Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Ethan Nadelman, 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 drug. Hello, Psychoactive listeners today is Uh, Well,
Speaker 1: we have quite a guest. He's an extraordinary writer and author.
Speaker 1: He is a professor of journalism at u C. Berkeley. Uh.
Speaker 1: He's somebody I've known for quite a while who I
Speaker 1: think whose writing is changing the world, and that is
Speaker 1: Michael Pollen. So, Michael, thank you so much for joining
Speaker 1: me today. I'm very grateful for your time. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: do go back. I guess too, when I was writing
Speaker 1: about medical marijuana, right, I think I interviewed you then
Speaker 1: as exactly I was going to bring that up, which
Speaker 1: is it was back in the spring of nineties seven,
Speaker 1: and I think you had just maybe maybe around that
Speaker 1: time you had published the piece on Poppies and Opium
Speaker 1: and Harper's which is the chapter of your new book,
Speaker 1: This is your Mind on Plans, And I had put
Speaker 1: together that ballot initiative in California on legalizing medical marijuana,
Speaker 1: hadn't drafted it. That had been a local activist, Dennis
Speaker 1: to Rome. So you came to see me. We spent
Speaker 1: a couple of hours together my office, and we're beginning
Speaker 1: to plan out the next cycle. And I think since
Speaker 1: then we've crossed passed over the years. But let me
Speaker 1: open up by asking you. I mean, the next thing
Speaker 1: I saw you writing about drugs was the Bodany of Desire,
Speaker 1: where you wrote about what apples, potatoes, tulips and mean, Well,
Speaker 1: what I remembered about that piece I remember sitting around
Speaker 1: everywhere after you did it, was that what you did
Speaker 1: was really when you raised the question, is this victory
Speaker 1: for Proposition to fifteen the meddical marijuana and they should
Speaker 1: have been California twenty five years ago, did it represent
Speaker 1: a tipping point or beginning of a tipping point at
Speaker 1: ending the war on drugs? And the second key point
Speaker 1: you made there was that what it had really done
Speaker 1: was to open up a dialogue between the people and
Speaker 1: the government, between the cops and the growers, and the
Speaker 1: docks and the patients and you name it. And I
Speaker 1: just thought that in both rowse respects, it was prescient.
Speaker 1: But I'm curious now when you look back on these
Speaker 1: last twenty five years. I mean, marijuana has not been
Speaker 1: a focus of your writing in recent years, But what
Speaker 1: do you think about this evolution? I mean, what's I
Speaker 1: Do you have concerns about it? Do you feel very
Speaker 1: good about it? I basically feel good about it. I
Speaker 1: think that what we learned from that episode was that
Speaker 1: a very important tool for changing attitudes towards drugs was
Speaker 1: um And this was your your idea, I think, was
Speaker 1: to reframe marijuana as a medicine rather than a kind
Speaker 1: of cheech and chong, you know, fun thing. And when
Speaker 1: the public began to see that it was helping people,
Speaker 1: and then it was aids patients of course, and some
Speaker 1: people with epilepsy UM and these were mostly anecdotal stories
Speaker 1: about how they had helped people, but that completely changed
Speaker 1: the public's attitude. The simple demonization of these substances became
Speaker 1: much harder. When we began to think of them as
Speaker 1: medicines for some people, and I think it's that same
Speaker 1: game plan, and I don't use that word in a
Speaker 1: cynical way, has really driven the shifts around psychedelics too.
Speaker 1: What's interesting is there was never as much science around
Speaker 1: cannabis as a medicine. It was really largely anecdotal. It
Speaker 1: was a citizen science kind of movement, whereas the science
Speaker 1: around psychedelics has been um, you know, more conventional control,
Speaker 1: double blind studies. Yeah, I mean in a way, right,
Speaker 1: because you also had marijuana was in the farm with
Speaker 1: copia until the twenties or thirties. Oh yeah, there was history,
Speaker 1: There were studies out there. There was the fact that
Speaker 1: marin all, that synthetic version of marijuana was already available.
Speaker 1: They're oncologists already saying they were using it, and in fact,
Speaker 1: you know, it was really a previous generation before me.
Speaker 1: That helps shift opinion on medical marijuana because with ballot initiatives,
Speaker 1: you weren't really going to run a ballot initiative unless
Speaker 1: you went into it with already or more public support.
Speaker 1: I think somewhat similarly with the psychedelic stuff. You know,
Speaker 1: those local initiatives that began to win in Denver, and
Speaker 1: in Oakland and now the big state one in ore
Speaker 1: again last year. I mean, those were doable because of
Speaker 1: the work of others. And when I look at the
Speaker 1: work of others, I give a huge amount of credit
Speaker 1: to Rick Dobblin's organization maps. I give a lot of
Speaker 1: credit to the researchers, the Roland Griffiths and Bob Jesse's
Speaker 1: and the others. But your book had to change your mind.
Speaker 1: I just think that had an explosive impact just personally.
Speaker 1: The number of people would come up to me and say, Ethan,
Speaker 1: I just read Michael Pollan's latest book. I mean, where
Speaker 1: can I get some mushrooms? I've never done them, or
Speaker 1: I haven't done them in three or four years, So
Speaker 1: I mean, what do you think about that? I really
Speaker 1: think that you've been this major catalytic writer about food.
Speaker 1: I'm the worst dilemma. But that book was extraordinary in
Speaker 1: its impact. Well, I you know, I do hear that
Speaker 1: a lot, and people such as the couple that started
Speaker 1: the organ initiative, you know, have told me that it
Speaker 1: was reading not that book, but the New Yorker piece
Speaker 1: that preceded the book that inspired them. And it's incredibly gratifying.
Speaker 1: I mean, people write things and nothing happens all the time.
Speaker 1: To have anything happened. But I also feel that I
Speaker 1: was amplifying the voices of the researchers because these were
Speaker 1: incredible UM findings, and I would interview the patients and
Speaker 1: tell their stories, and that's really what moved the needle.
Speaker 1: As with medical marijuana, hearing about individuals whose lives were
Speaker 1: transformed for the better. There's nothing more powerful than that.
Speaker 1: And of course that's what happened in Oregon, right. I mean,
Speaker 1: they began that ballot initiative underwater. They were at forty
Speaker 1: six percent, I think, and they did have the resources
Speaker 1: that you didn't have back in the nineties. UM. They
Speaker 1: had a lot of advertising money. But what did they
Speaker 1: do with it? Well, they told the stories of cancer
Speaker 1: patients whose fear of death had been removed by their
Speaker 1: use of of psilocybin and picked up ten points in
Speaker 1: a very short amount of time. So the public is
Speaker 1: ready to hear these stories. I think the public is
Speaker 1: ahead of the politicians on drugs, and uh, they know
Speaker 1: that the drug war has been a failure, and they
Speaker 1: see the collateral damage, and they know now that the
Speaker 1: lies they've been told about drugs are just that, and
Speaker 1: they're much less likely to buy the propaganda. In the
Speaker 1: beginning of your new book, this is your minor Plans,
Speaker 1: you write, My wager in writing this book is that
Speaker 1: the decline of the drug war, with its brutally simplistic
Speaker 1: narratives about your brain on drugs, has opened to space
Speaker 1: in which we can tell some other, much more interesting
Speaker 1: stories about our ancient real aationship with the mind altering
Speaker 1: plans and fun guy with which nature has blessed us.
Speaker 1: And that opening to the book is actually a good
Speaker 1: description for why I'm doing this podcast now. It's the
Speaker 1: same thing, and we need this new conversation. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think just ending the drug war is not enough,
Speaker 1: because these are powerful substances. They're going to be part
Speaker 1: of our lives. They're going to be accessible. We're gonna
Speaker 1: have to talk to our children about them. Uh, and
Speaker 1: we have to learn how to live with them, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, not obvious. Yeah, well you know. So let
Speaker 1: me give you a little shit about something and see
Speaker 1: how you respond to it. Right, You wrote an our
Speaker 1: bed piece in the spring of twenty nineteen, I think
Speaker 1: in New York Times, Right, and it was a reaction
Speaker 1: to Denver legalizing uh, you know, plant medicines or philocipic mushrooms.
Speaker 1: I cant remember was Narrow Shore and you said, hold
Speaker 1: on here, you know, maybe the country isn't ready for
Speaker 1: this debate. And I was thinking, oh, well, Michael's just
Speaker 1: covering his asks. His book is having such a huge impact.
Speaker 1: The last thing he needs is to be identified as
Speaker 1: a new Timothy Leary of psychedelics. But ay, tell me
Speaker 1: what you were thinking then and what you're thinking now
Speaker 1: about this, because now you're talking about opening up to debate. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Um. At the time, I was strongly influenced by
Speaker 1: the scientists that I had been interviewing and that were
Speaker 1: really at the heart of my book, and they were
Speaker 1: all very nervous. Um. You know, this path had been
Speaker 1: laid out by Rick Doblin, originally of f d A approval. Right,
Speaker 1: We're gonna go through the phase one to three of
Speaker 1: the trials, then we're gonna get FDA approval, and then
Speaker 1: we'll reschedule psychedelics. And the fear then was that if
Speaker 1: this became a popular issue rather than this more or
Speaker 1: less hidden regulatory path, um, it would blow it. It
Speaker 1: would politicize psychedelics, and that I expected a backlash. I
Speaker 1: expected us to fall into the old culture war drug
Speaker 1: war narrative, and that suddenly this research, which had not
Speaker 1: been controversial, would get to be controversial. So I was
Speaker 1: in effect being protective of this research, which I thought
Speaker 1: was so important and so promising that I didn't want
Speaker 1: anything to get in the way. As it turned out,
Speaker 1: that process is going on. It hasn't been affected for
Speaker 1: reasons I don't entirely understand. The Republicans have chosen not
Speaker 1: to fight this, uh, you know, this suing for peace
Speaker 1: in the drug war that's happening. I think they've decided
Speaker 1: it's a losing issue. Uh. And and given that the
Speaker 1: how how the culture war is raging, it's very interesting
Speaker 1: they're leaving this one alone. And in fact, psychedelic research
Speaker 1: has has friends on the right. Rick Perry, the former
Speaker 1: Energy secretary and governor of Texas, as a supporter of
Speaker 1: psychedelic medicine. Rebecca Mercer gave money to MAPS, and Steve
Speaker 1: Bannon says friendly things about it. So, as you know,
Speaker 1: and I evolved, I mean, what can I say. I
Speaker 1: still don't support the commercialization of psychedelics. I don't think
Speaker 1: that cannabis is the proper model. And cannabis you know
Speaker 1: where I live. You know their billboards on the Bay Bridge,
Speaker 1: you know, promising delivery of cannabis within two hours if
Speaker 1: you call them, like you know, by the time you
Speaker 1: get home in traffic, it'll be there. There'll be a
Speaker 1: guy you're on a bicycle with your with your cannabis.
Speaker 1: And um. That kind of active promotion of psychedelics is uh,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean, maybe I'll be ready for that
Speaker 1: in a year too, but I'm not yet. And I
Speaker 1: think that decriminalization is very different. And I see all
Speaker 1: this capital moving into the psychedelic space, most of it
Speaker 1: for medical treatment. And I do believe there is a
Speaker 1: place or there should be access for psychedelics for people
Speaker 1: who are not clinically you know, mentally ill. Um. I
Speaker 1: think they have a lot to offer all of us.
Speaker 1: But I'd love to find a model that is well
Speaker 1: suited to psychedelics, to magic mushrooms, and not as many
Speaker 1: people in the cannabis world want to do follow that
Speaker 1: path so that the magic mushrooms are sold right next to, uh,
Speaker 1: to the cannabis, you know, vape cartridges in the in
Speaker 1: the dispensaries. Um, that doesn't feel right to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, Michael, I'm actually fairly sympathetic to
Speaker 1: your viewpoint. I'm also wary of the kind of over
Speaker 1: the counter commercialization and advertising. I think with marijuana, we
Speaker 1: recognize that it was inevitable and there probably was no
Speaker 1: other better model, and you just have to hope for
Speaker 1: good regulatory approaches at the state and ultimately the federal level.
Speaker 1: I mean, I do look at places like the Netherlands
Speaker 1: or Jamaica where they do seem to sell magic mushrooms
Speaker 1: in the same places that oftentimes cannabis is Clause I
Speaker 1: legally available, and those don't seem to be an issue yet.
Speaker 1: But I agree it has to be careful and I
Speaker 1: don't want to see that that backlash either. I mean,
Speaker 1: that definitely scares me that possibility. Right, We went through
Speaker 1: that backlash once, of course, and uh, it could happen again. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, this country is prone to moral panics around
Speaker 1: drugs and it has been for a very long time.
Speaker 1: What's happening with the truffles in Amsterdam though, that's a
Speaker 1: that's a pretty weak form of psilocybin. You have to
Speaker 1: consume enough truffles to get a stomach ache for it
Speaker 1: to actually work. And you know, some of these substances
Speaker 1: are you know, LSD is obviously very powerful, and uh,
Speaker 1: I do think that we have to find, you know,
Speaker 1: the proper cultural container. I was very influenced by rereading
Speaker 1: Andrew Wild's book The Natural Mind. It's like fifty years old.
Speaker 1: It's a very wise book, and he talks a lot,
Speaker 1: since he's done all this research in South America of
Speaker 1: what we have to learn from indigenous cultures about how
Speaker 1: to safely use these powerful psychedelics. Well, you know, I'll
Speaker 1: tell you Michael Andrew was my first guest. I did
Speaker 1: it in part because he has such a huge influence
Speaker 1: on me back in the eighties reading The Natural Mind
Speaker 1: at the time, and then his other books Chocolate to
Speaker 1: Morphine in the Marriage of the Sun of the Moon.
Speaker 1: I mean. The other thing, of course, is you know,
Speaker 1: he goes from drug writing to writing about integrative medicine,
Speaker 1: and he and he writes about coffee for example, which
Speaker 1: I will get into that shortly. And you also go,
Speaker 1: you know, you do the stuff on marijuana, but the
Speaker 1: embody desire ardening in this and then you become you know,
Speaker 1: the world's leading writer about food stuff. But I wonder
Speaker 1: how you think about your back and forth in the
Speaker 1: merging of these two issues. Yeah, well, for me, there
Speaker 1: of a piece. I mean, you have to go back
Speaker 1: in time to the beginning of my writing, which was
Speaker 1: very much about uh, you know, I began writing in
Speaker 1: the garden. I was very interested in the symbiotic relationship
Speaker 1: between us and plants and how plants have evolved to
Speaker 1: gratify our needs and desires. And that's a very successful strategy.
Speaker 1: Just look at the edible grasses, which now you know,
Speaker 1: have this huge amount of territory. We a lot to
Speaker 1: them because we depend on them for corn and rice.
Speaker 1: This has been a really winning strategy to hitch their
Speaker 1: wagon to ours. And so if you're interested in that,
Speaker 1: if that's the kind of trunk of my work, of
Speaker 1: the tree of my work, this interest in plants and people,
Speaker 1: eth nobotany, you might call it. UM. One big branch
Speaker 1: off of that trunk is food and agriculture. And I
Speaker 1: spent a couple of years writing about that, and I
Speaker 1: still do from time to time. I'm still very interested
Speaker 1: in that, and that's kind of the most profound way
Speaker 1: we change nature. UM is through our eating and what
Speaker 1: our agriculture does to the planet. Um, we changed the land,
Speaker 1: we changed the atmosphere, we changed the composition of species,
Speaker 1: so it was kind of natural. I would dig into
Speaker 1: that first and and wrote three or four books about that.
Speaker 1: But another really interesting thing, We use plants for us
Speaker 1: to change consciousness. And this turns out, as Andy says,
Speaker 1: in the natural mind to be virtually universal. And so
Speaker 1: that's another interesting branch um of our use of plants
Speaker 1: and their cleverness in enlisting us in their their mission
Speaker 1: to expand their habitat. They're also, you know, both things
Speaker 1: we ingest that changes us. And finally, they're both critically
Speaker 1: involved in health, physical health for the most part with food,
Speaker 1: and mental health for the most part in drugs. But
Speaker 1: as we know, those lines even are not what you
Speaker 1: would think. And Andy has made a very strong case
Speaker 1: that the psychedelics can have you know, real physiological effect
Speaker 1: and heal physical elements, not just mental ailments, and that
Speaker 1: there's not a real difference between the two at some level.
Speaker 1: I also like moving on as a writer at a
Speaker 1: certain point, I prefer to write as an amateur and
Speaker 1: then I become an expert and that kind of sucks
Speaker 1: it up. From a literary point of view, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's very gratifying as an advocate that you know, I
Speaker 1: learned about a subject, I publish a book about it,
Speaker 1: and then I have a platform to argue for the
Speaker 1: world I want to see. And that's great. But as
Speaker 1: a writer, I really prefer being at the beginning and
Speaker 1: being the idiot on page one who has a set
Speaker 1: of questions but doesn't have his answers. Read the first
Speaker 1: page of any of my books and you'll see I
Speaker 1: really am very naive at the beginning. And what I
Speaker 1: like to do is dramatize the process of learning and
Speaker 1: what I have to do to learn, which includes not
Speaker 1: only talking to people and reading lots of books, but
Speaker 1: having experiences that are really relevant that teach us in
Speaker 1: a way that books can't teach us. And so you know,
Speaker 1: when I was writing about the cattle industry, I bought
Speaker 1: a cow and followed it through the process for Omnivor's dilemma.
Speaker 1: And as you know, when I wrote about psychedelics, I
Speaker 1: took you know, a menu of psychedelics, because there's no
Speaker 1: substitute for personal experience, um, and there's a perspective you
Speaker 1: have doing something for the first time that you'll never
Speaker 1: have again. So even though I'm a relatively green or
Speaker 1: young psychoonaut, as Andy reminds me every time we're on
Speaker 1: the stage together and he lists the hundreds of experiences
Speaker 1: he's at all right, I actually think there's a virtue
Speaker 1: in being a newbie that I see things that you
Speaker 1: might not see on your hundredth trip, um, and that
Speaker 1: there's a quality of wonder not to mention the fact
Speaker 1: that the reader can identify more easily with someone doing
Speaker 1: something for the first time than for the hundredth time. Um.
Speaker 1: So there's a there's a bit of narrative strategy involved
Speaker 1: to right. One of the things I love There was
Speaker 1: a piece of the Times a year or two ago,
Speaker 1: and it had you having a lunch at your home,
Speaker 1: and it was with IoLET Waldman, who had written a
Speaker 1: book on micro dosing in fact, and I think she
Speaker 1: actually interned a Drug Policy Alliance when she was in
Speaker 1: her twenties. And then the novelist uh TC Boile, who
Speaker 1: I remember reading his wonderful book about growing marijuana and
Speaker 1: paranoia in Humboldt back in eighty four, Budding Prospects, but
Speaker 1: then he wrote a very recent novel. Yeah, Timothy Leary,
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly. It's called Outside Looking In. And one of
Speaker 1: the comments they quote you saying there is you're debating
Speaker 1: about what's going on American culture with with Iolette and
Speaker 1: TC boiled, and you say, I think part of what's
Speaker 1: going on is it's a reaction or or it's linked
Speaker 1: to the growing anxiety in American society, you know, and
Speaker 1: not just Trump is um, but a whole range of
Speaker 1: other things. Does that still feel true to you that
Speaker 1: or you just kind of speculating with him when you
Speaker 1: said that. I don't remember saying that. I mean that
Speaker 1: it was the anxiety that was leading to interest in psychedelics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's interesting. I mean I see it more as a
Speaker 1: dissatisfaction with the tools we have to deal with mental
Speaker 1: illness and anxiety and depression and the you know, the
Speaker 1: fact that s SR eyes are increasingly um not working
Speaker 1: as well as they once did, and people really don't
Speaker 1: like taking them. I see it being driven by like
Speaker 1: a willingness to do something really outside of the box
Speaker 1: that people feel, you know. The underground use of psychedelics
Speaker 1: is booming also, and I think people are looking for help, UH,
Speaker 1: and that people are in a very stressed state. It
Speaker 1: has partly to do with our politics, it has partly
Speaker 1: to do with climate change, and the pandemic has has
Speaker 1: only intensified this, and many people are looking for healing
Speaker 1: and UH, and here are psychedelics that offer some relief,
Speaker 1: but a very different kind of relief. And that this
Speaker 1: is not self medication in the sense of using an
Speaker 1: opiate or alcohol to kind of dull your senses. As
Speaker 1: you know, psychedelic experience is really hard work and it's
Speaker 1: an attempt to go inside, which can be a very
Speaker 1: scary place to go. But people are looking for something
Speaker 1: more radical, something that in the in the true sense
Speaker 1: of the word, that will deal with the roots of
Speaker 1: their problem. It's depression, it's anxiety. It's just the sense
Speaker 1: that we're in a very very difficult time and the future,
Speaker 1: you know, has not looked this dark, uh in my lifetime. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, the questions being raised not just about the
Speaker 1: environmental crisis, but about our political system, and well, whether
Speaker 1: our political system can cope with the environmental crisis, whether
Speaker 1: our political system can survive. And I think all these
Speaker 1: things make the potential of psychedelic healing very attractive to people,
Speaker 1: and they're they're willing to take a chance, right, They're
Speaker 1: willing to do something that may be way out of
Speaker 1: their comfort zone. I am really surprised at the people.
Speaker 1: I mean, many people come to me now like looking
Speaker 1: for psychedelic therapy, and we should tell your listeners, please
Speaker 1: don't come to me for this. I can't make referrals.
Speaker 1: It's just too dangerous for everybody. Um find your own guide.
Speaker 1: But I'm amazed that who comes to me. They're just
Speaker 1: not the people you would think. There are people in
Speaker 1: very prominent positions, people who look like they've got everything
Speaker 1: worked out in their lives, and they're willing to roll
Speaker 1: the dice and do something they never would have considered
Speaker 1: a few years ago. We'll be talking more after we
Speaker 1: hear this Adh. I have to say reading your chapter
Speaker 1: on mescalin in the current book was fascinating for me.
Speaker 1: First of all, I mean, I must confess I've only
Speaker 1: done mescaline I think once back, you know, years ago,
Speaker 1: I did synthetic mescaline, and I didn't. I did not
Speaker 1: appreciate the differences that you describe in your latest book
Speaker 1: between mescaline and LSD and psilocybin. And then you also
Speaker 1: quote Sasha Alexander Shulgin and uh, you know, the brilliant
Speaker 1: backyard chemist who actually I was quite friendly with and
Speaker 1: we visited his home in Latvia, California often times, and
Speaker 1: who was generous with me and having the experiment. Um,
Speaker 1: but he calls mescalin the queen of the psychedelics. And
Speaker 1: you had I think a Rabbi psycholic friend who said
Speaker 1: the same thing. Yeah, the king of the materials, the
Speaker 1: king of the materials. So is your experience would you?
Speaker 1: Would you agree with that description? Yeah? I mean I
Speaker 1: had a really interesting, uh and positive experience with mescalin.
Speaker 1: I had a more profound one with psilocybin. And given
Speaker 1: the choice what I do mescaline again, I guess I would.
Speaker 1: I mean I really liked this quality of you know,
Speaker 1: the way it immerses you in the here and now. Um,
Speaker 1: it's very different than the psychedelics that at high dose
Speaker 1: take you somewhere else, take you to another world, another dimension.
Speaker 1: I was just more here than I'd ever been, and
Speaker 1: more absorbed in what was right in front of me.
Speaker 1: And in a way it was the perfect drug for
Speaker 1: the pandemic. You know, where we were kind of claustrophobic.
Speaker 1: We were stuck in place. It felt like our worlds
Speaker 1: had shrunk down. Still feels that way. And here was
Speaker 1: this drug that made what you had, the room you
Speaker 1: were in, the life you were leading so interesting and
Speaker 1: so nuanced and so rich with possibility and insight that
Speaker 1: you were completely content with your little nutshell. And I
Speaker 1: thought that was a very interesting experience. I think Huxley's account,
Speaker 1: and you know, these accounts influence us. You know, there're
Speaker 1: no innocent psychedelic experiences, right, They're very much constructed by
Speaker 1: our expectations, as Timothy Leary understood. But Huxley in the
Speaker 1: Doors of Perception, a lot of what I felt chimed
Speaker 1: with what he said, which was that he felt like
Speaker 1: the reducing valve of consciousness, the fact that our consciousness
Speaker 1: is trying to reduce the amount of information coming in
Speaker 1: because it threatens to overwhelm us, and it's more than
Speaker 1: we need for the business of living in survival. But
Speaker 1: there's so much more out there, there's so much more
Speaker 1: sensory information than we're taking in. That felt really right
Speaker 1: to me, And Shulgin says this too. He said he
Speaker 1: saw colors or nuances of colors that he didn't know existed.
Speaker 1: And it is that kind of child mind, which is
Speaker 1: taking in information from in all directions, is not focused.
Speaker 1: It's the opposite of caffeine. I think psychedelics and caffeine
Speaker 1: are on two ends of a spectrum. Where caffeine helps
Speaker 1: you focus the lens where you want, which is very
Speaker 1: powerful for getting work done, which is why it suits
Speaker 1: capitalism so well. Psychedelics, you're bringing in information from all
Speaker 1: these you know, corners of the room and doesn't necessarily
Speaker 1: encourage you to focus, but can be incredibly enriching to
Speaker 1: see what's out there. So it was interesting. I didn't
Speaker 1: have that experience of ego dissolution. I didn't have hallucinations,
Speaker 1: with the one exception of there are a couple of
Speaker 1: moments where I was a little bit overwhelmed by how
Speaker 1: much information was coming in and I closed my eyes
Speaker 1: to meditate. But the me that was meditating with somebody else, um,
Speaker 1: And this happened a couple of times. I was like,
Speaker 1: who is this Latin American woman who's in my head meditating?
Speaker 1: I know that sounds crazy, but um. But in general,
Speaker 1: it wasn't about hallucination. It was about perception, and it
Speaker 1: was about taking in this information. The only negative experience
Speaker 1: I felt besides this brief period of being overwhelmed by
Speaker 1: as as I quote this poet, the immensity of existence.
Speaker 1: I mean I was really hit by that a couple
Speaker 1: of times at the peak. The only negative was it
Speaker 1: went on so long. I mean it's like fourteen hours,
Speaker 1: and I was done with the mescaline before it was
Speaker 1: done with me um. I wanted to just have dinner
Speaker 1: and go to bed, but it wasn't gonna happen. Well,
Speaker 1: I guess that's why they're not really using mescalini. Yes,
Speaker 1: it means two shifts for your two guides, right, your too.
Speaker 1: Therapists be kind of expensive, but it does seem like
Speaker 1: it's worth investigating or maybe working on the molecule as
Speaker 1: as Sasha Shulgin did so brilliantly, because it has some
Speaker 1: of M d M as qualities. You can feel very
Speaker 1: connected to somebody else on it, and you can hold
Speaker 1: a conversation, and it seems to me it could be
Speaker 1: useful in a group therapy context um, which might justify
Speaker 1: all the hours of therapist time. And there is a
Speaker 1: company that wants to work with it. Journey collab wants
Speaker 1: to use mescaline to work on alcoholism. And you know
Speaker 1: the Native Americans have used mescaline in the form of
Speaker 1: peyote with great success in a group setting and working
Speaker 1: often on alcoholism. Yeah, well, you know I reread before
Speaker 1: talking with you now, another essay you wrote that. I
Speaker 1: just thought it was wonderful and it was about the
Speaker 1: challenges of writing about this, you know, about putting into language.
Speaker 1: And I remember at one point, you know, you uh,
Speaker 1: you had done five N E O d m T
Speaker 1: the toad trip, the signor and toad where you squeeze
Speaker 1: the glands and you get five m O D M T,
Speaker 1: and you talked about the role of metaphors or rocket
Speaker 1: and the big bang, or another point. I think in
Speaker 1: the most recent book you're talking about comparing LSD and
Speaker 1: psilocybinto kind of a top down approach and mescalin almost
Speaker 1: a bottom up one. And I realized that as a writer,
Speaker 1: as a brilliant writer, you have the luxury of looking
Speaker 1: at your words and crafting them, where as I'm interviewing
Speaker 1: this moment, you don't have that luxury of doing it.
Speaker 1: Did you feel that when you were writing this most
Speaker 1: recent book and talking about your mescalin experience, that the
Speaker 1: words are the ways of writing flowed more naturally than
Speaker 1: it had a few years ago, just as you've been. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I found a way to write about psychedelic
Speaker 1: experience for me, And that was hard to do when
Speaker 1: I when I first approached the whole issue, and I
Speaker 1: knew that there was going to be a chapter in
Speaker 1: How to Change Your Mind where I'd have to describe
Speaker 1: my trips, and I was very nervous about it because
Speaker 1: I've read a lot of you know, really shitty trip
Speaker 1: reports we all have, and uh, and you know, it's
Speaker 1: like telling people your dreams. You know, the chances are
Speaker 1: you'll bore them to tears. So I approached that as
Speaker 1: a very you know, nervous making part of the writing um.
Speaker 1: In the event, it was actually great fun, much more
Speaker 1: fun than I thought, And as a writer, it was
Speaker 1: some of the most fun I've had And and writing
Speaker 1: about this mescal and trip too was really fun. And
Speaker 1: what unlocked it for me was understanding that I was
Speaker 1: writing for people who probably hadn't had this experience, many
Speaker 1: of my readers, and I needed to address them directly
Speaker 1: about what I imagined they were thinking about what I
Speaker 1: just said. So in other words, I I go into
Speaker 1: the trip and I describe it for a certain amount
Speaker 1: of time. But when I reached a moment of incredulousness
Speaker 1: in my own mind, like there was a Latin American
Speaker 1: woman meditating in my head, I stopped and talked to
Speaker 1: the reader and said, I know how crazy this sounds,
Speaker 1: or yes, I know that love is the most important
Speaker 1: thing in the world. I know that there's a hallmark sentiment,
Speaker 1: but remember it's also profound. It can be both. And
Speaker 1: so this direct address to the reader gave me the
Speaker 1: license to go where I had to go. And I
Speaker 1: felt like I wouldn't lose that reader by taking account
Speaker 1: of their skepticism or their wrinkled brow or whatever it was.
Speaker 1: So once I kind of found that that little formula
Speaker 1: I could let go, I could totally cut lose. And
Speaker 1: you know, for a journalist who's normally writing things that
Speaker 1: have to stand up to fact checking, right in that
Speaker 1: small box of checkable facts, when there's a lot of
Speaker 1: other interesting things that you can't quite pin down. Here,
Speaker 1: I'm transcribing the contents of my mind. There's no fact checking, right,
Speaker 1: I am it. I'm the expert on this story. And
Speaker 1: I imagine it's how novelists feel because they're they're basically
Speaker 1: as I imagine, I'm I don't write fiction, but they're
Speaker 1: telling themselves a story, or they're enacting a dialogue in
Speaker 1: their head and writing it down, and there's enormous freedom
Speaker 1: in that. And it was it was great pleasure. So
Speaker 1: I was very happy to write a book where I
Speaker 1: would get to describe another trip. You know. I also
Speaker 1: found sometimes, like when I smoke a marijuana, if it's
Speaker 1: strong marijuana, I'll get into this thinking of all great thoughts,
Speaker 1: great thoughts, but so often later in the day, afterwards,
Speaker 1: the next day, they just seem like fluff, you know.
Speaker 1: Whereas I found that when I've done this has happened
Speaker 1: on mushrooms, has happened on ayahuasca, that actually, and especially
Speaker 1: if I don't get high at the end of the trip,
Speaker 1: that my thoughts can be very clear later that day
Speaker 1: or even the next, and easy to remember, easy to
Speaker 1: remember and actually have there are insights. I had an
Speaker 1: influence of mushrooms years ago, they still have validity in
Speaker 1: my life today, and so I think that must be
Speaker 1: a benefit. Actually, you had, I think the same experience.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I know, I did. There are insights I
Speaker 1: had and you can you know, you can also call
Speaker 1: them banal insights around love and connectedness, but they're real.
Speaker 1: You know, the sense of interconnectedness people feel on psychedelics.
Speaker 1: The illusion is the idea of separateness, right, And so
Speaker 1: there is a veracity to some of this these ideas
Speaker 1: we acquire. But also think of the people using psychedelics
Speaker 1: to quit smoking, and they come to the profound conclusion
Speaker 1: that smoking is stupid and it's killing them. They knew
Speaker 1: that at one level. But there is a sturdiness to
Speaker 1: the insight on psychedelics. It's it's what James called the
Speaker 1: no edic quality, right that this is not just an opinion,
Speaker 1: this is a revealed truth, and some of the truths
Speaker 1: are really important. Um. And they have that etched in stone,
Speaker 1: brought down from the mountain quality. And I think that's
Speaker 1: one of the keys to the success of psychedelics and
Speaker 1: helping people change bad habits such as addiction, is that
Speaker 1: whatever insights they come to, either directed towards them by
Speaker 1: their therapists or on their own, those insights are sturdier
Speaker 1: than the insights we have in everyday life. Well, now
Speaker 1: let's talk about the powerful role of set in setting.
Speaker 1: And one of the big points you make in the
Speaker 1: mescal In chapter, I think it's in your other book
Speaker 1: as well, is for a lot of these drugs, there's
Speaker 1: the synthetic version, right, in this case mescalin or or
Speaker 1: you can have that with psilocybin as well, and then
Speaker 1: there is the natural plant version, or the one that
Speaker 1: comes from the toad um in the case of five
Speaker 1: mm e O d M T right. And actually, by chance,
Speaker 1: I met this guy last week, a Mexican guy named
Speaker 1: Mario Garnier, who is like the latest, you know, major
Speaker 1: advocate for the toad medicine. He actually comes from the
Speaker 1: Sonora area, and when he's asked, there's a debate synthetic
Speaker 1: versus the toad, and the way he resolves it is
Speaker 1: to say they're just different. They're just different. Right now.
Speaker 1: I think he privately actually believes the real stuff is better,
Speaker 1: but he frames it that way. I remember Sasha Shulgin,
Speaker 1: he was a bit contemptuous. He said, use the synthetic.
Speaker 1: It's the same drug, and in fact, if anything, that's
Speaker 1: a little cleaner, so you're less likely to get sick. Now.
Speaker 1: You talk in the book about your own experience with
Speaker 1: a synthetic and then using I think the mesican that
Speaker 1: comes from the sun pedro plant. I think in the
Speaker 1: second case, the first ones are very high dose. That
Speaker 1: was a kind of a lower dose. Um. But you
Speaker 1: also talk about how our view of this is so
Speaker 1: alien to people in the Native American church or indigenous
Speaker 1: people's for whom the drug quote unquote is almost secondary
Speaker 1: to the ritualistic context. And they're very devoted to their
Speaker 1: cactus and they're not interested in synthetic mescaline, and they're
Speaker 1: not interested in san pedro, and in fact, they're not
Speaker 1: even interested in peyote that's been grown cultivated. They think
Speaker 1: that's not the same either, that it has to be wild.
Speaker 1: And there may be some truth to that. I don't know.
Speaker 1: We haven't grown a lot of payoty, but we're gonna
Speaker 1: try and see what happens. But it may be like
Speaker 1: hydroponic lettuce, you know, it just maybe weak. Um, you know.
Speaker 1: I think it depends on the drug. I think that
Speaker 1: synthetics are often cleaner and there's less gastro intestinal upset.
Speaker 1: There are other alkaloids we know that are active um
Speaker 1: in the same way, cannabis is not just THHC. It
Speaker 1: has other things going on and and maybe other things
Speaker 1: we haven't yet found. Same with the natural forms of
Speaker 1: most of these drugs. In the case of air got
Speaker 1: you would not want to eat the natural form. That's
Speaker 1: you know, you could get gang green and insanity. I
Speaker 1: mean that things happen. And I just say to our listeners.
Speaker 1: Is the connection with LSD, right, Yeah, it's the It's
Speaker 1: the fungus from which LSD is derived and has a
Speaker 1: dark history in European culture of leading to all sorts
Speaker 1: of problems when people ingested it on bad grain. Another
Speaker 1: way to look at this is um look at coco
Speaker 1: versus cocaine. You know, Andy and Wade Davis have written
Speaker 1: eloquently about how coca leaves, which are used like caffeine
Speaker 1: is in our culture in South America, has a lot
Speaker 1: of positive attributes and very few negative attributes. And it
Speaker 1: is the refinement into cocaine where you end up with
Speaker 1: a powerful drug that people can get into trouble with
Speaker 1: and dit oh, you know opium poppies, poppy tea is
Speaker 1: or even opium Compared to the powerful synthetics like fenyl
Speaker 1: and so it depends. I mean, if you're talking about
Speaker 1: things of equal strength, that's one argument. If you're talking
Speaker 1: about the fact that you're refining something from nature and
Speaker 1: making it orders of magnitude more intense, that's another story. Um.
Speaker 1: I think we can get hung up though on romanticizing
Speaker 1: things in their natural form, But there are some protections
Speaker 1: and having them in their natural form too, which is
Speaker 1: that they're often weaker and you know, likely to be
Speaker 1: less overwhelming. Yeah. Well, you know. The other thing I
Speaker 1: like about your writing, and especially in the most recent book,
Speaker 1: is the way you throw things into historical context. And
Speaker 1: I'm reading through it and I'm saying to myself, I
Speaker 1: wonder if he's going to mention Shivel Bush, wonder he's
Speaker 1: gonna and there there's Wolfgang Shivel. He both this book
Speaker 1: Tasted Paradise a couple of decades ago, about spices, stimulants,
Speaker 1: and intoxic ins, and he points out how in Europe
Speaker 1: they didn't have coffee or tea until the sixteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: they didn't have tobacco. I don't think till the fifteen
Speaker 1: sixteen hundreds, right, that actually spices played a role almost
Speaker 1: like a Nebrians they had alcohol, and they didn't even
Speaker 1: have hard liquor, right, they had low potency alcohol. So
Speaker 1: spices played that role. Yeah, they had a hard cider
Speaker 1: and things like that. Yeah, I forget when distillation comes in,
Speaker 1: but that's pretty late too. Um. Yeah, spices are the
Speaker 1: kind of forerunners of drugs. Um. And you know, I
Speaker 1: mean if you eat chili peppers, right, or black pepper,
Speaker 1: lots of black pepper, you feel flushed and you feel
Speaker 1: it changes consciousness. I mean, there are many foods to
Speaker 1: change consciousness. Sugar Just watch kids with sugar. That's their drug.
Speaker 1: It's a powerful effect. But I love that chivil Bush
Speaker 1: book and I remember reading it back in the eighties
Speaker 1: and thinking, wow, this is a fascinating area. And and
Speaker 1: that was one of my inspirations to write about drugs.
Speaker 1: The other is a book I wonder if you know
Speaker 1: by uh By Lenson called on Drugs. I think that's
Speaker 1: just a brilliant book that no one's heard of about drugs.
Speaker 1: And um, he's very good at looking at the cultural
Speaker 1: and economic um identity of different drugs. You know that
Speaker 1: cocaine is a consumerist drug, right, you always want more.
Speaker 1: It drives that consumerist economy. And other drugs make you
Speaker 1: very content with what you have in front of you, cannabis.
Speaker 1: And then he had a wonderful chapter on LSD and
Speaker 1: how it was orientalized by Timothy Leary. It's really true,
Speaker 1: you realize it's it's so much of you know. He
Speaker 1: used the Tibetan Book of the Dead as the frame
Speaker 1: for the experience. And it's really just about how constructive
Speaker 1: these drug experiences are. But yet they do have qualities
Speaker 1: that push them in one direction or another. Let's take
Speaker 1: a break here and go to an ad. He also write,
Speaker 1: I mean about the ways in which society has transformed.
Speaker 1: I mean, alcohol is the far and a way the
Speaker 1: most widely consumed drug and revolutionary error early nineteenth century America,
Speaker 1: other parts of the world. Um, but then there's the
Speaker 1: transition here and in other countries, United Kingdom elsewhere, man
Speaker 1: a bunch of the Western world to coffee, and that
Speaker 1: in an increasingly industrialized world, that is more appropriate. I
Speaker 1: love the point you make that it can't be just
Speaker 1: coincidence that both the emergence of cought the and the
Speaker 1: emergence of the minute hand on the clock happened around
Speaker 1: the same time. Yeah, well, you know, what's really interesting
Speaker 1: about the arrival of caffeine, coffee and tea and chocolate
Speaker 1: in Europe. Those three substances arrive in the same decade
Speaker 1: in England, which makes that a really a red letter
Speaker 1: decade as far as I'm concerned. But we see it
Speaker 1: before and after the introduction of a of a powerful drug,
Speaker 1: because the older drugs like alcohol, cannabis, opium, they've been around,
Speaker 1: you know, since prehistory. Probably said, we don't know what
Speaker 1: a world without them was really like. But we see
Speaker 1: the arrival at a moment in time of caffeine and
Speaker 1: it changes things in a profound way. And people at
Speaker 1: the time noticed, they're writing about this new sober and
Speaker 1: civil drink and that you know, clerks and offices are
Speaker 1: no longer drunk, and they're doing a better job and um.
Speaker 1: And it was immediately grasped that this drug was well
Speaker 1: suited for mental work in a way alcohol wasn't, and
Speaker 1: was well suited for operating machinery. So the the industrial revolution,
Speaker 1: you gets a big push from the arrival of caffeine.
Speaker 1: It creates the kind of worker that you want. And
Speaker 1: you know, before that people were doing physical work outdoors
Speaker 1: and it didn't matter if you were buzzed, and people
Speaker 1: were buzz because they were drinking, you know, at breakfast,
Speaker 1: because alcohol was safer than water. And that's why you
Speaker 1: even gave alcohol to your kids. UM in the form
Speaker 1: of hartsider, I mean, not strong forms of alcohol, but
Speaker 1: but everybody got alcohol. Once you start doing work that
Speaker 1: involves heavy machinery, and especially when you need a night shift,
Speaker 1: you know, because these machines are so expensive and you
Speaker 1: want to run them all night. Caffeine is what allows
Speaker 1: us to stay up late. Caffeine disconnects us from uh
Speaker 1: natural time, the time of the sun used to be.
Speaker 1: You would work from dawn till dusk. With caffeine and
Speaker 1: electric light and or gaslight and a few other things
Speaker 1: like coal, you could have a night shift and an
Speaker 1: overnight shift. And it had a profound effect on um
Speaker 1: creating a human being, a human body that could work
Speaker 1: in the in the context of a mill or another
Speaker 1: kind of technological setup. UM. So, I think it had
Speaker 1: a big effect. And if you want an example of
Speaker 1: what's going on with capitalism and caffeine, just look at
Speaker 1: the coffee break and think about that. You know, your
Speaker 1: employer gives you a drug coffee or tea and then
Speaker 1: paid time in which to enjoy it. That's incredible. Why
Speaker 1: is your employer doing that not to be nice, They're
Speaker 1: doing it because they know that you you will work
Speaker 1: better and harder and more efficiently. Yeah. So part of
Speaker 1: what you do is to write this broad historical perspective,
Speaker 1: and you also raise concerns about the future. You point
Speaker 1: out that with climate change, many of the coffee growing
Speaker 1: regions maybe hurt the most. You know, you point out
Speaker 1: another place that with you know, we've typically gotten our
Speaker 1: opioids from the opium plant, morphine, heroin, etcetera. But now
Speaker 1: we see fentyl emerging, and we see other either semi
Speaker 1: or total synthetics that may be displacing this. We now
Speaker 1: see a for profit psychedelics world that knows that part
Speaker 1: of its opportunity to make money is by designing slight
Speaker 1: variations on the natural substances which they can't patent. And so,
Speaker 1: I mean, any thoughts about where we're going in terms
Speaker 1: of our psychoactive drug use of the future. Well, there's
Speaker 1: a few different futures out there, and I don't know
Speaker 1: which one is going to predominate, but I think they're
Speaker 1: going to be multiple. I mean, there isn't a kind
Speaker 1: of enclosure movement in the corporate world around psychedelics, an
Speaker 1: attempt to patent as much as possible. Compass Pathways is
Speaker 1: most notorious for wanting to patent psilocybin, and you can't
Speaker 1: exactly but the patent of one crystalline form of it,
Speaker 1: and whether that's a meaningful patent or not remains to
Speaker 1: be seen. But you know, psilocybin will continue to grow
Speaker 1: in cow patties, it will continue to grow in closets
Speaker 1: and the gardens, and it's I think it'll be hard
Speaker 1: to control. There will be the you know, the natural form,
Speaker 1: the mushroom form that will still be out there, and
Speaker 1: and underground therapy won't go away. I think it will
Speaker 1: actually get even more successful. There was a period where
Speaker 1: the underground therapists were worried they were going to be
Speaker 1: written out of psychedelic medicine. But they're no long you're
Speaker 1: worried about that because the demand is going to be
Speaker 1: so great and they have access to the drug and
Speaker 1: they they're the ones with a lot of experience too
Speaker 1: and administering it. And then there's gonna be this religious path.
Speaker 1: I'm very interested to see these new churches or you know,
Speaker 1: that use psychedelic as a sacrament. I mean, already we
Speaker 1: have three of them. There's two Ayahuasca churches that have
Speaker 1: the legal right to use ahuasca, and then there's the
Speaker 1: Native American Church, which has the legal right to use peyote.
Speaker 1: But there will be a church of psilocybin and a
Speaker 1: church of LSD. And I think that it's going to
Speaker 1: be very hard for the Supreme Court to deny that
Speaker 1: they are either religions or that this is their sacrament,
Speaker 1: and that the jurisprudence around religious freedom has gotten so
Speaker 1: crazily expansive that I think it's going to be like
Speaker 1: an exploding cigar when it gets to Samuel Alito's desk
Speaker 1: one of these churches, and we'll see. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: they don't always feel they have to be consistent, you know,
Speaker 1: they don't they it was saying, I mean, I remember
Speaker 1: Justice Scalia you mentioned right, and shot down the Native
Speaker 1: American Church is right to use peyote, and fortunately Congress
Speaker 1: overturn them. But Scalia was not consistently bad on all
Speaker 1: drug issues. But he may have been somebody who just
Speaker 1: kind of saw America as a Christian nation or Judeo
Speaker 1: Christian nation as fundamental to his conception, and that therefore
Speaker 1: allowing something like this might threaten it. But how outrageous
Speaker 1: I mean, given the fact that white people came to
Speaker 1: this country seeking religious freedom, the free exercise of religion,
Speaker 1: and they put it in the First Amendment. And here
Speaker 1: are the people who pre existed us using their sacrament
Speaker 1: and being told by the Supreme Court of the United
Speaker 1: States that the drug war is more important than your
Speaker 1: religious practice. I mean, it was just one of the
Speaker 1: most outrageous decisions, and I'm really glad it was undone.
Speaker 1: So you know, you get into the Native American Church,
Speaker 1: what are the interesting things? Well, first of all, you
Speaker 1: make the point that if people white people and all
Speaker 1: others who are not part of the Native American Church
Speaker 1: are gonna use mescaline, don't get it from peyote, get
Speaker 1: it from the synthetic or else, get it from the
Speaker 1: sign pedro plant which grows in abundance. And his very
Speaker 1: hearty right. But you also interesting pointed out that Native
Speaker 1: Americans did not actually use this until a hundred years
Speaker 1: or so ago, whereas the traditional use went back hundreds
Speaker 1: of not suses of six thousand years six value among
Speaker 1: the witch all in Mexico and others as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the story of the Native American Church and how it
Speaker 1: was created and what it did for Native Americans was
Speaker 1: to me one of the more moving stories I've I've
Speaker 1: written about. UM. It is true that it wasn't until
Speaker 1: the eighteen eighties at least, that white people noticed it
Speaker 1: that they were using peyote in a ceremonial way. Um.
Speaker 1: It was a revival of a practice um that had
Speaker 1: been continuous in Mexico. And remember the distinction between Texas
Speaker 1: and Mexico is fairly recent, and peyote grows on both
Speaker 1: sides of the Rio Grand in a strip there. And UM,
Speaker 1: there may have been Native Americans in Texas South Texas
Speaker 1: who used it continually, but for most Native Americans, it
Speaker 1: was really when they were forced onto reservations in Oklahoma
Speaker 1: and brought into close contact with one another that this
Speaker 1: practice spread, um and became a really an inter tribal
Speaker 1: um practice and did a lot to knit different Indian
Speaker 1: groups together, because remember, before we got here, they weren't
Speaker 1: Native Americans. Uh. In both in both senses, there was
Speaker 1: no America. But also they were separate nations, and many
Speaker 1: of them hated each other. They were agrarian people, and
Speaker 1: there were no mads, and they had many different lifestyles
Speaker 1: and and uh so it's it's only us that have
Speaker 1: forced them to be lumped together. And the Native American
Speaker 1: Church when that phrases invented, is the first time the
Speaker 1: phrase Native American is used. And that doesn't happen to
Speaker 1: but anyway, at a at a moment of maximum trauma
Speaker 1: for American Indians in the eighteen eighties, this is after
Speaker 1: the Ghost Dance has been suppressed violently, there's a massacre
Speaker 1: at Wounded Knee. This is after, um, we've begun taking
Speaker 1: Indian children from their parents, cutting off their hair, putting
Speaker 1: them in boarding schools. Where the avowed aim was to
Speaker 1: and this is a quote to kill the Indian and
Speaker 1: save them. And it was the policy of the US
Speaker 1: government to destroy Indian culture. Um, many of their religious
Speaker 1: practices were outlawed, the Sun Dance, for example, and and
Speaker 1: by the way, we're outlawed until the Carter administration. So
Speaker 1: this is a kind of horrible episode. And um, the
Speaker 1: Native Americans found that peyote used in ceremony was helped
Speaker 1: accommodate them to their new lives um and helped heal
Speaker 1: them from things like alcohol, which don't really become a
Speaker 1: problem until reservation life. And so you know, this is
Speaker 1: a traumatized people, and they found relief in peyote and
Speaker 1: continue to the payote is um is is. Now you know,
Speaker 1: there're two and or fifty thousand members at least in
Speaker 1: the Native American Church, and and I don't know how
Speaker 1: many different tribes, but dozens and dozens of tribes. So
Speaker 1: it's a very hopeful story and it's a story from
Speaker 1: which we we stand to learn a lot. Well. In closing,
Speaker 1: let me just say, you know, when I think about
Speaker 1: the future of psychoelic assistans psychotherapy and whether health insurance
Speaker 1: will pay for it, reading in your talk that the
Speaker 1: Indian Health Services pays for peyote sessions, I mean, what
Speaker 1: a great you know, precedent for covering the cost of
Speaker 1: psych assisted therapy. So, Michael, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: joining me. It's great to catch up. I love your
Speaker 1: new book. Um do you have any plans where the
Speaker 1: next book is not? Yeah, not yeah, I'm working on that.
Speaker 1: I've been too busy with this one. Okay. Always a
Speaker 1: pleasure to talk to you, Ethan Yes YouTube, Michael, Thanks
Speaker 1: very much. Psychoactive is the production of I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Naedelman. It's
Speaker 1: produced by Katcha Kumkova and Ben Cabrick. The executive producers
Speaker 1: are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronovski
Speaker 1: for Protozoa Pictures, Alice Williams and Matt Frederick for iHeart
Speaker 1: Radio and me Ethan Naedelman. Our music is by Ari
Speaker 1: Blusian and especial thanks to Aviv Brio, Sef Bianca Grimshaw
Speaker 1: and Robert Beatty. If you'd like to share your own stories, comments,
Speaker 1: or ideas, please leave us a message at eight three
Speaker 1: three seven seven nine sixty. That's one eight three three
Speaker 1: psycho zero. You can also email us as Psychoactive at
Speaker 1: protozoa dot com or find me on Twitter at Ethan
Speaker 1: natal men And if you couldn't keep track of all this,
Speaker 1: find the information in the show notes. Tune in next
Speaker 1: time for my conversation with the former president of Columbia
Speaker 1: that's the country, not the university, and Nobel Peace Prize
Speaker 1: winner Juan Manuel Santos. I come from a country which
Speaker 1: perhaps is the country that has suffered most in this
Speaker 1: world war on drugs. Colombia, for decades have been fighting
Speaker 1: this war at a terrible cost. We have sacrificed our
Speaker 1: best leaders, are best journalists, are best judges, and we
Speaker 1: are still the number one exporter of cocaine to the world.
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