Rick Strassman revisits his groundbreaking 1990s DMT studies, where two IV test subjects overdosed—one trapped in a storm hallucination, the other vomiting—sparking dose adjustments. He explores shared psychedelic consciousness via hashish trips and parapsychology, cautioning about potential misuse like Philip K. Dick’s dystopian "Perky Pat" drug. Rogan links ancient rituals (Mayan acacia, biblical visions) to DMT, while Strassman highlights UCLA’s upcoming PTSD study with repeated dosing. Their debate on regulation—from Oregon’s psilocybin centers to Native American religious exemptions—concludes with psychedelics’ dual promise: therapeutic breakthroughs or unchecked chaos, depending on how society approaches them. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, the book was fascinating because your book was, you need to adjust cameras.
Good.
Your book was fascinating to me because it was, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but it was the first time that the FDA ever allowed real studies to be done on Schedule I drugs.
And just so much cleverness has been shown here today.
So much ingenuity in working with what you have.
I mean, this press is a great example of it.
Take a look here.
It's just basically an automobile jack that's been put into a frame.
Had a couple of springs put on there.
And then, you know, these iron casing boxes made.
And it works.
It works really well.
And this is the way that the hash that's smoked by most people around the world, the largest quantity of cannabis that's made anywhere, is made still by this legacy method.
And the great thing about it is this could really be done anywhere.
I think about folks in Mexico or Colombia who could take this method and repurpose it and adapt it and be making quite a very nice high quality hash.
So I think he's using it in that sort of that little frame, that little case, and then they're packing it in there with that car jack, which is pretty crazy.
Well, so after that experience, smoking hash, and, you know, my chemistry mind got piqued.
I thought, you know, like a half hour ago, I was totally normal, and right now I'm just having the weirdest experience of my life, and I wonder how that works chemically.
So I figured there must be some...
Chemical changes in the brain, and I was interested in learning what those might be.
Well I get the occasional email from people who have really gone around the bend smoking too much DMT. There's people, I think, that have a tendency towards a type of paranoid schizophrenia that maybe they kind of have it under control or maybe it's mild.
You know, they just have some weird paranoias about certain things.
I've seen a few people do too many psychedelics and then now they're in fantasy land.
Yeah, it's almost like they're interfacing at the wrong...
They're not quite getting...
There's a reality port, and then there's a neighboring port where they're getting...
It's like they can pay their taxes, they can drive their cars, they can answer emails, but they think that there's some crazy mind control experiment at the head of...
You know, it's just one of those weird ones where people just start believing that the whole world's out to get them and the government's trying to track them down and there's a chip in my brain.
Yeah, it was, you know, their explanation of their unusual experiences.
You know, the kinds of stories I've heard with people doing too much DMT is a kind of mania.
They're really grandiose.
They think that they've got all the answers and nobody is listening to them and it makes them mad and they end up in prison or in psychiatric hospitals.
I'm always fascinated with how other human beings' brains work.
Mine as well, right?
I'm fascinated by the brain.
About how it's so different after exercise.
It's so different after rest.
It's so different when, you know, you meditate or you do something like yoga, some mindfulness kind of practice.
It's like, what are most people experiencing?
And then, what does it feel like to be mentally ill?
Like, what is that person experiencing?
Like, what weird shift in the chemical balance of the mind is causing that?
And, you know, how much of it is genetic and how much of it is life experience and trauma?
It's just the way people think and look about things and look at things has always been fascinating to me because I've got to assume that everyone's dealing with different hardware or wetware or whatever you would call the brain.
There's like mild, where someone just kind of like a touch schizophrenic, and there's someone who's like full-blown, you know, the aliens are hiding in my walls and they're out to get me?
Well, I mean, I guess the way I would look at it, which might not be the way everybody would, but I think what may have taken place is that because of all of the psilocybin that he took, he opened a portal into things out there.
I'm glad you said it that way, because I say it that way, too, and I know it sounds ridiculous.
Particularly to people that don't do psychedelics, opening a portal.
I've thought about that a lot.
I thought about that a lot about the DMT experience because it seems so insane and so impossible that I just can't believe that this isn't just another place.
It seems like it's not just a chemical reaction in my mind.
But what does that mean by when I say that's how it feels?
Because I don't have any understanding of what I'm experiencing it, what I'm experiencing rather.
So I must put it in some sort of context where it makes sense to me as a person who lives on Earth, you know, sitting here right now in 2022. You know, there's all those variables that you, everything, when you look at the world, goes through all the filter of your own personal reality.
The thing about a full-blown psychedelic experience, like the DMT experience, is it doesn't seem like any of that applies anymore.
You go over there and it's like you're gone.
So I was wondering about myself, like maybe I'm trying to put it into perspective like it's another place, because places make sense to me.
And what doesn't make sense to me is just full nothingness, chaos, wild imagery and geometry and things that move to music.
It's almost like it's so hard for me to wrap my head around that I convince myself it's another dimension, but it's not.
Yeah, well, I think you need to design experiments to test if it is another dimension or not.
How could you do that?
Well, I think, well, if you consider the location of the DMT world to be outside of us in objective reality, you'd need to call upon physics, you'd need to call upon physics, advanced physics, physics.
dark matter, dark energy, parallel universes.
So I think if you could get into those spaces with machines, let's say imaging machines or cameras.
Well, have you seen some of the new, there was some new article that was written about virtual reality being able to give people transcendent experiences, that it's similar to the effects achieved on psychedelics.
He said he thinks that one day they'll get to a point where they can create something visually and it'll bring you into that place, that they'll be able to recreate it with sufficient technology.
Here's, VR is as good as psychedelics at helping people reach transcendence.
On key metrics, a VR experience elicited a response indistinguishable from subject who took medium doses of LSD or magic mushrooms.
That's wild.
If they just keep getting better at it.
If you can get someone who's been there and knows what it looks like and then is a good artist who can recreate it.
Because I've seen some DMT art before.
That's so close.
It's like, oh, wow, that's so close.
It seems like it.
Of course, Alex Gray.
Like, Alex Gray stuff.
It's like some of it is so tryptamine-like, you know?
Okay, he says, I knew that the intensity of the light was related to the extent to which I inhabited my body, he recalls, yet watching it dim didn't frighten him.
From his new vantage point, Glowacky could see that the light wasn't disappearing, it was transforming, leaking out of his body into the environment around him.
This realization which he took to signify That his awareness could outlast and transcend his physical form brought a sublime sense of peace.
So he approached what he thought was death with curiosity.
What might come next?
So since his accident, an artist and computational molecular physicist has worked to recapture that transcendence.
Okay.
So he had some wild near-death experience and he's trying to recreate that with VR. So that's interesting because he's not even talking about a drug experience.
Yeah, you know, we've been studying, or there's a group at University of Michigan that's been looking at endogenous DMT that's made in the mammalian brain, and it increases during death, and especially it increases in the visual part of the brain.
When I first met you, there wasn't nearly as much data, and I remember you were talking about how much anecdotal data that points to the idea of the pineal gland being the source of DMT, but there wasn't a mammal model.
You know, when they first discovered DMT in mammals, people were focusing on the lung.
And they were also interested in DMT being involved in psychosis.
And there was a joke, or I don't know if you call it a joke, but an idea that schizophrenia was a lung disease because you were producing too much DMT. And they were doing studies to inhibit DMT in schizophrenics or increase it.
Well, so we found DMT in the rodent pineal in 2013, the group at the University of Michigan.
So it proved or established the validity of that idea that the pineal makes DMT. But this study in 2019 that I was mentioning where DMT goes up after death in the visual cortex, they looked again for pineal DMT and they couldn't find any.
And what they believe is that the original paper described the DMT in the brain, which was snagged on the way in and out of the pineal gland.
But even more interesting, I think, than the pineal making DMT is the brain makes DMT in quite high levels, comparable to even serotonin.
I mean, there still is a certain pineal kind of reverence out there.
If you look at Amazon and enter pineal, there's all kinds of esoteric things that are still being published on the pineal gland.
Hmm.
Well, it's an unpaired organ.
It's the only unpaired organ in the brain.
Everything else is paired.
You have a left and right hemisphere.
But there's just one pineal in the middle of your brain.
Its location, I think, has contributed to the reverence.
It's just under the fontanelle.
And certain kinds of spiritual experiences are also felt there.
And so it was the physical corresponding position of the subjective experience.
So people thought it must be occurring in the pineal gland.
You know, I have a friend who's really into Aztec savagery history, and he told me, this is kind of grim, but he told me that the Aztecs used to burn people when they were alive to really, like, freak them out, and then take their brains out and eat their brains because of all the hormones and all the things that were going on.
My uncle Vinny, who's a great guy, used to cook lamb's brains.
That was like a traditional Italian meal that you would cook.
Like, when we'd get together and have, like, family gatherings, he had, on more than one occasion, cooked lamb's brains, because I remember having it as a child.
If you're in transcendence, you've escaped this physical reality and you've gone into the next amazing dimension where there's no deception, it's all love and energy and you're floating together in music and then some dipshit brings you back to life.
You get sucked backwards, but now you're stuck in a computer.
Can you imagine?
If that was your soul, your soul is just sucked back into that brain as soon as it's reanimated.
But what if that fucking portal's open, you go, you transcend, and then they bring that goddamn brain back to life because you wanted to live forever.
So they take that thing that they had flask frozen, they kick that sucker back on, and now you're just an embodied brain in a fucking computer attached to a bunch of wires.
Well, you know, one of the interesting things about endogenous DMT, and especially with its discovery in such high levels in the brain, is that it may be the endomatrix.
It could be kind of regulating everything all of the time.
It could be the way we interact with reality, is through endogenous DMT, which is always at a steady level.
Well, the way I began wondering about that is because, you know, what is the purpose of endogenous DMT? You know, why does the brain make DMT? Can you do a DMT test on a person's blood level?
It's pretty hard.
It's pretty hard.
It's really low in the blood.
It's like, you know, billionths of a gram per milliliter.
When they start doing stuff like Neuralink, where they're going to insert wires into your brain and, you know, you're going to have an app to control your brain, to control your mood.
I mean, it seems like that would be one of the ways they would do it, right?
Do you think it's limited to one specific area where it's developed?
Oh man, they're just beginning to unravel the whole role and location of endogenous DMT. So when they know that it's in the liver and they know that it's in the lungs, the lungs to me sound interesting because of holotropic breathing.
But again, when I go back to that disembodied mind thought process of thinking like, what am I thinking when I'm over there?
Since my body doesn't seem to be there and I'm there and it seems more real than real, is that me just tricking myself into thinking that it's a different place?
I have one way of looking at it that I always describe.
This is what I say to people.
I say, if there was a thing that you could do, like a door you could go through and that door would take you to another dimension where you would communicate with Some entity beyond your wildest imagination that's constantly visually changing and communicating with you telepathically and knows everything about you,
sees all your bullshit and is trying to impart some ideas that will help you with your life.
Because it's a god-like experience.
You're experiencing some sort of uber-powerful entity, some more uber-intelligent entity, something beyond any...
If we just looked at humans and thought of the evolution of human, one day we'll get to this.
We're not going to get to that.
It seems like it's so beyond the body.
It's so beyond the human monkey body.
This is what I tell people.
I go, if you would open a door and you would go there and you'd have that experience, would you do it?
And most people are like, yes, I would do it.
If I gave you a drug that gave you that experience.
You still have the exact same experience.
It's the exact same experience.
You've just decided it's not real.
And you've decided it's not real because you're putting it in this category of hallucination.
What does that even mean?
What does that even mean?
You're actually having that experience.
I don't know what it is.
I mean, I like to play devil's advocate and I like to think that maybe I'm messing with my own head and maybe I'm just like...
It was wild, but it was that simple sort of there's like they'll say simple things to you in a way that you're not really hearing it, but you know what they're saying.
Well, you talk as openly about psychedelics as Dennis.
He's the best guy to talk about it, too.
Because he's got a really interesting way of discussing things, you know, and he's had so many personal experiences and he's so smart.
And he's got this incredible vocabulary to just draw from.
And when he describes the actual impact of psilocybin and psychedelic chemicals, particularly in formation of language, He was describing the stoned ape theory.
It's incredible listening to him say it because the way he describes it, like he actually understands what psilocybin and what all these various molecules are doing to different parts of the brain and why that would facilitate the development of language and compassion and connect the tribe more.
I think the more likely is that the brain is an antenna.
You know, it's one of the things that creative people always tell you, like someone sits down and writes a song.
It just like came from the air.
They're getting things from somewhere else almost.
It's almost like you just got to get out of your own way.
You got to put enough good juice out there in the world and take enough bad out and see the world from a clear perspective, at least in these brief moments of creativity, and then things come to them.
They just...
Like, they're sitting in front of the computer and bam!
They got an idea for a book.
Like, where the fuck is all that coming from?
It seems like people always want to say it's a muse.
Like, that's the Steven Pressfield analogy.
He's got a great book about it called The War of Art.
All about, like, inviting the muse into your life and being disciplined and sitting there at the computer every day and summoning it and treating it like it's an entity.
And if you do that, it works.
This is what's crazy.
People who are disciplined and also creative, that decide, I'm going to write this book, I'm going to sit down, and I'm going to force myself every day.
Ideas come to them.
Where the fuck are they coming from?
Is it possible that the brain really is some sort of an antenna?
And that wisdom and love and all these different things, they're just all around us.
If that's what you want to call it, you know, the only problem I have with the word God, and it's not really a problem, but it's a recognition, is that it's a loaded word.
Yeah, like the term entheogen, it refers to God, entheos, and it refers to en, which means that God exists within.
And it has the word gen in it, which means it's a drug which is generating something like God.
You know, so that assumes a lot.
And there are people who could benefit from psychedelic experiences who might not caught into those ideas and would avoid entheogen, but might take a psychedelic.
It seems like whatever anything, you know, really affects people in a lot of ways.
There's always someone who looks to sort of take the reins and sort of dictate what the experience is and how to do it and what the ritual should be and how you should, you know, manage it.
One of the big problems is that we haven't really had a chance to openly discuss it in terms of, like, the effective and ineffective ways to use it, what's detrimental, what's abusive.
You know, treatment centers, like we could have all had this lined up, right?
If they didn't pass that sweeping Psychedelics Act, the controlled substances that we, right now, they're still illegal.
But they've been a part of human history forever.
If they just opened that up, We would have the ability to tell people how to use them and how not to use them.
We'd have the ability to monitor them.
And you're going to have some strays.
You're going to have some things that go wrong.
So there's going to have to be some ways to mitigate that, right?
And if this theory of people that have these psychedelic breaks, if it's a Imagine if you could find out that it really is like some sort of an overload of DMT. Like they have exogenous levels that are too high.
I think, you know, if we can keep things going with psychedelic research in humans, there's a vast number of options that are going to start opening up.
For example, like a vaccine against endogenous DMT. I mean, that might be a great antipsychotic.
Or maybe some sort of technological intervention, like a neural link type thing, where I think they're going to be able to dial things in, which is going to be crazy.
You're going to be able to dial in horny.
You're going to be able to dial in happy.
I mean, 50 years from now, who knows what they're going to be able to do.
Well, they're breeding these things called knockout mice, which don't produce the gene, which makes X, Y, or Z. And they've developed knockout mice for the enzyme that makes DMT. Oh, wow.
So there are animals that don't produce any DMT. So you might be able at some point to put genes into people, like CRISPR, and have them stop making their own DMT. That would be a good zombie movie.
I came up with the idea of studying psychedelics when I was 20. I was doing developmental embryology work at Stanford in the summer between my junior and senior years.
I was studying the development of the chicken central nervous system.
We got two papers resulting from the research that I did that year.
And I wanted to study psychedelics, but I didn't really know how to do it.
I thought, well, maybe I'll just get some lab experience.
And I was reading all of the books for the next year's classes, which involved Freud and Buddhism and the new developments in consciousness that were coming out at the time.
And I was watching the sunset go down one evening and I flashed, I'm going to study psychedelics and combine Freud, Buddhism and psychopharmacology.
Yeah, but I was 20 years old, right?
And in the beginning, I didn't get a good reception.
Most of the medicals...
Well, I applied to 21 medical schools, and the 19 that gave me a chance to tell them why I wanted to be a doctor, they just said, forget it.
Yeah, so the two schools that did admit me, you know, they were either really short interviews or they steered me away from my obsession.
But I got the idea that talking about psychedelics when you're 20 years old in the early 70s was not really going to fly.
So I kept my interest to myself, but I wanted to get trained enough to be able to do that kind of work at some point in the future.
So I went to medical school and I trained in psychiatry and took a job up in Alaska.
Which was around the time that people were thinking and starting to understand winter depression, which then put emphasis on the pineal gland and melatonin.
So I thought that was an entryway into studying the pineal gland.
I think more than I've ever thought before that most people are really good people.
Most people try to be really good people.
They want to have a good life.
Most people.
That's most.
I think you're always going to deal with certain numbers of people that are trying to make enormous profits and doing so at the expense of either the environment or people's lives and they're going to influence politicians and they're going to make laws that benefit these people and they've done this since the beginning of time.
I mean, Eisenhower warned about it when he was leaving office.
He warned about the military industrial complex.
He warned about all that shit.
He warned about I mean, they warned about that when they built the fucking Constitution.
But I think overall, most people aren't like that.
Most people aren't trying to control people and ruin the earth for profit.
Most people are just trying to live their life.
It's a...
It's a significant impact, for sure.
It's horrible.
And it represents us overall.
It does.
Because what are people capable of at their worst?
Well, they're capable of starting unnecessary wars that are going to cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives for profit.
We know that people have done that.
But that's not you, and that's not me, and that's not Jamie.
Well, when things go sideways and when people get scared, when people get scared, their anxiety gets ramped up and they look for something to be mad at and it ramps up their anger at that person.
Well, it's important to think of some context, you know, too.
Things were just going crazy with kids taking way too much LSD in the wrong set of circumstances without any preparation.
And it was a public health emergency.
Emergency rooms and psychiatric units were being filled up.
You know, so the government had to do something, you know, from the public health point of view at the very least, which was to make it harder for kids to get their hands on psychedelics.
I think that notion that there was a desire to quash understanding what the drugs were doing to people, like in a scientific manner, I don't think that was ever the case.
I think it was more that nobody really wanted to challenge the government and submit a really good study that you can back up with safety mechanisms built into place.
Once I got my funding and my permits, which was a long process, it took two years, You know, the government was super keen on my studies.
They were very interested in what we were doing, that we were finding.
In the early 90s, when I just got my DMT study off the ground, I met the leader of the UDV, an Anglo fellow, Jeffrey Bronfman from Santa Fe, was the North American representative of the UDV. And he asked me about what their strategy ought to be to be able to drink ayahuasca.
So I advised, you know, taking care of all your permits, you know, kind of the way I did it.
Just, you know, fill out the forms and, you know, talk to the regulators.
And after a while, you know, if you stick with it, chances are good they'll give you permission.
Or you could wait to be caught and then, you know, take it to court, in which case you would at least be, you know, getting the experiences underway.
Well, I mean, you'd have to work out the regulatory and the organizational structure, kind of like they're doing in Oregon, which seems like it's kind of halting.
Are you familiar with what they're doing in Oregon?
You know, when I get emails from people who start sounding like they're just about ready to, like, lose it because they're smoking so much DMT, and, you know, they want my advice and, you know, support and, you know, confirmation of their funny ideas, and I just say stop smoking DMT. That's what I'd recommend.
It was like, if I have to go through life with this elevated level of weirdness and anxiety forever, like this is life now, I'm like, ooh, I don't like this.
It was almost like being too high.
You know that feeling when you, I'm a little too high, I don't like this.
We know people like that, that, you know, dad was an alcoholic.
They can't have a drink.
This is a thing that really is unfortunate because they could have studied this and had answers and we could be able to tell people how to do these things.
But the important thing, though, I believe, is that it doesn't make a lot of difference, right now anyway, because we can't really design experiments to determine that.
The important thing is the information that you're getting out of it.
You know, what's it good for?
Are you able to extract any valuable information for yourself or for other people?
How much have you paid attention to Graham Hancock's work on the Amazon, how they're rediscovering these civilizations, and also the use of, there's a bunch of different researchers using LIDAR down there.
Right.
We're going over the jungle and they're finding grids and the cities that used to exist down there.
And Graham thinks that there might have been cities with like millions of people in them that existed before the Europeans came through and gave them all smallpox.
The moment he got stoned, just breaking down how...
I think essentially we were talking about the dating of civilizations, about how arrogant people are with their initial assertions of what the origins or the timeline of civilization is.
He's like, the timeline of civilization is still a mystery.
And they're pushing it further and further back with every discovery.
And they keep finding stuff that pushes it further back, further back, further back.
They're finding complex stone structures that are 14,000 years old.
And they keep finding all this evidence of human beings being older than we thought they were.
You know, I think that this Younger Dryas impact theory is probably the best theory when it comes to explaining why we're so wacky.
I think we had once achieved some very high level of sophistication.
You know, I think that's what explains ancient Egypt.
That's what explains some spectacular construction methods that were from thousands and thousands of years ago.
And then we got wiped out almost to the point of extinction and then we rebuilt back again with a bunch of shit that we didn't understand and a bunch of people that came from really smart people but had been living like fucking barbarians for the last couple hundred years.
Yeah, but, well, you know, these compounds, you know, psychedelics stimulate the growth of new neurons, neurogenesis, and also stimulate the complexity and number of connections among neurons.
That's called neuroplasticity.
So it could be that there were neuroplastic effects in the monkeys that were using psilocybin.
That would be an explanation of how there would be an evolution of consciousness which would be passed on and continue.
You know, one of the big fun theories that people like to talk about when it comes to human beings, people that are like alien enthusiasts, they like to say, well, human beings are the product of some sort of accelerated evolution.
So the aliens came down here and they ran experiments with these primal people and converted them into modern people.
There was a straight scientist who did this study where they gave people psilocybin and they showed them parallel lines as they were moving off parallel, that the people on psilocybin could see it way quicker.
Something happened to people because the human brain doubled over a period of a couple million years, which coincides with the timeline that McKenna proposed that these rainforests were starting to recede during that same time period, right?
You know, so that's not the case with other senses.
There's a connection between the olfactory sense and memory, which is the strongest among the senses, which indicates that our sense of smell once was much more important.
You'd have to be able to smell things, hear things.
You'd have to be able to feel the vibrations on the ground of something running at you so you can get a jump at it.
I mean, that environment, if you introduced psilocybin to that environment, And that's what created human beings.
That is a fascinating theory.
And the thing is, we know psilocybin is real, and we know its effects are profound.
And so to dismiss it as being what happened, I don't think that's wise.
I think there's a problem with what mushrooms are.
It's like people think they're so silly.
I'm tripping on mushrooms.
You're doing something you shouldn't be doing.
Like, oh, look at Todd.
He's over there on mushrooms.
But what it probably is is some kind of a chemical gateway to some either state of mind or some other dimension.
And if you gave that to some savage proto-hominid that was just living naked, running away from jaguars all the time, and this thing starts tripping and starts figuring out tools and starts figuring out how to make sounds to indicate different animals.
You know, so look at the major religious institutions, and they're stamping out psychedelic use in the indigenous world.
If you could stamp out the estates, then you kind of have the hegemony over those states or you can promise them if you pray or if you're good or if you do various things.
You know, so there's politics involved competing groups, those that used mushrooms probably and those who didn't.
There would probably be some climactic and environmental ones too that the range of the mushrooms was shrinking.
Hmm, right like some sort of climate change and they forced out of areas that used to grow them all the time So they stopped using them and they start taking alcohol and other things It's just since we know so much about them today in You know like in comparison to what people knew in the 50s and 60s like publicly know so much more about them So there's so much real scientific data out there.
There's so many real Real intelligent people who are enthusiasts of them that can kind of explain the benefits of it.
It's just amazing that it's taken so long to just get one state to make it legal.
But there's also going to be an understanding that whatever that stuff does, it seems to encourage you to behave and think in a way that's better for everybody.
It seems to want to encourage you to think kindly, to be nicer to people, to connect more with the earth.
It tunes you into a very, for lack of a better term, positive frequency.
But then again, the Vikings took them and they slaughtered people.
Yeah, I don't think they should be illegal, for sure.
I do think that to just randomly give them out to everybody is irresponsible.
I think there are a lot of people out there that are having a really hard time with regular reality and that something as profound as a psychedelic experience could fucking blow a fuse.
But I don't want to be the person that can tell a person what they can and can't do.
I think that's part of the problem with it all.
Is that they can tell you, you can't try something.
Or me, I can't try something.
And they're just like us.
They're just a person.
They're just a person of similar age.
And they're going to tell you, you can't do something.
I'm like, you don't even know.
You've never even done it.
This is a dumb conversation we're having.
And you're going to make it so that I can get locked in a cage because I want to do something that you haven't done.
Well, the chairman of our ethics board at the university, when I presented these studies to him for the informed consent and what you would be doing with people, you know, I bumped into him one day and said, man, I'm so grateful for how open-minded you are about this.
And he said, I'm not God.
We're not playing God.
I thought that was a great line.
He was a libertarian, actually.
And he figured people should do what they want to do and just give informed consent, educate people, let them know what they're getting into and let them decide.
I think it's way more dangerous to have people uneducated about the risks of certain drugs and the importance of understanding the dosage and the purity than it is to tell people not to do drugs.
I think that telling people to not do drugs and you're gonna arrest them if they do drugs, that's unrealistic.
People have done drugs since the beginning of time.
I think the realistic approach is to fucking educate people and to stop all this nonsense about what is and isn't allowed that a grown adult, a person who has never done it, can tell you, don't do that.
I don't want you to do something that's been around for thousands and thousands of years and has a rich human history of usage, like psilocybin.
That's not the good guy.
The guy telling you he's going to put you in a cage for mushrooms is never the good guy.
The guy who drove me over this morning as a vet was talking about some of his friends who have done psychedelic therapy and they're like back to normal.
Yeah, and more than one different type of psychedelic.
I've also heard guys doing Ibogaine and then 5-MeO.
I've heard that there's some real success in doing that, but I've talked to people personally that have had psychedelic experiences that have just freed them of so much that they had from combat duty.
Because once we have more research data, we can say, this helps, and it'll really spread out to, you know, the rest of the country as opposed to just within the research communities.
Doesn't it seem like with every medication, and even if you look at psychedelics as being a medication, every medication is going to have side effects?
It seems like there's no one thing that, I mean, people die from aspirin every year, you know?
It is all about MKUltra and Charles Manson, and it is fucking wild.
It's a guy who studied this case, the Manson family case, for 20 years.
He started off writing an article about it, but as he dove deep into the case, it was so nuts that he just, it was so many layers to it that he refused to stop, and he kept going deeper and deeper, and he'd missed his deadline, and, like, he had a book deal, and he had to give the money back, like, chaos.
Twenty fucking years of this!
And at the end of it, he's got, like, very convincing arguments that Charles Manson was a part of MKUltra.
Charles Manson, that they gave him acid when he was in prison and that they supplied him with acid when he was out there teaching hippies to be fucking hit people.
Right, and if you've got someone who's already a charismatic con man, and you catch him in prison and dose him up with acid, and you run a study, I mean, what better person to run a study on than a charismatic, lifelong criminal, you know, and just dose him up with acid and give him a sense of delusions of grandeur, and then also, every time he gets arrested, get him out of jail.
Yeah, he thinks that that was a part of the project, and that where he used to get his acid from was the same place where the CIA was running the health clinic.
There's a Haight-Ashbury clinic.
The Haight-Ashbury clinic was being run by the fucking CIA. They were doing Operation Midnight Climax there, too, where they had brothels, and they would secretly dose the Johns up at the LSD and study them.
I mean, they were doing wild shit.
And they were also visiting people like Charles Manson in prison.
And this is the thing that he makes this argument that they got to Manson in prison and most likely were dosing him up with acid and teaching him how to turn people into your minions.
One guy described it as being thrown off a boat in the middle of a storm and ending up in the water and just being thrashed about, completely helpless and terrified.
And the other guy, he just, like, retched.
Yeah, and he didn't remember much, so we figured that was too much.
Yeah, so then we settled on a pretty stiff dose.
It's the biggest dose still in use, or smaller doses are being used now currently.
So far, nobody has gotten up to the high doses of DMT that we gave.
Every 500 years or so, when things are just dialed in, and it would be what people would be looking for, these people would live 35,000 years because that was the necessary time to attain all of the knowledge that was out there.
And they would spend all their time otherwise trying to connect on a worldwide level.
And it was every 500 years, every 1000 years.
It was a rare event, but everyone would sing and dance in that space.
What do you think about the possibility of some sort of a technologically inspired or driven Group telepathy like what I would worry about with stuff like that is it being co-opted and someone being able to control it but if somehow or another they released one of these things that you put on your head that allowed everybody to communicate in a universal language with everybody like a language that everybody
picks up pretty easily because you're getting downloaded information much quicker because you actually have some sort of a weird implant in your brain and I think we would need to be wiser, you know, for it not to go south.
I think it's going south.
And I think that's where people are going.
I think we are sliding down the mountaintop, holding onto our ass.
It's going to be interesting to see whether or not they can control it and whether or not the technologists will allow it.
Ultimately, it's like the people that put it out, whatever it is, they have the ability to control it or not control it, depending upon what stage it's at.
But I feel like if it keeps going in the same general direction, the general direction is about access to information.
It's more instantaneous.
It's more accessible.
There's only so much you can do to put a cork on that if it really gets out.
If it really gets to a universal language thing, the only way they're going to get people It's if they figure out some sort of a digital currency.
Force people into a centralized digital currency and then attach it to a social credit score system.
And I think if more people had positive, well-guided experiences, and not people with slippery grips on reality as it is, I think you're at least gonna get a sense that a percentage of the population is moving to a better state of mind,
a better way of coexisting with other humans, not so angry, more in awe and wonder about this whole thing, and with a general attempt to be kinder because of it.
And then if you add psilocybin to those experiences, it's generally it's like, I mean, the ones I've had have been like extra, like filled with awe, like extra, you feel connected to all the trees and the grass and the dirt seems alive.
I think it would be irresponsible to just give it away to everybody.
But I do think that it would be very beneficial to have it in places that are like a really well-established, well-set-up center where people can do these things under professional supervision, by people with experience in them, people that know the The purity of the stuff, the right dose, the right thing, and it can be a business.
And it can make sense as a business.
And then also give people the ability to do it on their own afterwards.
Okay, now you know what it is.
Now you know how to get it.
This is the right dose.
Just don't fuck around.
And enjoy yourself.
You get to learn.
You get certified in proper use.
It's not a bad idea.
If you give people a license to drive a car, Give them a license to do DMT. Like, hey, Todd, like, how do you feel about reality?
Like, Todd, you know, what shape do you think the Earth is?
I mean, there are just, you know, so many influences out there that want to see psychedelics or, you know, so many interests that want to see more people take more psychedelics.
You know, there's commercial ones, and there's therapeutic ones, and there's spiritual ones, and there's brain science ones.
You know, so...
You know, the great thing about psychedelics is they extend their reach into everything that's distinctly human.
And they affect all aspects of human consciousness, I mean, across the board, too.
So, yeah, they're kind of like mirrors in a way.
They're strange drugs.
I mean, I always encourage students to get as much school as they can and to study psychedelics in a rigorous manner if they can.
And so would you have to develop some sort of an assessment of the pros and cons and what the negatives could be and how to mitigate some of the negatives, like the people that are losing their mind and overdosing and have access to people that are too young?
Like, there's a lot of factors in there that you'd have to consider upon legalization.
You had some experience with one of those churches, because I remember you telling this story about what it was like to go visit them, and they were wearing golf shirts and doing ayahuasca.
Yeah, there's a lot of information about the effects of participation in the churches in Brazil, and some in the U.S., but especially Brazil, because that's where they both...
They're mostly seeing things which relate to them, how to be better people.
So there's a real emphasis on personal growth and evolution and bringing society to a higher level.
It's quite altruistic, and it's, you know, like as you note, if you have a structure that is essentially good, that you're kind of giving the psychedelics within, you know, the outcomes can be really positive.
Yeah, I think the structure of, you know, if you look at the best aspects of almost all religions, they're all about trying to unite society in some sort of a way.
If we did have legitimate psychedelic centers in America, there would have to be some real thought beforehand as to what's the best way to approach it from an education perspective, explaining things to people, what to expect.
There's a lot to that.
But I don't want to be the person that tells a person they can or can't do it either.
I would say we should have some sort of a screening process, but then I'm entirely against screening processes.
But I don't like the idea that someone can control whether or not people do or don't do it.
Because it could get slippery.
That could get weird.
Someone could, like, come up with more and more reasons to not give, like, maybe you have the wrong political persuasion, or they've labeled you a terrorist because you don't believe in taxes or whatever.
If you go back to the 1960s, the Ken Kesey, Tim Leary stuff, and then you shoot just 20 years ahead, it's gone.
There's nothing.
In high schools and in colleges, people were more turned on to some of those things, but it wasn't overwhelmingly popular like it was just 20 years before.
What do you think is going to happen in terms of the way the country opens up, in terms of being able to do therapy on people with PTSD, and then ultimately do you think we're going to see some sort of a recreational usage in our lifetime, like federally?
Well, if there were going to be dispensaries, yeah, there'd need to—well, yeah, I think state to state would be how it goes, you know, kind of like what they're doing in Oregon.
I mean, it is legalized even though it's a Schedule I drug.
It's like, I don't like the idea of the government being involved in psychedelics.
I don't think it should be like a prescription.
I think there should be some educators that put forth some sort of reasonable recommendations and then society adopts them.
People really understand what the dosage should be, what's the most important part about setting, and having well-educated, experienced travelers who are also counselors.
But getting the government involved, get the fuck out of here.
If they regulate it, they're just going to tax the shit out of it and ruin it.
They'll just water down the dose or figure out a way to make too much money from it.
Schedule 1, you know, when my study started giving DMT, I mean DMT Schedule 1, but I was thinking about the scheduling of psychedelics into Schedule 1, which means, you know, there's no known medical use.
They can't be given safely under medical supervision, and they're highly abusable.
You know, so this was in the early 90s.
I began the study, and I wrote to Janet Reno, who was the Attorney General under Bill Clinton at the time.
And I said, these drugs shouldn't be in Schedule I. And I could say, why not?
Because I'm doing research, which indicates they can be given safely under medical use.
And we're gathering important data, which means they have utility under medical supervision.
So, you know, one of her assistants wrote back and said, very complicated, changing drug laws.
Well, you know, at the time I had more important matters at hand, like, you know, running my study, but I think at a certain point it would be worth, you know, a while to reconsider the scheduling of, you know, Schedule I. Well, what is ketamine?
I don't have an experience with ketamine, but my friend Neil that I talked about earlier, one of the things that he had did prior to ayahuasca, he did ketamine in a medical setting.
And he was like, I can't believe how high I was, like how strong it is.
I was like, you're really tripping.
It's not like some sort of little sort of baby ketamine thing, like feel better about yourself thing.
It's not just that when you do the float thing, you have these wild visions and this weird way of seeing reality because you're sort of detached from everything else.
Just you alone with your thoughts.
Because the water is the same temperature as the surface of your skin.
So you're just floating there and you can't distinguish between the air and the water.
You feel completely weightless.
But besides the visuals, it's also really good for your muscles.
It's so that's like a state of mind and then it's the material and how you deliver it and you know That's part of being quote-unquote professional, right?
You don't really find your stone when you're doing it that way But there's things that happen when you're stoned that wouldn't have happened when you're sober That's the dilemma because sometimes like when you're stoned you are on a subject and then a new path appears like oh Why don't I go down there?
And you just start talking about something that you never talked about before, and it turns out to be hilarious.
Well, I think people take drugs a lot of time to escape.
When I was working in this little town between Taos and Santa Fe called Española, really serious drug problems.
And I would ask people, at least early on...
To distinguish among the effects of the different drugs that they were on, like heroin or methamphetamine or paint or, you know, whatever.
And they mostly said, it just makes us not feel.
You know, all the drugs, each of the drugs would have the same effect, even though they're quite distinct pharmacologically, but they just wanted to stop feeling.
One thing that psychedelics make you think, Is whenever there's some sort of a problem in this world in terms of like a poor neighborhood with another shooting, like Chicago, like South Side of Chicago or Baltimore, when you hear about these crazy things like How much money would it cost to fix that?
And how much money do we just send over to other countries when we're finagling deals and hooking people up and fixing things?
And I'm not talking even just about Ukraine.
I'm talking about how much do we spend, period.
How much would it cost to fix that?
It doesn't seem like it would cost as much as arming other countries.
It seems like if they had money for that, and they didn't anticipate that, and then they had money for that, why didn't you fix that other stuff?
Why didn't you fix, if you guys are really competent and you really wanted a better country, wouldn't you want to fix all the places that are fucked up like that?
Well, I'm just saying what I'm seeing and having people on that have all kinds of different perspectives.
I want to hear how they're looking at it.
I'm constantly amazed by how many intelligent people there are to talk to.
There's so many cool people that you can just have conversations with about everything and anything, whether it's you, about All the above about psychedelics, about your research, about having the mind and the courage.
You're such an important part of the psychedelic history of this country.
Because what you did is you legitimized a very important thing.
That everybody had already kind of heard about and some people had experienced it and you legitimized it by doing it in like a real clinical setting with the government's permission.
You know, it's really important because it opened people's eyes that this is repeatable, that this is understood to be something that has been used by human beings for a long time.
And just recently we probably have been detached from that.
You know, when they try to find the history of DMT use, what is the current understanding as far as like how long back they know people were either taking the snuff or doing an ayahuasca or some form of it?
I haven't looked carefully into his thinking, but as I understand it, he points to it being a very old compound, a very ancient compound that had occurred very early on in evolution.
Before smallpox ravaged the Amazon, Before all those people died, and they're still doing research on this, right?
They don't exactly know what these cities were because that LIDAR stuff, when it lays out this grid, they understand that there were structures there, but they don't know what it was.
But the big crazy story is that there was millions of people there.
That's the craziest possibility, and that's the one that Graham subscribes to.
There was millions of people there.
Do you think that that society perhaps was a psychedelic society and that's why they had that knowledge of how to make that stuff?
And then the people who survived were the people that were removed from the inner city areas, the people that lived in these tribal areas were the ones that lived and they had the knowledge that these people had run their society with using that stuff.
If they're able to have these insane structures, like the whole lost city of Z, you know, that it was a feature film, but it was also a book, and it's based on a real explorer who went down there and they were looking for this lost golden city that had been talked about before, but most likely what they think happened was those people that went, whether it was 100 years ago or whatever it was, they killed everybody.
They gave them diseases, and it just ravaged everybody, and the jungle just consumed everything.
So when they went back to look for it, they couldn't find anything.
So the Mayans used mushrooms and other psychedelics.
So, yeah, I mean, I don't know how extensive the use pervaded down among the lower strata of society, but you would think that the clergy would be taking them regularly.
Imagine watching someone slip and go down that thing.
Oof.
But the point is, like, these people, however long ago it was that they built these things, like, these are incredible structures.
Incredible.
Like, the way they're set up, they're so symmetrical and beautiful, and they have, at the top of it, like, a place where they would put human bodies when they would do sacrifices on them.
So you've got this, like, kind of creature that has its legs bent and...
Well, you wonder if they came up with the architecture based on their visions, of the geometric, fractal-like visions, how they may have modeled their buildings on some of those.
Some conquistadors wrote about Sompantli and its towers, estimating that the rack alone contained 130,000 skulls, but historians and archaeologists knew that the conquistadors were prone to exaggerating the horrors of human sacrifice to demonize the Mexico culture.
As the centuries passed, scholars began to wonder whether, I don't know how to say that word, Zompantli had ever existed.
Well, they have real physical evidence because of the vessels.
They have real physical evidence that there's some lysergic acid and some various ergots, like there's some forms of ergot that they can find residue of inside the wine vessels.
So these wine vessels weren't just wine, they were throwing in a bunch of psychedelic compounds into the wine, and that's what they did with all wine.
And now that they have, like, physical evidence of these vessels that has trace elements of this psychedelic compound, they can be sure that this is what was going on.
And this is why when they would talk about drinking wine and having these visions and...
Well, you know, were the thoughts new that were induced by the Kaikion, or were they already there, and the Kaikion just magnified them and made them more devoted to those ideas?
I mean, we'd have to find the origin of all of their ideas because it was such an incredible time period for people thinking things through and communicating and devising ways to live and saying things that to this day people quote as wise words.
Yeah, so he proposed that the burning bush was an acacia, and it was emitting fumes of DMT, and that's how Moses experienced, you know, the vision of the angel speaking to him.
I mean, it could be true, but it doesn't necessarily explain the broader phenomenon of the prophetic state because it was only Moses that one time.
It doesn't really explain Isaiah or Ezekiel or other prophets.
There are certain things that stimulate your prophecy, like a good meal and being happy and good music.
You know, the mana may be, you know, some people have suggested the mana has got a lysergic acid ingredient, and that's why the Hebrews were experiencing their visions in the desert.
You know, but the only, like, you know, clear-cut, you know, plant and, you know, person epiphany is Moses at the bush.
Some people believe that the incense in the tabernacle or in the altar had cannabis in it.
You know, but the whole presence of endogenous DMT kind of makes it moot whether or not people took, you know, plants or substances in the Bible or any of this old spiritual literature because you have endogenous DMT. You've got the means to experience visions without taking anything in.
I mean, you need to make certain that your heart's in good shape and you're not on any medications that might interact badly with being that out of it.
Yeah, it's a whole system.
It's like tripping without drugs and they've got a...
Well, so we studied runner's high for melatonin levels back in the 1980s and 1990s.
There was a marathon in the winter on Sandia Crest, which is like 10,000 feet to 10,000 feet.
And these guys run a marathon along Zendia Crest.
And I was looking for some way to stimulate melatonin.
And so I looked at the stress level of those guys and figured if anybody is inducing enough stress on themselves to raise melatonin, naturally it would be them.
So we did that and we found some increases.
We tried blocking it with naloxone and those were the kind of studies that I was doing.
Yeah, and after a certain point, you just switch and you're in this very highly altered state.
You know, Stan was that Czech psychiatrist who did a lot of LSD research.
And Stan was at the University of Maryland for a while, working with Bill Richards and those guys.
And once they stopped, you know, once the compounds, once psychedelics were scheduled and all human research ended, you know, Stan moved on and in the meantime developed this, you know, holotropic breathwork.
It seems so wild that someone figured out how to combine one thing that has DMT in it and another thing that's an MAO inhibitor so that your body will just absorb it.
So they may have their antennas up, so to speak, by being on the MAO inhibitor beta-carbolines all the while and experimenting with what plants do what.
We've got to, I mean, animals must have something similar too, right?
I mean, there's got to be a reason why they only eat specific types of grasses and avoid other ones.
Does it just taste?
Because I know that certain grasses and certain plants will actually change their flavor profile if they think cows are eating them or if deers are eating them.
The acacia tree, there was a thing they were reading about giraffes who wouldn't eat the leaves.
Of these trees, and it turns out they were downwind from trees that these giraffes were eating.
So these giraffes were eating, the wind goes down, it changes the flavor profile of all these other plants.
So whether it's through the mycelium in the ground, however they're communicating.
But they've even done it to the point where they've played sounds of like caterpillars chewing on leaves, and that causes the change in the flavor profile to the leaves.
Well, in the Middle East, in more traditional societies that are really into cot, they chew cot and the city council or the village council gets together, they chew cot and they make their decisions.
Well, that was a weird time in history, right, where people would go to, like, drugstores or gas stations, rather, and buy what they would call bath salts.
It says, not for human consumption.
And people would buy it and just kill each other on it.
That was a wild time where people found out that you could get that.
Well, one study that we did was an attempt to cause tolerance to a closely spaced repeated dosing of DMT. You know, like if you take LSD every day for a few days, you stop responding.
That's interesting to hear you say that because I had always heard for some reason that if you do TMT next to like a recent TMT trip like 10 minutes ago, do it again in 10 minutes, like you won't be able to do it.
But it's not true at all.
I've had that experience.
I've done it multiple times in a day and the most potent one was the last one.
I mean, if you gave four doses over the course of a morning, You know, stuff will come up, and you'll resolve it more or less by the fourth dose, but it isn't the end of treatment.
I mean, you would be in treatment already in some form or another, and with the stuff that came up during the DMT sessions, you would have that as Christopher the Mill in your future work.
What I was getting at was that, like, say if someone is having a bad experience, and say if they're doing this four-dose thing, but they have a really bad experience around dose number three, would you allow them to do dose four, or would you have to have a conversation with them?
I mean, I think one of the really nice things is that there's a lot of support for it on the right now because they realize the effect that it has on soldiers.
Imagine if you found out that your thinking wasn't just your brain, that your heart was actually involved, and that all the neurons that are around the heart actually work in conjunction with the brain, but that a brain disassociated from the heart is always a psycho.
Like so if everybody who did get their brain uploaded somewhere, they just popped out on the other end like a three-quarter human psycho.
The philosophical idea is the most interesting because I think if people really do freeze their brain and they really do boot that sucker back up and you get drawn from heaven, Back into this, like, earthly realm inside of a fish tank with a bunch of wires attached to you.
And so we're moving around with this thing, and I remember thinking, wow, this is just the beginning.
This thing's going to get really bizarre.
And then a couple of years later, Duncan had one, and he said, this one's so much better.
And he gave me this one, and you have this experience where you're in the ocean, and a whale swims by you.
It's wild.
You're like underwater with this thing, and I'm like, whoa.
And that was quite a while ago.
We are, whatever it is, if it's 10 years or if it's 20 years, because 20 years ago, again, nobody cared about VR. If it's 20 years from now, whatever it's going to be, whatever year it is, they're going to have something that replicates reality, like, down to every moment.
Down to touch, there'll be haptic feedback, there'll be something that, like, hijacks your nervous system and thinks your feet are on the ground.
Well, it'd be really interesting to see the two of them studied, you know, see the contrast between the singing and dancing and the way the other people would do it like they're in sort of a mainstream Christian church.