Hamilton Morris on Pharmacological Creations, Myths & Heroes

type of drug. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. UH. Today's guest is Hamilton's Morris. He's a journalist, UH, documentary maker, a scientific researcher, and explad lore. He's not even thirty five years old as yet, but he's made quite a name for himself and had quite an impact, most especially with his TV series called Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, which started off as a series of columns for Vice magazine and then became something for

Vice HBO TV. And I have to tell you I've been binging on his episodes of LA there's a total of twenty of them, and I just can't recommend it highly enough. So Hamilton's thanks, so much for for joining

me today, Thank you for having me. So, I mean, I have to tell you, on one level, I feel like something that you and I are in some respects kindred spirits and in one respect major respect different, and that you're really coming in part from a love of chemistry, whereas for me that's always been the kind of part of the whole drug piece that never quite engaged me.

But I say, Kendred Spear in the sense of being interested in the broad spectrum of psychoactive drugs and of their impact and impact of use on culture and society and and on prohibition. But I want to ask you right now, virtually all of your adult life right has been devoted to studying this, communicating about this, teaching people

about this. What was it you think that grabbed you? Well, I would actually say that, you know, I was always very interested in the power of psychoactive drugs, even dating

back to being in kindergarten. I can remember watching the news and hearing reports of people overdosing on drugs and finding the idea of it, just the very idea that drugs could kill somebody totally fascinating as a young child, and I would tell other children on the playground about it, saying, did you know that if he mix alcohol and sleeping pills that can be fatal? It can kill you. And

this wasn't, you know, something scary to me. It was something amazing, the idea that a combination of two substances could cause death. Um. You know, it's sort of in the same way that a child might find a karate move that's like the touch of death fascinating. And there was a certain magic to it all that I always found really really interesting. Um you know. I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a young child, and kind of like the storytelling and artistic elements of people

describing their psychedelic experiences. But I would say the real formative moment was reading an article in the New York Times magazine when I was in high school about Alexander Shaalgan and thinking, well, this is just about the most amazing human being I've ever heard of. This is I couldn't think of a fictional character as interesting as this person, and I as soon as I read about him, I

was obsessed. And I read Pekall and t Call and that was my entry into I think a deeper understand ending of the chemistry and the richness of this world. I mean, so, how your teenager when you read that article about Sasha Sugun, were you already using psycholic drugs

at that point or anything else? No. No, My father had a psychiatrist named Doris Millman who had published a number of medical articles on the dangers of LSD, specifically in the context of children using LSD, and he had this idea that psychedelics and LSD in particular were very dangerous. And he's a rational, permissive person who doesn't ask me not to do unreasonable things. And he said, don't take LSD. It's just not safe. Don't take it. You know, there's

mental illness in our family. It's simply not a good idea. Um, that's something you absolutely must avoid. And I thought, all right, fair enough. So I had this idea that LSD and classical serot energic psychedelics were especially risky. But I was fascinating did with salvia when I was in high school.

Probably my first real work with chemistry was extracting and purifying salvin or in a from Salvia divinorum leaves, and so I had used that, but I had never used a classical sertennergic psychedelic like psilocybin containing mushrooms or LSD at the time that I found out about Alexander Shalgan. I mean, were there other potential issues competing with drugs, psychoactive drugs and chemistry for your attention or excitement back then or was it just a clear straight shot from

there up to now? Uh No, not really. I mean I think I had this sort of typical high school interest in alcohol and that kind of thing, you know, cannabis, but it wasn't really a huge part of my life. I found it interesting, very very interesting. But I wasn't somebody that jumped in head first as a high school student. I was neurotic and coustious and um. Although I did it, you know, smoke occasionally or drink occasionally, it wasn't a

huge part of my life. It wasn't until I was in college and the gray market research chemical industry made it possible to order all of these chemicals that I was able to really actually use a lot of the psychedelics at Alexander Salgan described, which of course creates an

even deeper appreciation for his work. It's one thing to read the peak call entry for tow CT seven and another thing entirely to actually try to CT seven and realize, Wow, this is such a fascinating chemical that this man created in his backyard in California. Yeah. No, I mean it's interesting.

I think I first met Sasha. It was and I was teaching at Princeton and I got in a significant grant to create a Princeton working group on the Future of drug use and Alternative to drug prohibition, and Andy Wile suggested it that I reach out to Sasha Sugin. I didn't know, and he said he had based been keeping a very low profile. But then in nine six, Congress had passed the Federal Control Substances Act that effectively criminalized a lot of the work that Sasha was doing

in his back backyard lab. And so he and I became friendly, and when I would go out to the Bay Area, I would go over to his home and visit him and his wife Anne, where I was on Shulgin Road and Lafayette, California. I mean, he really was

a truly extraordinary, extraordinary figure. Um. You know, you know I watched Um, I guess one of the first documentaries you must have done was your visit to uh to see Sasha and when you're just in your early twenties and sort of your reverence for him just just came through, uh you know in that Oh yeah, no, I mean, I mean a huge I even would go so far as to say I became a journalist as a reason

to talk to Alexander Shulgan. You know, that was that was probably one of the early moode evaders, was you know, why would he talk to me? Well, maybe he talked to me if I were writing an article about him or you know, maybe then that would be some incentive.

And that was kind of one of the main things that interested me about journalism at the beginning was that it was a license to be curious about things that otherwise you would have no legitimate reason to ask questions about why would somebody talk to and annoying college student about their work. They have better things to do, they're busy. But if he's working for a magazine and he's writing an article or making a short documentary, well maybe they'll

We'll give him a couple hours. So that was one of my by early things that I wanted to do was just spend time with Alexander Shulgan. And his family was very kind to me. They would invite me to their home on the fourth of July each year, and I did have the opportunity to spend a good amount of time with him at the end of his life, and their memories that I will always share. Ish m hmm. Were there other key people you met at snash this

place who became imported in your life thereafter? Well, certainly, I mean it of course attracted a very interesting group of people, and it ranged from clandestine chemists too, scientific researchers, many of whom are still part of the world of psychedelic research today. Of course, there was Paul Daley who was sort of Shellgan's protege and worked with him in the lab at the end of his life after he

had pretty much gone blind. Um and Paul Daily is still working in Shulgan's lab and now is the head of the Sholgan Research Institute, which is a sort of pharmaceutical company aimed at continuing Alexander Shulgan's research. So I've you know, remained in touch with him and and Sholgan and Tanya Manning and all these great wonderful people that were part of Team Shulgin. It was called and of course, and yeah, I mean and is you know, a very

amazing and influential and inspiring person as well. Yeah, I mean really a sort of founder of M d M A psychotherapy in many respects. I remember it was unusual when I created that working group at Princeton. Sasha was the only one I hadn't thought to invite Anne. And Sasha said, well, wherever I go, she goes over, she goes I go, So she's going to be part of the group as well. So they really were this sort of dynamic duo, you know, putting and bringing their perspective

to thinking about the future of drug use. Well, let me ask you know, one of the things that comes through when I'm watching and binging your episodes is your reverence for some of the you know, the the underground chemists. You know. I had a Leonard Picard on the show a while back and he talked about the brotherhood of underground Chemists, and and what I comes through out of you as well is really almost a reverence for for

who these people were and what they were doing. And some of them are obviously people who are well known. You know, there's Dave Nichols, who was at produced and a leading person operating with a government license, producing many these chemicals, doing the research, but you also look at people who were on the underground and maybe and so I remember three of the names that popped up as I was watching. One was Ken Nelson, another was Steve

gil another was Darryl Lemaire. Can you just tell the audience a little bit about these three guys and maybe reflect on what they shared in common? Yes, yeah, I think that. You know, there are a very very small number of underground chemists who become public figures, and those are people like Owsley Stanley or Nick sand and they represent a minuscule minority of the people that have actually

built this world of psychedelics. Because a sort of unspoken fact of all of this is that when you go to, you know, a psychedelic conference, or you read an article about psychedelics, the chances are every single person that is there and interested in psychedelics has used them illegally, and the psychedelics that they have used have been produced by somebody who risked their freedom to make them. But those people get no credit for the work that they've done,

and their names are typically completely unknown. So one of the things that I wanted to do in my work was find people that made these substances, the people who weren't known, and talk to them about what their motivations were. And I have had the pleasure of spending time with an enormous number of different types of underground chemists from around the world, and I think that their stories are utterly fascinating and are really foundational to the world of

psychoactive drugs. It's probably the biggest part of this history that has never been told, and so I tried to do my part to tell a few of these stories that really explain the origin of these substances. Because you talk about something like PCP, and you know, if you look at it a typical historical gloss of the history of PCP, they'll say, Oh, it was developed by up John Pharmaceuticals in Detroit and it was used as an anesthetic, but then it escaped onto the street. We'll wait a second,

how did that happen? How did it escape onto the street? Who's the person that made PCP, What was their motivation, why were they doing it, who did they sell it to, what did they think it was, what effect did they think it would have on society? And so I wanted to answer a few of those sorts of questions. Everyone's talking about bouf will various venom, Well, where did this

come from? I remember Michael Paullen making a sort of off hand joke about it on Joe Rogan, like, how the heck did anyone think of that smoking toad venom? What kind of crazy person would do that? And on one hand, it's a joke, but on the other hand, it's a serious question. What kind of person would do that? Who is that person? What was their name? Why did they do it? So I set out to find the first person who had smoked well various venom and learn

about their story. And it was actually an immensely difficult investigative task that required years of work, but I was able to track down this person. His name was Ken Nelson. I interviewed him on his literal deathbed. He died just about two weeks after the interview, and the story is totally fascinating. So the same is also true of somebody like Steve gil This is a name that is not widely known. He's a close friend of mine. I talked

to him to this day. And this is somebody who is responsible for what are likely hundreds of thousands of M d M A experiences. These are probably, in many instances transformative experiences that people had, yet the name and the origin of that chemical is not known to those people, you know. I mean with the Steve Gil portion of one of your shows, I mean, that's a guy who was producing M d m A illegally for decades and

then gets busted. I mean, you have this very powerful moment in there, you know about he goes to prison, the tragedy of seeing somebody who's been creating you know, so much good I mean benefit in the world, just being sort of destroyed by that and not able to not not destroyed, but really destroyed for a while, and and not struggling to come back from that um whereas somebody like Ken Nelson, right, I mean his was not I guess so much concern about the criminality of it.

I mean, in this case with five five M e O d M T the toad medicine. You know, oftimes people think about these things like peyote or or you know, whether you also be talking about coca or opium, or it could be thinking about on ayahuasca. Sometimes where these things go back the use goes back hundreds or thousands of years. But with the toad medicine, ken Nelson sort of figured out that thing about the toes gland, it was not illegal, right, I mean, just tell us a

little bit of that story right there. Yeah, I mean, it's a very convoluted story that has multiple threads. The history of five EMMYO d m T has an indigenous thread where there is a history dating back thousands of years of people using various traditional snuff preparations from plants that contain small quantities of five EMMYO d m T s.

You could start there thousands of years ago. But the experience of using these plants that have complex mixtures of tripped to means is not comparable to the experience of smoking boof will various venom, which is, for all intents and purposes, just five m e O d MT. Yes, there are lots of other things in it chemically, but in terms of what is responsible for the psycho pharmacological effect of the smoked venom, it is a five mm

EO d m T mediated effect. Based on everything that is currently known and so ken Nelson had been reading a news report about an anthropologist named Janette run Quest, who had excavated a Cherokee midden pile that contained thousands of toad bones, and the high pathetical purpose of these toadbones was that they were part of a drug ritual. As it turned out, this anthropologist had made a mistake.

It was far more likely, based on contemporary anthropological analysis, that these toads were a food source, not a drug. And there's even evidence that the same group would consume toads as a food source. And on top of that, boof Ball various didn't exist anywhere close to the location of these thousands of toadbones, and it was a different species, so it doesn't really line up. But what's interesting is he was inspired by this idea even though it was incorrect.

He thought, Okay, there's an ancient history of this, an ancient history that likely did not exist, and I'm gonna go and I'm gonna try to do that thing that other people were doing in the past. So he thought he was recapitulating a tradition, when in fact he was creating something completely new. And he read an article by Victorio or Spammer, who's famous for having discovered saratonin, who's obsas with the chemistry of various frog secretions and toad

venoms and things of that nature. And he had found that the venom of bouf wal various contained five m E O D M T. And he thought, all right, well, that's that's a good candidate right there. Let me locate this toad. I'll do what the people were doing in the past, and I will express the venom and smoke it, and had this transcendent experience. But he was actually, based on all known history, the first person to have done anything like this. Mm hmmm. Why did you think he

remained kept himself anonymous too? More or less you figured out who he was. Because there is a tremendous amount of fear. I mean, people are still afraid, as they should be. The consequences for ending up on the wrong side of the story can be nothing less than the complete destruction of your life, and for many people that was a risk they did not want to take, especially in the nineteen eighties. I mean, like I said, it's

still scary now. But in the eighties, all of this stuff that we take for granted, all of this reform,

in this sense of progress, I don't think existed. I mean, I wasn't alive at that time, but that is certainly my impression that it was a darker and more frightening time and even though it was technically legal, it's the case that people will find out a way to get you in trouble for these things if they really want to, which was another aspect of my more recent bouf While Various documentary from the third season of my show, the man Bob Shepherd who was merely keeping the toads as

pets and was arrested for it and lost everything, lost his job, lost all of his money in the legal battle. He ended up homeless as a result of simply keeping these toads as pets at a time when five mm e o d m T was not a controlled substance in the United States. They initially charged him with possession of boufoton in, but then when the forensic chemist who is tasked with analyzing the venom to find boofoten in it to charge him, did the analysis, his name was

Ready Shamakura. He didn't find any boofotening at all. He only found five m e O d m T, so they couldn't charge him and they was all dropped by then. It was too late. The reputational damage had been done and there was no coming back. I'm just thinking, you know, one of these things you do in your episodes, as you sometimes interview the cops, including the cops who are

busting these people. But the one I most liked is you interviewed a d E A chemist and then you did this beautiful scene where you're juxtaposing the d E A chemist talking about his research with I think Steve gil the M d M A producer, I think it was him, and you're basically showing the parallels between the two of them. I mean, the same the same joy in the beauty of chemistry and the fascination with these psychelics. But then, of course, you know one of them has

never tried anything. The d A guy, right, it's all about the chemistry and the science. But you didn't press him quite as hard about how this was a guy who looked up to Sasha shil Again. But then when Sashas gets rated by the d A, you know, he just kind of expresses a mild regret. What was your own personal feeling when you're interacting with him on that. My feeling is that they have a very black and white, non moralistic view of things. There is a law, you

break the law, you suffer the consequences. That's the way it goes. And I think he also still values you know, he was in the military. He values the work of the d e A. He doesn't like to criticize the d e A. He still speaks at forensic conferences. I happen to really like Terry del cass and he's a brilliant scientist. That's the d A researcher. Yes, that's the d A researcher. And it just happens to be the case that he is so interested in exactly the same

thing in a totally different way. I mean, I think that's one of the most puzzling things about forensic chemists and narcotics officers is you have people who are obsessed with drugs, who have all of the passion for drugs of a drug user, but they think about them in an entirely different way than the drug user. And I think it's really important to talk to people like that to try to figure out the psychology of where they're

coming from. Because, of course I agree with you. If you were friends with Alexander Slgan, if you admired Alexander Slgan as a scientist, How could you think that there is anything okay about arresting that brilliant man for doing nothing wrong. But this is one of the complexities of this world. People have very different interpretations of the same phenomenon. And he happened to work for the government and work in law enforcement, and that was how he interpreted it.

And if he felt differently, maybe he suppressed those emotions because it's not an emotion that he could express. And do you think did Sasha child can ever have any qualms of his own about I mean, he had a schedule in license, I guess for quite a while. Did you think he ever had his own qualms about his interactions with the d e A researchers. I think probably he did at the end, especially. I mean, I think one of the things that made Shellgan so powerful and

so important was that he wasn't just a chemist. He was so much more than that, and he was somebody that brought people together. He didn't take sides. He would talk to you. If you were a cop, he would talk to you. If you worked for the d A. He would talk to you if you were a clandestined chemist. He would talk to you if you were a student. He would talk to you if you didn't know anything

about chemistry. He loved to teach people and to include people in his world, and that was what made him powerful, is that he wasn't judgmental ideologue who felt the need to wag his finger at everyone that disagreed with him. He was curious about the world. He wanted to learn why people were the way they were and try to bring people together through knowledge and understanding. I mean, he know he wrote an entire book for law enforcement. It was actually his first book, so he wanted to share

what he knew. And I think maybe a lot of it came from the perhaps slightly naive hope that through the dissemination of information, things would get better. If people understood what he understood, things would improve. And I don't

think long term that was naive at all. Short term it was complicated, and I think towards the end of his career, after the passage of the Federal Analog Act and the controlling of m d m A, and of course his own legal struggles after the publication of Pek Hall, I think that his opinion of these things probably changed slightly, as they would have to, I mean, given the sort

of harassment that he endured. But I still think that his general message and his general effort to make information available to everyone and to be as inclusive as possible to people who had different perspectives on the subject that

he valued so much, was the right way to do things. Yeah, and I remember, you know, Hamilton's him thinking about Peak all right, which for our listeners stands for Peak calls an acronym profen ethelenes I have known and loved, half of which is a semi autobiographical love story about him and his wife Ann and his friends and their use of these substances that he's creating, and the other half is the recipes for I think dozens or hundreds of

these substances. But I remember, I think at one point saying that he almost saw this as creating the recipe book for the sort of what might be the dark ages, of the pharmacological dark ages that might be lying ahead. I think when he got in a more sorrowful or depressed mood about where things were heading. I mean, obviously things have turned around very differently, and impact his influence has been enormous, But I also can see why he is for you, not just a hero, but I guess

a role model. I mean, it seems to me in the way you've present both in the in the documentaries you've done and in the way you present yourself, it's the same basic idea of wanting to talk to anybody.

Is that right? Yes? Absolutely? And I think that you know, part of his motivation and publishing that was he was very terrified by the destruction of Wilhelm Reich's research by the FDA in the nineteen forties because in the case of Wilhelm Reich, of course, it turned out that what he was doing was by all standards, pseudo science, and the FDA said, Okay, this is medically dangerous. We have to destroy this because it represents a threat to public health.

But his feeling was, well, couldn't somebody say exactly the same thing about the work that I'm doing. Couldn't they say, you know, this is dangerous pseudoscience. These aren't therapeutic medicines, these aren't psychotherapeutic adjuncts. These are drugs, and they're dangerous and they killed somebody. So we've got to we've got

to get rid of this stuff. It represents a threat to public health, and he was afraid that, like Wilhelm Reich, his research could be destroyed if the government decided that it was dangerous. And part of the motivation for the publication of pek Hall was to ensure that that could

never be done, that his work couldn't be destroyed. I think that also motivated the digitization of his research, which was freely available on arrow It and remains freely available and arrow It at least in terms of the chemistry. Why did he do that because he wanted it to be available to as many people as possible. He wanted to ensure that there was no way that it could be destroyed. Just explain from molitority, it's about Wilhelm Reich's research.

What was that about. You know, I'm not an expert in Wilhelm Reich, but my understanding is that he was producing these things called orgone accumulators, which would treat a

variety of different disorders, ranging from cancer to frigidity. And you'd get into this box and these things became quite popular with celebrities like William S Burrows, you know, later William Stag as well, and you'd get into this box that I think was just like a little shack with coils on the top of it, and the idea is that it would accumulate this imaginary substance called orgone that

would cure all diseases. So this was in fact pseudo science, and one could make a legitimate argument that the dissemination of this information was dangerous because of course, selling faulty cancer cures or selling faulty treatments to desperate people is a perennial way not only to make money but to hurt people. So if you're running the FDA, from their perspective, it makes sense this is dangerous. We've got to destroy this.

But the whole problem with you know, whether you're talking about the history of eugenics or genocide or psycho surgery, the problem is whenever we think we've figured out what the bad thing is and what we have to destroy, we often make a mistake, and sometimes the bad thing that we're destroying actually isn't bad at all. And so I think Shulgin was right to have that concern. And you know, I think we can all imagine, given the

caprices of world governments, how things can potentially go. I mean they went pretty badly in this country for a long time, and you know, they're still not doing all

that great, but they're getting better. And given the Reagan administration, given all of these very restrictive laws that have been passed, I mean, the Federal Analog Act, for those that aren't familiar with it, was a very frightening development in the history of drug policy, because in the past there was something closer to what exists in many other countries, where you have drugs that are legal that are uncontrolled, and you have drugs that are illegal they are controlled substances.

What the Federal Analog Act said was, well, if you're selling a drug that's substantially similar to a controlled substance that is in Schedule one or Schedule two, then that's also a controlled substance. But the problem is substantially similar was never defined in a chemically meaningful that way, and so the functional outcome is that it put an enormous number of compounds into a gray area. Is five m e O d m T and analog of d MT, Well apparently not, because they felt the need to schedule

five mmo d MT separately from d MT. But I don't think anyone could meaningfully answer that question, because the word analog isn't meaningful in any precise chemical sense, and so Sulgan correctly recognized that this was an enormous threat. This could render vast swaths of his research illegal without a single law being passed other than the Federal Analog Act.

You know, there's another person you described early on is one of your heroes, and it's just sort of not a chemist, I don't think, and sort of complimentary to Sasha, And that was way Davis say. Why oh, I mean, I think Wade Davis is you know, he's a great storyteller first of all, you know, um, and I think that he was able to bring the magic of a lot of these different cultures into the lives of people

who would never have the opportunity to visit them. Going to Haiti and seeing the work that is done in the Voodoo religion and the power of that belief system, or San Pedro shamanism in Peru, or so many different indigenous traditions. He I think, really was very good at appreciating traditional knowledge understanding how it could be applied to

Western medicine. But also I think that he had a you know, a deep respect for the cultures that he interacted with and was incredibly skilled at writing about them in a way that would allow people to recognize why they were important. We'll be talking more after we hear this ad. So watching your episodes of Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, I

see this kind of bouncing back and forth. They're not just bouncing, sort of integrating and sometimes tension between the episodes and the parts that focus on the modern day scientists, whether underground or operating above ground, but then in other episodes going and looking at traditional uses, whether it's eboga and gabon, whether it's something in Argentina, whether it's something

in Mexico or peyote, what have you. And I see, as I said before, some of the reverence I sometimes see when you're talking to the kind of modern day chemists, both you know, illegal and legal. And then there's this kind of rye look you have when you're engaged in some of the more indigenous practices. In particular, they're great belief that the plant is somehow fundament only different then the drug that it contains, and that can be easily

synthesized in a laboratory. Am I reading you right? There is there something in particular that you're referring to. There's part of this whole debate or discussion between the natural

versus synthetic. You and I were both at this Horizons conference in New York in late and you know that's part of what goes there, you know, is is there something fundamentally different between peyote and mescal in between psilocybin produced synthetically and mushrooms the issue of five M e O d M T And you're making the case, you know, like, let's save the toad, right if all human beings descend on the Sonoran desert or Arizona or whatever and destroy

the toad, so just people should shift to the synthetic, and people are having very strong reactions against that. And then I think maybe the other part of that is is some of your skepticisms sometimes about the role of

the shaman shame it. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, these are all very very complicated issues that have to be assassed on a case by case basis, because there are definitely instances where a single alkaloid does not effectively replicate the effect of a plant, and there are other instances where it does. So it really depends on what

you're talking about. In the case of buffo al various venom, it's clear to me, based on all published chemical analyzes that the only tripped to me in present in that venom that could be responsible for the effect that people are describing is five mm o d mt bfot is present in trace concentrations. And I say this as somebody who has actually used pure analytically confirmed bufton. It does not produce the sort of visionary experience that most people

look for when they take a psychedelic. Nobody talks about boufotonin and nobody is saying, oh, boutin, that's my favorite psychedelic. And the reason is that it's incredibly nauseating. It doesn't have the same visionary characteristics of something like d mt or silicin or five mm e o d mt, And so what people are interested in is a five mmo

d m T mediated effect. Then, at the same time, you have this massive demand for toad venom that will easily have catastrophic ecological consequences if everybody starts doing this, and it's gonna look bad and it's going to be unnecessary. And then you have this easy to synthesize chemical five EMMYO d MT, and in this instance the choice is clear. In other instances it's a bit more complicated. For example, in peyote, there actually are other alkaloids that likely contribute

to the psychopharmacology in a meaningful way. The same is true of eboga. In the case of psilocybin containing mushrooms, it's actually closer to toad venom. Again where people say, oh, but there's a study that found one femptogram of some beta carbonene in a mushroom once, therefore, silicon or psilocybin

could never replicate the mushroom experience. Well, I don't think that there's strong evidence that any of the other trip to means present in silosabin containing mushrooms are major contributors. So it's like I said, it's just you have to look at it at a on a case by case basis. And then the same is true when it comes to the contributions of shamans. It depends on what the purpose is, how it's being done, what culture you're in, why you're

doing it. I would never for a moment suggest that the guidance of shamans is unimportant, especially in the cultures where this is their way of life, in their way of medicine. But I think that there is an idea that became very popular, especially in New York um around maybe let's say two thousand seven, eight nine, tenn twelve, when ayahuasca was really gaining popularity, that in order for this experience to be valid and authentic, it had to

be mediated by a scare quote traditional shaman. But why why is it that, uh, somebody couldn't make their own ayahuasca or make a sort of ayahuasca derivative with synthetic d MT and a pharmaceutical m A o I. And there's one really crucial component about this that doesn't get

brought up very much, and that is dosage. I think the two most important issues when anybody uses a drug are knowing what the drug is, the chemical identity of what they're consuming, knowing that it actually is the drug in question, and knowing what dosage of that drug they have consumed. Sometimes people will you approach me and they'll act like I'm some kind of you know, super advanced psycho knots who has great powers of being able to

withstand psychedelic experiences. And I assure you that is not the case. The only power I have is being a neurotic jew who is too afraid to use unmeasured doses of things. And that one small protective attribute of not wanting to consume unmeasured doses of unknown substances has made all of my experiments infinitely more safe and comfortable. And so when you're talking about plant drive substances, you lose that ability to know exactly how much you're consuming and

the exact chemical identity of what is contained. And that has you know, in some circumstances, that might be a good thing. In many circumstances, that might be the only option. But if the hope is to help as many people as possible in a way that is repeatable, then I think understanding the dose and identity of what is being

consumed is of paramount importance. Like just to give one more example, suppose I go to an ayahuasca group at a yoga studio in Manhattan, and I drink some brew given to me by some guy, and lo and behold, I have the most amazing experience of my life. I unwind all of my problems. I suddenly feel energized and rejuvenated and motivated and filled with love, and I'm ready to to do what I have to do. And not only that, I want the people that I love to

have the same experience. I want my father to have this experience. I want my mother to have this experience. But I can't give them that experience because I have no idea what I took. And that's a problem. I think. I think, you know, if, on the other hand, I take let's say, sixty milligrams of synthetic DMT free base one hour after taking three grams of mirams of miklobemide, then that's repeatable, that's reproducible as far as these things can be. And I can say, listen, that dosage was really,

really good. It was just right. It was the porridge that's just right. I was for a moment in a threatening, difficult place, but it didn't last too long and I came out of it feeling strengthened. And I think those data points are really useful. I think that this is one of the great attributes of synthetic substances are working with isolated chemicals, is this ability to know the dose that you've consumed. It sounds boring and pedantic, even as

I'm saying this to you. I think, oh, this is kind of boring to say, But despite it being slightly boring, I think it's immensely important. Well you know, it's also I mean, you brought up a few points that I came across. Well, you've talked about like the use of I began in low doses in France some decades ago. I mean, we think about I began as one the most powerful psycholic substances there is. Or you talked about people using m dm A like substances as antidepressants and

low doses. So there's these I mean, just say a little more about those sorts of things which even I had never heard about those ones. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting that the pharmaceutical history of psychedelics, uh pretty much has only existed in the realm of micro dosing. This is something you never hear people talk about.

But the two let's say, psychedelic adjacent chemicals that have been approved for psychiatric use, namely lambourne which was I be gained that was used in France, and alpha ethel tripped to me and, which was an antidepressant used in the United States, were low doses of in the case of alpha ethyl tripped to me in a sort of m d M, a type serotonin releaser. And in the

case of ibgaine, it's ibegaine. And these were used at low doses precisely because it was believed that some benefit could be conferred without the disruptive effects of a high dose. And now people talk about micro docing LSD or psilocybin, right, And obviously there's you know with was micro docing taking an amount fits so low you don't even a barely aware of it, or taking a slightly higher dose it

might people a mini dosing. But what about what I began, I mean, is micro docing I begain something that might make some sense as far as you're concerned, Yes, it does.

And I say this with caution because it's it's hard to talk about these things from a place of personal experience or my intuitive beliefs without sounding like I'm saying, yeah, I begain, everyone go out and micro dose at that the way, And that's not what I want to say, because I think that you know, there are dangers associated with the use of ib gain, most of them are limited to high dose use. Low doses probably do not

pose the same risk of cardio toxicity. And when I say low dose, I'm talking about twenty milligrams of iby gain hydrochloride or something of that nature. But I have used low dose ib gain for long periods of time in the past, and I did feel that it was beneficial. Did I do a double blind, placebo controlled study. No, this is just an intuitive feeling in the placebo effect

is very strong. So I don't want to make any kind of grand claims about micro dosing or I begain micro dosing in particular, but that is something that has been reported by a number of people like Tim Ferris as well. And I think that at low doses I began, it's not psychedelic at all, you know, it really feels

more like a stimulant at those doses. So this is not really the same as a sort of effect that people described from low doses of psilocybin or LSD, where at least in my experience, you often do get a low psychedelic type effect, but even that's debate. Well, that's one problem with micro dosing is there's a precise definition.

For some people. Micro dosing is a sub perceptible dose where there is no psychedelic effect by definition, and for other people the whole point is having a low psychedelic effect with maybe a little bit of supposed increase in creativity or empathy or something of that nature. It makes me wonder, you know, I think, you know one of the issues involving because you don't get that much into the issue of opioids and heroin, opium and all that

sort of stuff. But you know, one of the questions with heroin was for people who had predicted to street heroin and for whom methanon main inance was not working, boupern orphane was not making as a substitution. Uh, that's they thought about, Well, when I try pharmaceutical heroin and then you know, heroin is so demonized as a name and has all that kind of you know, fear around it.

So people did controlled double blind studies where they tried injectable heroin versus injectable method on everybody can tell the difference. Injectible heroin versus injectable morphine. Everybody can tell the difference. Then they did injectable heroin versus injectable hydromorphone, which is commonly known as deluded and experienced heroin users who have been using heroin off and on illegally for years, if not decades, who swore they could always tell which was

which in a controlled double blind study, cannot tell the difference. Now, I wonder has that happened? Did all these sorts of control double blind studies with experienced users comparing some of these psychedelic substances either in a synthetic form or in a specifically dosed natural form. Yes, Actually there is a brilliant study that was done. I think it was done at Johns Hopkins where they actually did exactly what you're describing.

They took not normal people experience drug users. They didn't use the word psychoat but psychonaut types, people who in some instances had I think close to a hundred experiences, and they said, can you tell the difference between d x M, the active ingredient in robotas in and psilocybin, and believe it or not, even among experienced people, they sometimes could not tell the difference between the two of them.

Sometimes sometimes yeah, I think it was maybe, um, maybe like something like thirty or forty percent of the time people mistook d x M for a classical psychedelic and I think that that's a really and don't quote me on that, but I think that's a really interesting finding because you often hear people talking about these miniscule differences. Oh, I can tell the difference between Soloso by cubens has grown on brown rice flower versus Soloso by cubense is

grown on ry berries or something like that. And then I look at the study and think, Wow, people, uh, in many instances can't tell the difference between completely different chemicals in completely different pharmacological classes. So I think that people dramatically overestimate their ability to distinguish these things. And that's normal. I mean, that's just the way it goes. Right.

You take LSD one time and you have a great experience, and you take LSD another time and you have a bad experience, and maybe you think, oh, that was bad LSD because you're not recognizing your own contribution to the experience. You know, you also make some very powerful points, and that once again going back to the dose issue and also the context. You know, good old drugs set and setting.

You know, the phrase coined I think by Timothy Leary and developed by Andy While and then really researched by Norman Zinberg at Harvard. But I mean, in the issue of stimulants, you're not just looking at psychedelics. You're looking at things like amphetamine, meth amphetamine. And I think you're making the point which I've made over the years as well, but you did in a really nice way that amphetamine

meth amphetamine. I mean, the truth is millions of teenagers, especially boys, and it sounded like yourself when you talk about your old friend riddle In, you know, have been using, have been given these drugs to deal with their A D D and all this sort of stuff, sometimes correctly prescribed,

sometimes not so much. But that basically, if I have this right, if you were to take that riddle In or these other stimulants that they give, you know, teenage boys to help them behave better and focus better, and if you were to smoke them or inject them, they would be a lot like we perceive of meth amphetamine and the big bad myth amphetamine being used out in

the world, crank what have you. And conversely, if you were to take that meth amphetamine that people are smoking and injecting and supposedly is instantly addictive, all this sort of stuff, but to use it orally at the dose level that teenagers are using it in a prescribed way that it essentially would be no different than the riddle, and they're taking Did I get that right? Oh? Yes, yeah, and and I think again people dramatically overestimate their ability

to tell the difference between these things. When people talk about meth amphetamine, they talk about the effects as if they are intrinsic pharmacological properties of the molecule, as opposed to products of the culture in which they're used. So if you take adderall, first of all, that means that you're affluent and have your life organized enough that you are going to a psychiatrist and receiving a prescription for something and filling that prescription at a pharmacy and taking

measured doses that have been dispensed to you. Well, that already says something about the sort of person that you are. If you're taking methamphetamine, you're somebody who's comfortable finding a drug dealer, who will use a substance that has not been analyzed at an unmeasured dose, and you're going to smoke or snort it. That also says something about you. There was a study that showed that there was some brain damage associated with continuous high dose use of ketamine.

And I was looking at the study and the person I think had used ketamine continuously for something like two years and to begin, I wouldn't be all that surprised if using ketamine every day for two years did some kind of damage. I could also see it not doing damage. I think it would really depend on the dose and the circumstances. But the first question that has to be asked is, well, what kind of person uses ketamine every

day for two years? Might there already be something neurologically different about that person before the onset of the drug use. The same is also true for somebody that uses m d M A every day for years. Might that be a different type of person because a normal person wouldn't want to do that even if they had the opportunity.

So there are so many variables that have to be considered when talking about the toxicity of these substances, and when it comes to methamphetamine and emphetamine, I think the primary variable as a cultural one. One is a substance

that's used by affluent people. The other is used by people who are probably in a little bit of a difficult place in their life and they're potentially going to be using it in a slightly more self destructive manner, if only because it's not done in the context of medical use, which also changes the way that people think

about their drug use. I mean, this is a immense fractal of complexity, which is sometimes why when people talk about the subject of drugs as if it's some kind of like niche issue, I think, no, this is this is like the interplay of society and culture and history and psychology and neurology and everything else. I mean, it's like nothing less complicated than the entirety of human consciousness. It's a big deal. So there's no you know, reductive

answer like, oh, well, it's the methyl group. It's the methyl group on the nitrogen that makes it slightly more lipophilics so that it crosses the blood brain barrier more quickly, and it causes release of a little bit of serotonin, and that's why it's different. No, no, no, no, no, there are so many other factors at play, even if the things that I just said are true. Yeah, you know, I mean was just saying about the interdisciplinary nature of

drugs and drug studies as well. I mean, if you think about it in the university you could probably have an entire course on psychoactive drugs in the large majority of the departments in the humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences. Right. I mean, this subject just crosses so many boundaries in part of what comes through your show. And let me ask you a little more about this

because and I have to ask you this. I mean, here you are making these twenty fantastic episodes of Hamilton's Armacopeia, you know, for Vice HBO, which I strongly encourage our listeners to watch. And if I ask why you l ended up becoming a documentary maker as opposed to say going for a pH d and researching and in that way or something like that, there is the fact that you're the only child of a pretty famous documentary maker,

Errol Morris. I remember, for seeing his thing Fog of War about Robert McNamara, the Secretary of State under Kennedy and Johnson, and then the one about Rumsfield, you know, the Secretary of State for the second George Bush. Do you think you would have embarked pursuing this issue the way you have if you hadn't had a dad who's documentary maker. I think it's possible, believe it or not,

because this was never what I wanted to do. In the early documentaries, I was actually really thinking of myself as a writer, and I think it was partially because I was resistant to the idea of doing this, because I didn't want to enter the same arena of my father. So I was thinking, yeah, I'm I'm interested in the science, I'm interested in writing about this. Documentaries are not really

what I want to do. But the reality was that this was at a time when YouTube was just starting to take off, when the Internet was going from a place it was primarily text based to something that was very much video based, and there were huge amounts of resources being dedicated at many different media organizations, but vice in particular to pivoting to video, that was, you know,

the big thing. And what I quickly realized was that if I wanted to tell a story, there would be more resources to tell that story if I made a documentary. So at first it was a purely pragmatic decision, but as I continued doing it, I started to really appreciate the artistic elements of it, and yeah, I think it's, you know, a great way to tell stories. I think that it reaches a lot more people. It's sort of

like podcasts for that matter, you know. It's people are more likely to listen to something than they are to read something these days, and so it was a way to reach tens of millions of people that probably would not have read an article about the same subject. He got me wondering whether if the father didn't influence the son that much, did the son influenced the father because

two of your dad's recent productions. One was the multi part episode called Wormwood right about the CIA scientist who was given unknowingly to himself a psychedelic and lands up either committing suicide or being killed. And then more recently his Peace Psychedelic drug story about one of Timothy Leary's lovers and her story. Do you think that you had an impact or do you know if you had an

impact on your dad? Getting a little more curious, Yes, I certainly had, and I worked on both of those projects, so yes, he certainly did how of an impact, And I did play a big role in making my father interested in psychedelics, And he also played a big role in making me interested in psychoactive drugs because he's interested in that subject as well. So I think you know, I'm very close with my father, and we talk every

day and we talk about these things. So yeah, I think that there's been an interplay between both of us. The one reason that I'm sometimes hesitant to talk about him is that he's usually brought up in the context of diminishing the work that I've done. People will say something like, oh, he's only doing this because his father made documentaries, And that's all fine and good. If somebody wants to, you know, try to take me down a notch,

that's fine, whatever. But the reason that I don't like it is that I'm afraid it's sort of discouraging to people. They might think, oh, I can't make a documentary about this unless my father has made documentaries, And I assure you that's not the case. Advice published hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of drug documentaries and continues to do so to this day, and the vast majority of them were

not made by people whose fathers were documentary filmmakers. So I assure you that that is not a a prerequisite to getting involved in this world. And although I won't deny that it played a role in my own interests, and that I of course learned an enormous amount growing up around him and watching him make so many of his documentaries, But I don't think it's you know, necessary.

I learned a lot, but I think that I also primarily learned about these processes on my own because I was doing it in a way that was so different from anything that he was doing. I mean, he had, you know, huge crews and sound stages and all sorts of resources. My early work was done, you know, single camera on mini DV tapes with just me and two other people. So it was a very different type of filmmaking and a very different style of production as the

son of a famous documentary maker. But obviously there must have been other influences in the way you've proceeded to

become a documentary Who were those and how so. There's a filmmaker named Jason Cone who made a documentary called Manda Bolla that I really admire because it tells this strange story worry about corruption in Brazil, tying it into a plastic surgeon and a frog farm and a private security force and all these different superficially unrelated topics, and it figures out a way to tie them into a richer fabric of this strange phenomenon of corruption and frogs

and kidnapping. And I was really inspired by that movie in many ways because I think that you often find similar phenomena in the world of drugs, where they're all these superficially unrelated topics that then merge in this hub of a single psychoactive drug. One instance would be the episode about man dracks or kalude in South Africa, where you have this substance, but it's also intimately connected to the chemical and biological weapons program of the apartheid government.

It's also connected to the poaching of abalone and to the Chinese trade in the Abylonia as a luxury item and aphrodisiac, which then connects back to the clandestine synthesis of metha loan. So it's all these strange things, but when you weave it all together, it's all connected. And I really admire that film in particular, but there's so many different filmmakers that I admire, but in terms of documentary filmmaking, I think that's a really stand out example.

And of course I am very influenced by my father's work. I am a great admirer of his films, I've watched all of them many many times. I was present while he was making a good number of them, and I think that he's, you know, a really brilliant filmmaker. Well, I mean, I gotta say, I just thought you were incredibly gutsy, I mean, even courageous with a lot of

stuff you do. I mean, you know, you're going you're interviewing some guy in his meth lab and it looks like you're partly where he's gonna blow you all up. And then you go into Mexico and interviewing some very illegal meth producer in places of the world where things can get quite violent, and you're doing drugs. You know, you say how important it is to know that does so what you're doing. But you're doing these plant drugs and having people just put stuff into your mouth and

just going along with it. I mean, were you ever scared when you were doing this stuff? Yes, I was, But my primary fear was not for myself, but for the people that I was interviewing. That was always the concern, because the reality was, in most of these instances, I was okay. There were times that I took risks. For example, when I synthesized a large quantity of five mmy o d MT in Mexico. You know, five mmy o d

MP is not explicitly a controlled substance in Mexico. And I did a lot of legal review and consulted with many lawyers before embarking on that project. But the reality was, as I was saying earlier, if people want to funk with you, they'll figure out a way, and you don't want to depend on precise interpretation of the law if you're in a Mexican prison or an American prison for that matter, Because I've known people that were arrested and

convicted for synthesizing drugs that they never synthesized. I mean, this happens. I had a friend who was a chemist who was synthesizing a psychedelic called two C C and his lab was rated. They seized everything and they said, well, you were synthesizing two C B. They didn't say you were synthesizing to C C and it is an analog of tow C B under the Federal Analog Act. They just said, this is to C B. This is a

chemically different substance, where the chlorine is a bromine. In the case of two C B. It's totally different molecule, but they just said it's the same and he went to prison for it. So trying to go by the rule of the law doesn't always work in your favor, and there are always risks associated with this work. And I,

of course I am not a self destructive person. I never wanted to get in trouble for any of this, and sometimes I did have to take risks, but I genuinely believe that the greatest risks were those taken by the people that spoke with me. And my greatest fear was not for myself, but for them, that they might get in trouble as a result of sharing what they knew. Because sure, I might get in trouble, but I'll get

a lawyer. I'll figure out a way to get out of it, most likely, because essentially everything I did was technically legal. I mean, that was one line that I drew. There's little things that you can look at throughout the process. For example, I'm never helping anyone do anything. If I'm in a lab, I don't touch anything, because if I so much as hand them a glass of water, then that could be legally construed as me somehow, you know,

aiding and abetting the manufacturing and controlled substances. But it's legal to be in the presence of somebody committing a crime as long as you are in no way assisting that process. So I was protected. But if something had gone wrong, things could have been very bad for the people that spoke with me, and I'm grateful that that

did not occur. TOD just be spending a lot of time with vices or HBO's legal departments, so that you know, it was an enormous, enormous amount of time arguing with lawyers who had never taken a chemistry class, where they'd say, well, five m O d m T is the same thing as d MT and I'd say, no, it isn't. It's five methoxy d m T and The'd say, well, that's that contains d MT and I'd say, no, it doesn't. It doesn't contain d m T at all, and they'd say, well, yeah,

it does. It as d m T in the name, and I'd say, okay, Well what if I call it, uh, what if I call it h O N N trimethyl serotonin? Then is it legal? Then is it okay? And I realized that all that mattered was the name. Because O N N trimethyl serotonin and five mm O d m T are the same chemical. The only difference is that when you're naming them, one doesn't include d m T, and that was what they were afraid of. So it was a mess. It was very complicated. It required endless

negotiation about what could and could not be done. Um and one of the reasons that I stopped making the show was because it was so complicated and my fear that something might go wrong. You know. I feel that I was very lucky to have done all the things that I did, and to have done it in such a way that not only were people not hurt, that many people benefited from it, but I think that it was maybe only a matter of time before something bad happened.

When it came to picking the twenty different subjects, was that basically your decision or a team effort. It was my decision, and there was a brilliant team that I worked with who played a huge role in the construction of these projects. I mean, it was certainly not me alone at the end, you know, there were lots of brilliant editors and producers and cinematographers, sound people, lots of people played a big, big role in the creation of

these projects. But often there were ideas things that I wanted to do, but for whatever reason, they were impossible, and so it was a hunstant reshuffling and renegotiation of how to tell these stories. And sometimes the stories just couldn't be told. There were lots of stories that I wanted to tell or things that I wanted to film. For example, wanting to film the clandestine synthesis of LSD simply was impossible, So I filmed David Nichols making an

LSD derivative at u n C Chapel Hill. So yeah, there were things that couldn't be done, and for what it's worth, I do plan to continue with this documentary work at some point in the future. I've now just decided to shift my emphasis to lab work and chemistry because also not to mention the fact that making these projects during the pandemic was a nightmare. I will never forget and it would be nice for the world to stabilize a little bit before getting back into that sort

of work. Maybe that's a naive hope. I don't know what are the one or two your most itching to do when you get back into documentary making or filmmaking. Well, you know, there's so there's so many. I was very interested in doing something about two c B and the use of two c B in South America because most of the clandestine chemists that I interviewed were in the United States or Europe, and this culture of admiring the work of clandestine chemists doesn't exist in a lot of

the world. Yet there are people in those places as well who are making the same sacrifices. And I was curious, well, what is the two ce B chemist in South America think about what they're doing? And also seeing different instances of people making the same drugs in different countries. What is it to find somebody in Russia who's making synthetic cannabinoids. What is it like to talk to somebody who's making methamphetamine in China. Let's take a break here and go

to an ad. Let me ask you this. I mean, I know it's always a crazy question to ask you what are your favorite drugs? Because so much is dependent upon drugs set and setting in context. The one that you just you know, exalted about was Zeno. Tell me about Zeno? Well, Zeno is very interesting to me. I was friends with somebody named Matt Bowden. Who are you familiar with Mat Bowden? I know that name, yeah, but

tell me more. He was a very fascinating figure, really a drug policy advocate in New Zealand who was responsible for what was an immensely progressive change in the law where people could sell psychoactive drugs without any medical pretense whatsoever in New Zealand. So this wasn't uh, synthetic cannabinoids to treat glaucoma or PTSD or treatment resistant depression. This

was synthetic cannabinoids to get high. And he created a pharmaceutical company with the intention of creating better recreational drugs with no medical pretense whatsoever. And I thought, wow, that is so progressive, that is so amazing. I was ready to move to New Zealand to work in his lab because it was so revolutionary. I mean, to this day, nothing like that has ever been done. And when I was in New Zealand at his lab, he had this

brilliant pharmacologist who work for him. I really liked. It was sort of a you know, very much like Alexander Shulgin type. And he had bought a tank of zen on gas. This was in two thousand fourteen, and he said, have you heard of this stuff? And I had, I'd read about it. I knew that it was an anesthetic. I knew that it was an n MDA antagonist like nitrous oxide. And I also knew that it was immensely expensive. It's so expensive that a single inhalation of this gas

could cost hundreds of dollars. So not the kind of thing that you typically have the opportunity to use. And I was so excited. You know, it was right before I was in New Zealand. And he said, all right, um, do you have a balloon or do you have anything that you can fill up? And we were looking around for anything, a balloon, a glove that we couldn't find anything. Eventually, our soundman had a condom because all sound people typically carry condoms with them to keep the lavalier protected from

rain when you're filming in the rain. This is like a sound person trick. And so he said, all right, we'll use a condom and build this condom with zene on gas and inhaled it. And it was, you know, on one hand, very similar to nitrous oxide, but also this amazing, amazing experiences, almost as if a switch of raw, unadulterated euphoria were flipped and suddenly you felt kind of maximal pleasure. And to think that this is coming from a gas that is present in every breath that we take.

This is a natural component of our atmosphere. It's point zero zero zero zero zero five percent of earth atmosphere. And so it was this rare treat I got to inhale zing on gas. I'll never get to do that again. And then one day I got an email from somebody who said, Hey, I was in the sauna at the gym and I was talking with some guy who runs a zen on gas clinic. Have you ever heard of that before? And I said, a zenon gas clinic? What is that? And can you get me this man's contact information?

I must talk to this person and and he said like, well, I don't know, like what you want me to find him? I don't think i'll ever see him again. I was like, we'll just try. If you ever see him at the gym, please tell him that I want to talk to him. And then a few weeks later he got back in touch and he said, okay, all right, the guy, this is his phone number if you want to talk to him.

So I called him up, and as described, this person had built and opened a zenon gas clinic in the Czech Republic where people could inhale this gas, both for essentially recreational purposes but also for pseudo medical purposes. And I went to the Czech Republic like knowing very little. I mean, at that time and really to this day, there was almost nothing written about this practice in the English language. This existed in Russia and in the Czech Republic and in a few other places, but in terms

of English language reporting, there was nothing on it. And everything that I observed in that clinic was something I knew nothing about. I mean that that was kind of one of the great pleasures of working on these projects, was going somewhere to learn about something that I knew nothing about and seeing this entire world unfold before me. But you know, when you go to the policy issue,

I mean, you haven't focused as much on policy. I mean, you're very critical of the drug war, but a zeen on one of those things where you say, thank god, this isn't so cheap that it could be made available over the counter or anybody wants it. That's an interesting question, and I think this kind of has reverberations. And you know, whenever anybody talks about legalizing all drugs, then the next question is, so, wait a second, you're saying that heroin

should be available at the corner store. Well, you know what's next. And I think that the assumption when people make that, or when people ask that question, is if heroin were available at the corner store, wouldn't we all become heroin addicts? Wouldn't we all run directly to the corner store and get heroin and injected into our veins and ruin our lives right then and there. But I think the more measured responses that the answer is probably

not right. As things currently stand, you can buy all sorts of drugs, ranging from robotus into nitrous oxide, and the majority of people feel no need to buy those things and develop substance abuse disorders as a result of their freedom to acquire them. But in the case of Xenon, what's really interesting, and I think this also has some broader implications in drug policy. We talk about the addictiveness of a drug as if it is an intrinsic pharmacological factor.

But back to the cultural dimensions of this. What if the most addictive drug in the world is also the most expensive drug in the world, then what well, then people just can't use it because nobody, unless they are a millionaire or a billionaire, could afford to become addicted to zenon. This is why you never hear about zeno addiction. This is why there isn't a single case report in the medical literature of zenon addiction. It's not because zenon

isn't addictive. It most certainly is, but nobody has access to it, and I don't think there are circumstances where large numbers of people could have access to it. And I'm not suggesting that if zenon clinics opened up then that we'd have an epidemic of zenon inhalation. I really just don't think we would because it's prohibitively expensive and

that alters the way that people interact with a substance. Yeah, I mean, look at the thing I've struggled with is somebody's oftentimes identified as an advocate of drug legalization, but you know, my resistance or reluctance to embrace some more sort of free market approach is that you don't need everybody to run out the story. You just need a lot of people to run out and to eventually get

in trouble with that drug. And I look at something like fentonyl obviously the great danger there now is that it is highly unregulated, and I think we should be looking at ways in which people who are you know, going to buy drugs from the street if they can't get illegally, should be able to obtain what they want in a legal, regulated way. And that should include um fentanyl in aappropriate dose that's that's relatively safe, or heroin

or what have you. But I do still have still my reluctance about making these things you know, so easily available. And that's why I asked you if xenon were dramatically cheaper, where you could buy it for the same as a price of coffee or a joint or something like that, and it is as delicious as you describe, you know, what would happen? Well, I mean, okay, a brief story

about this. So I was at the clinic and and one of my journalistic tendencies is I don't like to say mean things about people I've never gotten into this with the intention of trying to attack people or hurt people or take them down a notch, simply because there's enough stuff out there that I like that i'd prefer to talk about that. So in the instances where I have said something mean or critical, it was typically because I felt I had no choice, and zenon was one

of those instances. So, like I said, I go to this clinic and I know nothing about any of this. I'm approaching it with a genuinely open mind and a charitable interpretation of everything that's going on. They have already said some pseudo scientific things to me, but that's okay. I don't need to police the scientific validity of everything that everyone around me says. They say that the mechanism of zenon is that the atom is so dense that it warps space time around the user. Okay, I don't

think that that is the case. And if that were the case, wouldn't the wouldn't the tank itself have some kind of powerful gravitational field. But but that's fine. So we go to the clinic and they're giving zenon to children. Okay,

that's a bit of a red flag right there. But people also give nitrous oxide to children, and nitrous oxide is far more toxic than zenon, although it's not very toxic as well when used under appropriate circumstances, given that you don't have certain genetic or dietary susceptibilities to be twelve depletion. So I think, okay, this is you know, probably actually safer. And they give nitrous oxide as a dental anesthetic to children all the time. I can think

of a charitable interpretation of what's happening here. It's done with the consent of the parents. It's a short duration, low dose. You know, it wouldn't be something I would ever do, but maybe it's not necessarily bad. But that's the first red flag. Then the second red flag is that a group of breath arians come to the clinic, and despite the fact that this is a general anesthetic, nobody is fasting before using. This is a general anesthetic

that can cause vomiting. And one of the breath arians these are people who claim to subsist on nothing but the uh. The chi or prana or energy of the universe is a scientific pseudoscientific belief that if you are sufficiently enlightened, you can sustain yourself with pure energetic ether that surrounds you in some way, and one of them almost asphyxiates on his vomit and dies. So that's red flag number two. And that's when I start to think, Okay,

maybe there's something dangerous. Maybe it's irresponsible for me to report on this as if it's just a fun, little, uh weird thing that's happening in the Czech Republic. Then in the clinic, because you know, it is so expensive. It has to be administered in a recirculating breathing apparatus that scrubs c O two out of the line because with each excellation you introduce c O two. So they have special beads that absorb the CEO two that have

a color changing indicator. So I want to film a time lapse of the beads changing color, just as a transitional shot to show the passage of time. So I asked my producer, Francis Lyons, I say, would you mind breathing into this mask for thirty minutes while I film a time lapse of the beads changing color. And one of the proprietors of the clinic comes and he says, you know, why doesn't he have some zenon as well? While he's doing it, and I say, oh, no, no, no, no, no,

you know, I recognize how expensive this is. I recognize that, you know, this is a precious substance. You don't need to feel obligated to give it away to us. It's totally fine. He says, no, No, I insist. I insist that he has some zenon. So I asked the producer, do you want zenon? He says yes, So I say, okay, if everybody wants this, then that's fine. You can, you know, give him some zenon and I'll film the time laps.

So I'm filming the time laps in that room, and then I go into a different room to film something else with a different camera. I come back twenty minutes later, and my producer is unconscious inhaling zenon, and the person from the clinic who is supposed to be watching him is unconscious as well, inhaling zenon too. Both of them are in the room simultaneously unconscious, with nobody watching either of them. And that's when I thought, Okay, this is

a problem. This is a serious problem. And we were about to leave. We were maybe twenty minutes from leaving for good, and I thought, if you can't wait twenty minutes to inhale Zenon. This is indicative of a problem. And then two weeks after that, that same person died

inhaling Zenon. So I felt actually bad about the depiction of the clinic because the proprietors, Susanna was someone who's very generous to me, someone who I think was a genuinely good intention person, not someone that I would want to publicly attack or hurt her business. But when you talk about these things publicly, you have a responsibility to tell people the truth of what you found, even if it's negative. And I was in such a position at

that time. Yeah, I mean, how when you think about because remember you also talked I think about a friend of yours in college, a good friend who had a schizophrenic break under the influence of psychedelics, and that that that didn't he didn't come back from it. How do you think about, you know, the casualties from some of this innovative psychedelic production. It's something that you know, I'm

sure you share this feeling. If you think about this enough, you've already integra arated the negative dimensions of it into your understanding of the subject. So when something bad happens. It's not necessarily like a total revision of everything that I thought, because I already was aware that bad things happen.

But you know, this year, I've lost for dear friends in either drug overdoses or drug adjacent circumstances, and it's been immensely painful for me, and it gives me some empathy for the way people respond in the wake of these these terrible tragedies. It's horrendously painful to lose someone you love, and I understand why that makes people anti drug. I get it. I get it completely. It's horrifying and you want to do anything that you can to prevent

it from happening. But the problem is, I think that a lot of people use that grief and that energy in the wrong way and end up actually making things worse. Yeah. Well, I'm curious, you know, because there's the reality of what's going on, and then there's the way it's being presented

in the media. Right, and we seem to be in this psychedelic renaissance, and it's a period maybe like the late fifties were, of almost all the media coverage being positive and you've actually been you know, you get going on this around or something like that. So you've been doing it for ten or more years, there's been this major transition. I mean, how do you see what's happening or less ten years? And what are your thoughts about where this may likely be headed? As it inevitable the

pendulum swings. Are there ways to keep it from swinging too harshly back the other way? It is inevitable, the pendulum is gonna swing. You can't stop that swinging, right. It's not easy. And I am concerned. I'm concerned because I am already seeing the backlash starting and I felt that there was a palpable sense of dread among many people that were speaking at the recent Horizons conference, and it worries me. It worries me because I see a

lot of infighting emerging in the psychedelic community. I've heard from people that were activists in similar spaces not related to psychedelic drugs, that at the cusp of some kind of major breakthrough and their activism. They've also reported similar things happening where there's a dramatic increase in in fighting as people get closer and closer to the finish line. And I think that maybe that's something that will happen out of necessity. But it worries me to see how

people externalize their anxieties. I mean, another example I think would be the way people treated the Sackler family and the opioid epidemic. Right, everybody hates the Sacklers. You go on Twitter and you say I think Arthur Sackler is an asshole, and everyone will applaud you for it, and that's all finding good. We stripped their names off of

every institution they ever donated to. But one thing that concerned me about the activist emphasis on destroying the Sackler name was that it didn't focus on things that would actually help people who were struggling with addiction. It wasn't until one month ago that New York opened a supervised injection site, the first in the country. So if you want to strip the Sackler's name off the Guggenheim, that's all fine and good. And I'm sure it actually did

hurt Arthur Sackler's feelings. I'm sure that he felt really bad about that. But I don't care about Arthur Sackler's feelings, for good or bad. I don't care about how he feels. What I care about is ensuring that people don't die, and hurting Arthur Sackler's reputation won't necessary. It certainly won't bring back the dead, and I don't think it will prevent future overdoses. So that's one of the the conflicts that I've felt, is this emphasis on sort of vindictive

call out activism as opposed to constructive activism. So you have and I say this actually with genuine admiration for Nan Golden, both as an artist and an activist, but there's something kind of off putting to me about how much praise there is for attacking the philanthropic work of the Sackler's, while, for example, I have a friend named Mark Cross who lives in Brooklyn who's dedicated himself to the distribution of Nelocks one and Hailers and figuring out

ways to get them to people for free and to teach people how to use them. But that doesn't get any press at all. You know, I'll tell you, I mean Hamilton, because to the earlier episodes of Psychoactive One, what I did with Patrick rad and Keith the you know, brilliant New Yorker writer who wrote the book about the Sackler family Empire pain, and I gave them a bit of a hard time about placing so much of the blame on the Sacklers, not that they are blame us

by any means. I think they deserve a lot of the criticism and the lawsuits and all that's coming after them because they did drastically, dramatically overpromoted drug that was a miracle drug for some, but not appropriate in the

ways that they were promoting it. But then I also had Kate Nicholson, who has created an organization specifically to deal with the pendulum being swinging so far backward against opia prescribing that now you have people who are using opioids responsibly and who needed for their proper functioning, but where doctors won't prescribe it, where their family is coming down on them. So I think we're we're exactly on

the same page about this. I'll say, with respect to the activism, my sense even at the Risings conferences, that we're still in that first generation period, and typically in our first generation. I've seen this in many different areas of drug policy reform. The first generation generally has a fairly high what you might call mensh kite quota. In other words, a substantial number that people are in it for the right reasons and doing it for the right things.

And inevitably, of course, your biggest battles are with your allies, because those are the ones that you know intimately, the ones you fight with over crediting girlfriends and funding and and all that sort of stuff. But I think as you move into the second generation, as it becomes more commercialized, as people start to go into it for reasons that are not the kind of first generation impulse, that's where it becomes a little more challenging. Okay, so three last

quick questions about particular drugs. One of their episodes focused on something called LSD Ultra to allay audience, how could you explain what's so potentially exciting about that? Well, this is yes, there's a an acronym that the brilliant scientist Brian Roth uses. He calls this project ultra l s D and LSD in this instance does not stand for lysergic acid diathyle amide. It stands for large scale docking.

And his idea is that if you can know the exact structure of a drugs receptor using X ray crystallography or cryo E M or something of that nature, and you can build a computer model of that receptor. You can develop programs that will virtually dok non existent drugs in silico to do all of the drug design on a computer, and then when you have a number of promising hits, you synthesize those things and validate the process

using conventional pharmacological techniques. So it's a brilliant idea, and he has already demonstrated its effectiveness in the design and of novel ligands for melatonin receptors. At the time that I interviewed him, he was focusing on five h T two a agonist. I don't believe that that research has been published yet, but I don't doubt that he's going

to find something really amazing. His technique is brilliant. Brian Roth is a brilliant person, and I think this represents a futuristic direction that all of this research can move toward in the future. The work that I do currently is effectively identical to the work that Alexander Shulgan was doing in the sense that it's not really hypothesis driven.

It's exploratory work where you simply make things and you look at their pharmacology and you make another thing, and you look at the pharmacology, and you examine trends and you try to understand chemical space. But it's a slow process. Even a dedicated chemist can only make so many molecules. You know, let's say one a week, creating one new molecule a week. Maybe if you're really dedicated, it could be two or three if it's the only thing that

you do. But using these in silico drug design techniques, millions of different hypothetical drugs can be screened. And I think that there's a lot of potential in these techniques. That said, I think that there's a beauty to the old way, and I of course have a romantic appreciation of the old techniques of chemistry, of working in a lab and the colors and the smells, and the beauty of growing crystals and all of that. And the idea of losing that is slightly sad to me, but you know,

maybe it's part of progress. Okay, next question. I remember having books on my shelf going back thirty years ago called smart drugs. What does that mean? What's happened with them? Have you used them? Or is there a big future? Yeah? I mean, when I was a freshman in college, I got a prescription for adderall and I took it as prescribed every day, and by the end of my freshman year, I was completely emaciated. I waged twenty pounds less than I weigh right now. And it was clear to me

that there was no way this was an abuse. This was as directed medical use of you know, something like twenty milligrams have em fetamine a somewhat low dose daily, And I realized, there is no way that this is sustainable. This is gonna probably kill me if I keep doing it, so I had to stop, and I became very interested

in new tropics. I read a lot of literature. I tried an enormous number of new tropics myself, and I did not find that any of them, you know, solved the problems of a d h D, or made me hyper intelligent or anything like that. Um. I think that they offer some benefits for some people under some circumstances, sort of like nicotine, where you know it might help sometimes, but then you might become tolerant, or it might have a side effect that limits the applicability for long term use.

But I think that as an idea, it's a very powerful one, because who wouldn't want a drug that improves their memory or concentration or makes them more reasonable and smart. It's a wonderful idea that has been explored at great length in science fiction. I think the issues that we simply have not found such a drug yet. Now you just mentioned the third drugg I was going to ask

you about nicotine. I mean, we know, on the one hand, it's associated with the massive millions and millions of deaths each year from people smoking consuming nicotine in a smokable form. We know that it has a rich history. There's a book I think called Tobacco and Shamanism, you know, where you see descriptions of tobacco consumption in South America that resemble some of the most powerful, you know, psychedelic consumption.

And now we have a new world of tobacco harm reduction where people are consuming nicotine, including smoking by consuming either a vaping form or in oral forms or in pouches. No this thing. Have you looked into nicotine any depth as yet Hamilton's or can you imagine doing so in the future. Yeah, I think nicotine is absolutely fascinating, and I think that nicotine is almost the prototypical neotropic or cognitive enhancer, and and so it doesn't meet the strict

definition of the new tropic. But the problem, of course is that it is immensely habit forming. And so if you use nicotine for the first time and you have no tolerance to the effect. I mean, I've had instances where I use nicotine and you know, wrote an entire article in a single setting. That's kind of the best case scenario. But of course that type of effect is not sustainable, and you rapidly become tolerant, and then after a little while, the effect of the nicotine is simply

curing the withdrawal from not using nicotine. A very similar thing happens with caffeine. Anyone that has gone weeks or months without using caffeine and uses it again for the first time, we'll have this kind of uh, incredible explosion of concentration and focus and energy. But for most people it's just the way you deal with caffeine withdrawal, first

thing in the morning. Yeah, I mean sorry. I discussed this with Michael because Michael Pollan in his last book, Caffeine was the whole chapter and he described it the way you do. Although I wonder if a hundred percent of effect for long time users is simply warding off withdrawal, or if there's not still some effective stimulant thing that happens. You know that it's a combination of those two. Last thing, you don't get that much into people altering their consciousness

through non drug means. There is that fascinating episodes you have where you're you go to visit Amanda Fielding, the founder of the Beckley Foundation outside Oxford, and you get her to share her experience with a trepidation um, which was a way of altering consciousness and maybe enhancing longer term health that people, you know where you put a little hole in your head. But I wonder know you're

very open to Amanda sharing your experience with trepidation. Do you think you could see yourself doing a lot more research into the alterations of consciousness that don't involve taking these chemicals? Yes, of course. The problem is that I think that starts to rapidly include the entirety of human life.

We're constantly trying to alter our consciousness through non pharmacological means, whether it's entertaining ourselves by listening to podcasts or reading a book, or watching a movie or a YouTube video, or falling in love or trying to fall in love, or breaking up with somebody, or eating a meal. I mean, it's that the problem is that this rapidly expands into everything because and I think this also is one of the issues with the way that people talk about addiction.

They talk about addiction as if it is heroin addiction and nothing else. But the reality is that these sorts of addictions exist throughout human life, whether it's food or entertainment to her avoidance of suffering through various social behavioral patterns, and so on and so forth. So of course I'm interested in it. The problem is that it just becomes

an enormous subject, very very quickly. And the nice thing about drugs is they are single entities with histories that can be studied and understood, and they allow you to narrow the focus on a infinitely expansive field of consciousness alteration. Sometimes people would talk about these episodes as if they were about a drug, but the drug was typically just a a single focal point in a larger issue where you know, the LSD episode, was it really about LSD? Know?

Was about Amanda Fielding and the history of her research and the future of drug discovery that was guided in part by historical research on LSD, and it rapidly expands into this very big topic. And so part of the reason that I've emphasized drugs is They've been a way to encapsulate this enorm its enormous subject that can rapidly

get out of control if you don't focus yourself. You're reminding me though, the part of that episode where you get into misth amphetamine and then you go visit some people in recovery and you basically keep pushing them, aren't you just substituting an addiction to mith amphetamine with an addiction to Jesus? And their response is kind of interesting

in a way. I mean, on one hand, they're saying yes, But it also gets to the distinction between addiction and dependence, right, where one something you become dependent on in your life, but that dependence is causing little or no harm, as opposed to addiction, which involves a dependence plus a lot of harm. Right. And when people saw that, I think they sort of misinterpreted what I was doing and they

thought it was like a snarky attack. But I'm genuinely very interested in how well religiosity seems to help certain people with substance abuse disorders. I mean that what they were doing is not uncommon. That's not something that you only see in you know, Arkansas or ten See. This is something that you see in New York City. It's actually very common for people who are addicted to drugs to find solace in the concept of a higher power

and use that to help their sobriety. It's, you know, a foundational concept in a A and a lot of other addiction treatment programs. So I think it's it's a valid question, and I think some people were thought it was a snarky remark when one of the I said, what would you do if you didn't believe in God but you wanted to experience this benefit that you know,

seems to be very real for these people. How would an atheist or somebody who is agnostic or resistant to the traditions of Christianity still experience this in a materialist mindset? And I don't think it's a good answer to that question. Unfortunately. I think that it may be the case that this alternate belief system really does confers and benefit, and it might be incompatible with atheist materialism. So I don't know

that there's an easy solution for that problem. Hey Hamilton, I think we should just go on and on forever. So for our listeners, I strongly encourage you to take a look at you know, Hamilton's twenty part series of documentaries about drugs, Hamilton's Pharmacopeia. He has a podcast as well, in fact that he had me on as a guest not long ago, even as he's working at the university and doing research in the following the footsteps and the

traditions of Sasha Shulgin. So Hamilton's thank you ever so much for taking the time to be on this and I look forward to our crossing paths for many years to come. Yes, thank you. We love to hear from our listeners. If you'd like to share your own stories, comments and ideas, then leave us a message at one eight three three seven seven nine sixty that's eight three three psycho zero, or you can email us at psychoactive at protozoa dot com or find me on Twitter at

Ethan natal Man. You can also find in contact information in our show notes. Next week I'll be talking with Daniel Wolfe, who's played a pivotal role in global harm reduction in his role as headed the Harm Reduction program

at George Soros's Open Society Foundations. When public health agencies talk about harm reduction, or even when some public health programs discuss harm reduction, they're really thinking about it as a set of approved interventions to reduce the risk of HIV or other blood borne infections, and they're really not thinking about it the way I think about it now, because I see harm reduction, including needle exchange, as a sense of personal restoration and enfranchiseman, not just as a

way to stop disease. Subscribe to Psychoactive now, see it, don't miss it. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Naedelman. It's produced by Noam Osband and Josh Stain. The exact to the producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronofsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from my Heart Radio and me Ethan n Edelman.

Our music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks to Abbvi Briosef, Bianca Grimshaw and Robert Beebe