In this episode, Joe and Kyle interview Mark Haberstroh: mushroom enthusiast, contributor to our Navigating Psychedelics course, and in Joe’s words, the “person who has worked at more psychedelic retreats than anyone I know.”
Haberstroh talks about his journey from a liter-of-vodka-a-day “drinking career” to rehab, to finding his calling and spiritual path through a combination of using psilocybin for the first time at a retreat center and later, someone at a festival asking him if he used mushrooms intentionally. He talks about what he’s learned from working at so many retreat centers, from issues he’s had with unwelcome surprises and miscommunication, to ways retreat centers can improve to become more people-focused with more attention paid to the very necessary (and all too often neglected) aftercare piece.
He also talks about the importance of researching retreat centers, how different retreats could be geared towards different intentions, the power of the Lakota Sun Dance, Stan Grof’s theory of perinatal matrices, how integral community is to the healing experience, and the complicated aspects surrounding our collective focus on safety.
Notable Quotes
“It’s unfortunate, but when people don’t know about these substances, they compare them to the substances they do know, and if I told them I was doing mushrooms, they equated it to heroin and alcohol and other drugs. These things are so different, and people are so set in their ways, not only would they not listen to me, but they wouldn’t even see me. I lost a hundred pounds, I became active and healthy and happy. …Nobody saw that. All they saw or heard was that I was using mushrooms, and to them, that was bad.” “People ask me about [microdosing] and I’m like, ‘I don’t know. Personally, I don’t get anything out of it.’ We don’t have any data, the placebo effect is really, really strong. But like, whatever. Same thing about spirituality: If you’re happier, healthier, and it’s working for you? Fuck yea.”
“These things have been around forever. We just kind of forgot about them or became afraid of them.”
“I grew up playing video games. And at one of these retreats, I was walking through the woods and was like, ‘Oh my god, I grew up having nature pre-packaged and sold to me for 60 bucks. An ‘adventure,’ and I’ve been ignoring actual adventure in my own life. I need to sell my PlayStation.’”
“It’s a chaotic time right now, but I think we’re also witnessing a real paradigm shift and it’s what we need societally. We need to think about, reevaluate, and revamp the education system, the prison system, [and] the medical model that likes to put band-aids on things rather than getting to the root cause of the issues.”
Mark Haberstroh is a self-educated entheogenic specialist and amateur mycologist, working with mushrooms of all varieties for the last 6 years. He has traveled the world, visiting and working for different psilocybin retreats, educating himself on the different models currently being offered in countries where this work is legal. Originally from Alabama, he now lives in Oregon and is attending the School of Consciousness Medicine.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Michelle, Kyle, and Joe welcome Benjamin Mudge to talk about psychedelics and bipolar disorder, and although there was an intention to also cover some news, the bipolar topic turned out to be quite interesting- so much so that there will need to be a part 2 of this episode in the future.
Mudge, a Ph.D. candidate and Director of the Bipolar Disorder CIC, talks about his own journey of living with bipolar disorder, and how it was ayahuasca that got him off pharmaceutical drugs and to a place of self-awareness and balance he never experienced before. He discusses the taboo against bipolar people and how keeping them out of research studies out of fear for their safety is actually more dangerous to them, and how ayahuasca on its own (and in the correct setting and proportion) could actually be a very safe solution. He talks about how ayahuasca has been a scapegoat, the many factors that come into play to determine its strength and efficacy, institutional ethics, mania triggers, the effects of antidepressants, and how bipolar people are “quantificationly challenged.”
Mudge is working to become an ayahuasca facilitator, collaborating with researchers to determine the best ayahuasca component ratio, pushing to get more bipolar people in more studies, and his biggest project: creating a safe protocol for bipolar people to engage in ayahuasca ceremonies so that they can experience the peace he has.
Notable Quotes
“I was prescribed the wrong antidepressant and became manic psychotic, got locked in a hospital, and went on a journey through the mainstream psychiatric system, tried 17 different prescription pharmaceutical drugs, …I left psychiatry, tried to figure out my own way, tried a bunch of herbs from herbalists and Chinese doctors- they didn’t work. And then 15 years ago, I discovered ayahuasca, and I’ve been off psychiatric pharmaceutical drugs ever since then.” “The contraindication status is not logical, and it’s functioning more like a cultural taboo in our community than it is an evidence-based medical fact. And by the contraindication and the exclusion of bipolar people from the clinical trials, from the ayahuasca retreat centers and so on and so on- that is an attempt to ‘do no harm,’ but doing nothing when you’ve got a suicidal population does not equal ‘no harm.’” “Excuse me, but can anyone actually give me a logical reason why one peer of one minority group who has superior understanding than the rest of the population about what this other bipolar person is going through, knows how to help them, and actually has some experimental treatment medicine- can anyone actually give me a logical, ethical reason why those bipolar people can’t get together and help each other out?” “There is a role for mainstream psychiatric pharmaceutical drugs. They can definitely play a role in stabilizing someone, [but] the question is, does that really have to go on for their whole life? Or once they’ve got their life together and done some therapy, can they have a lower dose or have them less often, or come off them, or use a psychedelic or whatever? That’s not something that the profit margin and that big pharma wants to consider at this point. But I think the humans deserve it.”
Benjamin Mudge has a background in music, art and political activism, and is now a PhD candidate in the Psychiatry Department at Flinders University, as well as Director of Bipolar Disorder CIC. He taught himself the science of bipolar disorder, while working at Neuroscience laboratories and GlaxoSmithKline, to be able to manage his own personal experience of manic depression. After psychiatrists prescribed him 17 different pharmaceuticals (all of which were problematic), he gave up on pharmaceutical psychiatry and decided to find his own solution to living with manic depression. He has been managing his bipolar disorder with ayahuasca for 14 years – without any need of pharmaceuticals – and was awarded a PhD scholarship to research whether his personal protocol could assist other bipolar people. His future vision is to make ayahuasca ceremonies available to bipolar people as an alternative treatment to pharmaceutical drugs.
Taking a deep look at what Measure 110 did and didn’t do in Oregon, and speaking with one of the measure’s Chief Petitioners, Anthony Johnson, on the future of drug policy reform.
“There’s never been a better time to be a drug policy reform activist,” says Anthony Johnson, a Chief Petitioner of Oregon’s Measure 110. Amid a sea of despairing headlines, it’s refreshing to hear a streak of optimism, especially from someone who has been working in public service for over twenty years.
Measure 110, also known as DATRA (the Drug Abuse Treatment and Recovery Act), received 58% of the Oregon vote in November. Similar to Portugal’s drug approach, the measure decriminalized the personal use and possession of all drugs. In addition, it allocated cannabis tax dollars and prison savings to pay for expanded drug treatment and other vital services. This progressive policy was passed alongside Measure 109, which created a legal statewide psilocybin therapy program.
Measure 110 was implemented statewide on February 1st, 2021. Addiction recovery centers and services must be available in each of the state’s 16 coordinated care organization regions by October, 2021.
What Measure 110 Does:
Removes criminal penalties for low-level possession of drugs. The amounts are as follows:
Under 1 gram of heroin
Under 1 gram, or fewer than 5 pills, of MDMA
Under 2 grams of methamphetamine
Under 2 grams of cocaine
Under 40 units of LSD
Under 12 grams of psilocybin
Under 40 units of methadone
Fewer than 40 pills of oxycodone
Allocates $100 million in state funding to expand behavioral health, addiction, recovery, housing, peer support and harm reduction services and interventions.
Establishes an Oversight and Accountability Council, made up of people who have direct lived experience with addiction, along with service delivery experts.
Reduces the criminal penalty for larger amounts of drugs from a felony to a misdemeanor.
Replaces the misdemeanor charge for small possession (which held a maximum penalty of 1 year in prison and a $6,250 fine) with a fine of $100. This fine can be waived by completing a health screening within 45 day of receiving a citation.
Nearly eliminates racial disparities in drug arrests, according to an independent analysis.
The Measure Does Not:
Legalize or create a regulated supply of drugs.
Change the criminal code related to drug manufacture and sale.
Change the criminal code for other crimes which may be associated with drug use, such as theft and driving under the influence.
I spoke with John Lucy, a Portland-based attorney focused on cannabis and business law, to clarify. He explained that Measure 110 covers all controlled substances, Schedule I through IV. The defined amounts in the bill language were provided for the more well-known drugs. So in short, Measure 110 really does make simple small possession a Class E violation for most drugs (with some A misdemeanors for larger quantities of the drugs listed that don’t meet commercial drug offense guidelines).
To be more specific, substances such as GHB (Schedule I and III), 2C-B (Schedule I) and Fentanyl (Schedule II) are now all class E violations, subject to the new $100 citation.
Why Measure 110 Matters for Racial Justice
The Oregon Criminal Justice Commission (OCJC) is an independent government body which is responsible for research, policy development and planning. In 2020, the Secretary of State released a Racial and Ethnic Impact Report, which explored the potential impacts of Measure 110. The findings make it easier to understand why Oregonians voted overwhelmingly in favor of this measure.
According to analysts, Measure 110 is slated to:
Prevent 8,000 arrests.
Reduce drug convictions of Black and Indigenous Oregonians by a whopping 94%.
Save between $12 million to $48.6 million from ending arrests, jailings, and convictions.
Also noteworthy are the more systemic solutions that could come from this measure. According to the OCJC’s report:
“This drop in convictions will result in fewer collateral consequences stemming from criminal justice system involvement, which include difficulties in finding employment, loss of access to student loans for education, difficulties in obtaining housing, restrictions on professional licensing, and others,” the report says, adding: “Other disparities can exist at different stages of the criminal justice process, including inequities in police stops, jail bookings, bail, pretrial detention, prosecutorial decisions, and others.”
Q & A with Anthony Johnson on Current and Future Drug Policy Reform
The three chief petitioners of Oregon’s Measure 110. From left to right: Haven Wheelock, Janie Marsh Gullickson, and Anthony Johnson.
I spoke with Chief Petitioner of Measure 110, Anthony Johnson, about the treatment-not-jails approach and where he hopes the drug policy reform movement will go next.
Rebecca Martinez: It’s a little late, but congratulations on the passage of 110. What a huge accomplishment!
Anthony Johnson: It’s a step in the right direction. Oregon took a big sledgehammer to the failed drug war. But I would say there is still more work to be done around the criminal justice element, making sure that harm reduction, treatment, and recovery programs are fully funded. And there’s still more work to be done expunging past criminal offenses that people have suffered from.
RM: Do you foresee new organizations being formed under this measure, or will the funding go to expand existing ones?
AJ: Right off the bat, at least with the initial funds, it will go to groups like Central City Concern and Bridges to Change that set up sober housing living situations and want to expand their programs so they can help people find places to live, get job training and experience, and be able to move on with their lives. Programs like that can expand. There could be rural organizations that understand there are places in Oregon where people have to travel hours to receive drug treatment. Groups could get funding for mobile units and meet people where they are. And then we have organizations like Outside In, who may want to expand the ability to provide NarCan, or fentanyl-testing supplies so that lives can be saved.
So in the short term, it will be organizations that are already up and running, doing good work and have experience applying for these types of funding sources. Over time, I could see new organizations established based upon lessons learned and the needs of the community.
Navigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Therapists starts up again on May 20th. Reserve your seat today.
RM: When it comes to drug testing [as in checking for purity, not to be confused with urine drug testing], is this something we currently have in some form, and if not, is it legal and allowed under this new program?
AJ: Right now, organizations can get funding to expand programs to test drug supplies. There are organizations working today in Oregon that provide test strips so people can test their own drugs and make sure they are not fentanyl. I’m unaware that this conflicts with federal law if a group is just supplying testing equipment. It’s a little different than say, a safe consumption site where there is a violation of federal law happening on site. It’s more like, “Here’s your kit,” and you’re on your way.
When we talk about the interplay and all these issues of impact, I want to highlight one point, and I believe we did this effectively during the campaign. I hope this can reverberate all throughout Oregon: When people talk about drug policy changes, ultimately it is not about the drugs. It is about the people. Our loved ones. No matter where you live, who you are, you have family members using drugs, most likely illegal drugs, but definitely legal drugs, be it alcohol, tobacco, or prescription drugs.
Knowing the truth about these drugs, treating them without stigma so that when people who do have an issue, they’re willing to come forward and there are resources available to them. Ultimately, what do you want for yourself or a loved one? How do you want to be treated? Do you want them arrested, put in jail, fired, given a scarlet letter “F” labeling them a felon for the rest of their lives so they can’t get certain housing opportunities? Or do you want them treated with dignity and provided resources if they need help. Remember that the majority of drug users actually don’t need help and can lead productive lives.
When mainstream media stories are written, headlines are going to be as inflammatory as possible. The photo’s gotta be needles and lines, razor blades, if they can they throw some guns in the picture too, but that’s not a realistic representation of life in America. As we move forward, we want to be compassionate, empathetic, end the stigma, and treat people how we want to be treated.
When people talk about drug policy changes, ultimately it is not about the drugs. It is about the people.
RM: I have two immediate family members who have been incarcerated. Is there a pathway to ending sentences for people who are serving time for substances that are no longer illegal? Or, is it: “What’s done is done”?
AJ: Something could be done about it, for sure. And we were able to accomplish some of this work with cannabis. We could have something passed that provides a study saying, “Who is in prison for these substances that are now decriminalized?” Or, “The offense was reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor and their prison time should be reduced and they should be let out.”
For whatever reason, there’s often some reluctance around that. I don’t quite understand it. The way I see it, when we legalize cannabis or drug possession, voters and society are recognizing that the state has made a mistake. Cannabis shouldn’t have been illegal in the first place. These small amounts of drugs should not be a felony or a misdemeanor. So, why are people in prison and why do people have criminal records when the state made the mistake?
It will take further legislative changes to accomplish this. We still have such a huge stigma around drugs. Cannabis has taken 25 years. It may be due to coronavirus and other concerns, but really there’s been no movement on further decriminalizing drug possession yet.
RM: What do you want to see moving forward?
AJ: What I want to see, what I’m working for and will continue advocating for, is automatically expunging old convictions. Automatically releasing people from prison. Following Measure 91 [Oregon’s Legal Marijuana initiative, on which Anthony was also Chief Petitioner], one of the most proud moments of my activist career was reading an article on OPB.org in which a man said he cried tears of joy because his cannabis delivery conviction could finally be expunged from his record, after following him for 30 years of his life.
Now, six years later, I am still proud of that, but I am struck that we didn’t go far enough. He was in a position to hire an attorney, pay the court fees, pay for the filing. [But] expunging your criminal record should not depend on your ability to hire an attorney. The law is the law. It should just be off everybody’s record. It should not be based on how much money you have or whether you know how to jump through legal hoops.
RM: Have you heard interest from people in other states who want to create models designed after 110? Given what you know now, what would be the dream model that you believe could be pushed through in more progressive states?
AJ: I have been in touch with people interested in enacting similar policies, and even city or countywide changes where statewide is not feasible. The cannabis movement did the same thing with local efforts. I definitely support anything that moves the issue forward. I became an activist over 20 years ago and I definitely see a key change in where we are and we are definitely going to move forward in other states. My dream model would be largely based in Oregon.
Now, the possession limits of what you decriminalize should be examined and should be realistic around peoples’ usage. One of the critiques I heard a lot from addiction doctors was that the possession limits we decriminalized in Measure 110 were, really, too low for a lot of users.
Even potentially, so long as someone is not selling, [general possession] could be decriminalized. Automatic expungements of past offenses and early prison release, and I think there should be funds allocated for treatment, harm reduction and recovery for those who need it.
This should be looked at as an extension of our healthcare needs. States should also be looking into studies into the medicinal benefits of various psychedelics, be it psilocybin mushrooms or MDMA. Slowly but surely, we are getting research moving forward at the federal level, but it is really up to the states to move these things forward.
In the future, something like 109 and 110 could be combined.
Explore the shadow side of psychedelics in this learn-at-your-own-pace course.
AJ: I support anything that moves the issue forward and educates people. My one caveat [about Decrim Nature and the Plant Medicine Healing Alliance] is I don’t want anybody to possess larger amounts of these drugs [in Oregon] than what Measure 110 allows, believing they are okay under state law because of a city resolution. A city cannot make something legal that the state has made illegal.
This is a problem with not having a city court, and this is something I look at when we are planning future drug policy reform measures. Cities that have their own city court, such as Columbia, Missouri where I went to undergrad and law school, can pass a measure and force the city prosecutor and police to keep that case within city courts and not send it to county or state [court], or refer it to the feds. So in these places, you can actually change the law [at the city level].
The city can’t make, say 28 grams of psilocybin mushrooms legal if the state says 12. It could be de facto legal, if the district attorney chose not to prosecute people, but DA’s change and it may not always be that way. [It’s then up to] local police discretion… it could be “lowest law enforcement priority,” but they could still arrest you.
RM: If it is on the discretion of the police, is it worth putting resources into these city-based resolutions? The last thing any of us wants is blood on our hands or anyone having a brush with the law because they thought they had legal protection when they didn’t.
It is imperative for all advocates to do what they can to be open. Lowest law enforcement priority measures are symbolic measures. If you are not actually changing the law, people can still be arrested and convicted. There could still be a lot of good out of that, but we need education that helps people realize this doesn’t actually change the criminal code. It’s up to advocates to make sure people know the truth of the matter. We don’t want to do harm. That said, if anything is moving the issue forward, I tend to support it. My focus is on changing the law, but I support anything that’s chipping away at the drug war. We should be honest about the pros and cons.
We want to let science, truth, and common sense guide us. We need to be truthful about what a lowest law enforcement priority measure does.
Expunging your criminal record should not depend on your ability to hire an attorney. The law is the law. It should just be off everybody’s record.
RM: What would you say to those who are pro-psychedelics who are new to the idea of broader drug policy reform?
This is something I’ve battled within cannabis legalization, which I’ve been involved in for over 20 years. Early on, and still to this day, there was cannabis exceptionalism. People had the attitude of, “Don’t arrest us [cannabis users]. Arrest these other people who use heroin, or meth, or these other drugs.” And now we’re seeing the same thing with psychedelics.
In the end, I believe people need to do their best to be empathetic to the situations people are born into, how they’re raised, the traumas they go through, and the drugs that are used. If you were born in a different city, state, whatever… you may have used different drugs than what you use today.
When I first told people in cannabis activism that I was working on 110, they were like, “You’re not going to decriminalize meth, right?”
Bottom line is: Arresting and convicting people, whatever the drug is… it’s counterproductive. Throwing someone in jail and taking away their education, housing and job opportunities is not good for them or society. We have to set aside our feelings about drugs because we believe some substances are better than others and that [certain] people should be treated better than others. We all have circumstances and hardships. No matter the drug of choice, arresting, criminalizing and stigmatizing them is a counterproductive policy.
We always need to come back to that. We need to appeal to people’s compassion and empathy. We cannot arrest and jail our way out of people using drugs.
RM: You make an important point. You’re touching on the question of: What does punishment do to us? Does it move us closer or further from the society we want to have?
We have to change the conversation. Imagine the headlines you’d see if other drugs caused the consequences we see with alcohol. Car accidents, death, abuse, other accidents, all these bad decisions people make… if that was another drug, just imagine the headlines, every day. People committing crimes, getting in wrecks with alcohol in our systems. But for better or worse, it is accepted in our society.
But if someone came to you and said they used alcohol and thought they needed help, that is [also] totally acceptable in society. And it should be. That’s where we want to get with all drugs. No matter the substance someone uses. If people seek help, they should get the help they need. Ultimately, we need to end the stigma. It’s difficult when even people within drug policy reform have their own stigmas around certain drugs. I’m a different advocate in 2021 than I was in 2000. Everyone has their own journey, but I definitely see the light at the end of the tunnel.
We got a strong majority of the vote [in Oregon]. Drug decriminalization got a higher percentage of the votes than Jeff Merkeley, who is a very popular senator! This is more popular than we think. We’ve got to thank Dr. Carl Hart, who is braver than most, for paving the way.
I believe in ten years, in this discussion around decriminalization, stigma and use, we’re going to be in a much better place than we are now. It’s not just electoral victories, it’s conversations we have publicly like this one, conversations with our friends and family, we can just chip away at it.
I’m actually very hopeful. Drug policy reform is two steps forward, one step back. But as scary and maddening and the world can be, I’ve never been more optimistic about what we can do. I’m proud that Oregon’s been playing our part and other states are following suit.
I believe in our lifetime we are going to end the drug war.
Rebecca Martinez is a Portland, Oregon-based writer, parent and community organizer. She is a co-founder of the Fruiting Bodies Collective, an advocacy group, podcast and multimedia platform exploring the intersections between healing justice and the psychedelics movement.
In this episode, Joe interviews Dr. Fernando Espi Forcen and Dr. Franklin King from Mass General Hospital’s new Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics.
They talk about how Jerry Rosenbaum, Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, and Compass Pathways led to the creation of the Center, and they talk about their plans, including a study involving imaging, a study looking at ketamine use with and without psychotherapy, and their first: a study on rumination inspired by Rosenbaum’s work.
They discuss people’s “good or bad” binary opinions on drugs and the fear so many still have of psychedelics, the mystery of consciousness and how more studies can lead to a better understanding of it (and therefore better psychiatry), spiritual emergence vs. spiritual emergency, what could hurt our collective progress, and their vision of the future as a very multidisciplinary world with a lot of cross-collaboration between different fields of psychiatry and science- a future they’re already starting to see with some of the excitement coming from their neighbors at MIT.
Notable Quotes
“One of the major issues, I think, facing psychedelic research right now is that all the money is private money. …We don’t have any federal funding for psychedelic research at this point, which essentially means that people with deep pockets are able to dictate what studies get funded and that private companies get to decide what gets studied. …It’s definitely true that political bias and some of the scars of the 1960s and the Nixon laws and the Reagan era are continuing to suppress research.” -Franklin “If we’re going to hold psychedelics to this super high standard, I think we also need to hold all of our other treatments to a super high standard. So I do see within that, there’s kind of a bias where people are willing to look the other way about something like ECT or the criticism that SSRIs might not be super effective for mild to moderate depression. We look the other way for that, whereas psychedelics need to jump through so many hurdles to prove that they’re worth pursuing.” -Franklin “The amazing thing about consciousness is that we still don’t have a good model for the mind of consciousness. And as a psychiatrist, [that’s] tremendously intriguing.” -Fernando “Another piece of this is really preparing not just patients, but psychiatrists, physicians, the world, for how this works, because it’s really a completely different model of treatment than pretty much anything else. Whether you see a psychiatrist or you see another kind of physician, you’re going in and sort of asking for a treatment to be given to you as kind of a passive recipient. Psychedelics are not like that.” -Franklin “Nixon’s ghost is in my apartment, probably.” -Joe
About Dr. Fernando Espi Forcen and Dr. Franklin King
Fernando Espi Forcen, MD, PhD, works at the Department of Psychiatry of Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, taking care of patients at the inpatient psychiatry unit and urgent care clinic. Before moving to Boston, he worked at Rush University in Chicago as a consult liaison psychiatrist with a particular focus on patients in need of liver and kidney transplants. He was born and raised in Spain and graduated from Medical School at the University of Murcia. He has more than 20 peer-reviewed publications in a variety of aspects of psychiatry, such as akathisia due to drugs, metabolic syndrome, inflammation, dissociative symptoms, history of psychiatry, and cinema. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychiatry and the author of the book, Monsters, Demons and Psychopaths: Psychiatry and Horror Film.
Franklin King IV, MD, is the director of training and education at the Mass General Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics and a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School. His primary clinical and research interest is in the utilization of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy to treat a variety of chronic psychiatric conditions, including depression and anxiety disorders, and in strategies to optimize these interventions for different patient populations. In addition, Dr. King teaches and supervises residents and fellows at Mass General, and practices clinically as a staff psychiatrist at the Center for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Disorders as well as on the Acute Psychiatry Service in the Emergency Department.
On Thursday, May 13th, we’re celebrating 5 whole years of making Psychedelics Today and you are all invited to come celebrate with us!
We’re hosting a live, virtual birthday party on 5/13 starting at 7:30 pm EST on Twitch. We’ll start with a conversation between Joe, Kyle, and our newest edition, Michelle, on the origins of Psychedelics Today, how Joe & Kyle met, why they wanted to start a psychedelic podcast and media company, how they created their Navigating Psychedelics course, and so much more! We’ll also be opening it up to questions from the audience, so if you’ve been meaning to ask us something, Thursday evening is your chance!
Then after about an hour, we’ll be winding down (or ramping up) with a live vinyl DJ set from dr. bouchard. So mark your calendars and get ready to celebrate our birthday with us! It’s totally FREE and guaranteed to be a super chill evening full of psychedelic insight, music, and more!
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Michelle is back, Joe is in Phoenix, news is covered, and rants are made.
They first cover Maine’s recent proposal to legalize psilocybin therapy, and how interesting it is that a diagnosis wouldn’t be needed, but a “licensed psilocybin service facilitator” would: Is this a move towards liberation or far away from it? They then discuss the excellent results finally coming out of MAPS’ Phase 3 Trial for MDMA-Assisted Therapy, which leads to a huge sidebar about the efficacy of therapy, what a diagnosis can mean, how we define “sick” and “healthy,” and how we trust “evidence-based” studies and the DSM when maybe we shouldn’t so much.
They then talk about a CEO of a $2 billion startup getting fired for using LSD at work in a microdosing experiment, the FDA proposing a ban on menthol-flavored cigarettes and flavored cigars (which Michelle refers to as what a lot of us know them as, “blunt wraps”), and the list that sparked a lot of controversy in the community, Psychedelic Invest’s “100 Most Influential People in Psychedelics” list, which, despite Joe’s inclusion at #85 (Yay Joe! Sorry Kyle!), Michelle did not entirely agree with.
Notable Quotes
“I understand that maybe totally regulating and legalizing psilocybin for sale without the facilitator component is a little radical for the mainstream to handle, but …I do hope that this is a first step toward that. Maybe we can show how safe and gentle psilocybin can be, and that the facilitator aspect should be a choice among people and not a necessity.” -Michelle
“You don’t need a clinical diagnosis to know you have shit to work on.” -Joe “Talking about diagnosis and the medicalization of therapy, I think it’s this double-edged sword where some people really find relief in having a diagnosis, and go, ‘oh, it gives me some sort of language that this is what’s going on with me and I have a path forward to treat it,’ but that also limits people from wanting to seek out therapy.” -Kyle “The establishment wants us to think that they’re keeping us safe so that they can continue to justify their existence. That’s one of my reads. I understand how that’s pretty cynical, but it’s kind of the way it’s been: ‘Oh, you’re smoking cannabis? We’re going to put you in jail and take your kids away, because it’s what’s best.’ That sounds like a nightmare, first off. And then secondly, where’s your data? Where’s your data that prohibition has ever worked? Ever, ever, ever?” -Joe
In this episode, Joe interviews Professor of American Religious History and Cultures at Emory University, podcaster, and author of Don’t Think About Death: A Memoir on Mortality, Gary Laderman.
He talks about challenging our notion of what “religious” means: how “religious” doesn’t have to be linked to traditional dogmatic structures and how conventional conceptualizations around religion can actually close people off from possibly deeply meaningful experiences. He talks about the “rise of the nones”- his term for the growing demographic of “spiritual but not religious” people who combine aspects of different religions to create their own, or don’t consider themselves to have a religion at all, and use the rituals, myths, lessons, and transcendence attached to experiences to create the same effects that our ancestors achieved from traditional religious structures.
They also discuss how psychedelics work in our lives outside of the mystical, Esalen, Lady Gaga, the culture built around medicine and the religious authority we see in doctors, how religion has affected our language and how we learn, and the various ways it seeps into our understanding of sex, our bodies, and death.
Notable Quotes
“[I’m] just really asking people to consider the possibility that religious life extends far beyond how we normally see it in the media or think about it. It’s more than going to the church or reading The Bible.”
“Back in the day, going to Grateful Dead concerts or maybe now, Phish, Burning Man- these are all obvious examples of tying some of this stuff together. You can’t avoid the religious connotations of these kinds of activities, just in how people describe them who go and attend and what they bring back from those commitments and experiences.” “You want to talk about what ultimately matters in our lives in how we bring order and meaning and stave off chaos and suffering? We should talk about pharmaceutical companies and prescription drugs.” “What’s interesting about studying the sacred is that nobody agrees upon it.”
Gary Laderman, Goodrich C. White Professor of American Religious History and Cultures, is the author of the new book, Don’t Think About Death: A Memoir on Mortality (Deeds Publishing, 2020), and hosts the podcast, Sacrilegious.
Laderman was also a founder of the online religion magazines, Religion Dispatches (created and initially directed with Sheila Davaney in the early 2000s), and started Sacred Matters on his own. He is continuing to research, write, and teach on the sacred in American life generally, and is currently working on a book project exploring religion and drugs, the focus of a new course first taught in 2017, “Sacred Drugs.”
Rick Doblin and Bia Labate debated Jeffery Lieberman and Keven Sabet on whether or not psychedelics should be legalized, and the results may surprise you.
Last week, we received an invite to attend an early screening of the newest debate in Intelligence Squared US’s online debate series: “Should Society Legalize Psychedelics?” Being immersed in the world of Psychedelics Today, it seems like we’re constantly involved in various similar conversations around legalization, decriminalization, benefits and dangers, and the less-discussed idea of drug exceptionalism. So while I was curious to see how a question like this would be handled by a more mainstream outlet, I also wondered if they’d get it right. When I saw who would be involved, I knew this would be worth watching.
Arguing for the motion to legalize psychedelics were Rick Doblin, Founder & Executive Director of MAPS, as you likely know if you’re on this site, and Bia Labate, anthropologist, drug policy expert, and executive director of Chacruna. Against the motion were Jeffrey Lieberman, former President of the American Psychiatric Association and Chair of Columbia University’s Department of Psychiatry, and Keven Sabet, three-time White House drug policy advisor, president and CEO of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, and author of Smokescreen: What the Marijuana Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know. What instantly caught my eye was psychedelic legend Rick Doblin going against a three-time White House drug policy advisor (i.e. “The Man”), and I wanted to see exactly how Doblin would choose to wipe the floor with him. But this was a debate, and debates don’t care solely about facts, which to me, is exactly what makes them so interesting.
After a brief and somewhat cringeworthy performance by “psychedelic comedian” Sarah Rose Siskind (which felt very odd to me—if we’re taking this seriously, why are we starting it out with bad jokes about drugs?), moderator John Donvan came on and asked us all to cast a vote before the debate started. We’d be casting another one after the debate, and the winner would be declared by calculating which side’s numbers increased more, or really, which side won over more of the undecided voters.
I personally feel that this is a very nuanced topic that probably can’t be answered with a simple yes or no, but decided to vote “yes” anyway.
The debate started and right away, I noticed a classic juxtaposition between Doblin and the Against Legalization team: Lieberman and Sabet wore black sportcoats and white collared shirts with crisp, stylized hair, while Doblin looked to be wearing a Hawaiian shirt, hair as out-of-control as always. Lieberman looked to be sitting in a professional office with hundreds of journals and important books proudly staged behind him, while Doblin looked like someone dug a chair out of the piles of papers in his office and placed him on it shortly after waking him up. The For Legalization team argued passionately, with a more freestyle tone drawing from personal stories, while the Against Legalization team spoke more slowly and seemed to have more prepared statements (Lieberman seemed to be reading off a script several times).
Screen shot of Rick Doblin of the “For Legalization” team at the Intelligence Squared debate.
The opening round consisted of each participant getting a few minutes to make as many points as they wanted. Doblin started out by listing what he believed his opponents would agree with him on, and introduced the idea of “licensed legalization,” where the ability to use drugs legally would be handled the way a driver’s license allows you to drive a car (and would therefore be taken away with abuse or misuse). Labate focused on the prevalence of drug use throughout all of history, the racism and failure of the drug war, and how “the sky didn’t fall” when other countries have legalized drugs.
From the Against Legalization team, Lieberman made it clear that while he has plenty of experience with psychedelics and absolutely sees a benefit, they should be decriminalized only and studied for therapeutic use. He also called out MAPS’s mission statement, saying that their effort to develop cannabis into prescription medicines is a “ruse” to get around prohibition, and posited the idea that the gateways to creativity and spirituality people experience were maybe just the drugs fooling them. Sabet performed pretty strongly here, saying that the historical use Labate talked about couldn’t be further from what would happen if the US legalized psychedelics, which he imagines as stereotypically US as possible, with Super Bowl-level mass commercialization, major lobbyists promoting their agendas, and the rich getting richer off of an addiction-for-profit model. He also said that opioids and alcohol kill more people than all illegal drugs combined, partly because they’re legal and therefore used more.
Round two was more of an open discussion with Donvan moderating. Some good points were made by the For Legalization team: decriminalization means impure drugs; classic psychedelics are not addictive; there actually is a lot of ceremonial use already in the US; commercialization doesn’t mean a psychedelic boogeyman is going to create addictive psychedelics; and decriminalization is not freedom and still comes with fines.
Meanwhile, the Against Legalization team didn’t seem to grasp why decriminalization wasn’t enough, but made some great points about how legalization doesn’t always mean purer and better (look at tobacco and cigarettes), and if we haven’t gotten this stuff right in all this time, why would we suddenly get it right when it comes to the legalization of psychedelics? Much time was spent on the need for scientific proof over tons of anecdotal stories. The open discussion showed some heat, and also exposed some debater flaws, like Lieberman rambling to the point of me entirely missing his point and Labate not realizing when her time was up and talking over everyone several times.
Screen shot of all the debaters and moderator from the Intelligence Square debate, “Should Society Legalize Psychedelics?”
Round three went back to each participant making closing statements for two minutes. Doblin spoke passionately about how much he and his wife have benefited from regular MDMA use, and said opponents shouldn’t let the fear of overcommercialization from “Big Psychedelic” spoil something so many could benefit from. Labate talked about how the US is the “land of freedoms” (which I laughed out loud at), and we’re going to look back on this time in shame, saying that a lot of what had been said against psychedelics was based on fear, a false narrative, and science’s attempt to control everything. Lieberman said that this would be a very dangerous social experiment, and then spent an odd amount of time talking about Prometheus and Frankenstein.
Sabet, on the other hand, really killed it here, spending a good chunk of his allotted time reading a quote from Robert Corry (one of the writers of Amendment 64 on Colorado’s 2012 statewide ballot that permitted recreational sales of cannabis), who fully regrets what he has done after seeing the massive commercialization of the industry. He ended by echoing his main point again: “It’s one thing to advocate for decriminalization, ending the war on drugs. It’s another thing to advocate for the commercialization and normalization,” saying that this would create an industry that cared only about profits, to the detriment of everyone’s health and safety.
The pre-recorded debate ended, and those of us who were able to attend the sneak preview were then sent to a live check-in with all the participants. Here, huge points that were missed in the debate were finally made. Doblin asked Sabet if he’s so against big corporations getting rich off drugs, does that mean he’s OK with cartels getting rich instead?
Labate pointed out that the time people were the most reckless with alcohol was during prohibition. Lieberman hurt himself by making it clear that he felt medical use and recreational use have to be completely separate, and the same drug couldn’t be used for both. Sabet made his same points again, but hurt my view of him a bit by making sure to have the cover of his book prominently displayed twice in his background (I’ve never been a fan of shameless plugs).
My favorite parts of the debate were in this live session. The first was when Founder and Chairman of Intelligence Squared US, Robert Rosenkranz, joined in and made Doblin’s point about money even stronger: If something is bought, that means someone is selling it, so why does the amount of profit and who it’s going to matter so much to Sabet? It can go to corporations and be regulated, or go to criminals and stay unregulated. Which is better?
Labate also shut down Lieberman in extraordinary fashion. Lieberman had already established himself as being extremely focused on science, studies, and needing proof for everything, but also had a really odd moment where he was certain he had more psychedelic experiences under his belt than Doblin. I cringed at this, thinking, “Really? You’re arguing for keeping psychedelics illegal and talking about their dangers while bragging about breaking the law to enjoy them?” So I was filled with joy when he said that he had had wonderful experiences on psychedelics, and Labate immediately hit him with: “But there’s no proof that your experience was wonderful. There’s no peer-reviewed study. How do you know it was wonderful?” Yeah, take that, pal.
There was a place to submit questions, but the live session was kept to a half hour, leaving most questions unanswered. I wanted to know if the Against Legalization team would be for legalization if it was presented in a “licensed legalization” manner—the way Doblin had explained in his first segment (which wasn’t discussed again because it was outside of the main argument). Wesley Thoricatha of Psychedelic Times asked another great question in the chat window: “If our society believes that the benefits of alcohol legalization outweigh the observable risks, how can there be any valid case against legalizing these non-addictive substances that clearly have more potential benefits and less overall risks?” Since the pros didn’t address these thoughts, I guess it’s now the job for all of us to keep asking these questions and having these conversations on our own time.
All said and done, I really enjoyed this debate and found the arguments really interesting. Sabet’s “why would we get it right this time?” overcommercialization argument really hit home with me, as I’m quickly becoming disgusted with the money-grabs, ridiculous patent-filing, and dangerous “magic pill” narrative that keeps proliferating this movement, while constantly being reminded of the ineffectiveness and rampant corruption in the government. But I wondered if he really meant that, or if he was just trying to win the debate by cashing in on the “rich people are evil” attitude he guessed many viewers would have. And while his vision of the future is ugly, was his point (or any others made by the Against Legalization team) any stronger than Doblin’s argument for taking money out of the hands of criminals in favor of safer drugs?
I loved Labate’s passion and realness and she made some great points, but her talking over people hurt her. Lieberman was very organized and prepared, but his rigidity and inability to make strong, understandable arguments hurt him. So this felt more like a debate between Doblin and Sabet, and after breaking it down more, it really felt like hope, compassion, and common sense were going up against pessimism and fear.
At the end of the debate, the results were tallied. My view was a little more nuanced and I was more open to discussion, but I still generally sided with the For Legalization team. This was not the case for others. Before the debate, 65% of viewers voted to legalize psychedelics, while 15% disagreed with the motion and 20% were undecided. After the debate, however, even though the For Legalization vote increased to 67%, the Against Legalization vote grew to 24%, giving them a 9% total increase over the For Legalization’s 2%. Therefore, in the preliminary vote, Against Legalization ended up winning the debate.
Intelligence Squared US then posted the video and encouraged people to watch, leaving voting open for a week for a separate “online audience” tally. I assumed that a larger audience would trend more towards legalization and I’d get my win here, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Not only did the Against Legalization vote jump from 11% pre-debate to 30% post-debate, but the For Legalization vote dropped from 74% to 62% too, leaving me to wonder what arguments swayed people so much.
In the end, as I assumed it would, this debate just highlighted the importance of nuance and looking at huge, important topics like this from all angles. I’m not sure that “should society legalize psychedelics?” is a question we should even be asking (can it really be answered with a simple yes or no?), but the beauty of it is that these questions are even being asked and debated, especially by such big names on such a mainstream platform. And as a culture, we’re now making available both sides of the argument, to be heard by anyone who wants to listen. These conversations need to be had, bad arguments need to be called out, and strong points by the other side need to be looked at fairly. While the complete adult-use legalization of all psychedelics may never happen, this is the only way we’re ever going to get close.
About the Author
Mike Alexander works for Psychedelics Today. He writes the show notes for each podcast, handles most of the email, edits video and audio, helps with the blog, and annoys the rest of the team on Slack. He eats a lot of pizza, spends a lot of time in the woods, and spends most of his money on Phish tour.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, a power outage keeps Michelle from joining in, but Joe and Kyle pick up the slack, going old-school SF style for the week.
They talk about new drugs: Cybin investigating using their proprietary psychedelic compound “CYB003” for alcohol use disorder, and scientists using a technology called psychLight to identify when a compound activates the brain’s serotonin 2A receptor (in hopes of activating the biological benefits of psychedelics without their traditional hallucinogenic effects).
They also give a legalization update, with new cannabis and psychedelic reform bills in Texas and legalization bills in Louisiana, talk about non-profit Porta Sophia’s new Psychedelic Prior Art Library and the importance of establishing a public domain, and discuss Johns Hopkins’ new study on psilocybin for Alzheimer’s-related depression (and ways to possibly combat the effects of Alzheimer’s). They also cover climate change, Leonard Pickard, the tragedy of the commons, 2C-B, the importance of looking at fringe cases, and the intelligence of millennials.
Notable Quotes
“How could we shift to more cooperative actions vs. competition all the time?” -Kyle “Our map of reality is minimized inappropriately when we exclude these fringe cases. …What does it mean that somebody can present as psychic, or present as a spirit, or meet these spirits, or go to the [afterlife] and come back (in your case) and then get set on an interesting trajectory via psychedelics? This is not what doctors can deal with, but this is what those of us outside of medicine can deal with, as a philosophical endeavor.” -Joe
“Some of these new compounds- I guess it’s exciting, and you always say we need new drugs, but …why is there a race for new drugs when we’re not even using the ones to the full potential that are not even on the market right now? ..Just thinking about all the new companies coming online trying to find new drugs for patents and development, when it’s like, have we really explored the potential of the ones that have been around for a while?” -Kyle
Taking a deep look at the trial’s Supplementary Appendix, the response from the psychedelic science community, and the choice to measure the results using the QIDS depression rating scale.
On April 15, 2021 the New England Journal of Medicine published a study comparing the efficacy of psilocybin-assisted therapy to a popular SSRI antidepressant, escitalopram (sold under the brand names Lexapro, Cipralex, and others): titled: Trial of Psilocybin versus Escitalopram for Depression. The landmark paper written by the team at Imperial College London’s Centre for Psychedelic Research, concluded that the “trial did not show a significant difference in antidepressant effects between psilocybin and escitalopram in a selected group of patients”, which caused a bit of an uproar in the psychedelic science community.
Reactions and questions came quickly on social media: Was the paper edited too heavily by the New England Journal of Medicine? Were appropriate rating scales used to judge the effectiveness of psilocybin? Are the “real” results hidden in the study’s appendix? As a participant in NYU’s study on psilocybin-assisted therapy for major depressive disorder in 2020 who received incredible benefits (my depression of five years went completely into remission and has remained there), I felt it was necessary to try and explain the latest results in more depth.
The study in question, under lead authors Robin Carhart-Harris, Ph.D, David Nutt, MD, Rosalind Watts, D.Clin.Psy and others, was a double-blind randomized trial with 59 participants for six weeks to compare the efficacy of psilocybin versus a leading antidepressant in treating depression. Each trial started with a psilocybin dose day; one group received a high dose of 25 mg, the other a negligible dose of 1 mg. Then, the high dose group proceeded to receive a daily placebo while the low dose group received 10 mg of escitalopram each day for the first three weeks. At three weeks, the psilocybin group received a second 25 mg dose of the magic mushroom compound and continued with the daily placebo. The SSRI group received a second placebo, 1 mg dose of psilocybin and also had their daily dose of escitalopram increased to 20 mg. Both groups received an equal amount of extensive psychotherapeutic support and counseling, totaling around 35 to 40 hours during the six week-trial using Watts’s ACE therapeutic model: Accept, Connect, Embody.
Prior to the start of the trial, both groups received multiple and extensive depression assessments, using four different depression rating scales; QIDS- SR-16, HAM-D-1A, BDI-17, and MADRS. Of the four depression inventories, QIDS-SR-16 is the newest, designed for convenience of use so patients can “self-rate” (that’s what the SR stands for), and crucially for this trial, it was the primary scale used to compare psilocybin and escitalopram’s efficacy in fighting depression. However, lead author Robin Carhart-Harris has now stated that should have been better considered because QIDS-SR-16 is the least established of the four scales used. There are several issues as to why it was not the best rating scale to use and its results should be viewed as less accurate, and we will explain those issues below, but first let’s review the trial results as published.
In the abstract, the NEJM concluded:
“On the basis of the change in depression scores on the QIDS-SR-16 at week 6, [the mean (±SE) changes in the scores from baseline to week 6 were −8.0±1.0 points in the psilocybin group and −6.0±1.0 in the escitalopram group, for a between-group difference of 2.0 points] this trial did not show a significant difference in antidepressant effects between psilocybin and escitalopram in a selected group of patients.”
This is an extremely conservative and staid summary for all the rating scales and secondary outcomes. Even so, in my opinion, this alone is phenomenal because they are stating that psilocybin, a psychedelic compound, is at least as effective as a leading SSRI for treating patients with major depressive disorder. But the real results are in the data contained within the appendices and tables, many published in the Supplementary Appendix rather than in the abstract or main study itself, so let’s examine them.
Analyzing the Supplementary Appendix
In clinical research, the two main items to track in depression scores are the “response” rates and the “remission (remitter)” rates. A response rate means there is an improvement in depression symptoms in at least 50% of patients. A remission rate means that a patient no longer has enough symptoms to qualify for a medical diagnosis of depression; for all intents and purposes, it’s effectively gone. So even when we look at the solely at QIDS scores for those two rates, the difference is striking:
“A QIDS-SR-16 response occurred in 70% of the patients in the psilocybin group and in 48% of those in the escitalopram group… QIDS-SR-16 remission occurred in 57% [psilocybin] and 28% [escitalopram]… Other secondary outcomes generally favored psilocybin over escitalopram, but the analyses were not corrected for multiple comparisons. The incidence of adverse events was similar in the trial groups.”
In both ratings for the QIDS scale we see psilocybin outperform escitalopram by nearly double with only two doses as opposed to six weeks of daily doses. But also notice the statement at the end about secondary outcomes favoring psilocybin and that adverse events were similar.
Honestly, these are significant understatements when you look at the secondary outcomes directly in the appendices and tables. Certainly, as a leading scientific journal it’s a far better position to conservatively report the outcome rather than promote the results, but consider the following: In the three other well-established depression inventories, HAM-D, BDI, and MADRS, the response rate for psilocybin at the 6-week mark was between 67.9 and 76.7% while for the SSRI it was only 20.7 to 41.4%. Even more striking are the remission rates, lying between 28.6 and 56.7% for psilocybin while the SSRI produced remission at 6 weeks in 6.9 to 20.7% of participants. (Check out the Supplementary Appendix, pg. 13 to see for yourself.)
As this is a two-dose study, there was a similar outperformance after the first psilocybin dose; in two scales (QIDS and BDI) 33.3 to 51.7% of participants no longer qualified as being depressed by the end of the first week. In my opinion, it can’t be overstated how miraculous these remission rates are; these are patients that have often been non-responsive to other treatments for depression, and have likely been through a gamut of approaches, including psychotherapy, exercise, other antidepressants, alternative therapies, and had yet to find relief, let alone remission after a single week.
When we look at secondary outcomes, there are even more revelations. In a score known as “wellbeing”, participants in the psilocybin group increased 15.8 points after six weeks while those in the SSRI group only improved 6.8 points. This not only shows a reduction in depression symptoms, but a marked improvement in patients’ happiness with their sense of self. This is similarly reflected in the “Flourishing Scale” which found the psilocybin group to improve 14.4 points while the SSRI group only improved by 8.9 points after six weeks.
Other similar secondary outcomes also demonstrated remarkable efficacy for psilocybin including reductions in suicidal ideation, trait anxiety, experiential avoidance, anhedonia (which has implications for chronic pain), emotional breakthrough inventory, psychotropic related sexual dysfunction, and others. A key line to take from the caption for Supplementary Table S1 that compares depression inventory rates across all six weeks is: “All contrasts favored psilocybin. None favored escitalopram.” These are well established depression inventories that are used as the standard of comparison in nearly every modern study testing efficacy against nearly any method or medication for relieving depression, but because they were not chosen as the primary scales, they were classified as secondary outcomes. But if all these scores had been corrected against each other, including the QIDS, psilocybin would have shown to be clearly superior.
So why was QIDS chosen as the primary evaluation instead of the much more frequently employed MADRS inventory? As someone who had to take the MADRS inventory repeatedly in order to qualify for NYU’s investigational study of psilocybin for major depressive disorder, I will tell you it is surprisingly precise and accurate, making it nearly impossible to hide the depths of your disease from yourself. As much as we may mask the symptoms of our disorder to others in order to function in our day to day lives, we may in fact find we mask the severity of our symptoms to an even greater degree to ourselves. According to Carhart-Harris, the choice to use QIDS was almost arbitrary and now considered ill-advised in hindsight. And other professionals on Twitter and elsewhere online are largely in agreement, arguing that QIDS was a scale not designed to measure depression so much as one designed for patient convenience and to measure response to classic SSRIs. For example, QIDS has no measure for wellbeing, emotional breakthrough, experiential avoidance or, dare we say, mystical experiences.
SSRIs modulate and downregulate distressing feelings, but do not generally resolve them, much like a daily salve that keeps negative emotions just under conscious awareness. Psilocybin not only goes to the heart of engaging the origin of troubling feelings, but due to its ability to induce neuroplasticity, it’s theorized that the psychedelic compound directly aids in a cortical reorganization of prior maladaptive circuits and strongly held associations that create the framework of a patient’s life experience and the events in it.
Evaluating the Choice to Use the QIDS Scale
Worth noting about the QIDS scale relative to the other inventories in the study is a concept in statistics known as a confidence interval or CI. When a study is performed, it’s obviously not done on the entire population but on a sample of the population. A confidence interval is a measure of how likely the mean average of the results in the study population would match the mean average of results in the general population. It’s also a measure of how likely those same results would occur if scientists were to repeat the test multiple times.
In a study like this one where two medications are being compared against each other for efficacy, their confidence intervals can be laid out on a table or graph known as a forest plot. When the CIs are displayed on a forest plot, they are shown as a range of most likely results (i.e. -2 to -15). This is key because that allows researchers to demonstrate their confidence that a given range of results would occur for 95% of the general population or in repeated studies. 95% is the agreed upon standard for proof of any statistical significance in patient response to medication for this type of study. However, if on a forest plot, your CI crosses zero (which is the midline between the two groups), there is a far greater likelihood that there is no difference in effect between the groups.
So recall now that Carhart-Harris said that choice of QIDS was arbitrary as the main depression scale for the study and that their team of researchers predicted no difference in effect size between the psilocybin and escitalopram when they submitted the pre-req application to run the study. For more than a week before the study was released, Carhart-Harris did a daily thread on Twitter describing effect size, how different measurements may in fact be measuring the same issue and could be condensed, that NEJM analysis of the results are extremely conservative, but most of all he “implored” readers to view the supplementary tables and appendices, and to particularly look at the confidence intervals for the main inventory and then the confidence intervals for the secondary outcomes.
Carhart-Harris made a very careful note that confidence intervals that do not cross zero are considered statistically significant and those that do cross zero are considered insignificant. He directed us to look at Figure S1 and Table S4 where you will see at the top that the only inventory that crosses zero is the QIDS scale, which strongly implies its result is a false negative in showing no difference in outcome between the SSRI and psilocybin, and we can be confident of that because of the redundancy of the other evaluations they also used. Every other inventory and measure shows psilocybin far out pacing escitalopram by nearly a two to one margin. You can take a look yourself by accessing the study’s Supplementary Appendix, and turning to Section S6. Supplemental Figure S4: Mean change for primary and secondary outcomes with confidence intervals (pg. 16).
Conclusion
Between the extraordinary results in the secondary outcomes, the fact that the QIDS scale was the only inventory to cross zero in the forest plot, and the strong likelihood that modern depression scales aren’t designed to capture the full range of positive personality change that underpin psilocybin’s cortical mechanisms, it’s hard to see how this is not an overwhelming win for psilocybin.
It would certainly be remiss for me to not once again state I was a participant in a very similar study myself who experienced full remission and know others who experienced the same. I would be equally remiss to not mention that for many who took the two doses, their depression returned after a few months—but not all of them. However, this is already the case with standard daily antidepressants. And with psilocybin, there are no sexual side effects, you can actually feel a full range of emotions, and the frequency of dosing is far less. But for people that have either found themselves unresponsive to standard SSRIs, or experience untenable daily side effects from antidepressant medication, psilocybin appears to offer an equal, if not superior, opportunity to recover their happiness and effectiveness in their daily lives.
About the Author
Court Wing has been a professional in the performance and rehab space for the last 30 years. Coming from a performing and martial arts background, Court served as a live-in apprentice to the US Chief Instructor for Ki-Aikido for five years, going on to win the gold medal for the International Competitors Division in Japan in 2000 and achieving the rank of 3rd degree black belt. In 2004, Court became the co-founder of New York’s largest and oldest crossfit gym, and has been featured in the New York Times, Sunday Routine, Men’s Fitness, and USA Today. He is also a certified Z-Health Master Trainer, using the latest interventions in applied neuro-physiology for remarkable improvements in pain, performance, and rehabilitation. You can find out more on his website: https://courtwing.com
A safe and sensitive way to speak with your children about psychedelics, explained.
We are living through rapidly shifting times. As parents in the psychedelic community, we are not only navigating our own medicine work, but realizing a responsibility to help our children make sense of the changing landscape as well. Whether they’re teens perusing Reddit boards and watching Netflix documentaries, or young children overhearing adult conversations about psychedelic medicine or drug policy, young people are constantly absorbing messages about these substances. Parents have an opportunity to help set the tone for ongoing dialogue and intentionally guide their children toward a less stigmatized understanding of psychedelics.
Many advocates feel passionately about reducing stigma around psychedelics as medicine and changing the way we approach substance use as a society. One way that we can interrupt harmful stereotypes and policies is by living our truths within our own families and intervening in the messaging the next generation receives about substance use. By helping young people develop a less sensationalized and more factual and nuanced perspective on psychedelics, we can empower them to make balanced and informed decisions as they grow up.
Because I worked on Measure 109 in Oregon and several cannabis farms beforehand, my son, who is now seven, is unusually adept in his understanding of plant medicine and psychedelics. His introduction to mushrooms came in the context of fighting for healing options in our community, and his understanding of cannabis involved running through fragrant fields on a biodiverse organic farm. We have spoken openly about these medicines his whole life. Because of this, they don’t carry the same frightening charge they had when I was a child, growing up in a strict, Pentecostal home where the mere mention of drugs, let alone curiosity about them, was forbidden.
For those who don’t have opportunities to teach through professional exposure like I did, here are a few tips for starting and navigating a conversation with your children about psychedelics.
Remember that basic communication values apply: Ask for consent before sharing; create opportunities to listen as much as you speak; and be okay with not reaching a tidy conclusion. These topics are far reaching and can be overwhelming. Ideally, they should be infused into larger family conversations and be revisited as they come up naturally over time.
How To Talk With Your Kids About Psychedelics:
Get Clear with Yourself First
Before you open up a conversation with your child, spend some time journaling and reflecting about your own beliefs and assumptions around psychedelics. What are your hard and fast rules about substance use, and how did they come to be? Is it possible that your experience doesn’t paint the whole picture? For example, your profound healing experience with ayahuasca does not mean everyone who uses it will experience the same benefits. Alternately, having a scary experience with LSD does not make LSD inherently dangerous. Do you believe that some substances are inherently harmful and others are inherently beneficial? Why is that? (For a deeper exploration of this subject, read Dr. Carl Hart’s book, Drug Use for Grown-Ups.)
What are your blind spots? See if you can identify your biases, own your unique experience, and not allow your individual narrative to color the entire landscape of your child’s views on drugs. Get clear on the heart of your message and know when to set aside your personal experience in exchange for larger truths.
Get on the Same Page with Your Co-parent
Every family is different. On one end of the spectrum there are parents who use psychedelics together and are prepared to have a family conversation about it. If you are in a co-parenting situation there are added considerations. Is it possible this topic could spark family tension or create a burden of secrecy or pressure to choose sides for your child?
In cases where custody is a consideration, take extra caution. Do you have a co-parent or other adults who may use the knowledge of your usage against you in court?
If at all possible, have a conversation with your co-parent about your relationship with psychedelics and see if you can get on the same page about how to approach this conversation with your children.
Show, Don’t Tell
If you believe psychedelics can be beneficial and part of a healthy, happy life and want to convey this to your child, make sure your lifestyle and substance use reflects this. As the saying goes, lessons are “caught, not taught.” What you model about psychedelics in daily life will speak volumes over the words you say.
Consider the Timing and Risks
The risks and benefits of disclosure are different in every family. If you are currently closeted about your psychedelic use, it might be more beneficial to come out publicly around the same time you open a family dialogue. If you are in a community or job where the implications of your drug use could be damaging to your reputation or employment, seriously consider possible outcomes before proceeding.
Asking your child to keep a secret from friends, parents, and teachers could be a great burden. Make sure you have thought through the potential impacts on your child and your expectations about how they will respond. They may not be able to keep your use a secret, so consider what could happen if they disclose this information to others.
Author, Rebecca Martinez, and her son, Moses.
Open an Ongoing Conversation, Not a One Time Talk
If this is the first time you are broaching the conversation, it may be tempting to overload your child with information to ensure they have all their questions answered. Remember that your support or personal use of psychedelics may come as a surprise and be a lot for them to digest.
Be prepared to have a brief conversation and leave space for questions. Let your child set the terms for how much to discuss. Before moving on to other topics, let your child know you will check in a few days to answer any questions they may have. Be sure to follow through on this.
Consider Age and Awareness Level
How this dialogue plays out will vary widely based on the age of your children. A conversation with small children is not needed. Instead, take a cue from parents using cannabis in the home: Make a habit of keeping substances and supplies securely out of reach and when needed, let children know these medicines are strictly for grown-ups.
If you open the dialogue with your child during grade school, this may be their first introduction to the topic. Ask them questions. Have they heard about psychedelics? What do they already know or believe about them?
Ask for their consent to share about your perspective and explain why you have chosen to have a conversation. Maybe you want to build trust and create a culture of honesty in your home. Perhaps you’re anticipating the messages they’ll get in school and want to offer an alternate perspective. Or maybe you want to be involved in their introduction to psychedelic experiences.
Most older children and teens will be capable of having a more nuanced conversation. Ask them to share what they know and how they feel about drug use. Be prepared to talk about laws, cultural stereotypes, and household expectations.
Don’t Make It a Huge Deal
Kids these days will be exposed to plenty of anti-drug messaging which can feel quite serious and scary. If you approach the topic of psychedelics with too much gravity yourself, you may be sending conflicting messages. They will pick up on your tone, body language, and mood as much as what you say.
If you frame a coming-out conversation more like a confession, or if it is intense and emotionally charged, your child may come away confused about how you feel about your own substance use. By demonstrating that it is easy to have an open, stigma-free conversation about psychedelics, you will open the door to future conversations when they have questions or curiosity.
Explain Your Decision to Use Psychedelics
If your child wants to hear, explain when your relationship with psychedelics started. Talk about things you wish you would have known beforehand.
Discuss your personal path. How has your psychedelic use benefitted or changed you? Do you use them for mental health or in your spiritual development? What are the reasons you support the use of psychedelics?
Share about your personal practices for using them safely. Do you only use them when you’re not parenting? How do you create safe containers and make sure you can still be the best parent and person you can be? Explain what set and setting is, and how intentional use differs from party/recreational use that young people may be exposed to.
Discuss the Laws and Consequences
Times are changing. We are already seeing a wave of changing laws, first with cannabis nationwide, and now with psychedelics in select cities, and possession of all drugs in Oregon. The old reprise, “Don’t use drugs because they are illegal,” is no longer sufficient for talking with kids about drugs. This calls parents to think critically about how they present the issue.
Explain why the age limits on legal substances exist, and the importance of taking extra good care of one’s mind and body, especially during the developmental years.
Help your child understand why you are discreet about your use of psychedelics. Familiarize yourselves with the laws in your area. Discuss the consequences of possession and use of scheduled substances. You may choose to do some research together. It is okay to admit if you feel conflicted about breaking the law to use psychedelics. Most youth appreciate seeing humanity and vulnerability in their parents.
Watch a documentary or read a book together about the war on drugs. Talk about initiatives in your area and what you are doing to help create change. Ask your child to share their thoughts and prepare to be surprised by their clarity and insight.
Explore History and Indigenous Use
Put the use of psychedelics into a historical context. This is information young people won’t be exposed to in school. Emphasize that the ceremonial history of entheogens goes back thousands of years and is far more multifaceted than the American 1960’s psychedelia subculture. Explore stories about Maria Sabina and the Mazatec people of Oaxaca, Mexico, the Bwiti people’s relationship with Iboga in West Central Africa, and other histories of ceremonial psychedelic use around the world. What is your family’s heritage? See if you can find the pre-colonial traditional use of entheogens in your ancestral line.
Discuss the Research
Most children know someone who is affected by depression, addiction, or PTSD. In an age-appropriate way, explain that there are research institutions finding ways psychedelics can help people heal their minds and spirits and live happier, healthier lives.
Ask what your child thinks about these medicines being used in a medical context, and be willing to listen and answer questions they may have.
Explain the Experience
If alcohol is commonplace in your home, explain that, like drinking alcohol or using certain medications, taking psychedelics has temporary effects on the mind and body which make it unsafe to drive or work while under the influence.
Take time to clarify assumptions and common misconceptions. Discuss how the media’s portrayal of psychedelics differs from your firsthand experience. If your child wants to know what psychedelics feel like, be sure to highlight the emotional and spiritual sensations as much as the visual and sensory experiences associated with them. Try to find common ground when broaching this topic, for example, many children relate to the idea of a dream quest or journey, especially if they are interested in fantasy books or media.
Talk about the power of language. To you, are these substances drugs that you trip on, or are they medicines for healing experiences and journey work? Do you use them to unwind and relax, or as a ceremonial part of your spiritual practice? It’s important to get clear with yourself first, and then explain to your child using your preferred language.
Discuss your Expectations and House Rules
Explain why there are age restrictions on the use of legal mind-altering substances. Define what you see as an appropriate age for use, revisit the legal risks and ramifications of use, and set clear household expectations. Some parents want to be present for their child’s first psychedelic experience. Some want to source the supplies for them. Others want their child to feel safe calling them if they find themselves in situations that feel unsafe or out of control. Whatever expectations you set, be prepared to follow through on this commitment.
Remember that your child will choose to do what they wish, and that building trust and open lines of communication will lead to more safety than simply enforcing hard and fast rules.
As you wrap up the conversation, be sure to emphasize your openness to your child with phrases like: “If you ever have questions, I am here for you. There are no stupid questions and I will do my best to create a judgment-free space for you.”
Provide Alternative Resources
Depending on your relationship, your child may not feel fully comfortable opening up about their questions or experiences with you. If they want to learn more, offer books, films, organizations, or documentaries, and perhaps a trusted mentor you can refer them to.
Things to Avoid When Speaking with Your Children About Psychedelics
Overloading: Take cues from your child on whether they have heard enough or are engaged and want to hear more.
One Sided Conversation: Create space for your child’s comments, questions and concerns. If they don’t have much to say, assure them this is fine and don’t push it.
Binaries: Good-bad, us-them, right-wrong type of language can make children feel pressured to pick sides in a highly nuanced conversation.
Showing Your Stash: There’s no benefit in showing your child where your drugs are kept or how they are used during this conversation.
Stories About Bad Trips or Scary Experiences: Modern children will hear enough anti-drug messaging during their lives. Your child needs to feel that you, as their parent, are secure and safe in order to feel secure and safe.
Conclusion
Part of the beauty of psychedelics is they introduce us to a more complex and interconnected view of the world. Through the lens of expanded states of consciousness, the world seems at once simple and profoundly intricate. Children have an innate capacity to see the world this way. Beyond the binaries of modern life exists a space for nuance and relationship. See if you can meet your child there.
It takes courage and commitment to the process to talk with children about psychedelics. When we do so, we are breaking generational patterns of stigma, fear and secrecy. The conversation around psychedelics could open up doors into deeper trust and communication with your child. Perhaps, by changing the culture in our homes, we can begin to change the culture at large.
About the Author
Rebecca Martinez is a Portland, Oregon-based writer, parent and community organizer. She is a co-founder of the Fruiting Bodies Collective, an advocacy group, podcast and multimedia platform exploring the intersections between healing justice and the psychedelics movement.
In this episode, Joe interviews Nick Meyers and Tyler Chandler, the makers of the documentary that has made a lot of waves over the last year (and been praised on this podcast): “Dosed.”
They first visited the podcast last year, a few months after the film’s release, and are back to talk about the response it’s received and their progress on “Dosed 2: Psilocybin and the Art Of Living,” which will follow the journey of one of the patients granted legal palliative psilocybin therapy by TheraPsil last year. And although it’s not mentioned, they’re actually planning a “Dosed” trilogy.
They talk about their early psychedelic experiences, the accusations that some of Adrianne’s scenes in the film are fake, the risk profile of iboga and how age can be a factor in its efficacy, the strength and passion of the iboga community, the complications of methadone in our opioid crisis, “The Pharmacist” docuseries, pill mills, the absurdity of the drug war, and the argument for treating someone for a year vs. a lifetime. They also talk about how many people have been inspired to change their lives after watching “Dosed.”
“The way we did it was, as I said earlier, maybe not exactly correct, but she still had the profoundly beneficial experience, and I think that’s because her intentions were there. She was ready to make a change in her life. And anybody that’s looking to get past depression, anxiety, and/or addiction, you need to have that shift and realize it’s time to make a change and move forward.” -Tyler
On criticisms of the film: “I find it actually a little frustrating, but I can just go back just a few years in time and if I had heard about a film like this, not knowing what I know now, I would probably be like, ‘Yeah, right. That sounds hokey or kind of like, bullshit.’” -Tyler
“A better judge of what it’s doing and the impact that it’s making is not a negative comment here or there; it’s the fact that we have emails in our inbox every single day from people that are expressing to us that the film changed their lives, [and] it set them on a different path, away from their struggles and towards potential solutions. It’s a very, very good feeling to be a part of something like that.” -Nick
“Mental health is a problem that is actually getting worse and worse over the last few decades even though the pharmaceutical industry is supposed to have all the answers. But ‘Why is it still getting worse and worse?’ is the question.” -Tyler
Nicholas Meyers is a Canadian producer, writer and cinematographer, known for the multi-award winning feature documentary, DOSED. He’s currently in production on DOSED 2.
Tyler Chandler is a Canadian documentary director, writer, and producer. His directorial debut is the award winning feature documentary, DOSED, about the therapeutic use of psychedelics like magic mushrooms and iboga to help people overcome mental health issues including depression, anxiety, and opioid addiction. Prior to DOSED Tyler produced two other features, winning three awards, and he’s currently in production on DOSED 2.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle, Joe, and Michelle are joined by Tim Cools of PsychedelicExperience.net, a not-for-profit website that aims to be both an open data source for researchers, as well as a Trip Advisor/Yelp-style review site for retreat centers and facilitators that will actually allow negative reviews (something that’s oddly rare in similar sites). While the site is live now, they are having are-launch event on Saturday, streaming the documentary, “Psychedelia,” followed by a live panel discussion with “Psychedelia” director Pat Murphy, Cools, and David Luke.
The team first discusses a recent Forbes article that reported Beckley Psytech teaming up with Fluence (a psychedelic education organization that trains mental health providers) for the first 5-MeO-DMT training program, and how it felt like a press release that was both pushing 5-MeO-DMT while also ignoring many of its more important aspects.
They then move on to The New England Journal of Medicine’s recent “Trial of Psilocybin versus Escitalopram for Depression” study and the way it was reported, highlighted in a reaction blog by one of its authors: Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris. This leads to a discussion on how these studies (whether intentionally or not) so often bury important information deep within these papers, including study-related deaths. And they review responses from Katherine MacLean and Rosalind Watts that perfectly illustrate the importance of community, the efficacy of in-depth therapy, and the shortsightedness (and danger) of treating psychedelics as miracle cures.
Notable Quotes
“Learn to be aware of what you’re thinking. Learn to be aware of what your emotions are, what is in your body. This is more important because this is your real life. The psychedelic or the mystical experience is life-changing and it’s good to have once in a while, but you’re living in this moment. You’re living right now, and so it’s more important for [you] to be aware of what you have now than to chase the other psychedelic experience, one after each other.” -Tim Cools “We should have this open science to try to prove these things, but maybe the clinical model isn’t really where we need to be proving that this works. Maybe in the community model, we’re going to see more effective results. And we won’t be able to have that until it’s legal and therefore safe for everyone to participate in.” -Michelle
“I’m not totally against these capitalist groups, I’m just kind of against their fuckery and manipulation and hiding data, kind of lying in a way- selling us things but having a lot of lies hidden in the closet.” -Joe
“I think that tripping is a skill …and that you should practice that skill- build those muscles, and then maybe it can happen for you. But we shouldn’t sell it as: ‘You take a psychedelic, you have a mystical experience, you’re never depressed again.’ That doesn’t sit right. That doesn’t usually happen.” -Michelle
Tim is a conscious entrepreneur and psychedelic coach. After experiencing the profound transformational power of Ayahuasca in 2015, he realized his purpose is to advocate safe and responsible use of psychedelic plants and medicines: this is how Psychedelic Experience was born! He has over two decades of professional experience developing industrial-grade software in various industries, including smart homes, energy, payroll and logistics. In 2018, Tim re-trained himself as a psychedelic integration coach and guide, hosting legal psychedelic sessions and retreats in the Netherlands. Tim’s interests are software architecture, psychedelics and plant medicine, non-dualism, mindfulness, and helping people to reduce their suffering and improve their well-being.
In this episode, Michelle and Joe interview Ralph Blumenthal, 45-year New York Times contributor and author of The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack (which inspired one of ourmore popular recent blogs, and you can win a copy of!).
They talk about John Mack: legendary Harvard professor who did breathwork with Stan Grof at Esalen and became interested in the mystery of alien abduction, which led him to write 2 bestselling books, appear on Oprah (who is probably an alien*), become a pioneer in the world of alien abductions, and die while immersed in afterlife studies, only to reportedly visit friends later on. Mack’s notoriety came from trusting the stories he was hearing, trying to help people make sense of it all, and taking a big interest in how these experiences seemed to transform so many of the abductees. Sounds a lot like powerful psychedelic experiences and integration work leading towards growth, doesn’t it?
So sit back, pause that X-Files episode, light one up on this high holiday, and get really deep into the world of aliens. Learn about the government’s secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, the Ariel school incident, Avi Loeb’s Oumuamua theory, out-of-body experiences, shapeshifters, and more! Ponder how Blumenthal “accidentally” leaves questions unanswered about the government experimenting with DMT as a way of communicating with aliens. Contemplate why the government is suddenly so forthcoming with UFO data. Think about how today is 420 and this is episode 240…
The truth is out there, folks.
*This viewpoint is not that of Psychedelics Today, but merely of this high Show Notes writer.
Notable Quotes
On Mack doing breathwork with Stan Grof: “He was awakened to a different world, a spiritual world, a world of other realities than the one he was familiar with, and as I say in my book, he said, ‘Stan Grof opened up my psyche and the UFOs flew in.’”
“It’s no spoiler to say that my book does not provide the answer to the mystery of alien abduction, and I acknowledge that. I shed some light on it, perhaps, and what I like to say is that at least I’m comfortable saying that I know what it isn’t. It’s not mental illness, it’s not hoaxes (by and large), it’s not fabrication, it’s not the delusion of crowds. It’s something else. It’s something that is very real to a lot of people from different walks of life [and] different ages, and there really is no good explanation for what has happened to these people.”
“What do you say about the 2-year old children who tell these stories? You know, ‘Little man fly me up in the sky.’ ‘I go up in the sky.’ These 2-year-old kids: have they read UFO books? Are they influenced by UFO movies?”
“Skeptics have not taken the time to read the literature. They don’t know the cases. So all they can do is say, ‘Ah, that’s ridiculous.’ Of course it’s ridiculous! We all agree it’s ridiculous. We all agree it’s not possible. …We all agree that these stories that people are telling are not possible in our reality. They’re completely crazy. And yet, there’s no easy way to explain them away.”
Ralph Blumenthal was a reporter for The New York Times from 1964 to 2009, and has written seven books based on investigative crime reporting and cultural history. His latest book The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack was published by High Road Books of the University of New Mexico Press on March 15, 2021. It’s the first biography of Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard Psychiatrist John E. Mack (1929-2004) who risked an esteemed career to investigate stupefying accounts of human abductions by aliens. Vanity Fairexcerpted the work-in-progress in 2013.
Paradigm-shifting tools don’t fit into paradigmatically static ways of doing things
Psychedelics. Maybe you’ve heard. They’re having a bit of a moment right now. And for good reason. To name just a few examples, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is moving MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD through the FDA approval process. Decriminalization of psychedelics, including LSD (!), is taking place at a breakneck pace. Psilocybin-assisted therapy was even legalized in Oregon during the 2020 election. And, multi-million dollar research institutions are also popping up left and right.
However, there’s an elephant in the room. The looming presence of large, for-profit companies swallowing up patents left and right and ostensibly becoming the primary option for psychedelic therapies of the future is becoming too big to ignore.
It’s beginning to get called out, for a start. More articles are popping up rightfully critiquing this situation as an issue. About a month ago, famous entrepreneur Tim Ferriss kicked off a question on his blog asking if there are any viable alternatives to for-profit psychedelic companies. In reply, Christian Angermayer, one of the main investors behind Compass Pathways, a for-profit psilocybin-assisted therapy company responsible for a large chunk of the patent grab, basically said, “Nope”.
This is disheartening to many in the psychedelic field, to say the least. Most of us didn’t become advocates for psychedelics because they promised to make our healthcare system a bit more effective and a few people a lot more rich. We became advocates for psychedelics because they offered a promise of a better way of doing things; not just for healing, but for the world.
Traditional for-profit companies that are seemingly dominating the space are a betrayal of that promise, especially when no viable, scalable alternative seems to be in sight. Luckily, I think there is a true paradigm-busting healing model that’s not only a proper fit for psychedelics, but has been worked on for years right under our glitter-speckled toenails. We just haven’t yet given it a name. But first, let’s address the elephant in the room: equity.
The Equity Elephant in the Room
I’d like to call this elephant in the room the “Equity Elephant” for two reasons. One is that this elephant is largely a product of private equity entering into the psychedelic space a few years ago. Think venture capital and angel investors. Another reason for deeming it the Equity Elephant is that the response to large, for-profit companies dominating the psychedelic space has largely been one of increasing equity in terms of fairness—or in other words—increasing access. This makes sense considering that most of the companies in question are derived from our healthcare system, which is not exactly the Cadillac of compassion and accessibility.
Thus, the question around what to do about the Equity Elephant has largely been around increasing access. There’s a problem with this, however. Much like how the old paradigm for mental health failed because it treated symptoms rather than causes, increasing access to a system that is inaccessible by design isn’t really going to do all that much good.
We became advocates for psychedelics because they offered a promise of a better way of doing things; not just for healing, but for the world.
Another issue is that we’ve only so far been using one half of the meaning of the word “equity”. Another important use of the word is equity as ownership. So far, asking who owns the future of psychedelic healing has been relatively off the table when it should really be on the tips of our tongues.
First, let’s dive into what ownership means a little more. Ownership is not just about who gets to keep the profits from something. This is another relic from the old paradigm. It’s also about who has the power to direct something’s future. It’s about stewardship, rather than just status. Equity as a term, defined as meaningful power over directing something, needs to be put to use yesterday in the psychedelic space.
The absence of discussing equity as ownership is, in my opinion, why the Equity Elephant in the room is so disheartening. It exemplifies a radical feeling of disempowerment by us in the psychedelic scene who’ve experienced profound healing benefits from these substances. When faced with these behemoths of capitalism making such large strides in the psychedelic space, it’s no wonder we feel outmatched. These organizations don’t strike us as stewards to the future we’re trying to bring about.
But fear not. Now that we know equity is about access and ownership, or fusing them together to increase access to ownership, I think some very promising alternatives will begin to emerge.
Before we go into what those are though, let’s take a quick look at who, in my opinion, actuallyowns the psychedelic future and why they’re charting its path forward: community-based psychedelic organizations.
Community-Based Psychedelic Healing
Perhaps I’m a bit biased. I have been leading the Brooklyn Psychedelic Society since 2016. But to me, what’s been taking place at psychedelic societies across the globe over the past years is muchmore headline worthy than a new multi-million dollar psychedelic company popping up overnight.
Psychedelic societies are self-organized, mutually supporting organizations that together form a grassroots movement of thousands of healers, seekers, organizers, artists, psychedelically curious, and many, many more that have been healing each other with little input from traditional therapeutic institutions. They’ve been doing this for years in ways that regular for-profit companies can only dream of, in an effective, decentralized, evenly distributed and accessible manner.
Why isn’t this getting any headlines? Well for one, twenty people gathering in a park for an integration session with a net yield of $8 and some palo santo sticks isn’t exactly click bait. It’s also because it’s emblematic of a pattern that took me many a psychedelic trips to realize: The most transformative changes aren’t in the headline-grabbing epiphanies (I’M GOD?!!), but in the little, subtle things that we integrate and adopt into our lives patiently and gradually over time (I really need to start painting again and be nicer to people). And that’s exactly the kind of transformation that psychedelic societies have been holding space for.
Because of this, a bonafide healing modality on its own has emerged: community-based healing. Besides just anecdotes from the hundreds of people I’ve met who’ve gotten healing through our community and other psychedelic societies around the world, there’s good ol’ science to back this up as well.
Much like how the old paradigm for mental health failed because it treated symptoms rather than causes, increasing access to a system that is inaccessible by design isn’t really going to do all that much good.
Mike Margolies, founder of Psychedelic Seminars, even came up with a nifty acronym to describe this approach: PEACH (Psychedelic Education and Community Healing) that I highly recommend reading. But, why is community-based healing its own approach altogether?
As mentioned earlier, the old mental health paradigm was failing because it treated symptoms rather than causes. We know that isolation and loneliness exacerbate some of the conditions psychedelics treat so effectively, such as addiction and depression. Thus, delivering psychedelic healing in environments that lack an authentic social component seems to repeat the same mistake of the old paradigm, albeit with better tools.
Of course, clinical modalities for psychedelic therapy should always be available and made as accessible as possible—if that’s what’s needed by the person seeking healing. I don’t think community-based healing will or should replace therapy altogether. But it does seem to be a genuine fourth context that goes beyond the clinical, retreat, and recreational settings, and should probably be the first place to go when someone is seeking a transformative experience.
Psychedelic Mutualism
While we are on a streak of trying to get to the root of things, I’d like to briefly outline what I think is the core philosophical difference between the community-based approach to psychedelic healing and those of the clinical models.
The difference is that community-based approaches take interdependence not just as a fact of life, but as a necessaryaspectof well-being and growth, especially when it comes to healing. This is called “mutualism” in biology and is something that ecologists have long been saying is key in order to awake from our anthropocentrism.
Therefore, psychedelic mutualism is the philosophy that emphasizes community, interdependence, and proactive peer support as centralto growth and flourishing on both an individual and societal level.
The clinical and retreat models contrast with this approach. These modalities are derived from an older philosophy: We are all atomized individuals with consciences that need to be preserved and kept secure. Hence the model: Go to a clinic and get your healing, and then go back to your private life, work and all the other dysfunctions of modern living included.
Sure, these settings might have some community components to them, such as check-ins with retreat members for a few weeks after the journey. But this is not core to their operating philosophy.
Psychedelic mutualism, and the healing modality in which it’s most exemplified, community-based healing or “PEACH”, puts community at its core. The psychedelic experience shows us this in spades by revealing our interdependence not only intellectually but viscerally, in our minds, bodies and hearts.
So how do we scale these modalities to not only increase access, but also increase ownership over them? In other words, how do we democratize the ownership of psychedelic healing?
The Cooperative Model of Ownership
Most traditional organizations are either non-profit or for-profit, with a board, an executive team, managers, employees, and then the people they serve (usually, the customers). While input is sometimes welcomed by other stakeholders within and outside the organization, the decisions are ultimately made by a small handful of people.
Using our definition of ownership as meaningful power and say over something’s future, these organizations are centrally owned. There is an alternative to this model called worker or member owned “cooperatives”.Cooperatives, or co-ops, work differently than the organizations previously mentioned. A cooperative is democratically owned (decentralized) and controlled by its members. Its members can be its workers, its consumers, a combination of both, or any number of different combinations depending on the needs of the community that it serves. Each member gets to vote on the direction of different parts of the organization’s future.
Thus, the key difference between co-ops and regular for-profit companies is that they’re owned by the people that produce and use their services. Put in another way, the profits made by cooperative organizations are in service to the community, not vice versa.
Cooperatives are social and equitable (in both the access and ownership sense) by design, rather than community being a nice byproduct. In other words, mutualism is baked into how they operate. One of the best accounts of this model specifically in a psychedelic context is Bennet Zelner’s Pollinator Model. In his article, Zelner contrasts “pollinator” organizations—those that contribute to the wellness of its members, surrounding communities and society—with “extractive” organizations that accrue value for its shareholders but don’t distribute that value to those they serve or are adjacent to.
Most of the companies that the psychedelic community is rightfully up in arms about are the latter variety. The co-op model is just the answer we’ve been waiting for, I believe. It just has to be applied.
Owning Our Future with Psychedelic Co-ops
You can’t fit a paradigm-busting tool, like psychedelics, into a paradigmatically-static context, like our healthcare systems and traditional for-profit companies. You also can’t use an old philosophy to help shoehorn it in. The settings and operant philosophy needed for psychedelic healing to scale in an authentic way must be at least as transformative as the tools and modalities they are provisioning.
So far, however, no viable and scalable alternatives have been presented. This is where cooperatives and psychedelic mutualism enter into the picture. Yes, large for-profit companies will be in the space. But they are not the end all be all. One day, I hope for-profit companies in the space will be the alternative to the default model: psychedelic co-ops.
Psychedelic co-ops would treat psychedelics and healing as they are meant to be treated: as a publicly accessible service that’s for the benefit of all, in the communities they serve. We have all the building blocks we need to not only construct our psychedelic future, but to own it. So all we need to do now is build. Together.
About the Author
Colin Pugh is the executive director of the Brooklyn Psychedelic Society (BPS), a MAPS-sponsored organization whose mission is to make psychedelic healing a publicly accessible good through community, education, democratic ownership, and advocacy.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle, Joe, and Michelle start out with what’s turning out to be a weekly legalization update (what a time to be alive!), this week highlighting New Mexico and Virginia’s recent legalization of cannabis and Maine representative Anne Perry filing a bill to decriminalize the possession of all drugs. Vacationland, indeed!
They then talk about a recent study that proved scientifically that psilocybin increases creativity, and another that analyzed changes in personality after ceremonial group ayahuasca use, which, based on self-report assessments filled out by both participants and informants alike, showed a reduction in neuroticism among participants. This leads to a conversation about the benefits of group work and the importance of more research being done on ceremonial ayahuasca use.
They then discuss Vice’s recent recovering of the long-lost page 25 from the CIA’s report on astral projection, why this was something conspiracy theorists have been clamoring for, and how the self-knowledge aspects of the report relate to psychedelics (other than astral projection being really freaking trippy, man). And they talk about Navigating Psychedelics (which has its next round coming up on May 20th) and remind us that although that’s the one they talk about the most, there are actually several other courses at psychedeliceducationcenter.com worth checking out. Maybe there’ll be one about astral projection soon? This guy sure hopes so.
Notable Quotes
“It’s nice to see that Virginia is authorizing home grow (up to 4 plants per household) beginning July 1st. I see all these other states being able to offer this besides New Jersey, so… F. U., New Jersey.” -Kyle, who lives in New Jersey
“Human creativity kind of got us here. Human creativity can get us out, and psychedelics can play a huge role in that, if we figure out how to leverage it properly. Let’s not use this stuff to help us get more oil out of the ground or pump more freshwater into single-use plastic bottles. Let’s use it to solve this crisis.” -Joe
“Our culture is set up in this weird way that it’s constantly making us feel bad and that we’re not doing enough. So when we can all be really vulnerable and honest and open in a group, whether it’s with psychedelics or not, it’s so important.” -Michelle “We can take an analytic approach and tear it apart and try to get to the core of ‘What is this?’ but all humans have this access to this other realm through breathwork, through meditation, through psychedelics, through near-death experiences. And if you’ve ever had that experience, how do you deny it?” -Kyle
Many in the Black community are weary of psychedelic therapy because of stigma rooted in the racist War on Drugs. But how do we begin to change that?
Last year I wrote an article entitled “Why Don’t More Black People Use Psychedelics?” I cited several reasons as to why we haven’t seen psychedelics embraced by Black people at the same rate as other groups. One of those reasons was that drug use has been highly stigmatized, especially in Black communities.
Another topic that has been heavily stigmatized within Black culture is therapy. As a result, many Black people are hesitant to try a treatment that involves both drugs and therapy.
Numerous research studies have shown that psychedelics can aid in the treatment of trauma, depression and PTSD. According to Medical News Today, “Depression is about as prevalent in Black communities as in white ones, but there are significant differences. Black people face different social pressures that may increase their risk of depression.”
These risks include but are not limited to:
Racial trauma
Difficult life experiences as a result of racism
Barriers and lack of access to mental health resources
Socioeconomic inequalities are another stressor that can increase poor mental health. In 2019, Black people represented 13.2% of the total population in the United States, but 23.8% of the poverty population. According to the organization Mental Health America: “Black and African American people living below poverty are twice as likely to report serious psychological distress than those living above the poverty level.”
Equity in psychedelics has been a popular topic of discussion. For those of us that are committed to equity in this space, what can we do to help destigmatize drugs in the Black community?
1. Normalize Drug Use
Society has led us to believe that illegal drugs are harmful while prescriptive drugs are useful.
This is not true.
We can end this harmful narrative by normalizing the use of drugs, all drugs.
In his latest book, Drug Use for Grown-Ups, Dr. Carl Hart writes about his experience with recreational heroin use. He shares that he uses heroin to unwind at the end of his day, the same way many of us turn to a glass of wine. Dr. Hart is not addicted. Instead, he says that his use of heroin has increased his overall life satisfaction. In order for our society to start to normalize drug use, we need to hear more of these stories.
2. Normalize Therapy in the Black Community
In the Black community, mental illness is a taboo topic and often, we’re labeled as “crazy” if we seek mental health services. Instead, we’re told to find solace in the church or prayer. In order to start to normalize therapy, we need to educate ourselves and each other about mental health. Part of that education needs to involve open and honest conversation about mental health in schools, churches and in the Black community.
3. More BIPOC Representation in the Media
Psychedelics have been portrayed in the media as a drug for white guys. We rarely see the portrayal of a Black man taking a trip on acid or psilocybin. Documentaries such as Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia and Psychonautics have helped to destigmatize psychedelic drug use, but not in Black communities. While I’m glad that these shows exist, they need to include faces that look like ours.
4. More Black Representation in Healthcare
Only 4% of all therapists in this country are Black. Finding any therapist you connect with can be hard. Finding a Black therapist can prove to be even more of a challenge. And if you’re in search of a Black psychedelic therapist, that can be nearly impossible. Just as we need to see faces that reflect ours in the media, we need to see that representation in the healthcare industry as well.
Our current healthcare system includes racial and ethnic biases which can impact the quality of care Black people receive. As a result, this may deter a person from the community to seek care. We need more Black therapists, trip sitters and educators in this space. We can start by seeking out future therapists and introducing them to these medicines and the benefits they offer.
For those in the Black community who want to pursue the path of becoming a therapist or healthcare professional, there needs to be adequate funding offered to support our education as well as our future research studies.
Conclusion
We can begin to normalize the stigma of psychedelics in the Black community by sharing information, having open conversations and seeing diverse representationin this space. The Black community has the added pressure of overcoming the stigma of both drug use and therapy, but the more we talk about these medicines and this work, the more normalized they will become.
Black people are traumatized. We not only live with current daily racial trauma, but the generational trauma endured by our ancestors as well. Psychedelics offer us a path to healing that exists outside of Western medicine. If we can begin to undo the stigma and shame associated with drugs and therapy, then as a community, we can finally begin to heal.
About the Author
Robin Divine is the founder of Black People Trip
Robin Divine is a writer, psychedelic advocate and the creator of Black People Trip, an online community with a mission to raise awareness, promote education, teach harm reduction, and create safe spaces for Black women interested in psychedelic use. If you’d like to support Robin in her mission to bring Black People Trip to more women of color, check out her Patreon or find @DivineRobin on Venmo.
In this episode, Joe interviews returning guest Richie Ogulnick, a facilitator/guide who has been helping clients through ibogaine experiences for 26 years.
Ogulnick talks about how ibogaine works, why he prefers working with the whole plant (iboga), why the flood doses he used to recommend weren’t as effective, and the importance of allowing his clients to spend as much time as they want on intention-setting before their session. And of course, he talks about the session itself, which usually tends to be a gradual slide into a 15 to 30-hour waking dream state of deep exploration, followed by the slow process of coming out of it, making sense of it, and starting to work towards integrating what was learned.
He also talks about LSD, the work of Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh (Osho), an instance of someone who had no experience with iboga (and why), methodologies and experience, and tells a story of a time in NYC, watching someone shoot up heroin while explaining their experience to him as a way for him to better understand addiction and an addict’s search for a feeling of peace.
Notable Quotes
“Very often, people ask me if they should bring a tape recorder with them, and I say, ‘Well, just make sure that it’s a voice-activated tape recorder, because you may say a few words and then 15 hours later, you may finish the sentence.’” “Unlike other psychoactives, it’s interesting- it’s almost like you’re introduced to a new language, and 6 months, 8 months later, people are sharing with me that their intentions have finally all been worked through and they’re maybe considering doing another session in 6 months or a year. Whereas, with other psychoactives, you can very comfortably do ayahuasca once a week, once a month, for months or years. People tend to do iboga maybe 2 to 4 times in a lifetime.”
“Psychedelics or iboga or meditation- methods won’t get us to that beneficence. What methods tend to do is allow us to crawl back to ourselves and say, ‘I’ve accumulated all of these experiences through this methodology, but I can’t go any further. I have to let go of this method’ and then the beneficence really happens. So it’s running at the arrogance of adulthood until you crawl back to yourself and you say, ‘I surrender.’” “The cool thing about setting intentions is not so much the content but the impetus. You create the pilgrimage to go deep within, irrespective of what you really explore.”
Richie Ogulnick is a long time Ibogaine provider and enthusiast Over the course of fifteen and a half years, he conducted about 750 sessions, including addiction-interruption treatments. He spent the next several years referring close to 1,000 more people to other ibogaine providers. During that time, he also trained doctors and ex-addicts who opened ibogaine centers throughout the world. Richie feels a pull to focus again on the more therapeutic and psycho-spiritual treatments where he is able to offer his expertise in ibogaine treatment along with his knowledge of reintegration with individuals who are looking to deepen and enrich their life experience.
We know this past year has been extremely challenging and isolating. Humans are social creatures by nature, and quarantine and social distancing have been hard on all of our psyches and mental health. But as a community, we have to get real: if we really want what’s best for the collective whole of humanity, the truth is that it’s still not safe to meet up in big groups to do psychedelic work or ceremonies.
We’ve been talking about it a lot on the podcast, especially on Solidarity Fridays, so here is a reminder in print: COVID-19 is real, psychedelics and spirituality won’t make you exempt from catching and spreading it, and therefore, it’s still too dangerous to be doing group psychedelic work.
Often, when people justify disregarding masks or social distancing measures, their line of reasoning is that they’re not a senior citizen or immunocompromised, and so the current safety precautions don’t apply to them. But this is not a zero-sum, “die or survive” game, and it’s not just about you and your healing; it’s about the people around you–employees at your local grocery store, your bus or taxi driver, the nurses, doctors, and teachers in your community–people you don’t know and don’t think about, who still might be harmed by your actions.
And COVID-19 is not temporary. There are psychedelic community members with vagus nerve damage, permanent vocal cord damage from severe coughing, lung issues, and other serious long-term conditions. We know plenty of people in their 30s and 40s who survived COVID-19 and thought everything was fine, but their post-virus quality of life has since been severely lowered. We know folks who are still sick, struggling with chronic pain, brain fog, and low energy for over a year, who have therefore been unable to work and have become dependent on family members to support them as their recovery extends past the 13, 14, and 15-month marks.
Beyond our immediate community, a recent study published in The Lancet journal of psychiatry found that a significant portion of COVID-19 survivors were diagnosed with a neurological or psychiatric condition within 6 months of contracting COVID, many for the first time. And remember- we’re still seeing COVID variants pop up, so while many feel we’re making our way out of this dark period, we may still have a long way to go.
And it sucks. We understand people are struggling right now. Kyle sees it every day in his therapy and coaching practice, and we all feel it. Being in isolation and lacking human connection is extremely hard, unnatural, and affecting us all. The need for healing and contact is immense and only getting bigger, and we absolutely empathize with you all. We understand that it goes against our individualistic cultural conditioning, but this is a social responsibility that is beyond individual healing or personal politics, and we have to think communally. When the community is sick, the individual is sick. And when the individual is sick, the community is sick.
When we’ve posted about this on social media, we’ve had folks bring up suicide statistics from 2020, using the high number as an argument for encouraging much-needed psychedelic healing work. Everyone on our team has lost someone to suicide and we know how difficult that is, and also how easy it is to think that perhaps an ayahuasca or mushroom ceremony could have saved our loved ones from their afflictions. So it feels insensitive to compare numbers of deaths against each other, but since that’s something that gets brought up a lot, look into it: while the 2020 stats aren’t final and don’t take overdoses into account, the numbers are actually very similar to 2019, with the number of deaths directly attributed to COVID-19 being drastically higher. It’s uncomfortable to think about, but the numbers speak for themselves. This is beyond our emotional ties to the issue; this is for the sake of the whole community of humanity.
The fact of the matter is, psychedelic group work involves a lot of touching, being close together for 6 to 12 hours, and being in close proximity to others’ bodily fluids while we cough, purge, or cry. Cups of water, pipes, snuff tools, and tobacco cigars are often shared. People hold hands, hug, and practice bodywork with each other. These are all optimal opportunities for viruses to spread. Plus, when you are under the influence of a psychedelic medicine, the realities of social distancing and spreading germs won’t exactly be in the forefront of your mind and can easily be cast aside as “silly human problems.” And while that belief may feel freeing, it won’t protect you from catching or spreading disease.
Are there safe options for participating in psychedelic healing work? At the moment, we think the safest option for those looking for mental health relief with psychedelics is ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and infusions. Unlike underground group work or retreats abroad, ketamine clinics and practitioners are regulated by organizations like OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) in the US, meaning they have to follow governmental guidelines for safe and sterile working environments. Also, ketamine infusions, injections, lozenges, and nasal sprays are not typically done in groups, and if they are, they also follow social distancing protocols, as outlined in our recent piece on the topic.
We understand that for many, treatment options like ketamine-assisted psychotherapy may not be accessible or appropriate, and some people will still participate in group work anyway. To those people, we encourage everyone to do everything as safely as possible by only engaging in small ceremonies that are following strict safety and social distancing protocols and have contact tracing in place. If the work can be done outside, do it there. And if you’re traveling, please quarantine in consideration of the communities you’re traveling between. But don’t forget- there are lots of virtual psychedelic community offerings to keep us all engaged too. And think about the other work you can do, from meditation, breathwork, and journaling, to creating art or just going for a walk in the woods. Not all healing comes from psychedelics and group work.
As more people get vaccinated and the world begins to reopen, we are all feeling the excitement to move towards the sense of normalcy we all miss so much. But this is a slow process, and we encourage everyone to continue to move slowly, stay cautious, and continue engaging in safe practices and social distancing measures until we get there.
We know that this is not what a lot of the psychedelic community wants to hear, but regardless of how unpopular putting this out might make us, we feel it’s a necessary reminder that we all have a shared responsibility to keep our communities safe.
Thanks for your support,
Joe, Kyle, & the rest of the Psychedelics Today team
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, everyone’s back and so is the news.
They cover California Senator Scott Wiener’s SB 519 bill to decriminalize psychedelics statewide (which is the first time a decriminalize bill has been put through and passed by lawmakers instead of ballot initiatives), a 3rd Massachusetts city decriminalizing psychedelics, an article pointing out how the various flaws in our capitalistic world also thrive in the psychedelic world, and a TIME magazine article on ibogaine and Marcus and Amber Capone’s VETS organization (that curiously didn’t mention Marcus’ 5-MeO-DMT use or iboga’s endangered status).
But there are 2 big articles that lead to the most discussion this week: first, Psymposia’s article about Third Wave’s Paul Austin stealing provider information (possibly including Kyle’s) from Psychedelic.support and MAPS and the ethics of doing something like this, and second, Vice’s article examining patents and ethics within the psychedelic world. How can companies be profitable while also being ethical? How can a company grow within a capitalistic society without falling into the greed traps of our Western ways?
And although he doesn’t call it out, this episode features the return of this show notes writer’s favorite PT segment, Joe’s Paranoid Update- this time about the chaos that could ensue if the Colorado River dries up.
Notable Quotes
“We can work on ourselves, but does that ultimately heal the society when these systemic issues are at play which continue to make us sick? It just feels like this endless feedback loop. …If we’re just focused on our individuation and not actually engaging and participating in the community, in the society, then what are we doing the work for? Are we just doing it for our individual selves?” -Kyle
“Representation matters so much and it affects people’s self-esteem and self-worth when they don’t have it there, because they don’t think that that’s ever going to be a possibility for them. It just felt so good to be able to put that article out there and to represent some different types of people in this space and highlight their really important and often overlooked work. And we’re going to continue to do it.” -Michelle
“It really is just this cool new therapy for the affluent class [that] Compass [Pathways] wants, and that’s how you make the most money. But I think that if you were an ethical psychedelic company, that wouldn’t be the goal. That wouldn’t be the mission, and you wouldn’t dress it up all in this B.S. language.” -Michelle
“I do feel like we’re in the middle of something really powerful and it can either really change everything or… not. I just hope that we, as a community, keep our eye on the prize, which is like- it’s more than psychedelics. It’s cultural change, societal change.” -Michelle
Internal Family Systems therapy, or IFS, is an effective complement to psychedelic therapy and integration. But how does this therapeutic approach – best known for working with the many pieces of the psyche that comprise one’s personality, or “parts,” – work in conjunction with psychedelic medicines?
My own experiences with this modality enabled me to better understand how it works.
Navigating inner space is always a surprisingly visual journey for me. In one particular session, my eyes had been closed for a while. And this time, in a guided Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy session, the powerful visual component was exactly the same.
There are many paths from which one can enter the inner world, known as “trailheads” in this detailed method of psychotherapy. Just taking a few breaths within this dark, introspective place, I could feel something churning like magma in my stomach. I saw and felt hot, crackling flames of anger percolating within my abdomen; painful memories of betrayal filtered through my consciousness.
Using this bodily trailhead as an entry point and working through the “parts” that hallmark the IFS approach, my therapist began to gently ask about it, as if the anger was a sentient presence.
“What would your anger do if it didn’t have to keep doing this job?” I heard from what now seemed like a far-off place.
“I don’t know,” I mumbled. “I like the anger. I know it’s here to protect me. We get along.”
It felt deeply familiar, like a well-worn sweatshirt that I couldn’t bring myself to let go of. It was safe. Or rather, it kept me safe. In the language of IFS, I had contacted a protective part of my psyche, which in this case, was a flaming cauldron of anger.
“Good. Let the anger know that you appreciate it. Really let it feel that… what does the anger have to say to you now?”
“That sometimes we lose people,” I sighed. “And that that’s OK.” These simple words gave way to a massive sense of release.
I felt the turbulent energy inside me suddenly transform into something which encompassed my entire awareness. The fiery magma of anger which coursed through my body a minute ago shifted into something that I can only describe as an emotionally expansive, all-inclusive moment of peace.
This space was familiar. I had felt it before, this wordless balance between bliss and sorrow which the thinking mind, or “ego”, seems to dissolve in.
Now, instead of feeling the flames inside me, I was inside the flame itself. I felt my entire body relax. My mind, a psychic battleground only moments before, was quiet.
I exhaled into a stillness which resonated throughout my cells. The immensity of all of life’s crushing beauty somatically flooded through my nervous system and inner vision. I felt my heart beat and my lungs expand as forgiveness flowed through my entire body. My mind relinquished control, letting the story behind this painful life chapter melt into the purifying, boundless flame I suddenly found myself engrossed in. I was deeply immersed in what IFS therapists call the energy of “the Self.”
The distant voice advised me to stay there as long as I could. And so I did, until time began to loosen its grip upon my consciousness.
As powerful as any psychedelic moment of healing, this visionary journey was facilitated by a therapist in my Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy training program. After being guided through this modality, my suspicions around its potential for use in psychedelic therapy and integration were confirmed beyond a doubt.
What Is Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy?
Developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz in the late 1980’s, Internal Family Systems is a psychotherapy modality rapidly growing in popularity. As an outgrowth of his work studying family systems therapy and working with patients struggling with severe eating disorders, Schwartz noticed that his clients spoke about their inner conflict in terms of “parts” of themselves guiding their troubling behaviors and inner conflicts.
In what is ironically a radical act in many areas of the psychological establishment, Schwartz actually took his clients at their word.
Integrating his knowledge of family systems, as well as the work of Carl Jung and other psychotherapeutic pioneers, Schwartz created the IFS model which embraces the notion that our personalities are actually composed of a symphony of different parts, as well as a core, boundless source of energy that both Jung and Schwartz deemed “the Self.”
“There are times where you just can’t convince these protective parts to let us get to an exile and heal it. And a psychedelic session can expedite that pretty easily, it seems,” Schwartz told Psychedelics Today.
When asked about working with IFS and MDMA, Mithoefer said, “I have learned how well the spontaneous observations and experiences of our participants map onto IFS, including both parts and the Self… in my experience, people are hungry for this perspective. (Richard Schwartz) didn’t make it up – IFS taps into real phenomena.”
Schwartz says his experiences with psychedelics and the insights he gathered through substance work helped open his awareness to the “multiplicity of mind,” a core principle of IFS.
In the past, the field of psychology viewed subpersonalities with great skepticism, giving way to infamous diagnoses such as dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly called multiple personality disorder (MPD). Yet IFS, a non-pathologizing form of psychotherapy, looks at the many subpersonalities, or parts, as natural facets of the psyche–aspects of ourselves which yearn to be known, understood, and healed.
As a depth psychotherapist, I was trained to suss out the unconscious and possibly archetypal aspects of a given dynamic or situation with my clients. Image and metaphor have long been the bread and butter of depth psychology, with myths and fairytales frequently providing the backdrop for some of this tradition’s most memorable texts. In other words, both depth psychology and IFS take to heart the notion that image and psyche are one and the same.
After slowly developing my own therapeutic style, which is influenced not only by human teachers, but psychedelic plant teachers as well, IFS felt like an immensely practical tool with which to weave this odd tapestry of animism, image, and archetypes.
After all, what is an archetype if not psychic energy crystallized into an image?
What are “Parts” in IFS?
For millennia, psychedelic medicines have been used by humans to invoke visions, as well as bring one into dialog with some larger presence: the Great Spirit, the spirits of teacher plants, animals, elements, or the ancestors. Especially with ayahuasca, DMT, and other tryptamine-containing substances, people report encountering beings or entities who often communicate detailed information that can be recalled after the effect itself has worn off.
Whether these entities are mere reflections, or personifications of psychic parts,is a valid, but different, discussion. The point is that when one goes deep enough into the mind, research and anecdotal evidence proves that it is not unusual to encounter presences that seem entirely other than one’s own self.
Instead of entities, beings, or spirits, IFS employs the language of partsto describe the psychic presences which collectively constitute one’s personality.
As a psychedelic integration therapist, IFS provided me with a systematized toolkit for working with people trying to make sense of the paradigm-bending moments that can often occur during a psychedelic journey.
For example: take the voice that suddenly tells you to quit your job; the sinking feeling in your stomach when you think about a memory from childhood; feelings of unworthiness that you’re doing it all wrong; or that suddenly you’re not safe, despite all evidence to the contrary. From the IFS perspective, these are most likely parts expressing themselves and asking for your attention. From a shamanic perspective, these messages might be coming from the spirit of the plant you just ingested, from the ancestors, or from something else entirely.
For psychedelic explorers who prefer not to think in terms of spiritsor entities, IFS can provide a useful method of conceptualizing and categorizing potentially confusing aspects of psychedelic experiences that might not fit within their worldview.
Defining “Self” in Internal Family Systems
Both IFS and psychedelics work by reconnecting one to an internal source of transpersonal energy, which Schwartz, taking a page from Carl Jung, calls “the Self.”
IFS has the potential to lead one into profoundly visionary and emotionally cathartic experiences. For me, IFS has been comparable to some of the most healing moments that I’ve experienced with psychedelic medicines.
IFS can provide both facilitators and participants a language by which to conceptualize and map an experience that would otherwise be, by its very nature, ineffable.
In describing the energy of the Self, Schwartz developed what he calls the “eight C’s”:
Compassion
Curiosity
Calm
Clarity
Courage
Connectedness
Confidence
Creativity
In IFS, it is the energy of the Self, not the therapist, that truly heals.
The good news here is that everyone, regardless of past trauma or experiences, has within them the boundless energy of Self. Thus, IFS believes that everyone has the capacity to heal.
The notion of the Selffirmly locates IFS therapy in the terrain of existential-humanistic, transpersonal, and depth psychology, all of which form the foundations of emerging and long-standing modalities of psychedelic psychotherapy (for examples, see Grof, 1975, Stolaroff, 1997, and Leary, Metzner & Alpert, 2007).
One could say that within the psychological establishment, the idea of the Selfis as radical a notion as LSD being used to heal. In many mental health agencies or governmental health services, both concepts would likely be given a sideways glance at best, mockery or early termination at worst.
In my own psychedelic experiences, I can recall moments of feeling immersed in many of the eight C’s.Formal research has yet to be conducted connecting the Jungian and IFS concept of the Selfwithin psychedelic experiences and its potential for healing, though the work of Stanislav Grof, as well as Griffith’s research mentioned above, comes close.
Perhaps the expansive, all-encompassing energy of the Self is what the famous Mazatec curandera, Maria Sabina was referring to when she said, “Heal yourself, with beautiful love, and always remember, you are the medicine.”
How Psychedelic Integration Could Employ IFS
After a psychedelic experience, my clients often share what can seem like a deluge of information, imagery, and questions. In addition to archetypal imagery, transpersonal, and shamanic perspectives, IFS provides me a detailed map for understanding and deeping into the integration process with clients. Often, there are recognizable themes or patterns that can emerge during a psychedelic experience – for good or ill.
Here are some core concepts in IFS therapy that I have found useful while facilitating integration work: “Unburdening,” “Polarization,” and “Blending.”
“Unburdening” in IFS
If one could distill IFS therapy down to a single sentence, it could be that it consists of helping certain parts of ourselves let go of outdated or inherited ways of being that cause us to suffer.
IFS calls this process “unburdening,” as it understands that certain parts take on “burdens” early in life which, as we grow, might become less and less helpful or healthy.
This unburdening is achieved by establishing a connection to the Self, so that the part can realize it doesn’t have to do it all by itself, that it’s not alone, and that its past experiences don’t dictate the future. Usually, these moments are profoundly cathartic and emotional. It can also take an immense amount of work to get there, which is why psychedelics can potentially play a helpful role in this therapeutic process.
From an IFS perspective, unburdening is often what happens in a positive psychedelic experience, and can be some of the most memorable moments of the journey. For example, metaphorically giving your anger to the fire; letting your grief float away into the ocean; or planting your sadness into earth. Such images are common in both IFS therapy sessions and psychedelic journeys.
Through the lens of IFS, our stories about who we are or how the world is might be a burden carried by a part. For instance, seeing oneself as a savior, victim, martyr, or outcast is a story that might be severely limiting one’s idea of who they really are and their self worth. Tendencies towards workaholism or scarcity fears, chronic shame, feelings of not being enough and needing to prove oneself, are all burdens that certain parts might carry for decades. Many burdens were placed upon us during childhood by family members, and in that sense are not true reflections of who we really are.
On an even deeper level, some burdens are inherited through our blood lineage and ancestry, or experienced through what author and psychotherapist Resmaa Menakem calls HIPP (historical, intergenerational, persistent institutional, and personal) trauma. These heavy burdens may inform every aspect of someone’s life, and are heartbreakingly real, but are still not accurate reflections of who they truly are.
Trauma twists someone’s story about who they are. Healing helps rewrite it.
“Polarization” in Internal Family Systems
Dealing with “polarization” between parts is a common occurrence in IFS therapy sessions. Through an IFS lens, challenging psychedelic experiences can often occur because these same polarized parts are amplified during a journey. Looping or confusion – a frequent element of a bad trip – might be seen as an extreme polarization.
Polarization is like an inner battle. A difficult psychedelic experience might occur because of this inner tension: one part wants to surrender, another part is terrified to do so. One part says to take a second dose, another part cautions against it. One part wants to lay down under a blanket, another wants to stand up, stretch, and go outside. Such conundrums can be viewed through IFS as polarized parts playing a psychic tug-of-war.
This can get exhausting. And usually, there is a much deeper process going on beneath. The IFS therapist’s job is to tend to the parts that arise with compassion, to witness them, help them unburden, and reconnect them to the energy of the Self.
“Blending” in IFS
We all have certain parts that become strong aspects of our personality. Many people who live outwardly successful lives might be plagued by a “manager” part which acts as a strict taskmaster, inwardly limiting their creative expression and spontaneity. High levels of anxiety, especially social anxiety, can be viewed through IFS as a “critical manager” or “worrisome exile” part which gains control in uncertain situations. Or someone struggling with a strong addiction, for example, can often revert to what’s called a “firefighter”–a reactive part that rushes in to dramatically protect the system when triggered, even though it ultimately sabotages that person’s wellbeing.
Such experiences are referred to in IFS as “blending.”
Fear of letting go, or becoming stuck in certain thought patterns is a basic example of being “blended” in a psychedelic state. The psychic energy being taken up by the part in question is inhibiting one from connecting to the body, the deep nervous system, and the Self, which is how healing most easily occurs.
Extreme examples of negative outcomes from psychedelics can often be seen through this idea of blending.
How many of us have experienced someone – possibly ourselves – fresh out of a psychedelic state convinced they are either some kind of messiah with a sacred mission, or at fault for some global catastrophe, disaster, or cosmic mishap?
Taken to the extremes, this is the stuff that psychedelic-induced psychosis is made of.
And almost guaranteed, there is a much deeper reason why the part in question took over. Likely, it is to protect the psyche from facing something incredibly scary or traumatic.
From a Jungian lens, one could view these extreme examples of blending as a type of “archetypal possession,” resulting from some form of inflation. During an archetypal possession, according to Jung, an archetype takes “hold of the psyche with a kind of primeval force and compels it to transgress the bounds of humanity. The consequence is a puffed-up attitude, loss of free will, delusion and enthusiasm for good and evil alike.
Interestingly, psychedelics can both inflate or deflate the ego, filling someone up with grandiose visions of spreading the “good news,” or reducing one into a fragile shell of themselves.
This is the critical role of integration: to recalibrate the ego with the Self, to witness and guide the vulnerable parts that need care, and to ground potentially expansive visions into a genuine path of tangible healing.
Using IFS to Navigate Psychedelic Journeys
Beyond integration, IFS can offer an immensely valuable toolkit for navigating psychedelic space as well. Speaking from personal experience, IFS has helped me to create more psychic spaciousness within a journey. Much like mindfulness, remembering my IFS training has helped me practice observing, rather than getting “hooked” into particular thoughts and feelings that might emerge during a psychedelic experience.
The basic premise of IFS is that the psyche is inhabited, and that we can learn to dialog with these presences or parts. Remembering this simple fact, I’ve been able to remain in a space of gentle curiosity when, for instance, I might fall into a thought pattern that could potentially send me down a critical, anxious, or confused internal loop during a journey.
Cultivating the ability to remain connected to Self, or any of the eight C’swhich characterize this energy, helps me to remain grounded and present within psychedelic space. Much like mindfulness, the goal is to create psychic flexibility, spaciousness, and literacy, so that we might more deeply be able to do “the work” that psychedelics inevitably ask of us.
Every IFS therapy session, like every psychedelic experience, can be worlds apart. Speaking from experiences both as a therapist and client, I am continually blown away by what this therapeutic modality has revealed to me and those I’ve been lucky enough to work with.
Internal Family Systems is not only an effective psychotherapy modality with an extraordinary capacity to heal trauma, demonstrated in a pilot study in which 92% of participants no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis, it is also a non-pathologizing, client-directed, and ultimately psycho-spiritual framework for guiding one on the potentially infinite road of inner work.
As every good navigator knows deep down, the map and territory will always remain two very different realms. Yet as far as a set of directions for charting the inner world, and for helping people integrate potentially life-altering psychedelic experiences, Internal Family Systems therapy presents a toolkit which can greatly benefit therapists and facilitators looking for a detailed, multifaceted, and truly psychedelic methodology for exploring the soul.
In this episode, Joe and Kyle interview Palo Alto-based Ph.D., author, clinical psychologist, and “integration specialist,” Kile Ortigo.
From what he’s learned at his time at the Grady Trauma Project, the National Center for PTSD, VA work, hospice work, and his own practice, he talks about the flaws of active intervention models of therapy and why what can be most healing for someone is often just letting them be and bearing witness to their experience. And he talks about burnout in healthcare, secondary trauma, common factors that help in all therapy techniques, Jung, “Altered States,” and what we might derive from the popularity of Marvel movies.
And he talks about his book,Beyond the Narrow Life: A Guide For Psychedelic Integration and Existential Exploration, and integration: what it actually means, the basics of how he works with clients, if it’d be possible to create some sort of integration measurement, the importance of being flexible when intention-setting, how the psychedelic journey relates to Campbells’ idea of the hero’s journey, and the importance of movies like “Joker.”
Notable Quotes
“I think that’s one of the downsides of working in any sort of big, large, complex system- is that the metrics that you’re being evaluated on are how many patients you’re seeing a day or a week, not necessarily: are they improving?”
“We need to loosen our attachments on active interventions sometimes and realize that just bearing witness- being present in a mental way can be what’s most healing.”
“Mythology is being created, I would say, at a very rapid pace these days, and it’s being communicated in a much higher scale. And that’s primarily through our science fiction, I think, because it’s previewing some of these challenges that are here right now and we knew they were coming, but we haven’t been paying attention to them and we need to. ‘Black Mirror’ is important.”
“There have always been multiple stories that need to be told, including counter stories to our dominant narratives (our hero’s journey). And that’s why a film like ‘Joker’ from last year was so incredibly important. We needed to hear the story of the shadow and why we need to pay attention to the shadow, and not from a place of judgment or antagonism, but of compassion.”
Kile M. Ortigo, Ph.D., is an award-winning clinical psychologist and founder of the Center for Existential Exploration, which supports people exploring profound questions about identity, meaning, life transitions, and psychospiritual development. He also serves on advisory boards of Psychedelic Support, an online training and clinician directory for legal, psychedelic-informed care, and Project New Day, a non-profit organization providing harm reduction resources for people using psychedelics in their addiction recovery process. He received his PhD from Emory University and is a certified psychedelic therapist trained at CIIS and mentored by Dr. Bill Richards (who wrote the foreword to his second book, Beyond the Narrow Life). For several years, Dr. Ortigo worked at the National Center for PTSD (NC-PTSD) where he collaborated on technology development and implementation projects, ranging from apps like Mindfulness Coach to online programs like webSTAIR. With colleagues at NC-PTSD, NYU, and Harvard, Dr. Ortigo coauthored Treating Survivors of Child Abuse & Interpersonal Trauma: STAIR Narrative Therapy (2nd Edition), which was released in June 2020.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, technical difficulties lead to a week off from the gang reviewing the news, and instead, Joe interviews microdose & mindset mentor, entrepreneur, author, public speaker, retreat leader, and voice of the Psychedelic Leadership podcast, Laura Dawn.
Dawn talks about her path from Montreal to building a retreat center by a volcanic hot spring in Hawaii, only to see that dream end with the volcano’s eruption. But due to an ayahuasca experience that fed her a song and the lyrics, “Trust in the great unknown,” she did exactly that and followed her heart towards coming out of the psychedelic closet and beginning teaching people the ways of microdosing and ways to inspire creative thinking.
They talk a lot about creativity: how to define it, misconceptions about learning and practicing creativity, the 4 Ps of creativity, the concept of convergent/divergent thinking and cognitive fluidity, the 5 stages of creativity, flow state, peak performance, and her framework of preparation, practice, and psychedelics towards a more open and creative mind.
Notable Quotes
“When we think about creativity and creative thinking, we can start to understand this as a range of cognitive processes that can best be described as a dynamic fluid movement between multiple states of mind, and of course that’s where psychedelics really come in.”
“By creating a conceptual framework, we can teach ourselves. It’s almost like uploading a neurological program in the mind, which then allows you to perceive reality differently, and you can train yourself how to perceive in that way by taking that framework and that understanding into the psychedelic space.” “Think about creativity and creating not for the thing in and of itself. …It’s not about the thing. When people are afraid to create, take the leap for the act of flying through the air, not because you think you’re going to stick the landing.” “I think everything comes down to intention. There is very much so this quality of focusing on peak performance from a place of like, the drill sergeant and the whip, and ‘I’m not good enough, I need to get over there and be better,’ and I think it’s easy to fall down that road. But then there’s also another aspect that we can choose to relate to it differently, of like: how much can I expand what I believe is possible to create with my life on this planet while I’m alive?”
Nine women of color who are working hard to ensure their communities have access and representation in the psychedelic movement
As interest in psychedelic medicine explodes, it is trailed by conversation about representation and access. From leaders, authors and filmmakers, to researchers and clinical study participants, one simple fact is clear: The psychedelic community is disproportionately white. The recent global focus on racial inequity and social justice has called us all to reflect on our impact and seek out tangible ways to show up for communities of color. Now, this conversation has reached the psychedelic community and called leaders to task. Are we ready to explore why the movement is so homogenous, and to learn from leaders of color who can help us shift and evolve?
While psychedelic press coverage focuses on hand-wringing over the privileged corporate takeover, there is a more hopeful subculture emerging. Around the world there are visionary and collaborative leaders who aren’t waiting for an invitation from the vanguard of psychedelic elites. We spoke with nine women of color who are shaping psychedelic culture at the grassroots level and helping to create more inclusive spaces within the movement for global healing.
Buki Fadipe, Founder Adventures in Om
Buki Fadipe is the founder of Adventures In Om
Buki Fadipe, founder of Adventures In Om, is a transformational guide, artist, and psychedelic practitioner in training based in London, England. Her work focuses on empowering individuals to take part in their own healing and consider all aspects of the self: emotional, physical, environmental, spiritual and psychological. “When we self-heal, we do so for our lineage, community, collective, Mother Earth and all living beings,” Fadipe says.
In the future of psychedelics, Fadipe hopes to see better representation and access.
“Accessibility is a big issue,” she says. “The way the industry is currently heading does not leave much room for focusing on marginalized groups. These medicines are being worked into a psychiatric framework, a system that is already incredibly dismissive of those from lower economic brackets who are often most in need.”
Fadipe’s goal is to positively disrupt the conversation, one which she says overemphasizes the clinical model and dependence on quick fixes, pharmaceutical medicines, and years of ineffective talk therapy.
“This is an emerging field,” she continues. “How can we map its scope without more diverse data coming from a realistic representation of society? I hope that the future will lead us to see more leadership from BIPOC and women who need representation across the industry, from clinical research and decriminalization to harm reduction, education and integration.”
Jenn So, Founder SO Searching Oneself
Jenn So is the founder of SO Searching Oneself
As a femme embodied person from a family of Viet-Khmer immigrant refugees, Jenn So, LCSW and founder of SO Searching Oneself in Washington, USA, is passionate about generational healing. So has worked as a professional social worker for the past 14 years, and her private practice specializes in racial trauma, adverse childhood experiences, and intimate partner violence. She first became intrigued about the healing potential of psychedelics after witnessing firsthand how psilocybin transformed her cousin’s life.
“Psychedelic-assisted therapy could help someone who has experienced trauma return to a specific moment in their memory and know they can be safely walked out of it,” So explains. She emphasizes the importance of trained professionals and safe environments.
“Western life is disconnected from the idea of things being passed down generation to generation. We don’t live with our elders. We don’t have opportunities to be closely involved with their lives and experiences the way traditional cultures do,” So says. She believes we are just beginning to appreciate the way trauma impacts the body and family lineage.
“These medicines are being worked into a psychiatric framework, a system that is already incredibly dismissive of those from lower economic brackets who are often most in need.”
–Buki Fadipe
Is the mental health community ready to take a serious look at the potential of psychedelic medicine? So isn’t sure.
“The stigma around psychedelics is largely because we don’t fully understand them,” she says. “We humans believe that what we know is all there is to know, so new information is met with skepticism and fear. The mental health community isn’t immune to these attitudes.”
So hopes to bridge the conversation and help mental health practitioners better understand psychedelic medicines.
Charlotte James, Co-Founder The Ancestor Project
Charlotte James is a co-founder of The Ancestor Project
When co-founders of The Ancestor Project (formerly The Sabina Project) Charlotte James and Dre Wright met, they connected over their shared experiences in white medicine spaces and the recognition of the need for BIPOC-centered healing environments. They launched The Ancestor Project (TAP) in 2019 with a focus on Baltimore-based events, then shifted online when the pandemic hit.
James outlines some tangible steps the psychedelic community can take to better support Black community members: “We invite White folx to buy our Psychedelic Anti-Racism workbook. To sit in their discomfort as they unravel privilege and find their role in the collective liberation movement.” James continues, “Also, recognize that racism causes trauma, [and so] treat Black and BIPOC folx with the same trauma-informed care you provide others.”
The mantle of leadership is heavy for a woman of color navigating her own healing path while working to further conversations about psychedelics as medicine. James emphasizes how important it is to slow down. “I really try to live my life in ceremony. I have a massive toolbox of practices and technologies that support me: sitting in ceremony, practicing Kemetic yoga with my partner, spending time in nature, dance, meditation, drinking lots of water, and building a healthy, shameless relationship with food. I would say though, when you’re walking in your purpose, the work is less draining–even when it is really intense.”
James shared about TAP’s recent name change, and the importance of modeling accountability:
“We have to walk the walk. We can’t be out here holding White folx accountable to their sh*t and not also reflecting on the ways that we have deeply internalized their ways of being to the point that the system becomes self-replicating. It’s okay to be vulnerable and admit when you have self-reflected and recognized a misstep. I’m grateful for the humans who support us as we do our own liberation work, and to the ancestors, spirit guides, and relatives who are the true geniuses and creators of this work.”
Elan Hagens, Co-Founder Fruiting Bodies Collective
Elan Hagens is a co-founder of the Fruiting Bodies Collective
Elan Hagens is the co-founder of the Fruiting Bodies Collectivein Oregon, USA, which was born out of a need for education, advocacy, and community within the state’s new psilocybin therapy program.
“Just inviting people of color into the scene or making options financially accessible isn’t enough,” Hagens explains. “We need to consider why communities of color aren’t as aware of or interested in psychedelics. We need to understand the history of the War on Drugs and what can happen if we invite people into vulnerable healing spaces and then they return to a world that can be dehumanizing.”
Hagens also explains the need to be mindful of the language we use. “When enthusiastic advocates talk about “magic mushrooms” and “tripping”, we can lose a lot of people due to stigma and cultural connotation. Instead, can we talk about these medicines with respect and in a new way that people from all walks of life can understand and relate to? Healing goes beyond one subculture. We all have hearts and souls and an innate ability to heal in the right conditions.”
“We have to walk the walk. We can’t be out here holding White folx accountable to their sh*t and not also reflecting on the ways that we have deeply internalized their ways of being to the point that the system becomes self-replicating. It’s okay to be vulnerable and admit when you have self-reflected and recognized a misstep.”
–Charlotte James
Ultimately, healing must go beyond the individual. The founders at Fruiting Bodies believe that individual healing and societal change are inseparable. Beyond helping shape Oregon’s program, their mission is to shift the narrative and destigmatize psychedelic medicine through relationship building and storytelling.
*Note: Elan Hagens is co-founders with Rebecca Martinez, who authored this article.
Robin Divine, Founder Black People Trip
Robin Divine is the founder of Black People Trip
Robin Divine is the founder of Black People Trip, an online community with a mission to raise awareness, destigmatize, teach harm reduction, and create safer spaces for Black women in psychedelics.
“There is such a stigma around drug use (as well as therapy) which makes the idea of psychedelic therapy taboo for many Black people,” Divine says. “We need to see the faces and hear the stories of people who look like us in order to begin to break down these outdated ways of thinking.”
Divine explains that Black communities are traumatized. She sees psychedelics as a way for people to take healing into their own hands, down a path to wellness that exists beyond Western medicine.
“I invite white community members to get involved. If you are truly committed to equity in psychedelics, then take action. If you have the resources, then donate money to organizations that are doing the work to create better access in Black communities. I’d also ask them to respect the idea that Black people need their own spaces to heal that don’t involve them. In short: take action, and honor our space.”
Jessika Lagarde & Tian Daphne, Co-Founders Women on Psychedelics
Jessika Lagarde is a co-founder of Women on Psychedelics
Jessika Lagarde and Tian Daphne are the co-founders of Women on Psychedelics (WOOP), which began organically during the COVID-19 lockdown while the two were volunteering for a mushroom-related initiative. “Having ourselves experienced the healing and transformative power of psychedelics, we saw a glaring need to not only normalize the talk around psychedelics, but to specifically work to end the stigmatization around women’s mental health and substance use,” Lagarde explains.
Tian Daphne is a co-founder of Women on Psychedelics
The promising research inspired them to become advocates. But as they dove deeper, they quickly noticed a lack of diversity in the psychedelic space. “Despite having disproportionately higher rates of trauma, people of color and women remain underrepresented in research amongst participants, as well as in underground psychedelic communities and the movement toward decriminalization and legalization,” Lagarde adds.
“Through Women on Psychedelics, we hope to connect women through social, creative, political, and educational content and activities. We truly believe that everyone should have the freedom and ability to access psychedelics for their own healing and growth.”
Mariah Makalapua, Founder the Medicine Collective
Mariah Makalapua is the founder of the Medicine Collective
Mariah Makalapua is a Hawaiian and mixed Native North American artist and mother who is the founder of the Medicine Collective in Oregon, USA. Since 2017, the Medicine Collective has combined art and medicine for the purpose of healing people and the planet. Makalapua’s mission is to provide safe and respectful healing experiences rooted in indigenous traditions.
Makalapua believes respect for indigenous rights and wisdom is an expression of an individual’s healing process. “Trauma healing has to do with diving into your upbringing, your ancestry, and ultimately, decolonizing and clearing your own lineage and understanding where you come from. We all have ancestors. No matter who you are, there is a reality of what colonialism and patriarchy did to your family.”
“We need to consider why communities of color aren’t as aware of or interested in psychedelics. We need to understand the history of the War on Drugs and what can happen if we invite people into vulnerable healing spaces and then they return to a world that can be dehumanizing.”
–Elan Hagens
If people understand these things, she says, we will no longer need to argue about cultural appropriation because we will develop a heart level-understanding of it. “You wouldn’t attend an ayahuasca ceremony and then think a medicine leadership role is yours to take. You just wouldn’t be having that jump. It’s not a healed or whole approach.”
In regards to Oregon’s legal psilocybin therapy program, Makalapua advocates for wisdom, accountability and intentionality.
“Historically, indigenous communities did not exist in a vacuum in their healing. The medicine was part of the larger culture and there was a collective consciousness around it. They understood: This work is terrifying, necessary, and we must go to the right people. But this collectivism has been lost from modern culture. We need support in watering the seeds planted during ceremony. It is deep, inner, relational work: making changes, making boundaries. It requires friendship, community, and at least a few close people who can support and guide you through that change.”
“The mushrooms are going to be mushrooms no matter what we do,” Makalapua continues. “I want to protect their sacredness. It’s like protecting your grandmother. You know she’s strong and a badass, but you’re not going to let her go and do something dangerous. It’s the same with the mushrooms; we should respect them, love them, and help carry their groceries, so to speak.”
Hanifa Nayo Washington, Founder One Village Healing
Hanifa Nayo Washington is the founder of One Village Healing Photo credit: Rachel Liu
Hanifa Nayo Washington is an award winning cultural artivist and sacred activist combining arts, healing, and activism for the last 20+ years. Based in Connecticut, USA, Washington is the founder and principal organizer of One Village Healing, cultivator of beloved community at the Fireside Project, director of community engagement for CEIO, and a founding member of several emerging psychedelic initiatives, including the Equity in Psychedelic Therapy Initiative.
In 2017 she released her third album, Mantras for the Revolution. In December 2018 Washington received a Phenomenal Women Arts Award from the Arts Council of Greater New Haven for her contributions and achievements in the arts. She is currently working on a storytelling project called Growing Wilder, which is expected in 2022.
Washington explains how her own healing experiences led her to the intersection of psychedelic medicines and social transformation:
“Going into ceremony and creating sacred spaces…helped me deconstruct the poisons of internalized systems of oppression. These allies, these plant medicines, have helped me to unhook these things from my body and mindset, and allow me to be in deeper relationship with myself and others in ways that are not poisoned,” she says.
What makes Washington’s leadership stand out is both her joy and her specificity. One vision many emerging leaders share within the psychedelic space is inclusion. Washington carries a torch into the unknown and helps to illuminate the “how” by shaping practical models with which to realize this shared vision. Equity and access are more than buzzwords at One Village Healing–they are the pillars that form the very structure and breath of the organization, which currently provides seven online wellness sessions for free to the community.
“Historically, indigenous communities did not exist in a vacuum in their healing. The medicine was part of the larger culture and there was a collective consciousness around it. They understood: This work is terrifying, necessary, and we must go to the right people.”
–Mariah Makalapua
The immense value of Fireside Project’s Psychedelic Peer Support Line is multiplied by their attention to “providing compassionate, accessible, and culturally responsive peer support, educating the public, and furthering psychedelic research, while embracing practices that increase equity, power sharing, and belonging within the psychedelic movement,” Washington says.
In order to create safer spaces and experiences for marginalized communities, Washington suggests a few practical steps:
Normalize and furthermore, require, inner work as a fundamental part of all psychedelic organizations, businesses, and institutions. “That means creating space and time within the work schedule for individual and collective learning, to practice and imagine ways of being that support healing from the trauma of oppressive systems.”
Within this process, trust and invest in affinity integration spaces.
Listen to, fund, and invest in individuals, businesses, projects, and initiatives led by people who have been impacted the most by systems of oppression.
“Without representation in leadership,” she says, “I’m pretty convinced that these aforementioned aspects will not happen.”
Conclusion
The common threads that come through these interviews help weave together a larger story. It’s a vision for global healing that doesn’t stop at getting over depression or healing family trauma. It’s a call to recognize our interconnectedness with one another and the Earth, and to commit to the work which enables psychedelic insights to transform us into more engaged, justice-focused citizens. Because of their intersectional identities, women of color offer the presence, leadership and perspective which are essential to the integrity of the psychedelics movement. We have endless opportunities to lift them up and learn from them as we grow and heal together in the years to come. Let’s begin today.
About the Author
Rebecca Martinez is a Portland, Oregon-based writer, parent and community organizer. She is a co-founder of the Fruiting Bodies Collective, an advocacy group, podcast and multimedia platform exploring the intersections between healing justice and the psychedelics movement.
In this episode, Joe interviews Dena Justice, who uses her unprecedented 4th appearance on Psychedelics Today to not talk a whole lot about neuro-linguistic programming or ways to beat anxiety. Instead, she blasts out of the psychedelic closet and opens up like few guests have before, taking us on the harrowing and life-changing journey of the last 6 years of her growth.
She talks about how her first MDMA experience made her realize how many limiting beliefs, insecurities, and issues with never feeling safe all came from childhood abuse and could be traced back to one specific morning. She discusses the “ages and stages of Dena,” and getting to know her childhood self, Little Dena, and how Little Dena, her 15-year-old self, and her future self influence her today. And she talks about the breakthroughs and realizations from each subsequent experience (MDMA, LSD, and ayahuasca), and how each was just another step leading to her year of “energy and life cleanup,” culminating in the most profound psychedelic experience of her life, where she found the frequency of safety she’d been seeking her whole life.
The first few minutes of this episode feel tense and you may be cautious to continue, but stick with it- like many beneficial psychedelic experiences, you may have to go through some rough stuff to get to the gold, but in the end, it’s worth it. This one’s pretty powerful.
Notable Quotes
“This whole morning as a 4-year-old is ingrained in my memory. I remember what I was wearing, I remember the way my Mom looked, I remember the sunlight streaming into the living room through our front windows. …And I’m standing at the top of the flight of the stairs, screaming at her and sobbing because she’s not hearing me. And in that moment, I created an entire set of beliefs that literally ran my show until 3 months ago.”
“I look at what I’ve done since I started really utilizing psychedelics intentionally, and my whole life changed. In the last 5 years, my whole life is completely different than where I was in November of 2015, and I don’t look at the person in the mirror and recognize her anymore the way I was familiar with myself before. I’m like, ‘Where did this woman come from? She’s pretty amazing.’”
“I literally saw all of this energy moving and I traveled up one thread of this energy to a point of light, and I articulated it so clearly- I said, ‘Wow. I found the frequency of safety. I can see it and I can feel it in my entire being, and this is what I’ve been seeking my entire life.‘”
“Everybody who has trauma should be able to experience this kind of healing. Everybody should get to feel this free from the past that has tormented them.”
Dena’s training as a facilitator, educator, trainer, mentor, and coach started at age 7 when she took her first social-emotional training program. That started years of training in conflict management and mediation, leadership, communication, facilitation, and more. By 15, she was facilitating personal development courses.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle, Joe, and Michelle start out by reflecting on the awesome conversation with Dr. Carl Hart from earlier in the week and everything it made them think about concerning the drug war, society’s framing of addiction, how different drugs have been vilified in different eras, privilege, and how greed is keeping the truth from us.
They then launch into the articles, which really run the gamut: Nebraska’s governor saying cannabis will kill your children, the Biden administration asking staffers to resign over past cannabis use (What? A politician LIED TO US?!), a study from 2008 showing no statistical difference between SSRI and placebo effects (notable because it mirrors findings from the recent microdosing study they keep discussing), and an opinion piece on the healing power of mushrooms. They then talk about an interesting study where researchers are looking to predict who will do best with psychedelic-assisted therapy, and who might have a really challenging experience. Could you always predict that? Or is it just about getting to know a patient, supporting them, and titrating the dose, hence the title?
“Why are we only concerned about someone’s psychological well-being when it has to do with drugs?” -Michelle
“Heroin was killing a lot of Black men in the 70s and no one cared. And now that it’s killing all these white people with opioids and all this middle-class stuff, all of a sudden, we care. And we want harm-reduction and we want laws and we want drug-checking. But no one gave a fuck 40 years ago.” -Michelle
“So we had the war on drugs and ‘drugs are bad.’ ‘Weed, psychedelics- they’ll make you go crazy.’ And now we have that part of the drug war sort of ending and we’re legalizing them and we’re making money off of them, so all of a sudden, we’ve gone from one untruth which is ‘all drugs are bad’ to this kind of other untruth which is like, ‘Weed and psychedelics: they’ll save your life, they’re great, everyone should use them!’ It’s like, fuck, dude, where was the middle? Where was the neutral? Where was the actual truth?” -Michelle
“How do we catch medicine up to the state of science? Medicine seems to be 10 to 30 years behind science, often. …Sorry doctors- I don’t mean to insult you, but it’s your field, it’s not you as an individual. If you’re listening to this show, clearly you’re ahead of the curve.” -Joe “Just thinking about how transpersonal came out of the humanistic movement because they needed something new, we’re at a new point where like, how do we incorporate and integrate a lot of this neuroscience, the somatics, the transpersonal, the depth, and what could a new field look like? …What would that look like to create a new branch of psychology that really incorporates and integrates a lot of this stuff, and the impact that psychedelics have had on this? What type of theories and frameworks do we need, moving forward, as psychedelics become more integrated into the culture and into the medical realm? Do we need to bring psyche back a little bit with the psychedelics, to really help give a framework or some context to some of these transpersonal and numinous experiences?” -Kyle
If you’re a regular listener of Psychedelics Today, you know how much Joe loved Dr. Carl Hart’s newest book and testament to responsible, out-of-the-closet drug use:Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear. In this episode, Joe and Kyle get to sit down and talk with the man himself for nearly 2 hours. This one’s in the “can’t miss” department, folks.
Hart’s main points echo many of ours: that the drug war is doing exactly what those in power created it for, that drug exceptionalism is wrong and only seeing one path towards progress is limiting, that our job is to use facts and logic to battle inaccuracies and people clearly pushing a false narrative, and that drugs can be fun and coming out of the closet about responsible drug use only opens up the dialogue more (and in the interest of that, this show notes writer is high right now).
They also discuss how scientists rationalize their work within the drug war, the frustrating inaction from drug policy organizations around coming out of the drug closet, opinion-makers and their relationship to the rest of society, what needs to be done to help Brazil, how decriminalization doesn’t stop problematic policy and police, the treatment industry’s misaligned focus on drugs over environment, incorrect assumptions about heroin, the importance of safe supplies and testing your drugs, and Hart’s desire to change “harm-reduction” to “health and happiness.”
Notable Quotes
“I’m always thinking that all I have to do is make this argument logically, and then people will fall in line. That’s naive as fuck, as I’m discovering. But that’s the world in which I live, and I love that world because I can’t live in an illogical world.”
“If the treatment provider is focused on the so-called drug of the person who’s having a problem …they’ve already lost.” “High Price was a book that was kind of comfortable for progressives and conservatives as well- it’s an up-from-slavery book, you know? A poor, Black boy from the hood done well, ‘We feel good about ourselves and our society. See? It can happen to you!’ kind of story. Whereas this book is like, ‘Fuck that. We want our rights.’”
“When these people say that they are worried about drug addiction or what I’m saying might increase drug addiction, that’s some bullshit distraction. If you’re really worried about the negative effects of drug addiction, you would make sure everybody in your society is working. You’d make sure they all have health care. You’d make sure that basic needs were handled. Because if you did those things, you don’t have to worry about drug addiction.”
“The way they portray heroin in the movies sometimes, it’s upsetting because they portray it like people are deadening their emotions and feelings. It’s like, no, shit, you take heroin to feel.”
“When politicians or whoever are out here saying that they care about the opioid crises and they’re not talking about drug-checking, you can stop listening to them because those people are idiots or they think you are an idiot, but in any case, there’s no reason to listen to those people.”
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle, Joe, and Michelle first discuss an article from Salon.com that illustrates the flaws behind psychedelics being continually hailed as a miracle cure: has everyone just replaced the oft-criticized model of selling a “miracle” pill with selling the narrative that a few psychedelic sessions can cure anything? And inspired by Lenny Gibson, they point out that this rabid focus on medicalization is a direct result of these substances being made illegal in the first place. What would things look like if that had never happened?
They then cover the developing drama between Compass Pathways and seemingly anyone compassionate and not making money from Compass Pathways’ seedy behavior, represented this week by Tim Ferriss and David Bronner. The latest update includes Compass co-founder Christian Angermayer calling Ferriss’ millions in donations a “drop in the ocean” in an odd donations-measuring contest, an email sent to investors saying competitors will never be able to bring a product to market due to the (absurd) patents they’ve filed (which Angermayer actually defended), and co-founder and CEO George Goldsmith mobilizing opposition to Oregon’s Measure 109.
This, not surprisingly, leads to a discussion about the competition between corporations, the race for patents, the drug war, how companies overestimate costs of drug-research and potential loss, how so little of the money being made is going to the Indigenous cultures we got all of this knowledge from, and more fun stuff in the endless mire of bullshit we have to wade through as a result of the drug war and greed.
Notable Quotes
“The only reason why we need to get this medicalized is because we made it illegal and we put it on a scheduling system. So, to make it official and legit and to deschedule it to make it into a medicine, we have to go through FDA-approval. …What if it was never made illegal to begin with?” -Kyle (inspired by Lenny Gibson)
“I really don’t believe in the antibiotic of psychiatry. You really have to actively work on changing the way you think and behave and react and all these things, and it’s a lot of hard work. Mushrooms make it more fun, but it’s a lot of hard work.” -Michelle
“We’re not trying to be the enemy, but please be open to critique and understand where we’re coming from. In the same way a white male in America needs to understand American history and Imperialism and the crazy shit we’ve done, medicine should also try to own that a little bit. Like, why don’t certain communities trust you? Why don’t you get the results that the data says you should?” -Joe “This is not just about decrim. This is about restoring our rights as citizens of the world, regaining autonomy over our bodies, [and] improving science.” -Joe
The week I am writing this, author and psychedelic philanthropist Tim Ferriss poised a very direct question (via Twitter) to the public and various leaders in the psychedelic community, including Michael Pollan, Rick Doblin, and Robin Carhart-Harris.
Ferriss asked about how best to navigate the apparent “patent land grab” occurring behind the scenes within various private companies, many of which have received millions of dollars in investment capital and stock valuation.
This was in no doubt a response to the bizarre move by the British psychedelic startup Compass Pathways to patent, according to a recent VICE article, “the basic components of psychedelic therapy,” including the use of “soft furniture and holding hands.”
The internet being what it is, Christian Angermayer, a venture capitalist representing both Compass Pathways and a biotechnology company called ATAI Life Sciences, chimed in. Downplaying Ferriss’ philanthropy efforts and deeming his concerns as “wrong,” Angermayer defended the business strategies that Ferriss, along with many other leaders in the psychedelic community, called into question.
We are in the midst of a psychedelic gold rush. This comprehensive article from VICE addresses the nauseating pace at which psychedelic patents are springing up, including everything from psilocybin-infused cannabis to Phillip Morris e-cigarettes containing DMT and patents for psychedelic treatment of food allergies.
As if our world wasn’t getting strange enough.
If the $1 billion initial public offering (IPO) of Compass Pathways tells us anything, it is that we are well into witnessing the birth of an unwieldy and unpredictable psychedelic capitalism–a phrase which would likely compel the Huxleys, Hoffmans, and McKennas of the world to roll over in their infinite cosmic graves.
With multiple decriminalization measures passing this past year across the US, along with Measure 109 in Oregon that will allow the therapeutic use of psilocybin, the trip train is moving fast.
This news is worth celebrating. Personally, I am overjoyed, especially due to the fact that psychedelics played a central role in why I became a psychotherapist. Yet at this very moment, the future of psychedelic medicines is being bought and sold through high-level investment pitches delivered in sleek board rooms across San Francisco, London, and beyond.
Along with it is the potential for equitable and affordable access to psychedelic treatment for millions of people desperately seeking their healing effects–the very same people these companies claim to want to “help.” Forgive me for being skeptical.
Because here’s the thing we all must keep in mind as we trudge along into this wild new century:
Psychedelic Capitalism Doesn’t Exist.
There are psychedelic substances, experiences, music, art, and literature. There are psychedelic philosophies, ethics, worldviews, and sub-cultural communities. And there is psychedelic healing, treatment, and indigenous traditions. Psychedelics dissolve boundaries and reveal the soul, as the Greek definition of the word indicates (psyche– soul, delos – to reveal).
And then there is capitalism: an economic system controlled by private corporations based on infinite growth, resource extraction, consumption, and the bottom line of financial profit. Capitalism engulfs, confines, and extracts the soul from what it consumes.
Like “military intelligence” or the “music business,” the two words create a philosophical conundrum. We are currently witnessing how these paradoxical concepts will mesh in the here and now. The balance will undoubtedly be precarious.
In the heart-wrenching internet comic,We Will Call it Pala, artist Dave McGaughey tells the story about one woman’s vision to start a psychedelic healing clinic colliding with the hyper-optimized ethos of Silicon Valley and the cold-blooded demands of her venture capital investors.
As the story progresses along its all-too-likely trajectory, she faces the monstrosity she has unwittingly created. Grieving for her seemingly naive vision, the heroine laments, “There is no medicine strong enough to blow a corporation’s mind.”
This is because, despite their legal standing in our society, corporations are not conscious beings. By definition, a corporation will never have a mind-altering or heart-opening experience. And though the etymological roots of the word inevitably boils down to “body,” a corporation will never feel a thing.
Art may be one of the best arenas where we might be able to predict how the weird, alchemical vinegar of psychedelics will merge into the oil-laden waters of capitalism.
It is said that art can serve either as a hammer or a mirror for society. Even once a great work has been absorbed by the market–a Banksy or a John Cage or a Van Gogh–the impact of that work can still continue to resonate within the psyche and catalyze an imaginal or inner shift, no matter how many coffee mugs it’s been plastered onto.
Art is able to, at least partially, escape the trap of capitalism because it exists between two realms.
Art takes a form in our physical, time-bound reality, but also lives within the imagination, and is formless. Art can embody and transmit ideas, imparting rare messages that transcend the tangible and time-bound. Art changes culture. Art evokes emotion, even if we’ve seen the same image a thousand times. Art can shock, uplift, or crush us. Art is dangerous.
The Art of the Trick
Lewis Hyde, in his book Trickster Makes This World, argues that artists have evolved to become the mythological trickster figures within our modern culture, previously relegated to ritual and story.
Charting the work of figures as diverse as Marcel Duchamp, Bob Dylan and Frederick Douglass, Hyde explores the very nature of the words “art” and “artist,” tracing their etymological origins back to the Latin “artus,” which means joint, or juncture.
As Hyde playfully elaborates, the “artus-workers” of our modern era now play the role that Hermes, Raven, and Coyote played in their own cultural mythologies, as gods of the threshold, the trick, the lie, and the oft-misunderstood bearer of culture.
These were celebrated beings who, often unwittingly, upset the established and most likely stale cosmic order, and introduced a bit of divine chaos, thereby creating a new cosmic law, sacred technology, or a new world entirely.
Despite their humble or comedic natures, tricksters, like psychedelics, are not to be taken lightly.
Take the Greek myth of Hermes that Hyde uses as an example in his book. Hermes, through stealing and then slaughtering the golden cattle of his brother Apollo, performed the first sacrificial offering to himself and made himself a god. He clearly made a fool of his brother, who had a thing for fancy board rooms in the sky. The other Olympians thought it was hilarious and let Hermes stay.
Another example, Coyote, comes from Native American tradition, as told in the 1984 book, American Indian Myths and Legends. In thousands of tales told across many languages, Coyote creates the world, teaches hunting and tracking, or travels to the land of the dead, amongst other adventures. Up north, Raven brings fire to humans, invents the fish trap, and perfects the art of theft. He also travels between the earthly and heavenly realms, bringing messages across the divide.
Eshu and Legba, trickster gods from West Africa and the Carribean, are invoked before all other gods, for it is understood that every act of divine communication and exchange must pass through their hands. According to Hyde’s book, even though Eshu and Legba are not the most powerful beings in the Afro-Carribean pantheon, these lords of the crossroads are feared above all others because of their pivotal cosmic position. And you never know what you are going to get.
Even the Loki, dark trickster of the Norse pantheon, sets into motion events which would result in the destruction of the very gods themselves–Ragnarok. But what is often forgotten is that Ragnarok is not just about the fiery end of all things. It is also the beginning of the new world, all of which was put into motion because Loki couldn’t help but push a few buttons up in Asgard.
Come to think of it, trickster myths seem to have a lot in common with the role that psychedelics play within the psyche and the brain. Stay with me here.
Neurology and New Worlds
Neuroscientist and psychedelic researcher Robin Carhart-Harris’ landmark 2014 article, The Entropic Brain, highlighted the ways in which psilocybin decreases blood flow to an area of the brain called the default mode network (DMN), enabling novel connections to be made between neural pathways that are normally routed through this cognitive superhighway.
Psychedelics upset the applecart of our normal cognitive functioning, and by introducing a bit of pharmacologically mediated chaos, make room for new and different neural connections to take shape.
Of additional interest here is Carhart-Harris’ discussion of psychedelic states being “poised at a ‘critical’ point in a transition zone between order and disorder” in terms of consciousness. The place between two places, often called the liminal, plainly invokes the many trickster gods we have been speaking of, for all dwell on this same precipice, and can be found anywhere that roads, worlds, and perhaps even neural networks, collide.
Even the many studies showing the promise of psychedelics to treat addictions can be seen in the light of trickster myths (e.g. de L. Osório, et.al, 2015, and Hamill et.al, 2019). Whatever epiphany is granted during the psychedelic experience that might finally help someone kick a long-held, potentially lethal habit, marks a shift from one world to another, mythologically speaking.
True recovery marks an end and a beginning. Such an epiphany, especially in the language of Alcoholics Anonymous, is seen as a message from a higher power, which the Greeks and the Yoruba knew was always mediated by the trickster.
Lastly, let’s not forget the reason why psychedelics were made illegal in the first place. As Terance McKenna famously said, “Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”
Just like art, psychedelics have the potential to change culture, and can be dangerous to the established order of things. The 1960’s and 70’s proved that with a spectacular flair. It is not difficult to imagine why Nixon deemed Timothy Leary “the most dangerous man in America” at the onset of the drug war.
The simple fact that a naturally occurring plant or fungus could impart such soul-revealing visions may even be “the best kept secret in history,” according to Brian Muraresku in his revelatory book, The Immortality Key. Who needs priests to talk to god when you can do it yourself with the help of a plant? But that’s a story for another time.
Even if these awe-inspiring revelations are “occasioned” (to use the words of psychedelic researcher Roland Griffiths) through a psychopharmacological trick of serotonin agonists, if the above mythologies teach us anything, it is that sometimes a trick is exactly what’s needed for real transformation to occur.
Standing at the Crossroads
Psychotherapy, it has often been said, is both an art and a science. And now as psychedelics firmly make their way into the field, it may require those facilitating this work to embrace the deeper dimensions of what such a sentiment actually implies.
Perhaps the evolving art of the psychedelic therapist or facilitator will be to more deeply embrace the fact that these medicines are as unpredictable as the tricksters we’ve just met, and that their true implications for both individuals and culture lay far beyond simply feeling better and having a nicer day at the office.
To believe that psychedelics can be confined to the clinic, the lab, or the corporate body not only ignores the volatile history of these compounds in the 20th century, it ignores the fact that the very function of these substances is to dissolve boundaries and dismantle familiar, long-held structures on neurological, psychological, and cultural levels.
To bring this all to a close, and to end where we began in true trickster fashion, it seems that Hermes has one last ace up his sleeve. Not only was he the divine messenger, bringer of dreams, guide of souls, and lord of the crossroads, Hermes was also the god of the marketplace. Any time money is exchanged, Hermes is said to be there. The true “free market” is imbued with the spirit of Hermes, and involves much more than the simple exchange of currency and intellectual property rights sold to the highest bidder.
Emerging philosophies, religions from far off lands, rumors of wars, and village gossip were all exchanged in the markets of old. They were places of excitement, cross-pollination, unpredictability, and community–things I think we could all use a bit more of these days.
There’s one last thing. It was said that one could ask for Hermes’ help by leaving an offering at his shrine, located at the heart of the market, covering one’s ears, and walking away. The first thing you heard when you opened your ears was Hermes speaking to you. The fine print is that one had to be firmly outside the hustle and bustle of the market before listening for the winged messenger’s reply. I believe the modern term for uncovering one’s ears too soon is called an “echo chamber,” and we all know how helpful those can be.
What does this mean for our purposes here? I haven’t the slightest idea. Only that the god of the marketplace requires us to maintain a certain distance from his domain to be clearly heard. Just because Hermes rules the marketplace doesn’t mean he lives there.
So just like where we find ourselves today, peering over the precipice of this new psychedelic capitalism, there’s no map for where we must go before listening for Hermes’ synchronistic response. Go far enough out and we might encounter the language of owls, moonlight, and whoever else prowls those liminal wilds. Stay too close, and we risk repeating just more of the same.
And if we get lost, and find ourselves back at the crossroads where we first began, perhaps that is the message we were needing all along. Because ultimately, the joke’s on us.
About the Author
With a masters (MA) in depth counseling psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, Simon Yugler is a depth and psychedelic integration therapist based in Portland, OR. Weaving Jungian psychology, Internal Family Systems therapy, and mythology, Simon also draws on his diverse experiences learning from indigenous cultures around the world, including the Shipibo ayahuasca tradition. He has a background in experiential education, and has led immersive international journeys for young adults across 10 countries. He is passionate about initiation, men’s work, indigenous rights, decolonization, and helping his clients explore the liminal wilds of the soul. Find out more on his website and on Instagram , Twitter (@depth_medicine) or Facebook.
In this episode, Joe interviews the most guests he’s ever had on at once- 5 people from the Entheo Society of Washington: Leo Russell (Executive Director), Monique Bridges (Head of the Female Battalion and Head Guardian of the Santo Daime Ayahuasca Church), Malika Lamont (Director of VOCAL Washington), Tatiana (Executive committee member, DNS), and Solana Booth (promoter and teacher of traditional Native American healing techniques and modalities).
The Entheo Society of Washington is a 501c3 organization that is working to create community and treatment centers and eventually a movie about the underground psychedelic culture in the Pacific Northwest. Their larger, more socially-focused goals are to encourage people to reconnect to the earth, accept our emotions more, hold space for healing and encourage others to do the same, see the economy around legal cannabis and psychedelics become much fairer, and their biggest goals: to help the most marginalized people receive care without being criminalized, and to dismantle the very systems of power that keep marginalizing them.
They are a sister organization to Decriminalize Nature Seattle, which is yet another chapter of the Decriminalize Nature movement making legal waves across the US.
Notable Quotes
“I consider the first wave of the psychedelic movement to be very masculine-oriented. So for me, just my personal opinion- the second wave just feels much more diverse, and I see a lot more women leading, and I’m excited about these women. I have lots of curiosity about them. …how they’ve come up and how they found their voice. We’ve never seen women before lead in grassroots psychedelic political efforts. We’ve never seen that in human history. So I just want to celebrate these women. I want to help the ones that are behind a mountain and lift them up.” -Leo Russell
“What is extremely attractive about decriminalization of psychedelics is that we know that the most potential is there to be able to help people heal from the issues that have impacted them through systemic violence. However, we can’t stop there, because just to heal somebody to throw them back into a harmful system is not enough. We need to dismantle the systems.” -Malika Lamont
“I do believe that there’s also a shift in general towards not criminalizing people for any kind of substance use. I think that that is a very real, attainable goal. It’s coming, and I really believe that.” -Tatiana “I really don’t like it when people say ‘use psychedelics’ when they’re talking about mushrooms or talking about plant medicines, because we don’t use people. Like, I’m not going to ‘use’ my sister Leo when I’m in a conversation with her. I’m going to partner with her and listen and look at her face (if I can see her) and be with her in that moment. So, I’m not going to use any plants; I’m going to go into the medicine, I’m going to ask permission.” -Solana Booth
“With all of the talk of being gentle and reaching higher consciousness and being cognizant of the healing properties of these plants, I think that we also cannot lose focus that trauma out of context can look like culture. Trauma out of context can look like personality or be perceived as weakness.” -Malika Lamont
Traditional entheogens (natural plant and fungi medicines) can dramatically improve human health and happiness—transforming our ability to care for ourselves and one another. The Entheo Society of Washington educates the public about the healing value of entheogens and seeks to destigmatize and decriminalize their use. Their community believes the use of entheogens reinforces our connection with nature and is an inherent personal, therapeutic, and spiritual right.
In last week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle, Joe, and Michelle talked a lot about a landmark new trial to study microdosing and the placebo effect. And this week (the big SF50!), they’re joined by 2 key members of that very trial, lead researcher Balázs Szigeti and principal investigator David Erritzoe.
Szigeti and Erritzoe explain all the factors of the trial in great detail: how participants blinded themselves and the complications with capsule weight (and burping?), what substances participants took, how they were able to track which participants were in which group, what “breaking blind” meant specific to this trial, how they essentially used cognitive performance tests as a control, how depression factored in (or didn’t), why they specifically chose people with experience in psychedelics, and why this study mimics real-life microdosing so perfectly.
And they talk about the fascinating results: that while across the board, people scored better and felt better after microdosing for 4 weeks, the people who thought they were microdosing did too, and nearly as much.
They’re working on future editions of the trial- one that will likely be much longer in duration and work through the new psychedelic app, Mydelica, and one that will be more traditionally placed in a lab, where they can study the neuroscience present (or maybe not so present) in microdosing.
Notable Quotes
“If you really simplify it, you can say that …in a way, the guess was [a] 10 times better predictor of some of these acute outcomes than was the actual condition- what they actually took.” -David Erritzoe
“I’m not trying to invalidate your experience by saying, “This is placebo,” but I’m saying it could be, because that’s what the trial actually came up with. But it doesn’t mean that those experiences are not real, it’s just that a lot of those effects come from a combination of hoping, believing, expecting things to become better, and then your mind [does] magical tricks. And that’s the beauty of placebo, in particular when it comes to mental health and well-being.” -David Erritzoe
“Based on our data, there is no question that people do better after microdosing. It is just that people feel equally better after they have taken a placebo.” -Balázs Szigeti
“I was in a panel recently about microdosing where the people kept asking, ‘Oh, but what are the mechanisms?’ ‘How is it that microdosing works?’ And I’m like, ‘Let’s maybe start by seeing whether it works.’ It’s only so interesting to find out how something works if it works.” -David Erritzoe
Dr. Balazs Szigeti has studied theoretical physics at Imperial College, but turned towards neuroscience for his PhD studies at the University of Edinburgh. His main work is about the behavioural neuroscience of invertebrates, but he has a diverse scientific portfolio that includes computational neuroscience and driving forward the OpenWorm open science initiative. Balazs is also the editor of the Dose of Science blog that is published in collaboration with the Drugreporter website. Dose of Science discusses and critically assesses scientific studies about recreational drugs. Recently Balazs has started a collaboration with the Global Drug Survey to quantitatively compare the dose of recreational users of various drugs with the scientific literature.
About David Erritzoe, PhD
Dr. David Erritzoe is qualified as a medical doctor from Copenhagen University Medical School and currently holds an Academic Clinical Lectureship in Psychiatry at Imperial College London. Alongside his clinical training in medicine/psychiatry, David has been involved in psychopharmacological research, using brain-imaging techniques such as PET and MRI. He has conducted post-doc imaging research in the neurobiology of addictions and major depression. Together with Prof Nutt and Dr Carhart-Harris he is also investigating the neurobiology and therapeutic potential of MDMA and classic psychedelics.
Could taking and integrating ketamine in groups make psychedelic therapy more accessible?
As psychedelic-assisted therapy continues marching into the mainstream, the issue of how absurdly expensive the treatment is continues to present countless difficulties. Of the strategies practitioners are taking to circumvent this problem, one of the most promising—and underreported—approaches is offering psychedelic-assisted group therapy.
Despite promising preliminary research using psilocybin in small groups to treat depression in cancer patients and MDMA-assisted therapy for couples where one partner has PTSD—and ignoring the fact that psilocybin-containing mushrooms are traditionally taken in group ceremonies in Mexico—ketamine is the only psychedelic medicine that’s already legally used in psychedelic-assisted therapy. Let’s take a look at the emerging world of group ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, its benefits as well as drawbacks.
Group Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy
Though traditionally used as an anesthetic, ketamine, an Essential Medicine of the World Health Organization, is now widely being prescribed off-label by qualified practitioners to treat a host of mental health diagnoses, including depression, addiction, PTSD, and chronic pain.
Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy—“KAP” for short—is a growing mental health treatment option for people who meet diagnostic criteria. In line with most psychedelic therapy protocols, KAP involves a sequence of medicine sessions, in which clients take the substance with the mental health professional present, and sober therapy sessions referred to as “preparation” and “integration.” Through KAP, many people are finding healing where prevailing mental health treatments have fallen short.
Also in line with most psychedelic therapy protocols, KAP is really freaking expensive.
Though ketamine’s effects are relatively short-acting compared to MDMA and psilocybin, therefore requiring fewer therapist hours to pay for, sessions still cost several hundred dollars. Ongoing treatment can quickly climb into the thousands.
Even ketamine “infusion centers,” which involve no therapy, tend to charge $400-$600 for each intravenous infusion—and they typically make it clear that lasting symptom relief only occurs after several rounds. At such centers, folks may receive infusions in group rooms, but oftentimes it’s more akin to the way you’d find yourself sitting on a sterile lab chair next to some stranger at a plasma donation center, while someone who doesn’t want to hear about your problems sticks a needle in your vein and leaves. While this might help some folks, costs remain abundant.
Group ketamine-assisted psychotherapy is different. Though there is currently no published research on group KAP’s efficacy, ketamine’s legality via prescription allows therapists to smoothly translate the modality into groups. As group members can then split the price of the therapist’s time—the largest contributor to high costs of treatment—the overall cost decreases significantly.
Raquel Bennett, Psy.D., is a psychotherapist and researcher who specializes in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, who also teaches our masterclass on ketamine ethics as part of our Navigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Therapists course. She practices in Berkeley, CA, where she runs the KRIYA Ketamine Research Institute. Bennett has been studying the therapeutic properties of ketamine since 2002, when a personal encounter with the medicine sparked her awareness of its powerful antidepressant properties. That was over a decade before infusion centers started popping up, well before “ketamine-assisted psychotherapy” was a term.
“I was studying this long before it was cool,” Bennett tells Psychedelics Today with a laugh.
Motivated by a desire to lower cost and increase accessibility, Bennett began facilitating ketamine groups with her medical partners in 2016. The same motivation also prompted the Wholeness Center, a leading ketamine therapy clinic and psychedelic research site in Colorado, to offer ketamine therapy groups as well. Scott Shannon, M.D., who founded Wholeness in 2010, teamed with colleague Sandra Fortson, LCSW, to offer the clinic’s first ketamine therapy group last year.
“One of the most prominent reasons why I endorse and am exploring group therapy is that it solves one of the greatest drawbacks of the psychedelic model right now, which is that psychedelic therapy is a treatment of the affluent,” Shannon tells Psychedelics Today. “Instead of offering KAP for three or four hundred dollars a session, group therapy brings the cost down closer to a hundred dollars a session, which is a big difference.”
Fortson elaborates on how significant that difference can be: “Clients are looking at a savings of almost 50% for a 5-week KAP group curriculum—including medical clearance, intake, 3 experiential sessions and final integration session.”
At the time of writing, Shannon and Fortson have facilitated two groups, each spanning five sessions. They are currently planning for a third and foresee group KAP as an important option in the Wholeness Center’s future psychedelic therapy offerings.
What Group Ketamine Therapy Looks Like
Bennett breaks down the process of ketamine-assisted psychotherapy into four essential steps:
Patient selection
Patient preparation
The medicine session
Follow-up care
At the preliminary level of patient selection, legal concerns must be taken seriously. “In order to participate in a ketamine group, you still have to fully meet the criteria for a clinically necessary treatment,” Bennett explains. “It’s currently not legally defensible for a person to participate in a group just because they want a ketamine experience.”
Both Wholeness and KRIYA use a cohort model where the same participants come together at scheduled times, and their series of sessions begins and ends together. Throughout that process, the group engages in both ketamine and non-ketamine sessions together, the latter of which involves working through their challenges and implementing insights into their lives with the support of the therapist(s) and fellow group members.
Shannon and Fortson have limited their cohorts to four people due to COVID-19 restrictions and social distancing protocols. Going forward, Shannon envisions groups of eight participants, which would require two therapists present. At KRIYA, Bennett has found that five or six participants with two clinicians is an optimal ratio.
At the Wholeness Center, participants sit on bean bag chairs in socially-distanced corners of a large room. During the ketamine sessions, members are given eyeshades along with their measured doses. Specifically-curated music plays through speakers, and Shannon and Fortson remain present in the space, supporting as needed and facilitating conversation if appropriate—and if possible, for at higher doses of ketamine, folks often temporarily lose their capacity to form words with their abruptly-nonexistent mouths.
There are three primary routes of administration in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy:
Lozenges (held in the mouth)
Intravenous (IV) administration
Intramuscular (IM) injection
All three require an MD’s prescription, and the latter two require a nurse or doctor for administration. Dose ranges vary significantly in each route—though low-dose sessions are often orally administered, while high-dose sessions typically come through IV or IM.
Each route yields a unique experience in terms of onset, depth, length, and intensity. Different routes of administration and doses are associated with the treatment of different conditions—in individual KAP, for example, high-dose IM treatment is often regarded as uniquely effective for suicidality. At KRIYA, doses and routes of administration are determined based on individual and group assessments.
“As providers, we need to be clear about what effects we are going for, and then make our dose recommendations based on that,” says Bennett. “That varies depending on the needs of the group and what we’re trying to accomplish.”
Regardless of dose and route of administration, ketamine sessions at KRIYA follow a consistent protocol. “Our ketamine groups include an opening ritual, time for sharing, the ketamine administration, quiet rest, and a potluck meal, with more time for sharing,” Bennett explains.
The frequency of group sessions at KRIYA varies. “For some cohorts, the participants come once per month for four consecutive months. In other cohorts, the participants come once per quarter, four times in a year,” describes Bennett.
A capacity for fluidity and openness is called for on the part of the therapists, along with a willingness to learn from the groups and attune to the members’ needs.
“Sometimes, we ask people to share something that feels heavy on their heart, and that usually opens a conversation,” Bennett says. “Then, we move to something they feel grateful for—it’s very helpful to invite people to enter a positive mindset as the medicine is wearing off, because that then seems to linger. Other times, we are quiet and simply hold the space as people spontaneously work on what they need to work on.”
At the Wholeness Center, ketamine groups have thus far followed fixed, five-session structures. Shannon details the process:
“We start with a prep session, where we get to know each other and build rapport. The second session is a low-dose oral experience, which doesn’t put people in a full, dissociated state. It reduces their inhibitions, opens up their heart; what we find is that people actually bond very well during that session. They feel safe and secure. In the third session, which is a moderate-to-higher-dose oral session, they begin to have deeper, fuller psychedelic experiences. We really encourage people and give them the instruction that they can come in and out at will. If they want to come into more consensual reality, they can talk with us, connect with us, or their peers even—or they can go inside if they’re feeling pulled to explore.
“That third session begins to give them the taste of the more full-fledged psychedelic experience,” Shannon continues. “In the fourth session, they have a high-dose IM experience, where they’re going to fully dissociate and go into their personal inner space. People reenter the group space at various times as they’re ready and able, and come back and process it. Then, the fifth session is an integration session.”
Unlike the varied frequencies of KRIYA’s groups, the Wholeness Center’s groups meet once a week. Shannon is not attached to that model and expresses that future groups may follow different formats. Likewise, Bennett remains open to new possibilities. Even after all her years of ketamine research, she reflects, “We are always learning and trying things to find the most effective strategies.”
How to Establish a Safe Group Culture
For an effective group, a culture of safety and trust must be established. One way of doing that is to create “homogenous” groups, where all members share common struggles, such as depression or anxiety. The Wholeness Center, for instance, is in the process of creating a KAP group to treat PTSD experienced by COVID first responders, as well as a group for alcohol addictions.
At KRIYA, Bennett is not attached to homogeneity as a necessity, yet she recognizes that disregard for commonality among group members can be detrimental to the group’s safety, and therefore efficacy.
“It is possible to have somebody in the group who is on such a different page than the other folks that it really puts the group out of balance,” she explains. “We try not to do that.”
Bennett circumvents issues related to group imbalances by focusing on preliminary assessment. She describes the assessment process as an under-regarded component of psychedelic healing, the “magic for helping people to get better in the fastest and most cost-effective way.” If therapists take a first come, first serve approach to their groups, imbalances are bound to emerge, negatively impacting trust and safety.
“Not everyone is a good candidate for group treatment,” Bennett candidly states. “Ketamine is a fickle medicine. People need to feel physically and emotionally safe in order to have big and beautiful and expansive experiences. They need time to relax into the space and develop trust with us.”
For example, Bennett has found that people with complex trauma are better suited for individual work, noting that these folks “are often better served by having the individual attention of the therapist.”
Shannon underscores the necessity of a detailed intake process to ensure safety. When group safety and assessment are sufficiently prioritized, however, he has found that ketamine presents very little risk to individuals or groups in a therapeutic context.
“People are screened ahead of time for concerning medical or psychiatric issues,” Shannon says. “We haven’t seen any safety issues in our groups so far. I think that reflects our experience with KAP in general—that it’s a low-risk, quite safe medical process.”
For folks who have been properly screened and assessed, Shannon has found that the drop in individual attention from the therapist that groups entail does not negatively affect the healing process.
“I think we overrate the value of having an expert in the room, and we underrate the importance of connection and community in our current mental health paradigm,” he reflects. “My observation is that although the attention of the practitioner is more divided in a group, that is more than enhanced by the sense of community and safety and support that comes with it.”
Healing in Community
On top of assessment, non-ketamine preparation sessions help establish the safe and supportive group environment.
“People spend time getting to know each other in the preparation sessions before the medicine is introduced,” Bennett explains. “We’re not just throwing people in and shooting them up. That would be totally unethical.”
The cohort model contributes to participants’ sense of safety through rapport and consistency. When safety is established, Bennett has found that groups are not only consistently effective, but offer a host of benefits she did not anticipate.
“In individual treatment, people often felt very alone, that they were the only person on earth dealing with whatever problem they were living with,” she explains. “In the group, people quickly found that there were other people who had similar issues and challenges. That in itself is healing.”
Shannon and Fortson have observed the same trend. Fortson shares, “While it is difficult to explain, there is something about the sense of connection and support that is fostered in a group environment, specifically as it pertains to KAP, that seems to greatly expand the therapeutic benefit experienced by participants.”
Shannon notes this “enhanced response” is influenced by participants’ magnified expectation of hope, as well as something more primordial.
“With the pandemic, and really just in modern society, one of the major plagues we’re facing is a sense of disconnection, isolation, and removal from our social roots as herd animals,” he reflects. “A primary reason I like group therapy so much is that it really makes use of the power of community and group process.”
This unmeasurable component of community healing is emerging as a trend of group psychedelic therapy. The Forbes article linked in the introduction indicated that the cancer patients who receive psilocybin treatments together “frequently develop a sense of community and mutual support that can enhance their recovery and overall well-being.”
Implications of Ceremony in the West
An intriguing argument sometimes leveraged on behalf of group psychedelic therapy hinges on its potential correlation to group entheogenic healing ceremonies practiced by countless cultures for millennia. While it would be imprudent to propose a generalized, catch-all comparison between the two, given drastic differences in cultural context, traditional plant medicine healing ceremonies testify to both the safety and the power of group psychedelic journeying when held in an intentional and meaningful container. Base-level similarities between these processes—i.e. community healing through visionary journeys—suggest the possibility of a ceremonial, rite-of-passage element to group psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.
Now, I am not advocating for psychedelic therapists to buy rattles and drums and chant songs from other cultures they do not understand. That would be very bad. My suggestion—which I am not the first to make—is that outside the boundaries of important issues related to appropriation, there are archetypal processes of ceremonial rites of passage that have factored prominently into countless cultures through the ages, and their general lack of existence in Western society may have some connection to the rampant isolation, existential confusion, and struggles of purpose and maturity afflicting so many people in this hyper-individualized capitalist paradigm.
It strikes me as significant that countless Western people are traveling to distant countries to experience sacred plant medicine ceremonies of cultures about which they know nothing, seeking a kind of spiritual healing and renewed sense of meaning their lives lack. Could group psychedelic therapy play a role in patterning these forsaken archetypal ceremonial processes into Western culture?
What kinds of ceremonies could fit into and emerge out of a Western therapeutic context? Can such rituals respectfully incorporate wisdom shared by other traditions, while establishing a unique and authentic identity? How might ceremonial rites of passage, held in a safe therapeutic container, help heal the complex, multitudinous mental health struggles unique to our techno-capitalist world?
These questions are way too massive to attempt to answer here. The fact that group psychedelic therapy raises them, however, highlights an added layer of its potential significance.
Diversifying the Psychedelic Space
The decrease in cost has the obvious benefit of making the treatment accessible to more people. A hope is that such increased access will invite more diversity to the space of psychedelic healing, which remains strikingly un-diverse. In 2018, Dr. Monnica T. Williams and her co-authors demonstrated that between 1993 and 2017, 82.3% of participants in psychedelic therapy trials were white. While no research has been conducted on diversity in the practice of ketamine-assisted therapy, it is unlikely that results would be much different.
It would be erroneous, however, to suggest this lack of diversity is related exclusively to cost and implicit bias among practitioners. It’s also about safety. In my recent interview with MAPS-trained therapist Dr. Joseph McCowan, McCowan reflected, “People of color desire to do what is safe prior to contributing to research or science, or even healing themselves. Right now, psychedelic spaces, due to their illegality and the stigma they carry, are not safe.”
While offering more affordable treatments is a great start, white therapists must educate themselves on unique struggles and barriers related to mental health in communities of color, as well as the socio-political factors—i.e. the ramifications of the War on Drugs—that keep these barriers standing. Further, they must use that education to create more safety. Only then can the decreased cost offered by modalities such as group KAP really help diversify the landscape of psychedelic healing.
Training and Ethical Considerations for Group Ketamine Therapy
As the field currently stands, there are no regulated training requirements for clinicians to facilitate ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. Theoretically, so long as an M.D. prescribes the medicine to the client, any therapist can offer ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. Many are disturbed by this lack of regulation, and an increasing chorus of voices is calling for higher ethical standards for ketamine therapy practitioners to abide.
Bennett is a leading voice on the ethical front. She recently authored this article on ethical guidelines for ketamine clinicians that was published in the Journal of Psychedelic Psychiatry, which establishes the importance of assessment, medical safety, preparation, training, and maintaining professional conduct for providers.
As with other psychedelics, ketamine should not be taken lightly or offered carelessly. It is a powerful substance that can consistently facilitate healing experiences when offered with care; at the same time, it can have destructive consequences when handled carelessly. If facilitators are unprepared to work with deep and painful unconscious content that can unexpectedly erupt in clients under its influence, they are putting clients at risk of retraumatization that could leave them in a far worse state than before. At a broader level, reports of such egregious harms could do significant damage to the still-vulnerable field of psychedelic therapy in general.
Many practitioners advise therapists who intend to offer KAP to experience the medicine themselves. Both KRIYA and Wholeness have run groups for mental health professionals who meet specific criteria; Bennett shares that KRIYA’s professional participants “reported that their direct experiences with ketamine vastly increased their understanding of how to use this tool with their own clients.”
If therapists do not meet criteria to experience ketamine therapy themselves, a number of trainings in KAP now exist, many of which involve an experiential component. Shannon and Fortson, for instance, helped found the Psychedelic Research and Training Institute (PRATI), a nonprofit organization that currently offers several KAP trainings each year. Over the course of the three-day intensive, therapists are given the opportunity to experience both a low-dose and high-dose ketamine session while dyad partners practice skills in the facilitator role.
“For clinicians who want to do group work with ketamine, it is strongly recommended that they get specialized training,” Bennett emphasized. KRIYA has compiled a list of reputable trainings for those interested in learning more.
Group Ketamine-Assisted Therapy: Summarizing the Journey
In the new mental health frontier of psychedelic-assisted therapy, group psychedelic therapy represents an even newer frontier. With its potential to lower cost and invite the healing power of community into psychedelic therapy, group ketamine-assisted therapy calls for more attention in both research and ethically-minded practice. It will not be for everyone, and it is far from a panacea, but the modality holds tremendous promise to help people with a whole lot more than lowering their bill.
And even if a lowered bill proves to be the sole benefit, that’s still a huge accomplishment for the current landscape of psychedelic therapy.
About the Author
Sean Lawlor is a writer, certified personal trainer, and Masters student in Transpersonal Counseling at Naropa University, in pursuit of a career in psychedelic journalism, research, and therapy. His interest in consciousness and non-ordinary states owes great debt to Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, and Hunter S. Thompson, and his passion for film, literature, and dreaming draws endless inspiration from Carl Jung, David Lynch, and J.K. Rowling. For more information or to get in touch, head to seanplawlor.com, or connect on Instagram @seanplawlor.
In this episode, with hisrecent salvia experience in mind, Kyle interviews creator of the salvia pipe, and somatic salvia guide working to bring mindfulness to salvia use, Christopher Solomon.
To many of us, the word “salvia” conjures up images of one or both of the following: smoking salvia with friends and having a panicked, out-of-body experience that (rightfully) scared us away from ever doing it again, or watching Youtube videos of people filming themselves doing the same. Solomon’s goal is to reframe salvia’s reputation from one of confusion and panic back to how it’s known to the Mazatec people who discovered its power: as a loving, empathetic healer.
He talks about his first time smoking salvia after meditating and meeting a female entity, the differences between smoking, chewing leaves, and drinking a tincture, virtual salvia sessions, why you should smoke tiny amounts of salvia repetitively rather than 50x bong hits, why so many people feel like they’re zippers while on salvia, and his thoughts (and salvia’s) on if salvia should be smoked or not. And he lists out all the unique feelings that salvia can bring to the table if it’s approached with mindfulness, trust, and respect. “The more respectfully and cautiously and mindfully one approaches salvia, the more rewards she gives.”
Notable Quotes
“Aside from the fact that I was taken aback at seeing this entity, what was also amazing with it was the sense of emotion and love that was coming from this being. There was a very genuine, caring, telepathic connection that I had with this being that was made out of colorful, almost magnetic-looking lines.”
“When we think of transformation or transformative experiences, we think about these big, explosive, cathartic things, like, ‘Oh my gosh, my entire life flashed before my eyes and I could understand everything, and boom! I had this big transformation, and now I’m healed.’ And that can happen, but the real transformations happen in small, bite-sized moments that can be integrated, like taking that small sip of air- getting that one deep breath in if you haven’t had a deep breath in a long time.”
“Maybe we’re experiencing the zipper because we go so deep within our bodies that we’re actually getting taken into the felt experience of our DNA replicating.” “If you’re trying to make decisions in your life and you’re waffling back and forth and making lists of pros and cons and debating with yourself and then getting guidance from other people and you’re not sure where to go- you bring those questions to salvia, and she very quickly gets straight to the heart of the matter.”
Christopher Solomon is a somatic Salvia guide, teacher, and inventor of a pipe that aids in the mindful exploration of Salvia Divinorum. Incorporating lessons learned directly from Salvia and as a student of somatic psychotherapy, Christopher is pioneering techniques to use Salvia as a therapeutic tool for guided self-healing, meditation, and introspection. Christopher lectures about the proper, intentional, and therapeutic use of Salvia, offering a blend of scientific, esoteric, and therapeutic perspectives. He also cultivates a medicinal Salvia garden for use in his therapeutic practice with clients. His main goal is to teach people how to use Salvia for themselves in a manner that is supportive, informative, and empowering. He has a B.A in Psychology from the University of Texas at Dallas, and received his training in somatic psychotherapy from the Hakomi Institute of California.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle, Joe, and Michelle once again meet through the airwaves to discuss recent news articles and see where that takes them.
They first talk about a North Wales police boss who wants to give prisoners controlled amounts of cannabis as a way to combat violence and drug addiction and how that questions the notion of prisoners being expected to suffer. Then, they head to “Missurah,” where a bill was just introduced to remove their established provision against Schedule I substances, expanding eligibility and getting them closer to how other states use 2018’s federal Right to Try Act to help people with terminal and life-threatening illnesses.
They then talk about a study that showed significant reduction in alcohol consumption after MDMA use and why the sense of connection that MDMA fosters could be the reason, a self-blinding microdosing study that proved the power of the placebo (and expectation) effect and what that might mean for regular microdosers, and a listener email highlighting the importance of establishing the idea that rituals and ceremonies don’t have to have a Shaman, healer, or some other person in an all-knowing, leadership role.
Other topics covered: how to make therapy cheaper, whether or not a lot of letters after someone’s name matters, learning survival skills, Paul Stamets, NASA, and astromycology, Zapatistas, Star Trek: Discovery, and Pauly Shore (but only a little- hopefully more next week).
Notable Quotes
“I feel like they’re getting a little out of hand sometimes with how we sell these treatments. In press releases or on websites for retreat centers, it’s like: ‘Cure everything that’s ever been wrong with you in one week!’ and ‘Addiction no more!’ -all this kind of stuff. …It’s not as sexy to sell a mushroom retreat as like: ‘Start this new relationship with mushrooms and work on it every day for the rest of your life!” That’s not going to sell.” -Michelle
“How essential is it that the therapist is even in the room? Can’t you just be somewhere really safe with a volunteer sitter or somebody that doesn’t have a huge student debt to pay off? Is the conversation being steered in a particular direction because of incentives like graduate degrees, licensure, etc? …If I can consume $30 of street MDMA and not have to pay 12 grand, and I can just go to my medicare-covered therapist a few times before and after, that’s a way cheaper proposition.” -Joe
“There’s a lot of great healers in the world that would be really amazing at doing a lot of this stuff, but could they afford their degree? The answer is probably no, and so they don’t get to even be at the table to make any of these decisions.” -Kyle
“We can say microdosing is all a placebo effect, but I think there’s something more interesting here on the power of the expectation effect, and how we’re almost manifesting our own mood change.” -Michelle
“You don’t need a Shaman there, I think, for a spiritual experience. …You don’t need someone in a seat of power. I also feel like Shamans and healers- they’re fascinating and they’re a deep part of human history, but so is the desire for power. …You don’t have to get stuck in that ‘I’m nobody, the Shaman has all the power, and I need you for learning’ [narrative].” -Michelle
In this episode, Joe interviews the founder and CEO of MindMed, JR Rahn.
This one’s a bit different and plays out perhaps unsurprisingly, as Joe’s well-established talking points against the drug war and DEA, legalize-everything stance, and all-inclusive focus on the many branches of drug-use (medical/therapeutic use, religious use, celebration/partying, inner work and exploration, and creative problem-solving) meet a businessman whose life was saved by psychedelics and who doesn’t want to talk about the battle but instead wants to push forward, all-in on the method he thinks will get people in need the medicine that could save them the fastest: not putting so much effort towards state-by-state decriminalization and demonizing the DEA, but instead, working with them towards medicalization, and telling them what we want by passing measures that allocate more capital and resources towards infrastructure that will help people.
Rahn talks about what MindMed is working on: the first approved commercial drug trial studying the effects of microdosing LSD on adult ADHD, and their more long-term plan, developing a trip-neutralizing drug that would be a safer option than Xanax for ending a challenging trip and getting people back to stability. He also discusses the importance of scalability and lowering healthcare costs, changing anecdotal evidence into real science, and his life-saving (and cheaper) hope of patients being able to work with therapists in their homes rather than in expensive, anxiety-increasing medical environments.
Notable Quotes
“As a society, we need to prioritize treatment and we don’t. …It’s just completely illogical to me that, as a society, we stare it in its face every day and we blame the opioid crisis and we blame drug addiction for our crime and all these things, yet, as a society, we don’t allocate the resources necessary to solve it.” “I think there’s that Forbes article where I was like, ‘Oh, I want nothing to do with the decrim people.’ I definitely said that, but that’s not really what I meant. What I meant was: if we’re going to make psychedelics into a medicine, and we’re going to make it scalable and accessible, I think we should be having a federal conversation about it, and to me, the most efficient pathway to do that is the FDA. And I’m concerned that we’re going to go through this process of state-by-state legalization that happened in the cannabis days and we’re going to get some pretty unsavory people involved in this community …and I’m just concerned that, if it happens in that manner, it becomes a political battle, and it doesn’t become: How do we help people? How do we get medicine to folks that are in need?”
“If we’re going to get people willing to healing themselves and get over the stigma, I think it’s important to have the feature of: ‘Look, we have the emergency stop button. Your therapist can press it if they need to when they feel that you’ve reached a point that is not good anymore.’ And I think that, ultimately (and we’ll have to study this), it might make the experience even more therapeutic. …They should be walking into a cocoon and we’re taking care of them. They should not be walking into [a room] or sitting on their couch, going, ‘Holy shit, am I going to die?’” “I’d love to get to the point where we have destigmatized these substances enough in society that people value them for what they are, and I think we will be a much better society when we get to that point, but I don’t think we can do it all at once. People tried that- didn’t work. I would just hate to watch the potential for so many people that are actually suffering from mental health and addiction [to] not get access to this treatment because we went too fast.”
“Psychedelicstoday.com: best podcast in psychedelics.”
JR is a former Silicon Valley tech executive who realized that transformational solutions to mental illness and addiction might lie in psychedelic medicines. He spent 2 years researching and began personally investing in psychedelic research through his investment company. JR partnered with drug development veteran Stephen Hurst to start MindMed in 2019, assembling a leading clinical drug discovery and development team with vast experience conducting clinical trials and research on drug candidates derived from psychedelics. Before starting MindMed, JR worked in market expansion and operations at Uber.
From virtual psychedelic integration circles to conferences, book clubs, and classes, we’ve rounded up the best of online psychedelic community to help you get through the next few months.
We’re almost a year into lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and if you’re feeling quarantine-fatigued, believe us, we get it. We are too. However, like we’ve been mentioning in our Solidarity Fridays podcast, that doesn’t give us an excuse to ignore safety precautions and begin meeting in large groups to do medicine or integration work. But the good news is, there are lots of virtual psychedelic community options to get involved in as we ride out the last of Covid. From online integration circles to events, conferences, and Discord and Facebook groups, there are plenty of ways to meet like-minded folk, both in your area and all over the world. So don’t lose hope and join us in an upcoming online community event that speaks to you – there are plenty of options!
Virtual Psychedelic Integration Circles
One of the best ways to meet like-minded folks and to stay grounded while doing personal psychedelic journey work is to join a psychedelic integration circle. Pre-pandemic, these were often groups of 10 to 20 people who would meet up once a month or so to share psychedelic experiences and insights in a safe and accepting space. Luckily, most of the circles that were already established migrated to online platforms and are still going strong today, which also means that folks who live outside of big cities where these were hosted in-person can now join from anywhere in the world. Plus, there are lots of specialty integration circles for particular groups so you can choose the meet-up that makes you feel the most safe and comfortable.
General Integration Circles Open to Anyone
Before we describe all the speciality integration groups, we thought we’d start with some of the general integration circles we know of and trust. First up, our friends at Mt. Tam Integration host an open circle every Wednesday evening on a sliding scale from free to $30, depending on what you can afford.
The Portland Psychedelic Society hosts an open integration circle called “Community Integration Circle” every other Saturday afternoon.
Lastly, the NYC Psychedelic Society has teamed up with the New York-based Psychedelic Sangha to offer a monthly harm-reduction focused integration circle, called “Global Gathering” with a $5 to $10 suggested donation.
San Francisco Psychedelic Society
One of the most active psychedelic societies hosting an array of psychedelic integration circles and other online community opportunities is the San Francisco Psychedelic Society (SFPS). They host a general psychedelic integration circle open to anyone who’s interested on the first Tuesday of every month, but it’s all their specialty offerings that really make them stand out.
They host an integration circle specifically for those with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) on the second Monday of every month, a women’s circle called “Sacred Sisters Spaceship” on the third Friday of every month, and a circle for BIPOC folk on the fourth Sunday of every month (each circle has its own link, so visit the main page for more details).
SFPS, along with MycoRising also hosts a group specifically for mushroom people where folks can discuss both mushroom cultivation questions as well as any entheogenic mushroom concepts and experiences on the first Thursday of every month. They also host a group for microdosing support, The Microdosing Movement, on the second and fourth Tuesday of every month.
For those in addiction recovery, SFPS have an addiction-focused circle for asking questions and sharing experiences, which is more focused on harm-reduction than following the traditional 12-step program. They also offer a dream circle for folks to come discuss and integrate their dream work in a safe and open-minded space.
One of the best things about SFPS is their affordable pricing model. They only ask for a donation of around $10 for groups and will not turn anyone away if they can’t afford even that.
More BIPOC Circles: The Sabina Project & Others
Feeling safe, seen, and heard is so crucial to psychedelic integration work, which is why a lot of psychedelic societies around the country have started their own specifically BIPOC integration circles led by and open to people of color. The Sabina Project, a community that supports “radical self-transformation in the name of collective liberation,” also hosts a BIPOC circle on the first and third Sunday of every month, co-facilitated by their founders, Charlotte and Dre.
Other local groups also host BIPOC circles, like the New York City Psychedelic Society, which hosts a virtual integration circle for people of color once a month. The Portland Psychedelic Society also hosts a monthly BIPOC integration circle.
More Women’s Integration Circles
Another popular choice for people to feel safe and heard in integration spaces are women’s integration circles (which are often also opened up to non-binary people). Mt Tam Integration hosts a virtual women’s circle on the first and third Thursday of every month. The Portland Psychedelic Society also hosts a Womxn’s Support Group every other Wednesday.
Men’s Integration Circle
The Portland Psychedelic Society doesn’t only have a womxn’s support group, but also one for men on Mondays.
Trans and Non-binary Circle
The NYC Psychedelic Society hosts a peer-led circle specifically for trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming, and gender-questioning folk called “Transdelic” once a month on Tuesdays.
Psychedelic Integration Circle for Parents
There is also a virtual integration group specifically for parents, the Plant Parenthood Integration Circle, facilitated by Rebecca Kronman, LCSW (founder of Plant Parenthood) and Andrew Rose. This group meets virtually once a month to discuss issues such as talking to children about psychedelics, including children in the integration process, understanding intergenerational trauma, coping with stigma and shame in parent communities, and much more.
Psychedelic Integration for Neurodivergent Folk
Folks with neurodivergence or who are on the autism spectrum also have a few of their own spaces to integrate psychedelic experiences. Aaron Orsini, author of Autism on Acid, hosts a group with Justine Lee called The Autistic Psychedelic Community (APC). They meet on Thursdays and Sundays for folks to share experiences, receive support, and ask questions.
The Portland Psychedelic Society also hosts a virtual space for neurodivergent folks (facilitated by Orsini and artist Nathan Cooper) called “Spectrum of Experience.” The next free/donation-based event will be on March 11th.
Psychedelics in Addiction Recovery
In addition to SFPS’s recovery circle, there is also a 12-step based group that hosts multiple meetings a week for those in addiction recovery who are curious about or engaging with psychedelics. Founded by writer and addiction counselor, Kevin Franciotti, Psychedelics in Recovery (PIR) has 15 meetings a week and even host a couple meant to cater to those in European and Australian time zones. You can sign up for their weekly meeting newsletter for days and times, and they also have a private Facebook group for people to continue to form and engage in virtual community in between meetings.
Psychedelic Societies: Beyond Integration Circles
There are loads of psychedelic societies and clubs around the country and globe continuing to form psychedelic community through other online activities, like live talks, events, Facebook and Discord groups, and other saloon-type virtual meetups. Some of our favorites include:
There are many more psychedelic clubs and societies with virtual offerings around the world that you can find on Psychedelicexperience.net and around the US on Psychedeliclub.com.
Online Psychedelic Courses
Another great way to build community and learn some valuable info at the same time is by enrolling in an online course related to psychedelics. There are a lot of different courses out there, with some popular topics including learning how to become a psychedelic therapist, how to grow your own mushrooms, and how to use psychedelics safely.
Of course, if you follow our work, you’ll know we’re very proud of our online course offerings here at Psychedelics Today, which you can browse in our course catalogue here. But one of our biggest contributions to the psychedelic movement is our “Navigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Therapists” course, which is an 8-week intensive class on everything interested mental health professionals need to know about psychedelic substances. The course is super handy for clinicians and coaches who want to deepen their knowledge of entheogens so that they can help support their patients and clients who might be considering a psychedelic experience or already experimenting (plus we offer CE credits!). The course is also a great way to form community and valuable working relationships with other professionals because it includes weekly live 90-minute group discussions and Q&A sessions to explore the reading and lecture of that week in more depth, as well as a private Slack group for clinicians to continue to network, problem-solve, and educate each other on psychedelic and mental health topics.
Of course, we also have a whole catalogue of other courses, not limited to offerings for doctors and therapists. We have all sorts of offerings for the curious-minded, like our class that explores how to view the psychedelic experience through a Jungian lens, called Imagination as Revelation, and a deep dive into shadow work called Psychedelics and the Shadow. We also have great entry-level classes for those looking to experiment with psychedelics in a safe and responsible way, like our in-depth Navigating Psychedelics: Lessons on Self Care, and our totally free 8 Common Psychedelic Mistakes: Exploring Harm Reduction & Safety. And that’s just a taste – we have other offerings (some that are even free!), and we’re always working on new ideas, like our upcoming free webinar exploring the legal side of psychedelics, Religious Use of Psychedelics in the United States. You can always sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date with all of our offerings!
If you’re interested in learning how to grow or use mushrooms, then we’d recommend checking out the virtual courses our friends down at the Fungi Academy host. Their mushroom cultivation course is the most in-depth online class we’ve seen; a go-at-your-own-pace class, it covers everything beginner and intermediate home-growers need to know, from equipment, inoculation and sterilization, to more advanced techniques like working with liquid cultures and maximizing yields. Plus, students also receive access to their Discord channel to continue to socialize with and learn from other mushroom people from around the globe.
They’re also about to release a class on using psychedelics in a safe way called Psychedelic Journey Work, which I’ve had the privilege to peruse. It’s a super in-depth and unbiased approach to psychedelic use that I found fascinating and helpful, especially for the newly psychedelic-curious person in your life!
Over at DoubleBlind Mag, they’re also dipping their toes in online courses, events, and community. They also teach a 101 mushroom cultivation course that is great for total beginners because it uses one of the easiest and most fail-safe “teks” (mushroom people lingo for techniques) out there. And they’ve recently released a more advanced 102 course co-taught by Dr. K. Mandrake, co-author of the popular books, The Psilocybin Mushroom Bible and The Psilocybin Mushroom Cookbook.
The Sabina Project also hosts monthly masterclasses with a social justice slant. In March, they’re offering “Microdosing to Dismantle Your Oppression,” which will not only teach the basics of microdosing, but moves away from the “productivity” benefits of microdosing and instead, focuses on creating a healing practice that “honors your spiritual, mental and physical wellness” to “help dismantle White Supremacy.” The 90-minute master class is open to anyone, only costs $22, and is a live group gathering.
There are many more online courses related to psychedelics out there, especially for those looking to learn about becoming a psychedelic therapist or facilitator. You can find a bunch on this website Aaron Orsini created, Psychedelic.Courses, and through our post: How to Become a Psychedelic Therapist.
Virtual Psychedelic Conferences
In pre-pandemic times, one of my favorite ways to forge new psychedelic community was by attending conferences. These kinds of large events will probably be one of the last types of gatherings to start up again in person, but that doesn’t mean they’re going extinct! In fact, with so many conferences going online, it’s actually opened up a new opportunity for folks in small towns and big cities alike to attend conferences they never would have been able to in person. While the bulk of conference season is usually in the fall, there are a few fun ones coming up around Bicycle Day (April 19th) that we’re already getting excited about.
First up, our friend Daniel Shankin from Mt. Tam Integration and who organizes the fun and pleasantly weird Psilocybin Summit in September, will be hosting the first-ever conference focused entirely on psychedelic integration (and everything in between), called the Mt. Tam Psychedelic Integration Family All Star Jamboree. It’ll be a totally virtual 3-day event from April 16-18th, packed with fascinating talks, panels, experts, and music! Our team here at Psychedelics Today is already plotting our involvement and we’re so excited to share more info with you all soon!
Earlier that week on April 14-16th, the Philosophy of Psychedelics conference will also be 100% online and feature talks from some of the greatest thinkers in psychedelics (including our very own Joe Moore and Kyle Buller, who will be moderating some fascinating discussions). Plus, the conference plans to facilitate many virtual group discussions open to the public that will be a great way to forge community and learn from other psychedelically-inclined new friends. More info will be released shortly and you can stay up to date by visiting their website.
The next week, our friends over at Chacruna.net will also be hosting their own online conference, Sacred Plants in the Americas II from April 23-25th. This multidisciplinary event will focus on psychoactive plants of North and South America and will spotlight the Indigenous communities who have kept their healing wisdom alive for generations.
Lastly, our friends at Psychedelic Seminars are also hosting a three-part series of online talks called CryptoPsychedelic Flashback. These three online events are a look back at the first CryptoPsychedelic Summit, which took place in February of 2018. Now, those involved are reconvening to discuss cryptocurrencies through a psychedelic lens, and how blockchain technology has grown in the three years since the original summit. Tickets are on a sliding scale and unsurprisingly, they accept cryptocurrencies!
Psychedelic Facebook Groups, Discord Channels, and Clubhouse Rooms
Another way to build some form of community in these weird times is by joining psychedelic message boards, Facebook groups, Discord channels, and most recently, Clubhouse rooms. We moderate a very active Facebook Group called Psychedelics Today Group where our listeners share psychedelic current events, ask questions, share experiences, and engage in healthy discourse.
There are tons of other groups out there on Facebook and sites like Erowid, Shroomery, Reddit, and others. Mt. Tam integration also has a Discord group, and I saw recently they’re on Clubhouse as well. Speaking of Clubhouse, there’s a bunch of psychedelic clubs already on there, and it seems to be really easy to start your own. We’re looking into joining soon, so stand by for more info!
Other Fun and Weird Psychedelic Online Events
For the book nerds out there, my friend Bett Williams, author of The Wild Kindness, has started a psychedelic book club that meets monthly. Every month, they read a different psychedelic classic, curated and hosted by Williams herself *squeals in fan girl*. Next up on March 11th, they’ll be discussing one of my favorite sci-fi, gender-fuck classics, Dawn, by Octavia Butler.
There are seemingly endless ways to get involved with virtual psychedelic community, and here at Psychedelics Today, we’re always trying to find new ways to grow our community and keep our listeners and readers involved. We recently hosted a “happy hour” panel discussion for the new psychedelic film, Light Years, with director Colin Thompson and co-host Joe Moore, where we invited all of you to come hang out and discuss whatever you want.
We plan to keep providing these kinds of online community events because we know how important “finding the others” is and how much more sense the world of psychedelics makes when you can share it with fellow travelers. So continue to seek out and attend virtual community events, and by the time we can all meet-up again, it’ll be an epic party.
About the Author
Michelle Janikian is a journalist focused on drug policy, trends, and education, and the editor of the Psychedelics Today blog. She’s also the author of Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion and her work has been featured in Playboy, DoubleBlind Mag, High Times, Rolling Stone, and Teen Vogue, among others. One of her core beliefs is that ending the prohibition of drugs can greatly benefit society, as long as we have harm-reduction education to accompany it. Find out more on her website: michellejanikian.com or on Instagram @michelle.janikian.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle and Joe are joined once again from Mexico by Michelle Janikian, and let’s take a moment to do what wasn’t done last week: welcome Michelle to the podcast, as she will be joining the guys on SFs for the foreseeable future, and possibly on other podcasts soon as well. Welcome to the revolution, Michelle!
As you’d expect, they discuss the news: Norway’s plan to decriminalize personal drug use based on recommendations from the U.N. and W.H.O. and why that may be related to Norway’s high rate of drug-related deaths (or maybe even a high suicide rate), a new bill in California to not only decriminalize psychedelics (including MDMA and LSD, and excluding peyote) but expunge records as well, a new Massachusetts bill to decriminalize all drugs and study psychedelics, a study where researchers achieved real-time communication with lucid dreamers, and Alex Jones’ (likely true) claim that government officials regularly use DMT to communicate with freaking aliens.
The most-discussed articles though, are Vice’s post about how psychedelic therapy needs to embrace the mystical side of things, and Tim Ferriss’ recent blog, pleading people to follow more ethical, safer, and more environmentally-friendly paths in their explorations of different medicines. They also talk about Ferriss’ concept of a minimum effective dose, the progress of cannabis legalization in Mexico, using caution with frameworks, Pascal’s Wager, how the idea of a psychedelic community is becoming antiquated, and whether or not Kyle is regularly astral projecting without realizing it.
Notable Quotes
“This concept of political capital- you only have so many ‘politics tokens’ to put in the machine, and being a politician, you kind of have to play the game of not only influencing what you and your constituency want but [also] ‘how do I get re-elected too?’ It’s not spending political capital to be anti-drug in most states. [To] be a really hardcore prohibitionist, you actually gain political capital in a lot of ways. But putting your neck on the line for something like this is quite risky for a politician, so, good on ya!” -Joe
“It just doesn’t fit into that narrative where it’s like: ‘Can psychedelics revolutionize mental health?’ Yes, but not just help people and cure, heal- we have to change the way we think about the human experience and we have to let in so many other weird, unworldly experiences to really, fully– like, yea, it’s going to revolutionize mental health. It’s going to revolutionize everything if we really integrate it and take all aspects of it into consideration. But that’s really hard for doctors and these psychiatrists in-training to really do- they just want a new medication to help their patients. Do they really want to like, rethink reality? [sarcastically:] That’s just for weirdos like us.” -Michelle
“Sometimes when I’m in conversations with other clinicians and it’s so pathology-oriented, I’m like, do we need to keep continuing that language? Could there be other ways of viewing and seeing this? How [can] psychedelics- or not even psychedelics- just extraordinary experiences in general help shift our view of what it means to be human? What does it mean to be well in the world? Do I always need to be sick when I come to a mental health professional? Do I always need some sort of diagnosis? I think these are the questions that my exceptional experiences have made me think about- traditional systems and how they’ve really shifted over the years.” -Kyle
“The dream world, to me, has always been so fascinating, because it’s like the natural psychedelic everyone has every night. Dreams are so weird. There’s no psychedelic that really touches how weird dreams are. And yet we go to that place every night.” -Michelle
In this episode, Kyle interviews clinical psychologist focusing on sexual trauma, health, and identity, and author of The Psychedelics Integration Handbook, Dr. Ryan Westrum.
Westrums’ biggest focus and conversation with clients right now in our age of Covid concerns who we are without medicine- how we fill the liminal states between our sessions or rituals. He talks a lot about the work people can do on their own now: learning to listen to our inner healers, honing and sharpening what we already know, stretching ourselves, listening to the different parts of our intuition (our physical bodies, emotional hearts, and cognitive thinking) and realigning when one is out of sync, and maybe the most important lesson: embracing the idea that self-work doesn’t have to be built on trials and tribulations, and often, challenging ourselves to use our hands and practicing something we know we’re good at or getting back into a long-forgotten hobby can be just as effective towards growth and feeling better about ourselves.
He also talks about solitude, how to use technology the right way and not fall into false engagement, what safety means to people in today’s climate, the importance of tethering yourself to trustworthy allies, how psychedelics and his work with sexuality converge, and how to embrace the wonder and beauty of what we discover through psychedelics in everyday life.
Notable Quotes
“We have to consciously watch what we’re consuming, being prudently aware of this mindful consumption rather than this inappropriate consuming of information when we don’t even know why we just touched our phone or why we just engaged in learning more. Without sounding blasphemous (because I love the internet), what’s it for? What are we doing it for? …How often are you getting lost in people you don’t even know? And how often are you reaching out to people that could actually be there for you? And it leads to psychedelic medicine work- are you leaning on the people that could actually support you?”
“What is the higher level of intention we’re living? If we are going to take the challenge to dive into medicine work by ourselves, we should still be constructing something that’s higher level, and to speak volumes of motivating the purpose of why we’re doing it. If you’re just doing it to do it because you think that’s the next thing, I’d ask you: what are you doing in your life away from the medicine?”
“Some of the most amazing transcendences are personal, and without being disrespectful to the medicine, do we need it to evoke that? Is that a state of being that we can find within ourselves through evocative breathing, through a great song, sexual pleasure with your partner, whatever? There’s other avenues. That’s what that leads me to, is the plethora of opportunity outside of taking psilocybin or doing an ayahuasca ceremony- [the] plethora of experiential experiences that are very evocative towards healing.” “Without going into hours of conversation, even in couples, people are unaware of what they can share, unaware of entering into what they want to ask for. And that’s where the intersection of psychedelics happens, is it gives them this embodied expression of: ‘This is genuinely who I am, sexually, emotionally, spiritually,’ and it’s quite beautiful.”
Dr. Ryan Westrum, PhD, MA. is a nationally recognized psychedelic integration expert, author of The Psychedelics Integration Handbook, and Doctor of Clinical Transpersonal Psychology. For more than 15 years, his primary focus has been working with individuals and groups facilitating experiential therapy and integrating psychedelic journeys into healing and personal transformation. Ryan speaks on myriad of topics and leads experiential groups, like dreamwork integration therapy and psychedelic integration groups. The founder of http://healingsoulsllc.com and psychedelicintegration.net
Science has demonstrated that psychedelic compounds “can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance.” Scientific surveys indicate that a statistically significant number of people have a stronger belief in a higher power after taking psychedelics. Science is starting to “prove” these things that practitioners have known for thousands of years, and society is rapidly redefining its relationship to psychedelic sacraments and medicines.
As more and more people begin taking psychedelics, an ever-growing number of them will start asking spiritual and religious questions that arise out of their experience. Our goal in this class is to open some space for these conversations and to help educate people about the legal risks that such explorations may involve.
Our regular contributor on legal matters explains how the nascent psychedelic pharmaceutical industry and grassroots reformist movement could work together to achieve both their goals, read to the majesty of the classic American musical, Oklahoma!
Interested in learning more about the legal side of psychedelics? Then sign up here to receive info on our upcoming FREE series: Religious Use of Psychedelics in the United States.
In my last article, I introduced the idea of crafting the Uniform Plant and Fungi Medicine Act (UPFMA), which could be employed as a public initiative or adopted by state legislatures as a solution to the local piecemeal reforms and slow and improbable response from the federal government to make traditional entheogens lawful outside of religious use. I am happy to report that a team is assembling to undertake drafting UPFMA.
This, of course, begs a serious and important question: Who’s going to pay for that?Cue music…
“Oh, what a beautiful morning!” …. it would be to see the burgeoning psychedelic pharmaceutical industry back and support UPFMA. Why? Because, like the cowman and the farmer, the pharmaceutical industry and the grassroots movement can be friends. In fact, they need one another. No need to struggle with your feelings over cowboy Curly McLain and farmhand Jud Fry, Laurey. You can have both!
This is no mere minstrel show; this is serious stuff. Consider:
Farmers (Played Here by Grassroot Reformists) Need a Friend
UPFMA’s promise is to provide a uniform model body of law, akin to other uniform model laws (e.g., the Uniform Commercial Code) for state reformation and regulation of plant and fungi medicines. Amongst UPFMA’s goals are to promote further options in health care, responsible use, freedom of choice, elimination of the underground market, and personal and public safety, through state adoption of a uniform reformation law that will span the gulf between prohibition and total deregulation via a reasonable regulatory structure. The model we hope to write is intended to be adoptable either by state legislatures, or by public initiative campaigns in the more than a dozen states that allow citizen legislation.
Even with the volunteers who exist and those who will come, the production and campaign will cost the sort of sums that these sorts of campaigns cost. Let’s just put it out there on the square dance floor: “Purty little surreys” ain’t cheap. UPFMA needs benefactors, sponsors, patrons, supporters, shekels. So, peering over the fence and into the grazing lands, UPFMA’s supporters want to give a loud “Howdy, Neighbor!” to our cowmen friends in the pharmaceutical industry. We cannot help but to notice that supporting UPFMA would be hugely beneficial to your interests. It need not be, “All Er Nuthin.” Can we count on you to be neighborly?
Cowmen (Played Here by the Pharmaceutical Industry) and Grassroot Reformists Are Not Competitors for Territory
The psychedelic pharmaceutical industry will derive its revenues by exploiting patents and trademarks. But, aside from modified genetics, the pharmaceutical industry cannot patent or trademark natural medicine in its unrefined state. In contrast, UPFMA would seek only to democratize natural substances and would not be aimed at the same patent-driven and trademark-driven “market” as western industrialized pharmaceuticals seek to create. UPFMA poses no challenge to pharmaceutical patents or trademarks. Indeed, discussed further below, UPFMA might even be able to help facilitate product research. Like the cowmen and farmers from Oklahoma!, pharmaceutical industry and grassroots reformists may occupy overlapping interests, but they are not competitors and do not seek incompatible goals.
UPFMA Can Help Cowmen Catch Cattle Rustlers
As the existing pharmaceutical industry can tell the future psychedelic pharmaceutical industry, the individual home grower and/or user is no threat. Rather, it is the underground market, where pirate industrializers infringe intellectual property and undercut prices, that are your true “cattle rustlers.” Unfortunately for our cowmen…errr…pharmaceutical companies, the coming FDA approval of their products also brings an increase in public interest in psychedelics, and so too an increase in the illicit market. UPFMA is no friend of the unregulated market. Rather, one of UPFMA’s goals is to reduce illicit trade, and not just in (our metaphorical) Kansas City.
You Can’t Sell the Steak, But You Can Sell the Sizzle: Pharmaceutical Companies Benefit by Supporting UPFMA
Until FDA approval is given, the psychedelic pharmaceutical industry may not advertise their products or offer them for sale. Psilocybin and MDMA are at Phase 3’s door, and FDA approval looks promising, if not inevitable. But FDA approval is still years away, and pharmaceutical companies continue to burn capital waiting for the FDA’s start pistol to fire. This delay in marketing is a costly lost opportunity.
Meanwhile, UPFMA can do what no pharmaceutical company may – begin to educate the public and draw national popular interest in natural psychedelics. While pharmaceutical companies vie for rescheduling and for FDA approval, pharmaceutical companies who back UPFMA will receive years of permissible brand awareness and marketing research, in advance of being able to bring their products to market.
Support of UPFMA Does Not Risk the Ranch
Natural medicines and their patented counterparts do not typically compete. Instead, they compliment. Because of pricing constraints, a significant population will be unable to afford pharmaceutical industry products. It is significantly that demographic – those who cannot afford these patented medicines – that UPFMA addresses. UPFMA offers an alternative to exclusion. UPFMA does not pull market share away from the pharmaceutical industry. Rather, it addresses “customers” the industry never had or was going to have. In the wise words of Obi Wan-klahoma, “These are not the cows you’re looking for.”
There’s a Bright Golden Haze on the Meadow: Support of UPFMA Grows the Ranch and Buys More Cattle
Just like the nascent psychedelic pharmaceutical industry, UPFMA optimistically predicts the public will warm to psychedelics as an optional (if not preferred) tool to fight all sorts of mental illness. As UPFMA democratizes access, a residual effect will be the encouragement of further investment, thereby enabling pharmaceutical companies to more easily explore varieties of formulations, concentrations, extractions, etc., making their products more varied and more accessible to an ever-increasingly interested market. Again, UPFMA’s focus is on natural non-branded medicines, and has no ambition to occupy the patent market.
Support of UPFMA Allows Industry Cowmen to Better-Protect Fences
UPFMA intends to consider and to factor traditional use of entheogens, including cultural and environmental interests. UPFMA’s focus is legal access, not promotion of industrialization and scale, and UPFMA resists commoditization. UPFMA can help build fences, to allow the grassroots reformists to sustain themselves while leaving scale as the province of pharmaceutical companies. And don’t forget, pharmaceutical companies will, by virtue of their patents, retain exclusivity to further refine and to sell refined products.
UPFMA Helps When the Pharmaceutical Industry Brings Its Cattle to Market
By supporting UPFMA, the pharmaceutical industry invests in itself. UPFMA helps to popularize and to normalize psychedelics and can do it more quickly than the nascent industry presently may. Not only might that help to speed FDA approval for the industry’s products, but it might help to speed acceptance by health insurance companies. In turn, that speeds up and increases revenue that can be paid back to investors or poured back into research and product development.
UPFMA Gives Cowmen Opportunity to Show the Pharmaceutical Industry’s Human Side
At the end of Act I of Oklahoma!, an unscrupulous patent medicine peddler sells our heroine actual heroin – laudanum, to be precise – promising he had her best interests at heart, whilst taking her money. While no one expects the pharmaceutical industry simply to be just a girl who “cain’t say no,” industry support of UPFMA avoids a coming public relations whirlwind over the unavoidable disjunction of the pharmaceutical industry touting the benefits of its patent medicines, while pricing them outside the reach of many.
Support of UPFMA is consistent with ubiquitous sound public policy of fostering and promoting good mental health and responsible drug use. UPFMA can help give the public an alternative, while allowing the industry a platform to openly share the benefits of supporting humanitarian goals that pharmaceutical companies hold in common with the public. In other words, if the pharmaceutical industry touts its wares as good for everyone, support of UPFMA allows the industry to walk the walk.
UPFMA Can Create a Public Health Database
For public health study, UPFMA may consider inclusion of voluntary and anonymous data gathering provisions. This may include regulatory agency ability to present program users with voluntary questionnaires regarding their experiences and other relevant health data points. Support of UPFMA fosters gathering data and sharing it for study and research.
I submit that UPFMA and the pharmaceutical industry would be fine partners at the square dance. And, like in Oklahoma!, this would be OK. Besides, UPFMA needs a partner. How about it, cattlemen? Care to two-step?
Interested in learning more about the legal side of psychedelics? Then sign up here to receive more info on our upcoming FREE series: Religious Use of Psychedelics in the United States.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle and Joe are joined from Mexico by freelance journalist (who has been featured here several times) and writer of Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion, Michelle Janikian. They first get into an email from a listener in Costa Rica highlighting a problem Michelle has seen in Mexico (and that mirrors last week’s discussion about ayahuasca gatherings): expats’ disregard for Covid safety protocols showing an egotistical disrespect for the communities that have welcomed them.
The episode then shifts to a bit of a callback to the early days of solidarity, with fewer philosophical ponderings and a whole lot of articles (just scroll down to view the wall of links). From ketamine reducing suicidality (and is ketamine a cure-all silver bullet or just an overhyped respite?) to a Rick Strassman-backed study of DMT for stroke patients, to a college in Jamaica opening a Field-Trip backed psilocybin lab, to Vermont and New Jersey’s progress on decriminalization bills, to a discussion on if drug laws violate human rights, to extremely mainstream Vogue and Rolling Stone both reporting on psychedelics, this episode has it all. And yes, it does also include anti-government and drug war rants from Joe, so it’s truly a complete episode.
“If we are at home working with psychedelics because we can’t do group work, I think it’s still really important to be talking about it with other like-minded folks, because when we don’t have any community and we just are using psychedelics, it can get a little delusional. …We can still take psychedelics, but we have to live in reality.” -Michelle
“Everybody’s saying psychedelic integration is important [and it] makes me roll my eyes. Like, yea, true, but how many times do we have to say it? I guess ‘until everyone’s doing it’ is the answer.” -Joe
“A lot of my anxiety and depression stems from an existential, spiritual root, and a lot of my experiences with breathwork or psychedelics in the past would get me there and provide that deep level of insight of: ‘I have a choice here.’ And it allowed me to change my relationship (or at least provide insight on how I could change my relationship to that), but then coming back to do the work was the challenge. Like, ‘Oh shit, I need to actually change this. And how do I do that?’” -Kyle
“Ok, Federal government: what can you do to win my trust back? And I don’t know what the answer is, honestly. I don’t think I will, at large, ever really trust the US Federal government. I don’t really hold out hope that I’ll trust them again in my lifetime because they’ve shown to be a corrupt, gross, crony, capitalist system that does not care about human well-being.” -Joe (big shock)
In this episode, Kyle interviews board-certified heart and lung transplant surgeon and author, most recently of The Art of Human Care, Dr. Hassan Tetteh.
Tetteh talks about his book, a “manifesto of sorts” about what human care is in relation to what we traditionally see in standard health care and how the model is rooted in empathy and listening, and was inspired greatly by both his near-death experience with bacterial meningitis (and seeing what it was like to be a helpless patient) and his work with transcendental meditation (which has helped him deal with past trauma and connect him more with the here and now).
He talks about his Human Care “LEARN” framework, an amazing “Death Over Dinner” experience where he and randomly-assigned strangers contemplated 3 simple (but not so simple) questions over dinner, how he sees death as a doctor and as someone who came close to death himself, how to discover what a patient’s purpose is, and why he’s excited about psychedelics becoming medicines.
Notable Quotes
“I’ve told this to my colleagues- I said, ‘I think everyone in healthcare should have an experience where they feel like they almost died as part of their educational experience,’ because sometimes, it takes that empathy to really identify and relate to some of the patients that you’re taking care of, but more importantly, I think gives you this real deep sense …of gratitude, and this longing desire to ask yourself, always: ‘Why did that happen?’”
“I think death, in its natural form, is absolutely something that’s going to happen. It’s just the way we’re designed. We have a beginning, we have a middle, and we have an end. And I think it’s our duty and our responsibility, in my opinion, to make your life as meaningful as possible while you’re here, so that in your death, your music continues to play, so to speak. Bob Marley, to me, is never going to die.”
“A lot of patients will come to seek medical attention with a so-called complaint or an issue, and it turns out that if you do take that time (like you said) to listen and empathize and sort of understand what their now is, you’ll realize, ‘Hey wait a minute, they’re not really here for the problem they told me about. They’re seeking something else.’”
“If you give someone a minute or two, they’ll tell you a lot. But you know what you have to do in that whole time? Don’t interrupt them.”
“We don’t have the monopoly on the best healthcare, because no, that’s been done for ages, well before we came into existence.”
Dr. Hassan A. Tetteh is an Associate Professor of Surgery at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, adjunct faculty at Howard University College of Medicine, and served as Division Lead for Futures and Innovation at Navy Medicine’s Headquarters, Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. He was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow from 2012–13, assigned to the U.S. Congress, Congressional Budget Office, (CBO), and served as Assistant Deputy Commander for Healthcare Operations and Strategic Planning at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center during its integration. Currently, Tetteh is a Thoracic Staff Surgeon for MedStar Health and WRNMMC and most recently served as Command Surgeon for the National Defense University.
Could 18-MC, a synthetic derivative of Ibogaine, make treatment safer without the psychedelic trip?
With COVID-19 still spreading, mutating, and killing, it’s easy to forget the other health crises ravaging the country. One of the most concerning of these is drug overdose deaths, with opioids representing a large share of such casualties. From 1999 through 2018, nearly 450,000 people fatally overdosed on opioids in the US. While slight decreases in 2018 buoyed hopes that we were past the peak, even then, overdose deaths were four times greater than in 1999. In 2019, such optimism was dashed as the number of opioid overdose deaths climbed to 50,042, an increase of nearly 7 percent over the previous year. But, are there viable treatment options that are overlooked by the medical community and general public?
In the psychedelic community, many would argue yes, and highlight the potential of ibogaine, a psychedelic compound found in the West African shrub, Tabernanthe iboga. But ibogaine comes with more possible health risks than other psychedelic plants and substances that we’ll explore below, and of course, there remains a lingering bias in some parts of the medical establishment against psychedelics. And so, a non-psychoactive alternative, 18-Methoxycoronaridine (18-MC) was developed in the 1990s and is now advancing through the FDA’s drug development process at a steady clip, while research into ibogaine remains virtually frozen. However, the question remains: are the concerns about ibogaine’s risks valid enough to explain the differing fates of these chemical cousins, or are other factors at play?
What is Ibogaine?
Ibogaine is a plant-derived alkaloid with unique psychoactive properties distinct from those of classic psychedelics, such as LSD, psilocybin-producing mushrooms, or DMT. One of its effects is panoramic recall, often described by patients as watching a movie of their life playing in their head. Sometimes called a dissociative psychedelic, Geoff Noller, a medical anthropologist with a doctorate from the University of Otago’s Department of Psychological Medicine, prefers the term “oneiric” (pronounced ō-ˈnī-rik), which is defined as, “dream-inducing.”
This description of the ibogaine experience was seconded by Dr. Bruno Rasmussen, a physician and researcher based in Brazil who provides ibogaine therapy. “Ibogaine doesn’t make you hallucinate; Ibogaine makes you dream, but you are awake when you are dreaming,” Rasmussen said. “If you do an EKG during the effect of ibogaine, the lines will be like they are in a REM state, the rapid eye movements state, the dream state.”
How Does Ibogaine Work?
The unique, psychedelic qualities of ibogaine are not the only way it differs from more familiar hallucinogens. Psilocybin, LSD, and DMT all act in a more focused manner on the brain’s serotonin receptors. And while ibogaine does act on serotonin levels in the brain, it also acts on numerous other neural systems. Noller compares its relatively blunt mode of action to cannabis, which also acts on many different receptor sites, and contrasts it with more targeted designer medicines like Prozac.
While the exact neural systems ibogaine engages are not fully understood yet, studies show it can reduce opioid withdrawal symptoms and help control cravings. This offers a window of opportunity for patients to make changes in their life that would otherwise be more difficult due to the pain, anhedonia, and other symptoms of withdrawal. Once they have weathered this storm, the reduction in cravings increases their likelihood of not relapsing.
Furthermore, studies have shown that ibogaine reduces the amount of drugs, like cocaine, alcohol, and nicotine, that animals self-administer, despite the fact that each of these drugs has their own distinct way of influencing neural chemistry. This ultimately suggests that ibogaine acts on multiple regions of the brain. Studying this broad function could lead to new insights into the physiological underpinnings of addiction, which makes the relative dearth of research on ibogaine all the more curious — until you consider its potential hazards.
Ibogaine Risks
The benefits of ibogaine must be weighed against its potential dangers. An article in the Journal of Forensic Science examined 19 deaths that occurred following ibogaine treatments given between 1990 and 2008. Post-mortem testing revealed that at least 11 of these patients had other drugs in their systems, such as benzodiazepines, cocaine, opiates, and methadone, all of which are known to be dangerous when mixed with ibogaine.
Prior to treatment, however, a dozen of the patients who died also had one or more comorbidities known to pose risks when using ibogaine, such as obesity, brain neoplasm, and a range of diseases affecting the liver, heart, and other organs.
Although ibogaine research in the US stalled in the late ‘90s, it continued abroad. Thomas Kingsley Brown, a California-based anthropologist, worked with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) for a 2017 study in Mexico, where ibogaine treatment is not specifically outlawed. Thirty people with opioid dependence received ibogaine treatment and were evaluated over the following year. After one month, half of the research subjects stated they had not used opioids since their ibogaine session. Further follow-ups showed sustained anti-addictive effects.
“To address the first question of whether or not ibogaine can be used safely and effectively, my short answer is yes,” Brown said. “There are going to be risks with that, but you can also minimize the risk.”
In addition to screening patients for potentially dangerous comorbidities and identifying contraindications, such as the presence of drugs that could cause harmful interactions, Brown explained that genetic tests can determine how quickly people’s bodies break down ibogaine into noribogaine. This helps those administering the treatment determine whether it’s safe for a patient to move forward with ibogaine and how to calculate an optimal dosage.
Noller also worked with MAPS on an ibogaine study, though this one was based in New Zealand, where Medsafe (the country’s equivalent of the FDA) made such treatment legally available as a non-approved medication in 2010. According to Noller, this classification gives doctors the ability to write a prescription for a drug or treatment even if it hasn’t gone through a three-phase trial testing period.
He points out that ibogaine’s mortality rate is comparable to methadone. A 2008 paper in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology reported 11 ibogaine-related deaths from 1990 to 2006 out of the 3,414 people estimated to have taken it — a mortality rate of 0.32 percent. A 2007 paper in the Drug and Alcohol Review found 283 methadone-related deaths in Australia between the years of 2000-2003 out of an estimated 102,615 episodes of treatment, which yields a mortality of 0.27 percent.
But Rasmussen believes it can still be safer, attributing the majority of ibogaine-related deaths to preventable failures on the part of caregivers, such as not having qualified doctors present, forgoing the use of cardiac monitors, and passing on testing patients for drugs that could cause harmful interactions. His strongest piece of evidence for the ability to safely use ibogaine is that none of his roughly 2,000 patients have died due to or during treatment. In fact, he hasn’t even had a subject develop complications, like severe heart arrhythmia. In Brazil, doctors can legally prescribe ibogaine therapy in hospital settings, a model Rasmussen champions.
“I think that the trick here is to face it as a little surgery,” Rasmussen explained. “We make some pre-surgical examinations, lab tests, blood tests, and EKGs. We do it in a big hospital with the emergency team aware that there is an ibogaine patient in the hospital. For anything we could need, we are backed up, but we never needed the emergency team because we do the lab tests, so we can usually prevent the complications.”
18-MC: The Non-Psychedelic Alternative to Ibogaine
Concerns about ibogaine’s psychoactive effects and potential risks led to the development of 18-MC in the 1990s. Dr. Kenneth Alper, a professor of psychiatry and neurology at New York University School of Medicine, explained that 18-MC is a structural analog of ibogaine, meaning they share a common molecular base, in this case the ibogamine ring system. At the microscopic level, even small variations can lead to big changes.
The general consensus seems to be that 18-MC is not psychoactive or oneiric, though Alper speculated that it could potentially be hallucinogenic at higher doses. 18-MC also does not seem to carry the same cardiovascular risks. MindMed, a new Canadian pharmaceutical company focused on psychedelic and psychedelic-inspired medicines, obtained the patent for 18-MC in 2019 when it acquired the biopharma startup, Savant HWP, for an undisclosed sum. MindMed recently completed Phase I testing on 18-MC. The company declined to share information about their 18-MC trials or comment for this story.
18-MC Patent and the Halting of Ibogaine Research
Karen Szumlinski, a neuropharmacologist, neuroscientist, and professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, worked on animal studies for both ibogaine and 18-MC from the mid to late ‘90s—long before Savant HWP or MindMed existed. 18-MC was first developed in 1996 by a group of scientists, one of which served as Szumlinski’s research mentor. Based on her observations, Szumlinski believes 18-MC is not psychoactive. But the bias against psychoactive compounds combined with 18-MC’s minimal cardiovascular risks are likely the reasons why ibogaine research in the US halted when it did.
Another reason ibogaine studies in the US stopped is due to profitability. Ibogaine is a natural product not eligible for a patent, according to Brown. Patenting molecules is how companies make big profits. Somewhat confusingly though, Howard Lotsof, the person credited with discovering ibogaine’s anti-addictive properties, was able to patent the use of ibogaine and related molecules in doses ranging from 1 mg/kg to 60 mg/kg given orally or rectally for treating poly-drug dependency in 1990. The patent covered addiction to one or more of the following: alcohol, heroin, methadone, cocaine, caffeine, amphetamine, desoxyephedrine, and nicotine. However, it’s the patents held by companies like MindMed that cause Rasmussen to express concerns.
“Big pharma, they like molecules that they can register as their intellectual property and make more money on,” Rasmussen said. “So, I think that’s the reason that there’s a lot of money for 18-MC and there’s no money for ibogaine research.”
Is the Ibogaine Experience a Crucial Part of the Treatment?
Ibogaine’s effectiveness for treating substance abuse disorders and addiction is established in human trials and supported by numerous first-person testimonials. We were unable to find data showing the same for 18-MC, likely because the results of clinical research don’t exist on the molecule yet. But when such information is available, it may offer additional insights into whether the consciousness-altering properties of ibogaine are essential to its effectiveness for treating various SUDs.
Alper suspects the new data will be consistent with what is shown in the existing research. “In terms of ibogaine and its effects on self-administration and withdrawal, the animal model and human experience appear to align pretty well,” Alper said. “Effects on reduced drug self-administration following treatment with ibogaine or 18-MC are not likely to be based on the processing of the content of psychoactive experience.”
In other words, Alper doesn’t think that the reduced consumption of addictive substances by lab animals is caused by psychedelic epiphanies. Rather, he believes it’s the physiologic processes induced by ibogaine. He suspects the same is true for humans, though he also accepts that the psychedelic experience could be a useful aid for patients undergoing psychotherapy.
Other researchers were less optimistic about 18-MC’s relative prospects in human trials. “I think that at least in some cases—not the majority of them maybe, but in a significant number of situations—the psychedelic experience is a key to solving the problem,” Rasmussen explained. “It’s not that I think that 18-MC will not work, but I really don’t understand how it would work as well as ibogaine does without the psychedelic experience.”
Instead of viewing the question as a zero-sum game that promotes one treatment at the expense of the other, the true win-win scenario for patients would be that both medicines become safely available. After all, the need for more effective therapies is paramount. COVID-19 and the policies put in place to contain it have only exacerbated the risks posed by SUDs. The Lancet reports that as of July 2020, drug overdose deaths in the US increased by 13 percent, with rates in some states up by over 30 percent.
If the end goal is to reduce harm and save lives over the long haul—and not pump up stock prices in the short term—then it’s up to those within the psychedelic movement to continue their decades-long struggle to end the criminalization of these potentially life-saving medicines. Otherwise, the fate of these powerful and potentially transformative substances will be decided by supporters of the failed policies of criminalization and the corporatization of psychedelics.
About the Author
Jeff Kronenfeld is an independent journalist and fiction writer based out of Phoenix, Arizona. His articles have been published in Vice, Overture Global Magazine, and other outlets. His fiction has been published by the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, Four Chambers Press, and other presses.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle and Joe cover several news stories, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison creating a Psychoactive Pharmaceutical Investigation masters program, a non-profit called the Healing Advocacy Fund being created to implement therapeutic-use psilocybin in Oregon, legislature in Hawaii filing a new bill to legalize therapeutic-use psilocybin and psilocin (and remove them from their Schedule I controlled substances list), Cambridge, Massachusetts joining its neighbor, Somerville, in decriminalizing entheogenic plants, and the biggest story: Compass Pathways attempting to patent such common aspects of psilocybin-assisted therapy as soft furniture, muted colors, and providing “reassuring physical contact.” This leads to a discussion on patents and what companies are really trying to do with this behavior.
They then discuss why mescaline isn’t researched more, why psychedelic exceptionalism is a problem, Dr. Carl Hart, The Weeknd, and one of everyone’s favorite topics: the drug war and why it sucks.
“Are we in a little bit of a fantasy land when we’re trying to separate ourselves from the rest of drug culture? Big portions of psychedelic culture overlap with other portions of other drug cultures. And we’re not mutually exclusive. We’re prosecuted and surveilled by the same government agencies. Prohibition hits us all really hard.” -Joe
“I think that’s how a lot of politicians win votes, is by being ‘tough on drugs’ when we should be tough on the drug war.” -Joe
“What does it really cost to end the drug war? What do we save by ending the drug war? It’s probably actually better for culture to end the drug war than to medicalize psychedelics. It’s going to be cheaper, we’re going to have a lot of our citizenry back, we’re going to have less felons, …much less racist culture, all of that. I know this is Psychedelics Today and once in a while, I feel like I’m going, “This is Drug War Today!’ but this is just a thing that keeps coming back to me, and I think it’s important that we examine our cultural baggage around our traditions. Should we really be demonizing people who use PCP? I don’t think so.” -Joe
Can psychedelics heal humanity’s global mental health crisis? If so, when will it be legal and accessible to all?
Mental health disorders affect over a billion people worldwide. Prior to the pandemic, the 2017 Global Burden of Disease study estimated that 264 million people in the world suffered from depression only.
Since the start of the pandemic, rates of depression have tripled in the US, while rates of substance abuse from alcohol to opioids have risen 30%.
Psychotherapists might say that the root of this crisis is widespread trauma, the outcome of an increasingly unequal capitalistic culture exacerbated by financial uncertainty, and social isolation caused by the pandemic.
Shamans might say that the cause of this disease is humanity’s separation from Nature and Spirit; that the events of 2020 signified a shamanic initiation of planetary proportions, a warning sign of a civilization recklessly out of balance, and an urgent call for humanity to wake up.
What if both are right?
The acute need for a new way to address humanity’s mental and spiritual crisis has pushed the promise of psychedelic medicines to the forefront, making 2020 a banner year for drug policy reform and psychedelic therapeutics.
In spite of the pandemic, demand for underground ceremonies remains stronger than ever, as people seek out community, spiritual meaning, and alternative healing, some fearing vaccines more than the virus.
Join me, my friend Lorna Liana (publisher of media platform EntheoNation), and 40+ experts in a series of bold, inquisitive conversations about the future of psychedelic medicine and the expansion of plant medicine shamanism.
This is not your boring academic conference filled with scientific presentations and cultural anthropology papers. We celebrate the work of psychedelic research, but now, it’s more important than ever to raise awareness of how the ordinary person can participate in the “Psychedelic Renaissance” and access the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics… Safely, responsibly, and with integrity.
Together we’ll explore:
Ancestral Plant Spirit Healing Traditions (Ayahuasca, Iboga, Peyote, San Pedro, Sacred Mushrooms) as well as Kambô, and Bufo
The Past, Present & Future of Psychedelic Medicine
The Art & Science of Microdosing Transformation
Psychedelics & Leadership Innovation
During this visionary 5-day event, you’ll hear from:
Kyle Buller, co-founder of Psychedelics Today, who shares his insights about the emerging field of psychedelic integration therapy and coaching and the shadow side of psychedelics.
Ninawa Pai da Mata, spiritual leader of the Huni Kuin community of Novo Futuro, on the indigenous cultural renaissance catalyzed by the globalization of ayahuasca and their tribe’s decision to collaborate with outsiders. Filmed in the Kaxinawá indigenous territory of Humaitá in Acre, Brazil, during the Eskawatã Kayawai Festival, this mini-documentary shares their culture, shamanic medicine traditions, challenges, and hopes for the future
Wade Davis, celebrated author, anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and filmmaker, who talks about the impact of the Psychedelic Renaissance on contemporary culture, as well as about the Drug War’s destruction of Colombia and what he considers to be the ultimate sacred medicine of South America (not ayahuasca)
Nat Kelley, activist & actress (Fantastic Fungi Foundation, The Fast & the Furious, Vampire Diaries) and Alan Scheurman (Santiparro), musician / shipibo trained facilitator, discuss the impact of COVID on the indigenous communities in the Amazon, and what it takes to create a global campaign of active reciprocity.
Bruce Parry, filmmaker and explorer, on the delicate nature of living with remote peoples, egalitarian tribal cultures, and his visionary experiences on iboga, ayahuasca, Bufo and ebene (yopo), revealing the surprising reaction that overcame him… that might have been a little TMI
Cecilio Soria Gonzales, Shipibo indigenous rights activist, on how the Comando Matico initiative is distributing plant medicine through indigenous communities to treat and prevent COVID (and the recipe for this remedy… dare you drink it?
Jeremy Narby, legendary anthropologist and author of the Cosmic Serpent, with advice on how Western ceremony facilitators from the Global North can stop engaging in spiritual extraction of indigenous cultural wisdom, and give back in a meaningful way
There is no charge to attend this event, no upfront ticket to purchase in order to gain access to this diverse wealth of information. All sessions are free to the public for 48 hours. So, grab your complimentary seat right here:
Decriminalization, legalization, and medicalized psychedelics are advancing rapidly. Discover the impacts these developments may have on humanity’s mental well-being and capacity to thrive, as well as the risks of bad actors, corporate profiteering, and the perpetuation of colonialism in psychedelic medicine.
You’ll also hear from Shelby Hartman, co-founder of DoubleBlind Magazine, Daniel Shankin of the Psilocybin Summit, Carmen Jackman of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Tricia Eastman & Joseph Peter Barsuglia of Psychedelic Journeys; Elizabeth Bast, Iboga Provider & Integration Coach ; Chor Boogie, visionary artist ; Kyle Buller, host of Psychedelics Today; Mareesa Stertz filmmaker and producer of the series The Healing Powers, and many more.
In this episode, Joe interviews Vancouver-based serial entrepreneur, co-founder, president, and CEO of Better Plant Sciences Inc., and founder and CEO of NeonMind Biosciences, Penny White.
White works to take companies public, and was running Better Plant Sciences before creating NeonMind as a subsidiary, largely inspired by Michael Pollan and research by scientists at the University of British Columbia who were looking to treat addiction with CBD. Now that NeonMind has successfully gone public (which just happened at the end of December), her goals with the company are to develop a protocol around using psilocybin to tackle obesity (they’re in pre-clinical trials now and have 5 patents filed), to work more with medicinal mushrooms and sell products with proven health claims (they sell mushroom coffees now), and eventually get into work involving drug addiction and preventing the effects of Alzheimer’s- also likely with psilocybin.
This podcast feels like a meeting of 2 minds fully immersed in the psychedelic world having a bit of a check-in about where we find ourselves at the beginning of 2021. Among other topics, they talk about NeonMind’s path, taking companies public, how cannabis and psilocybin are regulated in Canada, the benefits of being able to prescribe psilocybin, the worries of oversaturation in Oregon, and the complications of trying to make legal cannabis businesses work in federally-illegal land.
Notable Quotes
“It’s cool for younger people who are coming of age and having money for the first time and deciding what to do with it, and people that are just interested in promoting things they believe in. It’s an opportunity for people to say: ‘I love the idea of psychedelics becoming legal or becoming available as drugs to help humanity, and so I’m going to buy some of this stock.’ It’s empowering in a way.” “We may end up doing some compound work. We may end up looking at other mushrooms and maybe combining more than just one compound- psilocybin maybe being the key compound. So we’re still at the early stages of what we’re doing, but by no means would we ever have any kind of monopoly on the use of psilocybin. I mean, it’s a plant, right?”
“There’s a lot of people who really very religiously rely on the advice of their doctor, and for them, health is going to your doctor and doing what your doctor says. And so, a lot of people won’t have access to alternative medicines unless they’re prescribed by their doctor. I think those people are going to benefit the most from a drug that contains psilocybin that can be prescribed.”
“I’m still very, very interested in drug addiction and how psychedelics can help people get off drugs, and so, if I come across any companies that are focused on this, any clinical work- if I can get involved in that or help in any way, to be a co-sponsor, something like that- that would be something I’d be really interested in.”
Penny is a serial entrepreneur with over two decades of experience building companies. She was recognized in PROFIT Magazine’s W100 most successful entrepreneurs and her private company was included in PROFIT 500 Fastest-Growing companies in 2015 and 2016. She is also Co-founder, President and CEO of Better Plant Sciences Inc. (CSE: PLNT, OTCQB: VEGGF). She was an initial officer and director for 2 years at Merus Labs Inc. (TSX: MSL), a speciality pharmaceutical company focused on acquiring and optimizing legacy and growth products, which was acquired by Norgine B.V. for $342 million in 2017.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle and Joe first talk about some great news stories pushing forward the psychedelic movement: Massachusetts General Hospital creating the Center for Neuroscience of Psychedelics with backing from Atai Life Sciences, Florida pushing forward a bill to establish a legal therapeutic-use psilocybin model similar to Oregon’s (with a task force responsible for studying psilocybin), Connecticut pushing forward their own much simpler bill to establish their own psilocybin-studying task force, and a recent study using fMRI to examine brain connectivity that found that under the influence of LSD, the relationship between anatomy and brain structure on brain function (similar to phrenology) weakens, thereby allowing the brain to explore other functional connectivity patterns.
They then dive into the hot and oddly polarizing topic of ayahuasca centers continuing to hold ceremonies with as many as 80 people and 3 sessions a week during a time when people should be doing their best to avoid large groups for the hopeful eradication of the constant thorn in our side known as Covid-19. Even for centers testing people before allowing entry, tests aren’t 100% accurate, and that only really addresses people’s time at the center and not the travel and interactions afterward. When considering risk management and harm reduction, do people attending these events really need to do this now? Could talk therapy or breathwork over the internet (or taking LSD or psilocybin safely with a trusted friend) be a temporary tide over until gathering in large groups is safe again? What’s ethical here?
“A lot of people fear that folks like you and I and the psychedelic culture at large might destroy this whole medicalization thing by perhaps being too reckless, making regulators nervous. But I think because a huge money company like Atai and Mass General are working on this (and there’s so many other big institutions), that this is the kind of ballast that would resist any kind of backslide into a deepening of the drug war. …This is a nice way to say, ‘Ok, we can’t really go backwards from here.’” -Joe “Politics is regularly about gambling: ‘What is going to be politically popular, possibly make a big difference, or get me re-elected?’ And it’s kind of a weird political calculus that people have to make. The fact that politicians in these states are willing to put their name on the line and say, ‘Hey, I believe in this. I think you should too’- that’s a pretty big deal. They’re spending their political capital. Whereas years ago, it would have been maybe, ‘Let’s stop the Iraq war,’ now, it’s: ‘Let’s get these people treatment with psilocybin’ and that’s really cool progress.” -Joe
“When you’re talking about magical thinking and ‘The spirit of ayahuasca’s going to protect me,’ well, I guess we have to look back into history- did shamanistic beliefs help protect a lot of Indigenous people that fell ill from a lot of the European sicknesses and disease that came over in the early years? … A lot of people died from illness being transmitted within those communities.” -Kyle
“Does your organization have a contact tracing plan? Even if you have a contact tracing plan and testing, that doesn’t mean that people aren’t going to die as a result of you doing this” -Joe
In this episode, Kyle and Joe interview Dr. Matthew Johnson: Professor at Johns Hopkins, writer of the recent paper, “Consciousness, Religion, and Gurus: Pitfalls of Psychedelic Medicine,” and researcher (with others) on several trials through Johns Hopkins involving psilocybin: for smoking cessation, anorexia, mood and effects of early-stage Alzheimer’s, opioid addiction, post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, co-morbid alcoholism with depression, and soon, LSD for chronic pain.
Johnson talks about his paper, which largely deals with the ambiguity of the term “consciousness” and how it applies to David Chalmers’ hard problem, and asks many philosophical questions: What is consciousness? What is phenomenal consciousness? Are things that seem like you actually similar? Do they have similar experiences or agency? How would you even know? If you built a robot that displays perfectly human-like qualities similar to yours and appears to have agency and experience, does it? Can you prove that it doesn’t?
They also talk about how clinicians and investigators bringing their own religious and spiritual frameworks to psychedelic and breathwork sessions can create unnecessary expectations and narratives and make many people think the experience isn’t for them, the theory that the default mode network decoupling just makes you feel not quite yourself and that this action can be observed with other non-psychedelic drugs, access consciousness, how it’s ok to feel things that can’t be proven scientifically, shamans, gurus, and the idea of enlightenment, the nuance in everything, and the beneficial sense of ownership people feel after getting through a challenging psychedelic session.
Notable Quotes
“It may very well be that the default mode network is a key or one of the keys that explains quintessential psychedelic effects, although it’s also possible that it’s not so special- that it explains maybe some of the effects sometimes, and that these aren’t so quintessentially psychedelic.”
“You don’t have to pretend like you have the answers. I don’t know, frankly, I think we’d all be better off if physicians had more humility. …There’s a whole lot about the human body we don’t know.” “Whether we’re talking about a Richard Dawkins style- you know, kind of a hard atheist who might be inclined to be of the spaghetti monster variety-appreciating person, or whether it be [a] Muslim- like, do we want a statue of a Buddha to tell either of those people that ‘this is not for you’ if they’re incredibly suffering from end-of-life anxiety, if they’re suffering from a decades-long addiction, if they’re depressed and are at risk of suicide? I don’t know, it just seems like we really need to think: how is this going to play out in the world and how are we really going to help people? Do we really want someone to think, ‘Oh no, this stuff is for hippies or new age folks’? They might be a political conservative, they might be a veteran, they might be someone who would never touch an illicit drug in their life. Do we want those types of people saying, ‘This is not for me’? I just see these as human experiences.” “One of the reasons why psychedelics and probably breathwork can be so effective is that people are doing their own heavy lifting. …At least in the type of work that [I do in] clinical research with psychedelics, people come out feeling they have done (rightfully so) the heavy lifting. It’s not like, ‘Oh, I took some pill, and thanks to Pfizer, who was able to figure out a way to manipulate my serotonin system, I’m feeling better. Thanks to Doc So-and-so who knew that I needed Lexapro rather than Prozac.’ It’s like, ‘No, you faced your own demons, dude. You did the hard work. You cried your heart out about that thing you did you don’t feel good about and you came out with a laundry list of what you need to fix with your life, and with this renewed sense because you feel like you’ve earned it.’”
Dr. Matthew W. Johnson, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins. He is one of the world’s most published scientists on the human effects of psychedelics, and has conducted seminal research in the behavioral economics of drug use, addiction, and risk behavior. Dr. Johnson earned his Ph.D. in experimental psychology at the University of Vermont in 2004. Dr. Johnson is recognized for his research in behavioral economics, behavioral pharmacology, and behavior analysis. He has conducted seminal and widely cited research applying behavioral economic principles such as delay discounting and demand analysis to decision making within addiction, drug consumption, and risk behavior.
We are hosting a panel discussion about the film Light Years. We will be joined by the filmmakers to have some enlightening conversations about Light Years.
Register here for our Feb 12 event. It will start at 8p ET / 5p PT.
We had Colin Thompson on our podcast recently and you can check that out here.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle (or “Jimmy New Jersey”)’s spot is taken by Vermont-based filmmaker Colin Thompson, and Joe interviews him about his newest movie, “Light Years,” released in 2019 with help from Free Association (Channing Tatum’s production company).
Thompson, a very sarcastic and down-to-earth writer and director, talks about his past films, the trials and tribulations of making a movie and trying to sell it, how Free Association got involved, Phish, Rickie Lee Jones, and the importance of good music to film, how a heroic dose of mushrooms and a sunrise hike helped him complete the movie, why there aren’t more psychedelic films, and how it came to be that he ended up playing nearly every part in a movie that he originally didn’t want to be in at all.
“Light Years” is summarized on imdb.com as: “A thirty-something man goes on an annual cosmic vision quest to visit a dead friend. But a stick gets stuck in the spokes of his psychedelia and in every face, friends and family alike, his own looks back at him. All but his dead friend.” You can buy or rent Light Years onAmazon.
Notable Quotes
“I wanted to make ‘Superbad,’ but on mushrooms.” “There is a lot of hysteria, obviously, in tripping your nards off, but also, with the waves and the troughs of a trip, it’s a lot like the conflict resolution that you want with every scene in a movie that you’re just kind of bouncing in and out of. And anything that doesn’t have that kind of conflict gets left on the editing room floor. So you always want that push and pull.”
“It was up on top of that mountain in Malibu where the line from the movie came to me, because it was my mantra of however many hours as I was walking and the sun was coming up and I was losing my fucking marbles. But in those peaceful valleys, I kept saying to myself- I was like: ‘When it’s not scary, it’s fun. When it’s not scary, it’s fun. When it’s not scary, it’s fun.’ As with life.” “We did this little kind of animated short. It’s longer than it feels. It’s on the lightyearsmovie.com page. If you scroll down a little bit, it’s called “I was not supposed to be in this movie.” And there you see me. And I do an explanation on how this all came to be. It’s like a lengthy trailer and a disclaimer, that is much like the last almost 38 years of my life: one lengthy disclaimer.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Director of ecological think tank The Institute of Ecotechnics, and publisher and CEO of Synergetic Press, Deborah Snyder.
Snyder talks about her past- meeting people from the Institute of Ecotechnics at a conference about the solar system, time working with Richard Evans Schultes, participating in a traveling theatre company, and the early days of the Heraclitus (a research ship built for a 2-year expedition through the Amazon, which is now being rebuilt to soon visit and chronicle remote coastal cultures). She also discusses Biosphere 2, ecotechnics (the discipline of relating the technosphere to the biosphere), regenerative agriculture, and the idea of natural capital- assigning economic (or other) value to an ecosystem as a way of both identifying keys to ecological longevity and increasing corporate or governmental interest in the environment.
She talks about books she’s published or work she’s been inspired by from a veritable who’s-who of names listeners of this podcast should be familiar with: Dennis McKenna, Wade Davis, William S. Burroughs, Mark Plotkin, Ralph Metzner, John Perry Barlow, and Claudio Naranjo. And she’s very excited about a 2-day symposium Synergetic Press will be putting on in May to commemorate the launch of Volume 1 of Sasha Shulgin’s course curriculum on the nature of drugs.
Notable Quotes
“I’m from Illinois. I’m from the rural midwest. All my family are farmers. There is a gulf of understanding about plant medicines and the potential of these medicines in places where people are really desperate for these kinds of tools to help with youth health and mental well-being- good well-being. So, I’m interested in bridging that gulf with the work that we’re doing next, because I think that part of the divide is this physical divide between suburban city and rural country to some degree, which we’ve seen growing over a 50-year period of time.” “Many of our shoulders on which we stand- we’re losing them. So I feel more necessity, you might say, to capture these voices.” “In doing anything, it’s very hard to do anything by yourself. You need to find a group of other individuals that have some commonality or ally yourself with other organized groups already to get something of a coalescence of wills to make something happen.”
Deborah, co-owner and publisher of Synergetic Press, Ltd., has published over 40 books in ethnobotany, psychedelics, biospherics, consciousness and cultures since establishing it in 1984. From 2000-2019, Synergetic Press published Ayahuasca Reader, by Luis Eduardo Luna, Birth of a Psychedelic Culture with Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner, Mystic Chemist on the life of Albert Hofmann, Zig Zag Zen, Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs, and Secret Drugs of Buddhism. Deborah just signed copublishing agreement with Transform Press’s CEO, Wendy Tucker. First title under the joint imprint is Sasha Shulgin’s book on The Nature of Drugs. Synergetic Press is expanding it’s line of books in the ethnobotanical and psychedelic medicine field with forthcoming titles from Kile Ortiga, Beyond the Narrow Life: Psychedelic Integration and Existential Exploration and with Chris Kilim for the Shaman’s Pharmacy.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle and Joe cover a crazy story about a man who injected psilocybin tea, only to end up having fungi grow in his blood and put him into organ failure. They question the logistics of this and wonder if it’s ever happened before, but Joe has since found an article reporting that this did happen back in 1985. So as crazy as it seems, it is absolutely possible. Be careful out there, folks.
They then talk about how the current psychedelic rush is diluting the existing culture, and how we should react to it, comparing it to “Eternal September,” the Usenet term for when AOL started mailing out internet disks to millions, providing access to Usenet, and how that affected the long-established and tight-knit Usenet community. This leads to a discussion of what tends to happen in the black market when cannabis is legalized, what lawyers will likely be doing in this space, why outlaw behavior is so attractive to people, and how “plant medicines” is too broad of a term to be used for psychedelics.
They also talk about Dr. Carl Hart’s new book, Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear, and let us know that seats are already selling quickly for the next round ofNavigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Therapists, which begins on March 11th. Curious about what you’re missing? Head to the page and view the growing collection of glowing testimonials to find out!
Notable Quotes
“Say you have a small music club and you’re used to 20 people coming, or a social club of some kind, and all of a sudden, 20 people get added every day. At a certain point, culture can’t really persist. That original culture’s going to be so diluted that it’s not necessarily a substantial part of the thing anymore. And I was thinking about this in terms of psychedelics, because there’s so much money coming in. If you’ve come in because of Michael Pollan, you’re part of this new wave. There’s some resistance to it- we see a lot of hate directed at Michael Pollan [and] a lot of these businesses. And I kind of get it- the resentment towards newcomers, but how do we balance that? How do we not turn into vicious defenders of our culture, as opposed to emissaries pushing our values in a nice, positive way? …There’s plenty of room for cultural dissemination. It’s just: how do we do it skillfully without becoming the thing we don’t want to become?” -Joe “There’s this whole tradition that has nothing to do with psychedelics, necessarily, and it’s quite multicultural. Plants were largely medicine for huge portions of our history- probably the majority of our history as a species. And now, in the last 60 years or whenever this whole trend started, people say ‘plant medicines’ and they really mean psychedelics, but they don’t want to sully their perception of their preferred plant allies by saying ‘psychedelic.’ They want to differentiate themselves because ‘those LSD users and those heroin users are dirty. But we’re clean.’ …Carl Hart pointed out that calling yourself a psychonaut or any of these terms that we use in the psychedelic world- it’s sort of mental gymnastics that we use to justify our drug use and vilify other people for their drug use.” -Joe
In this episode, Joe interviews Dr. Anne Wagner: Toronto-based clinical psychologist, founder of Remedy (a mental health clinic combining therapy with research through their corresponding Remedy Institute), investigator on the MAPS-sponsored trial on cognitive behavioral conjoint therapy for PTSD, and current lead investigator on MAPS’ trial of cognitive processing therapy + MDMA for PTSD.
She talks about working with Candice Monson in 2013, having her first MDMA therapy session with Michael and Annie Mithoefer a year later, her first couples study on PTSD using MDMA, her MAPS training (she’s now a trainer in-training), her passion for relational healing, Remedy and what she hopes to accomplish there, and what she’d like to do next: a larger MDMA couples therapy study with hopes of proving its efficacy towards relationship satisfaction improvement to the point of running a study without PTSD being a factor, and a new protocol combining mindfulness-based work with psilocybin.
They also talk about the idea of personal optimization and how it relates to community, speaking at psychedelic conferences, behavioral accommodation, psychology’s struggles with being accepted in a scientific data world, how to measure what makes a therapist good, and the importance of clinicians-in-training going through extremely in-depth training and doing their own work.
Notable Quotes
On trying MDMA with MAPS: “[I] went and had that therapeutic experience for myself, and was convinced in that moment that this is really, really worth pursuing. And it honestly shifted not only the course of my research, but of my career, my personal life, everything.”
On MDMA being used in therapy: “We saw 6 couples go through this protocol, and it was very compelling. Really, as someone who works with PTSD all the time in my clinical practice and in many different trials over the years, it is the thing that’s excited me the most as a clinician and a researcher, and I feel so much hope for the potential future clients who might get to access this.”
“The advice I really give to people is to try to be an expert in something, and it doesn’t have to be psychedelics. …So, it could be that you are going to be a therapist. Fantastic. Become an amazing therapist. You could be a statistician. We’re going to need those. Become an amazing statistician. We’re going to need great lawyers, or great people who understand policy- all of these things. I really believe in this model of: become an expert in a skillset, and then apply it to psychedelics.”
“Right now, everything’s focused on the drug- this pharma model of: ‘Is it the drug or the placebo? Which one has more effect?’ When really, I think the question needs to be: ‘Should it be the therapy, or the therapy plus the drug? …Is it the process, or the process amplified?’”
Dr. Anne Wagner, C.Psych., is the founder of Remedy, a mental health innovation community, and is the lead investigator of the pilot trial of Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) for PTSD + MDMA and the upcoming randomized trial of Cognitive Behavioral Conjoint Therapy for PTSD (CBCT) + MDMA. This work and collaboration builds on the MAPS-sponsored pilot CBCT+MDMA trial she ran with colleagues Michael Mithoefer, MD, Annie Mithoefer, BSN, and Candice Monson, PhD. Anne is deeply committed to bridging the worlds of psychotherapy and non-ordinary states of consciousness, and has a passion for its use for relational healing. She is committed to supporting and protecting traditional and Indigenous wisdom with sacred medicines and consciousness expansion, and uplifting the voices of women in the psychedelic world. She is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychology and an Associate Member of the Yeates School of Graduate Studies at Ryerson University. She is also certified in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, and is engaged in learning and practice of somatic, emotion-focused and transpersonal methods of healing. She is the Past-Chair of the Traumatic Stress Section of the Canadian Psychological Association, is a Global Ambassador for the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies, and sits on the Board of Directors of Casey House (Toronto’s HIV/AIDS Hospital).
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle and Joe talk about last week’s incident at the US Capitol and point out that the most recognizable figure from the protest calls himself a shaman and promotes the use of psychedelics.
This leads to a discussion about how we in the psychedelic community like to believe that psychedelics lead to connection, self-actualization, and love, but they can also lead to crazy ideas, an openness to conspiracy theories, and other dark paths. They talk about how they both went down conspiracy rabbit holes for years, but ultimately came to the realization that while it was all interesting and aligned with their distrust of the government, they couldn’t prove any of the conspiracies they were spending so much time looking into, and even if they could, would that really better their lives or the community around them?
They talk about where we’ve arrived as a culture in terms of trust in the government and other authoritarian institutions, how we’re dealing with an unending stream of information constantly being thrown at us, how we decide what truth is, how people unintentionally project their own biases on others, how more people should read philosophy, how we’re merging with technology and not using our brains like we should be (like critically thinking), and how we need to practice digital hygiene and really reflect on what we’re getting out of our time with social media and the neverending cycle of news and opinions that surrounds us.
Notable Quotes
“[Pyschedelics have] definitely put a lot of interesting ideas and beliefs in my head from time to time, and I’ll sit there and entertain them, but I feel like, at times, psychedelics have really shown me that I really don’t know much about anything.” -Kyle “The Tim Leary line- ‘Think for yourself and question authority.’ Totally. But, don’t just listen to what some maniacs are saying on the internet. Like, don’t believe what Kyle and I are saying. Verify. This is a cryptocurrency line- don’t trust, verify. …One of the great things that psychedelics have baked in is that they work. You can have MDMA or DMT or ayahuasca and you can come back and report back. It’s the substance interacting with the psyche and the body- nothing to do with what Kyle and Joe say, hopefully.” -Joe
“I hope everybody continues to do their thing [and] express however they want to express on the internet. But I think there is something about that [idea of] digital hygiene that we just should be aware of. Like, what are you consuming? And is it draining you? Is it motivating you? Is it inspiring you?” -Kyle
“Psychedelics can be used in really whack ways. They can also be used in really amazing ways. So let’s try to be really intentional about how we can use them in amazing ways, and same thing with our standard other technologies.” -Joe
In this episode, Kyle interviews psychologist and licensed marriage and family therapist, Veronika Gold, and author and clinical psychologist, Harvey Schwartz. They are co-founders (and Gold is the CEO) of Polaris Insight Center in San Francisco, which offers ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. Together, they work as co-therapists, as trainers on ketamine-assisted psychotherapy through Polaris Insight Center, and as investigators in MAPS’ Phase 3 MDMA-assisted psychotherapy clinical trial for the treatment of PTSD.
They talk about their training model, the benefits of co-therapy and how a leader/apprentice co-therapy model is likely the future of therapy training, the importance of doing your own work as a therapist, the arguments for therapists not taking drugs, the subtle hierarchal and approval-seeking games uncovered in training, how working with ketamine today is like raising a teenager, the “mystery and mastery” in therapy, medicine, and psychedelics, and the casualties of the mental health care system and the importance of de-programming patients from the effects of its abuses.
Notable Quotes
“We almost need to create a culture. That’s what we’re trying to do in our training- to create a culture of courage and [fearlessness], honesty about ourselves and about the work, and humility and vulnerability, and to have as much of an egalitarian approach to our patients and clients as possible- for many reasons, but one of the main ones is to, in a way, undo the damage that many of them have had by being in the mental health system for as long as they’ve been in the mental health system, because so much gets laid down in terms of programming about worthlessness or failure or ‘it’s their fault.’ So, I feel like a big part of this model is not just giving the medicine and doing the protocol, but kind of imbuing the person with a whole new worldview about what their struggle means and what their struggle is about. …It’s almost like de-programming them from the mental health systems’ long-term effect on their sense of self and their identity.” -Harvey Schwartz
“Mastery and mystery both have risks, both have shadows. And I think teaching that is really important so that everybody learns about humility by walking down the center path between these possible errors that we could all make- being too rigid, or being too loosey-goosey.” -Harvey Schwartz
“The clients do report different experiences, even with the same doses of the medicine. And is it just the set and setting, or is it just the music, or is it really the space that we hold that allows the patient’s psyche to go deeper, to go to the inner-healing intelligence, to access things that will be safely held in that space? That maybe this inner-healing intelligence knows that if that something was not welcome or supported, it’s not going to bring it out because it would be re-traumatizing for them?” -Veronika Gold “Psilocybin’s been on the planet for thousands of years. Iboga, thousands of years. Ayahuasca. These medicines, I feel like, have thousands of interdimensional spiritual support systems between ancestors, and it’s been going on for a long time. Ketamine is like a teenager in the spirit world, I feel like. And so, in a sense, we are really having a chance to impact the morphogenetic field in a greater level than these other things which have been around so long. So all the things we do, every session we have, I think of this. And all of our trainings, we’re kind of adding into this, helping this teenage form of therapy grow up and steward it in the way that we think it should be stewarded from the point of view of serving in the best possible ways, the safest possible ways, and the most expansive possible ways. So it’s kind of exciting to be raising a teenager.” -Harvey Schwartz
Veronika Gold, a psychologist from the Czech Republic and a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California, has expertise in the treatment of anxiety, depression, and PTSD. She is a co-founder and CEO of Polaris Insight Center in San Francisco, clinic providing Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy treatment for depression, anxiety, PTSD, and other mental health issues. She is also a lead trainer in the Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy Training offered by Polaris Insight Center. She is a sub-investigator and a co-therapist at San Francisco Insight and Integration Center, site participating in Phase 3 MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy clinical trial for the treatment of PTSD sponsored by MAPS, and she is an associate supervisor for Phase 2 trial in Europe. Veronika Gold is as well EMDR therapist, consultant, and volunteer facilitator for the EMDR Humanitarian Assistance Program. She is a certified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and a Realization Process Teacher. Veronika provides Psychedelic Integration Therapy and serves as an article writer, consultant, trainer, and presenter on Psychedelic Assisted Therapies.Dr. Harvey Schwartz
About Dr. Harvey Schwartz
Harvey Schwartz has worked as a licensed Clinical Psychologist in private practice in San Francisco since 1985, and is Co-founder of Polaris Insight Center. He received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Emory University, Atlanta, GA. in 1982. He has specialized in treating complex PTSD, severe dissociative disorders, survivors of organized abuse experiences, and individuals working on psycho-spiritual development. Harvey has undergone training in psychedelic psychotherapy with the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and the Ketamine Training Center (KTC), and served as a trainer in two KTC trainings, and currently served as a Sub-Investigator and co-therapist on the MAPS MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy Phase 2/3 Clinical Trials for treatment-resistant PTSD. Harvey is an associate supervisor for the MAPS sponsored clinical trials in Europe.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle takes the week off and Joe jumps into the podcast backlog for his conversation with who he describes as “the world’s foremost expert in music for psychedelic sessions,” neuroscientist and founder and CEO of Wavepaths, Mendel Kaelen.
Kaelen talks about his first mushroom experience in a Meow Wolf-like house and his realization of the similarities between psychedelic and musical experiences leading to the creation of Wavepaths. He talks about what Wavepaths has done (experiments in facilitating psychedelic (and healing) experiences through environments specifically designed to create those experiences through music that changes based on the individual and by attending to all senses for a completely immersive experience), what they’re doing next (an app that should be released soon to help people do this at home), and what they hope for the future (a mental healthcare system based less on drugs and more on experiences).
But they mostly talk about the power of music: how music is psychedelic, how listening to music can be an experience itself, and how music can be a healer. For anyone who has ever had a life-changing experience due to music, or has had a rush of overwhelming emotions just from hearing a familiar melody- for anyone who still turns their phone off, puts on headphones and truly listens to music they love rather than just throwing on a computer-generated playlist as background noise, this is the podcast for you.
Notable Quotes
“I always used to say that psychedelic mushrooms were my first introduction into altered states of consciousness, but then at some point, I realized that music actually was.” “When we project into the future and ask how mental healthcare can be (and maybe should be) revolutionized, in my opinion, it will become more and more experiential. Therapists and facilitators of all sorts will be more and more acknowledging and understanding [of] the importance of experience.”
“Music itself really can be a psychedelic, in the real meaning of the word ‘psychedelic,’ and this is really the vision of Wavepaths- that experiences can be medicine, and that we can, with the right music in the right moment and with the right framing of the music (it’s not only about the music itself, it’s also about the way the music is approached- the way one listens to the music), that music can become this mind-revealing, soul-revealing agent for change.”
“Music has this immense potential, but that potential, like the potential in psychedelics, is easily lost if those other variables are not taken seriously. And when it comes to music, it’s really comparable to psychedelic therapy. It really has to do with the same elements, like the capacity to be open to music, to be fully open, to be fully moved by the music itself, and on top of that, to be attentive, to be curious, to be engaged with the unfolding of the experience, the imagery, the thoughts, the feelings, the physical sensations- all of that, and how that is in constant flux and change with the musical experience. And if you attend to that, and are capable to surrender to that, you’re carried on a journey. You’re literally carried on a psychedelic journey inside of yourself in the same way as in a psychedelic therapy context.”
Mendel Kaelen is a musician and post-doctoral neuroscientist, specializing in the function of music in psychedelic therapy. Mendel’s work focuses on unifying contemporary arts, psychotherapies and intelligent technologies into new models of care-giving. Mendel is founder of Wavepaths, a social venture that revisions mental health care by building meaningful communities and creating accessible psychotherapeutic tools. Wavepaths centers around the concept of art works not as objects but as triggers for experiences, with new experiences posited as the most effective way to bring about positive change in identity.
In this episode, Joe interviews author of Psychedelica Lex, general counsel to the Peyote Way Church of God, founder and president of the Arizona Cannabis Bar Association, and practicing attorney for nearly 30 years, Gary Michael Smith, Esq.
Smith talks about what he specializes in- the law and how it relates to psychedelics, and what’s happening most in his world right now: people trying to create new religions, people fighting for their religions to be legally permitted to use entheogens, and investors rapidly trying to push psilocybin and MDMA through the FDA as prescribable medications. He also talks about the Peyote Way Church of God, the history of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (often referred to as RFRA), the problems with banks and dealing with money attached to illegalities, the complications of fighting for legal drug use and the importance of having established history with entheogens, the antihero aspects and deification of Timothy Leary, Nixon and the scheduling of cannabis, federal patent law, today’s speed of knowledge and the youth’s resistance of what they’re being told, and how there’s an argument to be made that many of today’s existing religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam, of note) have a right to use entheogens due to their somewhat newly discovered historical use.
Notable Quotes
“The short story is, I went looking for this book and I couldn’t find it. It didn’t exist. So I figured well, heck, if I’m going to have to pull and do all this research, I might as well assemble it into a book and fill the void. So that’s how the book came about- written because nobody else wrote it.” “There aren’t really any psychedelic lawyers yet. I’m probably the first one to publicly come out and say that I am. And for good reason: there’s really not a lot of business right now that attracts this. But seeing cannabis unfold over the last decade, as I have- it doesn’t really take a genius to figure out that the law is way behind the curve on this, and lawmakers even more behind the curve, and there’s no shame in trying to catch up, or, Heaven forbid, get ahead.”
“I’m advocating a middle ground position where I think that these companies absolutely have a place, I think that they absolutely can do good (it’s not the tool that’s bad, it’s how you use the tool), so what I’d like to see is both the fostering of this licit market where there are companies that can mass-produce and also give people in the West what they’re comfortable with, which is a Western model of medicine. …I think as long as there is an across-the-board decriminalization so people can still do freely for themselves, let the medical model grow up next to it. There’s no contradiction as far as I’m concerned.”
A seasoned litigator, advisor, mediator and arbitrator, Gary Smith focuses his practice on commercial matters, construction, real estate, cannabis and administrative law. He has represented a wide range of individual and institutional clients in both State and Federal courts, administrative hearings, and arbitration. Moreover, Gary is one of the leading cannabis attorneys in the state, often advocating for ADR in the industry under the Weediator and Weediation brands. Notably, he served as amici counsel to the former Director of the Arizona Department of Health Services in the Arizona Supreme Court petition State v. Jones, attempting to restore cannabis extracts and concentrates to legal status under the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act. He has authored numerous articles about cannabis law, and he is commonly invited to share his expertise with professional association and industry groups. Further, Gary is a founder and current president of the Arizona Cannabis Bar Association, an organization committed to educating lawyers and the public about cannabis law and responsible legislation.
The story of John Mack, the Harvard psychiatrist who wanted to believe—and ended up introducing the entire culture to the possibility of transpersonal experiences.
“At their core Carlos’s encounters have brought about a profound spiritual opening, bringing him in contact with a divine light or energy, what he calls “Home,” which is the source of his personal healing and transformational powers. In our sessions, when he comes close to this light he becomes overwhelmed with emotions of awe and a longing to merge with the energy/light/being. Space and time dissolve, and he experiences himself as pure energy and light or consciousness in an endlessness of eternity, ‘a pure soul experience . . . I go back to the source because I’m not just human. I need to go back to the source in order to continue.’ Carlos, like so many abductees, has developed an acute ecological consciousness. He is deeply concerned with the earth and its fate. The question of whether this is an unintended by-product of a process that he, no more than any of us, can fathom, or is an integral part of the alien phenomenon, cannot, of course, be answered. Carlos clearly believes that the aliens, however awkward, or even brutal, their methods, are trying to arrest our destructive behavior.”
-Dr. John E.
Mack, M.D.
Abductions: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994)
Until many lines in, to us in the psychedelic community, the passage above reads exactly like insights from a psychedelic-assisted therapy or integration session. But to my surprise in my recent alien abduction reading, this was work being processed with abductees – or “experiencers” as they preferred to be called – by pioneering psychiatrist, John E. Mack, in the 1990s. Mack wasn’t only the Head of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, but also the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence (his 1977 biography of “Lawrence of Arabia” ), and a fearless anti-war activist as well.
“John had always been so well regarded,” his former research associate and girlfriend Dominique Callimanopulos tells Psychedelics Today. “He was such a wunderkind in circles, such a bright light and leader in his field, and well known for his clinical perceptiveness and precision.”
So how does a Harvard psychiatrist get into the fringe world of alien abductions? It probably won’t surprise our readers that the story has its roots at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. According to NY Times journalist Ralph Blumenthal’s upcoming biography on Mack, The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack (scheduled to come out in March 2021 on University of New Mexico Press), in 1987, Mack attended the “Frontiers of Health” conference at Esalen in which Stanislav Grof spoke about transpersonal psychology and hosted an unplanned Holotropic breathwork session for the group. It was Mack’s first time trying the consciousness-altering form of breathwork and he had a profound experience relating to the death of his mother when he was only nine months old, as well as his first truly transpersonal experience.
Mack continued his exploration and training with breathwork, and according to Blumenthal’s book, by 1989, he had become a “regular” participant in Grof’s breathwork modules. Elizabeth Gibson, co-founder of Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork and co-author (with Mack and Grof) of the 2003 article, “Reflections on Breathwork and Alien Encounter Experiences,” remembers Mack’s involvement in the Grof breathwork group. On a Zoom call, she recalls that Mack was a facilitator at the first Holotropic breathwork session she had ever participated in, one of the “big weekend workshops” Stan and Christina Grof used to host. “There must have been 130, 140 people there that weekend,” Gibson recalls, “and John Mack was on the team with them [to help facilitate] and he brought with him a lot of the psychiatric residents that were then in training with him at Cambridge hospital.” Similarly, Callimanopulos recalls that Mack was part of a Grof breathwork “pod” that would meet a few times a year in different parts of the world for two weeks at a time. “That was a very strong bonding experience for all the people in his pod,” she says.
It turns out that Grof not only introduced Mack to breathwork and transpersonal experiences, but to the alien abduction phenomenon as well. In March 1988, at a breathwork training module at Pocket Ranch in California, Grof gave Mack a chapter on alien abductions from his and Christina’s upcoming anthology, Spiritual Emergence: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis (1989). “I have no idea why Stan thought I would be particularly interested in that subject,” Mack wrote in 2003. “I read the chapter with much interest, although I kept asking myself, ‘But is it true?’ Were people really being contacted by humanoid beings or the like?” Later in the same article, Mack wrote, “Through Breathwork I became open to the fact that the universe might be full of entities, which we call spirits, gods, archetypes, angels, mythic beings or whatever. The humanoids encountered by abduction experiencers seem to be one such type of being.”
Soon after the March ‘88 breathwork module, Mack was introduced to New York artist and famous alien experiencer and researcher, Budd Hopkins, who then introduced him to a whole network of abductees through a support group Hopkins was running. Unlike other mental health care professionals these folks may have seen, Mack had a much more empathetic approach. Instead of disbelieving what these people claimed to have experienced because he couldn’t prove it was true, Mack just held space for these folks to process their abductions, much like one would do for any other type of non-ordinary state of consciousness, like a near-death, psychedelic, or mystical experience.
“I think that was one of the big gifts he brought to this community of people he was working with. He never questioned whether their stories were true. He just accepted that people were having these experiences and tried to support them and give them a safe place where they could express what they were going through without fear of being judged. And that was huge for people,” says Gibson.
Mack helped abductees tremendously through this approach to their trauma by helping them “integrate” this reality-shattering experience, and at the same time, he started to find some undeniable common threads among their stories, which he writes about extensively in his two books on the subject, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994) and Passport to the Cosmos(1999). For example, the alien beings typically communicate with people telepathically and transmit profound messages through their big, dark eyes. Aliens also seem to alter people’s consciousness during their abduction experiences and even their “vibrations,” which then permits the aliens to move humans through the air and even through solid objects like the walls of their homes. What was also reliably consistent from experiencer to experiencer was a traumatizing loss of control of their bodies, incredibly invasive medical procedures, and even forced sexual contact and impregnation, which was often communicated to experiencers as an essential part of an alien-human hybrid program, and the future of both of their species.
Now, I know this all sounds a little X-Files-y (and according to Blumenthal in The Believer, Chris Carter (the TV show’s creator) even called Mack to pick his brain when he was developing the iconic series), but for the actual experiencers, this was deeply traumatizing. Budd Hopkins, for example, found the abductions to be incredibly demoralizing and felt it was a deep violation of trust and power by the alien beings, and that’s how he framed his support group for abductees—as one of victims processing trauma.
However, when Mack worked with experiencers, he used his recent training as a Holotropic breathwork facilitator to “hold space” for folks to integrate the non-ordinary state and to help it reach some kind of conclusion, which often lead to spiritual transformation. “As our work deepens, especially as the reality of the alien intelligence is acknowledged and the abductees come to accept their lack of control of the process, the frightening and adversarial quality of the relation seems to give way to a more reciprocal one in which useful human-alien communication can take place and mutual benefit is derived,” writes Mack in Abduction. “For example, the abductees [who] felt bitterly resentful about having their sperm and eggs used by the aliens in the hybridization project, may come to feel that they are participating in a process that has value for the creation and evolution of life.”
What Mack understood is that folks were processing experiences that completely shattered their worldview, similar to having one’s idea of reality flipped on its head after a strong psychedelic experience. How were folks supposed to get back to their regular lives after communicating with aliens telepathically and being shown we’re not the only intelligent life in the universe? “The terror is not just the terror of being paralyzed, having your body taken and having things done to you, the terror is the terror of the expansion of consciousness,” Mack said at a seminar on “Affect” in June 1992. He goes on to explain that is it a type of “ontological shock” that attacks people’s sense of their material reality—as it has attacked his own. And in his opinion, that’s what really needed to be integrated, not only by the abductees themselves, but by society, because that’s what really shocks people—that there’s more out there than we perceive on a daily basis.
In fact, his theories on the existence of aliens greatly differed from many of his UFO-hunting counterparts. Through his work with abductees and transpersonal realms of consciousness, he came to believe that aliens exist, but not in this physical dimension that we humans know as reality. He started to theorize about other realms of existence, or spiritual dimensions, where entities and intelligence like the alien “Grays” could exist, possibly less embodied but more conscious than us. And perhaps, the alien abduction phenomenon exemplified the most damning occurrence in the “Western dualistic worldview” as he often called it—that there are intelligent beings who are, at will, able to travel between dimensions and enter our material reality from their spirit realm.
“In
short, I was dealing with a phenomenon that I felt could not be explained
psychiatrically, yet was simply not possible within the framework of the
Western scientific worldview,” Mack writes in Abduction. “My choices then were either to stretch and twist
psychology beyond reasonable limits, overlooking aspects of the phenomenon that
could not be explained psychologically… Or, I might open to the possibility
that our consensus framework of reality is too limited and that a phenomenon
such as this cannot be explained within its ontological parameters. In other
words, a new scientific paradigm might be necessary in order to understand what
was going on.”
While deep in this research, my next question was: how significant were Mack’s psychedelic experiences to this openness to the possible existence of aliens, in this reality or another? Because for me, as a person who’s not particularly spiritual or religious and also grew up with a Western idea of what’s “real,” it wasn’t until my psychedelic experiences began lifting the veil that I started opening up to the possibility of spirit realms, plant intelligence, and now, the existence of aliens in some dimension. Mack admits in Passport to the Cosmos that his own experiences of “a transcendent reality” influenced his evolution of thought, in addition to his decade of working with experiencers and all the data they supplied him with.
In The Believer, Blumenthal also reports that Mack was experimenting with some psychedelics with his Grof group and other close friends. He talks of MDMA, LSD, ayahuasca, and ketamine trips, in addition to Holotropic breathwork. Mack also had correspondences with psychedelic philosophers and researchers doing adjacent work, like Terence McKenna and Rick Strassman. There’s a 1992 video of McKenna interviewing Mack at the International Transpersonal Conference in Prague and multiple references to McKenna’s work and the conversations the two of them had in transcripts and correspondences of Mack’s, which the John E. Mack Institute provided for me while I was researching this piece.
When Mack started theorizing about the purpose of the alien’s visits in his writing—that perhaps they were sent by some greater creative intelligence or “Anima Mundi” to expand human consciousness and help us not only evolve (or co-evolve), but also help us understand we are all intricately connected and need to take better care of our most precious gift, the planet earth—it sounds a lot like the insights from a strong psychedelic experience, or a talk from Terence McKenna at the time. At another Affect Seminar in July 1992, Mack referenced a McKenna quote, “that even God has limits”, in which Mack took to mean, “There is a point when one species seems to have carried the experiment too far in certain directions, then there is a cosmic correction occurring of a sort. And many of the abductees actually experience that powerfully, that this phenomenon involves some kind of balancing that is going on.”
Mack continues this line of thought in other talks and later writings—that perhaps the Anima mundi thinks we’re getting too destructive and it sent the aliens here to help us correct our ways. While I was in a deep reading of these ideas 20 years later, I couldn’t help but think that perhaps in 2020, that same intelligence thought psilocybin mushrooms may be a more successful plan to help evolve the human mind to realize its vital connection to all things. It’s a very common psychedelic insight (especially on mushrooms or ayahuasca) to feel a deep, spiritual connection to everything and to return with a great sense of urgency to help save our ailing planet. Could these messages all be coming from the same “source”?
Or, was Mack inserting his own spiritual and environmental bias onto his clients? “My own impression, gained from what abductees have told me, is that consciousness expansion and personal transformation is a basic aspect of the abduction phenomenon,” Mack wrote in Abduction. “I have come to this conclusion from noting in case after case the extent to which the information communicated by alien beings to experiencers is fundamentally about the need for a change in human consciousness and our relationship to the earth and one another. Even the helplessness and loss or surrender of control which are, at least initially, forced upon the abductees by the aliens—one of the most traumatic aspects of the experiences—seem to be in some way “designed” to bring about a kind of ego death from which spiritual growth and the expansion of consciousness may follow. But my focus upon growth and transformation might reflect a bias of mine.”
Are the aliens trying to expand human consciousness so we
can live more harmoniously with the rest of the galaxy, save our own home
planet, and become more in touch with a spiritual dimension? Or was Mack
letting his own consciousness expansion leak into his work and influence it too
strongly? “We would fight about it sometimes,” Callimanopulos recalls. She explains that Mack
was accused of leading people to believe their experiences were spiritual in
nature, and she also believed it had become his bias. Coming from an
anthropological background, she “felt he should hold back more and be more
neutral. Let people struggle to define their experience more.”
Yet, Callimanopulos also says that she often felt Mack was being very appropriate, and she describes how powerfully real people’s emotions were when they began to recall and process their abduction experiences. “He started this work because people were hurting,” Callimanopulos says. She also drives home that Mack possessed an incredible intellect and was always drawn to life’s mysteries. “John always tried to address the big questions in life, like what’s life about? How does it all work? What are we doing here? What’s our identity?”
After Abduction came out, Mack supported his theories—that aliens exist, but perhaps not in this physical dimension, and they’re here to expand and transform human consciousness for a higher intelligence’s purpose—on all the mainstream outlets of the time, including Oprah and Charlie Rose. But after a few damning articles in Time Magazine and the New York Times that questioned Mack’s practices, Harvard began a long and trying inquiry into the standards of his work. For instance, part of how Mack worked with abductees to help them remember and process their experiences was a relaxing form of hypnosis. But could that just be opening the door for false memories or confusing nocturnal dreams with reality? Mack defended his practice and truly felt that a non-ordinary state of consciousness like an alien abduction needed a similarly altered state to help the integration process, but to others, its necessity was less clear. There were other discrepancies that Harvard looked into as well, like how he billed insurance and charged abductees, and whether they were formally clients or research subjects.
Mack survived the Harvard inquiry tenure intact, but the emotional toll it must have taken on him is only for us to wonder. “He was very used to being well regarded and well-liked. It came as a big shock to him that people—his close colleagues, turned against him,” Callimanopulos says. “I think it was also harsh for John because he was a very collaborative, empathic person who enjoyed relationships more than anything else in life and sought out that harmony— that comfort and adulation from colleagues. So I think it was really tough.”
However, he continued the work with abductees, releasing his second and more openly spiritual book on the phenomena, Passport to the Cosmos, in 1999. Then, he also began a professional interest in the survival of consciousness after death, until his own tragic passing in 2004. When Mack was in England for a conference, he was hit by a car after looking the wrong way while trying to cross the road in London. It was a shock to the abductee community and all who knew him. He was 74 years old.
I can’t help but wonder if Mack’s ideas would be more easily accepted today in a world that’s decriminalizing magic mushrooms, pumping out psychedelic doses of ketamine to depressed patients, and scientifically quantifying the significance of mystical experiences in psychedelics’ usefulness for treating mental health conditions. During a time when more people are taking mushrooms and ayahuasca than ever before and coming to very similar insights as Mack’s abductees, would we be more receptive to his ideas of aliens expanding human consciousness in order to enlighten and transform our species, so that we can save ourselves from ourselves?
In 1999, he wrote in Passports to the Cosmos: “We seem to be experiencing now in the United States, and more or less throughout Western culture, a kind of spiritual renaissance. It reflects a deep hunger for something missing in the lives of many people, a sense, however vague, that there are other realms from which they feel cut off, and a growing realization that many of the catastrophic events of this century now ending have derived from radical secularism and spiritual emptiness.” Perhaps Mack himself was part of the cosmic correction, opening the mainstream’s mind to a whole world of transpersonal possibilities. “He was a big catalyst for the whole conversation being in the mainstream,” says Callimanopulos. “Maybe if he lived longer, he might have gone on to do a little more mapping of those different dimensions.”
About the Author
Michelle Janikian is a journalist focused on drug policy, trends, and education. She’s the author of Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion, and her work has also been featured in Playboy, DoubleBlind Mag, High Times, Rolling Stone and Teen Vogue. One of her core beliefs is that ending the prohibition of drugs can greatly benefit society, as long as we have harm reduction education to accompany it. Find out more on her website: www.michellejanikian.com or on Instagram @michelle.janikian.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle and Joe have a discussion about spirituality and spiritual development.
Joe was rubbed the wrong way by a podcast he recently listened to where a previously very psychedelic-oriented Qabalist said that psychedelics didn’t really help with spiritual growth. This leads to a discussion built on many questions: what is spiritual development? What is enlightenment? Does drug-taking always need a set intention based on growth? Do “I need a break from bullshit” or “I want to have fun with my friends” count as intentions? And who are we worried will discredit or judge us for having those be our intentions or keys to spiritual development?
They also touch on religion and their embedded spiritual goals, the importance and power of the communal aspect of some of these experiences, the community that church brings to people and what’s changing as more people move away from religion, hypnosis and the dangers of inaccurate or entirely fabricated “memories,” the importance of diversifying your tools for growth, the trouble in trying to define shamanism, the problems with therapists and facilitators bringing their own frameworks into sessions rather than letting clients define their own experience, and the unfortunate passing of the Fungi Academy’s Oliver Merivee (fundraiser link below).
Lastly, they remind us that there are only a few spots left for the upcoming Navigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Therapists class, which begins on January 7th. If you’ve been considering taking the class, what better time than the new year to take that step? Time to leave 2020 behind and step into 2021 with purpose! Happy New Year!
Notable Quotes
“The thing that had me keep coming back to breathwork is that sense of community. And I think a lot of people start to find their community in these medicine spaces and ayahuasca circles and whatnot, because you’re having an experience together and being able to explore and share that, and sometimes these are so vulnerable and so deep experiences- you’re together with a bunch of strangers and you feel like you just shared things or experienced things that you never really experienced with the closest people in your life. And somehow, that creates a sense of meaning or connection that is hard to find elsewhere. It’s interesting to really kind of view the community or community aspect as part of spirituality, in a sense.” -Kyle
“It’s interesting to hear people have these experiences and then have a facilitator say, ‘Yes, that’s what happened to you.’ How do you know? I don’t know. I’ve had plenty of these past life experiences and I have no idea if that was actually real.” -Kyle “Of course this is a complicated topic, and really messy. We wouldn’t have this many episodes of the podcast if it wasn’t.” -Joe
In this episode, Joe interviews Medical Director of the Kuya Institute for Transformational Medicine, consultant to Onnit Labs, consultant to several international treatment centers, and author of one of Joe’s most referenced books, The Concussion Repair Manual, Dr. Dan Engle.
Engle is quite knowledgeable when it comes to concussions and traumatic brain injuries and the brain’s ability to heal. He specializes in psychiatry, neurology, peak performance methods, and healing through regenerative and plant medicines. He talks about the sadly very different stories of his siblings, the factors that affect neurological resiliency, the need for establishing neurological performance baselines for athletes, the science behind CBD being a neuro-protectant, the safety and efficacy of psilocybin, how scaling research can dilute data, the importance of dipping one’s toes into non-ordinary states of consciousness before trying psychedelics, how we seem to have hit a new phase of learning more about preparation, and how not trying to achieve transcendence is suppressing a biological need.
Notable Quotes
“It’s fascinating that, in the midst of this medical movement, we’re seeing both of these fields of medicine, in parallel, gain more and more traction- this being the psychedelic medical arena, which is more psychological-based in nature, and then you have the neurologic concussion repair arena [that’s] more hardware, brain-tissue based. So you’ve got, now, software and hardware technologies in two parallel medical paths, both accelerating at the same time, with this intermediary bridge between those two fields, which is the psychedelics.” “There’s a lot of interest, there’s a huge demand, the data’s very good, and when done well, there can be a pretty significant profit margin. And so, it still comes down to: the primary focus has to be client care and client outcome, not a profit-driven model.” “When you prepare people well, for sure, you see this magnificent improvement in rates of response, recovery, whether you’re going for healing something like one of those epidemics I mentioned, or just optimization and fulfillment and the radical remembering of our awesomeness and what we’ve come to be a part of. At that point, the whole game has changed. The whole game of life just has changed from scarcity to abundance, from ‘what I have to’ to ‘what I get to,’ from the ‘me, mine and I,’ to the ‘us, the we, and the all.’ This is a shift in consciousness. It’s a shift at the level of the psyche, and psyche means soul, so this is a process where we reconnect with the deeper aspect of our inherent humanity, and no agent on the planet is as consistently predictive to support that process than psychedelics. Near-death experience can do that, but it’s not as easy to control that process.” “We’re always evolving, individually and collectively, and these psychedelic medicines, when done well- these are sparks. They’re ignitors. They’re catalysts of consciousness.”
Dr. Dan Engle is a psychiatrist with a clinical practice that combines aspects of regenerative medicine, psychedelic research, integrative spirituality, and peak performance. His medical degree is from the University of Texas at San Antonio. His psychiatry residency degree is from the University of Colorado in Denver, and his child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship degree is from Oregon Health & Science University. Dr. Engle is an international consultant to several global healing centers facilitating the use of long-standing indigenous plant medicines for healing and awakening. He is the Founder and Medical Director of Kuya Institute for Transformational Medicine in Austin, Texas; Full Spectrum Medicine, a psychedelic integration and educational platform; and Thank You Life, a non-profit funding stream supporting access to psychedelic therapies. Dr. Engle is the author of The Concussion Repair Manual: A Practical Guide to Recovering from Traumatic Brain Injuries, as well as his new book, A Dose of Hope: A Story of MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy.
Disclaimer
The information provided in this podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical advice. The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical recommendation, diagnosis, or treatment. The use of information in this podcast is at one’s own discretion, and is not an endorsement of use given the complexity inherent in these medicines, and the current variable widespread illegality of their usage.
In today’s Christmas episode of Solidarity Friday, Kyle and Joe take a break from the news and instead sit down with Jonas Di Gregorio and Kristina Soriano of the Psychedelic Literacy Fund, a donor-advised fund working to raise money and co-finance the translation and publication of the most important books on psychedelic therapy into a variety of different languages.
Their first project is both volumes of Stan Grof’s The Way of the Psychonaut, which they hope to have translated into German, French, and Italian by July (for Grof’s 90th birthday), and they have started a list of future projects, with Christopher Bache’s LSD and the Mind of The Universe likely next. They talk about early interactions with Rick Doblin, why they went with a donor-advised fund rather than a crowdfunding model, the synchronicities they saw at early steps in their path, what Grof’s work has meant to them, and a possible future goal of setting up a Grof museum in Prague. Kyle and Joe also share stories of their interactions with Grof and how his work (and how little he was being discussed) led to the beginnings of Psychedelics Today 4 years ago.
If you’re feeling some holiday generosity and want to help more people gain the knowledge Grof has brought to so many, please visit Psychedelicliteracy.org and make a donation (or volunteer translation services or suggest future projects).
Lastly, if you celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas from Psychedelics Today!
Notable Quotes
“We have an inherently global mission. We’re an Italian and a Philippino living in America, trying to translate the work of a Czech psychiatrist.” -Kristina
“For me, it’s his capacity to really connect different fields, from quantum physics to psychiatry, [to the] history of religion- it’s really remarkable. The depth of his knowledge is so wide, and I think it can speak to so many people coming from different fields. I remember as a teenager, sharing the content of the books by Grof with friends that were studying physics and friends who were studying philosophy and friends who were studying psychology, and all of them could find something they could really appreciate.” -Jonas
“A book can be a harm reduction tool. …Just having a book at the right time can really help you integrate a difficult experience and change the course of your life. Definitely, this has been the case for me. I didn’t know anyone in my community at the time that could really guide me, and these books played that role.” -Jonas
“Especially now, there’s a lot of conversation about diversity- how to increase diversity in the psychedelic community. Maybe the way to do that is literally to speak their language.” -Jonas
“I think the mental health crisis isn’t language-specific. I think it happens everywhere.” -Kristina
Husband-and-wife team, Jonas Di Gregorio and Kristina Soriano, established the Psychedelic Literacy Fund: a donor-advised fund managed by Rudolf Steiner Foundation Social Finance in San Francisco. Their vision is to connect with other donors passionate about supporting the translation of books about psychedelic therapy in different languages.
Kristina Soriano holds a Masters Degree in Healthcare Administration from Trinity University. A classically trained pianist, she is the patient relations manager at a boutique doctors office in San Francisco. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the Women’s Visionary Congress.
Jonas Di Gregorio comes from an Italian family of publishers, Il Libraio Delle Stelle. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy from La Sapienza University of Rome. He co-produced the documentary The Psychedelic Renaissance.
In this episode, Joe interviews “Car Bomb”- the 9-year NHL veteran, 2-time Stanley Cup winner (as a member of the Chicago Blackhawks), founder of The Chapter Five Foundation (an organization helping athletes transition into post-sports life), and advocate for the healing power of psilocybin, Daniel Carcillo.
Carcillo tells the story of his struggles and depression brought on from post-hockey life transition, 7 diagnosed concussions, and the death of his good friend and fellow player, Steve Montador, who struggled with similar issues before his sudden death in 2015. He talks about the stress of pro sports and the cult-like, team-first attitude in hockey, the hazing athletes experience coming up, the causes and effects of yelling coaches and a “be better” attitude, and how his post-hockey work and speaking out has ostracized him from the community while many people are reaching out to him for help behind the scenes.
His first hero dose of psilocybin forever changed his life, but it wasn’t just psilocybin- he’s done a lot in the 5 years since that first ceremony, from neurofeedback, acupuncture, deprivation tanks, and using a gyrostim, to regularly microdosing, taking medicinal mushrooms like lion’s mane and reishi, meditating, starting a CBD and supplements company, and growing huge crops of cannabis. He talks about how this has all helped improve his life and his relationships with his family, and what he hopes to do with his Chapter Five Foundation and beyond- researching more into what worked for him and developing a protocol/regiment to help people affected by concussions, post-concussive syndrome, TBIs, CTE, or just those struggling with what to do after sports.
Notable Quotes
“I’m an advocate for everything, for all tiers. I’m an advocate for the Decrim Nature [model] because it’s a lower-tier model to get people this medicine, and then I’m an advocate for the clinical model that people are pushing forward in Oregon, and I’m an advocate for these big pharma/biotech companies coming out and researching. …You really have to make sure that we’re doing it the right way, and I think a lot of the companies out there are, so I think there’s such an opportunity at the ground floor right now to really get in, and if you have something that’s proven, that’s worked (like we do), then I really, really just feel so passionately about furthering that type of research, to again, get millions of people this type of treatment and this type of option.” “It’s still kind of unbelievable when I begin to talk about it, kind of what I’ve set in motion, but I believe in it so much and I’m still really in awe of what this medicine has done for me. We have one life to live. How do I help the most people that I can?”
“I just had to adjust my whole perspective and thinking and how I spoke to myself, changing the negative motivation to positive. But it’s constant work, because I’m just so used to being yelled at and then [being negative towards myself]. It’s definitely one of the biggest shifts that I’ve had, and I had that shift- that was at 2 and a half months after that big ceremony. That’s where I knew- that’s what really convinced me, and I’ll never forget this: I was driving out to my plants and they were about, I don’t know, 3 feet tall, and we were about 2 and a half months in, and I was like, ‘Wow Dan, really good job.’ I had this voice say that and I was like, ‘What the hell was that? Where did that come from?’ I’ve never done that, ever, and I was like ‘Ohhh man, something happened. Something shifted.’”
Daniel Carcillo is a two time Stanley Cup Champion and played 9 seasons in the National Hockey League. Daniel experienced emotional, sexual and physical trauma within hockey’s culture and battled mental health and addiction issues during and post career. When he retired in 2015, after sustaining 7 concussions and due to Post Concussion Syndrome, he founded Chapter 5 Foundation, a charitable organization that helps athletes transition into life after the game. Daniel struggled with PCS symptoms like light sensitivity, slurred speech, insomnia, headaches and head pressure, impulse control issues, anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts and traditional treatments did not work. Daniel brought forth the Decriminalize Nature resolution to the city of Chicago, sits on the Decriminalize Nature National Advisory Board & the board of the Heroic Hearts Project, a registered 501(c)(3) non profit that connects military veterans struggling with mental trauma to ayahuasca therapy retreats. Daniel has recently founded Made Therapeutics, a life sciences company that is researching loading and maintenance doses of psilocybin to treat traumatic brain injury, Post Concussion Syndrome, migraines and TBI related anxiety, depression and PTSD. Daniel and Made Therapeutics will be working towards validating the first novel care option for TBI survivors through Health Canada (IMPD) and FDA (IND) clinical trials, with Pre-IMPD & Pre-IND meetings set to establish a pathway forward to fast track status for traumatic brain injury.
Wittingly or not, pharmaceutical companies are clearing the path to the next populist revolution in traditional psychoactive plant and fungi medicines. Although still on the horizon, reregulation is fait accompli. As decriminalization and rescheduling of plant and fungi medicines advances, the inability to drive product costs suitably down will fuel the existing black market. Illicit users exist and more will join their ranks as pharmaceutical companies create a customer base. While new understanding of these ancient medicines disseminates, the public will learn that plant and fungi medicine is significantly less expensive to forage or cultivate at home than clinics or pharmacies could ever offer.
Pharmaceutical Companies Are Protecting Their Interest with Patents, and the FDA Will Impose Limits on End-Users
Pharmaceutical companies are doing necessary and helpful work, leading the way with regulators. But their reign will not last. It is inevitable that a populist preference to procure psychedelics per penny will prevail. Profiteers have a problem: price.
Consider the effect on price caused by:
Federal law’s support of patent “monopoly.”
Health insurance’s slow adoption of psychedelics.
Investor need to recoup investments in years of research and promotion.
Investor hunger for profits.
Novelty, as the world awakens with fascination to something old as something new.
To recoup the tens-to-hundreds of millions of dollars invested in securing FDA approval and related patents, and then the expense of thereafter marketing their wares for a profit, the corporate owners of these future FDA-approved psychedelics are not acting out of principled charity or for the goodwill of all humankind. They are going to make their money, either in the pricing of the medicine or in the coupling of it to clinical services. At least in the early years, as the owners of these patents and FDA approvals try best to figure out how to market their products, it seems the inevitable price per dose will be multi-hundred dollars. Even if the price gets down to tens of dollars, nature remains tough competition- nature’s price tag of “free” is a tough price to beat.
Pharmaceutical Companies Are Not the Problem— But They Are Its Origin
This not a rant against pharmaceutical companies, capitalism, or therapeutic services. It’s far from such, and each plays a necessary and vital role in this story. Without pharmaceutical company efforts, there would be no story. This is simply an observation that plant and fungi medicines are nothing more than unrefined nature, metaphorically and literally as cheap as dirt. With simplicity of that sort as competition, pharmaceutical companies are going to have a tough time keeping the genie in their “bottle of exclusivity.” This is not the circumstance where a retort of, “If you don’t like our prices, try to manufacture your own ibuprofen” ends the conversation. With psychoactive plants, if you do not like industrial prices, you can easily forage or home grow for pennies or free.
FDA Approval Means Islands of Privilege and a Festering Public Resentment
Here is the rub: future customers who may initially believe it acceptable to pay high prices for psilocybin or other natural therapeutic psychoactives will be the second group to bear resentment.
The people who cannot afford to partake are the first to be left out.
The western industrial medical model is unintentionally in the midst of creating a psychedelic privileged class. If you cannot afford FDA-approved medicine, you will be left out. And if you try to partake like the wealthy people who can pay Gwyneth Paltrow prices, you will be branded a criminal. The difference? Pay your “tithing” to a corporation, and you will be alright. Do not pay? Well, tough luck on you, felon.
Who dares tell those who can’t afford this ancient “new” medicine not to turn to alternative sources, after science and corporate America confirm these plants and fungi are effective and healthy? Who dares blame those who correctly observe that contemporary science confirmation and corporate blessings do not themselves literally turn something old into something new? The fact that a corporate board finally figured out how to squeeze a nickel, or a politician found courage through campaign donations is not going to wipe out thousands of years of well-documented natural medicines and their effects.
Shareholders telling the public not to access nature, while slapping nature’s bounty with big price tags, is not going to sit well. The public will not long tolerate pharmaceutical companies touting the “added value” their little tweaks, concentrates, or clever packaging and marketing may bring. The public will inevitably learn that science did not give us psychedelics. Rather, science, in the name of politics, merely confirmed what thousands of years of human history have already well documented. The use of certain psychoactive plants and fungi to treat anxiety and depression is no more a credit-worthy invention than Columbus accidentally running into North America, and like a continent, thousands of years of history were not waiting for a contemporary politician’s approval to justify its existence.
Resentment over artificial financial barriers will satiate itself in a black market and home cultivation. The more pharmaceutical companies raise awareness, insisting compounds like psilocybin treat depression and anxiety, the more the public will want affordable access. Profiteering pharmaceutical companies are making a case against their own long-term interests. As modern cannabis has taught us, much like every vegetable at the supermarket, product price is a race to the bottom, and the vendor with the lowest price wins. Mother Nature, with her pesky ability to self-generate, and with a price tag of “free,” poses eternal and tough competition.
State Legislatures Could Be the Solution (But Won’t)
As federally approved plant and fungi medicines make inroads, there will be market-driven increase in illicit use- illicit being “illegal,” only because our current laws deem it so. Knowing this, the logical thing would be for legislatures to act and get ahead of what will become a problem. Make no mistake, it is coming. But most legislatures are too frightened of change, and psychedelics, for too many, represent radical change.
The political familiar is not the noble lion. It is the chicken, and rather than face their fears (and in so doing, master them), legislatures opt to ignore and pretend it will all just go away. My home state of Arizona is such a place. Three times, the citizens of Arizona passed pro-marijuana laws by public initiative. This election, a successful citizen initiative made Arizona the 13th state to legalize recreational marijuana. Although invited multiple times to craft laws, Arizona’s legislature took no action, forcing the citizens to do so for themselves.
A Better Solution— Introducing the Public Initiative
No one expects self-initiated reform from the federal government or from agencies like the FDA and DEA. One need only look to cannabis’ experiences these many decades. But one-by-one, citizens of certain states and cities are changing their local laws through a direct democratic process known as public initiative.
Public initiatives are citizen-initiated and citizen-driven proposals for new state laws or state constitutional amendments (sorry, there is no such thing as a federal public initiative). If enough citizen signatures are collected to qualify an initiative to be on the ballot, the initiative is added to the ballot and citizens vote on whether to adopt the initiative as new state or city law. For example, in November 2020, a few plant and fungi medicine citizen initiatives went to ballot, including Oregon’s psilocybin initiative, Measure 109, Arizona’s recreational cannabis initiative, Smart & Safe Arizona, and District of Columbia’s Initiative 81. All were successful- a historic first in U.S. history.
Even though state initiatives do not change federal law, changes in state law take off some pressure, reduce individual criminal entanglements, and allow for experimentation of policy reform. Plus, public initiatives garner the attention of other states and the federal government, thereby advancing the dialogue of reform.
Citizens of states with no public initiative
laws are in a tougher place. They must resort to lobbying and campaigning for
office to make these changes. But maybe those of us in states with public
initiative laws can help at home. Plus, there is no reason a uniform model
plant and fungi medicine act could not similarly be adopted by state
legislatures. After all, the goal of a public initiative is to create laws upon
which a majority of citizens agree. Any well-worded initiative good enough for
a public vote could as easily be adopted inside a legislature.
Do Not Move a Mountain One Pebble at a Time
Although an initiative’s success at the ballot box is important, the progress it brings is slow, local, and piecemeal. There is a better way. Citizens can join forces and campaign with a uniform initiative that could be introduced simultaneously in multiple states and flip the country in one election.
As seen with cannabis, successful initiatives sometimes have a domino effect. There is every reason to believe that neighboring states will take notice. A well-regulated legal environment is apt to serve as the national model, and success invites imitation. Strong currents in law and politics favor uniform laws. They make commerce and predictability more reliable across jurisdictions. The unanimous adoption of the Uniform Commercial Code is emblematic.
Strength in Numbers
Imagine the buying power of shared campaign costs across ten or more states. Imagine the impact on national public awareness with campaigns running simultaneously in multiple states, educating the public about plant and fungi medicine reform. Imagine the favorability a well-crafted initiative will receive, if citizens across the country know they are not alone in considering change. A multi-state public initiative can attract and focus investment dollars from every national (and local) group with a stake in serious drug policy reform. In lieu of small and local, perhaps a national campaign will attract national dollars and national support from national drug policy, mental health, civil liberty, and similar reform organizations.
As results of the 2020 election suggest, there has never been a better time than now to push for impactful reform. A uniform initiative can succeed if it is thoughtful about cost and access, is patient-focused, is respectful of privacy, is driven by science, promotes responsible access and responsible use, and looks upon plant and fungi medicine as a health and spiritual issue instead of a criminal issue.
Remember there is no such thing as perfect law, and there is always someone ready to complain. Doomsayers can be placated with the inclusion of terms to address child safety, impaired driving, tax allocation, etc. A well-crafted uniform model plant and fungi medicine act can and should deal with the good and the bad upfront. A well-crafted uniform plant and fungi medicine initiative can curry favor amongst millions of citizens and be implemented in multiple states in a single election cycle. Swaths of the nation can tune in and turn on together, while implementing sound and measured policy that can start to erase the damage of the last 50 years of oppression and societal harms brought about by the Controlled Substances Act and the war on drugs.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle and Joe talk about what they’ve been up to in the last few weeks: doing drugs!
Kyle first tells us about his recent experiments with revisiting salvia (which is legal in his state) and how different the experiences were from his young-and-dumb experiments as a teenager- how smaller doses in more ceremonial settings with years of experience in breathwork-inspired non-ordinary states of consciousness helped him see salvia differently. He talks about feeling like he just met the spirit of salvia, and the first message was to “respect the plants.” He may be seeing her again.
And Joe talks in-depth about his experience last Friday with his first intramuscular ketamine injection- the setting, the music (Sigur Rós- good call, Joe), the dose and timing, and what he heard and felt (and didn’t) in his ultimately anxiety-relieving, body-dissolving time in an empty void. Like Kyle, he’s now even more open to and supportive of ketamine after the experience.
And they also talk about a new ibogaine analog that was recently created called tabernanthalog (or TBG), of which a single injection helped against heroin use relapse in mice for 14 days and doesn’t stimulate the brain’s reward centers. And they talk about the good that could come from the drug-designing technique used to create it, called function-oriented synthesis.
Notable Quotes
“Some people tell me they like 1.2 mg/kg. Some people even like to go as high as 2. I think 2 mg/kg is essentially like, they could harvest all your organs and you wouldn’t notice one bit. Based on how high and dissociated I was, they probably could have done it to me- if they made it quick, like 5 minutes. I probably would have been fine.” -Joe
“The way I always framed it before going in was: this is an experience of consciousness without identity, without ego, without anything, really. And I didn’t really feel like there was anything there that was me. The idea of ‘Joe’ felt like a weird thing, a weird silly thing. There was just, like, I and ego and one consciousness, so it wasn’t like a Hindu, bliss consciousness thing; it was like me, as an entity, experiencing… something. Like empty void.” -Joe
“This experience was really just fascinating, like how rapidly my consciousness changed. It wasn’t a hurried, frenetic thing like DMT. It was like, “Oh, nope. You’re just here. You’re chilling. You’re not going anywhere.” -Joe “The MAPs protocol is going to be very expensive. Psychedelic Therapy is already very expensive. So, if we could have a drug that would be safe for somebody to take at home, alone, I think of course we should do that. Not everything is cured through the psychedelic experience. Though a lot of things can be, it’s not the case that everything needs to be.” -Joe
In this episode, Joe interviews Dr. Naveen Thomas of Clarity Psychiatry in Boulder, Colorado.
Naveen first discusses what he initially looks for in patients (low-lying fruit like a vitamin D deficiency or poor diet) and what he recommends for boosting immunity and improving overall health, then this becomes a bit of an “everything you ever wanted to know about ketamine and ketamine-assisted therapy” podcast.
He talks about the range in treatment methods across conventional models and what you could expect to experience in relation to dose, experience, and price, and how he likes to use ketamine in his practice. And he talks about the dependence that can come from more conventional “get dripped” methods, the variation of doses and subsequent effects on most people vs. more sensitive people, ways to calibrate a patient to give them the best (and safest) possible experience, the missed opportunities of models that don’t spend as much time on the experience and integration, why he believes so strongly in the efficacy and safety of ketamine (especially when compared to other psychedelics), and why how he’d like to see breathwork be used more in conjunction with both psychedelic and traditional therapies.
Notable Quotes
“In the worldview of the way I was trained, the whole point of ketamine therapy is not to get somebody hooked on ketamine for the rest of their life. It’s to give them enough corrective expanded experiences of healing and of their own inherent wholeness that they don’t need the ketamine- that whatever was off-balance is coming right.” “I’d like to maybe reframe the word ‘dissociative.’ With ketamine, chemically, in the ketamine state, we are becoming less and less in tune with outside sensory input. We are dissociating with ourselves as a body, temporarily, to some degree. And we are associating with ourselves as something other than body. And there’s some real- I’m just going to go ahead and use the word- there’s some real magic in that possibly. There’s some real healing potential.”
“One of the final common pathways, shall we say, of any medicine or technique that can induce a non-ordinary state is temporarily softening the ruminative negative self-narrative that’s so characteristic of human suffering and mental illness. And how you achieve that state, in some ways, is potentially not even that important. …Holotropic breathwork, or what I call journey breathwork, in any of its forms, absolutely can soften that egoic function and give people access to the parts of themselves that are bigger than that negative self-narrative, and just to bask in the juiciness of what’s possible when that happens. …And I think from a pragmatic standpoint, if we were to use breathwork as [an] interim integration tool between sessions, could we get away with maybe slightly decreasing the frequency of the more expensive psychedelic sessions? Might there be societal value in that while still retaining the efficacy and the self-learning and the insights and all the good stuff that goes along with that?”
Dr. Thomas graduated from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He completed his medical school training at Emory University School of Medicine. He then went on to complete his post graduate psychiatric residency training at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle and Joe sit down and discuss several topics in the news.
First, they congratulate co-founder of Psymposia, President of Adelia, and friend of Psychedelics Today (and first podcast guest) Brett Greene, on Adelia being acquired by CYBIN, for the equivalent of about $15.75 million USD (!!). And they talk about Silo Pharma announcing an upcoming Phase 2B trial testing low-dose psilocybin and LSD on the effects of neurogenesis on patients with Parkinson’s disease and how we often forget that psychedelics can help with physical ailments (and not just depression and anxiety), 17 healthcare professionals at TheraPsil being allowed to take psilocybin as part of a training program and the need for therapists and sitters working with psychedelics to have psychedelic experiences themselves before working with others, and rock art evidence of datura being ingested at Pinwheel Cave in California.
And they also discuss a very important article about how to keep the psychedelic renaissance from going off the rails. With so much excitement surrounding psychedelics and so many underground groups and professional organizations doing so much without any centralized control, it’s too easy for people to drain their bank accounts, jump ahead of science, and overcommit to an idea, forgetting the very real risks of these substances and everything surrounding them. And if we go too far, it just raises the risk of those in power shutting it all down.
Notable Quotes
“There’s a lot of nervousness around training, I think. Like, what constitutes good training? Not only is a ton of education, but it’s kind of a ton of time. The same way psychoanalysts have to go through psychoanalysis themselves, and therapists have to do therapy themselves, why is it not the case that psychedelic people need to do the same?” -Joe
“I think we need to be having some of these honest conversations even if it goes against our mission here at times of wanting to help get these substances legalized, decriminalized, whatever that track is. And [talking about] the promise of it, sometimes maybe we do get idealistic and say ‘This is going to revolutionize and change the world!’ but I also have to think back to some of my past experiences and be like, ‘Do I want to go through that again? I don’t think so.’ I mean, it pushed me out on the other side and I think made me a stronger person to some degree, but going through what I went through in those early years, it was pretty terrifying.” -Kyle
“Education and caution, I think is the point here, moving forward, and to be really honest with yourself too, especially if you’re in a place [where you’re] educating folks about psychedelics. How can you listen to other people’s stories and hear that maybe they’re not always light and magic- that people do experience a lot of fallout from it at times and things can get worse?” -Kyle
If we do not face the issue of medicine guide abuse with as much courage as the psychonaut faces the edges of reality and their own healing process, we would be missing an important opportunity to do the necessary work at hand for us in this realm. When else would we confront the Shadow so greatly as this past year, when fascism, a global pandemic, and ecological demise were no longer on the horizon in post-apocalyptic visions, but were instead upon us? As we begin to heal and recover from the last four years and detox from the underlying structures of oppression at the core, we realize all that is at stake.
The longing to be more connected and the need to create order out of the chaos of conflicting narratives combined with the simultaneous upsurge in fear of the virus, hate crimes, and political unrest, has created a swirl of catalytic enzymes with everything needed to activate a new wave of high-demand groups. In everything from the alt-right to the psychedelic underground, we see manifestations of high-control group dynamics, including charismatic leaders, propaganda, brainwashing, and the gaslighting of anyone with an opposing voice. Adding in the complexity of non-ordinary states with the accompanying loss of sense of self and agency, dissolving boundaries, and susceptibility, we have found ourselves deep in the psychedelic Shadow.
The current zeitgeist calls for a level of inquiry, openness, and capacity to withstand critique, without fear of losing the whole endeavor. We have an opportunity to refine, make the work more potent, and have more integrity and efficacy. This is the charge we have received: to name the ways that misuse of power in the guide/journeyer relationship manifests in traumatic consequences, to take actions to prevent future abuse, and help people heal from past abuse.
This article will explore the types of high-control group dynamics that perpetuate and amplify psychedelic guide abuse, dispel myths, and offer a healing path forward on individual and collective levels.
Demystifying High-Control Group Dynamics
I wrote this piece to better understand and to share about the dynamics that set into motion a cascade of loss of agency, loss of identity, and the inability to speak up and out against problematic behavior. We can understand it on a micro-level within families, and a macro-level with what we, as a country, are coming out of from the last four years. All of us, especially the most vulnerable, have been affected by blatant narcissistic abuse.
High-control groups (HCGs) are defined by the areas that are being controlled and by diminishing the will of the individual, while the affected person actually is manipulated into believing what’s happening is in their best interest. Or, in some cases, the perceived value of the cause outweighs personal needs, and their intuition and ethical compass can become faulty.
Steve Hassan’s BITE Model (Behavior control, Information control, Thought control, and Emotional control) is an entry point to begin to see the underlying infrastructure of HCGs. When we combine Hassan’s BITE model with data from Yale’s 1962 Milgram Obedience to Authority Study, Palo Alto High School’s 1967 Wave Experiment, and Phillip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, we begin to see how these forms of control and manipulation have great potency to influence the thoughts, words, and deeds of others in group dynamics.
In his book, Practice And All Is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, And Healing In Yoga And Beyond (Embodied Wisdom, 2019), Matthew Remski explores self-care and recovery while unpacking these dynamics, and cautions us to have discernment. The book’s final section includes a workbook for “better practices and safer spaces.” Janja Lalich and Madeline Tobias’ book, Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (Bay Tree, 1994), is a comprehensive reference on cultic mechanisms, paths to recovery, and therapeutic concerns. Its appendix, “Characteristics Associated with Cultic Groups,” written by Lalich and Michael Langone, is a useful analytical tool to discover if the group you or a loved one is in displays such features.
Lalich wrote another book with Karla McLaren called Escaping Utopia (Routledge, 2017), in which they share “the stories of 65 people from 39 different cults in more than a dozen countries.” On her website (which features her very helpful “Systems of Influence” checklist, McLaren talks about a common occurrence that happens to people:
“When powerful systems of influence are active, people may lose their sense of self, their critical thinking, and their autonomy – and when they do, they can be converted into obedient followers. One of the strange side effects of this process is that converts may begin to believe that they have free will, and that they have intentionally chosen to de-self and obey. They become true believers and lose any real awareness of the influence methods that reshaped and resocialized them – and they come to believe that they willingly accepted this personal transformation to be one of the chosen few. This seems bizarre, but it’s a crucial feature of toxic systems of influence and persuasion. And it’s possibly the most difficult feature for someone who hasn’t experienced it to fully understand. “
People get hooked through a combination of insiders finding out what they want and believe and offering them just that. It is essentially sales, and the lieutenants/recruiters are the best salespeople on the team. They may say: “You need to offer this to your clients in order to really help them,” “You’re special, and I don’t know why you’re just now being invited,” “This is your destiny,” “You’re perfect for our program/cause/community, and together we can create a better world.”
Then, one is broken down to induce further vulnerability on physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual levels, through methods including, but not limited to: overwork, lack of rest or nutrition, altered states, and cathartic and re-traumatizing processes. When one sees abuses or questionable behavior, they are gaslit or judged as being unwell in some fundamental way, and coerced and guilted into silence. Once a person has been broken down, they no longer have a will of their own- a new persona is rebuilt that matches the need of the group and serves as a proxy for the leader’s enactment of will.
A window into these dynamics- the allure and encroachment, followed by people awakening to what’s happening, leaving, and fighting back, can be seen in the HBO docuseries, “The Vow,” about the NXIVM sex cult. Be sure to watch it and consider the synchronicities you see between this group and other organizations, or even patterns in the rise of authoritarian governments on the planet, in various communities, or within family systems. It is vital to understand these patterns on both micro and macro levels to be able to tend to the underlying wounds that give rise to these structures and reactions, defenses, trauma enactments, and conscious or unconscious perpetuation of harm.
Psychedelic Guide Abuse and the Problem of Community Complicity
As the Shadow of Psychedelics makes itself more overtly known to us though lived experience and our holding space for those who have been harmed, it has become vital for me, as a clinician, to name and express these concerns- for the survivors, and as an advocate for the ethical employment of entheogenic therapies. Many topics arise from the depths, including appropriation, misuse of power, complicity through economic ties, and allyships with other communities as funnels.
The implication that psychedelics will be the panacea that will cure all the ills of our time on the planet may blind some to the problems at hand and the detoxification that needs to be done to make these practices safe again (which will ultimately be in service of furthering the movement overall). We notice, as well, the lack of proper training in how to honor and work with trauma as well as extraordinary states catalyzed by the medicine, such as Spiritual Emergence, and lack of oversight and accountability within communities (if they are underground).
Two examples of psychedelic guide abuse that everyone is already familiar with are the stories of Octavio Rettig and Gerry Sandoval, highlighted on 5-meo-dmt-malpractice.org, which displays the following open letter:
Join us in standing against psychedelic and entheogenic malpractice.
For many years there has been concern in psychedelic and entheogenic circles about what appears to be reckless, unethical, and potentially criminal behavior by Dr. Octavio Rettig and Dr. Gerry Sandoval in their capacity as facilitators of ‘Bufo’, the 5-MeO-DMT containing secretion of the Bufo alvarius toad.
Despite difficulties in gaining a clear picture of the overall situation, there is now overwhelming evidence that these concerns are well founded. For that reason we, coming from the psychedelic, entheogenic, and broader consciousness communities, have decided it is necessary to make this public statement.
A brief list of reported malpractices by Octavio include: dangerous sessions leading to hospitalizations and deaths; psychological and physical violence; non-consensual interventions and abuses of power; and neglect of people who have been damaged.
A brief list of reported malpractices by Gerry include rape; clandestine drugging; planting drugs on people with intent to endanger them; intentional overdosing; grossly unsafe serving practices; psychological manipulation; and financial fraud.
The collective consequences, apart from death, include physical injuries, psychological trauma, ongoing mental health issues, and shell-shocked and divided entheogenic communities.
For these reasons we, who come from the psychedelic, entheogenic, or simply the broader consciousness community, think it is time to take a stand. Now that these long running problems have come clearly to light, choosing to push them back into the shadows is no longer an option. Silence in the face of this knowledge risks making us complicit in any future abuses. It also risks completely distorting the role of this entheogen as it makes its way into the world.
We invite you to sign and take a stand with us.
Another example is in the March 3, 2020 Quartz article “Psychedelic therapy has a sexual abuse problem,” by Olivia Goldhill. In the article, Lily Kay Ross, who said she felt the need to leave her psychedelic work behind after speaking out about her rape by an ayahuasca shaman in the Amazon, shared, “I was told explicitly that I might single-handedly re-instigate the war on drugs and undo all of the advancements in the field of psychedelic research since the 1960s. There’s the idea that psychedelics are so important and so wonderful that the train has to keep going. We can’t slow down to get the rapists off the train.”
Ross will be speaking on a panel at the Psychedelics, Madness, and Awakening Conference in early 2021 with therapist and author of Outside Mental Health: Voices and Visions of Madness, Will Hall, among others. They will be sharing their concerns about the impact of psychedelic guide abuse. In Will Hall’s most recent Psychedelics Today appearance, he discussed the shadow side of psychedelics, and challenged us all to look into what our motivations are, and how they align to the movement’s ethics:
“What is the commitment? Is the commitment to get psychedelic drugs accessible at all costs? And we’re going to lie, cheat, and steal our way to get there? Or is the commitment to trust that truth is the way? And if we just stick with the truth, that is how we change society?”
Dispelling the Myths
1) These Groups will naturally self-correct.
False. HCGs are closed systems that self-perpetuate their beliefs and dynamics and create a feedback loop. Thus, they not only create homeostasis, or a balancing within that keeps things the same, but this homeostasis may also intensify as the closed system feeds back upon itself. In the groundbreaking book, The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision, authors Fritjof Capra & Pier Luigi Luisi have this to say with respect to feedback loops: “Feedback loops not only have self-balancing effects but may also be self-amplifying” (Capra & Luisi, 2014, p. 91).
Knowing this, we can see that by doing nothing, nothing will change. Many of us have thought that because the medicines are working in the ceremonies and sessions, they will help to automatically awaken and shift dynamics. For some, that is the case. For others, it deepens the trauma bonding them to the guide and HCG, and creates an even stronger disorganized attachment, which strengthens the reliance upon the guide and, by proxy, the medicine.
2) The abusive guides must not realize they are doing harm.
This is based on an assumption that folks who work with medicine are free from the traits that are self-serving, manipulative, or Shadow manifestations. Maybe these are unconscious dynamics/trauma re-enactments, or maybe they are sadistically harming. I will not participate in the othering, though, lest I fall prey to enantiodromia (a Jungian principle that states that over time, an extreme, one-sided tendency can unconsciously change into its polar opposite). But suffice it to say that not all guides and facilitators of the work prioritize the healing and service for the highest good of all beings in their journey toward wholeness.Their motivations might be financial or for power, feeding the ego that gives them that godlike rule over folks in non-ordinary, vulnerable states. How do we demand accountability and create the change that needs to be made in these situations? If it is unconscious, how can the gift of the medicines not intensify these defensive structures, but instead melt them away?
Can we lean into the wisdom of restorative and transformative justice to both understand the wounds that create those structures, and at the same time, keep those that are vulnerable safe from the abuse? Which part of this web of healing are you? Are you an advocate, ally, supporter, or educator? Know that each of us is needed to heal this together. And we must keep in mind and heart the words of Thich Nhat Hanh: “When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That’s the message he is sending.”
3) Others in the community, and outside of it, know and don’t care.
This myth stems from the idea that “nobody is doing anything about it.” We need to remember that the trauma which occurs while in non-ordinary states of consciousness is so profound and the recovery so delicate, we must not place the burden of transforming this issue on the backs of the survivors. We all must acknowledge the harm that is being done, and those who are complicit out of financial necessity need to do the right thing and disconnect their umbilical cord from the toxic womb. If the community complicity is bound to the group’s silence and secrecy, and has lost agency and capacity to speak out against abuses, then more support is needed. And more support is needed for those that do see, and when they are excised for going against the grain, they need to be witnessed, held, and cared for.
Because so many of the harmful communities are underground, there is no way to go to above-ground sources for accountability and ethical quality-control. So how can the wider community of psychedelic educators and healers enact the change that is needed? This is a question in process- in deep inquiry now, and I would love to see more discussion, panels, and think tanks, here and through other platforms and organizations.
A Way Forward: Ethics, Education, and Accountability
The amplification of the intensity of trauma within entheogenic extraordinary states makes the impact of guide abuse, gaslighting, and complicity much vaster, and the effects deeper and more difficult to recover from. I propose that there is a way forward, beginning by naming and honoring the reality of these experiences, offering a haven for the abused, and sharing new ethical standards, not only for the above-ground practitioners, but for the underground as well. This can be community-based, restorative and transformative justice, and peer-led; informed by open dialogue, harm reduction, and radical humanism.
Remember: Cognitive liberty is not only the freedom to, it is also the freedom from.
How does one resist these dynamics and methods of control and manipulation, maintain integrity in the sacred work we are undertaking, and therefore protect the safety and efficacy of psychedelic clients? First, do an inner inquiry into your relationship to power- others’ and your own. It is very likely that in entheogenic non-ordinary states of consciousness, that COEXes (layers of resonant trauma imprints) may re-create trauma enactments, whether you are the sitter or the journeyer. There may also be role-reversal, the unconscious’ way of balancing the scales. The Shadow activations thus may be on the continuum of repetition or counterpoint.
The guides must have adequate education on trauma, spiritual emergence, and emergency, be well-versed in transpersonal psychology, and have the capacity not only to validate the reality of subtle realms, but great respect and competence to work with all of its parts: entities, energies, possession states, archetypes, lifetimes, and dimensions. At a minimum, each guide must have a list of resources for trained trauma therapists, Spiritual Emergence Coaches and energy workers, shamanic practitioners, and psychopomps.
It is our ethical responsibility to maintain a clear and protected container for our clients. When a breach of ethics is witnessed, it is vital to intervene in some way to protect the vulnerable. Check your complicity. What keeps you silent? Is it livelihood? Access to medicines? The stream of potential clients? What is the cost of work if it is founded on harm, manipulation, abuse, and potential re-traumatization? Instead, bring curiosity, compassion, and humility to each session, and the courage to trust the Inner Healer of the client and the inner compass of the soul.
On a community level, we must replace these unwell systems of control with what Karla McLaren calls “healthy systems of influence.” She shares about the qualities of these healthy systems, which can help us orient when faced with HCGs or on behalf of others we care about. She says:
“Healthy systems of influence involve rules that make sense, clear checks and balances on power, responsive and respectful leadership, and goals that are livable and beneficial for everyone.
The system is democratic; all members have a say in how the rules and regulations are developed and implemented.
Members have the right to question, doubt, and challenge the system.
Checks and balances are in place so that the system remains flexible, responsive, and fair.
The system supports equality, and no person is above the rules.
The system incorporates fairness, justice, and leniency; no one is humiliated, abused, or shunned.
Members appreciate the sense of structure and discipline that the system provides.
The system provides a healthy sense of belonging and camaraderie.
The system helps members develop a unified group identity that does not erase their own identities.
The group encourages critical thinking and welcomes ideas from outside the system.
When a system of control is healthy, its structure supports and nurtures the people inside it. When a system is toxic, its structure crushes, demeans, and dehumanizes the people trapped within it.”
I would like to close this piece with a quote from Matthew Remski, who offers us hope and inspiration in the possibility of what he calls an “empowerment network:”
“The values expressed in an empowerment network directly opposed those in the abuse-enabling network, because the goal of victims and their allies is to deconstruct and re-distribute power, rather than to capture and hoard it. Where secrecy silenced harm, there will now be transparent speech. Where deception confounded critical thinking, there will now be evidence and research. Where power had crystallized vertically, there will now be a horizontal sharing of space and dignity… Harm is not inflicted in a vacuum, and healing is not accomplished alone“ (Remski, 2019, p. 242).
References
Capra, F., & Luisi, P. L. (2016). The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision (Reprint ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Hassan, S. (2015). Combating Cult Mind Control: The #1 Best-selling Guide to Protection, Rescue, and Recovery from Destructive Cults. Freedom of Mind Press.
Lalich, J., & McLaren, K. (2017). Escaping Utopia: Growing Up in a Cult, Getting Out, and Starting Over (1st ed.). Routledge.
Lalich, J., & Tobias, M. (2006). Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2nd ed.). Bay Tree Publishing.
Remski, M. (2019). Practice And All Is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, And Healing In Yoga And Beyond. Embodied Wisdom Publishing.
Zieman, B. (2017). Cracking the Cult Code for Therapists: What Every Cult Victim Wants Their Therapist to Know. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
About the Author
Michelle Anne Hobart, MA, SEC, AMFT is a teacher, writer, and Associate Marriage and Family Therapist at the Center for Mindful Psychotherapy. She trained as a Spiritual Emergence Coach with Emma Bragdon, works closely with the Gnosis Retreat Center project, and among other collaborations, co-facilitates Psychedelics Today’s Spiritual Emergence Course with Kyle Buller. She offers individual, couple, and group therapy, and leads community wellness workshops and retreats. Michelle graduated from the Integral Counseling Psychology program at CIIS in May 2018, she finished her second book, Holding Sacred Space in February 2020, and is in awe of the beautiful opportunities to support others that the universe provides her with through writing, being a therapist, and her other energy healing modalities. You can learn more at michelleannehobart.com.
In this episode, Joe interviews Ph.D., Professor at the University of Maryland focusing on economics and global business studies, Advisory Board Member of the Usona Institute and Synthesis Institute, and co-founder of the Transformative Capital Institute, Bennet Zelner.
Zelner discusses the problems with our current economic, healthcare, therapeutic, and community paradigms- that our prevailing model is one of hyper-individualistic, drug-first action, compounded by a crisis of connection (the epidemic of loneliness we’re experiencing), a crisis of extraction (giant corporations replacing local businesses with the bulk of profit being sent outside the community), and a crisis of depletion (decisions about community resources being made by those outside the community). And he talks about how his Transformative Capital Institute aims to facilitate many small changes to lead to large paradigm shifts, centered on his pollination approach- recognizing and encouraging the intrinsic interdependence between individual and community well-being.
He talks about the various projects the Transformative Capital Institute is working on, the way change happens and the complications of creating new paradigms from flawed ones, and how the pollination approach relates to psychedelics: using the newfound window of openness people experience after an experience to connect them with their community systems and surrounding environment- to help heal a person while revitalizing currently-broken systems at the same time.
Notable Quotes
“The pollination approach is rooted in a core, ecological principle, which is that the health of a system and of the elements in a system depends on the continual renewal and recirculation of resources within that system, and that’s the complete opposite of what we have right now.” “What you’re not seeing is the reduction in subsequent local economic activity that’s going to occur as a result of the few bucks you just saved at Walmart. One of the other projects that I’m working on with a few other folks attempts to quantify that so that people can see what the effects are of spending their money locally vs. spending it at outposts of giant corporations. And I think if we can make that information accessible and comprehensible to people, then we can change behavior without even having to build in some kind of strong form incentive.” “We’ve been taught by every institution in our society from the time that we are born that we’re not enough, that there’s not enough to go around, and in order to get ahead, we basically need to win at the expense of someone else, who loses. Even once we recognize how fallacious that is intellectually, there’s still a lot of work to be done to eliminate the deep, cognitive imprints in which that type of thinking is enshrined. …I think that psychedelics– as I said, they’re tools of personal transformation, so they can help people heal from trauma, etc. But I think they can also help people move into new paradigm ways of thinking and behaving.”
“In terms of shifting to a new paradigm in the healthcare system, I think the key shift needs to be one from a system that is focused on managing disease or managing disease symptoms (which is what we currently have) …toward a system that’s focused on producing well-being. And I think psychedelics have a big role to play in that type of system.”
Bennet A. Zelner studies the governance of economic and political relations. His primary interests include inclusive models of economic development, distributed governance, regenerative economics, and mental healthcare delivery. He also has a longstanding interest in the process of institutional change, which he has previously studied in the context of neoliberal policy reform and the diffusion of Anglo-American shareholder capitalism, and is now examining in relation to the legalization of psychedelic medicines.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, after a short and much-needed break, Kyle and Joe return, but don’t really touch on any news. This time, they have a very open conversation largely focused on philosophy and capitalism.
They dive into a lot of philosophical questions: are we reducing the mystical to the medical? Do we understand enough about spirit and somatic energies to measure them? How much are therapists and sitters interpreting mystical experience and assigning meaning to it for others vs. teaching people how to interpret it themselves? What makes a God? Is commodifying the sacred bad? And what makes something sacred other than it being significant? And the classic: What is good?
They also touch on Harvard School of World Religions’ year-long series on psychedelics and the future of religion, the Divine Command Theory, James Kent’s DoseNation podcast series, Charles Eisenstein and the concept of deflationary money, the billionaire pledge, triple bottom line thinking and other ways to incentivize employees to make businesses closer to co-ops, and why not all capitalism is bad. Lastly, Joe highly recommends Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring’s book, CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, which touches on MKUltra, the Phoenix Program, how the government used Charles Manson, and how the drug war was a logical consequence of the paranoia of the U.S.S.R. and communism toppling the USA and capitalism.
Notable Quotes
“Coming from the somatic world, our bodies- I think, sometimes we dismiss that and maybe might call that a little ‘woo woo,’ but how is your body an actual instrument that can help you understand maybe what’s going on? It’s firing a bunch of signals all the time, right? Information is just coming in and we have to try to make sense of it. Is it an appropriate instrument to try to learn how to discern the information that’s coming in? Could we finely tune that?” -Kyle
“It’s helpful to have diagnostic categories, but I think we’re taking the diagnostic categories a little too seriously and making them a little too real. A diagnostic category is not as real as a glass of water in your hand. One’s real concrete, one’s real abstract. Both are helpful at times. Both could be harmful, depending on what you do with the glass.” -Joe “A lot of folks want to just use psychedelics and escape the world, like the ‘drop out’ thing. Like, ‘I’m just going to be with the spirit world.’ But it’s like, what good is you being with the spirit world if you’re not having any impact on the world world?” -Joe “Being hubristic enough to say that ‘I have an answer’- that’s where I see the problem. Being willing to engage in conversation with people with a lot more experience with this kind of thing is probably where it’s at. Like, ok, let’s talk to 4-5 economists and see what their opinion is. Maybe talk to some professional ethicists to see what their opinion is. I don’t think anybody is going to have the answer, but by hearing all of those perspectives, we can learn more.” -Joe
In this episode, Joe interviews writer, director, and producer of the recent documentary, “The Way of the Psychonaut: Stanislav Grof’s Journey of Consciousness,” Susan Hess Logeais.
The film, which we streamed and presented a panel for back in October, was co-produced by Stan Grof himself, and tells of his journey from his youth in Nazi-occupied Prague to Esalen to today, with much of Logeais and her theory-affirming life story mixed in. It features interviews with many big names, including Fritjof Capra and Rupert Sheldrake, and full-length interviews can now be found on the film’s website; 2 of which are conversations between Grof and legends we’ve lost recently: Ralph Metzner and Michael Harner. It is Joe’s favorite film on Grof and his work.
Logeais talks about making the movie and meeting such big names in the field, wonders how differently children might grow up if quantum physics and a respectful agreement with nature were taught in school, discusses cesarian births and the differences they could create in fear or stress response in comparison to kids born traditionally, and talks about the power of breathwork and its enormous influence on psychedelic-assisted therapy.
Notable Quotes
“When I met Stan and heard him speak and heard what he spoke about- tantric science, mythology, Eastern spiritual traditions, even quantum physics, Shamanic journeywork- there were so many things that he spoke about that I had explored on my own before I met him. And then in the course of making the movie, I realized that he had introduced many of those concepts during his 14 years at Esalen. And so I was resonating with him on a level– it’s like he was impacting my life before I met him.”
On using MDMA with psychedelics: “Perhaps as an introduction to a psychedelic experience, especially for people who are older, it might not be a bad idea. I know the anxiety that I had occasionally when something was going really fast and very deep. But I agree with you in that the depth and that anxiety passes, and it’s in the learning to get past that anxiety that we develop capacity for reflection and to move away from reactivity. So I think maybe for the first trip, just to say, ‘Ok, this is what you’re in for, and next time we’re not going to do this.’”
“I just want to say how valuable I think Stan’s contribution is, and how proud I am, or how, I guess, grateful I am to have worked with him in the creation of this film. And I’m so glad that you enjoyed it because I wanted to take his theories, his discoveries, his contributions, and make them accessible and interesting so that people could watch it and come away with an understanding that would hopefully inspire them to then go and do the deep work. And I hope people come to the website and visit the live stream archive page so that they can gain a deeper understanding of all these amazing concepts that Stan participated in sharing during his time at Esalen and his ITA conferences.”
Susan holds a demonstrated history of working in the entertainment industry. She is skilled in Music Videos, Film, Documentaries, Commercials, and Theatre. She demonstrates strong entrepreneurship professional with a Interdisciplinary Degree focused in Transformational Entertainment and Human Consciousness from Marylhurst University. She is an actress and producer, known for Gone (2012), Not Dead Yet (2009) and The Way of the Psychonaut: Stanislav Grof’s Journey of Consciousness (2020).
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, the typical Solidarity Fridays format is switched up yet again, this time with Joe interviewing author of best-selling book, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name,and recent Joe Rogan Experience guest, Brian Muraresku. Because where do you go after Joe Rogan? Psychedelics Today, of course.
Muraresku discusses how his fascination with Latin and Greek and the 1978 book, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck) and its proposal of a psychedelic sacrament of sorts being imbibed at the Rites of Eleusis led him to spend about 12 years searching for evidence to prove it. From the idea of “graveyard beer,” to Alcibiades and the profanation of mysteries, to wine parties to interact with the dead called refrigeriums, Muraresku dives deep into his findings: that the wine they drank was, at the least, spiked with herbs and spices to create something very different and likely hallucinogenic, that participants were seeking immortality, a euphoric ecstasy, and communion with both God and the dead, that both the Dionysian Gospel and Christianity are heavily related to the Rites of Eleusis, and that these ceremonies don’t appear to have been isolated to Eleusis- that people took what they learned and practiced elsewhere, in what Denise Demetriou refers to as “open-access sanctuaries.”
Notable Quotes
“Some of the legacies of this civilization, from democracy and the arts and sciences to literature and philosophy and the very concept of a university- all these inheritances are the things that we associate with the very literate Greeks. And there stands Euelisis at the center of it all. …And they [the Rites] were seen as so important, so central, so integral to life at the time, that even Cicero, a Roman in the first century B.C.- he referred to Euelisis as ‘the most exceptional and divine thing that Athens ever produced.’ So it wasn’t democracy, the arts, sciences, etc. It was Eleusis.”
“They saw something. The thinking for a long time was that maybe it was a theatrical performance- maybe there was something happening in this temple that has been lost to time. And then that book I mentioned in 1978, The Road to Eleusis, was saying as long as we’re talking about a vision, why can’t it be something that was produced internally? Why couldn’t it be one of these great epiphanic psychedelic visions? And so, as a hypothesis, it makes sense just based on the way people talked about this experience. It was a once in a lifetime experience that essentially erased the fear of death and made these initiates immortals. And weirdly, which is why I picked this up in the first place, it’s very, very similar to the testimony that comes from the volunteers in the Johns Hopkins experiments with psilocybin. It’s again, a once in a lifetime single dose of psilocybin [that] seems to result in these profound, mystical transformations in people; including atheists, who will describe it as among the most meaningful experiences of their lives.”
“I think that there was a historical Jesus, and I think that we have these relatively conflicting accounts of what he was and what the message was in the canonical gospels that have come down to us. But we have these other gospels and this Gnostic literature that didn’t make it in The Bible, and the gospel of Mary Magdalene. And what comes across to me, time and again, are people trying to find ecstasy, people looking for communion with Jesus. And again, you don’t have to look off into all this esoteric stuff just to focus on the very simple proposition that the Eucharist is an immortality potion, plain and simple.”
Brian Muraresku graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University with a degree in Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. As an alumnus of Georgetown Law and a member of the New York Bar, he has been practicing law internationally for fifteen years. He lives outside Washington D.C. with his wife and two daughters.
In February 2020, Israel treated its first PTSD patients in Phase 3 trials with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. The trials are part of a research initiative conducted in partnership with the US-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), encompassing 15 sites in the US, Canada, and Israel, that is expected to conclude in the fourth quarter of 2021, in anticipation of receiving full regulatory approval.
The first randomized controlled trial of MDMA, the results of which were published in 2010, achieved an incredible 83% success rate in alleviating symptoms of PTSD, sustained over the 3.5-year duration of the study. More recent studies have demonstrated such significantly higher therapeutic results with MDMA relative to FDA-approved drugs for PTSD that in 2017, the FDA granted it a breakthrough therapy designation (BTD).
In 2019, Bella Ben Gershon, director of the Israeli Ministry of Health’s Psychological Trauma Unit, reported a 68% success rate for clinical trial patients whose PTSD symptoms were resistant to more conventional forms of treatment.
Considering the role of post-traumatic stress in exacerbating and perpetuating conflict, one way the US could improve its prospects for achieving a sustainable set of interdependent diplomatic agreements addressing security concerns in the Middle East would be to lead a Middle East science diplomacy initiative including Israel, Iran, and the Arab states.
A highly promising area of research to focus regional cooperation on would be the application of psychedelic drugs to the treatment of post-traumatic stress, which, over time, could be applied to countering violent extremism, security sector reform, and conflict resolution.
Political opposition to a US invitation to Iran should be reconsidered in light of decades of scientific cooperation on a broad range of issues between the US and the Soviet Union from the Eisenhower to the Reagan administration. Israel and the UAE’s more recent decision to conclude a peace agreement and engage in scientific cooperation, followed by a similar agreement between Israel and Bahrain (despite outstanding policy differences between these countries concerning the Israeli-Palestinian issue) set the stage for regional science diplomacy. Despite persistent enmity between Israel and Iran, Israel’s direct offer to the Iranian public to assist in water supply management, though lacking in diplomatic tact, further strengthens the case.
Though its many applications have yet to enter into the mainstream of international relations, psychedelic research based in prestigious Western research institutions such as Johns Hopkins University, New York University, MAPS, Imperial College London, and Beckley Foundation has made great scientific strides since the missteps of the 1960s and subsequent decades of government suppression of research into these highly intriguing substances.
One can envision a future, as close as the next decade or two, in which they become instrumental- not only to the treatment of mental health disorders that established medications and therapeutic techniques have, in many cases (at best) unsatisfactorily managed, but also to resolve some of the most complex problems of international diplomacy. Solving these problems will depend on leaders reconciling with their own trauma and expanding their empathetic and creative problem-solving capacities, all of which psychedelics have the potential to facilitate, depending on the openness of those who are courageous enough to explore them.
This is not such a bold proposition considering the broader historical and current context. Intelligence agencies, including the CIA, researched LSD and other psychedelics beginning in the 1950s (if not earlier) for their potential efficacy in interrogation and covert operations. Illicit drugs such as Captagon are being distributed on the battlefields of Syria to bolster combatants’ endurance and fighting resolve.
The highly unstable state of the Middle East and the demonstrated shortcomings of world leaders to engage broadly in effective diplomacy raises the question of why drugs should not be studied in earnest with the aim of applying them to psychological issues related to peace-building and international cooperation. Considering the existential threats to human civilization from cyber and hypersonic nuclear weapons and the callous disregard of world leaders for the destabilization of our planet’s climate, this is arguably, more than ever, a moral imperative.
As MAPS’ Director of Policy and Advocacy, Natalie Lyla Ginsberg, notes, “For millennia, indigenous communities around the world have used ceremonies and traditions involving plant medicines in the service and protection of intergenerational peace, and some communities continue to use traditional medicine practices for active conflict resolution. For example, in Colombia, councils of indigenous communities are joining together to hold yagé (ayahuasca) ceremonies to bring together those fighting on opposing sides of the civil war.”
Anecdotes of deep personal shifts in perspective, healing, and transformation have been documented in American veterans who have explored treatment with ayahuasca for post-traumatic stress- a contributing factor to substance abuse, domestic violence, and suicide.
In addition to ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms, there is evidence that natural psychedelics such as ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT may be able to catalyze healing from post-traumatic stress and related symptoms, as documented in a study published in the scientific journal Chronic Stress in July, 2020.
In an October 2018 segment on treating veterans with the empathogen MDMA, The Economist reported that the VA alone spends approximately $400 million per year on PTSD and other mental health issues. An estimated 8 million Americans suffer from PTSD.
Approximately 900,000 Israelis- 10 percent of the population- also suffer from PTSD, according to Dr. Keren Tzarfaty, MAPS’ representative in Israel.
Among the millions of refugees and internally displaced persons of the conflicts of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, vast numbers are susceptible to developing PTSD and some are vulnerable to recruitment by militant groups, in part, as a result of their traumatic experiences.
Psychedelics do not offer magic cures to the complex problems ailing our world. They can be used for nefarious and noble purposes and everything in between. As with nuclear power or any technology, it ultimately depends on how one chooses to use them. With wisdom and good intention, they may help us to achieve even deeper diplomatic breakthroughs that have, for so long, eluded us, in great part because they have so challenged our political leaders’ empathic capacities.
Thomas Buonomo is an independent political consultant with expertise in Middle East affairs. Much of his research over the last decade and a half has focused on how trauma associated with violent conflict can inhibit conflict resolution and, in more recent years, on how psychedelics could help increase the probability of constructive diplomatic outcomes. His writing has been published by Middle East Policy, Atlantic Council, Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Fikra Forum, The Cipher Brief, Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE)’s The Fuse, Cairo Review of Global Affairs, The Daily Star, The National, RealClear Defense, Informed Comment, The Hill, CQ Roll Call, The Humanist, et al.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, the typical Solidarity Fridays format is switched up again, this time with Joe interviewing podcast host and psychiatrist specializing in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, Craig Heacock.
Will Hall’s 2 recent SF episodes spurred a lot of conversation, and led to Heacock reaching out to Psychedelics Today to counter some of Hall’s points, and stand up a bit on behalf of psychiatry. He feels that while psychiatry isn’t perfect, saying to replace it isn’t helpful, and doesn’t feel that anyone in psychiatry is saying a pill will fix anything, but rather, that if psychedelics can help people get in touch with buried trauma (something that typically takes a lot of time and relationship/trust-building and often still doesn’t work), then shouldn’t we not only be treating them like medicine, but also learning as much as we possibly can about them?
He points out some of the most obvious flaws with our model of psychiatry (and how we deal with mental health in general), discusses the barriers stopping physicians from learning more about ketamine, looks at the “spiritual emergency vs. psychotic break” argument from a different perspective, talks about what he sees in his practice and how much ketamine has helped his clients, and really brings home one of Will Hall’s main points from a different perspective- while Hall talked about how science isn’t always the answer because of how much nuance there is from person to person, he points out the amount of nuance in how mental health physicians treat clients, how clients arrived at their mental state in the first place, and how differently they respond, both with or without psychedelics.
Whether you felt Will Hall brought a lot of interesting ideas to the table or hated those episodes, this is the yin to those episodes’ yang.
Notable Quotes
“I think a lot of psychiatrists are just trying to keep their head above water, which, I think, they would much more enjoyably keep their head above water if they would use ketamine in their practices.”
“We may never understand the mind-brain connection fully, but don’t we want to try?”
“We’re finding with ayahuasca work (a lot of psychedelic work) that some people are going to these sessions and their conscious brain is saying ‘oh yea, there’s no trauma,’ and we’re finding out that there’s some serious trauma that’s just underneath the surface. And again, if we don’t know that, how can we get to the roots of anything? …Almost like we use a CT scan to see what’s happening in your innermost self, it’d be interesting to think of using psychedelics as sort of a psychological diagnostic tool to say: ‘Is there trauma in there?’” “When Will is saying, ‘Why are we trying to address trauma with a pill?’ I don’t think any of us are. I don’t think anybody on the MAPS study or I don’t know, people in the psilocybin studies- I really don’t think anybody is thinking, ‘Ooo we’re going to fix PTSD with psilocybin!’ or ‘We’re going to fix trauma with this 150 mg MDMA capsule!’ Nobody’s thinking that. What we’re thinking is: this is a catalyst, [and] resources are limited. …We need to get in there quickly and get working on this, and that’s what’s so exciting to me about psychedelics coming online with mental health, is that we can get down to business quickly and not have to spend so much time trying to get past these defenses.”
“Capitalism is messy and psychiatry is messy and psychedelics are messy and people are messy, and isn’t that ok? Can’t we just accept that and not default to this sort of pan-negativism and finger-pointing and blaming? Because, again, we’re all on the same team. We want the same thing. We want people to thrive and we want to dial down psychological despair as much as we can.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Psychedelics Today’s first 3-time guest, Dena Justice of the Ecstatic Collective.
They discuss the ins and outs of something we’re all too familiar with: anxiety. They talk about how Western society’s lack of community and focus on doing things yourself (and not asking for help) mixed with a weird pride in being overworked and stressed has created a world where we all deal with daily anxiety, and deal with it differently. She first became addicted to exercise, but realized that learning to slow down, ignoring FOMO and embracing JOMO (the joy of missing out), having fewer goals in favor of more accomplishment, embracing play as a way of finding flow state, celebrating accomplishments instead of failures, and tuning her frequency towards happiness has helped her change her life drastically for the better.
She talks about more ways to combat anxiety, and her new program where you can sign up for these kinds of tips and tricks to be emailed to you on a regular basis (sign up here). She is also offering a valuable bundle of courses in partnership with Psychedelics Today, which includes 2 Ecstatic Collective courses and 2 Psychedelics Today courses. Use promo code: JOMO at checkout for a discount, and act fast for a significant discount, as the price will increase considerably after November 25th.
Notable Quotes
“The best thing you can do is learn to be uncomfortable.”
“Talking about playful things is just tapping into the inner child inside of us, giving ourselves permission to play. Go to the playground. Ignore the sign that says ‘this playspace is designated for 12-year-olds and under.’ F that! Your tax dollars paid for that playground. Go play on that playground!”
“Look at all these non-ordinary states of consciousness and how they tie in here- meditation, breathwork, exercise, early childhood (because that’s pure receptivity), psychedelics, every single orgasm. …Every single one of these things is putting us in flow state. It’s bringing us to the present moment, where anxiety cannot exist because we’re in the present. Anxiety is fear of the future, depression is being caught up on the past. …but when we’re in the present, all of that goes away.”
“Email is a tool for efficiency, not necessarily effectiveness. What’s effective? Real communication. I think a lot of anxiety comes from the lack of true communication these days. …7% of what our communication is is the actual words we say to each other. 55% is our physiology and 38% is our tonality. That means we’re losing 93% of our communication when we put it in an email or a text message or on social media.”
As a master manifester, Dena has created a beautiful life for herself. She been financially responsible since age 15 including putting herself through college, two masters degrees and purchasing her own home in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has made over $1M in her life through a fulfilling career as a facilitator, educator, trainer, mentor and coach working with thousands of people across the country. She loved her career, yet hit a point where she felt empty. Near the top of her career ladder, she was a classic case of a high performer and leader hitting burnout. She chose a powerful pivot out of her J-O-B and into her own business. Now, she helps other high performers who have hit burnout and are scared to admit they’ve hit a plateau or a wall. She helps them get the eff out of their own way and move to the next level to increase their impact so they feel fulfilled and inspired again, as well as helping them create more wealth and the relationships they want in their lives. She helps people experience new levels of success, increase/improve focus and performance, abolish FOMO, evolve communication skills, develop transformational leadership skills, create amazing relationships, increase financial abundance and live life on their own terms.
Working in psychotherapy with substances such as LSD, MDMA, and psilocybin in order to help heal depression, post-traumatic stress, or to overcome death anxiety has been the subject of many publications. Some authors, such as Stanislav Grof, have even gone so far as to establish new stages in human development. Just as Freud in his time conceived of psychopathology on the basis of trauma in the oral, anal, or genital stages, Grof postulates that certain behavioral disorders stem from suffering encountered in one of the four perinatal stages. In conjunction, both older (James Fadiman, Michael Mithoefer) and more recent authors (Benny Shannon, Eric Vermetten) have modeled psychotherapy settings that use work under psychedelic substance.
Our aim today is not to question these different approaches and their possible transferability to countries where the law prohibits such practices. Indeed, what are the implications regarding the relationship with therapists when working in a framework outside the law, which imposes secrecy towards the environment? What does this induce in therapy?
In France, the law prohibits the use of substances in psychotherapy. However, in our therapists’ offices, we receive people who have gone abroad to other continents to have psychedelic experiences (whether conducted according to traditional practices or not) or even to nearby countries where foreign shamans come to perform ceremonies. The people who come to consult in this context have either had a “bad trip” that still disturbs them, or are no longer able to reintegrate socially after a strong mystical experience, or, still further, want to understand and integrate what they have lived through.
This is “afterthought” process work that differs from what a therapeutic framework would have involved, with preparation prior to the experience, specific therapeutic support during the experience, and an integration (the phase where meaning is given, where the experience is symbolized) and assimilation (the phase when we are able to link this experience to all our past experiences and our history, enabling us to visit prior beliefs) of the elements that emerged during the experience. Indeed, the psychedelic experience induces a shock by opening up hitherto unknown spaces which the psyche does not know what to do with, or, if it does, it will literally cling to the visions that have arisen during the experience, even if this means being out of step with daily reality.
These people come knocking at our door because they know that in addition to our training as a psychologist and psychotherapist, we have been initiated into shamanic practices. As such, we are supposed to know all about this, or, at least, are willing to hear non-ordinary stories without limiting our diagnosis to psychopathology. Through this approach, we are asked to hear these accounts not as pure madness, but to take care of their experience as a salient moment in their lives, even if a painful one.
In doing so, the experiencers come to challenge our own reference grids and our anthropology. Applying a single theoretical reference frame as we usually do in therapy has the risk of greatly reducing our understanding of the experience, even if this frame of reference was based on the transpersonal current. From our point of view, Grof’s perinatal stages or the archetypes of Carl Jung or Gilbert Durand cannot, by themselves, sufficiently support the elaboration work required by our patients. We believe that elements emerging during a psychedelic experiment are polysemic. They must be looked at on several levels: symbolic, metaphorical, transcendental, processual, as well as on the ego and somatic levels. Each level can, in itself, feature several interpretations.
For example, if I see myself as a warrior killing the dragon to free the princess:
-This may symbolize a problem in my married life which is very difficult to solve (we talk about symbolism at this point, because in our culture, references to the warrior and the princess speak of couples, as seen in children’s tales).
-At the level of the ego, it may question my desire to be recognized by my wife, or manifest my need to be seen as a powerful man.
-At the transcendental level, I may be envisaging the influence of superior, and even very ancient archetypal forces impacting my life as a couple.
-On a metaphorical level, it could be interpreted as the work I have to do to channel masculine strength and liberate the feminine dimension of my being.
-On the somatic level, during this experience, I may have felt a lot of energy inside, which could point towards the fact that I have a lot of inner energy at my disposal to obtain what I desire.
-On a process level, if I follow through with my vision, it has me view my wife as a weak person in need of rescue. Maybe this reveals my thoughts on male/female relationships.
-And at the transgenerational level, it may evoke how one of my ancestors forced a marriage upon his family against their advice.
The symbolic and metaphorical levels can overlap, and it’s often a very fine line to distinguish between them, and not necessarily always useful to do so. However, it is essential for therapists to keep these different levels in mind so that interpretations can be broken down and not rushed through too quickly, for the sake of an immediate ‘aha’ moment that would obscure and eliminate all other possibilities.
At the same time, a single level of interpretation may contain several meanings. For example, at the symbolic level, seeing oneself locked in a dark cave from which no escape is possible can represent how my current life is functioning now, just as it can symbolize the overwhelming constraints which I am confronted with in my environment, or my inability to see my situation clearly, etc.
To shed light on our way of working, we offer below three very different clinical cases.
Marc is a 38-year-old man. He lives alone without any children. His mother died when he was 20, and he sees his father quite regularly. He has little contact with his brother, who lives far away. Marc has been to South America, where he tried mushrooms, peyote, and ayahuasca. During his experiences, he was given a highly spiritual task: to attain spiritual enlightenment and guide his fellow citizens on this path. He saw himself as having high spiritual potential and became convinced that this was his destiny. Unfortunately, his return home to France was not as smooth as expected. There were no followers to be found. His speeches were met with irony. He didn’t make a good Messiah. Disheartened and still convinced by the visions he experienced deep inside, he isolated himself and drifted into a state of depression.
When we meet him for the first time and ask him about the faith he has in his own visions, he answers that his mother had the gift of clairvoyance and that she spoke “The language,” implying the language used by Christ. So there was no doubt that he had to continue the work of his lineage, being himself, like his mother, a person different from others.
From a psychological viewpoint, we could make the hypothesis of narcissistic disorder, eased by an extraordinary ideal. This defense mechanism against narcissistic collapse, however, is undermined by the lack of disciples. The depressive movement is the reason for his consulting us, and not his psychedelic experiences, which he believes to have understood sufficiently well.
Initially, no attempt was made to deconstruct his defense mechanism. We looked at his mission and more precisely how he had come to this conclusion. Based on his visions where he had sensed divine power within and where he had seen himself conveying it to others, we came up with several other interpretations for each of the levels previously evoked.
For example, divine power was seen as a spark of life shared by every human being (transcendental level). It was no longer a superpower that he possessed and that made him into an exceptional being. Together, we worked on his representation of the visible and invisible worlds, and the beliefs attached to these representations; namely, whether every human being had a mission, who assigned it, and whether we all had some degree of freedom with regard to this mission.
We also looked to see if this mission could stand as a metaphor for the way his family functioned, in which one person was the leader of all. We explored his family lineages. Was this “gift” already present over several generations? He thought his maternal grandmother had it, but wasn’t sure. He could only confirm that this particular trait was not recognized by those around him. Rather, it caused exclusion. This was a form of transgenerational recurrence. He thus was able to see exclusion as something to be avoided and discontinued. We did not go any further on that level.
Next, we addressed the level of ego, in this case, the desire to be recognized, admired, loved, and to be able to guide others. Through this inquiry, he was able to let go of his feeling of being all-powerful. It reintroduced a notion of intersubjectivity that he was overriding. It was also a way of looking at his limits and of accepting his shortcomings, thus allowing acceptance of a sufficient level of frustration (in the psychoanalytical sense) to live in society.
We suggested to him to let his vision unfold to the maximum (on the imaginary level), push it to the limit, and see how that would be for him, and what he would learn from it. This is the process level. When we go to the very end of the rationale of “I have something divine that I must share with others,” it most often leads to a crazy, untenable position. In this situation, it could well lead to becoming a new Christ. Pushed to this extreme, he felt that it was not right.
During these experiences, he had felt full of energy. He told himself that it would be forever present in him and that he could rely on it for his new life projects. Working on the different interpretation levels allowed him to let go of the initial conclusion that had stuck him in an unbearable pattern. Working on his ego, he resumed humility, which, in turn, helped him find a job in nature that he easily adapted to.
Exploring the transcendental level through how he viewed the visible and invisible worlds set him back on a spiritual path that did not split him off from the people he knew. In this case, we can speak of a shock or intrusion that caused spiritual trauma. If psychedelics have been shown to open up a spiritual space that is helpful for the person, they can just as easily cause a form of trauma, because the experience cannot be integrated, thus locking the individual into an alienating dynamic.
This example shows us once again the regrettable absence of a containing setting when using psychedelics. Such experiments proposed in a different cultural context, with codes often unknown to us Westerners, do not allow the experimenters to integrate the contents of their experience.
The second situation refers to a person who underwent a bad experience using psychedelics with a sitter in a supposedly therapeutic context.
Simon had taken LSD. After marveling at the fantastic images and colorful music, he had found himself locked in a kind of hell with viscous, crooked, suffering beings. Some of them were obsessed with sex. Disgusted, Simon could see in these beings all the darkness of their souls. A voice sounded in his ears: “You’re just like them, just as bad… You’ll never get away with it… You’re doomed to stay here…”
In fact, until the end of his psychedelic experience, Simon would not leave this space. Very affected and upset by his experience, he shared it with his sitter, whose answer was: “The medicine knows what is good for you… Let this experience take you through.”
A state of depression ensued. Simon couldn’t bear to see this hideous evil forever lodged in the depths of his soul. He saw no way out of this condemnation. The darkness of the images he had seen on that trip had left a deep impression on him. He imagined he’d be stuck there even after his death. This state lasted more than three months without his sitter being able to help him any further. She was always evasive during their phone calls, probably overwhelmed by the situation herself.
It was at this point that Simon began work to heal his depression. We invited him to delve into the darkness he evoked and see how it was inscribed within. Through our elaborations, differentiation was made between his cowardice in everyday life, the fears that triggered aggression, the frustrations generating anger, and the possessive, predatory nature of his sex drive.
The darkness he witnessed during the journey was no longer a shapeless, slimy magma. In fact, each element of this hell could metaphorically represent an aspect of Simon’s personality. Viewed in this way, it provided a perspective to work with. By unfolding each element, we were able to extract him from the suffocating magma he couldn’t shake free from before.
This “bad trip” can be construed as an attack on the ego. The ego seeing itself in its darkest aspects with no hope of breaking out triggered the depressive episode. The attack on the ego also contributed to taking a good look at the reverse polarity: “Who do you think you are, to imagine you’d be free from negativity?” The process allowed Simon to identify his quest for an idealized self (being a good person in all respects), which cut him off from a whole part of his being.
His spiritual quest, as he practiced it, let him off from confronting his shadow areas. In fact, it really supported a cheap narcissism. However, it was actually through this soul-searching initiative that he finally was able to take into account the shadows perceived during his journey. He saw them as constitutive of all human beings, i.e. elements that everyone had to work on.
This transcendental perspective made him accept his shadow areas and brought him out of his self-condemnation that had frozen his being. Having to improve on these negative areas, as with any human being, brought movement back into his life. It also gave him more compassion for others and for their shortcomings.
At the process level, this experience was analyzed on two levels:
-The form of idealization that he held for his sitter was shattered. Through this idealization, Simon was looking for a knowledgeable figure who would pass on their knowledge to him. From the pupil being taught special knowledge, he became the grown man making the effort to search for himself. The fact that the sitter had failed to be of help forced him to give up his search for a master and to discover himself.
-The second level of the process consisted of pursuing his vision to the end, i.e. remaining locked up in this hell. Simon then asked himself who held such a power to condemn? Could God condemn a human being to such a degree?
Several hypotheses were offered to Simon on the basis of his spiritual beliefs:
-Christ (Simon had been raised as a Catholic) is a God of love and forgiveness. This is what He preaches. Simon could not see Him condemn in this way.
-Reincarnation makes us consider death a passage and not a prison.
-Returning to the original source is not what he had seen either.
Simon concluded that the only one who could condemn him to this hell was himself. He had to learn to forgive and have compassion for himself, which was quite different from a narcissistic drive.
At the same time, he had also associated the image of hell with what his father had endured during the war. This episode was never talked about in the family, and, as Simon saw it, everything about that war was censored in his family. Through his vision, it was as if that hushed-up part of family history was finally revealed. That’s how Simon interpreted it. Without talking about closer ties between father and son, Simon understood and accepted more of his father’s silence. It also opened up a whole new set of questions about his transgenerational legacies.
Working this way on the different levels enabled Simon to move out of his depressive state. This example shows that the medicine does not do the work on its own, contrary to what is sometimes claimed by some counselors. The qualification of the counselor/sitter is fundamental.
The third example tells us about a defaulting set and setting.
Elizabeth had been experimenting with a friend, Birgit. One day, Birgit suggested she should work with an LSD specialist she knew and admired highly. Elizabeth agreed, but some time before the experience, she got into an argument with Birgit.
On the day of her experience, Elizabeth was greeted very coldly by her friend, who quickly introduced her to the specialist before she left. After taking LSD, Elizabeth was shown into a small room, with a stained bed and deafening music. She remarked on the lack of cleanliness of the sheets, but at the insistence of the sitter, she moved in with resignation and disgust. After some time, Elizabeth got up and asked to move to a chair in another room. A power struggle immediately ensued. The sitter refused and, in a rage, Elizabeth physically grabbed her. Frightened, the sitter gave in. Shortly thereafter, Birgit reappeared. Elizabeth was beginning to come to her senses. Confused by the tense atmosphere, she decided to go home against Birgit’s advice.
This experience left Elizabeth in a deep state of unease and she severed contact with both her friend and the sitter. She thought things over without really understanding what had happened. Guilt took over.
A few months later, she signed up for a trip to swim with dolphins. Two striking events followed: a mother dolphin and her baby dolphin came to swim with her. Then, a hummingbird landed on her while she was lying on the sailboat in the open sea. These two events caused a shockwave. The discomfort disappeared and gave way to an old childhood memory of being in communion with animals. She had rediscovered the simple joy and wonder of her childhood nature.
Looking back with Elizabeth on what had happened, she saw these moments as signs of healing that her soul had granted her- an interpretation based on her spiritual approach strongly anchored in shamanism. This interpretation, based on a transcendental perspective, but also on a childhood experience, had reconciled her with life through connection to the animal world.
Yet there were further developments to the session. Her relationship with her friend Birgit changed. From a relationship of dependence, she went through a period of anger, sadness, and then detachment. She came to see how the emotional bond was tied in with a form of submission. This issue, playing out on the level of the ego, concerned all three persons involved. Each one was playing their part in the game (loyalty, displacement of the bond, and roles).
How the framework is set and how the setting (physical conditions) is organized will have a strong impact on the experience, since it conditions mindset and the inner security with which the experience is met: many psychic contents will be colored by those factors. It also underlines the importance of the sitters/caretakers overcoming personal issues in order to avoid feeding them back unconsciously into their work environment.
Thus the framework, which had become violent due to the climate of disagreement (above and beyond the mere dirtiness of the sheets and the intensity of the music), had, in turn, summoned Elizabeth’s physical violence. Realizing how everyone had participated in the unfolding of this session, Elizabeth was able to refrain from taking on all the guilt and to see what recurring patterns were at play in her relationships.
Curiously, Elizabeth had few memories of what she saw during her trip, other than her strong desire to admire the beauty of spring outside, from the vantage of a clean and quiet environment. It was as if the most important part of the experience revolved around what happened between these three people. In this situation, the process level stood out clearly. This episode also echoed on the metaphorical level for Elizabeth. It highlighted how the people who needed to take care of her had failed to do so, and how nature had made up for it.
The multiple levels summoned in the integration work (and their scope) require of the therapist a real freedom and skill in wielding the whole keyboard of interpretive planes, i.e. a vast opening to numerous therapeutic, symbolic, emotional, processual, transgenerational, and spiritual meanings, in the face of the infinite psychic contents unveiled in these experiences.
Through these three clinical vignettes, we propose a structured intervention framework quite different from what is applied in traditional therapies, and that we use when assisting clients with such painful experiences or “bad trips.” We insist on the polysemic nature of each vision and on the different levels to be explored:
-The symbolic level -The level of ego -The transcendental level -The somatic level -The process level -The transgenerational level
Of course, when exploring all these levels, some may not be relevant to the person’s experience. Yet we ought not be satisfied with the first insight singled out, which would lead to an overlooking of the other equally relevant possibilities. We have often noticed that by focusing on a first interpretation, one failed to question the ego level, thus avoiding an awkward challenge.
In fact, this type of work unfolds in time. Integration and assimilation cannot happen in the span of a few rare sessions following the stressful experience. Indeed, these bad experiences often confront our clients with hidden elements of their functioning, beliefs, or history, i.e. elements which they were not ready to face, hence the importance of in-depth support.
About the Authors
Denis Dubouchet: A clinical psychologist for 35 years, psychotherapist, and Gestalt therapist, he trained at Michael Harner’s Foundation for Shamanic Studies, and he has worked with shamans and participated in ceremonies in their countries. He is the author of Etats de Conscience Elargie, Psychothérapie et Chamanisme (Ed. Dervy, 2017). You can reach him at denis.dubouchet@gmail.com.
Rosine Fiévet: A Gestalt therapist and coach for over 20 years, Rosine first discovered shamanism in 1981 with the women of Okinawa. She now regularly travels to North and Latin America to explore the traditions of the First Nations people to support her practice in ancestral healing. She has completed a full course in shamanism with the Sacred Trust in England. You can reach her at rosine.fievet@orange.fr.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle review all of the big wins from the U.S. election, from Oregon decriminalizing drug possession and legalizing psilocybin therapy, to 4 states legalizing cannabis use for adults, to the most surprising (in terms of how far this movement has come), Washington D.C. decriminalizing plant medicines with an overwhelming 76% of voters in favor.
And they talk about the other side of this good- how Oregon memes show just how little the majority of people understand, how there are still huge issues with stigma, drug exceptionalism, and labeling, how liability and the rules of healthcare get in the way of compassion and humane treatment, and how those same issues will unfortunately extend into psychedelics.
They also do a brief deep dive into breathwork- its history, its various versions, its building blocks (accelerated breathing, evocative music, focused bodywork, group process, and safety), and the risks and likely loss in benefit in attempting to do this kind of work online.
“I remember just watching all of this stuff come in on election night and just thinking, ‘Wow, it feels like plants have really won the election here.’ …All of the initiatives that were up there passed during this election cycle, which is pretty phenomenal and a huge kind of shift.” -Kyle
“These different institutions have different rules, different liabilities. Like, a VA doc is probably going to be a lot more protected than a private practice doc, but the VA doc is going to be on a lot tighter regulations on what they can do, just based on the healthcare system they’re in. It’s a complicated deal. I don’t envy doctors for having to be in that situation. It’s really not an easy job. And I know they’re doing the best they can; it’s just, you know, their rules get in the way of their compassion and interest in healing people sometimes.” -Joe
“I had and still have a ferocious case of ADD that’s never been diagnosed. I’ve been extraordinarily productive if I ever needed to use something like Adderall. It works great. But there’s so much stigma around saying something like that in the psychedelic world. We’re often a little too judgy, is kind of my position. …There’s cases when it’s appropriate, there’s cases when it’s not appropriate, and as long as there’s informed consent and decent education, it should be up to the individuals, and we should stay the fuck out of people’s business.” -Joe
On breathwork: “It’s my favorite. It’s something I’ve been doing for so long that it’s my most comfortable, somehow least scary method of going inside and doing inner work, because I know I have this safe cultural container- a safe container with people I trust and love, and it’s always helpful and amazing. Even if I don’t get the experience I want, just being there in community is still medicine enough.” -Joe
In this episode, Joe interviews Ph.D., Professor at the University of Saskatchewan, and author specializing in the history of psychedelics and their relation to the medical industry, Erika Dyck.
Dyck talks about her interest in Canadian history and specifically Saskatchewan, which was the first jurisdiction in North America to elect a socialist government. She talks about how it was clear in the early days of governmental support that they were reaching out to people with bold ideas, leading to Humphry Osmand coming there in 1951 to commence research that he felt was being stifled in London.
They talk extensively about the work of Osmand and Abram Hoffer, early experiments with giving staff in mental hospitals LSD to encourage empathy toward patients, a hospital architect taking LSD and learning that tiled, checkerboard-esque floors may be a challenge to patients with depth perception issues, a “Hollywood hospital” where wealthy film stars were flown to deal with addiction largely in secret, the concept of having patients write out an autobiography before a medicine session in order to reflect back on their life afterward, Osmond’s participation in a peyote ceremony and his subsequent report, why the Timothy Leary model of dropping out of the scientific/academic world isn’t helpful, why time passed and changed public opinion have led to old research coming to light, and why it’s more important to talk to people who aren’t sold on psychedelics yet instead of those who are already bought in and live in our psychedelic bubble.
Notable Quotes
“Even people like Humphry Osmond or Abram Hoffer who were on the frontlines of that psychedelic heyday in the 1950s- they were quite careful (and obviously they were sort of practiced at this), but they were quite careful about how I might characterize their work with psychedelics, and they insisted that what they were doing was not unethical, they did not have money from the C.I.A., they had lots of checks and balances, and they were clearly responding to that very heavy reputation and characterization of psychedelics. And I reflect on that every once in a while, and wonder, ‘what would they would say today?’”
On Osmond and peyote: “It was the question of whether or not these chemicals and these rituals using chemicals should be allowed more broadly. And I think that the federal government in Canada was thinking that, again, this white-coated British guy would walk in and behave like the colonialist that they expected him to be, and come out and say ‘these are rotten ceremonies,’ but that was absolutely not who Humphry Osmond was. He participated fully. He chewed the buttons, he threw up, he participated in the feast afterwards, he participated in the drumming circle. …So Osmond then made a statement (and he’s published about this in a variety of different places) saying this was an absolutely beautiful ceremony, it was absolutely sacred, it should be protected, it should be promoted, [and] people should be given access to peyote so that they continue this sacred ceremony. And the Canadian government was not impressed with this reaction.”
“Our governments are addicted to the war on drugs.”
“I think that part of what the psychedelic world needs to do, in my humble opinion, is to reach out and seek these kinds of bridges and these alliances, because I think that there’s a risk that we can just convince ourselves that psychedelics are good and that it won’t actually break through the psychedelic bubble, if you will, to convince regulators that in fact, there is real merit here. There’s still a sense that– even just saying LSD- I gave a presentation last week to a group of retired physicians and these are people with medical training and who’ve spent their careers doing medical education and medical work, clinical work. And they’re like ‘oh, but LSD, that’s the one that fries your brain, right?’ I mean, these were disproven studies in the 70s, and yet it’s very interesting that that characterization is so strong.”
Erika Dyck is a professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan. Her work focuses on 20th century medical history, especially the history of psychedelics, psychiatry, eugenics and population control. Her books include Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus (2008); Facing Eugenics: Reproduction, Sterilization, and the Politics of Choice (2013); Managing Madness: Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada(2017); and she is editor of A Culture’s Catalyst: Historical Encounters with Peyote and the Native American Church in Canada (2016) and co-editor of Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond (2018). She is a guest editor at the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. You can email her at Erika.dyck@usask.ca.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle continue their conversation from last week with Will Hall: therapist, host of the Madness Radio podcast, author of Outside Mental Health: Voices and Visions of Madness, and previous psychiatric patient diagnosed with schizophrenia.
This week, Hall compares how the medical industry treats those seeking therapy and growth vs. how they treat the homeless and victims of sexual abuse, how the framework for mental disorders disrespects the individual, neoliberalism and why capitalism and the free market shouldn’t be the answer for everything, Grof’s focus on etiology and why his model of spiritual emergence is problematic, the future of psychedelic advertising in a world where anything that can be sold will be sold, and the 3 biggest factors towards successful therapy.
And he focuses a lot on what we should be doing: creating and promoting individualized medicines and healing techniques over mass-produced Band-aid medicine, not reducing a difficult psychedelic experience to biology and instead focusing on getting to the root of what is causing the issue and working through it, not solely researching the effects of drugs, and most importantly, researching how people have bettered themselves without drugs- if the long-lasting effects of psychedelics and integration work are the catalyst for change, how can we get to those effects and integrations without the drug?
Notable Quotes
“Drugs are drugs. I don’t believe in psychedelic exceptionalism. I don’t believe in psychiatric drug exceptionalism. Drugs are drugs. There’s no exceptionalism for drugs. If they change your consciousness, they’re getting you high in one way or another, and that is what is either beneficial or nonbeneficial to you, based on your experience.”
“The people who are having successful treatment with MDMA psychotherapy- they aren’t just reporting ‘oh, my depression is down;’ they’re reporting all these wonderful benefits of MDMA. Why should we wait until you have a diagnosis of PTSD to give access to MDMA [to someone] if they want to experience those benefits as well? The people who are having the experiences of psychedelics are not having the experiences of disease-treatment, they’re having the experiences of psychedelics, which can be, for many people, very positive. So why are we gate-keeping the access? And if we don’t gate-keep the access, then we have to admit that, actually, it’s not a disease treatment; it’s actually something that many people find beneficial and some people don’t.”
“What is the commitment? Is the commitment to get psychedelic drugs accessible at all costs? And we’re going to lie, cheat, and steal our way to get there? Or is the commitment to trust that truth is the way? And if we just stick with the truth, that is how we change society?”
“I think you’re onto it. I mean, this is the key thing- psychedelics, in the best of contexts, is the pathway towards that. So why not study that? Why not research that? Why not invest the resources to exploring how we can create contexts for that which you’ve just described- create more spaces in society for successful encounters and engagements with openness, deeper relatedness, developing more trust, learning to communicate better, learning to form better community bonds, learning to develop our loyalties for each other, overcome our traumas together, tell our stories, overcome our shame, find ways that we can accept each other and support each other? That’s what we should be researching. That’s what we should be investigating, not psychedelic treatments that might have the effect of this, because this is what we’re really after.”
Will is a counselor and facilitator working with individuals, couples, families and groups via phone and web video (Zoom). He has taught and consulted on mental health, trauma, psychosis, medications, domestic violence, conflict resolution, and organizational development in more than 30 countries, and has been widely featured in the media for his advocacy efforts around mental health care. His work and learning arose from his experiences of recovery from madness, and today he is passionate about new visions of mind and what it means to be human.
The 2020 U.S. election has brought several significant wins for proponents of drug policy. Presidential and pandemic madness aside, these wins deserve to be celebrated. Here are the most significant changes this election has ushered into law.
1. Psilocybin Mushrooms Have Been Legalized in Oregon
For the first time since they became a Schedule I drug in 1971, psilocybin mushrooms have attained legal status in a U.S. state. With nearly a 56% majority, Oregon’s Measure 109, referred to as the Psilocybin Services Act, has significantly altered the psychoactive fungi’s future in the state, and quite possibly the nation.
Psilocybin’s newfound legality in Oregon carries important caveats: mushrooms will be legal only within state-regulated “psilocybin service centers,” their use will require supervision by a state-licensed facilitator, a preparation session will be required, and participants must be over the age of 21. Thus, it would be more accurate to state that under the umbrella of the Oregon Health Authority (OHA), regulated psilocybin mental health services will now be legal in the state.
The OHA will establish the specific protocols- i.e. supervisor training requirements and dosing standards over the next two years. So long as universal implosion has not transpired by 2022, we will witness the formation of a legal service in the United States that committed psychonauts of the last many decades never could have anticipated.
So, Oregon will not suddenly become a haven for independent growers holding ecstatic dance bashes and selling their flushes to flannel-wearers far and wide. It will, however, set the standard for psilocybin-assisted mental health services in the United States. Given that the Schedule I label has long classified mushrooms as having “high potential for abuse” and “no currently accepted medical use,” a successful implementation of these treatment facilities could pave the way for large-scale changes in propaganda-informed prohibitions long embedded into federal law.
For the sake of a bad pun at the expense of one of two U.S. Presidents most responsible for these prohibitions, let’s celebrate Measure 109 as a loss for the Gipper, and a big win for the Tripper.
2. Measure 110 Decriminalizes Drug Possession in Oregon
Beyond the psychedelic-specific world, Oregon has made another huge move in ending the war on drugs with the passing of Measure 110. The measure, which passed with nearly a 59% majority, effectively decriminalizes non-commercial possession of small amounts of some of the most heavily penalized drugs in the country, including cocaine and heroin.
To clarify the significance, Oregon’s previous classification of non-commercial possession was a Class A Misdemeanor, which was punishable with up to a $6,250 fine and one year in prison. That has now changed to a Class E violation. Instead of potential imprisonment, folks possessing small amounts of these substances will have the option to pay a $100 fine or receive a “completed health assessment” at an addiction treatment facility. According to the measure, these treatment services will be paid for “in part by the state’s marijuana tax revenue and state prison savings.”
This is a huge win for those fighting the oppression of the war on drugs on several fronts. Not only are penalties far less life-destroying, but the state is actively shifting the ethos of criminality around substance use that has dominated the nation for decades into a model of rehabilitation and social service. Within this shift is the recognition that substance addiction is not reducible to moral failures of the will, but rather a mental health illness that often requires external intervention to heal.
Now, it’s key to remember the difference between “legalization” and “decriminalization.” Mushrooms, for instance, were famously decriminalized in Denver in 2019. This meant that they remained a Schedule I illegal substance, but the prosecution of their possession became the city’s lowest law enforcement priority. The potential ambiguities of this nuance were cast in sharp relief when Denver’s infamously boastful mushroom grower/distributor Kole Milner was raided by the DEA five months after the initiative’s passing. Milner was charged on one account of possession with intent to distribute, and last month, Milner pleaded guilty in hopes of reducing his sentence to six months in prison.
The goal in sharing this isn’t to freak you out or be a downer. It’s to remind you to be mindful and careful during this propitious phase of drug policy reform and evade the pitfalls of Icarus’ ill-fated hubristic flight.
A final implication of Measure 110 is that while psychedelics may be the substances of choice for readers of Psychedelics Today, it can be dangerous to over-glorify psychedelics at the expense of other drugs. Engaging in this “psychedelic exceptionalism” can unconsciously perpetuate and embed racially-motivated, propaganda-induced stigmas around “bad” drugs. As Dr. Carl Hart told Psychedelics Today, “It’s just wrong to vilify people for wanting to alter their consciousness and the particular drug that they use, especially when you’re doing the same thing with another drug.”
At its core, using any substance is choosing to alter consciousness. Measure 110 opens a big door on the long route toward making that choice an essential human right, while simultaneously recognizing and addressing the potential for harm that substance use invariably opens.
One of the most high-profile chapters of the Decriminalize Nature movement has been Washington D.C.’s Initiative 81. Yesterday, the initiative passed by a landslide, with 76% of voters casting a ballot in its favor.
The initiative effectively decriminalizes the “non-commercial cultivation, distribution, possession, and use of entheogenic plants and fungi” in the nation’s capital, a category defined as “species of plants and fungi that contain ibogaine, dimethyltryptamine, mescaline, psilocybin, or psilocyn.”
Initiative 81’s passing makes D.C. the fourth U.S. city to decriminalize entheogens, and the fifth to decriminalize psilocybin. (Denver’s Ordinance 301 was limited to psilocybin mushrooms.) As with the decriminalization measures of Oakland, Santa Cruz, and Ann Arbor, the D.C. initiative renders the enforcement of laws against natural plant medicines among the lowest law enforcement priorities.
The decriminalization movement’s continuing spread through the U.S. has not come without controversy. The Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative (ICPI) and the National Council of Native American Churches (NCNAC) have spoken critically of the decriminalization movement, citing histories of oppression and mistrust of these non-Indigenous measures that could further threaten peyote, their sacred and endangered medicine. In March of 2020, these organizations made a specific request that decrim movements remove the word “peyote” from their initiatives. While Initiative 81 mentioned “mescaline,” the psychoactive chemical of peyote, the phrasing appears to have respected this request.
4. Four States Legalize Cannabis for Adult Use
Cannabis is now legal for adult recreational use in four more states: Arizona, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota (South Dakota!). On top of legalization, Arizona’s passed measure will also allow for people previously convicted of particular cannabis-related crimes to clear their records. With these four added to the roster, cannabis is now legal for adult consumption in fifteen States.
South Dakota and Mississippi legalized cannabis for medical use as well, making South Dakota the first state to pass medical and recreational laws under two separate measures in the same election. These advances now bring the total number of states offering some form of medical access to thirty-five.
In their debriefing of these changes, the Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) wrote, “By 2022, we could end U.S. federal marijuana prohibition.” The fight to end the war on drugs is far from over, but each new policy is a crucial step toward an optimistic conclusion.
Looking Forward
2020 has been quite a turbulent flight for many, if not an intergalactic rocket on constant verge of explosion. All predictions of where the world is headed appear to have collapsed into cosmic uncertainty. Nevertheless, amidst the turmoil these curated algorithms of frantic news churn and sell, significant changes in drug laws continue to take effect in unprecedented propulsion.
With these new laws in mind, as well as MDMA-assisted psychotherapy’s legal forecast set for 2023, the landscape of substance use and normalization is shaping up to look radically different by the mid-2020s. Plenty of folks are going to need some help rebounding from this seismic maelstrom we are collectively navigating. For those who often sink into despair lamenting the global situation, perhaps it’s helpful to remember that these new options are adorning the tables of expanding possibility.
About the Author
Sean Lawlor is a writer, certified personal trainer, and Masters student in transpersonal counseling at Naropa University, in pursuit of a career in psychedelic journalism, research, and therapy. His interest in consciousness and non-ordinary states owes a great debt to Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, and Hunter S. Thompson, and his passion for film, literature, and dreaming draws endless inspiration from Carl Jung, David Lynch, and J.K. Rowling. For more information or to get in touch, head to seanplawlor.com, or connect on Instagram @seanplawlor.
In this episode, Joe interviews MD, attorney, host of the Plant Medicine podcast, and founder of the Psychedelic Medicine Association, Dr. Lynn Marie Morski.
She talks about her time working for the United States Department of Veteran Affairs and how her frustrations with not being able to recommend medicines she knew would help people led to her creating the Plant Medicine podcast, and how realizing that the podcast wasn’t reaching enough doctors led to her creating the Psychedelic Medicine Association. She discusses their goal: to bring organizations, corporate entities, lawyers, and practitioners/therapists (really anyone in the medical field responsible for the wellbeing of another) together through forums and newsletters to bridge the enormous gap between those on the cutting edge of new medicines and modalities of healing and the more traditional doctors who don’t know nearly enough about this emerging world.
She talks about her podcast and dedicating 4 full episodes to each drug, common misconceptions about doctors and healthcare, what it’s like to be both a doctor and a lawyer, doctors who judge patients for using cannabis and the disservice that is, the complications of what comes after the FDA approves a drug, what’s necessary for getting psychedelics more into mainstream culture, and the silver lining that could come from COVID and COVID-related trauma.
Notable Quotes
“It should not be weighing job security vs. saving veterans’ lives, but that’s really the position a lot of us are put in, and I couldn’t take that anymore, and so I left the VA and made it my mission to undo the years of silence by speaking out a whole lot about it.”
“FDA approval, for example, of MDMA or psilocybin, is just step 1. What do you do when you’ve got a medicine now approved that doctors are afraid to recommend or prescribe because it came out of nowhere? They’re like, ‘Whoa, psychedelics were Schedule I and extremely dangerous and ‘Don’t do drugs!’ and now I’m supposed to be giving it to a patient?’ That is a barrier.”
“We’ve known about the 22 veteran suicides, and somehow, still, things haven’t gotten done in mental health. Maybe because, again, that’s ‘other.’ We have this whole issue with others, right? ‘That’s happening to these other people over here.’ The pandemic is one of the first things in… ever that has happened to everybody. It’s not ‘Oh, only the poor get this.’ Nope. Poor and rich. Tom Hanks got it right off the bat. Everybody’s getting it. Prime Ministers get it. And a lot of people are suffering the same mental health issues from the quarantine and so, it’s no longer where we can say ‘Oh, mental health struggles are for others.’ This has hit everybody. …The suicide rate is rising for everybody. Mental health issues are rising for everybody. Is this the tipping point where the mental health system looks around and says ‘Ok, our tools aren’t sufficient. Can we start looking at these other modalities, including psychedelics, because we’ve got a second epidemic on our hands here?’”
“It should be absolutely crucial for anybody on the front lines of patient care to know at least the basics of these medicines. We’re not trying to get doctors to all want to do psychedelic medicine at all. That’s not our goal. If people learn about it and get excited and want to get trained and do that? Fantastic. But we just want a basic level of knowledge, and like you said, if just 20% of doctors knew, that’d be great. And then those doctors can talk to their colleagues in other areas. But that’s essentially the way that we’re impressing it on people: ‘This is coming. You, as a professional responsible for other people’s health need to educate yourself on this.’”
Dr. Lynn Marie Morski is the president of the Psychedelic Medicine Association, host of the Plant Medicine Podcast, the founder of Plant Medicine.org, and the medical director for Way of Leaf.com. She is a Mayo Clinic-trained physician in family medicine and sports medicine, as well as an attorney and former adjunct law professor.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle switch things up and take a break from news stories. Instead, they interview therapist, host of the Madness Radio podcast, author of Outside Mental Health: Voices and Visions of Madness, and previous psychiatric patient diagnosed with schizophrenia, Will Hall.
Hall says a lot that will challenge your ideas about the power of psychedelics and the progress of psychedelic medicine. From the idea of “either/or” thinking creating a legal/illegal paradigm, to the basic limitations of science, to the near-religious worship of neuroscience, to William James’ idea of “medical materialism” reducing the complexities of the human mind to simple biology, he points out the various flaws in psychedelic medicine and how psychedelic crusaders have ignored placebo results and focused on the drug or the numbers behind a study over the power of therapy, the benefits of community, and the mystery of consciousness.
While he understands and promotes the benefits many receive from psychedelics and psychedelic-assisted therapy, he’s promoting a bigger conversation: that the popular science of looking at synapses, biomarkers, and chemical imbalances, and viewing the brain as a hard drive or machine is the result of science done under the umbrella of an overwhelmingly capitalistic society, where research grants, profits, and career ambitions take precedence over honesty, real conversation, and working together for the benefit of everyone.
Notable Quotes
“If you end war-on-drugs prohibition in a context of heavily corrupted science, pharmaceutical company corruption, people that don’t have access to basic healthcare, they don’t have the basic context to be able to make smart choices, and you combine that with the profit motive in neoliberalism, then you’re going to have to really be very careful about how you do it, or else you’re going to have some very negative consequences. And this is a problem with any legalization.”
“We’re trying to describe this incredibly rich, mysterious thing- human consciousness. Nobody even knows how to define it. The people who have been studying it for decades can’t even settle on a definition. …This is a field of science- psychology, which is so mysterious and so complicated, they can’t even agree on what it is that they’re studying. And now we’ve gone from this model that’s basically a steam engine model- there’s chemicals that are going through and they’re connecting and they’re flowing in different places. And that’s sort of antiquated, so now we have a computer model, which is about circuitry, networks, connectivity, pathways, and it’s just another cartoonish metaphor for something that we fundamentally don’t understand.”
“The fact that the marvel and the awe of what human consciousness is, what the human experience is, what the mystery is, that is so awakened for many people when we have a psychedelic experience- your mind is blown by how incredible, awesome, beautiful the mystery is, and then to take that and then go into graduate school and cut up mice and have this cartoonish, mechanistic version of what that consciousness is, seems to me like a real betrayal of what I think is the best of the psychedelic experience.”
“I think that once MDMA becomes available and more widespread, we’re going to see the efficacy go down. It’s not going to help everybody. It’s going to be another thing that some people try and some people, it helps them, but it didn’t really quite do it and then they have to kind of go back and they do more and then they lose the magic of the MDMA and then we’re back on the treadmill. We went from antidepressants to MDMA, and then what’s the next drug? There’s no drug solution to these problems, folks. We have to change our society. …Until we actually look at social changes, we’re not ever really going to solve these so-called mental health problems. But that’s not the kind of thing you want to talk about at a MAPS-sponsored conference, because it’s a buzzkill. It just bums everybody out. People want to have their careers, they want to have their focus, their advocacy, their crusade, their excitement, and their community of other people who are excited.”
Will is a counselor and facilitator working with individuals, couples, families and groups via phone and web video (Zoom). He has taught and consulted on mental health, trauma, psychosis, medications, domestic violence, conflict resolution, and organizational development in more than 30 countries, and has been widely featured in the media for his advocacy efforts around mental health care. His work and learning arose from his experiences of recovery from madness, and today he is passionate about new visions of mind and what it means to be human.
In this episode, Joe interviews Ryan and Rory of Cultivating Connections, a Vermont-based nonprofit and podcast dedicated to fostering deeper connections between themselves and the members of their ritual, as well as promoting the idea of intentioned rituals, answering questions and giving advice on creating your own ritual, and eventually, hosting larger group rituals.
They talk about how Ryan’s depression and Rory’s heroin and crack addiction (and eventual overdose) and experience with ayahuasca led them to realize that their biggest problem was disconnection, and through sharing a joint in the woods and talking openly, they realized they could help each other by continuing to embrace that connection with each other. They discuss the weekly ritual that blossomed from that: the different things they’ve tried, the specific details of what they do, and the big moments that made them believe that what they were doing was helping them grow and change.
While they admit that they wouldn’t be where they are today without psychedelics, psychedelics or other drugs (they use cannabis) are not necessary: ultimately, it’s the intention and dedicated practice that matters most. Being vulnerable, accepting yourself and others, opening up and sharing, remaining consistent and steadfast, trusting the process, and most importantly, embracing their fear is what has helped them the most. And the biggest thing they’ve learned is the power of staring into each member’s eyes for as long as possible, which has given them deeper connections than they thought they could have.
Notable Quotes
“You can say, ‘I want to experience something in a psychedelic experience. I want to face my fears.’ But what you say is not what you get. If you create a structure that you come to every week, where everyone has this unwritten, unspoken bond- that you know the intention is to get deeper into your psyche- into your unconscious, and confront the shit that you need to deal with, then every week you go there, you can’t avoid it.” -Ryan
“I’d say the most intense experiences of my life have been these weekly sessions the past 22 weeks. And it’s also been the most transformative time of my life. So I think there’s a lot to be said about the intensity of what you’re feeling and how you can use that. If it’s not in the right setting, it can become traumatic. But if you’re in a setting where you’re supported and you can grow with it, then it becomes a transformative experience.” -Ryan
“For us, it’s really about doing these things with intention in our group setting and our community setting, with the intention of connecting and facing fear. Really, I think the big thing that we focus on is not looking at fear as a negative thing. Fear is not something that we should repress, it’s something that we should let in- we should accept, and we should find value in. But if you repress your fear, you end up manifesting it.” -Ryan
Ryan and Rory are two brothers from Vermont, that have struggled with mental illness and addiction most of their lives. With the help of plant medicines, they came to realize disconnection was at the core of their problems. They created Cultivating Connections as an attempt to try and foster deeper connections in every aspect of their lives. One of the ways they do this is with their podcast. Another way is with their weekly group ritual.
For decades, the subject of children and psychedelics has been one of great contention. The mere thought of exposing children to mind-altering substances elicits substantial controversy in public opinion, often considered a “no-go zone.” Anything that concerns children and how to best care for them precipitates strong reactions because parents aim to safeguard their well-being and protect them from harm’s way. Nonetheless, after a long period of suppression, we now find ourselves in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance. As access to these substances continues to expand through legalization, decriminalization, and medicalization efforts alike, our conversation redefining the use of these substances should seek to holistically address the groups that interact with them, including children.
Re-examining Cultural Paradigms
Viewing the subject through a Western lens, there is often the conception that child and adolescent brains are not fully developed, and that ingesting psychedelics could be damaging to brain development and identity formation. This view is widely held even among psychedelic enthusiasts, such as lay psychotherapist Ann Shulgin, who believes that “when you are under the age of, say, 16, you haven’t really lived that long. You haven’t had time to find out what the core of your self is.” Shulgin estimates that a well-prepared 15-16-year-old could cope with the experience, but recommends waiting a while “until you’ve lived a little bit” (Mind States, 2017).
Similarly, Armando Lozaiga, certified chemical dependency specialist and president of the Institute of Intercultural Medicine of Nierika A.C., suggests that adolescents from the age of 16 onwards are better psychologically equipped to deal with psychedelic experiences. At that age, “you have more of an emotional intelligence as well as abstract thinking functions,” he says. Lozaiga also contrasts Western and Indigenous perspectives, noting that “through a Western lens, in order to attain benefit, I feel that you have to have undergone certain hardships and have a medicinal need.”
In general, psychedelics are considered to be physiologically safe substances that do not lead to dependence or addiction. In fact, many classic psychedelics, including LSD, psilocybin, and ayahuasca are being researched for their anti-addictive properties. In theory, even if you were to ingest psychedelic substances on a regular basis, the human body is hardwired to develop a tolerance to them in a short timespan, diminishing both their psychoactive and physiological effects.
For many, the idea of pairing psychedelics with children (even in a medical venue) sounds absurd due to the cultural stigma attached. However, medicating young children diagnosed with ADHD with amphetamines like Adderall has become normalized within our societal paradigm. Why then, should it be such a leap for us to imagine that certain psychoactive substances could provide healing benefits to children?
In an interview conducted earlier this year, Mark Haden, the executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) Canada discussed the topic, suggesting that psychedelic experiences are a health service, reframing the question by asking: “How do youths access health services?” Haden acknowledges that youth access in a medical context would also necessitate parental consent as well as being dependent on the individual child in question. He believes that there is no golden rule for an individual being ready for such experiences, firmly asserting that youth access “isn’t about age, it is about maturity.”
Limited studies have been conducted on psychedelics and children in a medical setting. However, researchers in the 1960s looked at LSD as a treatment for autistic children, concluding that the effects “were very promising and could even be considered excellent for the majority of children.” Despite this, the positive outcomes associated have often been dismissed due to the fact that the study designs employed were not as rigorous or effective when compared to today’s standards. A more recent double-blind study by Yale University is examining the effects of using ketamine as a therapy for treatment-resistant depression in adolescents.
Beyond this, Phase 3 clinical trials for MDMA as a treatment for PTSD are well underway, with MDMA moving ever closer to becoming an FDA-approved treatment. Once MDMA becomes legal, the FDA has signaled its willingness for MDMA to be used as a treatment for adolescents suffering from PTSD.
Regardless of whether or not children should have access to psychedelic substances, the fact remains that a large proportion of adolescents choose to experiment with psychoactive drugs before coming of age and graduating high school. According to the 2016 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, approximately 2 million U.S. adolescents aged 12 to 17 were current users of illicit drugs at the time.
As it stands today, when it comes to drugs, we tend toward a “zero tolerance” policy, strictly writing substances off because they are “bad” and have no perceived value. However, this attitude is itself dangerous as many young people world-over are drawn to experiment with psychedelic substances regardless, resulting in failed or misguided self-initiations that can be damaging and harmful. Our “‘zero tolerance’ style of drug education trivializes the factors underlying actual drug abuse and pathologizes normal adolescent experimentation” (Stuart, 2004).
As greater access to psychedelics awaits on the horizon, we are in dire need for a reform in drug education. The prevalent strategy of repeatedly reinforcing the message of simply avoiding drugs does not provide our youth with ways to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks associated with these substances.
Recognizing the need for a safe, non-judgemental space to talk about such delicate subjects, Rebecca Kronman, a licensed therapist specializing in psychedelic integration, founded Plant Parenthood, the only digital and in-person community dedicated to exploring how psychedelics impact modern parenting as well as de-stigmatizing the subject of children and psychedelics.
Reflecting on the origins of Plant Parenthood, Kronman shares that the idea for the project emerged through conversations with parent peers about psychedelics. “Many shared stories about their own use and how it changed them as a parent, and some shared about their use while their children were present (sometimes sleeping, sometimes not),” she says. “When these conversations can take place in a loving, open way, it makes space for more dialogue and inquiry, which is enormously helpful to reducing stigma.”
Learning from Indigenous Cultures
Taking a step beyond our cultural conceptions, there are numerous examples in which children are included in psychedelic medicine rituals, including non-substance participation in ceremony as well as use of psychedelic substances throughout all stages of the life cycle.
Kronman recently wrote on the topic, emphasizing the value of using Indigenous traditions to re-evaluate Western paradigms. “When we look towards Indigenous cultures, the paradigms that govern our thinking around children and psychedelics are reflected back to us,” she explains. “It allows us to see that it doesn’t have to be this way.”
Within the Indigenous Huichol culture of Mexico, children are thought to begin ingesting peyote around the age of six, as they are able to verbally articulate their experience at that age (Stuart, 2004). Comparatively, within the Native American Church (NAC), younger children are less likely to consume peyote in ceremony, and are usually invited into the tipi as a rite of passage around the age of 12, when they hit puberty. Families in the Brazilian ayahuasca churches, Santo Daime and União do Vegetal, likewise allow children to participate in ceremonies and have also been known to give extremely small doses of ayahuasca to newborn babies as a symbolic initiation into their tradition.
Contrary to Western youth, Kronman (2020) highlighted the fact that “Indigenous children are not using psychedelics for escapism, experimentation, or in ways that are contrary to their society’s norms.” Instead, the ingestion of psychoactive plant sacraments is culturally ingrained into a way of life and the use of substances can be both culturally and spiritually reaffirming, reinforcing the values of the community. “If it is in ceremony, and Huichol children want to eat peyote, it is reinforced, as it is part of them fulfilling their spiritual identity,” says Lozaiga. “It is not a drug, it is a spiritual plant completely free of prejudice, and they know that it is not going to do them harm.”
Although both peyote and ayahuasca are Schedule I substances, Indigenous groups and ayahuasca communities are entitled access to their medicines through religious freedom laws. In the United States, Indigenous adolescents are free to participate in NAC road meetings (ceremonies) without facing legal hurdles due to their religious exemption, allowing them to use peyote as a ceremonial sacrament. Within the Brazilian ayahuasca churches, the consumption of ayahuasca by pregnant women and children is considered as an “exercise of parental rights” (Labate, 2011).
Childhood and adolescence are both periods characterized by significant brain development, and naturally, the use of substances that influence our brain functioning and development should be approached with caution. Hence, there is a paucity of research examining how psychedelics affect the developing brain.
Even so, there is no evidence that the long-term use of peyote causes brain damage and mental health issues. On the contrary, a 2015 study attempted to understand the long-term effects of peyote consumption in Native Americans, finding that there was no evidence of residual neurocognitive problems and that the subjects actually scored significantly higher on overall mental health measures compared to members of the same tribe who were of a different religion and did not use peyote. Similarly, another study analyzed the effects of ayahuasca on adolescents, comparing 40 Brazilian adolescents who consumed ayahuasca to a control group and finding no measurable difference in scores on neuropsychological and psychiatric tests.
In Indigenous peyote traditions, many women ingest peyote throughout different stages of their life cycle, including eating peyote prenatally, while nursing, and sometimes even during childbirth, as it is thought to help prevent miscarriage, allow for the healthy development of the fetus, increase breast milk production, and ease the experience of labor.
As it happens, the theme of pregnancy and peyote is intimately intertwined with the Huichol origin myth of the first pilgrimage to the sacred peyote desert, Wirikuta. In the myth, the Earth Goddess (Utüanaka) and the Mother of Peyote (Wiri’uwi) begin to menstruate before they enter the desert and encounter peyote, only to consume it and fall pregnant.
Stacy Schaefer, Professor Emerita of anthropology at California State University, has devoted much of her research career to the topic of pregnancy and peyote, illuminating how Huichol women use peyote throughout their life cycle as well as providing theories for how it may interact with the female reproductive system. Through her research, Schaefer has explored how consuming peyote throughout pregnancy may affect a baby’s cognitive development in the womb. With limited research on the processes of prenatal cognitive development, she speculates that peyote might stimulate the fetus’ neocortex and help with the connection of neurons in the brain.
Schaefer’s hypothesis is based on the idea that the more stimulation a baby gets, the better its nervous system will develop, including cognitive and reflex abilities. She compares this to an existing theory which posits that the reason newborn babies require so much sleep is because they do not get the necessary stimulation from the environment in their waking states. “Peyote is a stimulant, and I wonder what is going on as their brains are developing and these neural pathways are being created,” says Schaefer. “However, this is something that can’t be proven unless there is more research.”
In Schaefer’s field studies, some Huichol women suggest that eating peyote when you are pregnant can predispose young children toward becoming shamans. Schaefer attempts to make sense of this in relation to her theory. “We use very little of our brain capacity and perhaps the neural pathways that are being stimulated can create an even greater consciousness or awareness that wouldn’t normally exist,” she says. “Indigenous societies would not continue to do this if it was maladaptive. They would notice if something was wrong through trial and error,” she emphasizes. “They would see it is causing serious problems to their children and pregnancies, and they simply wouldn’t do it.”
“All I can say is that I can propose these ideas, but I don’t feel comfortable promoting children- especially young children consuming psychedelics, including peyote, in Western society, unless there is more medical and scientific research done,” says Schaefer.
Going beyond peyote traditions, it is also increasingly common within the Santo Daime and União do Vegetal ayahuasca churches for women to drink ayahuasca throughout their pregnancies and during the process of childbirth.
There is conflicting information revolving around the subject of pregnant women ingesting ayahuasca and peyote. Some advocate avoiding consuming ayahuasca and peyote during the first trimester in which the embryo undergoes critical development (Schaefer, 2018), while others suggest that it is perfectly safe to consume ayahuasca throughout the whole pregnancy (Labate, 2011).
Glauber Loures de Assis, sociologist and president of Céu da Divina Estrela, a Brazilian Santo Daime church, shared that his wife drank ayahuasca during the process of childbirth, finding it helpful and spiritually important. Beyond that, Loures de Assis shared, “The first thing I did when my son was born was to give him a drop of ayahuasca. In Santo Daime, it is in our tradition to serve ayahuasca to pregnant women and to children alike,” he says. “However, they often drink smaller quantities as a symbolic gesture.”
Non-Ingestive Ceremonial Participation
For pro-psychedelic parents looking to help lay the foundations of their children’s spiritual lives and expose them to the ceremonial aspect of psychedelic use (without them actively ingesting substances), Kronman (2020) suggests that introducing children to the ceremonial aspect of psychedelic use by itself can serve as a model for Western parents to teach their children important values about community, spirituality, and nature on an experiential level.
Lozaiga shared about his own experiences raising his children in this context: “In my experience, we sensitized our children to ceremonies, but we didn’t necessarily want to give substances to the kids until they were adolescents. For us, it was more about exposing them to the ritual; to the sacredness that revolves around the consumption of plants, rather than inducing visionary effects.”
“For many young adolescents, I think psychedelics can do more harm than good,” he says. “There is a general lack of guidance, and looking ahead, if we were to destigmatize these substances to the point where we could look at them objectively, I would like to see initiatory spaces in which young adults can come and be introduced to the sacred dimension of themselves in a guided way.”
Lozaiga additionally believes that incorporating youth in ceremonies and educating them about psychedelic medicines could serve as drug abuse prevention. “These plant medicines can help people be more inoculated, as once you have sat in ceremony, you begin to understand that it is no game.”
Re-examining Rites of Passage
It is clear that in our modern, industrialized culture, we are missing meaningful rites of passage that help our youth transition into adulthood. It has been thought that modern-day Western society allows for the delay of adult responsibilities, in that youth are educated for extended periods of time to meet the employment demands of today’s complex economy (Stuart, 2004). Many young people seek ways to claim the independence of adulthood, and experimenting with psychedelics is one of those ways.
Despite contention over what age adolescents should have access to psychedelic substances, many agree that under the right circumstances, with the proper guidance and a controlled set and setting, such experiences could potentially be beneficial in serving an initiatory function for young people. “I think it is treacherous in Western society to promote psychedelics with children from birth until puberty,” says Schaefer. “However, at puberty and adolescence, under the right circumstances, with a proper support system in place, it has the potential to be an incredible rite of passage.”
In many ways, Western, industrialized society has become bereft of meaningful rites of passage. However, our society is still permeated with rituals like the celebration of birthdays, Bar Mitzvahs, graduations, and so on. Exploring how our rituals have become deprived of meaning and living spirit, beloved guru and countercultural figure, Ram Dass, suggested that the main problem with modern-day rites of passage is that they “no longer provide direct contact with the numinous” (Dass, 2004).
It is important to tread with care despite the existence of both anecdotal and empirical evidence, in that there are very few peer-reviewed scientific studies observing how psychedelics affect adolescents and how they affect children developmentally when mothers ingest prenatally or during nursing. However, we can learn from Indigenous communities and their age-old cultural integration of plant medicines throughout the life cycle, better preparing our own children to approach these substances with respect. By including children in the psychedelic dialogue, we pave the way to dissolving the taboo and stigma that are often a cause for harm among Western adolescents, as well as cultivating reverence for the sacredness of these substances.
In re-examining the principles that have dominated our perceptions in the West, and looking beyond the boundaries of our society’s current paradigm while integrating the wisdom of other cultures, we can develop a fuller and more nuanced understanding of these substances and what they can add to our lives.
Schaefer, S. B. (2018) Fertile Grounds? – Peyote and the Human Reproductive System. In McKenna. D. (Ed.) Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs (Vol. 1 & 2): 50 Years of Research. Synergetic Press.
Jasmine Virdi is a freelance writer and editor. Since 2018, she has been working for the fiercely independent publishing company Synergetic Press, where her passions for ecology, ethnobotany, and psychoactive substances converge. Jasmine is also a writer for Psychedelics Today, Chacruna.net, Lucid News, and Cosmic Sister. She is currently pursuing an MSc in Spirituality, Consciousness, and Transpersonal Psychology at the Alef Trust with the future aim of working in psychedelic integration therapy. Jasmine’s goal as an advocate for psychoactive substances is to raise awareness of the socio-historical context in which these substances emerged in order to help integrate them into our modern-day lives in a safe, grounded and meaningful way.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle sit down and discuss some very scientific (read: hard to understand) articles. First, they talk about one on Salvinorin A and its interactions with a different receptor than other psychedelics (kappa opioid receptors) and what that could mean, and a related article from Wired- a first-hand account of taking salvia as part of a brain-imaging study at Johns Hopkins University. The biggest takeaway from these can be summed up in researcher Manoj Doss’s closing quote: “Not only does this tell me how little we understand psychedelics, it also tells me how little we understand how to study them.”
They then review a recent double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study on LSD, which showed results we expect to see, but the full details haven’t been released yet. This leads to a discussion about intergenerational trauma and researchers finding that children of Holocaust survivors often display more trauma-related behavior than their parents, commonality between people of Irish and German decent (due to shared traumatic histories), the idea of “group soul,” how the lymphatic system works within the brain to remove toxins and how this and the blood-brain barrier can be affected by a concussion, and the effects caesarian sections have both on an individual person as well as in higher concentrations of people per country. Do countries with more C-sections produce more traumatized people?
Lastly, they talk about how psychedelics opening up people’s brains and thought processes could possibly lead toward more conspiratorial thinking, which leads to discussion about QAnon, Alan Moore, a crazy story about 9/11 from Kyle, and the very idea of truth: what is your personal criteria for something being true? What do any of us really know?
And one last reminder- October 28th is the premiere of the new 15-week online course offering called An Introduction to Philosophy and Psychedelics with Lenny Gibson, so if you’re considering taking it, now is the time to sign up!
Notable Quotes
“Do we always need to seek ego death to have profound healing in psychedelic experiences? Could it be more gentle at times?” -Kyle
“There seems to be this trend in the scientific world to say, ‘ok cool, our data suggests that this model of the world and how things are working is true, therefore this model is true’ and kind of sticking to your guns on that, and I think because we finally have our tools back where we can examine the psyche after decades of prohibition, that maybe let’s not rush- like, let’s keep them hypotheses, and perhaps we can be more fluid when new hypotheses come out about the world and the mind and the brain and these things. Perhaps that’ll help us not necessarily have to live in a certain paradigm for a super long time and we can be a little bit more paradigm-fluid maybe, or model-agnostic, and just kind of shift around as new data comes to light.” -Joe
“What’s truth and how do you know what is true? ….How can you validate that that is true? And what do you know to be true in your world? It’s a hard thing to really understand. When I think about it, I think the only true thing that I know is this present moment.” -Kyle
“It’s interesting. How do we know more? How does knowledge work? Epistemology, metaphysics- these are massive questions, and as much as I appreciate science, I feel like science could benefit a lot from being philosophy-aware. Like, what are we really doing? What kind of metaphysics and epistemology underlies our go-forward here? Is there data to suggest that mind and brain aren’t the same thing? Yes, there is, including [from] top neurologists like Karl Pribram and others. Mind does not equal brain. And how do we transcend that and go forward? I know this is not what the establishment wants us to be saying, if we want to talk about conspiracies. Just look at scientism vs. philosophy and the humanist traditions- really, quite a battle that’s been going on for a long time, probably since the time of Newton or before.” -Joe
In this episode, Kyle interviews Doctor of Psychology, faculty member at Esalen Institute, Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Dharma teacher, and former Buddhist monk, Dr. Michael Sapiro.
Sapiro talks about his recent travel pilgrimage to the northeast US, living in a camper with his dog and spending a lot of time in the woods working on himself and his connection with others. He talks about the “ways of knowing” that is taught at Esalen Institute, where people ask their cognitive brain about an important decision, then ask their body, their intuition, and even their ancestors and/or spirit guides, paying attention to their reaction to each interaction. He talks about methods to deal with body reactions, breathwork, the importance of self-talk, metaphors, cutting karma so you aren’t perpetuating old ancestral wounds, the concept of post-traumatic growth, the difference between selfishness and self-focus, and knowing when to be passively working on yourself or actively engaging with and helping others.
They discuss how to fuse your normal self with your mystical self and make the mystical ordinary- through action, being self-aware, staying calm, staying open-hearted, and always thinking of what can be done next to improve yourself and the health of others. This is a bit of a feel-good episode: in a hectic, stressful time, it’s a reminder of the importance of checking in with yourself, taking care of yourself, and allowing yourself to just be.
Notable Quotes
“One of the things nature and the mystery taught me in my retreat, was to slow down and feel the presence of the mystery in a strand of a spider web. And I’m not being hyperbolic- I would slow down on a walk and see this spider web and just be with it for a while. What can I learn? What can I soak in? How can I be with it? And then I would take that into conversations when I met people. So that’s one practical way of bringing the wisdom of the forest into our daily lives.”
“How beautiful that we have this access to deep knowledge of the universe through us, but we have to be quiet. We have to be quiet to hear the whispers of the heart. And when you become quiet, the whispers of the heart become louder and they start filling you in. Then you have to start believing it.”
“What I learned in the forest and when I was doing my own healing work, is that the mystical states are actually ordinary- profoundly ordinary states of greeting the world [presently]- through my eyes, through my being, through being quiet when I’m agitated. …Making the mystical states ordinary is a verb. It’s turning mysticism into an action, and that comes out through our speech, eye-gazing, through the way we listen, [and] the way we show up for ourselves and other people.”
“Selfishness is doing a behavior that negatively impacts other people on purpose. …Being self-focused is different. It’s ok that we have time being self-focused. …You have to discern the difference. Because it’s not selfish to take care of the vessel that your consciousness is housed in. It’s important so you have good health to contribute to others’ health. It’s important because you’re precious and you matter. You don’t have to be selfish to take care of yourself, so let yourself off a little bit. Because a lot of people say ‘I feel selfish when I take care of myself.’ That’s not fair actually. That’s not fair. If you’re being selfish, call yourself out on it and change your behavior. If you’re just taking care of yourself out of self-love, because you know your health will positively impact other people’s (because we’re interdependent), then it’s really important you do take time to be self-focused.”
Michael Sapiro, PsyD is a clinical psychologist, Dharma teacher, meditation researcher, writer, workshop and retreat leader, and former Buddhist monk. He is on faculty at Esalen Institute and is a Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences where he engages in research on meditation, transformation, and consciousness. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship in advanced psychology at the Boise VA Medical Center where he specialized in rural health, PTSD, and combat trauma. Dr. Sapiro teaches nationally on the art and science of transformation, expanded human capabilities, self-care, and meditation for personal and community growth. He is the founding teacher of Maitri Sangha Boise, an integrated Buddhist community, and director of Maitri House Yoga, LLC, serving the community through integrating meditation practices, psychology, noetic sciences, and social justice. He can be found at michaelsapiro.com.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle sit down and discuss a recent segment on CNN highlighting Brian Muraresku’s book, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name,” about the role of psychedelics have played in the origin of religion and western civilization. They talk about psychedelics throughout history, like the Eleusinian Mysteries, soma use in Hindu scriptures, therianthropy and the idea of psychedelics leading towards these human-animal hybrid visions, and even the idea that Moses was huffing acacia or some other type of mind-altering plant available in that area. Does it matter to the movement if all of this is historically accurate? And why do we romanticize ancient psychedelic use so much?
They briefly highlight Michigan’s poison center putting out a statement warning of potential risks of using psychedelics after Ann Arbor just decriminalized several plant substances, and point out that while this looks like a negative scare tactic, it really highlights some important harm-reduction information many people new to all of this likely don’t know.
They then spend a lot of time on a very important and unpleasant topic- accountability for misconduct in the psychedelic space: with no huge or well-known Yelp-like website to review facilitators or retreat centers, and abuse (or at least unethical relationships) seeming to be very common in the therapeutic world, what’s the best way to handle abuse and abusers? In the legal therapeutic world, there are at least licensing boards to contact or police to reach out to (since nothing illegal would be tied to the victim). Is the answer excommunication? Restorative justice? Some sort of mediator? Filming everything for the protection of both sides? Whatever the ideas, the conversation needs to continue and louder voices need to be a part of it.
And Kyle lets us know that he’s been taking ketamine-assisted psychotherapy training at Polaris Insights center, Alex Grey just followed him on Twitter, and Joe introduces a possible new Solidarity Fridays segment, “Joe’s Paranoid Update.” And reminder- there is a new 15-week online course offering called An Introduction to Philosophy and Psychedelics with Lenny Gibson, which begins October 28th.
Notable Quotes
“I didn’t really grow up very religious, so I’m curious- the people that did and may not understand this indigenous kind of perspective of using plants to alter consciousness and have some sort of relationship with the universe- I wonder how that came off to them, seeing this on CNN.” -Kyle
“What is it about that that is so intriguing to us at times? I know for myself, looking at a lot of Indigenous cultures or ancient traditions helped me kind of provide a framework for understanding some of these experiences that maybe western traditions kind of have but don’t really have. Maybe I found more comfort in these traditions, but to say they have all the answers because they were possibly doing some of this stuff, I think could get a little tricky at times. Like, why do we want to romanticize the past so much?” -Kyle
“I forget who said this, but one of the worst things you can be in the psychedelic space is a narc. So how do you balance ratting on somebody when they’re regularly sexually abusing somebody or have a pattern of at least doing it once in a while? Sure, they might have helped 50 people- great. But the 3 people they raped; it wasn’t very helpful for them. And how do we deal with that? In the therapy world, with licenses and whatnot, you’ve got the police to go to, you’re not doing illegal activity, you’ve got a licensing board that kind of thumbs up/thumbs down them, and like, Yelp too- you can actually go on and say ‘Hey, I had a really bad time with Joe on September 12th. Perhaps you don’t want to go see this person. This is what happened.’ And in the underground, we don’t really have that.” -Joe
“I think Dimitri Mugianis mentioned this to us: what kind of movement is it that would cover up rape to achieve its ends, and serious sexual misconduct? And victims have been told: ‘If you out this rape, this is bad for the movement, so please don’t do it.’ Are you fucking kidding me? No. Absolutely not. If someone raped you, [that’s] not ok.” -Joe
“We’re not waiting on the FDA to get our ethics together. Ethics can happen right now.” -Joe
In this episode, Joe speaks with Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine, Psychiatrist (specializing in the treatment of OCD), and Psychedelics Today Advisory Board member, Dr. Matt Brown.
Brown talks about osteopathic medicine and his thoughts on energy: how the principle of osteopathic medicine is that “mind, body, spirit” and the things we interact with contribute to what makes up a person, and by shifting things within each body system (neurological or respiratory, for example), change can be made, just like the way small postural shifts can lead to a decrease in pain or anxiety and how smiling can fool your brain into feeling happier. With bodywork emerging as such a powerful tool and breathwork facilitators learning interventions to help clients work through stuck energy, there is clearly a huge connection between the different energies in our bodies and how they affect us, but how much do we really perceive these shifts, and how do we measure these energies and create usable data out of it all?
They also discuss other new methods of psychedelic healing, like the Integratron, light machines like the Lucia Lucia N°03, and Soren Peterson’s sound table, and what it might look like if people used these and other non-drug methods in addition to a small amount of psychedelics- could that take away a lot of people’s fear? And they talk about Stan Grof, Dr. Christopher M. Bache’s LSD and the Mind of the Universe, Elon Musk’s Neuralink, and why people should watch and read more sci-fi.
Notable Quotes
“We’re talking about the study of consciousness, which I am fully confident we are not going to find out way past my death. But that’s ok, and actually, I find that somewhat exciting, because this is a really hard problem that humanity has been working on forever, and if we can even push the ripple of the movement in a slightly different direction for a positive change, that’s an amazing feat when you think about the totality of the universe and how huge it is and how small we are.”
“I think that what we might do, is, over time, try to figure out ways of having very, very specific, reliably repeatable experiences mediated through the combination of [a] psychedelic and some sort of a technology, that neither the drug by itself would cause, nor the technology by itself would cause, but if you combined the two, you could have something. What that would be, I don’t know, but it kind of feels a little bit like Total Recall. And then on the opposite side of that, with more the natural medicines, there’s this constant exploration of like, ‘ok, well, what is this broader universe all about and how is nature interconnected with everything else?’ And so, they’d be used for different purposes. So then when you think about it, when you’re talking about the ‘medicines coming from the earth’ so to speak, vs. like, the synthesized version, it’s like, ‘Do you want the blue pill or the red pill?’”
“He [Dr. Christopher M. Bache] does have that eye about him, of people that have gone really, really deep. …There’s just a thing- I don’t know how to explain it- it’s like a different twinkle in the eye, that you can just see in folks that have seen more than, I don’t know, what we’re supposed to see.”
“This is very much a global psychedelic experience going on right now. We are on the biggest trip that we’ve ever had, ever. And this is not going to be fast. …I’m not sure if we’ve gotten to the point where all the other traumas that we get to be able to be introduced to have all been shown to us yet. I think we’ve gotten some glimpses with that, with the whole George Floyd situation, but I’m not sure what’s still on the horizon before this whole thing ends. And hopefully, just like a psychedelic experience, there’s going to be a dramatic healing and growth that comes out of this. We’ll all find out together, whenever that happens.”
Dr. Brown Specializes in whole health psychiatry. This approach differs from many other practitioners who more and more practice symptomatic management when it comes to mental health. Dr. Brown takes the perspective that the body has the ability to heal itself, but from time to time may need assistance through balancing the things that are important for physical health that are also important from mental health. These include, sleep, diet, exercise, meditative/spiritual practice and cultivating positive social relationships. Dr. Brown also has a strong command of how to balance vital nutrients in our body with the aid of supplementation to augment traditional psychopharmacological therapies. Dr. Brown’s method is aimed primarily at the treatment of Depression and Anxiety as well as other mood disorders and ADHD. Dr. Brown is a specialist in the treatment of OCD specifically and is board certified by the ABPN in both adult as well as child and adolescent psychiatry.
Claudio Naranjo was a Chilean-born shaman of Moorish, Spanish, and Jewish descent. He was also a psychotherapist, medical doctor, author, educator, serious Buddhist practitioner, and pioneer in the areas of psychology, psychedelic therapies, and human development. His integrative approaches to a variety of fields elevated his work and created global reach and influence. He was always keen to point out that “spirituality should not be confused with religious beliefs or moral codes.” Towards the end of his life, he stressed the importance of emotional education, and the forgotten goal of educating for wisdom– and not just for knowledge to be harnessed for financial gain.
An early practitioner of Enneagram, he enriched it by integrating Gestalt therapy via Gurdjeff, meditation, music and art therapy, and other practices designed to provide deep, personal insights. But he admitted a vulgar commercialization of the Enneagram took place in North America. He explored the power of education to counter the patriarchal beliefs contributing to our deepening global crisis. “To change the world,” Claudio would say, “change education.” Naranjo’s approach to Buddhism was the same as the Buddha’s; he taught meditation with the offer to “ just try it,” and “see what it offers.”
His many years of teaching at Esalen Institute in the 1960s were both a pinnacle as well as a painful period in his life. One of his closest friends was Carlos Castaneda, who agreed with his concern that the “powerful gentleman Mr. Money” had increasingly taken control of the world, and belittled human beings to the point of dehumanization. Claudio soon became one of Fritz Perls’ three successors at Esalen, along with Jack Downing and Robert Hall. Claudio attended sensory awareness workshops with the legendary Charlotte Selver. Richard Evans Schultes arranged for Naranjo to make a special journey by canoe up the Amazon River to study ayahuasca with the South American Indians. He brought back samples of this drug and published the first scientific description of the effects of its active alkaloids.
Claudio also took part in the meetings of Leo Zeff’s pioneering psychedelic therapy group. He was an early enthusiast of using psychedelics (primarily ayahuasca, MDMA, and ibogaine) as medicines for a panoply of social and psychiatric conditions. Married four times, his last partner was Carolyn Merchant, a marriage and family therapist and a co-worker with Claudio on his book and teachings. In 1970, Claudio lost his only son in a terrible car accident on Big Sur’s Highway 1. He stated that the most significant realization of his life was that “nothing is more important in our time than our learning to be a little kinder.”
The Naranjo Institute presented the Seekers After Truth (SAT) program in 2012, with a new cohort opening annually. The program consists of four residential workshops, each lasting between six to nine days. The retreats represented a comprehensive exploration of psychological, spiritual, and expressive practices for understanding the human trajectory toward growth and fulfillment. From exploring who we have become and the precise ways we have each become stuck and continue to get stuck, the program went on to encourage processes of active healing and the expansion of one’s sense of possibilities. It was a “supplementary curriculum” of self-knowledge, relationship-repair, and spiritual culture.
In the course of its evolution as a program for personal and professional development of therapists and teachers since its rebirth in the late eighties, Naranjo called SAT a “psychotherapy laboratory,” in which people learned to help each other through the development of psychotherapeutic skills that do not require a background in the customary academic theoretical literature. He called this the “democratization of psychotherapy,” and education of future teachers, who may be able to assist their students in their personal growth.
Claudio’s recent and last talk was the highlight of the 2019 World Ayahuasca Conference in Girona, Spain. I will never forget his courage as one of his arms was violently swinging in the air due to his Parkinson’s. For all of his powerful influence on the development of human consciousness, in the bigger picture, Naranjo felt unsatisfied with his work, and disillusioned: “The economy has dominated politics, and practically everything else, asphyxiating life and its intrinsic values, the social order, and all our institutions.” A harbinger of things to come (such as defunding police) was his hope that the community take charge of many things (or perhaps of everything) that it once delegated to its governments, including communications, finance, and maintaining peace.
Claudio also found time to write or edit numerous books. He revised an early book on Gestalt therapy and published two new ones. He published three books on the Enneagram of Personality, as well as The End of Patriarchy. He also published a book on meditation, The Way of Silence and the Talking Cure, and Songs of Enlightenment.
Published in 2010 with a foreword by Jean Houston, was Healing Civilization: Bringing Personal Transformation into the Societal Realm through Education and the Integration of the Intra-Psychic Family. Naranjo explored what he saw as the root causes of the destruction of humanity: war, violence, oppression of women, child abuse, environmental endangerment, and patriarchy, which has taken root over millennia in our own conditioned minds. He touted the work of Tótila Albert, who asks us to see ourselves as three-brained with the “Inner Father” (corresponding to the head), the “Inner Mother” (corresponding to the heart), and the “Inner Child” (corresponding to the instincts). As people learn to integrate these three “brains,” Naranjo believed, they (the instincts) may bring about a functional- even divine, family within. For Naranjo, transforming education to be oriented toward personal and collective evolution could help heal civilization.
In his last book, The Revolution We Expected: Cultivating a New Politics of Consciousness (2020), Dr. Naranjo presents a call for individual and societal transformation in order to rebuild and humanize our institutions and realize a post-patriarchal global ecological community. “Even if the catastrophe of the sinking of the patriarchal vessel in which we have been sailing continues,” Naranjo writes, ”it is better for us to understand, by going through our crisis with faith, that the agonizing death rattles of our civilization are our greatest hope for regeneration.” He speaks of “apprentice shamans, who, without knowing it, are searching for their own development, and will sooner or later have the possibility of being of help in a world needing precisely those qualities they are developing.”
Dr. Naranjo observes that ‘realizing’ is the bravest thing of all- “to see that one was wrong and to change direction.” As Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker reminds us, “We humans have a very good eye for intellect but we do not yet have the right organ to understand consciousness.”
Claudio Naranjo passed away in July of 2019 at 86 years old.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle sit down and discuss several items in the news, including Mark Zuckerberg donating $500,000 towards Oregon’s Measure 110, national psychiatric associations coming out as in opposition to Oregon’s measure 109 due to concerns over medical treatment being determined via a ballot iniative, voters in Mississippi being able to vote on medical cannabis and voters in Arizona, Montana, South Dakota and New Jersey being able to vote on legalization measures (with polling data showing 65% of New Jersey voters likely in favor), Denver’s Kole Milner offially pleading guilty in his ongoing psilocybin investigation, a recent study looking into the effects of chronic THC exposure on the 5-HT2A receptors typically studied more with psychedelics and the question on if cannabis is psychedelic or not, the University of Toronto joining forces with Sansero Life Sciences to study the effects of microdosing and smaller doses of psilocybin, NYU Langone teaming up with MindMed to start a clinical training program focusing on psychedelics and psychedelic-assisted therapies (with the eventual goal of establishing a Center for Psychedelic Medicine at NYU Langone Health), and yet another psychedelic company going live on the stock market: Toronto-based Field Trip Health.
They also issue a correction/update on statements made last week about Oregon’s Measures 109 and 110, and talk about why the placebo effect isn’t studied more, and how drugs establishing themselves in your personal life story can influence their efficacy. And they discuss some of the positive, community-encouraging COVID-related changes they’ve seen in their local cities and wonder how many of them can stay when we eventually return to some sort of normalcy.
“As we see things decriminalized, it’s not necessarily the case that you’re safe. You can still go to prison, and it’s not a nice place. So, be careful. Please be careful. I’m lucky enough to be blessed with extreme paranoia. Consider what a healthy level of paranoia is for your situation and what you’re up to, and err on the side of caution. The special saying is, ‘Only break one law at a time.’” -Joe
“What I’m really excited about is that in the next year or two, we’re going to have a lot more clinical data on this. Doctors will be a lot more comfortable with it, and this story will keep progressing in really interesting ways that I don’t really think we’re understanding how this is going to look in a couple years yet. Just how much 2020 has changed the movement, it’s going to be really intense over the next couple years.” -Joe
“I think if one thing that comes out of this is, as you say, forced creativity- we’re forced to make some of these changes, and what works, what doesn’t work? If things feel like they’re working in a different way, how do you keep that? Just thinking about coming back to the integration aspect of experiences- if something feels like that is moving in a new direction, how do you continue to follow that without needing to just snap back to what has worked in the past? Food for thought. …If things start to shift a little bit, could we continue that change, or do we keep feeding a system that feels broken or isn’t helpful in our own evolution?” -Kyle
“22 veteran suicides a day- can we cut that in half through decriminalization initiatives? I don’t think the answer is yes. So like, what are the alternatives? Pharma. Pharma at scale doing what capital does. It might not be pretty but it might be able to save a lot of lives. And the decrim people looking at that as an evil, it’s like, what’s more evil: that happening, or all those people killing themselves because of what your tax dollars had them do? …Your ideology might feel really pure but there might be a lot of subtext there that you’re missing.” -Joe
The role of therapy in psychedelic therapy has been underexplored in mainstream articles that focus more on neuropharmacology and the psychedelic medicine experience. Without therapy, however, results from clinical trials would be no more significant than if the substance was studied in a recreational setting, and the fact that there is such a difference is central to the growing appeal.
As our companion article on psychedelic therapy explained, numerous therapeutic approaches used in psychedelic therapy converge on an inner-directed, relational approach. In psychedelic sessions themselves, therapists take more of a back-seat role, encouraging clients to focus inward and engage in an authentic process facilitated by their “inner healer” and refraining from interpretation. Still, complications can arise in psychedelic sessions, such as an upsurge of trauma, and if therapists lack the skills to respond, they risk leaving clients stuck and unresolved, potentially re-traumatized from improper care in a vulnerable state.
While therapeutic training is essential in case overwhelming content arises, the bulk of therapy work occurs during preparation and integration sessions. Across numerous clinical trials and clinics offering ketamine and cannabis-assisted psychotherapy, psychedelic therapists are using many therapeutic approaches to help their clients heal. Here are some of the most common.
Internal Family Systems
One of the most consistently referenced models used in psychedelic therapy is internal family systems (IFS). Developed by Richard Schwartz in the 1980s, IFS views the psyche as an amalgamation of interrelated personalities, or “parts” that often conflict with one another. IFS brings clients’ attention toward three main parts of the psyche: Exiles, Managers, and Firefighters. When these parts are in conflict, they prevent people from grounding in their core Self.
Exiles are related to psychological trauma, often from early childhood. They are the parts that have been cast away- buried beneath shame, fear, or pain that has not been expressed or accepted. In psychoanalytic terminology, they have been “repressed.” Managers keep the Exiles in control, relegating them to their shadowy domain so they do not disrupt overall function. Still, Exiles sometimes break through Managers’ control, at which point Firefighters take over, putting the system on high alert and inciting reactive behaviors to avoid encountering the Exiles. All of these parts create the “internal family,” and IFS helps clients center in the Self, which transcends all the parts, to create a loving inner container for intrapsychic balance and communication.
“The goal of IFS is to first acknowledge these protected and wounded parts within a person, and then to foster this reconnection with the higher Self,” explained Jason Sienknecht, who practices ketamine-assisted psychotherapy in Fort Collins, CO. “Ultimately, the Self is put into a position of a manager so the other parts can fall in line behind the Self’s guidance, instead of monopolizing a person’s consciousness. We want the Self to monopolize the person’s consciousness.”
Sienknecht is a MAPS-trained MDMA-assisted psychotherapist and a lead trainer for ketamine-assisted psychotherapy through the Psychedelic Research and Training Institute (PRATI). In his psychedelic therapy work, Sienknecht regularly uses IFS. “The reason I gravitate toward IFS is because ketamine aligns the client with their higher Self, or innerhealer, very naturally,” Sienknecht said. “The Self doesn’t need development- it’s the root of love and wisdom within each of us. Some people have lost sight of the Self through years of identifying with the protected or wounded parts of themselves.”
Sienknecht added that clients’ subpersonalities also naturally arise under the influence of ketamine, and IFS helps them make sense of the confusing content. As such, it is more a framework of integration than an intervention used in psychedelic sessions. “When you’re engaged in dialogue in a medicine session, you don’t want to give your client linear, logical reflections that their left brain can attach to,” Sienknecht said. “You want to encourage their non-linear state of consciousness to continue, rather than connecting them back to their thinking mind. I generally don’t bring my understanding of IFS into the dialogue of a medicine session.”
As a tool for psychedelic integration, IFS provides a powerful means to restructure one’s relationship to one’s inner reality for lasting healing to occur.
Gestalt Therapy
Gestalt therapy preceded internal family systems as a predominant modality focused on internal parts. Created and developed by Fritz and Laura Perls in the 1940s and 1950s, Gestalt therapy helps clients enhance their present moment awareness through acute sensitivity to internal responses to stimuli. “Gestalt is a way to identify inner polarities within a person, or inner parts, and encourage dialogue between those opposing parts or beliefs,” explained Sienknecht.
Those dialogues can take the form of the “empty chair technique,” in which clients converse with a part of themselves as if that part is sitting in the empty chair beside them. Clients are encouraged to feel and express the emotions that arise. Through the process, therapists help them expand their self-awareness and take more responsibility over their way of being in the world.
Sienknecht recently facilitated ketamine therapy for a man suffering from alcoholism. A part of this man wanted to stay in a comfort zone and keep emotional pain at bay, which he did through binge drinking, while another part wanted to free himself from that addiction. Sienknecht helped him become aware of the polarity between these opposing parts, and from that awareness, the client could move toward resolving the conflict.
Psychedelics can enhance clients’ awareness of the relationships and dichotomies between internal parts of themselves. Therapists have found that models based on accepting and balancing those parts can significantly enhance the healing potential from that newfound awareness.
Somatic Therapy
Somatic therapy refers to body-focused psychotherapy. Somatic therapy is a relatively recent development without much research on its efficacy, yet it has still recently come to be regarded as one of the most effective approaches for healing trauma. Its foundational premise is that trauma is stored in the nervous system, and listening to the body’s messages is the ideal inlet to healing trauma’s lasting effects.
The two most prevalent somatic methods are sensorimotor psychotherapy and somatic experiencing. Rafael Lancelotta, a psychedelic therapist and researcher practicing in Denver, CO, helped elucidate the differences. “Somatic experiencing is highly relational and has a ton of emphasis on resourcing,” he said. “Sensorimotor is more based on movement. It’s a little less relational; more let’s go into your body and see where these incomplete movements are. It’s more physical in nature.”
The somatic style used by Innate Path, a psychedelic therapy clinic where Lancelotta worked for two years, is called trauma dynamics. Trauma dynamics uses elements of both approaches but focuses more on challenging clients outside of their window of tolerance. Lancelotta explained that while challenging clients can be effective, sometimes it can be too challenging and push clients too far outside their comfort zone. “I’ve found it most helpful to use pieces of all of these to find something that can be more fluid from one person to the next,” he explained.
Since somatic therapy involves focusing on the body, it can be a helpful intervention in psychedelic sessions themselves. If therapists notice that clients appear stuck in their processing, they can invite the client to focus on their body and notice what arises. From there, new content can become conscious, allowing the client to move toward the point of stuckness and continue processing through it.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy
Many psychedelic therapists reject the efficacy of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and claim it does not lend itself well to psychedelic work. Nevertheless, one of Johns Hopkins University’s most significant psilocybin studies to date uses a framework of CBT- a study using psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy for smoking cessation.
Dr. Matthew Johnson is the study’s principal investigator. While he explained that the psilocybin sessions themselves (which typically involve the synthetic equivalent of a Terence McKenna “heroic dose”) proceed with a non-directive, supportive approach, the many weeks of preparation and integration are CBT-focused.
“In terms of the CBT, my thinking is that any number of empirically validated forms of therapy can be brought to bear here,” Johnson said. “If a tool tends to work for the disorder of focus, my bet is we can combine it with psychedelics and make it work. When you’re talking about smoking cessation, most of the programs and a lot of empirical support are based in CBT.”
CBT is among the most widely practiced therapies; used for depression, anxiety, PTSD, and addiction. Therapists help clients identify distorted thought patterns and then replace these cognitive distortions with new, healthier thought patterns, which correspond to better emotional regulation and healthier behavioral patterns. CBT has no interest in psychoanalysis and the unconscious mind. It is an action-oriented, solution-focused approach, and Johnson has found it particularly effective during the “afterglow” of a psychedelic experience.
“We have a lot to figure out [about] what that afterglow is, but there’s probably some neuroplasticity lingering- this window of increased agency,” Johnson said. “If we then establish a new normal with boring, bread-and-butter techniques like CBT, it’s probably going to help.”
In the study’s ongoing second iteration, 59% of participants who received psilocybin were confirmed as abstinent from smoking in the one-year follow-up, as compared with 27% who received a nicotine patch. Such powerful results suggest that even modalities unconcerned with psychological depth can enhance psychedelics’ healing properties.
Mindfulness-Based Approaches
Mindfulness involves directing one’s open attention to present moment awareness. While this may seem like a given in therapy, many therapeutic approaches encourage interpretation and recounting of past experiences, both of which can impede awareness of the present. Mindfulness-based approaches to therapy, such as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) and mindfulness-based stress reduction, foster present-moment awareness as a path to healing.
Sienknecht has found that mindfulness-based approaches align well with ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. “Ketamine quickly and effectively helps someone transition from the thinking self to the observing self,” he explained. “It just so happens that meditation does the exact same thing. Meditation mimics the activity of the higher Self, which some people refer to as the eternal witness. You’re not walking down the street, you’re aware of yourself walking down the street. It’s one step back from the ego. Mindfulness-based psychotherapy can help teach the skills needed to move more fully into this observing self.”
In order for people to move more fully into the witnessing Self, both inside and outside the psychedelic session, it is important they develop a daily mindfulness practice. “I find that people who practice daily throughout the course of a two-month ketamine treatment program are more able to move in the natural direction of the medicine as it moves you away from your thoughts and into an observing self,” Sienknecht explained.
A daily mindfulness practice does not have to be seated meditation. The practice can involve journaling, painting, exercising, or simply walking through the woods, as long as it is intentional time taken to practice awareness and receptivity to what arises within and without.
Learn more about our course on Psychedelics and The Shadow
The Hakomi Method
The Hakomi Method is a mindfulness-based somatic approach that is often discussed alongside psychedelic therapy. Developed by Ron Kurtz in the 1970s, Hakomi focuses clients on their present-moment experience and understands that the body is the harbinger of messages from one’s inner workings. Hakomi clients are encouraged to focus on mental content that arises alongside embodied sensations, such as images and memories.
Hakomi therapists use “probes” to gather information on a client’s internal process. These probes often aim at clients’ core beliefs that structure their relationships to their self and their world. For instance, a hakomi therapist might encourage a client to close their eyes, focus on their breath, and notice what arises as they say, “You are lovable exactly as you are.” It does not matter whether a client experiences elation and lightness, or bitter, self-defeating thoughts and constriction of the stomach- what matters is that the client notices what happens, because the response contains all the information needed to then work with the core content.
Psychedelic sessions can cast new light on core stories while also showing clients that other stories are possible. Skilled Hakomi therapists help clients restructure and heal those stories’ ongoing impact on their present moment experience.
Experiential Therapy
Another present-focused approach is experiential therapy. Sara Reed spoke to the approach’s efficacy in her work with ketamine-assisted psychotherapy at the Behavioral Wellness Clinic in Connecticut, as well as her work in MAPS’ Phase II trials for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. “What that therapy is about is really focusing on what’s happening in the here and now,” Reed explained. “Often clients come in flooded with a lot of different things, and experiential therapy can help clients slow down and be present with what’s happening in the here and now.”
Experiential therapy can take many forms; those forms are united in that therapists involve clients in real, present-focused processes to gain insight into their thoughts, feelings, and emotional responses. Examples include art therapy, animal-assisted therapy, adventure therapy, and psychodrama.
Michelle Hobart, a specialist in psychedelic integration, uses psychodrama with her clients. She described psychodrama as “an embodied enactment of certain scenes from life,” thereby allowing clients to engage creatively with their experience. “Creativity is a really important way of working with the material that arises,” Hobart explained. She often helps clients work with their psychedelic experiences as if they were dreams, focusing less on analytical processing than on “embodiment and active imagination.” This approach becomes especially important when psychedelic experiences cannot be rationalized or interpreted at all.
Transpersonal Psychology and Spiritual Emergence
While transpersonal (meaning “beyond the personal”) psychology is not a modality, it is a broad wave of western psychology that embraces the validity of non-ordinary states of consciousness and understands humans as inherently spiritual. Academic programs in transpersonal psychology, such as those offered at Naropa University and Sofia University, are among the most popular programs for students interested in working with psychedelics. Understanding the expansive frameworks through which it views people can help therapists support clients through their most challenging internal experiences.
An important topic within transpersonal psychology is “spiritual emergence.” Developed by Stan and Christina Grof, spiritual emergence refers to experiences in which individuals suddenly expand far beyond their established understandings of themselves into a broader perspective on the universe. When this process becomes too overwhelming, it can incite a “spiritual emergency,” which the western diagnostic model can misinterpret as psychosis.
“Spiritual emergency is when something comes up that’s so expansive that it’s not able to be metabolized or integrated,” explained Hobart, who specializes in spiritual emergence in her integration work with clients. “Sometimes that opening is very ecstatic and blissful, and sometimes it’s terrifying and devastating. If we don’t have a framework for how to work with and hold spiritual emergence and emergency, then when that process happens; whether it’s catalyzed by medicines or happens spontaneously as through kundalini awakening or near-death experience, people may think it’s a mental illness or psychosis. Then people get sent into hospitalization, thrown into the pathology paradigm and forcibly medicated, and it’s not understood as what is actually happening.”
In honoring clients’ overwhelming experiences, Hobart helps clients integrate those experiences and adjust into a society that does not understand or appreciate their profound transpersonal expansion. “I hold it in terms of awakening to spiritual gifts,” she explained.
Hobart also suggested that the potential for spiritual emergency in a psychedelic session heightens the need for therapists to be highly skilled and trauma-informed. “Some people who have been activated into these states have not been held properly in medicine spaces,” she said. “To be able to hold spiritual emergence and emergency, and for that matter, entheogenic work, people need to have attunement and the capacity to hold emotional and energetic space. And they need to be trauma-informed. That’s a huge piece.”
Conclusion
If anyone told you that being a psychedelic therapist is easy, that person lied to you. While specific regulations and training requirements are sometimes hazy and differ between medicines, psychedelic therapy calls for both responsibility and a diverse skill set for therapists to bring out optimal healing potential for their clients.
These therapeutic approaches and frameworks do not comprise a complete picture of the approaches currently being practiced in psychedelic therapy. As Johnson suggested, it is possible, if not likely, that psychedelics can enhance any therapeutic specialty. Regardless, a robust therapeutic tool kit will help any psychedelic therapist meet clients’ specific needs. There is always more to learn, and psychedelic work has never been about staying within an established pattern or comfort zone.
About the Author
Sean Lawlor is a writer, certified personal trainer, and Masters student in transpersonal counseling at Naropa University, in pursuit of a career in psychedelic journalism, research, and therapy. His interest in consciousness and non-ordinary states owes a great debt to Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, and Hunter S. Thompson, and his passion for film, literature, and dreaming draws endless inspiration from Carl Jung, David Lynch, and J.K. Rowling. For more information or to get in touch, head to seanplawlor.com, or connect on Instagram @seanplawlor.
In this episode, Joe interviews environmental and cultural activist, founder of advocacy group Cosmic Sister, and originator of psychedelic feminism, Zoe Helene.
In this open, free-form conversation, Zoe discusses her career path in male-dominated fields of performing art, then high-tech, then natural products, leading to a major shift leading to the creation of Cosmic Sister. She talks about concepts of othering and ableism, of coevolution and coextinction, and about how people often talk about how ayahuasca “tourism” harms Indigenous communities but rarely talk about the many ways it can and does benefit Indigenous people. She also talks about how many Americans have a fleeting, fickle, media-centric attention span on critical social and environmental issues, how living in “late-stage patriarchy” affects everyone across the gender spectrum, and how most males don’t think about how it has harmed and is still harming them.
They talk about Zoe’s “Ancestor Medicine” and colonization and the decolonization movement. She talks about ancient Mycenean and Minoan civilizations and their use of sacred psychedelic plant medicines, the tribalism of Greek people in general, and about how early Greek civilizations worked with sacred medicines even more than most people think (not just the Mysteries of Eleusis). She talks about the effects of colonization and the roots of cultural appropriation, and about ancient gold Signet rings depicting medicine women, including one that looks very much like an artistic depiction of ritual ecstatic dancing and ergot.
Notable Points
Colonization is multidimensional, and it isn’t just for people in the United States of America. We need to decolonize from ALL the colonizers. Globally, and throughout herstory. Dominator cultures have been around since the beginning of time, in subtle, systemic ways and in brutally apparent ways—and it’s still going on.
When people talk about Venus, I get on their cases about it. Please don’t call her Venus. Please call her Aphrodite. When the Romans appropriated Aphrodite, they didn’t just change her name. Venus is a twisted, patriarchal version of Aphrodite, and calling her Venus is no different from other cultural appropriations people talk about. Same goes for Mercury, Mars, Vesta and all the others. Please call Mercury by his original name, which is Hermes. Hermes is so, so much cooler. Mars is Ares. Cupid is Eros. I cringe when pop culture celebrates Diana, rather than the original Artemis. Artemis is a complex and powerful archetype, and we need her now more than ever.
There’s this prevailing idea of ayahuasca centers and so-called ‘ayahuasca tourists’ traveling to Peru and ‘taking advantage of indigenous people.’ Yes, of course there are always going to be bad people and yes, some tourists are crass and stupid, but most people go to Peru as a pilgrimage, and if anything, are guilty of romanticizing the Indigenous people in ignorant ways like, ‘Oh, they all want to run around in grass skirts.’ No, they want a cell phone. They want a good Internet connection so they can watch soccer or study or connect with loved ones or have access to more economic opportunities. Ayahuasca centers closing because of Covid-19 has been d devastating for the local and Indigenous people.
I hope people hold onto this passion for change. Fighting Racism should not be looked at as another damn trend rather than something we keep working on. We can’t quit. Same with Sexism and Environmentalism—all the big things. This is, I think, a flaw in our culture. We have this habit—it’s a trait I’ve especially noticed in American culture—where we are fickle about important issues in the news. Remember when the Amazon was burning? It’s still burning, and so many people were devastated by that, as if that was the first time we’d learned about the destruction of the Great Amazon. In mainstream American culture many people will think, somewhere in the back of their head, that it’s done. It’s fixed. ‘That got solved.’ Well, it didn’t. It’s still raging on. All the big social and environmental issues should not be considered trends. If you truly care, you are needed for the long haul.
Zoe Helene is an artist, environmentalist, and cultural activist best known for women’s empowerment and sacred plants such as cannabis, ayahuasca, peyote, and psilocybin mushrooms—our co-evolutionary allies—and for “Psychedelic Feminism,” a term she coined and popularized in support of women in psychedelics. Zoe’s personal work with sacred plants continues to deepen her determination to help protect the earth’s diverse biological abundance. She believes that creating a true balance of power across the gender spectrum—globally—is the only way humans (and non-humans) will survive, and that it is our moral responsibility, as Earth’s apex predators, to protect and defend the rights of non-humans to live freely in thriving, uncompromised wilderness sanctuaries. She founded Cosmic Sister, an environmental feminist collective for progressives who understand that the current, grossly imbalanced “power-over” patriarchal model will continue to lead humans down a devolutionary path that will eventually end in the destruction of life on Earth as we know it. Cosmic Sister’s psychedelic feminism educational advocacy projects promote sacred plant spirit medicines as a way to “jump-start rapid cultural evolution,” starting with women.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle sit down and dissect 3 recent items in the news.
First, they discuss a 2-year study on 18 older long-term AIDS survivors (OLTAS) with a high degree of demoralization and trauma, in which participants underwent 3 hours of individual psychotherapy, one 8 hour psilocybin session, and 12-15 hours of group therapy. While the study predictably showed improvement in demoralization after a 3-month follow-up, the bigger takeaway is the effectiveness of group therapy and the ability to replace hours of individual therapy, (in this case) cutting therapist time almost in half. With many people struggling to connect with facilitators but finding connection in groups, could group therapy work better to help with healing while also cutting costs? This brings up the concept of AI therapy and what improvements we could see by adding technology to this fairly established clinical model, both in cost and effectiveness.
They next talk about Decriminalize Nature Oregon groups urging voters to vote “no” on the upcoming Oregon Psilocybin Service Measure 109 due to them finding the measure to be highly restrictive and essentially putting these plant medicines behind a paywall, making it even more difficult for those with race and income-based trauma to gain access. They wonder why DN is so opposed to what they see as progress- why not come at the problem from all angles and embrace legality alongside other initiatives, especially in a time when we are likely to see huge spikes in pandemic-related PTSD?
This leads to a discussion of David Bronner of Dr. Bronner pulling funding from DN at a national level (but still supporting local initiatives) and the in-fighting that’s seeming to happen everywhere with this battle. And that leads to money and the very common feeling that large donations usually come with ulterior motives. And how do you make sure they don’t? Does taking money from someone to further your cause automatically make you a sell out? Or is there only a conflict if you have the contingency of the donor needing some sort of return on investment that affects the end goal?
Notable Quotes
“Let’s just keep experimenting and understanding what we lose when we get a little bit more technical, and perhaps also what we might gain. What would happen if you had your clients wearing a wearable, so you could review how their week actually was in data terms vs. self-reporting? That would be an interesting adjunct. And what happens when you do a full system thing with apps and the wearable being tied to that, to say, ‘Alright, hey, you should go meditate for a little bit, [and] right now, because you are spiking’ or ‘Go do this bio-feedback thing for 5-10 and re-regulate and then go back to your day’?” -Joe
“I think a lot of people that are just starting off, that are looking for some sort of mental health treatment- they’re probably going to want this medical model. Going to a group setting scares the shit out of them. They might not want to go to ayahuasca ceremonies or these spiritually-oriented, self-development groups with people. They might want that one-on-one, individual session, maybe to start off with, until they can build up a little bit of expertise and understand their own inner psyche, where they say, ‘Huh, maybe I can explore different models and different uses of context now.’ But I think that is something that is important to try to explore too- what do the people want that are outside of these inner circles that are more seasoned psychonauts- people that are trying to push for some of these changes and trying to say, ‘Hey, this is the model that we want’? Well, does everyone want that? Is that going to work for everybody?” -Kyle
“There’s no real reason to think that laws stay forever. Laws are flexible. Laws are a pain in the butt. Laws are also amazing sometimes. So consider flexibility when thinking about laws and that citizens can change things. Perhaps we don’t get it right [on the] first try, but let’s get it right iteratively. This is the direction of right, in my mind- what OPS [Oregon Psilocybin Society] is doing.” -Joe
In this episode, Joe interviews Del Jolly: co-founder and Director of psychedelic research nonprofit Unlimited Sciences, previous Business Development Manager at Charlotte’s Web, previous Outreach Director for Decriminalize Denver, and member of the Board of Advisors for cannabis nonprofit, The Realm of Caring.
Jolly talks about his path to Unlimited Sciences and its purpose: to collect as much data as possible through an observational research study through Johns Hopkins University, where participants are asked to provide as many details as possible about their psilocybin use. Like “Cannabis moms” Heather Jackson and Paige Figy collecting years of data from cannabis users through The Realm of Caring, Unlimited Sciences aims to do the same with psilocybin. They want data from recreational users as well, and they want to know where these users are, since location often establishes comfort levels (think about how much more relaxed someone would be in a decriminalized area like Denver vs. a country where you could be killed for doing these types of drugs). The goal is to use this data to find trends in all aspects of psilocybin use and figure out where to go next, both in terms of suggested use and legality.
Jolly talks about some athlete friends who are doing a lot, from UFC fighter Rashad Evans speaking on panels, to Blackhawks player Daniel Carcillo and his work with his organization Chapter 5, to Brandi Chastain pledging her brain to the Concussion Foundation. And he talks a lot about concussions and traumatic brain injuries- how female soccer players seem to get the most concussions (and women are more prone in general), how smaller, repetitive hits to the head often cause more damage than being knocked out, and how Marcus Capone of Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions (VETS) believes it’s not PTSD that’s leading 22 veterans to commit suicide a day, but more likely post-concussive syndrome. And he talks about his hope for psilocybin to emerge as something that can help these people (and all people) legally.
Notable Quotes
“If we never stopped studying psilocybin, we’d have about 50 years of research under our belt. Maybe there’s a slight possibility we’d be able to- and I’m not even kidding, help people walk again after being paralyzed.”
“If we want to slap on some dumbass bumper sticker that says ‘Support our troops,’ but then we really don’t, because we don’t want to look at psychedelics as an option or cannabis as an option, that doesn’t seem like supporting the troops. Supporting the troops, to me, means providing as many options as we can to these humans who have sacrificed everything to provide us the luxuries that we have. Can we please reciprocate to some degree and at least research this shit?”
“Something has to be done to unify to some degree, because at the end of the day, the champions of this are these smaller nonprofits and the community. And the cold hard facts about these nonprofits and community and the veterans of this space- we don’t have the money that big pharma does. We don’t have the power that the political side does and if we don’t unify and have a pretty common goal, we will be crushed in a New York second. …And realistically, if we just want to cannibalize ourselves by saying who’s ok and who’s not and all that jazz, it’s a waste of effort and it’s just going to speed up the opposition’s position.”
“This is a bipartisan subject in my opinion. Here’s how I see it- there’s not a single person who isn’t going to be affected or could not potentially benefit from the potential of something like psilocybin. Everybody, at least the last I checked, at some point, is going to suffer from depression or anxiety. …If we would just open the floodgates on research, we’d be able to help these people. So, this is a human issue. This isn’t a red, blue, black, white- this is a humanity issue that we need to just get responsible and realistic about. And the time is now. We have the information. There’s no excuse anymore. There’s no excuse. There’s no excuse not to be exploring and understanding everything we can.”
Del comes from a position leading business development for Charlotte’s Web Hemp oil, the world’s largest CBD oil producer. Del is currently on the community board of advisors to the Realm of caring, a high impact cannabis non-profit, and was the outreach director to the Decriminalize Denver campaign, which passed a historical initiative to decriminalize psilocybin in the city of Denver.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle sit down and discuss recent items in the news.
They first discuss an update to last week’s Michigan story: that this week, the Ann Arbor city council unanimously voted to decriminalize entheogenic plants. While this is great progress, remember that these substances are still illegal- just decriminalized, and as the saying goes: don’t be the low-hanging fruit. This brings up the concept of likening the ability to get these substances to earning (and keeping) a driver’s license, and the idea of temporary autonomous zones.
Next, they talk about the formation of a global group called the Psychedelic Medicine Association (PMA), formed to bridge the gap between the medical establishment, patients, and the industry in general. While there are already organizations doing this to an extent (like the very website you’re on right now), most doctors don’t have the time needed to really dive in, and shorter sound bites or articles vetted by those in the know could be very beneficial towards their growth in this new (to them) field.
They also report on a new study pinpointing exactly how psychedelics bind to 5-Ht2a serotonin receptors, which sets the stage for new kinds of antidepressants and antianxiety drugs, could help with cluster headaches, could even help explain HPPD (hallucinogen persisting perception disorder), and leads to a discussion of natural vs. synthetic drugs and the ethics of thinking someone needs to go through the psychedelic experience in order to heal.
Lastly, they discuss Compass Pathways going live on the stock market, starting at $17 a share and hitting $38 within a week, which leads to a discussion on how larger companies sue each other over valuable information but regularly take information from Indigenous people and people who’ve been working in the underground for years. In order to pay proper respect to plant medicine lineages, should we “take” MDMA, LSD, ketamine, and other synthetic substances as part of a western lineage and categorize them differently?
Notable Quotes
“That’s the vision that I would like to see. More expanded access, less legal presence. Less Empire interfering with the rebels.” -Joe
“Is it the case that people need psychedelic experience? No. I would prefer that more people have psychedelic experience, but I don’t think it’s an ethical obligation for more people to have it, or that ‘oh, in order to deserve healing, you need to go through that potentially tortuous or difficult experience [idea]’. Or joyous experience- it doesn’t have to be bad. There’s a lot there, and just thinking that people have an obligation to have the experience is a little whack to me.” -Joe
“The hard problem of consciousness is still there. What is mind? Where is mind? What is consciousness? Where is consciousness? Really big questions. We know mind appears real. We know consciousness appears real, but what is that? There’s a lot of questions left. Philosophy of mind and neuroscience are not really communicating too regularly. I saw headlines: ‘Oh look! LSD finally solved! We know how it works now!’ Like, yea, kind of, but not really, because we don’t even know what mind or consciousness is. …Most people are willing to say ‘mind equals brain,’ and use interchangeably. I think that’s pretty common parlance, but I suggest people check it out. Dig in a little bit to philosophy of mind and limitations of neuroscience and mind. I’m not trying to say we shouldn’t do neuroscience- we absolutely should. But, making conclusive statements like, ‘Oh cool, since neuroscience said this, then God isn’t real’ [is] kind of a goofy argument.” -Joe
“What it does it look like from a capitalistic point of view? X company develops a patent and then X other company goes over and wants to use that- what usually happens? There’s usually a lawsuit that entails, right? But if X company goes to an indigenous and underground community and extracts information and then they go use that to profit, what really happens there? Not much. The bigger company that has all the money usually will just dominate.” -Kyle
In this episode, Joe interviews shaman, motivational speaker, author, minister, and healer, Vanessa LeMaistre.
LeMaistre talks about her path towards shamanism: from being told she was different as a child, to traveling to India at 25 and falling in love with yoga and meditating on the Ganges river, to a tarot card reading inspiring her to earn her Master’s degree at Naropa University, to trying coca for the first time (without realizing ahead of time that that’s what she’d be doing), to training with Michael Harner. Ultimately, what led her towards accepting her fate as a shaman was both healing from the devastating death of her infant son, Kamden, due to a very rare disease, and numerous ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru, where shamans told her that her ancestors were calling to her.
She talks about living with the odd uncertainty of feeling like she should become a shaman, tarot card readers, a neighbor at an ayahuasca ceremony’s entity attachment and her interest in getting into entity extraction, her connection to Voodoo and interest in Haitian zombies, microdosing, homelessness and how some countries help each other compared to the U.S., the complications of being a shaman and trying to avoid narcissism, and what her travels have been like for her as a multi-raced woman in a world that is predominately full of white men.
LeMaistre offers spiritual coaching sessions, divination readings, sound bowl healing, motivational talks and spiritual coaching, facilitates healing talking circles (with a focus on diversity and inclusivity), and has started selling “Self-Love candles,” which she prays over and sets with intentions. She also donates books and teaches children how to meditate through her non-profit, Kamden’s Room, and has started a virtual “Soul Church,” which people can attend through her website every Sunday at 1pm PST.
Notable Quotes
“I’m finally coming to terms with accepting that, ‘You know what? Maybe there is no elder.’ I have been burned by so many people that are ‘spiritual leaders’ who are charlatans or frauds, and they’re posing as something and then they may get threatened by the power I bring, or they’re afraid that I’m going to catch them. I’ve just kind of taken it as: ‘let me learn as much as I can from what I don’t want to be, and accept that maybe there are no elders, and I’m on the verge of becoming an elder myself.’”
“It was the most spiritual experience of my entire life. I have never seen the veil so thin to where I was getting premonitions, prophecies… It was very enlightening in the sense that I had a big impairment- and I’ll just be transparent here- I had a big impairment on a personal level with accepting my physical experience, and I had a lot of complexities around understanding that I was beautiful. And this night- it showed me who I was, what I need to do, and really started this process of coming into accepting myself as I am.”
“In plant medicine circles too- most of them that I’ve sat in, I’ve always been the only black person, which has been interesting. And even being in the jungle, and having that experience with that person, I was the only female as well, so that was uncomfortable. …I’ll see ads for “Shamanic drumming- Michael Harner,” but it’s always a person who looks a certain way, and I’ve never seen anyone that looks like me. Well, why not get someone like me? …I think it’s important for people to see someone who’s multi-raced, who’s diverse, and who’s passionate and an advocate for psychedelics, especially considering, within our community, how many people don’t know what it is.”
After going through childhood experiencing a plethora of sexual abuse and dealing with the absence of her father to protect her, she has overcome a tremendous amount of trauma. When she was 25 she was a lost soul who found her way through yoga and traveling to India for spiritual trainings. Later down her journey, she gave birth to a beautiful baby boy who passed away 9-months later. Since then, Vanessa has stepped into her path as a shaman and a holistic healer. She has created a virtual church called Soul Church where people can congregate in community through ritual and conversation.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle discuss recent items in the news and dive into cannabis-assisted psychotherapy after Joe recently helped with his first session.
They discuss Compass Pathways’ projection that their upcoming stock price could be $14-$16 a share, giving them a possible valuation of as much as $544 million and the problem of having Peter Thiel as one of their leading investors, as it has recently come to surface that he met with white nationalists in 2016 and had good things to say about them. This, in addition to his concerning data-mining company, Palantir Technologies, soon going public puts a lot of the wrong attention and bad press on Compass Pathways.
They talk about UC Berkeley launching a new center for psychedelic science and education with Michael Pollan as one of the co-founders, Decriminalize Nature Ann Arbor putting forth to the city council a resolution to decriminalize entheogenic substances on September 21st, and progress in Washington D.C. and Chicago’s decriminalization efforts. They also talk about Dr. Bronner’s new “Heal soul!” campaign, which includes new labeling about psychedelic-assisted therapy and a 10% donation of net October sales towards several familiar organizations including: MAPS, Heroic Hearts Project, The Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative (IPCI), and Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions, Inc. (VETS).
Lastly, they talk about cannabis-assisted psychotherapy sessions and how similar they are to both psychedelic and breathwork sessions, how Kyle uses cannabis and somatic work together, and how established worldviews and paradigms can shift through narratives and critical analysis from both sober and psychedelic-assisted thinking.
And finally, the next round ofNavigating Psychedelics (beginning September 17th) is now officially sold out, but dates for the next round will be announced soon if you missed your chance. Additionally, there is a new class offering which explores Jungian psychology calledImagination as Revelation, developed by Kyle and Johanna Hilla-Maria Sopanen, and a new class with Lenny Gibson coming in October about the history of western philosophy (info/sign up here).
Notable Quotes
On cannabis use: “It’s always been very psychedelic to me. The way I work with it is somatically, being able to lie down, incorporate some of the breathing techniques, do movement, do yoga, do some bodywork, and to really work with whatever is coming up in my body that way, maybe play some music… I kind of started developing this naturally over 10+ years just from– it was like listening to the plant saying ‘this is how I should be used’ in a sense. Like, ‘every time you go do something stupid with me, X might happen.’ So I started getting the message of: use this more consciously. This is a tool for inner exploration.” -Kyle
“It’s this cultural baggage around cannabis. We think ‘oh you smoke it at a Grateful Dead show’ or ‘you watch Cartoon Network late at night while you’re smoking pot.’ You don’t think: ‘Let me close my eyes with intention and journey with it.’ That’s not part of our cultural vision of the plant and our relationship to it. Though, why not? There’s no reason not to. If we can cure or help manage or treat a lot of these things happening in our psyche with cannabis, what kind of miracle is that?” -Joe
“Similar to Robert Anton Wilson’s kind of reality tunnels, you can flip on the Marxist lens, you can flip on the existentialist lens, or modern capitalist lenses just to allow you to get a better picture of what’s happening in front of you. You’re never going to see objective reality but you can get closer and closer and closer. And the more lenses you use, the better you’re going to get. Does a single telescope give you a great idea about a planet? No, but when you have 400, you’re going to have a lot better [idea]. What happens when you throw a satellite out there and you’re able to see from outside the atmosphere?” -Joe
“I guess I come back to narrative a lot. If you’re telling somebody that they are sick and broken, what are they going to think about that, that they’re never going to be able to heal? Is there power in narrative? If you have a more hopeful narrative, can people heal? I’m just thinking about even in breathwork experiences, where I’ve visited narratives that are so embedded in me and then going through a breathwork session, being like ‘holy shit, maybe I don’t actually need to subscribe to that narrative anymore. Maybe that’s something I’ve been holding onto for so long, and maybe I do have the internal power to change.’ But most people just say, ‘no, that’s what it is. That’s going to be your lifelong sentence.’ Maybe not. How do we encourage people that they can change?” -Kyle
Peyote (Lophophora williamsii) is a small, spineless cactus endemic to North America, growing in the vast desert thorn scrub that runs from the southwestern United States into north-central Mexico. For centuries, the mescaline-containing cactus has been used by Indigenous groups in Northern America as a ceremonial medicine and a religious sacrament considered integral to their way of life. The rapidly growing psychedelic movement has generated a new wave of interest in plant medicines, including peyote, requiring us to tread with awareness for the impact this has on the Indigenous cultures and communities who have long stewarded these medicines.
At present, the peyote cactus is in the midst of a deep conservation crisis. Over the past few decades, wild peyote populations have been rapidly declining due to a convergence of factors including oil and gas development, illegal poaching, agricultural development, and unsustainable harvesting practices. Amongst Indigenous communities, there is a growing need to conserve this quickly disappearing natural resource that is a core element of the Native American Church (NAC), the largest pan-Indigenous religion in the United States.
Due to growing evidence of the decline of peyote and mounting concern about obtaining their sacred medicine, the NAC commissioned the Peyote Research Project (PRP) in 2013. The first phase of the project (PRP 1) concerned itself with documenting the decline of peyote as well as assessing threats to its natural habitat, while the second phase (PRP 2) focused on identifying conservation strategies, including “securing sovereign land” to protect the Peyote Gardens and building relationships with landowners to lease space for replanting and harvesting.
Sandor Iron Rope, former President of the Native American Church of North America, current president of the Native American Church of South Dakota, member of the Oglala Lakota Oyate (Oglala Sioux Tribe), and Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative (IPCI) board member, reflects that “supply and demand have always been an issue, and when we started looking at it through the lens of the PRP, we found out many issues were in the forefront of the longevity of supply.”
The research activities of the PRP showed that peyote was under threat, both in regards to its populations and quality of the plant. As the need to conserve peyote became more pressing, the National Council of Native American Churches (NCNAC) called for the establishment of the IPCI. “The coalition of the NCNAC were involved in PRP 2, and the collective decided that conservation itself needed to be addressed. Hence, IPCI was born in 2017,” says Iron Rope. “The Church is a religious, spiritual organization, however, peyote is a cactus that needs its own attention as far as its conservation status.” IPCI is not a religious organization, but a conservation center focused entirely on supporting the broader NAC community in North America. It is led by a Board of Directors controlled by NAC leaders from across the United States.
In late 2017, the NCNAC secured 605 acres of peyote habitat in southern Texas, often referred to as “the 605” on behalf of IPCI, with the help of the RiverStyx Foundation. Later that year, IPCI was formally established with the aim of empowering Indigenous communities across the U.S., Mexico, and Canada to conserve and regenerate peyote for generations to come. IPCI operates as a non-profit, officially becoming a 501c(3) organization in 2018. In early 2019, IPCI held its first peyote harvest on the 605, educating children alongside their families on how to harvest in an ecologically and spiritually respectful way.
Unlike other conservation initiatives, IPCI is a cooperative Indigenous-led initiative, and is employing a range of biocultural strategies in order to conserve, as well as facilitate spiritual reconnection with peyote. Beyond purchasing land allotted for peyote conservation, they are also building alliances with local landowners, and developing a system of harvest and distribution that is in line with their values.
IPCI considers the rancher community in south Texas an important ally in its efforts, and its members have established an ongoing relationship with landowners from whom they lease land for biocultural harvesting and replanting. “Sharing our perspective as practitioners with the ranchers, we were encouraged to seek our own land and regain sovereignty over our medicine,” shared Iron Rope. “Most ranchers that we spoke to had a lot of issues concerning poaching, and lack of respect for their land making them fully supportive of our cause.”
Lophophora williamsii – Peyote
How and When Did Peyote Become Endangered?
For decades, Indigenous cultural practices and peyote ceremonies were suppressed across the U.S., with peyote ceremonies being illegal in many states where peyotists practiced. It wasn’t until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) was passed in 1978 (and further amended in 1994 to expressly include peyote) that the NAC was finally granted exemption on a religious basis, allowing federally recognized tribes to use peyote as a ceremonial sacrament. The possession, transportation, and use of peyote by persons who are not members of federally recognized tribes remain illegal under federal law.
The endangered status of peyote is by no means a new problem. According to Dawn Davis, a Shoshone Ph.D. candidate at the University of Idaho and an Indigenous researcher studying the peyote habitat, researchers and scholars have been talking about peyote’s endangerment since the 1960s, when so-called “hippies” became aware of its “psychedelic” properties.
In the heat of the 1960s countercultural revolution, peyote was brought to public attention, gaining worldwide popularity through the works of Aldous Huxley and Carlos Castaneda. Their writings generated a newly sparked interest in the psychoactive properties of the plant and resulted in an influx of eager psychedelic tourists traveling to Texas and Mexico to seek out the famed cactus in its natural habitat.
To some extent, this trend continues today as we find ourselves in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance, and interest in the therapeutic potentials of visionary plants continues to grow. Such “psychedelic tourism” has inevitably impacted the availability of peyote for Indigenous groups. In fact, it was the countercultural movement of the 1960s and the corresponding interest in psychoactive substances that resulted in the U.S. government enacting The Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which classified peyote as a Schedule I substance.
Due to improper harvesting techniques and overharvesting, peyote populations were left decimated, and it was declared an endangered species in Mexico as early as 1991. Currently, peyote is listed as “vulnerable” as populations in the wild continue to decline. “The International Union for the Conservation of Nature placed peyote on their red list as a vulnerable species in 2009 and the next level after re-evaluation of the population, it could move to endangered status,” says Davis. “It is also important to acknowledge that within the United States, in Texas, peyote is considered an endangered species at the local level.”
Other threats to peyote populations are largely a result of exploitative land management practices, including mining, oil and gas development, the construction of wind turbines, rancher root plowing, cattle grazing, and poaching. “Over the last ten years, wind turbine development within peyote gardens has had a huge impact on peyote populations, completely extirpating large populations of cacti from the natural range,” says Davis.
Lophophora williamsii – Peyote
Another less obvious threat to peyote lies in the ongoing debate between Indigenous groups and the decriminalization community. Earlier this year, IPCI and NCNAC leaders produced an official statement in response to Decriminalize Nature Oakland’s resolution to decriminalize all plant medicines, including peyote. Although those working with Decriminalize Nature (DN) might have been well-intentioned, NCNAC leaders felt disappointed in Decrim’s failure to consult with Indigenous peoples, as well as their oversight of the cultural and religious history of peyote and the plant’s endangered status. The NCNAC’s statement requested that Decriminalization initiatives should not include peyote in their efforts to decriminalize all plant medicines, with the concern that it would provide citizens with a false sense of legality. Indigenous leaders fear that the decriminalization of peyote could unintentionally cause damage to populations by serving to “increase interest in non-native persons either going to Texas to purchase peyote or to buy it from a local dealer who has acquired it illegally and unsustainably in Texas.”
Very recently, Decriminalize Nature Santa Cruz issued a formal apology to the NAC for not consulting with them prior to proceeding with the resolution to decriminalize all entheogenic plants and fungi. DN Santa Cruz’s apology was accepted, and both the NCNAC and IPCI have stated that they “look forward to building a continued relationship based on unity, solidarity, and allyship.” DN Santa Cruz hopes other Decrim efforts will follow their lead, building a respectful relationship with Indigenous peyote practitioners.
A licensed distribution system was established in Texas as a regulatory companion to the federal exemption for Native religious use of peyote. This system employs licensed dealers, also known as peyoteros, to legally harvest and distribute peyote to NAC members, however, not all peyoteros necessarily consider Indigenous values of spiritual and ecological sustainability.
There have been issues with over-harvesting and improper harvesting by the current licensed dealers. When harvesting is done sustainably, the top of the root hardens and is able to produce more peyote pups in the future. Peyoteros (and black-market poachers) sometimes sever the root, causing the entire plant to die.
Iron Rope expressed IPCI’s intentions of being inclusive of and working with existing peyoteros, wanting to build relationships with them and start a dialogue about sustainable harvesting techniques. “The IPCI are a new family in the neighborhood,” he says. “We come as friends, as neighbors, as partners, and we don’t want to engage in any type of conflict.” However, IPCI also wants to take a step towards sovereignty, training Indigenous distributors so as not to rely solely on current suppliers.
“As Indigenous practitioners, it is important for us to reconnect in order to gain the full spiritual benefit of our medicine,” Iron Rope shared. “We are learning how to sustain our peyote for generations because a lot of our tribes have never harvested medicine and we have become lazy in a sense, relying on the non-practitioner distributors to send it to us in the mail.”
At the beginning of this year, there were four licensed peyoteros. According to Davis, the process of becoming a licensed peyotero is both time-consuming and costly, involving submitting an application to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Up until last year, peyoteros were licensed through the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS). However, the law has changed and the DPS regulatory program was dissolved, making it only possible to acquire a license through the DEA.
“The stringent process of becoming a licensed peyotero involves annual application fees and thorough background investigation, but as far as harvesting protocols and regulations, there are now none,” adds Davis. “This has contributed to a lot of the issues that peyote is having in regard to propagation, because distributors aren’t necessarily harvesting ecologically. “If you look at pictures taken from peyote harvests, you can see that a shockingly high percentage of peyote are harvested unsustainably.”
Even if harvesting protocols and regulations were implemented through the DEA, Davis is doubtful that they would be effective, in that peyoteros operate in sparsely populated areas and such regulations would be hard to monitor. She also fears that increasing regulation would push distributors out of the business, making it more difficult for tribes who don’t have a connection to landowners in Texas to access their medicine.
“I feel that there is a more organic way of resolving this than relying on western law,” says Davis. “Rather, NAC practitioners could prevent these issues by educating fellow peyote practitioners about what a properly harvested peyote button looks like, encouraging them to buy sustainably harvested peyote.” Demanding properly and spiritually harvested peyote is the first step to bringing about lasting change.
Lophophora williamsii – Peyote
How Can The Psychedelic Community Respect Indigenous Traditions?
As the psychedelic renaissance continues to unfold, it is increasingly important that we learn from the mistakes of the past, and make efforts to avoid another wave of colonial entitlement when it comes to peyote as a plant medicine.
Despite being given such reverence by Indigenous tribes and the NAC, peyote traditions have been extremely misunderstood by outsiders for centuries. From the persecution of peyote traditions beginning in the early 1600s by Spanish colonists in Mexico to the 19th and 20th-century legal suppression of peyote practices in the U.S., Indigenous people have had to undergo countless struggles to ensure the continued use of their sacred medicine.
Rather than feel entitled to peyote, the psychedelic community can serve as an ally to Indigenous communities by listening and choosing to support them in the ways that they wish to be supported. “It starts off with respect. Those that want to help can do something as simple as supporting Indigenous initiatives such as IPCI,” offered Iron Rope. “Indigenous people know what is best for them for the most part, and allowing them to take lead on certain matters is important.”
Beyond this, Davis expressed that one of her biggest concerns as a practitioner and a researcher is that non-Indigenous people should try to understand the history of peyote and what Indigenous people have endured in order to access and use their medicine. “Peyote went back underground until the passing of the AIRFA amendments in 1994, and now we have this movement pushing for peyote to be a sort of ‘free for all,’ and completely negating the historical struggle of Indigenous people’s use of peyote.”
Further, Davis also urges people to stay clear of harvesting wild peyote populations anywhere throughout its range, suggesting that one of the most important things that allies can do for peyote is to take the position that they will refuse to harvest wild populations while encouraging others to do the same. “Whether it be in Texas or Mexico, people who are truly respectful of this medicine- this plant, this way of life, will not harvest any wild populations because of peyote’s status as a vulnerable species with potential for future extinction.”
As we traverse the developments of this renaissance, it is crucial for our community to be aware of the impact we have, not only on mainstream culture, but also on Indigenous communities who have so frequently been left unheard. There are several steps that we can take to support peyote conservation, including sharing information about peyote conservation issues and educating oneself on the ethical considerations to be made when choosing to buy or use peyote outside of a bona fide NAC context, which must include awareness for the socio-historical baggage specific to this plant medicine.
About the Author
Jasmine Virdi is a freelance writer, editor, and proofreader. Since 2018, she has been working as a writer, editor, and social media coordinator for the fiercely independent publishing company Synergetic Press, where her passions for ecology, ethnobotany and psychoactive substances converge. Jasmine’s goal as an advocate for psychoactive substances is to raise awareness of the socio-historical context in which these substances emerged in order to help integrate them into our modern-day lives in a safe, grounded and meaningful way.
In this episode, Joe interviews Ash: Netherlands-based psychedelic entrepreneur with his hands in many psychedelic spaces- drug manufacturing company Synergy Trading, nootropics company Cerebra Nootropics, and podcast, Shifty Perspective.
Ash talks about his path from trying San Pedro on a farm, to trying DMT and living on the road and in squats for years, to moving to Belgium from the UK, to finding his way into the world of CBD after a friend recommended it for his epileptic girlfriend at the time. When she went from 12 seizures a day to none within a month of starting regular CBD use, he started a CBD company to sell to consumers at much cheaper prices than had been established, as well as to provide CBD for researchers. He eventually moved to the Netherlands and started a nootropics company, which has started manufacturing Micro1p, the world’s first legal lysergamide microdosing product, which uses LSD’s active ingredient (available only through their website, and only to specified countries (the U.S. is not one of them)).
Among other things, they also discuss U.S. state law vs. federal law and the differences between U.S. policy and the UK, big corporations’ willingness to lock people up to ensure continued profits, the idea of DMT being used with VR, Daniel McQueen’s DMTX extended state DMT-infusion pump, UK harm-reduction group The Loop, his new CBD drink called Galaxy, how much he loved and came to partially fund the recent Dosed documentary, and nootropics and the idea of having a “health-span” instead of a lifespan.
Notable Quotes
“I feel that I want to change the world, and I feel that psychedelics are one of the many great ways of changing humanity for the better, and I’m going to do whatever it takes.”
On corporations funding opposition to alternative medicines: “It’s pretty demoralizing when these billion-dollar industries are just totally stopping it because it’s taking away from their potential profit. …They’re the biggest cartels in the world, really.”
“I think that the medical and spiritual things kind of actually intertwine. Things like anxiety and depression are crippling society. So many people have horrendous pressure on them from these high-stress lives. It’s exhausting just living- all the pressure from jobs and education. So there’s higher suicide rates [from] people suffering and being over medicated. I think with psychedelics, we can just reduce that massively. I’m not saying we can globally cure depression and anxiety and everyone’s going to be happy, but even if we reduced it by 5%- even by a percent, it would be a huge seismic change in people’s lives and their attitudes, and that kind of goes hand in hand with opening people up, which then brings people together. So by tackling those huge problems, it allows people to talk about their problems. …And we can actually start to bring people together.”
As an innovative business man with a history working in the CBD industry, Ash likes to get his hands on as many projects that he can handle. He has a firm belief that the products offered by Synergy Trading can help better humanity.
In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle discuss several recent items in the news that further the advancement of psychedelics, including: Canadian company Havn Lifescience following Compass Pathways’ lead and registering with the Canadian Securities Exchange under the symbol HAVN, Amsterdam-based psychedelic retreat company Synthesis announcing that leading Clinical Psychologist Dr. Rosalind Watts has joined their advisory board (which also includes Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, who joined in November), European psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy company AWAKN Life Sciences Inc. announcing the launch of its Commercial Clinical Research Division with Professor David Nutt and (past Psychedelics Today guest) Dr. Ben Sessa at the helm, a recent study at the National Center for Biotechnology Information that further proved that psychedelics promote structural and functional neural plasticity, and a new app called “Trip” from Field Trip Psychedelics Inc., which was designed to help people through psychedelic trips, and brings up the very difficult balance of encouraging harm reduction and safety while also essentially promoting dangerous experiences.
They also discuss a recent article in ScienceAlert, which focused on the similarities between psychedelic trips and religious experiences through 288 people filling out a Mystical Experience Questionnaire, the Good Friday experiments’ roots of this questionnaire, and the important point that not all good data needs to be scientific and collected through clinical trials.
They also talk about books by Louis Cozolino and Rick Strassman, Strassman’s DMT-pineal gland hypothesis, whole-plant statistics vs. single-molecule statistics, the idea that LSD could promote life extension, the insensitivity and danger of playing music with historically bad roots during sessions (like playing anti-semitic composer Richard Wagner’s works), and the possible similarities between COVID isolation and the concept of nuclear families.
And they remind us that spots for the next round ofNavigating Psychedelics (beginning September 17th) are going quickly- the early class is sold out, but spots remain for group 2, so sign up now! Additionally, there is a new class offering calledImagination as Revelation, developed by Kyle and Johanna Hilla-Maria Sopanen, which explores Jungian psychology.
Notable Quotes
“These competitive forces are going to continue to drop prices, and I think that is optimistic for accessibility, long-term. But, you know, realistically, this comes back to the same question- are psychedelics exclusively in the domain of psychiatry, or do they belong elsewhere? Is peer to peer use ok? I think yes, but how do we, as a culture, kind of land on that? That’s the big question. I think a lot of psychiatrists probably agree that people should just be able to use mushrooms when they want to, or LSD when they want to. Others would be vehemently opposed, but there are people in that field that are on our side of liberation and cognitive liberty and whatnot. So it’s there. It’s coming, I think, and competition plays a part.” – Joe
“If we’re in isolation, we’re probably going to see brain atrophy. If we’re in community, we’re going to see heightened neural activity. And perhaps the brain will come back alive with the heightened neural activity. I remember hearing somebody recently talk about a visit to the actor/singer Jamie Foxx’s house. You know, super rich, right? But he’s got at least 20 people in the house at all times, and perhaps that’s how some high performers do so well- is that they’re just always around folks. …I’m wondering, are nuclear families toxic? Is the concept of a nuclear family one of the major factors at play here?” -Joe
“You can have a mystical experience. DMT doesn’t necessarily need to be involved at all. Does that take away from the value for you? If so, why? Are you fetishizing DMT? There are a lot of other drugs out there that do amazing things. Your brain is an amazing thing. The human psyche is an amazing thing. Why not fetishize the highest thing, which is psyche and its relation to the universe?” -Joe
In this episode, Joe interviews Wade Davis: Ph.D., Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, explorer, ethnobotanist, star of the recent documentary, “El Sendero de la Anaconda,” and author of several books, including bestseller The Serpent and the Rainbow, which was optioned for a movie, starring Bill Pullman and released by Universal Pictures in 1988. His new book, Magdalena: River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia, comes out on September 15th.
Wade discusses his history with Richard Evans Schultes, the strange phenomenon behind the growth of ayahuasca compared to other more benign plants, how set and setting can shift expectations across generations, how Indigenous people treat plant medicines in comparison to the western world, the difference between ayahuasca and yagé, Haitian zombies, Voodoo, and the mystery of how Indigenous people have been able to identify plants and learn of their combined effects through the plants speaking to them.
He also speaks about his hatred of cocaine and the damage it has caused Colombia and its people from US drug laws and global consumption leading to violence and deforestation for generations. He’s working to decouple cocaine from the coca plant (hopefully through some sort of future coca nutraceutical like a chewing gum or tea), encourage people to stop supporting the illicit cocaine market, and to think of Colombia differently than its unfair reputation encourages. Through his new book, which has been called a love letter to Colombia,he hopes to show people that everything they think they know about Colombia is wrong.
Notable Quotes
“This sort of quest for individual health and healing, for individual enlightenment, individual growth – which, at some level, is completely understandable, but it is also a reflection, in good measure, of our own culture of self; the ongoing center of narcissism, the idea that one’s purpose in life is to advance one’s own spiritual path or one’s own destiny – that is, in my experience, very much not what is going on in the traditional reaches of the northwest Amazon, where the plant (the medicine) both originated, but also, where today, it’s taken very much as a collective experience, such that the ritual itself becomes a prayer for the continuity and the wellbeing of the people themselves- where you’d never even think of this in terms of Self or I.”
“All of these cultures are fundamentally driven by this idea that they, themselves, are the stewards of the forest- that plants and animals are just people in another dimension of reality, that there’s a transactional relationship between human beings and the natural world so that the hunter is both hunted and the hunter; where you don’t simply go to get meat, you must seek permission to get that meat; where the shaman is less a healer than a nuclear engineer who periodically goes to the very heart of the reactor to reprogram the world.”
“I still am incredibly loyal to that passage in my life, and I find that I’m very proud and happy to say that I wouldn’t write the way I write, I wouldn’t think the way I think, I wouldn’t treat gay people the way I treat gay people, I wouldn’t treat women the way I treat women, I wouldn’t understand the power and resonance of biology- of nature itself, if I hadn’t taken psychedelics.”
“Everybody who uses illicit cocaine, I’m sorry to tell you, has the blood of Colombian people [and] the near destruction of a nation on [their] hands.”
“Everything you’ve ever heard about Colombia is wrong, and this dark cliche that has persisted is completely inaccurate, and an injustice to a people whose miseries have largely been caused by our actions- our prohibition of drugs and our propagating of this war on drugs, and of course our consumption of this horrible drug.”
Wade Davis is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. Named by the NGS as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.” In recent years his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Australia, Colombia, Vanuatu, Mongolia and the high Arctic of Nunuvut and Greenland. An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, Davis holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among fifteen indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best seller later released by Universal as a motion picture.
About Benjamin Mudge
Franklin King IV, MD, is the director of training and education at the Mass General Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics and a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School. His primary clinical and research interest is in the utilization of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy to treat a variety of chronic psychiatric conditions, including depression and anxiety disorders, and in strategies to optimize these interventions for different patient populations. In addition, Dr. King teaches and supervises residents and fellows at Mass General, and practices clinically as a staff psychiatrist at the Center for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Disorders as well as on the Acute Psychiatry Service in the Emergency Department.
Gary Laderman, Goodrich C. White Professor of American Religious History and Cultures, is the author of the new book, Don’t Think About Death: A Memoir on Mortality (Deeds Publishing, 2020), and hosts the podcast, Sacrilegious.
About Nick Meyers and 
About Tim Cools
About Ralph Blumenthal
About Richie Ogulnick
About Kile Ortigo
About Dena Justice
About the Entheo Society of Washington
About Christopher Solomon
About JR Rahn
About Dr. Ryan Westrum
About Dr. Hassan Tetteh
About Penny White
About Dr. Matthew Johnson
About Dr. Anne Wagner
About VeronikaGold, LMFT
About Dr. Harvey Schwartz
About Mendel
About Gary Michael Smith, Esq.
About Kristina and Jonas
Ryan and Rory are two brothers from Vermont, that have struggled with mental illness and addiction most of their lives. With the help of plant medicines, they came to realize disconnection was at the core of their problems. They created Cultivating Connections as an attempt to try and foster deeper connections in every aspect of their lives. One of the ways they do this is with their podcast. Another way is with their weekly group ritual.
