In this episode of Psychedelics Weekly, David is joined by Kyle, who is finally home after a lot of traveling, to talk shop and dig into the articles they found the most interesting this week.
They begin with the news that Paul Stamets now has a species of mushroom named after him (Psilocybe stametsii), then take a look at a recent self-report study called “Prevalence and associations of challenging, difficult or distressing experiences using classic psychedelics,” which aimed to collect data on just how many psychedelic users (in this study, anyone who had ever tried a psychedelic) felt that they had had a challenging or difficult experience. They discuss the results and highlight some interesting data: that LSD was the most commonly associated substance, that smoking cannabis was one of the most commonly reported interventions, and of course, the question of whether or not these experiences were beneficial.
They then talk about Synthesis Institute closing its doors, the possible hope Synthesis could have, and the sadness in this – when businesses fail, it’s easy to look at numbers and profit margins and be dismissive, but we forget the people involved; not just at Synthesis, but the hundreds of would-be students.
And lastly, they look at an article about a California-based startup called the Reality Center, which uses a combination of pulsing lights, sounds, and vibrations to create a drug-free but seemingly very psychedelic experience, reminding us yet again that you do not need a substance to achieve non-ordinary states of consciousness.
In this episode, in celebration of International Women’s Day, Victoria interviews Tracey Tee: co-founder and CEO of Band of Mothers Media, co-producer and co-host of the Band of Mothers podcast, and founder of Moms on Mushrooms, an online educational community for psychedelic-curious moms outside the prying eyes of social media.
With similar histories of womb trauma, self discovery, and body reconnection, Victoria and Tracey discuss the complications of motherhood, substance use and embracing psychedelics in a broken culture, in which engaging with small, approved coping mechanisms is fine – where the “wine mom” archetype and numbing yourself with medications is celebrated, but where we don’t often talk about how challenging motherhood can really be, and the lasting mental, physical, and spiritual impacts of birth, loss, and grief. Tracey’s goal with Moms on Mushrooms is to bring mothers together for personal growth, healing, and most of all, for the safe, supportive container that so many women considering plant medicine need.
She tells her story of creating and performing “The Pump and Dump Show” and the psychedelic journeys that led her to creating M.O.M., and discusses much more: how those large dose journeys reconnected her with her body; how microdosing has helped her feel more vulnerable, honest, and in tune with her daughter; how psychedelics can help parents realize where problematic core beliefs came from; how teaching children the ways of the world forces parents to confront and reaffirm what they truly believe; and the challenges mothers face in even talking about wanting to try psychedelics.
“Had I not had this divine intervention, I think I would have been pretty stubborn, which I can tend to be. I would have not wanted to be vulnerable with my daughter because I think I was raised to say that that wasn’t something that is good or that I should show – I’m a parent: ‘My way is the highway.’ Instead, I’m much softer. I ask for forgiveness, I tell her when I screw up, I admit my mistakes, [and] I ask her what she thinks. I always talk about Old Tracey and New Tracey (Old Tracey and ‘Shroom Tracey’): Old Tracey would have never been like that, and I think that’s a real gift, because in asking forgiveness [and] in admitting my mistakes, I’m changing.”
“What is the most upsetting to me is the fear, like this push/pull of hearing either my story or your story or reading How to Change Your Mind or watching a Netflix thing and saying: ‘My soul is telling me this makes sense, my soul is telling me to give this a shot. I might have a way out of this,’ and then my head is like: ‘You cannot do this. You’re a bad person, this is shameful, you might die (which is ridiculous) and at the very least, your children will be taken away from you.’ And that is why I’m talking to you, because that has to stop. It has to stop.”
“I don’t love rehashing the past. I don’t love carrying victimhood, but I am sad for what I lost. And when I work with the medicine (again, intentionally, safely; all the things that we’ve been talking about), I am shown, piece by piece, [that] I’m calling all those parts back. And it’s not easy, but it’s like I’m rebuilding. I’m like a Lego project right now, and I would never be able to do that without the shrooms.”
In this episode, Psychedelics Weekly is back after a brief hiatus (everyone was either traveling or sick last week!), with the OG PT team: Joe and Kyle.
With the exception of some commentary on John Oliver’s recent piece on psychedelics (which was excellent), they skip the psychedelic news this week in favor of Psychedelics Today news, as a lot has been going on!
In the last few weeks:
Joe sustained a traumatic brain injury and a broken arm;
Joe, Kyle, and Victoria attended PT’s first Cannadelic in Miami, where Joe and Kyle moderated or sat on several panels, Kyle and Victoria went and saw Afroman, and we won the Psychedelic Brand of the Year award(!);
Joe experienced a music festival in different ways (completely sober, and somewhat still in a concussion daze) and did some interesting research on psychedelics and post-concussion effects;
Despite Joe and Kyle both getting sick and not being able to attend all of it, the last Vital retreat was an amazing one, capping off a year of incredible content and connection that is only fueling the fire to make this year’s Vital even better;
And, due to issues beyond our control with the planned venue and the City of Los Angeles, we had to cancel Convergence.
In this episode, David interviews Victor Alfonso Cabral, LSW: Director of Policy and Regulatory Affairs at Fluence Training and Licensed Social Worker and practicing psychotherapist in Pennsylvania.
Cabral is currently involved with the film, “We are the Medicine,” which aims to explore the reemergence of plant medicines from the perspective of people of color from all backgrounds and walks of life, with the added factor of a strong hip hop influence. Filmmakers Eric Blackerby and Esteban Serrano want the film to normalize the concept of psychedelics and healing for people of color, but also the notion of men being truly authentic with each other and building each other up with love and support – something that challenges society’s expectations on how men (and more specifically, Black and Brown men) should be in relationships with one another. Head to pictureacolorfulworld.com to donate and sign up for the mailing list for more info on future fundraisers and screenings.
He begins the episode by reading a powerful poem he read at Horizons NYC, then tells his story: his childhood and his mother’s sacrifices; how trauma caught up to him in college and led to the low point of his life; his subsequent 120-pound weight loss journey and embracing of therapy, how his first psychedelic experience resulted in an awakening of possibility; how he became a social worker and why he felt instantly aligned with the work; how he ended up working for PA Governor Tom Wolf; and how he came to be interviewed by Sway Calloway (who is also an Executive Producer of the film). His story and all of the organizations and efforts he’s been involved with prove that being authentic, following your heart, and building relationships with the right people can lead to growth and positive change in whatever path you choose in this space.
Notable Quotes
“Social work felt like I finally had language to describe the way in which I’d been living and being most of my life, and it felt validating to have this whole profession dedicated to the way in which I felt I was showing up in the world already.” “After that experience, I felt like there [were] possibilities for me to be whatever I wanted to be, and that I wasn’t everything that had been prescribed to me through intergenerational trauma or systemic oppression or a capitalist society. And I was able to peel those things back one by one and see: okay, what’s under this? And what’s under this? And then when I got to the core of that, the message to me was: love is what matters. So that really made me feel like I do have everything that I need. I have my wife, I have my daughter, I have a family, I have good friends, I have my health. And I have ability to manifest, to do, to plan, to live. I’d been doing a lot up until that point to get my life on track, but that opened up the doors in a way that I didn’t think was possible for me, where I felt a kind of freedom that I’ve never felt before in my life.”
“When we talk about collective healing and about empowering our communities and about joy and freedom and liberation, I think it’s important for us, as men of color – for me and for the people that I love and the people around me – to be liberated, to just love each other and to be together, and to be able to be their authentic selves together without all of these other masks that we’re taught to wear. So I hope that if there’s anything that comes out of the film, [it’s] a message of what we can co-create when we can be our authentic selves with each other and hold each other up and love each other.”
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, Johanna takes the helm for the first time, hosting a conversation with Jungian analyst-in-training, writer, researcher, 5Rhythms® teacher, and Vital student: Mackenzie Amara; and clinical psychologist, long time PT collaborator, and Vital instructor: Dr. Ido Cohen.
As this episode features three huge fans of Jung (Johanna wrote her Master’s dissertation on The Red Book and teaches a course through PT), they focus less on education and the future of psychedelic therapy, and instead get pretty deep; shining a light on an integral part of psychedelia (and life) we often avoid: the shadow. What is the shadow and what is true shadow work? What did Jung give us, and why is Jungian psychology so relevant for integrating psychedelic experiences?
They discuss the notion of the unconscious as a place you can develop a relationship with and access by very different means; the idea of the healer as the container; the problematic binary of good vs. evil; the flawed concept of ego death; the differences between authentic and neurotic suffering and personal and collective consciousness; the archetype of the wounded healer and why facilitators should both be wounded and in the process of healing; and how wonderful it is that society is beginning to embrace the weird and what makes us unique.
There are no shortcuts in life and there is no “cure” for the parts of the human condition we aren’t comfortable with, but in the capitalist, efficiency-above-all-else West, we aren’t raised to sit with the unpleasant, and instead learn to seek a quick fix, which has created an environment where we’ve lost the ability to feel in the ways that we need to. Can you be with someone else’s pain if you’re running from your own? Can you have real compassion if you’ve never suffered? Can you be complete without knowing your shadow?
Notable Quotes
“Yes, we’re all suffering and suffering is scary and shadow is scary and it can overwhelm us and it takes time. And there is this thing where we can build a relationship with it. It’s all about the relationship.” -Ido
“Nature is a perfect representation of how the unconscious is. It’s unfinished. It’s in process. It’s not perfect. It’s human consciousness, and [it’s] our egoic, persona-driven striving that have us believe that we can be perfect, AKA not human, AKA have no shadow. So the shadow is this part of the unconscious; it’s the frills, it’s the weirdness, it’s the awkward pauses, it’s the burps and the disgusting stuff and the repulsion, and also the quirks, the idiosyncrasies. In Swiss German, they talk about a square that’s missing a corner – it’s the missing corner. You need to have a piece missing so that life can live there.” -Mackenzie
“There is no ego death. You can have ego disidentification, you can release the center of your consciousness from your ego, but you will never kill your ego, and you shouldn’t want to kill your ego. If you’re going to kill your ego, who’s going to be home to integrate? Where are you going to take all these beautiful experiences? Who’s going to synthesize them and alchemize them for you? …That is a way in which we’re banishing the feminine, which is process, which is yes, being in my body and suffering, because there is also so much beauty in suffering, because if you can’t be in your body to suffer, you’re not going to be in your body and experience love. They work together.” -Ido
“Psychedelics are the opportunity to get outside of oneself far enough that then I can come back and say: ‘Do I consciously want to choose to continue to be the way that I’ve seen that I am, or do I want to use my power, my influence over myself to make different choices?’” -Mackenzie
In this episode, Joe interviews artist and photographer, Rupert Alexander Scriven.
Under his brand, Vintage Disco Biscuit, Scriven recently released The Art of Ecstasy: a coffee table book that pairs high definition images of ecstasy tablets he collected over the course of 25 years with interviews and compositions written by himself and a host of other notable names from the 90’s British club scene, documenting the culture and rise of MDMA, while also promoting harm reduction and the work of UK drug charity, The Loop. The book has received some notable high praise, with Dr. Ben Sessa calling it “absolutely fucking awesome.”
Scriven discusses why he started collecting ecstasy tablets and how the book came to be, as well as details behind the photography and writings, which he likes to think of as conversations at an afterparty. And he talks about his days in the club scene and how it was like his church; how MDMA changed culture; UK drug policy; talks with his parents about drugs; differences in the club experience when people are on different substances; and whether or not dancing on MDMA can be the therapy people need. And he asks a question many of us wonder regularly: Why are we, as a culture, so far behind with drug testing?
Notable Quotes
“It really did change the culture and society as a whole, because at the time, there was ‘Thatcherism’ ([from] Margaret Thatcher, our Prime Minister), and there was a lot of disdain, there was a lot of discomfort. And this was just an outlet for everybody to enjoy themselves, whoever they were. So you could be a street cleaner, you could be an MP, you could be anybody. Everybody came together on a Saturday or Friday night and you just partied.”
“Each of these pills, even though they’re only eight millimeters across, that stamp; it didn’t signify just quality, it signified somebody’s memory of meeting a friend, a loved one, an experience, a time. You can go on any forum and people will go, ‘Oh, can you remember the dove?’ …You can ask them, and they’ll be able to recap a full story or an experience they had just from that one on element.” “A few years ago before the lockdown, [there were] only three festivals that didn’t have The Loop or some form of drug awareness testing charity at them in the UK, and those were the three festivals that there were fatalities. Now that just speaks volumes. It really does.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Jessica “Jaz” Cadoch: anthropologist, Co-Director of the Global Psychedelic Society, and Prop 122 steering committee member; and Sovereign Oshumare: Founder of XRYSALIS, an online community and retreat for queer, transgender, and intersex people of color, and Founder of Shelterwood Collective, a 900-acre eco-village and retreat center led by LGBTQ Black and Indigenous people.
Together, they are Co-Founders of ALKEMI, a consulting firm for psychedelic ethics and accountability, created due to the amount of businesses coming into this space who likely have very little understanding of the values that were established while they weren’t paying attention. They’re asking businesses questions many don’t consider: Is there a true need for them? Do they know their community and does the community want them there? Are their internal operations hierarchal or decentralized? Do employees feel heard and seen? And most importantly, have they taken any of the lessons from psychedelics and applied them towards the way they handle business and treat each other?
As Cadoch was a member of the steering committee for Colorado’s Natural Medicine Act (AKA Prop 122), she discusses what it was like from the inside: the problems (complaints about who was involved, if the voices from the community were a true representation, language in the bill); how the conflict showed how easily money and power could embody people; the problems with fighting over perfection while people are being sentenced to prison; and, where everyone is now: together in the aftermath, trying to figure out how to work together, unite missions, and build bridges between seemingly disparate parties.
They also discuss the problems with binary thinking, the concept of a business recalibrating its relationship to profit and ROI, what true access means, why it’s ok to go slow and not rush through the uncomfortable, and more.
Notable Quotes
“How are you really taking the lessons that the medicines are teaching us and applying them to the way you’re building your company? …Are you doing psychedelic business or are you doing business psychedelically?” -Jaz
“Each time that I’m broken, I’m rebuilt stronger. And that, to me, is such a journey. And committing to that journey is what I hope we as ALKEMI bestow upon people; giving them the endurance and stamina to be broken and be rebuilt, because we all need that. This system needs that. This world needs that. And we live in a system where we’re rewarded for not doing it.” -Sovereign
“At the end of the day, we are all we got. And the more we know who we are, the more we find alignment, the more we find each other, the more we mend our differences, the stronger we’ll be.” -Sovereign
“When we talk about access, it’s not only like financial access, but it’s also cultural access – to make it make sense for people who don’t speak this language, make it make sense for people who have survivor’s guilt from growing up in the hood in D.C., make it make sense for Hispanic rural communities, make it make sense for my Grandmother that needs a doctor in a white coat to tell her that this is safe. That’s what access means. It’s all of that.” -Jaz
In this episode, Joe interviews Portland, OR-based licensed marriage and family therapist, ketamine-assisted therapist at Rainfall Medicine, lead educator at InnerTrek, and speaker at our upcoming Convergence conference: Gina Gratza, MS, LMFT.
She talks about how she decided she wanted to become a therapist and when she knew psychedelics were the next step; meeting Rick Doblin at Burning Man; the efficacy of MDMA being used in conjunction with traditional therapy; how the self-compassion of MDMA gives her tremendous hope for its use in treating eating disorders; how non-ordinary states of consciousness teach us the wiseness (and uniqueness) of our inner healer; and her healthy concerns for how Oregon handles psilocybin legality: InnerTrek will be graduating some of the first licensed facilitators in Oregon and they should be certified by summer, but with OHA-approved service centers and manufacturers still up in the air, what happens next?
She and Joe also discuss how non-ordinary states of consciousness teach us the wiseness (and uniqueness) of our inner healers; the need for therapists to continuously do their own work; the idea of a psilocybin-licensed facility doubling as a music venue; David Nutt’s drug harm scale; Kylea Taylor; “The Trialogues”; archetypes of Burning Man; and how in psilocybin-assisted therapy, we can only do so much before the spirit of the mushroom ultimately takes over.
Notable Quotes
“There’s a strength in the empathic attunement that’s happening in the heart space that’s coming forward, so it’s not just talk therapy. There’s a connection happening. And we are creatures of love and belonging and connection, and when we feel that with another human being [and it’s] authentic – that is a very powerful force. We don’t have to compare it, but it’s just as powerful as medicine.”
“I hope to never be a master of any domain. I know that the juiciness of this life and this existence is continuing to stay open to learning and growing and evolving, and for me, that’s coming back to humility: I’ll never know everything, especially when it comes to the realm of altered states of consciousness. We’re trying to understand life in this state of consciousness, let alone bringing in altered states and the many different dimensions at which things can come through to you, and the uniqueness of everyone’s experience.”
“This is what we humans are able to do: Here are the measures, here are the ways in which we’re training. And then there’s the spirit of the mushroom. There’s what we are going to bring and then there is going to be what the mushroom brings: …the mycelium network, the earth, the nature; like a total other force that is beyond our ability to really know or read what will move through that.”
In this episode, David interviews two people from different sides of Vital: clinical psychologist, adjunct professor, Co-Founder of the Psychedelics R2R nonprofit, and Vital instructor, Dr. Dominique Morisano, CPsych (the teacher); and writer, psychedelic-assisted medicine facilitator, integration coach, and Women On Psychedelics Co-Founder, Jessika Lagarde (the student).
With the 2023-24 edition of Vital set to begin in April and applications closing at the end of March, we thought it would be interesting to relaunch Vital Psychedelic Conversations, but with the spin of speaking to both instructors and students to hear their different perspectives on retreats, facilitation, psychedelic education, the quickly advancing psychedelic space, and of course, Vital itself.
Morisano and Lagarde mostly discuss experience: how it’s gained, how it changes perspectives and methodologies, how one decides they’ve experienced enough to be able to know the terrain enough to help others, the importance of knowing when a patient needs a facilitator/therapist who has had the same life experience, and knowing when one’s own skills and limitations means a patient would be better off seeing someone else. And they discuss safety, the importance of being trauma-informed (and what does that mean, really?), and the puzzling cases when facilitators haven’t had their own psychedelic experience but feel the need to use psychedelics to help others.
And of course, they talk about Vital: the joy in joining together in community with people they’ve only known virtually; how interesting these retreats are compared to others due to the level of the participants’ experience; how partnering up and taking turns as the sitter and experiencer shows how little of a difference there is between student and teacher; and how many people have reported the most impactful part of the retreats was not their own experience, but being there for someone else.
Notable Quotes
“Do you know the terrain? Let’s say you’ve taken ketamine once, and you’re doing six sessions of ketamine with a client. Do you really know what they’re going to be experiencing, and can you have had the full range of experience? …How do we define this? I can tell you: You have a hundred psychedelic experiences; most likely you’re going to have a different experience each time, and a different connection to inner/outer terrain or different realms or different ways of thinking and being. So when is enough enough? When did you learn your lesson? When did you gain the experience necessary to navigate someone [else’s experience]?” -Dominique “You learn a lot about yourself as well, I find at the end of a day. Every journey is also a journey for the facilitator, and we are constantly mirrors to each other, so it’s very interesting work to do in that sense as well, because your own inner work is continuously being done.” -Jessika “It’s never the same. Two sessions are never the same, and even how you show up on that day for that session, or set and setting; all of that influences [the experience], so we have to constantly be placing ourselves between being a student [and being] a teacher sometimes, but never put ourselves in the spot that we think, ‘Okay, now I know everything. Yeah, I’m done.’” -Jessika
“How do you develop wisdom? The way to develop wisdom is through experience, and often, pain.” -Dominique
In this episode, David interviews Raad Seraj: host of Minority Trip Report, a podcast for underrepresented views in psychedelics and mental health, and founder of Mission Club, an education and investment platform.
Seraj tells his story of growing up in Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia and eventually finding himself in Canada, and how the discomfort and rage he felt as a result of class and xenophobia affected him. He talks about the idea behind his podcast, Minority Trip Report, and how, while they need to be heard, underrepresented and BIPOC voices aren’t a monolith. And he talks about the incestuous and gatekeeping nature of venture capital and the complications of actually turning investments into lasting business. With Mission club (which is partnering with Microdose), he aims to create opportunities for people who don’t have a ton of money to invest in early stage companies in this space, to help the dreamers who don’t necessarily fit the bill for traditional VC.
And he discusses much more: David Chalmers’ theory of “The Extended Mind”; the problems with having one idea of mental health and summarizing complicated minds into little boxes; how we are made up of different selves and how psychedelics can help us to acknowledge and integrate our minority selves; the differences between anger and rage and how 5-MeO-DMT helped him shed his rage; how we can use technology, culture, and capital together to amplify what exists and build what doesn’t; the three places that have transformed him the most; and initiating a bus-wide Cyndi Lauper sing-along while on tour with Finger Eleven as a host for Much Music.
Notable Quotes
“If you talk about mental health and healing: all healing is the reintegration of the narrative landscape – the autobiographical story. But the problem is; when you only have one type of story, one type of autobiographical narrative that gets to be heard, that gets to be embedded, that gets to be shared, that gets to go viral; and from that, you build courses and infrastructure and definitions of what mental health is and then you sort of impose it on the rest of the world – that is a problem because mental health is ultimately about being a human being, and we are multipolar beings and we are forced to be summarized in very small ways, whether by society or by systems.”
“You have a part that is elevated above the body and the mind and the consciousness, and seeing and observing yourself and your truest nature and your truest needs and wants and desires and so on, and I think with people who are on the margins (again, whether you’re Jewish, whether you’re bisexual, whether you’re a person of color, whether you’re an immigrant, or whatever), the parts that you suppress the most all of a sudden find light. They can be seen; that’s where the light gets in. And then that temporary visibility of all of a sudden seeing that part of you without judgment, and being almost agnostic to those parts, is powerful.”
“I recognized very early on [that] there was class. Race came after. Race is a 400-year-old concept. Class is a permanent part of any human society, but class is so much more insidious. We don’t talk about it.”
“At the surface of everything, whether it’s culture, politics, music, tech: it’s all bullshit. There’s a thin sheen of garbage. You have to dig a little deeper to find the true stuff.”
In this week’s episode, Joe is joined by Kyle, calling in from The Atman Retreat in Jamaica, where he’s running the fourth of five retreats offered through our Vital program.
They first discuss some news: Oregon Senator Elizabeth Steiner introducing a bill (SB-303) to essentially override many of the recommendations of the Oregon Health Authority, especially around client data – which would be provided to government agencies instead of staying private (which the people voted for); a reparations proposal in San Francisco recognizing the harms of the drug war; GOP lawmakers in Missouri and New Hampshire proposing bills for psilocybin therapy and psychedelics legalization (respectively); and Canada’s Apex Labs being granted approval for a take-home psilocybin microdosing trial.
Then, Kyle gives us an update on his very busy last few months, running Vital retreats: breathwork in Costa Rica, breathwork and cannabis in Colorado, and psilocybin in Amsterdam and Jamaica. He talks about the retreats themselves, the five components of breathwork, the idea of safety and “brave spaces,” the power of community and being witnessed, the concept of focusing on technique over the substance, what students have been saying, and finally: how the five elements relate to Vital, psychedelic therapy, seasons, and the process of growth. Reminder that applications for Vital’s 2023 edition (beginning in April) close at the end of February (update: we’ve extended the date to March 26), so if you’re curious, head to the site to learn more or attend an upcoming Q+A here!
For this week’s episode, we had plans for a guest to join Joe to talk about some legal battles, but as seems to be the norm this time of year, sickness postponed that conversation to a future date. With David taking some much-deserved time off and Kyle in Jamaica on a Vital retreat, this Psychedelics Weekly is a rarity: just Joe, monologuing the news.
It’s probably best to just listen and head to the links to follow along, but some highlights this week are: Prince Harry coming out of the psychedelic closet; Virginia lawmakers proposing the legalization of psilocybin; psychedelics legislation already in plans for nearly a dozen states in 2023; NBC news recognizing the need psychedelic therapists, facilitators, and education; the WHO aiming to rename 5-MeO-DMT to Mebufotenin; and Roland Griffiths creating The Roland R. Griffiths, Ph.D. Professorship Fund to ensure his work continues to be recognized after he passes.
He also talks about Convergence, and you should know that prices increase on January 16, so don’t wait any longer! Check back next week for more news and, *fingers-crossed* a co-host – hopefully Kyle calling in to tell us all about the retreat!
In this week’s episode, Joe and David meet up to talk about Vital, Convergence, and the latest news:
-Tryp Therapeutics and Mass General signing a letter of intent for a Phase 2 clinical trial investigating the effects of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of Irritable Bowel Syndrome – interesting because it further highlights the likely effect of psychedelics on the brain-gut connection and that psychotherapy is involved;
-New York lawmakers pre-filing a bill to legalize DMT, ibogaine, mescaline, psilocybin and psilocyn (and remove them from the state’s banned substances list) for 2023;
-New York’s first cannabis dispensary finally opening on December 29;
-British Columbia responding to their opioid crisis (the latest data reports 14k deaths since 2016) by beginning a Portugal-like decriminalization model, allowing people 18 years and older to carry a combined 2.5 grams of drugs (heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine and even MDMA);
and finally, an interesting but confusing (maybe a follow-up is necessary) article showing that what we’re learning about ketamine could lead towards a better understanding of psychosis and schizophrenia.
In this week’s episode, Joe and Kyle are together again before Kyle sets off for a 2-month road trip centered around Vital retreats, where we hope he’ll be able to report in from live while in Jamaica.
In this episode, David interviews published researcher, social entrepreneur, and internationally recognized Indigenous rights activist: Sutton King, MPH.
In New York City alone, 180,000 people identify as Indigenous, Native American, or Alaskan Native, and this community is facing a disproportionate prevalence of mental health disparities, poverty, suicide, and PTSD due to intergenerational trauma from attempted genocide, forced relocation, and the erasure of culture and identity via boarding schools. Her purpose has become to bring light to what Indigenous people are facing due to being forced to live under a reductionist, individualistic Western approach that is in direct opposition to their worldview.
She talks about growing up being instilled with the importance of ancestry and tradition; why she moved to New York; how psychedelics helped her move through the trauma she felt in herself and saw so commonly in her family tree; and capitalism: how we need to move away from our private ownership, profit-maximalist, extractive model into a steward mentality inspired by the Indigenous voices and principles that have been silenced for so long.
And she lays out all that she’s doing to push these goals forward and help these communities: her work with the Urban Indigenous Collective, Shock Talk, the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund, Journey Colab and their reciprocity trust, and even her time last year at the World Economic Forum in Davos. We’re thrilled that she’ll be speaking at our conference, Convergence, this March 30 – April 2.
Notable Quotes
“One of the principles that I always was taught is that Indigenous peoples were always taught to be humble and not to be proud and not to be loud. But I have always felt like that was a way to keep us stagnant, to keep us complacent. So I would say I’m definitely a disruptor of this generation.”
“We are dealing with a burden of poverty, we’re dealing with so much chronic morbidity and mortality, as well and our chronic health. There is a number of different issues that we’re facing as Indigenous peoples. However, I’d also like to highlight how resilient we are as well. To be able to survive genocide, forced relocation, boarding school, and the poor socioeconomic status that many of us face [and] our families face, but continue to be a voice for our communities; continue to be on the front lines, advocating for missing and murdered, advocating for the protection of our land and demanding land back – I see a resurgence.”
“When you look at that skyline of that concrete jungle in New York City, I love to remind folks that it was the Mohawk ironworkers who risked their lives on that skyline, to be able to create the world we see around us. The paths that we walk today [and] the rivers that flow have always been used by the Indigenous peoples who came before us.”
“When we think about the economy and this market, it’s not capital that creates economic growth; it’s people. And it’s not this reductionist, individualistic behavior that’s centered at the core of economic good; it’s reciprocity, and being able to make sure that we have a market and an economy that’s inclusive; that’s bringing in all voices, that’s also considering all voices, all of the different parts of the ecosystem – not to silo people, but to bring everyone together, I think, will be the opportunity of a lifetime to really be able to really enact change.”
As the psychedelic movement expands, with surmounting research serving to change the tide of public opinion, more people are seeking out psychedelics as modalities for healing and self-exploration. Whether in the context of psychedelic-assisted therapy, plant medicine ceremonies, or recreational use, the modern Western psychedelic discourse has long been interwoven with the concept of “set and setting.”
But in contemporary psychedelic culture, the term is no longer sufficient as a harm reduction mantra. How can it be updated to better serve today’s journeyers?
A Brief History of Set and Setting
“Set and setting” refer to many factors which extend beyond the psychoactive effects of a given substance, playing a vital role in shaping psychedelic experiences. Typically, “set” refers to the mindset of a psychedelic explorer and “setting” refers to the context in which a substance is taken.
However, there has been little development of which variables fall under the umbrella of set and setting since its conception in the 1960s. There are significant factors that shape a psychedelic experience – both acutely and in the long term – which aren’t fully captured by set and setting alone.
The concept of set and setting has become something of a harm reduction mantra interwoven with the emergent field of psychedelic-assisted therapy and psychedelic research at large, used to describe the ways in which factors that extend beyond the substance itself can impact and shape its effects. Accordingly, it’s been an impactful linguistic tool that therapists, researchers and explorers have looked to for guidance on curating a container for an experience with medicine.
“Set” commonly refers to an individual’s mindset, including both immediate and long-range states of mind. A person’s immediate set is related to their state of mind before a psychedelic session, including everything from intentions, fears, hopes, and expectations about the session. However, their long-range set might include enduring personality traits, personal history and formative life experiences, social identities, and mental health history.
“Setting” commonly refers to the container of the experience, which includes the physical and social environment within which a substance is ingested, factoring into account when and where it will take place. Thus, setting may include aspects such as music, whether it takes place outdoors or indoors, the decor/props in the session room, as well as the relationships between others present.
The concept of set and setting does not exist independently of culture, with the sociocultural context of set including, but not limited to, race, economic status, strength of relationships with others, and the individual’s access to and relationship with nature.
Timothy Leary, 1960s counterculture icon and ex-Harvard lecturer in clinical psychology, is generally given credit for popularizing the concept of set and setting through his emphasis on the importance of both in shaping psychedelic experiences.
In the cult classic, The Psychedelic Experience, Leary together with his colleagues Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert reflected, “Of course, the drug dose does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key – it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures. The nature of the experience depends almost entirely on set and setting.”
To a large extent, the notion of set and setting within Western culture has been shaped and inspired by the ways in which Indigenous cultures around the world ingest psychoactive plant medicines in contexts bound by ritual, ceremonial objects, music, relationship with the land, and cosmological interpretive frameworks.
Compared with Indigenous cultures, Western culture has a bias against the use of psychoactive substances, and despite evidence that the peoples of Europe once used psychoactive plants ritualistically, such traditions have been long forgotten. Cultural frameworks determine the lens through which psychedelic experience is interpreted, and the lack of a cultural context, beyond that of prohibition, within which to make sense of psychedelics in the global North has produced a need for the ongoing formulation of set and setting.
More recently, Ido Hartogsohn, assistant professor at the program for Science, Technology & Society at Bar-llan University, has been conducting research on set and setting, exploring the ways in which psychedelic experiences are shaped by society and culture. In 2017, Hartogsohn published a paper outlining the history of set and setting, pointing out that although the term is often credited to Leary, its roots extend further back.
He explains how members of the Club des Hashischins, translated as “Club of the Hashish Eaters,” a Parisian group dedicated to exploring psychoactive-induced experiences in the 1840s, gave emphasis to what he calls factors beyond the substance itself. When Timothy Leary began his research with psilocybin in 1960, he exchanged letters with English author Aldous Huxley, who shared an excerpt written by one of the club’s members, Théophile Gautier, in which Gautier explores the necessity of preparation and going into a hashish experience with a “tranquil frame of mind and body.”
In addition, Hartogsohn suggests that having a better understanding of set and setting could serve as a form of harm reduction as well as benefit enhancement, highlighting that “the discourse on set and setting had remained largely underdeveloped over the years.”
An Expanded Vision: Set, Setting, and Support
Considering the growing mainstream emergence of psychedelics, set and setting alone is no longer sufficient as a harm reduction mantra, nor is it sufficient as a guidepost for the benefit maximization of psychedelic therapy and research. We argue that as a matter of public health, this mantra must evolve into “set, setting and support.”
No doubt that the proliferation of positive results from clinical studies being conducted on psychedelics, alongside countless mainstream articles detailing their healing benefits with promising headlines like “The Psychedelic Revolution Is Coming. Psychiatry May Never Be the Same,” are driving increasing numbers of people experimenting with psychedelic substances.
Despite the undeniable healing benefits of psychedelics, media discourse around them is sometimes dressed in sensationalist language, serving to construct psychedelics as miracle cures for all mental health problems. This premise is misleading and does not highlight the innumerable challenges that present themselves around the psychedelic experience.
One evident challenge that may emerge, is that of the psychedelic experience itself. Even when set and setting are controlled, there is no guarantee that challenging content and situations will not present themselves.
“Sometimes active journeyers can find themselves in unsound decision-making states. Having the support of a peer, trip sitter, or facilitator, during an experience can help the explorer navigate their inner state and make adjustments to the setting for maximum comfort and safety,” says Hanifa Nayo Washington, co-founder and Chief of Strategy at Fireside Project, a psychedelic peer support line that provides free, live phone support to individuals actively tripping or looking to process past experiences.
As psychedelic researcher and transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof says, psychedelics can be “non-specific amplifiers of mental or psychic processes.” That is, they have the ability to amplify content which is latent in the psyche, bringing up thoughts, emotions, and sense impressions that we were previously unconscious of.
Another challenge that may emerge after the experience relates to the fact that healing is often a messy, non-linear process in which things sometimes get worse before they get better. Anecdotally, there appears a common point of contention around individuals’ expectations going into an experience versus the actual outcome. No doubt, having forms of support already integrated into the process can make such moments of difficulty easier.
Beyond this, the aftermath of a psychedelic experience can also be destabilizing, as the non-ordinary states of consciousness they elicit serve to catapult us beyond the bounds of our everyday perceptions. In part, it is this very disruption in our normative flow of consciousness that enables psychedelics to be so healing, however, it can also be a simultaneously scary process as we find the foundations of our worldviews and belief systems turned on their heads.
“Psychedelic experiences can invite tremendous dysregulation in the body, mind, and spirit system,” Washington says. “Enlisting post-journey support in the immediate days, weeks, and months that follow a psychedelic experience can significantly ease the process of self-regulating to a ‘new normal’.”
What Can You Do To Seek Support?
Seeking avenues of support is a way to enhance psychedelic preparation, journeys, and integration, with support taking many different forms. One type of support, which may seem more self-evident, is that of socially-based, community support at the interpersonal level.
Despite the fact that psychedelics can elicit feelings of connection and oneness, some who use psychedelics may find themselves feeling alienated and misunderstood. For years, prohibitionist, zero-tolerance policies served to demonize psychedelic substances and those who used them, resulting in a lingering stigma and sense of shame associated with their use. This is especially true for individuals from communities of color who have long faced the impact of the discriminatory enforcement of drug laws, with the war on drugs producing profoundly unequal outcomes across racial groups.
Additionally, spiritual and mystical-type experiences have long been ridiculed and pathologized in Western culture, as they often include elements that are not culturally accepted as objectively real, sometimes resulting in those who have profound transpersonal experiences being dismissed or labeled as “crazy.”
Following a deep spiritual or transpersonal experience in which an individual disconnects from their ego, once they begin folding back into themselves there are layers of their identity or their lives that they may leave behind. This letting go of behaviors and parts of the psyche that are no longer of service can be conceived of as a type of “psychedelic shedding.” Omar Thomas, Founder of Jamaica’s Diaspora Psychedelic Society, CEO of Jamaican Organics and Psychedelics Today Advisory Board member, first formulated the notion of “shedding” in the context of psychedelic integration.
This might relate to one’s job, relationship, identification with a certain religion, sexual identity, or even their gender. When one goes through this shedding process without adequate support, there’s the risk that rather than finding relief from their mental and psychospiritual afflictions, they deepen, due to the many associated implications and consequences of the shedding process.
For example, what happens when someone realizes that the reason for their stress is rooted in their work, but they can’t quit because they won’t be able to support their family otherwise? Or what happens when someone sheds a cis-gendered identity but they’re in a marriage that would fall apart, opening a flurry of difficult, albeit potentially necessary effects?
This shedding process isn’t necessarily a bad one, but it certainly can be without having adequate support present to facilitate and ease the process. Like a butterfly going through its metamorphosis, it needs to be held in a safe container while fragile to emerge on the other side as its fullest and most beautiful expression.
Even today, as psychedelics become increasingly accepted in the mainstream, there is still a residue of stigma that remains. Thus, it is important, when looking for someone to support your journey, to find a non-judgemental, trustworthy person to share the experiences with. For some, this person may materialize in the form of a therapist, counselor, coach, or shamanic guide, while for others it may be a trusted friend or family member.
If support in an individual’s immediate circle is scarce, finding community support could come from connection online or in person with a psychedelic community, many of which offer courses and integration circles. One benefit of finding community online is around connecting with people from a particular social identity group that may not be accessible otherwise. For example, there are now integration circles that cater to individuals who identify as BIPOC, neurodivergent, or queer.
“In preparation for a psychedelic journey, support can look like gathering with a trusted friend, psychedelic facilitator, or support circle, to explore intentions, apprehensions, impressions, and beyond,” Washington says. “This support can increase awareness of one’s inner weather or set. With greater awareness comes the possibility for increased understanding of one’s own needs and knowing.”
Other forms of support include tools and techniques that a psychedelic voyager can draw upon as resources for grounding before, during, and after psychedelic experiences.
No matter the quality of the experience, beyond an intention to reduce the risk of harm, certain practices can be adopted as a way of supporting oneself through moments of discomfort or difficulty, to add a deepened sense of meaning and lasting benefit to the experience. For example, a 2019 study that observed the effects of psychedelics on long-term meditators suggested that the effects of a mindfulness practice may help patients sustain treatment outcomes in the long-term.
One might consider adopting a type of embodiment practice, engaging different aspects of the body in creating deeper self-awareness, balance, and connection. Whether it be a practice rooted somatics or mindfulness, or a more dynamic movement-based practice like yoga or dance, finding ways to become embodied helps to cultivate a deeper relationship with oneself and inner support to fortify your whole being.
Exploring the value of somatic practice, Lauren Taus, therapist practicing Ketamine-assisted Psychotherapy and Founder of Inbodied Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy and Integration Training shares, “Every emotion has a somatic counterpart, a felt sense in the body, which means that developing a daily practice of being in your body and listening to somatic wisdom is essential for healing.”
Support can also manifest by tending to your connection with nature. It can be easy to feel isolated after the depth and intensity of a psychedelic experience, however, the earth and the manifold beings that permeate it can serve as a source of community, providing consistent support through the embodied, knowing you were never alone to begin with.
In our vernacular, we tend to say that we are using psychedelics, but it’s certainly possible that psychedelics are actually using us. When one considers the predictable shift in values developed out of their use, expanding them to the global scale, we can see that not only are psychedelics healing us at the individual level, but are collectively helping to change the course of humanity’s place on earth by allowing us to care more about ourselves, one another, and the earth itself.
As this continues, there will be a never-ending need to increase layers of support for the broader community. Where might you be able to add that missing piece in your community, in your work, or in your personal life? What does it mean for you to evolve beyond set and setting?
In this episode, Joe interviews Zach Leary: host of the MAPS podcast, facilitator at Evo Retreats, author, and of course, son of psychedelic legend, Timothy Leary.
Leary was last on the podcast four years ago, so this episode serves as a bit of a check-in and reconnection, and truly goes all over the map. He discusses his relationship with Ram Dass and reconnecting to psychedelics (and himself) after a 13-year spiritually-bankrupt career and not quite understanding his identity outside of his father’s shadow; why the psychedelic facilitation role shouldn’t be standardized; Dave Hodge, Kilindi Iyi, and super high-dose experiences; ancestor work; solo ski trips compared to the Vipassana experience; the ease with which people play Monday Morning Quarterback with the story of his father; floatation tanks and the birth of ketamine; why Ram Dass held a grudge against Dr. Andrew Weil; and critiques of Michael Pollan – how much How to Change Your Mindskipped, how little experience Pollan had before essentially jumpstarting a revolution, and how many people now think they’re ready for a psychedelic experience when they’re likely not.
Leary just recorded with Rick Doblin for the MAPS podcast, he’s finalizing his first book (tentatively titled And Now the Work Begins – Psychedelics in the 21st Century and How to Use Them), and launching an online 8-week course called “Psychedelic Studies Intensive,” which begins February 8. He will also be a guest at our first conference, Convergence (March 30 – April 2).
Notable Quotes
“I don’t believe that the psychedelic facilitation role or experience should be standardized. There are just so many ways to do it. There’s no one way to do it. Sure, there are some wrong ways to do it, there’s no doubt about that. But it shouldn’t be standardized. It shouldn’t be generic. It shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all. It really doesn’t matter to me if somebody has gone through the MAPS training program or CIIS; that doesn’t make them any more qualified than some of the amazing underground visionaries who are doing healing work as well. …No one psychedelic experience is the same. Why should the facilitation experience be the same?”
“It sort of becomes like a catch 22: If you have to ask if you’re ready for psychedelics… I don’t know, maybe you’re not.”
“If you look at every iteration on the war on drugs; every single one, going back to the late nineteenth century criminalization of opium against Chinese immigrants in the bay area, to African Americans [and] cocaine, to [the] Hispanic population and ‘Reefer Madness’ to white, long-haired, anti-authoritarian hippies dropping LSD, African Americans [and] the crack epidemic – every single time (I mean, this list is endless), it always goes back to a war against people [they] don’t like. And once you do that, you create an inherent system of corruption to fuel that, because it’s a civil war. It’s not a war against the drug. It’s a civil war against behavior [and] against consciousness.”
“This isn’t a political issue. It’s a human rights issue. Like it or not, every single society on the face of the Earth since recorded history has used mind and mood-altering chemicals. And that is never going to change, ever.”
In this week’s episode, Joe and David team up again to discuss what news interested them the most this week: the DA dropping a felony drug charge against a mushroom rabbi in Denver due to the passing of Proposition 122; Numinus Submitting a Clinical Trial Application to Health Canada that would give in-training practitioners the ability to experience psychedelics with their psilocybe-containing EnfiniTea; and a University of Exeter-led trial moving forward with the next step in a study using ketamine for alcohol use disorder (with 2/3 of the money coming from the National Institute for Health and Care Research).
They also review a paper that analyzed the economics of psychedelic-assisted therapies and how insurers come into play; as well as The Journal of the American Medical Association stating that, based on current trajectories compared to cannabis legalization, they believe the majority of states will legalize psychedelics by 2037. So nice to see these continued steps in the right direction!
And if you missed it, we just announced that applications are open for the next edition of Vital. There are incentives to paying in-full by certain dates, so if you missed out on last year’s edition or have been curious, attend one of our upcoming Q+As!
In discussing these articles, much is covered: methylation and genetic memory; addiction; gut biome; cesarian births; how much inequality is built into the “psychedelic renaissance” due to it primarily evolving out of inherently unequal Western societal paradigms; permaculture; new ways to be together; Burning Man; the concept of the nuclear family; the power in working with your hands; creativity; harm reduction and the lack of readily available drug testing kits; and more.
In this episode, Victoria hosts a bit of a microdosing roundtable, speaking with three champions of microdosing: “The Father of modern microdosing,” James Fadiman, Ph.D.; Adam Bramlage, Founder/CEO of Flow State Micro (a functional mushroom company and microdosing educational platform); and Conor Murray, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at UCLA who conducted the world’s first EEG microdosing study.
Fadiman and Bramlage recently launched a very popular course through our Psychedelic Education Center: “Microdosing Masterclass,” which covers the history and science of microdosing, as well as best practices for microdosing safely and effectively. They discuss the roots of microdosing, decriminalization and concerns over the corporatization of psychedelics, what we’ve seen so far in research, and how we’re finding ourselves in an era where people are going to be allowed to actually help themselves.
Murray is hoping to make big waves in the promotion of microdosing with the world’s first take-home EEG microdosing study: participants will be mailed a wireless headband that will be able to track brain activity in real world scenarios – the citizen science we’ve so desperately needed in comparison to lab studies that couldn’t be more different from how people actually live day-to-day. There is no criteria to participate, and, in contrast to lab studies, they want all data possible: people who are in therapy or not, people following different microdosing protocols, people microdosing for different reasons, etc. Will microdosing improve brain scores on cognition and emotion? Will participants see measurable improvements? And how will these numbers look when comparing scores months after initial peak neurological windows?
If you’d like to participate, head to psynautics.com and sign up. The first 50 people to do so will receive the wireless EEG to track their brain for one month for only $40.
Notable Quotes
“Because it’s inherently interesting for people to find that their consciousness can be improved (not necessarily changed) and that their whole physical system can also be improved, microdosing has found a natural niche which is: it might be good for you, and as far as we can tell, it’s very, very, very, very, very rarely bad for you. And that’s a nice risk/reward ratio.” -James
“It’s hard to fool the brain. You can maybe have a good placebo effect if you’re trying to ask someone: how much do you think your cognition’s improving today or emotion’s improving today? But it’s harder to fool the brain into having a different answer.” -Conor
“There’s so many people who will not buy into this until it’s proven by modern science, and that’s why Conor and his work is so important, and this new study with the wireless headbands and the idea that every citizen scientist on the planet can write Conor at Conor@psynautics.com and be a part of this study and get a wireless headband – I mean, that is fascinating. That is taking microdosing out of a sterile lab and putting it into the natural environment where it came from, as hunter-gatherers, for hundreds of thousands of years.” -Adam
“That’s really the metaphor, which is: the more windows, the more you see different views, and there’s nothing good or bad about any particular window except how clean it is. …We’re opening up bigger windows in more directions than has been the case in the past.” -James
This week features David Drapkin, Joe Moore (for the first part), and introduces Alexa Jesse, who you’ve probably heard in ads, but who makes her first appearance on the podcast.
They discuss two big political moves in the advancement of psychedelics: the creation of the Congressional Psychedelics Advancing Clinical Treatments (PACT) Caucus (led by Representatives Lou Correa (D-CA) and Jack Bergman (R-MI)), and the filing of the Breakthrough Therapies Act by Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rand Paul (R-KY).
And they talk about the story of Jim Harris overcoming paralyzation through psilocybin; NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) determining that Esketamine is not cost-effective; new progress in Germany and Finland; MDMA-assisted therapy (and other psychedelics) showing alleviation of chronic pain; a ramp up in LSD research for Alzheimer’s studies; and more.
Plus, we hear a bit of Alexa’s story, wish Joe and Johanna happy birthdays, and talk about what’s most immediate in the PT world: Early Bird pricing ending today for our first conference, Convergence (use code PTINSIDER10 for a 10% discount!), and the next round of Navigating Psychedelics launching next week.
This week’s episode features David Drapkin and Jon Dennis, who you know from Eyes on Oregon and all of the work he’s done in an effort to protect religious freedom under Oregon’s Measure 109.
They discuss opposition and concerns around Colorado Proposition 122 (which officially passed last week with 53% of the vote!) and recent cannabis legalization in three states, then move on to Oregon: what it’s been like being so involved in Measure 109’s rulemaking progress, what people were saying during this week’s final public comment period, whether María Sabina would be able to work under the proposed guidelines, and even the idea of microdosing under this new framework.
In April of 2020, the world was locking down at the same time the Black Lives Matter movement was gathering steam, and Joe and Kyle found themselves in new territory, filled with uncertainty and fear while watching conflicts explode everywhere. They felt an immediate need to talk about all that was happening, largely as a way to break through the lockdown malaise and connect with each other, and hopefully, our audience. And so, Solidarity Fridays was born: a different style of podcast that, instead of interviewing a guest about their story, focused on what was most pressing in their world: in the psychedelic space, and in their lives.
Other priorities took over and the series slowly faded away, but today, we’re happy to announce that the spirit of Solidarity Fridays has returned in a new weekly show, aptly titled Psychedelics Weekly.
The show will feature a rotating cast of familiar voices, while introducing new hosts and friends of the show, covering the most important psychedelic news (and our take on it), while giving you all a glimpse into what’s going on in our lives and at Psychedelics Today.
This week features Joe and Kyle, discussing the controversy around Wonderland banning a small list of people from attending, Colorado Proposition 122 passing (at least we think…), and the newest round of Navigating Psychedelics (starting November 29th; reserve your seat now!).
In this Veteran’s Day episode, Joe checks in with two members of the Heroic Hearts Project: Founder and President, Jesse Gould, and Chief of Operations, Zach Riggle.
Heroic Hearts’ mission is to create a healing community that helps veterans suffering from military trauma recover and thrive through helping them gain access to psychedelic treatments, professional coaching, and ongoing peer support – and we’re always happy to have them on the podcast to remind listeners about the extremely important work they do.
Among other projects, they are currently running several studies: psilocybin for gold star wives (spouses of fallen soldiers), ayahuasca for combat veterans, and ibogaine for special operations veterans through the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School’s Center for Psychedelic Research & Therapy; a study with the University of Georgia on personality change through psychedelics; a gut microbiome study with University of Colorado Boulder; and a psilocybin for head trauma study through Imperial College London. And today, they released the short film, “It’s Time – A Documentary of Veterans and Pro Athletes Seeking Healing Through Psychedelics.”
Gould and Riggle discuss the growth in interest and acceptance in psychedelics they’ve seen over the last few years; the importance of people telling their stories; relative trauma and how people too often wait to seek help; how trauma isn’t always due to a single event; Colorado’s Proposition 122 (which passed!); the need to have standard measurements in psychedelic studies; and how people who go through trauma together can heal together.
Notable Quotes
“At what point do we ask for help? I think, just as a society, we feel like things have to be in full-on crisis before we need to seek some sort of assistance. And we want to put [it] out there that that doesn’t have to be the case – that if you’re able to look at your life and realize that there may be some areas where things could improve and you might need some help in improving them, then don’t be afraid to reach out, because we’re not going to turn you away.” -Zach
“In the standard medical world, the physicians [or] the psychologists are looking at that qualifying incident and trying to heal that, trying to address that. And there’s some things that are pretty effective …but they’re working largely on that single incident, and ignoring all the other things that may have happened over time. And that’s where psychedelics can be so beneficial, is that they address that whole issue with a full system reset.” -Zach
“You take a population that largely (due to their illness) has been isolating, pushing everyone away, and just sitting back and looking at how amazing everyone else’s life is while theirs continues to deteriorate. Well, we plug them back into a community, bring them in, and help them to heal together. That’s a powerful thing to realize: that communities that were traumatized together; they heal better together.” -Zach
Unless you’ve somehow managed to stay away from it all, there’s a lot of conflict in the world right now, and arguments and vitriol never seem to be more abundant and impassioned than in the time leading up to an election – which is where we find ourselves today. So, what a perfect time to laugh!
In this episode, Victoria interviews podcaster and Instagram comedian gone-viral, Dennis Walker, who talks about the value of satire: how people are realizing that often, humor is the way to cut through the noise and make difficult news more palatable, and how this is something we especially need to remember in our psychedelic echo chamber where it’s all too easy to start yelling rather than hear each other out. He views his platform, Mycopreneur,as “The Onion of the psychedelic space,” – a way to embrace the classic Trickster archetype and laugh at some of the absurdity in our lives, while also calling attention to important issues that aren’t always easy to talk about.
He discusses his long relationship with mushrooms; how “The Daily Show” and other satirists changed the way we consume news; his experiences with having people he’s parodied appreciate his work; going viral (his most popular reel has 164k views); and also, on a more serious note, how mushrooms could be the answer to many of humanity’s geopolitical challenges around pollution, hunger, and sustainability.
Head to his instagram to check out some of his characters like Don Chad or his ideas like “PsychoNaughty,” and if his humor doesn’t do it for you, go spend time with something that does. It’s important to take things seriously (if you’re in the US, get out and vote!), but it’s just as important to laugh.
Notable Quotes
“I think we just live in a state of perpetual crisis right now as a society, and the psychedelic movement can’t help but internalize that and reflect that. …We’re dealing with a powder keg right now of all of these underlying issues that are bubbling up to the surface and that we’re having to confront collectively, and I think that even in the most serious dramas in theater or in television, there’s comedic relief.”
“I started reading through these 17 goals and producing the interviews that students did with various stakeholders from the Los Angeles Mayor’s office or from representatives from the United Nations and this and that and the other, and all of the subject matter they were talking about – about the need for sustainable development all over the globe; the need for cleaner, safer, smarter cities; the need for more equity across industry and across society; etc., etc. – I realized that in my perspective, mushrooms filled a lot of these niches.”
“Remember to have fun. Remember that even the most serious political, geopolitical, business, this and that and the other intersections that are going on in our world; there’s room to laugh about it and there’s room to not take everything so seriously, because that’s actually bad for your health. So if we’re talking about therapeutic value in psychedelics; laughter, humor, levity, [and] wit are extremely valuable from a therapeutic perspective.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Dana Larsen: one of Canada’s most well-known advocates for cannabis reform and long-time anti-drug-war activist.
Larsen discusses his path from a high school kid sending letters to Canadian Parliament about cannabis drug policy, to his recent Overgrow Canada stunt (where he gave away 10 million cannabis seeds in order to encourage people to grow plants everywhere), to opening his mushroom dispensary where he sells psilocybin and LSD, to last year; opening The Coca Leaf Cafe: a Vancouver, BC-based store that sells peyote and coca leaf tea (and they’re apparently the only store in the world doing this). As a long-time fighter of the drug war who has clearly made great strides, he talks a lot about prohibition and its many problems; and how, in all of his work, it’s been civil disobedience that has been the most successful.
He discusses what it’s going to take to establish a recreational mushroom market; differences between US and Canadian reform; his feelings on peyote; his thoughts on new designer drugs; his concerns with current rehab and safe supply systems; and he gives and an oddly fitting analogy between the stereotypical picture of an opiate user and the masturbation panic that spread through Europe for hundreds of years.
Notable Quotes
“I’ve been doing this for over 30 years, and looking back at this time, the one tactic that was the most effective was the civil disobedience. I’ve done a lot of political work, I’ve done lobbying and other things, and there’s a role and a place for that. But for me, I think the most success has come from myself and others openly breaking the law.”
“Large doses of mushrooms can be great, but for a lot of people, they don’t want to be super high. They just want a little bit. And I think that there’s a tendency, if it’s legal, for most people to move towards milder forms of use. When there’s prohibition, a lot of folks stop using, but those that continue to use are pushed towards the most extreme forms of use, which is most harmful for them and for society in general.”
“We talk about harm reduction, and I think that’s important, but the other side of harm reduction is benefit maximization. These substances aren’t just harmful; like with anything, you want to reduce the harms, but there’s positive things about cannabis use and mushroom use and cocaine use and heroin use. …There are a lot of positives about these substances as well as the negatives. Prohibition just makes the positives very hard to manifest and it accentuates the negatives to an absurd degree.”
In this episode, Joe interviews David Bronner: CEO (Cosmic Engagement Officer) of Dr. Bronner’s, a top-selling natural soap brand, that has, over the years, branched more and more into social (and psychedelic) activism.
Bronner visits largely to discuss Colorado’s Proposition 122, which they describe as “the most progressive policy yet” and would define natural plants like psilocybin, psilocin, mescaline-producing plants (excluding peyote), ibogaine, and DMT as “natural medicine,” and decriminalize their personal use, possession, growth, and transport for people over 21 years of age. If it passes, the statute would also create a Regulated Natural Medicine Access Program for licensed healing centers to administer these substances in safe, controlled environments.
He discusses the details of the proposal and its friction points with Decriminalize Nature’s efforts (most recently in their Initiative 61); some of the false narratives driven by opposition to Proposition 122; the ways the psychedelic movement is connecting with traditionally psychedelic-averse conservatives; peyote and the need to focus on sustainability; what happened with California’s Senate Bill 519; research into ibogaine; Biden’s federal prison “pardon”; and more.
While some say the people of Colorado aren’t ready for Proposition 122, we believe that they are, and we join Bronner in voicing our support for the measure – which could be a massive win for Colorado and the psychedelic movement in general. If you live in Colorado, we urge you to research the measure and think hard about which way you’ll be voting on November 8.
Notable Quotes
“Everyone here really wants to bring the healing power of these medicines and is understandably suspicious of corporate takeover like we’re seeing in big pharma. The way I see it; this regulated program and access is what competes with big pharma.”
“Conservative leanings on this could play in our favor, I don’t know. I mean, maybe not, but a crushing victory in Colorado, man, makes a lot of things possible. If we crush it with a 2/3 majority across a political spectrum in an off-year election in a purple state; that’s just going to send a shockwave to the political establishment and just make a lot of things easier, I think, at both the state and federal level.”
“What is a sustainable source of medicine? What’s not? This whole cognitive liberty/religious liberty [belief]: you need to balance that against ecological sustainability and Indigenous rights and not just say, ‘I have the right to use anything. It doesn’t matter how endangered it is or unsustainable that is.’”
Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics, the annual psychedelic conference in New York City, is celebrating its fifteenth anniversary year.
Horizons has been a landmark on the psychedelic conference circuit long before there was ever such a thing. Once a small, single-day gathering at Judson Memorial Church, the conference has grown into a five-day event. In the past, its stage has welcomed speakers such as Steven Benally, Rick Doblin, Amanda Feilding, Roland R. Griffiths, Ph.D., Bia Labate, Ph.D., Nick Powers, Ph.D., Alexander Shulgin, Ph.D. and Ann Shlugin.
From the beginning, the goal has been to create a forum with the credence and respectability that the topic of psychedelics deserves. The conference has, accordingly, sought out historic venues to host its programming: The New York Academy of Medicine, founded in 1847, and The Great Hall at Cooper Union, where; when it was new, Abraham Lincoln spoke. More recently, in September, Horizons debuted the Horizons Northwest conference at the Portland Art Museum, one of the oldest art museums in the country.
After all, why should this subject, which many traditional cultures have held sacred for thousands of years, not be discussed in esteemed cultural institutions?
What’s Special About This Year?
In previous years, the focus at Horizons has been on advocacy and awareness. But things are changing. Now that we are seeing the fruits of this work – with, for example, the Natural Medicine Health Act in Denver, Colorado, and most prominently with the Psilocybin Services Act in Oregon – the focus is moving quickly toward implementation.
What are the hard problems of making psychedelics accessible to a large group of people? How do we meet this historic opportunity safely, responsibly, and with wisdom?
The Program and Speakers
Classes and workshops for care professionals will be offered on Wednesday and Thursday, October 12 and 13, at The New York Academy of Medicine. Attendees will have a chance to learn from experienced researchers and guides William A. Richards, Ph.D., Brian D. Richards, Psy.D, Matthew W. Johnson, Ph.D., Marcela Ot’alora G., LPC, and Bruce D. Poulter, RN, MPH on Wednesday. Those who have taken classes before can enroll in intermediate workshops on Thursday: “Guiding Psilocybin Therapy Sessions,” with Mary Cosimano, LMSW of Johns Hopkins, and “Intermediate Topics for MDMA Therapy Clinicians,” with Marcela Ot’alora G., LPC and Bruce D. Poulter, RN, MPH.
After a challenging year in the industry, The Psychedelic Business Forum at The New York Academy of Medicine will begin with an overview of the state of the industry on Thursday, October 13. We will hear from companies operating in this space on impact- and values-driven models, as well as from those raising capital for psychedelic endeavors. Mike Mullete, who oversaw the commercialization of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine and who is now COO of MAPS PBC, will give a briefing on how MAPS PBC is preparing to bring MDMA-assisted therapy to market.
Saturday, October 15, is focused on the medical and legal implementation of psychedelic treatments. What are the current successful and ongoing efforts to develop regulated access to psychedelic experiences? What work has yet to be done? Assembly member Patrick B. Burke, who introduced a bill to regulate the medical use of psilocybin in New York State, will kick off the day. Rachel Yehuda, Ph.D. will appear along with retired Lieutenant General Martin R. Steele and Marcus and Amber Capone of VETS to speak about the remarkable confluence of veterans and psychedelic therapy. Brett Waters, Esq. will also give a briefing on federal-level policy reform.
Sunday, October 15, is all about the way people are actually using psychedelics in the world – not in medical or clinical environments, but “in the wild.” Saleena Subaiya, MD, MSc and Kate O’Malley, MA will present two of the larger surveys that have been done on the impact of ayahuasca use on behavioral health and mental illness among users and facilitators – the first time preliminary conclusions have been presented on this subject. Bia Labate, Ph.D. and Joseph Mays, MSc will speak about decolonizing psychedelics, and Sandor Iron Rope, president of the Native American Church of South Dakota, will tell his story and offer an Indigenous perspective on the rise of psychedelics in popular culture.
Looking Forward to Community
The purpose of Horizons is to be in service to the public availability of quality knowledge on psychedelics, as well as to strengthen the networks and communities involved in this work. The decisive ingredient in both? People.
Indeed, because this subject has been prohibited and criminalized for decades, this can be a powerful experience. For many who are on the fence about committing to advocacy or entering this field in some way, this environment can tip the scales, empowering people to become community participants and leaders.
Registration for Horizons New York is still open. Visit Horizons PBC’s website for a detailed event agenda, speaker lineup, and to register.
And when registering, make sure to use code PSYCHEDELICSTODAY-NY-17 at checkout to receive 17% off!
Photos by Andres Bohorquez Marin
This post is part of a 2022 media sponsorship between Horizons PBC and Psychedelics Today.
In this episode, Joe interviews Miriam Volat, MS and T. Cody Swift, MFT; Co-Directors of The Riverstyx Foundation: a charitable organization focused on funding psychedelic research and ensuring integrity and reciprocity in the psychedelic space.
Volat and Swift cover a ton of ground in this conversation; from philanthropy, research, and the hurdles of funding in the psychedelic space, to the unintended consequences of the quest for holistic healing (e.g.: iboga & peyote over-harvesting), to plant medicine biocultures and the Good Friday Experiment, to changing our relationship with waste with green funerals. They discuss psilocybin’s ability to ease distress related to cancer and death, toad conservation efforts by the Yaqui; the true sacredness of peyote amongst Native Americans, and Indigenous-led structures for future biotechnology companies.
They talk about the ever-present reality (and ripple effect) of the decimation of the Native American way of life, and break down the critical considerations for the survival of Indigenous culture; looking at the Nagoya Protocol and how sustainable harvesting structures, better relationships with the land and surrounding communities, benefit-sharing, and, most importantly, partnerships with Indigenous leaders can help to ensure a culturally respectful and informed future for the psychedelic field.
Notable Quotes
“Sometimes in the psychedelic space, people are just focused on this organism or brew or something, and that’s the focus. But really, for thousands of years, those things aren’t separated from a way of life or a cultural container that guides many things through a territory, through language. So that’s why we’re really using that term, ‘bioculture,’ so as not to dissect these things into little parts that are actually very interconnected.” -Miriam
“If we arrive in a psychedelic future 20, 30, 50 years from now and we haven’t done our work to empower those communities to survive and stay strong and stay rooted in their own traditions, we’ll be at the same place of not knowing where we came from: What were the original ways of holding these medicines? What were the original songs? What were the original protocols? And once again, [that] will have been lost. And that’s not healing, that’s more disconnection.” -Cody
“White cultures, especially on the West coast; we’re blessed with …so many amazing medicines from MDMA and LSD and ayahuasca and 2C-B, and all the 2Cs, and 5-MeO, and just– it’s incredible. And the Native American communities have, at least in this country, they have peyote. They do not regard it [as] a psychedelic. This is a sacred, sacred plant medicine. And they have no interest (from all the leadership that we’ve talked to); absolutely no interest [in other drugs]. It would be a sacrilege to consider the other pathways. All they have is Peyote. We really need to keep that in mind.” -Cody
Miriam Volat, MS, serves as Co-Director with Cody Swift of the Riverstyx Foundation, Interim Executive Director of the Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative, Director of the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund, and she is on the Board of Directors of MAPS Public Benefit Corporation. The RiverStyx team undertakes deeply engaged relational philanthropy supporting social justice; ethical and innovative integration of the psychedelic movement into broader society; addressing mental, spiritual, and ecological crises through biocultural responsibility; and respectful allyship with Indigenous traditional knowledge holders. Miriam Volat works personally and professionally to promote health in all systems. Her background is as a complex systems-facilitator, soil scientist, educator, and community organizer. Her work aims to increase broad-based community and ecological resilience through supporting high leverage initiatives at the intersection of biological, socio-cultural, and psycho-spiritual diversity.
About T. Cody Swift, MFT
T. Cody Swift, MFT is a philanthropist, qualitative researcher, and licensed psychotherapist. Through the Riverstyx Foundation, he has collaborated extensively on projects addressing healthy society through working with stigmatized populations and issues – those most likely to be overlooked for funding and support. Since 2007, he has helped to fund over 20 psychedelic research trials. He has served as a therapist-guide in the Johns Hopkins psilocybin and cancer-anxiety study, and has conducted dozens of qualitative interviews with study subjects into the subjective aspects of their experiences with psilocybin and MDMA. He has a passion for reinvigorating religious traditions through psychedelics, and has also worked for over 7 years supporting Indigenous communities in the conservation of their sacred plant medicines, such as the Native American Church in the preservation of Peyote and the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund.
Shannon feels that the majority of people who are interested in (and could benefit from) psychedelics would prefer that their experience be as close to a conventional medical setting as possible. And especially with the risks of rogue practitioners, licensing boards want to see predictability, uniformity, regulation, and (perhaps most importantly) that we as a psychedelic culture are placing importance on being accountable and self-governing. He wants to establish a certification process that’s standard enough that which medicine the patient is using will become secondary.
He discusses what the certification process will likely look like; why uniformity is so important; the challenges of respecting and integrating Indigenous traditions into a medical model that’s drastically different; what people should look for in psychedelic education; and the importance of breaking from a siloed and hierarchical model into one that’s cross-disciplinary, where professionals of all types can work together for the betterment of the patient.
Notable Quotes
“The premise of the certification board is that we’re trying to certify a process …of medication-assisted, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy that looks at integration [and] prep, that looks at set and setting, that looks at the sacred container of this relationship; and that we build that, and that is the core of it, and the medications become a little bit secondary. We can bring ketamine in, we can bring DMT in, we can bring psilocybin [in], [and] we can bring MDMA in; because these medications, frankly, they’re not really chemically-related or that similar, but what’s similar is the process that patients go through with them.” “There’s always the question of: ‘How do I get training?’ …The Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative just did a survey of the field of education and found that there are now over 50 providers of psychedelic education, and four years ago, there might have been a handful. But someone coming [up]: What do they do? ‘How much do I need to study?’ These things are expensive. It’s confusing. So we want to create a clear, professional path [where] someone says: ‘I’m going to step into this and do this as a career. Here’s what I need to do? Good. I can do that.’”
Scott has been a student of consciousness since his honor’s thesis on that topic at the University of Arizona in the 1970s. Following medical school, MDMA-assisted psychotherapy became a facet of his practice before this medicine was scheduled in 1985. He then completed a Psychiatry residency at a Columbia program in New York. Scott studied cross-cultural psychiatry and completed a child/adolescent psychiatry fellowship at the University of New Mexico. Scott has published four books on holistic and integrative mental health including the first textbook for this field in 2001. He founded Wholeness Center in 2010 with a group of aligned professionals to create innovation in collaborative mental health care.
Scott is a past President of the American Holistic Medical Association and a past President of the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine. He serves as a site Principal Investigator and therapist for the Phase III trial of MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD sponsored by Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. He has also published numerous articles about his research on cannabidiol (CBD) in mental health. Scott founded the Psychedelic Research and Training Institute (PRATI) to train professionals in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and deliver clinically relevant studies. Scott co-founded the Board of Psychedelic Medicine and Therapies in 2021 and currently serves as the CEO for this non-profit public benefit corporation. He lectures all over the world to professional groups interested in a deeper look at mental health issues and a paradigm shifting perspective about transformative care.
In this episode, Joe interviews Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and certified sex therapist, Courtney Watson. In just two years’ time, Watson grew from “Psychedelics are white people drugs” to opening a ketamine clinic to serve the marginalized communities she comes from. She shares the work she is doing through Access To Doorways; her Oakland-based non-profit whose mission is to bring psychedelic-assisted therapy to queer, trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming, Black, Indigenous, people of color, and two spirit communities.
This discussion is all over the map, from the platform of African traditional religion through the prospect of trauma healing for white supremacists, across BIPOC erasure in psychedelic research studies, and down into the realms of connecting to the spirit of entheogens from our pasts. Watson waxes on Black resilience; Hoodoo; how ALL plants are entheogenic; how conceptualization and talk in the psychedelic space often falls short of real action; ancestral veneration and ways to connect with one’s ancestral past; andthe concept of “spirit-devoid” synthesized compounds actually being the evolution of those plants’ spirits. She breaks down thoughtful considerations for queer and trans people in the psychedelic space, pointing out that while our society places too much emphasis on gender and sex, the acknowledgement of gender diversity and tearing down of the myths of hetero- and cisnormativity is hugely important. She believes that true access to these medicines can lead to true healing, which leads to love, justice, and actual equality. You can support Access to Doorways by making a donation here.
Notable Quotes
“Our people will talk to us. They will guide us. They will direct us. Especially for folks that don’t have ancestral practices in their day to day and haven’t had for generations; ancestors are starving for attention. They’re like, ‘Thank God you see us!’ Give them some light, give them some love, give them some attention, and they will open roads for you in all sorts of ways that you never knew were possible.“
“I think we also place way too much emphasis on gender and sex in this culture in this way that ends up stigmatizing the fact that there is gender diversity. …Holding all of this knowledge that heteronormativity is a thing and cisnormativity is a thing, and that these are not the default when we’re working with trans folks and folks that do not identify as heterosexual – that is really important.” “Healing could actually help shift what’s happening. It can help turn things in the ways that they need to be turned; in the ways towards love, towards justice, towards actual equality. It’s only when we are healed that we can actually do that; 1) because we have enough energy to be able to do that, but also because we have enough vision and foresight to be able to do that. The clarity of what it means to actually love only comes when we are healed.“
“There’s a lot of conversations, there’s a lot of talk, there’s a lot of conceptualizations, there’s a lot of dreams. But there’s not a lot of action. …So many people get stuck in the conceptualizing piece of it and the philosophizing piece of it that action gets missed. Access to Doorways is action. With $7000, we have given 4 subsidies. I know people that have raised ten times more than us and have not done that much. It is completely about doing what we say that we’re doing. It is completely about action towards healing.”
Courtney Watson is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and AASECT Certified Sex therapist. She is the owner of Doorway Therapeutic Services, a group therapy practice in Oakland, CA focused on addressing the mental health needs of Black, Indigenous & People of Color, Queer folks, Trans, Gender Non-conforming, Non binary and Two Spirit individuals. Courtney has followed the direction of her ancestors to incorporate psychedelic-assisted therapy into her offerings for folks with multiple marginalized identities and stresses the importance of BIPOC and Queer providers offering these services. Courtney has received training from the Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research at CIIS, MAPS, and Polaris Insight Center to provide psychedelic-assisted therapy with a variety of medicines. She is deeply interested in the impact of psychedelic medicines on folks with marginalized identities as well as how they can assist with the decolonization process for folks of the global majority. She believes this field is not yet ready to address the unique needs of Communities of Color and is prepared and enthusiastic about bridging the gap. She is currently blazing the trail as one of the only clinics of predominantly QTBIPOC providers offering ketamine -assisted therapy in 2021. She has founded a non-profit, Access to Doorways, to raise funds to subsidize the cost of ketamine/psychedelic-assisted therapy for QTBIPOC clients (now accepting donations!!!). When not in the office seeing clients or in meetings for the businesses she leads, she’s watching Nickelodeon with her kids, kinda working on her dissertation and more than likely taking a nap!
In this episode, David interviews one of the biggest names in psychedelics and someone we haven’t had on the show until now; Founder and Executive Director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), Rick Doblin, Ph.D.
MAPS has recently been at the center of media scrutiny, notably through the New York magazine‘s “Cover Story” podcast series, which chronicled instances of alleged sexual abuse within the MAPS clinical MDMA trials. Since reporting on this issue has largely called into question the design of MAPS’ clinical trials, data reporting, quality control, and claims around the efficacy of MDMA in the treatment of PTSD, we wanted to provide an opportunity for Doblin to respond to these very real concerns – and he does just that.
He discusses how MAPS reacted, what could have been done better, what it has all meant for the non-profit, and how it feels to now be considered the enemy by many in a space MAPS helped build. He addresses the concerns of sessions ending too soon (highlighting how that may suggest a desire for additional therapy) and asks anyone who has participated in a MAPS trial to complete a long-term follow-up survey so the organization can improve their process and ensure their data is as accurate and robust as possible.
He also discusses what the post-approval psychedelic landscape could look like; their goals for facilitator training and how they align with requirements in Oregon; their desire for a patient registry or “global trauma index”; and the importance of collecting and analyzing real-world evidence. And he talks about MAPS and their globalization goals: how exploring psychedelic therapy specifically in countries with little to no tradition of psychotherapy can lead to new therapeutic models. Rather than exploring areas where there is guaranteed revenue, they are seeking areas that are high in trauma instead – to bring these medicines where they are most needed.
Notable Quotes
“I think you can have solutions that go too far. The podcast people put out a solution, saying that there should be no touch in therapy. …They’ve also said that [our] studies should be shut down and that we need experts to think about this for years. I think that kind of thinking is out of balance with the amount of suffering that seems to actually be alleviated.”
“The more dangerous the drug, the more important it is that it be legal.”
“We’re really wanting to bring this to the police, [and] we’ve done a lot of work with veterans. The breakthrough that we’re still looking forward to one day would be to treat the first active duty soldier. So far, it’s only been veterans, but if we can treat active duty soldiers, I think that would be [great]. The closer you can treat people to the trauma, probably the better.”
“Even though we’re focused on MDMA and there’s all these other things for MDMA, really, what we’re doing is opening the door to psychedelic medicine. So what we want, ideally, is therapists to be cross-trained with MDMA, ketamine, psilocybin, ibogaine, 5-MeO-DMT, ayahuasca, whatever. And then the psychedelic clinics of the future will not be: ‘Here’s a ketamine clinic, here’s [an] MDMA clinic, here’s a psilocybin clinic.’ It will be psychedelic clinics, and the therapists will be cross-trained and they’ll customize a treatment program for each individual patient with any number of different kinds of psychedelics at different times in a sequence.”
Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He received his doctorate in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he wrote his dissertation on the regulation of the medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana and his Master’s thesis on a survey of oncologists about smoked marijuana vs. the oral THC pill in nausea control for cancer patients. His undergraduate thesis at New College of Florida was a 25-year follow-up to the classic Good Friday Experiment, which evaluated the potential of psychedelic drugs to catalyze religious experiences. He also conducted a 34-year follow-up study to Timothy Leary’s Concord Prison Experiment. Rick studied with Dr. Stanislav Grof and was among the first to be certified as a Holotropic Breathwork practitioner. His professional goal is to help develop legal contexts for the beneficial uses of psychedelics and marijuana, primarily as prescription medicines but also for personal growth for otherwise healthy people, and eventually to become a legally licensed psychedelic therapist. He founded MAPS in 1986, and currently resides in Boston with his wife, with three children who have all left the nest.
In this episode of the podcast, recorded in-person in Joe’s living room, Joe interviews Philip Wolf: Founder of Cultivating Spirits, Co-Founder of the Cannabis Wedding Expo, past guest, and friend whose path in cannabis aligns nicely with that of Joe’s with Psychedelics Today.
Wolf’s work in cannabis has largely been in the form of “elevated dining,” where participants are treated to an experience similar to what wine aficionados seek out; with dispensary tours, cannabis tasting, and food-pairing. His current project is CashoM: a platform offering education to cannabis consumers, from beginners to connoisseurs, covering everything related to cannabis – from teaching a newbie how to pack a bowl to the science behind terpenes, and everything in between.
Wolf discusses the free-for-all, wild west early days of recreational cannabis in Breckenridge; similarities between those days and what’s happening in Oregon with psilocybin; cannabis as medicine and the reframing of what “medicine” is; his recent appointment to the Rolling Stone Culture Counsel; and the recent “deep dive into winter” he took by staying at a house alone in Wisconsin for 2 months.
And he talks about some higher concepts: The importance of sitting in a circle with a group, the need for integrity in all things, embracing uncertainty, and why we need challenging trips. There is no one tool, modality, or programmable set, setting, and dose that will work for everyone every time, but he believes the secret to making this all work is to find commonality between each other. Can we all grow enough to make that link a general love for one another?
Notable Quotes
“Right now, we’re really limiting the potential of cannabis, and limiting how it can actually affect someone’s experience, and how people are connecting with it. And this comes from people trying to create digestible marketing because they feel like that is the route in order to get new consumers on board. But actually, I think, through that, they’re actually doing a really big disservice, because people are just pigeonholing cannabis with sleep or anxiety relief or [to] energize. It’s just really limiting everything in my opinion. …Having a limited understanding of what cannabis can actually do for your life isn’t going to allow people to tap into the true potential of that particular medicine.”
“I think there is a wisdom to the medicine. Like, if you feel like you ate too many mushrooms, maybe you were supposed to eat too many mushrooms. …You get provided a lot of things in your life that can lead to a lot of other things, and we don’t always have the capability of seeing the importance of that.”
“Hopefully it’s a good reality check for a lot of people to understand how we’re going to come together to get this right. And it’s not my way, it’s not Joe’s way, it’s not your way, it’s not this person’s way, it’s not this company’s way, it’s not MAPS. It’s none of it. All of that together is the only way that this is going to happen.” “When we’re going through a bad experience, we grow from it. If we were happy all the time – if we have the happy pill, if we have the happy mushrooms all the time – then there’s no point to grow and advance. But if we can push the edge, as we spoke about, then there’s that opportunity for growth.”
Philip Wolf is grateful to do the work he was born to do: open the minds of the world to the benefits of cannabis, and showcase them in the form of celebration, ritual, and elevated dining. Since then, he’s founded Cultivating Spirits, co-founded the Cannabis Wedding Expo, co-founded Hispanola Health Partners (501-c3 non-profit) and is currently creating CashoM, a Cannabis Masterclass program for beginners and connoisseurs. His focus: to bridge the gap between mainstream America and cannabis through education, experience and lifestyle. Philip has been featured on CBS Nightly News, NBC, Business Insider, New York Post, Rolling Stone, Forbes, Time Magazine, Bloomberg, Vice, Entrepreneur, and many more. He’s appeared in viral Facebook documentary style videos with over 12 million views, and starred in an episode of the popular television show, “Bong Appetite” on Viceland. Philip was recently honored this year by the Rolling Stone Magazine Culture Council to join its ranks.
On the eve before the final vote, Jon Dennis, Esq. shares his thoughts.
If you don’t know Jon Dennis yet, he’s an activist and attorney leading the charge for affordable community access and religious freedom under Oregon’s Measure 109 program, as well as the co-host of our Eyes on Oregon series. He’s been involved in many of the official Oregon Health Authority (OHA) Subcommittee meetings and has been keeping us up to date with everything going on in Oregon.
This week is the week many in the psychedelic community have been working toward and excitedly anticipating, as Wednesday, May 25th is the day the Oregon Psilocybin Advisory Board (OPAB) will make its final vote on whether to recommend allowing a community-use paradigm of psilocybin services that Jon and so many others have been advocating for.
To hopefully bring even more attention to this landmark event, we thought it’d be helpful to share the comment Jon sent to the OHA, as it perfectly summarizes why his proposed entheogenic practitioners framework is so important.
We invite Oregon rulemakers to read Jon’s succinct overview of the issues in advance of their Wednesday vote.
“There is a growing social movement that believes access to psychedelics is a fundamental civil and human right that should be denied to no person. Members of this movement consider psychedelic freedom to be the maligned cousin of religious freedom. For some people, they are the same or very closely intertwined.
Pew Research data show that only 49% of people report ever having had a mystical experience in their entire lives, which is defined as a “moment of sudden religious insight or awakening.” Also, 49% of respondents to your Community Interest Survey on psilocybin under M109 said they were interested in psilocybin for spiritual reasons.
The fastest growing category of religious self-identification in the United States is people who identify as “spiritual but not religious.” For a growing number of people in our society, religious institutions have come to be viewed with distrust, often because they have inflicted religious trauma on people who’ve come in search of healing. When I began talking about the proposed religious use framework under M109, I was initially amazed at the amount of criticism I got on account of it protecting “religions.” People liked the community access model, but they thought they wouldn’t benefit from it because “religion” for them has become obsolete.
I believe, as many do, that we are undergoing a spiritual crisis. Martin Luther King warned that a society that is addicted to war and ignores its problems of racism and poverty “is approaching spiritual death.” There is growing recognition that we have the analytical and technical solutions required to solve many of the world’s greatest problems but lack the social and political will. King recommended that we become less of a “thing-oriented society” and more of a “person-oriented society.”
I see these problems as spiritual in nature and believe they might be solvable only through spiritual solutions.
Oregon is about to begin a great experiment of introducing legal adult-use psychedelics into mainstream Western society through its safe and legal container of Measure 109. So far as I can tell, nearly everyone who works with psilocybin or other psychedelics in a sincere and personal manner believes that psychedelics have the potential to help us breathe some much-needed spiritual life into society. We believe adoption of an affordable community-access model of psilocybin services to be a moral imperative.
An expensive program in Oregon creates a new kind of religious or spiritual inequity that I don’t think we are capable of fully comprehending yet, but it clearly exacerbates other types of social problems that already plague us.
“Affordable access for all people” doesn’t mean that everyone should take psychedelics. I view the question of whether to take psychedelics as a big decision that should be made only after careful consideration of a number of things. One of the best promises of the M109 system, from my perspective, is that people will be required to consider some of these things before they make potentially life-altering decisions, and that people can agree to purchase these potentially-profound and potentially-destabilizing psilocybin experiences only after giving informed consent. The other great M109 promises: Support is available before, during, and after the experience; there will be a lot more oversight and accountability; a lot more access to medical and legal assistance; and people won’t really have to fear going to jail. This framework is a light-years-leap forward in terms of the safeguards of the so-called “unregulated market.” It really is quite brilliant.
Within the M109 framework, the harms that could be caused by untested, community-grown mushrooms would be practically non-existent in the context of sincere community use and cannot be used as an honest justification for rules that would effectively require communities who work with psilocybin to procure their community sacrament through commercial channels. When regulations drive up costs without serving important government interests, they raise paywalls, deepen inequities, and further racial, gender, class, and other divides.
Affordable, community-grown mushrooms would decrease paywalls and, contrary to the position announced in your Fiscal and Economic Impact Statement, actually drive more of the unregulated market into the safety of the M109 container. More people will take psilocybin under M109 if its costs are considered by consumers to be justifiable when compared with the unregulated market.
Moreover, many religious and spiritual communities who work with psilocybin report having a relationship with the living psilocybin organism that can only be described as sacred. Under federal jurisprudence, religious freedom laws require a “compelling government interest” in order for the government to have any say on how a religious community grows, handles, stores, consumes, or discards their psychedelic sacraments. And (assuming arguendo that the government might have a compelling interest here), any time a government deigns to enforce laws that burden free religious exercise, under federal jurisprudence, it must still tread carefully and impair religious freedom only by “the least restrictive means” of doing so.
Sincere religious communities are publicly saying that they intend to operate under Measure 109, and it is only right that the State consider the regulation of these organizations in light of the broad federal protections that now exist under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act – and which were, in fact, enacted in reaction to Oregon’s allowing members of the Native American Church to be fired for practicing their religion, which uses peyote.
Oregon isn’t a state that generally tries to short-change people on civil liberties issues.
The ask here is that you permit Oregonians to take and use the non-Western medicine in ways that reflect non-Western paradigms of health and wellness. The truth is: potency-testing is part of a Western paradigm, and psilocybin has always been a non-Western medicine. It is exciting to witness the power of psilocybin beginning to be harnessed by skillful Western medical practitioners, but Western practitioners are relatively new to the psilocybin and the psychedelic scene. It is appropriate for us Westerners to defer to Indigenous voices when their experience surpasses our own, and to incorporate their wisdom and experience into our “Oregon Model.” I believe we can do this if only we make sure these psilocybin regulations aren’t too rigid or too heavy handed.
The entheogenic practitioner framework and manufacturing endorsement work together to do two things:
Honor the religious liberties of sincere religious practitioners who work with psilocybin; and
Create an affordable community-access model and community container for psilocybin services.
A one-size-fits-all system would treat churches and other community-owned nonprofit organizations the same way as luxury resorts. This is out of touch with federal religious freedom laws and raises unnecessary paywalls for 520,000 Oregonians who live in poverty.
I hope you will consider these things when you decide how to balance safety and access.
Yours in service,
Jon Dennis”
Stay tuned for updates and analysis after Wednesday’s vote, as the coming weeks will bring forth a revamped Eyes on Oregon podcast, as well as a new series exploring Oregon’s emerging psychedelic marketplace through the lens of lawyers.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews Lyle Maxson: Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Entheo Digital, a “technodelic” company focusing on digital therapeutics and virtual reality – both as adjuncts to psychedelic-assisted therapy, and theoretically, as new forms of medicine.
Maxson began his career by creating immersive, psychedelic-like experiences at some of the world’s largest music festivals. It was mostly those world-building experiences and some time in sensory deprivation tanks that led to his interest in seeing just what was possible through altered states of consciousness and technology. He discusses using VR before and after psychedelic experiences as a priming and integration tool; VR’s potential to ease first-time trip anxiety; Entheo Digital’s SoundSelf system and the powerful influence of biofeedback; and the question of whether or not technology (on its own) could initiate a non-ordinary state of consciousness with the same benefits as one brought on by psychedelics.
This episode treads lots of new ground, with Maxson discussing the likelihood of using different tools to be able to naturally activate endogenous DMT; the idea of a Steam-like internet marketplace for digital medicine; the possibility for technology to trigger lucid dreaming; the concept of highly-personalized digital schooling, and the tough question of how to not become so reliant on technology in such a quickly-advancing technological world. The challenge, which Maxson is eager to take on, is to shift opinions on VR from fear and pessimism to inspiration about what’s truly possible: How can we use technology not for escapism, but instead, for good?
Notable Quotes
“If you’re trying to drive to a yoga class, you’re usually more stressed out by the time you get there than if you hadn’t of left your house at all. And I feel like that’s the case with a lot of therapy work in general, whether it’s psychedelics or not; you could have [an] onboarding call with somebody the day before, but you have no idea what’s happening to them [in] the 24 hours leading up to them actually coming into your clinic. So I think the big focus on the priming is: how do we have reliable, very consistent treatment processes with being able to drop people into a very deep surrender, meditative, introspective state prior to them actually going into a therapeutic process?”
“I think that eventually, you’ll start to combine light, frequency, vibration, [and] electromagnetics to the point where you could actually activate DMT inside of your brain without having to use it from an external source – so like, literally using technology to activate the psychedelics inside of your own body. I think we will get to that place and that will be very interesting.”
“What [we’re] doing with creating digital medicine is a holy grail type of project, but with that comes the reverse side; which is the addiction that we already have to computers is off the charts, but what happens when you could literally press play and get high at any moment? Would people ever get off of it? So that’s a philosophical question, but I think we’re actually going to butt up against that in the next few years as we continue to develop this technology.”
“What does it look like to get in on the ground floor? It’d be really hard to do that in movies or radio or the variety of mediums; TV shows, all of those things. Like, they’re already pretty much dominated by content that we don’t really want or doesn’t make us feel better when we watch it. But with VR, it’s early enough to get in on the ground floor and create compelling alternatives to the zombie shooter games and the porn that will inevitably fill the device, and get people thinking about how to be an embodied avatar inside of a virtual world and do it for good instead of for escapism.”
Lyle Maxson is the Co-Founder of GeniusX, an XR education platform reimagining online learning. He is also the Co-Founder of Andromeda Entertainment, a VR publishing company focused on bringing to market “games for good,” which developed and published the first-ever digital psychedelic, Soundself VR, as well as the breakout hit, Audio Trip (voted best dance game of 2019 by VR insider). His latest venture, Entheo Digital, seeks to provide digital therapeutics solutions for psychedelic therapy and the treatment of mental health disorders. Lyle has appeared on a variety of stages, speaking on benevolent technology and the positive impact immersive tech can play in our future. He runs a 50,000 person community of transformative entertainment enthusiasts and is a pioneer in the neurohacking movement.
In this episode of the podcast, David interviews Anne Philippi; Founder & CEO of The New Health Club. Prior to her work with TNHC, Anne was a journalist for VOGUE, GQ, and Vanity Fair.
Philippi takes us through the arc of her departure from the media world in 2018 and into the realm of psychedelia. She opens up about her first experiences with LSD and psilocybin; how those journeys helped her shake off her “old narrative” as a journalist and step into her “real narrative”; the podcast that was birthed out of that inner work and its transformation into a business; and the work TNHC now does with ketamine and psilocybin truffles. Along with her personal story, she talks about things like integration; how the meaning of symbols witnessed in journeys becomes clearer over time; generational trauma (especially as experienced by Germans); non-linear healing; and how modern data pertaining to psychedelics is outshining the hangover from the US’s drug war propaganda.
Using the current COVID era and Ukraine/Russia conflict as examples, Philippi shares how crises can inspire togetherness and the importance of making psychedelic therapy available to refugees. She takes a very optimistic stance on the incorporation of psychedelics into the workplace as a means to help it evolve, and she talks about the toxicity of hustle culture; how safe, supported psychedelic practices can prevent burnout in the workforce; the companies that are already offering psychedelic experiences and therapy for their staff; and the value in entertaining psychedelics as a preventative measure – not just a recuperative treatment.
Notable Quotes
“I really think that with a psychedelic experience, or a regular checking in with [yourself] based on that psychedelic experience (maybe even to go on a guided trip [once or twice] a year), it’s really easier to acknowledge your body, to have a conversation with your body. Because we don’t say, ‘I’m tired, I feel like I need to take a break’; we mostly overstep that moment because then you have another coffee or you go for a run – all these tools we have in our Western society to ignore our exhaustion limits.” “Let’s say you have an amazing psychedelic trip, and then you go back to your shitty life and you don’t change that, and you don’t go in nature, and you don’t have a community, and you’re in a toxic relationship – then the trip doesn’t actually matter in a weird way. I think that’s also something that is becoming now very clear; that the surrounding where you actually land after your trip also has to be transformed.” “I think in the next five years, there might be completely transformed companies coming out of a psychedelic leadership idea. And again, that doesn’t mean the crazy CEO who is going crazy on ayahuasca, it’s just really to have a very conscious use of these substances, to really look into a better understanding of a very productive and creative community that is not suffering from [a] toxic work environment anymore.”
“You can find this kind of truth with the help of psychedelics. The people who I have talked to who have experienced that, whatever substance it is …pretty much, that’s the bottom line [of] what people say. At the same time, we should not really forget to say those people who found that had also done a proper integration and keep doing it, even after months and months of experiencing what they have seen.”
Anne Philippi was a successful journalist with a strong background in established media, journalism, and communication. She published books, worked for Condé Nast, was a Vanity Fair reporter in Berlin and for GQ in Los Angeles, and she wrote for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about tech and California. In 2019, she founded The New Health Club podcast and newsletter, and created a space where CEOs, founders, investors, scientists, and therapists from the new psychedelic ecosystem and business world could talk abut the disruptive power of psychedelics, new markets, new compounds, and psychedelic medicine. In 2021, Anne made it onto Psychedelic Invest‘s list of the 100 most influential people in psychedelics. She is working on bringing The New Health Club to the next level soon.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews Kole, who was famously arrested for growing and possessing mushrooms in Denver back in 2019 – shortly after psilocybin had been decriminalized there.
Kole has moved on from his past and has begun a new life far away from any drugs, but he shares his whole story here, in his only podcast appearance. He discusses why he decided to start growing mushrooms; how he became involved in the decriminalization movement; why he brought several journalists to personally see his grow; and how, even though those journalists may not have had bad intentions, that blind trust led to his downfall.
He describes how the arrest played out and why he was likely let go with probation instead of the possible 6-10 year sentence he had heard warnings of. And he digs into the sociology in a lot of this: the disconnect between people in terrifying, life-altering moments and joking police who do this every day; “man’s law” and how the law is not necessarily put in place for ethical reasons; and how breaking the law (and getting caught) doesn’t just affect you, but affects everyone you care about too.
In this psychedelic echo chamber many of us live in, it’s easy to feel so strongly that what we’re doing is right, and start acting reckless; trusting anyone in the space, and believing that “that could never happen to me” when seeing others get caught. This episode is an important reminder to be extremely careful in your actions and in who you trust.
Notable Quotes
“They actually took the handcuffs off me and the agent guy kind of made a joke, like, ‘You’re not going to start swinging if I take these off, are you?’ And I’m getting the impression that it’s just another day on the job for them. But it’s sort of a life-altering moment for me. Sort of a weird disconnect there.”
“I wasn’t really doing something that created victims or hurt people, but the whole idea to make it sound like I’m leaving this environment where I was doing this? I wasn’t hurting people. My efforts through activism and cultivating was to help people and myself. So it’s weird to say I’m in a prosocial environment when I already was in one. I was around good people and I was doing the right things and I was working a full-time job. Nothing about my life was criminal in the sense that there are victims from my actions. So it’s just very weird how it was all framed just because of what the law is.”
“Other people’s ignorance affects your freedom, and I think that’s completely true, whether it’s social, political, [or] legally. Ignorance definitely harms everyone.”
“The idea that it is illegal and that there are consequences is sort of separate from actually having consequences and having all that happen to you and thinking that you’re going to be going to prison. They’re two totally different animals. I suppose if you’re going to learn from other people’s experiences; learn from mine, and do not be public with your activism, because you never know. You never know what could happen. You might not be as lucky as me.”
In this episode of the podcast, recorded live from the Archipelago Attic space in Denver, CO, Joe sat down with Unlimited Sciences founder, Del Jolly; Former UFC champion and Hall of Famer, Rashad Evans; and 10-year NFL veteran quarterback, Jake Plummer, at the initial launch of their new functional mushrooms company, Umbo Mushrooms.
Plummer and Evans tell their story of how they met Jolly and transformed from professional athletes to long-haired mycophiles who are now running their own mushroom company; discussing how difficult transitioning back to normal everyday life after a sports career can be, and how CBD, following the Stamet’s stack protocol, and learning about all the anecdotal evidence of brain injury healing started to make them question what kind of long-term issues they may have coming to them (fellow athletes have asked Evans: “Do you feel it?”). Jolly believes that functional mushrooms have just as much, if not more potential to help humanity than the often higher-praised psilocybin.
The four of them talk about a lot more in this nearly 2-hour panel discussion (with audience questions): the power in language and how a diagnosis can be a wall people put up that blocks progress; how valuable it is to learn from each other in group preparation and integration sessions (Evans calls these ceremonies “share-emonies” for this reason); how the UFC and NFL feel about psychedelics; microdosing and competition; NFTs; the Telluride Mushroom Festival; and the problem with TBI often being misdiagnosed as PTSD. And they discuss what steps we can take to better align our communities to the set and setting we want; the importance of slowing down; how every person has a specific audience they can reach; how we can learn from Indigenous people about our lost connection to community; and the interesting question of if we actually feel better from eating mushrooms because as a society, we completely removed them from our diets and our bodies have been craving them ever since.
Umbo Mushrooms has just recently launched and they’re offering a 20% off discount for PT listeners (use code Unlimited20 at checkout). Additionally, if you are planning to use psilocybin outside a research laboratory before July 1st, Unlimited Sciences is running a study to learn more about the positive and/or negative outcomes of using psilocybin in more natural settings. You can participate here.
Notable Quotes
“As a big advocate for psilocybin in particular, functional mushrooms have just as much, if not more potential to help humanity than psilocybin. I really believe that. And it’s just a matter of time before some eight year old kid is going to come up and say, ‘Oh, that’s the key. Look what I found!’ Boom. ‘Now my Dad really isn’t going to age.’” -Del
“I think tapping into those Indigenous voices – those stories, the history – is very important for the movement because they understood community. And when you look at what are the biggest [ailments] in our society is the fact that we have a broken community. Our communities are broken for the larger part. And finding ways to tap back into that old knowledge of ways we used to be can get us to remember what we are [and] how to be towards each other. I think that we don’t get better as a world until we get better as a community, and I think tapping into those strong Indigenous community roots would help us to be what we could be.” -Rashad
“The world doesn’t need psychedelics. The world needs community and a meditation practice. But psychedelics is the 2×4 that brings you to that awareness.” -Del
“Don’t minimize what your impact is. If you’re Rashad Evans with a platform, [a] Hall of Famer, Jake Plummer, [whoever]… Either you’re that or this. Don’t minimize what it is, because whoever you’re speaking to might be the person who sets it off.” -Del
“I think once you get into the mushrooms, you can’t help but learn more kindness, compassion, and love. It will open your mind. That’s kind of why I said those three words; is if we can keep that in front of everything and also the sacred part of everything… Everything should be a lot more sacred than it is, everything we do. I find myself grabbing food and eating it and then going, ‘Damn, I didn’t even really thank this food for being here.’ We take a lot of things for granted, so I think just starting with that awareness can be a step in the right direction.” -Jake
“Suga” Rashad Evans (left) is a former UFC light heavy weight champion and Hall of Famer. He currently is an ESPN analyst for the UFC and Co-Founder of Umbo Mushrooms.
Jake Plummer (center) is a former NFL Pro-bowl quarter back who played 10 years in the league with the Arizona Cardinals and the Denver Broncos. He is now a mycophile who runs Umbo and Mycolove Farms.
A progress update on the Oregon Health Authority, Measure 109, and religious liberty.
It turns out a whole lot of people care about religious and spiritual freedom issues surrounding psilocybin. A few weeks ago, Oregon had two public hearings on its proposed psilocybin rules on products, testing, and facilitator training. The overwhelming majority of the public testimony received was in support of religious freedom, affordable access, and the community container for psilocybin service. The support was so overwhelming during the first meeting that I tried to keep tabs on the second meeting. I counted 31 total comments that were received. 24 of those 31 – or 74%! – voiced support for the adoption of the entheogenic practitioners framework for safely regulating community-based practice. I do not believe a single person testified in opposition to its adoption.
Additionally, we are starting to receive written comments that people and organizations have submitted to the Oregon Health Authority (OHA).
David Bronner, CEO of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, has published his comments to OHA about the proposed rules, in which he recommends adopting the proposal in whole and even making some of the provisions around safe, affordable ceremony applicable to the entire M109 program. You can read his statement here.
Concisely: (1) Psilocybin in mushrooms or as synthesized substance provides access to many different states of human awareness, some powerfully facilitative of psychological and/or spiritual development; (2) The safety and probability of benefit are best ensured when preparation/education is provided in the context of a supportive relationship or community, either in a framework of mental health or of religious care; (3) When wisely integrated into our culture, psilocybin may well significantly decrease human suffering and promote the fuller realization of values such as peace, respect for diversity and compassion; (4) Access to this molecular tool for those who desire it, whether in medical or religious contexts, may be seen as a fundamental human right to explore our own minds.
“Currently, no state or federal law protects religious communities or practitioners who utilize psilocybin from being prosecuted by Oregon law enforcement. As charitable non-profit organizations, most if not all of these communities and practitioners lack the resources to hire attorneys to secure their rights. Measure 109 promised to welcome these communities into a legitimate legal framework. However, we believe that some of the proposed rules for implementing Measure 109 would substantially burden such communities and force them to operate illegally while remaining in the shadows.”
It also points out the following: “We note nearly half (49%) of the respondents to your Community Interest Survey indicated that their interest in accessing psilocybin under Measure 109 was for spiritual purposes. For context, the interest in spirituality ranks higher than interest in psilocybin for trauma-related issues (47%), addiction and substance use (17%), end of life psychological distress (10%), or “other” reasons (9%).”
It also offers some legal analysis to show that, based on the language of M109, Oregon has the legal rulemaking authority to protect religious practice. Here’s just one example:
“…Subsection (C) empowers the OHA to regulate the use of psilocybin products and psilocybin services ‘for other purposes’ deemed necessary or appropriate by the authority. The phrase ‘for other purposes’ indicates that the OHA may create rules that achieve purposes that are not explicitly stated in sections 3 to 129 or implied from them. This too means that OHA can create rules for the purposes of accommodating religious practice.”
You can view or download their full statement here:
“Affordable access to psychedelic healing is perhaps a wholly new equity issue that touches on racial, health, and spiritual equity. Equity means affordable access. Lack of affordability reinforces inequity that exists around race, gender, and class lines. We believe access to psychedelics to be a means of promoting spiritual equity, that we not create “spiritual privilege” as a function of socio-economic privilege. Equity also means culturally-sensitive. It must not impose Western medical paradigms on non- Western approaches to psilocybin.“
You can view or download their full statement here:
The Oregon Health Authority will be publishing its written summary of the public comments soon. Stay tuned to hear how Oregon responds to the public outcry to protect religious and spiritual communities!
For those who have been following closely, a revised edition of the proposal for the entheogenic practitioners framework can be viewed/downloaded here.
Please note that we are continually striving to improve upon this document and welcome feedback on how we can make aboveground entheogenic practice safe and affordable for all.
Additionally, Eyes on Oregon will be changing shape over the coming month, from a somewhat sporadic web series into a more traditional and more regularly-released podcast. I will be hosting and interviewing various people from the frontlines in Oregon, with Joe joining when he is able. With so much happening, there’s a lot to talk about, and we hope you tune in.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews Jason Grechanik; a tabaquero running plant dietas, an ayahuasca ceremony facilitator at The Temple of the Way of Light, and host of “The Universe Within” (@universewithinpodcast) podcast.
Grechanik tells his story and digs deep into the rich history of shamanism, herbalism, and Indigenous spiritual traditions that span the globe from Siberia and India to Peru. The unifying theme rests on bridging our cultural commonalities; recognizing the fundamental truths consistent across cultures and acknowledging how this seemingly lost knowledge has been kept, guarded, and passed down through epochs of change.
He unfolds the many layers of ayahuasca medicine work; examining plant intelligence, plant dietas, ways of seeing beyond yourself in the world of spirit, and how deep ayahuasca work can inspire gratitude and humility. And he discusses how group containers exemplify universal oneness; the value in both Western and Indigenous medicine; critiques for the current psychedelic renaissance; the power of breathwork; and the debate between traditional plant medicines and newer lab-derived substances – how everything has a spirit, even a mountain.
Notable Quotes
“I think it’s always really important when we’re talking about these experiences to also realize that they’re extremely personal; that there’s certainly archetypal experiences that these plants can invoke, but they’re very personal as well. And for some people, what they need is the opposite of that. They need to see beauty and love and their own self-worth and to have a very gentle experience. And then other people need to be thrown into the abyss to kind of shake themselves out of something. And I think that’s where that idea of plant intelligence comes in.”
“It’s not that far-fetched to think that these medicines were ancient, and that they were guarded even through apocalypses and catastrophic events and colonization. They kept these things, but why did they keep them? They kept them because they were seen as not only important, but actually something that was inseparable from humanity.”
“All of these things; there’s a time and a place for it. There’s benefits to certain things, there’s some drawbacks to certain ways of doing things, but ultimately it’s: what is going to be best for the patient? And that’s also something that’s fundamental to any holistic medicine, is realizing that there’s no panacea for everyone. We’re all different. We all have different body types, we have different stories, we have different physical ailments, [and] different mental stories. So how do we find the medicine that’s going to be best for us in this moment?”
Jason Grechanik’s journey has led him around the world in search of questions he has had about life. Early in his twenties, he began to develop a keen interest in plants: as food, nutrition, life, and medicine. He began learning holistic systems of medicine such as herbalism, Traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, and nutrition. That curiosity eventually led him to the Amazon where he began to work with plants to learn traditional ways of healing.
Jason came to work at the ayahuasca healing center Temple of the Way of Light in 2012. After having worked with ayahuasca quite extensively, he began the process of dieting plants in the Shipibo tradition. In 2013, he began working with maestro Ernesto Garcia Torres, delving deep into the world of dieting. Through a prolonged apprenticeship and training, involving prolonged isolation, fasting, and dieting of plants, he was given the blessing to begin working with plants.
He currently runs plant medicine retreats in Peru and travels abroad running dietas. He also works at the Temple of the Way of Light as a facilitator of ayahuasca ceremonies. In 2020, Jason created a podcast called “The Universe Within.”
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, David interviews philosopher, clinical psychologist, Grof-certified Holotropic Breathwork® facilitator, and long-time mentor to Joe and Kyle: Lenny Gibson, Ph.D.
They talk at length about shamanism, Greek mythology, tribal cultures, and the overlapping themes across them. They discuss how religion became but a shadow of the ancient wisdom these cultures held; the commonalities between physics and poetry; how Holotropic Breathwork is a shamanic technique appropriate to 20th century western culture; and the battle between attainable knowledge and the vice of ignorance.
Gibson discusses the “dying before dying” that took place at Eleusis; how practices like meditation and breathwork can help us in recovering what in Zen is called “original mind;” achieving mystical enlightenment by studying mathematics; and the philosophical parallels between Plato, Kurt Vonnegut, Alfred North Whitehead, and the ancient Greeks.
He also shares how LSD has reshaped shamanism along with a fun story from the first time he met Albert Hofmann. When considering the most vital conversations people should be having, Gibson encourages us to return to the origins; to study the lineages that embodied the mystical wisdom discovered through non-ordinary states – something he believes our modern culture is missing. In the words of Leon Russell, “May the sweet baby Jesus shut your mouth and open your mind!”
Notable Quotes
“Lao Tzu says, ‘The secret awaits the vision of eyes unclouded by longing.’ The secret is in plain sight. All one has to do is step back and pay attention.”
“Conformity and deep understanding don’t go together.”
“I try to discourage the focus on substances because one of the most important means in Greek culture was poetry. Homer may or may not have been a person identifiable, but his poetry survived as a body. …The Greeks gathered in large festivals and they would recite the poems of Homer, The Iliad, and The Odyssey, and get thousands of people together chanting the same poems – a huge rave!”
“The absolutely most impressive thing about Stan Grof’s discovery …that if you empower people in accessing their deepest Self, you will get more than you could get by having a psychoanalyst talk to them about themselves.”
Leonard (Lenny) Gibson, Ph.D., graduated from Williams College and earned doctorates from Claremont Graduate School in philosophy and The University of Texas at Austin in counseling psychology. He has taught at The University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Lesley College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He served a clinical psychology internship at The Veterans Administration Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and trained in Holotropic Breathwork with Stanislav Grof. Most recently, he has taught Transpersonal Psychology at Burlington College. Together with his wife Elizabeth, he conducts frequent experiential workshops. He is a founding Board member of the Community Health Centers of the Rutland Region. As a survivor of throat cancer, he has facilitated the Head and Neck Cancer Support Group at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Lenny is President of Dreamshadow Group. He raises vegetables, fruit, and beef cattle on a homestead in Pawlet, Vermont, and plays clarinet in local bands.
Morisano was researching the small percentage of people who experience negative effects from cannabis dependence, but in 2013, her boss retired to pursue ayahuasca research around the same time she was reading Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, and she wondered: Is there a tangible future here? She discusses the emergence of psychedelic medicine and the importance of reciprocity and inclusivity, pointing out how we often lump very different traditions together under the umbrella of “Indigenous.”
Three years in the making and planned as a one-time event, she considers the “From Research to Reality” conference to be a state of the union of the field of psychedelic science, where people from all fields in psychedelia will meet and discuss what we know, what the future could look like, and how we can get there. Each presentation was submitted and reviewed by a committee of peers, and will largely feature new research. The conference takes place May 27th to May 29th in Toronto, and a virtual option is available, with a special “Saturday night special” featuring David Nutt, Rick Doblin, Monnica Williams, and others. Check out the website for more details!
Notable Quotes
“We can’t just pick and choose what we want to gain from Indigenous knowledge. It has to be gifted to us. It has to be given freely. And if people want to incorporate Indigenous practices into their modern Western clinical practice, I think it should be done in consultation with multiple folks across different groups of different nations, and done with reciprocity in mind.”
“One person can’t speak for everybody. Three people can’t speak for everybody. 10 people can’t speak for everybody. But the more we listen to different perspectives of people coming from different nations, the more we will learn. And we includes everybody. It’s not just like we’re in one group and they’re in another group, it’s like we’re all having conversation together, hopefully learning from each other.”
“This is a place where everybody’s going to come together – government, regulators, policymakers, traditional medicine providers, neuroscientists, clinical practitioners; they’re going to all come together for the conversation. It’s a single track event, so there’s not going to be: ‘The neuroscientists are going to that room, the clinical people are going to that room.’ It’s like: No, everybody’s in the same room at the same time, listening to all the same stuff, and they’re going to learn from each other. That’s the idea. We’re going to learn from each other so that when we’re making decisions moving forward about what works best for people and for us, we’re going to have a lot of different viewpoints in the conversation.”
This week, we celebrated a humbling achievement at Psychedelics Today: three million unique downloads of the Psychedelics Today podcast!
This milestone couldn’t come at a more fitting time. It seems like the stars are aligning and shining a spotlight on progress in psychedelics, with Bicycle Day and the kickoff of our new, 12-month practitioner training program, Vital, both occurring in a 48-hour window last week. Amidst it all, the podcast download counter kept going, and rolled over to an incredible three million just a few days later. We couldn’t be more grateful to all our listeners who enjoy, support, and engage with the podcast. You’ve helped Psychedelics Today get to where we are simply by tuning in.
Psychedelics Today has also achieved the #9 rank of all Apple Life Sciences podcasts in the United States, and it stands alone as the only psychedelics-themed podcast in the Top 100 list!
When it comes to podcast guests, we’ve been lucky over the years. Our team has recorded with many world-renowned figures in psychedelic science, culture, and advocacy. But from the day we started recording in 2016, we wanted the Psychedelics Today podcast to be more than a platform for well-known figures.
Intentionally, we’ve made ample space for conversations with people who are quietly doing important work behind the scenes, too. Because this is an area of great complexity and one in which experience matters, the Psychedelics Today podcast is designed to give listeners a richness in perspective they won’t find anywhere else.
Thank you for taking the time to listen to us. We are humbled by your support and your willingness to listen to all that we and our guests have to say – which, over the past six years, has been more than a mouthful.
Looking for some essential listening? These are the Top 8 most downloaded Psychedelics Today podcasts of all-time, and some of our favorite discussions:
Joe had been raving about Dr. Carl Hart’s Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear for months before we were able to get him on, and the nearly 2-hour conversation shows just how much Hart’s views align with ours: that the drug war is doing exactly what those in power created it for, that drug exceptionalism 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.
This is one of Kyle’s favorites, since it highlighted so much about cognitive liberty and failed drug policy – two ideas central to the Psychedelics Today ethos. And it may be Joe’s favorite episode: “That was a scary one, because I wanted to do it so well and I respect him so much, that I’m like, ‘Can we do this well?’ And we did. So please check that one out. That one’s really important to me.”
“When these people say that they are worried about drug addiction or [that] 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.”
Manesh Girn is a Ph.D. candidate in Neuroscience at McGill University and co-author of over a dozen scientific publications, most recently on the neurocognitive processes behind creative thinking and the potentiality for psychedelics to enhance creativity. He’s been on the podcast twice, runs a YouTube channel called The Psychedelic Scientist, and is now part of the Vital faculty as well.
This one went deep into a lot of neuroscience; covering neuroplasticity, the similarities between psychedelic mind states and dream states, distinctions in creativity, how psilocybin can affect creativity, and the complicated idea of ego dissolution: Do we really understand what it is? Do ego death and a mystical experience always have to go hand-in-hand?
“Other research has exclusively linked psychedelic experiences to the dream state, and seeing that they’re phenomenologically similar. There’s a lot of overlap in a number of different ways of looking at it. So then, on the basis of that, I was like, ok, so if we conceptualize psychedelics as almost being like dreaming (but awake), then that could be a great source of novel ideas and creative ideas because you’re now in this mental state that’s unconstrained by logic, it’s unconstrained by a need to make sense, and you can get this more free flow of ideas.”
Before Michelle was a member of the PT team and featured in many solidarity Friday episodes (and a follow-up to this episode on Magic Mushroom day), we just knew her as an extremely knowledgeable mushroom connoisseur and the author of Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion, an easy-to-use guide to understanding magic mushrooms, trips, microdosing, and psychedelic therapy. Reflecting back, Joe said: “Michelle saw that there [weren’t] really great resources for people and put this book together. …I actually don’t know of anything better that’s mushroom-specific, still to this day.”
In the episode, she tells her story and why she wanted to write the book, which she also talked a lot about on Solidarity Friday episodes: that despite what many mainstream minds will tell you, there isn’t one right way to use psilocybin.
“As long as you’re being safe with your surroundings and with yourself, any way is the right way.”
In this episode, Joe interviewed computational neurobiologist, pharmacologist, chemist, and writer, Dr. Andrew Gallimore; one of the world’s most knowledgeable researchers on DMT. They discussed all things DMT, from entity encounters to his intravenous infusion model, which would allow a timed and steady release of DMT to induce an extended-state DMT experience – the goal being to slowly make that space more stable (and comprehensible) over time, to eventually live in the DMT space as you would in this reality. “We’ve nerded out and talked about the extended state DMT stuff for a bit. That’s highly fascinating,” said Kyle.
“We know how the brain learns to construct worlds, but we don’t know how the brain learns to construct DMT worlds.”
In this episode, Joe and Kyle finally got to interview legendary author and microdosing popularizer, James Fadiman, Ph.D. Fadiman talked about transpersonal psychology, microdosing and how it emerged, how researchers are finally starting to look at brain waves of microdosers, and his newest book, Your Symphony of Selves: Discover and Understand More of Who We Are, which says that we are all made up of different selves which take lead depending on the situation.
Kyle (who has an undergraduate degree in transpersonal psychology) lists this as one of his favorites, as Fadiman laid out the emergence of transpersonal psychology and the early days of the Transpersonal Association: “I think one of my favorite parts about this was just exploring some of the history of transpersonal psychology. It was really cool to chat with him about that.” Joe added: “He was there. He is named as one of the 4, 5 people, in a sense ‘in the room’ when this came about. He’s got a lot of connection to this stuff.”
“The secret of microdosing is if you’re noticing it, that’s a little too high a dose. …The perfect definition of a microdose is: You have a really good day; you get things done that you’ve been putting off; you’re nice to someone at work who doesn’t deserve it; after work, you do one more set of reps at the gym than you usually do; you really enjoy your kids; and at the end of the day, you say, ‘Oh, I forgot I had a microdose.’”
In this episode, Joe interviewed 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 the bestseller, The Serpent and the Rainbow.
Davis discussed his history with Richard Evans Schultes, the strange phenomenon behind the growth of ayahuasca, Haitian zombies, Voodoo, and Colombia and its relationship with cocaine and coca. This one covered a lot of ground other podcasts haven’t, and it was awesome to have him on, as Joe called him “possibly the most famous person on the show, other than number 1.”
“This 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.”
In this episode, Kyle and Joe interviewed Chris Bache, author of LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven. Bache talked about music in psychedelic sessions, the debate on whether facilitators should have experiences before helping others, and the five levels of the universe as he understands them. But he mostly discussed what he learned about psychedelics, the universe, and integration from going through 73 high-dose LSD sessions (after which, he doesn’t recommend working with high doses).
Looking back, Joe said, “I think the most important part are his lessons learned and like, ‘What would you have done if you knew what you knew now? What would your protocol have been?’ I think that’s a big deal. [There’s] no way for him to go back in time but we can all learn from what he did.”
“We are moving toward a collective wake up, it’s not a personal experience, it’s a collective experience – an evolution of our species.”
While most of these episodes have been in the Top 8 for a while, we knew James Fadiman would likely end up here pretty quickly. And we were all certain that it would take no time at all for Hamilton Morris’ episode to take the top spot (also by far our most-viewed YouTube video, even though we weren’t even able to record video for the episode). How could it not take the top spot? From his work with Vice, Morris has become the go-to media consultant around psychedelics, and specifically new psychedelics, as many consider him to be the next Sasha Shulgin.
While they discussed what you’d expect (including his controversial 5-MeO-DMT episodes of “Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia”), this episode is especially notable because it’s the first time Morris had really publicly talked about his relationship with Compass Pathways – a development seen as problematic by many in the space, but a relationship that’s helping him create massive amounts of new compounds week after week.
This was an in-person recording, as Joe traveled to the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia to meet him, and they recorded just outside Morris’ lab. “It was fun,” Joe said. “[I’m] really grateful for Hamilton spending time talking to us and going into some of these fun topics.”
“Yes, there are very serious differences between [psychedelics and other drugs], but if we fall into the same moral binary, then we’re ultimately no better than people that think that the distinction between licit and illicit drugs is a pharmacologically or medically meaningful distinction.”
Psychedelics Today Team Recommendations
The members of the team who have been here the longest (and therefore listened to years worth of episodes) talked about some of our favorite episodes as well, and we thought it’d be cool to share which ones we liked the most.
Joe’s picks:
Having been involved in the majority of episodes, Joe was a bit overwhelmed with this question. Dr. Carl Hart’s episode was the first he mentioned, but these were some he particularly liked as well:
“Grof’s work has been at the foundation of PT, so this episode felt like a huge milestone for us and I’m so grateful for Stan and Brigitte’s time,” said Kyle. “One thing I really enjoyed about this episode was hearing what Grof’s vision is for the future of psychedelics.” A few others he really enjoyed were more recent:
In addition to managing several projects, Marisa handles most of our social media, our affiliate programs, and contributes a lot of art and graphics. Marisa wrote the show notes for each episode up until June of 2020. “There are so many episodes that I love, but the ones that make me feel are the ones that resonate.” She particularly loved these three:
“These episodes stand out to me because they are extremely moving stories of how psychedelics have the power to heal, leaving me in tears of inspiration.”
Rob’s picks:
Other than the very early episodes, every episode of Psychedelics Today sounds much better than it originally did because of Rob’s work. In addition to being our main audio engineer, he’s helped with video on many courses at our Psychedelic Education Center. The episodes that came to him right away were:
I didn’t listen to many episodes before (sorry, Joe), but since I took over writing the show notes in June of 2020, I’ve listened to every one. Dr. Carl Hart was also one of my favorites, and although it was hard to listen to, I strongly recommend the same Dena Justice episode Marisa picked. Other than those, the ones that stand out to me are the episodes that make me think of things differently or present opposing viewpoints to what we’re used to. A few that instantly come to mind are:
Between our regular Tuesday episodes and different Friday episodes (Solidarity Fridays and Vital Psychedelic Conversations), there are over 400 episodes of Psychedelics Today to listen to. And the best news of all? With that many episodes and three million downloads now under our collective belt, we’re just getting started.
Keep listening, and we’ll keep bringing you psychedelic conversations that you won’t hear anywhere else.
Follow the Psychedelics Today Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you like to listen. Have an idea for a podcast theme or guest? Was there a guest that blew your mind who you want to hear from again? Do you have feedback about how we can make the show better? Connect with our team on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or by email at info@psychedelicstoday.com.
For our first ever Earth Day episode, Joe interviews publisher, ecologist, and planetary steward, Deborah Snyder. Snyder is the co-owner of Synergetic Press and its associated organic farm, orchard, and retreat center, Synergia Ranch.
Snyder worked with the team that designed and built Biosphere 2, and she unpacks the many ways in which understanding the planet as a biosphere – a collection of cooperative living systems – can shift our perspectives and help us to heal our precious home. She discusses how monitoring the earth from space can teach us how best to care for it; the technosphere’s disharmonious relationship with the biosphere; the anthropocene epoch;Synergia Ranch and Synergetic Press; the importance of recognizing ourselves as an integral part of nature; and the ways psychedelic and ecological spaces overlap. While both agree that the environment is in trouble, they have an air of optimism and action that we all desperately need in order to secure the future of the planet and our species. This episode also features a brief chat between Joe and Kyle, with Joe calling in from Bicycle Day San Francisco. With Vital officially launching the same week we hit 3 million downloads of the podcast (!!!), they felt it was worth doing a rundown of the top 8 most downloaded episodes, as well as highlighting some of their favorites. Thank you to everyone who has been listening and sharing your favorite episodes with friends. To 3 million more!
Notable Quotes
“I would describe the psychedelic world as tools to be able to enhance a person’s ability to explore and to understand what connections and interrelationships are. Many people that have had grand epiphanies that have led to whole new revolutionary technologies attest to this phenomenon. So Biosphere 2 was definitely an example of the creativity that came out of people that were able to do that.”
“We are very much nature and I think that we need to really work on our value of what that brings us and carefully consider before utilizing those resources for something that is perhaps just a one-way street.”
“I have never met anybody that has undergone or gone through any kind of transformative experience for themselves or looking for insight that hasn’t come out with a greater appreciation for the nature of which we are a part.”
Deborah Snyder, 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. In 1986, she was on the team that designed and built Biosphere 2. There, she met Richard Evans Schultes, publishing his two classic books on ethnobotany of the Colombian Amazonia. In 1990, she started The Biosphere Press, an imprint of Space Biospheres Ventures, producing a dozen books for children on biospheres and biomes; developed a K-12 curriculum; and helped launch the first peer-reviewed journal in closed ecological systems, Life Support and Biosphere Science. In 1999, she moved to Synergia Ranch, in Santa Fe, NM, which was established in 1969 as an intentional community and site where the Institute of Ecotechnics formed. Deborah is currently a director and VP of the U.S. non-profit. Synergia Ranch is home to a 4 acre organic orchard, a half acre market garden, and small retreat center. From 1982 to 2019, Deborah spent time volunteering most years on the Institute’s pastoral regeneration project in the northwest Kimberley of West Australia. Starting as an apprentice in savannah system management, by 1990, she became a co-owner and chairwoman of the 5000 acre freehold property). A recent documentary, “Spaceship Earth,” features the work of the Institute and its landmark ecological project, Biosphere 2. Click here for a short video on how Deborah got into publishing and her relationship with Ecotechnics on City Lights Bookstore’s Youtube channel.
In this Bicycle Day edition of the podcast, Joe had the honor to sit down in-person with chemist and researcher, William Leonard Pickard. In 2004, Pickard was famously convicted for the alleged manufacture of 90% of the world’s LSD – the largest case in history – scoring him two life sentences in a maximum security prison. Prior to his conviction, Pickard was a drug policy researcher at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and deputy director of the Drug Policy Research Program at UCLA.
Pickard discusses his prediction of the current fentanyl crisis (warnings which fell on deaf ears) and watching it all unfold and desecrate lives across the globe from behind bars on the televisions of the Tucson, Arizona Penitentiary he found himself in. With new and dangerously addictive substances like fentanyl being produced carelessly at staggering rates, he believes that it’s incredibly important that we be stronger than any substance, while cautiously asking: will there soon be a drug that is stronger than the will of man?
He talks about the unfair and ongoing sentence of Ross Ulbricht; the alchemy in drug manufacturing; the Fireside Project; what made LSD special; substance overuse and what he saw when volunteering in an ER; the inhumanity of prison and the coping mechanisms of prisoners (like making pets out of ants); 2C-B; NBOMe; LF-1; LSD (of course); and perhaps the most sultry devil of them all, caffeine. And he shares his stance on why it’s okay to be drug-free: how the natural and unaltered mind is the greatest gift of all, and how it’s actually a sign of great respect to the sacraments to finally put them down after you’ve received the message you needed to hear.
Happy Bicycle Day from Psychedelics Today! If you’re celebrating, please be safe and respectful.
Notable Quotes
“I do think that it’s important to remember that these powerful drug experiences that people have had (psychedelics or otherwise) are not the end-all and be-all – not a religion in themselves but simply a place that points to a greater realization; a greater purity of life and practice. And in the end, you don’t need the drug. That’s one of the beauties of psychedelics, I think, is that they tend to be not only non-lethal (at least the classical hallucinogens: mescaline, LSD, largely psilocybin), but they also are self-extinguishing; that is to say, after a number of long nights of the soul, one may realize that one has learned everything that this particular sacrament can teach and it’s time to put it down. It’s not necessary to go chasing after analog after analog, after different drug experiences with hundreds, soon to be thousands of things available on the net. It’s not necessary to be continually stoned on a different analog every weekend. …It would be respectful for these particular sacraments to put them down and, in honor, say farewell, and simply go about a healthful life of caring, loving one’s friends and families, [and] doing good work in the world. It’s okay to be drug-free. And that’s one of the beautiful things that these particular compounds teach us.”
“I believe that the nobility of ourselves, the dignity of ourselves, is that we are stronger than any substance. We are stronger than heroin. We are stronger than cocaine. We are stronger than methamphetamine. We are stronger than fentanyl and carfentanil or sufentanil or any of its analogs. We are stronger than alcohol or nicotine. And that must always be true or the world will be enslaved to a substance.“
“The problem children of the future are not developed by rogue underground chemists. There are few of those and most are not well-trained. The problem children of the future, drug-wise, comes from Big Pharma [and] their relentless tweaking of molecules.“
“When I first was released, … the first thing that happened when the government van drove away and suddenly, for the first time in twenty years, I’m standing alone with no inmates or officials or anything around – I’m alone for the first time in twenty years – the first thing I did was I saw a flower on a growing tree and went to stare at the flower for about twenty minutes. It was quite beautiful.“
Alleged by United States federal agencies to have produced “90% of the world’s LSD,” William Leonard Pickard is a former drug policy fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a research associate in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, and deputy director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). As a researcher at Harvard in the 1990s, Pickard warned of the dangers of a fentanyl epidemic, anticipating its deadly proliferation in the illicit drug trade decades before the current opioid crisis. Pickard’s predictions and recommendations for prevention have been acknowledged as prescient by organizations like the RAND Corporation. In 2000, Pickard was convicted of conspiring to manufacture and distribute a massive amount of LSD, and served 20 years of two life sentences, during which time he wrote his debut book, The Rose of Paracelsus: On Secrets and Sacraments, using pencil and paper. Pickard was granted compassionate release in 2020. Presently, he is a senior advisor for the biotechnology investment firm, JLS Fund, and the Fireside Project.
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, David interviews Omar Thomas: Founder of Jamaica’s Diaspora Psychedelic Society, CEO of Jamaican Organics, Psychedelics Today Advisory Board member, organic farmer, and certified death doula.
Thomas discusses how we define home, the importance of having open dialogue with our children about psychedelics, how the psychedelic experience relates to permaculture, our cultural absence of a rite of passage, the joy in psychedelics, and the value in allowing change to become a natural evolution we experience once we take the mindful seat of the observer.
Thomas breaks down all the ways in which Jamaica is shaping its framework as a psychedelic-informed health & wellness destination and the country’s cultural roadblocks that could potentially impede its development. And he talks a lot about his work as a death doula: the importance of taking a more sacred and preparatory approach to death, how helping someone through the transition is the ultimate holding of space, and how each psychedelic trip can be a practice session for death.
A theme that is consistent throughout this conversation is self-directed growth via The Warrior’s Way – an exercise in discovery, surrender, and developing daily practices toward change. Thomas posits that it’s when we hold space and shed the many layers of our identity that we can begin to foster real change – by “staying on” and becoming an observer rather than directly trying to change things, change will happen naturally.
Notable Quotes
“The things you need for a psychedelic trip are the same things you need for life. You need courage when you’re afraid and you need to prepare yourself for the things you’re going to undertake, and to do them seriously and with appreciation for the moment.” “The idea of holding space is so much about us not being in the way of hearing what others have to say, and allowing them to come to realizations that they would come to naturally if they would but take the time to sit for a while and contemplate the idea without distraction.”
“I found that Jamaica itself is healing. The island is healing. And I don’t want to get too esoteric about it, but there’s something about even just being outside for me in the early morning hours before the sun rises in a climate that can allow me to do so comfortably, and to be able to start to appreciate still connection, just on its own – I’m finding that this place seems to be tuned to some sort of frequency. It just makes it easier to slip into a feeling of wholeness, or at least of wanting to be.”
“We have our lifetimes only to begin to affect the change in the things that move us. If we are upset about the climate, let’s use the life we have. Let’s use the life we have to connect so that when death comes, we have lived a life worth living, that’s so satisfying that it’s okay to let go. For me, the psychedelic trip and journey is about letting go in a micro sort of way. Each trip is a practice session.”
“I’ve seen people laugh and chuckle now at the idea of not being, because during the trip, they learned that there’s no way to not be, because matter cannot be created or destroyed. …We’re afraid of smoke and mirrors and shadowboxing – things that we don’t need to fear.”
Omar Thomas is the founding advisor of Diaspora Psychedelic Society (DPS) and a member of the Jamaican Diaspora Task Force on Behavioral Health. His Afro-Caribbean upbringing led him to seek out non-traditional answers to his own PTSD and trauma issues in the early 90s. His search eventually took him to Mexico where he underwent 30 days of fasting, isolation, and intensive sacred mushroom work under curandero guidance. He’s lived as a permanent resident of Mexico for a number of years developing a deeper connection to the medicine in the context of community. He brings his years of experience in Mexico to bear in guiding the vision for DPS.
Through Diaspora Psychedelic Society, Omar collaborates with a number of organizations to promote more equitable access, Jamaican inclusion, and innovative approaches to psilocybin-supported therapies. In addition to overseeing day-to-day DPS activities, he is the CEO of Jamaican Organics, and sits on the strategic advisory board of Psychedelics Today.
Omar now resides on his ancestral island home in St. Elizabeth, Jamaica.
After traveling the world and seeking knowledge for 15 years, a conversation with the spirit of iboga helped her realize that the highest teachings were all there in her own culture, and she could have healing relationships with plants in her own environment – that while it’s beneficial to learn other cultures’ traditions and have reverence for the spirit of other cultures’ medicine plants, you can achieve the same result at home, with plants you can be more connected to, and through a lens you may understand better.
She discusses her process and the importance of plant dietas; the idea of the “ethical warrior”; the types of energies she sees in different plants; how we’ve forgotten our connection to nature; what can help strengthen connections to plant energies; why she recommends starting a plant exploration with mugwort; the concept of ayahuasca helping you to die consciously; the power of energy fields; how we are the most amazing technology; and how, for many reasons, people are often carrying around attachments they’re not aware of.
Notable Quotes
“What I found was that if you approach our native plants and trees like the oak, alder, elder, etc. with reverence and in a sacred way – as you would with, say, a sacred ceremony with a psychedelic plant – if you approach them in this kind of reverential way, then they can be just as psychedelic.” “[You] just have to have this patience that the plant spirit knows exactly what you need when you need it and it’s working in the background even if you’re not conscious of it. But then you become conscious of it.” “I wouldn’t say we’re disconnected [from nature] because we are nature. It’s just that we’ve forgotten our deep connection. And so whenever we’re working with plants and trees (or any plants), it’s just a remembering – remembering who we are.” “These plants show you what you need to resolve within yourself. The plants don’t fix you. Ayahuasca doesn’t fix you, but she gives you a lot of homework.”
Emma Farrell is a plant spirit healer, geomancer, and author. Emma has held plant diet retreats and ceremonies in England and Wales since 2016. She holds a Master’s Degree in “The Preservation & Development Of Wisdom Culture & The Art Of Liberation” in the Tibetan Buddhist Mahayana Tradition, writing her thesis on “Understanding The Nature Of The Self Through Lucid Dreaming.” Emma spent 2 years at the Lama Tsongkhapa Institute in Tuscany studying under lamas and geshes including her refuge lama, Dagri Rinpoche. Emma has been initiated into Indigenous healing and magical lineages of the British Isles and the Ecuadorian Amazon, has trained in Geomancy, Pranic Healing, and Psychic Surgery. She lives in Somerset, UK, where she runs the Plant Consciousness Apothecary, a remote healing practice and WisdomHub.tv. Emma’s healing practice is grounded in quantum plant technology, which she believes is the healthcare of the future. Emma is the co-founder of Plant Consciousness, the ground-breaking London event about the conscious intelligent world of plants and trees.
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, Kyle interviews professor of anthropology, author, and historian, Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D.
Together with his wife, Julie M. Brown, MA, he co-authored the book, The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity, where they present compelling anthropological arguments through early Christian frescoes and iconography of the major religion’s long-forgotten entheogenic history.
Brown discusses the historical and cultural use of entheogens, the major universities currently conducting clinical research, the importance of ethics in this space, the question of ‘will psychedelics survive success (in business)?’, the future of these substances in the fields of medicine and mental health, and rides on the back of giant bengal tigers up volcanoes during LSD journeys. He breaks down why it’s important to understand the role of psychedelics in religion and how they can play a large role in the returning of faiths to their mystical roots, and he highlights two important areas professionals ought to be well-versed in: the establishment of trust between the therapist and client, and the technique of guided imagery – evoking mental images and symbols to facilitate deep healing.
Brown teaches our CE-approved six-part course entitled “Psychedelics: Past, Present and Future,” and is one of the teachers of Vital, which begins on Bicycle Day, April 19th. Applications for Vital close on March 27th, so if you’re considering joining in, now is the time to act!
Notable Quotes
“The magic …is that it is the spiritual experience – the intensity of the mystical experience – that seems to be the kind of magical key that opens the door to healing, to what Grof calls the activation of that inner self-healing intelligence that psychedelics bring to the surface.”
“To borrow an American Civil Liberties Union phrase, ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’. And I think that eternal vigilance within the psychedelic community against all kinds of abuse by egomaniacal leaders or ‘phony holies,’ as Julie and I call them (people who want to put themselves out as a spiritual leader and they have no credentials for that); that’s going to happen. And we have to be vigilant for that so it doesn’t derail the good things that are happening.”
“Guided imagery along with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy could help heal even cancer, not just alleviate the psychological anxiety and depression.”
Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D., is an anthropologist, author, and ethnomycologist. He is a Founding Professor of Anthropology at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, where he teaches an online course on “Psychedelics and Culture.” He also co-created the “Psychedelics: Past, Present, and Future” course for us. Professor Brown teaches and writes on psychedelics and religion as well as on psychedelic therapy. He is coauthor (with Julie Brown, LMHC, an integrative psychotherapist and also his wife) of The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity, 2016.
With the emergence of more and more psychedelic religions, many people are finding themselves in a situation where proving that their religion is sincere is the difference between being able to practice their religion legally or not. Could an International Psychedelic Religious Survey be the answer?
My lord, I suspect an incredible secret has been kept on this planet: that the Fremen exist in vast numbers – vast. And it is they who control Arrakis.
-Duncan Idaho, David Lynch’s “Dune” (1984)
To expand and clarify religious freedom and liberty in the United States and abroad, it is sometimes necessary to seek court rulings. One of the missing pieces of evidence that would prove helpful in most psychedelic religion cases is a reliable data set evidencing the demographics and statistics behind the world’s psychedelic religions. How many religious groups exist? How many members are there? What type of sacraments do they use? How to quantify communities that may not have stable membership? And more? I have gone looking for a reliable resource but have not found one yet. Indeed, I have spoken with some of the lead legal practitioners in this area, and they also lament the absence of this data. And the concern is not limited to lawyers. My friend, Brad Stoddard, Ph.D., a professor of religious studies, points out additional challenges in defining and applying metrics, including:
Some people will identify as spiritual but not religious.
Some people are likely to identify as neither religious nor spiritual but will still engage in practices many would consider religious or spiritual (the so-called “nones”).
Many Native Americans reject the category of religion as something that misrepresents their traditions. They also reject the categories of entheogens and psychedelics as they relate to sacraments like peyote and San Pedro. The politics of labeling these groups “religious” is tricky.
Beyond the U.S., even today, wide groups of people don’t have a category in their native language that corresponds to Western definitions of religion or spirituality, so assessing psychedelic religion in, say, rural India, would be almost impossible without extensive ethnographic surveys.
So, this gave me an idea. I would like to propose that some ambitious Ph.D.-types consider undertaking (as a Ph.D. thesis?) an international survey. For purposes of this article, I call it the International Psychedelic Religious Survey, but it could have a variety of different names. What is important is that the survey be conducted under scientific principles that could withstand court scrutiny, and that the data it procures answers the right sorts of questions.
Why are Psychedelic Religions Secret?
Psychedelic religions are not mainstream, and they are dogged by the omnipresent threat of allegation of criminality. It is therefore natural that psychedelic religious groups and their adherents stay mostly out of public scrutiny. There is justifiable fear of social stigma and risks to liberty, amongst myriad downstream repercussions. But these same forces that keep the psychedelically-inclined underground also serve as a shackle for things to remain so. The existence, nature, and populations participating in the world’s psychedelic religions is not well-documented. Some are out in the open, but most are not.
Why a Survey?
The importance of having numbers and an understanding of the types and varieties of psychedelic religions is helpful in court cases. This sort of data could be especially important in aiding the defense of persons criminally charged for their participation in psychedelic religious practice. Such data could also inform legislatures and other policy makers, increasing their awareness of (and possibly, sensitivity to) psychedelic religions. Indeed, the information could be useful to the United Nations, and could help the UN Office on Drugs and Crime with policy reform.
Similar to how a census counts a population and derives statistics, psychedelic religions might benefit from being counted. My suspicion is that revelation of the true demographics of psychedelic religions is apt to be a lot like Frank Herbert’s Dune – like the Fremen, the numbers of people who participate in psychedelic religions is secret and vast. When it comes to psychedelic religion, there persists popular ignorance and misunderstanding that have dampening effects on how these minority psychedelic religions are treated. Having data, even if it be anonymous, reflecting that these minority religions are not nearly as small as they appear helps to give these religions presence. From presence can flow understanding.
Consider that most psychedelic religions do not behave like more broadly accepted mainstream religious organizations. Out of fear, most psychedelic religions do not have billboards, do not evangelize, do not have television or radio ads, do not seek public donations, etc., and for similar reason, most do not fight court fights. Litigation is often prohibitively expensive, and minority religious groups trying to fly under the radar tend not to have financial means. A survey could provide synergy by which these minority religious groups could gain collective leverage. A survey could change the conversation about psychedelic religions with backed statistics and data. A survey might even move public policy focus away from chemical structures (the metric law enforcement uses) toward purpose and effect (the metric psychedelic religions use). Courts are not presently accustomed to the argument of “it is not how you get there that matters, it is that you get there,” but a reliable data set could further the point.
The Importance of Court Admissibility
If you are sitting in a criminal defense chair, charged for psychedelics but claiming religious exemption, the burden is on you to educate the judge and jury on the nature, basis, and supposed validity of your defense. The probability that the judge and jury are going to be well-educated about psychedelic religion is low. Your burden to come forward with credible, persuasive, court-admissible evidence supporting your psychedelic religion defense is made that much more difficult and necessary.
The key is court admissibility. To have a jury or a judge consider data, it needs to be admissible. It also needs to be relevant and authenticated. The most compelling and relevant evidence is meaningless if a court will not admit it. Hence, the need for a scientifically-run survey that considers all the details: who will gather the data, how that data will be gathered, what form of survey will be used, what questions would be posed in the survey, the types of answers permitted, etc. The survey will also need to be verifiable and be able to demonstrate things like chain of custody, all encapsulated in a report that can be admitted within a hearsay exception or over a hearsay objection.
Why International?
Religion is not national. Indeed, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution would find the notion of national religion abhorrent, and no court in the United States could rule a religion “un-American.” Rather, at most, a court could rule an organization altogether not a religion, or a person’s observation thereof insincere, but a court could not weigh the merits or values of a religious group. Rather, under Constitutional principles, court inquiry is limited to examination for the trappings of things commonly associated with religion – concepts like contemplation of the imponderables of existence itself, contemplation of the source of all things, the nature of spirit, etc. Neither nationality nor nation of origin are relevant points of inquiry.
Pragmatically, it is a lot harder to claim religious exemption when the court knows nothing about, has had no life experience with, and is questioning the validity of your religion or the sincerity of your practice. The benefit of having a court-admissible survey demonstrating that you are far from alone, but are acting in conformity with possibly millions just like you, is manifest. Likewise, one of the greatest challenges that many of us entheogen lawyers are hoping to crack is the multi-sacramental conundrum, or the wholesale legal transcendence of relevance of sacrament. Along with the many holes in appellate precedent, there is no high-level appellate decision that has affirmed multiple psychedelic sacraments as acceptable religious practice. But that case can be made, and it can be made better with better evidence.
Although the United States Constitution contemplates a variety of religious expression, it would still be dangerous in court to ignore that Abrahamic lineage dominates in the United States. Statistically, it is more probable that the judge and jury in any psychedelic religion case will be most familiar with concepts of a revelatory religion that is manifested in scriptural texts, and whose members meet in some form of congregation and group worship, employing scripted prayers and relying upon faith. Many psychedelic religions look like this. Many do not. And getting that point across in a meaningful fashion to a court can make the difference between winning or losing a psychedelic religion case. An International Psychedelic Religious Survey can help demonstrate that minority adherents in one country may not be as minority as they seem, when taken in a global context, and could likewise reveal trends in the spread of psychedelic religions around the world.
Content and Manner of the Survey
The precise execution of the survey is admittedly at the edges of most lawyer’s skill sets. I imagine this project calls for a Ph.D. or aspiring Ph.D. theology student, or a professor excited to take on one of the most significant projects of their career (not to mention perhaps a couple qualified statisticians). I also offer that while we won’t do the survey ourselves (again, not our skill set), I and fellow entheogen attorneys, Greg Lake, Ian Benouis, and Dan Peterson are happy to contribute, particularly regarding framing survey questions that would be helpful for court admissibility. Brad Stoddard, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Religious Studies at McDaniel College, is also available to assist and welcomes contact. Anyone interested in picking up the mantle and running with it is invited to reach out to any of us. My friends and I hope this article inspires one or more of you to take on this very important task.
In this episode of the podcast, Kyle interviews Laura Mae Northrup, LMFT: author, educator, somatic psychotherapist, and host of Inside Eyes, a podcast focusing on the use of psychedelics for healing sexual trauma.
Northrup is the author of the just-released Radical Healership: How to Build a Values-Driven Healing Practice in a Profit-Driven World, which, although not focused on psychedelic work specifically, was largely written on or inspired by psychedelics, and is beneficial for people entering the field as psychedelic practitioners (she calls it “a self-help book for healers”). She talks about the book and ways to make a sustainable path towards a healthy practice, with the most important factors being to build in time for joy and inspiration, and to continuously do your own work.
She discusses what “doing your own work” really means; what people struggle with when entering the field; the idea of ”action movie therapy”; the ways gained power, unconscious motivations, or issues you haven’t worked on can influence the ways you work with others; why preparation is maybe more important than integration; capitalism and why practitioners shouldn’t feel bad about charging money for their services; the importance of trauma training; the need for community and developing relationships with colleagues; and why, while society usually feels differently, you don’t actually have to be perfect to become a healing practitioner.
If you’re interested in Radical Healership, we have a discount code for you thanks to North Atlantic Books! Go here and use code psychedelicstoday for 30% off and free shipping!
Notable Quotes
“What you’re doing, especially if you’re working in a psychological or spiritual realm, is that you’re using your own being as your instrument. And so, just like somebody who is a surgeon that is using a surgical knife; you would want that person to be cleaning that surgical knife and replacing it when it’s dull and really tending to this surgical knife. This isn’t the same as just trying to cut up a tomato for dinner and it’s okay if the knife gets a little dull over the years. You want to make sure your instrument is well cared for, and that is you. It’s your being.”
“We’re so obsessed with the pinnacle moment or the peak experience that we don’t value appropriately all of the more mundane experiences that actually allow that peak experience to happen safely. Absolutely, the people I see doing the most profound healing work for themselves [and] getting a lot out of psychedelic medicine; they did a lot of prep. We talk a lot about integration, I think, in the community, but we don’t talk as much about preparation, and I actually think integration flows a lot more easily if you’ve done a lot of preparation.”
“There’s kind of this fantasy healing practitioners can get into where they’re like, ‘I’m not going to charge anything’ or ‘I’m going to charge really little.’ And I would say one individual person driving themselves into lifelong debt and not charging enough money is not actually changing the system. I think it’s masochistic. I think a lot of healing practitioners do it, and to all the healing practitioners listening right now that struggle with this, I want to speak to you and I want to say: I want you to be a okay, because we fucking need you so that you can actually help people heal, and when you’re driving yourself into the ground and stressed out and you can barely support yourself, you’re not taking care of yourself enough to support other people. So please charge enough to be okay.”
“Finding our way through capitalism involves connecting ourselves to a deep, deep, deep sense of love.”
Laura Mae Northrup, LMFT is an author, educator, somatic psychotherapist, and podcaster. Her book Radical Healership (Feb 2022) is a spiritually-informed and anticapitalist guide for healing practitioners who seek to build a values-driven healing practice. She is the host and creator of the podcast Inside Eyes, an audio series about people using entheogens and psychedelics to heal from sexual trauma. Her work focuses on defining sexual violence through a spiritual and politicized lens, mentoring healing practitioners in creating a meaningful path, and supporting the spiritual integrity of our collective humanity. You can learn more about her work here: www.lauramaenorthrup.com.
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, Kyle interviews researcher, author, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Greenwich, and Co-Founder and Director of the Breaking Convention conference: Dr. David Luke.
Luke talks about the importance of understanding the full range of psychedelic experiences; the difficulty in defining and measuring the transpersonal, how science has pathologized (and religion has demonized) the weird; the need for counselors to be open minded to the reality (and after effects) of their clients’ experiences; the problem of trying to apply science to something science can’t define; and how the most important thing we need is community.
And he talks about DMT and entity encounters: What could these encounters represent, or what could these entities be? And why do people who have these experiences have such massive shifts in belief afterward? While he can’t answer these questions, he shares a few stories of his own that led to prolonged, incremental ontological shock in his own life, including elves taking light from the sky and putting it into his chest, and meeting a being with “multiple snake body tentacles all morphing in a kind of fibonacci spiral covered in thousands of eyeballs.”
Reminder that each of the guests on Vital Psychedelic Conversations is a part of the teaching team for our 12-month Certificate course, Vital. We’re taking applications until March 27th, and classes begin April 19th!
Notable Quotes
“I would have these extraordinary experiences which I couldn’t quite explain, which begged me to kind of reconsider my worldview about the nature of reality. And just as I maybe started to incorporate that and go, ‘Okay, I feel comfortable with that now, that isn’t really so mind-blowing to me any more,’ …I’d have another experience which would be even more mind-blowing than that, and I’d have to try and get my head around it. And then on and on it went. …It’s a series of just shattering your beliefs and then just staring at them on the floor and wondering how to reconstruct them.”
“When your ‘boggle-threshold’ just gets exceeded, it finally finds some new equilibrium in a more expanded kind of worldview. But then that can be exceeded again. [There] doesn’t appear to be any apparent limit on how far out we can go with our beliefs. But just a word of caution: Keep an open mind, but not so much that your brains fall out.”
“Experiences are real. It’s a real experience, no matter what. If you are somewhere in another dimension encountering with impossible entities, then it’s still a real experience. It doesn’t mean the phenomena are real or the entities exist, but it’s a real experience. …And that has a profound effect. We see these profound effects and how [they shift] people’s beliefs, so they should be treated with that respect and seriousness.” “The very fact that the mystical experiences even are in the scientific parlance; [are] in the research agendas; [are] in some of the clinical research (not all of it); and being talked about is a massive shift. Basically, up until very recently, what we might consider a mystical experience was either demonized or pathologized. Now it’s completely done a 180, and it seems to be part of the solution for mental health problems instead.”
Dr. David Luke is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Greenwich. His research focuses on transpersonal experiences, anomalous phenomena and altered states of consciousness, especially via psychedelics, having published more than 100 academic papers in this area, including ten books, most recently DMT Entity Encounters. When he is not running clinical drug trials with LSD, conducting DMT field experiments or observing apparent weather control with Mexican shamans, he directs the Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness salon and is a cofounder and director of Breaking Convention: International Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews Professor of Neuroscience, author, and Founder and Vice Director of the Brain Institute at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil: Sidarta Ribeiro.
Ribeiro tells his story, discusses some of his work with dreams, and talks about what he’s seeing happen in psychiatry: that we’re realizing how little traditional psychiatry paid attention to set and setting, how much the creation and spread of antidepressants was influenced by conflicts of interest, and how the future of psychiatry and psychotherapy will mean more talking and less use of drugs (and not the other way around).
He also discusses research where MDMA was given to octopuses; how we’re arriving at many “new” conclusions that are actually old; why he’s primarily researching LSD; how all descriptions of the world are metaphors; the ayahuasca-like drink, jurema; how we need to look at things outside the realm of logical positivism; microdosing; and why we aren’t more tolerant of each other. And he talks a lot about biopiracy: how we need to honor the sacredness of these plants, learn from the knowledge that came before Western science, and respect the dream-state journey that many psychedelic companies are trying to figure out how to remove from the experience. We’re giving away 5 copies of Riberio’s newest book, The Oracle of Night: The History and Science of Dreams. Click here to enter!
Notable Quotes
“People need to be listened to. People need to dialogue. People need to have access to sophisticated techniques of care that can be aided by substances, but they cannot be replaced by substances.” “What I don’t like and I think it’s either naive or disingenuous or even quite misleading (and I see it [with] lots of people; scientists, journalists, and capitalists going in that direction) is to say that the non-psychoactive psychedelics are the good ones, the preferred ones – that this is the right way of doing the therapy. I think this would be similar to saying that sex without orgasm is better than sex with orgasm.”
“Because of the propaganda, because of the war on drugs, because of Nixon, because of Reagan, because of people that said that cannabis kills brain cells, because of people that said that psychedelics would make everybody psychotic. That really worked. People really believed those myths and it really took very sustained research work over many decades to overcome this. Now, I think the genie is out of the bottle. It’s very hard to portray psychedelics as something tremendously harmful and dangerous. This moral panic; it doesn’t stick anymore.”
“We are really close to a very big positive change. And the reason I believe it is because it’s obvious that we have accumulated in the past three million years such a wide and rich wealth of knowledge from many different sources, that if we were able to gather the best of all that we have and apply it, we would reach world balance and harmony quite quickly. If we think of the financial capital that has accumulated now, the technological capital, the human capital: we have it all. But we’re still confused about something that is quite basic, which is that we need to share.”
Sidarta Ribeiro is Full Professor of Neuroscience and Vice-Director of the Brain Institute at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from the Universidade de Brasília, a Master’s degree in Biophysics from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and a Ph.D. in Animal Behavior from the Rockefeller University, with post-doctoral studies in Neurophysiology at Duke University. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Latin American School for Education, Cognitive and Neural Sciences (LA School), and he is a senior research associate of the FAPESP Research Centre for Innovation and Diffusion in Neuromathematics and Scientific Coordinator and Member of the Advisory Board of the Brazilian Platform for Drug Policy and the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. His most recent book, The Oracle of Night: The History and Science of Dreams, was released by Pantheon in 2021.
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, David interviews Andrew Tatarsky, Ph.D.; author and developer of Integrative Harm Reduction Psychotherapy, and Juliana Mulligan; writer and head of Inner Vision Ibogaine, which supports people in their preparation for and integration of ibogaine treatment. Both are involved with our Vital program, and both are part of The Center for Optimal Living in NYC (CFOL); Tatarsky as the Founder and Director, and Mulligan as the Psychedelic Program Coordinator.
Mulligan tells her story of overcoming opioid dependence through an almost deadly ibogaine treatment, and how later, she began to see two major issues quickly becoming a problem: the continued labeling of psychedelic interventions as “miracle cures,” and the alarming lack of knowledge so many people seemed to have about preparation and integration. Tatarsky discusses his realization that traditional 12-step or abstinence-only programs were contributing to what he calls “treatment trauma,” and how breaking the rules in how he treated people led to a newfound interest in harm reduction and the creation of the CFOL.
They talk about reframing addiction, the ways society divides us by accepted behaviors, how being taught to doubt ourselves as children creates trauma, the idea of the “disease narrative” and self-demonization, how research studies support the idea of the quick fix, and harm reduction as a pathway to a better self.
The CFOL is currently running an 8-week virtual training series with a focus on intersectionality and social justice called “Working with Psychedelics to Treat Substance Use Issues,” featuring names like Gabor Maté, Laura Mae Northrup, Courtney Watson, and Dr. Carl Hart. Mulligan developed the curriculum by asking her favorite people in the psychedelic space what they were most passionate about. Check out the event page here.
Notable Quotes
“The harm reduction framework is about not imposing barriers, expectations, our values [and] our agendas on the people that we’re trying to be helpful to. It’s about radical acceptance and respect and empowerment, and therefore we can truly meet people where they are as unique humans in unique social and relational environments and create a safe space to support people in discovering their truth and their goals and what approach to positive change makes sense to them. So it’s non-ideological, it’s non-prescriptive, and I think it really is a very powerful way of engaging folks. And it works!” -Andrew
“I had to go through homelessness and getting beaten up and going to jail and all of this, but the most traumatizing thing for me was being told repeatedly that I had a disease for life that had no cure and I had to admit that I was powerless and say that I was an addict for the rest of my life, and if I stopped going to these meetings, then I would end up in a jail, institution, or I would die.” -Juliana “In the psychedelic world in general, we need to get away from this kind of ‘miracle’ language or even ‘10 years of therapy in one night.’ That kind of thing, I think, is playing into the notions that we’ve been taught in capitalism that you can buy your way into getting what you want or there’s some kind of magical overnight fix for things. There’s not.” -Juliana “We’re losing hundreds of thousands of people a year from lethal overdose or drug poisoning because of prohibition. Our American gulag is filled with mostly people of color and folks in marginalized communities because of the simple use or possession of a substance. I mean, these are catastrophic outcomes of prohibition. If anybody ever believed that prohibition was supposed to be helpful to vulnerable people, I think that’s been glaringly exposed as a terrible lie.” -Andrew
Andrew Tatarsky, Ph.D. has worked with people who struggle with drugs and their families for over 40 years. He developed Integrative Harm Reduction Psychotherapy (IHRP) for treating the spectrum of risky and addictive behavior as an alternative to traditional abstinence-only substance use treatment. IHRP brings relational psychoanalysis, CBT and mindfulness together in a harm reduction frame and meets people wherever they are on their positive change journeys, working collaboratively to support people in discovering their truth and what goals and approach to positive change best suit them. The therapy has been described in a series of papers and his book, Harm Reduction Psychotherapy: A New Treatment for Drug and Alcohol Problems, which has been translated into Polish and Spanish and is currently being translated into Russian. He holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from the City University of New York and is a graduate of New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He is Founder and Director of the Center for Optimal Living in NYC, a treatment, education and professional training center based on IHRP. He is a member of the Medical and Clinical Advisory Panels of the New York State Office of Addiction Services and Support. He has trained individuals and organizations in 19 countries. His writing, teaching, clinical work and leadership aim to promote a re-humanized view of problematic substance use and a harm reduction continuum of care that will extend help to everyone who needs and wants it wherever they are ready to begin their positive change journeys.
Juliana Mulligan has been an active member of the Ibogaine community for nine years and is currently working on her MSW at NYU. She runs Inner Vision Ibogaine, supporting people in preparation for, and in integration after treatment. She is also the Psychedelic Program Coordinator at the Center for Optimal Living. Previously Juliana was an opioid dependent person, and in 2011, with the help of Ibogaine treatment, she left opioids behind and set off on a path to transform the way drug users and their treatment are approached. She has been featured in DoubleBlind magazine, Chacruna, Woman’s Day magazine, and Psymposia.
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, Kyle interviews Sam Gandy: researcher, science writer, Ph.D. ecologist, and collaborator with the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London.
Gandy is most interested in the capacity of psychedelics to amplify or ignite our relationship with nature. He talks about our skewed relationship with nature; David Luke’s study on nature interconnectedness after psychedelic experiences; and ways to add nature into the integration and prep stages, from VR to planting seeds to even just looking at pictures or videos.
He talks about the challenge of maximizing the benefits of the psychedelic experience and the need for more knowledge on how to integrate, asking how we can use psychedelics intentionally as creativity-enhancing agents. And they discuss James Fadiman and Willis Harman’s 1966 “Selective Enhancement of Specific Capacities Through Psychedelic Training” study and how the directive priming that was used in it is similar to intention-setting today.
They also discuss the communal aspect of the music festival psychedelic experience, dream states and creativity, how more research is needed on the context around the chemicals (not just the chemicals), and the complications of trying to step into a newly-discovered life purpose while living in a capitalist society.
Notable Quotes
“People are maybe slightly focusing too much on the chemical substances themselves when the context around the usage of those chemicals is probably much more important and in need of much more attention, I think. And I feel like more exploration there could enhance the potential benefits of psychedelics in a variety of different ways.”
“Some scientists have argued, as I do in this paper, that perhaps we’ve become a little bit over-reliant on analytical thinking. Like, I’m in no way shooting down the importance of analytical thinking. It’s absolutely essential. But perhaps [these] more slightly dynamic, free-flowing, unconstrained states of consciousness that you can access through these altered states – perhaps they’ve got a place.”
“There’s not that much known, really, at this stage, about how to maximize the benefits in terms of people bringing those insights back and integrating them into their life and acting on them. That’s something that I feel needs more attention.”
“Prior to people going into an experience, you could maybe tend a bit of soil, like you’re preparing your psychic soil before going into [the] experience. And then plant a seed that you then take away and you nurture this young plant as you’re hopefully nurturing and grounding the insights in yourself.”
Sam Gandy is a lifelong nature lover and has been fortunate enough to conduct ecological field research in various parts of the world. He is a Ph.D. ecologist, researcher, and science writer, and has experience of working within the psychedelic field as a past scientific assistant to the director of the Beckley Foundation, and as a research assistant with the Synthesis Institute and a senior science writer with Wavepaths. He is a Project Manager with Norfolk Rivers Ecology and a collaborator with the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, with a research interest in the capacity of psychedelics to influence our connection to nature.
Jon Dennis, Esq. looks closely at what Oregon’s Measure 109 really says, and provides a possible framework for the fair treatment of religious-use sacrament.
Oregon’s Psilocybin Services Act, aka Measure 109, is currently undergoing a reputational makeover. Although primarily advertised to voters as “psilocybin therapy,” clinical use of psilocybin is only one of the many modalities of psilocybin services that may soon be permitted in Oregon. Nearly all of the media reporting on M109 have echoed the messaging of the M109 electoral campaign, creating a narrative that Oregon voted to legalize “psilocybin therapy.” But now that people are beginning to write and speak about M109 in a more careful and nuanced way, many are surprised to find out that the psilocybin law passed in Oregon allows people to take psilocybin for virtually any reason. If there is still any doubt about whether M109 is a “therapy” program, Tom Eckert, one of the chief co-petitioners of Measure 109 and now the chair of the Oregon Psilocybin Advisory Board (“OPAB”) (as well as a practicing therapist), said in a recent interview that “The idea [of M109] is to create safe space under the facilitation of licensed professionals to explore [the psilocybin] experience for personal benefit.” According to Eckert, taking psilocybin under M109 is “about your consciousness and using psilocybin however you really want to, whether it’s creative, spiritually, or for a therapeutic benefit.” This means, of course, that psilocybin may be used pursuant to religious or spiritual exercise. It means that psilocybin churches might soon become commonplace in Oregon. The intersection of M109 and religious liberties is an important and complex topic that so far has received very little attention during the meetings of OPAB and its 5 subcommittees. Religious exploration is already a large part of this so-called “psychedelic renaissance,” and all signs point to religious use of psychedelics becoming more prevalent over time. Because the “Oregon model” of psychedelic services has become one of the leading models in psychedelic policy reform, it is paramount we build religious protections into the model. In response to public comment, the Oregon Health Authority (“OHA”) recently published the following statement:
Q: Can the psilocybin services be offered within a ceremonial or religious context?
A: Yes, if psilocybin services take place at a licensed service center and is otherwise compliant with statute and rule requirements.
In other words, OHA intends to allow the religious use of psilocybin if performed in accordance with Oregon’s regulatory framework for psilocybin. The preceding sentence constitutes pretty much everything we know so far about how Oregon intends to address religious practice under the measure. This is particularly concerning in light of the fact that OPAB has many complex issues to still resolve, and it must issue its final recommendations by June 30 – meaning there are only 15 hours of full OPAB meeting time remaining. Time is running out for Oregon to create thoughtful and nuanced policy on this matter of great importance. Fortunately, serious conversations about religious practice are about to begin. The February 2 meeting of the Equity Subcommittee and the February 3 meeting of the Licensing Subcommittee and the Equity Subcommittee will address religious use.
What is Essential to a Religious-Use Framework?
When considering what a religious-use framework might look like under M109, I identify six elements that are essential:
It must permit a broad range of religious practices and ceremonies without unnecessary interference from the government. Protections should accommodate practices and beliefs ranging from traditional Indigenous practices to contemporary Western, Eastern, and neo-shamanic religions that incorporate psilocybin into their practices;
It must create a pathway for religious practice that is affordable to marginalized communities;
The regulations should allow special rules around the growing, storing, handling, and testing of psilocybin mushrooms that reflect the view common in many entheogenic communities that the mushrooms themselves are sacred objects worthy of reverential treatment;
The regulations must provide meaningful oversight of and accountability for religious practitioners, particularly in:
Screening new members;
Disclosing risks/obtaining informed consent;
Preventing abuse; and
Ensuring that religious practice is conducted in a safe manner;
Given the Oregon constitution’s protection of both the religious and the non-religious*, the regulations must not give preferences to “religious” over “non-religious” organizations or individuals. Accordingly, the criteria for who may operate within the “religious framework” should be framed in terms of sincere practice relating to one’s deeply-held values, beliefs, and convictions, rather than affiliation with a religious organization;
It should be simple enough to administer that it does not cause a substantial burden on OHA.
With these considerations in mind, I have taken the liberty of drafting a proposed model regulatory framework for how religious practice could be protected under Measure 109. My proposed framework may be found here:
I am actively seeking stakeholder feedback. Please email me with questions or comments. To execute this project well means compiling and assembling a wide range of stakeholder input, so please do reach out.
One of the fundamental assumptions underlying the model is that if religious-use privileges are only affordable to a small subset of the population, it might actually be better to not grant special religious privileges at all. Perhaps the most iniquitous aspect of M109 is that access to psilocybin will be unaffordable to a lot of people. Luckily, as we will see, religious use privileges can be structured in a manner that creates new pathways to affordable access. Several key features of this framework may be aided by some explanation.
Peer-Support Assistance
Measure 109 requires that all psilocybin be purchased, possessed, and consumed “under the supervision of a …facilitator” (Section 57 (2)). The measure does not otherwise describe what that supervision should look like, which leaves open many possibilities. Currently it appears that Oregon is poised to require that the majority of assistance given to clients must be provided by paid facilitators, who are prohibited from taking psilocybin while serving as a facilitator. If this is the case, even if Oregon adopts liberal rules that require lower amounts of paid facilitation, I estimate that a “cheap” group session, offered by a nonprofit, will not be available for less than $500 per person, including the costs of psilocybin. This is inequitable. We can do much better. Luckily, Indigenous and other religious and spiritual communities have substantial history and experience using plant medicines as sacraments in ceremony. They provide clear proof that ceremony can be safely conducted without the need for paid facilitators who abstain from fully participating in the ceremony. Accordingly, religious communities who operate under M109 should have the option to provide their own peer-support assistance through community members that have been certified by their community as being qualified and capable to provide that assistance. Reasonable minds could disagree about how much the state should regulate that certification. Regulation could be enacted to encourage the slow and sustainable growth of these organizations and to ensure that the clients who provide peer-support assistance are familiar with and oriented to the community in which they intend to serve. Successful implementation of this system will require relationship-building within each community, and the regulations could require that a client be involved with a community for a period of time (which could be defined by a minimum number of ceremonies attended) before they begin providing peer-support assistance. Or the regulations could simply trust the community to responsibly manage itself, particularly in light of the fact that its licensure could be lost if it behaves irresponsibly.
The freedom to exercise one’s religion means little if paywalls keep most people out. However, if peer-support assistance is allowed, it could avoid having to pay unneeded facilitators to “supervise” ceremonies. The number of facilitators that are needed to safely supervise a ceremony may vary by community, but well-organized communities could conceivably conduct ceremonies safely with only one facilitator present. By reducing the number of facilitators that must be on hand for a ceremony, we drastically reduce the cost of the ceremony. Additionally, many entheogenic religions do not permit people into their ceremonial space who have not consumed at least some amount of their sacrament. The idea in some communities is that the presence of people who are on a different vibrational wavelength (i.e., who have not partaken of the sacrament) fundamentally prevents participants from receiving certain religious benefits. Facilitators are prohibited from taking psilocybin while serving as a facilitator, so allowing facilitators to supervise from outside the ceremonial space is the only option if this view is to be respected. This could be safely done if peer-support assistance were permitted by clients who are participating in the ceremony. This permits a higher degree of self-governance and self-reliance, which is healthy. This peer-support assistance model was inspired in part by the practices of the Church of the Holy Light of the Queen (“CHLQ”). CHLQ is the Santo Diame church who successfully sued the federal government for the right to use Daime (which some people call ayahuasca) in their religious practices.** In their 25 years of practice, it is my understanding that CHLQ has never had a safety situation which they were not able to safely manage internally. For people interested in learning more about that, I interviewed Padhrino Jonathan Goldman, the spiritual leader of CHLQ, on Episode No. 6 of Eyes on Oregon.
Religious Manufacturing Privileges
The religious manufacturing privileges contemplated by the framework are severalfold: 1) Religious communities are granted permission to grow mushrooms in a less-regulated (i.e., far less expensive) manner than is required of standard manufacturers; 2) Religious growers may grow the species of mushrooms using techniques and substrates that are consistent with their beliefs and convictions, provided that products are safe; 3) Testing of religious products is not required, unless indicated by a client’s adverse medical reaction; 4) Religious products may not be delivered to a service center that is not a religious service center; and 5) Religious growers are under a duty to provide safe products and avoid creating nuisances and other environmental hazards. The policy considerations behind the proposed religious manufacturing privileges are two-fold: 1) it gives communities the option to offer very low-cost products (mushrooms are famously cheap to grow); and 2) it creates space for Oregon plant medicine communities who believe that the mushrooms themselves are sacred and must be handled with reverence. Product safety can be maintained without the need for expensive laboratories. Unlicensed, unregulated mushroom growers – many of whom grow in their basements or closets using improvised laboratory equipment – currently create the bulk of consumer psilocybin products. This matters because it serves as a counterpoint to the concern that “under-regulated” manufacturing operations pose a threat to public health or safety. In truth, reports of adverse reactions to unsafe psilocybin products are exceedingly rare, particularly in light of the amount of mushrooms being eaten nowadays. While the idea of permitting a religious or spiritual community to have homegrown sacramental mushrooms might make some people uncomfortable, it’s worth remembering that you can buy myceliated grow kits for gourmet mushrooms virtually everywhere, and society allows that practice without question. Moreover, the practice of a religious or spiritual community handling its own sacrament in accordance with their beliefs and convictions is a practice that predates Oregon statehood.
Relaxed Testing Requirements
Oregon is required by M109 to consider the costs of testing to the client when deciding its testing rules, and testing may not be more onerous than is reasonably necessary for health and safety (Section 96 (7)). Moreover, testing standards must be different for different “varieties of psilocybin products” (Section 96 (1)(d)), which could presumably include mushrooms grown for use in religious ceremony. Relaxed testing rules for religious products will help the state achieve its statutory mandate of striving for an affordable system, while also respecting practitioner beliefs. While this could create greater imprecision in dosing, this is the current state of things in our existing unregulated market, and people safely manage that imprecision.
Affordability
In addition to providing meaningful autonomy of religious practice, the combination of peer-support assistance and less-regulated religious manufacturing and testing starts to get us close to an affordable system. If all three are adopted, a lower and more satisfying price point begins to emerge. The costs for services may even be as low as the combination of one facilitator’s time that is spread across multiple clients (or which may be donated by volunteer facilitators), low-cost products sold by a nonprofit manufacturer, and overhead costs of running a nonprofit service center. To drive costs lower still, OHA could adopt a progressive fee structure that permits nonprofit service centers and manufacturers to pay a little less than their “fair share” of the program’s fees. Additionally, onsite manufacturing centers could possibly create a direct manufacturer-to-client sales pipeline that might allow entheogenic service centers to avoid the application of that pesky tax rule, 280E (which disallows tax deductions or credits attributable to businesses that “traffick” controlled substances). This appears to be allowed under M109, as sales by manufacturers must be either “to or on a premises” licensed as a manufacturer or service center (Sections 53 (1)(a) and (2)(a), and Section 57). With all of these cost-savings measures in place, it is foreseeable that a psilocybin ceremony under M109 could cost well under $50 per participant. That’s still too expensive. But it’s considerably better.
Reciprocal Exchange Program
Participation in reciprocal exchange programs should be required of all who engage with the M109 program, from clients to testing laboratories. Involvement with a reciprocal exchange program is important because the programs help minimize the harmful impacts that extraction of cultural and natural resources have on the Indigenous plant medicine communities who have stewarded plant medicines for centuries or longer. It also helps ensure that Indigenous knowledge and wisdom do not become lost or forgotten. The proposed model framework requires entheogenic practitioners to have an unspecified level of involvement in a reciprocal exchange program, and an annual public report of that involvement. This doesn’t punish bad actors for negligible involvement, but it provides social incentives for people who can demonstrate meaningful participation.
Discipline of Entheogenic Practitioners
Because this framework gives entheogenic practitioners a considerable set of privileges, it also creates a reciprocal set of duties to use those privileges safely and responsibly. To achieve this, the proposed framework borrows language from the Oregon law that protects the religious use of peyote. In order for religious use of peyote to be protected in Oregon, the use must be done “in a manner that is not dangerous to the health of the user or others who are in the proximity of the user (ORS 475.752(4)).” Oregon should adopt the same standard for psilocybin religions who operate under the measure. Ultimately, if a religious practitioner engages in conduct that is unsafe or irresponsible, the practitioner risks losing their special religious privileges, as well as their general psilocybin licensing. Given the significant financial and personal investment that will go into opening any psilocybin business in Oregon, this provides powerful incentives to operate within the bounds of the regulatory framework.
Conclusion
In conclusion, if we think of M109 not in terms of “therapy” vs. “not therapy,” but rather (as Tom Eckert put it), a “safe space under the facilitation of licensed professionals to explore [the psilocybin] experience for personal benefit,” it appears the best way for Oregon to reduce the most harm to its people is to invite all beneficial use of psilocybin to come and operate within the relative safety of the M109 container. This includes religious use. The model framework proposed herein would create a type of partnership or alliance between religious practitioners and OHA. In exchange for paying licensing fees and submitting to administrative oversight, religious communities who use psilocybin gain mechanisms of accountability*** and the freedom to practice with substantially less fear of criminal repercussions. However, in order for entheogenic practitioners to accept Oregon’s invitation, the M109 religious container must not be unduly restrictive in what it allows, and it must be affordable. If these interests can be balanced, psychedelic religious practice could soon find its way out of the shadows of the underground and into the full light of day. The following is my presentation from the February 3 Oregon Psilocybin Licensing Subcommittee Meeting. Bob Otis of the Sacred Garden Community also presents.
*See, e.g., Meltebeke v. Bureau of Lab. & Indus., 322 Or at 147. (Oregon’s constitutional religious protections “extend[] to religious believers and nonbelievers alike.”) This also avoids giving nonreligious clients a financial incentive to seek religious services from a religious provider, which is important. For more information about the inappropriateness of confusing religious and non-religious containers of psychedelic use, see Matthew Johnson’s article entitled “Consciousness, Religion, and Gurus: Pitfalls of Psychedelic Medicine.” **It’s worth noting that Oregon regulatory agencies have already granted religious exemptions to religious organizations that use controlled substances. See the Oregon Board of Pharmacy’s 2008 letter to CHLQ.
***The need for greater mechanisms of accountability in psychedelic communities is described in horrifying detail in a new podcast series called Cover Story, which is produced by a collaboration of New York Magazine and Psymposia.
Gathering as professionals in psychedelics has taken on new meaning. It’s more – a lot more – than just networking now.
In early December, Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics (an annual conference often referred to just as ‘Horizons’) re-emerged from the proverbial ashes of COVID-19; a pandemic that led to the dismantling of social connectivity and a general feeling like we were moving with momentum. With the pandemic came distance: social distance, emotional distance, and psychological distance. We stopped going to work together, we stopped learning together, we stopped moving and growing together. Reconvening at Horizons was therefore much more significant than just attending a regular conference.
Pandemic or not, the Horizons conference already played the role of a psychedelic sandbox where the psychedelic community convenes each year – a place where we get to see how widespread the community really is, and where each conversation is an opportunity to learn from our peers. It is a place where we can learn together, cry together, break bread together, and dance together. It is a place where we can be our most authentic selves, see others, and be seen. And it is a place where difficult conversations are encouraged to be had.
I heard a colleague explain that at other conferences, we are often introducing psychedelics to a new audience that sometimes lacks the capacity to grasp the shadow of psychedelic therapy. Contrarily, Horizons seeks to shed light on our shadow. It seeks to broaden our collective dreams of what is possible in the psychedelic space while learning from our past. By having those difficult conversations in front of 2,000 people, we get to grow collectively – as a community, and as a movement. And this year’s Horizons, more than ever, was an opportunity to rebuild a sense of collective effervescence.
Collective Effervescence
Sociologist Emile Durkheim coined the term “collective effervescence“as a “shared state of high emotional arousal related to intensification of emotions by social sharing, felt in religious and secular collective rituals, irrespective of their content (joyful feasts or sad funerary rituals), which empowers the individual.” Essentially, collective effervescence occurs when there is a shared sense of engagement with something bigger than the self, warranting a personal sense of empowerment. In developing the Perceived Emotional Synchrony Scale, psychologists Anna Wlodarczyk, Larraitz Zumeta, and their fellow researchers determined that some of the key conditions for collective effervescence to emerge are a “shared attention on one or more symbolic stimuli” and a sense of “intentional coordination or behavioral synchrony among the participants in a given gathering.” Ultimately, they argued that “the relevance of emotional synchronization in collective gatherings [is] conducive to strong forms of social identification, particularly the overlapping of the individual with the collective self.”
By blurring the lines between the individual and the collective self, Wlodarczyk and her colleagues suggested that a sense of collective effervescence ultimately “pulls humans fully but temporarily into the higher realm of the sacred, where the self disappears and collective interests predominate.” It is no surprise that a conference discussing the ethics and future of the psychedelic movement would incite a collective effervescence so strong that a perceived sense of emotional synchrony may occur, where there is indeed a “co-present other” that becomes closer and closer to a perceived sense of self.
This is how I want to see the psychedelic movement evolving and growing, with the collective interest dominating a sense of self. The uniqueness and radicalness of this movement will only come from our ability to enter into this shared sense of togetherness, and into a “higher realm of the sacred” and not to bypass it. How can we do this?
“Shadow work” is a term those in the psychedelic movement have heard countless times. In psychedelic healing, shadow work is not about eradicating the shadow. Rather, it is about shedding light on it and getting to know it deeply, so that when it shows up, it is not unfamiliar. By working with the shadow, we become better equipped to handle what may come up as a result of trauma. If we do not have a safe space to have these conversations, to be held in our confusion, and to be educated on our blind spots, then how can we move forward? How can we call ourselves a revolution if we are not rethinking the way we engage with our work each and every year?
Horizons is a place where we learn about cutting edge research in science and in the clinic, new models for approaching business, and cultural matters. But more importantly, it’s an opportunity to converge as a community and reflect on the previous year together, shedding light on our blind spots and engaging in shadow work to build a sense of collective effervescence and a unified goal. While there were many great presentations this year, three in particular really encapsulated all of this.
Doing the Work with Laura Mae Northrup
Without a doubt, the most impactful talk of the weekend for me was from marriage and family therapist, Laura Mae Northrup, who, in light of recent events, spoke about sexual misconduct in the psychedelic space. Shivers ran down my spine as she powerfully proclaimed these words into the microphone: “Mental health clinicians self-report engaging in sexual violations with their clients at rates of 7-12%. We don’t have data on corresponding rates of psychedelic therapies, but we have no reasonto believe it would be any less than our non-psychedelic counterparts.” She spoke with conviction, with grace, and emotion. She had us all in tears, reflecting on the very real fact that the clinicians who are at a higher rate of sexually abusing their clients are male clinicians who were sexually abused as kids.
Northrup highlighted that we are in a cycle of abuse; that healing trauma is painful, and without doing so effectively, we will continue to cause harm to others. She did not name names, and she did not stand on that stage building a pedestal for herself (regardless of how compelling it seemed, as she noted). Instead, she served her community and said what needed to be said. If there was one takeaway from her powerful talk, it was that “we need to heal ourselves.” She took what was frantically scrambling around everyone’s minds and hearts, and put it into powerful and sensical words. She made it make sense.
Tears continued to flow down my face as Horizons founder Kevin Balktick approached the podium, applauding Northrup for the outstanding courage it took for her to get on that stage and speak from her heart. He then declared that sexual abuse and misconduct should not be a “women’s issue”; that it always has, and certainly should be, a men’s issue as well.
Eradicating the Promise of a “Miracle Cure” with Juliana Mulligan
The second presentation that captivated my attention was from ibogaine treatment specialist, Juliana Mulligan, who spoke of her experience of being sent to jail for using heroin, being thrown on the streets in the middle of Bogota, Colombia, and finally seeking refuge in what she was told was a miracle “cure” for opioid dependence. She then shared her own horrifying journey of getting off of opioids by going to an ibogaine center that did not have the proper protocols in place.
She brought about gasps in the crowd when she told us that the clinic did not have a heart monitor and that they gave her twice the safe dose of ibogaine – certainly enough to kill anyone, she clarified. When the clinic noticed her abnormal EKG readings and decided to seek professional and medical help, she was refused by three hospitals largely due to a lack of understanding on how to handle her situation, being overwhelmed with patients, and not believing that someone her age could be having a heart problem. Finally, when the fourth hospital almost turned her away, she had her first of six cardiac arrests due to her high dose of ibogaine. She explained that she remembers very little about her experience on ibogaine, but that she woke up with a tiny fraction of the usual opioid withdrawal symptoms, the feeling of a huge weight lifted from the guilt and shame of years of substance use, and a newfound clarity around her life’s mission.
Despite her experience at this ibogaine clinic, Mulligan has not turned her back on the promise of ibogaine in treating opioid dependence. In fact, she has dedicated part of her career to ensuring that people are equipped with the tools and knowledge on how to choose an ethical and effective ibogaine clinic – something she realized was necessary due to the many vulnerable people who don’t know what to look for when choosing an ibogaine clinic. Often, people do not take the time to learn about the proper protocols needed to provide this treatment, with many acting out of desperation in an attempt to “fix” their issues as quickly as possible. Her main point was to remind us of the dangers of selling ibogaine as a “miracle cure,” and how damaging it can be for people to have the idea that Ibogaine will fix their issues overnight.
Speaking Softly in Recollection with William Leonard Pickard
Finally, ex-convict William Leonard Pickard held us all in a state of awe as he eloquently and captivatingly shared his story of spending 21 years in prison for allegedly producing 90% of the United States’ supply of LSD. He spoke softly, and took long pauses between his sentences, his descriptive tone allowing me to truly visualize the scene where a CIA agent pointed a rifle at his forehead while uttering, “I’m going to blow your brains out.” He told us about the violence that occurred in prison, and how he became desensitized to fights and killings while he would quietly sit and eat his lunch. He showed us photos of a prison cell, and told us about how he fell in love with American Literature, and that without that – coupled with deep meditation, he may have not survived.
Pickard reminded us all why we were sitting in that room and why we need to change the way psychedelics have been viewed since the 1970s. The majority of the people in that room are privileged enough to never experience going to jail for psychedelics, and getting a glimpse into that reality reminded us why rewriting the psychedelic script in America is critical.
Composting Emotions into Inspiration
In exploring rituals where collective effervescence is powerful, Wlodarczyk and her team discuss the way in which both positive and negatively valenced rituals ultimately lead to a shared sense of emotion and heightened well-being. Indeed, what truly comes through in these rituals is “the creation of a positive emotional atmosphere in which grief, sadness, anger, and fear are transformed into hope, solidarity, and trust.”
Contextualizing these experiences –sexual misconduct in psychedelic healing, the wrongful advertisement of ibogaine as a miracle cure, and the harsh realities of the drug war and the American justice system – provides our collective community with the opportunity to transform these emotions of grief, sadness, anger, and fear into a shared sense of solidarity. We were provided with the opportunity to compost these moments of disappointment and turn them into something productive, where the unified goal of ethically bringing psychedelics to modern American lives empowers each and every one of us, both on a collective and individual level. This is how we can heal and move forward as a collective movement.
These three presentations are simply a glimpse into the moving stories that were told on that stage. The breadth of content shared allowed us the opportunity to reflect on what the world could look like once we systematically dismantle the war on drugs, and what is effectively involved in doing so: the clinical trials for which researchers have put their careers on the line, the endless volunteer hours that policy makers and lawyers have been putting toward changing legislation, the repairing of relationships with Indigenous communities through the work of the Native American Church and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the importance of doing our own work in order to help others heal from their trauma, and the dangers of presenting psychedelics as a magic bullet.
There are many pathways to attain psychedelic healing. Horizons provides a space for the entire range of themes that ought to be considered in bringing psychedelics to the modern world. In order to achieve this goal, we must do so collectively. We must reimagine what it means to be successful, and we can only do this by building a collective sense of self. To do this, we must continue to have these conversations, processing fear and anger into hope and solidarity. If we want to see the psychedelic movement radically change the world we are living in, we must face the music by continuing to have these difficult conversations and seek to elevate collective effervescence.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe revisits the topic of religion and psychedelics touched on last week in PT280, but this time, much more in depth, with two guests of different religions: Rabbi Zac Kamenetz and The Rev. Hunt Priest.
Kamenetz and Priest both had catalyzing psychedelic experiences as participants in research studies, and after gaining interest, noticed that their religions weren’t referenced much in psychedelic literature. They’re each working to build a broad network of leaders and academics who are Jewish (through Zac’s website, Shefa) or Christian (through Hunt’s site, Ligare) to act as psychedelic societies and encourage more people to buy in, be more open, and embrace the renaissance. Do these communities know enough to properly frame and integrate their experiences when they add psilocybin to Seder? What are the best protocols in which to authentically blend in religious tradition and lessons? Is their true purpose to help others use religion to explain mystical and psychedelic experiences? Or use mystical and psychedelic experiences to explain religion?
They also discuss the differences between how Christianity and Judaism talks about psychedelics; the Jewish Psychedelic Summit; why Christianity seems to be so far behind; the minimization of mystical experiences; the concepts of spiritual harm reduction and spiritual literacy; the need for accountability and “bumpers” in religion; Rick Strassman, DMT, and prophecy; how religious tokens and symbols in psychedelic-assisted therapy can traumatize or influence an intended experience; what religions can do in situations of spiritual emergency; and why serving others should be part of the integration experience.
Notable Quotes
“There is a very vibrant Christian conversation. It’s just quiet. It’s too quiet, really.” -Hunt
“When more people are having transpersonal experiences – ‘The All! The Nothing!’, them existing beyond their body and their consciousness – people are going to be looking for answers to their questions, more questions to their questions, and then these traditions that sadly, people are walking away from for all sorts of reasons (maybe good reasons, even), that we’re going to have to then present meaningful models, responsive models to their quandaries. That, really, I feel, is the heart of the work.” -Zac “It would probably have taken 10 more years of Vipassana meditation to get to where I was six hours into my psilocybin experience. And people will say, ‘Well that’s a spiritual shortcut.’ And I mean, at least in Christianity, we say none of this comes because we work hard for it; it comes as a grace and a gift, and take it. Take it and go with it, and then change your life because of it.” -Hunt
“This is multi-prong, multi-experience, multi-community [thing]. It’s not going to just be the psychological community, it’s not just going to be the hospice/end-of-life community, it’s not just going to be the party community, it’s not going to just be the religious community. It’s going to be all of us, I hope, moving forward together for the healing of the world.” -Hunt
“It’s interesting to figure out the ways in which you integrate these plants and fungi and substance/compounds into Jewish ritual, but I think there’s also, then, the opportunity to think about, like: Okay, what’s the role of preparation here? Like, if I steep myself in Jewish wisdom, is a ‘Jewish experience’ going to emerge? …The idea of set and setting then becomes a really interesting one. What is a Jewish mindset and are we actually interested in trying to fill people with content in order that they have an experience come out? …We don’t want, necessarily, to fill people with Hebrew music or words or ideas. We want the medicine and the inner healing intelligence to do that work. And then, really, what is the role of clergy there? Just to witness, just to support? ‘What are we doing and whose experience is being had?’ I think, is a really important question.” -Zac
Zac Kamenetz is a rabbi, community leader, and aspiring psychedelic-assisted chaplain based in Berkeley, CA. He holds an MA in Biblical literature and languages from UC Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union and received rabbinic ordination in 2012. As the founder and CEO of Shefa, Zac is pioneering a movement to integrate safe and supported psychedelic use into the Jewish spiritual tradition, advocate for individuals and communities to heal individual and inherited trauma, and inspire a Jewish religious and creative renaissance in the 21st century.
About Hunt Priest
Hunt Priest is an Episcopal priest and the founding Executive Director of Ligare: A Christian Psychedelic Society, a non-profit network of Christian leaders educating themselves and those they lead about the intersection of open-hearted Christianity and the Psychedelic Renaissance. A participant in a psilocybin study in early 2016, he had two life-changing mystical experiences under the care of a research team. His encounters with psilocybin opened him to the healing and consciousness-raising power of psychedelic medicines and changed the landscape of his work. Hunt believes the healing power of psychedelics should be in the toolkits of all who are healers of bodies, minds, and souls, and can’t wait to provide access for legal, safe, and guided experiences in a Christian setting. This past April, Hunt took an extended break from full-time parish ministry to expand his priesthood out into the emerging psychedelic landscape.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews D.C.-based attorney, Executive Director of the Association of Entheogenic Practitioners (AEP), and Guardian of the Temple of Mother Earth, Danny Peterson.
He discusses the work of the AEP, which he describes as similar to a bar association for practitioners in this space (facilitators, shamans, guides, sitters, etc.), with a code of ethics, best practices guide for facilitation, and efforts to continually improve the psychedelic-assisted therapy experience through what he calls “community building practicums.”
They talk about psychedelics, religion, and freedom in the United States; where we are in the “forming, storming, norming, performing” process; how much culture has changed in the last year due to Covid and a blossoming virtual world; Phish; the iron law of prohibition; the need for 10,000 entheogenic churches; and the classic questions we ask ourselves when analyzing our most powerful experiences and the communities we experience them in: Is this religious? Is this spiritual?
This is a bit of a hybrid Solidarity Fridays episode as well, with Joe and Kyle having a brief chat first. As one should in an episode coming out on New Year’s Eve (Happy New Years, everyone!), they reflect back a bit on the year and look to the future, with two brief, but huge announcements: 1) They just recorded a podcast with Stan and Brigitte Grof (!!!); and 2) In March, Psychedelics Today is launching a 12-month certification program called Vital. You’re going to hear a lot more about it, but learn more and join the waitlist now at vitalpsychedelictraining.com.
Notable Quotes
“[I] learned about the UDV and Santo Daime cases that had gone through the federal courts and came to be of the opinion that while the people who are clearly protected by religious freedom in the United States is a pretty small group, the people who should be protected is much bigger than that. And that is the community that I’ve been seeking to serve.”
“I might be wrong in this – I don’t know the Consciousness Medicine community. But merely watching this situation from a distance, something that’s interesting to me about this moment in time is that it doesn’t seem that any part of the conversation is about whether anyone is likely to be arrested for being involved in psychedelic work. That is the unusual thing here. We’re talking about this openly and it’s not about whether the DEA is going to come knocking.”
“The initiative (81) didn’t so much change the law in D.C., as it recognized what’s already happening. It was already the lowest law enforcement priority to deal with entheogenic plants and fungi. Now we’re saying that it is and it should be. That’s what we’ve said as a city. And in a way, I guess that’s the analogy that I’m going for here: This is already religious, now we’re just saying so.”
“Music, psychedelics, [and] community at the same time: How can we see that as not a religious or spiritual activity? …I’m not trying to get Phish a religious exemption or anything, but there’s something there that’s under-discussed and under-investigated.” -Joe