what was the drug in omnivore's dilemma i thought it was like antibiotics well there's that yeah you mentioned mckenna and stamets and oh in the mushroom chapter right passing inside yeah yeah you're right so it is it's thank you it's a very curious human desire though i mean we get the the fact that we would want drugs that would relieve pain we get that and drugs that would help us stay awake we get that but then you have these really profound ones that change consciousness in radical ways that leave us kind of vulnerable to you know attack or predation or whatever and what are they for and i've always been curious in that about that question as apparently are you yeah but i think there's different ways of approaching this topic and that is one way that i've always gravitated toward finding somebody who's wronged by the war on drugs yeah he was a writer his life was destroyed last i heard he's homeless i mean he was truly hogshire yeah his life is truly destroyed by this arrest and it's very tragic he didn't do anything wrong and then you if you um highlight the injustice then that's one way of communicating this is a mistake but you chose a different strategy with how to change your mind so what was your well you know i often write from a position of naivete i really like writing that story i mean in a way that's the master narrative of all my books is moving from a position of you know i'm usually an idiot on page one and and you go with me and you learn things and i've it's always occurred to me and i feel this way when i read nonfiction i don't like to be lectured at i like to learn with the writer and so one of the reasons that i kind of finally said i'm done with food for a while is i was an expert now i'd become you know i was like you are on psychedelics and i had lost that that privileged position of being able to write uh from a position of doubt reluctance skepticism and naivete into gradually knowing more and more and more and i really like taking um readers on that journey and it's not something you can fake now in a way you're being coy because when you sit down to write page one where you're an idiot you actually know a lot more than you're saying at that point and so you could argue that there's something a little disingenuous about that but anyone has ever told a joke waits doesn't start with the punch line right i mean this is the nature of storytelling you you point you find your place and you begin you begin the story there and then you move through to a state of uh knowledge or you know revelation right i guess what i'm getting at is that your emphasis of course is on the scientific medical psychiatric understanding of psychedelics and that is one of many different ways to approach this issue of course there's an entire shamanic world there's an entire black market world there's underground therapy which you do get into and then there's the entire history of chemistry and pharmacology which is and i am aware that you can't cover all of these different subjects so i'm curious why this particular area was the one that you gravitated toward uh because science has an authority in our culture that nothing else has you know for good or bad uh and that for me and i think for the audience discovering that um serious scientists uh you know at prestigious universities were studying psychedelics uh became a license to take them more seriously i think you're always looking for you know sources of authority when you're writing journalism and i knew i was writing i mean i don't write for people in the psychedelic community obviously because they're people who know a lot more about it than i do i'm writing for people who maybe have no experience of psychedelics and i'm trying to bring a a general reader to a topic that they have a lot of resistance for about and um and so science is a very powerful signifier that oh this is this is worth taking seriously and i also just thought that was you know as you suggest there are many different lines you can take through a subject and i didn't deal very much with the shamanic world you know i didn't do the you know peru ayahuasca or even go to mexico to do psilocybin i did them here and that's really interesting and i think it's a whole other book um but i think to get them to get the subject taken really seriously um the virgils i chose who were these scientists people like roland griffith you know really terrific scientists doing something at great risk you know there was enormous reputational risk for them to get into psychedelics was um uh the way i chose you know there are many paths through a book um and uh for me that was and also it had explanatory power um you know that they were developing theories on why it was working that they were robin carhart harris was taking fmri images of brains of people on psilocybin and lsd and beginning to develop theories on why it worked so the following the path of science gave me a lot of it opened up a lot of interesting doors uh so you could look at therapy you could look at neuroscience you could look at um history because there was this history of research that got aborted in in the 60s so it was really you know i mean we're talking about a rhetorical strategy basically yeah and you said that you weren't writing it for the psychedelic community but of course the psychedelic community did really took an interest and they were extremely opinionated about it yeah do you relative to the food world how has your experience been with the psychedelic people psychedelic people it just conjures images doesn't it my sense is and you you tell me if i'm wrong my sense is they've been very um uh positive about the book you know some of them will say well i didn't learn anything from it but um which is fine um i they they taught me a lot you know um that's how it works in journalism but um i think many people felt that i've heard many people say that this that this book legitimized what they were doing in the eyes of civilians and you know i heard from many people i finally had a book i could give my parents and um and help them understand and then there were the people the parents who gave it to their kids to help a little little older to help them understand their interest in psychedelics so in a way it has been a a calling card across that divide of people who are really deep into this world and and people outside who don't really understand it and i think uh that the book made everybody feel a little more respected is that your sense yes partially okay that's the other is that but then there's also you know like a seething undercurrent of of infighting and rage about how this narrative is going to play out in the media and who controls it and what is right and what is wrong and you mentioned that this is a rhetorical strategy and i think about this a lot myself because because you write for general audiences too you write for harper's as well as vice yes yeah yeah yeah and um and you know reading through your book and thinking about how much criticism leary receives i think that one of the overarching ironies is that leary didn't really do all that much of anything you know he wrote some books that probably not that many people actually read he started some religions that i don't think all that many people actually joined he had a small elite group of people living in a mansion that not all that many people got to visit but outside of that he was propelled into the limelight by journalists journalists created leary so to blame leary for this media circus that would have been impossible without him being used as a tool to promote sensational stories i think is a little bit unfair to him and now the new way to talk about this is a scientific model which i think is probably in fact it is certainly more palatable to most audiences but then i also worry if that if it doesn't address the problems with the ongoing criminalization with access to psychedelics because um you know i mean this is a whole complicated situation but if these things are going to be made into pharmaceuticals there's a question of will they actually become available to people how expensive will they be who will control it who will profit and um and if that's the only model that is being advocated publicly as opposed to decriminalization or something like that it potentially could create problems of its own yeah well there's several implicit questions in what you just said um one is leary and leary is an important character in the book and he does get some blame for the um uh the backlash um the reason i thought leary was important and didn't deal with say kankeezy who was another important character in terms of spreading psychedelics in on the west coast was that um leary began as a scientist right he comes to harvard as a psychologist very well regarded personality researcher and begins doing research and gradually loses that focus um he you know he does some kind of silly studies um and and it blows up and the blowing up of that which i mean he's at heart so he goes to harvard he's there for three years two and a half years uh his plan he got this appointment there and then the summer before he was going to go he's in cornevaca and he's heard about these mushrooms that are psychedelic and he takes them he gets a hold of them he takes them and he has this amazing trip poolside in cuernavaca and he says he learned more about the human brain and mind in four hours uh on psilocybin than he learned 15 years as a as a researcher and um and then when he gets to harvard he uh starts the harvard psilocybin project and you know if you look at the the studies they're they're not very rigorous um you know he's he's giving psychedelics to a lot of people in his living room and then writing studies about administering psychedelics in a naturalistic setting um and he he is involved with uh the good friday experiment uh although that wasn't his idea it was a graduate student's idea walter panke where they gave they took 20 divinity students they gave 10 of them psilocybin 10 of them a placebo and they're in the marsh chapel on the bu campus and they want to see if they're going to have big spiritual experiences and i think eight of them did uh and then the the ten on placebos are just sitting there really pissed off in the pews but nothing happened um and that was an interesting study and it's kind of being reprised right now right at nyu and uh johns hopkins so i mean is leery a tool the media as often as the case it goes both ways leary was addicted to the media he could not resist the opportunity for an interview there are ways to avoid becoming a tool of the media and he he didn't choose them he was he just he just soaked it up and you know was i mean i have a i have a kind of love hate relationship with him i mean i find he's a very endearing character in certain ways his his effervescence his positivity the fact that he's always he can't hold a grudge i mean he is getting persecuted by the end right i mean i i tell the story of i forget how many bus he had like 32 bus he escapes from jail with the help of the weatherman and he has to go to algeria and submit to eldridge cleaver who has a government in exile and then cleaver takes his passport and won't let him leave and he has to escape again and he ends up cons i mean it's just it's a fantastic i don't know why the movie of timothy leary has not been made yet there's someone in the audience this is it's such a good biopic anyway um but again if you're looking at things from the perspective of a scientific enterprise that beginning in the 50s is really promising and making very interesting discoveries and it gets derailed in the mid 60s and at least the scientists all felt the ones working there who tried to stop leary from going public and telling everybody to take psychedelics that he is if you want to tell the story of the the rise of the science and then the collapse of the science and the renaissance of the science leary is an important character in that in that particular narrative i forget the other what would you say more at the end there of that question one then i got into a whole decriminalization decrement so we should talk about that because i just published this op-ed piece yes which definitely pissed off people in the psychedelic community right so if you didn't hear in denver three weeks ago i guess it was never two weeks ago denver did the voters of denver did something very surprising uh it was a very small campaign i think they spent 25 000 on this campaign but the opposition spent zero dollars and um uh they passed an initiative it squeaked by by about uh 1900 votes that said ordered the it's not exactly decriminalization but close ordered the police department to make psilocybin crimes their lowest priority um so psilocybin is still illegal in denver and of course you're still vulnerable to federal and state uh charges um not a lot of people were getting arrested for it i think it had a lot of symbolic value and you know as i've said in interviews i if i lived in denver i would have voted for it without question i don't think anyone should go to jail for the possession or use of uh or cultivation of mushrooms um but that's different than legalization uh and i was being you know sounding cautionary notes about that i mean it'd be disingenuous for me having possessed used and cultivated mushrooms to argue that they should be illegal without submitting myself to you know arrest surprise me that you've cultivated them you didn't write about that did you i did not they did [Applause] what species did you cultivate or is this not a discussion but we can talk about it later okay okay we don't want to get too technical um so but i thought you know i raised some questions about going further and using ballot initiatives as the way to do it for a couple reasons um which you know i'd like to i'd like to briefly lay out um so decriminalization i support that i support that with all drugs um legalization i live in california and i've watched what happens and one of the things that happens when you legalize something is that large corporations move in and not only are the drugs made available to people but they're pushed on people i mean there's really aggressive marketing now when i come home from this trip and i go over the bay bridge i'm going to see three or four billboards for marijuana delivery companies that will have marijuana at my doorstep within two hours and a choice of products and a lot of people i know in the food community are now making delicious foods with lots of marijuana in it um and so you know i think are we ready to have psychedelics marketed to us in that way i'm not sure um i mean i tend to think that's not a good idea and but it won't be quite like that it will be different i think that i hope so it's happened in other countries of course it was amsterdam amsterdam the uk japan for a period and in all of those cases it wasn't being pushed on people but it was openly available and then there were problems but again this is the the tricky thing about problems is i think that the problems the real problem isn't the problem it's journalists jumping on the problem and making it into a story and blowing it out of proportion because what happened in amsterdam i mean it was one friendship one kiss right named gael care off maybe took mushrooms they're not even sure and jumped off a bridge and then that becomes a reason to right it's like our link letter's daughter yeah i mean a single story that's never verified yeah sure we see this i mean this is the nature of the media these are these are definitely risks but um i think part of the the part of the problem is is a lot of the activists who are supporting legalization are treating psilocybin like cannabis and i think it's a really different drug in many ways how do you mean that they're trading like cannabis well this is the playbook first you establish it as a good medicine that changes the image you know with cannabis when we had medical marijuana uh suddenly it wasn't cheech and chong anymore it was like marcus welby and and that made it possible to uh start talking about legalization and that was the strategy that was drug policies you know activist strategy i remember they told i wrote about um about legalization or medical marijuana in california where after the proposition was passed in the late 90s and they were very frank they said we're going to change if we're going to make people think of it as a medicine first and then we're going to be able to move toward legalization it's exactly the strategy they pushed and um and i think a lot of people see the same thing a lot of drug policy activists are working to support the research hoping that that will soften up the public for uh more uh like legalization now how is it different well i mean as you know the experience is more consequential more momentous um i think more things can go wrong i think there are people who shouldn't use psychedelics uh i think people at risk for schizophrenia the kinds of people are excluded from the current studies i just don't think we're ready for it i mean i i want to get there and i'm hoping that you're right fda approval and that's the path we're on and and that's the path i'm worried will be compromised if we start having a big political debate about psilocybin if we politicize it which which is necessary to pass a ballot initiatives or legislation right you have to make it a political issue then you then force politicians to take positions prematurely that they then get stuck in and i i wonder too what problem are we solving i mean are are there a lot of arrests for psilocybin in this country i don't think there are one of the reasons it was so important to decriminalize and then legalize cannabis as we've done now in 10 states is that cannabis was was the very foundation of the drug war you can't have a drug war without illegal cannabis and you know we talk about mass incarceration and cannabis had a lot to do with that many of the people who are serving long jail sentences because of three strikes you know how many of them was one of those strikes a cannabis crime so there was a important social justice reason to bring down the whole edifice of law around cannabis or try to uh and i don't think that's the issue here so i guess yes on this even if not a lot of people are getting arrested it still plays a role in the way the experience plays out for the user yes the very fact that it's illegal has some bearing on the nature of the experience you're maybe you think you're doing something wrong if you feel a little bit afraid apparently you're that much more reluctant to seek some kind of professional help because maybe you'll get arrested or maybe your parents will be angry you for committing a crime i think that um the the effect of this prohibition goes beyond mere arrests it also interferes with research it interferes with hobbyists that might want to cultivate some species of mushrooms there's a there's a lot of uh things that look i agree it's not a good thing but and i think it's a fight we need to fight at some point but in politics not only do you do you choose what what you're going to fight for but you need to give thought to when are you going to make that fight and timing is very important in politics and it just strikes me as premature now there's another initiative in oregon which is interesting in a different way and that the idea there i'd be curious to know what you think is not to decriminalize or legalize but to create a state training and licensing of psychedelic guides who could serve anyone whether they you don't need a diagnosis and they're going to instruct if this passes the the state medical board to set up this whole thing and uh that's an interesting idea um i i still i'm not sure i'm not sure what i think about that uh i still think the path we're on which so far there have been no obstacles placed in the way of researchers and some companies now seeking approval from the fda of uh psilocybin for depression and addiction and these other indications i think once that happens it will be a lot easier to design a container or a way for what one of my sources called the betterment of well people in other words all the people who stand to benefit from psychedelics who don't necessarily have a psychiatric diagnosis do you think the pharmaceutical model is the i don't know i don't think that that is the pharmaceutical model necessarily i think we need another model i mean i think we have i i see three models we have the pharmaceutical model and that and we're on that track and you know it looks like in five years seven years maybe that that it will be approved and then on the other side we have the spiritual model the religious model right there are people in the native american church and the ayahuasca churches have a constitutional right to use psychedelics in their worship um and that seems to work fine there's not a lot of controversy around that and then you've got the rest of us in the middle so how what do you do there and i'm not sure exactly what you do there but i think in the same way you have those two other containers a set of of uh protocols for the use of these drugs we need to design one in the middle uh for everybody else and it may be related to the pharmaceutical model i mean i could imagine like lots of people seek psychiatric help or or psychotherapeutic help who aren't clinically depressed or clinically um uh anxious they're just troubled and they you know they go see shrinks to to work out problems and you could and many of them have a consulting psychiatrist who gives them meds and you know you could see something like that happening that there would be clinics and there would be some doctor involved and people who go there and have and want to have this experience are checked out and they look at drug interactions and risk of schizophrenia and then they're you know given the experience so that's one model and another model is simply decriminalizing it so people feel safe doing it on their own and growing their own mushrooms i mean the great thing about mushrooms is it doesn't take it takes some skill it doesn't take enormous skill like compared to making lsd um so you know i think it's what we have to work out but i look forward to a day when that happens i mean i found these experiences very useful i learned a lot i learned a lot about myself i learned a lot about the natural world i learned a lot about the mind and uh and you know i i don't want to close the door behind me by any means by saying no one else should have this experience that's definitely not what i think it's just about tactics and strategy right yeah you mentioned in that new york times article that you felt that the researchers should complete some research before we were ready but my concern with a lot of psychedelic research is that maybe this model won't work maybe these very promising initial studies won't hold up i mean this has already started to occur with the you know the findings that griffiths had in terms of um increased openness in a larger analysis those findings were no longer significant same thing had to do with some measure of of spirituality was also not significant once they increased the size of people that they were testing and with things like smoking cessation the sample sizes are extremely small it's like eight people yeah they're pilot studies yeah but most of the therapeutic studies have had so far promising results i agree so let me just i should tell the audience where we are on the therapeutic study of this um the things the most promising i think has been the uh and this is the first thing i wrote about was giving psilocybin guided psilocybin experiences and i should explain what that is to people who had cancer diagnoses many of whom were terminal and there were two studies one at nyu and one at johns hopkins and these are phase two studies so it was about 80 people i think altogether and in two-thirds of the cases people had who had debilitating depression and fear and anxiety around their cancer diagnosis or their or the chances of recurrence um had significant drops in their scores for depression and anxiety many of them lost their fear of dying it was quite remarkable this was interpreted by the fda and some of the researchers as a strong signal that maybe psilocybin is would help with general depression i think that may be a mistake because i think the depression of someone with a new cancer diagnosis is not the same as someone who's been depressed clinically for 10 years and may not have a existential cause the way that depression does and may have been depressed so long that their brain has been reshaped by being depressed so i worry that a lot of resources are going into testing psilocybin for depression and depression is really you know can be really difficult to treat so the other so there are these depression studies underway um and just to back up a little bit the way this this is these drugs are not just they don't give you a pill and you go away right this is psychedelic assisted psychotherapy so that you um uh are prepared very carefully by two guides who are professionally trained they tell you what to expect they give you a set of flight instructions they call it to tell you what to do if something really scary happens and sometimes something really scary does happen and that if you if you think that you're dying or dissolving or um uh you know going crazy go with it don't fight it surrender i mean it's that kind of you know relax your mind and float downstream as john lennon advised um then during the experience they sit with you the whole time and they don't say anything um but they have they offer a helping hand if you need to get up and use the bathroom or just a comfort uh covering hand on your shoulder and then afterwards the guides help you make sense of what happened you have an integration session so it's not just psilocybin therapy it's it really is a whole package and that's a challenge i think to both psychotherapy and pharmaceuticals in that we're joining the two in a in a novel way anyway so the other things to be used for is smoking cessation and there's a much bigger trial underway now and addiction there's an alcohol alcoholism trial here in new york that's quite large a couple hundred people in it and there is a um there has been a successful cocaine addiction trial at the university of alabama um and then there have been some interesting studies of other kinds of people like religious professionals are being given um psychedelics uh in a very peculiar study going on it here at nyu and uh hopkins and they're giving it to people in every denomination they can get they haven't been able to get an imam um rabbis no problem they they were they were lining up uh and but they have priests and ministers and all the nominations i think they got a buddhist or two and i don't know exactly why they're doing this um but i think it's going to be interesting information and other and they've given it to long-term meditators and you know there's been a lot of interesting work going on and yeah maybe it'll all blow up and then we'll have to figure out plan b um but so far um you know these results compared to everything else in psychiatric medicine have been really impressive the effect size in the in the study of the the cancer patients was dramatic far beyond what ssris got when they were approved um and far beyond a placebo so you know i think it's really promising um i don't think the depression studies will be as impressive as the uh the these pilot studies but i think it'll still be better than ssris i think there's a good chance that it will be so that's the you know that's the kind of spine that i was following in this work and i found it um in addition to describing my own experiences you know that's how i felt i could shine the most light on it but it's not the only book to be written on psychedelics yes i look forward to yours okay well and i think you make a great i'll come back and interview you about it okay that sounds fine promise okay and of course i agree with all this you know i'm i'm a believer i want all of this to be true i want them to be legal i want them to be medicines i want all this research to have tremendously promising results but i'm also extremely worried because i think if we look at them exclusively as medicines and don't emphasize just cognitive liberty the freedom to do things regardless of whether or not they're medicinal it'd be like if somebody made music illegal and instead of saying well it should just be legal because why not just make it legal it doesn't hurt anyone everyone said oh no we can prove that it's a medicine and then if it's a medicine then then it's okay for everyone to use it and look it actually helps people with neurodegenerative diseases and certain people with ptsd if they listen to a certain type of music under very controlled circumstances it can actually be tremendously therapeutic we need to make this legal but then it would cost money and the whole thing would be a mess and you would sort of neglect the overarching issue which is why is this even controlled in the first place and if the medical model works fantastic that's great but what's happening with ketamine is you're already it's you know it's been less than three months well people with ketamine is does do people not know academics i don't know what sort of audience this is am i i imagine most peop do okay well ketamine's a dissociative anesthetic that has been used medicinally since the 60s and more recently probably late 90s they found that it had a very impressive effect treating depression it's fast acting in a way that ssri antidepressants aren't it seems to work for people that have refractory depression that hasn't responded to other treatments and it's it's safe and it's extremely safe so well it's yeah it's pretty safe short term yeah but uh but so it was approved by the fda in an intranasal spray called spravato um a couple months ago and and there's already huge arguments playing out in the psychiatric journals about well what if it's addictive and how long will these treatments go on and is it really safe and you know and and the reality actually as much as i like psychedelics want ketamine to be available is that it just squeaked by fda approval the results two out of the three studies weren't didn't show much yeah it was not the results were not especially impressive there were even some potentially frightening aspects of there were more suicides in the non-placebo arm of the trial so there were there were some things that were a little bit off-putting about those trials and people are already saying wait this was a mistake we went too fast we were guided by this medical idealism we thought this was the right thing to do which i still think it is but my fear is that something similar might happen with psychedelics that we're all so excited that we're going to just put all of our eggs in the medical basket and then the moment one of these trials fails then then we've invested everything in the idea that they're medicines but maybe that wasn't really the purpose yeah well you know part of the book is about the medical aspects but obviously a lot of the book was about my exploration under the the rubric of recreation right i mean i i worked with underground guides and some of them call themselves therapists but others are interested in other things they're doing it for people looking for spiritual insight or development or personal development and that world goes on and that world will go on whatever happens with these trials it's it's thriving right now i mean there's a big underground and uh and it's all over the country i don't know how big it is um but it's on the order of i don't know one or two hundred people would you say you think it's more than that underground yeah psychedelic psychotherapy gods yeah you think it's much bigger than that i have no idea yeah oh well you raised an eyebrow so high i thought i was gonna get it i was gonna get information i know i don't know i well maybe i know a little bit but i don't know anyway so i i uh you know so i i explored that world too and that's where i went to go i couldn't i didn't qualify for any of the the university trials i mean that would have been an interesting experience but they didn't either they didn't want me right they weren't studying healthy normals which i flattered myself to think that was the category i was in um so you know i there is this vibrant underground and um yeah they would like to be more uh recognized and they would like to be feel less paranoid definitely and that's why oregon is interesting because that would bring the underground overground because those people could get licensed and we you know maybe that'll happen so you know i i'm not i'm not putting all my eggs in that basket um but i think it's a really interesting basket i mean and the reason is that um we have a mental health crisis in this country i mean it's it's just one of the things this book has acquainted me with is the is the scope and extent of suffering around addiction and depression and uh anxiety and i i just had no idea i mean i've heard from hundreds of people who are uh seeking psychedelic therapy and there's a tremendous demand for something better than the drugs that psychiatry now has people are you know antidepressants worked better when they were new and even then they didn't work that well um you know they performed slightly better than placebo and got approved and over time their effectiveness seems to be declining and and people really hate the side effects and they're very hard to get off and in general psychiatry has very few good tools the ones they have basically treat symptoms not causes and so psychedelic therapy holds uh you know enormous potential it may not be realized you're absolutely right but one of the things that's also surprised me is the receptivity of um psychiatry and mental health field in general that i thought i would get a lot of pushback from you know by writing this you know positively about psychedelics but it's been the opposite they're like they want to get into this i mean i've seen so many uh school medical schools uh and and really good neuroscientists who now want to explore this area and so and i get it it's it's actually a the result of a certain desperation um because psychiatry is is uh is really broken and um and the and there hasn't been any innovation since the early 90s um so anyway i there's a lot of hope in that and you know if that's all that happened that came out of this that we could relieve some of that human suffering i think that would be great and just one more thing about leery [Laughter] because we started talking about this you know the idea and the narrative that's presented in your book and sort of the conventional narratives that he destroyed psychiatric scientific research with his antics but one thing that i think is is really complicated about all this and this is the kind of the the double-edged sword aspect of the pharmaceutical model is that in 1965 sandoz who were the major pharmaceutical impetus behind any medical research on psychedelics they had patented both lsd and psilocybin and they were going to be the company that if any company was going to bring these to markets as pills it could be purchased in pharmacies it would have been them and then in 65 before it was prohibited before leary even existed in the public i mean if you look up timothy leary 19 up to 1965 in the new york times he's not even mentioned or maybe mentioned a couple times he doesn't exist essentially outside of this small countercultural sphere so they had already gotten frightened well before timothy leary existed and they had pulled out that's right capitalist support so suddenly not only is there they're not a major pharmaceutical supplier of the drug for researchers the whole idea that this was working toward a new uh psychiatric revolution where this would be a new tool it could be purchased by doctors kind of disintegrated with that and you know you see this with what year was it pulled 65. almost 22 years exactly after albert hoffman first tried it yeah but but leary had exploded into the national media in 63 when he gets fired from um harvard and it was becoming a street drug 65 is a big turning point it's when the media turns against uh psychedelics too um and there's so so i i would disagree that i mean leary was um you know there were big articles uh andrew wild wrote a big piece for look magazine about about leary and that he was giving drugs to students at harvard and i mean andrew weil brought down leary in many ways and um so it was becoming controversial and sandoz does what corporations do when something's controversial which is you know try to protect themselves yeah i don't know and maybe i mean i'll say something very positive about leary if you think it'll help and that is that and this is rick doblin's line um that he created a world where psychedelic research could resume and the reason is that he because of him so many more people were exposed to psychedelics tried them in the 60s and those people are now in charge of our institutions um you know i'm meeting with the head of psychiatry tomorrow at uh at columbia and you know he told me he's actually written this that his interest in the brain began with some psychedelic experiences and and uh former head of the american psychiatric association and and um i was at i was doing a book event in dc last year and somebody i heard somebody from the fda wanted to come meet me and i was a little nervous about it and it turned out it was a psychonaut that works for the fda so we have leary to thank for that yeah i mean he did some it's weird he he gets blamed for all this psychiatric all these psychiatric problems but uh if he ruined anything it was first amendment defenses of psychedelic drug use i mean that he did actually ruin because you know he was trying to claim that when he was arrested for cannabis that he practiced hinduism and it was a part of his religion and he was protected by the first amendment and then there was a you know ruling that there is some kind of slippery slope argument and if we if we allow him to practice his hindu religion then everyone gets to practice their hindu religion yeah it was a bad move definitely so and i do think that if it hadn't been him it would have been someone else i think that's probably true um i think it you know what i was surprised to learn is it was becoming a street drug so-called in la by 1959 because so many psychiatrists were using it in l.a and it was sandoz lsd i think and it suddenly was becoming a you know showing up at parties and things like that so it was fine it was going to find its way into the culture and it was going to escape the lab uh with or without leary but leary gave it a real toss out over the wall um so anyway i think journalists did i think journalists are to blame for all of this journalists are the blame for everything come on let's take some questions okay okay okay what if the question was about whether or not journalists are typical [Music] i'll think you wrote it in what ways do you think the world would be different if everyone had at least one experience with psychedelic drugs oh wow that's a really interesting question so there is a uh an idea well let me let me back up and approach this another way one of the things that has really struck me about psychedelics is that they seem to address what i regard as the two biggest problems we face as a civilization that is the environmental crisis and tribalism okay and um and here's how i mean one of the very common responses to a psychedelic experience is this new understanding of the natural world and that you feel connected to nature in a way you don't ordinarily or most people don't um this is uh you know and and this has been tested i mean i don't know how much you want to believe in these psychological scales but the the psychologists have a scale for nature connectedness and um how much do you feel part of nature and how much do you feel away you know out of nature and because you know we're a weird species we have a relationship to nature what other species has a relationship to nature they're just nature and um but in uh in england they tested this and they found that after a single psychedelic experience people's nature connectedness scores went up their tolerance for authoritarianism also went down and this stands to reason because one of the things that happens is that the whole world seems more conscious um other people seem you feel more connected the the the defenses i think the ego the ego formation of consciousness which which is what allows us to objectify the other and allows us to objectify nature um that goes away or it gets more permeable and um so it in some ways it's exactly the drug we need the challenge of course is how do you how do you drug a whole civilization this is not fluoride right um we're not going to put it in the water the cia may or may not have experimented with that but it wouldn't work because i think wouldn't the solar energy destroy lsd fluoride would yeah oh the chloride would okay so so well water would be okay um but anyway that's not what we're going to do that's not the way to do it so there's been this argument in psychedelic circles going back to the 50s do you try to democratize the experience and give everyone the experience as the questioner is suggesting and that was leary's approach basically you know turn on tune in drop out or tune in turn on drop out um he wanted everybody to have the experience and and then there was a counter argument aldous huxley you know being the most important exponent of that but several other all the researchers i think in the 50s which is give it to the elite give it to the the masters of the universe and and the the people in government and the church and there was and there was an effort to do that in the 50s and and hopefully the new consciousness would filter down to everybody else um i don't know what's right i mean in a way we're pursuing both strategies i guess right now and i don't even know that giving it to everybody would have the desired effect i mean people emerge from the experience in a lot of different places i mean this ego dissolving experience has produced its share of egomaniacs um and uh you know so it's it's very unpredictable and um but that wish is there and that that general kind of hunch that this is this is really useful to a civilization in crisis um so i don't know the answer what do you think well the fact is that a lot of people have used psychedelics i mean depending on what demographic you look at it's maybe somewhere around it depends on the age and the state but up to 50 of the population really yes so and look how fucked up things are so there goes that theory you know and you know someone like alexander shulgin who's a wonderful man and his wife ann shulgin who's still alive you know they use psychedelics they both smoked cigarettes she smoked cigarettes until i think three years ago um he drank they both had divorces i mean they were human beings it didn't turn them into super humans that had no flaws and this is why i think that the music analogy is almost a closer thing than the medical one because it's like what would happen if everyone didn't listen to music i don't know it would be worse it would be unfortunate you'd have a little bit less richness in your life would it necessarily make you a better or worse person it's hard to say but you still want to have the ability to do that right right yeah that's a tough one yeah but that i mean that that battle goes on i think you know elite versus popular yeah okay this is good what else you got what are your profit strategies what are your profit strategies for the future of psychedelic medicine you know sell books that's the only game i've got going i'm a writer i'm a journalist i can't i can't i'm not going to invest in any psychedelic companies i don't sell psychedelics uh i have the usual writer profit strategy um there are other profit strategies out there as you know there are companies getting into this space there is one pharmaceutical company in england compass that is hoping to bring psilocybin to market they've raised a ton of money and especially in silicon valley and uh they're very controversial in the in the community extremely extremely yeah and people feel that they're trying to control things and that they um uh and very suspicious of their motive and this is something that worries me about about compass because i can already see all these things coming down the pipeline like if they treat psychedelics like any pharmaceutical company should they'll do things like alter them which i think is good from a chemical pharmacological perspective i don't think that psilocybin is perfect i think you could maybe modify it in certain ways that might make it better for certain therapeutic purposes or just make it more ip right i mean well that as well like ketamine has been altered slightly basically so somebody could own it and charge a lot of money and that could happen to psilocybin too but it also shortened the duration yeah so there's a reason oh yeah no there was and well yeah we can talk about that later okay okay i'm trying to bracket like really technical quotations uh there's some some pretty basic ones here but that's okay okay don't be afraid of basically okay okay are these drugs addictive no okay no i mean that's a real they're they're two very striking facts about the the so-called classic psychedelics this is um you know lsd psilocybin dmt i don't know if i can say this about mescaline or not you tell me if i'm wrong but that there there there's no lethal dose um no ld50 as they say in pharmacology and that's really striking because you've got drugs in your medicine cabinet you bought over the counter without a prescription that have a lethal dose in the dozens of pills um and uh they that doesn't happen with psychedelics um the other thing is that they are non-addictive if you if you create those experiments where you've got the rat in the cage and it's got two levers and one administers cocaine to the bloodstream and one administers glucose food to the bloodstream and the rattle press the cocaine lever until it dies and heroin too until it's addicted um you put lsd in that setup the rattle press that lever once and never again and so it's um rats don't like lsd we can we can conclude that um so that's very striking the risks are not physiological the risks are psychological um and and practical i mean the fact that you're you know your judgment is disabled and you might walk into traffic or do something like that but the risks are that you have panic attacks some people have had psychotic breaks people at risk for schizophrenia can be tripped into the schizophrenic state that can also happen on cannabis and alcohol though too and there's some debate whether it was going to happen eventually anyway so so the risks are psychological and there was a bad trip survey done i think last year or two years ago at hopkins and um they asked people about their bad trips and that's a real phenomenon and um something like eight percent of them had sought psychiatric help uh in the wake of a very difficult experience so talk about micro dosing when i when i wrote about food i always got the gmo question it's just a command not a question yes i know so micro dosing i didn't dwell on it in the book because my focus was following the science and there's really not much science uh on micro dosing the science we have is a very interesting collection of anecdotal reports that have been gathered by a psychologist named james fatiman who enrolls people informally and they they micro dose and they report back what happened and a great many people report improvements in mood productivity creativity it's very popular in silicon valley and beyond i was i was going on a tv show that i won't name the other morning and one of the people at the table said hey i'm micro dosing um and but we haven't done the the controlled you know placebo-controlled uh blinded trial um and supposedly there's a company who has done some of that in england now but the the real test to see is it really the the small dose of lsd and basically how it works is you take uh 10 micrograms of lsd every third or fourth day um and uh but we haven't done that with a placebo to see if it really is the lsd that's giving these opi these these feelings or is it a placebo effect and frankly the placebo effect with psychedelics is really strong there's so much magic imputed to these molecules that if someone thinks that if someone takes any amount of lsd they're they're likely to feel something right absolutely i mean this is a thing that people say oh you can tell that it's not placebo but many of the clinicians in these experiments mistake ritalin for a psychedelic experience yeah that's right so um so that's that's the research we need to do it's a little hard to do because uh i mean it should be easy it's very straightforward but on the other hand getting it through an irb uh in institutional review board you're going to give people lsd and then let them get in their car and drive away um that's challenging do you find it at all obnoxious all this micro dosing stuff i'm starting to find it a little bit a little a little bit much all the discussion yeah i mean it's such a you know to me there's something that violates the spirit of psychedelics and micro dosing i mean here's this this incredibly disruptive drug in in the best sense it makes people question their assumptions their frameworks it's it has the potential to change culture and change mental health and and and here you're just turning into another productivity drug you know it's it's what capitalism would do with psychedelics if it had free reign you know right it's it's making psychedelics non-psychedelic yeah and then everyone's very excited exactly it's yeah exactly it's neutering it's neutering it's turning it into another supplement it's a brain supplement i i know i feel the same way um i hope it works i mean it'd be wonderful it does if you know there are people who who say it's uh you know i yell at waldman wrote a whole book about how it you know helped her with her depression and um um and even if it is a placebo great you know i mean we could ruin it by finding it doesn't work um right i mean the placebo might not work as well that's interesting i wonder i think it would still work fine well they say that even a sugar pill if if someone if here's a sugar pill for your the pain in your knee it will work in a certain number of people even if you say it's a sugar pill the placebo effect is kind of wild and and i think that as one of the researchers said to me um psychedelics are placebos on rocket boosters that's an interesting idea yeah and i had a question i think that you know throughout probably the entire recorded history of psychedelics every generation has tried to explain the experience and often tried to explain it scientifically although in some societies that wasn't a possibility so you have aldous huxley and the doors of perception giving this kind of like oh it's a masculine is interfering with glucose metabolism in the brain therefore psychedelic experience and uh and then you know you have people saying oh the 5 hd2a receptor that explains it or the 1a receptor or and now the new thing that is the hot explanation of course is the default mode network so do you think that the default mode network really explains it is that a satisfactory explanation for you i think it's not definitive by any means i think it's really interesting um it takes us further it takes a story further than the 52a receptors um and you know i think the important thing to always keep in mind is we don't know anything really about the brain or very little about the brain and and the relationship of the brain to the mind is is still i mean i was really you know this is my first foray into neuroscience as a writer and and i assume like most people that consciousness is the product of brains but you know the dalai lama is right when he said that's just a hypothesis um you know we don't know this so there's a lot we don't know um the default mode network theory is interesting it's the idea that there's this one network in the midline that connects the prefrontal cortex to the uh to deeper older centers of memory and emotion and the posterior cingulate cortex and and it is deactivated on psychedelics and um you know and this is based on fmri imaging which is imperfect right um it's a proxy for activity in the brain and um this was surprising to people because they thought that um that psychedelics appeared because of all the fireworks it produces in your sensorium that everything must have been activated by it but in fact there was a deactivation and this was really surprising the default mode network is in is involved in things like self-reflection theory of mind the ability to impute mental states to others the autobiographical memory how you create you know it's where you create the story of who you are and incorporate events in your life into that narrative and time travel the ability to to project yourself in time and and travel in time which which you need to have an identity right i mean without memory you you don't have an identity oliver sachs has shown that and so to the extent the ego has a home it seems to be in that in that set of structures and uh and it's really interesting i think that they are deactivated is that the whole thing and we don't know and how do you get from uh activating the 5.2 aar to the the diminishing of activity in the default mode network we don't know they talk about a cascade of effects which is neuroscience speak for don't know yet um so you know i'm i mean i'm excited by that theory i think it's really interesting and it has some explanatory power but that's all it is is a theory yeah i agree okay there's not i mean there's some they're very specific they're like my son has this problem what should i do type questions yeah so i mean let me just address that i mean because i do get lots of um requests for referrals to guides and for obvious reasons i can't do that it's too risky for the guides they would assume anyone i introduced them to had been vetted in some ways but i can't do that and so it would put them at jeopardy and and it's it must be very frustrating for people who've who thinks that psychedelic therapy has something to offer their you know their their children or their parents um and um you know but i i think that you've got to find your own way um i do offer some advice uh or some suggestions on my website there's a big resources page on psychedelics so for example there are now 120 psychedelic societies around the world they've they've sprouted up everywhere just in the last two or three years and i think and these are not places where people use drugs but they go to talk about them and share their experiences and talk about the new research and things like that and my guess is if you spend some time at some of those meetings you would find your way to some people who knew some people in the underground just to guess also a lot of the ketamine therapists not the new style using the nasal thing but the old style which is legal ketamine therapy off-label ketamine therapy is legal and that that community at least on the west coast is very closely plugged into the underground community um and then you do what we journalists do is you know i just asked everybody i knew um and then finally someone said well i have a friend who worked with someone in the south bay and i think they did psilocybin and well could you ask them could you put me in touch and you know i think you can find your way and go to brooklyn um i think they're more in brooklyn than manhattan what do you think and more in brooklyn in the upper east side for sure [Laughter] i don't know i don't know i think you know try and figure it out on your own that's my my take on this yeah as much as you possibly can because i i wouldn't trust these groups you wouldn't trust i wouldn't i haven't and wouldn't oh that's interesting why not because it's a very personal experience to volunteer to someone who you don't have you know i trust just a close friend more than i would yeah so that's another approach is is doing it with someone there's a there's a wonderful book called the psychedelic explorers guide by james fatiman which is if if you're going to have a guide who's kind of more of an amateur that's i think that's a really good set of instructions for how to go about it but i'm talking about a professional guide and i interviewed a bunch and frankly i wasn't comfortable with all of them there's some i thought were a little crazy and there were others i thought were a little too cavalier about something that was pretty momentous for me they didn't kind of honor my fear there was one guy this romanian guy who i said so what happens if someone has a heart attack what are you gonna do and and um you know what if someone dies and he says you bury him with all the other people like he wasn't the guy for me i mean in a way yes that's what you do but i want him to call 9-1-1 [Laughter] yeah it's scary i was with one guy and he was uh i was saying it was before i was trying 5 meow dmt and i was saying you know i have these concerns because a friend of a friend actually died very recently and uh and you know it's you know that is a risk and he's like oh that was so terrible and that happened you know no one expected that because he was the son of a shaman and he had you know this lineage and i was like son of the shamans that's my friend is someone else and he's like oh there was another death just recently so i was like oh this is really just like a bad way to get into this experience right now satin setting yeah yeah uh so maybe we should take one more one more okay these are very specific these are just like medical questions can someone you can also do you want to read something or have we gone on for so long that would now be interesting i don't know do we have time for read a short passage ah yeah so sometimes i ask audiences if they i'm i haven't talked about my own trips um and sometimes i ask audiences do you want to hear a good trip or a bad trip and audiences always say bad trip right so speaking of 5 meo dmt this is a very to me exotic psychedelic to you maybe run of the mill um it's the um smoked venom of the sonoran desert toad you've got to give props to a species that could figure that one out um that you could smoke the venom of this toad and don't worry no toads are harmed in the making of the psychedelic they're they're gently squeezed and they squirt this venom out and you catch it on a glass a sheet of glass and then it you dry it overnight it dries and it looks like brown sugar and you smoke it to get rid of the toxins and you take one puff and here's what happened to me this is just a couple couple pages and then we'll wrap up i have no memory of ever having exhaled or of being lowered onto the mattress and covered with a blanket all at once i felt a tremendous rush of energy fill my head accompanied by a punishing roar i managed barely to squeeze out the words i had prepared trust and surrender these words became my mantra but they seemed utterly pathetic wishful scraps of paper in the face of this category 5 mental storm terror seized me and then like one of those flimsy wooden houses erected on bikini atoll to be blown up in the nuclear tests i was no more blasted to a confetti cloud by an explosive force i could no longer locate in my head because it had exploded that too expanding to become all that there was whatever this was it was not a hallucination a hallucination implies a reality and a point of referent reference and an entity to have it none of those things remained unfortunately the terror didn't disappear with the extinction of my eye whatever allowed me to register this experience this post-egoic awareness i'd first experienced on mushrooms was now consumed in the flames of terror too in fact every touchstone that tells us i exist was annihilated and yet i remain conscious is this what death feels like could this be it that was the thought though there was no longer a thinker to have it here words fail in truth there were no flames no blast no thermonuclear storm i'm grasping at metaphor in the hopes of forming some stable and shareable concept of what was unfolding in my mind in the event there was no coherent thought just pure and terrible sensation only afterwards did i wonder if this is what the mystics called the mysterium tremendon the blinding unendurable mystery whether of god or some other ultimate or absolute before which humans tremble in awe huxley described it as the fear of quote being overwhelmed of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind accustomed to living most of the time in a cozy world of symbols could possibly bear oh to be back in the cozy world of symbols after the fact i kept returning to one of two metaphors and while while they invariably uh deform the experience as any words or metaphors or symbols must they at least allow me to grab grasp hold of a shadow of it and perhaps share it the first is the image of being on the outside of a rocket after launch i'm holding on with both hands legs clenched around it while the rapidly mounting g-forces clutch at my flesh pulling my face down into a taut grimace as the great cylinder rises through successive layers of clouds exponentially gaining speed and altitude the fuselage shuttering on the brink of self-destruction as it strains to break free from earth's grip while the friction it generates as it crashes through the thinning air issues in a deafening roar it was a little like that the other metaphor was the big bang but the big bang run in reverse from our own from our familiar world all the way back to a point before there was anything no time or space or matter only the pure unbounded energy that was all there was then before an imperfection a ripple in its waveform caused the universe of energy to fall into time space and matter rushing backwards through 14 billion years i watched the dimensions of reality collapse one by one until there was nothing left not even being only the all-consuming roar it was just horrible i don't want to leave you on that note one last point something that um uh happened right after that was you come down it's the best thing about this trip it only lasts 10 minutes believe it or not and i came i came down and i started feeling that i had a body ah i have a body and and i felt the floor and there was matter and i could feel time going by and i was so grateful at the reassembling of the known world and the dimensions that you know we've all expressed gratitude for being alive i hope at some point i had gratitude that there was anything and not nothing so so in the end there was this positive side to it um so anyway thank you so much thank you and the book is great it really is great very kind thank you i just want to say that uh you all have a signed copy of the book in your lap that i used a very special ink tonight no don't lick it don't lick it [Applause] you

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Length: 77min 31sec (4651 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 29 2020