Joe Rogan and ethnopharmacologist Dennis McKenna explore psychedelics’ dual risks and rewards, from cannabis’s dosage-dependent chaos to carfentanil’s lethal potency (0.002g fatal). They critique the U.S.’s failed drug education, contrast ayahuasca’s accidental Amazonian discovery with synthetic isolation (e.g., THC in Marinol), and debate its legalization as a sacrament—UDV/Santo Daime approved by Brazil’s Supreme Court vs. unstructured Peruvian traditions. McKenna argues psychedelics reveal humanity’s biological roots, dismantling dogmatic religion while warning against corporate exploitation, like Amazon deforestation mirroring Trump-era chaos. Endocannabinoid receptors, ancient and non-cannabis-specific, highlight nature’s self-regulating systems, with psilocybin’s sensory-filter disruption offering athletes (e.g., kickboxers) microdosing advantages. The episode ends with McKenna’s ESPD50 conference (June 6–8, UK) and a late-November book compiling psychedelic research. [Automatically generated summary]
It just seems the problem with the marijuana is five four three two one Dennis McKenna, ladies and gentlemen.
Before we were just discussing how I was saying that marijuana can be your friend and it can enhance your life.
But if you take too much, it's such a seductive little creature because a little bit of it is like, ah, this is nice.
This feels good.
But if you get too crazy, especially if you get too crazy with edibles, it'll take you and take you away on this wild journey of paranoia and it'll lock you up.
I mean, we're, you know, people get, you know, to these places and they fail to do a reality check on themselves.
You know, I mean, I get emails from people all the time that say, well, I'm, you know, life's been pretty weird lately.
I took mushrooms five times last week.
And, you know, I was, and it's like, dude, how about you lay off for a while and do it?
Give yourself a chance because, you know, they tell these stories and it's like the idea of, okay, let's find your center, go back to baseline, lay off the sauce, whatever it is you're taking, and just chill out and try and rediscover your center.
It seems like common sense advice, but people don't do that.
They activate those pleasure circuits, you know, in the brain, mediated mainly through dopamine and all of these, I mean, the so-called drugs of abuse, which I think is a terrible word, terrible word.
But the reinforcing drugs, the pleasure drugs, work directly or indirectly through the dopamine circuits, and the dopamine is like your button for pleasure.
In the same way that serotonin is kind of on the opposite side.
It's your button for more like euphoria, feeling good, but it doesn't have the punch, I guess, which is why people can get addicted to gambling.
They can get addicted to sex.
They can get addicted to television.
All of these things.
It doesn't have to be substances.
Because they all hit those same circuits.
Except the psychedelics, which don't work on that reward circuitry.
All the question about recreational use versus spiritual use versus therapeutic use...
I mean, these are all ways to approach it.
And I am not a person who says, you must do it this way, you must do it that way.
What I do say is do it from an informed place and do approach it thoughtfully, you know, because, I mean, in other words, don't, you know, plan for it.
Respect the medicine in a certain way.
Use it in a circumstance where you can learn from the medicine rather than have the medicine be sort of an overlay over whatever else you're doing.
This is something that demands attention, and I think that's the best way to use psychedelics for whatever The spin you put on it.
Is it spiritual?
Is it therapeutic?
Is it recreational?
Is it shamanic?
These are all labels.
The important thing is that you approach the medicine itself.
The medicine is the teacher, right?
Not the sitter, not the shaman, not the psychotherapist.
If they're doing the right thing, Their job correctly, in my opinion, their job is to let you have your encounter with the medicine.
And the medicine is what you learn from.
They're there to facilitate that.
They can intervene if you get anxious or if things go on, make sure, you know, nobody comes to the door, that kind of thing.
But basically it's to facilitate a learning opportunity where you and your teacher, which is the medicine, be it ayahuasca or mushrooms or whatever, can have this intense one-on-one interaction, you know?
Feel like with psychedelics as well as with all these other things we're talking about any kind of drug I mean even coffee Alcohol whatever and behavior patterns all these different things I think one of the things that happens with human beings is you get so far along in your life in these behavior patterns become so like tight grooves that are carved into your psyche and then as you become an adult you Then you start to learn,
like, oh, there's got to be a better way to handle this.
Let me figure out how to do this.
And it's almost like getting a car when you're really young and not learning how to drive until you're, like, in your 20s.
I just don't think that there's anything wrong with any of these things.
I think there's something wrong with the way we use them, and I think it's one of the inherent problems with things being illegal, is that we can't discuss this.
We don't have people like you or centers where people can go, where people can become educated on the proper way to use these drugs, medicines, whatever you want to call them, these compounds, and get something out of them that can really be beneficial.
I mean, I've said this many, many times that, you know, drug education, what they call drug education in this country, is a joke because the whole emphasis is on don't use them.
That's absurd.
That's like telling, you know, an 18-year-old guy full of testosterone, don't have sex.
You know, come on.
It's built into the genetics.
They're going to go for that.
What they have to do, what they can't bring themselves to acknowledge in the drug education field is it's not about telling people not to use drugs.
It's about teaching people how to use drugs if they choose to, right?
I mean, like any other skill, people have to learn to drive.
They have to learn to do yoga.
They have to learn to do whatever they do.
There's an educational process.
I tell people many times, you know, my shtick is there is no such thing as a bad drug.
That's another problem with the dialogue.
The badness is projected onto the drugs.
Drugs are simply compounds with a certain pharmacology.
There's no moral aspect to them.
The moral dimension comes in how do people use them.
That's where, you know, it's human behavior that's moral or immoral.
I say, you know, there's no such thing as a bad drug.
Plenty of bad ways to use drugs, you know, but that comes from the person, not the compound.
So this is really not good, you know, because I am certainly not an expert on, you know, the sources and all this.
But apparently this stuff is being made in China, imported here, and they use it to cut heroin because it's so strong.
But people are dying left and right, you know, because of carfentanil is far more toxic than heroin or even fentanyl.
So, you know, we're so, you know, there is so much, I don't know, so much confusing and fuzzy thinking about the whole drug issue.
You know, for example, as long as we're talking about opiates for the moment, which is not really what I came here to talk about, but, you know, you've heard of Kratom, right?
Now the DEA and the FDA, it's a plant.
It's used in Thailand.
It is an opiate.
There's no doubt about it.
It hits the opiate receptors.
And they want to schedule it.
But the problem is that in Thailand, traditional areas, it's often used to get off of heroin.
So it's potentially part of the solution, not part of the problem.
It's relatively easy to quit.
And the big thing about Kratom, it doesn't cause respiratory depression.
And respiratory depression is what kills people from heroin overdoses.
You know, it hits the opiate receptors, but then it also hits a few other receptors as well, which is part of the stimulating effect.
But, you know, why the pharmaceutical companies are not all over this plan, I don't understand.
Because for a long time, the holy grail in drug discovery when it comes to analgesics is find the narcotic that is not toxic, you know, the analgesic that is not toxic, hopefully not addicting, but that's not going to happen.
People who want to get off those kind of things, they can't quit cold turkey, but they could go on Kratom and gradually cut down because the withdrawal symptoms for Kratom are much less apparently than for heroin and these things.
They just don't grab you.
So this is a gateway out of the addiction.
Or they could even just maintain because it's not particularly dangerous or impairs function or so on.
They could maintain.
Lots of people take heroin and manage to maintain.
That's one of the differences between plants and pharmaceuticals.
Plants have families of molecules and they often have You know, complementary kinds of activities, you know.
So kratom is one of these.
We've known about it for a while.
Well, it needs a lot more work, but potentially it's very, very interesting, you know.
And of course, the other one in this sort of universe of opiate treatment is ibogaine, which is not a completely different kind of thing.
Ibogaine is not itself an opiate, but people use it to get off opiates because the experience is profound, but then it does something that a lot of psychedelics don't do, which is it interrupts that craving for opiates.
Depending on how it's structured, anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.
And the thing I think that determines the effectiveness of Ibogaine as a treatment for opiates is if the person has prepared for what happens afterwards, right?
You've got to prepare for what happens after.
If you go back to your old neighborhood, your old buddies, your old habits, it's not going to work.
You're not making a serious commitment to make it work.
But if you have a plan, going to go to this clinic, get this treatment, get cleaned up, then what?
And that's true.
I mean, really, I think that's the main factor that determines whether ibogaine is effective or not.
And it is for a lot of people.
It works.
It's a problematic substance.
It's not It's a controlled substance in the States, but only in about six countries is it actually prohibited.
Most countries, it's either in a gray area.
I guess it's a gray area.
It's unregulated is the term.
A couple countries have put it on prescription drug status, Brazil and New Zealand.
But the framework is there.
That doesn't mean there's a rush of people to go to Ibogaine clinics in those countries.
It really hasn't created a rush.
But the framework is there of people who want to do that.
So Ibogaine is another one of these that needs more investigation and is potentially part of the problem to the opiate epidemic.
There is rumors, well, there are more than rumors, but some ibogaine activists are trying to get certain states to provisionally approve the use of ibogaine.
You know, a special waiver from the federal government, Vermont and I think New York has now applied for this because their problem is so bad.
It's like basically they're saying to the government, Here's something that may work.
just grant permission on a state side, statewide basis to have this medicine.
We'll see where that goes.
You know, as you, I'm sure you, I think we're all in this community acutely aware of now the government is again rumbling about how they're gonna revive the war on drugs.
I mean, it was a stupid idea then and it's even more stupid now.
But hey, this government, you know, stupidity are us!
And if there is too much pushback from that direction, I think he's going to try to avoid that as much as possible.
When they did a recent survey of the United States of how many people think that marijuana should be legal, like recreationally legal, it's in the 60% now, which is for the first time ever.
Don't you think that maybe I would like to speak to him alone and find out who he really is?
I mean, you think when someone's speaking in front of You know, a big group of press or, you know, any time there's a camera on them, it's really hard to figure out who that person is.
This is something that I've wanted to do for a long time.
And the backstory is that in 1967, there was a conference that was sponsored, believe it or not, by the Health Education and Welfare, Department of Health Education and Welfare, National Institute of Mental Health, U.S. government paid for this symposium held in San Francisco in 1967 called the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs.
And all the biggies were there.
Shulgin was there.
Andrew Weil was there.
Schultes, of course, he was probably the one that, you know, more or less around whom it coalesced.
But this was a chance for interdisciplinary people to come together in a private conference and share knowledge.
And that was done.
And they published this symposium volume called Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs.
Which was U.S. Public Health Service publication.
You could get it from the U.S. government printing office for a long time.
But originally the idea was that about every 10 years or so they'd have follow-up conferences, right?
Well, in 1967, the war on drugs came along.
The government became embarrassed that they had anything to do with this.
there was never any follow-up conference right so I though that book that came out was very influential to me it was one of the big influences of my life as a 16 year old when I was just getting interested in psychedelics so for many years I've wanted to do a follow-up conference.
I wanted to do it on the 30th anniversary back in 97, but it never came together to do that.
So this is the 50th anniversary.
It's now or never.
And so it's now, apparently, we are going to do this thing.
And it's going to be kind of much in the spirit of the original conference.
We're not going to keep it completely closed, you know, because we're not that kind of people.
There's not a lot of room for people to actually come to the place it's going to be, which is this place called Tiringham Hall.
It's like, it looks exactly like Downton Abbey.
I mean, it's an English country house, beautiful place, but not a place set up for a huge conference.
There'll be maybe 10 guests staying there and a bunch of people staying close by.
But the point is not so much the people attending.
It's going to be live streamed on Facebook, which anyone can tune into that.
And then we're going to publish the symposium volume for 2017 that everyone who presents is going to submit a full paper.
We're going to publish that as volume two.
We'll bring them out together as a deluxe edition.
The first one, which is available for free, it's in the public domain, and then the one from this conference and we'll package them together as a collector's edition and we're pre-selling that now.
As part of the strategy for getting the money to pay for this thing.
And we're doing okay, you know.
So I give you the website.
It's ESPD50.com.
What does it stand for?
Ethnopharmacologic search for psychoactive drugs, 50thanniversary.com.
And then there's also a Facebook page, which is where the live streaming is going to be.
So if you go there, you can order the book.
You can get the whole backstory.
You can sign up for the Facebook live stream and so on.
And that's what we're going to do.
And I've been very lucky.
You know, some people, you know, how these conferences are.
You don't do it on your own.
When I sort of floated this idea, a lot of people stepped up and said, yeah, I want to be involved.
I'll be involved.
Not only people that are helping organizing it, but also people that are providing some funding.
So now we have the money to pay people, bring them from all over the world.
There'll be about There's 18 presenters and some really good people, some very high-profile people.
David Nichols will be there.
Mark Plotkin, who runs the Amazon conservation team.
A number of, you know, those are maybe the two highest profile, but people that are known in the field.
And there's, you know, you can look at the website, ESPD.com, you can look at the program, and if it appeals to you, get on the, you know, get on the live stream.
So that, you know, those technologies did not exist in 1967, right?
So they do now.
So why not let the world in?
You know, we can't have everybody come to Buckinghamshire, but we can have them all over the world, so that's the idea.
Now, how do you organize the 18 different people that are talking and the subjects so there's no overlap and so that, you know, the message stays vibrant?
I mean, for one thing, you know, I pretty much knew who I wanted to come and I know what their specialty is, so I invited these people and they cover a variety of specialties.
So, not really too much duplication.
Everyone brings something unique, their own perspective.
So it's pretty easy, really.
I mean, the idea of the ethno-pharmacologic search for psychoactive drugs is that we wanted to focus on the frontier of this, This is still a very active area.
And we don't want, you know, not another conference about ayahuasca.
And that's all wonderful, and I'm totally behind it.
And in fact, truth in advertising, we got four talks on ayahuasca, but different aspects of ayahuasca that haven't really been discussed so much at conferences.
And then we do have one gentleman talking about Kratom and, you know, a specialist of ethnopharmacologists talking about that.
We have Ken Alper, who is maybe the world's recognized authority on iboga and ibogaine and from the pharmacology chemical clinical side.
We've got him.
We've got Dave Nichols.
We have another person, another phytochemist talking about salvia divinorum.
So these are things that were not even on the radar, you know, in 1967. And that's kind of the idea.
That there's been 50 years more work and a lot of work and never any follow-up conferences.
So that's the excuse for doing this.
This will be the follow-up conference.
And if it gets momentum, then maybe we'll be able to do number three and number four.
Well, probably by the time number four comes around, I'll be drooling in my oatmeal.
I only did it once and I had this very bizarre out-of-body experience, but I don't think I took enough.
I had a friend, Ari, who took a lot, who over the course of ten minutes lived, maybe, he believes, in the neighborhood of five to six months.
In this dimension where he had a life and he had friends and he had a job and relationships and He went through this and came back and you know ten minutes later.
He's like This is gonna be impossible to describe but I lived a life I had like this alternative reality that I went through for multiple months Those kinds of experiences, believe it or not, are not that uncommon out in Salvia.
Somebody told me once they had an experience where, you know, they were in a place.
They were like seven or eight years old.
It was Christmas morning.
They were at the Christmas tree celebrating Christmas, opening the presents with a family that this guy had no connection to and had never seen.
Years ago, when I first explored DMT, you could get five MEO DMT online.
There was a chemical company, you could buy it, and I bought like a jug of it, like a container of it, like the size of this stevia container, which is, for people who don't know, enough to get high for the rest of your life.
You can do DMT once a month for the rest and that's all you want to do by the way, especially 5 MEO 5 MEO brings you to someplace that feels like the ultimate center of the universe And there's nothing and it's you you're a part of the whole it's it's also no visuals Which is really weird or if it is a visuals.
It's like these opaque Geometric patterns that exist in this bizarre white Mm-hmm, and you just cease to exist And it feels terrifying and strange.
Most toads produce bufotinine, which is very close to 5-methoxy.
In fact, it's named after the toads.
The genus of toads is Bufo.
Bufotinine is found in most of these toads.
But Bufo alvarius is the only species known that contains 5-methoxy-DMT. So it's got this, you know, there's probably a single gene mutation that lets it produce this methoxylated compound, which is much stronger than bufotanine.
And by the way, just to caution people, sometimes in the media you hear about people are licking toads.
There's a lot of controversy about whether, you know, these endogenous tryptamines, DMT primarily, but 5-MeO is definitely there as well.
Do they have a function?
There is a lot of speculation and not a lot of facts about whether they actually have a function.
I mean, they're made and there's one school of thought that says, yeah, they're sort of like physiological noise.
You know, they'll never reach a point where you could actually perceive any effect because the enzymes, you know, any kind of cellular enzyme will just chop up DMT very readily.
It's so close to human metabolism.
It's going to be very ephemeral in the system, even if it is released.
But other people maintain that under some circumstances the DMT can be stored in vesicles and neural vesicles and released on demand or when some stimulus leads to its release like stress some stress of some sort.
Jamie go out and grab that painting that that young guy sent the guy who has a pineal gland tumor who makes this really crazy tryptamine art Yes, I've heard about this guy.
This guy sent me one of his pieces, and he has a tumor.
Do you know his name, Jamie?
We'll find his name.
I'll give this guy some love.
But you look at his artwork and you go, oh yeah, that's what that is.
Almost like Alex Gray's stuff, but Alex Gray's stuff is art.
I mean, it's definitely representative of the tryptamine world.
It's beautiful and fantastic and amazing, but it's art.
This guy's stuff seems like a trip.
The chaos of the tryptamine experience is sort of replicated in his artwork.
Yeah, that's it.
And so this young guy, we'll find out his name, he sent this.
We're building a new studio and when that's done we'll have this up prominently featured but this kid's work is just incredible Jamie see if you can find it who he is, but he should be is he?
And apparently, well, he's, at least in some sort of way, anecdotal evidence that it's produced in the pineal gland.
Of course, the Cottonwood Research Foundation that Dr. Rick Strassman is a part of in his amazing work from DMT, the spirit molecule, of course, the documentary that you and I were in.
His work has shown that it is produced by the pineal gland in live rats.
So we know now for a fact that at least in that mammal it's it's produced in the pineal gland But that's always been for people that you know, I went to the Vatican last summer and one of the really cool things was that the giant pine cone that they have in the center of like one of the outer areas Yeah.
And I was really lucky to have a very good guide who was a professor.
And he was explaining to me that that was representative of the pineal gland.
It was really fascinating because there's this enormous pine cone and it's surrounded by these two peacocks or two peacocks on the side.
they're supposed to represent immortality in some sort of strange way so i don't know what that whole vision was supposed to mean but he was very adamant that that pine cone there you see it up there on the screen that that is representative of the pineal gland and also in ancient egypt and a lot of the hieroglyphs you see that as well right right well Well, yeah, pineal itself means because it is shaped like a pine cone.
What was also fascinating was this guy, although he knew that that was representative of the pineal gland, he did not know that the pineal gland produced DMT. He wasn't even aware of what DMT was.
So he and I had this really cool conversation about it where he was like, what?
You know, this crazy Italian accent?
This is amazing.
And he's writing things down and I'm, you know, writing, telling him about Strassman's work and you and your brother and all these different things to look into.
Well, there is a guy, a couple of interesting people to mention in this context.
One of them is a researcher, a guy named E.D. Frexka.
How do you spell that?
Good question.
E-D-F-R-E-C-K-S-K-A, I think.
I may have to correct myself on that.
He's a pharmacologist and a neurochemist and psychiatrist, but he is the one that's really kind of leading the charge for endogenous functions of DMT and has good evidence, which has been disputed by some.
I mean, Dave Nichols is kind of on the other side of it.
He's like, ah, DMT doesn't have any internal function.
I mean, when you consider the potency of it and the knowledge that's produced in the body and then also the knowledge of the effects of it, which are just astounding.
Well, I think he does, but then there's also this very reductionist side to him.
Basically, just as a pharmacologist, he says, it's never going to reach.
You know, sufficient concentration in the plasma to have an effect.
However, I think he's wrong.
And I told him, I mean, I was teasing him, I was saying, you know, I wrote back, you know, that famous phrase Arthur C. Clarke once said, you know, when a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, he's very likely correct.
When he says it's impossible, he's almost certainly wrong.
Well, when you're talking about the just general biodiversity of human beings and how some people, let's talk about other human neurochemistry like depression.
Like, some people are super happy and have no problem with their dopamine or serotonin levels.
And there's other people that have, like, real issues.
So if you just look at that, the variability of that, and then also how that can be manipulated with exercise and all these other different things that can raise those levels up.
I haven't experienced it in Kundalini Yonah, but I did have a very bizarre experience fairly recently on yoga where I went into class on a pretty high dose of cannabis.
And I started tripping in the middle of one of the more intense poses.
It was just something akin to the very beginnings of a DMT trip where I started seeing patterns and seeing things moving.
It didn't go anywhere, but I don't pursue it in terms of attempting to make that happen.
But I would imagine that if it's made in the body, and the effects of it are reproducible when you take it, I mean, taking DMT, there's a very few people, there's a very small percentage that don't have an experience when they take it, right?
Probably something like, I mean, I would say a wild guess, but a 2% or something.
That's actually pretty high.
Which is again, anomalous.
Why should there be people who don't have any effect?
I mean, that's a whole other question about what's strange about their metabolism.
But it's interesting that you raise this because a lot of these yogic techniques, especially kundalini, is probably about inducing DMT synthesis in the pineal or wherever it occurs.
There's also a very interesting technology that has come to light, I just found out about it last summer, called the Ajna light.
This guy who's developed this is a very interesting fellow.
He's named Guy Harriman, and he used to work for Apple.
He actually worked very closely with Steve Jobs when Steve Jobs had Next Computing, so he's basically a computer programmer and engineer.
Worked with Steve Jobs, but then he, for some reason, he decided he had to move to Thailand and become a Zen monk, which he did, but he continued to work with technology, and he developed this thing called the Ajna Light, which he claims induces DMT synthesis in the pineal.
And I was at a conference last summer, actually, at Tiringham, at this place where this one is going to be, and he was there.
I tried it a couple of times and by golly, it's a lot like DMT. Really?
No, well, yeah, you close your eyes, doesn't matter, because it's, you know, you don't have eye shades on.
And usually he's playing some music.
But then, you know, in me, like, the reductionist, you know, kicks in and says, well, guy, this is interesting.
How do you know it's really DMT that you're stimulating?
And we've been going back and forth on that, and how can you test that?
And there are ways to do it, but most of them involve some fairly drastic procedures that you wouldn't want to do on people because they wouldn't give you permission if they had any sense, but you could do it to rats.
You could do something called microdialysis.
You can put a Essentially a microscopic tube that's absorptive next to the pineal and you can collect samples that you can detect.
This is not something that people would volunteer for.
I am not saying it does, but it's a lot like DMT. What about hovering something like that over a sensory deprivation tank, like being inside of it and having it hover over your head so you have the added experience of outer body with that?
I would think that would be pretty intense and not hard to recreate.
But if you just hover it over your head, if you just have an arm, like a computer monitor arm, and just swing it over the head.
And so you turn it on, close the door of the tank, close your eyes, lay back, and maybe it has like a 30-second window where it lets you settle in and then begins the program.
Now, with this stuff, did you experience the communication that you get with DMT? Because that, to me, has always been the most profound aspect of it, is this feeling that I'm in the presence of something, and then this sort of telekinetic, understanding the words but not hearing the words.
Honestly, I didn't get that because I think I was not under long enough.
I didn't have much time.
So I was only under – each time I was under maybe 20 minutes, which isn't – I think if I'd stayed in that place, if I could settle into it for an hour, I think that probably would manifest.
I'm very curious about this, because I know that I have a good buddy of mine, my friend Danny, who's done Kundalini for quite a long time, and he can reproduce DMT states.
He's actually had DMT experiences independently of the Kundalini, and he says it's the same thing.
Well, I think there's a genetic component, you know.
I mean, like this gentleman, although he has a tumor, I'm not sure why.
I mean, he doesn't want medical people poking and prodding him, but he would be a perfect subject to settle a lot of issues if he was willing to, you know, cooperate with.
I mean, just having a look at his cerebral spinal fluid, which would be the obvious, you know, fluid to sample for this, would be very interesting.
He just has this idea that I think for one thing, I think, you know, he's kind of a reductionist guy.
I think all the new age stuff, the new excitement about DMT, the pineal and all that, it kind of puts him off.
But on the other hand, don't assume that we know everything because, in fact, we know nothing.
And if it's there, I think it probably does have a function.
It's not surprising that it's there.
It's everywhere.
I mean, DMT is an interesting molecule because it's two steps from tryptophan, right?
Tryptophan is an amino acid, an essential amino acid, one of the 20 that goes into proteins.
So tryptophan is in every living thing on this planet.
And there are two enzymes that are also pretty much universal in cells that can convert DMT or tryptophan to DMT in two simple steps.
You know, I don't want to get too into the chemistry, but basically you remove the acid portion of the amino acid.
You get tryptamine and from there you add the methyl groups and there you are.
Which is why DMT is very, very common in plants, for example, and animals.
I tell people nature is drenched in DMT. Drenched is a great way to describe it.
Drenched in DMT. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of species of plants that contain DMT, for sure.
You know, I mean, there hasn't been any survey or anything like that, but if you look at the genera that have a lot of DMT, like acacia is a good example, the Australian acacias are some of the strongest sources of DMT. There are 1,700 species of acacia.
Probably 75% of them contain DMT. And I'm sure you're aware of the Israeli scientists that believe that the story of Moses and the burning bush was the acacia tree.
And they think that that was the confusion of all the translations and, of course, the oral history past It's down over many, many years, then finally written down.
But this idea of the burning bush delivering the Word of God was most likely in some way a psychedelic trip induced by DMT, and most likely because of the acacia tree.
Most likely the acacia tree, because that was in the area.
You know, I mean, it's an interesting idea, and it's interesting that the, you know, sort of the way that the burning bush presented itself was like DMT presents itself.
You cannot take your eyes away from it, but at the same time, you cannot look at it.
But they, the Aborigines, I think they had to know about it.
They're just not talking about it.
But one possible way that they could have used it, because the DMT in the acacias is so high, the leaves, some of these acacias, they're 2% DMT. Wow!
So if you were to take leaves and throw them on a fire in an enclosed space, like a sweat lodge type space, you could potentially get quite loaded on DMT. There's no indication that they smoked stuff, but they may have fumigated themselves with DMT. Oh, that completely makes sense, if you're talking about a burning bush.
I mean, these folk technologies, it's interesting.
If you look at the New World, you know, in the historical sense— People have remarked, why are there so many more psychedelic plants in the new world than the old world, right?
It's something about people's relationship to plants in this very high biodiversity environment.
People are mucking around with plants, right?
Like a perpetual question that comes up.
Is how did they figure out how to combine banisteriopsis and psychotria to get the activity of ayahuasca?
How out of 80,000 species in the Amazon do they figure out combine these two?
Yeah, well it's important because banisteriopsis contains these alkaloids called beta-carmelines that are monoamine oxidase inhibitors and monoamine oxidase It's the enzyme in the gut that breaks down DMT. So you can drink tea with DMT in it.
You can eat it all day.
Nothing's going to happen because this enzyme will inactivate it.
And that's probably a reflection of an evolutionary process.
You know, we've adapted to toxins in our environment, basically.
If you inhibit that with the alkaloids from the banisteriopsis, they're very potent, very selective MAO inhibitors that protects it from degradation in the gut.
It can cross into the blood and into the blood-brain barrier.
So that's the basis of the oral activity.
And people make much about how they sort of stumbled on this combination, right?
And in fact, one of our presenters at this conference, Manuel Torres, is an archeologist, has been looking at this for quite a while.
And this is one of the sort of gee whiz things, How did these primitive people figure out how to combine these plants, right?
I agree it's remarkable.
If you talk to the shaman, they'll say, well, the plants told us.
But what does that mean?
But what is interesting to me in a way or what I've been thinking about lately, if you look at the archaeology of these things, the snuffs that – there are two or three different kinds of snuffs that are used in South America that contain DMT, the anadonanthra snuffs and the varrola snuffs.
The Anadenanthera snuffs are ancient.
We have archaeological evidence that puts that back to 10, 11,000 years.
They are by far the most ancient psychedelics used in the New World are these snuffs that contain DMT.
Nobody is asking the question, what possessed these people to take the seeds, grind them up, and shove them up their nose?
I mean, this is not something that intuitively you would do.
And yet that seems to me as easily as puzzling as how did they find the combination for ayahuasca.
Nobody's really addressed that.
My first impulse when I find a new plant is not necessarily to snort it.
I mean, obviously it's possible, but is there any evidence that points to the idea that primitive primates maybe didn't have this monoamine oxidase in their system?
Or if they did, they had it in lower amounts and it allowed more dimethyltryptamine to enter into the body from consuming plants?
Is there a potential link between consuming various plants?
Like we're talking about thousands of different plants.
If you didn't have monoamine oxidase in your gut, you could eat a salad and potentially trip.
And there are three main beta-carmelines in banisteriopsis.
In fact, this is what I'm talking about at the conference.
My talk is about beta-carmelines.
The idea that they're not psychoactive, that they're just MAO inhibitors is not really true.
It's an incomplete picture.
There are a lot of other activities with beta-carbolines and a lot of attention recently refocused on harmine, which is the main beta-carboline in Banisteriopsis.
It turns out it has all kinds of activities that have been sort of overlooked until now.
Not least of all, it stimulates neurogenesis.
It stimulates nerve cell growth.
Wow.
This is big news because— Yeah, and potentially it inhibits a kinase, which has to do with...
Kinase is a protein that phosphorylates things, right?
Very common, all kinds of kinases around the body.
But it inhibits this one particular kinase called DYRK1, whatever that means.
But it is associated with the stimulation of nerve growth from neural stem cells.
This is all petri plate test tube stuff.
but it's not unreasonable to think that this is going on in the body.
So if that plays a part in neurogenesis, that could potentially have some real benefits to people that have things like Parkinson's or nerve disorders or- Maybe PTSD or CTE, rather.
One of the talks that I listened to of your brothers from way back in the day, he was talking about Scientific nomenclature related to harming and that before they when one of the Recent or one of the early explorers to South America when they found this stuff they were calling it telepathine Yes, they were calling it telepathine.
Because it induced these group states of telepathy.
I mean, if you want to get into what you could call the sordid history of the chemistry investigations of ayahuasca, because harming and harmaline and tetrahedral harming, these were originally found in Paganum harmilla, which is where they got their names, which is Syrian rue, right?
And a lot of people use that as an alternative MAO when they're making ayahuasca analogs.
So that's how those alkaloids got their names.
And then when chemists came along, kind of all through the 19th century, they started looking at banisteriopsis, and they would isolate things, and they didn't know what to call them.
Sometimes they called them telepathine because of the rumors.
Sometimes they were called banisterine and yahaine because they didn't really know what the compound was, right?
And then it turned out, well, it's actually harming, and harming was isolated earlier, so then they got their nomenclature right.
There was a long period where they never collected voucher specimens, so a lot of this work was in some ways useless because they forgot to collect the actual plants that they did the isolation from.
It got a little more rigorous.
There was a group, a couple of investigators that actually thought to collect the plants that they did the isolation with.
So then they could document the source, right?
I mean, people think this is not important, but in ethnopharmacology, it's quite important.
You know, for example, for a long time, just a side thing, you know, for a long time, there was a plant called Prestonia Amazonica.
That was reputed to be one of the sources of these alkaloids and one of the components used to make ayahuasca.
That got loose in the literature and it took years to straighten this out because it's not true.
And there was no doubt, there was no voucher specimen to show that this was, you know, it was not Prestonia Amazonica.
It got so bad that Schultes actually had to publish a paper that said Prestonia Amazonica, Amazonian hallucinogen or not.
Turns out, not.
You know?
So you have to be aware of bad documentation.
If you're going to collect plants, know what you're collecting so the chemists that might come along and work with that can refer back to it.
It seems to me that that part of the world, the Amazon jungle, and our really troubling relationship with it currently, is so analogous to the way human beings are kind of interfacing with the world.
Like, that's a good way to look at it there, because there's so many different powerful things that they're learning about this one area while people are chopping it down left and right and slashing and burning and making room for cattle grazing and all this other crazy shit that's going on down there.
Well, yeah, and there is, and this is a good illustration of, you know, our sort of penny-wiseness and pound-foolishness about these things.
There are literally trillions of dollars, if you just want to look at it in terms of Dollars and cents, which is not the best way to look at it, because after all, this ecosystem is, you know, the burning of the rainforest is about 30% of human global greenhouse gas emissions, if you could just stop burning down the damn forest.
But then on the other side of economics, and there have been assessments, what use do you make of the Amazonian biome to maximize its value, right?
If you do cattle, it's worth so much per hectare.
If you do...
Well, yeah.
That's the big issue, right?
But the thing is, in terms of undiscovered, potentially undiscovered blockbuster drugs, there's probably at least a trillion dollars worth of undiscovered drugs in the Amazon, which will, of course, never be discovered because we're going to wreck it.
And all of this, less than 10% of this, not even close to 10% of this incredible molecular and biological diversity has been looked at as potential sources of new medicines.
I mean, there's a whole area of folk medicine and folk knowledge, but to systematically look through these species and isolate things of interest hasn't been done.
I mean it's been going on for years There's been a lot of work, but it's not really touching a big proportion of it.
pharmaceutical companies are not interested in this, you know, interestingly enough.
They want to you know, their corporations, and despite...
They tell you they're finding new medicines that will cure people and help people.
To a certain extent, that's true.
But remember, the bottom line is profit.
They want to own everything.
You know, they don't want to share intellectual property with these savages down there that are the stewards of this knowledge.
You know, why should we let these people have any part of it?
So they want to make everything synthetically.
They want it all to come out of vats, you know, in their laboratories.
But it's the totally wrong approach because the frequency...
Of compounds that make it from discovery to the clinic is very low.
And when they abandoned natural products about 25 years ago, the frequency of drug discovery, the pharmaceutical discovery pipeline, as they call it, dried up.
And it took a long time for the pharmaceutical industry to realize, you know, essentially we threw the baby out with the bathwater.
We need to go back to natural products.
Because that's where you find the molecular diversity, the scaffolds on which we can build these drugs.
Think of the complex molecules that you find in nature.
That may not be what makes it to the clinic.
It may be a derivative of that or an analog of that, but it's still the plants that give you the ideas for the structure, if you can follow me.
It's not that you're going to grow this rainforest tree in plantations, but you can go and isolate a compound, determine the structure, and then you can probably synthesize an analog.
Again, the FDA and just the whole drug discovery process, they like single compounds, you know, magic bullets.
They like the synthetic compound that is completely defined molecularly, and they don't like all these other compounds.
related compounds like Marinol for instance right synthetic THC which is not nearly as pleasant for people who have cancer or Glaucoma or any a host of very very good very good example Marinol Marinol, it does what it does, but the multi-component preparations of cannabis are much more effective.
But it's just so incredible with so much information available today that they're making such poor choices in that regard that someone can't step up and logically address this thing and say, look, you're getting a fraction of the benefits of this just because of this bizarre need that human beings have to patent things and to own things.
And with, as you say, with something like that where, you know, it's pretty obvious how you do it.
It's not that complicated.
There's no innovative technology there.
There's no art.
There's no art of innovation, which is what would make it patentable.
There were attempts to patent ayahuasca a few years ago, and it got, you know, it actually was patented.
And a delegation of indigenous healers from Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru came to the US Patent Office and petitioned against this and said, "We've been using this medicine for thousands of years." Who patented it?
Oh, it was a guy named Loren Miller who really didn't know what he was doing.
I forget what his company was.
This was when I was still doing my postdoc at NIH.
So this was like mid-'80s.
He tried to patent it.
And what it turned out was it was a completely specious patent.
It was a patent on a particular strain of Banisteriopsis that he collected that had an anomalous flower color, I think, and that was the basis of the patent.
Well, that's absurd because flower color is Highly variable.
Yeah, the patent office overturned the patent, as they well should have.
And then I believe it was reinstated for some reason.
I haven't really followed this up, but I think by that time everyone kind of came to the conclusion that It was absurd.
There was no reason to do it.
And he didn't really have the resources to develop it.
and he was not, you know, he lost a lot of respect.
Because it's not so much that you can't, I mean, the intellectual property thing is the real issue, you know.
And that's why the pharmaceutical companies want to stay away from traditional medicines by and large because it's like the indigenous people are the stewards of the knowledge.
They know how to use the plant.
They maintain the plant.
Their habitat, you know, is where the plant is found.
So they rightly should have a place at the table.
If you're going to commercialize this traditional medicine, they should get something back.
Because traditionally, we've been ripping things off from indigenous people for a long time.
It's called biopiracy, right?
And that's how they operate generally.
So that's an issue.
But there are ways to address that issue.
Just basically, you know, come to terms with it and acknowledge that their knowledge does count for something.
And they should have a part of the proceeds.
If you make a billion-dollar drug out of this, you should be able to give something back to Indigenous people.
It also seems like when everything becomes commercial, it becomes...
When you look at the idea that pharmaceutical drug companies at all, when you look at a corporation and you think of this idea of infinite growth and this is what they're subscribing to and they're constantly trying to make more and more money, and then you think about compounds and compounds being legal and them trying to figure out a way to market these things, it seems to be a big issue that we're relying on that at all.
It's almost like that tale of the scorpion and the frog, where the frog tells the scorpion, hey, I'll give you a ride across the river, but do me a favor and don't sting me, because if you do, we'll both drown.
And then halfway through, the scorpion stings him, and the frog goes, what the fuck?
And the scorpion goes, hey man, it's my nature.
It seems like right the nature of these corporations is just to make money so relying on them to bring these intense Psychedelic compounds to the market or to even saying the markets terrible word to just bring them to daily use or bring them to making them free to use I think that corporations You know,
as you say, their main job, as they see it, though they don't say so in public, is basically to make money, you know, to patent these compounds and make money.
You know, I mean, take the family for a weekend and have a nice, you know, psilocybin vacation while you're busy getting your massages and doing yoga and whatever it's like.
That's how it's going to work, I think, if it's allowed to go forward.
That's the model.
Yeah, well, we'll see.
I mean, I've often said the very idea that you could patent or prohibit A plant is absurd.
It's almost like with the UDV and these other churches that what they've done is they've used this scaffolding of Christianity as a Trojan horse.
That's allowing this ayahuasca to get through.
Strassman was telling me his experience with them, where they were all wearing golf shirts, and they have uniforms, and they're taking these insane doses of super potent ayahuasca.
And then they're all singing and singing songs about Jesus.
You know, Strassman is like a really, like, very mellow and easygoing guy, really pleasant guy.
He was explaining how he sat down with these people in the morning after all this was over.
He's like, what the fuck are you people doing?
And his eyebrows are raised.
And he's thinking about his trip from the night before.
He's like, these people are taking super potent doses of ayahuasca, and they're singing about Jesus with golf shirts on.
And they have plastic folding chairs and shit, and lawn furniture, and it's like, what the fuck is this?
I mean, the thing is I haven't had much to do with Santa Dime.
Not that I just haven't had the opportunity, nor am I particularly interested in going to ceremonies where I am told that I have to dance the whole time.
It's not my thing.
But I know the UDV well, you know, because we did the biomedical study with them in the 90s.
But it seems to me, with my experience with DMT, that it's so powerful and so profound that I wonder if that's a way that Christianity works.
You know, like this idea of Jesus and the saints and heaven and God and all these different manifested deities.
Like, people thumb their nose at it and say it's ridiculous and preposterous, but everything on DMT is ridiculous and preposterous.
And I wonder if under the guise of the UDV and they're singing and they're dancing, if Jesus is real in a sense that you can actually communicate with a thing that takes the form of Jesus.
In that sense, I wonder what they're seeing.
I mean, I really wonder if they're going, the whole idea of psychedelics for the non-initiated is a big part of it is how you're going into the experience.
Set and setting and also your mindset.
Also, you know, the state of mind that you approach these things can greatly I think we're good to go.
Well, I think what you experience You know, is not confined to Christianity.
What you articulated is just basically kind of the characteristics of a religious experience or spiritual experience without necessarily tying it to Christianity.
I mean, love, compassion, respect for each other.
You know, I mean, these are elements of a kind of the, well, I don't know what you call it.
Generic religion.
These are elements of the religious experience.
The interesting thing about the UDV and these other churches is that they have actually created a structure where this can happen, whereas most religions, the last thing they want you to do is have an actual religious experience.
I mean, it's all set up to make sure that doesn't happen because religious experiences are dangerous.
But the thing is, and this happens, it's not just Christianity, it's like It's like any powerful spiritual technology, anything that is numinous, right?
I talk a lot about the mysterium tremendum, right?
The DMT, the psychedelic experience is a mysterium tremendum.
Something that is mysterious, tremendous, terrifying, spiritually powerful, and must be controlled, right?
I mean, it is all those things.
It's too powerful.
So in these power structure, there's always someone who says, you know, who wants to sort of put a collar around that, put a lasso around that, to seize the reins, if you will.
There's a temptation to grab it and use it for your own purposes, which is, you know, usually a man.
Usually, I don't know if any women, women don't seem to be, you know, it's not inbuilt to do the dominance thing, but there's very often a male figure who can take any spiritual technology, co-opt it to their purposes.
You know, which is often sex or money or power or all of those things.
My friend Amber Lyon had it happen to her, like on one of her first experiences.
This guy was groping her and where she was under, and she's realizing what's going on, and just realized, like, this is probably how some of these people sort of, like, they found this technology.
You can call it technology if you want, but this pathway to this incredible experience, they provided to people, but they're not really much into taking.
that journey themselves.
They're really into exploiting this thing for financial gain and for power and influence.
That is what it's morphed into now that there's the tourism phenomenon and all that stuff.
So yes, they see it as a way to exactly that, to power, influence and money, which just illustrates again, it's all about there's nothing inherently good or bad about these technologies.
Ayahuasca can be a wonderful thing if it's used properly, and it can be a really terrible thing.
It's all about the use you make of it, the moral dimension that comes with how you use it.
I mean there are ayahuascaeros that have – I say they don't listen to their medicine in a sense.
They do these things.
They're not really absorbing the lessons that they should be getting from the medicine.
Others do listen to their medicine and it's not so easy to sort out who's the good ones and who's the bad ones.
Sort of like what you were talking about, these people that have the simplistic idea that all you have to do is get Donald Trump high on DMT and he's going to see the light.
They definitely don't deserve the amount of power that they're wielding, nor does anybody.
What's more fascinating about him than anything is that what he holds up to the golden standard is success, right?
I mean, this is the guy that, you know, everything has to have his name on it.
It's all Trump this and Trump that.
And if you looked at like the great American vision of success, It's to become some sort of super rich ultra billionaire.
But even though everybody knows he's a super rich ultra billionaire, he still is deceptive about his own success.
He still has to lie about it.
He still has to distort it far past, whether it's the numbers that came to the inauguration, whether it's the numbers that he won the electoral college by.
He lies about all these different things, and it's inherent.
It's a part of him, this intense lack of satisfaction with any result.
Any result, even if it's winning by a mile, he must win by a hundred miles.
That's childish.
But it's that same intense dissatisfaction that's inherently very dangerous in a leader.
Because it's leading him to make these critical judgments that aren't based entirely on reality, but rather what he wants people to perceive.
Not what you want in your leaders because, you know, we see what's happening.
Like, you know, he's going back and forth with the Soviets.
He's going back and forth with North Korea.
And it's like a schoolyard spat, you know.
But these people have nuclear weapons to throw.
So we need to back off from that, Donald.
You know, it's just, but he can't do that because he has to respond.
He has this impulse to respond.
I mean, I think that, you know, I don't know.
I mean, he's not going to be exposed to ayahuasca, I'm pretty sure.
Unfortunately, because it would help him.
And, you know, what is disturbing to me in many things about Donald and this sort of reality distortion he's created is people, you know, they take it seriously.
I mean, they're sort of like intimidated by it.
Not enough people are standing up and saying, well, this is not true.
This is not true.
You're completely deluded about this.
You know, I mean, there's some sort of impulse to show some respect.
Respect for the office, for whatever some – but then when he comes out with these things that are obviously not true, I'm sorry, there are no alternative facts.
I'm not the guy to be the architect of the future civilization, but I would think that putting as much power as we put into one individual is insanely problematic.
It's just you're dealing with all these ego issues, decision-making issues, and also the camps, the two separate camps, the right-left camp.
I mean, I think one way to approach it wouldn't have to be such a tremendous shift from what we've got.
It would be to go to a parliamentary system like Canada has, for example, where you represent your party.
And if the other party gets enough, you know, they can vote you out without going through the whole impeachment process.
There is no impeachment process.
The parties can form a coalition and I think there's also an issue with dealing with the real problems of the world in a In a time where the realities of,
say, Syria and what's going on over there are so horrific and they're so far removed from the realities that we deal with here, you almost need to have someone who has some sort of experience with those people in those lands to understand and put it into perspective.
And I think we're entirely lacking of that perspective in terms of our culture.
I don't think we understand what a brutal military dictatorship is like.
I think we see it on television, and it seems almost too abstract.
But the president has to deal with that in a very real way.
So there's nobody there to say, wait a minute, you're wrong.
And based on experience and expertise and all this, you're wrong.
Right.
You need to rethink it.
That's what bothers me about one among many things about the way that he proceeds.
I mean, you know, the thing that bothers me most about the change in administrations is that they have basically looked at climate change.
They said, we don't believe it.
It's not happening.
It's not even on the table.
And actually, that needs to be the thing on the table.
That should be the primary thing we're talking about.
All this other stuff is important, but we're talking about the accelerating changes that are essentially undermining the mechanisms that keep the Earth habitable by life.
This is a pretty important issue.
And to have people that say, well, we don't believe in climate change.
Well, I'm sorry, climate change is real.
I don't care what the fuck you believe.
It is real.
And for this administration to not only ignore it, but then roll back all these other measures that were put into place is, you know, it's just the stupidest idea I can imagine.
In some ways, it's just too eerily parallel to what we're talking about with the rainforest.
Like, with all this potential in the rainforest, and almost this race.
The race to see like can we get to these incredible new plants that we haven't discovered before we fuck it up by cutting down all the hardwoods and burning all the forests?
Can we get to this potential future utopia of people being able to read each other's minds, being able to communicate simultaneously all throughout the world, understanding each other regardless of language?
Can we get to that before we blow ourselves up?
Before we get into a nuclear war with fucking North Korea or any of this crazy shit with this insane administration that's existing in this sort of chaotic manner alongside Some of the brightest minds and most innovative people that have ever walked the face of the planet that are influencing things in a way today that it's really unparalleled in terms of human history.
The potential that any new invention or innovation can enact, whether it's understanding new compounds that we discovered in the rainforest or some new technology that's made in Silicon Valley.
What do you think about the idea, and I've heard this brought up and I've entertained it my own self, that maybe we need some sort of enemy or some sort of thing to resist in order to rise to the full potential of innovation, of ideas, that we almost need some sort of mountain to conquer.
We need some sort of a force to be aware of that really makes people rise up.
I've seen more More people politically active and politically engaged now, post-election, than I ever did before the election, because they didn't expect Trump to win.
But what you said about journalism, I think it's important to point out that they fucked up just as hard with the left as they did with the right.
I mean, they let the Clintons get away with a lot of horse shit.
They let Obama get away with a lot of horse shit.
They said talking points.
They were given talking points.
And they ran with those talking points so that they would get access to the president.
And they would get access to congressmen, the senators, and they did it forever.
And it wasn't journalism.
And you're right.
And the reason why this guy got into place in this situation right now, it's just as much of a fault of them of not holding the left to the fire as it is to, you know, what's going on right now.
I would just, I would I would like to think that journalism is finding its voice and finding its function.
Again, its function is to, you know, as somebody said, I think it was I have stone, you know, the function is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, right?
Then the other side of it is that we can just – You know, the way the Trump administration proceeds with all these things they want to do, they inevitably just get bogged down in litigation, protest, you know, at some point they do have to answer to Congress.
So I think, you know, I mean, the wheels were already coming off before he even took the oath of office.
They've continued to come off, and it's just going to get, it's going to just sort of degenerate into litigation, acrimony, inability to get anything passed.
The whole thing to me, when I'm looking at these protests, like what was going on yesterday, where people are just beating the shit out of each other in the streets.
People with red hats.
Like, the red hats are the bad people.
It's so strange.
Like, it's so strange seeing people with these Make America Great Again hats.
Fighting with people that are wearing masks and motorcycle helmets and their sticks and people are throwing, you know, smoke bombs.
I'm like, this is crazy.
I really never thought we'd see such a clear right versus left civil war, in fact, like these little battles.
And it seems to be ramping up and becoming more and more common and becoming more and more violent.
You know, we're not out on the streets protesting on one side or another.
I mean, I, you know, and basically I think for me, I continue doing what I'm doing because I think these plant medicines are the single most important catalyst for changing consciousness on a global level.
And that's what has to happen.
So I'm not saying I have nothing messianic about it.
I tell people I work for the plants, but I think it's valuable to bring people to that experience in a place that is safe.
They don't have to worry about those issues.
They can have this direct download with the Mysterium Tremendum, if you want to call it that.
That can change hearts and minds.
I think that globally, I think that ayahuasca is a catalyst for that.
You know, why has it suddenly gone global in the last 20 years?
I think, you know, I think that it's a sign that Gaia, if you believe in that concept, that the Earth itself is an intelligent entity, is getting a little bit hysterical and is trying to get our attention.
You know, wake up the monkeys.
And this is the way it's, you know, so ayahuasca is an ambassador from the community of species to what I call the problematic primates, you know, this out-of-control species that needs protection.
Well, it seems like systems always try to balance themselves out, you know, whether it's through warfare or disease or some new government usurping the old power, or whether it's through predators and prey, and there's always some weird sort of reaction to something gaining too much power.
Whether it's ideas or ideologies or patterns, they gain too much power and then something shows up that sort of tends to diminish that and erode the very foundation of it.
That's what I feel about psychedelics, that in many ways what they're doing, and even the sneaky door, like the people that talk about cannabis being some sort of a gateway drug.
It's not a gateway drug to the bad ones.
I think, if anything, it's a gateway drug to the ones that are going to change the world.
You know, the FDA could not classify tobacco as a drug because it was a different regulatory framework.
Well, of course it's a drug.
you know and somebody said yeah it's the only drug you can use when used as instructed will kill you that's hilarious isn't it funny that the word drug I'm not funny but it's isn't it problematic at the very least the word the word drug is sort of this gigantic blanket that we throw over all these things that perturb consciousness Right.
You know, and then also, I mean, the problem that they're facing and that we have to acknowledge, which I've been saying a lot lately, is, you know, we're made of drugs.
Right.
That's why drugs work.
We are made of drugs.
Right.
We're biochemical engines that run on drugs, which are neurotransmitters and hormones and enzymes and all of these things in biochemical system.
They're involved with signal transduction.
Organisms are networks of communication.
They're mediated by neurotransmitters.
Neurotransmitters, if you isolated them from the brain, Put them into a bottle and sold them, that would be a drug.
Well, it is a drug.
So this idea that, you know, we are inherently biochemical systems, you know, and people don't want to acknowledge that, but that's the truth.
You know, we're made of drugs.
So the people that want to have the drug-free America, I'm sorry, you know.
We're made out of drugs.
Drugs are built into who we are.
That's why drugs taken from plants or from the outside have the effects that they have, you know, because they affect these systems that, you know, are big brains.
This is kind of a consequence of evolution.
You know, we have these enormous brains, you know, that evolve very quickly.
And we like novelty.
We have all of these brain receptors.
We like to stimulate those receptors because it makes us feel good or it's interesting or for all sorts of reasons.
In all honesty, though, it's so important that you are saying these things so people can change their perspective when they realize that, oh, yeah, we are really just water balloons of drugs.
Yeah, somehow being in a body, being this chemical system and enjoying what it is to be that is forbidden somehow.
And this is partly a reflection of our devaluation of nature, which includes our own nature as well as nature out there.
Psychedelics are the antidote to this, right?
They make you re-appreciate your relationship with nature.
So they can catalyze changes in consciousness.
That's why I say the most effective thing that I can do as somebody who's concerned with the planet is bring people to situations where they can encounter the medicine and make of it what they will.
I'm not there to tell them what to make of it.
I'm there to tell them this will be the most intense personal experience that you'll ever have.
There's at least three kinds of cannabinoid receptors.
And evolutionarily, you know, they're not cannabinoid receptors.
There's the endocannabinoid system.
They are responsive to things that we make in the body, like anandamide, and there's another one which I always forget, but these are endogenous compounds that That bind to cannabinoid receptors.
So just like there are endogenous compounds that bind to opiate receptors, these are peptides like endorphins, enkephalins, and those sorts of things.
But the receptors just happen to bind these plant alkaloids, but that's not why they evolved.
You know, they have functions in the body related to analgesia and sleep and that sort of thing.
Same with the cannabinoid receptors.
They evolved not because there were cannabis plants out there, but because the body made these endocannabinoids and they mediated all kinds of functions like anandamide.
These things, you know, cannabinoids are a little different than something like DMT or psilocybin, which work kind of very specifically on the serotonin receptors.
Because we can actually trace the phylogeny of these things.
We have molecular methods now where we can actually trace the ancestry of receptors.
For example, we have ways to measure this.
You know, cannabinoid receptors, you can look at the phylogeny and, you know, they were present in mammals long before we were around, you know, and tryptophan is the same thing.
Tryptophan, which is the amino acid we were talking about, precursor to many of these psychedelics, right?
So how old is tryptophan as an amino acid?
You can look back at the phylogeny.
Turns out Damn old.
Possibly 3.8 billion years old.
genes for tryptophan have been found in phylogenetic groups that go back that far, the so-called trip operon.
So these things have been around for a long And, you know, in the most primitive organisms, you know, serotonin is another good example.
Serotonin is, which most of the psychedelics work on, serotonin is thought to be the oldest neurotransmitter, phylogenetically older than dopamine and norepinephrine.
Tryptophan, serotonin is, receptors are very old phylogenetically, evolutionarily.
I've heard runner's high discussed in terms of the opiate receptors, the endorphin and so on.
Maybe cannabis too.
What we do know is that in states of high stress, you can boost the production of these endogenous compounds, which is why high stress is one way to induce altered states of consciousness on the natch, right?
Oh, I don't need drugs because I can run and get high, or I can do meditation and get high.
I'm sorry, dude, you're still on drugs.
Because we're made of drugs, and you've just figured out a way to boost your endogenous DMT, cannabinoid, opiates, or whatever.
Yeah, essentially, because we are drugs, remember.
There is no state you can experience, including the state that we're in right now, that is not a reflection of our neurochemistry.
We're in a hallucination right now.
This is a reality that our brains take information in from the environment through our sensory neural interface.
They combine it with what we know from memories and associations in the cortex and they essentially create a model of reality.
And that's the reality we're inhabiting.
And a lot of what the brain does, it receives information, but a lot of the brain's function is to filter stuff out.
If we received everything from the environment all the time, we'd be nuts.
We wouldn't be able to take it.
So there are these gating mechanisms that's called neural gating.
And we are genetically programmed to, and through experience as well, to have these gating mechanisms that filters a lot of stuff out so that we can function.
Otherwise, reality would be a blooming, buzzing confusion all the time.
We wouldn't be able to focus on anything.
So, for example, gating is malleable.
It can change depending on the input.
So you're in a crowded restaurant, for example, and it's hard to hear.
There's a lot of noise in the background.
You adapt to that by filtering out most of what's there.
You can suppress it to some degree, so you can talk to the person across from you.
You're not paying attention.
But at the next table, you hear somebody say your name.
Suddenly, your gating mechanism, you know, you get that.
That gets through the filtering mechanism.
Oh, somebody's talking to me.
I wonder what they're saying about me over there.
You know, that kind of thing.
So it relates.
But a lot of what the brain does when you...
Essentially create this hallucination, if you want to call it that, of the reality that we inhabit.
You can call it a model of reality.
It's not reality itself.
It's a reasonable facsimile of reality that we inhabit.
Different experiences create literally drug trips.
Also can explain love affairs where people become incredibly addicted to each other and addicted to the experience of being around the person and what that does to you.
And that literally you are on drugs when you're with someone.
Well, but people, you know, again, they have these artificial distinctions about, well, you know, my mystical experience is more valuable than yours because you had to have psilocybin and I got there on the natch.
You're still a prisoner of your neurochemistry, no matter what.
It just so happens that psilocybin is a drug.
Taken in the right circumstances in the right amount will reliably induce a mystical experience.
Nothing wrong with that.
You know, you can even study it.
Suddenly science can study mystical experiences because we have a reliable trigger that will, nine times out of ten, induce a mystical experience in the right circumstances.
So then we can take somebody, you know, maybe somebody's meditated for 20 years or done yoga or done other things, hoping that they might have a mystical experience.
Good for them.
But then, you know, you can take me, an ordinary schmuck or somebody like me who hasn't particularly, not particularly spiritually evolved, but I can take psilocybin and yeah, it works.
Because what's going on with that, this static diagram, a different molecular model would show, but what's going on is that that nitrogen there, when silicon's in physiological solution, The nitrogen is charged, has a positive charge.
The oxygen doesn't have the H there.
It has a negative charge.
So the nitrogen curls back and is in close association with the oxygen.
If this makes any sense.
So the enzyme can't get to it.
That's why it's orally active, because essentially it can't get to that nitrogen.
What that enzyme does is cleave off that nitrogen, monoamine oxidase.
It takes away that nitrogen.
And it can't do it with psilocin.
So that's why psilocin is orally active.
It doesn't require an MAO inhibitor.
It's just, in some ways, it's the perfect psychedelic because, you know, no preparation needed.
You just bend over and pick the mushroom.
No preparation is required, which is probably why very ancient man knew about psilocybin.
They couldn't not have if they were living in an environment where it was found.
You know, what's really incredible is that people are using psilocybin these days in what they call microdosing, taking very small doses and seeing these profound benefits.
And one of the things that I'm aware of is kickboxers are using it.
And kickboxers are using it and a good buddy of mine is using it.
He says that he can see things happen before they happen.
It's almost like he's reading people's minds before they're about to do something.
Because I think that these things let you step out of your box a little bit.
They let you step out of your usual reference frame and notice things going on in the environment that, again, this gating mechanism we were talking about, we're programmed to filter stuff out.
Psychedelics temporarily disrupt that.
They let the background come forward.
And you notice things about the environment that normally you would suppress because they're not relevant to immediate survival.
I don't know if you've read some of the work by Simon Powell.
He wrote The Psilocybin Solution.
He writes very intelligently about psilocybin.
In his latest book, The Magic Mushroom Explorer, he talks about how psilocybin is a lens, essentially.
You can think of it as a lens.
You can look at the world.
You can look at natural phenomena, and you will notice things about that, those phenomena that you normally would overlook because we're programmed to do it.
So in a sense, he talks about how psilocybin is a scientific instrument.
You know, it's a lens through which you can look at the world and see aspects of it that are always there, but you've never noticed them before because we're programmed not to.
For example, you know, Carey Mullis is famous because his discoveries in molecular biology, he attributes to his insights about molecular processes that he got from LSD. That he could get down with the molecules, as he put it, and see how all this is working.
And obviously he invented polymerase chain reaction, which he got the Nobel Prize for.
So it's not like this is a delusion.
It's a real thing that he was able to notice that no one else, you know what I'm saying?
He was able to put himself in a place where he could notice these phenomena.
And I think that's really true.
If you go to take a walk in the forest with an indigenous person, you know, who in some ways is in this less of this sensory gating in a more open place all the time.
They will notice things about the environment, you know, that you are completely oblivious to until they point it out, you know, and then they'll say, oh, yes, I never noticed the leafcutter ants are behaving this way or these different things.
Their sensory sort of experience of an environment like the forest is very different than ours.
You know, because we're used to, we're just not out in nature the same way.
And I dare say, I think one of the things that in some ways inserts a barrier between us is literacy.
You know, we're all literate, right?
And we like being literate.
It's good that we're literate.
But in order to be literate, you have to have this separation between the self and the external environments.
You have to pick up a book and read it.
I am here.
I'm the point of view.
Here's the book.
So that creates that relationship.
And you sacrifice, you focus on one particular sensory modality, and you sacrifice all the other input that is coming in.
They can essentially reverse this background-foreground relationship that we're so used to.
Suddenly, what's right in front of you is not so important, and you can pay attention to the things in the background that you're normally programmed to suppress and ignore because you have to be ready for the saber-toothed tiger to come across over the mountain or whatever, you know what I'm saying.
But, I mean, it's interesting in that respect, you know, with psychedelics, because we're verbal people and, you know, we inhabit a world of language as much as the physical world.
And we're almost compelled to try to put some kind of a linguistic wrapper over everything, which is one reason why.
If you smoke DMT, right, you have a complete revelation.
It's amazing.
all of these things but it's in most cases you aren't even down yet before you're trying to explain it to yourself you know You're trying to stuff this thing in a box because it was so impactful.
It's inherently ineffable.
You know, you can't really describe it in language.
But boy, is there a desire to somehow tame this thing, which is incomprehensible, totally transcendent.
But that doesn't stop you from rapping about it immediately to try to stuff it into a box because it's too impactful.
And so on the individual level, this is what people do.
That's what religions do, too, right?
They try to take something like this and stuff it into a box, because in and of itself, without that wrapping or that linguistic, you know, filter to somehow tame it and, you know, nullify, neutralize its power, these things are very dangerous.
There also seems to be some sort of a physiological component to the DMT trip, where once it's over, you have a very limited amount of time to hang on to those memories.
And so this is an attempt to entrain that, to grab it, and I think put a linguistic, you know, tag on it in a certain way so that as a way to not forget it or try and, you know, both reduce its power but give you something to hang on because, right, the memory of what it actually is is going to fade very rapidly.
That's the key thing, ESPD50. The conference will be June 6th, 7th, and 8th in the UK. You can go there if you want to attend it.
The cost is high to actually go there and do it.
But people can access it on Facebook.
And if you go to that website, then there's a link through to the Facebook page.
And we'll be live streaming it, you know, on the 6th, 7th, and 8th of June.
And it'll be archived, so I don't expect people in the States to get up at 3 in the morning to watch it, although they could if they want to watch it live.
But it'll all be archived so they can look at it any time.