Joe Rogan Experience #1136 - Hamilton Morris

I try so hard boom and we're live Hamilton Morris sober as [ __ ] how about you absolutely say yes this time so we did a podcast seven years ago and most people apparently didn't know how [ __ ] up we were but I figured damn we're here with Hamilton Morris we should go deep and we just kept hitting that joint till I lost most of my grasp on reality while we're talking it's just a very slippery conversation I was just too high to form coherent thoughts it was just whatever I pieced together was just you know it was almost like miming a conversation uh-huh but now seven years later and you have a new place yeah it's beautiful yeah we you were in the early days we did it at my house yeah that was way way way back in the day I had no idea really I knew you were of course but I didn't know about your podcast entirely I had seen clips of you on YouTube and it wasn't until I was driving home from that recording and my phone just filled with hundreds of emails that I realized oh wow this is a serious phenomenon that I was not aware of and now I see it's just become huge it's a weird thing dude it it's it's got the wheel I just sort of have to show up it's a very strange and it sounds like false modesty or something like that but I'm just being totally honest like this thing does itself I think a lot of it might have to do with the long form begins people are so used to seeing people's opinions condensed and filtered into these sound bites and snippets and to hear an extended conversation with someone where they can actually tell stories and articulate their opinions in a nuanced careful ways so rare I agree it's one of the reasons why I don't do those shows anymore like panel shows and things like that it's just so frustrating oh it's insane I have very little experience with that sort of thing but I did dr. oz [Laughter] yes and I don't know how any normal person could function in that sort of environment I mean I have a TV show so arguably I'm well trained for that sort of thing but unless you're an actor who's prepared a line to say as soon as they point at you there's no way that you could function because it's not a genuine conversation it's just an opportunity to launch one sentence sound bites and an audience applause yeah and also the audience is such a strange element to add to a conversation I mean if you and I were having this conversation exactly in this this room but to the left of us is an enormous group of people we feel weird we would have to address them we'd have to turn to them it would be odd the following illuminated applause and laughter science God knows the weirdest when there's always the warm up guys like okay ready we're coming back from break coming back from Craig and they hold up the side and applause applause applause and everybody goes crazy and they create the worst environment I was on this discussion about crow Tom are you familiar with this I'm on it right now oh wow yeah I just took some I [ __ ] my knee up the other day I did something and it's been stiff and painful so I I stood before I came here and then I just took took six of them see what happens Wow okay 10 once I don't know can you grab that bag there's a bag that's sitting right on the sink I'll tell you exactly what's in it but now I get why people might think it's a drug what is the drug yeah for sure but when I took four I was like well I took two for the first time I took it I took two and a couple times I took two him with this like a mild stimulant but then when you get into the range of eight to ten pills it's like oh this this will [ __ ] you up this stuff the stuff I take is urban ice organics and see it says it says take two it doesn't say the amount of material in the capsule 750 milligrams okay so not quite a gram not quite a grandma all right it seems like a reasonable amount but they always construct these things in these ridiculous dramatic opposition's like it was me versus a woman whose son had died of some kratom associated for DOS and you know it turns into a thing like what do you have to say to this woman whose son died it's like I don't know you know there are people that die from caffeine overdoses as well it's tragic that this happened have people died from this yes they haven't you have to take an enormous amount I mean I think a lot of people set up these unrealistic expectations with these drugs where they if they like a drug they want to say it's impossible right to kill anyone it's impossible there's no possible way if you said that is your standard you'll always fail because people will die doing absolutely everything running having sex defecating aspirin aspirin absolutely there's nothing in this world that can't find its way into a human death so if people want to say and even you know cannabis obviously people say you can't overdose on cannabis and essentially you can't but if you look in the medical literature there are a number of these cannabis associated fatalities you know you can debate them endlessly but the point is once a drug enters a large enough population there'll be a number of sensitive individuals and someone will die it doesn't mean that the drug is dangerous it means that it's unrealistic to set a standard where if anything bad happens to anyone we have to decide that the drug is dangerous and should be banned yeah I agree I mean look water kills people there's a lot of these hazing things where the fraternity kids will be asked to drink a [ __ ] ton of water and oh yeah the people have died from it a woman died in San Jose a few years back from a contest to drink water to get her son like an Xbox or something like that yeah yeah I mean there's a lot of things that are lethal but the ld50 for cannabis I mean you literally have to smoke your bodyweight or something right it's something crazy be very difficult yeah but it doesn't mean that you couldn't get so high that you did something really stupid and wind up dying right yeah especially dependent upon the person and the the you know biological variability right right exactly and it's just I think it's also just a sort of a bad road to go down people always want to emphasize the safety of things that in my opinion safety isn't the point it doesn't ultimately matter to me whether or not something is safe I think we should have the freedom to do dangerous things if we choose we're allowed to ride motorcycles were allowed to shoot guns you're allowed to go skydiving and bungee jumping all those things carry risks but it's assumed that any adult that does them is aware of those risks yeah I couldn't agree more I mean it's it's also who is if the society that we live in was just you and I is that we were the only two people alive who are you to tell me what I can do or me to tell you what you can do it's ridiculous and so when you have grown adults telling a grown adult who's informed what they can and can't do then it becomes a question of children well then it becomes a an education issue and it becomes a parental issue I mean it's just you can't lie to your children about the effects of certain drugs because then they're not gonna believe you about the really actual the actual dangerous ones Brayan and this is of course reflected in the the so-called opioid epidemic yes right now yes there's endless finger-pointing everyone wants to find a culprit that's behind all of it and the easiest person to blame of course are pharmaceutical companies because everybody hates pharmaceutical companies so why not blame them right but you know and I'm not Pro pharmaceutical by any stretch of the imagination but I'm also not anti pharmaceutical either and when you look at the way for example the New York Times is covering the opioid epidemic it's always in this tone of like documents were uncovered this show that executives at Purdue Pharma were aware that morphine was addictive as early as 1999 it's like well of course of course they were aware people have known that morphine is addictive for hundreds of years this is old news and this whole idea that doctors were convinced by some letter in the New England Journal of Medicine that said that oxycontin isn't addictive is absurd these are all morphine derivatives any adult especially a medically trained adult should know that no matter what little variation you make on that molecule if it's structurally and pharmacologically and qualitatively similar to morphine of course it's going to be addictive and that in and of itself isn't even a bad thing it should be okay to give people addictive drugs as well as long as everyone's aware of the risks as long as they understand a protocol to get off of it the you you know there's so many people that get on these things and then wind up taking them far longer than they're supposed to because it's easy to get I mean we need to at least have some sort of responsible direction that these people need to go to to get off of them once they're on them because people that get back operations any anything where they prescribe you high doses of opiates it's a huge problem I know many many people that have gotten hooked because and in fact I should tell you that my good friend Justin Ren his wife found out about kratom because of you because of your show he had a problem with his shoulder got shoulder shoulder surgery they put him on oxycontin's he was [ __ ] up on them and he was having a really hard time getting off and having the shakes really bad and kratom is the only thing that got him off of it right and that's not surprising I mean this has been known for a very long time in Thailand and that was actually the reason that it was originally prohibited I don't know if you're aware of that but because the government taxed opium and people started using kratom then they made Crotona leaves not the right way to say it because people say kratom yeah you're the only one I've heard sacred Tom people in it's a Thai word people in Thailand call it critic so people in the US call it kratom it's a it's also they have you know is maybe it's a quick Tom something I'm not gonna go that forever Cree tom is close if you did it would be weird but I feel as you know yeah like American people that say Ecuador hahahaha Argentina but it is Krita yeah crow Tom okay so we'll try to call Chris or something close to that it's closer to that than kratom right and so the reason why was made it illegal was because of the fact that it was pinching some of the profits off of the opium trade yes Wow yeah that's [ __ ] up and so this has been known for a long time that it helps people get off more addictive opioids and how does it do that well it's an opioid itself and a lot of people don't want to admit or acknowledge that but I think we need to get beyond this idea that drugs are inherently bad or opioids are inherently bad just because the ones that we're aware of have a lot of problems you know in some sense medicinal chemistry and pharmacology and all this are still in a very primitive state and there's so much to be learned so we're mostly giving people these derivatives of morphine that have been around for a hundred years and there are better things we're going to continuously discover less addictive treatments for pain and I think that the alkaloids in kratom are a step in that direction and which is so tragic that they're trying to now make it illegal because this is something that as far as I can tell has genuinely helped an enormous number of people reduce their intake of more addictive and more dangerous opioids one of the things that I felt I mean and again my dose was not extremely high but when I was on it I was very coherent I was clear it was clear to me that was affected by something but it felt kind of good it didn't feel bad it felt a little a little uneasy like a little like whoa this is what the world feels a little weird right now but it did not feel like I was impaired like I know a lot of people who take it and exercise like I have a friend he'll take ten pills and exercise it just just seems kind of [ __ ] crazy yes but he says he has a great workout right by taking that stuff before he works out yeah I mean it seems to lend itself to a lot of different applications in Thailand it's used almost exclusively for that sort of purpose in the south it's a drug that labourers use so they can you know collect it the latex from rubber trees and just get their job done that's what it's about I mean that's what opioids are about for a lot of the world both in the United States and in Africa and in Thailand is you know people live hard lives and manual labor is painful and repetitive and difficult and anything that makes that a little bit more manageable is a very important tool for humans I always felt like people that did heroin or opiates or some point that were on a very short road to death that that was my perception when I was a kid and then I had a friend who was a longshoreman they worked on the docks bringing they would bring fish in and fillet the fish for the market and he worked with a guy that every day at lunch the guy would go cop he would get his heroin he would shoot it up in his car and then he'd go back to work and I was like he'd go back to work you know he kept he worked everyday like every day shot up and every day he worked like yeah who's never late nope just did his work all right Wow well I didn't think you could do that I thought you did heroin the next thing you know you just be on the floor in a fetal position in your own urine and you just would fall apart and die right yeah there's this idea that people sometimes refer to as pharmacological determinism that a certain drug has to do a certain thing so alcohol has to sedate and dis inhibit you heroin has to addictive and make you a slave to it and kill you cocaine has to be a euphoric thing that's done at parties it's also very addictive PCP has to make you strip nude and run around fighting Compton fighting cops and punching holes and wooden fences but when you look at this you know anthropologists have looked at certain drugs that are used cross-culturally like alcohol and what you find is this whole idea of pharmacological determinism is fundamentally flawed drugs behave differently in different cultures depending on the set and setting of the user and so you find all sorts of instances that are major exceptions to these rules that we've set up for these various drugs for example PCP which is arguably one of the most ubiquitous ly maligned drugs in the world I mean no one can imagine that PCP is medicinal but even to this day PCP is in schedule to not Schedule one like cannabis and LSD schedule two it can still be prescribed actually and that's because it had a history of medicinal use there was even PCP psychotherapy in the UK and in the 50s so this is a something that most people wouldn't believe but to those patients that were taking it then there was none of this cultural association with PCP being a drug that causes psychosis or makes you strip nude it was simply another tool for a psychiatrist to use and help people release repressed memories or traumas that they were afraid to talk about when sober hmm well we're seeing that now with MDMA right I mean and also ketamine ketamine you being used as an actual tool for psychotherapy particularly for people with depressions having really good results my my friend hmm excuse me Neal Brennan who's a hilarious comedian he's had struggles with depression yeah he got great relief from from taking ketamine right and what I think is really interesting is you know this is often packaged as a sort of psychedelic Renaissance but I think in a larger context it's a drug facilitated psychotherapy Renaissance because this was not just limited to psychedelics people did something called narco analysis where they would give people sedatives like propofol the drug that killed Michael Jackson or various barbiturates or various other drugs and the relaxing effect would allow people to talk more openly to a therapist and it was considered very effective now this idea of a psychiatrist injecting you with a drug in order to help you talk about your problems is it's unheard of I don't think anyone does it anymore but it used to be very common and I think a return to that is going to be really beneficial yeah I agree with you I think the right drugs with the right cases and the right people and I think we've got to get past these schedules that when you have things like marijuana and psilocybin and and especially DMT which your own body produces is a Schedule one drug and the famous Terence Mckenna line we're all holding you know when it comes to DMT it's just stupid it's just it's stupid that these things are Schedule one when you're saying there's no medical benefit whatsoever or medical application for cannabis it's [ __ ] crazy when something didn't you want to have something that really actively promotes a distrust in law enforcement the scheduling of drugs is one of the best ones because when you look at something like marijuana and you see that that's a Schedule one drug that that that's infuriating to people that gain huge benefits from cannabis I mean people that have going through chemotherapy people that have you know inter ocular pressure from glaucoma you can go down the list over and over and over again maybe kids that have epilepsy there's so many people that have had great benefit particularly from edible cannabis from people that have seizures I mean you could keep going on and on and on it's just it's an amazing plant and to have that demonized because of some ridiculous propaganda from the 1930s that still somehow or another clung on and 2018 you think about all the information we have now with the Internet and the fact that cannabis is still scheduled one you have [ __ ] like Jeff Sessions still saying things like good people don't smoke marijuana like this is crazy talk it's crazy but keep in mind it was just about a hundred years ago that alcohol was prohibited in United States and it took 13 years to reverse that and that was alcohol there's no drug more integrated into our culture than alcohol and that took 13 years to reverse what was that like back then that must have been madness when alcohol was illegal when the cops would come in and jackbooted thugs would knock over gin mills and bust open kegs of whiskey and spill it all out like what the [ __ ] was that like it was it was disastrous but I think what's interesting about that is it was a worthwhile experiment to give them the benefit of the doubt it was worthwhile to see because on some sense you could say the prohibition has a certain logic to it you could say drugs cause problems so if we just make all the drugs illegal then maybe those problems will disappear mm-hmm but it didn't work the experiment failed and there's nothing wrong with a failed experiment but it's a problem if you keep repeating it over and over and over again for a hundred years looking for a different result right and then go to other drugs and go well this one let's try this one let's make this one illegal and it's a terrible PR situation for the police as well if I were a police officer I would be the biggest opponent of the war on drugs and of anyone in the government because when you think about why does the average person in New York City love a firefighter they love firefighters but they hate cops why is that it's because of the drug war because a firefighter isn't going to hurt you for something that wasn't really a crime to begin with for some kind of victimless crime a firefighter is just there to help you to save you if you're in trouble and the same would be true of police officers if it weren't the drug war ideally there's a little more complexity to it sure this sermon certainly more complexity when it comes to shootings and yes but I mean the stop and frisk I've read something about stop and frisk in New York when they had when they add that instituted that most of it was drugs most of it was like catching people with marijuana yeah which is just [ __ ] insane you just study you look like you might be streetwise get over here and that's the way these laws have functioned from the very beginning I mean if you look at drug law in the UK it tends to be very black-and-white something is legal or illegal if it's legal it can be sold in stores because it's legal if it's illegal it can't be sold anywhere in the US they've instead created this nebulous far-reaching gray area where there's all sorts of things that are maybe illegal kind of illegal do it but don't get caught and and it's created an ability for the government to selectively prosecute people whenever they want if they want mmm yeah well that seems to be lessening I mean when you have someone like Jeff Sessions in office it's very disturbing but then Trump says things like he's very strong on states rights to you know past marijuana laws and things along those lines you know you're very incredulous I don't know I mean I suppose I am a bit incredulous when it comes to Trump doing anything good but I think if you told him that people love him more if he did things good he would do things good that's probably true I think someone that he trusted said - yeah I think that's is more I think we've got to get somebody in deep we got to get them all and got to get somebody who's good at backrubs it gets by I [Laughter] doubt it up I mean just I don't know what is the thing that will help there's also the separation between the drug users and the policy makers yes and and one thing that I am certain will help and it's sort of tragic that this is the case but it's capitalism it's the corporatization of these drugs because with cannabis you know when it was hippies in the counterculture had you know marches down the streets of New York holding up 420 signs it doesn't I suppose have all that much clout in the eyes of lawmakers but when you have some guy from Yale Business School who's never smoked weed who says you know this is a serious business opportunity yeah we're gonna make it big and gets investors invests millions and millions of dollars into it hires lobbyists plays the game like a capitalist then the laws do change and I wish that weren't the case but it is and it's tragic for the people that did fight and did go to prison and did sacrifice that then these these business school guys come along and reap all the benefits but that's the way it works yeah that is the way it works and that's okay I mean it's just a weird path it's a weird path but as long as we can get to legalization I'm a hundred percent for that path I just think that might be the only way in this weird country this country is so enamored with money I mean we're so enamored with money and profits and even for dying people even old like Warren Buffett invested [ __ ] tons of money in warehouses to sell ket to to grow cannabis in Colorado when the laws are passed I mean that guy's a hundred and fifty thousand years old he's worth billions of dollars and he's like who gives a [ __ ] I'm making more money now and more and more and more I mean even when they're really old they're they're massively motivated by profit yes and I think the same will be true for psychedelics and will probably be true for all of these things because you need to have lobbyists you need to have this sort of typical white-collar support to push things forward mm-hmm I agree I don't see any other way around it right now I mean the real hope is that cannabis not that it will get rid of capitalism but that we'll figure out it's hard to wear those things with glasses on right yes they always talking about it the glasses dig in your head that cannabis will the not just cannabis but cannabis will open the door to all these different substances that'll allow people to have a to gain a greater perspective this is the ultimate goal in my opinion is to give people the opportunity to step outside the momentum of their lives and look at things with fresh eyes and make clear decisions this is a one of the best things that I think that drugs provide is that these psychedelic drugs in particular provide an escape from the momentum of this life that you've created or that you found yourself a part of it's very difficult for people to stop behavior patterns to stop and to just look at themselves objectively and sort of rethink regroup and reassess and this is one of the best things about cannabis and about psilocybin and a lot of these other psychedelic drugs is that it gives you this newfound perspective that allows you to reconsider things yes absolutely and I think with you know ketamine and the treatment of depression it's a similar idea because depressed people become used to these very ingrained patterns of thinking and anything that can break you out of that that can shake it up for a minute and maybe give you a different perspective I think is inherently therapeutic yeah I think so as well and I think I'm hoping that what I see and this is what I believe I see is that we're changing our perceptions of it I had a conversation with a friend of mine the other day about marijuana where we were talking about how you used to hide whether or not you did it from certain people and now that group of people that you have to hide it from is smaller and smaller and that it seems like everyone casually smokes marijuana now in in our circles there's so many people to do there's a few that don't sober people and whatever but it's way more common whereas 10-15 years ago this was something you hid if you had a good job if you had a family there's not something you wanted people to know about and what I think is really interesting is that in and of itself changes the nature of the cannabis experience so I think if somebody uses cannabis in a culture that supports it that approves of it their experience will be better by virtue of that fact right so there's a certain shame that a lot of people feel when using any drug I for whatever crazy reason feel it a little bit with cannabis it's you know a little just a hair of I should be you know I should be studying should be reading it should be you know more focused this is a little hedonistic it's a little comfort oriented I should be working harder but that's I think just the vestiges of this propaganda that I've been fed or something like that or maybe it's true but I understand from one perspective why the cannabis culture drums the benefits of cannabis so hard you know that a cures all disease that it's good for you that a cures cancer all the stuff because if you have that in your mind at the very least it's going to reduce that sort of internal shame that you might feel it makes the entire experience healthier and more beneficial because we do construct these limitations we construct these experiences to some extent so if you decide that cannabis is a dissociative drug that's hedonistic and comfort-oriented and will take you away from your responsibilities and that's what it will become but if you decide like Terence Mckenna did that it's an intellectual catalyst that it will facilitate your ability to read and learn and think and write then it will become that as well yeah it's it's a weird one right because people that are people that take it that are prone to paranoia or that are dealing with like some difficult issues in their life right now that they're perhaps trying to avoid it becomes an uncomfortable experience whereas people that are happy and having a good time and in a good place the marijuana will sort of enhance that give it as loving warm feeling of comfort and of like sort of acceptance of your existence and it's going to be okay right but I think even the paranoia is like it's sort of sort of meme you could say a sort of vestige of this propaganda that makes people afraid in the same idea van is the bad trip I think the concept of a bad trip is a very damaging concept because and I know from personal experience I never really used psychedelics in high school with the exception of salvia because I was terrified of a bad trip I talked to friends who'd described bad trips and they say oh it's a it's a bat it's bad trip it's really bad it's scary and I would think oh that's terrible I could I would never want a bad trip I'm never gonna touch these things because a bad trip would be too much for me to tolerate and then I started using psychedelics and I realized there's no such thing as a bad trip any more than there's a bad meal or a bad relationship or a bad day I mean having an occasional bad thing in life doesn't stop you from doing things like eating or having relationships or living typically so what do you mean by there's are you saying there's no such thing as a bad trip yes there's no such thing as a bad meal I'm saying that there is such thing as a bad meal but but it wouldn't prevent you from tripping and I think that even the bad or wouldn't bring you from eating rather sorry about it but but I think even these bad trips although they can be difficult are beneficial and our learning experience in the same way that a bad meal could be you learn not to go to that restaurant or maybe you learn something about what makes you sick or what to be careful of in the future you know if you are approaching life from a non fearful perspective where your intention is to learn then you can extract benefit from almost any experience and these difficult psychedelic experiences I genuinely believe and this is what is maybe the hardest thing to communicate about psychedelics is that it's the difficult ones that are often the best those are the ones that really teach you something and when you were trying to talk about psychedelics with people who've never used them it's not a great selling point to say oh you know the best thing that can happen is you're gonna think you're gonna die but that is arguably the best thing that can happen I used to think that you're going to die because that's a confrontation with the overarching fear the fear that generates all other fears and if you conquer that fear then your life will almost certainly improve well what is one thing that's sort of genuine genuinely universally accepted as a beneficial experience is a near-death experience sort of universally accepted as a transformative moment in people's lives like I had this near-death experience and I realized wow I got to get my [ __ ] together after that heart attack I realized that life is a gift and I changed the way I think about things and I started calling people that I loved and telling them that I love them this is the same you can get a near-death experience from cannabis you just don't ever die you really do I mean it's the death of so many perceptions and so many things about your life especially from a durable cannabis which i think is probably one of the least understood and most potent things that people are consuming on a daily basis I can't tell you how many times I've given someone edible marijuana and they're [ __ ] convinced that it's been laced with something awful and that they're going to die but then afterwards they come out of it and they're like oh I got some work to do the only way I would disagree with you is people that are prone to psychotic breaks yeah yeah because that there there's a absolute genuine connection between people who have a slippery hold on reality and some experiences with psychedelics that lead them down a bad road that's true it can it's a stressor and like all stressors it can precipitate a psychotic break they've done pretty large-scale epidemiological analyses of psychedelic drug users versus the non psychedelic drug using population and the incidence of mental illness isn't any higher so I don't think that you can argue that psychedelics cause mental illness but you can and some measures it seems to actually reduce it in terms of things like alcoholism substance abuse disorders but but it can be a stressor that would precipitate such an episode in a susceptible individual and I had a very traumatic informative experience myself for my best friend had a psychotic break while I was with him tripping so I've seen this firsthand I know exactly what it looks like yeah I've had friends have real bad experiences to where they're screaming and yelling and then disassociative and then afterwards become very strange and have a really hard time with reality for a bit yeah I've never seen someone have a complete psychotic break this was that he never recovered never he never recovered he was my best friend at the time and he never recovered so he was fine before the psychedelic yes Jesus Christ slide again you know it's and that happened early so now he's still [ __ ] yes but again you know I typically don't tell that story in public because it's it could be misinterpreted as a scare story you know I don't it's impossible to prove the counterfactual would it have happened without psychedelics almost certainly I can't say all I know is that he took a very high dose of a Scylla semester and had this episode he was hospitalized and he was not the same afterwards so I'm aware that this is a something that happens but it also typically happens in the early 20s late teens the same time that people typically have psychotic breaks and develop schizophrenia yeah the instances of schizophrenia in people who use cannabis are cannabis in particular but I don't know about other psychedelics but I would imagine they're very similar they're exactly the same as the incidences of schizophrenia in non using populations it's like 1% 1% across-the-board seem to have issues with schizophrenia and there the real question is how many of those people could I mean is it avoidable like if your friend had never done that and instead had you know become a marathon runner or something and you know found some other outlets for his energy would he have never gone down that road we don't know it's impossible yes it's impossible so I think it's very important to talk about that though and with further research perhaps we could isolate genes you know like they have for CTE now they have they can do an analysis of your genes and then determine whether or not something like football would be a dangerous path for you because you have a higher probability of developing CTE it would be wonderful if they figured out a way to do that with psilocybin or with cannabis or with anything else and be able to recognize the potential links to psychotic breaks and to you know a host of different mental disorders that could possibly be triggered by high doses yes I mean this is one of so many things that needs to be done and that's you know everyone's very excited about all this clinical research that's happening right now I'm excited about it as well but on one level it is very politically oriented research you know the the things that they're looking at have actually typically been done before not all of it but the aim is to firmly establish these things that have been known for a long time psilocybin occassions mystical type experience or MDMA is useful for treating PTSD or psilocybin has an anti addictive effect these are things that people have known for a little while but now it's about proving it but I'm really looking forward to getting deeper into these serious questions about you know exactly how these drugs interact with various subtypes of serotonin receptors because I think that they're going to be very important tools for understanding consciousness as a whole yeah it would also be interesting knowing how they react to different diets you know when people are you know when you're eating certain types of foods that are bad for your body I would really be curious to see what kind of effect that has I mean when when you have real large-scale research that goes over really important variables in terms of a human health and then you add in these different substances whether it's psilocybin or cannabis or whatever it is it's it's gonna be interesting to see how the body reacts to these various perturbance iziz various changes of your state yeah and that's you know traditionally in a lot of these indigenous groups the diet plays a big role in the way that the drug is administered and I think we're slowly rediscovering a lot of things that have been known for tens maybe hundreds maybe thousands of years in some of these indigenous groups have you had a chance to see any of my new show when no no I haven't oh you I think you'd like it I'm sure I'd like it I look at old show yeah I think it's a lot better than yeah yeah awesome yeah but I you know I had the opportunity to look at the way salvia is used in the mountains of Oaxaca and you know Native American peyote use and all these different things and yeah that there's so much to be learned from all these traditions that are not reflected in the current clinical climate because they can't be but I think that that's gonna be a part of it is slowly integrating these other alkaloids that are present in the plants to see what role they play in the same way that you know the initial medicalization of cannabis was Marinol which is just THC and sesame oil but now there's increased understanding of the way these accessory cannabinoids modulate the THC experience or whether THC is even the primary therapeutic agent for certain disorders and I imagine the same thing will be true for peyote and for the iboga alkaloids and probably even for some of the chemicals found in mushrooms so when you're doing this show have you had any problems have you had any pushback against what you're doing or any any issues with it being on vice I've had an enormous amount of freedom you know ultimately I have very very little to complain about when it comes to censorship there was the way the show got started the actual TV show is sort of an interesting story where they were starting up vice land and a producer who's now gone gave me this deck of drug stories they were gonna do in they're all kind of terrible scare stories like the new drug bromo-dragonfly it's killing teens a new drug promo driver Romeo yeah yeah what is that it's a really fascinating compound developed by this chemist David Nicholls who found that that these conformational e constrained benzo fear an amphetamine derivatives are like very high potency dob derivatives anyway it's just it's a super potent psychedelic amphetamine that has a cool tricyclic structure huh it looks like a dragonfly the molecule looks like a dragonfly kind of and it's got a very high yes it's super super potent and very very long-lasting so it lent itself to scare stories you know people it's a potent vasoconstrictor so people would take very high doses of it and occasionally they would have to amputate it oh there's finger or something like that but again you know this isn't because the drug is bad it's because people used it irresponsibly and this is something that people have so much difficulty understanding we're so eager to blame drugs for all of our problems drugs have never hurt anyone they're just inanimate constellations of carbon and hydrogen nitrogen and oxygen they don't jump out of their bags and vials and attack your serotonin receptors or dopamine transporter or anything like that so this is just a weird pattern that we've done repeatedly over time and I don't know if you read the new Michael Pollan book I know he was on the podcast I mean right now yeah it's great yeah it is great but one thing that I thought was interesting about it is that he put a lot of the emphasis on the prohibition of psychedelics on Leary and Leary almost certainly played a role but I think it's slightly ironic that he's a journalist and didn't really go that deep into the role that journalists played in all of this which was humongous you know journalists are sculptors of public opinion and it became the standard way of reporting on any of these things to say that they're bad to sensationalize it and to not have any consideration for what that would do because any time a journalist writes some scare story they can really mess with drug policy in a serious way it might seem like nothing like oh there's a bunch of people in Brooklyn and they overdosed on some obscure synthetic cannabinoid amb foo bhinneka who cares about amb foo bhinneka no big deal say that it turns people into zombies and if it gets thrown into schedule one who cares not a big deal well that's a very short-sighted way of thinking about all of this because that's exactly what happened with psychedelics and then we're not learning from the mistakes of the past that just because something it's fun to sensationalize and talk about how dangerous it is at this moment doesn't mean that 10 years from now we're gonna recognize it it has therapeutic potential and we made a big mistake outlawing it and I think a lot of that also comes from this sort of us versus them mentality that people have where it's cannabis is good synthetic cannabinoids are bad well synthetic cannabinoids don't have to be bad for cannabis to be good cannabis can be good without something else being bad to counterbalance it you don't need to hate something to justify your love of cannabis and this whole hatred of synthetic cannabinoids I think is totally misdirected because these are products of prohibition that most people wouldn't even want to use in the first place and when they do use them they don't know what they're taking they don't know what dose they're consuming and so of course they're having bad experiences that would happen with almost any drug caffeine included if people just consumed enormous unmeasured doses without having any idea of what they were getting into and so they're thrown into Schedule one well what happens if 30 years from now once the therapeutic potential of cannabinoids is being really seriously explored we find out that that amb Phu bhinneka that everyone was saying turned homeless people into zombies in Brooklyn in 2017 turns out to activate a certain subtype of the cb1 receptor that's especially useful for Parkinson's disease or something like that then we're going to regret having done that so I think people have to be very careful anytime you say anything negative about a drug you have to be very very careful because the implications can be enormous I think that the best stance in all this is to not speak ill of drugs true drug enthusiasts but it's not a problem also with just what journalism is it's like asking a comedian to talk about something but not make fun of it that's what their job in in a certain sense is to get people excited about things and I don't know whether you'd say the lazy way out or the common approach is to say something that scares people I mean that's that's what clickbait is mostly about either outrage or fear that's true but there's a lot of richness in truth I agree but it's hard to sell it's hard to sell that religion hard to sell I think the people are lazy you know why is this idea that a lot of people have that you know journalism is organized by some malevolent Rupert Murdoch type puppeteer who's telling everyone to you often you say that cannabis causes car accidents right you go off and you say this evil thing about this and say the alcohol is good did you see when Alex Jones is on my podcast and got high with me drunk and I and when it came up in his trial for his divorce he said that George Soros puts a heat test marijuana every year to see how much George Soros is influencing the levels of THC people love these ideas in the ideas of the puppeteer and malevolent puppeteer because it denies individual agency but the reality and I say this as a journalist who's worked at many different publications not just vice is and this is a difficult reality to swallow is that people are free to say whatever they want most of the time and the journalists choose to report on things this way yeah that is true but it's also true that they like I've been a part of stories that where I've talked to the author of it and they said well this was manipulated by the editor the editor manipulated the title the change was a great excuse yeah another perspective but at the right but it's true like the Rolling Stone did an article about me and they called me a psychedelic warrior and I said to the guy who wrote down what the [ __ ] is that I was laughing and he goes dude I did not write that yeah an editor gets a hold of it tries to make it more salacious it becomes something that's more it's more likely for people to buy or click right especially with headlines that is that is true and the real problem is that this sort of outrage culture and comment culture that has emerged provides no incentive for truth because suppose someone were to write an article about this conversation we're having right now and it could say Hamilton Morris says kratom should be illegal or something like that then that will get so much more engagement because then you'll have all these people saying [ __ ] Hamilton Moore he's a he's a traitor how dare he say that it should be illegal that it didn't watch it and then you'll have other people arguing those people saying well listen to the interview hey he actually never said anything about that listen carefully to what he was saying and then you create this whole engagement a bigger engagement for doing the long thing then you'd get for doing the right thing true but the initial statement is much stickier the initial statement of Hamilton Morris is a bad guy because he thinks kratom should be illegal or khatam should be illegal that is what more people are going to pay attention to far less people read the retraction than read the initial arse this is one of the more insidious things about printing things that are patently untrue purposely that people do do things that are untrue with the caveat that they could just print a retraction that maybe 30% of the people that read the original article are gonna read the initial imprint is what's gonna stick with people even if you someone calls you a rapist okay and then it turns out that the person who called your rapist was lying the people heard you were rapists first they still have that in their head oh he's a rapist greatest right it's just it's very difficult to get slippery ideas out of people's head so if somebody writes some article saying that you're against the legalization of certain drugs and they they start looking at you as being compromised it's the influence that people have today can't be understated because the reach is so powerful the reach of any article any video any it's it's so significantly greater than any other sort of distribution of information in the history of human beings the the potential for it impacting large groups of people is so huge now yes and this is the result of that is also that the viewers have a lot of power and I think that in some sense they don't quite recognize the nature of that power it's like voting with your dollar if you spend all of your time commenting hatefully on things you don't like you are actively encouraging the production of more of that thing that you don't like right if you like something you need to engage with what you approve of more because every time you engage with something you dislike advertisements are sold and it has been incentivized to do that bad thing and that's a really sticky thing when we have this culture where everyone loves to out show their outrage and virtue signal and show that they're on the right side and all this stuff constantly to say hey step back you're just feeding the problem yeah I think there's also a problem with a lot of what people are doing during the day is something they don't want to do a lot of what people are doing is some job that they don't enjoy and during that job they have freedom to go online and in this state of feeling like [ __ ] about whatever they're doing they'll enjoy complaining about stuff and so they'll read things and type things and get engaged in things and there's some sort of a sport to getting pissed off about stuff instead of just spending your time doing things you actually enjoy it seems so simple it sounds like a simple solution but if you could figure out a way to actively ignore things that are gonna piss you off and seek out things are gonna excite you and intrigue you you're gonna be a healthier happier person and doesn't that isn't that ultimately what everybody wants I want to be happier don't you want to be happier of course but why do we seek out [ __ ] that pisses us off because it becomes a sort of addiction yeah it's drug like in and of itself I mean I see it these arguments these people are frittering away their finite time on earth engaged in these endless comment battles that no one reads and and it's a very dark reality but it is also something that's driving the current culture of journalism that where the truth doesn't matter as much all the matters is engagement right right it's just clicks it's just clicks and money it's interesting that you were saying something about drugs being inanimate objects and drugs don't actually kill people it's so funny how drug enthusiasts parallel gun enthusiasts with their arguments it's really the same freedom argument and it's really and I'm in an interesting perspective because I live in New York I'm like a whatever just a nerdy guy that doesn't let me guess you live in Williamsburg I do yes yeah big surprise that's for the office though I live close to the office that I work at but but you know I have no interest in guns I'm not so it's really easy for me to say well look there was this the shooting and all these people died right and and this other guy got shot and these things are really causing a lot of problems let's get rhythm because doesn't impact me and that's where you have to be the most careful because that the worst thing you can possibly do is make judgments about how other people should conduct their lives based on your own preferences which people do all the time so you hear someone said well I don't like cannabis I don't like it I don't smoke it why should it be legal because people go to prison for it because it ruins people's lives who aren't your own you have to think about people that aren't you and so it's very difficult when it comes to gun control issues because this I'm faced with that exact same issue where it would be so easy for me to say get rid of them all it doesn't impact me I don't like guns but I don't want to fall into that same trap yeah it is a trap and it's it also sort of highlights how slippery life is in general that these absolutes that we look for these ones and zeros they don't necessarily exist in a lot of subjects you know there's there's a lot of people that have done bad things that have also done great things and that gets weird too you know it just human beings in general where we're not we're complex creatures you know and to just categorize something as negative or positive it's there's a lot of positive things that you could find with drugs there's a lot of negative things you could find with drugs too and they mirror human behavior there's a lot of positive and negatives in human behavior yes and back to this journalistic issue in the coverage of drugs I mean one thing that worries me about the way cannabis and kratom and psychedelics are presented is that it's always couched and they're safe their therapeutic their spiritual their historical but that isn't the point even if all those things are true and there's some debate eventually someone will find a [ __ ] in that armor someone will die maybe they're not haven't been used as long as you thought they were used maybe they don't always work therapeutically so then what do you go back to prohibition no that's why I think you need to emphasize cognitive Liberty you need to emphasize people's right to explore these alternate states of consciousness regardless of whether or not they're therapeutic or safe or traditional or spiritual the point isn't that it's safe or any of these other things the point is that if you want to live in a free society you have to be allowed to take a certain amount of risk yeah that's that's a big point that's a very big point and and I think it really it fits well with your description of the things that people are allowed to do that are legal that are very dangerous like race car driving bungee jumping all these things that we just allow them to do we don't think twice about it using a parachute all that crazy [ __ ] we just openly up saying hey we should ban skydiving there's no one saying that but [ __ ] a lot of people die skydiving man I mean it's it's a [ __ ] dangerous pursuit we don't seem to care we seem to care about drugs because we think that somehow or another either our children or someone we know is going to be insidiously infected with these things they're going to get into their lives and and [ __ ] them up you know and I think the real problem with that is education that's the real problem with that I was extremely fortunate in a weird way to see someone with a cocaine addiction when I was in high school was a good friend's cousin who got really [ __ ] up on cocaine when he was a couple years older than me and I watched his life fall apart and I remember thinking when I was little like wow I don't want to touch that [ __ ] like cocaine is [ __ ] terrible and then from then on I've never done cocaine but it's because of that education because of and I think real education is something it's a [ __ ] tough thing because you don't really just get it from knowing information you have to see things you have to talk to people you have to experience things in your own if someone talks about psychedelics someone teaches about psychedelics but they have no experience in actual psychedelic States personally it's a very hollow conversation it's like a certain amount of education has to be from real-life experience oh yeah absolutely and the other thing is just again this idea of pharmacological determinism like I had a friend that was very very very seriously addicted to cocaine and had the resources to do immense quantities every single day and he'd always say well you know if I try heroin I know it's all over for me I know that will be the last straw so I'm never touching that stuff and he didn't but my own perspective you know I've essentially tried everything and if you really just think about these things you can actually learn for example I've tried heroin once I didn't think was that interesting did you do it injecting no nor did I snorted a yeah yeah what was it like it was boring I think orange yeah I don't think opiates are very interesting drugs psychologically you know if I were to be totally honest I think the cannabis is more euphoric and has so few side effects you know opiates cause horrible constipation that cause all kinds of weird sweating problems I don't think they're especially Pleasant drugs but they romanticize so much in our culture that people think that's it heroin the ultimate high well maybe it isn't maybe it's not even that great at all maybe it's garbage and it doesn't even matter and that's the same way I feel about snorted cocaine I don't even think it's a good drug it's not an issue of it's so addictive you've got to stay away from it because it's so damn good it's not good it's not even an enjoyable high it has a short duration it you then feel bad almost immediately afterwards it's a flawed substance same is true of alcohol I think as well alcohol is a crazily flawed molecule it's terrible no other drug that I can think of causes a hangover of that type where there's a toxic metabolite that poisons you the following day dr. Karl Hart was trying to explain to me what that is and essentially he was saying that when you are getting a hangover it's your body reacting to the addictive properties of alcohol that you're getting addicted to alcohol almost almost immediately that your body is compensating for that and then these this this this hangover is not just you being dehydrated it's also your body withdrawing from alcohol I would I am not familiar with any evidence for that no yes dr. Corsi actually tried to in brilliant for him when I first moved he loved that guy yeah I have a lot of respect for him but I mean there's a I'd have to look at his source for that you'd have to also listen look at the way I described it because I probably butchered it okay but there's an alternate explanation that's even simpler which is simply that alcohol is metabolized into a chemical acetaldehyde that's toxic so and with alcohol it's a very very weak drug by weight you're consuming insane amounts in terms of the number of molecules you're in consuming insane quantities of the drug so all this acetaldehyde accumulates in your body and it has a directly toxic effect is there a way to counteract that and mitigate the effects yes there are proposed ways to do it I haven't experimented with any of them myself because they don't really like alcohol that much to begin with is in glutathione that's a that's something that allows your body to process it more easily it would have to be something that prevents this specific conversion I don't know off the top of my head a car what about crocodile you ever [ __ ] with that stuff well this is another perfect example so you take a drug like crocodile and it's it sounds horrible so the Internet's drugged you have fear drug yet people are but behind every scare story there's nothing if you blame what that is okay so there's a scare story that I believe it was in Moscow somewhere in Russia and it was hitting the news around 2004 no no much later 2000 10 something like that I don't know and and the idea was that this is the war stuff it's ultra addictive you inject it and then you lose a limb and you have profound necrosis all around the injection site and this is the worst drug most addictive drug of all time well the drug itself is called des Eaux morphine and it's been used medicinally there's nothing especially addictive or dangerous at all about des a morphine the problem is that people were injecting completely impure reaction mixtures that had all of the components from the synthesis that hadn't been removed including phosphorus which is immensely toxic so you have people basically reporting on IV phosphorous toxicity as if it were a result of this drug when it's a completely separate issue and this is what you see when you look at all of these things it's never the drug any drug scare story it's never the drug you always have to look for the root cause because it's never the drug there's never been a drug in history and that is why if you look at the DEA 's list of controlled substances it's not dangerous drugs that are controlled it's enjoyable drugs something like tetrodotoxin the chemical and pufferfish that's not a controlled substance there's some regulations in terms of how much you can purchase but it's not a controlled substance Sego toxin the most potent known neurotoxin it's not a controlled substance lead is in a controlled substance mercury is in a controlled substance mercuric chloride is in a controlled substance all of the deadly poisons cyanide is in a controlled substance it's not about what's safe and what's dangerous it's about what people like to use what's enjoyable what is the root of that I think it's you know a puritanical idea that that any sort of euphoria is bad and you forea is listed as a side effect in some medications we we assume that it's a bad thing diarrhea it's like euphoria diarrhea yeah yeah that is a strange thing like that's gonna it's gonna cut back productivity and make you a lazy near dwell and just become a burden on society that's that's a common way of describing people use drugs sure and this fundamental idea that sobriety is good yes you look on Instagram people post a selfie and say six months sober guys thank you so much and tons of congratulations because it's a virtue because you accomplish something you're not using drugs yeah whereas in other cultures that would not be the case people would just say oh you've decided not to work with a certain medicine that it's an interesting choice not an accomplishment no who was saying was it Kyle Kingsbury that was saying that how much he hates the term plant medicine or was it Dennis thing was tile you don't like the term plant medicine do I don't you well do you by there's a it's a weird sort of pretentious yes yes I know what people call ayahuasca the medicine or things like that yeah or tows medicine I mean I wouldn't you don't hate it I a lot of these like more flowery terms like entheogen and I just don't use them myself but I don't hate it well you're you know I think people like you were very important and I'm a big fan but I think one of the reasons why you're important is you are a cognoscenti of real drugs like you you understand what they actually do you could explain them to the layman or you could debate them with someone who was a doctor perhaps that wanted to you know to talk about the dangers of them and you understand all the various aspects of it and I think there's a tremendous amount of ignorance when it comes to drugs drug consumption what is a drug I mean how many times have you seen a person with a beer in their hand smoking a cigarette saying they don't do drugs it is so [ __ ] stupid but it's it's so common there is this very very very common aspect of being a person which is these desire to change your mental state and we've done it throughout history with various substances but there's so much stigma attached to it and one of the things I've been doing lately on stage I'll ask people how many people get pissed tested at work it's [ __ ] stunning it's stunning it's like more than 10% of the audience will raise the hand like 1 out of 10 people gets there their body tested to make sure that while they're not working there they're not putting anything in their body that's prohibited which is such a horrible invasion of privacy they you know that became so popular that in the 80s during one presidential election all the candidates voluntarily had their urine tested to prove that they were sober I mean this is like truly considered a virtue and it's immensely invasive I say this is someone who's analyzed my own urine in a laboratory before and it's like a strange portal into your own life that you're showing to a stranger everything that you've consumed is then apparent there yeah and it's incredibly it's a huge invasion of privacy that we've just decided is acceptable and you have to be very careful about these things yeah no I agree it's and of course the synthetic cannabinoid epidemic if you want to call it that I actually don't want to call it that because even the idea of a drug epidemic but the the popularity of synthetic cannabinoids is largely driven by the fact that they didn't show up on these urine tests so initially was in the military then it was people who are on parole or probation people who were living hard lives wanted to get high couldn't get high this was a way that they could do it and so they've incentivized people that just wanted to smoke weed using completely untested synthetic cannabinoids instead as a direct result of these urine tests well it's also just a complete misunderstanding it comes to the actual effects and how long they last you're not even testing a person's conscious state you're testing whether or not a person has altered their state of consciousness outside of their their working time you know it's not like you show up and they could scan your hand and realize that you're high on marijuana right now that's not what they're doing what they're doing is they're they're testing you for something that could linger in your body for weeks after these psychoactive effects of long since gone oh yeah or even be the result of passive exposure there was a great scientific article that came out a couple of years ago where they found that just passive exposure to cannabis smoke contaminates her hair with THC so that all these people who had hair tests who actually had not smoked cannabis but it sounds like an excuse I was just in the room someone else is doing it just being in contact with someone who'd smoked cannabis could then deposit THC in your hair and cause you to test positive so these tests aren't even necessarily reliable this is the same problem there is a kind of trend a little while ago if you saw about this where people would get their urine tested for different to quantify the levels of neurotransmitter metabolites in their urine and this was supposed to be like a fingerprint of your mood so they'd quantify the level of serotonin dopamine GABA whatever whatever whatever and then they'd say oh you're a little low on serotonin you're pretty depressed actually you need to supplement with some 5-htp or something like that it's a very reductive way of thinking about consciousness but the main issue is that you're not testing in your brain you're testing your urine and a lot of these neurotransmitters are bio synthesized in the periphery so just because you have these neurotransmitters in your urine doesn't mean they were ever in your brain it doesn't say anything about anything so it's just it's so juvenile in a way it says such a it's such a piss-poor way of maintaining order checking people's consciousness and making me what you should do is judge people based on the productivity if I have some guy and he shows up for work and he kicks ass every day I'm like dude what's your secret you know I get high before work it's great I feel good having a good time at work zip-a-dee-doo-dah Zippity day I'm putting everything in order and it just feels good like keep doing what you're doing that's how it should be we we should be judged based on whether or not whatever we're doing is I mean I guess the real caveat Tibet would be people that do speed oh yeah I mean you would get pretty productive for a short period of time doing speed but I think the downside of that there's so many people that are on adderall today right what are your feelings on that I think that it's a very interesting issue because it's amazing when you look at the history of all these things how these issues repeat themselves over and over and over again so it was a problem in the 50s and it's a problem in the 60s and it's a problem in the 70s now it's a problem now it's always a problem that we're treating as if it were a new thing but people have been using and fetta mean type stimulants for the better part of a hundred years and people will now the kind of popular thing to say is you know didn't you know adderall is one carbon atom away from meth but here's the flipside meth is one carbon away from adderall so this whole idea that meth again back to pharmacological determinism that meth is a drug that turns you into a toothless insane white-trash guy who's stabbing the walls of the cleaver looking for people that are hiding and whispering secret messages or something like that like this is just a stereotype that we have created of course there are people like that but the reality is that these stimulants have an ambiguous potential for all sorts of things some people use low doses of methamphetamine in fact methamphetamine is scheduled to because to this day it can be and is prescribed as a treatment for ADHD in addition to amphetamine which is adderall what do they call it when they prescribe it des auxin is the brand name for methamphetamines and adderall is the brand for amphetamines and their vet and I tried both drugs both amphetamine and methamphetamine and they're very very similar drugs and that's not to say that either are good or bad it's just a factual statement that if in a double-blind placebo-controlled or not even placebo control just a double-blind trial I don't think that I could it could GHD it could also help obese patients lose weight yeah did you know that um there's a lot of people that think Trump is on diet pills oh yeah yeah on a diet appropiate yeah right yeah and that he used to be on one of the one of the elements of Finn Finn Fenn Fenn Fenn Fenn Fenn flare I mean maybe yeah yeah phentermine well there was a some journalists that even talked about the dwight we saved this we have it on a folder now what do you say Jamie I've been hit up messages about that journalist oh he might be calm catches their sketchy or something yeah but even if he were on diethyl propane or then Fleur Amin or phentermine or fen metazine or any of these substances yeah so what well the question is is his judgment compromised because he's hopped up on speed his judgment seems compromised regardless but is that why no probably no you know I uh but it could be why he gets so much [ __ ] done I mean remember when during the your your you just don't want to compliment I mean I understand that no no that's not why it's again it's this idea there's a certain exculpatory value the drugs have people make the same arguments about Hitler like Hitler he was just high on speed that explains it the Nazis they were just high on speed that explains it but what value does it really have the same thing with Anthony Bourdain let's say oh no drugs were found in his system postmortem so what what if they had been then what well the idea is that he might have been experiencing a [ __ ] up state of mind because of some drug that made him make a poor choice and take his own life but you wouldn't know you wouldn't know why he did it is that what you're saying it wouldn't explain anything really because you still wouldn't know his internal state it would just be you're projecting an assumption so what if there were a small amount of heroin in his blood at the time of his death then you would assume that he had relapsed was so ashamed of his relapse that he then decided to kill himself by the reality is we can't make those sorts of assessments we don't know other people's internal states we don't even know what these things do to other people we don't but we do know that some things like abilify and some other SSRIs and even some anti-anxiety medication have been strongly linked to suicidal thoughts and in in fact there are actually listed as some side effects for a lot of these drugs yes don't you think that I mean I know correlation does not equal causation but don't you think that that's worth considering and it's something to be discussed it's worth considering but I would be careful about assigning too much value to it which is what people tend to do same thing with Columbine and they'll say oh he was on this without antidepressant that's why is it why does it really explain it because there's a hell of a lot of people to take those same drugs and don't kill all of their classmates right right for sure for sure but it also could be a factor and this is not something I think we should avoid considering I think it should be discussed yes I agree with you you know but I think we were trying to look at things binary right we're looking at things in terms of like on or off black or white 1 or 0 and I just don't think drugs work that way no and I think you agree yeah the speed thing is curious to me because one of the side effects of these drugs is impulsive irrational behavior and a extreme confidence in oneself oh yeah this is this is right this is what we always think of people that are hopped up on speed people that have coke confidence you know coke confidence is a real phenomenon what people do cocaine they feel very confident about themselves and they they say ridiculous [ __ ] to people so the question is is that really what's happening if they of I gave coke to you would you start acting irrationally and feeling extremely confident yourself or is it just accentuating a problem that already exists in the person's personality both probably yeah a combination of the two but the other thing is even if he has been using this stuff for decades he's probably tolerant to it and it's not I don't think it would explain his behavior well I think it's giving him energy he's been like this for so long know this I mean this is a long history of this sort of behavior this was what the journalist had talked about that he had been on this stuff for a long time and that there was a actual duane reade pharmacy in new york we described where he got the prescription filled people were doing the same thing with his finasteride as well though and I found that particularly obnoxious finasteride is falesha so they were saying oh he's on finasteride and that explains you know is a fare or that explains this because it does this or that to your libido and again it's like I don't know or not at all or let's give him some credit for being a human being with freewill that makes choices on his own that aren't entirely mediated by what Pharmaceuticals uses well for an asteroid also has side effects of depression and we went over this yesterday with my friend Ari who was really depressed at one point in time and it coincided with his use of finasteride right yeah I've seen but it's not very common it does occur but it's not uncommon right but for the person that does get those side effects saying that it's not common doesn't really offer any comfort no no okay call wag I'm one of the lucky ones yeah I'm one of the lucky ones was it jump off a bridge get my hair to grow back but you know the reason that I'm so opinionated about this particular issue is because you see a time and time again it never stops you know I don't know if you're familiar with the Geoffrey McDonald murder case no I'm super fascinating he'd probably have read about it and forgot about it was a big thing and maybe 1970 but he was this military doctor who's credentialed the perfect man did everything right perfect family everything beautiful and then one night he goes to sleep and claims that is right after the Manson murders claims that these hippies walk into the house saying kill the pigs acid is groovy kill the pigs acid is groovy and then just brutally Massacre his entire family and out of nowhere out of nowhere yes and and it's a long and complicated story but he went to prison I don't think that he is guilty but people had to find an explanation for wine you don't think he's guilty I don't think he's guilty he had no mode and there were and the investigation was botched and so you think someone came into his house and did that yes he was accused of yes but but because he had no motive people had to construct a motive that could concoct a reason that this doctor would have murdered his entire family and so what's a good reason oh and feta mean he'd been using this amphetamine containing diet pills so that explains it all right but it doesn't it's a terrible explanation people use him feta mean all the time without killing their family so I just want to be very careful about it you know do these things play a role in human behavior of course they do but do they determine human behavior no that's a very good point there's a lot of factors there's just it's messy being a person is messing it's very complicated I mean you're a different person at noon than you are at 7 p.m. of course yeah I mean it's just it's so complicated and the more limitations we put on research and the more stigma we put on the use of these things the more murky these waters are going to be yeah and I think people don't even appreciate the extent to which all these drugs have been made illegal of course everyone's where cannabis is scheduled on LSD psilocybin MDMA but the list is long it's hundreds and hundreds of chemicals and a lot of these chemicals are chemicals with no supporters no one's fighting for them there's a substance called 2cn one of Sheldon's creations they just threw it in schedule and no one uses it if you scour the internet I'd be surprised if you could find three reports of people using 2cn totally unheard of but they just throw it in schedule one because why the hell not no one's gonna stand up for it that's the end of 2cn but they miss a lot of [ __ ] too right like they miss five methoxy dimethyltryptamine they missed that no that was made illegal in 2011 right but yeah for 1970 when everything else got thrown into the mix they made it illegal I bought that [ __ ] used to be able to buy it online yeah so did I yeah I was crazy you could buy a [ __ ] jug of it then get the whole city hi yeah bye it'll online yeah because it was never popular so how do they make it illegal how do they how do they do that they don't need any reason they can simply say that it has abuse potential and make it illegal and if no one opposes it then it becomes illegal that's how this list has gotten so long you have all these people fighting for the legality of cannabis and these other substances that are known to have therapeutic potential but these other more obscure substances that are really only a concern to scientists who are very seriously disinclined to break the law for the sake of their research drug users don't care about breaking law scientists are very unlikely because the whole purpose of science is to publish and you can't publish if you committed a crime in the context of your research so scientists are dramatically limited by the prohibition of these substances and it's the obscure ones that end up actually making a big difference not so much clinically but in terms of actually understanding the mechanism of these substances the structure-activity relationships the neuropharmacology yeah the stigma on psychedelic you and in even studying them has led so many doctors or scientists researchers that would be inclined to want to do research on these particular things they avoid them because it could be incredibly damaging to their careers and it's bureaucratic I mean there was a group at Columbia that was doing really fascinating research on the drug ibogaine and Parkinson's disease and the I was speaking with the head of the study and he was saying how obnoxious it was to have the government common way his vial of ibogaine every day and monitor his logs and you know this guy is a really serious researcher he's not gonna if you were to get high he's not gonna get high off this tiny supply of government mandated or government sanctioned ibogaine right that was supplied to him but but they give these people a really hard time they make them buy a very expensive safe they do all this stuff that these are the last people to abuse the substances it's and they are the ones that are hurt the most severely except for of course the people to go to prison they're the ones that are hurt the most severely yeah it's a crazy thing to think that people are gonna recreationally use IVA gain that's that's one of the weirder ones oh it's it's totally bizarre yeah and and ibogaine is a drug with so much potential for those people that are aware of ibogaine it's typically only discussed as a drug that treats addiction to opioids which is very very important especially now but that's the tip of the iceberg with ibogaine it has one of the most complex pharmacology of any drug I've ever studied there's almost nothing it does not do I mean it's you know you have the alpha 3 beta for nicotine ik acetylcholine receptor which is also the target of wellbutrin and has a kind of smoking cessation anti addictive effect then you have really high affinity relative to the other receptors for the NMDA receptor so it has a ketamine type effect and has a classical psychedelic effect at the 5-htt to a receptor then it's a dopamine reuptake inhibitor serotonin reuptake inhibitor it's screws goes on and then it releases this protein GD n F which is considered one of the most important proteins in treatment of Parkinson's disease it's one of the only things that is able to cause regrowth of dopaminergic neurons and people that have parkinson's so this is like really fascinating stuff that's just in schedule 1 scientists can't work with it is a tragedy it is a tragedy and it's also so effective I know so many people that have gone to Mexico and gone to these clinics and done one ibogaine session for 24 hours and come out of it a totally different person come out of with with a complete new perspective on even why they were using whatever they were using in the first place in a way that they didn't it not only is it helped eliminate the addictive properties and the connection that your body has to those substances but it also allows you to re-examine why you went down that road in the first place yeah oh yeah and there you know there was a sort of pharmaceutical push to develop non psychedelic derivatives of ibogaine that would retain the anti addictive properties which sounds like a good idea in theory but so they created this drug called 18m C and it wasn't psychedelic but then it also lacked some of these neurotrophins ive ibogaine but really the bottom line is that we shouldn't deny the fact that the psychedelic activity of these substances is therapeutic psychotherapeutic in and of itself you know I had a friend who was severely severely addicted to heroin and he traveled to the Netherlands to take ibogaine and you know took the drug was going into the experience and started feeling this intense craving for heroin and it started looking through his bags to see if he'd somehow put a little had forgotten about a little bit of heroin that could just get him through the day and then he he goes into his bag and and then finds a small bag of heroin and snorts it and then is like I traveled all the way to the Netherlands to do this this was I'm a failure I'm relapsing after all this money all this work I have no self-control I'm a terrible terrible person why can't I just stop and then realize that the whole thing was a hallucination there was no heroin he'd hallucinate Adhir own relapse whoa Wow what was your experience with ibogaine I've never taken high doses the most I've ever taken is 50 milligrams of listen effective dose it really depends there's a sort of move toward micro dosing ibogaine because it actually does have a cardiotoxic effect especially at higher doses so people are looking into ways of reducing that cardio toxicity by using it at lower doses for longer periods of time again this is something that has to do with prohibition because in a this prohibition market if you are addicted to heroin you go to Mexico or you go to Canada and you go to an ibogaine clinic you need to get as much bang for your buck as quickly as possible you're not going to stay there for two months of treatment because most people have lives and can't afford to do that so what do you do they give you what is called a flood dose it's a massive dose often a multi gram dose of ibogaine because it's just like a sledgehammer that knocks you down and allows you to get out of it but is that the best way that's the fastest way that's the most appetizing way for someone that had to travel to do it but is it the best probably not because we know that it high doses it has this potential to induce cardiac arrhythmias and that can kill and has killed so people are yet now looking at lower doses over longer periods of time which would be ideal if it were legal in the United States I believe mm-hmm yeah that's it's a really interesting one to me it's a it's a really interesting one because it's got such a long history of use and so many people have had these very good experiences with getting off of addictive drugs from it oh yeah and it's so relatively unknown as well it's it's something that you know talk to someone like you and of course you know about it but I mean I bet if we walk down the street and asked a hundred people I'd be shocked if one of them knew about it yeah and you know Terence Mckenna would sometimes talk about psilocybin as an invention of mushrooms or as technology or as being synthetic and I don't really agree with that idea but an invention of mushrooms or you would sort of say like this is as synthetic as a coca-cola bottle this is like alien technology that's how you would describe psilocybin but in my opinion in its you know it's a pretty simple derivative of tryptophan you just decarboxylate methylate the nitrogen twice and then had this phosphate ester but but ibogaine that's a crazy molecule that's like a three-dimensional thing that no medicinal chemist would have ever discovered that if there's you know not to sound mystical but that strikes me as some sort of plant technology I mean it's an amazingly complicated structure it's so complicated that it's almost impossible to synthesize in fact it can't be synthesized commercially all the ibogaine that people use has to be extracted from plants because that's the only way to get it Wow I first found out about it when when Hunter s Thompson accused Edie muskie of being on it during the presidential race of was at 1970 or whatever it was that was a hilarious moment and a lot of people I think were introduced to what ibogaine was by that when he said a Brazilian witch doctor had been flown in it doesn't even grow in Brazil yeah it doesn't even make sense well it's also it was hilarious when he was on the Dick Cavett show and they asked him about spreading those rumors and he's like well there was a rumor that he was doing this ibogaine and I know because I started the rumor ha ha ha I just reported factually there was a rumor yeah it's there's there's a lot of these drugs that get put into various categories and ibogaine is one of the very few that really isn't in any category in terms of like modern culture like the way we discuss and consider these things oh because it's very different structurally and Formica logically but that Hunter has Thompson story is really interesting because it's obviously a very charming funny story and I'd have to know exactly when it happened relative to the scheduling of ibogaine but that might be an example of how what's a you know frivolous joke that most people enjoy told in the wrong climate can result in the loss of a chemical that could be good that could save tens of thousands of lives and could be a treatment for part since disease hmm you know this is the responsibility that journalists have it's more responsibility than I think they'd like to have often but that's the truth you make a joke about ibogaine next thing you know it's in schedule one maybe he made the joke afterwards but if he didn't you have to wonder because that was one of the first major mentions of ibogaine in the popular press and the same is true of you know there was a Rolling Stone scare article that came out a while ago and it's same deal this drug to ct7 and they do a whole story oh this teenager he took too much and this too ct7 it can kill you with just a you know a little pile of powder or whatever and and then the drug is made schedule one shelgon worked on psychedelics alexander shulgin great medicinal chemists who spent his entire life studying psychedelics considered this one of the six greatest creations of his entire career squashed by a single stupid story in Rolling Stone that's how easily it happens now was the story stupid I mean did it have any basis in fact an editor at rolling stone told me that there were factual errors in it and there's something weird about it but yes people did die because yes people die from using drugs occasionally to deny that would be to lie but that doesn't mean that they don't have therapeutic activity and it doesn't mean that they should be illegal one of the ones that disturbs me the most is fentanyl fentanyl just I don't even understand why anybody would want to make that it seems to me that we have no any of opiates as it is why make one that's a thousand times stronger than heroin yeah I've known for fentanyl chemists including the one that introduced fentanyl to the United States initially he died recently did he die from it no died of all day it just killed so many people yeah Tom Petty David Boies it was Bowie one I'm not sure prints yeah I mean there's quite a few great people that we've lost to this stuff yeah it's really it's unfortunate but again fentanyl is not the problem the problem people taking problems people taking it and the problem is lack of access to say for opioids and lack of education surrounding fentanyl because it doesn't even really have desirable properties you know one thing that people always talk about the potent the offense and one thing that they don't often talk about is the duration it's a very very short duration opioid which necessitates compulsive constant Rideau Singh if you're addicted to fentanyl unless you're doing a transdermal patch or something like that you typically can't make it through a single night without having to reduce because the duration is so short that's why it's always done in these prolonged release formulations like a lollipop that you sock or a patch but anyway it's yet it's not a drug that's well suited to street use it's to the therapeutic index is to narrow its duration is to short it has a medical purpose that it works very well for it shouldn't be used as a heroin replacement but the economic reality is that you have to make heroin from opium opium ask that come from a place where poppies are grown that's a whole process whereas fentanyl can be made by one guy somewhere and the profit margin on the fentanyl is so much greater that there's an enormous economic incentive and the first chemist this guy that was sort of a friend of mine that died to do it considered it a good thing to do that's the complexity that you have to recognize it's so easy to say that all these people are so bad but often you don't know what's gonna happen until it happens his idea was that one of the major burdens of being addicted to heroin is that you can't afford it it's really expensive so by substituting this relatively inexpensive material the price of heroin would go down this financial burden associated with opioid addiction would be reduced it would actually improve the quality of life of the users and it could even be a more pure potentially safer material if you look at certain literature of course that's not what happened and many people died and he went to prison as a result of it did he really yes why did he go to prison for it because people died and it was traced back to him Wow yeah so he wasn't doing this in any sanctioned know he was in clandestine chemist his name was George Marquardt weird guy yeah I guess yeah but anyway you know you just don't know you don't know what's going to happen until it happens you know of course the legendary story that heroin was introduced by Bayer as an addictive alternative to morphine they probably did think that was the case at the beginning but history has shown that that is not the case that's one of the problems with introducing any drug to a large population you simply don't know it's and it's also one of the things that I find most interesting in and perhaps a silver lining in this whole synthetic cannabinoid narrative that's been playing out over the last decade is you could say oh it's terrible people should just smoke cannabis but we're learning so much about what cannabinoid receptor agonists can do that we would have never learned if it weren't for the widespread use of synthetic cannabinoids I mean just for instance that it is possible for high potencies cannabinoid receptor agonists to kill you that's a big one we didn't know that until recently that they can be addictive we didn't know that what are they using what is it it's so it's an impressively diverse array of chemicals you know it started out with a drug called CP 55 940 then it was CP they call it cannabis I Clos hexanol now and then J WH 18 j wh 73 j wh 210 on and on and on and on and then it just branched like a giant cannabinoid fractal in every imaginal imaginable direction and in a lot of these compounds you know they were patented by various pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer for therapeutic purposes again this wasn't some malevolent chemists whose cackling and saying ha ha ha I figured out the most addictive thing possible they were just looking to see what's legal what looks pretty potent and reasonably safe okay we'll make that we'll sell it and and I've spoken with the chemists actually we're behind a lot of these operations again not bad guys necessarily they they you know typically people don't want to hurt other people you know genuine villainous people are pretty rare in my experience most people believe that what they're doing has a justification that is good and again with the synthetic cannabinoid ideas one is that although you won't hear this in the popular press and it's rarely said they can be very enjoyable and it would be dishonest to say otherwise some of them are very euphoric and compared favorably to cannabis and in certain measures might even be superior that as a they're safer it just means that there's something very desirable about them and if you deny that then you neglect to understand why people use them in the first place which is that they make you feel good so that's part of it but then the other thing is that urine testing people wanting to be able to get high without breaking the law low cost I mean there's a lot of motivations for doing this and as it played out people died people became addicted and random things that no one would have ever expected occurred we learned here's another silver lining I'm sure you're familiar with cannabis hyperemesis syndrome no not you know this this bizarre pattern that certain people that smoke all day every day it started showing up in the medical literature about a decade ago people smoked all day every day and they start getting very very nauseous and start vomiting and the only thing that can relieve the vomiting is a hot shower huh so really weird so all these people are showing up in emergency rooms when they like run out of hot water saying like I need some kind of I need some help or something like I don't know what's going on the condition resolves itself very rapidly as soon as you stop smoking cannabis so it's not hard to treat you just can't smoke weed anymore but no one knew what caused it and why it was happening now after thousands of years of human cannabis interaction why now for the first time in history and the answer is that people are smoking more weed now than ever before you know the levels of THC ingestion with dabbing and high potency strains are just higher for some people it's much higher than has ever been in the past but but then the question is what is causing it is it the cannabis itself is it a fertilizer is it a pesticide what is responsible for this and it wasn't until people with using synthetic cannabinoids began to experience the same constellation of symptoms that they realized that this is an intrinsic property of certain cannabinoid receptor agonists so that's something that you can learn from all of this that it wasn't pesticides and it wasn't some kind of fungus or something like that growing on the plant but this is something that happens from prolonged high dose use of cannabinoids and there's all sorts of other lessons that can be learned is that an issue with cannabis use pesticides have you ever heard of people having real most historically it was certainly you know paraquat pot did you ever you know what's not paraquat was uh you know in one of many misguided attempts to prevent people from using drugs they started spraying all the cannabis it was grown in mexico with this ultra toxic herbicide called paraquat and this is a drug that induces parkinson's disease when you're exposed to it like really seriously nasty stuff no joke and so the idea was if we poison all the cannabis and create this widespread fear that whatever you're smoking might contain paraquat maybe people will use it less and luckily paraquat is doesn't have a lot of thermo Stability it's sort of denatured by the heat of smoking so it's argued that people were not actually exposed to it who smoked it but still this is a horrendous thing for the government to have done they did the same thing during alcohol prohibition by the way that would poison alcohol I mean that's the extent they'll poison people to prevent them from getting high but that's a reality but but now in turn you know it there's obviously a move toward organic gardening people using you know neem oil and things like that so I wouldn't know oh and there was the other was actually a big controversy in Colorado with a pesticide called Mike clove butanol I believe that was used and potentially could release cyanide when smoked so yeah yeah well I would worry about that with large-scale production things become commercially viable the point where someone like r.j. Reynolds gets into the mix and starts growing enormous marijuana plantations oh yeah I mean it's a concern with all the food that we eat as well of course yeah what is interesting to you now like is there anything that's coming up or some new thing that people are might not be aware of that might be fascinating to you yeah I mean I'm I'm I'm interested in everything you know I love the history I love you know I did a piece in this last season of my TV show where I trace the history of psychedelic totem of five Meo DMT containing toad venom because people this idea that all psychedelics have been used for thousands of years that every psychedelic has an ancient history but when you look at the history of five Meo DMT there is no evidence really no convincing evidence that I'm aware of maybe you can point to it you know ceramic toad is that evidence that people smoked toad venom not in my opinion it might be some indication that maybe they did but it's certainly not hard evidence even if there were this guy sitting on his back smoking a pipe it wouldn't be hard evidence mmm but anyway so there isn't convincing evidence as far as I'm concerned of ancient toad venom use so then the question is when did it start who was the first person to do this and I I love these little historical investigations to get to the bottom who is the first person to synthesize this drug what were their intentions who is the first person to smoke toad venom and why in the toad venom is a weird one - because this is bizarre misconception that you lick the toads right which again journalistically produced maybe was inspired by cartoons as well to some extent but I yes so the way you do it is you have to get the toad to excrete whatever this is and you put it on glass and then you dry it out is that the idea that's the idea yes and then you scrape it off with a razor blade and then smoke it that's it and does it come is it a pure form of five amino DMT no and there's actually very little chemical analysis that's been done in the 21st century I analyzed a sample that I collected when I was in Sonora and it contained in addition to five Meo DMT it contains some interesting serotonin derivatives including serotonin Oh sulfate and nobody knows how these different tryptamine components as well as these steroidal lactones that are sometimes called Bufo tox and contribute to the experience if I had to guess probably not that much but maybe there's a little bit of that sort of entourage effect that you get with almost any plant that has a variety of different alkaloids that might inhibit certain enzymes or do this or that but it's about 15% according to the older literature the analysis that I did wasn't quantitative so I don't know exactly what the concentration was but it's somewhere in that region and I'm sure it depends on whether the toad has been milked previously in all these other variables does the experience mirror taking synthetic 5mm dmt I haven't tried I've tried synthetic five Meo DMT a couple times have tried bufo alvarius venom once at a low dose once at a high dose they were all different but then everything is different mushrooms are different every time I take them you know it's really hard once you start explaining a different experience based on the composition of the material because how do you assign it to the dose or the minut number of different tryptamines that are also present it's really hard to say but you know I think that there is a strong argument to be made for using the synthetic as opposed to the toad drive material simply because you don't have to harm or hurt not that it necessarily does harm toads but you don't even have to risk it right right and it's easy to synthesize yeah I'm sure toads aren't into getting rubbed on windshields yeah seems like a annoying day for a toad yeah yeah they want to eat insects yeah whatever the [ __ ] they do one of the more interesting stories out of the last decade or so was this story that I read about these scholars in Jerusalem that were connecting the story of Moses in the burning bush to the acacia bush and the Keysha tree which is rich in DMT and they believed that you know when you're talking about a story that was told through oral traditions for who knows how many years and then written down in ancient Hebrew and then transcribed and you know and translated to Greek and Latin and all these day there's a lot lost in the mix and they believed that what that story might have been about of Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the the tablets and having the experience with meeting God and the burning bush that what this is in fact was a dimethyltryptamine experience maybe yeah it's a big maybe it's a big maybe I can say that if you go to the south of Mexico and Chiapas there's a tree that grows there is a weed called mimosa hostilius maybe you're familiar with it and this is so abundant that it's used to make fence posts all the fences on the side of the road are made of mosul hostel as its uses firewood to cook meals the air smells like DMT because people are using it as fuel all over the place not a single person that I spoke with was aware that it was psychoactive these are people that are burning it all the time do they get high from it is there like if you were in a tent or something like that you were doing a hotbox sort of scenario would you get high from it no I saw no would you it may be it's about 2% DMT so you'd probably have to get so sick from big coughing and yeah it would be a very I mean even just smoking pure crystal DMT can be very difficult for some people so my guess not to be like a wet blanket but my guess is not really and that's a very strong source as strong as maybe there's a some acacia is stronger but that's certainly comparable and that's something people are using to cook food all the time they're not aware that it's psychoactive so was there a way or is there a way for a person living thousands of years ago to somehow or another extract DMT from something like the acacia tree that's a actually spent some time thinking about that a while ago it would be first of all depends on how you define extraction if it were to in like an ayahuasca sends like a tea of course yes but then they would need some sort of enzyme inhibitor to create the ayahuasca if it were to create an isolated smokeable form again you know you could just do like an aqueous infusion and then dry that out and maybe smoke that but in terms of like a real extraction that would produce crystals of DMT I don't know what the nonpolar solvent they would be using to extract the freebase would be like butter or something and then how would you get rid of the butter so what is the process like if you're gonna take a tree that's rich in DMT and extract DMT from it what what do you have to use have you ever done it before no I've never done it oh okay well it's it's a very generalizable and simple process that applies to almost everything in chemistry it's you know sometimes it's called an acid base extraction most people that are in the DMT community go something they call straight to base and you know the idea is that the sidechain of the DMT molecule contains a basic nitrogen that if it's protonated in an acidic solution then it's water soluble and if it's deprotonated then it's only soluble in a non-polar solvent so what you do is you just deprotonate the nitrogen with a base potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide typically and then treat that aqueous basic solution with a non-polar solvent like naphtha and isolate the naphtha dry it out and you have your material and that applies to everything that's not a DMT specific process but that's what people do hmm everything with the basic nitrogen now what's the earliest history of extraction do we well you know the first wave of DMT use in the United States was all synthetic in fact DMT was discovered synthetically before it was ever found in nature the same is true of five Meo DM how'd they do that there was a Canadian chemist named Richard Hellmuth Manske who I believe is looking at different alkaloids in strawberry plants and he was synthesizing references for these potential strawberry alkaloids and made DMT so he didn't know what he had made other than a potential natural product found in strong and and then it wasn't until saara much later conducted self experiments with injected DMT that people became fully aware of its psycho activity and then people started finding it in plants I mean the the nineteen fifties were like I've and early sixties were of course a fascinating time in psychedelic research because you have these convergences of these amazing ideas first you have the discovery of serotonin which is like you know we take this for granted now it's in television commercials but this is of course something that no one knew about and suddenly they're finding this in all kinds of different animals initially it was in the the salivary glands of squid and in different animals than they're finding it in the human intestine then they're also finding that all of these plants that people worshipped in various indigenous societies also contain serotonin like molecules and they discover LSD and find that that's maybe the most potent known pharmacological agent at that time and it binds to serotonin receptors it activates a serotonin type response in isolated tissue so there's like this weird triple convergence of information super potent amazing compound LSD is discovered serotonin is discovered in all these different organisms and there's a pharmacological convergence between the two of them and then you have all these people worshipping serotonin like molecules so there was you know a lot of enthusiasm at that time to figure all this out so in terms of history so we're talking about like somewhere in the 1950s they started extracting DMT the use of it orally dates back far longer than that because of use of mao inhibitors and creating ayahuasca but in terms of the first extraction we can kind of iceland's yeah smoke yeah it might have been even later it might have been in the 80s okay so the idea that people thousands of years ago we're able to do something along those lines is probably probably not accurate because because they're talking about a burning bush that's why it's appealing to people right the idea of Moses do you do you think that maybe the understanding of synthesis from the you know synthesizing this from these scholars maybe they don't have enough of an understanding of chemistry well what would be really interesting is to do an experiment to see what were the materials that were available how would this have been done would you have to use butter as your nonpolar solvent how well would that work what would your butter preparation be done where you put it would you take it rectally then is that how it would work I mean you have to kind of load your base have been well I think they were talking about it being something from I mean burning right a burning bush maybe it's just one of those things that sort of gets conflated right because you have people today that are very aware that people smoked DMT and have these incredibly Tent intense religious psychedelic experiences and then maybe they looked at the acacia bush and said oh the acacia bush is rich in DMT that's probably where the Moses story came from right well what's really interesting is you know DMT has never been found in the human brain even though Rick Strassman says that it has been so a lot of people are constantly assigning altered states of consciousness to DMT but we can have these states without DMT I mean maybe it's never been found in the human brain but also there's ethical and experimental issues with sampling fluid from a living humans brain right but it has they have found it in living rats okay this is fairly recently yes this is a con Wood Research Foundation that's their their attempt is to try to prove that the pineal gland is a source for DMT we know that DMT exists in the human body we know that the liver produces it and we know that the lungs produce it yeah we're not totally aware of whether or not there's anecdotal evidence that points to the pineal gland based on the rat idea and based on the presence of certain enzymes that could be responsible for it but even if it is even if it is then what there's still a whole question of how is it released how is it distributed what receptors does it activate and is it even necessary as an explanation for altered states of consciousness because there other things in the brain other than DMT DMT has never even been found in the room but there are other things you know you have endogenous proteins that bind to the Kappa opioid receptor the same receptor that is responsible for the effect of Salvia things like that they agree are responsible I mean even carbon dioxide itself can induce a pretty strong altered state of consciousness right which is why people like those psychedelic breathing exercises yeah they're sort of is it like hypoxic is that what it is what are they doing when they they have those the what is it called there's a type of breathing exercise that induces psychedelic states holotropic College rhetoric yeah and that is the idea behind that right it increases the amount of carbon dioxide in your blood I haven't seen a mechanistic explanation hmm yeah I think that was but it would yeah it would make sense in an early LSD psychotherapy one of the things that they would do before giving someone LSD is it give them something called carbage in' which was a gas that contained carbon dioxide and they would look at their response to the carbon dioxide inhalation and if it induced a panic response they would say maybe you're not psychologically ready for this LSD experience so that was you're talking about a test I mean that was a very primitive early test that was used by psychiatrists to see if people were had the psychological fortitude to withstand the experience that's fascinating so tell me more about whatever is in the brain that mirrors the effects of salvia it's a protein I can't remember off the top of my head what it it's if you look up endogenous ligand for cap opioid receptor it will come up David Nicholls recently wrote a paper that actually goes into alternate mechanisms of how the DMT type near-death experience could be produced by non DMT compounds but I mean you know there was a lot of work also on endogenous NMDA receptor antagonists there was a a protein that was called alpha endo psycho sin or angel Dustin named after angel dust but the main researcher died in a car accident like right as he was making some kind of breakthrough breakthrough supposedly mmm but cue spooky music yeah but you know there's all this has been a long-standing question in psychiatry is you know what causes psychosis what causes altered states of consciousness is there an endogenous psychedelic that was like one of the major motivations for a lot of this research in the 60s finding the endogenous psychology that is responsible for schizophrenia now it doesn't seem to be the case but it's still a question that comes up what if dopamine is methylated in a certain way to create diamond thoughts even ethylamine or what about this what about that I mean Sheldon was very interested in it about the metabolic production of various psychedelics that account for altered states of consciousness it just hasn't been supported by evidence in a very strong way even though people really find the idea compelling and there was also that v of Mayo DMT and schizophrenic people see Aaron that's also the thing right and the we know that the body does produce five Meo DMT we just don't know where yet because again it's like what I was saying earlier about the the depression tests where you look at your urine so you find five Meo DMT in your urine and your first assumption might be okay there's five Emil DMT in my body it was in my brain but you don't know that right it could have been biosynthesized in your intestine and it could have been excreted without ever entering your brain right and this is the whole idea of mono amine oxidase right the idea that when we're eating things that are rich in DMT monoamine oxidase is breaking it down the gut yeah so even if you're consuming something so if something is so how do they know that this this salvia like substance exists in the mind or in the brain rather because this this peptide or protein has been isolated do you find the name of it oh okay how I caught four of those words you said so we know there's a host of different psychoactive substance that are absolutely produced by the body and in in in the MA in the brain and that there's different ways that human beings have been able to achieve psychedelic states side of consuming drugs have you done that I've done lucid dreaming things I've done Kundalini Yoga Kundalini one is the one I'm most interested in because I have someone who's a friend of mine that got really into it and he was saying that he can achieve very DMT like states you know there's a really interesting aspect of all this that isn't often discussed which is the ability to have these states and still interact with your environment because of course there's something very physically taxing about Breath of Fire or these Kundalini breathing techniques if you induce an altered state of consciousness and you need to be focused and you need to be in a specific place sitting down whereas psychedelics have this amazing ability to allow you to have that experience but walk around hmm and I think that's not to be underestimated the walking around because then you can really re-examine your environment that's a big part of it for me a big part of the psychedelic experience is seeing what is New York like what do I like or not like about New York what do I like or not like about my apartment because it matters things matter this is your environment do you want you surrounded by clutter that you don't like if you don't get rid of it right these are the sorts of thoughts you have and this is my other issue with going to the Peruvian Amazon to have a psychedelic experience because if you do it in this place that is superficially inappropriate like your apartment I think it has the most applicability to your own existence in terms of the music you listen to your friends your environment your life you're confronted by the books that you read the photos of the people that you know all the things that matter to you not a jungle although jungles are very beautiful and visually stimulating and I'm sure then are I know an amazing place to use psychedelics I think that we underestimate the value of these things have when integrated into a more normal type of experience and that's something you can't do as easily with Kundalini right right that makes sense so when you're using psychedelics you will use them and walk around New York City yes what is that like I often feel a lot of love for Barilla yeah which is you know because I think that we also tend to get into these very angry Subway's annoying the guys taking up too much room I have to stand it's taking forever it smells weird whatever everyone is looking at their phones all the time which is a little bit dark and then you know if you're on a low dose of a psychedelic or even a higher one sometimes I look at everyone on their phones and I'll just feel compassion and love and think like what a strange situation we've all gotten ourselves into I love all these people and it's like I don't know what to say about it but I understand it completely and I don't know where we're going from here and you suddenly feel connected to something that's very real which is people in the subway not looking at each other anymore yeah I mean this is in my own life something that has changed dramatically when I moved to New York no one looked at phones now people only look at phones everyone is looking at phones the entire time they're on the subway this is it total change in human behavior and you really start thinking about things like that and it matters because it's not in the Amazon it's your life and these are the things the choices that you make are you gonna be a person that looks at their phone all the time as well yeah it's fascinating how quickly that took hold yeah if you look at human history when the iPhone is ten years old I know and that's really when it started so ten years ago people and even then in the beginning of the iPhone they were [ __ ] useless right you'd get online it was just really slow and terrible and so most the time you just text message it but now with all the apps and social media and constant constant updates of information and new things and new events new trends it's just it's always calling you I better check make sure anything's - we've been on this podcast for two hours let me see what's going on oh look at that all these massive you did it to me actually I have this this vivid memory of standing at your front door and you selling Twitter to me saying like oh you've got it you've got to use Twitter it's amazing people send all send you all these articles and it's so useful you learn so much it's really amazing said it only had one tweet at that time and now it's like twenty-five hundred tweets later and hundreds of hours of my life I'll never come sorry I got ya I got ya it is that way still for me in many ways I learn a lot about what's going on in the world in terms I follow a lot of science tweets Twitter counts and a lot of really interesting people that post interesting stuff but you gotta know how to abandon a tweet several words in like this is [ __ ] I'm not reading that no I'm not reading that Oh what can they do now it reads are too long this is crazy no it's not even that it's just knowing that it's gonna be horseshit this is gonna be just either gossip or nonsense or not interesting but there's still a [ __ ] ton of really useful information that you can get out of Twitter on a daily basis there's always something new that's coming out and I try to retweet those things as much as possible when I see something that someone sends me and then that becomes people know hey if you send Joe something really cool and he reads it if I get a chance to read it I'll retweet it and people get a kick out of that so they'll send me more cool stuff and so then it sort of it's it sort of becomes a like a little ecosystem almost for disseminating interesting ideas yeah let's also [ __ ] - there's a lot of [ __ ] in there a lot of a lot of arguing which I don't do I just don't argue I think it's a very ineffective way to communicate with people with you know going back and forth with stuff like that online it just doesn't work well it's and it becomes I think more like idea sport with a lot of folks like they're just trying to win these little battles and find the witty or nasty thing to say and it's just it's not productive it's not healthy I don't like it well they're doing the same thing the journalists do which is that you get more attention for doing the wrong thing than you do for saying the right thing so and we all know that feeling where someone says something about you that's unfair and wrong and you want to say hey wait a second how's that that is totally incorrect I'm gonna set the record straight yeah and that's what gets the engagement not the kind thoughtful considerate thing that somebody says yes yes I would love to accentuate the trend of kindness I really think that that is one thing if there's any one trend and to lean towards kindness to just just be nicer to people and if we could all sort of agree that this is a virtue worth pursuing I think we could change the way human beings interact with each other these shifts like the shift of looking at your phone if we could figure out a shift and one of the more disturbing things to me that comes from the left which I've always associated myself being a left-leaning person that there's a lot of meanness coming from the left now and so a lot of lot of by any means necessary a lot of feeling the need to squash people and humiliate people and insult people because they don't agree with what you believe and that this this is a I think this is a terrible path to go down because then it sort of justifies people who think the opposite of that to be mean to you so now no one's getting anything done because this sides being insulting and that sides being insulting and people are getting kicked out of restaurants and people are protesting in front of people's houses because they disagree with things and this is a lot of cruelty a lot of like meanness and cruelty which is the enemy of discourse as soon as that stuff gets thrown about and soon as it becomes a war an idea war or an idea sport people are just trying to win and they're trying to get back at you for what you said and you get back at them for that and it becomes this terrible stall out situation yeah we've all bought into a game and it's a bad game to play it's the worst possible game and it's very transparent I mean you look at what shows up on the first page of Twitter and it's things that are perfectly designed to generate opinions so the teacher says that now classrooms will be equipped with a bucket of stones to throw at a school shooter and what do you feel oh that's stupid or hey that's actually kind of a good idea it's better than nothing and everyone's engaging with it and you're buying into it you're supporting it and you're promoting it you're making it bigger by paying attention to it I mean there's an amazing book that I recommend anyone listening to this read called amusing ourselves to death by Neil postman which he wrote in 1985 before computers before social media before any of this he predicts all of it perfectly without even knowing the faintest hint of what was going to happen and you know his solution if there is one is you know partially to disengage from all of this but to try to appreciate long nuanced careful things which is very hard to achieve on Twitter or television or most places we can try our best well I think that's one of the reasons why podcasts like especially ones like this that are these long-form conversations are becoming popular because people are hungry for actual communication they're hungry for people that are just even if we disagree on things I want to know why you think the way you think and I want to hear it all I want to hear all of your reasoning I want to hear the thought process that led you to that I want to hear that and I want to be able to talk to you about how I think and why I think the way I think and maybe we can come to some middle ground or at least understand each other and go oh I see where you went or I see why you do I see what's happening inside your mind or the way you feel or how it relates to your life this is absent in most discourse on television it's absent in all talk shows it's like what we're talking about that the oddness of a panel show I mean they're so bizarre it doesn't make any sense that none of it it's not how human beings interact with each other do you imagine if every conversation you had in your life there was an audience clapping or wooing at everything you said you'd I mean it creates this sort of fake way of communication that has become so commonplace with us you just even the way they sit sitting next to each other like this like we're not looking at each other I would be sitting over here and you'd be at the desk and I believe well Hamilton funny you bring that up but you know and then look at the crowd it's just it's it's alien I mean it's really weird and I think because of the fact that people are so addicted to their phones and addicted to media and this constant influx of this loop of information and mean if you watch the news they can't just give you the [ __ ] news you have to get that scroll on the bottom of other [ __ ] that you should be freaking out about it's like the news itself snot enough know you have to know about terrorist attacks and [ __ ] Isis and some new flu that can't be cured and it's all scroll on the bottom while you're watching other shed we this is not how human beings are designed we're designed to talk we're designed to communicate with each other person to person this is what we're good at this is what we're we've lost and the one thing that has probably led to more people understanding more about each other the actual conversations is rare which is really weird you're it's way more common for someone to look at their phone for 10 hours a day than it is for someone to have a one-on-one uninterrupted conversation with someone for an hour those don't exist they exist with lovers that's it with lovers and occasionally with did if you have polite dinner companions that put their phone down and just drink a glass of wine and talk to you about stuff but even then people suck at it people are it's almost like people forgot how to do it they talk over each other they don't listen to each other when the other person is talking they're just waiting their turn and talk it's a we're we're going down weird roads that these roads where we are sort of distancing ourselves from compassion and understanding and real communication absolutely I don't want to about dear psychedelics might help that's what I'm 10 that's what I'm saying hey I think they would help I think if we had like real centers where you could go and just like you could go to a place where you can get a licensed therapist to massage you you know hey I've got this back Pole and you know the only thing that works is deep tissue massage you go to a place they give you a robe they play nice music they give you team and they're there setting the set and the the setting and the the the ambience of the room it enhances the experience of getting the massage when you go into the room the lights are down they might have a candle lit you know there's some [ __ ] hot rocks in the place and they're playing beautiful harp music in the background the set and setting is a part of the experience of getting a massage if we can have something like that and have these things common for the use of psychedelics where you could go to a an actual some sort of therapist that's trained in both psychotherapy and the use of psychedelics so they could talk to you and find out if you're stable ask you questions about your medical history what kind of medications are you're on and how you feeling what are you trying to achieve through this and then work you through an experience I think this could be enormous ly beneficial enormous event sure it already has been I mean that's you know we keep talking about psychedelic medicine all the time but so much of this has been done that's the really crazy thing ibogaine used to be a pharmaceutical in France although was used at lower doses that weren't psychedelic there used to be an MDMA using it for as like a tonic to stimulate people it was called Lam Berean eight milligram tablets what is an effective dose threshold psychoactivity in my experience is about 20 milligrams of the hydrochloride salt so they were micro dosing they were they were mini micro dose and mini micro dosing ibogaine they may have used multiple tablets I don't know if anyone is familiar with French historical literature relating to ibogaine I have a little bit of it but there isn't I mean again they used to use a psychedelic called endo pan as an antidepressant in the Soviet Union in the United States there was a drug called Monet's alpha ethyl tryptamine was used as an antidepressant it's an MDMA type serotonin really sir and then of course the whole history of DPT facilitated end-of-life therapy LSD psychotherapy on and on everything Shogun's group did using two CB MMD a ibogaine this was along with claudia Naranjo in order to facilitate psychotherapy I mean people not only were doing it they were exploring all the different ways to do it which compounds are best for which applications hmm do you have any experience with cacao yes what what is your experience in terms of the psychedelic effects or psychoactive effects it's mildly stimulating because of the theobromine content but does it mirror a small dose of MDMA or not in my experience no this is what was it was Kyle that was talking about that right Kyle Kingsbury he was saying that in large doses that raw cacao has some sort of a mild MDMA like effect I've heard people say that and people will sometimes say that the presence of phenylalanine in cacao could account for that but it's it's such a small amount raise quantities less than a milligram and the active dose of finesse women is hundreds of milligrams or grams in order to achieve a psychoactive effect so I think the effect that people do experience is probably mediated by theobromine which is present in in relatively high quantities that's how the you know it's named after the genus Theobroma and theobromine does what how does it make you feel it's just it's a caffeine type stimulant so when people say that chocolate contains caffeine what they they're really referring to theobromine and is that why it's deadly to dogs yes it is huh so it's theobromine that's doing it yep fascinating so it's not actually caffeine no this is a caffeine like substance it's less potent than caffeine what was your experience like physically how did you feel when you took this this cacao and what not what helped well how large dose I mean I eat it every day like raw yeah but pound it's the powder yeah you did every day and yogurt and just as a health thing yeah as a health thing and I liked the the flavor of it but I have never had an experience beyond at most a low-level stimulant experience and I've also taken pure theobromine and is stimulating but it requires like 500 milligrams to achieve an effect if I remember correctly hmm um what others what about um you ever [ __ ] with nutmeg nobody I mean it's a fascinating area of course you know prisoners historically did it Malcolm X did it yeah and the essential oil of nutmeg contains maryska Tsin which is a precursor for the psychedelic amphetamine mm DEA not MDMA but it's methoxy MDA and as well as LM Eason which is another psychedelic precursor as well as there's I think one other maybe even safrole actually I think it's safrole LM Eason and maryska sin' and Shulgin had a hypothesis again shelygin was actually by training a biochemist not a organic chemist although he spent his career doing organic chemistry so he was very interested in these ideas of the body creating psychedelics so he thought when you consume nutmeg oil that your body is is emanating this double bond and creating a series of different amphetamines and that's what it counts for the high but in reality people don't actually know whoa yeah hmm so what kind of history of use the does it have in terms of like people taking it for the psychoactive benefits I'm sure there is some ancient your I it would be I would assume there is some ancient use of it but you know it's mostly like thing for teenagers and people in prison these days it's kind of what it's illegal hi it's one of these things that you do when you don't have access to to anything else it's and most of the reports make it sound more like an anticholinergic deliriant type experience more like taking a lot of Dramamine than like a classical psychedelic experience but you can use that oil to make a lot of psychedelics in a laboratory Wow no history of use is also so fascinating to me when you talk about history of use because there are certain cultures that really don't have a written history they have oral history so it's very difficult to determine when people started what about peyote what is the history of use of peyote because I remember reading something that kind of stunned me that said that there's only like a couple hundred years of known use of peyote yeah okay so there's different histories because peyote is used it grows naturally over a relatively broad region stretching from the southern United States into I believe mostly northern Mexico and so in the United States the history is about a hundred years old of the Native American church it's recent but that's crazy so 1918 something like that yes it was a Comanche chief name Quanah Parker who spread the peyote religion across the United States and it caught on because it's fantastic of course it caught on I never experienced it what does a lot well again it's another one of these plants that has mescal and of course but then it has these other accessory alkaloids that modulate the experience of what's really interesting about peyote is it contains this chemical called peyote and peyote in it I have some pharmacy trade journals from like 1890 or something like that no it must be later than that it must maybe like 1915 or something like that sometime around there and they talk about like your pharmacy must have morphine cocaine and peyote the three substances every pharmacist needs and and peyote was used as a hypnotic it was used to induce sleep but there's been no very little research on it none in the twenty-first century I mean this is like was once considered a really valuable medicine the issues that it's a little bit tricky to synthesize and it has to be extracted from this rare cactus LaFave for a diffuse' but but that modulates the experience you have so many different alkaloids and and it it's very long-lasting it causes dramatic pupil dilation it's extremely nauseating embalm i made an episode about peyote in the most recent season of my show and i vomited so much that my nose started bleeding you know it was some serious vomiting and it's physically very very punishing more so than almost anything I've ever done in terms of the after-effects or while you're doing it while you're doing it it's it's a heavy load on the body um so it's people always say this is not recreational or whatever but it's truly isn't so you know this is really um a punishing experience and on top of that the Native American ceremonies often accentuate some of those punishing aspects of it like water is conserved you don't get to drink as much water as you want but to emphasize the importance of water in Mazatec salvia ceremonies there's no water at all which i think is actually increases the absorption of the leaf into your mouth because the natural reaction when you eat something disgusting is to wash it down with water these are little things that people do impulsively without thinking that are going to change the nature of the experience so anyway you eat this cactus it's incredibly nauseating and bitter and then you have maybe a 12 hour hallucinatory euphoric state that's very beautiful and strange no you see the cactus raw yeah some people grind it some people cook it so that's cactus you could get that [ __ ] at Home Depot you can get San Pedro at home no no peyote is a dumpling cactus it's a very small somewhat spherical cactus that produces beautiful white and pink flowers and it's incredibly slow growing which is why the conservation of peyote is an even bigger issue than the conservation of toads I mean peyote all these psychedelic plants have major conservation issues that need to be addressed but peyote is arguably the biggest of them all because this is a slow growing plant if you want to learn patience grow peyote that is how you learn I mean this this bottle cap I mean it would take five years before it's the size of a dime if you grow it from seed yes so when you're eating something that's you know that's as big as the column of a coffee mug or something like that it might be 20-30 years old Jesus Christ so there's a lot of history in these plants they call them grandfather peyote and I think the reason is that by the time that they're ready to be consumed they often are grandfathers or grandmothers they have produced seeds and have offspring and all this stuff because it takes that long so yes it's very slow growing it's not a sustainable practice the way that it's being done but there's also even bigger threats to the environment in the form of Route ploughing all of the territory to build Walmart's and subdivisions and different things in South Texas because most of that land is privately owned and and it's difficult because there's a belief in the Native American church that has to be an outdoor natural grown it can't be a green house cultivated plant because part of the potency and the value is from its interaction with nature so it's it's if it's sustainably harvested where only the crown of the cactus is removed with this long carrot like tap root is left in the soil it can regenerate new heads but if people don't have proper harvesting techniques it can decimate the population very quickly especially because it's not a very potent substance it requires many of these ultra ultra ultra slow growing plants Wow so what is the natural territory of it how wide is the natural tear taury of these plants I can't tell you exactly but it's not very large so if it got very popular there'd be a real problem yeah it probably won't I mean you know the people that care most about it outside of the Native American church are interestingly kakda files in Thailand in Japan who grow it for purely aesthetic purposes because it's so beautiful they and they would never even consider it because to them it's this prized ornamental plant that produces amazing fruit and flowers and lives seemingly forever and if you take care of it it can just look amazing so those there's a huge peyote scene in Thailand of people that never would dream of consuming it that just grow it ornamentally Wow now San Pedro cactus does that have psychoactive properties absolutely yes and did you have to extract in a different way like peyote it can be consumed raw with some varieties of San Pedro they actually contain comparable quantities of mescaline to peyote and it's a much more sustainable source of mescaline for that reason it grows unlike peyote it grows very very quickly and and can be propagated by cutting easily and it you know it's much easier to work with but traditionally if you go to Peru they'll take a length of the cactus and they'll cut it like a loaf of bread into slices then they boil those slices and create a sort of low potency aqueous infusion that they drink and what's interesting about the way they do it is that it seems that it's almost designed to create a lower potency drink the way they do it they drink every night the shamans every night of their entire life and many people come back and do it repeatedly and for them it's sort of it's like a traditional form of micro dosing you could say it's not about blasting yourself into the cosmos the way people do when they spoke DMT this is about fortifying your body giving yourself strength cleansing yourself balancing yourself and are there people that consume it raw as well not that I saw there no hmm oh but people do what people do I have and what is the effect is it comparable to the peyote effect it's comparable but it's yeah it's comparable but again it's very hard because of these variations with natural it's all just in terms of the potency of the cactus and that point in your life and you know people will always come up to me and say what's the deal with MDMA it used to be like this and now it's like this what accounts for that it's like well don't underestimate your own changes over time when I was 21 I could drink alcohol not that I did very often but I could and not want to kill myself the next day now if I try to drink more than three drinks I'm gonna feel horrible the next day I'm just emotionally ruined and that's me not alcohol now you brought up the term hypnotic and which made me remind it reminded me of our conversation that we had through email about Roseanne Barr oh yeah yeah right oh yes of course yes and about ambien yeah and about the effects of ambien she came on the show she still hasn't um she can't she's having a really hard time with this she feels terrible about what she said she feels like the whole world hates her she feels like she's lost everything and her life is destroyed and she's distraught and she she was going to fly out here but we had a conversation and we kind of decided to be probably better if she waited just let let some of this pass by it's still in the news because they've decided to move the show on without her there they're gonna kill her off or something man yeah and she's just devastated and you know she was also devastated health-wise physically she's an older woman and not that it been any different she was an older man she's an older person and this grueling schedule of doing a television show was horrible on her it just it was really really tough to do she got bronchitis she felt like she was almost dying she was completely exhausted and she felt like the schedule of it all just was just way too taxing on her physically then on top of that she's on a host of different things she's I mean she'll if we ever do wind up sitting down and talking on the podcast I'll get her to list the various thing she's on but she's on various antidepressants that she changes him up mixes him up she was one of the things she said to me she's she needs to get her doses readjusted she drinks alcohol regularly she smokes marijuana regularly she's also on ambien regularly takes it every night to go to sleep and I tried to explain to her the fact that you're not getting real sleep when you're on that this is not something you should take and rely on on a daily basis they even tell you to get off of it I mean it's it's and it's difficult to get off of it but people want to dismiss the idea that she could have said something that's completely out of character or done something that's completely out of character while under the influence of this stuff that it could have contributed to that they want to dismiss it because they want a villain they want you know no she's bad they want this like this childlike simplistic reasoning and rationalization for what she's done right and this is you know a prime example of this sort of schizophrenic nature of the way drugs are depicted in our society if it's if it's something like bath salts or k2 they're responsible for everything one toke of that stuff and you're eating your best friend's face under a bridge but then in Roseanne's case they have no explanation whatsoever no exploratory value they can't be used to explain anything is it an excuse no is it an explanation I think yes I think that intoxication can explain all sorts of inappropriate behavior and to pretend otherwise is again dishonest I know and Sanofi the pharmaceutical company that manufactures ambien had this widely shared tweet saying that racism is in a side effect of ambien but it's a little bit ridiculous for them to have done that you know especially to someone who's mentally ill because you know if you look at the medical literature the fact of the matter is that ambien is associated with all sorts of absurd hey viewers command hallucinations where people stab themselves jump out windows people that you know butter their cigarettes and smoke them people that paint their houses in the middle of the night with no memory whatsoever and it's a profoundly profoundly disinhibited drug so you know here's maybe a somewhat analogous example from my own life I never take ambien on planes for this reason because I'm around strangers I don't know what I'm gonna say or what I'm gonna do let alone use Twitter but I don't it's uncomfortable because it's so disinhibited I might do something weird I don't know take off my shirt I have no idea you who's to predict what you're gonna do when you have no inhibitions whatsoever so I remember once I was on the plane to Berlin and I did take ambien and I start in a sort of delusional state thinking that the cabin crew and the person that's announcing over the intercom is saying various Nazi things that's like an unfair stereotype that all Germans are Nazis that's offensive but I had no control over this like just because they're German talking in German doesn't mean that this is like a Nazi airship because you're just completely out of your mind Wow but again I mean I'll another story I used to be friends with a girl whose dad was a psychiatrist prescribed her immense quantities of ambien and she would snort it there's no reason to start it it's water-soluble has a fast onset of action there's no benefit and snorting it it's fine orally if you're gonna take it at all there's no reason to take high doses it's already a deliriant at the therapeutic dose you don't need to take more even five milligrams induces delirium but but I remember that I was at some party and someone was saying that they wanted ketamine and didn't at the party of ketamine and just a complete stranger and I said oh I actually have a little bit of ketamine but it's at my apartment here are the keys and here's my address and just run over to my apartment and greet it and help yourself talk to you later and and then I'm one of these people I've never lost my phone never lost my keys I don't lose things so then I you know wake up the next morning go to my apartment reach into my pocket my keys are gone and then it hits me this flash of oh my god I gave my keys away to a complete stranger to go to my apartment and take ketamine from me what on earth was I thinking what like what level of disinhibition is required to do something that insane luckily I was there had to spend the rest of the day tracing finding out who that person was getting my keys and these people happen to be very courteous people and actually did go to my apartment did take the small amount of ketamine that I had and then just lock the door after themselves and didn't make a mess but again I mean this is it like this is a profoundly disinhibited substance and also I think the idea that a drug couldn't modulate racist activities interesting as well because there's a study that you can look up where they use the beta blocker propranolol and they found that it actually seems to block racial implicit racial bias in people in certain tests that what they're suggesting is that there's an a drone or jet component to implicit racial bias but there's a certain maybe heart rate or fear response and once that's physiologically blocked you become less racist in a sentence implicitly it's not a conscious decision conscious racism is introduced but an implicit racial bias is I mean these are like really complicated higher-level questions about how drugs impact cognitive functioning and and the bottom line I think is be careful as being certain about anything about what drugs can or can't do what does this Jamie oh this is this story blood pressure drug reduces inbuilt what does that word inbuilt racism common heart disease drug may have an unusual side effect of combating racism well isn't that a [ __ ] that was that stupid movie with Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt as good as it gets he was a racist and they gave him a pill they gave him some medication and reduced racism it stopped him from being racist oh I completely forgot I remember it because I was angry because a bunch of people from the I was working on television show at this time bunch of people were talking about how great a movie it was because it was weird dark sort of film and I was like that movie [ __ ] sucked it was so depressing here this woman she's got you know she's like a waitress and Jack Nicholson is this old racist [ __ ] and she's relying on him for some real reason because she can't find a new one who's nice to her and and he's racist but the the the the resolve of the film was that he just was sick and they gave him some medication he wasn't racing anymore I'm like get the [ __ ] out of here that doesn't make any sense meanwhile maybe it does I mean ambien is an amazing amazing substance I made a piece about it called the ambient effect years ago I don't know if you're familiar they're people who are paralyzed who can take ambien and start walking again it has the power to regenerate regions of the to regenerate activity in regions of the brain that look dead on fMRI it is a wacky drug it's also chemically very similar to 5-methyl DMT it's it's not it's not like a benzodiazepine like valium it has its own bizarre structure I mean it's a weird drug so when these people are paralyzed why they paralyzed like what what is wrong with the strokes traumatic brain injury various reasons there's a book about it called hope and brain damage I believe the title of it is an ambien somehow another temporarily fixes it yes temper only for the duration of the drug effects so there's people that are in a you know persistent vegetative state they take ambien and suddenly they wake up what the [ __ ] yes yeah it's pretty it's well documented and it's a really bizarre effect that is exclusively present in ambien and maybe slightly in baclofen as well yeah I thought that the the statement that the pharmaceutical company made about racism not being a side effect was kind of cute it's kind of witty yeah it was a very snarky yes but the problem with that [ __ ] is well what are the side effects and then you go into the actual side effects you're like holy [ __ ] how is this legal and then you go into the side-effects of like what is this doing to people like well yeah here's another one it supposedly increases consolidation of negative memories whoa yeah there's a lot of weird stuff- memory increases consolidation of negative memories causes just total hallucinatory insanity at higher doses may be the most powerful disinhibited I'm aware of and is able to restore cognitive and motor functioning and people with traumatic brain injuries what a weird drug very weird and not not something people should be taking every day just not it's certainly addictive I mean it binds to even though it's not a benzodiazepine itself it binds to the benzodiazepine site on the GABA a receptor but yes no it's addictive it's super addictive so for that reason alone people shouldn't be taking it every day because you'll become horrendously dependent on it and withdrawal is ruthless yet withdrawal is total insomnia so most people just go right back to it or you know you can then Trant like you can transition onto different types of hypnotics like taking an anticholinergic like benadryl to sleep or cannabinoids cannabis things like that or you know just things that don't bind to the GABA a receptor in order to try to reduce tolerance there's ways around it you're not doomed if you start taking it but it's it's certainly habit forming and something that's best to avoid if you don't require it and it doesn't give you real sleep correct I mean you're you're missing some part of the sleep cycle dr. Matthew Walker was on here as a sleep specialist and he went into depth about it but I really don't remember his exact description but he was talking about how it bypasses certain cycles and you're not getting a real night's sleep I I'm not aware of that I mean there's wouldn't surprise me hugely you know there's still debate about what the most restful part of sleep is I think most literature points to actually non REM sleep slow-wave sleep being the most restful type and that's actually supported or promoted by chemicals like musk amol from the Amanita muscaria mushroom mmm and there was one pharmaceutical derivative called GAO box at all that i did an episode about on the most recent season of my show and that really does produce incredibly restful sleep that is superior to ambien but like ambien it was also psychedelic even more psychedelic probably so this is an issue it seems that for whatever reason a lot of these drugs that really promote sleep effectively also happened to be hallucinogenic and nobody knows exactly why but it's been a pharmaceutical barrier because we don't live in a culture that allows people to go nuts at night yeah no kidding I'm glad you brought up to MIT to muscaria because that's another one that is almost like a drug of lore more than a drug of application you don't really hear too much about people getting real good experiences no you don't but it's also connected to you know the sacred mushroom in the cross the cover of it from gianmarco Allegro has dynamic Amanita muscaria he thought that the Amanita muscaria was probably linked to psychedelic states and prehistoric christianity we we don't know right oh he's such a salacious wacky guy was he oh yeah yeah absolutely I mean he he was getting off on it he loved it he would love getting off on freaking people out of freaking out Christian that was a you can't underestimate what he was saying he was saying all of Christianity is a sex cult that worships a fungal phallus and the semen of that phallus are the spores yeah that all of Christianity is an ancient fertility cult that's a big claim from a serious oxford-educated Dead Sea scroll scholar who's respected up until that point yeah who was also an ordained minister yeah I mean there's a great book called shroom that argues that this was all some kind of cynical attack on the Christian religion and that he didn't even believe it himself the issue is that in order to carefully examine his claims you need to speak what is it ancient Aramaic or something so it's like it doesn't I'm not in a position reading his book which is all having to do with etymology of these words there are origins and different languages I just don't know enough about these ancient languages to make an informed assessment of his claims but which is I think one reason that they've kind of hung around in this lore for such a long time because it's hard for people to say with certainty if they're true or not although I leaned to them toward them probably not being well supported big pause why is that just seems too wacky yeah because they're not I haven't seen them integrated into any serious work since not that's necessarily a good argument it to take a lot of Education to be able to even understand whether or not that debate is cogent right right it's the same deal I encounter this sometimes on like really fringe aspects of physics and chemistry where someone will make some kind of wacky argument about the way atoms bond or something like that and it's like it's it gets hard because you only have like a small handful of people that are capable of seriously evaluating the claims able to weigh in and then it doesn't really get vetted in a serious way so things just linger around is maybe it's true maybe it's not but but the bottom line is that most people don't get a valuable experience from these mushrooms but some do some people figured out how to make it work and the experiences again it's you know it's its own thing it's a GABAergic deliriant it takes you into a dreamy drunk zone yeah and it's it's in many ways a toxin right it's toxic in some forms but well it contains another chemical a botanic acid that is potentially very toxic although it hasn't really been examined in fact it also contains a complex of this element of vanadium that could potentially be toxic as well so there are some legitimate toxicity concerns that I think anyone who's consuming it should be aware of you know the ideal situation would be isolated Mosca mole but it's hard to extract hmm and but yet it's connected in so much artwork and so so much ancient depictions of this particularly of Christmas cards there's always elves and these little Amanita muscaria caps right well drugs aside you have to acknowledge that it's a spectacularly beautiful mushroom as amazed you I've gone mushroom hunting all over the world and there is no question that when you see that mushroom in habitat that it's completely spectacular there's nothing else like it it is magical experience just looking at it yeah I ran across it only more in Colorado in the woods and it was amazing it's like this bit was a big one - it's big beautiful red with white dots on it it's like one of the most gorgeous things you could ever see growing yeah yeah and it's legal right you you're it's legal to possess again yes it's legal because it's you know anything enjoyable for most people but is it possible that we just are doing it wrong and that the the information has been lost as to how to cuz a lot of people felt like it might have been a part of soma which hasn't really been defined as to what soma is right yeah those those debates are not really my my cup of tea Rhys it's like just tons of guys pushing this or that argument without like a lot of evidence one way or the other and so I don't know and then there's people that argue that you're in drinking somehow yeah wired to concentrate the muscum all in one way or another you know if you want to learn about it I think the best way to do it is actually through this other related drug a box at all which was almost developed by Merck as a competitor for ambien and there's some high dose reports of gobblox at all that give you a much clearer example and from my own experience as well of what the potential of that class is and it's very different it's every bit as powerful as ayahuasca or something like that but completely different hmm and it's hard to articulate all these things are hard to articulate but it's something that's been experienced by relatively few people so you don't even have this spiritual or metaphorical vocabulary for it the way that I had it most powerfully was once I was doing a shoot for Vice on HBO and they told me I had to go to Tokyo with it less than 24 hours notice and that I had to start filming as soon as the plane landed couldn't go to the hotel room so I thought alright this is serious no messing around no time for jet lag like I've got a fall asleep 10:00 p.m. that night wake up at 8 a.m. that morning I've got to be awake all day so I'm gonna pharmacologically force this a little bit I'm gonna take a really high dose of this muscum old derivative at night to induce sleep and I'll take adderall during the day that was the plan so I took a high dose I believe it was 45 milligrams but don't quote me on that of this Moscow mole derivative that's about the same potency and at the equivalent of what would have been maybe 2 p.m. New York time which I think was crucial because these things are hypnotic they induce sleep so if you take it during the day you're less likely to sleep through the whole experience and it was unbelievable I mean I I I couldn't fathom the intensity of what I experienced it was you know just this rushing sense of becoming a passive observer in my own consciousness and seeing all of my thoughts produced by someone else that were racing at a speed that was so fast that I found it physically dizzying and had to lay down and I felt as if like the acceleration was pushing me toward an ultimate state that was sleep and that sleep and death represented the ultimate state of consciousness whoa so it was it was and then and then I had to wake up I didn't work the next day and if people say how did you sleep it's like well I actually had this transformative existential trip accidentally but but but have you tried it since just purposely for I mean a couple of times yeah did you ever recreate that kind of experience no because it was it was a bit much I would say and I know people that have taken even more and you know it turns into just your entire visual field transforming into rotating cubes where each face of the cube represents a different aspect of your life your future your past your present you know really dramatic stuff so I think that potential exists with high-dose muscum all it's just hard for people to ingest it because of all the other material in the mushroom and the disgustingness mm-hmm consuming it so is it possible that we've just just much like people have sort of altered many different things like wheat and tomatoes and what-have-you that at one point Tom the mushroom was somehow different oh yeah well yes absolutely yeah I mean the evolutionary chemical history of all these different plants is a fascinating subject that's pretty much lost to history you know there's no like archaeological alkaloid analysis that I'm aware of but it would be so fascinating to know because all these natural products evolved just like the plants that contain them what were the intermediate materials what drugs have gone extinct have did our ancestors drive certain psychoactive plants to extinction there's a plan called Silphium that some people have argued that may have happened with it was a phenyl derivative or like a phenol related plant but yeah I mean it's it's really and we've seen it with cannabis you know the black-market encouraged everyone to produce THC dominant strains because it was the most potent most stoning most bang for your buck you know now we have the ability to change the evolutionary direction of the plant and to encourage the production of CBN or CBG or THC V or CBD or whatever hmm so when you talk about a plant like the peyote cactus that grows so incredibly slow and you know if if that became something that was highly sought after and very very valuable it could conceivably be wiped out yes yeah especially something really slow so there could have been substances like that that we're very geographically local at a very small area they're just gone yeah it's just a thought I just had totally non evidence-based but it wouldn't be crazy if a lot of the reason that a lot of these psychoactive plants that are present today tend to be less addictive it's because all the addictive ones were harvested to extinction thousands of years ago maybe something like that I mean these things do happen if I guess it didn't wouldn't no we really wouldn't have any way of knowing but if they're fossilized plants right right it certainly didn't happen with coca which contains cocaine or riot-- so it probably didn't happen that way but you know you just don't know yeah and I had read some theories that it's conceivable that the Amanita muscaria very seasonably so you have to figure out like when is the right time to harvest it because there are some plants although of course fungus isn't really a plant it's kind of the opposite of a plan the way in ingest oxygen it takes in carbon it takes in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide like a like an animal does but that it's possible that these things very seasonably that you have to catch them within a window of time and that they also vary geographically like some places they might be more potent like you know Cuban cigars growing on specific land have a distinctly more you know more potent taste to them oh yeah absolutely because the biosynthetic precursors for all of these natural products come from the soil typically you know amino acids and things like that and and it's all going to to change there was an amazing experiment that was done where they started doping the substrate of psilocybin containing mushrooms with other tryptamines so they used instead of these det and dipt put it in the substrate and they found that the mushroom would take that completely synthetic chemical that does not occur in nature it would then for hydroxylate the indole ring just like it were a silicon derivative and create natural product derivatives of these synthetic materials creating these semi synthetic hybrids between man and mushroom creations Jesus yeah yeah I mean this is like why the synthetic natural dichotomy doesn't make sense everything is evolving it's a constant interplay between human and plant and fungus you know after we're all gone all of our plastic bottles are going to be consumed by some bacterium that evolves to degrade all of these you know polymers and that will create natural products from them and will those natural products be natural products because they were derived from a substrate that we created you know it turns into like a very complicated issue which is why I don't believe in the idea of natural and synthetic everything is simultaneously natural and simultaneously synthetic well everything comes from Earth yes so even the most unnatural things that human beings have created or and essential natural creations like a bee creates a beehive a beehive is a natural creation right yeah it's a mindfuck so to get back to Amanita muscaria do you know of anyone who's effectively regularly used it as a psychedelic yes I've met but not people who I whack e people yeah I would imagine yeah yeah people would say oh that guy's a professor and he uses Amanita every night he's doing really well but yes wacky people there's so much lore again attached to it specifically because the Christian I mean the books by Allegro we're big right one of them was the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian myth it was one of his books and that was the second book that he published after the sacred mushroom in the cross I think he did that because they took the sacred mushroom in the cross off the market right like what didn't the catholic church buy out the rights for that or was that a myth as well i can't remember something along those lines but Yohn Irvan republished it fairly recently with the blessings of the allegro family but the the just that the whole connection to Santa Claus and the whole connection to Christmas with that mushroom it's there's so much attached to that mushroom people want that mushroom to be Jesus there that's the one you know that's the way it's the prettiest it's like it grows it's got a micro Reiser relationship with coniferous trees so you find it underneath pine trees just like the shiny presents underneath the Christmas tree so people get so excited about that mushroom yes they do but yet no one gets off on it except wacky people yeah it's it's a complicated situation and you know just because something's convenient isn't a good reason to say that it's the truth like there are other psychoactive mushrooms that may have been used in the past they're ones that we've discovered recently there's a species called roto kaliba Immaculata as far as I know there's no information about humans consuming this mushroom but it contains a Salvadoran a type Kappa opioid agonist this could be a completely different type of psychedelic mushroom no information on it exists maybe someone used it somewhere in the past I don't know whoa well isn't there there are some psychedelic substances that have been discovered that have no history of human use like isn't Hawaiian baby Woodrow's as I would how you say it yeah doesn't have LST like properties but no history of human use that's a complicated question yeah there's maybe not with Hawaiian baby woodrose but with Morning Glory seeds there does seem to be some Mesoamerican history although it's not as well founded and Morning Glory seeds will put you on the moon right well they yeah they contain LSA and again allas a is actually the Albert Hofmann did is the inventor of Elysee did an experiment where he injected himself with small quantities of LSA but there aren't many evaluations of the pure material so the exact nature of the different components in those seeds remains a little bit mysterious as far as I'm concerned some people will suggest that it's the strongest naturally-occurring psychedelic other people will say that it's not even psychedelic at all that it's just a hypnotic it just has a sort of sedating quality I've used Hawaiian baby Woodrow's many many years ago and it's certainly psychoactive whether I would call it classically psychedelic is a complicated issue it's kind of like a dreamy unpleasant delirium hmm any other ones that we could go that are weird watch my show I think you'd really like it I'm sure I'd like it I like all your stuff okay because it goes into lots of weird so I just don't have enough time I know I to many things yeah that are cool now yeah that's one of the problems with Netflix and HBO and YouTube and just just too much cool stuff yeah but this will be cool I will definitely watch it okay ah that was three hours men just flew by Wow not crazy that is crazy time warp over here so Wow listen this is way better than the first time we did it we were here I think got a lot of cool information now and I really appreciate you coming back man thanks for how secure do this again but not in seven years - quicker yes I hope so sure thank you and on Twitter and Instagram it's Hamilton Morris and your show is Hamilton's pharmacopoeia it's is it available online because people watch it online yes it's on Hulu and streaming on Amazon and streaming on iTunes and it's on vice land as well so no phone yeah all right easy to find thanks man that was awesome appreciating [Music] [Music]

Channel: undefined

Views: 10,142,480

Rating: 4.7786131 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, podcast, JRE #1135, 1135, Hamilton Morris, Joe Rogan, Deathsquad, Freak Party, VICELAND, VICE, comedy, comedian, jokes, stand up, funny, mma, UFC, Ultimate Fighting Championship

Id: HM8WDZIhs3M

Length: 173min 37sec (10417 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 26 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/hutchandstuff]

A must listen

[u/SyntheticEddie]

I loved hamilton's pharmacopoeia thanks for the link.

[u/DjScrewMXEcrew]

What drugs does he talk about? I saw the ibogaine part which was interesting.

[u/Moruga_]

I like Hamilton morris

[u/reddit2124]

i agree - everyone should have complete control of their consciousness

but a private businiess has a right to hire or not hire whoever they want

[u/reddit2124]

I love Joe Rogan but at times he does become extremely self-rightous.

[u/[deleted]]

Where do we stream this? Also when are his new Hamilton's pharmacopeia episodes coming up?

[u/here_behind_my_wall]

This is a reaaaaally good podcast. Worth listening to the entire thing. Soooo much real shit just pours out of hamilton's mouth