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March 8, 2001 - Art Bell
03:32:10
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Psychoactive and Healing Plants - Dr. Dennis McKenna
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From the high desert and the great American southwest, I bid you all good evening and
or good morning wherever you may be across this great land of ours stretching from the
island of Guam out across the dateline eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S.
Virgin Islands, south into South America, north all the way to the pole.
This course is Coast to Coast AM, carried worldwide on the Internet.
And yes, thank you all, all over the world, who sent me the emails.
We have turned on your countries.
The next time we do an International Line Fest, you'll be able to get in.
Anyway, it's great to be here.
We've got a lot to do.
In the next hour, we're going to have Dennis McKenna here.
Dennis McKenna is a brother of Terrence McKenna.
And when you hear Dennis, you're going to think you're hearing the late Terrence McKenna.
God rest his soul.
I mean, they sound so much alike, but I guess brothers would.
And Dennis McKenna kind of stayed to the scientific side of drugs.
We'll find out to what extent.
While Terrence stayed on the let's pop it and see what it does side of drugs.
So we're going to talk a little bit about drugs in the second hour.
Coming up in a moment, Richard C. Hoagland.
And I'll tell you why he's here.
As you know, I saw the Frasier Show and taped it, fortunately, the other night.
And now there's a big brouhaha about what Senator Glenn said on the Frasier Show.
And let me say once again, for the minions, in the context of comedy, Senator John Glenn said on the Frasier Show, quote, Back in those glory days, I was very uncomfortable when they asked us to say things that I didn't want to say and deny other things.
Some people asked, you know, were you alone out there?
We never gave the real answer, yet we've seen things out there, strange things.
But we know what we saw out there, and we couldn't really say anything.
The bosses were scared of this.
They were afraid of the War of the Worlds type stuff, and about panic in the streets.
So we had to keep quiet.
And now we only see these things in our nightmares, or maybe in the movies.
And some of them are pretty close to being the truth."
Obviously, this is on a comedy show, but why would John Glenn say this?
Did John Glenn want to say it?
Certainly, if he had not wanted to say it, he would not have said it.
In other words, he knew very well what was in the script.
I've been on these things, and even though it looked very extemporaneous, you can bet it wasn't.
I mean, these things are scripted carefully.
I've been on enough TV shows, too damn many, To not know that, they're scripted very carefully, so he knew what he was going to say.
Now, there's a lot of reaction on some other programs and by other individuals, remaining unnamed right now, are reacting furiously to this, saying, oh, this comedy was nothing.
Well, maybe it was nothing.
Or maybe it was something.
Who knows?
It was interesting, that's for sure.
Now, check this out, folks.
Go to my website right now at www.artbell.com, and you're not going to believe this, but NBC has two video clips up there on NBCI.
Two video clips.
One of Senator John Glenn making part of this statement, only part of this statement.
They cut it off, and I'll tell you where in a minute.
And then the second video clip.
is of John Glenn uh... sort of talking uh... you know about the fact that uh... the Joe Frazier came to him now Richard Hoagland has some contrary information uh... we'll we'll uh... we'll talk to Richard in a moment and find out about that uh... this whole thing is blowing up in a very interesting way now all of a sudden there are video clips on the NBC page was so we've got links you can actually see a video clip of Senator John Glenn saying, in part, what he said on Fraser, but only in part.
All right, having said all of that, in a moment, we'll get further into it with Richard C. Hoagland.
Now, here from the mountains of New Mexico, the man who consulted at one time for NASA, Won the Engstrom Science Award, worked with Walter Cronkite.
Daddy, here is Richard C. Holman.
Richard, hi.
Good evening, Art.
Good evening.
Well, well, well, well.
We did a little thing on Frasier the other night, and now what a brouhaha has ensued.
Well, it looks to me, in some quarters, as if it's damage control.
The thing everybody needs to keep in mind is that John Glenn is not the first American astronaut to claim The U.S.
government is not telling us the truth on these matters.
Right.
The first one was Gordon Cooper on your show.
Gordon has, oh yes, on my show indeed.
That's right.
I mean, he just flat out said it.
That's right.
And then a week ago, plus a few days and hours, you know, we have Arthur Clark making this startling statement.
So there's a context.
You know, Clark says there's life on Mars.
We're not getting, you know, appropriate answers or any answers, no official comment.
And then, you know, a few days ago, we have this Frasier Show.
Now, everybody makes a big deal, including you, that it's a comedy show.
I said it a million times, but those other programs now that have followed mine, Richard, are coming on.
And what's the big deal?
My God, it was just comedy!
Well, that's what I said in the first place, but it apparently is a big deal to bring out people ripping at me for even bringing it up.
Well, if you're going to make that claim, as Oberg is claiming, that it's, quote, just comedy, you have to look at the entire context of the half hour.
And what is so peculiar is that John's soliloquy is done in total isolation.
There's no interaction with any other character.
The other characters don't even know he's doing it.
And then, at the end of the bit, he comes into the control room and says, when he finds there's a tape, I gotta have that tape.
And then NBC puts a partial recording of it.
They didn't use the whole thing.
They only used part of it, and they used part of it which would lend credence to the, oh, it's just comedy, but the part they put has no relevance to the soliloquy that Glenn actually utters.
Well, quite true.
They put this much in.
This is what you'll see on a video clip if you go to my website and click on the link.
Back in the glory days, I was very uncomfortable when they asked us to say things that I didn't want to say and deny other things.
Some people asked, you know, were you alone out there?
We never gave the real answer, yet we've seen things out there, strange things, and that's where the video clip ends.
They don't do the second, oh, two-thirds of the thing.
Yeah, where you talked about the nightmares in the movies and how the movies are pretty close to the real thing.
Yes.
I see this all as ad-hoc, back-channel damage control, and the reason is that after we did the show the other night, and you made a big deal of this, apparently the production company got a lot of calls.
It's a smart thing to have a track down who produces Fraser.
Yes.
And one of the people that called them was Steve Bassett.
Remember, we said on the show he was going to do that.
Steve Bassett, America's only UFO lobbyist.
A call from Washington.
He actually had incorporated some of this Into a letter to John McCain, because he's requesting a meeting with the Senator, to sit down and discuss NASA and UFOs and military security and cloistered, you know, black ops technology and a whole range of issues.
And he used the Clark quote and the Glenn quote to bolster the idea that something is going on and the political part of this government needs to get with the system.
They need to get with what's going on.
So anyway, Bassett called the production company.
And let me quote very accurately what happened.
He said he contacted them and they took a message.
There was no call back.
So he called them again.
Today, I guess.
Yeah.
And it was made very clear they did not want to talk to him on the phone.
They said, write a letter.
And he said, forget it.
However, in the process of the exchange with this official spokesperson, who he got the impression was really pissed at all the calls they were getting on this.
I'm sure they are.
He was told by this woman that Glenn had approached them.
You mean, now... John Glenn had called up the production company that produces Fraser and had suggested he do a show.
Alright, folks... And it was not the other way around.
Well, okay.
Now, having said that, one of the clips that I've got on my website tonight, linked to, one of the clips is a clip of a Senator John Glenn himself Saying that the people at Frasier approached him.
That's right.
That's from his mouth.
From his mouth, sitting on the set with a PR camera running.
But you can tell that that clip was shot weeks ago, whenever this show was actually produced.
I'm sure.
The lead time.
I'm sure.
They do all the little promo things while you're sitting there.
Sure.
The comment today was made in real time after this whole thing had erupted.
And the production company is saying, officially, John Glenn approached us.
Now, if you understand Hollywood, and you, of course, do, Art, you understand that the only thing that makes any sense in Hollywood is ego and money.
And they both go hand in hand.
So, if the production company had gone out to get John Glenn, they would brag to the rooftops that they had managed to snag this genuine American hero, U.S.
Senator, senior, etc., etc., to come on and do a show.
They would not be giving away the ego part by claiming that it was Glenn's idea to come to them.
In other words, there's no reason for this spokesperson to have lied about this.
And what Glenn did on the show, given that no one realized there was going to be any big deal, I mean, come on, it's just a TV show, right?
On the other hand, there's no reason for Glenn to lie either.
Well, but it all depends on the nuance.
Remember, we're in the era of spin.
You know, let's say...
Who knows how it actually went down, and whether he really made the phone call, or did one of his people make the phone call, and then they responded so he could say, they came to me.
You know what I mean?
In other words, you don't know the precise footing.
No, of course we don't.
It's interesting that there is a controversy, because we're going to get to the bottom of this.
Well, what I really find interesting, aside from the fact that NBC's probably going nuts, is the fact that they did put the clip up there, number one, which means they must be reacting to an awful lot of, you know, an awful lot of phone calls, an awful lot of interest.
I mean, why else put the clip up?
And I wonder where that interest came from?
Well, number two, just because we do a program and we talk about the clip, it generates And remember, this is not without a context.
other programs uh... sort of uh... doing damage control it would seem
uh... by several hosts just comedy is to what what it is a big deal out of it for
us to study what it's no big deal why bring a a spokesperson on to say it's no
big deal exactly and remember this is not without a context context is that
other astronauts
have very strongly no cooper being one of them
ed mitchell being another Absolutely.
I mean, Ed Mitchell has said there's a secret black government and it's running the space program and that NASA really isn't in control.
I know.
I know what he's saying.
He's got a John Glenn statement in context.
Now, look, there is the classic game in Washington of plausible deniability.
If you want to run something up the flagpole to see who salutes, as they used to say in New York City in the ad game, how would you do it?
Would you call a press conference?
No.
It's called the trial balloon.
Presidents and Secretaries of State and Secretaries of Defense and all kinds of Senators do this every single day of the week.
They run something up to see what the reaction is going to be.
Now, what better way to see what the reaction is going to be to such an extraordinary statement from a man like Glenn than to put it in the frame of a comedy show?
And it wasn't some two-bit whoever-heard-of-a-comedy-show, it was the number one show that everybody, including myself, watched very carefully because it's well-written, it's intelligent, it's articulate, it's funny.
And I will say this, the entire program seemed to be a frame for that few moments of John Glenn, rather than the other way around, rather than John Glenn doing a You know, just a sort of a quick appearance.
It wasn't that at all.
It was the other way around.
And for those who didn't see the show, what was remarkable is that while Glenn is doing his from-the-heart, this-is-the-way-it-really-was, Ross and Fraser are in the control room having a fight over Fraser's ego, and they miss the biggest story of their lives.
That's right.
And the metaphor, which I think we can reasonably impart to the writing, So let me tell you what's going to happen tomorrow.
We've got two major papers.
they've missed the biggest story of their lives.
I do agree. It could easily, that could be a good metaphor I think, yes. So let me tell
you what's going to happen tomorrow.
We've got two major papers, two Cracker Jack reporters who are going to be calling the Fraser production offices
and basically demanding
to talk to senior producers.
Oh, I'm sure they're glad to hear that.
And we're not going to tell everybody who they are, but I'll tell you, you would recognize instantly the papers that they work for.
Really?
And tomorrow night, if there's anybody that cares, we will report what we find out from those reporters.
Well, tomorrow night I'm going to be in Los Angeles, Richard.
That's right.
So it may well be Monday that we report in.
Frankly, it may take Monday before you get an answer.
Impossible.
But the point is that this, again, has to be viewed in context.
If we had not had Arthur Clarke raising the ante by claiming forthrightly there's life on Mars... Large life.
Large life, yeah.
And if we hadn't had previous astronauts claiming that the government is snookered us on this critical issue, John Glenn's statement All right.
Well, Richard, wonderful.
I think we've laid it out pretty well.
there is a flow here there is a definite run up the flagpole and see what happens and nbc in the
government and whoever's behind it
quite included are certainly seeing what happened uh...
alright uh... or richard wonderful i think we've laid out pretty
well all i can say is i am suspicious
of the amount of reaction to what we did the other night no doubt reaction to
I mean, video clips go up, people get on other shows denying things.
Come on, folks.
Unofficial NASA spokespersons like Oberg say, oh, come on, lighten up, guys.
It's just comedy.
Well, the only thing I can say is stay tuned.
Stay tuned.
Richard, thank you.
Good night.
Good night, Richard.
And thank you very much for coming on.
So, folks, again, on my website right now, if you go to it, You do have a kind of a rare opportunity, usually with television shows, you never get to see what somebody like myself is just talking about.
Unfortunately, you don't get to see the whole statement, but you do get to see it at least in part.
So if you'll go to my website under, just to put your cursor over what's new, first thing you'll see is video clips of John Glenn's statement, and it will take you to an NBCI page where they have actually put the video clips up.
There are broadband and narrowband versions for dial-up folks out there.
I've got a story here that I'm not going to let go of.
I'm just not going to let go of.
The Boston Globe ran what I'm about to read you back in October of 2000.
Entitled, Space Fungus, A Menace to Orbital Habitats.
Now that the service module has docked and the International Space Station will soon be habitable, a growing number of cosmonauts and astronauts could soon face a new threat, space fungus.
During a recent mission, Mir crew members noticed that the view from the station's portal was deteriorating due to an unknown film that was spreading like some horror movie scum.
This is the Boston Globe, folks.
The portal was examined carefully after the crew returned to Earth, with the results shocking researchers and engineers.
Although the portal and other windows were made of extra-hard quartz glass and mounted on titanium covered with enamel, they were partly destroyed by a colony of fungi and bacteria visible to the naked eye.
A communication device on Mir was damaged by space fungus during the 24th main mission.
Engineers later learned the fungus also damaged electronic equipment on Mir, including a control block for a communications device used on the outpost from 1997 to 1998 during the 24th main mission to Mir.
The microorganisms crept under the steel cover of the block and sat on electrical contacts and polyurethane Polyurethane, rather, pieces.
As a result, parts of the copper cables located nearby were also oxidized.
Substance for these microorganisms was certainly not the metal.
You can't subsist on metal.
Not glass, not plastic.
According to Natalia Novikova, a deputy chief of the Department of Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow, quote, they consume organic stuff, Which consists of skin, lipids, and other products of human activity.
Human activity, she said.
Quote, these products get into the station atmosphere from human breath, sweat, and so forth, and stick to the station's surfaces.
Bacteria and fungi eat this stuff and generate products of metabolism, particularly organic acids, which can grow in steel, glass, and plastic.
It is a mysterious strain.
And I tell you once again, folks, it's all over Mir.
It's infesting Mir all over the place.
And I know they say Mir will burn up, or at least the better part of it will burn up.
Some is going to get to the ground.
But this fungus, or whatever it is, is in Mir.
Now, if Earth people are lucky, why, obviously, it's going to burn up and become sterilized as it re-enters the atmosphere.
If we're not so lucky, why, It's probably going to miss the Pacific Ocean east of Australia, New Zealand, and it's going to come down in Canada, and it's going to begin eating tasty Canadians.
Anyway, the mainstream press is just not reporting this, and I get story after story after story.
This one from the Boston Globe that I just read you, going back to October.
So, there's something strange up there, and it's coming This way.
Open lines ahead, a couple of more items.
I'm Art Bell.
This, from the high desert, is Coast to Coast AM.
This is the Coast to Coast AM.
This is the Coast to Coast AM.
Girl, you just don't realize what you do to me.
When you hold me in your arms so tight, you let me know everything's alright.
Kup Bundra Ah....
Put on a feeling, I'm high on believing, that you're in love with me.
It's as sweet as candy, its taste is on my mind.
Girl, you got me thirsty for another cup of wine.
Wanna take a ride?
Call Art Bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
800-618-8255, east of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
First time callers may reach out at 1-775-727-1222.
The wildcard line is open at 1-800-825-5033.
And to call out on the toll-free international line, call your AT&T operator.
And have them dial 800-893-0903.
Ah, good morning everybody.
Remember, I'm not gonna be here tomorrow night.
Uh, Ian's gonna be filling in because I'm going to a convention.
I hardly ever go to conventions.
Ever, ever, ever.
So...
This is sort of a new thing for me.
But I am going to a Radio and Records pop convention down in Los Angeles.
And it's going to be kind of interesting.
Somebody sent me the following in email.
Now there is a match.
I can see the variety headline now.
Major League Medicine man ready to rumble Queen of Sludge.
Let's get ready to rumble.
No, it's not going to be like that.
I am going to go up on stage with Matt Drudge, I'm told.
And we're going to have a little bit of an exchange, and as soon as I break his arm and he tells me where he broke the story about my returning to radio, then we'll have a civilized conversation.
It'll be fun.
Actually, it'll be fun.
So I'll be in Los Angeles and back on Monday.
Looking at the news headlines out there right now, House approves Bush tax cut plan.
True.
But before you start counting your pennies, know the Senate gets it next, and not smooth sailing there.
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in the investigation of blame for the sub-wreck.
They're beginning to shift blame, which they always do, of course.
Today, going toward a crewman who failed to report the ship was nearby.
As testimony entered the fourth day, criticism mounted against a fire control technician.
And then the other thing that looks interesting is, AIDS vaccine experiments promising.
Well, I've seen about a million of these stories.
It says, in a study giving new evidence that AIDS can be controlled by vaccine, inoculated monkeys stayed healthy despite exposure to high levels of the virus.
The new vaccine is being fast-tracked toward human testing.
In a report appearing tomorrow in the journal Science, researchers said the vaccine uses a 1-2-3 punch with Two shots to prime the immune system to resist the AIDS virus and a final shot with a modified pox virus to boost protection.
And I'm sure that there will be years of testing on people at high risk for AIDS, but I'll tell you this, with my recent experience with a flu shot, I'm going to let a lot of people take this one before I ever open up my arm to somebody with a needle.
This is an interesting story, very interesting story from UK news.
A lot of times stories like this appear in UK news and Europe and you know all around the world but rarely here.
A computer chip implanted behind the eyeball that could record a person's every lifetime thought and sensation is to be developed by British scientists.
Dr. Chris Winter said, quote, this is the end of death, end quote.
He said that he predicts within three decades it's going to be possible to relive other people's lives by playing back their experiences on a computer.
Kind of like the Dennis Potter television series.
By combining this information with a record of the person's genes, We could recreate a person physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Can you imagine?
Dr. Wenner's team of eight scientists at BT's health labs near Ipswich called the chip the soul catcher.
It would be possible to imbue a newborn baby with a lifetime's experiences by giving him or her the soul catcher chip of a dead person.
Holy smokes!
So, if you wanted to, maybe that's going to be the television of the future.
Talk about reality TV!
My Lord, you actually get to relive somebody else's life?
I mean, they say television is bad enough.
You know, you sit in front of the boob tube and you're sort of living life vicariously, but oh my God, to be able to actually experience the feelings, the smells, the touches, the Moments of passion, the moments of anger, the moments of religious insight of another person.
If you think you're stuck in front of the TV now, suppose you could slip in a chip and just live somebody's extraordinary life.
Year 2525 is right.
We're going to have our arms hanging by our sides before you know it.
And this also caught my eye, being a smoker, from the BBC News.
Cigarette packet gives verbal warning.
Now they better not do this over here.
Scientists are working on a cigarette pack which gives smokers a verbal health warning every time they satisfy their craving.
Now isn't that the pits?
You reach for a cigarette and your pack is gonna go, The Surgeon General says you better not do this!
Or something like that.
You know, like those little, those stupid little Things where you squeeze their belly and there's a little mess every time you take out a cigarette.
It's gonna say something.
I wouldn't do that.
You'll be sorry.
You're going to be breathing through a tube.
You know, they'll probably have all kinds of different messages.
Do I want my cigarette pack to talk to me?
No, I don't.
And so they better never bring it over here, but in Britain, it's on the way.
Mollins is a company in Britain.
And they're going to actually do it.
Under their design, a stiff plastic strip connects the hinged lid of a cigarette pack to a microchip in a miniature loudspeaker hidden in the base.
Well, gee, that ought to raise the cost of a packed cigarette by another two or three dollars, at least, huh?
Oh, and here's another one.
Just one more, sorry, and then we'll do some open lines.
In Sydney, Australia, We talked to some Aussies last night.
They've got a real mystery.
Seems something fell out of the sky.
A gigantic chunk o' ice.
Authorities were stumped today, that's Wednesday, March 7th, over the origin of a chunk of ice that crashed through the roof of a ceiling of a house on Sydney's northern beaches.
Nobody hurt when the ice cream container-sized block smashed apart on the Bathroom floor of a 63-year-old woman in Coles Road, Hartford, at 7.15 p.m.
yesterday.
Now, hail has been ruled out.
It was not hail.
Now, you'd say, normally, okay, well then, how about an airplane?
Everybody always thinks it's an airplane, right?
Once again, first they talked to the duty forecaster.
The weather bureau said no.
It wasn't hail.
It could have been hail.
It wasn't any hail.
And hail, no.
It wasn't that at all.
And then they checked with the airplane people.
And they say, no, sorry.
Virtually impossible.
Air Services Australia spokesperson said virtually impossible.
The ice had fallen from the plane.
For the ice to freeze on the airplane, it would have to be flying at a very high altitude level.
She's not over any flight path.
No airplanes went over her, so not an airplane, not hail, and a great big piece of ice, it came down through her roof, right, boom, made a big hole through her roof, and landed on the floor.
What in our atmosphere could cause something like that to happen?
Does anybody out there have any idea?
I certainly don't.
Okay.
uh... we will uh... we will in just one moment to open last and to the phones we go and on the wild card line you are on the air good morning lower by their employees yes and i have a couple of him radio questions for if you don't mind sure far away okay uh... i mean the uh... air force and i was wondering do you know if the air force has any alarm him radio or should i Well, when I was in, I had no problem.
I lived in a barracks, for example, at Amarillo Air Force Base, and I was able to go out and put a dipole on top of the barracks.
They allowed me to do that until I began to interfere too much with the TVs and radios, and then they moved me to a building far at the end of the base.
But no, as far as I know, no rules.
Okay, and if you're allowed, can you give your call sign or handle?
Sure.
My call sign is W-6-0-B-B, Old Broken Bones.
And one other thing.
Do you know what the best low-cost ham radio would be?
And also your best ham radio, no matter what the cost is?
Well, that calls for product endorsement.
The best way to get a good, inexpensive rig is to go to a ham swap meet.
And there you will find all kinds of extremely, extremely reasonably priced used equipment.
That's your best shot.
Okay, thank you.
All right, you're welcome.
Take care.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hey, good morning.
This is James calling from Worcester, Massachusetts.
Hi, James.
You're using new technology, new telephone technology.
The cell phone strikes again.
I am.
I'm in my cab, actually.
You're in your what?
Cab, I drive a cab.
Oh, you're a cabby, all right.
I am.
And, uh, can I give a, I guess a quick shout-out, sort of?
A quick what?
I don't know.
Want to say hello to somebody?
No, see, if you had just done it, that would be one thing, but there's actually, there's like a rule against that.
Maybe if you want to say hi, Mom, you know, no problem.
Hi, Mom.
Very good.
The only people who know about Art Bell are the people that I told.
Except twice in a row, I had someone that knew who you were in the cab.
They know who they are.
That should do it.
Alright, anything else?
I have a question and a suggestion.
Alright, question is?
Michael Moore, I called last week about him.
You know who he is?
Do you have any thoughts on him?
I didn't quite catch that.
Who?
Michael Moore, TV Nation, the Whole Truth guy.
Oh, um, no I don't know a whole lot about him.
No?
Sorry?
I read a few books and seen all the stuff, and I think you two would have plenty to discuss.
Well, as I said last night, and I'm going to say again, if people have a suggestion for me to have a guest on, please send me information about how I can contact that person.
Otherwise, it's a nightmare trying to do it.
Anyway, anything else?
Well, you know how you have... Do you still send your pictures that you put on your front page?
Yes.
You get a lot of suggestions for bumper music.
Whichever play you like.
I know someone who sent you a song once a week or... Well, uh, people send me songs all the time.
Thank you.
And if you want to send me one, you're welcome to.
But I only play stuff I like.
So, if I take a cotton to it, then I'll play it.
If I go, ooh, then probably it won't get on.
It's about that simple, really.
Buzz for the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hi.
Art Bell.
That's true.
This is Kwee Kweg.
Okay.
I'm just going to use that name because I'd like to use that name.
Do you mind?
I don't care.
You can call yourself Tomato if you want to.
Great.
So this is Quickquake from Sucker Tomato.
Okay.
Since you said Tomato.
I have a couple of comments and perhaps a suggestion about your last night's guest.
The very interesting stuff on cloning.
On cloning, yes.
Yes.
Now, he did not cover There's this interesting possibility where you can clone a female because the mitochondrial DNA that he talked about that gets carried over in the egg is from the female, and that's been known for a long time.
Oh, you know what?
My God, you're right!
In other words, if they use the female's egg, which has her DNA, and the female's nucleus, you could, in fact, clone an exact duplicate.
Presumably.
I mean, there are some... Let's say you could get a much higher percentage that is probably a homozygous of that.
Yeah, I'm with you.
Okay.
I should have asked about it.
I should have thought about it myself.
Right, right.
That's a good one.
And then, you know, he said that you get one out of ten of tries, actually, He did not give you figures that were meaningful.
right off the one right for ten out of a hundred that you implant five-year-old
fifty percent come out and actually develop correct yes he then did not on
go go on to say of that fifty percent that was the five percent remaining how
many of those have mistakes i mean he did not give you figures that were
meaningful you're talking generalities and that's that's the crux how you know
What kind of mistakes?
Are they teratogenic mistakes?
Are they developmental mistakes?
But even he said that, given his druthers, even though he wouldn't put government regulation on it, he's very wary about going ahead.
And he understands there are going to be mistakes.
Right.
And some of the mistakes are going to be living human... Horrors.
Mutants, yes.
Horrors.
Okay, now here's a last point.
There was this point made that in Genesis there's this reference to people remembering seven, eight hundred years back.
And there's some different interpretations of what that really means.
And let me give you one that's not usually mentioned in the mainstream, but is a good one.
All right.
And that is that when the report, you know, as reported in Genesis, that they could remember 800 years back.
Yes.
What that really means is that they could remember multiple incarnations back.
Well, it might mean that.
I mean, that's a good guess, but most people take it quite literally.
Right.
Well, that is literal.
It doesn't mean that it's in that body's lifetime, but that body can remember that far back.
Well, Yeah, but it was said that they live that length of time.
Actually, it says that they can remember, if I remember correctly.
And that is an interpretation that is made, and you have to go back to the original text.
It was something like seven, eight, nine hundred years, wasn't it?
Right.
No, I think the Bible is rather specific, and I think the Bible said that humans did live that long, had that kind of lifespan, and then the idiot Bit into the apple, and you know, here we are with 70 years, 80 years, whatever.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air.
Morning, afternoon, whatever.
Morning in some places, definitely not afternoon, except maybe on Guam.
Okay.
Well, I was going to call with a question pertaining to an island not too far from there.
Really?
I have an army buddy.
I don't listen to you.
I'm sorry to say, just until recently, uh... that mention that you are said you are in okinawa uh... i spent i spent a little better than a decade on okinawa yes well what i was wondering uh... if you might have been there during nineteen seventy one seventy two uh... i might have been yes why well the reason being i was stationed with army security agency which you probably know is the military intelligence branch of NSA yes and uh... i was at a place called field station soviet
Nicknamed Tory Station, just a little bit north of... I know where you were.
Sure, I know where you were.
Okay.
And on our off-duty time, myself and two other Army buddies were doing seminars on UFOs.
Oh, were you?
Way back then.
Yeah.
And they were members of NICAP and I was a member of NICUFO.
I wasn't into UFOs then.
I was mostly into chasing women.
I did a lot of that on the island.
Okay, well what I was getting at real quickly is that somebody at AFRTS got a hold of us.
We went in and we were interviewed.
On AFRTS, really?
They were our competition.
I was at KSBK, which was, you remember KSBK?
I sure do.
You must remember it.
Okay, they were our big competition.
We played all the songs that annoyed the hell out of them.
Okay, but you yourself never gave interviews concerning that?
No, as I say, back then on my off-duty time from the Air Force, and or my off-mic time from KSVK, I chased women rather than UFOs.
Okay, so you must have been in COSO a lot.
I was in COSO a lot, yeah.
Okay, well thank you for your time, sir.
You're very welcome, and Naha City as well.
Oh yes, those were the days.
Believe me, the stories one could tell.
Only, of course, you really can't.
I don't think I have enough time.
Wild Card Line, if you have something very quick before the top of the hour.
It's real quick.
All right, do it.
Raymond from Michigan.
Yes, Raymond.
And about the mirror fungus.
Yes.
I'm reminded of two things.
Yes.
One, the Andromeda strain.
Of course.
And two, the title, Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Something, boy, I'll tell you what, you nailed it right on the money, my friend.
All right, thanks, Art.
All right, thank you.
Take care.
I'm not saying this fungus is dangerous, but they don't make it sound real good either.
And it's in mere and indeed this way it's common.
Roll on the ground by the wind.
Roll on down in a spin.
I gave you love, I thought that we had made it to the top.
I gave you all I had to give.
Why did it have to stop?
You blow it all sky high By telling me a lie
Without a reason why You blow it all sky high
You blow it all sky high You blow it all sky high
You blow it all sky high You blow it all sky high
You blow it all sky high Leave your cares behind
Come with us and find The pleasures of a journey
Come with us and find The pleasures of a journey to the center of the mind
To the center of the mind Come along if you care
Come along if you care Come along if you dare
Come along if you dare Take a ride to the land inside of your mind
Take a ride to the land inside of your mind Beyond the seas of thought
Beyond the seas of thought Leave your cares behind
Beyond the realm of what Across the streams of hopes and dreams where things are
really not Come along if you care
Come along if you dare Take a ride to the land inside of your mind
But please realize You'll probably be surprised
For it's a land unknown to man where passion's deed is bad So if you can please understand
You might not come back Wanna take a ride?
Call Art Bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
618-8255, east of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
First time callers may rechart at area code 775-727-1222 or call the wildcard line at
775-727-1222.
To talk with Art on the toll-free international line, call your AT&T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
It is indeed.
Coming up in a moment is Dennis McKenna.
Dr. Dennis McKenna, the brother of Terrence McKenna, the late Terrence McKenna, who was on this program many times, was a good friend.
Terrence, God bless him, is gone now and I'm so sorry.
He was such a great man, he was such a great mind, but you're about to have a strange journey yourself because his brother Dennis...
He almost, frankly, he sounds like a clone, but I'll let you decide for yourself.
Last hour, we talked with Richard C. Hoagland.
We've got a link up on the website right now to the John Glenn statement made on Frasier, or at least a sort of a little part of it.
You can see that little part right now by going to my website at www.artbell.com.
Everybody's taken a look at that one.
NBC posted it, put it up there.
It's actual video with the audio, and only a partial statement.
And then, just to sort of wrap that up, Anne, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, writes, Hey Art, is it possible that Richard C. could be the Antichrist?
Yeah, I thought about that.
Sure, it's possible.
Now, Dennis McKenna, who sent me the following bio on himself, I'm going to try and read this.
No guarantees.
For the last 25 years, Dennis McKenna has pursued the interdisciplinary study of ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens.
His co-author, he is co-author of course with his brother Terrence, of the invisible landscape mind hallucinogens and the I Ching, Seabury Press 1975, Citadel Press 91, a philosophical and metaphysical exploration of the Ontological implications of psychedelic drugs, which resulted from the two brothers' early investigations of the Amazonian hallucinogens in 1971.
He received his doctorate in 1984 from the University of British Columbia.
His doctoral research focused on anthro-pharmalogical investigations of the botany, chemistry, and pharmacology of Akusa and Ukubi, two orally active I believe it's tryptamine-based hallucinogens used by indigenous peoples of the Northwest Amazon.
Following the completion of his doctorate, Dr. McKenna received postdoctoral research fellowships in the laboratory of Clinical Pharmacology, National Institute of Mental Health, and the Department of Neurology, Stanford University School of Medicine.
In 1990, he joined Shaman Pharma... He joined Shaman... Dennis!
Yes?
He joined Shaman what?
Pharmaceuticals.
Oh, pharmaceuticals.
As director of... Ethnopharmacology.
Thank you.
You're going to help me right through this.
Then went back to Minnesota, I guess, in 1993 to join the Aveda Corporation.
Right.
Manufacturer of a natural cosmetics product as senior research pharmacologist.
Pharmacognosist.
You want to read the rest of this?
No.
He currently works as a scientific consultant to clients in the Herbal, nutritional, and pharmaceutical industries together with two colleagues in the natural products industry.
He incorporated the non-profit Institute for Natural Products Research, or INPR, in October of 98 to promote research and scientific education with respect to botanical medicines and other natural medicines.
He is currently a senior lecturer at the Center for Spirituality and Healing, that's interesting, in the Academic Health Center at the University of Minnesota.
Dr. McKenna serves on the advisory board of the American Botanical Council and on the editorial board of, Dennis?
Phytomedicine.
Thank you.
International Journal of?
Phytotherapy and Phytopharmacology.
Wonderful.
Founding board member and vice president of the Hefner, right?
Hefner?
Hefter.
Ah, okay.
Hefter.
Not to be confused with Hefner.
I understand.
Okay.
A non-profit scientific organization dedicated to the investigation of therapeutic Applications for psychedelic plants and compounds.
He's also served as board member and research advisor to Botanical Dimensions, a non-profit organization dedicated to the investigation of... Ethnomedically?
Significant plants.
He was a primary organizer and key scientific collaborator for the... Waska.
Project, an international biomedical study of... Waska.
A psychoactive drink used in ritual context by indigenous peoples and syncretic religious groups in Brazil.
He has conducted extensive ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian Amazon.
He has served as invited speaker at numerous scientific congresses, seminars, and symposia.
Dr. McKenna is author or co-author of over 35 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals.
His publications have appeared in the Journal of...
Ethnopharmacology, European Journal of Pharmacology, Brain Research, Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Neurochemistry, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Economic Botany, and elsewhere.
My God Almighty, Dennis.
Welcome to the program.
Thank you, Art.
It's great to be here.
And thank you for the help.
Am I on the air?
Of course you're on the air!
All right.
Yes, you're on the air.
And it's like listening to Terrence to hear your voice I was so shocked when I called you and we talked on the phone I was just I was I just sat there kind of blown away just blown away yes well everyone says we sound the same especially on the telephone oh and here on the air believe me you sound the same now when you and I talked on the phone putting all of this simply you said that you were more into the science of drugs while your brother Terrence was
My words, probably more hand-to-mouth.
Well, yeah.
We sort of have a division of labor, I guess you could call it.
He was more interested in the philosophical and metaphysical side, and I was more interested in what you might call the nuts-and-bolts side, although... So, in other words, when you would... Obviously, there was a lot of overlap of those two things.
So, for example, when you would discover a new drug, you'd say, here, take this, Terrence.
Uh, not exactly.
Or Terrence said, hey, what you got there?
I'll take that.
I just got curious about how these things work.
And, uh, uh, you know, those of your listeners that are familiar with our experiences in the Amazon and have read The Invisible Landscape will know that we came up against, uh, A number of things down there that it's very hard for science to get its hands around.
Explain.
Actually, you know what?
I have never really heard the story of what happened in the Amazon.
Well, I don't know if we can go into it here.
It's kind of a long story.
Well, maybe the high points.
Those of you who have read my brother's book, True Hallucinations, will be familiar with
it.
I would like to say, Art, before we get into that, I'd like to say that I very much appreciate
the support that has come.
It's been a rough couple of years here.
Horrible, actually.
I very much appreciate the support that came from many of your listeners.
There's really no way to thank so many people, but while we were struggling with Terrence's illness and his family, You know, we always knew that we weren't alone, that many people love Terrence so much, and we could feel that support.
Terrence had a brain tumor, for those who don't know.
you know dennis i i interviewed terence very much toward the end right and his
philosophic he was he was so good with it his his philosophical
approach to the possibility that he might die it was incredible
i had a money or he talked about he talked about it and and boy did he have it together
yes he had it together he had it together and i think that uh... couple of
interviews uh...
You know, if the use of these plants and working with these shamanic states doesn't prepare you for what lies beyond, I don't know what does.
And I think that's true.
I think that, you know, a lot of his experiences in life, you know, led up to that, so there were no real surprises.
You know, in the latter stages, I think he was very much ready to take control of the Starship and let it take him where it would.
But I did want to express my gratitude to so many of your listeners that were part of that struggle.
Well, I had Terrence on many times.
The audience knew him as one of their own, so it could not have been any other way.
That's right.
He was absolutely, Dennis, a remarkable, one of the most remarkable men I've ever had the pleasure to know.
I guess that's pretty good as remembrances go.
One of the most remarkable people I've ever known.
What a mind he had.
Yes, he had a great mind.
And he was a remarkable person in ways The world is a poorer place without him.
I'm very lucky to have grown up with him.
He was obviously a great influence on me and on many people.
Well, anyway, the two of you did go to the Amazon, and he never really talked a lot about that.
We touched on it, but he never really talked a lot about the nuts and bolts of what actually went on down there.
I guess, you know, how to get into this story.
Why did you go down?
What made you go down there?
Well, we both grew up in the 60s, of course, and I guess you could say we were hippies during that period of foment in the United States.
You know, I was in Haight-Ashbury in 67, and Terrence was living in Berkeley.
And so we were interested in psychedelics, you know, and sort of in an experimental phase of those with our lives.
But the one that stuck out in our experience at that time was one that still is fairly rare, and that is DMT, which stands for dimethyltryptamine.
Back in the 60s, it used to be called the businessman's trip because it's so short.
The way in duration, the way that DMT is normally taken, pure synthetic DMT is, well, essentially you smoke the free base as you do crack.
And when you do that, it produces a very rapid but extremely intense Psychedelic experience, which lasts about 10 minutes.
Terence had a quote about that experience that he used to say.
He compared it.
I'm trying to remember what he compared it to.
But he had a hit of a roller coaster ride or perhaps a rocket ship ride.
Well, something about, yeah, a rocket ship ride.
But he said it was probably the closest thing to heaven on earth or something fairly significant like that.
Well, I don't know if it's exactly heaven on earth, because it can be quite terrifying.
I mean, it's very overwhelming in that form, and it's also sort of very hard to pull anything out of it.
It's such a profound and such a rapid experience that you come back not really able to English much.
That you experienced.
I mean, about all you can say is, my God, what happened?
And that was part of our motivation.
That was at least the exoteric motivation for going to the Amazon, because we had heard in a paper by an ethnobotanist, Ari Schultes, about a very obscure hallucinogen used by the Wittoto In the Northwest Amazon, this was called ukule in their language, and it was a DMT-containing sap or resin from a tree.
But what was unusual about it, and what's unusual about the pharmacology of DMT to a certain extent, is that DMT is not orally active.
It is, if you eat it, pure DMT, nothing happens.
You have to smoke it.
You have to smoke it in the synthetic form because it's inactivated by enzymes in your gut and in your liver called monoamine oxidase.
So it's got to go straight from the lungs to the bloodstream.
Right, or somehow bypass that system.
Now in the case of ayahuasca, which is the other beverage, the psychoactive beverage that forms the linchpin of Amazonian shamanism, and has been sort of my preoccupation for 30 years, they get around this by combining two plants.
They combine the leaves of one plant, which they call chacruna, with the bark of a vine, which they call ayahuasca, and the beverage itself is called ayahuasca.
The bark contains compounds Which are monoamine oxidase inhibitors.
And when combined with the leaves of the chacrona, which contain DMT, that protects the DMT from degradation by this monoamine oxidase enzyme system.
So now it becomes orally active.
Exactly.
But it becomes a very different experience.
Instead of lasting 10 minutes, it lasts More like three or four hours.
Oh my.
But the intensity is less.
So, you know, it's like the slowed down, it's like you're seeing it at normal speed and when you smoke it, you're seeing it on the fast forward.
Dennis, I have no frame of reference to know what this, what this combination of drugs is like.
Is it like LSD?
Is it a lesser experience?
No, I wouldn't say it's a lesser experience.
It's a different experience than LSD.
If you compare intensity levels?
Again, it's always related to dose.
I mean, ayahuasca can be extremely intense.
It's similar to mushrooms, and it's similar chemically and pharmacologically to mushrooms, because psilocybin and DMT are Mescaline?
In the same chemical family.
Mescaline is in a different chemical family.
DMT and psilocybin are called tryptamines.
Mescaline and their ilk are in another class called phenethylamines.
So it's actually different.
But ayahuasca is unique.
In terms of its effects, you can't really say it's somewhat like LSD, yes.
It's somewhat like mushrooms, yes.
But it's really its own... And there's no language to describe the difference from LSD or from some other experience that somebody out there might relate to?
Well, I think you could say LSD, at least in my past experience, has been, excuse me, tends to be More of a personal thing, more psychoanalytic, more in a sense about you and about your psychology, whatever problems you may have, that sort of thing.
Ayahuasca can be that way, but I think there are more transpersonal elements, more archetypical elements.
It's much like dreaming, and it's like dreaming while you're awake, in the sense that you
experience many archetypal type themes.
I guess that's the best way to describe it.
People do use it for self-examination and psychotherapy, but it seems to incorporate, it seems to be, I guess, More of a direct pipeline to the collective unconscious.
Many of what... Now, that's something Terrence said about it.
Right.
That's something Terrence said about it.
Dennis, Dennis, Doctor, we're at the bottom of the hour.
Should I call you Doctor or Dennis or both?
Dennis is fine.
Dennis is fine.
All right, stay right there, Dennis.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
And don't do any of this.
If you want to listen, that's fine, but nobody's encouraging you to do any drugs.
Stay natural.
you'll be happy the same
it the
the the
Oh, baby.
I hate them.
Wanna take a ride?
Well, call Art Bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
First time callers may reach Art at 1-775-727-1222.
to the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
First time callers may reach out at 1-775-727-1222.
The wildcard line is open at 1-775-727-1295.
And to reach out on the toll free international line, call your AT&T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on the Premier Radio Network.
My guest is Dennis McKenna, Dr. Dennis McKenna, the brother of the late Terrence McKenna, who's on the show many times with me.
And we've had many discussions on this program about drugs, and we're going to touch on many of them tonight.
And none of this discussion Should be interpreted by anybody out there as an indication that you should go out and do it.
This is an examination of what some of this is all about.
That's all.
Drugs are part of our life.
They're very much part of our life.
Whether the over-the-counter type, the type you get at the store where it says drugs, or the guy down the street.
You know, drugs are part of our society.
Actually a very large part of our society, so dare we talk about them?
Absolutely.
Once again, Dr. Dennis McKenna.
Dennis, welcome back.
Thank you.
How much of the experience of the drugs themselves crossed into a sort of a metaphysical search?
How much of a part of All of this was that?
Well, I think at that time in our lives it was very much bound up with a metaphysical search.
You know, we were so impressed with the effects of synthetic DMT and so sort of frustrated with the rapidity of the experience.
That was the rationale for going to the Amazon to look for this orally active, this very obscure Orally active form called Ukuhe.
As it turned out, Ukuhe, which I returned to the Amazon ten years later and did part of my doctoral work, turned out not to be that interesting.
But in the process of investigating these things, we encountered the mushrooms when we went to La Charrera for the first time.
And eventually ayahuasca, and those are the orally active tryptamine hallucinogens that really have more depth to them.
I'm somewhat curious, I'm sorry, as you go down, as you go to the Amazon, Terrence and yourself are in the Amazon, you're going to some natives way out in the middle of nowhere How do you begin to ask them?
What plants?
Take us to the plants.
We want to have this experience.
How do you approach them?
Well, we were very naive at the time.
We didn't really know.
We had read a few papers from Schulte's work, from the Botanical Museum leaflets that reported this for the first time.
We just, you know, we were 20 years old, 20 and 24 years old, respectively.
I mean, we figured, you know, the world was our oyster and we could just go down there and get to it.
And as it turned out, that wasn't so far wrong.
There was an amusing incident when we were on the way to La Charrera, which is the ancestral home of the Wetoto and this area diffusion where this where this uh... ukulele is most widely most widely used even though now it's it's pretty much a dying cultural tradition but there was a colombian anthropologist at one of the villages that we passed through dr collier and he claimed that you know if we went and asked people for who could hate most would not know what we were talking about because it was a ship it was a secret that only the shaman do
And if we chance to ask a shaman, he would probably kill us for even mentioning it.
Really?
They told you that?
Well, he told us that, but he was a little paranoid himself.
So as it turned out, it wasn't so bad.
And when I actually went back in 1981 as a graduate student to sort of more systematically go about this, I went to a different place.
Difficult to travel in at that point.
And I went to Peru to a village called Pucurquillo, which is just north of the Amazon, downriver from the city of Iquitos.
And that is sort of the new home of the Huatoto after they were driven out of Colombia during the rubber boom.
And so I went there and interviewed many people and sampled many collections.
And what I found was that, you know, it's a kind of a... it's a disappearing tradition among these people who have been, you know, very much culturally impacted.
And it was kind of like, well, I remember my grandfather knew something about this.
Really?
You know, my father knew something.
I can try and make it.
Of course, they didn't speak English or even Spanish.
We were working through translators, but that was...
You know, that seemed to be the position it held at that time.
But we did find one or two older people, older shaman in this group who really did know how to make the real stuff.
And so, you know, we did end up getting samples, bringing them back to the lab and being able to, well, for my personal reasons, complete the thesis.
How long were you there?
In both instances?
Well, in 1971, when we went down, we weren't really there that long.
We went down in January of 71 and came out around the end of April.
That's quite a while.
Right.
And in 81, when I went to Peru, I wasn't in Pucallpa, the whole time.
I was traveling all over the country because I was also investigating Ayahuasca.
I was there about five and a half months.
Oh no, that's quite a while.
Yeah.
Did you actually live out with the natives for a while?
Part of the time.
Part of the time.
But when you're working with ayahuasca, ayahuasca in the Amazon, among the mestizo populations, is really a sort of an urban phenomenon.
There are still How much longer will all of this even be there?
In other words, you're saying it's being assimilated, it's disappearing in another 10 or 20 or 50 years.
these are folk medicine so it's really on the outskirts of cities like Iquitos and Pucallpa.
How much longer will all of this even be there? In other words, you're saying
it's being assimilated, it's disappearing in another 10 or 20 or 50 years. Would you not
be able to make that trip with the same results? It would be difficult.
I mean, a lot of these indigenous tribes are definitely in a state of cultural decline.
They've been impacted by so many factors, you know, relocation, dislocation, and loss of their cultures.
But in mestizo folk medicine, where ayahuasca is commonly used and is kind of the You know, at the center of a whole pharmacopeia of medicinal plants that these people use, it's, you know, I think that tradition is going to survive, especially now that there's so much interest from American tourists.
I mean, this whole industry of drug tourism, you know, which I don't necessarily think is entirely a bad thing or a good thing, but it's In a sense, it's been a shot in the arm to the traditional people.
You mean there are people that virtually, they're drug tourists?
They go down there just... People that go down to have these experiences, usually with ayahuasca.
The problem is that there's also, you know, anytime there's a revival, there's also a lot of charlatans.
It's not easy to get to the people that really know what they're doing but you can easily find anybody on the
street corners of the key to us who'd be willing to tell you
you know something but they call i was good you couldn't really be sure that
that's what it is but uh... yeah
you know if the mix it's a mixed bag but i think you know one of the
positive things about it is that these some of these people are sincere and
they are rediscovering their their own traditions I mean, I don't think ayahuasca is going to go away very soon.
And in fact, you know, there are indications that it may be spreading.
And that, you know, again, that has negative and positive aspects about it.
Let's talk a little bit.
I would like to say, I appreciate that you Yeah, sort of put in that caveat there at the end of the hour.
I'm not on this program to advocate that anyone should use any of these things.
I think that they should be investigated.
I disagree with the whole strategy of the war on drugs.
I think that's very short-sighted, and I think that people should have You know, personal choice to form relationships with plants, which is basically what this is about.
I do have a lot of trouble with the war on drugs.
Right.
Particularly the way it's being orchestrated disproportionately with regard to marijuana, for example.
Well, it doesn't, I mean, it simply doesn't work.
I think the thing to do, you know, a better approach is to Enable people to make informed choices.
When I say form relationships with plants, I use that term deliberately because I think when you choose to use a drug of any sort, you're choosing to have a relationship with that substance.
Just as you should be careful in choosing your friends and choosing the people you want to hang out with, you should be Careful and make informed choices in terms of the substances you put into your body, and particularly with the psychedelics, the circumstances, the set and setting that Leary talked about, is so important for the effects.
And that is why shamanism is really the model.
These people have been working with these substances for thousands of years.
And if we're going to develop models, whether it's psychotherapeutic or shamanic or whatever, but you need to, in order to use these substances safely and in a way that has benefits, and I believe they can be used safely and they can be beneficial, but the context is so important.
And this is the problem, that in this culture we lack that context, we lack that traditional context.
Are there laws against these drugs now?
In America?
Which drugs?
Well, DMT.
DMT is a controlled substance, definitely.
When it comes to plants that contain DMT, of which many, many do, because DMT is a very simple compound and it's very widespread in nature, The situation is much murkier.
It's not clear.
In fact, the plants themselves, as far as anyone knows, are not illegal.
But then they contain a controlled substance, DMT.
Our own brain contains DMT.
So this is creating some legal conundrums right now.
How can you ban all plants containing DMT without essentially criminalizing All of nature.
You know, DMT has been detected in over 150 species of plants, and that's only because somebody's bothered to look.
My personal belief is it's probably found in thousands, if not tens of thousands of plant genera.
Doctor, quick question for you.
Hallucinogens, the entire family, as a whole, are they Are they physically addictive, in your opinion?
No.
No, they're not.
They're not physically addictive.
They don't work on that part of the brain that leads to addiction, which substances like cocaine, for instance, have a completely different neurochemistry, neuropharmacology, and they work on the parts of the brain that have to do with our pleasure sensations.
They tend to create a craving.
If anything, the hallucinogens are anti-addictive.
Some people would take it and say, I'm not doing that again.
Exactly.
You sort of have to get your courage up to keep doing it.
So yeah, they're definitely not addictive in the physiological sense or the psychological.
Are there diminishing returns as one continues to use it?
Again, I think that depends on the substance that one is using and it depends on the context in which you use it.
If you use it for recreational purposes or without any real intent, I mean, in taking ayahuasca they always emphasize that it's important to have an intent, then I think after a while there are diminishing returns because, you know, you have no framework in which to You know, in which to understand it.
On the other hand, if you're working in a context, whether it's something that you create, you know, sort of your self-referential context for learning, or whether it's a more traditional shamanic type context, then I think there are anything but diminishing returns.
I mean, that's the thing, particularly with substances like ayahuasca.
If you You know, people shouldn't get involved with it without knowing that it's really a life's work.
It's a path.
It's not an instant, you know, it's not a fast track to enlightenment or anything like that.
It's like any other discipline.
And to be involved with ayahuasca or many of these substances, really what I call the classic, classical hallucinogens, it's a discipline.
And people should approach it that way.
All right.
Back to the war on drugs for just a second.
Do you delineate in your own mind the difference between the hallucinogens and cocaine?
For example, we've got, my God, over two million people in jail in America right now for various drug violations.
Very few of them, no doubt, relating to DMT or any other class of hallucinogens.
Some, but the majority, cocaine and heroin and Right.
That sort of class of drugs.
Right, right.
Well, again, you know, where I think a differentiation could be made that might be useful and might actually help clarify some of the issues on the war on drugs are to make a distinction between plants and compounds.
If you look at the way coca is used in Peru among indigenous peoples, or even opium as a plant substance, it's much less harmful, and much more difficult to become addicted or abused.
I think if the drug warriors were to say, We'll make a distinction between plants and drugs.
We will focus on substances that are extracted, purified, or synthesized.
Plants, we're not so interested in.
90% of the drug problem would go away if they would just, you know, say, you know, we're not going, I mean, primarily cannabis would drop out of the debate.
Sure.
Well, it's an herb, but we're not that concerned with that.
Well, what would happen if they brought I would be, hey, what's the big deal?
to america and began selling them uh...
uh... on the street or in a store you know as they are sold in south america
and used and chewed would it be an instant hit
or would it be sort of hey what's the big deal i would be hey what's the big deal i don't think most
people would bother with it
you know uh... it because it is no big deal i mean coca
coca as traditionally used uh... you know it's about as harmful as
green tea uh...
You know, there have been studies that show that coca, you know, among the people who live in the Andes who depend on it, it's an appetite suppressant.
It also supplies minerals and vitamins that they don't ordinarily get in their diet.
I mean, chewing coca leaves is, you know, really has, it's like You know, it's about as bad a habit as drinking coffee.
I was going to say, is it like coffee?
Yeah, it's somewhat like that.
All mild.
So then you think for the purposes of settling this damned war, this God-forsaken war, we could delineate between plants and purified substances from plants?
Well, I think that that would, yes.
I think that that would be a step in the right direction.
And if the government were to say, we're going to focus our efforts on people that are extracting or Synthesizing or making these pure substances, which are much more easily abused and inherently more dangerous because they're more potent.
You know, I think that that would be a step in the right direction.
I don't expect it to happen because I personally, you know, I don't think personally that the war on drugs is particularly about protecting people from drugs.
You know, if that were the case, then all the focus would be on tobacco, which is an herb.
It also kills 400,000 people a year in this country, as opposed to all other drugs of abuse, which kill maybe 20,000 people a year.
Absolutely right.
All right.
Here we are at the top of the hour already.
Time really flies, you'll find out.
So, Dr. McConnell, hold on.
We'll get back to you after the news at the top of the hour.
We're talking about drugs.
All kinds of drugs with Dr. Dennis McKenna.
I'm Art Bell.
The wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again.
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing.
To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing.
To have all these things in our memories, all of them.
And they use them to cover us.
Use them to cover us to fight!
Yeah!
Fight!
Fight like she's tall!
Take this place on this trip!
Just call me!
Want to take a ride?
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell, from the Kingdom of Nine.
My guest is Dr. Dennis McKenna, and we are talking about drugs.
We're talking about plants, and we're talking about drugs, and we're talking about the drug war, and we're talking about all kinds of strange things, and interesting things.
So I suggest you stay right where you are, because we have only just begun.
Once again, here is Dr. Dennis McKenna.
Dennis, welcome back.
Thank you.
I have a question for you that you certainly don't have to answer.
You can consider it and not answer it.
I spoke with Dr. Timothy Leary before he passed away briefly, and I had set up an interview, and of course there wasn't enough life left, and we never made it.
Although he was very comfortable to the very end.
He had a big cylinder next to him.
It's a long story.
Anyway, when I interviewed Terrence, I asked Terrence something that I had heard about Dr. Leary, and that was that out there somewhere, buried or secreted away, in a place that might still be found, it is said, and has been said for years, there are 20,000 hits of Blue Sandoz.
LSD.
And Terrence chuckled a little.
And didn't exactly say he knew where they were, but he didn't say he didn't know where they were.
He didn't know where they were.
You don't think he knew?
Of course not.
I think that's an urban myth.
An urban legend, you really think so?
I do.
You don't think Timothy socked them away somewhere, huh?
Well, I don't know.
Maybe he did.
Maybe he did, right.
Cold, anyway, or they won't be much good.
Well, that's true, isn't it?
Alright, so urban legend, okay.
Somebody writes, and I've got this screen I can look at, this computer screen, and people can send what's called a fast blast mass question.
Somebody writes and says, would you ask Dr. McKenna, please, if the spraying of defoliant in South America, which we are doing now, due to the whole drug war thing, is it affecting these plants in the areas that you talked about?
Well, yes.
It's affecting everything in the areas that we're talking about.
Dr. Mark Plotkin, who is an ethnobotanist that many of you may know about, he's very well known as the author of Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, among other things, but he is working Down there with his nonprofit group called the Amazon Conservation Team.
And he has been doing quite a bit of work in Southern Columbia and has seen firsthand the impact of this defoliation.
It's not only, and the problem is that it's very hard to target the The defoliant only on the coca fields.
It also drifts over the crops that these people depend on for their food and the villages where the people live.
And anyone can go down there and see that, you know, the impact is tremendous.
I mean, children with terrible skin diseases and, you know, it's definitely impacting those people.
And it's, well, you know, it's outrageous.
It basically amounts to International criminal behavior on the part of the United States, in my opinion, there's got to be a better way to to deal with this problem than than toxify the environment.
Again, that's a war against the plants.
It's not a war against the people that are extracting and purifying.
Well, yeah, it's a war.
It's an attempt to exterminate the plants, which is which is in itself a bad idea.
But the problem is it also impacts I mean, these plants are growing where these people live, and they also grow their crops in the same or adjacent fields.
So, it gets in their food supply, it gets on the people themselves directly.
This is just one of the consequences of this misguided policy.
Alright, a little about DMT and drugs like it.
I played a song, just for fun, before you came on, Journey to the Center of the Mind, and one part of that song says, but be careful, referring to the journey, you might not come back.
Now, with LSD, there were some people that essentially didn't come back.
And I've always wondered, and I'd like your opinion, do you think that These are people who were predisposed to psychological difficulties in the first place, or that the ingestion of whatever drug we're talking about here was the primary cause of... I think that in most cases, the incidences of people who quote-unquote don't come back are extremely low for one thing, and I think that in most cases you can say that there were previous
Psychological problems and that the drugs, the LSD or whatever, was basically a catalyst that they were at risk, you know, of psychosis anyway.
The problem, of course, is that these are the very people on the street level that are most likely to do something like that.
Well, again, this comes back to the whole issue.
Number one, psychedelics are not for everyone.
And number two, you have to pay attention to set and setting.
The context is so important because, again, in the shamanic context, in the use of ayahuasca, for example, in Peru, yes, people do get into psychological difficulties.
They can have panic reactions or anxiety.
Many people often You know, become convinced that they're either dying, or that they're not going to come back.
But the shaman, you know, has a bag of tricks, essentially, and is able to apply some of those tricks, simply, very simple things, such as singing one of these Ikaros, one of these magical songs, or blowing tobacco smoke over the person, or otherwise.
You know, do things to calm them down and kind of get them back on a stable setting.
That's why it's very important to, you know, have a structured context, some sort of ritual context.
And, you know, generally, it helps if there's a person in the case, in this case, the shaman, you know, that people have confidence in, that they sort of feel that this person is watching over them, or this group of persons.
That's one of the dangers with the drug tourism.
Not all shamans are that experienced.
Some you can't always trust.
It's better if you do this in a situation where you feel safe and you feel like the people that you're with really are looking after you and not just there to take your money.
And that's the thing.
I mean, I think in the context of our society, if these psychedelics, which I really, you know, you have to place them in a category apart from all of these other substances, which are more recreational, but the psychedelics are more of a spiritual or experiential thing.
But I think if these things are ever going to be used, you know, in our culture, we have to develop some kind of models, some kind of context.
It may not be traditional shamanism.
We can't really integrate that into our culture.
But we can take some of the elements and combine it with elements of psychotherapy, for example.
Well, let's try this angle, Doctor.
What would you say would be The psychological or metaphysical benefits or gains that a person might reasonably expect to take away from the experience?
Well, it's hard to say because the experience is as individual as the person and a lot of it depends on what your expectations are.
Again, getting back to this issue of intent.
You know, some people may take it And in the case of ayahuasca, it's generally emphasized that it's important to have an expectation, to express an intent.
People may take it to have insights about their relationships, for example, or psychological problems, you know, maybe depression or, you know, sleep difficulties or even physical illnesses.
People take ayahuasca, you know, to have insights about their physical state of health.
Other people may take it to solve problems.
Things that they're working on.
Intellectual things.
It's taken for all these purposes.
So then it allows intense physical self-examination or intellectual self-examination?
It allows for both.
Yes.
Physical and intellectual self-examination.
I think that ayahuasca is unique.
I mean, while the hallucinogens themselves stand apart from all of these other substances as unique, I think that ayahuasca is, again, unique among that group, because I think that there is much more to its activity than just the psychological experience.
It's not that you take it, you have the experience, and then it's over.
It continues to work afterwards, more than other hallucinogens.
There's a lot of processing, both mental and physical, that goes on subsequent to the experience.
Maybe you could comment on this for me.
There are many scientists investigating near-death experiences.
Very, very interesting things produced by near-death experiences.
Associations with white light, Relatives that have passed away, examination of one's own life, you know, flashing by you, that sort of thing.
Is there a relationship of the pharmacology that occurs in the brain between any of these drugs and what might occur during a near-death experience, do you suppose?
Yes, I think there probably is.
I think that these two territories interface with each other or share a common border.
I mean, it is known, for example, that DMT and its close relative 5-methoxy-DMT are both neurochemicals.
They both occur in the normal human brain.
We're not sure what their functions are.
People have suggested, my colleague, Chase Calloway, a scientist in Finland, who has worked on these issues, suggests that maybe endogenous, that is, internally occurring DMT, has to do with the modulation of dream states.
And he's come up with a very plausible and testable theory that could show that maybe this is the physiological Function of DMT.
Other experiments have shown that in stress situations, in states of extreme stress, and I think we can put death in that category, the levels of DMT in your circulation, in your spinal fluid, for example, and presumably in your brain, are elevated markedly.
So it's possible that in the state of, in the dying state, the brain is actually programmed to turn these things out and modulate the experience, which is not to say that it doesn't reduce it to a DMT experience.
I think a DMT is probably an element of the process of dying and probably of the process of being born as well.
Wow!
That's a better question than I thought it was.
That's really interesting.
I believe one of your guests was Dr. Rick Strassman on your program recently, or was that another?
It may have been another host.
He is a researcher, a colleague of mine and others in this field, and he was one of the first researchers to do some FDA-approved research on DMT at the University of New Mexico a few years ago.
He was using synthetic DMT, administering it by injection, but he has recently written a book on his research called DMT, The Spirit Molecule, and it's very interesting.
He has some very interesting and provocative things to say In that book about the possible functions of DMT, for example, he suggests that at the 49th day of conception, which is in many traditions thought to be the moment that the soul enters the body, that the pineal gland, which is the source of, one source, the primary source of these endogenous tryptamines, there is a spike in its synthesis of DMT.
I'm not sure what the basis of his statement is, but I think people with an interest in DMT should pick this book up.
It's quite interesting.
I'm just in the middle of it.
Well, that's fascinating.
On the 49th day, when some say the soul is inculcated, there is a definite spike in the DMT produced in the brain.
Wow!
This is what he says.
I haven't seen the paper for it, but this is what he says.
Oh my!
That really is very provocative.
No, it's not unreasonable to expect that at death something similar may go on.
Generally, you know, in states of extreme stress or psychological stress, you know, it's not unreasonable to think that that may trigger the release of DMT, which is actually released into the circulation as much as in the brain.
Besides the brain, the other organ in the body that synthesizes DMT is the adrenal glands, which are very much involved with the stress response.
All right.
Again, a question that you are fully... You're just welcome to not answer it, but while you've Certainly concentrated on the science side of all this.
It's hard to believe that back through the 60s and through the trips to the Amazon and all the time you spent with Terrence that you would not have, that you stayed a pure academic, that you would not have experienced all of this.
So can we get that out of the way?
Well, yes.
I have and I think that's clear to everybody that knows our work. Yes, I mean I have
approached it from a scientific standpoint, but you know you can't you know you
can't become a lens through lens grinder or a telescope maker without
occasionally looking through the telescope. Right. This is the this is the
analogy. So was the experience for you, would you describe it in as profound a manner as
Terrence did or was it for you a different experience?
Which experience?
Well, DMT.
We'll stick with DMT.
Well, yeah.
It was pretty profound.
It is one of the most reliably profound experiences in the smoked form, because it is so overwhelming.
In the orally active forms, it's sometimes extremely profound and sometimes not so profound.
And again, it sort of depends on the circumstances.
Sometimes you get a leg up and sometimes you don't in these orally active forms.
But generally, I prefer... I think that the orally active forms are probably the way, Nature meant for man to take DMT.
It probably should have been in an orally active form, potentiated by one of these MAO inhibitors.
Well, you know what?
That's a really good question all by itself.
Doctor, that's a good question all by itself.
Do you think that God, or nature, however you want to phrase it, intended for man to make use of these plants and substances as has been done?
Do you think it was intended that way?
After all, they are here.
Well, exactly.
They are here.
I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea that nature intended it.
I think that, you know, we are part of nature and we have always had a relationship with plants.
I mean, I think that is the context in which you have to understand, you know, the use of all of these psychoactive plants.
It's part of a much vaster web of interaction uh... that we have with the plant
kingdom uh... you know all of these herbal medicines that people are interested in
uh... you know the whole interest in natural healing them yes additional
plants and so on is really an attempt i think on the part of alienated
uh... urbanized uh... culture get back to nature to literally rediscover their roots.
And the psychoactive plants, you know, are within this context.
But, you know, I don't think there's somebody, I don't think that, you know, there is somebody out there directing things.
I mean, it's not like nature is conscious or God is telling us It's that in the process of evolving on this planet as part of the biosphere, we have co-evolved with these plants and with these substances.
On the other hand, there were the Ten Commandments, and he didn't tell us not to take them.
He didn't tell us.
No.
Doctor, hold on.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
We'll be right back from the high desert.
I'm Art Bell.
Well, my guest is Dr. Dennis McKenna.
I'm going to play a song for you.
La da da da da da. La da da da da.
La da da da da da.
La da da da da da.
What will you do when you're lonely?
No one waiting by your side.
You've been alone, I know what you know.
You know it's just your foolish mind.
Wanna take a ride?
Call Art Bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
East of the Rockies at 1-800-825-5033.
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Boy, wasn't that interesting?
The 49th day and a spike in DMT in the brain.
49th day.
49th day.
You know, they call that something else, too.
I think they call that the quickening.
Back now to Dr. Dennis McKenna, and we were talking about plants and the fact that they were here, and I said, well, no commandments against interacting with the plants, or as you pointed out earlier, having a relationship with them.
It's been a co-evolution.
The plants have been here probably before the walking things, but we're both here, and they're here to be used, or looked at, or admired, or perhaps chewed on.
I don't know.
What do you think is intended for human beings and plants?
Well, again, you keep using this word intention.
I don't think anybody is running the show.
I think that this is sort of an organic process that's going forward, you know, evolutionarily.
The thing you have to understand about plants is that they're very different than animals.
I mean, that seems like an obvious statement, but One of the ways, and the way that they interact with the world and experience the world is very different than we do.
One famous botanist made the statement that plants have substituted biosynthesis for behavior.
Now what he meant by that is that plants, because they can photosynthesize, they make their own food and as a result They don't have to go foraging for food because they can make it from sunlight and carbon dioxide and water.
One of the consequences of that is that they make a vast variety of chemical compounds.
They are virtuoso chemists.
And in the same way that animals interact with their environment through behavior, through the famous flee or fight reaction, these sorts of things, Plants interact with their environment through chemistry, and they communicate with other organisms in their environment, bacteria in the soil, fungi in the soil, other plants, insects, birds, other animals that may feed on them, and human beings through these chemical messengers, through these molecular messengers.
And the molecular messengers speak in a You know, figurative sense, they speak to organisms on many levels.
They happen to also make chemical messengers that resemble our own neurotransmitters.
And, you know, that's where it gets interesting for us, for this particular topic, because then you're talking about plants that literally talk to you.
And, you know, they don't say anything, but they, you know, when you ingest them, their neurotransmitter-like chemicals interact with your neurotransmitter systems, you know, and you get some very interesting results.
And I think, in some sense, you're seeing the world kind of the way they see it.
I mean, I don't say that they use these neurotransmitters for perception.
But this process of chemically mediated co-evolution between plants and humans, and all organisms, is a concept that I think needs to be explored.
There is a field of science called chemical ecology, which is Basically, this is the territory we're in here, the way that chemical systems are used to mediate relationships between organisms.
And, you know, it's a two-way street.
The plants, you know, we largely value plants, if you think about it, for the chemical compounds they contain, whether they be nutrients or You know, cellulose, which are fibers that go into textiles, or medicinal compounds that we may use, or these more neuroactive type compounds.
Or as you said in the beginning, nutrition.
And again then, I'd prefer the word intended, because whether it's a plant or an animal, these are all things that co-evolved with us, and even the biblical scholars will say That the plants and the animals were put here for our use.
Now you can take that or not, but intended does seem like a reasonable word to me.
Well, if it's intended, I guess the question is...
By whom was it intended?
Oh, we can have a conversation about that if you want.
Right.
I mean, is it, you know, is it God that's, you know, running the show?
Or is it, you know, dome-headed beings in geosynchronous orbit?
Or is it Gaia?
I mean, I'm more comfortable with the Gaia notion that the whole biosphere is, in some An organism.
You can think of the entire biosphere.
It's really a mega-organism or a super-organism.
And just as in a cell, in the body, all of the processes of the cell between, say, what's going on in the nucleus and what's going on in the cytoplasm and on the membrane, That's all controlled and coordinated through chemical messengers that are shuttling back and forth from the membrane to the cytoplasm to the nucleus and so on.
The same thing is going on in the biosphere.
The biosphere is permeated with chemical messengers and many of them are made by plants.
And plants are very good at it.
I mean, they use these molecular messengers to establish relationships with all sorts of organisms in the environment.
Well, that makes a war.
Insects, for example.
Insects are probably the primary example.
Okay.
Plants depend on insects for their pollination in many cases, and the insects, of course, benefits from the plant in the form of nectar and pollen which they collect as food sources so it's a symbiosis this notion of a symbiotic relationship which has been very extensively studied between plants and insects not so extensively studied between plants and humans but that's the that's the key term I think that you have to you have to come at it from that angle what we're looking at here
It's a plant-human symbiosis that has impacts on the plants and impacts on us.
So then a war on plants is really screwing with Mother Nature?
Well, it's a really misguided idea.
What gives us?
We're only one species in the biosphere.
What gives us the right to, you know, decree that some other species, because it happens to be a plant that produces a chemical that You know, our society has not been able to come to terms with, do we then have the right to decree that, you know, this particular plant should be exterminated from the face of the earth?
I don't think so.
I mean, if we were talking about an ethnic group of humans, this wouldn't be tolerated.
Okay, then instead of, bearing in mind the fact that we cannot come to terms with it, instead of going to war against it, how do we come to terms with it?
How do we come to terms with it?
Well, for one thing, again going back to making a distinction between plants and chemicals, I think that's part of the thing.
You know, and you say, okay, if you want to grow marijuana in your backyard, if you want to grow mushrooms, if you want to grow opium even, you know, we don't care.
Whatever you do as a gardener is not of concern to us.
We're going to focus on the harder drugs, the drugs where there have to be infrastructures of creation and distribution and you have to have, you know, that's one aspect of it.
And then the other aspect of it is simply education.
I think you have to give people the tools to make informed choices about, number one, whether to use drugs, number two, If the answer to number one is, yes, I want to use drugs, the second question is, which drugs are you going to use?
And the third question is, how are you going to use them?
And this is the problem with the war on drugs and the whole dialogue is, there's this big, scary category called drugs.
You know, that all things are put into.
Well, there are drugs and there are drugs.
There are many different types of drugs.
And it seems that the, you know, the drugs of the, you know, the drug warriors have set up this big, you know, scary bugaboo called drugs.
But of course, they don't include in that.
You know, the drugs that they happen to favor, which are, you know, tobacco, alcohol, these things are also drugs.
Sure they are.
So I think we have to have a more rational dialogue about the subject, and we have to stop scaring people and try to give them, you know, the tools to make informed decisions.
It all comes down to education, and it's like saying, You don't have to use drugs to have a full life and to have a completely fulfilled life.
If you make that choice, fine.
If you do choose to use substances, be careful about which relationships you form with these substances and the circumstances under which you use them.
It's no different than forming relationships with people.
You know, and Andrew Wiles said all this years ago in his book, The Natural Mind.
I mean, nobody, you know, nobody listened then.
Nobody's listening now.
But that is the solution.
You know, I mean, you know, nobody wants their kids to go out and get messed up with drugs, you know.
And the key thing is, you know, if you promulgate What is essentially misinformation?
I mean, let's not put too fine a point on it.
Let's call it lies.
Kids are not stupid.
They're going to find out.
And then, you know, they will disregard what you say.
So they say, well, you know, you lied about marijuana, so you must be lying about heroin.
Been saying that for years.
And they've been saying that for years.
Why not have a reasonable debate?
I know.
I know.
Nothing through the years has made me angrier than the lies that are told about marijuana, because of course they then cause young people to just go right on up the chain, and before you know it, the cops put them in the back of a car with crack cocaine, and off they go, part of the system, in jail.
Yes, that's right.
I mean, the laws that are designed to Control the drug problem are having a worse impact than the problem itself I think Jimmy Carter said this if that's the case then we need to rethink this whole dialogue and In terms of the psychedelics, I think that you know They do need to be used in a ritual context or in a fairly structured context and and the use of guides or more experienced people who
You know, can kind of structure the experience, much as it goes on in shamanism.
And shamanism is really the model.
I don't think we can, you know, I don't think we can reproduce it, but I think we can take a few pages from that book and try and implement it.
And I can envision, you know, in a more rational society, a situation where there would be a place or there would be a center where one could go And have these experiences and it would be legal and it would be, you know, it would be beneficial to people.
We are not now that rational nor are we even close.
How far in the future, if you can just sort of stand back and observe our progression socially, how far in the future do you envision something like this?
Well, it's hard to say.
I mean, it's really very hard to say, because I don't see... I mean, I think that the people, as almost always, the people are way out in front of their government on this issue.
You know, most people feel that medical marijuana, for example, should be available to people that need it, to people that have diseases or chronic problems that Excuse me, that this could help.
I think most people feel that rather than being put in jail, people should be given access to treatments as their first option.
There have been propositions passed in California to this effect and a couple of other states.
So the people have a much more reasonable approach to the problem than the government does.
The problem is the government Well, for example, you mentioned Jimmy Carter.
A lot of people thought that when Jimmy Carter became president, there'd probably be a move to legalize marijuana.
Well, lo and behold, didn't happen.
Then people thought, well, next time we get a Democrat in office, it'll happen then.
Lo and behold, didn't happen.
Because, again, I think this is a function of the fact that it's very hard for politicians to come out on this issue.
Even if they do feel that it's misguided, anytime you make a statement that is in the least perceived as being pro-drug, you're vilified.
And politicians as a group are not a particularly brave bunch of people.
I mean, their decisions are based on, you know, what they think is going to get them re-elected.
And there is such a vocal anti-drug majority, or minority, actually.
I think it is a minority, but they're very vocal.
And so, you know, if you say, well, maybe we should take a different approach, then immediately They're pounced upon, and no rational conversation is possible.
Doctor, I lived in a state where there was a rational moment.
I lived in Alaska when the Alaskan Supreme Court struck down the laws against marijuana, and it became legal to grow your own plants and to have, I can't remember, an ounce or two for your own personal use.
That was a great success for a while in Alaska, but then all of a sudden from Washington, D.C., they came rushing in, and all conversation stopped.
The drug war was in full force, and Alaska reversed it all.
Well, again, this is sort of the irony.
The current administration and the position of the conservatives traditionally is get government off people's back.
And what I actually think they mean is get the government off corporations backs.
You know, put, I mean, when it comes to what we do in our bedrooms or what we put in our bodies or how we handle our reproductive choices, you know, these regimes are very, you know, very much totalitarian.
They want to control that kind of behavior.
They think it's very much their business.
You know, this is where the conflict is.
I take it you would consider yourself politically libertarian?
No, I'm not a libertarian.
I mean, the only thing I agree with with the libertarian agenda is the notion that these substances should be regulated in the same way.
No, I think government has a place in people's lives.
You know, I'm basically a liberal, I guess.
I think government should be Concentrating on helping people and, you know, making people's lives better.
If you pay taxes, why not get some benefit from it?
I mean, what bothers me is that my taxes go for, you know, the war in Colombia, which is not being talked about in the media and is a war.
You know, or the missile defense system, you know, this completely absurd technological boondoggle that Most of the experts say will never work.
I mean, these are the things that I would rather not have my taxes spent on.
Well, I agree with you completely, although certainly your view with regard to these substances is very libertarian.
And you say otherwise you're a liberal, which would generally mean to a lot of people that you want government involved in your life in a lot of areas.
But not in my personal life.
I don't want them telling me You know, I want them to be concerned with the public health aspects of drug use and all of these other things, but I don't really want them to say, you know, if you smoke this herb or if you drink this plant, you're going to jail.
And I think, you know, it's just absurd.
I'd rather have them giving, you know, a more intelligent level of support to that sort of thing.
All right.
You know, I would very much like to allow some of the audience after the break to ask you questions, if you're up for that.
Oh, sure.
Are you?
Okay, good.
Stay right there, then.
My guest is Dr. Dennis McKenna, the brother of the late Terrence McKenna, who appeared on the show many, many times, and they're both obviously brilliant minds.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM, screaming through the night like a freight train, glad to have you along as a passenger.
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Did you ever wonder if we were headed in the right direction in the 60s?
And then there was the war.
And then there was another war.
Wonder if you ever wondered about that.
Wonder if Dr. McKenna ever wondered about that.
We'll be right back.
Once again, Dr. Dennis McKenna, that's got to bring back some memories for you, I suppose, huh?
Absolutely.
You were there and just about at that time.
You know, socially, do you think, doctor, that it was the right direction at the wrong time?
How do you mean?
Well, I mean the whole 60s thing, the whole San Francisco scene, the whole national scene, frankly.
It was moving toward a gentler, More aware, social time for the young people, but then sort of the war got in the way and then we started the war on drugs and war and war and war.
But for a while there, we were headed in a bit of a different direction, weren't we?
Well, we were headed in a bit of a different direction and yes, I think that the war in Vietnam had a lot to do with derailing it, but I think that also just Uh, sort of the disillusion, the disillusion, uh, that happened in the American dream that probably started with the assassination of Kennedy, if not before.
I mean, I think that really impacted a lot of people in my generation.
Uh, you know, I can remember when that happened and both, uh, Terrence and myself, we were just in a state of shock.
For days after that happened, there was little you could do except just stare at the television.
That's right.
You know, a lot of people of our generation thought that Kennedy was, you know, was the sign of some needed change.
And when he was struck down, I think it was kind of a message that no, nothing is really going to change.
I mean, you know, however flawed he may have been as a Man, I think he symbolized the change for a lot of people.
And I think when that went away, you know, I think it began the process of deepening cynicism that has continued.
And then we sort of moved toward, as the decades went by, it seems like we moved from where we were in the 60s and where we were headed to a more materialistic society.
And we kind of replaced what went on with the 60s with materialism.
Anyway, listen, I want to ask you a question that's a sensitive question about Terrence, and it was actually a question that I asked Terrence, and I guess I would like to ask you.
Many, many people said brain tumor.
Right.
Why should we not believe that it's possible that some of the substances and chemicals and things that Terrence did contributed to that May have been a main contributor to that brain tumor.
Right.
I'm sure you've thought about it.
Well, I have thought about it.
And the answer is that there's simply no evidence for it.
If psychedelics or cannabis cause brain tumors, there would be a lot more brain tumors, that kind of thing, than there are brain tumors, particularly the kind that he had.
is an actually an extremely rare form of cancer only 20,000 cases a year supposedly are reported in this country although I personally think it must be more than that but as cancers go this one is rare and you know there's just there's simply no evidence there's no correlation between your intake of marijuana say and brain tumors in fact there is research That has been done that shows that cannabis, you know, tetrahydrocannabinol may inhibit brain tumors.
Obviously, for my brother, this didn't work, but, you know, I mean, you can say that, but it's not really a fair criticism.
You know, I mean, another person who maybe never touches any of these things may get a brain tumor, and you may say, well, you know, it's because they led a bad life or something.
Sure.
I mean, I just don't, it just doesn't hold up.
All right, before we, just before going to the phone lines here, Scott in Sonora, California asks a question that may not even be relevant, or you may know what he's talking about, but he says, please ask Dr. McKenna if he remembers what he was experiencing when he said that, quote, he didn't want to be a giant insect, end quote, at the experiment at La Correa La Charrera.
La Charrera, okay.
Right, right.
So, it rings a bell, huh?
Yeah, absolutely.
So, you didn't want to be a giant insect.
What was that all about?
Well, it's hard to explain that without sort of going into the whole narrative of what got us to go to La Charrera in the first place, which we started talking about at the top of the program, but then we sort of got derailed into other subjects.
But, I guess, to put it in a nutshell, A lot of the ideas and concerns that we were sort of processing at La Torera in these hyper-psychedelic states had to do with the notion of insect metamorphosis.
And insects undergo several stages of metamorphosis, like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly is the classic example.
And we had some notion whether correct or not, at least we thought at the time
they seemed correct, that the tryptamines and the beta-carbolines in this plant
environment had to do with the kind of an actual metamorphosis in
humans.
Ah, I see.
And that, you know, and that was what the basis of that was about.
I wasn't so sure I wanted to undergo this metamorphosis.
I see.
And I was convinced that I was about to.
I bet you saw the fly, didn't you?
Actually, I've never seen it.
Oh, you haven't seen the fly?
I haven't seen it.
It's just as well.
I just put it on my list.
Obviously, you're not exactly an anti-drug poster child, nor was your brother.
Your brother was a brilliant, brilliant man.
You're a brilliant, brilliant man.
And a lot of people who are fighting this drug war, I don't think like hearing you speak, because you're obviously brilliant, and somehow, you know, the brain cells have stayed in place throughout whatever it is you have done, as was the case with Terrence.
So far.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Dr. Dennis McKenna.
Hi.
Hi, Art.
I'm Laura, and I'm a Ph.D.
candidate in a I'm from Washington D.C.
area University and I'm doing the first ethnographic life history narrative based research study with near-death experiencers.
Oh?
So I'm getting some very interesting findings which I'd like to talk to you about more at some other time.
Now you guys kept talking while I was making, after I made the notes I wanted to make because I had the chance to spend some time with Terrence and Palenque and I had a couple comments that I wanted from Dennis.
A question you just raised about the brain tumor and the drug use.
Yes.
Raised the issue for me of, remember the Miami guy who had the strange heart attack and the bizarre little sort of twist in his vein or artery?
Oh, yes.
And the Native Americans who pointed out that, you know, from their point of view, that's called an energy attack.
I'm not to sound too paranoid, I just wanted to throw that in as another question that might be asked.
I have a wonderful quote from Terrence about an experience of Dennis's that your insect thing made me want to read, but let me hold off because maybe we don't have time.
But I'm loving hearing from Dennis and I love spending time with Terrence.
I've read all their work.
I think the research that they've done and the personal accounts that they have shared are not simply valuable, but extremely brave to stand out on the edge they're standing out on.
There's tremendous resistance.
As Terrence said, culture is not your friend.
I would agree with that.
I wanted to raise this.
The reason I was there is I got a scholarship that year.
That fellow from Texas gave some scholarships.
I got to go to Palenque and spend ten days having this wonderful ethnobotanical field seminar with an incredible group of people, including the Shoguns and Terrence, because I realized that there were analogs between near-death experience narratives I'm a near-death experiencer, as was my mother, which, you know, fueled my interest.
Well, you obviously heard the comments earlier with respect to DMT.
Well, no.
Oh, you did?
With light-related experiences related to ayahuasca.
Now, a lot is in the near-death studies research about ketamine, which I know the least about.
But I went there because that woman who was involved in Iboga research, Ibogaine... Deborah Nash.
Dr. Deborah Nash.
Dr. Deborah Nash was going to be there.
And there is this analog between NDEs and that experience in the life review that's very, very obvious.
I also wanted to say you hadn't mentioned scompastora, nor I think ketamine, and I'd like to hear what you have to say about them.
The other thing I found that was bizarre that didn't come up in clinical NDE model-shaped research, this is work I'm continuing now that I did two years' worth of field research on for my MA.
Now it's continuing as my just-approved dissertation work, is that there was this major, inexplicably high incidence of narratives where it was clear there was sort of overlap between... You could take a batch of these, change a few characteristics, hand them to alien encounter researchers like John Mack, or near-death experience researchers, and each of those groups would go near-death experience, or alien encounter.
Because it came up with so many of my informants and the only other research that has come
up in that high incidence is PMA Chatwater who like me, her methodology involves a more
person centered, informant generated narrative.
So you get data you wouldn't get.
I would never have thought to mention a strange experience that I had one connected maybe
maybe with the one that Dennis and Terence had in True Hallucinations, which I'd love
to hear him talk about.
All right, listen, we're way short on time.
Yeah, so I'd like to know what does he make of this overlap and the fact that we're trying
to model experiences we may not know as much about as we think.
Think we know.
Okay.
Well, a lot of things have been touched on.
I think that this notion, I mean, this business of the aliens and encounters with the aliens in, you know, abduction experiences, the near-death experiences, and also in psychedelics.
What do I make of it?
I'm not sure what to make of it.
You know, on one hand, I mean, the rational reductionist part of me says, you know, it's got to be part of the self.
I mean, certainly with psychedelics, you would think, you know, I mean, no matter how other it seems to be, ultimately, these things are coming from some part of the self.
It may not be a part that you know very much.
I mean, that's the reductionist model.
The other You know, it's possible to look at it another way.
Maybe there are other dimensions, and what we mean by other dimensions, I'm not sure.
Maybe some other level of etheric vibration.
You know, who knows?
I mean, more familiar, more, you know, other people on your program know more about this than I do.
I just feel like all bets are off in a sense that particularly when we're trying to understand the mind and what the capabilities of the mind are and how it interfaces with reality, we can't really make any assumptions.
Well, my own experience with ketamine is extremely limited.
dimensions well exactly who is to say that a little world there is there is not a path and the door opened
up comment and really if if you would on ketamine ketamine is being called the NDE drug
well my own experience with ketamine is extremely limited I've only taken it one time in my life
and I I didn't find it It wasn't pleasant for me.
It was interesting.
It was sort of like an anti-psychedelic to me in the sense that it seemed to be a state of sensory deprivation and complete isolation from the body, sort of like You know how in states of sensory deprivation, you start to confabulate.
You start to fill that empty space with thoughts.
Yes, of course.
And ketamine was like that for me.
Beyond that, I don't know.
It may be the NDE drug.
I'm not sure.
My own candidate for that would be something like 5-methoxy-PMT.
which is actually an order of magnitude more potent than DMT in terms of what the dose is, but its effects are somewhat similar, although it doesn't have a marked visual effect.
You don't see, excuse me, colored hallucinations as so much on 5-methoxy DMT, but yet it's just as profound, and it seems to be You know, at least again, my experience is somewhat limited with this, but the few times I have encountered it, you do seem to go to a place which seems close to what they describe as this near-death experience.
That's amazing.
All right.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Dennis McKenna.
Good morning.
Good morning, Art.
Good morning, Dennis.
God, I'm having a flashback.
I was a runaway flower child in 1964.
I became an electric acid test flower child, Ken Kesey style.
I wound up in 1967 living on a hippie houseboat, three boats down from Alan Watts.
Everybody I knew who used secular drugs were very brilliant, very intelligent, very creative people.
I have, over the years, in those days, I was a teenager in my early 20's.
I used lots and lots of psychedelics of all kinds.
Caustic acid, psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline, peyote buttons, DMT and DET, which I'm sure, Dennis, you know what DET is.
Diethyltryptamine.
Well, the point I'm trying to make is, I have gone on, I've gone to college, I have built a business.
I'm a very successful person.
I don't have brain tumors and I'm sorry about your brother.
Thank you.
The reality of the situation is most other people that I know who also during those days had been similarly involved in those sorts of things went on to be very successful in their careers.
The percentage of casualties I think is very, very small.
I think there's greater casualties from the later drug.
See, there's an early drug wave, and then the next one was the cocaine, heroin, speed, methamphetamine wave.
Which came with the materialism wave, by the way.
Well, exactly, Art.
That's right.
That's precisely it.
The first wave was the consciousness wave that most people were discussing when they were tripping or smoking pot.
We're talking about things like, you know, books by Velikovsky, World in Collision, Earth in Upheaval, things like that.
The Urantia book, Metaphysics, the early days of health food, health consciousness, earth consciousness, it's got a bad rap.
And I think that the war on drugs has turned into a very politicized power trip that the establishment uses to control people.
It's convenient for them.
It gives excuses to have larger police forces and larger military and bigger prisons and And, you know, to spend the public money in ways that none of us really want to see happen.
Well, have either one of you considered the fact that what do we care about?
What reports do we get?
We get reports on new housing starts, on national productivity, on all of these things that relate to how productive people are in turning out material things.
And I think some of these drugs are considered to be Anti-productivity, and I bet that's at the core of a lot of this war.
That's just me.
Well, I think you're right, because they saw that too many of the hippie types were going back to nature, wanting to become Native Americans, and were renouncing the civilization, going living in teepees.
I did that for a while when I was young.
Went off into Big Sur, lived in a treehouse.
Exactly.
When you could have been in a factory doing something or another.
Turning out useful widgets, right?
Absolutely!
Your caller makes a couple of interesting points that I'd like to comment on.
One is this notion that, you know, the wider cultural perception is that if you use psychedelics you have to be somehow drooling in the corner or somehow dysfunctional.
Yes.
And most people, in fact, who have You know, in which these things have played a role are anything but dysfunctional.
You know, they are generally high-functioning, creative people, often on the cutting edge of whatever their field is.
I mean, the whole computer and net revolution, you know, the Silicon Valley revolution was largely spearheaded by people who were involved with psychedelics.
So there is that.
element.
You know, it doesn't, you know, again, in a very, very small number of cases, some people do run into a problem.
Something went wrong, sure.
But most people do.
No, he was right.
In the great majority of cases, these people are now productive citizens.
All right, we've got a break here.
We'll be right back.
Dr. Dennis McKenna is my guest.
I'm Art Bell and this is Coast to Coast AM.
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Come walk with me. On a down day way.
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She always smiled for the people she meet.
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Charlie in York, South Carolina says, did anybody ever consider the fact that psychedelic drugs and pot are, according to Charlie, very, very, very, very fun.
Quit trying to analyze it to death, he says.
Guess that's an attitude.
Again, Dr. Dennis McKenna, and welcome back, doctor.
Thank you.
All right.
Gee, so many people want to talk to you, so let us continue, I guess.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. McKenna.
Good morning.
Good morning, Art.
How are you and the doctor today?
Just fine.
Where are you?
I am in Indiana, PA.
Okay.
I actually have two quick questions, if you don't mind.
Not at all.
My first is, you spoke of legalization of marijuana.
and ended the war on drugs i wonder if the doctor in your mind you differentiate between uh...
those natural drug which is marijuana and p o d and those which we considered for the time like lfd
in terms of legalization or just simply level of deviance
level of people you know that it's not a great a put that i didn't
well and no i mean that
i mean it if you've been listening to the previous conversation we were
making a distinction between plants and drugs
I'm not a doctrinaire saying that LSD, for example, should be banned and persecuted and peyote shouldn't be.
I mean, I think we have to find a context in which, particularly with the psychedelics, in which these things can be used.
In a way that is safer for people, but people shouldn't be denied access to these experiences if they feel that they should have them.
I'm not sure what you do about the war on drugs.
That's just one example.
It has to do with the fact that you form relationships with drugs or plants.
It's much easier in a way if you have a relationship with a plant that happens to also be a drug.
I think you have a much better chance to have a good relationship with that particular entity if you grow it, if you nurture it, and in return it provides you with a visionary experience.
I mean, that is a true symbiosis, and that's what we're talking about.
It's harder to have That kind of relationship with something that may come in a gelatin capsule or in the case of LSD on a windowpane, you know, square of gelatin.
Not that it's not possible.
I mean, I know that people do use LSD in a creative way, but it's this whole issue about how do we, if people are going to have relationships with drugs, how do we foster You know, good relationships, mutually beneficial relationships, rather than destructive relationships.
And with some drugs, because of the way they work, because of their neurochemistry, it's more difficult to foster good relationships.
I mean, good, bad, these are charged words, but you know what I mean.
Relationships that are not self-destructive.
With the psychedelics, I think they lend themselves to a more positive type of relationship, because they do open the way into experiences that many people would consider spiritual experiences.
My second question, and pardon me if either of these were mentioned before, I didn't catch the whole program, but not too long ago I was watching TV and I saw something on the That's great, because that's exactly where I was going, Doctor.
and something like LSD in the 50s for, I guess you'd call it quasi-mind control more just a...
Alright, uh, Coler, hold it right there.
That's great because that's exactly where I was going, doctor.
The government had a relationship with LSD for a while.
Right.
And, um, I guess not such a good one in view of what they did.
Right.
Well, these drugs don't particularly have moral qualities in the sense that, you know, if you're a bad person, just taking the psychedelic is not going to make you a good person.
You know, it's a two-sided, you know, it's a two-way street, as in any relationship.
It depends on what you bring to it.
You know, just because Just because the CIA used LSD in their experiments, I mean, it didn't turn them into saints, obviously.
No, it didn't.
So, these things are morally ambiguous, in a certain sense.
And you see this, again, in the traditional context where ayahuasca is used, for example, in mestizo society in South America.
You know, an ayahuascaro, just because he knows how to use ayahuasca, is not necessarily somebody you can trust or somebody you want to trust.
There is a whole other subtext going on of what's called brujería, or what we would call black magic.
Where, you know, they use the powers to put hexes on people.
And, in fact, in Peru, in mestizo ayahuasquero society, illness, disease, misfortune, all of these things are almost always seen as the effects of some brujo, some evil practitioner having put the whammy on you.
Speaking of evil practitioners, was Terrence or yourself ever approached by anybody in government?
You mean because of our involvement in these things?
Yes.
Well, not since... not for a long time.
Not since 1969, actually.
1969, huh?
Right, right.
But I mean, were you approached not so much because of your use or...
As a result of your use, but perhaps to help the government in some way with their proposed use?
No, not really.
I mean, I worked, I did a postdoc in the laboratory of National Institutes of Mental Health.
I was there for two years and I was working on a synthetic at the time, but I was basically working on Using radioactively labeled analogs of STP to map serotonin receptors, to try to map the serotonin receptors in the mouse brain or in the rat's brain.
But I think it's interesting that I was able to get that fellowship.
I went there.
I worked there.
There were never any problems, and this is actually, this speaks to, you know, one of the issues.
People who are interested in psychedelics, in doing research on psychedelics, often say, you know, we can't do it.
The government will not allow us to do this work.
That really isn't true anymore.
That is changing.
Rick Strassman, the fellow I mentioned who just wrote the book called DMT, The Spirit Molecule, He was really the pioneer, and for a lot of this work, he showed, I mean, he got tired of people.
He was a qualified psychiatrist and investigator at the University of New Mexico.
He got tired of people saying, you can't do this work.
So he decided, well, I'll do it, and he applied.
He went through all the channels.
He got approval, and he was able to give DMT to people in a clinical setting and do this work.
That sort of opened, I wouldn't say the floodgates, but it opened the door a crack.
And now there are other researchers are beginning to look into this again.
One of the websites I gave you, the Hefter Research Institute, which I'm a board member of, it's on the web at hefter.org, we're basically a bunch of scientists Neuroscientists, psychiatrists, ethnopharmacologists, people like that, who want to do legitimate research with psychedelics to try to find out, well, basically, not only how they work, but how they might be used to help people.
Well, what about applications in mental illness?
Well, exactly.
These sorts of things.
I mean, in one sense, You almost have to go the medical model.
I don't say that they should always be used, you know, to treat people who are sick.
They can also benefit people who are not, you know, who don't really have illnesses, but who might just want to learn from the experience.
But if you're trying to work through these academic, government, and research channels, you sort of have to come up with a You know, a rationale where, you know, is there an illness?
Is there something that these things can treat?
And, in fact, there are.
You know, the focus right now is on things like obsessive-compulsive disorder, for example, post-traumatic stress syndrome.
These sorts of addictions is another big one.
Alcoholism.
Potentially, psychedelics could be used.
I don't know how many of you saw Andy Weil on 60 Minutes the other night.
I didn't see the show, but he actually came out and admitted what he said many years ago, that LSD cured his allergies.
So who knows?
Who knows, indeed.
I mean, he had an experience where he had been very allergic to cats all of his life, couldn't get near them.
One day he was on LSD and a cat crawled into his lap and he didn't have any allergic reaction and claimed that he never had one since.
Isn't that interesting.
So that's rather remarkable, I think.
Very remarkable.
What was for the Rockies?
You're on the air with Dr. McKenna.
Hello.
Good morning, gentlemen.
Good morning.
Where are you?
This is Gary from Earthquake Seattle.
Okay.
Everything is going smoother up here, fortunately.
Glad to hear it.
Dennis, I was one of those people who had very many good thoughts about your brother.
I think he was a tremendously courageous and brilliant person and I wish he was still with us.
Well, we all do.
We all do.
Thank you.
Yes, we do.
We need more like him.
Ari, you said a couple of profound things I just heard recently.
One of the things you said was that I'm one of the people that feel that our society was on the right track during the 60s, and I think we've taken huge psychic damage since then.
It might have been a bit premature.
It could be some of us were not able to put it in context at that time yet, but certainly I think we've gone in the wrong direction since then.
You know, one thing, the caller before this, or one or two before this, He had some great things to say.
I came along in an age group right behind him in the mid-70s.
I was fortunate to go to college and find a group of friends.
After some research, we decided that these substances had been around for thousands of years, even long before Christianity and its teachings.
That's why we embarked upon taking many of these psychoactive drugs.
We had nothing but positive experiences.
I would say to your audience, for instance, they have nothing to fear from these substances.
I don't think fear is really the model, but I do think they should be respected.
That's the thing.
An earlier caller said, for example, that they're just fun.
You should remember.
I mean, something that's not being said is, they're just a lot of fun.
Well, they can be a lot of fun.
That's something Terrence might have said.
They're not always fun.
I completely agree with that.
You know, the two experiences I think, if we had it in our power to give people in the first to help us make a psychic breakthrough, I think the two would be to help people take psychoactive substances and maybe to put them in an earth orbit for 24 hours and just let them float there and look down.
I think that would help our society progress more than anything at this point that I can think of for us to do.
Well, in the right context, I think it could.
I mean, I think it could.
You know, going back to this, what an earlier caller said about how, you know, the perception is that if you take psychedelics, you have to be dysfunctional, or the larger society thinks it drives you crazy, or it makes you feeble-minded or something.
You know, in the course of working, I worked with my colleagues on What we call the Waska Project, we did a biomedical study of waska, which is the Portuguese transliteration of ayahuasca, and waska is used in Brazil by several syncretic churches, one of which is called the UDV, the União do Vegetal, and it's a syncretic church, and ayahuasca is their sacrament.
What was most Amazing to me, in the process of doing this study, I mean, we had to hang around with these people a lot.
Subjects were, you know, being tested and we were drawing blood samples and we spent about five weeks in very close contact with this group in the summer of 1993 when we were doing this study.
But what was remarkable was just experiencing this society.
They're a very close-knit community.
In lectures, I refer to them as psychedelic Mormons, with a meaning that is meant to be complementary to Mormons and the UDV, in the sense that Mormons also place a great deal of emphasis on being productive members of their community, having a close-knit community, Being creative, being successful in business, not, in other words, being a drag on the society, but being, trying to help society.
And these people were much that way.
I mean, they had much less incidents of domestic violence, for example, than is common in Brazilian society.
No alcoholism, no drug abuse.
Most of the people were successful.
They were doctors, lawyers, Businessmen, even politicians.
So I was just impressed, in hanging out with this group, how high-functioning most of them were.
Their kids seemed healthy and intelligent.
Their families seemed stable.
And a lot of it, of course, had to do with the community that they were involved with.
It was a very, very Close-knit community, but I think a lot of it also had to do with the fact that they had this tea as they call it this waska as their sacrament and You know every two weeks at a minimum they would take it in large groups every two weeks and I think they learned from that and it helped them to keep their lives on track and
I mean, you know, there were aspects of the UDV that I would not... I mean, I personally, I don't really... you know, I would not join a cult.
But if I was going to join a cult, I... That might be the one!
That might be the one!
Call her anything else quickly?
I just believe our government, as you said earlier, I think, our government fears these substances and does not want people to have access to them.
Let's remember, most of them are not physically addictive, as far as we know, in any way, shape, or form, the psychoactive.
The psychedelics.
Psychedelics.
I believe they lead to far too much contemplation and deep thinking, and the government is afraid of that, just as I believe they're afraid to tell us the truth about what they know about possible extraterrestrials coming in.
Yeah, I think that the caller's got a point here.
Not so much with the so-called drugs of abuse, but with the psychedelics, the fear, the problem is that they make you have funny ideas, and funny ideas are always a threat to the established order.
Well, they're viewed as anti-productivity.
Well, anti-productivity, or they just don't want people thinking too much.
I mean, that's a more sinister I think there's an aspect of the drug war that does concern me a lot, in that, in some ways, the drug war is not about protecting people from harmful substances.
It's about controlling states of mind.
It's about saying certain states of mind, certain territories are just off limits, and people should not be allowed these types of experiences.
You know, within the next few years, this is almost certain to happen, and it's going to be interesting to see what happens, but within the next few years, probably through biofeedback or similar types of technology, direct neural stimulation, it'll be possible to have these experiences without using drugs, by using some kind of You know, electromagnetic mechanism.
How is the government going to react?
I don't know.
That's fascinating.
What about my passing laws?
My passing laws?
That's right, I always ask.
Which of course will stop the problem.
Can you stick around one more hour?
Can I stick around another hour?
That's it.
I've got only one more hour of the show.
Well, I'm getting a little bit I'm running a little bit out of steam, but let's go another half hour and see how it goes.
You've got it.
It's four in the morning here.
Oh, that's right.
I've been eating fat.
Alright, doctor.
Stay right there.
We'll be right back.
this is coast to coast AM from the high desert.
I'll give you a hold of my heart.
You got me spinning in your light.
I love what a deal my father's gonna tell just like an old time movie about a ghost from a wishing well in a castle
dog or a fortress strong with chains upon my feet.
You know that goes to speak.
I will be set free.
As long as I'm a ghost, you can't see.
To recharge Bell in the Kingdom of Nye, from west of the Rockies, dial 1-800-618-8255.
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell on the Premier Radio Network.
Because the ending's just too hard to take.
Well, I'll tell you, this song has a lot of meaning for me.
Good morning, Dr. Dennis McKenna.
He's my guest.
Brilliant man, obviously.
About a little after four in the morning where he is right now, I forgot about the time zone difference.
He'll be right back.
Alright!
Back two time zones to Dr. Dennis McKenna.
Doctor, you're back on.
And, uh, lots of people still want to talk to you.
It's loaded up, so...
Here we go once again.
Alright.
First time caller on the line.
You're on the air with Dr. McKenna.
Hi.
Hi.
How are you doing, sir?
Just fine.
Where are you?
In Augusta, Georgia.
Augusta.
Alright.
My question for the doctor is that I know that he did make the statement once that he thought it should be his right to do in his home whatever he felt.
My question is, what makes you think that it will stay within the home?
It's not legal now, and it hits the streets.
I believe that something becomes legal that the people that do hide out now are going to say it's perfectly all right to go out and we're going to have more people on the street with it.
That's the first part of my question for you.
All right.
Well, maybe we could reduce that to we already have alcohol and drunk drivers out there.
That's kind of where you're going, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
Right.
I think that the element here that comes in is personal responsibility.
I think, you know, again, it comes back to This issue about relationships.
If you're going to have relationships with substances, you should use them appropriately.
It's not a two-way street.
I mean, it is a two-way street.
There's the substance and the person's interaction with it.
I think people need to take personal responsibility for how and where and when they're going to do this.
Obviously, there are always people.
That don't act responsibly, that don't use these things appropriately.
This is true with alcohol.
It's true with lots of, you know, different things.
Does that mean necessarily that that should make it prohibited for all of us?
I mean, that's the issue.
Again, it comes back to education, and particularly with the psychedelics.
I think, you know, if people are going to use psychedelics, I just can't overemphasize that the context is so important.
Context can vary widely.
For one person, taking it at a rock concert may be the appropriate context.
for another, taking it in the wilderness may be an appropriate context, but I
think that people have to, you know, people tend to want to act responsibly
and I think that people are capable of regulating their own relationships with
these substances as long as they're given good information.
I mean, they have to be able to make informed choices.
You mean you feel that even with the gross substance abuse that we have in the United States today, that people can have control of their self and know when to do this, we
have such an awful substance abuse problem right now.
But I think he's mostly making the case for the psychedelic class and most of the substance
abuse that we suffer today is narcotic related or crack or cocaine or one of the addictive
substances.
Would that be fair, doctor?
That's right.
That's right.
And partly, it's the approach to the regulation even of these substances which as I said earlier,
they're very much harder to form beneficial relationships with because they do lend themselves
to overuse because they are addictive and they produce craving.
And so there may be people, there probably are people who of course never really come
to the attention of the media or the authorities who probably do have.
beneficial relationships with cocaine or heroin.
It's possible to use these things, but it's much more difficult to have those types of relationships.
And I think, in part, the war on drugs, which is as much about economics and as much targeted at certain minority groups as it is about the drugs, Really exacerbates this problem.
I mean, if cocaine were legal and you could go to a pharmacy and purchase it for a couple of dollars, would it have the impact on society that it does?
It's not so much the drug, it's the economics that's driving this.
If the only reason cocaine is worth money Is because it's illegal.
I mean, it's the whole economic thing, the incentive.
And this is also the factor that drives it on the other side, too.
The war on drugs is an industry.
This is one reason why it's very hard to change direction.
Too many people are making money on it the way it is.
So that matter of incarceration is an industry.
Incarceration, the drug testing industry, the, you know, the government itself, the military.
You know, I think it's well known that the government, you know, they like to have a source of covert revenues to support covert operations.
I think it's pretty clear that, you know, the government itself is one of the biggest importers and distributors.
It's very, very clear.
So, you know, and that's convenient for them.
They want to keep it that way.
All right.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Dr. Dennis McKenna.
Good morning.
Good morning to both of you.
I have two main points.
Our country is becoming more and more crazy.
More and more divorces, suicides, and school shootings and workplace shootings.
You see a rash of them.
The main drugs that really should be taken off the market are the prescription drugs, the Prozac line, the SSRI group, and maybe we would find that these shootings would disappear without people going after the guns and so forth and so on.
Do you know about her?
I knew her very well.
Dennis and that is the plants that were in the Amazon besides the psychedelics.
They sounded like they were wonderful ones that Nicole Maxwell, she wrote a book called
Witch Doctor's Apprentice which I think is now out of print.
Do you know about her?
I know her very well.
She was a very good friend and actually I met her when I went to the Amazon as a graduate
student in 1981.
She was very kind to me and my associate who was with me at the time.
Nicole, who passed on about three years ago, I believe.
She's a great person.
She must have lived a very long time.
She lived a long time.
She was about 87 or 88 when she died, I believe.
What I really, I think really set off my interest in herbs was the Prevention Magazine article of February of 1996 about her and what she found.
And here we have this population problem and in the Indian areas, there near Iquitos, a mother with a girl reaching puberty just gives her one potion, one dose, And then she doesn't have a child for the next six or seven years.
And the other plants, the shortest acting one contraceptive wise was about one year.
And they had different other ones that worked better for arthritis, for stopping bleeding, so that if you had to extract a tooth without pain and bleeding from a hemophiliac where it might be really a problem.
I don't know, you were with the Shamanic Pharmacy?
Shaman Pharmaceuticals.
Yeah, I worked there when they were first founded in around 1990, from 1990 to 1992, but that's a good point.
They were attempting to exactly, what you say, systematically investigate some of these rainforest remedies.
What happened?
Nicole, well, what happened to Shaman?
Well, what happened to the investigation of these plants?
Well, the company was not successful, but not because investigating these things is not a good idea.
Probably because of more business decisions.
They're out there trying to compete in the world of venture capital and large pharmaceutical firms.
I don't really get into it on the radio, but I just think that they made some decisions that were bad business decisions, and when those didn't work out, they didn't have the resources to continue.
Is it possible that maybe if we gave this to the herb companies, various herb companies that are out there, that we could get these Yeah, this is already happening.
In fact, Shaman Pharmaceuticals has reinvented itself and is now Shaman Botanicals.
So, they're not trying to get FDA-approved prescription drugs onto the market, but they are selling products as dietary supplements.
And the herbal companies, there are a number of herbal companies that specialize in Amazonian These things are being imported and you can buy them.
The point that you make, which is a very good one, which is really the other thing that has fascinated me ever since I spent time down there, it's not just about ayahuasca.
Ayahuasca is at the center of a vast pharmacopoeia of plants.
Most of these healers know hundreds of plant remedies.
Most of them, or many of them, haven't even been looked at by science in any kind of detail.
Doctor, let me ask you a question.
Right along these lines, we have AIDS, cancer, heart disease, lots of big killers out there.
And, you know, it's interesting, from the International Space Station or anything else that orbits, one of the biggest things that you're able to see from space Aside from the city lights, are the lights of the burning rainforest very brilliant and very sad, and so a lot of this is virtually going up in smoke, and you've got to wonder how many cures are going up in smoke down there.
Well, that is a question.
And again, this is partly a function of the short-sightedness of governments.
You know, the rainforests I mean, if you just look at it in cold, hard economic terms, the rainforests are worth far more in an intact state than they are if you cut them down and harvest the timber, say, or cut them down and put cattle pastures in there.
Yes, that produces a short-term economic return, but the long-term return is exactly what kind of remedies are there, what kind of genes are still there.
Only about 10% or less of the, there is an estimated 250,000 plant species on the face of the earth.
Only much less than 10% of those have ever been investigated as potential sources of new medicines.
And out of that 10%, you know, enormous benefit has come.
Things like Taxol, the anti-cancer drug, you know, quinidine, quinine for malaria, all of these remedies that now, basically, we depend on, have come from less than 10%.
There was an interesting article published a few years ago in Economic Botany, which tried to estimate, made a lot of assumptions, but tried to estimate How many undiscovered major blockbuster drugs remain to be discovered in the rainforest if there were resources to do that?
What would they be worth?
And they did a lot of ledger domain and making different economic assumptions and so on, but the number they came up with that there's approximately 328 drugs undiscovered remaining to be found in the rainforest.
Each one of these After development costs, after research, after marketing, in terms of its profit potential, would be worth about $100 million.
So, you know, the value is there.
The problem is how to preserve this biodiversity, this genetic diversity, which is really what all of this rests on, and how to compensate countries You know, the problem being faced by the developing countries is that, you know, they need short-term economic gains.
They need revenues.
Their populations are expanding.
Their cities are overflowing.
So a lot of the people go into these rainforest areas to try to, you know, make a better life.
It's kind of sad, actually.
Farmers clear this area.
They cut down the trees, burn them down, mostly burn them down, I guess, and then they get one crop Out of them.
And then they have to go to the next plot.
And burn down snow.
That's right.
I mean, as I sometimes say in lectures, how do you put a price on a cure for AIDS, which grew in a forest that somebody cut down last week?
You know, it's very hard to do.
Indeed.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. Dennis McKenna.
Hello.
Hello.
How are you doing?
I'm doing all right.
Where are you?
I'm actually in the home of Gordon Lightfoot.
Are you really?
Way up north.
Way up north or east.
I'm not too far from Detroit.
Buffalo, either way you look at it.
I have a question for the doctor.
My father is a medical practitioner.
I grew up sort of living in the doctor's lounge waiting for him to finally drive me home.
Many hours.
I used to go home and make myself a peanut butter jam sandwich and then I'd look up and there'd be like tallwind, demerol, morphine, codeine, you know, just a whole whack of things, samples, products.
So I don't know, I tempted myself.
I got involved in using in that sense at a very early age and I grew out of it like I was a farmer and I farmed suticles.
But I grew out of it and it was an experience, not something that I, you know, Two are really excited about it.
Then I got involved with the United States rock and roll band called The Grateful Dead.
I was always an outsider because I was clean cut and wasn't part of the real, unwashed, but I got involved in psychedelics.
My question to you was, I've met people that have been, you know, the acid tests that were there in San Francisco.
You know, the whole Leary and Kessy and, you know, that whole tour.
Do the wild thing at 775-727-1295.
No, I have to take that out.
Let's rephrase it.
Just to, what are the ramifications to the stuff you did?
How about that?
Yeah, well, what's in the garbage in the LSD now?
Like, I haven't done it since August 19th.
Now, that's really a good question.
Hold on, slow down.
We're so short on time.
It's a good question.
The original LSD was one thing.
What's around in the streets now is probably something quite different.
Do you have any insights?
Well, yeah, I'm not I'm not really an expert on the quality of street drugs, but the feedback I get from people that are more knowledgeable about this is that actually the LSD, most of the LSD that is circulating is very pure.
It's remarkably good in that sense, but the doses tend to be lower.
The usual dose is around 65 micrograms, I believe.
Back in the 60s, it was rare that you would encounter a dose less than 100 or sometimes 200 or 500 micrograms.
So the doses that are circulating tend to be smaller, and that's partly a function of the fact that they're used more recreationally rather than for discovery.
They're often used in the rave kind of context.
There are problems, I understand, with MDMA, with ecstasy.
Which is, you know, very much in the rave scene, and there are problems with purity there, or adulteration or substitution.
Often methamphetamine is substituted for ecstasy, or ecstasy is cut with methamphetamine.
There's more purity concerns with that, I think, than there is with LSD.
There's actually an organization, which some of you may know about, called DanceSafe.
Which is, I think they have a website called DanceSafe.com and they are basically disseminators of information about the purity of street drugs.
I believe they often have representatives at raves.
You can take samples of whatever you're taking and they'll get it analyzed for you anonymously and confidentially.
These are the sorts of things that the government should be supporting.
Help people, if they're going to use drugs, help them to do it safely.
But of course, this is all funded through private donations and so on.
But they are doing a good job.
If young people are going to go out and go to raves and encounter these substances, at least we can help to ensure that they're getting the right thing.
All right, Doctor.
We're at the bottom of the hour, and I'm sure, let's see, it'd be about 4.30 there now.
Yes.
I want to thank you.
What a wonderful time we've had.
Can we do it again?
Absolutely.
I've enjoyed it.
It's just been great.
If you could reschedule it to the daytime, it would be easier, but this has been fun.
Well, I don't know about that, but we'll pick a night when you can get a good nap.
All right.
Sounds good.
All right.
Dr. Dennis McKenna, thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Good night, my friend.
Isn't it eerie, folks, listening to that voice?
Because you know you've heard it before.
Speaking of the rainforest, I'm Art Bell.
We'll be right back.
Welcome to the World of Tanks!
World of Tanks!
Call Art Bell from west of the Rockies at 1-800-618-8255.
at 1-800-618-8255, east of the Rockies, 1-800-825-5033.
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This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nye.
toll-free international line, call your AT&T operator and have them dial 800-893-0903.
This is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell from the Kingdom of Nye.
Well, wasn't Dr. McKenna absolutely brilliant?
games.
And wasn't it kind of like having a flashback to Terrence, to hear him?
Brilliant man.
I'm sure the show I just did is considered mainstream heresy, but that's all right, too.
What you'll get on this program is all kinds of different stuff.
Never the same thing.
Never quite the same thing.
And I suppose a lot of heresy.
More in a moment.
All right, let us now proceed to open lines.
I want to remind everybody that I will not be here tonight.
Ian Punnett will be holding forth.
Please welcome him back.
And I'll be back on Monday.
I've got a date with a kind of an interesting group of industry people down in Los Angeles at the Radio and Records Talk Radio Convention.
And it's going to be fun.
We'll see a lot of you there, a lot of the Program directors and managers and all kinds of people.
So, once in a lifetime I'm going to do that.
I rarely, rarely ever go to these events.
This is a new thing for me.
So I'll be on my way to Los Angeles.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hi, yes, this is Ganesh from San Francisco.
Welcome.
I was just calling to relate to my first and only time using DMT.
It was with a group of friends and All of us had taken it at the same time, but I was the only one out of the group of five that it didn't affect.
It didn't affect you at all?
No.
That's really interesting.
I laid back and felt as if I was falling into it, and then I woke up just as instantly as I started to fall into it.
And I dabble in tarot, and I have since high school, and about two weeks before this event, I had lost my universe card.
Really?
And a psychic told me that, you know, don't take the next step or the next step you try and take, it won't be there.
Yes, and that's the way it worked out.
Yes, and so I didn't know if anybody had related that they haven't been able to be affected by DMT or haven't tried it.
Well, listen, there's a lot of people, as you well know, that are not affected by all kinds of drugs.
There's people that will try marijuana and say, What was that?
Nothing?
So, sure.
And my only experience with Ketamine, I guess, was in a K-Hole and was going through the whole experience of a game show that, to me at the time, seemed bowling for consciousness.
And I kept getting gutter balls.
Throwing gutter balls in the game of life, huh?
Yes.
Okay.
Alright, thank you very much for the call.
I'll tell you, Ketamine, that's pretty heavy stuff.
That's what they call the NDE drug.
He was in a game show throwing gutter balls in the game of life.
That is funny.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air, hello.
Hello?
Yes.
Yes, you're on the air.
Yeah, I'm glad to be here.
Glad you're back.
Thank you.
Yes, I had a question for you.
Sure.
When you talk about derivative drugs, such as like heroin, cocaine, and so forth, and basic plants that are basically herbs, why are sentences or criminal laws passed in such a way To make these things equal.
In other words, psychedelics.
Well, because the government's stupid.
That's the only answer.
Well, that's not the only answer.
Right.
But it's the only one I can come up with.
They're idiots.
In other words, they're not... It's kind of like the punishment should fit the crime.
That's a good analogy, I guess.
And all drugs are not equal.
But they're being treated that way in the war on drugs, and it's stupid.
Right, right.
Like something like a mushroom that grows in a cow pasture.
Right.
As compared to something that has been chemically altered or, let's say for example, speed, which is horrible.
Yeah, of course it is.
That's a whole point that Dr. McKenna was trying to make.
In essence, we have relationships with plants.
And that should be separated from those who, you know, take the coca plant for example, And mish it and mash it and change it and put it through chemical changes and then on the other side out pops a cocaine or crack or whatever.
You know, they're very different things.
But is our government smart enough to separate these?
No.
They're down there defoliating as fast as they can.
Michael, why are all of these things classified as narcotics when a narcotic is a certain thing?
They classify them as controlled substances.
Not all are narcotics.
Just controlled substances.
Got a law?
Can't have them.
Right, right.
But why would you classify something such as, let's say cannabis, as a narcotic when it's not an opium derivative?
Well, I told you.
Because you're an idiot.
Exactly!
Alright.
Thank you, Art.
Thank you.
Take care.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hi Art, this is Josh in Runnet, Virginia.
Hi Josh.
And I just want to say a quick shout-out to my friends in the Art Belt chatroom on DowNet.
Hello there, you guys.
And, you know, DowNet is so easy to get onto, but FNet lately has been absolutely impossible.
What's going on with the FNet servers, anyway?
FNet's being, along with Undernet, are being attacked by what we call script-kitties.
Is that what's happening?
Little kiddies who call themselves hackers.
Yeah, I know what it is.
I had a feeling something like that was going on, because most of the FNET servers are down.
Yeah, but one of the things I wanted to say was I really miss Terrence.
Over the last two years, I've undergone a lot of changes, starting with listening to you, And then reading Terrence's books, and it's really changed my life, and now I'm actually considering a career in radio.
Good for you.
And taking an interest in psychedelics and studying them.
Well, Terrence, everybody misses Terrence.
I miss Terrence.
However, when I talked to Dennis, I was not the same for the rest of the day.
It was deja vu.
I'm telling you, I heard Dennis' voice and it kind of stopped me for a while when I first called him.
Yeah, I mean, it was actually quite eerie when I first heard his voice.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
And, but, oh, but it was, you know, it was, it hit me like a two by four when, when Terence
died because I had just finished reading all of his works.
So, that's it.
And I just started going to a type of all-night dance party called a rave.
Mm-hmm.
You were talking about him a little while ago, yes.
Yeah, and that was one of the things Terrence said was an early proponent of.
And another person who could be considered a proponent is Hakeem Bay, the anarchist philosopher.
Have you ever read any of his works?
No, I have not.
He wrote something called Temporary Autonomous Zone, which is a remarkable book.
I've heard of it.
You can find it online, easy as pie.
I've got short-term memory loss problems.
And I'm only 19 years old.
And you're only 19, huh?
Yeah.
Well, maybe it'll come back.
Yeah, maybe it'll come back.
That's the only direction it can go.
But I'll tell you, another thing, the stock market, the way it's been going, it's going just like Terrence's novelty theory.
Yes.
You know, we're just getting closer and closer to a point where things are just going up, up, up, up, up, and things are just getting more complicated, and it's coming to a point at which we'll eventually, hopefully, on December 21st, 2012, enter a new era.
Well, the 49th day, sir, of the quickening.
I gotta run.
Thank you very much for the call.
You start.
Take care.
Well, for the Rockies, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Hello, this is Andy from Clackamas, Oregon, listening to 1190KX.
Well, what's new with you, Andy?
Well, I have two questions for you.
We'll see how question one goes first.
Go ahead.
Have you heard any stories about people using the Stephen Gibbs time machine?
Well, I have a Stephen Gibbs time machine.
I mean, people that use it.
Yes, I've heard stories.
Of course, I've had people on the air.
Any telling?
No.
No?
I don't have time to do that.
I have another question.
Yes?
I was thinking maybe one night you could just be a DJ for five hours.
There's times I've almost done that, Andy, thank you.
There have been a couple of times when, years ago, when I was working at KDWN in Las Vegas, which is now an affiliate, by the way, when the phones quit.
I mean, the telephones just quit.
Now, how do you do a talk show when you have no telephones?
I mean, no telephones.
Well, you do okay for about 20 minutes, or 30 minutes, or maybe even 45 minutes if you're really inspired.
But at some point, you've got to tell the audience what's going on.
Hey, folks, our phones quit.
And then, of course, you've got technical work going on around you.
So, there were a couple of times when I almost became a DJ.
I did disc jockey work for a lot of years early in my life, and so, you know, it's all still there, and I could do it.
I prefer a little more intellectual stimulation.
What I like to do is mix the music I like with the talk that I'm doing.
But then you should have noticed that by now.
First time caller line, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hi, this is Misty.
Well, extinguish thy radio, please.
Yes, this is Misty.
Yes, Misty.
I just had a few questions.
I really didn't catch all of your show tonight, but I caught bits and pieces.
I've had two friends that have died within the last six months.
Kind of a strange circumstances.
One was actually just last week.
Not close friends, but acquaintances.
Yes.
The one that died last week was just a sudden brain aneurysm.
Had gotten really into like methamphetamines.
Oh.
And I'm just kind of wondering What kind of information you know about this?
It seems like it's been common.
Young people dying of brain aneurysms, heart attacks.
Well, that's something that methamphetamine can do to you.
On top of destroying OG bone marrow, it'll ruin your teeth.
Methamphetamine will ruin your life.
Methamphetamine can indeed raise your blood pressure and a blood vessel can Go, and you go with it.
Certainly.
The other one was a girl that had actually been using ecstasy periodically.
I personally don't do either, but like I said, they were acquaintances.
And she had done ecstasy the night before she had passed away.
And she was at work and just pretty much collapsed.
Cause of death?
They just couldn't get her heartbeat back.
What was the cause of death?
That's just it.
It never really came out.
I don't know too much about the effects of ecstasy.
I don't really know much about that.
Yeah, I really don't either.
I can't comment.
I can't comment.
I just wanted to ask those few questions and see what your thoughts were.
Okay.
I appreciate the call.
Thank you.
Certainly methamphetamine is an easy one.
That's killer.
That's an absolute killer, and I'm sure that, as Dr. McKenna said, the relationship with that kind of drug is not the kind of relationship that he was talking about with plants.
not even close wildcard liner on the air high yes this is for me whether from the war to your instance
for me whether extinguish your radio please
okay second uh...
anyway uh...
a couple nights ago he mentioned something about the at a craig ed
written a book A report from the Northwest here that the Antichrist had heard rumors that he had written a book.
No, I'm not aware of it.
Is this Art Bell?
Yes.
Yes, I'm not aware of it.
I don't know what book that would be.
Oh, well, I'll tell you what the name of the book is.
It's called Don't Swallow the Camel.
Don't Swallow a Camel?
Don't Swallow the Camel.
The Camel?
Yeah.
I've never heard of it.
And it's from Matthew 23, 24, where he says... Oh, that book?
Yeah.
He says, you blind guy, you would straight out of Manhattan swallow a camel.
The only camel I knew about was something about pulling a camel through a hive of needlers.
I don't know, something.
Use of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hey Art, how you doing?
I'm doing all right.
Haven't spoken to you for a long time.
Joe from WRKO Boston.
Boston, yes.
Only have you on the four hours.
We're disappointed.
We can't get you on the full five hours.
Well, life's a rock, then.
A few things I wanted to bring up.
One, before you left the air, you mentioned the death of one of the astronauts, Conrad and Bruce McCallis.
And you said you would tell us.
And I've been waiting.
And you said I would tell you what?
What happened to McCandless and more about Conrad's death?
No, I think that you're referring to somebody else.
It was not me.
I'm sorry.
It wasn't me.
It may have been one of the hosts that was in, and you've got them confused, but that was not me.
It certainly was not me.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
I didn't push the button.
There we go.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hi, Bart.
I wanted to find out one thing about Lorena McKinnon.
Are you ever going to be able to interview her?
Who?
Lorena McKinnon.
Lorena?
Oh, yes, very good point.
She said that she would do an interview, but that the time wasn't right, so I should follow up on that and see if I can get Lorena McKinnon.
But now that you're back, I mean, that was one of the things I was really hoping that would happen.
And one other thing, did he mention, did the doctor, did Steve mention Something about where in the spectrum of all this cannabis and marijuana fell.
Is that a psychedelic?
Oh, yes.
Oh, it is a psychedelic?
Oh, sure.
Oh, I didn't know for sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, all right.
Thanks, and welcome back.
Okay, thank you.
First time caller on the line.
You're on the air.
Hi.
Oh, let me turn my radio off.
Yes, turn the radio off.
I called to see if you could interview Peter Duesberg?
Are you referring to the scientist who's doing AIDS research?
Well, he's written a book about it.
Yeah, I have interviewed him.
I've interviewed him years ago, ma'am.
Oh, you did?
Oh, I did indeed.
Could you put it on sometime when you're going to be away?
Well, I'll... you never know, I might be able to.
I don't know.
I don't know what the policy on repeats is.
We're trying not to do a whole lot of that, although there are a lot of old shows that certainly deserve replay.
One that's getting a lot of votes lately is Father Malachi Martin, and one of these days we'll try.
Maybe we'll get some replays in somehow or another from past years.
I don't know exactly how we're going to do that.
It's not easy, and there's a lot of editing required, but it's a worthy endeavor.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
Hello, Val?
Yes, that's me, alright.
May I speak to you off the air when you get off, please?
Um, well, possibly.
Just take ten seconds of your time.
Is it really, really, really important?
Yeah, it has to do with me being Alan Shepard's nephew.
That's good enough.
Alright, I'm going to put you on hold, alright?
Thank you.
Stay right there, Alan Shepard's nephew.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hey, Art, how you doing?
I'm doing.
You're doing?
I'm doing.
Hey, this is Kevin in Union, South Carolina.
Yes, Kevin.
Basically, I want to tell you, man, I'm glad that you're back on the air.
Boy, I missed you bad while you were gone.
Thank you.
I think when you go out for the night, in the morning, I think you need to use that lightning bolt.
My lightning bolt?
Yeah.
Really?
As sort of a final thing?
Yeah, that'd be great.
I can do that.
That's basically it.
Alright, thank you very much for the suggestion.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hi, how are you?
I'm alright.
Well, you know, I've listened to the last couple of hours of your show.
Yes.
Of course, I love your show always.
But just recently you said that the methamphetamine is a bad, bad, bad... Yes, I did.
That's my opinion.
Bad, bad, bad, bad.
Okay, I know several people in very high positions That work, I mean, they work every day, that actually they have to use that just to get them to go and be somebody.
Well, yeah, that's because they're hooked on it and you ask, I'll tell you what, these people that you're talking about in high positions that seem to be doing very well and are using methamphetamine, a few years down the line, you take a look at them, they're going to be real old before their time.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, but then again, but the cannabis is, Look, I mean, I believe that's natural.
I believe that's okay to do.
Cannabis is a whole different story.
It's not even on the same playing ground.
No, it isn't even on the same playing ground.
And the problem that our society has is that it puts it, you know, the war on drugs puts them all together.
Just sloshes them all together.
And it's a lie.
It's a big, damaging, dastardly lie.
Because our children, you know, they go out and they try a little bit of pot and they go, well, gee, that wasn't... I didn't go crazy.
I didn't kill anybody.
I didn't... I didn't go on a rampage.
In fact, I was sort of downright lethargic, actually.
And so they determined they'd been lied to.
And then that same young child takes the next step, which could be pretty rough stuff, folks.
That's how it's done.
That's what a lie does.
I'm Art Bell.
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