Replay: Michael Pollan on Psychoactive Plants, Chemicals and Us

any type of drug. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. So today I thought we'd bring you a sort of bonus episode. It's my old interview from last year with Michael Pollen. I did it back then because he had just written a new book called This Is Your Mind on Plants. But you know, last week Netflix released his spectacle Cular documentary based upon Michael's previous book called How to Change Your Mind,

all about psychedelics research and its medical value. So in honor of that coming out, I thought, why not bring back that old episode. If you haven't listened to it before, I'm sure you'll enjoy it, And maybe even if you have listened, you'll enjoy it. Again Hello psychoactive listeners. Today is uh, well, we have quite a guest. He's an extraordinary writer and author. He is a professor of journalism

at you see Berkeley. Uh. He's somebody I've known for quite a while who I think whose writing is changing the world, and that is Michael Pollen. So, Michael, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm very grateful

for your time. Thank Yeah, we do go back. I guess too when I was writing about medical marijuana, right, I think I interviewed you then as exactly I was going to bring that up, which is it was back in the spring of nineties seven, and I think you had just maybe maybe around that time, you had published the piece on poppies and Opium and Harper's which is part of the chapter of your new book, This is Your Mind on Plans, And I had put together that

ballot initiative in California on legalizing medical marijuana, hadn't drafted it. That had been a local activist, Dennis Room. So you came to see me. We spent a couple of hours together in my office, and we're beginning to plan out the next cycle. And I think since then we've crossed passed over the years. But let me open up by asking you. I mean, the next thing I saw you writing about drugs was The Bodany of Desire, where you

wrote about what apples, potatoes, tulips and maria. Well, what I remembered about that piece I remember sitting around everywhere after you did it, was that what you did was really when you raised the question, is this victory for Proposition to fifteen, the medical marijuana initiative in California twenty five years ago, did it represent a tipping point or beginning of a tipping point at ending the war on drugs?

And the second key point you made there was that what it had really done was to open up a dialogue between the people in the government, between the cops and the growers, and the docks and the patients and you name it. And I just thought that in both rose respects, it was prescient. But I'm curious now when you look back on these last twenty five years. I mean, marijuana has not been a focus of your writing in recent years, But what do you think about this evolution?

I mean, what's I Do you have concerns about it? Do you feel very good about it? I basically feel good about it. I think that what we learned from that episode was that a very important tool for changing attitudes towards drugs was um and this was your your idea, I think, was to reframe marijuana as a medicine rather than a kind of cheech and chong, you know, fun thing.

And when the public began to see that it was helping people, and then it was AIDS patients of course, and some people with epilepsy UM and these were mostly anecdotal stories about how they had helped people, but that completely changed the public's attitude. The simple demonization of these obstinces became much harder when we began to think of them as medicines for some people. And I think it's that same game plan, and I don't use that word in a cynical way, has really driven the shifts around

psychedelics too. What's interesting is there was never as much science around cannabis as a medicine. It was really largely anecdotal. It was a citizen science kind of movement, whereas the science around psychedelics has been um, you know, more conventional control, double blind studies. Yeah, I mean in a way, right, because you also had marijuana was in the farm of Copella until the twenties or thirties. Oh yeah, there was history,

There were studies out there. There was the fact that marinol, that synthetic version of marijuana, was already available. They're on collegists already saying they were using it, and in fact, you know, it was really a previous generation before me. That helps shift opinion on medical marijuana, because with ballot initiatives, you weren't really going to run a ballot initiative unless you went into it with already fifty or more public support.

I think somewhat so only with the psychedelic stuff. You know, those local initiatives that began to win in Denver and in Oakland and now the big state went in Oregon last year. I mean, those were doable because of the work of others. And when I look at the work of others, I give a huge amount of credit to Rick Doblin's organization MATS. I give a lot of credit to the researchers, the Rolling Griffiths and Bob Jesse's and the others. But your book had to change your mind.

I just think that had an explosive impact just personally. The number of people would come up to me and say, Ethan, I just read Michael Polland's latest book. I mean, where can I get some mushrooms? I've never done them, or I haven't done them in three or four years, So I mean, what do you think about that? I really think that you've been this major catalytic writer about food. I'm the worst dilemma. But that book was extraordinary in

its impact. Well, you know, I do hear that a lot, and people such as the couple that started the organ initiative, you know, have told me that it was reading not that book, but the New Yorker piece that preceded the book that inspired them. And it's incredibly gratifying. I mean, people write things and nothing happens all the time. To

have anything happened. But I also feel that I was amplifying the voices of the researchers because these were incredible um findings, and I would interview the patients and tell their stories, and that's really what moved the needle. As with medical marijuana, hearing about individuals whose lives were transformed for the better. There's nothing more powerful than that. And of course that's what happened in Oregon, right. I mean

they began that ballot initiative underwater. They were at forty six, I think, and they did have the resources that you didn't have back in the nineties. Um, they had a lot of advertising money. But what did they do with it? Well, they told the stories of cancer patients whose fear of death had been removed by their use of of psilocybin and picked up ten points in a very short amount of time. So the public is ready to hear these stories. I think the public is ahead of the politicians on drugs.

And uh. They know that the drug war has been a failure, and they see the collateral damage, and they know now that the lies they've been told about drugs are just that, and they're much less likely to buy

the propaganda. In the beginning of your new book, This is Your Mind on Plans, you write, my wager in writing this book is that the decline of the drug war, with its brutally simplistic narratives about your brain on drugs, has opened to space in which we can tell some other, much more interesting stories about our ancient relationship with the mind altering plans and fun guy with which nature has

blessed us. And that opening to the book is actually a good description for why I'm doing this podcast now. It's the same thing, and we need this new conversation. I mean, I think just ending the drug war is not enough because these are powerful substances. They're going to be part of our lives, They're going to be accessible. We're gonna have to talk to our children about them. Uh, and we have to learn how to live with them, which is, you know, not obvious. Yeah, well you know.

So let me give you a little shit about something and see how you respond to it. Right. You wrote an OpEd piece in the spring of I think in New York Times, right, and it was a reaction to Denver legalizing uh you know, plant medicines or pilocipic mushrooms I can't remember. Was narrow short, and you said, hold on here, you know, maybe the country isn't ready for this debate. And I was thinking, oh, well, Michael's just covering his ask this. His book is having such a

huge impact. The last thing he needs is to be identified as a new Timothy Leary of psychedelics. But afy, tell me what you were thinking then and what you're thinking now about this, because now you're talking about opening up the debate. Yeah. So, Um. At the time, I was strongly influenced by the scientists that I had been interviewing and that we're really at the heart of my book, and they were all very nervous. Um. You know, this path had been laid out by Rick Doblin, originally of

FDA approval. Right, We're gonna go through the phase one to three of the trials, then we're gonna get FDA approval, and then we'll reschedule psychedelics. And the fear then was that if this became a popular issue rather than this more or less hidden regulatory path, um, it would blow it. It would politicize psychedelics, and that I expected a backlash. I expected us to fall into the old culture war drug war narrative and that suddenly this research, which had

not been controversial, would get to be controversial. So I was in effect being protective of this research, which I thought was so important and so promising that I didn't want anything to get in the way. As it turned out, that process is going on. It hasn't been affected for reasons I don't entirely understand. The Republicans have chosen not to fight this. Uh, you know, this suing for peace in the drug war that's happened. I think they've decided

it's a losing issue. Uh. And and given that the how how the culture war is raging, it's very interesting they're leaving this one alone. And in fact, psychedelic research has has friends on the right. Rick Perry, the former Energy secretary and governor of Texas, as a supporter of psychedelic medicine. Rebecca Mercer gave money to MAPS, and Steve Bannon says friendly things about it. So as you know, and I evolved, I mean, what can I say. I

still don't support the commercialization of psychedelics. I don't think that cannabis is the proper model. And cannabis you know where I live. You know their billboards on the Bay Bridge, you know, promising delivery of cannabis within two hours if you call them, like you know, by the time you get home in traffic, it'll be there. There'll be a guy you're on a bicycle with your with your cannabis. And um, that kind of active promotion of psychedelics is uh,

you know. I mean maybe I'll be ready for that in a year too, but I'm not yet. And I think that decriminalization is very different, and I see all this capital moving into the psychedelic space, most of it for medical treatment, and I do believe there is a place, or there should be access for psychedelics for people who are not clinically you know, mentally ill um. I think

they have a lot to offer all of us. But I'd love to find a model that is well suited to psychedelics, to magic mushrooms, and not as many people in the cannabis world want to do follow that path so that the magic mushrooms are sold right next to the to the cannabis, you know, vape cartridges, in the in the dispensaries. Um, that doesn't feel right to me. Yeah, I mean, you know, Michael, I'm actually fairly sympathetic to your viewpoint. I'm also wary of the kind of over

the counter commercialization and advertising. I think with marijuana, we recognize that it was inevitable and there probably was no other better model, and you just have to hope for good regulatory approach is at the state and ultimately the federal level. I mean, I do look at places like the Netherlands or Jamaica where they do seem to sell magic mushrooms in the same places that oftentimes cannabis is clause legally available and those don't seem to be an

issue yet. But I agree it has to be careful and I don't want to see that that backlash either. I mean that definitely scares me that possibility. Right, we went through that backlash once, of course, and uh, it could happen again. Um. You know, this country is prone to moral panics around drugs and it has been for a very long time. What's happening with the truffles in Amsterdam though, that's a that's a pretty weak form of psilocybin. You have to consume enough truffles to get a stomach

ache for it to actually work. And you know some of these substances are you know, LSD is obviously very powerful, and uh, I do think that we have to find, you know, the proper cultural container. I was very influenced by rereading Andrew Wild's book The Natural Mind. It's like fifty years old. It's a very wise book, and he talks a lot, since he's done all this research in South America, of what we have to learn from indigenous

cultures about how to safely use these powerful psychedelics. Well, you know, I'll tell you Michael Andrew was my first guest. I did it in part because he has such a huge influence on me back in the eighties, reading The Natural Mind at the time, and then his other books Chocolate to Morphine in the Marriage of the Sun of the Moon. I mean. The other thing, of course, is, you know, he goes from drug writing to writing about integrative medicine, and he and he writes about coffee for example,

which we'll get into that shortly. And you also go, you know, you do the stuff on marijuana, but the embodying desire gardening in this and then you become, you know the world's leading writer about food stuff. But I wonder how you think about your back and forth in the merging of these two issues. Yeah, well, for me, there of a piece. I mean, you have to go back in time to the beginning of my writing, which was very much about uh, you know, I began writing

in the garden. I was very interested in the symbiotic relationship between us and plants and how plants have evolved to gratify our needs and desires. And that's a very successful strategy. Just look at the edible grasses, which now you know, have this huge amount of territory. We a lot to them because we depend on them for corn and rice. This has been a really winning strategy to

hitch their wagon to ours. And so if you're interested in that, if that's the kind of trunk of my work, of the tree of my work, this interest in plants and people, ethnobotany, you might call it um. One big branch off of that trunk is food and agriculture. And I spent a couple of years writing about that, and I still do from time to time. I'm still very interested in that. And that's kind of the most profound way we change nature um is through our eating and

what our agriculture does to the planet. Um. We change the land, we change the atmosphere, we changed the composition of species. So it was kind of natural I would dig into that first and and wrote three or four books about that. But another really interesting thing, we use plants for us to change consciousness. And this turns out, as as Andy says, in the natural mind, to be

virtually universal. And so that's another interesting branch um of our use of plants and their cleverness in enlisting us in their their mission to expand their habitat they're also you know, both things we ingest that changes us. And finally, they're both critically involved in health, physical health for the most part with food, and mental health for the most

part in drugs. But as we know, those lines even are not what you would think, and Andy has made a very strong case that the psychedelics can have, you know, real physiological effects and heal physical elements, not just mental elements, and that there's not a real difference between the two at some level. I also like moving on as a writer at a certain point. I prefer to write as an amateur and then I become an expert, and that kind of sucks it up from a literary point of view.

I mean, it's very gratifying as an advocate that you know, I learned about a said check, I published a book about it, and then I have a platform to argue for the world I want to see, and that's great. But as a writer, I really prefer being at the beginning and being the idiot on page one who has

a set of questions but doesn't have his answers. Read the first page of any of my books and you'll see I really am very naive at the beginning, and what I like to do is dramatize the process of learning and what I have to do to learn, which includes not only talking to people and reading lots of books, but having experiences that are really relevant that teach us

in a way that books can't teach us. And so you know, when I was writing about the cattle industry, I bought a cow and followed it through the process for Omnivor's dilemma. And as you know, when I wrote about psychedelics, I took you know, a menu of psychedelics, because there's no substitute for personal experience, um, And there's a perspective you have doing something for the first time

that you'll never have again. So even though I'm a relatively green or young psychonaut as Andy reminds me every time we're on the stage together and he lists the hundreds of experiences he's at all. Right, I actually think there's a virtue in being a newbie that I see things that you might not see on your hundredth trip um, and that there's a quality of wonder. Not to mention the fact that the reader can identify more easily with someone doing something for the first time than for the

hundredth time. Um, so there's a there's a bit of narrative strategy involved to right. One of the things I loved there was a piece of The Times a year or two ago, and it had you having a lunch at your home and it was with Isolet Waldman, who had written a book on micro dosing in fact, and I think she actually interned a Drug Policy Alliance when

she was in her twenties. And then the novelist uh TC Boyle, who I remember reading his wonderful book about growing marijuana and paranoia in Humboldt back in eighty four, Budding Prospects. But then he wrote a very recent novel, Yeah,

Timothy Leary, Yeah exactly. It's called Outside Looking In. And one of the comments they quote you saying there is you're debating about what's going on American culture with with Isolet and TC Boiled and you say, I think part of what's going on is it's a reaction or or it's linked to the growing anxiety in American society, you know, and not not just Trump is um, but a whole range of other things. Does that still feel true to you? That or you just kind of speculating with them. When

you said that, I don't remember saying that. I mean that it was the anxiety that was leading to interest in psychedelics. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean I see it more as a dissatisfaction with the tools we have to deal with mental illness and anxiety and depression and the you know, the fact that s SR eyes are increasingly um not working as well as they once did, and people really don't like taking them. I see it being driven by like a willingness to do something really outside

of the box that people feel. You know, the underground use of psychedelics is booming also, and I think people are looking for hell uh, and that people are in a very stressed state. It has partly to do with our politics, it has partly to do with climate change, and the pandemic has has only intensified this, and many people are looking for healing and uh, And here are psychedelics that offer some relief, but a very different kind

of relief. And that this is not self medication in the sense of using an opiate or alcohol to kind of dull your senses. As you know, psychedelic experience is really hard work and it's an attempt to go inside, which can be a very scary place to go. But people are looking for something more radical, something that in the in the true sense of the word, that will deal with the roots of their problem. It's depression, it's anxiety.

It's just this sense that we're in a very very difficult time and the future, you know, has not looked this dark in my lifetime. Um, you know, the questions being raised not just about the environmental crisis, but about our political system, and well whether our political system can cope the environmental crisis, whether our political system can survive. And I think all these things make the potential of

psychedelic healing very attractive to people. And they're they're willing to take a chance, right, They're willing to do something that may be way out of their comfort zone. I am really surprised at the people. I mean, many people come to me now like looking for psychedelic therapy, and we should tell your listeners, please don't come to me for this. I can't make referrals. It's just too dangerous for everybody. UM, find your own guide. But I'm amazed

that who comes to me. They're just not the people you would think They're people in very prominent positions, people who look like they've got everything worked out in their lives, and they're willing to roll the dice and do something they never would have considered a few years ago. We'll be talking more after we hear this ADM. I have to say reading your chapter on mescalin in the current book was fascinating for me. First of all, I mean,

I I must confess I've only done mescaline. I think once back, you know, years ago, I did synthetic mescaline and I didn't I did not appreciate the differences that you describe in your latest book between mescaline and LSD and psilocybin. And then you also quote Sasha Alexander Shulgin Uh, you know, the brilliant backyard chemist who actually I was quite friendly with him. We visited his home in Latvia, California often times, and who was generous with me and

having the experiment. Um. But he calls mescaline the queen of the psychedelics, and you had I think a Rabbi psychelic friend who said the same things, the king of the materials. So is your experience would you would you agree with that description? Yeah. I mean I had a really interesting, uh and positive experience with mescaline. I had a more profound one with psilocybin. And given the choice, what I do mescaline again, I guess I would. I mean, I really liked this quality of you know, the way

it immerses you in the here and now. Um, it's very different than the psychedelics that at high dose take you somewhere else, take you to another world, another dimension. I was just more here than I'd ever been, and more absorbed in what was right in front of me. And in a way, it was the perfect drug for the pandemic. You know, where we were kind of claustrophobic, we were stuck in place. It felt like our worlds

had shrunk down, still feels that way. And here was this drug that made what you had, the room you were in, the life you were leading so interesting and so nuanced and so rich with possibility and insight that you were completely content with your little nutshell. And I thought that was a very interesting experience. I think Huxley's account, and you know, these accounts influence us. You know, there's no innocent psychedelic experiences, right, They're very much constructed by

our expectations, as Timothy Leary understood. But Huxley in The Doors of Perception, a lot of what I felt chimed with what he said, which was that he felt like the reducing valve of consciousness, the fact that our consciousness is trying to reduce the amount of information coming in because it threatens to overwhelm us, and it's more than we need for the business of living in survival. But there's so much more out there, there's so much more

sensory information than we're taking in. That felt really right to me, and Shulgin says this too. He said he saw colors or nuances of colors that he didn't know existed. And it is that kind of child mind, which is taking in information from in all directions, is not focused. It's the opposite of caffeine. I think psychedelics and caffeine are on two ends of a spectrum. Where caffeine helps you focus the lens where you want, which is very powerful for getting work done, which is why it suits

capitalism so well. Psychedelics, you're bringing in information from all these you know, corners of the room and doesn't necessarily encourage you to focus, but can be incredibly enriching to see what's out there. So it was interesting. I didn't have that experience of ego dissolution. I didn't have hallucinations, with the one exception of there were a couple of moments where I was a little bit overwhelmed by how much information was coming in and I closed my eyes

to meditate. But the me that was meditating with somebody else. Um, And this happened a couple of times. I was like, who is this Latin American woman who's in my head meditating? I know that sounds crazy, but um, but in general, it wasn't about hallucination. It was about perception and it was about taking in this information. The only negative experience I felt, besides this brief period of being overwhelmed by as as I quote this poet, the immensity of existence.

I mean, I was really hit by that a couple of times at the peak, the only negative was it went on so long. I mean it's like fourteen hours, and I was done with the mescaline before it was done with me. Um. I wanted to just have dinner and go to bed, but it wasn't gonna happen. Well, I guess that's why they're not really using mescalin. Right, Yes, it means two shifts for your two guides, right, your

two therapists exactly be kind of expensive. But it does seem like it's worth investigating or maybe working on the molecule as as Sasha Shulgin did so brilliantly, because it has some of M D M as qualities. You can feel very connected to somebody else on it, and you can hold a conversation, and it seems to me it could be useful in a group therapy context um, which

might justify all the hours of therapist time. And there is a company that wants to work with it, Journey All that wants to use mescalin to work on alcoholism. And you know the Native Americans have used mescaline in the form of peyote with great success in a group setting and working often on alcoholism. Yeah. Well, you know I reread before talking with you now, another essay you wrote that. I just thought it was wonderful and it was about the challenges of writing about this, you know,

about putting into the language. And I remember at one point, you know, you uh, you had done five M E O D M T The Toad Trip, the Signorian toad where you squeeze the glands and you get five mm o d m T. And you talked about the role of metaphors or rocket and the Big Bang or at another point, I think in the most recent book you're talking about comparing LSD and psilocybin too kind of a top down approach and mescalin almost a bottom up one.

And I realized that as a writer, and as a brilliant writer, you have the luxury of looking at your words and crafting them words I'm interviewing this moment. You

don't have that luxury of doing yet. Did you feel that when you were writing this most recent book and talking about your mescaline experience, that the words or the ways of writing flowed more naturally than it had a few years ago, just as you've Yeah, I think I found a way to write about psychedelic experience for me, and that was hard to do when I when I first approached the whole issue, and I knew that there was going to be a chapter in How to Change

Your Mind where I'd have to describe my trips, and I was very nervous about it because I've read a lot of you know, really shitty trip reports we all have, and uh, and you know, it's like telling people your dreams. You know, the chances are you'll bore them to tears. So I approached that as a very you know, nervous

making part of the writing um. In the event, it was actually great fun, much more fun than I thought, and as a writer, it was some of the most fun I've had, and and writing about this Mescalin trip too was really fun. And what unlocked it for me was understanding that I was writing for people who probably hadn't had this experience, many of my readers, and I needed to address them directly about what I imagined they

were thinking about what I just said. So in other words, I I go into the trip and I describe it for a certain amount of time. But when I reached a moment of incredulousness in my own mind, like there was a Latin American woman meditating in my head, I stopped and talked to the reader and said, I know how crazy this sounds, or yes, I know that love is the most important thing in the world. I know that there's a hallmark sentiment, but remember it's also profound.

It can be both, and so this direct address to the reader gave me the license to go where I had to go, And I felt like I wouldn't lose that reader by taking account of their skepticism or their wrinkled brow or whatever it was. So once I kind of found that that little formula I could let go,

I could totally cut loose. And you know, for a journalist who's normally writing things that have to stand up to fact checking right in that all box of checkable facts, when there's a lot of other interesting things that you can't quite pin down. Here, I'm transcribing the contents of my mind. There's no fact checking, right, I have it.

I'm the expert on this story. And I imagine it's how novelists feel because they're they're basically as I imagine, I'm I don't write fiction, but they're telling themselves a story, or they're enacting a dialogue in their head and writing it down, and there's enormous freedom in that. And it was it was great pleasure. So I was very happy to write a book where I would get to describe

another trip. You know. I also found sometimes, like when I smoke marijuana, if it's strong marijuana, I'll get into this thinking, oh my god, great thoughts, great thoughts, but so often later in the day, afterwards, the next day, they just seem like fluff, you know, Whereas I found that when I've done this has happened on mushrooms, has happened on ayahuasca, that actually, and especially if I don't get high at the end of the trip, that my thoughts can be very clear later that day or even

the next and easy to remember, easy to remember, and actually have the really insights I had an influence of mushrooms years ago. They still have validity in my life today, and so I think that must be a benefit. Actually, you had, I think the same experience. Oh yeah, I know, I did. There are insights I had, and you could. You know, you can also call them banal insights around love and connectedness, but they're real, you know, the sense

of interconnectedness people feel on psychedelics. The illusion is the idea of separateness, right, and so there is a veracity to some of this these ideas we acquire. But also think of the people using psychedelics to quit smoking, and they come to the profound conclusion that smoking is stupid and it's killing them. They knew that at one level. But there is a sturdiness to the insight on psychedelics.

It's it's what James called the noetic quality, right, that this is not just an opinion, this is a revealed truth, and some of the truths are really important. Um. And they have that etched in stone down from the mountain quality.

And I think that's one of the keys to the success of psychedelics and helping people change bad habits such as addiction, is that whatever insights they come to, either directed towards them by their therapists or on their own, those insights are sturdier than the insights we have in everyday life. Well, now let's talk about the powerful role

of set and setting. And one of the big points you make in the mescal in chapter I think it's in your other book as well, is for a lot of these drugs, there's the synthetic version, right in this case mescal in or or you can have that with psilocybin as well. And then there's the natural plant version, or the one that comes from the toad um in the case of five M E O D M T. Right. And actually, by chance, I met this guy last week, a Mexican guy named Mario Garnier, who is like the latest,

you know, major advocate for the toad medicine. He actually comes from the Sonora area, and when he's asked, there's a debate synthetic versus the toad, and the way he resolves it is to say they're just different. They're a difference. Right now. I think he privately actually believes the real stuff is better, but he frames it that way. I

remember Sasha Shulgin, he was a bit contemptuous. He said, use the synthetic, it's the same drug, and in fact, if anything, that's a little cleaner, so you're less likely to get sick. Now, you talk in the book about your own experience with a synthetic and then using I think the messical that comes from the sun pedro plant. I think in the second case the first ones are

very high dose and was a kind of a lower dose. Um. But you also talk about how our view of this is so alien to people in the Native American church or Indigenous people's for whom the drug quote unquote is almost secondary to the ritualistic context, and they're very devoted to their cactus and they're not interested in synthetic mescaline. And they're not interested in san pedro, and in fact, they're not even interested in peyote that's been grown cultivated.

They think that's not the same either, that it has to be wild. And there may be some truth to that. I don't know. We haven't grown a lot of penoty, but we're gonna try and see what happens. But it may be like hydroponic lettuce, you know, it just maybe weak um. You know, I think it depends on the drug. I think that synthetics are often cleaner and there's less gastro intestinal upset. There are other alkaloids we know that are active UM. In the same way, Cannabis is not

just THHC. It has other things going on and and maybe other things we haven't yet found. Same with the natural forms of most of these drugs. In the case of air got, you would not want to eat the natural form. That's you know, you could get gang green

and insanity. I mean, bad things happen. And I just say to our listeners, is the connection with LSD, right, Yeah, it's the It's the fungus from which LSD is derived and has a dark history in European culture of leading to all sorts of problems when people ingested it on bad grain. Another way to look at this is, um,

look at coca versus cocaine. You know, Andy and Wade Davis have written l quently about how coca leaves, which are used like caffeine is in our culture in South America, has a lot of positive attributes and very few negative attributes. And it is the refinement into cocaine where you end up with a powerful drug that people can get into trouble with and dit oh, you know opium, poppies, poppy tea is or even opium compared to the powerful synthetics like fenyl, and so it depends. I mean, if you're

talking about things of equal strength, that's one argument. If you're talking about the fact that you're refining something from nature and making it orders of magnitude more intense, that's another story. Um. I think we can get hung up though on romanticizing things in their natural form, but there are some protections and having them in their natural form too, which is that they're often weaker and you know, likely

to be less overwhelming. Yeah. Well, you know. The other thing I like about your writing, and especially in the most recent book, is the way you throw things into historical context. And I'm reading through it and I'm saying to myself, I wonder if he's going to mention Shivel Bush, won he gonna? And there there's Wolfgang schildren. He both this book Tasted Paradise a couple of decades ago, about spices, stimulants, and intoxicants, and he points out how in Europe they

didn't have coffee or tea until the sixteen hundreds. They didn't have tobacco, I don't think till the fifteen sixteen hundreds, right, that actually spices played a role almost like Nebrians. They had alcohol, and they didn't even have hard liquor, right, they had low potency alcohol, So spices played that role. Yeah, they had a hard cider and things like that. Yeah, I forget when distillation comes in, but that's pretty late too. Um. Yeah,

spices are the kind of forerunners of drugs. Um And you know, I mean if you eat chili peppers, right, or black pepper, lots of black pepper, you feel flushed and you feel it changes consciousness. I mean, there are many foods to change consciousness. Sugar Just watch kids with sugar. That's their drug. It's a powerful effect. But I love that Chivel Bush book and I remember reading it back in the eighties and thinking, wow, this is a fast sinating area and and that was one of my inspirations

to write about drugs. The other is a book I wonder if you know by uh By Lenson called On Drugs. I think that's just a brilliant book that no one's heard of about drugs. And um, he's very good at looking at the cultural and economic um identity of different drugs. You know that cocaine is a consumerist drug, right, you always want more. It drives that consumerist economy, and other drugs make you very content with what you have in

front of you, cannabis. And then he had a wonderful chapter on LSD and how it was orientalized by Timothy Leary and it's really true. You realize it's it's so much of you know. He used the Tibetan Book of the Dead as the frame for the experience, and it's really just about how constructive these drug experiences are, but yet they do have qualities that push them in one direction or another. Let's take a break here and go to an ad. He also writing me about the ways

in which society has transformed. I mean, alcohol is the far and away the most widely consumed drug and revolutionary error early nineteenth century America, other parts of the world. Um, but then there's the transition here and in other countries, United Kingdom elsewhere, man a bunch of the Western world to coffee, and that in an increasingly industrialized world, that

is more appropriate. I love the point you make that it can't be just coincidence that both the emergence of coffee and the emergence of the minute hand of the clock happened around the same time. Yeah. Well, you know what's really interesting about the arrival of caffeine, coffee and tea and chocolate in Europe. Those three substances arrive in the same decade in England, which makes that a really a red letter decade as far as I'm concerned. But we see it before and after the introduction of a

of a powerful drug. Because the older drugs like alcohol, cannabis, opium, they've been around, you know, since prehistory probably said, we don't know what a world without them was really like. But we see the arrival at a moment in time of caffeine, and it changes things in a profound way. And people at the time noticed they're writing about this new sober and civil drink and that you know, clerks and offices are no longer drunk and they're doing a

better job and um. And it was immediately grasped that this drug was well suited for mental work in a way alcohol wasn't, and was well suited for operating machinery. So the the industrial revolution, you know, gets a big push from the arrival of caffeine. It creates the kind

of worker that you want. And you know, before that people were doing physical work outdoors and it didn't matter if you were buzzed, and people were buzz because they were drinking, you know, at breakfast, because alcohol was safer than water. And that's why you even gave alcohol to

your kids. Um, in the form of hartsider, I mean, not strong forms of alcohol, but but everybody got al hall once you start doing work that involves heavy machinery, and especially when you need a night shift, you know, because these machines are so expensive and you want to run them all night. Caffeine is what allows us to stay up late. Caffeine disconnects us from uh natural time. The time of the sun used to be would work

from dawn till dusk. With caffeine and electric light or gaslight and a few other things like coal, you could have a night shift and an overnight shift. And it had a profound effect on creating a human being, a human body that could work in the in the context of a mill or another kind of technological setup. Um. So, I think it had a big effect. And if you want an example of what's going on with capitalism and caffeine, just look at the coffee break and think about that.

You know, your employer gives you a drug coffee or tea and then paid time in which to enjoy it. That's InCred Why is your employer doing that not to be nice. They're doing it because they know that you you will work better and harder and more efficiently. Yeah. So part of what you do is you write this broad historical perspective and you also raise concerns about the future. You point out that with climate change, many of the

coffee growing regions maybe hurt the most. You know, you point out another place that with you know, we've typically gotten our opioids from the opium plant, morphine, heroin, etcetera. But now we see fentyl emerging, or we see other either semi or total synthetics that may be displacing this. We now see a for profit psychedelics world that knows that part of its opportunity to make money is by designing slight variations on the natural substances which they can't patent.

And so, I mean, any thoughts about where we're going in terms of our psychoactive drug use of the future, Well, there's a few different futures out there, and I don't know which one is going to predominate, but I think they're going to be multiple. I mean, there isn't a kind of enclosure movement in the corporate world around psychedelics

and attempt to patent as much as possible. Compass Pathways is most notorious for wanting to patent psilocybin, and you can't exactly but they patent of one crystalline form of it, and whether that's a meaningful patent or not remains to be seen. But you know, psilocybin will continue to grow in cow patties, it will continue to grow in closets and the gardens, and it's I think it'll be hard

to control. There will be the you know, the natural form, the mushroom form that will still be out there, and and underground therapy won't go away. I think it will actually get even more successful. There was a period where the underground therapists were worried they were going to be written out of psychedelic medicine. But they're no longer worried about that because the demand is going to be so great and they have access to the drug and they they're the ones with a lot of experience too and

administering it. And then there's gonna be this religious path. I'm very interested to see these new churches or you know that use psychedelic as a sacrament. I mean, already we have three of them. There's two ayahuasca churches that have the legal right to use ayahuasca, and then there's the Native American Church, which has a legal right to use peyote. But there will be a church of psilocybin

in a church of LSD. And I think that it's going to be very hard for the Supreme Court to deny that they are either religions or that this is their sacrament, and that the jurisprudence around religious freedom has gotten so crazily expansive that I think it's going to be like an exploding cigar when it gets to Samuel Alito's desk one of these churches, and yeah, we'll see. I mean, you know, they don't always feel they have to be consistent, you know, they don't they it was saying.

I mean, I remember Justice Scalia, you mentioned right and shot down the Native American Church is right to use peyote, and fortunately Congress overturned them. But Scalia was not consistently bad on all drug issues. But he may have been somebody who just kind of saw America as a Christian nation or Judeo Christian nation, as fundamental to his conception and that therefore allowing something like this might threaten it.

But how outrageous, I mean, given the fact that white people came to this country seeking religious freedom, the free exercise of religion, and they put it in the First Amendment. And here are the people who pre existed us using their sacrament and being told by the Supreme Court of the United States that the drug war is more important than your religious practice. I mean, it was just one of the most outrageous decisions, and I'm really glad it was undone, so you know, you get into the Native

American Church. One are the interesting things? Well, first of all, you make the point that if people, white people and all others who are not part of the Native American Church are gonna use mescaline, don't get it from peyote, get it from the synthetic or else get it from then pedro plant, which grows in abundance and is very hearty. Right.

But you also interestingly pointed out that Native Americans did not actually use this until a hundred years or so ago, whereas the traditional use went back hundreds of not thousands of six thousand years sixth value among the witch all in Mexico and others as well. Yeah, the story of the Native American Church and how it was created and what it did for Native Americans who is to me

one of the more moving stories I've I've written about. Um. It is true that it wasn't until the eighteen eighties at least that white people noticed it that they were using peyote in a ceremonial way. Um. It was a revival of a practice UM that had been continuous in Mexico.

And remember the distinction between Texas and Mexico is fairly recent and peyote grows on both sides of the Rio Grand in a strip there and um, there may have been Native Americans in Texas South Texas who used it continually, but for most Native Americans, it was really when they were forced onto reservations in Oklahoma and brought into close contact with one another that this practice spread um and became a really an inter tribal um practice and did

a lot to knit different Indian groups together, because remember, before we got here, they weren't Native Americans, uh, in both in in both senses, there was no America. But also they were separate nations, and many of them hated each other. They were agrarian people, and there were nomads, and they had many different lifestyle and and so it's it's only us that have forced them to be lumped together. And the Native American Church when that phrases invented, is

the first time the phrase Native American is used. And that doesn't happen to but anyway. At a at a moment of maximum trauma for American Indians in the eighteen eighties, this is after the Ghost Dance has been suppressed violently, there's a massacre at wounded knee. This is after um, we've begun taking Indian children from their parents, cutting off their hair, putting them in boarding schools, where the avowed aim was to and this is a quote to kill

the Indian and save the man. It was the policy of the US government to destroy Indian culture. Um. Many of their religious practices were outlawed, the sun dance, for example, and and by the way, we're outlawed until the Carter administration. So this is a kind of horrible episode. And um, the Native Americans found that peyote used in ceremony was helped accommodate them to their new lives, um and helped heal them from things like alcohol, which don't really become

a problem until reservation life. And so you know, this is a traumatized people, and they found relief in Payote and continue to the Payote is um is is Now. You know, there're two or fifty thousand members at least in the Native American Church, and and I don't know how many different tribes, but dozens and dozens of tribes. So it's a very hopeful story. And it's a story from which we we stand to learn a lot well.

And closing let me just say, you know, when I think about the future of psychoelic assistant psychotherapy and whether health insurance will pay for it. Reading in your book that the Indian Health SUS pays for peyote sessions, I mean, what a great you know, precedent for covering the costs, like sister therapy soles like. Thank you so much for joining me. It's great to catch up. I love your new book. Um, do you have any plans what the next book is? Not yet? Not yet, I'm I'm working

on that. I've been too busy with this one. Always a pleasure to talk to you. Ethan, Yes, YouTube, Michael, thanks very much. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Naedelman. It's produced by Katcha Kumkova and Ben Cabrick. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronovski for Protozoa Pictures, Alice Williams and Matt Frederick for

iHeart Radio and me Ethan Nadelman. Our music is by Ari Belusian and a special thanks to avivt Brio sef Bianca Grimshaw, and Robert Beatty. If you'd like to share your own stories, comments, or ideas, please leave us a message at eight three three seven seven nine sixty. That's one eight three three psycho zero. You can also email us as psychoactive at protozoa dot com or find me on Twitter at Ethan Nadelman. And if you couldn't keep track of all this, find the information in the show notes zero