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Oct. 12, 2015 - Art Bell
02:23:33
Art Bell MITD - Dr Dennis Mckenna Psychedelic Research
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Time Text
from the high desert and the great american southwest i bid you all good evening good
morning good afternoon whatever the case may be in whatever time zone you reside in each
and every one of them covered like a blanket by this program midnight in the desert i'm
I'm Art Bell.
It is grand to be here tonight.
Dennis McKenna is going to be my guest, and it's going to be a kick-butt show.
We have rules here.
Only two of them during the week.
No bad language, and only one call per show.
That's it.
All right.
A little bragging, I guess.
This is kind of interesting.
Actually, a lot of bragging.
Two stories.
Talk stream live.
They monitor all the talk shows on the net, released its third quarter 2015 ratings and ranks for the most streamed national radio talk shows.
Michael Savage continues to dominate digital space, reaching new heights with a 27 share, his highest ever.
Savage takes the top spot once again, further extending his number one streak.
Congratulations, Mr. Savage, with high margins over all other competitors, followed by Rush, Laura Ingram, Mark Levin, and Glenn Beck.
Then it goes on.
Art Bell returned to talk radio with Midnight in the Desert, as predicted for his first rating period, lands right among the top 25.
TalkStream's third quarter 2015 sampling size report exceeds 1.6 million, a 14% increase in total listening over the last quarter.
So we didn't slaughter the top 25, but that we are on there at all is absolutely amazing, considering we just began.
That's one item.
And the other is the headline story on the Huffington Post Science page.
Go to the Huffington Post, and the headline you're going to see is, Scenario that Opens, quote, The Day After Tomorrow, end quote.
Actually, not that far-fetched, according to research.
The 2004 blockbuster movie, The Day After Tomorrow, is all about the disastrous effect of the collapse of a massive temperature-driven ocean circulation system.
Although the system, known as the Atlantic Circulation System, is real, researchers said at the time that the movie wasn't based in facts.
Right?
Actually, NBC clobbered Whitley and myself, and many other media clobbered us as well, but according to research I'm going on now, published last week by the journal Nature Scientific Reports, The effects dreamed up in the movie may actually be more possible than initially thought.
Now, I could go on, and I will a little.
The AMOC helps warm Europe and the East Coast by bringing Caribbean waters northward and shifting cooler waters south.
Should the AMOC collapse, especially in light of the broader impacts of global climate change, this report finds that parts of the earth would actually cool for a period of 15 to 20 years, very much like in the movie.
The basic scenario of AMOC as a result of global warming is not completely out of the blue or unthinkable.
They go on to say, and so on and so on.
So if you want to read about it, once again, when Whitley and I wrote the book, The Coming Global Superstorm, that became The Day After Tomorrow, we went on NBC and they made fun of us, and I got a couple of jabs back, as I recall, and then later a really good one.
But I mean, we got clobbered.
Absolutely got clobbered.
So there you have it.
It seems as though, well, frankly, um, na-na-na-na-na-na.
Sorry.
I shouldn't have done that.
Um, now, next item.
The Martian.
Um, our family went, uh, into Las Vegas this, uh, this weekend, in fact yesterday, uh, and saw the Martian.
Now, in my opinion, The Martian rates as the best movie of the year, though the year is clearly not done.
At least the best movie thus far, and I mean in every category.
The CGI was flawless, but that's not the reason to go see The Martian.
The reason to go see it is the story.
Oh my God, the story, the acting, the scientific realism, It was gripping, it was amazing, and I might also like to add they used my bumper music throughout.
I almost fell off the seat when Abba came on.
Amazing!
So, if you don't do anything else, and you don't go to any other movie this year, go to the Martians.
It's simply out of this world in more ways than one.
Sorry about that.
Also at Artbell.com, if Keith got it up, and I trust he did, somebody sent me a ghost photograph from Mackinac Island up in the northern part of the world.
Actually, that island is kind of special to me.
I know you know it is because of the movie, Somewhere in Time.
Which I absolutely have always loved.
In fact, I went up to the island in a private jet.
It was pretty cool.
Matter of fact, I'm a ham operator and I was talking to hams all the way from the private jet.
Something you cannot do in commercial aircraft.
Yet.
They'll finally figure out hams are not going to bring down planes.
It's bad guys.
Okay, just a couple of other items and then onward.
Evidence is mounting that the El Nino ocean warming phenomenon in the Pacific is going to spawn a very, very rainy winter in California now.
Scientists are saying they are 95% certain it's going to happen.
Now they say this is as close as you can get to a sure thing.
Now, they're calling it too big Too big to fail!
So, there you have science for you.
Too big to fail.
Now, it wouldn't all be good, of course.
Because of the deforestation, because of the extended drought, there will be mudslides.
I jokingly said the mudslides will put out the fires.
Europe's Climate chief has acknowledged now for the first time that climate pledges made by national governments ahead of a major UN conference fall far short of meeting the 3.6 degree Fahrenheit limit.
In fact, what they're saying is we're going to go up by 5.4 degrees And that's enough.
So, ocean levels, they say, will climb.
We could have, well, as the book said, we could have a big freeze.
This climate change is clearly real.
Coming up in a moment, Dr. Dennis McKenna's research.
You know, before I even say this, I want to say When I put up the fact that Dr. McKenna was going to be on tonight, there are a number of people who said, oh, a drug show.
Well, I'm not their watch.
I'm not going to listen to that.
It's a drug show.
A couple people, anyway.
And yes, in a sense, it certainly is going to be about drugs.
But I want to say something.
It's not a go-do drug show.
That's not what we're doing here.
Drugs are part of the human experience.
How strongly can I put this?
What do we do on this program?
We explore questions, some of them the biggest in the world, like what comes next.
And if there's anything out there beyond our physical, material existence, what greater questions can there be in the world?
Everybody does drugs, virtually everybody, right?
Coffee is a drug, and I'm hooked.
Cigarettes are a drug, and I was hooked.
I'm still hooked on nicotine.
So, alcohol, that's a big drug.
Drugs are part of human life, but the drugs we're going to talk about here are drugs that affect the human psyche, the human existence.
And so, they go to the very questions that we ask on this program.
They are central to the questions or may be, let me qualify that, may be central to the questions that we ask and study on this program.
Anyway, Dr. Dennis McKenna, Terence's brother, the late Terence McKenna, Dr. Dennis McKenna's research has focused on the interdisciplinary study of Amazonian ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens.
He has conducted extensive ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian Amazon.
His doctoral research at the University of British Columbia in 1984 focused on the ethnopharmacology of Ayahuasca and Ukiha.
We'll find out about that.
Two tryptamine-based hallucinogens used by indigenous peoples in the Northwest Amazon.
He is a founding board member of the Hefter Research Institute was a key organizer and participant in the Ayahuasca project, the first biomedical investigation of Ayahuasca used in the UDV, a Brazilian religious group.
He is currently assistant professor in the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota.
He has written a book called Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.
My life with Terrence McKenna, his brother.
Welcome to the program, Dennis.
Hello, Dennis.
Well, that's... Here I am.
Oh, there you are.
I had it muted, sorry.
You had it muted, okay.
I had it muted.
It's a pleasure, Art.
Thank you for having me back.
Well, I'm glad to have you back.
Very thankful to have you back.
And let us begin with your book.
I absolutely love the title, Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, My Life with Terrence, Terrence McKenna.
Tell me about your book and why you decided to write it.
Well, it's a complex question.
I felt that the time had come in my life to write this book.
I had a side of the story, our story, that I wanted to tell, and I just thought the time was right.
Especially since it was written in 2012, toward the end of 2012 is when it appeared.
And as you know, that was a very important date for my brother, And his time wave theory.
And so it was just it was partly a personal thing.
It was it was a desire to tell my story.
I mean, that's what it boiled down to.
And I was able to do a successful Kickstarter campaign so I could create the time And I did not do the break that I had promised I was going to do, which probably accounts for your not coming back in a timely way, so let me do that break.
And by the way, they used this song, folks, In my movie, The Martian, I about fell out of my seat.
They used a lot of the other music I use and then toward the end of the movie
they used this song by ABBA.
Take a walk on the wild side of midnight.
From the Kingdom of Nigh, this is Midnight in the Desert with Art Bell.
Please call the show at 1952-225-5278.
That's 1952.
Call Art.
Once again, here is Dennis McKenna.
Welcome back, Dennis.
Thank you.
Alright, so the title though, Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.
How'd you come up with that?
Where did that come from?
Well, I don't know.
It says book.
Well, it says here at the bottom, book, Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, My Life with Terrence McKenna.
Yes, that's right.
Well, the title is kind of tongue-in-cheek, or in some ways, when we were very young, when we were about 20, We got into some pretty interesting delusional, maybe, or conceptual places that led us to traipse off to the Amazon in 1971 in search of this legendary drug, Ukuhe.
And the reasons behind that are more complex, but to the question, our band of explorers, it wasn't just Terrence and myself, there were other people involved, but our band of people that went down there, we called ourselves the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.
Kind of tongue-in-cheek in some ways, you know, because we knew we were looking for a secret.
We had this idea that somehow the tryptamine hallucinogens held a great secret, but we didn't really know what we were getting into, and as it turned out, Subsequent events prove that we really didn't know what we were getting into.
But anyway, sort of, you know, it's good to keep a sense of humor as you get into these things.
And being Irish, we had this, I, you know, this moniker, the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.
We were sort of mocking ourselves, I guess, a bit.
So that's, that's where it came from.
I think it could not be more fitting, actually.
I thought so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, as it turned out, we You know, we were approaching an abyss of sorts, and we really had no idea what was in store for us down there in Columbia in 1971.
I should mention, I don't know how deep you want to get into that, but generally I usually avoid it because the story is so convoluted.
I wouldn't mind getting into it at all.
I would like to do this, though.
Now don't tell people, read the book.
It's all in there.
Well, Terrence, as you know, had been interviewed By myself, many times.
Right, right.
And we were quite close, Dennis, and nowhere near as close as you were with your brother.
But I'm kind of curious, you have followed, to some degree, parallel courses, and to some degree, not parallel courses.
And I wonder if you would, if you can enlarge on that thought.
In other words, how, in what ways are you different than your brother was?
Sure.
Well, again, if you read the book, it goes into sort of, you know, how this alliance started really from our earliest childhood.
I mean, we were both, you know, kind of weird kids and kind of nerdy.
We were interested in science fiction and space travel and paranormal events and you know just anything that was outlandish that
was our that was uh that was fascinating to us you know and not unlike I suspect a lot
of listeners to Art Bell they can often you know think back to their own childhood and
interest in what you might call the obscure and the esoteric and you know that's really the
thread that uh you know that was the thread of common interest between Terrence and myself we
both and he being the older you know kind of led in some ways he was four years older so he
would get into Interested in things, and then, you know, it's kind of the little brother syndrome.
Whatever your big brother's doing, that's interesting.
You know, you want to be in on that, even though half the time he says, go away, you know, you're just an ass.
But I, but we sort of grew out of that.
And then we realized that, you know, we both had mutual interests and both had something to contribute.
And so, you know, we were good partners in this exploration of the bizarre.
And when it came to psychedelics, you know, psychedelics came up into the culture and we clearly thought, you know, this is big news.
This is worth looking into, you know, something that can, you know, allegedly open these other dimensions.
This was right up our alley being fed on science fiction.
And that's what I'm trying to tell my audience.
You know, that's what I'm trying to tell the audience.
This is not a do drugs show.
This is a show that goes to the very center of the questions that we deal with on this program.
And there are many paths to finding out what comes next or what is beyond, if anything, beyond the material.
And if there are bigger questions in life, I don't know what they are.
Well, exactly.
I don't either.
And, you know, back in the 60s when we discovered these substances, these medicines, I thought it was, you know, the most significant discovery I've ever made.
And what are we into at all?
That was the 60s.
So 50, Years on, my opinion hasn't really changed.
I think that psychedelics are damned interesting, and darned interesting, I guess I should say.
No, that's fine.
Did you find that you and Terrence had a different road or a different approach to basically the same thing, or were you always sort of in lockstep?
No, no, not at all.
I mean, we did have a different approach, and he was more of a philosopher and a cultural commentator and a brilliant mind, but his approach was not really the science route, and I was more in the science route.
You know, I took a scientific interest in studying these things, but always I was cognizant of how limited science is in terms of really understanding what these materials are and also, you know, by extension understanding what consciousness is, what mind is, because that's really what these things are.
are their tools for exploring consciousness and possibly trying to understand the relationship
between the brain and the mind.
You know, so in some ways I think of psychedelics, they're really tools for neuroscience in a certain way.
But they're also tools for, I guess you could say, phenomenology.
People that are trying to understand, you know, what it is, what is it to be conscious.
These are tremendously useful tools and you know in that respect now you know you can say well drugs these are drugs right so therefore they're completely illegitimate and what I would say to that is You know, that is a, there are drugs and there are drugs, right?
For one thing, there are all kinds of drugs.
As you pointed out earlier, coffee is a drug, tea is a drug, all these things.
So the term, blanket term, drugs, is utterly meaningless.
We have to say, what kind of drugs?
And it so happens that the psychedelics are in a special class of drugs.
They don't cause addiction, they're not particularly toxic, but they do really interesting things phenomenologically, and they don't really, I mean, although they're classified as drugs of abuse, again, another meaningless term, but They don't necessarily invite abuse.
To use them you have to do a lot of processing to deal with what they bring up.
They have no relationship to the kind of hook that heroin or any other addictive substance like that Right.
Those are totally different neural circuits.
Psychedelics don't work on those circuits.
They work on serotonin, which is, you know, another important neurotransmitter, but they don't have this, and the pharmacologists call it reinforcing effect, meaning the more you take it, the more you want to take it.
With psychedelics, it's quite the opposite.
The more you take it, the more you wonder if Am I going to be able to face it the next time?
It doesn't invite you to leap off the cliff every other night or anything like that, because, you know, you get into some fairly strange realms.
Well, I mean, you went on to get a doctorate to study this, so clearly you did take the scientific approach.
How does one go about doing research on drugs that the government says you should be arrested for?
Well, you know, surprisingly there is a way to do that.
It involves a lot of bureaucracy.
It involves usually working through major academic institutions.
It involves, it helps if the scientists doing the work and applying for the grants and so on are, you know, have excellent credentials in their field.
Sure.
All of those things, and as it turns out, this has all happened within the last decade, more or less, since the last time we talked.
You know, I've talked about the Hefter Research Institute, which I'm affiliated with.
Then there's MAPS, which is a much more larger and well-known institution.
Basically, most of the scientists that are working in this field today, you know, are affiliated with institutions like New York University, Johns Hopkins, UCLA, you know, Harvard.
So, these are not podunk institutions, you know.
These are some pretty well-credentialed institutions, and within that framework, these investigators have got A number of research programs going right now, clinical trials, that's the holy grail really when it comes to clinical research with psychedelics.
You have to do an FDA approved clinical trial.
And it takes a lot of doing to get the permission to do that, but you can get it.
I would imagine a lot of paperwork.
All right.
Hold tight, Dennis.
We are at a break point, so stay right where you are.
This is the longer break I spoke of, so relax.
We'll be back in about seven minutes or so.
I'm Art Bell.
Now, here's Art.
Here I am.
me. I am so into you. In that darkest time between dusk and dawn from the high desert,
it's Art Bell's Midnight in the Desert. Now, here's Art.
Here I am. My guest is Dr. Dennis McKenna.
And we are exploring the world of psychedelic drugs.
And I think the first question I would like to ask is, when one does the hellish amount of paperwork, no doubt, required to get permission from the government to study these drugs, I'm certain that one has to project the possibility of positive benefit or knowledge coming out of it, and I wonder, Dennis, what you put down as a possible positive benefit coming from this study.
Yeah, well, there are a number of them.
You're right, when you get one of these FDA approved studies going, you want to have a You want to project a therapeutic outcome, right?
Why are you doing this?
And it turns out there are a number of kind of intractable conditions that the psychedelics can address that no other class of psychopharmaceuticals, psychopharmaceutical medications can really address.
They can kind of scab things over like antidepressants, SSRIs for example, Do not really resolve the underlying causes that make people depressed, right?
Right.
Psychedelics can address that sort of thing.
They can help people get to the root of many of their problems.
And so, you know, they're useful for things like PTSD.
The medication MDMA is showing great promise to treat PTSD.
And that's kind of MAP's focus right now.
They're trying to get this medicine approved to treat vets.
You know we have lots of vets who have problems with PTSD and there really is no adequate treatment.
The Hefter Research Institute, my group, which I'd like to say is hefter.org if you want to see what we're up to.
H-E-F-F-T-E-R.org.
We've kind of staked out psilocybin as our main medicine, our main drug of interest right now.
Okay, doctor, I'm hearing you move around something there.
I'm not sure what it is.
I'm probably waving my hand.
Waving your hand should be fine.
It's this kind of connection.
It's perfect audio, so we tend to hear every little thing.
Yeah.
Sorry about that.
So anyway... But anyway, psilocybin, as you probably know, is the active principle of the magic mushroom, right?
Right.
The psilocybin mushrooms.
And psilocybin turns out to be a very good psychedelic to use in a clinical setting, because it's fairly short-acting, It's not toxic.
It can be given to people in advanced states of cancer, for example.
People not in the best of health can tolerate it, if that's necessary.
And it reliably produces a profound psychedelic experience that is not unlike a mystical experience.
In fact, it is a mystical experience.
So this is one of the breakthroughs of this study of this pharmacology.
You know, we've come to understand we can simulate a mystical experience and that is very meaningful and profound for many people.
So, if you're dying, for example, if you're in a terminal cancer patient, you're anxious about dying, right?
You're anxious about death and how do you face it and what's going to happen to your loved ones and all this.
Some people are so You know, distressed by this, that they really need some kind of help.
And we found that psilocybin, in the right circumstances, can help these people with anxiety, what we're calling existential anxiety, anxiety about their fate as dying.
And it's been tremendously helpful for a lot of people.
And we have, there have been numerous studies now done at Johns Hopkins and NYU, If you go to the Hefter Research site and click on our research, you can get a summary of all these studies, what's going on.
Okay, you say it relieves or may relieve somebody's... Hello?
Yes.
It may relieve somebody's fear or change their fear of dying, and I wanted to ask if it's because This experience, Doctor, I guess introduces somebody to the concept of something beyond the physical, and that is where the relief comes for them?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, it introduces them to the idea that, you know, not necessarily that death is not the end, but the Psychedelics sometimes resemble the near-death experience, you know, and whatever goes on in the near-death experience, whether it's a transient neurochemical event or whether it's really an entry to some other place,
I don't think science can really say, but the psilocybin experience, when, you know, in these folks that are facing death, it helps reduce their anxiety, and maybe that's because they experience a profoundly altered state, and maybe they say, well, hey, this isn't so bad, you know?
Could it be, I'm sorry, doctor, could it be that the wire connecting to your headphones or something is moving around, it's kind of constant?
Oh, gosh.
Something is rattling around.
Could be the USB connection.
I'm not sure.
Yeah, now I'm hearing a lot of rattling.
Touching the headphones.
Now, I could try a different headphone.
I don't have the mic on it, but I could try that.
No, that's probably not a good idea.
It's something rubbing, or something... I can't quite put my finger on it.
I'm sorry to even be having to mention this to you, but it's going on constantly.
Well, I'm not touching the headphones, and the USB port is pretty well seated so I'll just... Sounds alright now.
Okay. I'll try to not move.
Anyway, are we talking about a near-death experience or something just similar
to it? Have you come that far in research to say, look, we're talking...
Well, it depends on the drug in a certain sense. I mean DMT, which is a close relative of psilocybin,
but much more short-acting and much more reality-altering, I guess you could say.
DMT, at high doses, does actually resemble the near-death experience in remarkable ways.
Psilocybin doesn't get you quite that far, but it does put you into a profound state.
And the outcome that we're observing with the patients, the terminal patients that take this, is not so much that they've experienced death and that they You know, are prepared for it.
It's more like a realization that they're no longer obsessed with their death.
You know, they come away with the realization, well, okay, I'm alive now.
I'm alive in this moment.
Why not focus on that and not be preoccupied with death?
And I think that's the meaningful, you know, outcome for these people.
They stop worrying.
Yeah, death is there, but I'm here now.
Would you extend that to say, yeah, death is there, but there may well be, or I may have had a glimpse of something beyond?
Yes, exactly, that too.
That may be, but I'm reassured that death is there, that's not necessarily the end, you know, it's a transition.
And whether that's true or not doesn't really matter.
The important thing is it matters to them.
It helps them cope with what's happening to them.
Sure.
The scope of therapeutic applications for psilocybin is way beyond this.
It can be used to treat addictions.
Protocols going for alcoholism and cocaine addiction.
You know, it can be used as a, as I mentioned before, a tool in neuroscience if you want to understand what's going on in your brain.
We now have very fancy toys for this.
Neuroimaging devices like fMRI and this sort of thing.
So you can Take a person in a mystical state, induced by psilocybin, and put them into a fMRI and see what parts of their brain are, you know, activated or suppressed or whatever.
And you can compare that to, say, a person who's never taken psilocybin, like a Tibetan monk or somebody who's meditated all their lives.
You see remarkable similarities.
Okay, if you wouldn't mind, let's go back to The possibility of helping people who are addicted to other substances.
I wonder, in what way you feel, in other words, is it a pharmaceutical change that occurs in their brain, or is it some revelation they have while taking the drug?
In other words, how does it help?
I think it's both.
I don't think you can separate these things.
For example, with psilocybin, there's a young investigator at Johns Hopkins who's part of the psilocybin research team named Matt Johnson.
He's been doing studies with psilocybin and smoking cessation, and you wouldn't think that a psychedelic would assist with that, but he is
getting some remarkable results.
He's working with people who are lifetime smokers, three packs a day, serious, serious
addicts who have not been able to give up smoking despite many attempts.
He has found that with two fairly high dose psilocybin treatments and a lot of counseling,
obviously leading up to this and following on, but about 60% of his larger sample and
in some other studies almost 80% of the subjects were able to give up.
kick cigarettes and basically were six months down the road a year down the road they were tobacco free what percentage again please I'm sorry 60 to 80 my god that's incredible oh yeah this totally wipes out the result of any other kind of treatment I mean it is completely you know it's remarkable it absolutely is remarkable okay again I've got to ask you say it's a combination of a pharmaceutical effect and Counseling.
Well, other methods use lots of counseling along with whatever pill or gum or patch or whatever it is they offer, and they don't get anywhere near those rates.
Right.
Well, a lot of the counseling has to do with the preparation for the experience, right?
and thinking about your problem and you wish to quit smoking
and when you have this experience, you're going to be in this state of deep introspection
where you're gonna have to confront this.
And so a lot of it is to prepare people in terms of how they think of these problems.
And when you have addiction, particularly when you say, well, is this pharmaceutical or is this psychological?
It really is a combination.
But I think that with I think that psychedelics in themselves do not cure addiction.
What they do is They let you step out of the box a little bit and look at your behavior and look at your relationship to the other drug, the one you're abusing, alcohol, heroin, whatever, make you look at that relationship in a different light and essentially see it as something that, you know, that's not you, that's not part of you, and you actually can make a conscious decision to change your behavior
You know, while you're out of the box, right?
Sure.
The question becomes, what happens when you come down and you re-enter your normal life?
Yes.
A lot of people can slip back into their old habits, and so it takes some planning.
But the temporary, you know, ability to step out of your own reference frame, essentially, for a while and look at it from that perspective, that is a tremendous opportunity.
you know, whatever, the ultimate success depends on whatever follow-up there is to that.
So it's complicated.
That's true of all cessation methods for smoking, for example, but again, they don't get anywhere
near a 60%.
Oh my goodness.
Right, because they don't provide, and I think this is important in psychedelic therapy of
all kinds, this comes up particularly when we're talking about ayahuasca.
I think that catharsis is something that psychedelics can reliably induce.
And catharsis is a Define various ways, but it's a kind of it's a spiritual.
It's a crisis.
It's a personal spiritual psychological crisis that leads to renewal Essentially, so it's a sort of reworking of this whole thing some of which I think does take place on the neurochemical level Some of it just takes place on the on the on the attitudinal level.
You know the way you understand.
Yes your relationship to Your drug or your medicine or, you know, really your whole environment.
Would you go so far as to say it kind of rewires the brain?
Yeah, I would, actually.
I think it probably does.
And in fact, in the case of Ayahuasca, you know, we have evidence for that as a result of this study that we did in 1993 with the UDV, the Brazilian church in Brazil, in Manaus, Brazil, that uses Ayahuasca as a sacrament.
They invited us, myself and a bunch of other scientists of various disciplines to come in and do a biomedical study of their practices, right?
Sure.
And they were trying to, they wanted to be sure it was safe and they also wanted to persuade the Brazilian government that it was safe and it was okay and not a drug abuse problem and all that.
So they asked us to do this investigation.
One of the interesting things we found from that was that in long-term users of Ayahuasca, there was an elevation In the brain, a long-term elevation of a very important key protein in the neurotransmitters.
I mentioned that psychedelics work on serotonin.
Well, another important serotonin thing is so-called the serotonin transporters.
Those are the proteins that SSRIs work on, right?
They block the reuptake, the SSRI, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, right?
That tells us what they do.
They suck the serotonin back up.
Okay, so that's getting a little technical for me.
It's getting a little technical.
Would it be fair to say that it's like the train that takes the good stuff to its destination?
Or a vacuum cleaner is a better energy in the presynaptic membrane that sucks everything back up and reuses it.
But that's not what ayahuasca did.
What we found was that the ayahuasca actually caused these transporters to multiply, to increase their density in the membrane.
That's called upregulation in pharmacology.
We didn't know what that meant when we detected this event with this effect.
We thought, what does this mean?
Why does it regulate these these transporters?
Then we got looking into the literature and it turns out there were all sorts of syndromes related to abnormal Abnormally low levels of these transporters, abnormal deficits in the transporters were linked to things like alcoholism, intractable depression, suicidal behavior, even homicidal behavior.
So we thought, wow, this is really a pretty clear relationship, you know?
I mean, there are all of these pathologies related to, you know, abnormal deficits in serotonin transporters, and ayahuasca reverses this?
I mean, this is... Maybe the average person could think of it as more trains.
More trains, right.
To take more trains.
Better vacuums.
That's right.
Exactly.
That's right.
To get more of the good stuff where it needs to go more frequently.
That's right.
So that's evidence that these psychedelics can, in some ways, rewire your neurochemistry.
MDMA is another one.
You know, for a long time it was thought that MDMA was neurotoxic to serotonin receptors, serotonin neurons, and it is at higher, at high doses, but they're usually quite a bit more than any, any human would take.
It turns out at the lower level, they actually, they don't, they're not neurotoxic, but what they probably do is increase neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is just the ability of the brain to change, to adapt to new conditions.
All right.
Hold it there.
It used to be thought that neurons never changed.
You got a certain complement and that was it.
All right.
Doctor, hold it there.
We've got a break and I've got a break here, so we'll be right back.
Two minutes.
and we will continue with Dr. Dennis McKenna.
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Dr. Dennis McKenna is my guest, and we are discussing psychedelic drugs.
The possible benefits of them, why they're being studied, and what they might help, and why.
So, back to it.
I did get one quick computer message that I want to pass on.
It's Rice from Dunsmuir who says, you know, I cannot think of a worse idea than putting somebody in an MRI machine while they're tripping.
Got a point.
Well, these are intrepid pioneers of science.
They are, but I mean, clunk, clunk, clunk!
Right, well, anything for science, right?
Yes.
Most of these people, yeah, I mean, I agree, that wouldn't be the optimal setting, but what are you going to do?
Yeah, what are you going to do?
Well, what do they see?
I mean, what lights up in the brain?
Well, there's interesting You know, again, I don't want to get too technical, but there's some interesting findings in some places, some parts of the brain.
We find that psilocybin really activates neural networks, activates interconnectivity.
So that's basically cross-talk.
Right?
Yes.
Other groups have found that some parts of the brain, that it actually suppresses, believe it or not, communication between certain parts of the brain that normally are in tight communication.
So these are two different findings that are kind of puzzling.
A lot of it has to do with dose.
And, you know, circumstances, but in both cases, you can, you know, at certain doses, psilocybin will activate these networks, but not necessarily across the whole brain, maybe only in certain regions.
At the same time, these regions, like the cortex, the limbic system, mostly the amygdala, these areas are involved, you know, are, the communication between them is suppressed.
And so the thinking is that maybe these feedback loops that always exist between these different groups, they sometimes have a, they put the brakes on, right?
They help maintain homeostasis, so they have an inhibitory function.
And if you break those connections temporarily, then each part is just Free to, you know, free associate if it will, just go off on its own without any inhibitions.
Have the experiments that you all have been doing yet led to any FDA approved use of them?
Well, no, we're not at that stage yet.
I mean, the clinical trials are FDA approved, right?
To do the trials, it's a long way from doing a trial to getting a drug into the clinic, right?
That's the long road that we have to travel, is from phase 1 to phase 2 to phase 3.
clinical trials each one involving more people and each one involving a lot more money I mean almost exponentially more money as you go up phase 3 trial might be hundreds of people at three or four different universities so that's millions and once a drug crosses that threshold and you know we're a long way from that then it will be can be approved for for clinical use and there are people that are That are working on that, that are ready to do that.
I want to mention something that might be of interest to your listeners.
There's a wonderful website called clinicaltrials.gov Your tax dollars pay for this, and it is a place you can go and find out any FDA-approved clinical study that's gone on, that's recently over or in progress or about to start for really anything.
I mean, if you want to research cancer treatments, that's a good place to look.
But if you search on things like psilocybin or MDMA or even LSD, You know, the studies that have been done will come up, so you can get a pretty good look at what's been done and what's in progress and what's planned.
That's just a great resource.
Money well spent by your government, which rarely spends money well.
So, take a look.
All right.
When you look at the current state of affairs with the war on drugs in America, Actually in the world, but certainly in America anyway What are your comments?
Well, I think the You know, the last, I mean, the war on drugs was really initiated at the end of the 60s.
So we're coming on what, you know, 45 years.
It's a, it's a miserable and total failure.
You know, I mean, over a trillion dollars has been spent on it.
And there are more drugs than ever.
There are more people in jail for drugs than ever, especially in this country.
And it's just not the solution.
You know, it's not working.
Prohibiting people from altering their consciousness is not the right approach because it's a fundamental instinct of behavior.
And this is just something that we do.
You know, so the right approach, in my opinion, is you have to educate people about how to use drugs.
That's the bottom line.
You have to educate people how to avoid the really harmful ones and use the ones that aren't so harmful in a way that's intelligent and maximizes their Well, you mentioned that there are a lot of people in jail, and there are.
Yeah.
Gee, millions.
And so, what would you do?
Would you legalize drugs, and which ones would you consider legalizing, or would you do it across the board, and then just do education?
Well, it's a tough call, you know, but I would pretty much legalize them across the board, but I would regulate them.
So, you know, if you're addicted to, say, meth or something, one of the really destructive drugs, I wouldn't just dispense that out of vending machines, right?
I would say, okay, you're a meth addict, so you like meth, so here's a prescription.
Go to the drugstore and get your meth.
But every time you go to get your prescription, you basically have a teachable moment.
You have a chance for a drug counselor, the pharmacist, doctor, whoever, to say, hey, you know, do you really want to take meth?
You know, is this is not good for you?
Have you thought about other choices?
Have you thought about, you know, and just basically encourage people to, you know, to intelligent behavior.
It's all about education.
Besides that, Doctor, I'm trying to imagine this.
People will kick a Coke machine because they don't get their Coke.
Imagine the meth guy puts 20 bucks in, doesn't get his meth.
He's going to turn that thing into twisted metal.
Right, well that's why you get it from a pharmacist, right?
Because ideally that's the thing.
You can't prevent people from altering their consciousness.
It's built into human behavior.
What you can do is encourage them to, if they're going to do that with artificial chemistry or plant chemistry or whatever, then teach them how to make good choices, you know, or teach them ways to get there without drugs.
There are plenty of those ways, too.
So meditation, all this stuff should be encouraged.
But people are going to take drugs.
This is a fact of life.
Partly it's because people are made of drugs.
This is what I Have started saying in my lectures, people take drugs because they're made of drugs.
The reason drugs work is because we are essentially bags of neurotransmitters and hormones and all these biochemical processes on some levels that drugs work on.
So, you know, it's just a fact of life.
We have to acknowledge that we're bad.
It is a fact of life.
In fact, a lot of people have to take drugs because their bodies don't make enough of that drug, right?
Well, in some cases, yeah.
Yeah.
As a rule, but a lot of cases like thyroxine, for example, the, you know, the thyroid hormone.
People have hot thyroid surgery, they have to take artificial thyroid hormone forever, and that's just a replacement of what their body doesn't make.
Or, you know, Parkinson's, we don't make enough dopamine, so you get Parkinson's disease.
Take precursors to Parkinson's, yeah.
So, sometimes that's what drugs do.
Okay, or the other way around.
I mean, as you point out, we are made up of drugs, and a body that creates drugs for its own safety.
Right.
And essentially our brain chemistry is a soup of drugs.
You know, that's what neurotransmitters are, essentially.
They're drugs.
They just happen to be drugs that our bodies make and, you know, which are essential for the functioning of our brain.
And then, you know, drugs that we might introduce into that system from outside, plant chemicals or whatever, they usually work on neurotransmitters in some way.
You know, that's kind of where the Rubber meets the road when it comes to psychoactive drugs they work on different neurotransmitters There are many neurotransmitters about 50 different types in the body You know and each has their own population of receptors that they work on and many many subtypes of these receptors, so you know it's a complex story, but it's basically about a
Neurons talking to each other, you know, largely via neurotransmitters.
I mean, there are other kinds of communication, like voltage-gated neurotransmission and that sort of thing, but basically it's chemical neurotransmitters that, you know, that run consciousness, if you want to put, that consciousness runs on, and largely the serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine are the three biggies, glutamate, all these things.
You can't It's a complex picture, which we probably don't have time to get into.
Okay.
Would you say, I don't know who puts these questions together, whether these came from you or from my producer, but one of them is, are our souls somehow naturally entangled with DMT?
Is that you?
That was probably one of the questions That your creative producer came up with.
I see, okay.
Great producer, by the way.
Oh, she's something else.
She's wonderful.
She's great.
Yes, Heather.
Very smart young woman.
She is.
She gave me a list of questions.
I added two.
The question is, DMT is tangled up with the soul.
Well, it certainly occurs naturally in the human body, right?
So it is a naturally occurring psychedelic that's found in the body.
And we're not sure what it's doing there, and it's kind of controversial because we don't really understand.
A lot of people say it has to do with pineal function and the whole third eye thing and we know that DMT occurs in the pineal at least sometimes and all the precursors for it are there and all the enzymes needed to make it are there so it's probably pretty sure that it occurs there.
Whether it does anything, whether it actually has a psychedelic effect when that happens is a matter of controversy, you know, and I mean I, my dear friend Dave
Nichols, who's the president of the Hefner Research Institute, you know, and
there's no better pharmacologist when it comes to psychedelics. He's the
world's expert and he says DMT probably never reaches levels in the tissues or
at the neurons where it can actually act as a psychedelic.
Alright, let me back up just a little bit and ask this question.
Most doctors, and I interview many doctors, many scientists, I would say, by far, would say they don't believe in God.
Typical of what a doctor would say, that they don't believe in God.
I think in medical school, beginning or perhaps even before that, they're sort of trained out of that.
And, you know, when you begin talking about souls, then inevitably you're talking about, well, are we more than our material and mental selves, whether there is something else.
And where do you come down in this range?
Well, again, you know, this is a complex question.
You bet it is, yes it is.
Yeah, most scientists in their scientific training and physicians and so on, they are trained into reductionism.
Reductionism being the idea that it's all matter, there really is no spirit in life, there really is no supernatural, this is all just atoms, you know, ultimately crashing about and doing things in random ways.
But then you have this knotty problem of subjective experience, right?
We all have subjective experience.
Sure.
And although scientists might be atheists, they might deny the existence of God.
It's very hard for them to deny the existence of mind, of their own mind, of their own consciousness.
And that's a reality.
You know, thoughts are real.
Consciousness is real.
Yes, it is.
So what is it?
Well, okay, let us try this.
Let me pin you down in a different way.
This is what neuroscience can't quite explain yet.
Alright, when the brain waves go flat, and there's no heartbeat, and there's no respiration, and the body grows cold, is there, in your estimation, the possibility of anything continuing in terms of what we would think of as consciousness?
You know, honestly, I can't answer that question, and I don't think anybody who assesses it honestly can say.
You know, consciousness in some form is an energy state, right?
It's a stable energy state.
It's associated with the brain.
It's associated with neural activity.
It's, you know, and you would think that it's dependent on that physical substrate to keep going.
Right, but just maybe there's a way that it doesn't depend on those things.
This is what we don't know, you know, because nobody, we've had people who have had near-death experiences and they've come back and reported on what happened.
That's right.
We don't have anybody who's actually died and come back and reported what happens and And I think that, you know, I think that we have to keep an open mind because I think that we don't know a lot.
And I think this is something that science, you know, is quick to be dismissive.
And I think that, you know, I think that science needs to remind itself every day, every moment, that what we don't know is much greater than what we do know.
You know, what science thinks it knows.
Sure.
There is no place in this equation for arrogance.
Right?
I mean, science can be proud of what it knows, but it should always remind itself most of the universe we don't yet understand.
And that's great.
I don't find that depressing.
I found that challenging and kind of joyful because it means there's a whole lot left to be learned.
The important thing is we have to keep an open mind.
You know, we cannot abandon our analytical capabilities.
But when science says a case is open and shut, We thoroughly understand this phenomenon.
We can put that on the shelf and forget about it.
This is a settled matter.
You know, the history of science has shown again and again that about the time science reaches that point, the whole thing blows up and it turns out, you know, new information comes in and it's not at all the way they thought.
Oh, you are so correct.
Examples would be recent news from science on the benefits of coffee.
And even more controversial, recent news from science on the benefits of fatty foods.
Yup.
Yup.
Exactly.
That one really cracked me up.
I just don't know how they can keep... What's accepted as established dogma, turns out a few years later, we were completely wrong about all that.
That's right.
You'd think that They would get it, and that this would be a cause for humility, and a cause for, you know, keeping our minds open.
This is the thing.
Just keep your mind open.
You can accept what's known, but you have to remember it may all be turned over next week, you know, or overturned.
This is the way discovery works, ideally.
You know, I mean, our picture of cosmology, due to, you know, relativity and quantum mechanics, Quite a bit different than somebody a thousand years ago.
Or even two hundred years.
Quite a bit different.
Yeah, quite different.
So, science is powerful, but it is also limited, and scientists should keep that in mind.
Well, okay.
How's that for dodging a question?
Well, not bad at all, actually.
So, DMT, there are people who are claiming That a DMT experience is the same as an NDE.
I guess you've looked into DMT and you've looked perhaps into NDEs, have you?
Yeah, I have.
And also abduction experiences.
People claim that high doses of DMT are not unlike abduction experiences.
That's true.
You know, I haven't had that kind of experience on DMT, although I will say, you know, the ones I've had are often quite, you know, science fiction-ish in a way.
I mean, you see machines, you see entities that appear to be aliens or not human.
You often encounter these entities, is I guess the term.
So you have encountered these entities?
Oh yeah, I have.
I think anyone who takes a high dose of DMT is probably going to run into these critters, you know?
I mean, they're out there.
What are they?
That's what's harder to say.
So how do you subjectively, I don't know, describe what you have encountered?
Well, everybody has a different kind of encounter with them, although there are similarities.
You know, Terrence used to talk about the elf machines, you know, the self-transforming elf machines, or the, you know, the hyper-dimensional Fabergé eggs, or, you know, these things, which do often appear to be You know, machine-like and sometimes intelligent, sometimes intelligent machine.
It's very hard to say, because we only have our categories to, you know, describe things.
And in DMT, it goes way beyond categories.
So, essentially, the experience is really hard to stuff into a box of description, a linguistic box, even though You know, it's a natural impulse to start to do that even before it's over.
You're trying, you know, you're babbling, you're trying to explain what, what, what was that?
You know, it's what we try to do is make sense out of things.
It doesn't necessarily make sense, but it's overwhelming and it's, and it's quite alien.
It's very hard to relate to anything else.
And is it real?
Well, you know, Well, Doctor, when you have... What do we mean by real?
When you have come back, and you have experienced these entities, is it for at least a short time, until your doctor's rational mind begins to crank away again, and you're away from the drug, is it for a short time unquestionably legal?
Legal?
Real?
Yeah, well, it certainly isn't legal.
Not in that context.
No, not legal, but real.
That brings me to the interesting question of, you know, what is all this drug prohibition and non-prohibition of consciousness?
We won't go right there right now, but is it unquestionably real?
Well, here's the thing.
I experience it as real, you know, so it's real in that sense.
And if you think about it, Everything that we experience is, you know, a hallucination in a certain way.
Everything that we experience, you know, this is what our brains do.
They construct a model of reality.
And that's the reality that we live in.
You know, we're in the hallucination.
We're part of the movie that our brains are creating.
So that's our reality.
Is it real?
Well, We experience it as real.
Does it map onto the real world, the world that physics and everything else tells us is out there, which I call the unknowable real world?
And the physicists tell us that the real world, as our instruments measure it, doesn't look anything like your subjective experience.
But everybody is walking around with a subjective experience.
That's a model that they're living in.
That's a hallucination.
And then when you bring drugs into the picture, I mean, basically what you're doing is changing the frequency a little bit, you know, tweaking the neurochemistry just enough that you're getting different, you know, a different, you're looking at it through a different lens.
Well, okay, let's approach it from this direction.
If a researcher like yourself came back from a trip And wrote in some peer-reviewed journal that he met aliens.
They definitely were aliens.
Or entities.
He'd probably not be a credentialed researcher very much longer unless he had really good tenure.
This is true.
Yes, this would not be a welcome message in peer-reviewed journals, you know, but you have to be honest about what you experience.
I mean, you know, my friend and a person known to many people in the psychedelic community, you know, Dr. Rick Strassman, who was really a pioneer in DMT research.
I mean, in the early 90s, he was the first Physician, psychiatrist in 20 years to actually get an FDA approved protocol to study a psychedelic drug.
And the drug he chose was DMT.
And he gave DMT by injection over a range of doses to more than 60 people over a period of time.
And many of those people reported these near-death experiences, alien abduction experiences, all this crazy stuff, right?
So poor Rick... I'm saying maybe crazy.
Well, maybe crazy.
This is what they were reporting.
To them, this was real.
But poor Rick, he's got to write a report to NIH.
He's got to write his grant.
That's right.
Being an honest scientist, you know, finally he threw up his hands and he said, I can't make sense of this.
I cannot discount it.
But how do I report this to, you know, to a peer-reviewed journal?
I mean, he did report it, but always with the caveat that this is what people were reporting.
He doesn't say it's real or not.
He just says, this is the observation.
So that's That's honest science, I think.
Doesn't this, in a way, describe some difference between Terrence and yourself?
In that you are reporting things as a scientist.
Terrence came back and said, man, here's what happens.
And here's who you meet.
And here's what you're going to see.
Well, yeah.
He was a narrator of his experiences there.
He was reporting phenomenologically what he saw, and that's perfectly legitimate.
Those experiences were real as far as he was concerned.
And I experience them too, and they're real when I'm having them.
I just wonder, like a lot of people, what is the You know, what is the machinery, the neurochemistry, the whatever it is that gives rise to these experiences?
Or, is there really another dimension somewhere out there in hyperspace, whatever, that these materials give you access to?
Well, that's really, doctor, what I want to know.
Yeah, well, take a number.
We'd all like to know.
And the question is, how do you answer that question?
You know, it's very, very difficult.
I mean, Terrence was always trying to get the entities, whoever, this Logos that he could reliably contact on Mushrooms to tell him something that he couldn't know, that he couldn't possibly know any other way.
And he would take that as proof of some kind that at least they're real, you know, this information.
It's not coming from within him.
Very hard.
They're very tricky, these entities, you know.
They help cough this up very easily.
And I don't think he ever succeeded.
You know, so it's, uh, you know, it's, it's, it's complex, but, but, you know, so it's sort of, that's the thing.
It's sort of, we fabricate our own reality.
We fabricate our own hallucination and we proceed to live there.
Yes, sir.
Hold, hold tight.
We're out of break.
And, uh, so I have to break.
It's been a long one.
We'll be right back with Dr. Dennis McKenna.
I'm Art Bell.
Her hair is hallowed gold Her lips sweet surprise Her hands are never cold She's got Daddy Dave inside Midnight fantasy Someone to share Alright, what we're going to do is open up the lines.
Let me give you the little lecture that I give.
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All right, what we're going to do is open up the lines.
Let me give you the little lecture that I give.
Dr. Dennis McKenna is my guest, and he is involved in testing some pretty serious drugs,
Ayahuasca, and much more.
DMT, just the wildest drugs you can imagine.
He is doing legitimate tests on these drugs.
What they do.
What they mean.
Whether what they mean is real, or... I guess it is.
You know, to most of the people that have taken them, they describe it as absolutely real as his brother did.
Anyway, I want to open the line, so if you want to get in on the discussion and have a question or what have you, our public number is 1 and then area code 952-225-5278.
Once again, 1-952-225-5278.
area code 952-225-5278. Once again, 1952-225-5278. Now, if you have a device... Oh, there was
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AT&T has begun something called Wi-Fi calling, and if you're in an area that has a lousy cell signal, let me tell you how you can improve, and I don't mean just by a little bit, the quality of your audio.
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Boy, oh boy, can you sound good, and if you're in a bad cell area, it will be, it could be your savior.
Believe me.
Other companies are doing it, but AT&T just let loose of a Wi-Fi calling in.
Boy, does it sound good.
Boy, does it sound good.
Anyway, where was I?
Yes.
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It is that simple, and rarely do you get the... You know, opinions vary so much.
For example, I'm looking now at what we call the wormhole messages that come to me while I'm doing the show.
This will give you an idea of the range of the way things like this are received, weighed uh... don't know where he is uh... says boring boring putting me to sleep not one of your better shows joy in santa cruz says this is within four uh... sentences of each other joy says now now this is a good stuff art absolutely the reason why i'm a time traveler thank you so much for interviewing him meaning dennis dr dennis mckenna this is absolutely fascinating
You know, not one thing hits people the same way.
It's, well, frankly, quite subjective.
Doctor, welcome back.
Thank you.
Sure.
It's great to have you, and you are giving out extremely important information, whether, in some cases, obviously, it puts people to sleep.
In other cases, it rivets them to the radio or the device of their choice, whatever.
I personally think that it is one of the most important shows we've done.
It is yet one other avenue to that which I explore here constantly.
And really, I do believe this, Doctor, that it is one... What's the right word?
One legitimate possible avenue to answering the questions that we explore on this program.
The really big ones in life.
Well, yes, I agree.
I mean, you can't please everyone.
No.
Oh, no.
I'm well aware of that.
If you find it boring, don't listen.
That's life.
That's right.
That's right.
Well, okay.
Let us, if you don't mind, allow some of the people in the audience to ask questions.
Would that be okay?
Sure.
All right, let's go to Hawaii.
I think.
Hello, Hawaii.
Hello.
You're squeaking and squealing and making all kinds of noise there.
Hey, that's the cokies in the background.
The what in the background?
The kokanee frogs.
Oh, the frogs.
The kokanee frogs.
Yeah.
Really?
Are they that loud?
Yeah, well, I'm on the big island.
Right.
I actually went to Terrence's property in South Kona back in, I don't know, it must have been around 92, 93.
Right, can you possibly walk into another room which is frog protected a little bit?
No, I'm out here in the jungle, I'm in a one room place, and you know, this is it.
Alright, well if you have a question, yeah, if you have a question, go ahead.
Well, no, I don't have a question as much as, you know, if this is putting somebody to sleep, they never did DMT.
That may be true.
Yeah, that would be a high percentage of the audience.
Right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And, I mean, I lived in the Bay Area in the early 70s, and You know, I love doing psilocybin and LSD and that kind of thing, but DMT is just a whole different degree of intensity.
I mean, it's like, you don't do it for fun.
You know, you're an explorer if you do it.
You may do it for fun the first time, but If that's the situation, you don't ever do it again.
Right, I understand.
If you do it around those frogs, I bet you don't ever do it again either.
I mean, DMT is very interesting for a number of reasons.
You know, like the gentleman says, it's a whole other level of intensity.
And then there's the fact that, you know, it's part of our neurochemistry, right?
None of these other things are, as far as we know.
So it's really built into, you know, the chemistry of our brain.
And not only that, it's very, very widespread in the plant kingdom.
It's a very simple molecule.
It's only two steps from tryptophan.
Tryptophan is an amino acid that's found in all living things because It's part of the 30 amino acids, or what is it, 20, I guess, that go into proteins.
Tryptophan is one of those, and tryptophan can be converted to DMT in two steps.
So, there are many, many plants that contain this.
You know, we know of about 100 or 200, but that's only because people have looked.
It's very likely that hundreds of thousands, if not Tens of thousands of plants contain DMT.
Not always in levels that would be high or usable, but it's a very common compound.
It's not an exaggeration to see that nature, you know, is drenched in DMT.
I sometimes say this, nature's drenched in DMT.
So why is the psychedelic so pervasive in the ecosphere, in the biosphere?
What is going on with that?
Doctor, can you explain in, for example, time, how long is a DMT trip?
It's quite short, is it not?
Well, there are two ways to approach a DMT trip.
DMT by itself is not orally active, right?
Because it's chopped up in the gut by these enzymes.
called monoamine oxidase, monoamine oxidases. So if you eat DMT or eat a plant that contains DMT,
nothing is going to happen, right? You have to take DMT parenterally is the term, other than by
mouth. You can snort it, you know, and there's a whole ethno-pharmacology of snuffs in South America,
DMT containing snuffs.
Or you can take it in combination with another plant that contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, another set of compounds that will knock out those gut enzymes.
Then it becomes orally active.
And that's the secret of ayahuasca.
Ayahuasca is a combination of two plants, One of which contains DMT and the other contains another group of alkaloids called beta-carbolines that knock out MAO in the gut.
So they protect the DMT.
It's absorbed unchanged.
It makes it to the brain unchanged.
And then it's instead of 15 minutes or Or so, when you take it parentally, when you snort it or inject it, it's very, very short.
But instead of that, it's four to six or seven hours.
Wow.
So it's stretched out.
It's not as intense as when you take DMT, you know, parentally, say, but you get more out of it.
It's more relatable because you spend more time there.
And you can learn more about what this state, this dimension, or whatever, what it's all about.
Do you really feel that it is possibly another dimension?
Well, like I say, I don't think we can dismiss it, you know?
I don't think we can dismiss that possibility that somehow You know, because we don't really understand what the mind is, right?
We know that the mind has physical roots in the brain.
It has a connection to physical substrates, but then it also seems to have elements that are not physical, maybe extra-dimensional, hyper-dimensional, or so on.
Yes, sir.
And maybe they do tap into some extra-dimensional realm.
I mean, this is where, you know, to approach these questions scientifically is difficult.
I don't think science can Really say at this point one way or the other but I think it's possible You know, I was yeah, so it's it's possible and certainly subjectively it seems so and if you talk to Indigenous people, you know people who use ayahuasca as part of their ethnomedicine, right?
you know for them this reality is just a It's just accepted.
Of course, this is the way it is.
You see how it is.
This is how we experience it.
They don't really get into these debates about whether it's real or whether it's not.
You know, in some ways, these notions are the product of Cartesian dualism and the whole, you know, scientific philosophical tradition of the Western mind to indigenous people.
These things are not separate.
There really is no in or out.
You know, the self is not separate from the nature that they're surrounded in.
They experience the world quite differently, I think, than we do.
For one thing, they don't have a point of view.
You know, and in indigenous cultures.
And the point of view is what separates us from nature.
And this is a problem.
I think that You know, one thing the psychedelics are doing as we see things like ayahuasca suddenly go global in a sense there.
Everybody's excited about ayahuasca.
It's all over the world.
People are using it, you know.
I think it's trying to reconnect us with nature.
If you could, you know, say that.
You can say that.
You can put it that way.
Let's go to Skype.
Michelle, you're on the air.
Oh, hi, Art.
I don't have a microphone, so I hope I'm close enough.
Can you hear me?
Yes, the key is find the little round hole in your laptop, if that's what it is, and get real close.
OK, it's an iMac.
Can you hear me now?
Oh, yes.
Oh, I hear you.
OK, clear.
OK, clear.
OK, I was in Peru, and I did an ayahuasca retreat.
Actually, I ran into Peter Gorm on the boardwalk down there in Iquitos in Peru.
And I think Art knows Peter Gorm.
He's had him on his show.
Peter Gorm.
Yeah.
Anyways, he told me that before tourists started arriving in Peru, ayahuasca's main use with the natives down there was to get rid and eliminate bacteria and worms that they That they would have in their systems from living in the jungle.
And that the hallucinations were actually a side effect.
It actually didn't have a spiritual... They didn't have a spiritual purpose for it.
This didn't start to happen until tourists started to come and they started to make money down there.
And then the money is what sort of transformed the whole use of ayahuasca into this, you know, psychedelic sort of a spiritual mind trip.
Because this is what Westerners were into, and this is how, you know, they could make money for themselves.
So now in the present, presently in Peru, there's all kinds of so-called, I don't, what do they call themselves, maestros?
Maestros, ayahuasqueros, curanderos, chamas, whatever.
Yeah, and a lot of them are self-made, understandably, because they can make an easy dollar, and there's big money in it, and they need money down there, eh?
So, anyways, I was pretty modest about it, because, you know, I have enough of my own hallucinations, you could say, on earth to deal with it, and I didn't need to get all screwed up with a whole bunch of ayahuasca.
But, anyways, I found it very enlightening, and it creates sort of an energetic feeling in you that you could get, say, in a ten-day vipassana sit.
Okay, something you actually have to work hard for to bring yourself into the same sort of sensitive mind space that ayahuasca takes you to, say.
But the effects were very short-lived.
You know, it might last, you get the insights for two or three weeks, but you don't really get That deep profound physiological sort of transformation you get with long term meditation sitting.
That's fair comment or a question actually and what do you think doctor?
Well I think she's touched on a number of interesting points.
It's true that with the ayahuasca tourism situation down in Iquitos and other places.
They're clearly transforming the tradition.
You know, the tradition was very different before the tourism started.
It was not simply used to treat parasites.
That was a use of these plants for a long time.
But if you look at indigenous groups that use ayahuasca, they do in fact have spiritual Traditions around this, you know, it's part of their cosmology.
It's part of their belief system.
I'm surprised that Peter would say that, you know, that he would dismiss all that because I know Peter quite well and he knows better.
He knows that there are spiritual traditions, indigenous traditions, that use ayahuasca.
Now, you know, they don't necessarily work for Westerners, right?
Westerners are looking for something else.
And ayahuasca, you know, as it's used in the tourism circuit, has evolved into this kind of New Age-ish You know, saying that emphasizes spirituality and self-discovery and all that a little bit more than it does in the indigenous traditions.
Basically, I don't have a problem with that.
I think that that's fine.
What's wrong with self-discovery and, you know, that sort of thing?
I don't see anything wrong with it.
The fact is that The human's relationship with ayahuasca is a co-evolutionary process.
We've been in relationship with it for probably thousands of years.
This continues, and it's going to change.
And as it goes global, and as these indigenous cultures encounter Other global cultures it's going to be transformed.
I don't necessarily feel that this is a bad thing.
I think it's inevitable for one thing.
And I think that ayahuasca is bringing insights and healing to a lot of people.
On a global scale.
And I think that, you know, as a people and as a culture, we need healing.
We are a deeply wounded culture.
We're a deeply conflicted culture.
Much of that has to do with our alienation from nature.
I think that one of the things ayahuasca's, one of its strongest messages that many people get is, we have to rethink this understanding.
We have to realize we're not separate from nature.
We're part of it.
Until we get that global shift in consciousness, which Ayahuasca is trying to catalyze, I think that we're not going to be able to deal with the problems that we face.
We have to read the news to realize how quickly this global environmental crisis is accelerating.
So we're in a heap of trouble.
Trouble.
Right.
Whatever.
Deep doo-doo.
And we have to change consciousness globally.
And I think that this is partly what Ayahuasca is trying to catalyze.
Now, I think that somebody who goes to Peru Probably without studying very much about what ayahuasca is about and that's what I infer from this young woman that she didn't really do much homework.
She just kind of went down there.
Doctor, I'm sorry.
I've got a break here.
We've got about two minutes and we'll be right back.
This is Midnight in the Desert.
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Actually, a very rare opportunity to speak with Dennis McKenna, Dr. Dennis McKenna.
We're talking about psychedelic drugs, EMT, ayahuasca, and more.
So if you have questions, comments, they are welcome.
I've got a question from Zach.
Art, is the first-time caller line good every night or just occasionally?
Thanks for joining the show.
Actually, every night.
Anytime you're a first-time caller, let me give you the number, alright?
I know it's hard to get through, so area code 775-285-5800.
775-285-5800. If you're a first-time caller only, area code 775-285-5800 and
we'd be more than happy to accommodate you.
Once again, Doctor, welcome back.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Could I just kind of say something about what we were just talking about from the previous questioner, caller?
Yes.
I just want to complete the thought.
I think that People who think ayahuasca and these sorts of psychedelics, but maybe particularly ayahuasca, people who think that it's a shortcut.
Don't quite understand the way it's used.
Right.
I mean, it is a difficult medicine to learn to use properly.
There's a lot of training that goes into it.
If you want to become an ayahuasca, you have to diet with other plants.
You have to go through a whole process.
So it's not without discipline.
And, you know, it's not like it's a replacement for or it's an easier path.
then these other paths like meditation and so on.
It is its own path and should be respected and treated that way.
You know, it's not a substitute for other paths.
It is its own path.
And it requires quite a lot of dedication and discipline to learn to use it.
I mean, the indigenous people have the idea, this is their model, that these things are plant teachers.
They call them teachers.
Plantas que ensenian.
Plants that teach.
And I think this is more or less correct.
You know, when you work with some of these medicines, you're basically Forming a relationship with it and you know it may present itself as an Intelligent entity that is not you that's fine or it might but you're choosing to enter into a dialogue with with something that is You know that is a teacher in some sense one way to put it I mean, I've been taking it for 40 years, and I'm still learning from it, so It has a lot to teach Okay out of that in mind
Resta, I believe it is, or Rita, is that correct?
Yes, it's Rita.
Okay, Rita.
Oh, okay.
It's not about the drug, but it's one of the things that we are hoping to discover through the drug or in various other ways, whether in fact We exist or our entity or soul exists on the death of the body and so I thought you might be interested in what happened with my children because of that.
They absolutely adored my father and when he died they were just inconsolable.
My daughter particularly was suffering terribly and she was losing a lot of weight.
I was terribly concerned about her.
And then one day, this would be about two months after my father died, I had handed her her laundry to put away and she went into her bedroom and as she walked through the bedroom door, as she walked through the bedroom door, I heard her say, Mom!
She didn't sound frightened, just stunned.
So my husband and I raced to her bedroom.
She didn't have to say a word.
Her room was flooded with this French aftershave that he had always used, and I never have known anyone else to use it.
Okay, I understand.
So, in other words, proof of the other side.
I totally get it.
And so, Doctor, that's right.
Whether the relief comes from French aftershave that you recognize and therefore your mind puts together the fact that that's granddad and I am so comforted.
I feel so much better whether it comes from something like that or one of these drugs that would suggest to somebody there is something else.
Either way, the resulting answer is about the same, right?
Right, right.
This is a phenomenon.
This is something that she experienced, you know, so I don't discount that, and I don't say it proves that your grandfather was hanging around, or I say that it was a phenomenon.
You know, you probably have heard of the UFO researcher J. Allen Hynek.
Yes, of course.
I guess he's gone, but he was very famous in his day.
But he said something very, you know, he was very well known for his UFO investigations, and he said something one day that really struck me.
He said, I don't know if UFOs are real, but what I do know is the UFO experience is real, and that's a key difference.
And so the things that we experience, like on psychedelics, like these paranormal phenomena, these anomalous phenomena, people experience them.
Whether the mind makes them up or not is open to question.
Maybe even immaterial.
It may be immaterial.
In other words, if it results in the comfort that she described... Right.
This is part of the reality that we inhabit, you know, and we have to remember a good deal of the reality that we inhabit is our brains synthesizing this hallucination that we're living in, you know, this movie that we're inhabiting.
That's not to say, that's not to dismiss it.
That's just to say, this is our existential situation.
You know.
Let's go to Stockton, California on the phone and say you're on the air with the doctor.
Hi.
Hey, this is Benny from Stockton, California.
How's it going, guys?
It's going well, thank you.
Can you hear me well?
I hear you fine.
Go ahead.
First of all, I want to say it's an honor talking to you, Dennis.
I am 24, but luckily I came across your brother's, you know, studies when I was 19 and been intrigued ever since.
And I would just, I'm just a little confused still on one thing.
The singularity.
I know it's kind of really, I mean, it's probably the most complex thing he actually did, but, I mean, looked into, I should say.
You've been knocking these questions out in a nutshell, remarkably so.
If you can just touch on that.
The singularity?
Yes, yes.
As Terence discussed it around the time wave theory or the idea of singularity as such?
I guess the idea of the singularity as such, I guess, yeah, would be.
Oh, yeah.
Well, the singularity, you know, the singularity in physics is a You know, it's a concept.
In physics, this gets into space-time physics and black holes and this sort of thing, but if you have a black hole, it's essentially, you know, there's an event horizon, there's a so-called event horizon.
Within the event horizon is the singularity, and the singularity is just a word for saying that physics cannot say anything about what's going on in there.
You know, it's opaque to observation, it's opaque to measurement, so it's the singularity.
They may as well say it's the black box, and that's essentially what they're saying.
We don't know What is going on in that realm?
The laws of physics don't apply, so we can't say very little about it.
On the other hand, the fact that we don't know what's going on in there means that almost anything could be going on in there.
It's possible, yes.
Right, and that's what's fascinating about it.
And when it comes to the mind and consciousness and all this, I mean, I don't know.
I have a model that I like.
I don't know if it applies or if it has scientific validity, but you know, black holes are something that happens, and singularities are something that happens when you get a certain amount, a critical amount of mass compressed into a small enough area.
Right?
Then it distorts space-time, and space-time essentially wraps itself around it.
Even light can't escape.
Then you get a singularity.
But maybe an analogy is, I sometimes speculated, you know, the brain is the most complex object in the universe.
And maybe when you get enough complexity stuffed together into a small enough area, like the cranium, Maybe you get some kind of singularity, a biological singularity of some kind.
I mean, this is totally wild speculation, but, you know, I like the idea.
So, I don't know.
As a physician, you really have to walk a fine line, don't you?
You do, right.
You definitely do.
I mean, I hear you going right down that line.
Well, otherwise they'd say I was nuts.
Yes, they would.
They would, and don't rule it out.
Alright, let's go to... Lipska?
Is that right?
On Skype?
Yes.
Hello.
Okay, you're not very loud, so you're going to have to get closer to your microphone or something.
Is this better?
Can you get... I don't know, what do you want?
I'm on Skype on a smartphone.
Okay, alright.
Are you using Bluetooth?
No.
Okay, well, go ahead.
I'll try to be as loud as I can.
I'll take my answer off the air.
Okay, sure.
I wanted to know your opinion.
Are people who sniff things like spray paint, would that have the same effect as psychedelic drugs?
No, afraid not.
That's going to be an easy answer, gee.
Yeah, no, you're not going to get the same effect.
You know, those things, you know, psychedelic drugs interact specifically with serotonin receptors, sometimes other receptors in the body.
The solvents, the inhalants, those sorts of things, they're nonspecific.
They don't interact.
With any receptors, what they essentially do is dissolve nerve membranes.
They totally disorganize it.
As a result, your neurotransmission is screwed up.
You know, these things should not be taken.
These are quite harmful.
Yes.
To the liver, among other things.
Of all kinds.
I don't recommend that.
That's not the way to go for altered states.
There are much better ways to go.
More poison.
Oh, my.
Okay.
First time caller line.
You're on the air with Dr. McKenna.
Hello.
First time caller line.
Going once.
Going twice.
Gone like the wind.
Hello there on the phone line.
You're on the air.
Hi.
Can you hear me?
I hear you.
Great.
Thanks for taking my call.
You're welcome.
Doctor, I have one question for you.
Throughout the show tonight, you have mentioned several times about basically personification of DMT and Ayahuasca and warrants of suicide.
My question to you, Doctor, is do you believe that there is a spirit or some sort of intelligence
behind these things?
Yeah, we're headed down that line again.
Right, well, yeah, and I'm headed down the same line where I'm, you know, I'm going to hedge my bets.
I mean, again, I think people do experience these things, and they, you know, they experience them as being real.
I have done that, and most people who have had psychedelic experiences have done that, but what do you mean by real?
That's the problem, you see, because we live in this... Well, I think he was asking whether you're encountering an intelligence.
Which appears not to be you.
That's right.
Right.
Exactly.
Yes.
But is it real?
Well, as I say, your experience of it is real.
So, you know, for practical purposes.
The rest is just sort of metaphysical, you know, nitpicking in some ways.
You know, I mean, it's for You know, perhaps it's not useful in a certain way to speculate on this, but it's always good to keep your mind open to say, well, maybe what I'm experiencing is a piece of myself.
Listen, I know it is difficult for you, doctor, to speculate on this, but it is inevitably the first question somebody back from this experience is asking themselves.
Right?
Yeah.
And it's remarkable how similar some of these alien or entity encounters are.
I mean, there is a whole universe, a whole phenomenology, a pantheon of these things, if you like.
I mean, if people aren't familiar with it, I suggest they click into this interesting website called DMT Nexus.
I think it's DMTNexus.com.
Okay.
It's fairly heavily science.
There's a lot of ethnobotany, a lot of chemistry, and so on.
But there are active conversations about this very topic, you know, and I mean, ranging from people who say, well, it's not real, to people who say, well, not only is it real, you know, but we need to open an embassy in hyperspace.
You know, they're on that side.
All right.
Okay, let's go to Lorraine, Ohio, I believe.
Hello.
Hello, Art.
Yes, hi.
Hey, this is Matt.
Thanks for having me on.
This is another iconic evening.
It is.
You're a first-time caller, right?
I am, indeed.
Okay, glad to have you.
What's up?
Big-time fan.
I have a question for Dennis.
I've been experimenting with a number of these substances that you've been speaking about tonight for A little over 15 years, specifically around live music experiences.
I'm wondering what kind of insight you can, if you talk to people, what experience you have as to what is going on on some of these stages, because I've seen the machines I've seen all kinds of madness.
I'm a student of it, and I'm just wondering what your insight is about that scene.
Thank you.
So, he's talking about the live music stages and that sort of thing?
I mean, there is a, you know, there are, you know, I'm surprised to see this, because, I didn't really know it, but apparently there is a whole genre of music that is related to DMT, and there is a subculture around this.
To be honest, I'm not that involved in this.
I mean, I'm kind of outside that.
too old, you know, but it is active. And actually I'd like to plug somebody else's book here,
which is just about to come out. It's by a gentleman named Graham St. John, and it's called
Mystery School in Hyperspace, a Cultural History of DMT.
And I read it.
He asked me to write the foreword for it, and I did.
And it's a very interesting book.
I suggest he get it.
It talks about all of these, the kind of movements in art and music and the way that DMT has really influenced our culture.
You know, and there's more than you might think.
I mean, that's what surprised me.
It actually has been around since the 50s and in the culture in some ways.
And it's having an effect.
And now, of course, its effect is accelerating because people are more aware of it, then
there's a lot of interest in it.
So, it's a great book.
Mystery School in Hyperspace.
I think it's just about to come out, if not already out.
All right.
Well, consider it plugged.
Yeah.
Hi there.
You're on the air with Dennis.
Hello?
Hello.
Hi.
I was asking a question about methamphetamines.
In 1983, I kind of went crazy and used methamphetamines from April to September, practically daily, and this thing about addiction to it, when I decided to quit, I just cold turkey quit, never used it, haven't used it since.
Alright, well that is interesting, and perhaps the doctor who studied this sort of thing I can explain this.
Most people get hooked on something like meth.
They're hooked, and that's all there is to it.
But there are occasionally people who can just decide to stop something, and without effort, and without apparent consequence, they just stop.
Doctor?
Well, that's right.
I mean, again, here you're looking at the biochemistry of individuality in a certain sense.
Everybody is a biochemically unique individual, and the way they respond to drugs of all kinds is determined by What's called their pharmacogenetics.
It's a big word, which basically is, you know, the part of your genome that's involved with metabolizing drugs and toxins.
That's your pharmacogenetics.
And everybody, you know, some people can use something like heroin or nicotine or methamphetamine and fairly regularly and not really get addicted, you know, and other people One or two exposures and they're quite hooked you know so there's a big there's a big psychological element to this and there's also a biochemical determinant and it comes down to this you see just maybe one of these people
That is not particularly prone to addiction and she took the drug and had the drug but never became hooked.
I mean, this is not unheard of.
This goes on.
I do understand that.
I'm just amazed.
I mean, I'm hooked on nicotine.
I smoked all my adult life.
I've now quit and I'm still hooked on nicotine.
I've got to chew or I've got to patch.
I've got to have a little lozenge or something.
I've got to have nicotine.
In my wildest imagination, I can't imagine people get hooked and then just walk away It's all about your sensitivity to these things.
I guess so.
I was a long-term smoker for a long time.
I smoked a pipe so maybe I wasn't so prone to it but one day I just basically quit and I never really smoked it regularly but the thing is for me when I get into a situation where people are smoking you know, I'll bum a cigarette, I'll smoke cigarettes, but
when I walk away from that, I don't have any cravings. So I'm one of these people that
I can do it, but I don't get hooked.
You know, knock on wood, right? I mean, hopefully this will continue, but I seem to be not really...
I can enjoy it and yet I'm not dependent on it.
To me that just describes how different we really are.
Let's go to our first time caller line.
You're on the air.
Hello.
Hello?
Yes, hi.
Oh, all right.
Yes.
Listen, you just mentioned the ear-brain connection modeling reality for you.
That absolutely is a medical science proven fact.
I mean, it's called psychoacoustics and it was If you, for example, if you have something, a sound in an aural coming at you, and there's two speakers set in stereo, separated, and you delay one speaker by like a millisecond, the speaker disappears.
I mean, it's far acoustically, you see the meters movement, nothing's coming out, and what happens is the sound on your other ear is intensified.
This is so that if somebody's like throwing a rock or something's coming at you, you get some sort of survival protection of some kind in signaling.
You know, that's what they feel.
There's a lot of these events.
So modeling of reality is scientifically sound.
Now the question is, when you take something that creates distortion, is it You know, connecting you to some new receivers, or is it just fooling with the modulation?
Yes.
But it's absolute sound!
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say, but that's absolutely right.
I mean, you know, it's a rule of thumb in science, you know, that if you have a system and you want to understand how it works, one thing you can do is you can You can muck with it.
You can do something that interferes with the way it works.
You can look at it this way.
And by making it go off track, like for example, maybe taking a psychedelic, is to interfere with normal functions, normal consciousness.
But by seeing what happens when you perturb that system in ways that you didn't before, You can understand things about how it works, and that's a common way to investigate phenomenon.
That's why, you know, that's why these drugs are so powerful for really understanding consciousness.
Essentially, it's a, you know, if you look at Franz Vollenweider's work in Zurich, he's one of our Hefter researchers and really a star in the field.
He really uses psychedelics, especially psilocybin in his patients,
you know, to study basically neuroscience. How do we perceive lights and sounds and other
types of input and how do we take all that and synthesize it
into something coherent, which we experience.
This is what the brain does, you know, it takes the raw data of experience, it mixes it with internal processing and associations and all this, somehow it extrudes, you can think of it that way, it extrudes this thing called consciousness.
And consciousness makes sense.
Consciousness is something that we're immersed in and it makes sense to us most of the time.
And this is what the brain does.
And so we can use psychedelics to study, well, what if we, you know, inject that, you know, put this drug into the mix?
How does that change it and what can we learn from that?
So it's interesting also that the caller mentioned psychoacoustics because Now, people are working with like sound meditation and this kind of thing, using acoustics in conjunction with psychedelics to cause profoundly altered states that can really give some insights into, you know, the limits of consciousness, how the brain works, also used in healing and that sort of thing.
Right, okay.
Has there been any scientific evidence that acoustics in Yes, and there is scientific evidence.
light up even further or different sections of the brain?
It's a good question.
Yes, and there is scientific evidence. If you look at the EEGs of
people who are, you know, having these types of sound therapy experiences,
they're quite remarkable.
I mean, I'm not qualified to interpret them, but they're, you know, they're pretty amazing.
These are quite anomalous, you know, electrical brain states that these things cause.
So that's a whole area, you know, and it's interesting that, you know, it goes back to Really pretty ancient technologies.
I mean, you know, indigenous people, ancient civilization and all this stuff have often known of, they've known of long time for the power of sound, you know, in combination with some of these things.
Or just by themselves.
They can certainly induce altered states.
So that's a whole area that is fascinating and is just beginning to emerge.
All right.
Professor, hold on a moment and we'll get back to you.
We're coming up on a break, so let me use the opportunity to say our public number is area code 952-225-5278.
That's 952-225-5278.
The first time caller line is area code 775-285-5800.
That's 952-225-5278.
The first time caller line is area code 775-285-5800.
Did you get that?
I did forget to mention it.
I brought this up, I think, during an open line show and then forgot to mention it again.
But we do have it.
Area code 775285 5800.
And with that, my guest is Dr. Dennis McKenna.
We're talking about a pretty sensitive subject.
Now if you want to join in, got a comment, got a question, here we are.
I'm going to be doing a lot of commentary.
To call the show, please direct your finger digits to dial 1952-225-5278.
That's 1952.
Call ART.
1952 225 5278 that's 1952 call art.
Here's a kind of an interesting comment from an ER nurse in Arizona.
She says, as a nurse, I really thought I was not going to enjoy the show,
but I must say it's very interesting.
I would say the same.
Good, uh, evening or morning or afternoon, whatever it is, wherever you are, uh, Dr. Dennis McKenna is my guest.
And we are discussing those drugs.
Those drugs.
Hello there, you're on the air with Dr. McHenna.
Hi Art, hi Dennis.
I was wondering, my question was concerning nitrous oxide.
It seems to be making a big comeback lately and some people, some of my friends, Consider it a psychedelic, in some ways, and it can seem to enhance the effects of psychedelics.
I was wondering why you thought that was, why you think it's so addictive, and what do you think about the current government regulations and controls over it?
Doctor?
Well, we may or may not get any input from the doctor.
Are you there, Dennis?
Dennis McKenna.
He doesn't seem to be there, or we've lost connection with him, caller, so I'm not sure what to tell you.
He's still here.
I believe he's still here.
He might just be away from the microphone or something.
I don't know.
Dr. McKenna.
Aging Dr. McKenna.
Dr. McKenna, I'm going to disconnect and try calling you back.
We apparently have some sort of... Well, I can't call him back.
Alright, you know what?
If I can't call him back, then we might as well go ahead and do essentially open lines.
We're in a situation where, I guess, the...
I keep hearing a... kind of thing, where the connection between us has dissolved, and there is Dr. McKenna.
Well, you may be in luck.
Hello, Dr. McKenna.
Yes.
What happened?
Hear me now.
Yes.
Yes.
I don't know.
We dropped the signal somehow.
Well, that's Skype for you.
Yeah.
But, here we are.
Did you hear the question, perchance?
Uh, could you repeat it?
Uh, the caller could.
Uh, hello, caller?
Hello, caller?
Are you still there?
They've given up.
Yeah, I guess they've given up.
Let's go to the next caller.
I think they're up there.
That's all right.
That's quite all right.
It happens.
New Haven, Connecticut.
Hello, you're on the air.
Hello?
Hi.
Hi, how you doing?
Doing great.
Hey.
Hey.
Listen, I kind of just broke into your show a minute or two ago, and I hear you talking about the psychedelics.
I'm 42 years old.
Back in my early 20s, I used to partake in some psychedelics.
I used to take a thing called mescaline.
Oh, yes.
Mushrooms, yes.
No, it was a little, it was a little tiny pill.
Some people called it a micro dot and the other people called it mescaline.
I don't know what the difference is.
But, um, I was able to, and quite frankly, some of my friends, the guys that I used to, the friends that I hung out with, that when, when they, we would, we would take these, the, uh, they would have, uh, some people, they just laughed and had a good time.
I found out that by taking this drug, for lack of a better phrase, I could actually hear other people's thoughts.
Does that make any sense at all?
Yes, it does.
In other words, you thought you were hearing other people's thoughts.
My question would be, did you prove that you could hear other people's thoughts?
I actually did.
I actually did.
Um, I thought I was hearing other people's thoughts and I thought I was going out of my mind.
So, uh, I went to my, we were, it was, there was a few people around and I went to my friend who also was on the same, uh, same thing and I put my back to his back.
Yes.
And I was able to, See what he was seeing and he could see what I was seeing.
And I confirmed this by asking him verbally, what are you looking at right now?
And he said, I'm looking at the streetlights, but the streetlights were not facing him.
He was facing the house and I was looking at the house.
Hmm.
Well, these things happen, you know.
I mean, they do happen on psychedelics.
That's part of what makes them fascinating.
Now, what's happened?
Why do we have an echo here?
I don't know.
I haven't changed a thing here.
I have not either, but I'm hearing an echo.
I wonder if you're still on the... Perhaps you changed away from the microphone on your headset.
Yeah, I'm checking that now.
Input, output.
That would be my guess.
It looks like it's inputting, outputting the right way.
Okay, well as you mentioned, that's Skype for you.
You know what, we might have the caller back.
That first time caller, are you there?
Hi, yes.
Okay, good.
Hi, I'm glad I had a chance to speak with you.
I have a question concerning nitrous oxide and it has been making a big comeback lately and also some people consider it to be very similar to a psychedelic and it can be used to enhance the effect of a psychedelic in many cases and I'm wondering why does it do that and why is it so addictive as far as people just liking to do it so much and why does it What do you think about the current government regulations and controls over it?
Should they be the way that they are, or lose it?
I remember the question now, and I don't know what I'm going to do about this echo.
But anyway, it's not really addictive.
People like to do it, right?
That's different.
So people like to do it.
It's not really addictive.
And it's not really a psychedelic either.
It works by a completely different mechanism, but it does seem to enhance the effects of psychedelics.
Some people say it does.
Probably part of it is it causes hypoxia.
It causes a You know, a lack of oxygen in the brain.
And if you hold your breath, you know, that will induce an altered state.
So that's part of it.
It's the psychedelic plus the hypoxia.
And, you know, people say it enhances it.
I've never found that it made much difference, but I haven't experimented with it a lot.
Medically, it's a medically used gas.
It's important.
I mean, it's used in dentistry, right?
It's used as a kind of anesthetic.
So, it's a medically regulated product, and in that sense, it's government regulated, but, you know, it's freely available.
I think it's fairly harmless.
He also asked about what you're feeling about the continued illegality of it.
Well, I wasn't aware it was illegal.
Is nitrous oxide illegal?
Go on.
color? Yellow, yes, yes. It is. Yes. It's more than heroin in some places. Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, like, like everything else, like I said before, I don't really think
prohibition is a solution.
I think that, you know, there's millions of substances out there which alter states.
So, you know, I think that people need to be educated how to use these substances.
And if you choose to use nitrous oxide, I can think of a lot worse choices in that sense.
I suppose.
So bad compared to other things, you know, methamphetamine, heroin, these sorts of things.
Why do you think the government, just sort of as a question here, took virtually all drugs, or most drugs, and made them illegal, with a couple of notable exceptions, tobacco, coffee, and alcohol?
Well, it didn't happen overnight.
I mean, it happened Really, sort of from the start of the end of the 19th century, you know, it happened because there were all these drugs like cocaine and opiates, mostly, that were getting used, getting incorporated into what amounted to, you know, nostrums, home remedies, like home remedies.
People could buy tincture of opium.
They could buy remedies for sleep that contained opium.
Things that contain cocaine, you know, coca wine, all this stuff.
So, these drugs are fairly hard to, you know, they're easy to abuse, right?
They're easy to get hooked on.
So, there was alarm that people were getting hooked on these.
So, that was really the genesis of the FDA at the beginning of the 19th century was an attempt to You know, first regulate and eventually prohibit these things.
So it evolved over time.
You know, I mean, the worst instance was prohibition, you know, was a good example.
And if we didn't learn our lesson from that, you know, I mean, we tried to prohibit alcohol, which probably is one of the worst drugs.
It's very, very dangerous, very bad for you.
Didn't work, right?
So they repealed prohibition.
They didn't repeal the prohibition on some of these other substances, but that's obviously not working either.
So, I don't know.
We, as a culture, we have a very, you know, sort of uncomfortable relationship with, you know, with these drugs.
And in our culture, there's too much effort.
I mean, I tell my students sometimes, you know, to shock them.
I say, you know, there's no such thing as a bad drug.
Right?
And that's true, because it's not the drugs that are bad, it's the way they're used, right?
So that comes down to human behavior.
There's lots of bad ways to use drugs, right?
But there's no such thing as a bad drug.
The badness in here is in the way people use them.
You know, you could take that exact argument and transfer it to guns.
Yeah, there's no such thing.
I mean, guns in themselves are not inherently bad.
It's how they're used.
Certainly use them in bad ways.
I mean, if you're talking about a moral dimension, I think, with respect to drugs, guns, all these things, moral dimension applies to human behavior, right?
So this is what we have to look at if we're going to evoke morality.
Is it moral to Take drugs or is it is it moral to you know use firearms or in what in what situation is there a moral way to use firearms a moral way to use drugs yes probably lots of not so positive ways to use them but it all comes down to human behavior this is what we've got to focus on not the prohibition of the drug or the gun
Ultimately, that's not going to work.
There's a lot of people waiting for you.
How do you use these things?
They're dangerous.
Doctor, a lot of people want to talk to you.
New Haven, Connecticut.
Very quickly for Dr. McKenna.
Hey, I'm back.
I'm sorry.
Somehow my phone got cut off.
Okay.
And your question is?
The question was a statement that I was asking about if it made sense that we were able to I was able to see what he was seeing.
He's able to see what I was seeing.
Oh, okay.
Well, that got answered.
All I can tell you is it's happened.
To go along with that, there was a gentleman, a CIA agent, who they were, back in the 60s, they were doing experiments.
The CIA was doing experiments on their own people.
MKUltra.
Yep.
They say he committed suicide, but they found that he had a bump on the head.
And you know the story I'm talking about?
Yes, I think we do.
There are several stories.
Yeah, I mean, the CIA, well, as we were talking about a moment ago, talk about the immoral use of psychedelics.
Yeah.
immoral you know I mean they were using it for mind control or whatever but but
the immoral part really was that they were giving these drugs to people
without their knowledge which I think is very immoral really immoral actually
okay Anchorage Alaska you're on the air with dr. McKenna yeah art yes first of
all thank you very much for your show It's a wonderful show, and I'd like to make a statement and pose a question.
And my statement is, this reminds me of a movie that used to be called Altered States, which was done by deprivation and drugs, but when you mention chemical compounds, my mind goes to the structure of atomic structures, the nucleus breaking through whole new dimensions, so my mind can't wrap around, if you walk this out, where it goes.
Because you seem to be implying chemical connections to the wonders of it all.
So my question to you is this, that earlier you mentioned that you've been doing this for four years, and I wonder if it's appropriate... Forty years.
Forty years, Conor.
Forty years.
Yes.
Four years.
Can you... No, no, Conor.
Forty years.
Forty.
Oh, forty.
I'm sorry.
Forty.
If it's appropriate, can you explain to us your doses and how often you've taken it, and your mission, so that we might understand I'm not sure this is the appropriate thing to ask you, but you're such a great communicator.
Maybe you could share with us your journey to understand what it is and why you're doing it.
Now get off, it's a great show, Art.
All right, thank you.
No, thanks.
I'm not going to go into details, really.
It would be boring to most people.
All I'll say is that I have learned from psychedelic drugs a lot.
I have been involved with them for over 40 years.
I've learned, again, in the model that these things are teachers, plant teachers.
I guess my major teachers have been mushrooms and ayahuasca, and more lately it's been ayahuasca.
But, you know, how a person uses them, how often, I mean, everybody's relationship with these things is different, right?
Just like everybody's You know, you have a friendship with a person and it's not the same that I might have with that same person.
So it's unique, you know, and all I can say is I feel like I've learned from them and, you know, I'm grateful for that.
And, you know, if there's a take-home lesson, people say, well, you've been taking these things for 40 years.
What have you learned?
The truth is, what I've learned is that we don't know much.
I don't know much, nobody knows much.
You'd think you'd have more to say, but that's my take-home lesson.
Be humble about How little you really know about this world, about this universe, and it's a marvelous place, and we only understand a very tiny part of it.
So that's what drugs have taught me.
Doctor, and that's a great place to end it, because we have to end it.
The show is ending.
So, anything you want to plug, plug it now.
Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, my book.
It's on Amazon.com, or it's from the website of the same name.
I have a lot of these books, so please buy one if you're interested in my story.
Thanks, Art, for being such a great host.
We barely scratched the surface, so I hope you'll have me back one of these days.
I will.
Doctor, thank you so very much.
I appreciate it so much.
Thank you.
Have a great night.
Indeed.
Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.
What a great title.
My Life with Terrence McKenna.
Dennis McKenna.
Dr. Dennis McKenna was our guest.
And what a great show.
So, listen everybody.
Thank you.
We'll do it again tomorrow.
And for those left on the line, I'm sorry.
We didn't get to you, but there's almost... Well, not almost.
There just is not enough time in a show to get to everybody.
So I'm sorry you got left in the lurch.
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