Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Ethan Edelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the
Speaker 1: show where we talk about all things drugs. But any
Speaker 1: views expressed here do not represent those of I Heart Media,
Speaker 1: Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, heed, as
Speaker 1: an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may not
Speaker 1: even represent my own. And nothing contained in this show
Speaker 1: should be used as medical advice or encouragement to use
Speaker 1: any type of drugs. Hello Psychoactive listeners. So today's episode
Speaker 1: is about micro dozing, specifically of psychedelics, mostly LSD and
Speaker 1: psilocybin mushrooms. My guest is Sophia Corb. She is a
Speaker 1: psychotherapist working in two on Arizona, primarily with people you
Speaker 1: know suffering from trauma. But my main reason for having
Speaker 1: her on today is that she has been the point
Speaker 1: person on a global survey of people who micro dos
Speaker 1: now numbering up to eighteen thousand people from around the world,
Speaker 1: and she's been working very closely on all of this
Speaker 1: with James Fadiman, who many regard as the godfather of
Speaker 1: micro docing. So I decided to have her on as
Speaker 1: our specialist. So, Soythhia, thank you ever so much for
Speaker 1: joining me on Psychoactive. Thank you for having me. So
Speaker 1: let me just start off with some of the you know,
Speaker 1: the kind of basics about micro docing. I mean, the
Speaker 1: first one is what is micro docing? How do you
Speaker 1: define micro docing? So, in general in medicine, when we
Speaker 1: talk about microdocing, we're talking about a different response from
Speaker 1: a large dose of something to a small dose. So
Speaker 1: there could be micro docing of hormones, or micro docing
Speaker 1: of another substance, or microdocing of psychedelics, So with microdocing
Speaker 1: of psychedelics or not looking for a trip experience, but
Speaker 1: there is a medical effect even at a very low dose.
Speaker 1: Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD, had said that he
Speaker 1: thought there would be a medical benefit of taking like
Speaker 1: a quarter of a tab or a third of a tab.
Speaker 1: So he had taught that to his students um and
Speaker 1: so people have started doing these journals. They would take
Speaker 1: like a quarter tab every few days and they would
Speaker 1: write in a journal about their experience. So that's what
Speaker 1: we thought microdosing would was going to be initially, then
Speaker 1: later we found that it was much much smaller doses
Speaker 1: that created a medical effect. Mm hmmm. So Albert Hoffman
Speaker 1: kind of comes up with this idea, but it sounds
Speaker 1: a bit like he's talking more about what we might call,
Speaker 1: you know, not micro dosing, but mini dosing, where people
Speaker 1: are actually experiencing the effect of the psychedelic but at
Speaker 1: a you know, not a full blow in uh, you know,
Speaker 1: macrodose level. But it's also something they're definitely aware of.
Speaker 1: I think most of our listeners will know Albert Hoffman,
Speaker 1: who sort of discovered or invented LSD back in the
Speaker 1: nineteen forties, was he actually thinking about micro dose at
Speaker 1: all on the way we think about it today. I
Speaker 1: think it's impossible for us to know. The best evidence
Speaker 1: that we have is from his students saying like he
Speaker 1: was really interested in this, but wasn't quite sure what
Speaker 1: it would look like, and was he himself doing it?
Speaker 1: Not that I know of Hoffman's students did, but I
Speaker 1: don't know if Hoffman did. I see. So I've typically
Speaker 1: said that when it comes to l s D people
Speaker 1: or any other drugs that we're talking about one tenth
Speaker 1: or one what would be a normal macro dose level.
Speaker 1: Is that basically what you say, Yeah, no visual difference,
Speaker 1: no visual hallucinations. We initially told people there won't be
Speaker 1: any perceptual difference, which is true in a way, but
Speaker 1: we mean that there won't be you won't have hallucinations.
Speaker 1: You might perceive that something is different, and that was
Speaker 1: one part of confusion in the initial literature. We didn't
Speaker 1: mean like you couldn't tell that you took a microdose.
Speaker 1: Who just meant that you wouldn't be seeing things. What
Speaker 1: Jim often says is like the laws are breathing even
Speaker 1: a little, you've taken too much. So the idea is
Speaker 1: micro dose that you should be receiving some difference, right,
Speaker 1: this is this is going to get into this conversation
Speaker 1: about placebo and double blind Right. So if what we
Speaker 1: call breaking the blind is when someone can tell what
Speaker 1: arm of a study that they're in, So in micro
Speaker 1: Doo saying it's very hard to create what's called an
Speaker 1: active placebo, which is where you'd effectively be able to
Speaker 1: fool people into thinking that they weren't sure if they
Speaker 1: had taken LSD or psilocybin or not. So that's very
Speaker 1: very hard because people know what it's like to take
Speaker 1: LSD or know what it's like to take psilocybin. And
Speaker 1: it's hard to create an active placebo, especially if you're
Speaker 1: using bladder paper because nothing else fits on bladder paper
Speaker 1: that can cause like a very similar effect. So you
Speaker 1: might think something like in the n y U studies
Speaker 1: when they did the psilocybin studies, they used forty milligrams
Speaker 1: of riddle in um as the control group. So that's
Speaker 1: an active control. And if people had were psychedelics naive
Speaker 1: and they had read something about psychedelics, they might expect
Speaker 1: to have some different thoughts, to have more energy, and
Speaker 1: they might expect the experience to last between four and
Speaker 1: six hours. That I'll fit in with riddle in But
Speaker 1: you can't get riddle of water paper and it won't
Speaker 1: work for a microdoce. So that's one of the major
Speaker 1: struggles in creating an effective double blind experiment. I see.
Speaker 1: And what if one were to design studies that did
Speaker 1: both a kind of total placebo, you know, with nothing
Speaker 1: of sugar bail type effect and with a low dose
Speaker 1: amphetamine and then with you know, different micro doses of
Speaker 1: varying levels, I mean, with that help to get at it,
Speaker 1: or that might that be a design of future Yes,
Speaker 1: I think that that could be a design in future studies.
Speaker 1: I think that when we're looking at things like depression,
Speaker 1: we need to think about what exactly a placebo effect
Speaker 1: for the treatment of depression would mean. How could someone
Speaker 1: have a placebo effect? Do they think that they're not
Speaker 1: as depressed as they are? Yeah? That becomes a little
Speaker 1: bit tricky, right, because the perception of well being is
Speaker 1: placebo effect and is also the opposite of depression. Huh.
Speaker 1: So then you get into like, Okay, what what are
Speaker 1: we doing and what is the what's the exact thing
Speaker 1: that we're trying to get at right now? And if
Speaker 1: you're creating a sense of well being in people, no
Speaker 1: matter how we're doing it, that's going to take away
Speaker 1: the their sense of depression. So with micro dosing, right,
Speaker 1: it's not just about taking this lower dose, which I
Speaker 1: think if I've often seen described this one or one
Speaker 1: the kind of normal dose for a second. So that's
Speaker 1: what we had, that's what we had normalized. After this
Speaker 1: idea of like a third or a quarter, we realized
Speaker 1: that people were still like they were like, I can't
Speaker 1: sleep at night if I take like a quarter of
Speaker 1: a tab, so we reduced it. We said, maybe tried
Speaker 1: ten percent, maybe tried, and that seemed to still have
Speaker 1: medical effects for people, but not be so overwhelming. Right,
Speaker 1: So if people have a normal dose to say on
Speaker 1: always going to be a hundred micrograms, under fifty would
Speaker 1: mean taking ten or fifteen or maybe less, maybe as
Speaker 1: low as five, right, And we've seen we've seen medical
Speaker 1: benefit as low as two. And like, I'm pretty skeptical,
Speaker 1: so I of course didn't think that people could effectively
Speaker 1: dose themselves at too. But like this woman's husband was
Speaker 1: a chemist and he did the dosing, so I trust
Speaker 1: that he was able to get two micrograms. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I guess some of it depends on tolerance. You know,
Speaker 1: watching your talk at Horizon Sofa, one of the best
Speaker 1: laugh lines when you talked about, you know, well, the
Speaker 1: normal dose from micro dose for many people with LSD
Speaker 1: might be you know, five micrograms to micrograms. But when
Speaker 1: lady Amanda Fielding, you know, who was just recently a
Speaker 1: guest on Psychoactive, you know, she said that for her
Speaker 1: a hundred micrograms was a micro dose because her tolerance
Speaker 1: was so substantial. With respect exactly did you get other
Speaker 1: people reporting that. Or is Lady amandas or the far
Speaker 1: end of this. No, I think that she's the far end.
Speaker 1: She's a great explorer. Um and she Yeah, she said
Speaker 1: that for her, a hundred would have been a micro dose.
Speaker 1: But I'm not sure anyone's using at that level right now.
Speaker 1: I don't really know if people are using in the
Speaker 1: way that she used to, which is to take ls
Speaker 1: every twenty four hours. Uh huh. Now it's also not
Speaker 1: just the dose, right, but it's also the frequency. And
Speaker 1: I've read about there's a kind of two types of protocols.
Speaker 1: Is the fatamin protocol and then there's the STA it's
Speaker 1: the polls protocol. And I just explain more about that
Speaker 1: and your thoughts about about those two. I remember when
Speaker 1: I was creating this with Jim, so we didn't really
Speaker 1: know because you don't know, you don't know. So we thought, okay,
Speaker 1: we think from mk ultra that LSD lasted the system
Speaker 1: around twenty four hours because you developed tolerance and it
Speaker 1: stops working if you take LSD every twenty four hours.
Speaker 1: So we thought, okay, let's give people like a day
Speaker 1: in between their doses to let get out of their
Speaker 1: system and see what happens because you're you know, we're
Speaker 1: not going from anything. So that's what we suggested to people.
Speaker 1: And then Paul Stamit's I think his protocol was a
Speaker 1: day in betweets. I thought it was more like twice
Speaker 1: a week or every third day. It was every third day,
Speaker 1: so it was like one day of effect, one day
Speaker 1: of just seeing how things turned out, and then the
Speaker 1: next day was dosing again. So every third day. Okay, okay, right,
Speaker 1: So that's the Fatamin protocol and the Stammits. I think
Speaker 1: what I was reading was something like three days a
Speaker 1: week and then off for the rest of the week
Speaker 1: or something like that. The idea so sort of stack
Speaker 1: them up and then um and then let people experience it.
Speaker 1: I know that for us, we were doing it based
Speaker 1: on this idea of tolerance and also an idea of learning.
Speaker 1: So if people are having like a learned effect from
Speaker 1: micro dosing, it might take some integration to be able
Speaker 1: to to learn whatever they're learning. Um, So we wanted
Speaker 1: to give them some amount of sober time. So we
Speaker 1: asked people in the fought them in protocol to do
Speaker 1: this for a month, right, so dose every third day
Speaker 1: or whatever felt right for them for about a month
Speaker 1: and report back their findings. So after that period, we
Speaker 1: asked people what they continued to do, how did they
Speaker 1: continue to micro dose after the study period, And what
Speaker 1: we found was two major groups. One was people who
Speaker 1: dosed once a week and one was people who done
Speaker 1: who dosed once a month. So almost no one continued
Speaker 1: at that initial level of of twice a week or
Speaker 1: three times a week. Now, just explained a little more
Speaker 1: about this survey. When did it take place, and how
Speaker 1: many people and from what types of countries and what
Speaker 1: types of drugs and all of that. Yeah, absolutely all right.
Speaker 1: So when I started working for a gym, I was
Speaker 1: a grad student at the Institute of trans Personal Psychology
Speaker 1: and I have a strong background in math and statistics,
Speaker 1: and as you might imagine people at the Institute of
Speaker 1: Transpersonal Psychology, that's a pretty unusual background. So UM, I
Speaker 1: needed money as a grad student. So UM I had
Speaker 1: this professor, Jim Fattman, who seemed cool enough, um, and
Speaker 1: he said, oh, do you want to work study job
Speaker 1: doing math for my research group? And I said sure.
Speaker 1: So I set out to try to prove all of
Speaker 1: this drug stuff was just placebo nonsense. So we first
Speaker 1: did some studies with like macrodocing, Like you know, he
Speaker 1: was giving toxic colleges and we're asking college students like
Speaker 1: what they did and what their motivations were. And then
Speaker 1: I got the micro doce thing. So what was happening
Speaker 1: initially was someone was sending out these journals. They were
Speaker 1: mailing journals to people who are micro docing. What do
Speaker 1: you mean by journals, Oh, I mean handwritten like notebooks.
Speaker 1: You mean something for people to fill in. You mean
Speaker 1: they blank blank notebooks books. Yes, they writing journal entries
Speaker 1: and and my job was to digitize these handwritten journals.
Speaker 1: And so that is no way to run like an
Speaker 1: international study on drugs. So I was like, no, Jim,
Speaker 1: we're not doing this. So I set up a Google
Speaker 1: form and I used snowball recruiting. So snowball recruiting means
Speaker 1: that if you're, say, doing a study of a population
Speaker 1: who's doing something illegal or who might not trust you,
Speaker 1: you have to establish trust with some members of the
Speaker 1: group first, and then they introduce you to other members
Speaker 1: of their group. So Jim Fadiman was well known within
Speaker 1: the psychedelics community. I was not. So we gave out
Speaker 1: this survey and so I know, designed a survey or
Speaker 1: a couple of surveys, put it in on Google forms,
Speaker 1: and then we handed the information out to people and
Speaker 1: that that way I didn't have to like type up
Speaker 1: people's handwritten journal entries. Um. And we could also get
Speaker 1: some hard facts, so we could do depression screenings, we
Speaker 1: could do anxiety screenings, we could get before and after snapshots.
Speaker 1: And as we had more questions about what was going on,
Speaker 1: we could survey the people who had filled out the
Speaker 1: study in the past, like we could go back to
Speaker 1: them and ask them, oh, we also have this question,
Speaker 1: have you had a stroke? So then the next time
Speaker 1: I looked at it, we had hundreds of entries, and
Speaker 1: then very rapidly we had thousands of entries. Because people
Speaker 1: love to share about their psyculic experiences. People love to
Speaker 1: share about what helps what helps them. Uh huh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm just thinking about errowd right though, fantastic source where
Speaker 1: people go for information about different types of psychaelics. And
Speaker 1: just as I don't know, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of accounts now over the many years. Yes,
Speaker 1: So basically with the people feeling these journals, you're going
Speaker 1: back and forth with them as or and they were
Speaker 1: contributing questions. Also, we wanted to have them be a
Speaker 1: really active part of this study because it's you know,
Speaker 1: for them. So we're like, what do you want to know? What?
Speaker 1: Why are you trying microdcing? What are you trying to do?
Speaker 1: And so we could find out more information about what
Speaker 1: people who were doing this wanted to know. And that
Speaker 1: was really really useful because we would find out things like, oh,
Speaker 1: even the people who say that they not depressed, they're
Speaker 1: actually showing up as depressed on a depression inventory. Even
Speaker 1: people who say, oh, I'm doing this to be more productive.
Speaker 1: If I check in with them in a couple of months,
Speaker 1: they've quit their job at a bank, and I don't
Speaker 1: need to worry about them using psychedelics to be more
Speaker 1: productive for capitalism, like they've you know, they've resolved that
Speaker 1: in themselves in some way. So that was a really
Speaker 1: interest and some of the things that people wanted to
Speaker 1: study didn't pan out, of course. So we had like
Speaker 1: a whole group from Louisiana who wanted to know if
Speaker 1: microdocing would help them control their blood sugar better, and
Speaker 1: the answer was no, it doesn't, not at all. Based
Speaker 1: upon what you were hearing from other people in the surveys. No,
Speaker 1: we we we did like a little study with them.
Speaker 1: So we had like the subgroup of people who were
Speaker 1: micro docing and they were taking their blood sugar um
Speaker 1: and there was no effect of Yeah, so we were
Speaker 1: able to do a little study and like eliminate that
Speaker 1: as a possibility, um, which is a really useful thing
Speaker 1: to do in terms of what we call pre clinical research.
Speaker 1: This type of it's not a double blind, but we
Speaker 1: can start to generate hypotheses about what clinical so you
Speaker 1: should look at. So, so you just put this in
Speaker 1: some time context. When did this survey begin and is
Speaker 1: it did it come to an end? Is it still ongoing?
Speaker 1: Still ongoing, it's just looking this up so um, it's
Speaker 1: still ongoing because people find it really meaningful to fill
Speaker 1: in the responses. So when did you start? Two sixteen? Maybe? Uhh?
Speaker 1: And and how many people have participated something? Right? So
Speaker 1: it's also there's different different tools, right, So there's like
Speaker 1: a tell us about your experience in general, and then
Speaker 1: there's a daily check in tool that some people are
Speaker 1: still using even though we don't use that data for anything.
Speaker 1: They just want to check in and let us know
Speaker 1: how they're doing. One of the things we know about
Speaker 1: psychedelics science is that psychedelists aroused the part of the
Speaker 1: brain that wants to communicate. People want to share about
Speaker 1: their experiences. That's probably why errowit is so popular. So like,
Speaker 1: I'm happy to listen to people's experiences, especially if it's
Speaker 1: on the Google form, and I don't need to individually
Speaker 1: listened to each person. I appreciate that, And we're able
Speaker 1: to build like AI to read these people's stories and
Speaker 1: see if there's just like, can a computer program tell
Speaker 1: the difference between a mushroom psychedelics, a microdocing experience, and
Speaker 1: an LSD one? Right? Can the artificial intelligence do that? Now?
Speaker 1: Is there some kind of macro daddy you have now? Like,
Speaker 1: for example, are the large majority micro docing psilocybin or
Speaker 1: micro docing LSD? So the large majority of people that
Speaker 1: we studied are doing one of those two things, either
Speaker 1: LSD or psilocybin. Because we collected as much data as
Speaker 1: people wanted to contribute, so we have data about lots
Speaker 1: of like what we call the alphabetamy and so to
Speaker 1: see I T C B people who are microdocing d
Speaker 1: M key. Those are not large samples, but they're the
Speaker 1: only samples that we have, so it's maybe not statistically
Speaker 1: significant to compare them to the LSD ones. But we
Speaker 1: can start to take a look and say, oh, this
Speaker 1: is starting to look pretty similar. Maybe there's this major difference.
Speaker 1: Maybe someone had like a bad reaction, you know, we
Speaker 1: can start to get some information. Is there any sort
Speaker 1: of significant third place after LSD and psilocybin in terms
Speaker 1: of what people are micro docing. Some people are are
Speaker 1: micro docing mushrooms um in combination, so like lions main,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. So there's a difference in our
Speaker 1: example between people who are using psilocybin mushrooms and extracted psilocybin.
Speaker 1: I've seen the phrase stacking I guess, which is also
Speaker 1: associated someone with Paul Stammit's but where people combine psilocybin
Speaker 1: with lions main mushrooms, which has a reputation in terms
Speaker 1: of I guess memory or your cognitive abilities as more
Speaker 1: for example, chocolate or cacao, which I think is you know,
Speaker 1: kind of connected with sort of indigenous traditions of psychelic
Speaker 1: taking in in the Americas, or with niacin, which is
Speaker 1: also known as vitamin B three. So did you see
Speaker 1: a fair bit of that popping up in your surveys.
Speaker 1: We only in the end now that we start to
Speaker 1: see this like stacking effect, it makes the statistics much
Speaker 1: more complicated if people are doing lots of different substances
Speaker 1: like it makes it much harder on my end, that's fine,
Speaker 1: but in order to get to be able to know
Speaker 1: things for sure, we kind of need to separate variables out.
Speaker 1: So the problem with stacking is that it's hard to
Speaker 1: know what's having the effect. I can say pretty conclusively
Speaker 1: that the best, uh what we call new tropic like
Speaker 1: things that help people think better is probably caffeine. It's
Speaker 1: going to be really hard to beat caffeine. And when
Speaker 1: people think that they're microtising and they're improving their cognition.
Speaker 1: And I went through this with a bunch of different
Speaker 1: people who wanted to study this. I gave them like
Speaker 1: little cognitive tests to take every day, and they were
Speaker 1: so excited they were getting better, and they did get better,
Speaker 1: But they didn't get better because of the LSD. They
Speaker 1: got better because they were practicing, because they were what
Speaker 1: practicing if you practice, because it's the cognitive task. So
Speaker 1: it'll be like, can you remember digits in sequence? So
Speaker 1: if you practice it over and over, of course you
Speaker 1: get better. But when it comes to stacking, then if
Speaker 1: caffeine's a key one, it seems like caffeine is so
Speaker 1: much a background drugs that two people even remember to
Speaker 1: report it or is it just exactly part of the
Speaker 1: lives of you know, a majority of all the people
Speaker 1: in the world, or at least in the in the survey.
Speaker 1: I think it's a really important thing for like the
Speaker 1: clinical research to be able to start to sort out.
Speaker 1: I'm also I'm not sure what we're looking at in
Speaker 1: terms of the neotropic effect and caffeine, Like if we're
Speaker 1: looking for stuff for people with dementia, I'm not sure
Speaker 1: that caffeine is that helpful. But if people are looking
Speaker 1: to enhance their work abilities, then of course those are
Speaker 1: the people who are looking at things like medefanel and
Speaker 1: adderall and caffeine. The medefanel is another stimulant or has
Speaker 1: a stimulant like effect without being an amphetomy. Medefine is
Speaker 1: a non stimulant that's used for a d h D.
Speaker 1: It's a cognitive enhancer. It shows a lot of promise
Speaker 1: for Alzheimer's and dementia. It is used off label for
Speaker 1: antidepression right now. We think perhaps because it's pro cognitive,
Speaker 1: so when people are to us, they don't think clearly.
Speaker 1: So it's possible that as they take modaphanel, which was
Speaker 1: originally designed as a anti narcolepsy drug. It was designed
Speaker 1: for fighter pilots to be able to not fall asleep
Speaker 1: while they were flying and to still make good and
Speaker 1: not aggressive decisions. So it prevents people from sleeping without
Speaker 1: being a stimulant, because eventually, if you take stimulants, people
Speaker 1: start to make foolish decisions. So it's it's used pretty
Speaker 1: extensively in geriatrics, and I know that it's being investigated
Speaker 1: for a number of things now that it's off patent.
Speaker 1: So yeah, dafinitely is definitely part of those stacks. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It was basically long distance pilots I think in the U. S.
Speaker 1: Navy who were allowed to use amphetamine oral amphetamine and
Speaker 1: low does and by and large the Navy was finding
Speaker 1: that effective that there were no accidents involving pilots using amphetamine.
Speaker 1: Where is the number one clause of accidents I think
Speaker 1: was fatigued and so the amphatic with amphetamine with amphetamine.
Speaker 1: But then I think as amphetamine became more and more
Speaker 1: controversial in the use of it, I think the the shifted.
Speaker 1: This is my understand that they shifted to meda panel,
Speaker 1: which supposedly did not have any kind of uplifting effect
Speaker 1: in the way that amphetamine can have, and basically had
Speaker 1: the intended desire of keeping these long distance pilots from
Speaker 1: falling asleep. You know, you're in a plane for ten
Speaker 1: twelve hours and your board to tears. They needed to
Speaker 1: make sure things didn't happen there. How about micro docing
Speaker 1: m d m A. So what I understand is that
Speaker 1: from the initiatives, and this is why we excluded m
Speaker 1: d m A from the initial m d m A trials.
Speaker 1: So when you do a globle blind study, you want
Speaker 1: to have an active placebo like we talked about, So
Speaker 1: you want something that has the effect of the drug,
Speaker 1: but not the full effect. So it's really common to
Speaker 1: use a lower dose of the substance that you're studying.
Speaker 1: So in the m d m A research, they tried
Speaker 1: to use a low dose of m d m A
Speaker 1: as their control group. So what happened is that people
Speaker 1: had panic attacks that low doses of m d m
Speaker 1: A cause panic attacks without having a positive benefit, and
Speaker 1: so it's not used and this was arose of m
Speaker 1: d m A or a mini doos of m d
Speaker 1: m A. You we would have to check the n
Speaker 1: y U study, but I want to say it's something
Speaker 1: like forty or fifteen of MBMA caused panic attacks and
Speaker 1: that so that's a mini dose. That's not a micro dose, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, I wanted to understand why that we might
Speaker 1: have that effect when you begin to have the impact
Speaker 1: of the n DMA coming on. But it's kind of,
Speaker 1: you know, not quite there. There's really nothing really knowing
Speaker 1: about many micro dosing of m d m A at
Speaker 1: this point. Nothing I don't know because that we didn't
Speaker 1: include m d m A and our samples. Jim feels
Speaker 1: like it's not a traditional psychedelic so it's been pretty excluded. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and what about anything involving I've seen some articles about
Speaker 1: micro dosing of THHC or cannabis. Did that show up
Speaker 1: in your study at all? People wrote about it all
Speaker 1: the time. It's really impossible to distinguish that from a
Speaker 1: background effect. So many people use cannabis, and cannabis is
Speaker 1: so complicated because there are so many compounds inside of it,
Speaker 1: inside of all of these botanicals, that it would be really,
Speaker 1: really hard to distinguish what's going on there. I'm excited
Speaker 1: about the cannabis research, but I don't know that much
Speaker 1: about it. M So I'm guessing with your survey in
Speaker 1: the eighteen thousand, that's a vast majority or that's the
Speaker 1: substantial majority come from the US, and then you get
Speaker 1: Canada and Britain in Australia. But what other countries were
Speaker 1: popping up in interesting ways? Oh, there's lots of countries,
Speaker 1: and there's lots of people who don't want to disclose
Speaker 1: their country. But there's like Egypt and Bahrain, and China
Speaker 1: and Japan, and there's lots of Western Europe. Of course,
Speaker 1: Russia was popping up in some places. I'm sure Ukraine also,
Speaker 1: Um and lots of people who didn't disclose. And just
Speaker 1: that I'm using a VPN, I'm in Europe, which is fine.
Speaker 1: I don't want people to get in trouble for using
Speaker 1: minor doses of of any substance. There wasn't a control group,
Speaker 1: right that you had basically a survey. We actually did
Speaker 1: set up a control group, so I asked my grandparents
Speaker 1: for help because I looked at the average age on
Speaker 1: these some of these studies, um, and so we're looking
Speaker 1: at people who are a little bit older. So I
Speaker 1: was like, all right, can I just have a group
Speaker 1: of older people take some cognitive tests like once a
Speaker 1: week and compare them to the people who are micro
Speaker 1: to thing? Um? So I had my grandparents, friends and
Speaker 1: their elder community do these like cognitive tests and mood
Speaker 1: tests and see what happened and what we were able
Speaker 1: to find out, which, of course you never designed something
Speaker 1: this way, but filling out a mood survey once a
Speaker 1: day is a positive intervention. It makes people feel better
Speaker 1: just because you're checking in about how your mood is.
Speaker 1: So we saw a mood elevation effect just from the
Speaker 1: survey without any drug effect. Then we saw on top
Speaker 1: of that and improvement on mood for the people who
Speaker 1: are micro docing. But are people writing in about their
Speaker 1: experiences not micro docing. There's we're so what are they
Speaker 1: comparing it to? Is what? What is the control or
Speaker 1: so we didn't control yet. So we controlled the cognitive aspects,
Speaker 1: like we did a survey of the cognitive part. But no,
Speaker 1: we didn't get journal entries from people not micro docing.
Speaker 1: What did you find in terms of yes people why
Speaker 1: they started micro docing, What did you tend to find
Speaker 1: about that? So there's a bunch of different motivations, including
Speaker 1: people who wanted to do it for creative read sends,
Speaker 1: people who wanted to do it to get better at
Speaker 1: their job. So we had sixty five percent people say
Speaker 1: they wanted to improve their physical or mental health. We
Speaker 1: had people say that they wanted to enhance wellness. Below that,
Speaker 1: there's things like curiosity and creativity and treating their d
Speaker 1: h D and so would you say that the large
Speaker 1: majority of people in the survey were people who we
Speaker 1: would define is basically fairly psychologically or mentally healthy, who
Speaker 1: are just trying to improve things, or people are actually
Speaker 1: suffering from some significant impairment and are trying to fix it.
Speaker 1: The vast majority of these surveys were people who, um,
Speaker 1: we're doing fine, and wanted to improve their lives in
Speaker 1: some way. As this became more popular and we got
Speaker 1: more media attention, we got more survey responses from people
Speaker 1: who were desperate, who had really serious medical or psychological
Speaker 1: problems and wanted to treat them. And of course we
Speaker 1: included those people also because they were also using microticity
Speaker 1: to try to enhance their lives. So the initial population
Speaker 1: was very, very healthy, and we excluded and this is
Speaker 1: in portant to know. We excluded people who have had
Speaker 1: bad psychedelic experiences in the past. So when people ask
Speaker 1: me about micro docing and say things like, oh, I
Speaker 1: had a bad acid trip, should I try micro docing,
Speaker 1: It's like, absolutely not. We don't have any data on
Speaker 1: people like you, Like if people are allergic to LSD,
Speaker 1: they're excluded from my sample. So I don't know. Until
Speaker 1: we do double blind experiments, we won't know how many people.
Speaker 1: This is really helpful for because our data is limited
Speaker 1: by the fact that we tried to exclude people who
Speaker 1: might come to harm. But the initial question was why
Speaker 1: are they doing the first place? And you're saying basically
Speaker 1: to improve well being, to improve you know, I don't
Speaker 1: know effectiveness whatever I mean. Was it also just things
Speaker 1: like I read about it in the newspapers or I
Speaker 1: saw media reports about it, or friends doing it, or
Speaker 1: did you ask how people heard about micro docing in
Speaker 1: the first place. Yes, we did ask people have they
Speaker 1: heard about it? I don't think that that many people
Speaker 1: trying micro dozing because they read about it in the paper.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, but I think that people make changes
Speaker 1: to their lives because they something they want something to change.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that just reading about LSD in the
Speaker 1: papers enough to like go source LSD, figure out a
Speaker 1: way to get a very small dose into something take
Speaker 1: it like a regimented schedule. That doesn't sound like something
Speaker 1: that people do if they're not super committed. I think
Speaker 1: that people would need to be committed in order to
Speaker 1: do it. Did you ask people how they went about
Speaker 1: sourcing the material then, because I mean, I mean, it's funny,
Speaker 1: you know when I think about I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: I've had experience, uh you know, getting for example of
Speaker 1: friends who gave me a little container of liquid l
Speaker 1: s D, you know, and one drop is supposed to
Speaker 1: be ten micrograms, and so just you know, for the
Speaker 1: hell of it, I did one of the drops an
Speaker 1: hour or so before I got into this interview with you.
Speaker 1: In fact, I may have mistakenly done two drops. So
Speaker 1: we'll see if I have any more above you know,
Speaker 1: sub perceptual effect, right, if you have to be sort
Speaker 1: of connected in order to get that and then when
Speaker 1: it comes to mushrooms, I mean, I don't know where
Speaker 1: people are getting you know, basically powdered psilocybin. And if
Speaker 1: you're doing mushrooms, you're talking about you know, this dried
Speaker 1: plant product oftentimes. And how do you know about how
Speaker 1: much to even cut? You know, what what pieces? Is
Speaker 1: it a part of the stem or what do you
Speaker 1: take a part of the cap or this part of
Speaker 1: I mean, how do people learn that? Or did you
Speaker 1: give advice about that? Yeah, these are really good questions.
Speaker 1: So because we assume that things like the government and
Speaker 1: the car Serrale State are reading our email, we did
Speaker 1: not provide any information about sourcing anything. What we did,
Speaker 1: and this is my standard response to people who want
Speaker 1: to learn more about psychedelics, is google psychedelics interest group
Speaker 1: and your city, So psychedelics interest Group San Francisco, Psychedelics
Speaker 1: Interest Group, Tucson, whatever. Go to those places, meet those people.
Speaker 1: If you're connected to the community, and then this is
Speaker 1: true about drug users in general. If you're connected to
Speaker 1: a community, you're much less likely to undergo harm. So
Speaker 1: those people are able to act in safe ways, they're
Speaker 1: able to source things, and then they're part of the
Speaker 1: community that can help them. I also know that in
Speaker 1: that psychedelic space there are people who sell mushroom kids.
Speaker 1: So this is very helpful for my study because people
Speaker 1: were able to be their own control, so they would
Speaker 1: do the survey, say for thirty days as they were
Speaker 1: growing their mushrooms, and then haven't thirty days micro docing
Speaker 1: journey with the mushrooms that they grew out of a kit.
Speaker 1: So I know that those things exist. I know that
Speaker 1: it's not illegal to buy scores in the United States.
Speaker 1: I know that it's not illegal to buy one p
Speaker 1: LSD in Canada UM and I did not get involved
Speaker 1: in any sourcing until the very end of this, which
Speaker 1: is when Compass came on the scene. What is exactly
Speaker 1: is the thing that's legal in Canada because there's no
Speaker 1: analog Act in Canada UM, so they have to ban
Speaker 1: each substance individually. So LSD is illegal in Canada, and
Speaker 1: one key LSD, which is LSD with another part added
Speaker 1: on to it, is completely legal. So you can get
Speaker 1: one p lsduishable from normal l s D without the one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's about so like one. I think it's hundred and
Speaker 1: fifteen micrograms of one p s the same as a
Speaker 1: hundred micrograms of LSD. It's a little bit and this
Speaker 1: is basically essentially legal in Canada. You can get it
Speaker 1: on the internet or I mean people to people actually
Speaker 1: sell it in shops or is it just an internet thing.
Speaker 1: I don't know what kind of shop you would buy
Speaker 1: it in, but maybe it's just an internet thing. I
Speaker 1: know that the researchers in Canada were able to source
Speaker 1: one p ls D for their study and at a
Speaker 1: very high level, meaning good manufacturing practices, which is the
Speaker 1: standard of substance that we use in human trials in
Speaker 1: the US and Canada and Europe, without a problem, whereas
Speaker 1: LSD would have been more of a problem for them
Speaker 1: to get permission from Health Canada. M I guess we
Speaker 1: should just say for the benefit of psychoactive listeners. You know,
Speaker 1: the United States does have the Controlled Substances ZACK for
Speaker 1: many years, and it would be illegal to import even
Speaker 1: the one p l s D from Canada, although I
Speaker 1: am a large number of people are doing so, and
Speaker 1: I hear remarkably few reports of anybody getting arrested for
Speaker 1: something like that. I think that that's true, and I
Speaker 1: think it's really important to know that there are natural
Speaker 1: substances in our world that you can extract psychoactive materials from.
Speaker 1: So I'm here in Tucson, Arizona, and San Pedro cactus
Speaker 1: is legal and sold at the home depot here, and
Speaker 1: you could extract d m T from that without that
Speaker 1: much work, and it's not illegal unless there's distribution. We'll
Speaker 1: be talking more after we hear this add So, supposing
Speaker 1: I had a bag of dried mushrooms psilocided mushrooms in
Speaker 1: my freezer, how would I know how much to take
Speaker 1: for a micro dose. If you know how much to
Speaker 1: take for a dose, then you're in good shape to
Speaker 1: know how much you want from a micro dose. So
Speaker 1: if you know a dose is this much of the mushroom,
Speaker 1: then you want a tenth or twenty that The problem
Speaker 1: is for people who are psychedelics naive, right, which is
Speaker 1: why it's important to connect them to these larger communities,
Speaker 1: because how are they going to know what's a good dose.
Speaker 1: But if they know what a good dose is, then
Speaker 1: they can take a that I mean, I have to
Speaker 1: tell you I tried eyeballing it um from my mushrooms, Sophia,
Speaker 1: and I was unsuccessful and I'm gonna be honest that someone, Yes,
Speaker 1: someone gave me what was supposed to be a microw
Speaker 1: dose of mushrooms in a chocolate and I was tripping
Speaker 1: extremely hard. That was not a micro dose, and there
Speaker 1: was still sort of mistake in the labeling, right. And
Speaker 1: I've also know that you know, one bag opposed to
Speaker 1: another depending upon either you know how potent is originally
Speaker 1: or else how long it's been hanging around. You know,
Speaker 1: they can vary by a factor of two or even
Speaker 1: five in terms of podency. Sometimes absolutely, Yeah, So I
Speaker 1: think it's hard to eye, but I think it's better
Speaker 1: to start low and go slow, which is a general
Speaker 1: principle of drug use. So in your survey, can you
Speaker 1: say the large majority of people doing it doing microdocing
Speaker 1: where people who had already done macro dosing in their
Speaker 1: life or vice versa. We didn't think to ask that
Speaker 1: question in the beginning, and then we went back and
Speaker 1: ask people that question. So, yes, a lot of blue
Speaker 1: Head macrodoced years and years before, so like thirty years before,
Speaker 1: and then they tried microdocing, And a lot of people
Speaker 1: tried macrodocing during their project of microdocing, which uses the
Speaker 1: data a little bit, but not everyone. Not everyone who
Speaker 1: tried microdocing had MACROWDOCE, and not everyone wants to. It's
Speaker 1: a large time commitment, could be a large emotional and
Speaker 1: psychological and spiritual commitment as well. Mm hmm. Now I
Speaker 1: noticed and just sort of prepping for this interview of
Speaker 1: Sophia and reading about microdoc thing, there was one term
Speaker 1: I wasn't familiar with before that kept popping up, and
Speaker 1: it's flow state. Just explain what flow state is and
Speaker 1: why that kept popping up and discussions of microdocing, So
Speaker 1: we only started popping up in after two I think.
Speaker 1: So the idea of flow state is that when the
Speaker 1: task meets the situation exactly perfectly, you can get into
Speaker 1: this state where everything just sort of works. There's energized focus,
Speaker 1: there's full involvement, there's enjoyment in the process of the activity.
Speaker 1: It's characterized by complete absorption in what one does, and
Speaker 1: there's a resulting loss in one sense of space and time.
Speaker 1: So in a sense of being like in the zone,
Speaker 1: would that be a comparable friend exactly? So when you're
Speaker 1: when you're writing one night at also and everything is
Speaker 1: just flowing, or when you're playing an instrument or giving
Speaker 1: a talk, and just the words are just coming in
Speaker 1: as you want them to. I'm a therapist, and I
Speaker 1: would say that when I am really feeling connected with
Speaker 1: someone and like I I just know what to say
Speaker 1: and I know what questions to ask, and there's not
Speaker 1: that effortful part of it like there might be when
Speaker 1: I first meet someone. So it's like, oh, I just
Speaker 1: know them really well and I just know what to say.
Speaker 1: And then the session is over and it didn't feel
Speaker 1: like either one of us did that much work, but
Speaker 1: things really improved, and so we start seeing a lot
Speaker 1: of those reports and people who are microdorcing for over
Speaker 1: two weeks as people would microducing. I'm experiencing this um
Speaker 1: more or the way I'm doing my job has changed
Speaker 1: quite a lot. I used to be like really focused
Speaker 1: and I would get like concerned about details, and now
Speaker 1: that I'm microticing, I can see the bigger picture. I
Speaker 1: can really put my effort where it's needed. Let's say
Speaker 1: some more about that. I mean, you say it in
Speaker 1: the work contest. What are the contexts and were the
Speaker 1: people artists who are experiencing this writer's experiencing this uh
Speaker 1: therapist experiencing this. I mean, you know how prevalent was this,
Speaker 1: you know how how many different ways did to manifest.
Speaker 1: So people are saying the effect of their relationships, they're
Speaker 1: able to see how they want to interact with people
Speaker 1: and take a step back in a different way. Um, definitely,
Speaker 1: there are a bunch of artists who are like, oh,
Speaker 1: I can change how I'm doing my work. There were
Speaker 1: other therapists who wrote in there's a lot of students
Speaker 1: in our survey, which is not that surprising because it
Speaker 1: was a snowball study of people who are using drugs,
Speaker 1: and if you get one student, they're likely to give
Speaker 1: the information to more students, and so that that flowst
Speaker 1: It was mentioned by a bunch of other people. Um,
Speaker 1: do you want to hear about the other themes that
Speaker 1: we saw? Okay, So the other two that we saw
Speaker 1: a lot of where first, the cognitive experience of psychedelics use.
Speaker 1: So you might not expect that if someone's micro docing,
Speaker 1: they're going to have the same cognitive experience as someone
Speaker 1: who's macro docing. So I would characterize the psychedelic cognitive
Speaker 1: experience in two important ways. One that there's uh, there's
Speaker 1: altered associations, you see things from novel perspectives, and the
Speaker 1: other is that you're able to see hierarchy as wholarchy.
Speaker 1: So people take apart their families, like in their minds
Speaker 1: and think, what would it mean if I were the
Speaker 1: dad right? How would my family be different? And they're
Speaker 1: able to see things in a different way. So people,
Speaker 1: even people who are micro docing, we're saying, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: looking at problems in different ways, and like curiosity is
Speaker 1: outweighing fear. Difficult problems are easier to start right now,
Speaker 1: I don't mind making a mess in order to find
Speaker 1: an examine solutions. So there's this like eagerness and curiosity
Speaker 1: that went along with the cognitive experiences of microdencing. The
Speaker 1: other thing that we consistently sub was about psychodynamics. So
Speaker 1: people having a history of trauma in their own families
Speaker 1: or in their own hearts, and they were able to
Speaker 1: go into that in a way that was controllable for them.
Speaker 1: So what we don't want is people to have these
Speaker 1: like emotional outbursts and not be able to bring themselves
Speaker 1: back right. But people who were microdcing, we're able to say,
Speaker 1: I can open it up a little bit at a time. Now,
Speaker 1: in terms of the experiential effect, I mean, if people
Speaker 1: are typically doing this every third day, are they feeling
Speaker 1: the effect the day they take it, the day after,
Speaker 1: two days later, or is there any pattern to this?
Speaker 1: So that's a really important question. What we thought was
Speaker 1: that there's going to be like only a learning effect
Speaker 1: on the third day. So we thought, Okay, the first
Speaker 1: day they're going to use the substance, the second it's
Speaker 1: still going to be in their assistant. The third day
Speaker 1: is going to be they're going to be clean, will
Speaker 1: just be able to see what they learned. Um. But
Speaker 1: we don't know that that's true. We don't know how
Speaker 1: fast it's eliminated by the system, and we don't know
Speaker 1: how the learning exactly is going to work here. So
Speaker 1: what we saw is that over time there was there
Speaker 1: was more of an effect. So in the first week
Speaker 1: people are reporting effects that seem really improbable. It's possible
Speaker 1: that this is placebo. You know, we talked about placebo.
Speaker 1: Different placebo effects, one of which might be people are
Speaker 1: taking charge of something that's bothering them in their life,
Speaker 1: so they start to feel better because they're doing something
Speaker 1: about it. So that's one placebo effect is like, Okay,
Speaker 1: you're finally doing something. So that's maybe where some of
Speaker 1: the mood elevation the first week of micro decing starts
Speaker 1: out with, and then after two or three weeks we
Speaker 1: start to see a sort of less anxiety, we see
Speaker 1: less depression, but we also see an evening out of moods,
Speaker 1: so like less less low lows and also sometimes less
Speaker 1: high highs. Now two, people just keep doing this, you know,
Speaker 1: for months and months and months or of most people
Speaker 1: kind of do it for a few weeks or a
Speaker 1: month or so and quit. And why would they do
Speaker 1: either way. It's a really important question, and we have
Speaker 1: done and we are continuing to do a lot of
Speaker 1: work on that topic because one of the problems of
Speaker 1: this type of survey research is that if people drop
Speaker 1: out of the study, we don't know why. So you
Speaker 1: can have really positive results because all the negative people
Speaker 1: dropped out of the study. So we followed up really
Speaker 1: extensively with people who lost touch with us and trying
Speaker 1: to find out what was going on. So the of
Speaker 1: people who micro dose for say a month and then
Speaker 1: continue to micro does afterwards. There's these two groups, the
Speaker 1: once a month people and the once a week people.
Speaker 1: My basic summary is that the once a month people
Speaker 1: are having like headache syndromes, So they're having migraines or
Speaker 1: having cluster headaches, or they're having like lyme disease or
Speaker 1: some medical problem that's able to be controlled with very
Speaker 1: low levels of microdocing. The microdocing once a month to
Speaker 1: prevent having these headache syndromes, and they're not interested in
Speaker 1: taking anymore because that's the amount that they need to
Speaker 1: do to control their headaches. Then there's the one to
Speaker 1: weak people who seem to be more on the depression
Speaker 1: and anxiety and of things. Those are people who who
Speaker 1: are using microdocing for motivation and for mood. Um. I
Speaker 1: think that that's a that's large majority of people who
Speaker 1: continue to microdoce after the first month. The people who
Speaker 1: don't micro doce who don't like it UM. So there's
Speaker 1: a couple of groups. One is people who find it
Speaker 1: to be anxiety provoking. So when we look at people
Speaker 1: with post traumatic stress disorder, you can sort of classify
Speaker 1: people into two groups. One is the people who are
Speaker 1: sort of depressed and out of it, and the other
Speaker 1: is the group of people who are having flashbacks and
Speaker 1: are really um they have high neurological arousal. So people
Speaker 1: who were depressed and out of it, they did fine
Speaker 1: with micro docing. People who were having flashbacks did not
Speaker 1: do well with micro docing and made them more upset.
Speaker 1: So if they work with the therapists, say, and they're
Speaker 1: able to control the neurological arousal, it seemed like microdocing
Speaker 1: wo is a good tool for that group. But there's
Speaker 1: definitely some people who find it to be too anxiety
Speaker 1: provoking and it brings up too much for them. That's
Speaker 1: one good yeah, But I'm a little confuseder because you
Speaker 1: said it's the large majority of people in your survey
Speaker 1: who said they were micro docing were people who were
Speaker 1: basically doing fine and we're looking to just increase their
Speaker 1: performance or mood or other things in general ways. But
Speaker 1: the categories you've just described people who has severe migraines,
Speaker 1: people have depression, that's not part of that first group.
Speaker 1: These are people are really looking to try to treat
Speaker 1: some type of really you know, substantial problem they're having
Speaker 1: in their lives. I would say that in the people
Speaker 1: who are like well functioning and using microdocing to enhance
Speaker 1: their lives, in that once a week group, So some
Speaker 1: of those people are depressed and they don't know it.
Speaker 1: Some of those I think if we would survey the
Speaker 1: American population as a whole, there might be lots of
Speaker 1: people who are depressed and don't describe themselves as depressed.
Speaker 1: But we didn't see a difference in depression inventory scores
Speaker 1: from people who labeled themselves as depressed in people who didn't.
Speaker 1: Just pretty sick difficant to me, So I think that
Speaker 1: the vast majority of people are doing fine, and those
Speaker 1: people would fit in that like once a week. They're
Speaker 1: trying to use microticity to enhance their life in some way,
Speaker 1: and they'll continue to do so for months or even
Speaker 1: years at a time exactly, and they might take a
Speaker 1: break and they might you know, try other things, or
Speaker 1: might start stacking as a result, but they report really
Speaker 1: positive benefits and they continue to be in touch with
Speaker 1: us and send us art and music like That's one
Speaker 1: of the things that Jim and I most value is
Speaker 1: people continuing to send us their stories and continuing to
Speaker 1: send us like what they got out of microdcing, so
Speaker 1: that those are the positive experiences. So there's also some
Speaker 1: negative ones, and like I said, there's the people with
Speaker 1: the g I problems. There's also people who um. We
Speaker 1: know from the literature that people who have taken LSD
Speaker 1: and lithium together have had seizures. So there were a
Speaker 1: number of people who didn't listen to that advice and
Speaker 1: took LSD with a number of other substances. So we
Speaker 1: kept track of who had a bad experience in substances
Speaker 1: they were taking at the same time. So some of
Speaker 1: the people who went on to use LSD and lithium together,
Speaker 1: they did not have such a great time, and we're
Speaker 1: not exactly sure why. So that that's useful information for
Speaker 1: us UM and some people who say the experience psychosis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people who experienced psychosis can sometimes really like psychedelics, and
Speaker 1: there's a theory behind that, which is that they're able
Speaker 1: to explain their own disturbing experience by saying I took drugs, right.
Speaker 1: So micro docing isn't great for those people because they
Speaker 1: can't blame the psychedelics for their psychosis because they're not
Speaker 1: taking enough, So they didn't get a lot of relief
Speaker 1: out of that like they might be expecting to. So
Speaker 1: people with psychosis did not like microducing all that much. Okay,
Speaker 1: So now Sea, let's turn to the big question that's
Speaker 1: been popping up in the last year, which is you
Speaker 1: now have these three published studies, right, and I think
Speaker 1: of them, one is the one where the first author
Speaker 1: is abolished saghetti, I think a Hungarian researcher. The second
Speaker 1: is when I think out of Chicago and the thirds
Speaker 1: of Dutch study, and all three of these, you know,
Speaker 1: we're done. Oftentimes the researchers who are leading figures in
Speaker 1: psychedelics research, and obviously I think to some exam advocates
Speaker 1: of the benefits of macrodo saying and it's not clear
Speaker 1: that any of them had it in for micro dose saying,
Speaker 1: and some of them came away disappointed, saying, you know,
Speaker 1: when all of a sudden done, we're finding that it
Speaker 1: seems to be overwhelmingly placebo effect, and that even you know,
Speaker 1: when you have controlled double blind studies, that far more
Speaker 1: significant than whether or not people got the actual micro
Speaker 1: dose as opposed to placebo, is what they thought they
Speaker 1: were getting. Um, So what's your take on these studies?
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean, first of all, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: and even the authors of this you know, are kind
Speaker 1: of wishing it didn't come out this way. And so
Speaker 1: they're saying what could be wrong with their own studies,
Speaker 1: how might we find a stronger impact, and what would
Speaker 1: be the limitations here? But what's your your sense of
Speaker 1: of what these studies? You know what they mean, and
Speaker 1: did they give you pause in terms of how you
Speaker 1: were thinking about the work that you and Jim are doing. Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1: So I encountered one of these proof Like I was
Speaker 1: speaking at a cannabis conference with some other researchers and
Speaker 1: they had just come out with a study, and I
Speaker 1: was like, Wow, that's really bizarre because if if it's
Speaker 1: true that it's just placebo, we would have needed way
Speaker 1: more people in my study to get such a strong effect, right,
Speaker 1: So you would need like a huge number of people
Speaker 1: statistically to create any sort of power if it's just
Speaker 1: a placebo effect, because it could be just like a
Speaker 1: low level effect on depression. So that's possible, and I
Speaker 1: will say that there's lots of depressed people, so we
Speaker 1: don't need like really high power. If we're improving depression
Speaker 1: just a little bit, that would help people a lot.
Speaker 1: It's not like prozak is a good drug, right, Prozac
Speaker 1: is like notoriously bad, So even if we help people's
Speaker 1: depression a little bit, that would still be worth it.
Speaker 1: So that's one thing that that's what I thought of initially,
Speaker 1: where most of these control double blind studies involved what
Speaker 1: a few dozen people or something like that, right exactly,
Speaker 1: So like even if we're only looking at okay, you
Speaker 1: need like a lot of people to show any effect
Speaker 1: on depression. Okay, people are really suffering from depression, and
Speaker 1: that might still be worth it for us, because it's
Speaker 1: not like there's great alternatives in the psychopharmacopia, and especially
Speaker 1: since there appeared to be relatively few negative consequences that
Speaker 1: have been exacted so far off micro dosing, and most
Speaker 1: of those negative consequences things like, as you were saying,
Speaker 1: g I or anxiety or what have you, just go
Speaker 1: away once you stop doing it right exactly, and as
Speaker 1: opposed to things like discontinuation syndrome from SSR eyes, which
Speaker 1: could be really significant in a lifelong way. So that
Speaker 1: was my initial thought, and then I spoke to Jim
Speaker 1: about it that evening because I was speaking at this conference,
Speaker 1: and he said, oh, did you look at how many
Speaker 1: broke blind? And I said, no, what's the what's the result,
Speaker 1: And he said it's over seventy percent. So if we're
Speaker 1: looking at over seventy or eight percent, just explain that.
Speaker 1: When you say break block, that means they were cheating
Speaker 1: and looking or it means that the dose was sufficiently perceptual.
Speaker 1: There's actualize that they were taking something they were able
Speaker 1: to figure out. Yeah, breaking by means that you're able
Speaker 1: to figure out what arm of the steady you're in.
Speaker 1: So if people can tell if they're in the placebo
Speaker 1: group or not, then we're not looking at a placebo
Speaker 1: if that were it just a drug effect can include
Speaker 1: knowledge of taking the drug. Should find fifty percent breaking
Speaker 1: blind are fifty percent basically being consistent. You think you
Speaker 1: ask people how how sure they are? Yeah? I think
Speaker 1: they ask people have sure they are? And sometimes people
Speaker 1: say like I don't know, um, and yeah, if we're
Speaker 1: looking at and I'm like, okay, well we need to
Speaker 1: look at like this, that's not really a double blind experiment.
Speaker 1: And so but what are the implications if people figure
Speaker 1: it out? Wouldn't that with that bias in favor of
Speaker 1: finding a result, Yes, it would buy us in favor
Speaker 1: of finding a result, but not necessarily a positive result,
Speaker 1: So it depends on the person's association with substance. So
Speaker 1: if they are able to figure it out, then they'll
Speaker 1: be Okay, I'm in the active group, or I'm in
Speaker 1: the active group today, right, So they're more likely to
Speaker 1: pay more attention to their own experience, so they're more
Speaker 1: likely to have every sort of side effect. They're more
Speaker 1: likely to also have a drug effect, So it could
Speaker 1: break both ways if people know that they're in the
Speaker 1: active group. And this was true in all three of
Speaker 1: the big control double blind studies I think, so I'm
Speaker 1: not sure that they all ask people how often they
Speaker 1: could tell. And some of those studies involved gaving. I
Speaker 1: think both did. I think I can't remember now exactly,
Speaker 1: but maybe one involved givings, say maybe with LST five micrograms,
Speaker 1: whereas another group might get twenty micrograms or something. Yes,
Speaker 1: And the British study, the one that I'm thinking about,
Speaker 1: they did this like complex thing with QR codes and
Speaker 1: envelopes where they had people like I think, get on
Speaker 1: video and shuffle the bladder paper and like the envelopes
Speaker 1: of bladder paper that contained bladder paper in like a
Speaker 1: really complicated and scientific way so it's possible that just
Speaker 1: wasn't super effective as a way of blinding the study,
Speaker 1: so people were able to figure out which of the
Speaker 1: water paper really had LSD on it. Mm hmmm. But
Speaker 1: I saw that a couple of guys involved these study.
Speaker 1: Van Elk, I think is one of the authors in
Speaker 1: David Ritsil I think in the UK's another. Both said
Speaker 1: it was it was actually a pretty good New York
Speaker 1: Times article about this a few months ago. I thought
Speaker 1: that was fairly fair minded. And they both said Erotsi
Speaker 1: and Van Elk said, you know, they think they're just
Speaker 1: gonna stop working on microw doos for now, that they're
Speaker 1: going to go back to studying macrowdos because they even
Speaker 1: though they weren't convinced that microw doos had no effect,
Speaker 1: that it was just placebo, they thought it was potentially
Speaker 1: less interesting to be working on in the future. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So Ariso, who's is who I'm thinking about in the
Speaker 1: British study where it was like seventy year eight percent
Speaker 1: of people broke the blind there, So it's possible that
Speaker 1: macrodocing just has more potential, right, So, like it's possible
Speaker 1: that what we're seeing is a slow effect with microdocing
Speaker 1: of the same thing. And so maybe, just like with ketamine,
Speaker 1: what we want is for people to do like a
Speaker 1: low dose thing in a doctor's office, have a relief
Speaker 1: from depression for six months, and then do it again
Speaker 1: and six months. That might be a better thing than
Speaker 1: micro docing once every three days or once a week.
Speaker 1: We don't know yet, but I think looking at both
Speaker 1: of those possibilities makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: saw made an interesting comments though, and I just wanted
Speaker 1: what your reaction to this is. He said, He said,
Speaker 1: you probably only participate at this point in a trial
Speaker 1: in micro docing if you really have a strong belief
Speaker 1: that this might help you. And when people expect to
Speaker 1: benefit from a trug, they typically do. Yes. I think
Speaker 1: that that's absolutely true. I think that people don't participate
Speaker 1: in drug trials because they don't want to get better,
Speaker 1: but also the element of believe, wanting to believe that
Speaker 1: this drug is helping. Yeah, and that's always a that's
Speaker 1: always an issue in these types of surveys and or
Speaker 1: this type of study. And there's also the issue of authority.
Speaker 1: So we know one of the placebo effects has to
Speaker 1: do with feeling like you're undergoing a medical treatment by experts,
Speaker 1: So like a placebo shot is more effective than a
Speaker 1: placebo pill. Right there, there are placebo like sham surgeries,
Speaker 1: Like if you feel like someone really cares about you,
Speaker 1: then you're likely to get better even if it's the placebo.
Speaker 1: So when we're talking about placebo effect, we need to
Speaker 1: really figure out what is the thing we're talking about.
Speaker 1: Because if people are getting better from depression by taking
Speaker 1: like one microgram every month, like why not? I think
Speaker 1: there's very little Yeah, there's very little harm to that,
Speaker 1: but there is a We don't want to fetishize the
Speaker 1: substance itself, right, We want to tell people that the
Speaker 1: power that they have to control their own depression that
Speaker 1: has to do with the inner work that they're doing.
Speaker 1: It's not the substance itself. Let's take a break here
Speaker 1: and go to an ad. What's out there in the ethos,
Speaker 1: the media ethos, the cultural ethos is that this that
Speaker 1: this works, macrodo thing or in this case microne saying right,
Speaker 1: the more likely it is to work, and the more
Speaker 1: likely and the more powerful the placebo effect, right because
Speaker 1: of that broader media cultural context. And conversely, if a
Speaker 1: reverse narrative gets going that we've done three control double
Speaker 1: line studies and they're showing that, you know, micro docing
Speaker 1: is no more than placebo, and we're actually seeing any
Speaker 1: real difference. When you really can blind for all of
Speaker 1: this stuff, then in fact it has the opposite effect
Speaker 1: that people are less likely to believe in the intervention,
Speaker 1: and that therefore micro docing, you know, whether with real
Speaker 1: micro docing or the placebo effect of micro docing therefore diminishes.
Speaker 1: And I wonder if it's possible to track that because
Speaker 1: a lot of these three studies, I think the control
Speaker 1: double lines have just come out in the last year
Speaker 1: and a half or so, and so a lot where
Speaker 1: is the coverage of the issue? A couple of years
Speaker 1: ago was much more upbeat and positive. You know, you
Speaker 1: had Iolett Waldman's book coming out a really good day,
Speaker 1: and when she talks about how micro docing, you know,
Speaker 1: saved her life. You know all that, and so you know,
Speaker 1: so you have all of this positive stuff, and now
Speaker 1: when you google micro docing, you know, you know, no effect,
Speaker 1: no better than places bow is likely to pop up
Speaker 1: when you do any kind of research. Is there any
Speaker 1: way you think you'll be been to pick this up
Speaker 1: in your surveys, that people having less faith in it
Speaker 1: and therefore getting less benefit. It's an interesting question, especially
Speaker 1: if you think about the contemporary landscape around depression treatment
Speaker 1: in general, because if you would google say S s
Speaker 1: R I, I'm not sure how much you would see
Speaker 1: about placebo. But we know a huge part of what's
Speaker 1: happening when people take S s RI s and have
Speaker 1: a benefit, there is placebo, and that has to do
Speaker 1: with medical authority as well, because that's a mainstream treatment,
Speaker 1: So it might be less effective than than microding. So
Speaker 1: I don't know how we'll be able to sort that out.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm not super worried about it because it's like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm not a psychedelics advocate, So if micro docing isn't
Speaker 1: helping people, then don't do it. And if it is
Speaker 1: helping people in them, let's do it. But in order
Speaker 1: to figure this out, we're going to have to do
Speaker 1: double blinds in a way that makes more sense. And
Speaker 1: what we're looking at right now is some like really
Speaker 1: intense medical stuff. So when you do surveys of thousands
Speaker 1: and thousands of people who have a variety of different
Speaker 1: medical conditions, and just ask them what happens. This isn't research,
Speaker 1: this is just search. We just found out. So there's
Speaker 1: this idea of HARKing or people called pa hacking. So
Speaker 1: HARKing means hypothesis after results known, right, So that's not
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about. I'm talking about like we, right,
Speaker 1: we surveyed like eight people who are micro docing, and
Speaker 1: then some of the people are like, oh, I'm a
Speaker 1: VET and my phantom limb syndrome is getting better. It's
Speaker 1: like that might be random, right, but we weren't looking
Speaker 1: for it, and then we can design a follow up.
Speaker 1: So we're working with the v A on not phantom
Speaker 1: limbs specifically, but people who have paralysis who started when
Speaker 1: they were micro docing getting twitches in their paralyzed limb.
Speaker 1: We don't know why that occurs, but we see that
Speaker 1: pretty consistently. So like, that's an interesting effect, and so
Speaker 1: I don't think it in terms of the medical I
Speaker 1: don't think it's place because we're seeing a bunch of
Speaker 1: weird stuff that consistent with itself, right, right. You also
Speaker 1: mentioned things like people who are you know, suffering terrible
Speaker 1: pain from shingles, finding that significantly alleviated right, or that
Speaker 1: people would startart finding um, you know, they were finding
Speaker 1: little improvements people. Yeah, So we're looking at what people
Speaker 1: call the garbage pale diagnosis, which is not meant in
Speaker 1: any sort of derogatory way. There's a set of diagnosis
Speaker 1: diagnosis not meant any sort of derogatory exactly, different phrase
Speaker 1: for it, thing you have a guy's exactly. So it's
Speaker 1: these stigmatized conditions m and people who get sort of
Speaker 1: um shifted to the back of the line, so things
Speaker 1: like fibro and myalgia, toxic mold sensitivity, UM, chronic fatigue syndrome.
Speaker 1: So there's these comorbid conditions that we don't understand very well. Um.
Speaker 1: So what I mean by comorbid is that these people
Speaker 1: will be diagnosed with more than one of them, and
Speaker 1: so it's not clear what the correct diagnosis is. It's
Speaker 1: probably stuff we don't understand that well medically. So we're
Speaker 1: doing a survey of those people with those sets of
Speaker 1: syndromes in particular because we don't know what's going on.
Speaker 1: But they're pretty desperate and they're seeing some effect from microdiscing.
Speaker 1: So that's one group, um, and those people are are
Speaker 1: really suffering and doctors aren't listening to them. There's the
Speaker 1: people with paralysis, and there's the people with traumatic brain injury,
Speaker 1: and then there's the people dimension Alzheimer's, and so those
Speaker 1: are some really important groups. For the headache suffers, we
Speaker 1: kind of know what's happening because of SUMA trippedan because
Speaker 1: because migraines. We don't know exactly what causes migraines, but
Speaker 1: we do know that one of the most effective treatments
Speaker 1: is on the market is something that's related to LSD.
Speaker 1: So it's not really surprising to us that low doses
Speaker 1: of LSD would also alleviate migraines because puma tripped and
Speaker 1: is related to LSD UM and cluster headaches the same.
Speaker 1: So we're looking at fast tracking for those two conditions
Speaker 1: for cluster headache and migraine suffers, but for depression, like
Speaker 1: then we get into this like what if it's a
Speaker 1: placebo effect thing? And so I am very curious about
Speaker 1: like how this is going to turn out. How do
Speaker 1: we distinguish what is the placebo when we're talking about
Speaker 1: depression in the first place. You know, I have to
Speaker 1: tell you so in reading about all of the stuff
Speaker 1: in micro docing, it got me thinking a fair bit
Speaker 1: about the whole phenomenon with CBD. Right, So, we know
Speaker 1: from the medical research that CBD actually can have very
Speaker 1: significant therapeutic effects for particular conditions, and that is fascinating
Speaker 1: research going on about this. But meanwhile, there's been a
Speaker 1: multibillion dollar industry that has emerged that's largely unregulated, with
Speaker 1: people selling CBD and drinks and food and motions and
Speaker 1: lozenges and you name it. And and virtually none of
Speaker 1: these are backed by any types of control, double blind studies. Right,
Speaker 1: you know, this will heliar on fright, this, this this will
Speaker 1: make you feel better, all this sort of stuff, and
Speaker 1: and you know, and and in a way, I think
Speaker 1: many of the people in the CBD industry, not all,
Speaker 1: but most of them may prefer that they're that these
Speaker 1: studies don't happen because they're doing pretty well based upon
Speaker 1: all the hype around CBD. And I'm thinking, you know,
Speaker 1: once again with microdoc thing, there is clearly something happening
Speaker 1: and going on there um, but it's actually you know,
Speaker 1: it's an extent that the hype is out there, the
Speaker 1: positive stuff, and the extent that there's a really powerful
Speaker 1: placebo effect, whether or not the actual substances making a difference.
Speaker 1: This is potentially an industry worth billions and billions and
Speaker 1: billions of dollars, and we think about, you know, all
Speaker 1: of the way in which you know, compass a tie.
Speaker 1: The for profit companies are all coming into the psychelics thing.
Speaker 1: You know. One of the points that people make is
Speaker 1: that for a lot of these studies, this is not
Speaker 1: something with macro dooz saying that it has to be
Speaker 1: done therapeutically, you know, day after day, week after week,
Speaker 1: months at two months. Sometimes it's just doing one trip
Speaker 1: or five trips or ten trips or periodic trips where
Speaker 1: there's not a big profit upside on that right where
Speaker 1: the profit is gonna come and creating the setting and
Speaker 1: the psychotherapist and all that sort of stuff. But when
Speaker 1: it comes to micro dozing, where people are potentially doing
Speaker 1: something three days a week and maybe not just for
Speaker 1: a month, but maybe over sustained periods of time, or
Speaker 1: doing it this month, taking a break another month, it
Speaker 1: taught that there you have a market of people consuming
Speaker 1: a psycholic substance in very lowest doses where the where
Speaker 1: the level of potency right is crucially important so you
Speaker 1: want this to be illegally regulated industry because people want
Speaker 1: to know whether they're getting five micrograms or eight micrograms
Speaker 1: or twelve micrograms, or they're not getting something else exactly,
Speaker 1: both both the both for the purity and also for
Speaker 1: the potency stuff. So it seems to me that in
Speaker 1: the psychedelics, like the profit driven side of the psycholics,
Speaker 1: renost science has a huge interest in there being something
Speaker 1: to this micro dosing. And as you step back, how
Speaker 1: do you think about the way in which the micro
Speaker 1: dozing plays out in this ever growing capitalist market of psychedelics. Sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've got lots of negative things to say about capitalism,
Speaker 1: but specifically about the I'm really curious that this micro
Speaker 1: docing piece of it essentially. I mean, you know, as
Speaker 1: I've had various you know, guests talk about what are
Speaker 1: the consequences of all the for profit investment and how
Speaker 1: most of them any driving the researches for profit and
Speaker 1: they're paying and giving money the university programs. But on
Speaker 1: the micro dos thing thing, it seems like a particularly
Speaker 1: acute issue because it's something that could be ongoing for
Speaker 1: profit you mean, yeah, and because people are going to consume,
Speaker 1: you know, not just you know, three doses once or
Speaker 1: three doses a year. They're potentially going to be consuming
Speaker 1: fifty or a hundred doses a year and maybe for
Speaker 1: long periods of time. Yeah. Absolutely, FDA became really interested
Speaker 1: when we started saying, like, okay, the doses that we're
Speaker 1: looking at for a medical effect. Even if you would
Speaker 1: give people like film, right, like like strips of LSD
Speaker 1: like once a week and they would combine all of
Speaker 1: them for the month. Like, when we start looking at
Speaker 1: doses that people could never get high on, then the
Speaker 1: FDA is like, oh, now we're interested. I mean they're
Speaker 1: worried about things like people abusing and diverting their doses. Right,
Speaker 1: So we are looking at a huge there's a huge
Speaker 1: profit opportunity here for capitalists. Um And like I know
Speaker 1: personally as a researcher, my name was included in a
Speaker 1: company that I was not affiliated with and was being
Speaker 1: used to sell something or to propose selling something. I
Speaker 1: think that the encroach of capitalism is a huge, huge
Speaker 1: problem here, and I think that what we did together
Speaker 1: as the psychedelics community to try to control that in
Speaker 1: certain ways was really positive. So we signed an ethical
Speaker 1: pledge Altogether, we worked on that and that included things
Speaker 1: like all the research needs to be open and upfront.
Speaker 1: When Compass took anti competitive action, I got on the
Speaker 1: phone and started calling pharmaceutical companies in Canada and got
Speaker 1: research grade LSD for other survey for other studies. So like,
Speaker 1: we need to work together to prevent the encroach of capitalism.
Speaker 1: But in the realistically, what are the profit motives? So
Speaker 1: if people are looking at an indication for depression, that's
Speaker 1: a huge market. That's what motivates these studies. So in
Speaker 1: order to take a drug to market, but that's a huge,
Speaker 1: huge investment of time and money, and because LSD is
Speaker 1: not under patent, you would need a sponsor to do that.
Speaker 1: So that's when you look at things like Compass patenting
Speaker 1: one version of LSD or psilocybin and then trying to
Speaker 1: take that to market. But if we were to use
Speaker 1: different statistical tools and pool research and pool studies in
Speaker 1: a different way, then we could start to not need
Speaker 1: the same type of pharmaceutical sponsors for indications. The other
Speaker 1: thing is that if people were able to say, Okay,
Speaker 1: maybe it's a placebo, but I'm gonna take my health
Speaker 1: into my own hands. Right now, I'm gonna try to
Speaker 1: talk to my psychuloics community, figure out my own micro
Speaker 1: do saying, figure out a stack that works for me,
Speaker 1: that reduces the power that we give to these pharmaceutical
Speaker 1: companies who are going to try to sell as LSD
Speaker 1: as a treatment for depression. So if people are able
Speaker 1: to rely more on their own communities and themselves, then
Speaker 1: there's less of a profit motive. But this is a
Speaker 1: really really hard issue. I think people need to get
Speaker 1: together and work on this together. You know, I'm normally
Speaker 1: an advocate that you know legalization, legal regulation is the
Speaker 1: right way to go. Yet I can also point to
Speaker 1: counter examples. We're having. A decriminalized situation can actually be
Speaker 1: the preferable one, although it's hard to sustain that for
Speaker 1: a long period of time. And one can imagine a
Speaker 1: world in which you have micro docing and a world
Speaker 1: where no no for profit legal company like Compass has
Speaker 1: succeeded in improving that micro dosing works, or has succeeded
Speaker 1: in disproving and sowing that it doesn't work. That allowing
Speaker 1: that to happen, I mean, you don't have the risk
Speaker 1: in the psychelics like you have, for example, with opioids,
Speaker 1: right with the fentinyl market now where a hundred thousand dead,
Speaker 1: you know, seventy of them because of an adulterated drug
Speaker 1: supply involving fentanyl. That's not the risk you have with psychedelics.
Speaker 1: And then so I'm thinking that to the extent that
Speaker 1: this actually stays, we might still have a risk of
Speaker 1: adulteration though right, you still have a risk, but it's
Speaker 1: a fair really minimal risk. We're not necessarily things fatalities.
Speaker 1: Taking a step back to the adulteration question, so it's
Speaker 1: true that we're not seeing fatalities, but when we see
Speaker 1: rich celebrities who are dying um from fentanyl from taking ketamine,
Speaker 1: we know that there's fentyyl and everything. Right, and because
Speaker 1: of the current supply chain management issues in the car
Speaker 1: Serra state, it makes most sense for drug smugglers to
Speaker 1: try to get as much across in as little package
Speaker 1: as they can, which means fent atyl. So fentyl might
Speaker 1: be in everything really soon, and I wouldn't say that
Speaker 1: it's necessarily safe. We recommend that everyone test their substances.
Speaker 1: You can buy testing kits on Amazon. Test your substances,
Speaker 1: No I actually just saw a report in the papers recently,
Speaker 1: was about early June here of three kids dying of
Speaker 1: the federal overdose where they thought they were getting M
Speaker 1: D m A. So yeah, there's been a lot of
Speaker 1: stories of the coups and putting out there about fentonyl adulteration,
Speaker 1: especially evolving cannabis sometimes other drugs that have proven i'm
Speaker 1: coming to be false. But the fact is, you know,
Speaker 1: there's both. But whether it's drug dealers making mistakes, I mean,
Speaker 1: there's not much reason to see why they'd have incentive
Speaker 1: to put it. You know, nobody only figure out why
Speaker 1: there's sentanel in the stimulant drugs, for example, in cocaine,
Speaker 1: or especially why there's an M D m A or
Speaker 1: things like this, I think assume that people who are
Speaker 1: packaging drugs aren't working under lab conditions. So that's hypothesis
Speaker 1: of what's going on there. Yeah, so that's one aspect
Speaker 1: of things. So let's talk about the greatest good for
Speaker 1: the largest number of people. So what I'm suggesting that
Speaker 1: people do, like what I've suggested over these years, is
Speaker 1: that people get in touch with like some group in
Speaker 1: their community. They connect with those people, they perhaps sour
Speaker 1: substances and knowledge through that. It's like, that's a lot
Speaker 1: of privilege, right, That's a lot of safety. There's that's
Speaker 1: not available to most people, So people who are people
Speaker 1: of color, people who are not connected to a community
Speaker 1: because of neurodivergence or geographic distance, So it's not possible
Speaker 1: to do what I've suggested. It's not possible to be
Speaker 1: safe in the same way as and I disagree with
Speaker 1: Michael Pollen that the psychedelics community is white. I think
Speaker 1: that that towards the contributions of people of color and
Speaker 1: indigenous people who have been part of our community all along.
Speaker 1: But I do think that if you're not connected to
Speaker 1: the psychedelics community, how are you possibly going to source
Speaker 1: a microw dose. So it's becoming more and more possible,
Speaker 1: but you have to be pretty savvy to like go
Speaker 1: online and order a mushrooms kit and grow your own
Speaker 1: mushrooms like that. That requires a lot of information um
Speaker 1: and a lot of expertise. And because of the car
Speaker 1: serial state, we would expect there to be more police
Speaker 1: attention on people who are already in stigmatized groups. So
Speaker 1: those are the people who are gonna get punished legal
Speaker 1: regulation in some capitalist encroachment might be the way to
Speaker 1: get this to the largest number of people. Like, let's
Speaker 1: imagine someone who is disabled by their depression, right, someone
Speaker 1: with serious and persistent mental illness that isn't well controlled
Speaker 1: with medication, which is why they want to two micro dos.
Speaker 1: So they're not going to be able to source things
Speaker 1: and do things the way that we're suggesting. They may
Speaker 1: not be able to source things in any area though,
Speaker 1: mean exactly are that being obliged to go on the
Speaker 1: internet is going to be the most challenging of of
Speaker 1: the opportunities to try to find ways to deal with
Speaker 1: their depression exactly. So if if there was a drug
Speaker 1: that their their doctor could give them, that might be
Speaker 1: something that they're able to do. But definitely if we're
Speaker 1: talking about increased access, that would mean working within the system.
Speaker 1: Moved to one last area here, you are yourself a psychotherapist,
Speaker 1: and I'm curious about to the extent you can talk
Speaker 1: openly about this, what's your own experience in psychotherapy and
Speaker 1: especially in helping people are dealing with trauma, and more broadly,
Speaker 1: what do you encounter in the broader psychotherapy PEWT to community,
Speaker 1: either in terms of stigmatization or in terms of curiosity,
Speaker 1: what's your own sense about where this is right now? So, yeah,
Speaker 1: I work as a psychotherapist. Right now, I work with
Speaker 1: people who are pretty pretty ill. I get a little
Speaker 1: bit bored by people who are too healthy. So I
Speaker 1: like working with people who have have complex trauma in
Speaker 1: in pretty intense environments. But I work with an integrated team,
Speaker 1: and I speak about you like within the larger psychotherapeutic community.
Speaker 1: So one of the most common questions that I get
Speaker 1: is whether or not someone who's microdocing can participate usefully
Speaker 1: in therapy, Like do they have to to micro dose
Speaker 1: and then go to therapy or can they micro dooce
Speaker 1: as part of therapy? Like will they be too out
Speaker 1: of it to be able to participate usefully in therapy?
Speaker 1: So just that question alone indicates to me that psychotherapists
Speaker 1: do not know what's going on. Because, of course people
Speaker 1: who are microdocing can participate usefully in therapy, right like,
Speaker 1: there's no reason to assume that they shouldn't be able to.
Speaker 1: But because there's there's not a lot of information that's
Speaker 1: out there, sometimes therapists think, oh, I should tell this
Speaker 1: person never micro dooce on the days that you're going
Speaker 1: to see me, and maybe you should just micro doce
Speaker 1: and see if that treats the depression and then come
Speaker 1: to therapy. So I'm able to reassure a therapist that no,
Speaker 1: you're able to treat people with with depression and with anxiety, whatever,
Speaker 1: with trauma as their micro docing, and what we see
Speaker 1: is an increase in positive benefits to people are able
Speaker 1: to use therapy to better effect. I'd recommend the work
Speaker 1: of Heather Hardgraves and Canada. I'm shed dos a neurobiofeedback
Speaker 1: with people, and what she sees with micro docing is
Speaker 1: that people's brain waves are able to adapt much more
Speaker 1: quickly as they microw dose. So that's one aspect of things.
Speaker 1: There's a lot a lot of stigma in the medical
Speaker 1: community about psychedelics use. There's this perception that that we're
Speaker 1: just giving people permission to use drugs. So I do
Speaker 1: a lot of work with medical professionals explaining the basic
Speaker 1: harm reduction stuff like that people are going to do
Speaker 1: drugs no matter what, and we better use this to
Speaker 1: good effect. But I'm also curious about here is a
Speaker 1: lot of attention I think is focused on macro dozing,
Speaker 1: And the question is when it comes to micro dozing,
Speaker 1: is the micro dozing receiving even a tiny part of
Speaker 1: the attention in the world of clinical psychology or psychiatry,
Speaker 1: or is it still just a very small number of
Speaker 1: people interested in the micro dosing element of you know,
Speaker 1: micro docing assisted psychotherapy. So I think that psychiatrists are
Speaker 1: much more open to microw docing than macrow docing. So
Speaker 1: for them it feels a lot safer, right, like the
Speaker 1: person is still going to feel connected to reality. If
Speaker 1: they want to try it, they can try it. So
Speaker 1: I think psychiatrists are much more open to microdocing than
Speaker 1: macro docing. I still encounter psychiatrists who think that psychedelics
Speaker 1: uses psychoto mimetic that were what we're doing is mimking
Speaker 1: the psychotic state in an individual. So there's a lot
Speaker 1: of education that still needs to happen around that issue.
Speaker 1: I will say that like a lot of people with
Speaker 1: psychotic conditions are very interested in both micro docing and
Speaker 1: macro docing, and that that's a large struggle for clinicians.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to say one other thing that we
Speaker 1: haven't brought out, which is that So I was in
Speaker 1: Fraud speaking at a psychedelics conference and I walk into
Speaker 1: this room where people are talking about it again. I
Speaker 1: didn't know anything about it again. When I walked into
Speaker 1: the room, I just had heard that it's pronounced it again.
Speaker 1: So I walk in. There's all these people from Africa
Speaker 1: who start hugging me, and I was like, I don't
Speaker 1: get what's going on here, and they were like, your
Speaker 1: research in microducing validates our traditional practice of using it
Speaker 1: again because they and this is the whety people of
Speaker 1: gut Bone have been using it, began to treat a
Speaker 1: number of conditions, most importantly addiction, and they have microdocing
Speaker 1: as part of their traditional practice, so they use both
Speaker 1: macrodoses and microdoces. So when we had created the Psychedelics
Speaker 1: Ethics Code, I had all these calls with different people,
Speaker 1: and I remember this one call that I had with
Speaker 1: the people from the Santo Diame Church, the Ayahuasca Church,
Speaker 1: and I said something like, are there any words that
Speaker 1: anything that needs to be said here that hasn't been
Speaker 1: said before we end the call? And they said, yeah,
Speaker 1: we need to bring out the voice of the Grandfather Vine.
Speaker 1: And I said, great, how do we do that, so
Speaker 1: then they taught saw this song. So I'm not going
Speaker 1: to teach you this song. All of these there's lots
Speaker 1: of these songs on YouTube and other places. But I
Speaker 1: think part of having psychedel excuse in a more open
Speaker 1: way means validating the voices of these traditional practices and
Speaker 1: people who have different exposure, different experiences than our own,
Speaker 1: and allowing those voices to come forward to learning those
Speaker 1: songs and learning what that can give us. And I
Speaker 1: think that that presents a model of depression treatment or
Speaker 1: psychedelic excuse that isn't just about the substances, about the
Speaker 1: entire context of it. So, Sophia, is there anything else
Speaker 1: we've left out here? Sure? I want to say something
Speaker 1: that's really important, which is that we can't measure the
Speaker 1: amount of any given neurotransmitter in a living being's brain.
Speaker 1: When we look at mass studies, if we're looking at
Speaker 1: how much serotonin a mass has in its brain, we
Speaker 1: kill the mass and then we autopsy the brain in slices.
Speaker 1: So when we talk about, oh, there's been this increase
Speaker 1: in this chemical, this increase in that chemical, or these
Speaker 1: are the parts of the brain that light up. That's
Speaker 1: one way of looking at it, but we need to
Speaker 1: validate that with people's experiences. So sure our brain lights up,
Speaker 1: and what you were talking about before is an increase
Speaker 1: in connectivity between different parts of the brain, but what
Speaker 1: is the lived experience of that. So if people are saying, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm more creative and we also see increased blood flow
Speaker 1: between different halfs of the brain, that makes a lot
Speaker 1: of sense to me. But I don't think we should
Speaker 1: look at it as it's just a chemical that's occurring
Speaker 1: in the brain, Okay, Sevilla. I mean, I really enjoyed
Speaker 1: our conversation, So thank you so much for having this
Speaker 1: conversation with me on Psychoactive, and best of luck with
Speaker 1: your future research as well as with your future you know,
Speaker 1: therapy effort involving or not involving these substances. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much. Yeah. I've worked in harm reduction in New
Speaker 1: York City in San Francisco for a long time and
Speaker 1: I've really respected the work of Drug Policy Alliance, so
Speaker 1: I'm very happy to be here. Yeah. Oh fantastic. Well,
Speaker 1: thanks so much. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your
Speaker 1: friends about it, or you can write us a review
Speaker 1: at Apple Podcast or where you get your podcasts. We
Speaker 1: love to hear from our listeners. If you'd like to
Speaker 1: share your own stories, comments and ideas, then leave us
Speaker 1: a message at one eight three three seven seven nine
Speaker 1: sixty that's eight three three psycho zero, or you can
Speaker 1: email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com or find
Speaker 1: me on Twitter at Ethan Natalman. You can also find
Speaker 1: contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by
Speaker 1: me Ethan Naedelman. It's produced by Noham Osband and Josh Stain.
Speaker 1: The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus
Speaker 1: and Darren Aronofsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt
Speaker 1: Frederick from my Heart Radio and me Ethan Nadelman. Our
Speaker 1: music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks to
Speaker 1: ab brios f, Bianca Grimshaw and Robert BP. Next week
Speaker 1: we'll have a special episode of Psychoactive. It's when I
Speaker 1: invite my dear friend Julie Holland to co host Psychoactive
Speaker 1: and answer questions with me from you the listeners for
Speaker 1: nine years, every Saturday night and Sunday night, I was
Speaker 1: the doctor in charge of the psychiatric emergency room at
Speaker 1: Bellevue Hospital. And I was in charge of it like
Speaker 1: a fifteen to sixteen hour overnight shift. And far and
Speaker 1: away the substances that reaked the most havoc and in
Speaker 1: the psychiatric patients that I saw in Bellevue number one alcohol,
Speaker 1: no question, and number two cocaine. Subscribe to Psychoactive now
Speaker 1: see it, don't miss it.