Dimitri Mugianis on Iboga, Addiction, and Healing

any type of drug. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. Today's guest is Dmitri Gainness. Dmitri, I have to say, among all our guests, he's got to have one of the most fascinating lives I have ever encountered. I've known Dmitri felt fifteen years. We've been friends for quite a while. If you look around on what these are the labels you see to describe Dmitri, right, you know, activist, anarchist, community organizer, poet and musician. The face for many people of I be

gained treatment. He's a harm reduction worker, he's a drug positive form activist. He's a former heroin and cocaine addict. Uh, you know, spiritual healer in the weaky tradition. What can I say? Dmitri, thanks so much for coming on Psychoactive. I think when you and I first met it must have been a fifteen years ago, you know, And I've been intrigued by I be Gain since the nineteen nineties.

And then I meet you and you're this charming guy, and you explained to me what you're up to and you're doing, and how it worked for you and all this sort of stuff. For those of our listeners who don't know, there many people have been addicted to heroin other drugs who have just found I began like a miraculous cure for them. And then I remember you were speaking at the two thousand and seven Drug Policy Alliance

Biennial down in New Orleans. You've given this talk to the people away, and I put you up on the closing planary and you blew people away again. So with I be Game, which I really you know, you moved beyond in many ways, But just tell me about your encounter, what I be Gain and why this plays such a pivotal role in your life for so many years. Sure, when we met, I was probably a few years off of heroin. And I don't like to use the word clean because it connoucts that you know that I was dirty,

But I begain. I guess I'll just started at sort of the beginning of the end of my relationship with cocaine and heroin. I was a twenty year I V. Drug user, and what started as exploration fun and also a way to anesthetize my pain took over my life, and so I was really sort of towards the end of my rope. I went from being an activist and an artist and a musician to living in my parents basement back and Detroy, to move back from New York and doing about two worth of heroin and cocaine today.

I was on the method of program as well at the same time, and I was just waking up every day and wanting to kill myself. I was parking cars, I was a valet, and I was hustling in various different ways to make that too in her books. But I've known about I began through the work of activists, the work of Dana Biu actually the mad Plastizer, the yippie pot activists who will not shut up about ibergine, and so I'm back in Detroit in my parents basement.

My common law wife had died pregnant. My world was getting smaller and smaller, and I saw no way out, and I reached out actually to Dana, and he hooked me up with a few people, and I found myself in Holland, just outside of Amsterdam. My family cobbled every dime they could get together. They were going through some financial issues at the time. And I got there and I worked with Sarah Glatt in her farmhouse outside of

Holland with five kids running around. So I went from the streets of Detroit to like, you know, fucking windmills, you know, But I took it. It was an incredibly difficult experience. I began comes from Eboga. The second layer of his root part produces this like psychedelic sawdust. You gotta like eat spoonfuls sometimes spoonfuls of sawdust that tastes like battery acid. Basically, it's the most bitter, bitter stuff in the world. It was incredibly difficult. It was three days.

There was tons of nausea, tons of vomiting, an incredible cathartic visual experience where I saw my past, I saw things that were done to me things I did to other people, And there was no moment where I just saw heroin is done. But three days later I came out of it with no desire to use, and I had no desire to use the entire time that I was under that very difficult experience. And from then I haven't had a desire to use heroin or cocaine or

used problematically. I haven't used problematically in going on twenty years until next year. Now, I gotta say, I thought that's the way it works with everybody, and I found out something very different. I should also say this not only to see my past. And this is the weird ship Ethan, and there's gonna be some weird shack. I saw my future. I actually saw that. For instance, I'll give you an example that I was going to be on this American Life talking about ibergaine, and then you

didn't actually foresee being on this aide man. No, that was those were later d M T experiences, just sitting out of my apartment smoking it. But you know, the whole time, I was burning to bring this to people I wanted for folks that didn't have the kind of access that I had, and My family weren't rich at all.

It took them a lot to get me there. But for folks that didn't have, you know, a couple of thousand bucks to have this experience, Folks who couldn't leave because maybe they're undocumented, or maybe they couldn't leave because of a record, or you know, they had three kids or whatever it was. I was burning with the desire to bring that to people and bring awareness. Can you

just explain to our listeners what is I began? I began comes from Iboga, and Iboga is a plant that grows in central West Africa, primarily Gabon, that has been used for thousands of years, first by Pygmy people and then by Bantu people who migrated into the rainforest the equatorial rainforest of Gabon, and it's been used at like a central sacrament, much like peyote or ayahuasca is used

in those places. The spiritual technology religion that grew up around it is called wheat Wheaty is an ancestral religion and animist religion. Wheaty became your practice fifteen twenty years ago, right Dmitri, in which you've used to help people heal when they're struggling and just say more about that. Sure. I mean, look, I'm a Greek boy from Detroit that found his way to Gabon. I think I was the first iby game provider ever to be initiated. I was

coming back to the source of my healing. And I would walk into a village and I would tell the elder I was healed a boga saved my life, and she would look at me and sort of like cast her hand through the whole village like, yeah, it saved us all, you know. So there was this recognition we were in the same space. We had gone through this

difficult process and it had changed our life. What I saw there was the performing arts as healing arts around dance and music, where multigeneration people would gather and in a very sophisticated and thoughtful way and minister this drug that every member of the community took, from the baby to the old people. There was African music, which is

trance music. There was dancing, There was healing, and everyone had a job, whether it was building the fire, a ministering the medicine, leading the ceremony, cooking the food, shaking a rattle, dancing, singing. So it was this mutual cooperation and participation, and I realized saying all this the view that is cultural appropriation, but on a very personal level,

it was a fucking mind blow. And this is after I was detox and I was administering this stuff and sort of a secular sort of as an act of radical service. But suddenly I had this idea that all these elements that have been so important to me, music and song and and coming together could be a part of the detox. And that was a journey. I went back to Gabon six or seven times and was initiated in other deeper levels of breaty. I got to say, I'm a very bad student, but I'm really grateful for

my teachers and my family there. I ultimately I saw that I could draw on my own belief system and could incorporate aspects of what I learned there, but I couldn't ever truly be a part of that as a as a Greek boy from Detroit. So I am an incredible gratitude to the Breety for teaching me so much.

It's still a part of my life. The way that it was brought into the United States, or at least made aware to all kinds of people was through its anti addictive properties, which was first discovered by my teacher and our dear friend, the late Howard lots Off, who has a nineteen year old college student who had a morphine habit consumed it in sort of a early sixties Lower East Side drug scene and realize that he no

longer was physically dependent on opiates. It eliminates or mitigates withdrawal, and most people who use opiates heroin oxycotton, et cetera. I began as a hydrochloride just to be crude, as coca leaf is to cocaine, right. So it's this white powder that can be put in a small capsule and you lose some of the properties, but it's a little bit more immediate, or a lot more of immediate, and

doesn't last as long. The reason it's preferred in detoxes, like someone detoxing from heroin cannot really eat that much of boga or it's very difficult and you might throw it up before you get to the point where it's beneficial. It's used in the West for detox but I have to say that in terms of like small doses, what they call the hunter's dose is amazing, great for hanging out, great for dancing, great for sex, and also for people who aren't addicted, if they want to have an experience,

a boga is incredible. You talk about microdocing, Yeah, microdocing, this whole thing with microdocy kind of to be laughing, I say, you don't want to feel it, Like what the funk? I don't want to feel it. I want to feel my drugs. But yeah, micro docing, and that's been used traditionally for thousands of years. They call it a hunter's dose because you can go sit in the woods and just you know, wait for the possum to

come by or the porcupine. So all this time that you're doing these ivy game sessions, I mean, just explain. So what's it like. I haven't done a detox in many years. You know, I've done some group stuff that wasn't around detox. I used to, you know, work in Washington Square Park or Union Square and I have people meet me. We do an assessment to see if they are healthy enough. Because there are cardio complications that can happen with people whose hearts aren't ready for it. There

might be medical reasons not to do it. There might be interactions with other drugs there on. So it's a very high threshold compared to all other psychedelics, not only in that it's that there could be a medical event, but also you need help standing up, walking to the bathroom, sitting down are very deep. It's a very very heavy experience. People get really freaked out about it. Done in a medically supportive, not medicalized, but medically supportive setting, it can

be fairly safe. So what would happen is someone would come in about ten to twelve hours without their opiates, so they're at the very beginning of withdrawal. And the really interesting thing to those of us who are opiate users or people who had a dependency on them, was that you would take a small amount sort of a testos, and you would give it to someone who's just starting to feel a withdrawal, just to see how it would work with them, and within an hour they're not feeling

the withdrawal and they're not tripping. Now, there's a bunch of different ways of a ministering it, but I'll just tell you the old school way of doing it. After they would go through that bit and they're not in withdrawal, we would begin by doing what we would call a flood dose, a series of capsules over the course of an hour, and that experience asked anywhere from eight to twelve hours, and it may be accompanied by intense vomiting, but not vomiting from withdrawal, and most people have gone

through it can tell the difference. Once you've asked them were you and withdraw The answers no, they were vomiting because like iowasca and payote, there is a nausea your body is rejecting it. That could go on for eight to twelve hours. Now, if you were detoxing, that would be sort of the end of your experience and you would go into this period which they called the gray day, which would be anywhere from another twelve to forty eight hours.

We're just sort of laying around, sort of waiting to process the experience but also to get your body back. So for the prison who's coming in for detox, you are asked to take more because your withdrawal will start to come back. So over the course of several days you're giving booster doses and it might take three to four to five days for someone to come out of the experience completely. Holding that space is the most intense experience that I've ever experience, and I did it hundreds

and hundreds of time. You have to be in there, why people are suffering, why people are processing, why people are vomiting, why people might want to start to use again or questioning why they use again, And it's an incredibly sacred space. And the gift of I begain, I believe, but the gift of all psychedelics is that bit is incredibly inefficient that we have to spend that much time

with somebody, but that's where all the magic happens. That's where what we might call healing happens because we get to honor somebody. So it's it's that place where I call it's the exactitude of the inefficiency of poetry that happens in those spaces. And that could take days and days, and that's just a matter of sitting with people and being with them and honoring them. How do you keep

people safe in the midst of experiences like that. I got to say that my early year and a half year that I was doing it, it wasn't safe because I wasn't doing it with a medical professional in a supportive role. So you know, monitoring the heart. You cannot go to leap on this. You need to be with someone seven. So those early years where maybe a year and a half ro I was doing it on my

owner with other addicts or drug users was dangerous. And after an incident in Canada where where someone almost died, I was thinking about stopping, but I didn't and I never did it without medical professionals. Again, what we did was we blended the ceremony in with the medicine, so the doctors were dancing with us. We'll be talking more after we hear this ad. So the question I want to ask you, because you're experience and a lot of other of the psychelics as well, what is it that

distinguishes I Begained from the others. I mean, people talk about l S D and and psilocyte peyote is giving this kind of deep spiritual insight that can help trans form your life. But is there something else going on with I Begain, you know, biochemically in the body that's causing people to lose their dependence on these substances. I can't tell you what's happening other than experiencing it myself and seeing it and hundreds of people. I think I

did over five detoxes. And when you're saying detox, by the way, you're talking about sitting with somebody for Oftentimes each detox might be two or three days, and sitting with somebody right at least three days, three to four days. Yeah, I spent I spent years in hotel rooms, cleaning up, cleaning up vomit with folks and going through similar processes that I went through. Here's the thing. I can't tell you what it's doing. I can tell you what I've seen.

I can tell you why it's different. Sure, you can take LSD or mushrooms and have what we call the spiritual mystical experience that might give you some insight into your problematic behaviors. I begain into ups the physical dependency on opiates and opioids with significantly reduced withdrawal or without withdrawal at all. And you know there's plenty of scientists

that will dispute that. But if you were to give a hardcore junkie like me ahead of acid basically twelve hours later, I'd want to kill you because I would be tripping, begging for some dope. And that's not the experience with most people going through Ivy Gaine. There there is a cessation of the dependency. You don't need the fucking hit in three or four days. Now do people go back to it? Yes, the majority do. But what I saw personally, what happened with me was so transformative.

I was using about a hundred fifty dollars with the heroine a day and on a hundred milligrams of methodone, and four days later I had a pocket full of money, and I was on the outskirts of Amsterdam and I didn't have a desire to use. Now that's what happened with me. Again, I think that might be about the It doesn't happen with everybody, and I think that's where the big problem was with I began advocates and with

psychedelic advocates in general. Yeah, actually, let's just back up here a moment, because your life is actually pretty interesting before all this stuff that happens when I began, and I was just reading up. But you're born in sixty two in Detroit, like a kind of working class Greek, second generation whatever family, right, you know, you're you're a kind of not so white white guy in a mostly

black city. You get involved in a band. What leisure class I think it's called that actually gets a fair amount of renown and you're the frontman for it, you know, making up poetry and singing on stages and and meanwhile you're also doing hero on a lot of time. And you're actually being a fairly successful guy for quite a number of years, right before things start to fall apart. Yeah, I don't know how successful we were. I think artistically

we're very successful. But yeah, I was a creative person. I mean, you know, I came to New York as a young person, and you know, the habit grew and I grew. But you know, it's the thing about especially opioids, I mean, there's a beautiful grace period and sometimes it could last for a very long time, but that grace period can be very beneficial. For me. It was a faustian deal. It took a lot more in the end than it gave. But yeah, my life was pretty interesting.

The thing is that I was playing nightclubs when I was fourteen and fifteen and the early punk days in Detroit, and then came to the New York when I was like nineteen. I lived in the Chelsea Hotel and this whole sort of world of the Hotel Chelsea that have been going on for a hundred years. I became involved in that, and then politics and art and music on the Lower East Side, and you know, for a while it was great. And I don't want to talk bad

about heroin. It's like distasteful. It's like talking bad about your ex wife. But I can't be that idealistic about it either. You know, if you're nodding out, you know, at like an important let's say, meeting with the record company guy, it's not a good look, right, I mean, it's a good look until it's not um. And so yes, most of the harm um from heroin is because of its illegality, but as we know from you know, oxycotton and other drugs, there's other stuff going on there too

that has nothing to do with the illegality. Then the thing is it's diminishing. There seems to be some sweet spot that you hit and then you can't get to where you were, and and then it becomes this drag about this maintenance thing. And so when you were doing the methan on, where you getting that from a clinic or getting it on the streets? I was I was getting it from the clinic that you were still doing the heroin on top of the messing on. Yeah, it's

totally possible. I mean, look, it gave me my wake up, you know, which was awesome. Here's the thing about the maintenance personally, and and from my observation, I was still seeking an outside euphoria so I could do enough air wine I get at night really high. But then I was mixing in benzos and I was seeking that sort of extreme euphoria in our world to say anything bad

about these things, and is you know, sacrilegious. Oh no, I mean if people got all sorts of use it on method on from the good the bad like it for a while this and that. I mean, the science is there that huge numbers of people have benefited by making the switch, but we also that for a lot of people haven't only worked that well. The matter clinic was right up the street from the from the police academy that we were clearly junk, and it got to the point where I had psychosis. I would think I

was being followed. I would stand by a window and look out for hours I was. I mean, I did crazy shit. I mean it's weird though if you think about, right, because I mean, what we know right, no matter what the intervention, right, whether it's going cold Turkey or doing method on or buprenorphreen or iby gain or psychedelics, or falling in love or finding a job or you know,

drinking green tea. I mean, people have every different method for trying to finally put some kind of problematic relationship with drugs behind them. But it's also true that, you know, there's a kind of double edged saying about almost the placebo effect of these things that if you believe in the treatment, it's more likely to work. I was at a Psycholis conference a few weeks ago and I saw

Matt Johnson. You know, it's been a long time psychological researcher at Johns Hopkins and he just got the first chair and Psychedelic Studies and we're chatting and I was telling him I was thinking about doing a show on the placebo effect. And he said, Ethan, sometimes I think

about psychedelics as placebo's on steroids. Yeah, and I've seen that work in the I begat space in particular because it has this thing, this miraculous alchemy that happens with some people, but also other things are happening that aren't emphasized. People might contact a family member that they haven't talked to in years and years. You know, they might go back to school, they might change the way they use drugs. They might just have a couple of days where they're

just honored. I'm a big proponent of placebo. I think placebo is where it's at. I mean, you know, you hear people talking about it, Well, that's just the placebo effect. And you know, to me, that's like the most interesting ship is the way what is that? That's the instant in ship, right, And that goes to like this idea of creating space, a space in which you can explore problematic relationships. You can explore depression or or or or

deep rumination, you can explore relationships. And creating space and accelerating that placebo effect is to me, what's the most interesting thing about all of this. And that's what I've been doing all my life is creating space, particularly around people who use drugs. Have been a bartender, I've ran after hours clubs, I work in needle Exchange, and I hold space in the psychedelic set. So to me, the placebo stuff, that's a great idea. That's the most interesting

thing to me. You know, it is also something about your journey to that your life is, in many respects committed to harm reduction. You've been deeply invested in the

harm reduction space. At the same time, you've talked a lot about the powerful, important role that twelve steps and the twelve steps consciousness and meetings have played for you, and people off times think that those two things are at odds, and there's certain elements of the philosophies that are odds, but by and large, there's a kind of common philosophy right around around recognizing and cultivating and embracing

the inherent dignity in every human being. For you, coming out of that I began thing in two thousand two three, beginning to become somebody's given sessions, were both these things well integrated for you? The whole twelve step thing and the harm merction thing was at a matter of time. To me, it was. But let me just tell you. Let's say I'm injecting cocaine and heroin. I'm on the Lower East Side of New York. My life is spinning out of control. I'm still in the band, but I'm

psychotic a lot of the time. And I'm at a point in my life where I'm not very much communication with my family. I just lost another girlfriend, another job, I'm hustling, and I go to the corner of Avenue A and First Street, which was a very different corner then, and that's where I would buy my syringes. That you're go there and there'll be you know, many women out

there selling syringes. And this is at a time when we were losing a lot of our family members to AIDS actually, and so I remember going on there to buy one for a dollar or two dollars, and I see this little table set out there, and there's these mostly men, mostly queer men, and I get choked up when I talked about it. They were there giving out syringes, which was illegal to do at that time. They were

passing out syringes and information about injection. And I walked into the table and one of them gave it to me. I can remember his face as an older guy, and I said how much and he said free, and then he said, we want you to be safe. Ethan that epoch at that time, that to me, it such a mind blow for me that someone would risk their freedom because they cared about me. The thing about I began to me, and the thing about that gesture, and the thing about twelve steps. I go back to the Christ's

story and the story of the leopard. The leopard was a social outcast, was contagious, was in danger and a shame. Christ stops and heals the leopard. Now is that a public health story about leprosy? To me, what it is is that Divinity loved the outcast. Divinity loved the untouchable. And so whether it's taking time to sit with somebody while they go through a detox or handing that that needle, that's about love. That's about communal love in action. And

to me, there's nothing more power. For that's where the placebo lies, right and I was seen and what happened in the either game space after a while, and then the other medicines at work with psilocybin and m d n A. What we try to do is honor someone just like we honor them at a twelve step meeting, or honor them when they come into a harm reduction facility. Hopefully this is what we do. It's I think, in

some ways to me, it's the most important thing. Of course, we don't want people to become sick or overdose, of course we don't. But that act is so revolutionary, you know, I'll tell you to me sometimes when I hear you talking about this stuff, you remind me of when I think about some of the most talented body workers I know, you know, the ones who are studying a half dozen a dozen different modalities and then integrating all together. And the way you talk about helping people heal seems the

same sort of thing. You know, you're bringing from twelve steps, you're bringing from harm reduction, you're bringing from wheat T, you're bringing from iby game, you're bringing from the psychalities, you're bringing from a sense of community. It's all about helping people and understand that people. Each person's got their own journey and that what worked for you may not work for others. I mean, is that a fair description of of how you do what you do now? And

think about it. First of all, when people come to me, and I've been working primarily with M D M A and psilocybin and sound by the way which we can get to when they come to me like, yeah, I've been doing this, I've been doing this almost twenty years, right, and so I know a few things, but what I'm listening for is that wisdom that brought them to me

in the first place, and that's what I'm following. And the idea is as someone who's played in nightclubs in bands for years, someone who's worked in the harm reduction space, and that somebody who is a trained ritualist. What I'm looking for is how we can co create a container what I call radical hospitality, just that we're there for you and we're going to hold you in all you unless you start to get into a discursive place or a self harming place. We're gonna hold you and honor

your sacred individuality because it's a big fucking deal. It's a big deal when you come to take a journey, and that's how we look for it. We're marking the day. It's going to be different for Ethan today because we're marking it and we're there to show up holy and with all the skill. The thing that's guiding us is the ethos, which is self love and acceptance. It's really about improvisation. You can have a formula, but if somebody, you know, we had somebody the other day, brilliant guy.

He talked for eight hours straight. Now I could tell him to let go to you know, go to your breath. But after a while, that's what needs to happen. So, you know, one and I just followed him. We followed him with the music, we followed him with our heart. We listened because that's what needed to happen. So it's

got to be an improvisational while ty to it. And that's where all the training and the thousands and thousands of hours with people come into play, because then you can shift and you're not so attached to dogma or a template. Let's take a break here and go to an ad. You know, there's one other moment in your life, right ten years ago where you get set up and the d e a bus you and you know, you go through a couple of years, a hell, did it change in ways what you do, how you think about

what you do? Did it change it? Yeah? You don't don't want to get busted again? Yeah, I'm do what it is Jamaica, man, it's Costa Rica. There's that, you know. I mean, I found this quote from you where you say, you know they the cop they took away my magic powder. So I thought they were my enemy, but now I realized we were dancing together. Even the arrest was part of my initiation. It was a blessing, pretty generous statement. But I guess you still believe that I I do.

You know, that affected me in a lot of ways. First of all, like when you read it on like you know, a blurb, like you know, you read it on Wikipedia or something makes it seem like not a big deal, you know, for those that have been through it. And I've been arrested several times before, but I was

never facing anything real, you know. I mean I might have spent a week bouncing around or ten days bouncing around New York City system, which is not pleasant, but I never had that sort of existential threat, just sort of damocles just hanging over me for two years. What it did for me, it is because I became so identified with Iby Game. I became the Iby Game poster boy. And you know, the Buddha says that all identity is pain, and it became painful for me, and my life was

totally consumed. It was one you know what usually happens. One cop gets a bug up their ass and I'll just say this that that. What I learned is that they took my magic powder away, right, And I was just there without a boga and who was I? What was my purpose? And I had this opportunity that Carlino Lopez who was running New York harm Reduction Educators at the time, and Brian Murphy was a therapist there and still like you amazing therapist, amazing psychedelic and harm reduction therapist.

They invited me to come in and just sort of hang out, you know, So I would do that and then they offered me this job and I sort of joined the team. Initially, I didn't even know what my fucking job was. It was like, I don't know, shaman at large or something. I've never identified as a fucking shaman.

But it was kind of like just go and do like weird ship with people, right, And what ended up happening is Brian had this little meditation group where he would shake a rattle and people would go and meditate, and some of them were pharmacological challenge so the meditation would be deep, basically on a no and I'm like, well, let me bring another rattle, and we brought another rattle, and I brought another rattle like, well, this guy plays drums,

and what happened. It became a weekly ritual for ten years at Marie where every Thursday at we would gather with drums and incense and sage and rattles and an altar that was constantly changing and being built by the participants who came in there, and we would spend time drumming and singing and then talking. But what I learned from the Buety and what I learned from twelve Steps,

is that everybody was participating. Everybody was contributing, either by singing, telling the story, talking about themselves, dancing, and some of these things turned into these incredible spiritual parties. And from that we began to form and co create with the community, this holistic space that we didn't have any money for. We didn't have a mandate. Management never told us go

ahead and create a holistic space. But eventually, just through I would say spirit, we started doing full body acupuncture

massage that weekly ritual. Brian and I would do these shamanistic interventions one on ones, which were just amazing sometimes, and we started bringing gongs and singing bowls and chai chi, and we've co created with the community this incredible healing space in the middle of all the other great things that NAIRI does, which is you know, case management and needle exchange and a safe pace for drug users and sex workers where we just see people as human beings

that coming in with spirit. And all of that came because the d A arrested me and stopped me from doing that. That community during my trial. To me, it was the thing that sustained me. And without that community, and I don't mean just my co workers, I mean the people, the drug users and the people who are living in the homeless shelf of the people that you know I became very close with. Without them, I don't

know where I would have been. Yeah, you know you mentioned in music, explain more about this healing role of sound. You know, lou Reid said my life was saved by rock and roll, right, And that's true for me. Music has always been healing from me, has always been a refuge for me. But vibration and the immersion in vibration in sound can deepen any experience. Particularly what I discovered

and others have discovered, is the psychedelic experience. So when you come in to a session or ceremony with me and the stuff we're doing. In Jamaica it's mushrooms, but in some other locations I've done the combination of mushrooms and m d M A. Coming into that space, the idea is that you would get comfortable, put on the

eyemask and allow these vibrations to center you. And much like meditation, if you get in a discursive space, if you get into space of a mind wandering, you bring yourself back to the sound and allowing that sound to deepen the journey. The only thing I'm interested in, Ethan, really interested is space. Another childhood hero of mine said space is the place that Sunraw. As a disciple of

sun Raw, I embrace that. And the idea is whether it is the space in an after hours club or a ceremony at a harm reduction center in East Harlem, or a twelve step space, the idea is you're creating room around yourself, room to be with others, and then space around the quote unquote problem or the issue. What psychedelics delivered most consistently is that space in order to give one perspective and maybe increased curiosity, and so owned

is an important part of that. So this thing I'm reading about that you're started up now with some colleagues the Cardia Institute, which looks like your big new venture coming up. Is that basically what it's all about? The stuff you're talking about now, combining these uh you know, programs outside the US using psilocybin or m D m A or maybe even iby gain more together with sound with creating space, is that the essence of it? First

of all, we're not using iby gain uh not yet anyways. Um. I've tuned up with Ross ellen Horn's therapist and and sociologists because we share a similar idea around improvisation. As a therapist, he recognizes the most important thing is to be a tuned to be improvisational, so we share that.

We share that idea. We know people are hurting, but sometimes the labels and the diagnosis is are harmful, and so the idea is how much curiosity can we create, how much improvisation can happen between the spaceholder and the participant.

So we've teamed up with Ross and then for me, for a guy who has been like in the underground, who barely graduated from high school to be involved in this project, it's kind of like a fucking miracle, and the idea is that we're gonna have a space in Jamaica where we'll be doing retreats and also offering ketamine using the same ethos, with live music for each person, and not only offering it to people paying you know the price were you know that's there's no sliding scale,

there's free, and there's whatever the prices, and we're gonna be teaming up with New York harm reduction educators um UH in the Holistic Department to offer these services to that population. I mean, I'm so encouraged by this explosion of interest and excitement about psychelics and therapy, and I realized, you know, you've written some powerful stuff saying let's not take this too fall, let's not get carried away by

our own rhetoric, let's understand the risks here. But I also see ways in which the popularization of this is kind of educating tens of millions of people and opening up a greater understanding. And some of that I think may well read down to the benefit of people who keep doing it traditionally outside the medicalized system, with practitioners and therapists who are not licensed but who are highly talented and very focused on helping people. Maybe I'm just

being optimistic. I think it's I think it's possible, But we have to recognize that the tendency for capitalists is to consume and to grow, and so we have to recognize that what's really encouraging about or gone to me, is that once we decriminalize it will take away those penalties. Some of the efforts of the sixties to sort of

radicalize the use of psychedelics in a group space. I think we could do that really deliberately, and to use psychedelics as an organizing tool of consciousness, raising, you know, consciousness about how we treat each other, class consciousness. I

think that's really exciting. I couldn't agree more. I mean, look, you know, people say that doses, the poison right and the drugs set and setting are pivotal how we experience drugs, and I think maybe many of us are overly optimistic that psychedelics can have this sort of revolutionary effect in terms of opening up people to what we need to do to save the planet and to turn politics in

the right direction. Yet, as I think you've written about, there are all sorts of ways in which pernicious groups and the state have used drugs, including psychedelic ones, for you know, evil purposes as well. So I've loved this conversation. It's a little like sitting in my living room and having the same conversation, which hopefully we'll be doing before long, you know, and maybe with some of the people you mentioned on on our conversation here. So I just want

to I want to thank you very very much. I want to wish you all the best on on the next journeys of your life as you get going with this institute. I think, I think your commitment and your passion, and your your lovable way of communicating this stuff, and your courageousness and sense of adventure you know, have been ever really played it in spiring role in both the broader harm reduction and drug policty reform worlds and beyond.

So for all of that, thank you, Thanks you. I love you do and I and and thank you for all your working and for standing by me when I when I really needed it. So thank you. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Naedelman. It's produced by Katcha Kumkova

and Ben Cabrick. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronovski for Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick for I Heart Radio, and me Ethan Naedelman. Our music is by Ari Belusian and a special thanks to a Vivit Brio, Seph Bianca Grimshaw and Robert Beatty. If you'd like to share your own stories, comments, or ideas, please leave us a message at eight three three seven seven nine sixty. That's one eight three three Psycho zero.

You can also email us as Psychoactive at protozoa dot com or find me on Twitter at Ethan Natalman. And if you couldn't keep track of all this, find the information in the show notes. Next week, we'll be talking about vaping and the cigarettes with Matt Culley, an activist and entrepreneur in the world of vaping. It's good to remember that this is not just a nicotine product. The owners, the business owners themselves view this as a life saving products.

They feel like it's saved their lives and they feel like it's saving their customers lives. Subscribe to Psychoactive now see it, don't miss it.