Oh hey, it's the Lady Eating Barriers of a Bush in the Park, Alie Ward, and here we are. We have arrived at an episode six years and the making. I have had thisology and this specificologist on my list for years. We had a few near encounters and then a pandemic lockdown and then scheduling issues, finally it happened. I had researched the top folks in the world doing psilocybin and hallucinogenic research and over and over he came up as the lead or the co-author on papers and I watched this documentary on fantastic fun.
I had a long-distance conversation with a friend and he was on the screen with me with the guy saying, that's myologist, we have even emailed. So a few weeks back we finally lined up our times and dates. I packed up my little little purse filled with mics and SD cards and off I went about an hour south, just past LAX and I pulled into this parking lot near the UCLA Medical Center. I was early, I was nervous and in he walked, his gray beard and long hair pulled back into a low pony. He was wearing a navy blue windbreaker with an easy smile.
I had a very chilled demeanor so we ducked into this stark near empty office in this new building because his old office of decades had recently been, I think condemned and torn down. This guy fell out of the ceiling one day. Oh my god! We had a family of raccoons living in like an attic. I mean the ceiling just came out. So we sat in this sparkling new office which he deserved. Zero raccoons or hallucinogenic research.
We got into it as you will hear. But first just a quick thanks to everyone who sent in such great questions for thisologist via patreon.com. You can join for one dollar a month and I may read your questions in your name. And thanks to everyone out there wearing allergies bathing suits and hats and shirts via allegiesmerch.com. We got them there for you.
And of course for no dollars you can support just by telling friends and texting links and social media or leaving a review which I'm bound to read because I never miss one. Such is the still warm one from Laura who wrote, I am a farmer who listens to podcasts all day long as I weed herbs and prune tomatoes. Your interviews tickle my brain and are an absolute joy and a treasure. So Laura a consolation farm. I do not enjoy tomatoes but I like you and herbs and mushrooms.
So let's get into it. So psychedelology has been used in the literature. Thank you very much. But just a few times in published books but I'm going to take it and it was coined by a psychiatrist in 1950s from the Greek word for soul or mind psyche paired with dilloon meaning to reveal and he meant it to mean mind manifesting. And this psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond also came up with this John T. Rhyme to fathom hell or sore angelic just take a pinch of psychedelic. So psychedelology it is.
So this guest is a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine and the director of child and adolescent psychiatry at the Harbor UCLA Medical Center. And he's the editor of the reader Hallucinogens and in this two-parter we'll learn all about the history of psychedelic research in the western world. Wow. And it's origins in ethnobotany how much LSD is too much LSD what juices are squirting in the brain when you are tripping out who should not take psychedelics.
How this guest research has helped terminally ill patients some serendipitous library time late night phone calls talking to dead people and I depress some mushrooms and the secret government experiments with hallucinogens. And so I know there is one brief mention of suicide and there are clearly themes of intoxication in the episode. But strap in lay back come take a journey with clinical psychiatrist researcher author and psychedelologist Dr. Charles Grove.
Oh so many questions and the so allegis is a every episode is a different allege. And so I think the allege for this probably would be micocycopharmacology or psychedelology. Whatever I can find all the other biology whatever rolls off the top whatever rolls whenever branding works. But the first thing I'll have you do is if you could say your first and last name just so I make sure my name is Charles Grove GROB.
I'm an MD I'm a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at UCLA School of Medicine and for the last 31 years I've been the director of the division of child and adolescent psychiatry at Harbor UCLA Medical Center. Amazing and I know it's Dr. Grove and pronouns he him. Yeah. And he called me Charlie that's I don't care that's fine too. My daughter says I need to start introducing myself as Charlie really. Charles is too formal.
Oh I feel like there's such a reverence for you in this field that like Dr. Grove feels more appropriate. Whatever I hear the term Dr. Grove it cats out fairly docking but I figured there must be referring to my father who is the true the originator of Dr. Grove. He was a big chief of medicine in New York for many years. And I understand that your dad told you when you figure out what you want to do you can call me at any time.
Day or night when I figure out what I'm going to do with my life call them so I figured it out they came to me one night when I was a research assistant at my monities medical center dream research lab. My task was to monitor sleepy eGs and to wake up the person who was sleeping and dreaming it was in a sensory deprivation chamber.
And there was another person to send her down the hall so I had to organize all of this and I would periodically when I saw the red episode was coming to an end I would wake them up and say, Ali Ali what's going through your mind.
No, so and then you would tell me usually dream recall is pretty good. If you have someone waking you up and it's pitch dark note no sounds and to stay up on that I had to read interesting material and Stanley Krippner is a pretty renowned psychologist in this field who's now in his 90s and he's still active he's still writing he's still speaking he's truly remarkable.
So Stanley Krippner said no 92 years old right now and he has been working in the field of altered consciousness and dream telepathy and weird how does this happen kind of brain stuff for decades though of course there are critics of his data in his studies I mean it is a slippery thing to try to science.
He was one of the major investigators on the study and in his office he had a wonderful collection of books on psychedelics scientific articles on psychedelics you know the articles on psychedelics anything you could imagine anything that had come out and he gave me free license to roam through his files and books lined up in shelves and I just read constantly in there and then one night I pulled a book it was like a coffee table book with a lot of pictures good narrative by J.B.
So basically I British philosopher called man and time and I was reading and staring at some of the pictures and I went through a part where there were pictures of mummies and you know about 20 30 minutes later my subject started going into a dream I waited until her REM was you know
and I was just panning it was you know leaving so I woke her up and I said what's going through your mind that she said oh I'm in a desert and I see a pyramid and I was on top of the pyramids sliding down so I thought whoa that's pretty good. That's a pretty good hit.
And that evening studying dream telepathy was just weird enough and spooky enough to open this lifelong curiosity about the very question of consciousness and just like dreaming there are so many mysteries around psychedelic experiences like how they create hallucinations seeming portals to other dimensions what was fact what was lower what was fiction but it was enough to convince him to dedicate his life to figuring out how and why they worked and if they could help people medically.
So it's right around that that I know there's something in this field that I'm interested in and I was just so excited reading these books about incredible potential and so in this particular night is about you know three four in the morning my father said wake him up.
Without fear I had to call them up welcome from a deep sleep and no idea why I was calling it to make sure everything was okay everything was fine but that I figured out what I want to do with my life is what what's that I want to study psychedelics they're fascinating so much we can learn about the brain the mind brain interface we can learn so much about
mental illness and there these remarkable treatments that seem to be helping people from standard conventional treatments are not helpful so he was silent for a while and then he said well you know son there may be something to what you say but no one will listen to you unless you get your credentials which meant I had to go back that I dropped out of school after my middle of my junior year you know I wanted to travel I also had infectious monitor glasses needed to rest on and he wanted me to get back to school.
He was very clever how he got me back to school and the years later he said yeah maybe I shouldn't be but I was a little surprised you stuck with that that vision that determination.
So he kind of understood what I was trying to do from one doctor grow to another right yeah he actually had one mushroom experience he did in Mexico it's very very you know straight lice you know big time doctor and never had much interest in recreational substances or explorations with psychedelics you know you drink alcohol at a social event that that was about it but one day I told him I was going to go to a talk that evening given by a Mexican psychiatrist named Salvador Roquette these were
very important for doing very unusual work with psychedelics kind of sensory overload with sometimes combinations of psychedelics sometimes one high dose on its own so I introduced my father to Roquette after the talk and Roquette was talking about his operation in Mexico City so my father's oh you know just so happens in a few weeks I'm going to be in Mexico City giving a talk at the medical school so
I'm in visit me wrote down his address and I'm thinking there's no way he's going to go yeah especially because my mother was going with him and she's much more conservative of him so they they met with Roquette he showed him around told him what he did and then he said just so happens we're having a group session tonight why don't the two of you join us sorry what and my mother right away said
well I could never do that I have four children really like she would be about influence or she would decompensate couldn't care for her kids and so my father without missing a beat says oh what time my mother was furious out of me had to tell us not going to do it he was just talking through that and to prove it because Roquette also said if you're going to come don't eat
thing the rest of the day so to prove to my mother that he was not going to go they went out and had a big lunch after which he said you know I changed my mind again I'm going oh dear oh dear so he got my mother's furious my father goes so it's a group of about 20 people in a large room sitting along the wall and there's this very intense music and simultaneously
three videos are going one of a beautiful aesthetically pleasing scenes from nature another of a lot of mania of anything you could imagine and the third of documentary footage of warfare bodies in the street execution so his doctor dad is tripping in a room with visuals of like a beautiful screen saver of nature another of essentially vintage porn and then another wall footage of an actual blood bath and I'm hoping that the attendance was
free because that sounds like a mixed bag oh and all of this was on like a heavy lunch of like spaghetti or beans or something just fucking kill me and the music was just really intense really driving and the patients there were emoting very loudly I'm sorry and my father started to feel really sick so he made his way to the bathroom and wretched his guts out yeah and then collapse and thought this was the end of him
meanwhile one of the helpers saw he was missing from a spot went into the bathroom found them dragged him back propped him up against the wall then my father tells me he proceeded to have this incredible vision of a primitive desert road people walking across the desert one behind the other connected from one to the other by their unbalicus he realized these were his ancestors oh wow
this is very very profound experience and you got I think a great deal out of it he changed and and some fun to better ways like I think he became less of a type a personality more capable of enjoying himself but he had a remarkable experience of course my mother was furious I was going to say what you said to me oh you should have seen how he looked he looked terrible and rookie mistake eating a big lunch no you never do that but he was just that was their relationship
go to these crazy situations yeah what a massively profound dream or vision like all of your ancestors tethered by this life giving flesh flesh rope leading right up to you like the best version of a human centipede and you have so so so many grape cramp
herds you don't have a clue about and if you have kids and if you generations your progeny might not even know your name or your face unless you make it into the history books or you get arrested or something but tickle the brain with some chemistry and flashes in front of you like a willy-wonga tunnel at least for doctor grobes dad doctor grobe was this before after you decided to study this oh this is after why he did why did he do it I mean it could have been to connect with me
it could have been because he was curious who knows you know we talked about it a lot afterwards over the years and he always kind of lit up when he would talk about it kind of animated but he never was inclined to do it again you know it's interesting because I have heard from so many people it's one of the most impactful experiences of their lives when done in a setting that is complimentary to what you need
and in books like journalist Michael Collins first person journey how to change your mind and the Netflix series of the same name I have heard that a well orchestrated doctor approved trip like this is impactful on par with the birth of a child
which sounds like a little sketch it sounds like a little bit of hype but people swear by it so what is happening chemically to make this big of an impression so I've talked about molecular neurobiology with doctor crystal doughworth in the past about the role of neurotransmitters
now is it trip like a barge of fireworks exploding but on a subcellular level but is it serotonin is it dopamine well it's with the classic psychedelics like psilocybin LSD the methylcheptamine it's primarily the serotoninurgettes system the sub receptor is primarily the five HT2A
or the serotonin 2A receptor it seems to get stimulated there a host of other sub receptors which probably have a role in this also I mean there are other ways of looking at this Robin Carter Harris is now at UCSF as his default mode network theory which is that the default mode network is task in central nervous system to hold it together and to ruminate on things to be somewhat obsessive somewhat negativeistic that kind of goes offline
and then short time later there's a reacquill liberation process and the default mode network is far less active and individuals have these very profound spiritual opening experiences very profound insight to their own psychodynamics
and they feel this is connected to what appears to be what's so interesting about these classic psychedelics not that they facilitate an antidepressant response you know ketamine does that also and I'm not so wilder at ketamine in part because within a week maybe two you're back to baseline
but with psilocybin or LSD or maybe ayahuasca with DMT not always but it can be a sustained therapeutic effect that persists over time and is that because when you're in that state when you go through equilibrium again your baseline default network is just a little bit less active
yeah those networks in the brain kind of go offline for a brief period of time allowing the system to reacquillibrate it's actually a very fancy you know model mechanism I find it in appealing you know psychobiological model just a quick overview so there are a few types of hallucinogens from a neurobiological standpoint so first there are alkaloids like trip domains which have similar chemical structures
and they include psilocybin which can convert to psilocybin once digested and then there are the compounds of LSD and DMT with DMT offering much shorter trip experience and there are also compounds called phenethylamines like mescaline which occurs in the cactus peyote
and MTA may sometimes call the hallucinogen but others argue that it's actually an empathogen which aids in social connectedness now ketamine which is being explored for treatment resistant depression is called more of a dissociative anesthetic
now ayahuasca is a South American indigenous medicine and it's composed of several different plant compounds and some deliver what's called monoamine oxidase inhibitors meaning that they prevent the brain from sweeping away amounts of dopamine and serotonin and norapornephyron from the synapses
that also means that the amount of neurotransmitters in the gut can be affected which can lead to that kind of sacred act of purging which is just fire-hosing your problems out of both ends of your body respectively speaking
now the second punch of ayahuasca is also DMT which occurs naturally in plants and in our brains in very small amounts unless you know you've just sipped some ayahuasca tea where your entire digestive and central nervous system becomes kind of a fun house water slide of dreams and diapers
and you know it's interesting to you that you worked in a dream research center yeah yeah is there anything correlating between dreaming and hallucinating well interesting yeah yeah yeah if you talk to some people who this is particularly the case I think
with plant hallucinogens plant psychedelics that they they will talk about having a very introspective experience akin to a waking dream yes they knew where they were and they knew what was going on they knew why they were there they knew they were altered but they're in a reverie they're having a vision a story is playing out there can be dialogue there can be purpose
yeah yeah so in our onerology episode about dreaming dr. William Dahlmhoff explained that neuro imaging research reveals hypnosis is not like psychedelics or hallucinogens or like dreaming and that every one of those states has a different network supporting it and the dreaming network is different from all of those altered states of consciousness networks and as this 2017 journal of current neuro pharmacology paper titled dreams and psychedelics
neuro phenomenological comparison and therapeutic implications explains so psychedelic states are closest to lucid dreaming which is characterized by this mixed state of dreaming and waking consciousness and has the potential for long term beneficial effects on psychosocial functioning and well-being
so tripping is not really dreaming although some hallucinogens can also promote vivid dreams meaning that they're an a near-idgen and one of those substances is the central african rainforest shrab called eboka you know that's like the west africa there they talk about you know you feed the initiate eboka until they have a vision of an ancestor often in the form of this waking dream or they die of a cardiovascular collapse which either are either or they're very serious about their sacraments
they don't mess around and that's true and also it's true that i began has some cardiac risk and there happens some you know unfortunate fatalities not in this country overseas you know where individuals significant history for a cardiovascular disease
cardiovascular disease was not properly recognized or taken into account so it's like before you run a marathon check with a doctor before you do a vocab maybe you should not that the doctor will know what you're talking about but he needs to take an EKG and see if you have an arrhythmia
probably the people who ran to trouble had had late an arrhythmia so they may not even have been aware of a lot of people don't know if they have an arrhythmia right there just may go through funny flutters and flips and turns but you tune that out
a lot of people tune that out they don't want to talk to the doctor about something that could be serious right no it's a real bummer it's a bummer so yes we need a cardiology episode coming up i'm on it also yes if you're going to toss any drugs into your system or stop doing any that have been prescribed please please talk to your doctor and be frank with them have absolutely heard weirder questions you can see our radiology episode for things found up but if you died from shyness or ignorance
they would be hellish ad so talk to your doctors you need people to be absolutely direct and revealing I know the case the sad case 74 year old man living in the northwest who had never taken a psychedelic but read the Michael Pollan book and felt okay he was ready this was his time he arranged for a an underground therapist who had a good reputation he met with him a couple of times and the guy came over to do the session
and he took a moderate to high dose and within an hour he had died of a cardiac arrest the doctor said there was no history of cardiac disease but he had never checked him for cardiac disease so guy had never complained he probably rarely went in to see the doctor
is this eboka or that was mushroom that was mushroom really so you can get cardiac issues with mushrooms and vulnerable people so here we're planning a new study that will include people we in the past have screened out like people with cardiac history older people we always had an upper age limit of 60 65 maybe 70 but not to go over because we're always concerned that you know adverse outcome could cause our study to shut down and other studies to shut down
so to be on the safe side there was an upper age cap because just one tragic study can really hinder research across the whole field globally but that is changing as more people toward end of life are willing to take that risk maybe just because they're boomers and they tripped when they were younger who knows also there are more medical safety nets available Dr. Grope says but now because we're looking at a pragmatic model what are the real life implications going to be
we need data on people with cardiac vulnerabilities you know we'll have a crash cart there you know to resuscitate people we'll have people trained in CPR ready to dive in but and hopefully nothing will happen but we need to collect this data that really hasn't been done I collected some data in both my psilocybin treatment of advanced cancer anxiety study and I also collected data in our ayahuasca study in Brazil years ago but we never published the Brazilian data
because it was summer it was incredibly hot and humid and my primary collaborator took the EKG sheets I just tossed them in a desk drawer when he went back to retrieve them at the end of the summer the you know the ink had to kind of dissolve oh no yeah absolutely my man
Well I'm curious too because you mentioned ayahuasca as well because I know we're talking about mushrooms but when it comes to like ayahuasca, mescalin, psilocybin, even LSD like structurally are the really big differences or are they kind of working in the same pathway they they look chemically some of them look similar they'll have an indol ring which is a kind of a five sided ring with a nitrogen atom in there that's pretty commonplace for the for the trip domains
and a trip to mean remember is an alkaloid found in many plants and even humans and the common feature is this chemical structure called an indol ring which diagrammatically if you look to the edge of drawing of it it looks like if you glued the big dipper and the little dipper together at the ladles so that's the base structure and then little tweaks and additions give you other compounds like serotonin or melatonin or DMT or psilocybin
so one little extra chemical do hiki here or there and you have a different neuromodulator that changes brain activity so there are similarities in fact there's similarity to the essential neurotransmitter serotonin serotonin is 5-pyroxychryptamine psilocybin is 4 phosphoryloxy and then dimethylchryptamine so it's only adding phosphoryloxy molecule or psilocybin and then dimethylchryptamine you flip the five hydroxy over to the four position and suddenly you've got a psychedelic
psilocybin isn't used generally in treatment because it's very short acting but other people interact it also there's now a run for profiteering people haven't really looked at psilocybin so they can get a patent that's a problem in the field is that the big money and interest are circling the wagons they're ready to attack and get milk whenever they can get out of this
so yes psilocybin can be synthesized and in lab trials volunteers are not choking down dried mushrooms and hoping that there's a standardized dosage they're really carefully controlled weights and delivered in pill form so mushrooms you look at different mushroom species you look at what percent concentration psilocybin what percent concentration psilocybin there's another alkaloid called Bayo-sistine which no one has ever looked at as far as I'm aware that would be interesting
they really want to do some novel research look at Bayo-sistine mushrooms that Bayo-sistine are different fundamentally different than psilocybin cubenses which has primarily psilocybin with the Bayo-sistine like I think azurecense or psilocybin essence
I think there's greater focus greater acuity of thought and maybe less carried away by vision and reverie that's been my observation but no one has formally looked at that and that's all anecdotal stuff see mushrooms vary in their potency depending on where they grew when they were picked
what the climactic conditions were what time of the day or night so you want to get the equivalent of 1 to 2 or 1 to 3 milligrams of equivalent synthetic psilocybin so in clinical settings like the 2023 study titled single dose psilocybin treatment for major depressive disorder
a 25 milligram dose of synthetic psilocybin was administered once in this specific setting which we're going to get to a bit and the study found that psilocybin treatment was associated with a clinically significant sustained reduction in depressive symptoms and functional disability without any adverse effects so those findings add to this evidence that psilocybin when administered with psychological support can hold promise as they say a novel intervention for major depressive disorder
but of course in these trials they're screening out folks who might be at risk for complications physically or a subsequent psychosis that could last for months now when it comes to dried mushroom amounts a pretty big wopper of a trip might be around 3 grams 5 grams and beyond is considered what's called a heroic dose now on the tiny end of the scale is microdosing which is this regimen of a few times a week at 0.1 to 0.3 grams like a 10th of a trip
but can your brain have this imperceptible brush with mushrooms like on a Tuesday at work and still see benefits?
now there's this whole controversy over microdosing and it was very excited to hear about these reports at first and the anecdotal reports look very good but as of yet there's no rigorously controlled methodologically sound study that demonstrates that microdosing is any better than a placebo so I think the case is still out it's not been resolved but it's a tough model to administer I looked into it years ago and you've got to administer it under supervision and a research setting
and then I've always believed the FDA would assist they have to stay there all day and that's you know 8 to 12 hours you know it's hard to recruit people just to sit around on a microdose but that's what it would take I mean some people are coming up with models where you give the patient the microdose tell them to take it home tell them to take it at a certain time maybe they turn on a zoom or another video but there are too many ways where that can go off the rails I think
can we figure out if microdosing has benefits so anecdotally some people say it's been extremely helpful for them just asking so many people I know who are a little bummed out and looking for answers but as we know from research into antidepressants the placebo effect tends to be as powerful as the administered pharmaceutical because hope is one hell of a drug but on the upper end of the microdosing spectrum like 3 milligrams of psilocybin
instead of that big 25 milligrams given for big trips or like a half a gram of dried mushrooms 0.5 grams one study showed those larger microdoses giving light kind of buzzy perceptible effects were more beneficial to overall mood and well being than a placebo but what about the big big big doses who does that and what about the studies about the larger doses and those kind of transformative experiences like the one the end of life ones that you've done like
well I didn't use a heroic dose I'm telling me kind of let's say you would say use a heroic dose in the dark and on the floor what how big is a heroic dose of mushrooms like 10 grams okay that's a lot that's a lot now I as Dennis is my good friend his brother who was my collaborator on the I lost his studies why no one one of my best friends and he said Terrence never did that he talked it up but he was too smart to do that himself so beware yeah some people say beware the underdose
I'll say beware going over the top and dosing too high above all we want to preserve safety because this won't go forward as a field or get any kind of legal sanction unless strong consistent safety parameters are adhered to so yeah big trip studies like Dr. Grobes use 25 milligrams of straight psilocybin which according to this 2022 paper the therapeutic use of psilocybin practical considerations for dosing and administration there's an assumed 1% of psilocybin per 1 gram of dried mushrooms
so a 25 milligram straight psilocybin would be about 2.5 grams of mushrooms and several studies indicate that this type of therapy is most effective for say cancer related depression and anxiety or treatment resistant depression or alcohol use disorder tobacco addiction
but do not expect your doctor to just crawl out like shrooms on a notepad and send you on your way and can you tell me a little bit about the history of the legality of it I understand that like in the 50s the government was all about it and then some stuff went down with LSD research
and then it was just like verbote no one talked about it what went down was Tillarian all the publicity he loved getting attention he loved the notoriety his involvement with the mind expanding drug LSD has resulted in his being praised by a faithful minority and damned by an irate majority a man very much in the news here is Dr. Timothy Liri not drugs into my alcohol they're instruments which expand consciousness they speed up the mind turn on tune in and drop out
he paid a price he had kind of a tragic life you know he spent years maximum security prison he was arrested in Algeria by Eldridge Cleaver a crazy wild story arrested again so he got to know at the end of his life those good friends with his old student Ralph Mezner
so I drive Ralph over there when Ralph came into town to see Tim his or Mark will guy brilliant but he paid a price Dr. Grobe says both Liri's wife and daughter died by suicide and Ralph Mezner was one of Timothy Liri's research partners in Harvard alongside this spiritual in Yogaguro
and psychologist named Ramdas who I just found out today Ramdas was born Richard Albert he's a white guy from Massachusetts I had no idea but anyway before that LSD was first discovered 1943 April 19 1943 by Albert Hoffman it was a fluke
sarandipitous unintentional phenomenon where what's believed to have been the cases that Hoffman had a cut on his hand he was using a very low dose but he absorbed some through the cut and there must have been a cut in the glove he had on as well because he was pretty festitious about conditions
so he was working for a pharma company and at the time he was studying the medicinal uses of a plant called a sea onion or a maritime school anyways he absorbed an appreciable amount and felt like he didn't feel like felt early felt he was losing his sense of balance
his orientation so he got back home slept it off then a few days later actually the first one was April 16th the second April 19th those the first intentional LSD experience he measured out an exceedingly small amount because he was going to start extremely low dose
and then gradually over some days or weeks work up the dose and he was testing on himself which is an old model yeah auto experimentation so he self-administered 250 micrograms which is a high dose yeah I don't know a lot about LSD but I know that's a lot
it's not today's recreational dose it's recreational dose when I was in college we would take very high dosages I have never done LSD and frankly I would be terrified to just buy it off some Gibroni but according to the 2020 study a cute dose dependent effects of lysergic acid diethylamide
in a double blind placebo controlled study and healthy subjects people start feeling effects at 25 micrograms of LSD and a ceiling effect was observed for good drug effects at 100 micrograms now at 200 micrograms you're talking further ego dissolution and anxiety in a trip that could last the better part of a whole day now that day Albert Hoffman took 250 micrograms so then Hoffman again felt ill he felt he needed to get home so he with a lab assistant he got on his bicycle
which the famous bicycle ride yeah which took forever it took him forever to get home he gets home he takes his bed he tells his wife that he's dying he had been injured in an experiment and to call the doctor so she she was very concerned she did what he said she called the doctor
by the time the doctor got to the house he was having a fantastic experience so this is extraordinary you know he was watching objects morph into other objects with eyes closed he would have these evisions often of nature natural settings groovy just had a you know an amazing time thought there's something to this he spoke with his colleagues at sandows pharmaceutical and Bazzle Switzerland they started manufacturing it and sending out samples to some of the leading psychiatrist around the world
mostly in Europe and North America in this is in nearly 50s there was a great deal of excitement psychedelics were the cutting edge of psychiatric research and there was an enthusiasm in Europe enthusiasm in the US there's a lot of work going on in Canada so everyone got excited about this and then the Department of Defense popped a set up like a mere cat well doing because remember the second world war had just wrapped up and nuclear weapons had entered the scene
mechanized death was a big business and it still is so in the early 1950s the bureaus of military defense like the CIA and the FBI were like oh hey I thought it might be valuable in helping their agents resist brainwashing and interrogation but also making it more likely that an enemy agent who was captured will spill up their secrets yeah so it's called the MK Ultra program and it was done under very unethical conditions sometimes they would just dose random people without their knowledge
so dr. Grille or Charlie says that in San Francisco the MK Ultra project had an apartment with a one-way mirror where they would enlist sex workers to bring back regular unsuspecting clients and dose them with LSD and I found a news release stating the director of central intelligence appeared today in San Francisco and he asked the cities forgiveness for that spy agency's operation of a body house at 2250 Chessna Street during the mid-50s
that was a press release first off a body house that's a word secondly the CIA called this program I'm not kidding operation midnight climax which is so cheesy it's so cheesy now where did I find all of this information and this news release via the website CIA.gov
okay now also I had to know right now what stands at 2250 Chessna Street now that it's not an acid house government run brothel by the grace of God it is now a restaurant called Tacolicious and I check their menu and unfortunately they do not serve make a local tra but back in the day a nightcap could be spiked as hell and you wouldn't even know it so these guys have no idea what was going on there's also another case a military scientist
who was active in the biological warfare program who had gone to Europe and had seen some very unethical and very dangerous behaviors by his colleagues and back in the US and Maryland his colleagues dozed him at a kind of a clandestine meeting he flipped out
they took him to New York put him in a hotel room with an agent to keep an eye on him took him to a military intelligence psychiatrist who was trying to make sense of what was going on and they were concerned that this guy was going to spill the beans and blow their cover so what happened to him and this was not revealed until the 70s and only because his family you know wouldn't allow it to be swept under the rug this is like early 50s he jumped to his death from a 20th floor the 19th floor
yeah and intelligence didn't come clean about what had happened until the church committee in the late 70s which was investigating MK Ultra and other questionably ethical and questionably legal activities of the intelligence service so that that was going on the military was really playing it loose with safety and ethics sadly and not and one research team via the nonprofit Shakruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicine dug into nearly 50 studies in this era
and found that test subjects were often incarcerated people and those in mental hospitals administered very high doses of psychedelics for long periods of time and people of color were also routinely exploited and subjected to what the paper even called brutal experimentation
saying that black participants were given more than double the dose at 180 micrograms of LSD compared to white participants who got 75 and white participants endured eight days of LSD administration while black participants endured chronic LSD administration for up to 85 days
now as for Frank Olson that scientist who was doced well according to the book prisoner in chief Sydney got leave and the CIA search for mind control Sydney was his boss Olson had formerly been in charge of the airborne distribution of biological germs
so also was a guy who was able to disguise cans of shaving cream and bug spray to hold lethal toxins he even designed a lipstick case that could kill on skin contact but after his acid trip it said that he realized that the experiments were not ethical and he wanted to leave the research as for his suicide from the 19th floor decades after his death his family had been fighting this had had gone to Washington and gotten a settlement for his wrongful death
but then in 1994 his son Eric had his body exhumed and found that the blunt force trauma to his head wasn't consistent with his other fall injuries on his back so in short this shit was shady and so we saw a decline in funding well research was going through in the 50s although in retrospect it turns out a number of these studies were funded by fronts for the CIA or fronts for military intelligence
so that was happening but then also in I think it was a summer of 1960 a relatively young instructor of psychology at Harvard took vacation in the corner of Ackham, Mexico and a friend of his a colleague he went and visited Maria Sabina because in 1957 there had been a life magazine article of our Gordon Wasson's adventures going into the Highlands of Central Mexico discovering a native healer who used mushrooms in her healing practice
so this was Maria Sabina a Sabia or a wise woman from the Wahakian area of southern Mexico who came from generations of shamans who used silasibimushrooms to heal the sick and to help people have visions of things that they lost so our Gordon Wasson a guy who just loved mushrooms and worked as a banker lies and tells Maria that he's looking for his lost son she introduced him to the mushrooms he swore up and down he would never reveal it to the outside world
and of course he blew the lid off this by publishing his accounts in life magazine so after Larry got into this he did some really good work he had some really fine papers but he had an unfailing need to call in attention often negative attention and he was just freaking people out he was told by one of the deans at Harvard that he could continue with his psychedelic research so long as he didn't recruit undergraduates to study he could recruit graduate students but not undergraduates students
didn't Larry never met a rule he didn't feel he had to break he brought in some undergrads and before he knew it they were kicked out of Harvard bye bye bye so when it came to you studying this how much did you want to dive into the ethno botany of it and the indigenous uses of it?
well I'm fascinated with that I did some writing with Marlene Dalkin Dureos who's an anthropologist she was a scholar in this area gifted writer and she wanted to co-write with a psychiatrist and she figured I was the one so we wrote a lot together you know I spent some time in Brazil I made a number of trips down to Brazil we did you know several fairly substantial studies
and we worked with people who are members of this in credit church which has permission from the government to use ayahuasca as a sacrament in their ceremonies we didn't do any research with actual indigenous people but I learned as much as I could as long as I was down there and heard some good stories and have a great deal of respect for the indigenous traditions from which we this is why we're talking about psychedelics today
because the descendants of the indigenous people from centuries ago made a collective decision not to give up their use of in theogenic plants but rather to hide them from the conquistadors from the invading conquering Europeans particularly the Spaniards and the Portuguese in South America and Central America and actually I think in that there's a lot of thocuses days on monetizing psychedelic work I really think there needs to be a provision and all this
that some of the proceeds need to be directed towards the descendants who are often the most marginalized and mistreated and impoverished people in the world whose environments we have destroyed, as cultures we have destroyed but they kept that knowledge secret from the Spaniards and the Catholic Friars and held it until some American guy came there, lied, took advantage of a healer, didn't protect her identity, published everything, turned a profit and then went on to be funded by MK Ultra
so people start getting word of this and after everyone from John Lennon to Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger and CIA operatives flocked to her village Maria Savino was driven from it and later died in poverty and a recent paper titled Ethical Principles of Traditional Indigenous Medicine to Guide Western Psychedelic Research and Practice
starts with acknowledging that indigenous peoples voices and leadership have been notably absent from Western Psychedelic Research and Psychedelic Assisted Therapy Spaces with the field currently being widely represented by Western peoples and when indigenous voices have been engaged their presence has often been more symbolic
with little distributed benefit going back to their communities and the lead author of that paper is Jerry Assella-Dwen who is born into this family of Indigenous Mystics and healers and poets in Mexico
and is a UC Berkeley othering and belonging institute senior fellow and she points out that Western Psychedelics or Recreational Mind Manifesting isn't treated as a sacred act and that these medicines are not about the human mind alone they reveal spirit, the very animating principle of life she writes and that paper urges researchers to consider the eight elements of reverence, respect, responsibility, relevance, regulation, reparation, restoration and reconciliation in trials and practice
and now here we are and here I am a white lady talking about taking Indigenous psychedelics because I wanted to Marie Kondo, my neuroses and after a quick break we'll be back with some of the protocol that's used in clinical settings and what people who do this under doctor or healer supervision are told to do
but first we're going to take a quick break from sponsors of the show who make it possible for us to donate to a cause and consistent with Dr. Grobes wishes to acknowledge Indigenous practice it's going to go to the Tecruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines which is a nonprofit run by a small staff of experts and enthusiastic volunteers who work to bring education and cultural understanding about psychedelic plant medicines to a wider audience
and I quoted some of their work earlier and they pioneer initiatives that support and provide a platform for diverse voices including women, queer people, people of color, Indigenous people and the global south so that is checkruna.net which will be linked in the show notes so ordination we'll go to them thanks to sponsors of the show
okay so next week we will all to all your questions and please trust there are great ones but let's continue on with how does a clinical neuropsychiatrist administer psilocybin to willing participants and what does that feel like? can you describe for anyone who's never done mushrooms what it is like for people experiencing it? I myself have taken like 3.5 grams and just like put on a mask I use the Yale Protocol like Imperial College of London
this is the suggestion of my own psychiatrist who is like I think this would be good and he's like a blunt enough that really heals dude I think this is something you should consider so that's great yeah so I did all this you know and it wrote out my intentions ahead of time like all that stuff but well 3.5 grams of it's a normal pote so it should be a nice dose yeah it won't spin you out into the atmosphere you'll have a good experience
oh I talked to so many dead people it was wild and it was before I didn't I was skeptical that it would be that big of a memory for me or that big of an experience in my life and it was completely transformed everything feels like before and after that and I have that as a benchmark of like what my optimal living experience could be of like how I could
look at the world through that window and you know I've talked to friends who have tried micro dosing or who have tried mushroom gummies here there or who have tripped at Coachella and it was weird and so I have friends who have asked me like what that's like but I know everyone has their own experience but when you are prepping people
yeah yeah this how do you describe it well first of all I'm always wary about recreational settings yeah yeah things can go wrong things do go wrong yeah but when you've got a formal setting
you know first of all you need to meet the facilitator he or she needs to kind of do a screening to make sure you don't have any conditions which would screen you out and then he or she will describe the range of experience and also get to know more about your background very very importantly your facilitator should ask you to spend some time reflecting on what is your intention what do you hope to get out of this experience is it healing
is it when you want a spiritual experience do you need insight into a particular issue you need to focus on what is your intention even you know journal beforehand about what you hope to get out of this and it's uncanny how the intention will manifest even if you don't realize it at the time later when you're reviewing what happened
it's always good to write when you're done when the session is closed the lights go on just put your notebook and pen and just scribble whatever is in your mind to nail it down because what you write down you remember very very clearly I did this and you know what why not in part two I'm going to reduce some I got to find it but we're going to see what's in there also for the record this was in Oregon okay it's legal
there it was in Oregon so then you've got you know you've got the preparatory experience and their intention is really important then you've got the actual experience and you've got to allocate 68 hours the facilitator should not leave you too soon you know and there needs to be good boundaries in the treatment room that there have been some you know missteps with with boundaries in the past presence of that needs to be very clearly
upfront what the boundaries are regarding touch and stuff like that and what we did was we didn't want to be overly intrusive to the subject so we would check in every hour and you know kind you know tap their near tap their arm into how you doing what's going on I'm tripping doctor and then we did a blood pressure and then as long as there wasn't anything major they needed to talk about
it's okay lie down put on the headphones the ice-shades go deep into the experience now sometimes people will sit up between the hours take off the I'm asked take off the headphones I said I got to talk to you about that and you hear him out a little bit and sometimes yeah they got a lot to talk about and we want to do it now but sometimes it's you know we have plenty of time at the end of the session to talk about this and in the days afterwards so
let's just put the mask on let's put the headphones on let's go deep into the experience and in his well-known paper pilot study of psilocybin treatment for anxiety and patients with advanced stage cancer the methodology is laid out and experimental sessions took place in a hospital clinical research unit but in a room decorated with fabric wall hangings and fresh flowers to provide a pleasing uncomfortable environment it says and the volunteers
checked in the day before their cardiac health was monitored for 24 hours ahead of time and then they were given a light morning meal the morning of and at 10 a.m. up with Cebo or psilocybin was administered and the subject was encouraged to lie in bed wearing ice-shades during the first few hours as well as to put on headphones and listen to some pre-selected music and they were monitored during this whole six hour session and they were held a few hours after and told not to drive for them so they were going to be in the hospital
and told not to drive for themselves home obviously so they had a friend or family member pick them up and later interviews collected data on what they perceived and how it felt and according to the paper they were asked to rate things like their quote and the genetic boundlessness they're mood from elevated to up to euphoric anxious ego dissolution visual and auditory hallucinations and their sleepiness was okay cool the sucks if you got the shirt bell right
and the story you know that happened so we had a subject and everybody got two sessions one was the active drug one was a placebo the order was randomized and it was blinded so neither the subject nor myself nor my co facilitators knew what they were getting but we knew they would get one of each
for the first session of this woman who had metastatic terminal cancer and a lot of reactive anxiety her first session fairly convinced it was a placebo but you never know so I was looking forward to month later session two so we go through a little preamble and administer the the psilocybin she takes it she lies at one hour nothing happening at two hours nothing happening at three hours nothing is happening I'm getting concerned
what could be going on did our research pharmacists slip up and give us a second placebo but I think well we just got a can then I said I had one of the residents psychiatric residents working with me with this patient had been charged of music selection so I said you know pre I think the music you are playing is just too mellow you we need something with a little war
umph to it what do you have up here he said well nothing up here but down in my car I was listening to dead condensed you know that yeah I mean I was with God yes it was Lisa Gerard yes I know it's not fabulous it's exactly what it pushes you yeah it really hamps it up like yeah fantastic get it so we pop it in and within minutes the floodgate open she was sobbing
wow sobbing and sobbing and I thought well I know I know it's the real thing yeah but also I didn't want it to it's rude but I was thinking in my own mind what could be going on internally with her and I thought well she must be getting in touch with her limited lifespan and her needing to let go of her attachments on in this world yeah
but at the end of the session when it was finally we concluded we did our concluding ritual that I could talk about well what was going on she says well I had a vision of my father who died many years ago and my father and I loved each other very much but we lived in a family where you didn't talk about emotions so we never told each other how much we love them so in my experience in my vision I was telling my dad how much I loved him and he was telling me how much he loved me
and that was this remarkable experience and yeah this was a woman who before her participation study had been on SSRIs for years she never wanted she never felt you needed to go back on yeah plan was go back on but you'll give us a signal her her positive mood impact sustained over weeks months and there last communication was maybe a year I don't think she survived much longer than that but she still was told that she was deriving great benefit from that experience
and it really was this kind of re-cuffexes with her dad who she she grew up in a culture where you just then talk about family yeah but internally in her vision she was talking about her feelings and he talked about his wow listen do we know where consciousness comes from not really do we know what dark matter is not really are there more life forms in the universe
we don't know what happens when we die unsure but we do have an episode called quasi-thanatology about near death experiences from a very straight-laced researcher on the topic but more on how or why we might talk to the dead in a bit also just a bit of caution don't stop or start any medications including recreational without your doctors blessing check yourself for heart conditions
anyway even if you're not going to do drugs and if you do use any kind of recreational drugs for the sake of your internet dad sanity please read up on harm reduction test for fentanyl and all that obtain some emergency Narcan think ahead okay don't do anything illegal please but yeah from a person who wants raw dog getting off a fixer and nearly lost my whole mind
with withdrawal anxiety attacks please consider the risks of going off a medicine talk to your doctor that was a big question I have two questions from that first one maybe is easier but if you're on an SNRI or an SSRI or a mood stabilizer or you have a history of schizophrenia
what kind of like contraindications are there I understand to that if you take psilocybin in your on an SSRI or any of serotonin re-optic inhibitor that it just won't work well yeah yeah the attenuation of effect that's well known and if you don't know you can see the 2023 paper attenuation of psilocybin mushroom effects during and after SSRI slash SNRI antidepressant use
which concluded that SSRI slash SNRIs appear to weaken psilocybin drug effects and this dampening effect may last as long as three months following antidepressant discontinuation and that study was about psilocybin mushroom specifically but dr. Grub says the colleague on my ayahuasca study chase Callaway from Finland he and I published a paper together in the late 90s about adverse SSRI ayahuasca interactions causing a condition known as a serotonin syndrome
because the ayahuasca contains M.A.O.I.s and it just too much serotonin is swimming around in the sexual nervous system charging synaptic receptors so with ayahuasca it could be dangerous and we caution people about not mixing SSRIs and ayahuasca
it's somewhat controversial I know people in Brazil who like to argue that but I know what I've seen I've seen several cases where that has clearly been the case yeah yeah otherwise like if you take psilocybin or LSD and you're on prozac or something like that it's an attenuation of effect dampening of effect and another question I have based on her story and my own story why do we see so many dead people I feel like everyone that I know who's done a mushroom travel
like my father died shortly before I definitely talked to my dad a bunch it felt like I was talking with him I feel like I had a weird vision of my dead grandmother who came in when it first started to take effects I told my sitter who was my husband I was like it's so crowded here there's so many ancestors who have come to like meet me at the train station and then you mentioned your dad's and Vilkas why do you think that it causes something in our brain to have that happen
it taps into something very very primal something very very deep and I think it's a great mystery yeah and it really explains I think religions that are based on ancestor connectedness and you see that with the aboka the wheat sea in west africa and go bon I guess not earlier
the direction is have a vision of an ancestor or we're going to keep feeding you the suboka this chopped up aboka you'll have a vision of an ancestor or you'll die whichever comes first they're very serious you better conjure up a grandpa thank you like a grandpa's here sometimes I wonder if some of these young people maybe thinking on the spot needed to walk that's all good can I ask you some questions from listeners that they sent in some questions
I told them you specifically were coming on a lot of people wanted to know about access people wanted to know what's your opinion on legalizing all hallucinogenic mushrooms how do you feel about Oregon recently legalizing it where are we at with it if someone wanted to do this
like my psychiatrist is like just get a hold of something I so far haven't been arrested for talking about it right right no I'm not nor by so ask tremendous experts trippy questions and next week we will cover so many juicy ones from set and setting to criminalization a critical look at the stone ape theory FMRI studies neuro divergence astrophysics and psychedelics how to be a good trip sitter and my own experience following clinical guidelines for a big trip
which for the record I didn't work in where it's legal sure so stay tuned and make sure you're subscribed for next weeks intense and very wonderful conclusion of this and of course we have links to dr. groves work in the show notes so you can follow up and see what he's been working on also if you like podcasts I'd like to take a moment to shout out my friend rose evelace new one called tested a surprising history of women sports it's about a group of female track and field superstars that are
told they're too fast to be women and rose evelace you may remember from our future all a lot of the episode and as a host of the podcast flash forward rose is an award winning reporter and writer I'm honored to say they're a friend of mine so subscribe to the new series tested which will trace the
very surprising 100 year history of sex testing in elite sports that led to this moment and rose will ask a question that goes far beyond sports which is what is fair and who decides so you can look for tested wherever you got podcasts so that's my little plug for rose and as for us we also have a new technology available wherever you get podcasts which each week we release a new g rated and shortened
episode of all of these classics are suitable for all ages all occasion so if you're going on a family road trip get some small geez in yours now you can become a patron of all of these at patreon.com such all these and will be asking while the wall patron questions for next week's episode all
of these merches available at the link in the show notes Aaron Talbert admins our all these podcast Facebook group avalan malik makes our professional transcripts new well deal where there's our scheduling producer Susan hails our managing director and and frankly our trips at our every week and Kelly our Dwyer does the website and piecing together the fractals of audio are chick chafy and lead editor Mercedes
mainland of mainland audio Nick Thoroughburn wrote the theme song if you stick around to the end of the episode I tell you secret this week it's that I will tell you more about my own mushroom experience next week I've mentioned it briefly here in there in other episodes but might as well get into it also people are always like alley why don't you just go to a professional salon to get your hair colored why do you do it with box die in your bathroom and I finally got my haircut I look like an
overgrown doodle with roots and so I was like you know what I'm gonna have a professional handle this I'm worth it but I have so much hair that whenever I get a done professionally these poor colorists are like trying to
whack their way like frosting my yak hair with a die and by the time they're done it's been on my head so long that it's charged not copper as intended but it always comes out this like brownish purple and then it cost me $200 instead of like $12 in my bathroom but I took myself to a place I
treated myself and I must report that my hair right now is purpleish brown but we tried maybe the stylist are just trying to tell me I'm not a good fake redhead but anyway I'm I'm temporarily brunette now which is just how it's gonna go for a bit okay next week we're gonna get into more biological neuro biological stuff they're deeper than my hair problems okay bye bye I have a great trip I see dead people