Dr. Andrew Weil on Drugs, Consciousness & Healing

to use any type of drug. Welcome Psychoactive listeners. This podcast episode is a really really special treat for me for for a number of reasons. I mean, first of all, the guests today, Dr Andrew Wile is internationally famous, tensive millions of people know his name, have read his books, have watched his videos. And that's not because of so much of the stuff about drugs. It's because of his work on integrative medicine, on basically integrating the best of

conventional medicine and alternative medicine in really remarkable ways. He's written about a dozen books, been translated to dozens of languages. You know, everything from healthy eating to us spontaneous healing, to spontaneous happiness, to stuff about diets, to stuff about cancer, to you name it really about how to lead a healthier,

better life. But the real reason I asked Andy t beyond there's actually two reasons is that before he really emerged as the pioneering figure in integrative medicine and started all the writing and started a medical program about this, he wrote a trio of books about drugs psychoactive drugs that were formative for me and formative for a huge number of people beginning in the nineteen seventies. Uh, and

how we think about drugs and alteration consciousness. And then the last reason quite frankly, I wanted to have a yahn Andy, is because going back thirty idea years ago, Um, you played a major role in my life, not just um your intellectual influence, but as I was going through probably the greatest emotional trauma and physical trauma of my life, you played a pivotal role by helping me see how they were really integrated with one another. So maybe we'll

have a chance to get into that. So Andy, thank you so much. I mean I have to say too, is that one of the things I really admired about you, is that, even as you become this globally famous person talking about food and diet and health, you've never shied from putting out the most provocative and I think correct ideas about drugs. And that goes back to I guess when you were just what a college student or something

like that and beginning to study all this. So what were the origins for you about thinking and talking about drugs in the ways that has such an influence? Oh gee, I told some of that story in my first book, The Natural Mine. But I've read about mescaline, uh, right after I graduated from high school, and I just fascinated me and I wanted to know more about it, and so I began reading everything I could and asking people if they knew anything about the psyched that I think

the word psychedelic wasn't even used then. And um, as an undergraduate at Harvard, I majored in botany and had the good fortune to be mentored by Richard Schultz, who was the godfather of modern ethnobotany. And you know, as I began studying that and learned learning about psychoactive plants, it struck me that there was a great dearth of knowledge about them, and people in the medical field scientific field really had not studied them, did not know what

they were talking about. And that was certainly true of cannabis, you know, it was true of the psychedelics, and so it fascinated me to try to get reliable information about them. And as you know, um, well, I I experimented personally

with mescal and psychedelics while I was an undergraduate. But then in my last year of medical school, I organized and carried out the first double blind human experiments with marijuana, and I you know, at the conclusion of that study, mainly it was to show that you could study marijuana on a laboratory and get away with it, because many

people said it was impossible. And we concluded that marijuana was a relatively mild and toxican that in people who were familiar with its effects, you couldn't really show uh, deficits and performance. Um And I thought that marijuana would be legalized within ten years, that it was just a matter of getting the correct information out there. Yeah, sorry, it took so long, Andy, boy, was I wrong? Well, at least it's happening, and at least we're one of

the first countries. I mean, Colorado Washington were the first states, even before other countries started doing it. But one thing that hasn't changed is you still can't get to National Suit on Health to really spend any money to look at the medical benefits of marijuana. Yeah, what's it gonna take to get it out of ski to one. You know, it may just become increasingly irrelevant as more and more states move towards legalizing this stuff, and the absurdity of

federal prohibition just persists. I mean, there's even some ambivalence about moving out of schedule one to schedule too. I think the real objective is basically just to deschedule it and treat it like any other substance, and then the pharmacy companies can come up with their specific versions of it. But by and large, you know, the cat is out of the bag or whatever the metaphor is. So I think we're moving forward there. You know. Now, you also

at that point in your life you were interacting. I mean, Timothy Leary and Richard Albert who became ron Dust were there. They were doing those experiments. As those things began to evolve into less than scientific experiments, but you were trying these things and then all this leads to you going down into Latin American the Amazon, and uh, how did that shape who you became in subsequent years? It was

a very great influence. First of all, travel has been a big part of my life, and I think there's no substitute for spending time at other cultures and seeing that there are other ways of of interpreting reality. Uh, and whether that's about drugs and or health and medicine, it's I think a problem in America is that so many Americans really have no experience of of anything outside

of it. One of the things that I learned in my looking at other cultures views of drugs and drug plants is that every culture says that some drugs are okay and we're going to use them, and other people's drugs are not okay and we're going to prohibit them and try to make them go away. But there's really no agreement from culture to culturists to which are the okay drugs and which are they not okay drugs. So

that was an interesting perspective to say. Yeah, I mean, we've also talked about plants, his allies and plant allies. What did you mean by that? Well, I think that plants can be very useful to us, and I feel that it's foolish to try to banish a plant or demonize a plant, as we've done with cannabis. You know, that is a multi use plant that only wants to serve human beings. It lets us manipulate its genome, It

produces fiber, medicine, edible oil, uh and intoxicant. And yet in our culture, we've tried to banish that plan and make it go away. And that's stupid. We let a you know, a multibillion dollar industry and hemp text will slip away to China, and a multimillion dollar industry and edible hemp products go to Canada just because of that stupid attitude that we've got another plant that I looked at a lot as coca. I think that's a perfect example of how to go completely wrong in the relationship

with a drug plan. When Europeans first came to South America, they saw native people's chewing coca, they thought it was a satanic habit and tried to stamp it out. And then they realized they can get more work out of natives if they let them chew it and taxed it and then European scientists got cocaine out of it and released it to the world as a wonderful thing, you know, created a wave of cocaine addiction, uh, and then blame the plant for this and the ultimate steps then trying

to stop native people from using their sacred plant. I mean, just ridiculous. There's obviously been these issues of class and ethnicity and race. I mean, oftentimes, when we look at why certain substances and band and others are tolerated, has less to do with the relative risk and dangers of these substances than with who uses and who is perceived to use these substances. And we've seen this in the US with cocaine and opium and even alcohol in some

respects and cannabis. But I think in Latin America you had these sort of westernized elites looking down their noses at the coca chewing indios and wanting to ban that stuff. Exactly. At one point, the Europeans sent in people from the World Health Organization to give Stanford Bennett and Wexler intelligence tests to Andian natives UH and try to blame low scores on their use of coca caused mental deterioration, and

that was justification for eradicating it. And with cannabis in the US, it was introduced by way of Mexican migrant workers in the South and black jazz musicians starting in New Orleans, and that was those, you know, and then later became associated with political radicals and hippies. So it was those associations that made the dominant culture view it in a certain way. You know, I'm thinking back, there's

another drug plant substance um. You know. I remember you and I first met back in seven I just started teaching at Princeton. I was teaching a drug policy seminar. You were just beginning on your integrative medicine work and still very connected to drug stuff. And so I invite you to give a talk at the university, and I remember you invited your parents up from Philadelphia to be

in the audience. And I'm expecting you to talk all about marijuana and cannabis and messlin psychedelics, and you spent half the talk talking about coffee. So what was that about? Well, it just struck me. You know, first of when people offer me coffee, I often say I don't touch hard drugs.

I'm not a coffee user. And I think coffee is a quite strong drug, and many people who use it have no awareness at all that it's a drug, let alone a strong one that causes physical addiction and many users, and it just is one of the cultural incongruities that I like to get people to focus on. It just points up how inconsistent we are in our attitudes about psychoactive substances. Yet it's a vast majority of people who drink coffee seemed to do so in a way that

doesn't really undermine health. And there are some health benefits associated with coffee, right, there's certainly our health benefits associated with coffee. But when I was in active clinical practice, I used to say that I produced about one miracle cure a week just by getting someone to stop drinking coffee.

And it can be caffeine. I remember a friend of mine who had serious knee problems, and he went to a half dozen doctors, some who recommended various forms of surgery, and then finally somebody quarrying about his diet, and he revealed that he was drinking a six pack of diet coke every day. The doctor said, stop that, and then knee pain went away. So I mean it's basically the caffeine and coffee, which is a key ingredient, or is a caffee plus other stuff. Well, it's caffeine plus other

things because other forms of caffeine tea does not. You don't see that as that's such an association of physical addiction with tea consumption, and the stimulation of tea is different, possibly because it's the caffeine is modified by other substances and tem We know, I've seen you, know, I remember you being an advocate for drinking tea instead of coffee and green tea, and then I've seen you in recent

years getting very excited about uh much a tea. You even have a little dot com website where this is. But so, what's so special about macha and can that actually be abused as well or is it pretty difficult to do? So I've never seen anyone abused much. First of all, it's expensive, so it's a luxury item. And uh, I guess cocaine is too, and people certainly abuse that. But mauches is a beautiful color. It's brilliant green. It's the only form of tea in which you consume the

whole leaf. It's got a higher content of antioxidants and other healthful substances. And it's got a fascinating cultural history associated with then Buddhism and with Samurais and with the ceremony and uh, something that I like very much. We'll be talking more after we hear this ad. Go back to coca, right, I mean sometimes you know, I mean

Coca cola, right. Hang. I don't know whether it was Litto's cocaine or or coca leaf extract in it until nineteen hundred and so far as we know, there was no major problem, any bigger problem with co cola addiction when it had cocaine or cocaine, and then then there is now. I mean, I sometimes wonder would we all be better off if you know, Coca Cola would puts a coca back in it and maybe substituted for caffeine.

What do you think I have long advocated for introduction of coca I think it's got many potential therapeutic uses. I think it would be a very good thing to have to teach people how to use coca the whole leaf, uh, and why it is different from and a much safer thing to use than isolated cocaine, and if it would replace coffee in our society more globally, I think that

could be a good thing. I think it is it is less less associated with it with jangling stimulation and aggressive energy that can happen with too much coffee consumption. And I don't want to trash coffee, as you know. Even my general belief is that there are no good or bad drugs. They're only good or bad relationships with drugs. Yeah, I mean, I think that was really a pivotal idea that you put forward in that first book, The Natural Mind,

and and carried forward. Right. Then, on some level, people all having innate need to alter their states of consciousness, right, and the different plants and drugs are useful vehicles for doing this, And it's about the relationship you have with these substances. Yeah. And there are of course non drug ways of altering consciousness that may be preferable. You know. It's everything from um skydiving to sex, to music to fasting.

I mean, there's endless ways to alter conscious and that drugs are very convenient because they work very rapidly and don't require a lot of work, and they also have their disadvantages. But I think the root idea here is that alteration of consciousness is a human need and drive, and that if a society doesn't come to terms with that in some way, it's going to get into trouble, as I think we have. And which of the most successful societies that achieving that sort of insight, you know? Uh?

I think traditional societies, indigenous societies are much better at that than we are. And in many cultures you can see still there has been stable use of psychoactive plants um causing no problems, and then offer we've come in and meddled with those societies and created the kinds of

problems we have here. An example is opium use in countries like Afghanistan, for example, in Iran, which is a very stable culture, opium was mostly smoked by older men when they had stopped working, and it was a social drug, not closing problems. And the US went into these countries and tried to eradicate opium and that use was replaced

by heroin use and younger people. So I think that's there are many examples of that kind of thing where our shortsightedness has has backfired and led to worse problems than were there to begin with, right, you're reminding me, there was this classic article by Joe Westernmire and the Archives of General Psychiatry, maybe forty years ago more, and he called it the pro heroin Effects of anti Opium Loves, pointing out that both in Southwest and Southeast Asia, how

when these governments um suppressed when had been legal opium monopolies. Uh, that what happened was, you know, people still wanted the opioid, but they went to the drugs that could be more easily smuggled, condensed, you know, in this sort of way, are hidden from the authorities, and that was had horrifying impacts, especially when HIV and injection drug use came around in the nine eighties and nineties, you know. So no, no,

it was definitely that element, you know. But I mean also, like you know, with with with a thing with drugs, as you said, right, is that the upside is that there were fairly easy and accessible way to achieve some not just mild, but sometimes substantial alterations of consciousness. But that's also their downside, right, that people can go to

them too easily. Um. But one thing I've heard you talk about at times is how one of the benefits of these drugs, whether it's cannabis or psychedelics especially, isn't helping one appreciate insights or or potential uh that then one can accomplish without the use of these drugs. Yeah, I think that's especially true of psychedelics. They can show you possibilities that you otherwise would never have believed in.

But when they wear off, you don't necessarily know how to get back there, how to maintain that, and you have to find other ways to do it. But I think that's the magic of psychedelics. And you know, everyone talks about them now is being useful for mental health conditions, But I see tremendous uh widespread applications of them in physical medicine as well and chronic pain and autoimmune disease.

I think they're quite remarkable. Yeah, I've heard you talk about some of your personal experiences, the ways in which psychedelics had some physical impact on you. Well, you know a famous one that's been quoted many times. It is my instant loss of a cat allergy lifelong cat allergy as a result of an LSD experience in which I was feeling terrific and uh, I interacted with a cat and had no allergic response and never have since. So uh, you know, I'd love to open at some point and

an allergy lost clinic using that. Uh. By the way, ethan, have you you know that also the the there's less written about the the spiritual potential, the potential for spiritual development. But you know, if I don't know whether you're familiar with this, have you seen the the YouTube clip housewife on LSD. No, no, please google that and all your listenership. Just google housewife on ls D on YouTube. It's a

video of an experiment. I think it's from the nineteen fifties, and it's like youatric clinic in l a of a housewife who takes a dose of LSD. Everything is so beautiful and lovely and and a lie. I wish I could talk in technicolor. You can't see it being never or not. I feel sorry for you. You know. It was striking some years ago when Roland Griffiths said Hopkins and others did this study testing the spiritual effects of psychedelics in a fairly scientific way, and I think it

helped open things up into other areas well. It's all happening now. Who would have I mean, I'm quite an As I saw last month, Vogue had a cover story on psilocybin mushrooms. I mean, if that's not mainstream, I don't know what it is. Well, there was a period right back in the late fifties or early sixties when Gordon Wasson was exploring when this stuff was showing up on the cover of Life magazine and Carry Grant and other famous actors and actresses were trying these things. And

then of course it all got blown out. But it looks like maybe this you know, people have learned the lessons from the past, and they're going to be more careful about how this uh, how this thing evolves. The interest is so tremendous out there. In the past few years, when I was traveling a lot and speaking all over the country, no matter what I was talking about, whether the subject was integrated medicine or healthy aging or nutrition, I would get questions about psychedelics. You know, this is

really on people's minds. So if you're Integrative Medicine Center in Arizona, right you have thousands of graduates, they're sort of spreading the world all around the country, in the world, what are they being taught and what are they teaching. There's about things like cannabis and about psychedelics or even

other psychoactive substances. There's quite a bit of curricular material on cannabis, on medical applications of cannabis, and they're also we have teaching about psychedelics, and a lot of people in our training programs are interested in in learning how to be psychedelic guides and how to refer patients to psychedelic therapy. So we are trying to accommodate that interest m hm. And so will there be are you doing

any research on psycholics at the university? Now? There was research going on there um on psilocybin, but I think that stopped now and whether there will be more in

the future, I don't know, uh huh. And when you sort of take what's going on now and you go back to your days in the uh what was it the early seventies or something, traveling around the Amazon region and I presume doing psychedelics with indigenous groups and all this, you know, what's how do you compare can Trashed what those groups were doing when you were in your younger years and observing this with what's going on now, with

all this new research in the U s and elsewhere. Well, you know that that what I saw was mostly use of psychedelic plants by shamans, and they would deal with

patients who came to them or clients that came to them. UM. I think what's happening in our culture now is that the possibilities of psychedelic therapy are being embraced very widely by uh, you know, much much more diverse groups of people, UM, and particularly particular interest on using it for conditions like anxiety and depression and PTSD and o c D and so forth. And I think it's you know, we're going to see these things made available for therapeutic use fairly quickly.

How important is it that they're being done with the assistance have trained psychotherapists or counselors or whatever, as opposed to doing you on your own or with a friend. I think that's all all important. I mean, it's fine if people want to do things on their own with friends, that's fine. But for you know, therapeutic use, I think it's it's very very important that you do this with

a qualified guide. And I'm happy to see now that there are a few institutions who are offering training programs in how to be psychedelic guides? Are there other I mean, you know you're seeing the research being done a lot with psilocybin. I think with mescalin we'll think we'll get into m d M A in a moment. Not so much with LST, probably because it still has that bad rep left over. Are there other planted substances of psychedelic

power that you think might prove well? Actually ayahuasca d MT, I mean, are the ones that you think are going to prove interesting in the in the future that they're not really doing the work on, you know what you mentioned ayahuasca d m T certainly, but also now there are a lot of pharmacologists and pharmaceutical companies that are working to develop analogs of some of these compounds that may have more specific corapeutic effects and fewer of what

are perceived as adverse effects. And one of the things, Ethan that's I think driving this is that our health care system is so burdened with conditions that don't respond to conventional treatment, things like chronic pain syndromes and and PTSD, and there's a real desperation to find methods that work and the possibility that some of these compounds may be very useful for that, I think is making them much

more acceptable. M h. I mean I can imagine that you're that you're fairly critical of the widespread use of these antidepressants, the prozacts and all these other society. But is there any role for them? I mean, do they help some people? Is it something that should be out there still? I think that there are some of these psychiatric drugs that are useful, particularly for treatment of bipolar disorder for example. But the antidepressants have a pretty poor

track record. You know, they don't live up to the claims made for them by manufacturers, and the theory that they're based on I think is weak. Um, if you look at the ads and psychiatric journals for the drugs, you would think that there'd be no depression or anxiety anymore, but that's not how it is. So I think that there is a great need to find better methods and that those will fall by the wayside. Yeah. Well, I mean, we know the psychedelics as well as ketamine, which is

the psychedelic in the way, are showing interesting results. Are there other things that you recommend or suggest to patients? Who are struggling with serious depression. I think there's a lot of new treatments. The one that I'm interested in is transcranial magnetic stimulation. You know, it's a non drug approach, relatively safe, and really good data on that as being useful. There's a quantitative e g. Neuro feedback and novel method

that you know offers great promise. UM. Now, since there's a lot of things out there that you know, are not yet in the etical mainstream but show great promise that their cost effective, TOM effective M. I mean, I've also seen this stuff about the important role of exercise

in dealing with depression. But I'm wondering if any of the kind of lower potency, more common stimulants, the tease kind of you know, all these other sort of South American stimulant plants, is there anything there in terms of addressing depression. I frankly, among the stimulant plants, I would say no. UM. But there may be other things out there, but I don't think any of them have the power of the psychedelics or you know, some of the major

pharmaceutical drugs. I just don't see anything out there that works the way except However, kava for anxiety. You know, that's a very significant, powerful herbal remedy, quite safe, and it's a South specific thing. Yeah, oceany. It's a root of a pepper plant used as a social recreational intoxicant than in many of those island cultures and now of available here. It's quite safe. Uh. It is a very effective anti anxiety agent, much better than any of the

drugs that we use for that. Let's take a break here and go to an ad h. Let me bring you back to the issue of stimulus. Right when we talked about caffeine, coffee, tea, much as things like that. Um, but you know, there's also a very interesting history with good old dextroamphetamine amphetamy, right, and for a long time, but we've seen it. It's use in military. I think there was a long period when long distance pilots in the US I think Navy would be allowed to use

extra amphetamine. And they found nobody ever had an accident within effect. The principal cause of accidents was people suffering

from fatigue. Um, it wasn't from this. And I've sometimes wondered if you were to construct not you personally, but but a huge study where like ten thousand people were to just continue the normal life to control group, and ten thousand people would be taking a five milligram dexter amphetamine every day and then they'd be evaluated after three months, six months, a year, five years on various quality of

life indicators as well as any harms. I sometimes wonder whether or not the group that was taking the UH the low dos amphetamine every day over many years might land up faring better than the control group. Well, that that is possible, even and you know, there is no there's a great enthusiasm for some of these newer ones, like adderall for example, and incredibly widespread use among students.

And I've talked to many UH college students who say that they can't afford not to take adderall because they know the person next to them is taking it and that's going to give them an edge on studying and exams, which is true, right. I mean, it's a short term performance enhancer for everything from sports to study into exam taking. It's like with many of these things, if you just use it occasionally in the right ways, it's probably perfectly okay,

if not good exactly. What about fighting to get a coca chewing gum um so that people for their afternoon break instead of taking that coffee which is harsh on their stomach, or the diet coke um. Do you think that could work? Oh, I definitely think it could work. I've written a scientific paper about that, and I tried to get that going. This is years ago, and now there is It looks as if Columbia might be close

to legalizing coca uh and commercializing it. You know, there's been some effort in Bolivia, less so in Peru, but the Colombian seemed quite enthusiastic about it, and maybe you know, this will stinally start to happen. Cocus in schedule to not schedule one, so you know, it is technically available for medical use, but there's no source of it here. But I would love to see that happen. I think it is such a useful plant and it's just a

shame that we've been denied the use of it. Yeah. No, I mean I think the former president of Bolivia, Able Morales, you know, who had been ahead of the coca growers union beforehand. I mean, he was a big advocate for this thing, and he would even go to the United Nations meetings in Vienna and publicly chew the coca leaf. The problem, however, was he wasn't much when it came to the diplomacy of advocacy for this stuff, so it never went anywhere, you know, I mean, while perusing a

shambles politically. So hopefully Columbia can move forward on this. It might. It's there, there's progress there now. You know, one of your other books that you wrote in the early years, which I remember taking to read with me on my honeymoon, was The Marriage of the Sun in the Moon, right, and you know, you start off with hunting for mushrooms and you're looking at different types of alter states of consciousness. But then the next chapter was

about eating mangoes in Central America. I mean just explained that one. Well, I get high eating very right mangoes, and that's just an example of, you know, another way of altering consciousness. I think they're just infinite ways of doing it. So, um, that book was really essays about my period of travels, most the Latin Americus, some elsewhere, but just about things that I'd done and seeing that I found made me high. Everything from being in the

Native American sweat lodges to watching total eclipses of the sun. Yeah, actually I remember you and I went together on a trip to this southern coast of Turkey for a solar eclipse about fifteen twenty years ago, and it was it was my only experience of that and and it was really quite traumatic when it happened. Was that kind of special sort of altered states. I forgot we had all that history. So talk to me about the placebo and placebo effect and how how central I mean it seems

to play. I mean, I guess there are ethical issues, and the extent to which physicians can use it in many ways are recommended. A bigger problem is that physicians are just uncomfortable with it because they don't understand it. They think placebo medicine is a form of tricking patients, and that's not how it is. Placebo responses are pure healing responses from within. To me, that's the meat of medicine.

That's what you want to make happen more the time, you know, I'm mostly here the word placebo used in phrases like how do you know that's not just the placebo effect, And the most interesting word there is just or we have to rule out the placebo effect. No, you want to be ruling it in. You want to

make it happen more the time. I'm happy to see that in fairly recent years, and this is a result of functional MRI scans of brains that we've been able to you know, people have been able to show that placebo responses are associated with activity in particular brain regions, and this makes them more real. Uh, two doctors. So

I think the views on them are changing. You know, I never give patients sugar pills, but I often give them, say herbs that I think are weaker forms of medicine and pharmaceutical drugs, but I believe in them because I know they work, and I can convey that belief to patients. And I don't really care how much of a favorable response is due to the intrinsic action of that herb, and how is due to a mind mediated mechanism and whatever. I'm just want to see the good result m H.

And it can operate both on the planet. I mean, in dealing in terms of immense pain or pleasure or absolutely the fact that there's there's accumulating evidence that a great deal of chronic pain is not really arising from the body it's a problem in the brain that the brain is misinterpreting receptions from the body, and there are ways of retraining the brain to make that go away, and that may have profound implications for getting us out of the opioid crisis that we're in at the moment.

And you've had personal experience of that even Yeah. No, I mean, you know, I it's funny in my life with this thing. I remember it was you were part of a working group of academics I had at Princeton in the early nineties trying to think through it over the optimal drug policy. And one of these sessions, you know, I had had a recurrence of really bad back pain.

I had been diagnosed with her need discs, and uh, you started advising me at that time and you suggested I read this book by John Sarno, Feeling Back Pain, And that was really pivotal in my life. I mean, it was coming to realize it wasn't the hurting yet disc that were causing the pain, but rather underlying emotional angst that was turning itself into physical pain. Yeah, very dramatic. Yeah, I think I think that view is gaining more ground

these days. Yeah, it was interesting because I thought you was Sarno's book coming out and uh, and then I remember when you wrote your breakout book, Spontaneous Healing, the chapter on back pain was ethan story. And then I remember my you know, I was on TV all the time talking about drug post before, but my only time ever being on OPRAH was sitting in the front row is your patient talking about the back pain experience? And I thought, guys, you're on OPRAH. That's gonna change. Everybody's

going to see the light. But it's amazing how long it takes for that type of insight and wisdom to really get out there, right. You know. That's what I said when I did my Marijan experiments that I thought it would be legalized in five years. It was just a matter of getting the correct information and out. And I saw, however, that people believe what they want to believe, and don't believe that they don't want to believe, and you can show them all kinds of stuff, but they

don't change their views. It was also include serious physicians who should know better, right exactly. And one of the things I think moved me was the evidence that showed that for people who had these herniated disks. The people who had surgery had an immediate relieving of the pain that was dramatic, but that if you compared them three years later with people who have not had surgery, they

had the same incidents of pain all over again. But it was also I remember, it was hard for me to believe that that intensity of pain and the fact that I couldn't even stand up straight and that my toes were numb, it was hard to believe that there was not some physical cause for that saying. And that was the leap that had to be taken you. But you took it. I took it, and I got there, and it changed my whole understanding of the of mind body relationship in a in a in a really important way.

In fact, I think it was just a few months after that that I took M D m A for the first time, and that was I think a very important thing for me in my in my marriage at the time. But I have a question for you now. M D m A has not worked for me for the last fifteen years. What might work? Why not? First of all, why does he keep working for other people for decades and other people who just stopped working and then what might be an alternative. Well, I do see

that pattern. You know, we change as we get older. Maybe your biochemistry has changed. I don't know the answer to that, but maybe you got what you needed from it and it doesn't work anymore. This is what I was saying earlier about that these drugs can show you possibilities, but then they don't really show you how to maintain the possibilities, and you have to work and to find some other ways of doing it. Mm hmm. I remember you telling some story about um yoga and showing the

possibilities or something. Yeah, that's a you know classic. I was learning to do yoga. This was in the around nineteen probably sixty nine seventy, and there was one posture. I couldn't get the plow where you lye on your back and try to touch your feet behind your head on the floor, and I just could not do that. I had was about to give up. I thought I was too old, my body was too stiff. I could get my toes about a foot from the floor, and

there was excruciating pain in my neck. And one day, it was in spring, I took LSD with a group of friends in Virginia. It was fabulous day. I felt terrific and my body felt totally a lastic and I thought, yee, I had to try that. And I lay on my back and was lowering my feet and I thought I had about a foot to go, and they touched the ground. I couldn't believe it, and there's no pain, and I raised them and lowered them. I was just, you know,

so delighted. The next day, I tried to do it, and I got within a foot of the floor, and there was excruciating pain in my neck. But now there was a difference. I knew it was possible, and I was motivated to keep at it. In a few weeks, I was able to do it. If I had not had that experience, I would have given up. Yeah, I wonder you think you can help with our writing blocks,

that's all. That's a lot harder. Yeah. I've always I've always admired an envy you for your incredible I mean, you know, you start off being a journalist when you were in college, right, and you've been writing ever since and just been incredibly prolific. But at this point in my life, I'm not that interested in writing very much anymore. I think I've said everything I have to say. You know, I heard you say that to me fifteen years ago

and you kept writing, so we'll see. Well, you know another thing I remember remember visiting you a two signs sometimes in past years, and you always had dogs around. And then I heard you saying someplace it means another podcast that there's a similarity between cannabis and dogs in the relationship to you remember it. Just stand on that because I found that fascinating. Well, you know, dogs are really unusual. They are the the only animal that has

thrown in its genetic lot with us. You know, sometime in the distant past, dogs decided to co evolved with us, and they have adapted behavior and remarkable ways. You're the only animal that can hold our gaze, for example, um, and you know that's remarkable. And they've learned to read human emotions. Well. Cannabis, in a similar way, has decided

to co evolve with human beings. As far back as we can go in history, we can't find truly wild hemp that has no association with human beings as far back as we have evidence for, it always grew in association with human settlements, and it has allowed us to manipulate its genome and it wants to live with us and serve us, and so I say, it's the dog of the plant world. Is there something similar with mushrooms

going on as well? That's more complicated. There certainly is a there's a sudden explosion of awareness of mushrooms in our culture maybe around the world at the moment that people are, you know, becoming fascinated with mushrooms, or more species of mushrooms, food, mushrooms being cultivated. There's oldest interest in and psychedelic mushrooms. It's a change and consciousness. Whether the mushrooms are driving that or it's us, I don't know,

something's happening. I remember you used to organize these conferences to tell your ride mushroom conference until you're right, Colorado. Remember that's one time. Remember hearing Paul Stamus give a very playful talk about the ways in which some of our mushroom spores found a way to keep putting themselves in interesting places where human beings gathered, including around the

local courthouse or something like that. Right, and then Terence mckennah had a whole theory around mushrooms and human evolution as well. I think, right, yeah, well, there are some people. I think he was the chief advocate of the idea that it was still psychedelic mushrooms that really provoked the leap from apes to humans and development of the modern brain. I don't I don't buy that one, but uh a lot of people like that idea. Uh huh. How about

the idea if they came from outer space could be possible? Right, there was an old there was an old science fiction movie called The Invasion of the Mushroom People. So maybe you know there's another fact, which is that you know, here we have uh opioids outside but endorphins inside. We have cannabis outside um, but the endocannabinant system inside. I remember hearing you talk about oxytocin and such. Well, it's

fascinating the the interconnectedness of the natural world. You know, why why do we have receptors in our brain that fit molecules made by poppy plants were by hemp plants. I mean, that's remarkable, and we have our own idogeneous psychedelic probably d m T. To me, that just points up some deep, profound relationship between us and the natural world, whether it's plants or mushrooms. You know, we're connected. M hm.

Are you still doing psychedelics yourself? Not really. I mean I feel like that that was part of a different phase of my life and I don't really feel that motivated to use them anymore. I think I got I got what I needed to get from them. Yeah, I'm sort of torn because, you know, yeah, sometimes it feels like psychedelics are wasted on the young. You know that they they're all into the colors and this and that. But that's the real value of psychedelics, um, you know,

is about going deeper. And I've analogized it to you know, growing up fairly traditionally Jewish, and fact, I still fast on young people are every year, and I think it's a basically a good thing to do, good for the soul, good for reflection, and that on some level doing psychedelics like once a year is a kind of good sort of annual ritual to stir up the emotional intellectual sediment that can settle, because that's one thing that psychedelics and a higher dose can really do, is stir up all

sorts of sediment. I do know, as most people I know, generally as we age we get more hesitant, and I don't know whether it's that we're more wary of it now, or it's just that we really did learn everything we did, or I don't know. I just find that I'm not motivated to do it. Uh. Alan Watts wrote a blurb for The Natural Mind, my first book, and the last line of it was, when you get the message, you

hang up the telephone. And I sort of feel that, you know, that's my sense that I did a lot of experimentation with psychedelics, especially in my thirties, forties, fifties, and I think I learned from them what I had to learn, and I don't I don't feel that I need to do that again. But if the opportunity presents itself, I mind, I'll say, yeah, yeah. Well, you know the other book that you did, part I think of your Andrew Wild's Drug Trilogy, UM, was Chocolate to Morphine. It

was really a fantastic drug education book. We made sure to order use numbers of copies and give them out, you know, through Drug Policy Alliance. UM. And I remember back in the day the Republican Senator of Florida, Paul Hawkins, wanted to have the book banned from schools and all this stuff. But it does raise the issue of what about the kids, right? I mean, you think about how the whole war on drugs is oftentimes justified as one

great big child production act. But I mean, what's your view about what parents should be doing visa the their kids on psycleactive drugs. I think they should be exchanging truthful information with their kids, and that's why I wrote that book, uh, to facilitate that. I don't want to make general rules for whether kids should or shouldn't use drugs or at what age it's appropriate. Frankly, I'm more

concerned about the vast medicating of kids with psychiatric drugs. No. I think we have no idea what their effects are on the developing brain, and we're doing this tremendous experiment with our nation's youth. Now. A lot of kids are on multiple psychiatric drugs, very strong ones, and as I say, we have no idea what the long term effects are.

I mean, there's also concerns about this growing number of synthetic substances, because you know, tendency for younger people just kind of be reckless about this thing and pop whatever's around. And this incredible proliferation of these synthetic drugs which is also I mean obviously not being used as broadly as the as the you know, the antidepressants and the really

enty drugs and things like that, but clearly a concern. Well, I think as we move toward legalization or general availability of these drugs, it is appropriate to think about, you know, what are the rules for younger ages, for people in sensitive occupations. I think that's on society is gonna have

to come to terms with. When I think of the few people I know who did psychedelics, either with their parents or with their teenage kid, I mean the cases I know of, actually we're quite beautiful stories, you know, and it's something you can't really talk about. Nobody could ever talk about quite openly or publicly. But we tend to say, you know, we here, we have laws that you can't touch marijuana or alcohol to your twenty one, and yet there's something about integrating this in perhaps in

a responsible way. Well, we will see. It's going to be an interesting time. I mean it's even a question, you know, like growing up Jewish, we're having wine on the Sabbath, and then you see buy and large Jews having higher rates of drinking but lower rates of alcoholism. Whether or not that kind of acculturation really helped to uh provide a protective effect. And conversely, I mean, now we're a point with cannabis legalization where cannabis is becoming

so widely accepted. And I fought for this all my life, and I feel very proud of the accomplishment, but I worry at times about cannabis beginning to be used in such a cavalier way a that it's specialness begins to fade. I mean, do you see that as a risk that's probably already happening? And I see that. You know that's a risk with psychedelics as well. You think so even with psychedelics, Oh, I think that's that's happening. Sure. What about the whole microdocing thing. You know, I don't know

what to make of that. I know a lot of people who are doing it and claim that they've gotten very good results in terms of enhanced creativity or lowered anxiety or improvement of depression. You know, I've tried it a bit. It's not something that I was really motivated to continue with long term, but fascinating to watch it happen. Well, Andy, listen, it's great to catch up Thank you so much for

having this conversation with me. Look forward to seeing you before long, okay, and wish you all the vest on your your next ventures, even if you think you've given up writing U, which I don't really believe. We'll see good to talk to you, okay. Take care. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Neatleman. 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 Nadelman. Our music is by Ari Belusian and a special thanks to Avivit Brio, Sef 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 Nadelman. And if you couldn't keep track of all this. Find the information in the show notes. On the next episode, I'll be talking with Yale law professor James Forman Jr. Who's Puliticer Prize winning book, Locking Up Our Own provides a truly unique perspective on the war on drugs. You know, without taking heroin into account, one cannot understand African American

attitudes towards the drug war. The heroin really devastated Black communities, and I think set the stage for some of these punitive Black attitudes. Subscribe to Cycleactive now see it, don't miss it.