June 19, 2015 • 49 mins
Each year, the horrors of addiction claim thousands of lives -- but what if some substances can break the cycle of drug abuse? Join Ben and Matt to learn more about hallucinogens and addiction.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to ghosts and government cover ups. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to. Now. Little
by little, I would begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors
and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes.
(00:25):
Kaleidoscopic fantastic images surged in on me, alternating variegated opening
and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in
colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in their constant flocks.
(00:45):
Then are you okay? Oh yeah, I'm fine. I'm actually
just reading a quotation from guy named Albert Hoffman. This
comes from April nineteenth, ninety three, a day that some
of you out there will recognize for its importance. But
who are you again? What are we doing? Oh? Yeah,
(01:07):
this okay. So we're in the podcast room. My name
is Matt, and then we're here with our super producer,
Noel Owsley Brown, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. Yes, are you're doing all right? Matt? Yeah,
I'm fine, man. Everything's good in the neighborhood, right, guys, right,
you can just look a little paranoid a little different. No, No,
(01:31):
I'm fine. I just want to talk about Albert Hoffman, right,
Oh yeah, tell us about Albert Hoffman. So he's the
guy who is considered the person who discovered LSD as
a hallucinogen because he took a famous bike ride, right,
he accidentally spilled a little on himself, Yes, and took
the most astonishing bike ride in history up to that time,
(01:53):
probably since the invention of the penny farthing. This idea
of LSD as a lucinogen was relatively new, but LSD
had been synthesized before and since that time, numerous people
have claimed that LSD and other drugs called hallucinogens have
abilities far beyond those of the typical recreational drugs like
(02:16):
alcohol or marijuana. That's right, And there are lots of
weird stories that go along with LSD that kind of
create this, uh, this mythos of LSD. There's one that's
kind of a true story about Francis Crick. You may
have heard that name before, and how he quote discovered
the double helix shape of DNA that we're all familiar
(02:37):
with while he was on an acid trip. However, while
it is true that Crick and James Watson, along with
Maurice Wilkins did work on d N A, they didn't
necessarily discover it right. The person who is the m
v P of the DNA story, there is a British
biophysicist named Rosalind Franklin photo rapt DNA, but she was
(03:01):
snubbed at the Nobel Prize ceremony. She also died for
years before it was awarded, and for those familiar with
the Nobel Prize will recall that they are not awarded posthumously.
But it sounds like Crick and Watson. Crick and Watson
snubbed her. Make no mistake, Crick huge fan of LSD.
But that story in itself has uh grains of things
(03:26):
that are not entirely true. And if you if you
hear a lot of people talking about Krick, make sure
that you mentioned Rosslyn Franklin as well. There is, however,
a story about LSD which is absolutely true. It's the
old tale you may have heard about once upon a
time a professional baseball player here in the States being
(03:49):
just tripping balls high out of his mind, yes, and
pitching a no hitter. And there have only been I
think maybe two hundred and forty seven no hitters in
the history of pro baseball. Any, yeah, not many, but
listeners right in. I'm sure our baseball fans will check
me on this one because I can't remember where I
found that number. But how did this happen? Matt Well,
(04:11):
The gentleman's name is Doc Ellis, and there's a documentary
out on Netflix right now. You can watch called No
No a documentary with spelled d O c K. It's
pretty funny. I actually watched it. This is one of
my father in law's favorite stories. So Doc Ellis was
kind of known for, uh, doing some strange things while
(04:32):
he was pitching, like drug He was the Belushi of
the Pirates. He really was. Um. But yeah, when when
he did this, he he he said that times slowed down, right,
the size of the ball would change while he was
on the field. Um. In the documentary, he just he
kind of makes light of it. Actually, he's like, yeah,
(04:52):
it wasn't even a really a big deal, right, But
it really did happen, and unfortunately, his drug use is
probably part of the reason that he did not go
on to continue his rise to fame. But that story
is absolutely true, and there are other stories with varying
degrees of truth about the strange and at this point
(05:15):
still mysterious interaction that hallucinations can have with the human
being's brain. But there is one big question that comes
up time and time again and isn't encountering a resurgence
in popular culture today, and that is this, So can hallucinogens?
Can these substances have some kind of curative effect when
(05:35):
dealing with things like addiction? Ah? Yes, addiction. Yeah, it's
an ugly topic, but let's let's talk about it just
for a little bit. For some people, addiction is like
a ghost to a skeptic. Right, It's something you might
not necessarily believe in because you have not encountered it yourself,
but you still find yourself whistling ever so uncomfortably when
(05:59):
you walk through a dark place at night. Right. For others,
the term addiction conjures the image of someone in their life,
a friend, a relative, a loved one gone or on
the way out, like a guttering candle. For others, the
word addiction invokes a shame, right, a memory, or a
desire for substance behavior and action or feeling. But what
(06:24):
is clinically speaking, what is an addiction. Right, Well, clinically speaking,
it's a primary chronic disease of brain reward. It's something
like a motivation or a memory or some kind of
related circuitry in the brain that associates one thing with
pleasure usually, right, And that is a very important thing
(06:46):
to note for our purposes today. An addiction has a
physiological observable, a process in the human body and effect.
So addiction this is a quote. Your addiction effects neurotransmission
and interactions within reward structures of the brain, including the
nucleus acumbans, the anterior singulate cortex, the basil forebrain, the amygdala,
(07:10):
such that motivational hierarchies are altered and addictive behaviors supplant
healthy self care related behaviors. So what this means is,
it's kind of a it's it's kind of a detour
if your brain is an inner state, which is yeah, sure,
it becomes the priority. You're gonna take this exit every time,
(07:33):
and all the rest of the stuff on that highway
doesn't matter, which could be everything from eating, from getting
your body nourishment to taking care of responsibilities in your life. Yeah,
and a lot of those things you hear about with addiction,
the priorities or the the behaviors, right, A lot of
that can be traced to specific areas of the brain. Again,
(07:59):
one thing that is very difficult for a lot of
people who are dealing with addiction or have whether it's
their own addiction or someone in their life. Right, One
thing that can be difficult to accept is that there
is a physiological basis. It's not just someone being a jerk. Right, yeah, yeah,
absolutely so. Um, we also know that this is a
(08:19):
widespread problem. Right, we have statistics to back it up. Oh, yeah,
there are tons of statistics. This thing, addiction, this whatever
you want to call it. Uh, it is rampant. There
are let's see, in the U s Alone, twenty three
million people over the age of twelve suffer some from
some sort of addiction, either alcohol or drug related. According
(08:43):
to the w h OH, the World Health Organization, the
harmful use of alcohol alone results in three point three
million deaths each year. Despite the fact that less than
half of the global population drinks alcohol, so less than
half of the world drinks there are still three point
three million deaths a year. Yeah, that's uh. When we
say less than half, we mean a little over thirty
(09:06):
eight percent, right, so it's still it's still more than
a third of the population. I think that statistics tricky
because it's how you phrase it. But yeah, three point
three million documented deaths at least that we were not
certain at how why the methodology goes for that number.
So for instance, it could just be counting uh, deaths
(09:28):
due to srotic livers. It could be counting deaths due
to drunk driving. It could and it doesn't necessarily mean addiction,
right right, Like it could be an overdose or a
car crash or something harmful. Use of alcohol is a
specific phrase they used to but we we do know regardless.
Um oh, and I guess we should say here, Matt two,
(09:50):
that addiction itself is not always something like alcoholism or
opium or even caffeine or nicotine or some other drug.
It could be a behavioral thing that your brain has
latched onto, right, And we we've seen these kinds of
addictions before, uh not in our personal lives, hopefully, But
(10:13):
addiction is real and it's dangerous worldwide. Again, we can
see the mechanisms of addiction leaving physical marks in the
human brain. So given all of these the financial and
the human cost of addiction on the world on a
global scale, all the way from petty crime to massive
(10:35):
illegal drug markets. Let's take a second, hey, HSBC, look
at that. Some people still remember that you hang out
hardcore with drug cartels and you haven't gotten in trouble,
you haven't gotten in any serious trouble, but you you
run money for drug cartels. I'm sorry to interrupt. Well,
I think it's safe to say that some of the
traditional programs, this the twelve step programs, they've been I
(10:59):
don't want to say debunked, because that's not true. They've
been shown to be a lot less effective than I
guess we had fought, right, Yeah, that is that is
true because there are some difficulties grabbing numbers there. But
also at this point, research has shown that there are
several factors that may contribute to a better chance at
(11:21):
rehabilitation from addiction, you know, like a support of community,
a family, a sense of purpose, things like that. However,
there is no one size fits all solution at this point.
Absolutely not. Now, this is something that we kind of
want to look at. That doesn't maybe it doesn't necessarily
pertain to this episode. I'm not sure. Let's let's let's
(11:44):
look into it and see what you think. Um, So,
do are there governments and corporations out there that don't
necessarily want people to be free from addiction? Okay? I see, Okay,
I think I see where you're going. Right, Yeah, I
think what I'm trying to say is money, Well yeah, money,
(12:05):
but also also control. And this is this is a tangent,
it's a bit conspiratorial. But we do know that this
kind of encouragement of addiction has occurred at a state
level before. In the Opium Wars, right, the primary British
export that they were pushing was opium, which can have
(12:27):
a horrendous effect on a population, right, And and it did,
and the Opium Wars were essentially an economic attempt to establish,
you know, severenity over an independent civilization. Right. But it's true,
It's totally true the British were slinging opium and encouraging
(12:52):
addiction amongst these people. And arguably, especially if you're Gary Webb,
you would say that that occurred more recently in the States,
and while the British government was profiting like gangbusters because
they were just shipping opium out like crazy, right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, um,
so there is truth that drugs could be used to
(13:12):
divide and control of population in a more I guess,
a more current stance. Iran has all but openly accused
Western powers of financing an illegal drug trade to destabilize
the country, and crystal meth is quickly replacing or quickly
catching up to opium is one of the most abused drugs.
And another thing we talked about in our episode on
(13:34):
the DPRK was their meth habits. Right, Yeah, there's also
a massive rise in the use of crystal meth there
in DPRK or North Korea, so we have to have
that question present when we ask ourselves about the nature
of addiction and addiction treatment. We've seen a lot of studies,
especially in Western Europe, which is on the whole a
(13:59):
little bit more humane with its treatment of prisoners or
people on the wrong side of the law, and what
they've found is that they have more success when they
have rehabilitation centers rather than I guess, punitive measures at
the forefront. Right. But also, these are very different places
(14:19):
with very different populations, so I'm not by a new
means saying it's a one to one comparison. The enclosed
culture is so different, I would be interested to see
how one of those facilities would function in the US. Right, yeah,
So where do hallucinogens fit in with this? If we
if we go past the tangent, and we do really
(14:39):
want to hear what you think about it. H If
addiction is a thing that can be fully found in
the human brain, a real thing, not an attitude, right,
not an opinion, but a a neurochemical, neurological thing, then
where do hallucinogens fit in with this? Right? Because hallucinogens
are drugs, right sure? Yeah, I mean totally legally, definitely technically.
(15:04):
So let's look at the definition here, or just define
some things before we hop in. Um. So, hallucination is
a substance, such as a drug, that causes people to
see or sense things that are not real. It's also
a substance that causes hallucinations. Now, I know it sounds
pretty simple, maybe a little too simple, but there are
(15:27):
three common types of hallucinogens. Okay, there are There are psychedelics,
there are dissociatives, and there are deliriums. So let's look
at LSD, which we mentioned at the very top with
Albert Hoffman it's a psychedelic like mescaline or d m T,
which we have an episode on. If you're interested, check
it out, it's in the video category. Here's the thing,
(15:50):
there's still quite a few questions about what exactly LSD
or mescaline or d MT due to the human brain.
While they could be class of as lucting gen's together
in a group, it doesn't mean that they are the
exact same. Thing We think that might it might work
is what's called a five H T two a receptor agonist.
(16:11):
But again we think this basically means that one of
the mechanisms they see it doing is that it binds
to serotonin receptors. However, right, yes, serotonin the field goods uh,
the scratches behind the ears of your brain. However, Uh.
There haven't been many, at least publicized studies on neurological
(16:33):
effects or processes of LSD experimentation, but it has been
studied as a possible treatment for alcoholism. And we'll have
more on that in a second, because that's not the
only drug. We'll talk about too, Like, what's a disassociative.
So dissociative is something like ketamine K special K special K,
which confused me because you know I'm square when I
(16:54):
created here. Uh, this is these have been used experimentally
to treat heroin addiction, or at least there are attempts
currently to try and make that work. And delirious that
third thing. These are a little bit less fun, but
they're fascinating to talk about. You may have heard about
(17:15):
things like Man Drake or Deadly Nightshade or Jimpson Weed,
you know, the witchcraft stuff. I've heard of some of
that from my RPGs that I play, right, Yeah, yeah,
I'm sure you can collect Man Drake and a lot
of RPGs. So these plants contain a thing called atropine,
which is considered an essential medicine by the World's Health
Organization because as a variety of uses. However, if you
(17:38):
go to UM a website called Arrowwood dot com which
has it's like a user run thing about a user
run forum about drug use. Yeah, people talk about their experiences, right, right,
And we're not in any way, of course, condoning the
use of something illegal, because is if you use something illegal,
(18:02):
then the consequences are probably going to outnumber the benefits, right,
It's true. But but on that site, I would say
it is. It is maybe a helpful tool to see
some of the negative and positive experiences with drugs if
you're trying to get an objective viewpoint of what it
is like to do that drug. Sure, I'm just saying
that if you're going to take an illegal drug because
(18:25):
you think it will help you quit smoking or something,
that's that's that's a terrible reason to go to jail. Agreed,
Because I'm sure you'll go to a nons fucking jail,
find a clinical trial. That's all I can say. So,
But this is, this is the thing, these deliriums, right,
this atropine. Most people, at least the people we found
on rowit and people who had talked about trying it,
(18:48):
did not seem keen to repeat the experience. This seems
one of the more unpleasant drugs to do. But if
we put all of this together, it turns out that
this general group of drugs making neurochemical changes to parts
of the brain might also, as a side effect, disrupt
that cycle of reward and motivation, the engine powering addiction.
(19:10):
So we know that these different drugs have all been
used two hopefully to combat some form of addiction. Right,
that's right, and these substances, these these drugs, hallucinogens have
been they've been tested for quite a while, maybe maybe
not a long time. Well, you can go back through
(19:30):
history and you can look at some of the tribes
that use things like ayahuasca, and you can say hundreds
of years, sometimes thousands of years. But if we go
back to the nineteen sixties, we can actually look at
colleges like Harvard who were who were conducting studies with hallucinogens.
(19:51):
You can look at the Harvard Psilocybin Project. This was
UM a study by Timothy Leary and Richard Albert you
might recognize as those names. It was done at the
Department of Psychology at Harvard from nineteen sixty to nineteen
sixty three. UH. In these studies, psilocybin was administered to
volunteer subjects. These were mostly graduate students, a couple of
(20:13):
times undergraduate students, and that's why the studies stopped in
nineteen sixty three. UM. But the way they were studied,
this is what they would do. Then they would have
these graduate students come into their the place where they
were testing, and both the subject and the tester, the
person who was supposedly administering this thing, would take psilocybin
(20:37):
and they would see what happened to make a recording
of it. And that was the extent of their testing.
That sounds a little bit like just people hanging out
and recording themselves doing drugs, right, And that's what a
lot of the faculty at the at Harvard said, And
that's ultimately I think why it got shut down. But
then those two guys Leary and Albert Albert became rom
(20:57):
Doss Timothy Leary. They both became huge members of the
counterculture with hallucinogens. Yeah, you're right, turn on, tune in,
drop out. I think that's the way it went exactly.
Then you've got a second one at Harvard, Ben, I'm
just gonna mention really fastly. I found pretty pretty funny.
It was called the Good Friday Experiment. Now, this one
was actually a double blind test, unlike the Lerian Albert study,
(21:21):
where there were there were twenty students who were given capsules.
Each one is given a capsule. Ten of them had
psilocybin in them. Uh, I'm not sure about the dosage.
It didn't say in the document I was reading. But
then the other ten had an active placebo and nice
cnic acid. It'll give you nice and rush, so you
feel like something's going on, but there's no hallucinogen. And
(21:42):
nice and rush also used in scientology. The it gets
your skin hot, kind of itchy, and you feel flushed.
That's one of the big that's one of the biggest,
most obvious symptoms, but you definitely feel like something's happening exactly.
So what they did is they all all these twenty
(22:03):
students went in, they took their pill, and they went
to a Good Friday service at Harvard. This was done
at Harvard University, but it was at Boston University where
they went to a Good Friday service, and eight of
the ten who received the hallucinogen reported quote mystical experiences,
though it is kind of funny. One of the students
(22:23):
apparently had to be restrained and given thorazine, which is
an anti psychotic, after he ran around, ran out of
the chapel down the street and proclaimed that he had
to tell the whole world about the new Messiah coming in.
So that's one of those stories that you would hear
in the news maybe about a drug like this. Yeah,
(22:44):
and one thing that's what's fascinating there is that we
see if you check out studies like that um and
leaving alone in k Ultra and other cetto experiments, because
those those happened as well, and those those were not
related to addiction as much as they were the possibility
of controlling someone. Right. But one thing that all of
(23:07):
those studies show is that the usual patterns of the
way your mind works. If we go with the interstate
the road system, uh starts to get detours, It gets chaotic,
traffic is weird, you know what I mean? The same
roads you drive every day don't lead you to the
same place. Cognitively, the whole road becomes hyperdimensional? Right, and
(23:30):
where are we? What? What is this thing asking we? Uh?
So there's another study that that applies this, this eyebo
gain stuff, which has been used as a bark showed
by various tribes I think, including people identifying as the
pygmy people. Uh. This this has been used as in
(23:52):
small amounts as a stimulant and larger amounts to encourage
a mystical experience. In study called the treatment of Acute
opioid withdrawal with eyebo gain found that it's a promising
tool for combating heroin addiction, and the study specifically argues,
and this is something that's weird to mean, the study
specifically argues that chemists should make a form of the
(24:14):
drug divorced from the psychoactive feelings it creates that instead, uh,
this should be this should just function like methodone, right,
like nothodone remove some of the pain of heroin withdrawal,
but doesn't get you high, if I understand, or it's
(24:34):
similar to this is a thing that's happening here in Georgia.
It's similar to the Yeah, the politicians who want to
take a moral stance and they say, well, we're going
to make this thing purely as a medicine, and we
assure you, we can ensure you one thing. Definitely, it
(24:56):
is a medicine and it won't be something people will
do for fun. And that's that's because you know, here
in the States, there is this the state this country
is very very different to Portugal or some other place. Right. Uh,
there are punitive measures taken for drug abuse. And there
is a very very strong argument that this attitude is
(25:20):
economically motivated. Right, but so so I think that's weird.
But what they found in this Eyebogain study is that
it did work. It helped people get off heroin, which
is a tremendously difficult drug to to free oneself from,
and other studies indicate that it has been useful in
treating other other issues, not necessarily addiction issues, but other issues,
(25:46):
dating all the way back to nine seven. Yeah, the
CIA studied it in the fifties and one of the
one of the things that you'll read often is people
have even used it to get folks off of addiction
to crack cocaine. Yeah. I, And people aren't tremendously sure
(26:08):
how they estimate that. There are maybe two two big
things that occur here. The first is metabolic, so ibocaine
creates a protein that blocks receptors in the brain that
trigger those cravings. So it kind of nips withdrawal in
the bud because your brain doesn't recognize that at once
(26:29):
that itch scratched, right. Yeah, And here's the weird thing.
It tends to remove those withdrawals immediately, just like that,
bringing people back to their pre addiction stage and a
normal rehabilitation. That journey can take months. The second effect
is much less clinical. It's where we verge into the
philosophical spiritual stuff, which is that eye Bolcaine seems to
(26:51):
inspire a dream like state with intense introspection, so people,
you know, journey back through the matrix of their mind
and find out, you know, they look at themselves from
outside in. I guess that's one of the things that
I keep hearing as I was looking into this. It's
that these psychedelics, more so than anything, give a wider perspective,
(27:15):
almost perspective outside of the ego of the person who
is going through addiction, and there they can finally look
at themselves and say, why the heck am I doing this?
At least that's that's that seems to be the common
thread that I've been reading throughout these studies. But hype, again,
isn't the only thing that they've been testing, not just psilocybin,
(27:35):
not just lsd UM. If you look at ketamine, it's
been used in psychotherapy for heroin addiction as well. Uh,
it appears to have immediate effects. And also um they
I think there's a study where they did a two
year follow up already, so they looked at patients, um
who are who are using ketamine as a psychotherapy, and
(27:57):
they seem to be less likely to to relapse after
two years. They also seem to be less likely to
crave heroin, which is really nice, right, Yeah, And then
if we go back, I think we mentioned earlier this
study on LSD and alcoholism to write in two thousand twelves,
some researchers Terry Krebs and Paul or John found that
(28:19):
they did a retrospective analysis. So what that means is
they took a bunch of existing studies from the sixties
and the seventies, they put them all together. They ran
the numbers on the results across all of these studies,
many by people who did not know one another, and
what they found is that fifty of people who took
LSD in these studies who are alcoholics reported lower levels
(28:41):
of alcohol abuse compared to thirty eight percent of people
receiving a placebo. So there especially. I know those numbers
might not sound super impressive if it were one study,
but across multiple studies spanning decades, that is a compelling point.
And these types of trials, it's teams are continuing, if anything,
(29:01):
experiencing a bit of a renaissance, which leads me to
a question, Matt, what why did this take solong. If
addiction is such a big problem, then why didn't doctors
and governments go down this route earlier? Well because of
Nixon ben yeh, that's I'm just kidding, because not just
because it's because of things that were put in place
(29:22):
during the Nixon administration though, about classifying Schedule one drugs
with hallucinogens other even marijuana. Uh, some of the uses
of th HC in high enough doses can be hallucinogens.
And there are all these drugs that were placed under
this restrictive Schedule one tier. And uh, I think that's
(29:43):
why because doctors nobody wants there there, you know, prestigious
university or wherever you're going to be conducting studies to
be you know, using illegal substances, right, because Schedule one
is bad business here here in the US, drugs are
classified according to these groups that are for some reason
(30:06):
called a schedule, which has to be so confusing if
you've never heard of it. So they're like schedule to
Schedule three. Schedule one is the worst of the bunch.
No medical use right, no medicinal value. Yeah, what highly
highly addictive, high likelihood of of health effects, right of
(30:27):
of dilatorious effects on your health. There's something I can't
remember the exact wording, but the biggest one is no
medical use, right, there's no reason to prescribe it. And
certain things have in the past been miss placed in
that schedule or moved, but it's very, very difficult right
to get that changed. And of course there are conspiracy theories,
(30:51):
especially if you go back to the idea of control,
several of which you can hear in our earlier shows. Yeah,
we highly recommend you check it out. What do we
do we did, We did the marijuana conspiracy, did a
little bit on it. I don't think we've done an
audio show on it. No, there are special and d
MT just about whether or not there's a whole another
realm that you can access through that drug. And why
(31:13):
so many people taking d MT tend to report the
same or very similar experiences energy beings or the gnomes,
the machine els or the spirit machines. But again, and
I would just like to say, we are not encouraging
anyone to go out and do these things. Yeah, consult
your doctor, don't do it illegally. It's not It just
(31:36):
seems so ironic and terrible and unfair, I know, for
someone who has a problem that they feel might be helped,
you know, uh, and then find themselves in jail or
even prison for attempting to do it. And unfortunately that
is that is a possible consequence. Also, Matt, neither of
(31:57):
us are doctors. No, don't think you're a doctor. Roll
is more of a doctor of love, you know. But
so we we know that other people have experimented with this.
Let's talk about Bill Wilson, one of the founders of
Alcoholics Anonymous. He tried LSD in a study and it
inspired him, in part to start Alcoholics Anonymous, and he
(32:22):
even told other members of the organization to try it out.
But however, the fellowship at large disagreed because and I
see how this is, this is a valid point to them,
They said, the the idea of treating those who cannot
control their substance use with another substance seemed then is
now heretical. Uh. The link between spirituality and sobriety, however,
(32:43):
remains a mainstay of the modern a recovery thing, which
is interesting because Bill Wilson said that he had a
mystic experience like a spiritual experience, and that story comes
to us by a writer named Kelly board Debt writing
for The Fix. So if we look at that the
politics of alcoholics anonymous or at least that's the opinion
(33:06):
that piece may have held back some progress on LSD.
Now that's a very small part of it, of course,
because as you said, the seventies, the the scheduling of
stuff is really what was a hindrance to this kind
of research. But these aren't the only things holding back
these studies. Let's look an example. Dr John Halpern. He's
(33:27):
the head of the Laboratory for Integrative Psychiatry at the
McLean Hospital. He's running an m d M A cancer study. Well,
he told the New York Times, quote, what drug company
is going to invest millions in a substance widely available
in our flora and fauna? Government regulations are predictively tight. Also,
stigma looms large for those interested scientists. Okay, so that
(33:52):
sounds like there are a couple of different things going
on there. One it's there. This seems like there's not
much of a financial incent to especially if something's already
on a schedule, to to pay for it. Yeah, because
you can go out and pick it. Is what this
guy is saying, why would you pay for it outside?
Why would you monetize ayahuasca or something right, uh? And
(34:13):
then or what would be the use? And then it
also sounds like the strict government regulations up the price
tag even more. The stigma part is interesting to me
because academic stigma is such a big deal, and more
so than people know outside of the Ivory Tower. It's
chilling to wonder how many legitimate things have been shut
(34:34):
down because they didn't fit with the current orthodoxy of
a given discipline. Or we're just chosen not to even
be be looked into by someone because they were afraid
of that stigma. And but there's another reason here too,
and I think that's a great point. You don't want
to risk your career for something that ends up being malarkey. Right.
(34:55):
There is another point here, though, that is exciting dangerous territory.
We we mean, the human species, don't know a lot
about how many of these drugs work. I mean, m
d m A doesn't just show promise for cancer. It
shows promise for uh, post traumatic stress disorder treatment. Right,
But like the rest of these drugs, it has side
effects that we have yet to comprehend. And and the
(35:18):
analogy it makes me think of is it might be
the equivalent of trying to shave with a chainsaw. I mean,
you're gonna you're gonna get the hair off, but what
else will you lose in the process? Or So, if
you want to learn more about all of this stuff,
there are a lot of places you can go. One
of them is MAPS dot org. That's the Multidisciplinary Association
(35:42):
for Psychedelic Studies again, that's MAPS, m APS dot org. Yes,
and we have a question for you as well, listeners.
Do you think this research has been actively suppressed? We
hear this sometimes in stories that relate to uh, you know,
the the idea of cure for HIV or a cure
(36:03):
for cancer. Is there is there a silver bullet cure
for addiction that was being suppressed? And if so, why
we know there's a stigma for scientists. We know, you know, Matt,
as you said that the anti drug culture of the
seventies in the in the West, at least in the States,
held this back. But as that changes, are we going
to see more stuff? Or because we want to be
fair to the other side, Matt, or is this a
(36:25):
bunch of bunk by people who want to get paid
to trip acid. Right, But before we move on, let's
make an important point here. We want to make this
abundantly clear. While we might be joking around about some
aspects of this kind of stuff, we are by no
means cavalier about the horrors of addiction. Statistically speaking, it
(36:49):
is quite possible that someone listening to this show right
now has some sort of relationship with an addiction, whether
it's your own addiction, whether it's the addiction of someone
else you know, right, And this is a disease. This
is not again, this is not someone just being crappy,
(37:11):
you know what I mean? There there is a there's
a reason for this, there's a physiological reason. This is
not an attitude. And the best thing that we can do,
we again being the human species, of course, is to
attempt to help anyone in that kind of situation and
(37:31):
ways to treat it right. And if you yourself need
some sort of you know, you need some sort of help,
don't know what to do? Then now more than ever,
although I hate to steal that line, it is possible
to find help. So please. I know it's probably a
corny cliche thing that people say, but a lot of
(37:52):
corny and cliche. Things are corny and cliche because they
are true. Please, it is easy now, easier now than ever,
to to find some sort of light in the darkness.
With that in mind, and in pardon the soapbox, what
do you think about doing some listener mail? Absolutely been
(38:15):
I've got one right here, and this is kind of
a long one, listeners, So Ben and I are going
to switch back and forth and tell you all about it.
This is a message from Dan, and Dan says, Hey, there,
I'm a longtime fan of how Stuff Works, but I've
only recently started listening to your particular podcast. I've listened
to s Y s K that stuff you should know
(38:38):
right back from two thousand eight, back when I was
but a wee lad of fourteen, but I've rarely felt
motivated to contact Josh and Chuck. Well, hey, you should
contact them, dude. They'll probably listen to you. They're pretty kill,
especially after the move over towards antisocial media. Your show. However,
I've only just discovered suffice it to say that I
haven't been seen without earphones, and since then, and with
(39:01):
a myriad of other videos left to check out, I've
been info binging and we uh, We're gonna go through
parts of this story here Dan uh So. Dan said,
from a very young age, I've always just been so
into learning, learning about anything I could, discovering at first
how stuff works, then later stuff you should gave me
(39:21):
plenty and plenty to think about. And I certainly got
into thinking, but as anyone who knows me knows, with me,
there's always been a yearning for something more than just thinking.
I got it first into psychedelics, then deeply into philosophy,
a stud a philosophy of religion, uh, biology, chemistry, geography,
critical thinking at a level which, from what I can guess,
is sort of like high school for you guys. It
(39:43):
was at college where I first discovered critical thinking, which
leads me back to the point of my email. And
then he goes on to summarize just a little bit
about how he passes A levels, got into a good university,
and he realized that he didn't just like learning and
(40:03):
something was missing right because he wanted to study, uh,
something other than philosophy. But then he decided he needed
to study philosophy, so he went to the department and
asked them if he could study in their department to
my delight. They said that I'd impressed them so much
in their interview that they love to have me as
a student there in their faculty. But I'd have to
(40:26):
wait until the next year because there's no aya i'd
be able to catch up on what I had already missed.
I was devastated. Before long, everything hit the fan. It
went down the pan, out the window, to the dogs,
and spread around in a few other areas. The fan
was powerful. It got very messy. I won't go into
the details because I could write you ten emails about why, what, who, where?
But I found myself with a pretty bad heroin addiction.
(40:49):
And I'll summarize a little bit here. Uh. He ended
up eventually dropping out of university, and he decided to
go to rehabilitation, and he had a lot of help
from his parents or pushing on that, and he was
relatively isolated. And in this time he began focusing on
what he was hearing and remembering lots of stuff he'd
(41:12):
forgotten in his addiction. I'll pick it up here, remembering
back the philosophy and books such as Manufacturing Consent by
Noam Chomsky, the no Logo by Naomi Klein, as well
as existentialist and dystopian literature like Nausea by Sartre, Fear
and Trembling by Kirka, Guard Human, All Too Human by Nietzsche,
and of course Brave New World in N four And
(41:33):
he says, after leaving rehab and after many relapses, right
up until basically the time I found your podcast a
few weeks ago, I find myself now writing this email,
remembering back to my A levels and thinking to myself
how critical thinking classes were an odd thing to find
back then. This is why I'm emailing you. I am
writing to thank you for confronting me with the power
(41:55):
of critical thinking and helping me to remember why I
was so fascinated with knowledge to begin with. And Dan
goes on to say, thinking in itself is half of
my problem. I over analyzed and overthink to the point
that I have no firm ground to establish myself upon.
But in discovering your podcast, I've learned some new things,
been reminded of a lot I've learned before, but most importantly,
(42:17):
been inspired to go out and learn more. I know
I have the power to shape my life with knowledge, thoughts,
and ideas, but I had forgotten I don't want you
to feel responsible in case I trip up again. But
it is in this reignition of my passions I'm able
to say no to heroin once more. This time, five
or six weeks ago, I was laying in a squat
injecting any vein I could find, with no friends, no family,
(42:40):
no values, morals or any hope, just an iPod. And
today I stid proud, saying that even though it's early
days again, I found the courage to pick myself up
off the floor yet again. It doesn't matter if you
fall over as long as you can stand up afterwards.
You know, Dan, we we can't read the whole letter,
and they're probably parts that we shouldn't read, but uh,
(43:01):
this this is uh, this is a powerful thing, and
we I know that I can say. I can't I
can't speak for everybody on the show, but I can
definitely say that keep going, man. I hope that when
you hear this this this is um a few months
old now, but I hope when you hear this episode
(43:21):
that you're able to, you know, lift your chin up
and think about the amazing role you're on, the amazing streak. Yeah, yeah,
I keep keep going strong, Dan, I think maybe you
give Ben and Ben and I a little too much
credit there, for sure, But we are certainly glad that
you appreciate what we're doing. What we're doing here, and
(43:42):
we appreciate the effort that you're putting in every day.
So keep going, man, and uh, we'll be here. So
keep listening. We hope we'll be here, yes, But and
also for for anybody else listening again, there are there,
There is light at the end of the tunnel, and
and we hope that you have enjoyed this episode despite that,
(44:04):
this is despite it being a very heavy subject um.
And we will keep you updated as we learn more
about the legal status of hallucinogens used to treat addiction
and the upcoming studies, because there are a lot that
are still out there. The one thing I'm super hooked
on is caffeine, and I haven't found any study about that.
(44:25):
You and me both, buddy, You and me both, and
probably most people actually want to look around, I don't
know how many people. I don't think there are many
of that aren't addicted to caffeine here. I don't know
how we would do this job without it. Yeah, yeah,
you know, it's strange out One one thing for anybody
who is contemplating twitting caffeine. Uh, you know, I guess,
(44:46):
do do what you will, but do be careful. If
you get the caffeine headaches and you take a pain
reliever to stop those headaches, check the pain reliever first
because a lot of them contain caffeine as well. Uh.
And those caffeine headaches are real. I have tried a
couple of times to stop, and man, I get splitting
headaches when I don't have enough. That's terrifying. So anyway, wait,
(45:11):
what what is that noise? I'm not sure, but I
think it means it's time for our movement with normal. Hey, Neil,
how's it going? Man? It's going okay, how are you?
We're doing all right? Pretty pretty heavy subject here today.
But but there's there's an inspiring thing or possible good news.
You know, if we have if we have this ability
(45:33):
being civilization, not the three of us, but if we
have this ability to help people out of an addiction,
you know, it's it's food for thought for sure. What
do you think? Yeah? I mean one thing that occurred
to me when you guys were talking about alternatives for
treating serious addictions, like like heroin and opiate addiction. Um,
(45:54):
how you know there aren't a ton of inroads being
made to alternatives and things like a methodone And it
kind of got me thinking about this documentary I saw
years ago called Methodonia that's sort of about like how
many methodone clinics are privately owned and almost treated like franchises,
like of a McDonald's or something, And so there's a
lot of profit, there's a lot of money to be
(46:14):
made in in that kind of treatment, and you know,
to your point of like, well, are are they really
trying to get people off it? Are they just substituting
one addiction for another? And a lot of people that
that take methodon end up taking it, you know, for
the rest of their lives or for a very coolent time.
And it kind of got me doing a little internet
rabbit holing, and I found this article from the Boston
Globe from last year about how this private equity firm
(46:36):
Bank Capital spent seven hundred million dollars acquiring a chain
of methodone clinics in the Boston area. And it just,
I mean not to say that because someone's making a
profit on something that means necessarily an insidious thing, but
It just does kind of get you thinking, especially when
there are you know, more natural alternative I did not
know that they were privatized. Yeah, it's a mix, but
(46:57):
I mean there's definitely a large, a large contingent of
private methodical Well, I guess from a business perspective, it
sounds terrifying to say it, but from a business perspective,
there is a built in demand. Yeah. No, this might
be one of the this is the worst moment we've
had with you. You got me internet rabbit holing. But
(47:20):
while I was doing that, I did receive a call
saying that I want a free trip to the Bahamas,
So I may not be back next week to have
another one of these downer moments. Wait, oh man, wait, wait,
don't don't leave us. It's a bitter sweet don't know. Man.
You can skype. You can skype, man, we can skype
in our producer. Yeah, let's try it. We're on the
(47:40):
we're on the forefront. I am going to check out that.
I'm going to check out that issue about privatization of
methodone clinics. And also no no offense to know, but
I hope that if you do go on a cruise,
it's it's not too long because you know you're part
of the show, right, or just take us with you, right,
(48:02):
or take us with you right, and listeners, you are
also part of the show, and in our opinion, the
best part of the show. So I think it's wrong
for us to say we hope you enjoyed this podcast
as much as we enjoyed making it. But we do
hope that this piqued your interest and that you found, um,
you found something worthwhile or something you want to look
(48:22):
into more. We'd like to hear from you. You can
find us on Facebook and Twitter, and we have a website.
Stuff they don't want you to know dot com. Yeah, uh,
it's all about the journey when you're typing, I guess
I know. On that website you can see everything that
we have ever done, all of it, all the audio podcasts,
(48:42):
all the videos, everything, and so many great pictures of
you and me, buddy, oh man, I forgot about those.
But if you can get past the pictures of our
of our but ugly mugs, you might find some stuff
in there that's pretty interesting. That's right. If you want
to write to us, you don't want to do the
social media thing. We understand go ahead and send us
(49:04):
an email. We are conspiracy at how stuff works dot com.
From one on this topic, another unexplained phenomenon, visit YouTube
dot com slash conspiracy stuff. You can also get in
touch on Twitter at the handle at conspiracy stuff
From UFOs to ghosts and government cover ups. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to. Now. Little
by little, I would begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors
and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes.
(00:25):
Kaleidoscopic fantastic images surged in on me, alternating variegated opening
and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in
colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in their constant flocks.
(00:45):
Then are you okay? Oh yeah, I'm fine. I'm actually
just reading a quotation from guy named Albert Hoffman. This
comes from April nineteenth, ninety three, a day that some
of you out there will recognize for its importance. But
who are you again? What are we doing? Oh? Yeah,
(01:07):
this okay. So we're in the podcast room. My name
is Matt, and then we're here with our super producer,
Noel Owsley Brown, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. Yes, are you're doing all right? Matt? Yeah,
I'm fine, man. Everything's good in the neighborhood, right, guys, right,
you can just look a little paranoid a little different. No, No,
(01:31):
I'm fine. I just want to talk about Albert Hoffman, right,
Oh yeah, tell us about Albert Hoffman. So he's the
guy who is considered the person who discovered LSD as
a hallucinogen because he took a famous bike ride, right,
he accidentally spilled a little on himself, Yes, and took
the most astonishing bike ride in history up to that time,
(01:53):
probably since the invention of the penny farthing. This idea
of LSD as a lucinogen was relatively new, but LSD
had been synthesized before and since that time, numerous people
have claimed that LSD and other drugs called hallucinogens have
abilities far beyond those of the typical recreational drugs like
(02:16):
alcohol or marijuana. That's right, And there are lots of
weird stories that go along with LSD that kind of
create this, uh, this mythos of LSD. There's one that's
kind of a true story about Francis Crick. You may
have heard that name before, and how he quote discovered
the double helix shape of DNA that we're all familiar
(02:37):
with while he was on an acid trip. However, while
it is true that Crick and James Watson, along with
Maurice Wilkins did work on d N A, they didn't
necessarily discover it right. The person who is the m
v P of the DNA story, there is a British
biophysicist named Rosalind Franklin photo rapt DNA, but she was
(03:01):
snubbed at the Nobel Prize ceremony. She also died for
years before it was awarded, and for those familiar with
the Nobel Prize will recall that they are not awarded posthumously.
But it sounds like Crick and Watson. Crick and Watson
snubbed her. Make no mistake, Crick huge fan of LSD.
But that story in itself has uh grains of things
(03:26):
that are not entirely true. And if you if you
hear a lot of people talking about Krick, make sure
that you mentioned Rosslyn Franklin as well. There is, however,
a story about LSD which is absolutely true. It's the
old tale you may have heard about once upon a
time a professional baseball player here in the States being
(03:49):
just tripping balls high out of his mind, yes, and
pitching a no hitter. And there have only been I
think maybe two hundred and forty seven no hitters in
the history of pro baseball. Any, yeah, not many, but
listeners right in. I'm sure our baseball fans will check
me on this one because I can't remember where I
found that number. But how did this happen? Matt Well,
(04:11):
The gentleman's name is Doc Ellis, and there's a documentary
out on Netflix right now. You can watch called No
No a documentary with spelled d O c K. It's
pretty funny. I actually watched it. This is one of
my father in law's favorite stories. So Doc Ellis was
kind of known for, uh, doing some strange things while
(04:32):
he was pitching, like drug He was the Belushi of
the Pirates. He really was. Um. But yeah, when when
he did this, he he he said that times slowed down, right,
the size of the ball would change while he was
on the field. Um. In the documentary, he just he
kind of makes light of it. Actually, he's like, yeah,
(04:52):
it wasn't even a really a big deal, right, But
it really did happen, and unfortunately, his drug use is
probably part of the reason that he did not go
on to continue his rise to fame. But that story
is absolutely true, and there are other stories with varying
degrees of truth about the strange and at this point
(05:15):
still mysterious interaction that hallucinations can have with the human
being's brain. But there is one big question that comes
up time and time again and isn't encountering a resurgence
in popular culture today, and that is this, So can hallucinogens?
Can these substances have some kind of curative effect when
(05:35):
dealing with things like addiction? Ah? Yes, addiction. Yeah, it's
an ugly topic, but let's let's talk about it just
for a little bit. For some people, addiction is like
a ghost to a skeptic. Right, It's something you might
not necessarily believe in because you have not encountered it yourself,
but you still find yourself whistling ever so uncomfortably when
(05:59):
you walk through a dark place at night. Right. For others,
the term addiction conjures the image of someone in their life,
a friend, a relative, a loved one gone or on
the way out, like a guttering candle. For others, the
word addiction invokes a shame, right, a memory, or a
desire for substance behavior and action or feeling. But what
(06:24):
is clinically speaking, what is an addiction. Right, Well, clinically speaking,
it's a primary chronic disease of brain reward. It's something
like a motivation or a memory or some kind of
related circuitry in the brain that associates one thing with
pleasure usually, right, And that is a very important thing
(06:46):
to note for our purposes today. An addiction has a
physiological observable, a process in the human body and effect.
So addiction this is a quote. Your addiction effects neurotransmission
and interactions within reward structures of the brain, including the
nucleus acumbans, the anterior singulate cortex, the basil forebrain, the amygdala,
(07:10):
such that motivational hierarchies are altered and addictive behaviors supplant
healthy self care related behaviors. So what this means is,
it's kind of a it's it's kind of a detour
if your brain is an inner state, which is yeah, sure,
it becomes the priority. You're gonna take this exit every time,
(07:33):
and all the rest of the stuff on that highway
doesn't matter, which could be everything from eating, from getting
your body nourishment to taking care of responsibilities in your life. Yeah,
and a lot of those things you hear about with addiction,
the priorities or the the behaviors, right, A lot of
that can be traced to specific areas of the brain. Again,
(07:59):
one thing that is very difficult for a lot of
people who are dealing with addiction or have whether it's
their own addiction or someone in their life. Right, One
thing that can be difficult to accept is that there
is a physiological basis. It's not just someone being a jerk. Right, yeah, yeah,
absolutely so. Um, we also know that this is a
(08:19):
widespread problem. Right, we have statistics to back it up. Oh, yeah,
there are tons of statistics. This thing, addiction, this whatever
you want to call it. Uh, it is rampant. There
are let's see, in the U s Alone, twenty three
million people over the age of twelve suffer some from
some sort of addiction, either alcohol or drug related. According
(08:43):
to the w h OH, the World Health Organization, the
harmful use of alcohol alone results in three point three
million deaths each year. Despite the fact that less than
half of the global population drinks alcohol, so less than
half of the world drinks there are still three point
three million deaths a year. Yeah, that's uh. When we
say less than half, we mean a little over thirty
(09:06):
eight percent, right, so it's still it's still more than
a third of the population. I think that statistics tricky
because it's how you phrase it. But yeah, three point
three million documented deaths at least that we were not
certain at how why the methodology goes for that number.
So for instance, it could just be counting uh, deaths
(09:28):
due to srotic livers. It could be counting deaths due
to drunk driving. It could and it doesn't necessarily mean addiction,
right right, Like it could be an overdose or a
car crash or something harmful. Use of alcohol is a
specific phrase they used to but we we do know regardless.
Um oh, and I guess we should say here, Matt two,
(09:50):
that addiction itself is not always something like alcoholism or
opium or even caffeine or nicotine or some other drug.
It could be a behavioral thing that your brain has
latched onto, right, And we we've seen these kinds of
addictions before, uh not in our personal lives, hopefully, But
(10:13):
addiction is real and it's dangerous worldwide. Again, we can
see the mechanisms of addiction leaving physical marks in the
human brain. So given all of these the financial and
the human cost of addiction on the world on a
global scale, all the way from petty crime to massive
(10:35):
illegal drug markets. Let's take a second, hey, HSBC, look
at that. Some people still remember that you hang out
hardcore with drug cartels and you haven't gotten in trouble,
you haven't gotten in any serious trouble, but you you
run money for drug cartels. I'm sorry to interrupt. Well,
I think it's safe to say that some of the
traditional programs, this the twelve step programs, they've been I
(10:59):
don't want to say debunked, because that's not true. They've
been shown to be a lot less effective than I
guess we had fought, right, Yeah, that is that is
true because there are some difficulties grabbing numbers there. But
also at this point, research has shown that there are
several factors that may contribute to a better chance at
(11:21):
rehabilitation from addiction, you know, like a support of community,
a family, a sense of purpose, things like that. However,
there is no one size fits all solution at this point.
Absolutely not. Now, this is something that we kind of
want to look at. That doesn't maybe it doesn't necessarily
pertain to this episode. I'm not sure. Let's let's let's
(11:44):
look into it and see what you think. Um, So,
do are there governments and corporations out there that don't
necessarily want people to be free from addiction? Okay? I see, Okay,
I think I see where you're going. Right, Yeah, I
think what I'm trying to say is money, Well yeah, money,
(12:05):
but also also control. And this is this is a tangent,
it's a bit conspiratorial. But we do know that this
kind of encouragement of addiction has occurred at a state
level before. In the Opium Wars, right, the primary British
export that they were pushing was opium, which can have
(12:27):
a horrendous effect on a population, right, And and it did,
and the Opium Wars were essentially an economic attempt to establish,
you know, severenity over an independent civilization. Right. But it's true,
It's totally true the British were slinging opium and encouraging
(12:52):
addiction amongst these people. And arguably, especially if you're Gary Webb,
you would say that that occurred more recently in the States,
and while the British government was profiting like gangbusters because
they were just shipping opium out like crazy, right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, um,
so there is truth that drugs could be used to
(13:12):
divide and control of population in a more I guess,
a more current stance. Iran has all but openly accused
Western powers of financing an illegal drug trade to destabilize
the country, and crystal meth is quickly replacing or quickly
catching up to opium is one of the most abused drugs.
And another thing we talked about in our episode on
(13:34):
the DPRK was their meth habits. Right, Yeah, there's also
a massive rise in the use of crystal meth there
in DPRK or North Korea, so we have to have
that question present when we ask ourselves about the nature
of addiction and addiction treatment. We've seen a lot of studies,
especially in Western Europe, which is on the whole a
(13:59):
little bit more humane with its treatment of prisoners or
people on the wrong side of the law, and what
they've found is that they have more success when they
have rehabilitation centers rather than I guess, punitive measures at
the forefront. Right. But also, these are very different places
(14:19):
with very different populations, so I'm not by a new
means saying it's a one to one comparison. The enclosed
culture is so different, I would be interested to see
how one of those facilities would function in the US. Right, yeah,
So where do hallucinogens fit in with this? If we
if we go past the tangent, and we do really
(14:39):
want to hear what you think about it. H If
addiction is a thing that can be fully found in
the human brain, a real thing, not an attitude, right,
not an opinion, but a a neurochemical, neurological thing, then
where do hallucinogens fit in with this? Right? Because hallucinogens
are drugs, right sure? Yeah, I mean totally legally, definitely technically.
(15:04):
So let's look at the definition here, or just define
some things before we hop in. Um. So, hallucination is
a substance, such as a drug, that causes people to
see or sense things that are not real. It's also
a substance that causes hallucinations. Now, I know it sounds
pretty simple, maybe a little too simple, but there are
(15:27):
three common types of hallucinogens. Okay, there are There are psychedelics,
there are dissociatives, and there are deliriums. So let's look
at LSD, which we mentioned at the very top with
Albert Hoffman it's a psychedelic like mescaline or d m T,
which we have an episode on. If you're interested, check
it out, it's in the video category. Here's the thing,
(15:50):
there's still quite a few questions about what exactly LSD
or mescaline or d MT due to the human brain.
While they could be class of as lucting gen's together
in a group, it doesn't mean that they are the
exact same. Thing We think that might it might work
is what's called a five H T two a receptor agonist.
(16:11):
But again we think this basically means that one of
the mechanisms they see it doing is that it binds
to serotonin receptors. However, right, yes, serotonin the field goods uh,
the scratches behind the ears of your brain. However, Uh.
There haven't been many, at least publicized studies on neurological
(16:33):
effects or processes of LSD experimentation, but it has been
studied as a possible treatment for alcoholism. And we'll have
more on that in a second, because that's not the
only drug. We'll talk about too, Like, what's a disassociative.
So dissociative is something like ketamine K special K special K,
which confused me because you know I'm square when I
(16:54):
created here. Uh, this is these have been used experimentally
to treat heroin addiction, or at least there are attempts
currently to try and make that work. And delirious that
third thing. These are a little bit less fun, but
they're fascinating to talk about. You may have heard about
(17:15):
things like Man Drake or Deadly Nightshade or Jimpson Weed,
you know, the witchcraft stuff. I've heard of some of
that from my RPGs that I play, right, Yeah, yeah,
I'm sure you can collect Man Drake and a lot
of RPGs. So these plants contain a thing called atropine,
which is considered an essential medicine by the World's Health
Organization because as a variety of uses. However, if you
(17:38):
go to UM a website called Arrowwood dot com which
has it's like a user run thing about a user
run forum about drug use. Yeah, people talk about their experiences, right, right,
And we're not in any way, of course, condoning the
use of something illegal, because is if you use something illegal,
(18:02):
then the consequences are probably going to outnumber the benefits, right,
It's true. But but on that site, I would say
it is. It is maybe a helpful tool to see
some of the negative and positive experiences with drugs if
you're trying to get an objective viewpoint of what it
is like to do that drug. Sure, I'm just saying
that if you're going to take an illegal drug because
(18:25):
you think it will help you quit smoking or something,
that's that's that's a terrible reason to go to jail. Agreed,
Because I'm sure you'll go to a nons fucking jail,
find a clinical trial. That's all I can say. So,
But this is, this is the thing, these deliriums, right,
this atropine. Most people, at least the people we found
on rowit and people who had talked about trying it,
(18:48):
did not seem keen to repeat the experience. This seems
one of the more unpleasant drugs to do. But if
we put all of this together, it turns out that
this general group of drugs making neurochemical changes to parts
of the brain might also, as a side effect, disrupt
that cycle of reward and motivation, the engine powering addiction.
(19:10):
So we know that these different drugs have all been
used two hopefully to combat some form of addiction. Right,
that's right, and these substances, these these drugs, hallucinogens have
been they've been tested for quite a while, maybe maybe
not a long time. Well, you can go back through
(19:30):
history and you can look at some of the tribes
that use things like ayahuasca, and you can say hundreds
of years, sometimes thousands of years. But if we go
back to the nineteen sixties, we can actually look at
colleges like Harvard who were who were conducting studies with hallucinogens.
(19:51):
You can look at the Harvard Psilocybin Project. This was
UM a study by Timothy Leary and Richard Albert you
might recognize as those names. It was done at the
Department of Psychology at Harvard from nineteen sixty to nineteen
sixty three. UH. In these studies, psilocybin was administered to
volunteer subjects. These were mostly graduate students, a couple of
(20:13):
times undergraduate students, and that's why the studies stopped in
nineteen sixty three. UM. But the way they were studied,
this is what they would do. Then they would have
these graduate students come into their the place where they
were testing, and both the subject and the tester, the
person who was supposedly administering this thing, would take psilocybin
(20:37):
and they would see what happened to make a recording
of it. And that was the extent of their testing.
That sounds a little bit like just people hanging out
and recording themselves doing drugs, right, And that's what a
lot of the faculty at the at Harvard said, And
that's ultimately I think why it got shut down. But
then those two guys Leary and Albert Albert became rom
(20:57):
Doss Timothy Leary. They both became huge members of the
counterculture with hallucinogens. Yeah, you're right, turn on, tune in,
drop out. I think that's the way it went exactly.
Then you've got a second one at Harvard, Ben, I'm
just gonna mention really fastly. I found pretty pretty funny.
It was called the Good Friday Experiment. Now, this one
was actually a double blind test, unlike the Lerian Albert study,
(21:21):
where there were there were twenty students who were given capsules.
Each one is given a capsule. Ten of them had
psilocybin in them. Uh, I'm not sure about the dosage.
It didn't say in the document I was reading. But
then the other ten had an active placebo and nice
cnic acid. It'll give you nice and rush, so you
feel like something's going on, but there's no hallucinogen. And
(21:42):
nice and rush also used in scientology. The it gets
your skin hot, kind of itchy, and you feel flushed.
That's one of the big that's one of the biggest,
most obvious symptoms, but you definitely feel like something's happening exactly.
So what they did is they all all these twenty
(22:03):
students went in, they took their pill, and they went
to a Good Friday service at Harvard. This was done
at Harvard University, but it was at Boston University where
they went to a Good Friday service, and eight of
the ten who received the hallucinogen reported quote mystical experiences,
though it is kind of funny. One of the students
(22:23):
apparently had to be restrained and given thorazine, which is
an anti psychotic, after he ran around, ran out of
the chapel down the street and proclaimed that he had
to tell the whole world about the new Messiah coming in.
So that's one of those stories that you would hear
in the news maybe about a drug like this. Yeah,
(22:44):
and one thing that's what's fascinating there is that we
see if you check out studies like that um and
leaving alone in k Ultra and other cetto experiments, because
those those happened as well, and those those were not
related to addiction as much as they were the possibility
of controlling someone. Right. But one thing that all of
(23:07):
those studies show is that the usual patterns of the
way your mind works. If we go with the interstate
the road system, uh starts to get detours, It gets chaotic,
traffic is weird, you know what I mean? The same
roads you drive every day don't lead you to the
same place. Cognitively, the whole road becomes hyperdimensional? Right, and
(23:30):
where are we? What? What is this thing asking we? Uh?
So there's another study that that applies this, this eyebo
gain stuff, which has been used as a bark showed
by various tribes I think, including people identifying as the
pygmy people. Uh. This this has been used as in
(23:52):
small amounts as a stimulant and larger amounts to encourage
a mystical experience. In study called the treatment of Acute
opioid withdrawal with eyebo gain found that it's a promising
tool for combating heroin addiction, and the study specifically argues,
and this is something that's weird to mean, the study
specifically argues that chemists should make a form of the
(24:14):
drug divorced from the psychoactive feelings it creates that instead, uh,
this should be this should just function like methodone, right,
like nothodone remove some of the pain of heroin withdrawal,
but doesn't get you high, if I understand, or it's
(24:34):
similar to this is a thing that's happening here in Georgia.
It's similar to the Yeah, the politicians who want to
take a moral stance and they say, well, we're going
to make this thing purely as a medicine, and we
assure you, we can ensure you one thing. Definitely, it
(24:56):
is a medicine and it won't be something people will
do for fun. And that's that's because you know, here
in the States, there is this the state this country
is very very different to Portugal or some other place. Right. Uh,
there are punitive measures taken for drug abuse. And there
is a very very strong argument that this attitude is
(25:20):
economically motivated. Right, but so so I think that's weird.
But what they found in this Eyebogain study is that
it did work. It helped people get off heroin, which
is a tremendously difficult drug to to free oneself from,
and other studies indicate that it has been useful in
treating other other issues, not necessarily addiction issues, but other issues,
(25:46):
dating all the way back to nine seven. Yeah, the
CIA studied it in the fifties and one of the
one of the things that you'll read often is people
have even used it to get folks off of addiction
to crack cocaine. Yeah. I, And people aren't tremendously sure
(26:08):
how they estimate that. There are maybe two two big
things that occur here. The first is metabolic, so ibocaine
creates a protein that blocks receptors in the brain that
trigger those cravings. So it kind of nips withdrawal in
the bud because your brain doesn't recognize that at once
(26:29):
that itch scratched, right. Yeah, And here's the weird thing.
It tends to remove those withdrawals immediately, just like that,
bringing people back to their pre addiction stage and a
normal rehabilitation. That journey can take months. The second effect
is much less clinical. It's where we verge into the
philosophical spiritual stuff, which is that eye Bolcaine seems to
(26:51):
inspire a dream like state with intense introspection, so people,
you know, journey back through the matrix of their mind
and find out, you know, they look at themselves from
outside in. I guess that's one of the things that
I keep hearing as I was looking into this. It's
that these psychedelics, more so than anything, give a wider perspective,
(27:15):
almost perspective outside of the ego of the person who
is going through addiction, and there they can finally look
at themselves and say, why the heck am I doing this?
At least that's that's that seems to be the common
thread that I've been reading throughout these studies. But hype, again,
isn't the only thing that they've been testing, not just psilocybin,
(27:35):
not just lsd UM. If you look at ketamine, it's
been used in psychotherapy for heroin addiction as well. Uh,
it appears to have immediate effects. And also um they
I think there's a study where they did a two
year follow up already, so they looked at patients, um
who are who are using ketamine as a psychotherapy, and
(27:57):
they seem to be less likely to to relapse after
two years. They also seem to be less likely to
crave heroin, which is really nice, right, Yeah, And then
if we go back, I think we mentioned earlier this
study on LSD and alcoholism to write in two thousand twelves,
some researchers Terry Krebs and Paul or John found that
(28:19):
they did a retrospective analysis. So what that means is
they took a bunch of existing studies from the sixties
and the seventies, they put them all together. They ran
the numbers on the results across all of these studies,
many by people who did not know one another, and
what they found is that fifty of people who took
LSD in these studies who are alcoholics reported lower levels
(28:41):
of alcohol abuse compared to thirty eight percent of people
receiving a placebo. So there especially. I know those numbers
might not sound super impressive if it were one study,
but across multiple studies spanning decades, that is a compelling point.
And these types of trials, it's teams are continuing, if anything,
(29:01):
experiencing a bit of a renaissance, which leads me to
a question, Matt, what why did this take solong. If
addiction is such a big problem, then why didn't doctors
and governments go down this route earlier? Well because of
Nixon ben yeh, that's I'm just kidding, because not just
because it's because of things that were put in place
(29:22):
during the Nixon administration though, about classifying Schedule one drugs
with hallucinogens other even marijuana. Uh, some of the uses
of th HC in high enough doses can be hallucinogens.
And there are all these drugs that were placed under
this restrictive Schedule one tier. And uh, I think that's
(29:43):
why because doctors nobody wants there there, you know, prestigious
university or wherever you're going to be conducting studies to
be you know, using illegal substances, right, because Schedule one
is bad business here here in the US, drugs are
classified according to these groups that are for some reason
(30:06):
called a schedule, which has to be so confusing if
you've never heard of it. So they're like schedule to
Schedule three. Schedule one is the worst of the bunch.
No medical use right, no medicinal value. Yeah, what highly
highly addictive, high likelihood of of health effects, right of
(30:27):
of dilatorious effects on your health. There's something I can't
remember the exact wording, but the biggest one is no
medical use, right, there's no reason to prescribe it. And
certain things have in the past been miss placed in
that schedule or moved, but it's very, very difficult right
to get that changed. And of course there are conspiracy theories,
(30:51):
especially if you go back to the idea of control,
several of which you can hear in our earlier shows. Yeah,
we highly recommend you check it out. What do we
do we did, We did the marijuana conspiracy, did a
little bit on it. I don't think we've done an
audio show on it. No, there are special and d
MT just about whether or not there's a whole another
realm that you can access through that drug. And why
(31:13):
so many people taking d MT tend to report the
same or very similar experiences energy beings or the gnomes,
the machine els or the spirit machines. But again, and
I would just like to say, we are not encouraging
anyone to go out and do these things. Yeah, consult
your doctor, don't do it illegally. It's not It just
(31:36):
seems so ironic and terrible and unfair, I know, for
someone who has a problem that they feel might be helped,
you know, uh, and then find themselves in jail or
even prison for attempting to do it. And unfortunately that
is that is a possible consequence. Also, Matt, neither of
(31:57):
us are doctors. No, don't think you're a doctor. Roll
is more of a doctor of love, you know. But
so we we know that other people have experimented with this.
Let's talk about Bill Wilson, one of the founders of
Alcoholics Anonymous. He tried LSD in a study and it
inspired him, in part to start Alcoholics Anonymous, and he
(32:22):
even told other members of the organization to try it out.
But however, the fellowship at large disagreed because and I
see how this is, this is a valid point to them,
They said, the the idea of treating those who cannot
control their substance use with another substance seemed then is
now heretical. Uh. The link between spirituality and sobriety, however,
(32:43):
remains a mainstay of the modern a recovery thing, which
is interesting because Bill Wilson said that he had a
mystic experience like a spiritual experience, and that story comes
to us by a writer named Kelly board Debt writing
for The Fix. So if we look at that the
politics of alcoholics anonymous or at least that's the opinion
(33:06):
that piece may have held back some progress on LSD.
Now that's a very small part of it, of course,
because as you said, the seventies, the the scheduling of
stuff is really what was a hindrance to this kind
of research. But these aren't the only things holding back
these studies. Let's look an example. Dr John Halpern. He's
(33:27):
the head of the Laboratory for Integrative Psychiatry at the
McLean Hospital. He's running an m d M A cancer study. Well,
he told the New York Times, quote, what drug company
is going to invest millions in a substance widely available
in our flora and fauna? Government regulations are predictively tight. Also,
stigma looms large for those interested scientists. Okay, so that
(33:52):
sounds like there are a couple of different things going
on there. One it's there. This seems like there's not
much of a financial incent to especially if something's already
on a schedule, to to pay for it. Yeah, because
you can go out and pick it. Is what this
guy is saying, why would you pay for it outside?
Why would you monetize ayahuasca or something right, uh? And
(34:13):
then or what would be the use? And then it
also sounds like the strict government regulations up the price
tag even more. The stigma part is interesting to me
because academic stigma is such a big deal, and more
so than people know outside of the Ivory Tower. It's
chilling to wonder how many legitimate things have been shut
(34:34):
down because they didn't fit with the current orthodoxy of
a given discipline. Or we're just chosen not to even
be be looked into by someone because they were afraid
of that stigma. And but there's another reason here too,
and I think that's a great point. You don't want
to risk your career for something that ends up being malarkey. Right.
(34:55):
There is another point here, though, that is exciting dangerous territory.
We we mean, the human species, don't know a lot
about how many of these drugs work. I mean, m
d m A doesn't just show promise for cancer. It
shows promise for uh, post traumatic stress disorder treatment. Right,
But like the rest of these drugs, it has side
effects that we have yet to comprehend. And and the
(35:18):
analogy it makes me think of is it might be
the equivalent of trying to shave with a chainsaw. I mean,
you're gonna you're gonna get the hair off, but what
else will you lose in the process? Or So, if
you want to learn more about all of this stuff,
there are a lot of places you can go. One
of them is MAPS dot org. That's the Multidisciplinary Association
(35:42):
for Psychedelic Studies again, that's MAPS, m APS dot org. Yes,
and we have a question for you as well, listeners.
Do you think this research has been actively suppressed? We
hear this sometimes in stories that relate to uh, you know,
the the idea of cure for HIV or a cure
(36:03):
for cancer. Is there is there a silver bullet cure
for addiction that was being suppressed? And if so, why
we know there's a stigma for scientists. We know, you know, Matt,
as you said that the anti drug culture of the
seventies in the in the West, at least in the States,
held this back. But as that changes, are we going
to see more stuff? Or because we want to be
fair to the other side, Matt, or is this a
(36:25):
bunch of bunk by people who want to get paid
to trip acid. Right, But before we move on, let's
make an important point here. We want to make this
abundantly clear. While we might be joking around about some
aspects of this kind of stuff, we are by no
means cavalier about the horrors of addiction. Statistically speaking, it
(36:49):
is quite possible that someone listening to this show right
now has some sort of relationship with an addiction, whether
it's your own addiction, whether it's the addiction of someone
else you know, right, And this is a disease. This
is not again, this is not someone just being crappy,
(37:11):
you know what I mean? There there is a there's
a reason for this, there's a physiological reason. This is
not an attitude. And the best thing that we can do,
we again being the human species, of course, is to
attempt to help anyone in that kind of situation and
(37:31):
ways to treat it right. And if you yourself need
some sort of you know, you need some sort of help,
don't know what to do? Then now more than ever,
although I hate to steal that line, it is possible
to find help. So please. I know it's probably a
corny cliche thing that people say, but a lot of
(37:52):
corny and cliche. Things are corny and cliche because they
are true. Please, it is easy now, easier now than ever,
to to find some sort of light in the darkness.
With that in mind, and in pardon the soapbox, what
do you think about doing some listener mail? Absolutely been
(38:15):
I've got one right here, and this is kind of
a long one, listeners, So Ben and I are going
to switch back and forth and tell you all about it.
This is a message from Dan, and Dan says, Hey, there,
I'm a longtime fan of how Stuff Works, but I've
only recently started listening to your particular podcast. I've listened
to s Y s K that stuff you should know
(38:38):
right back from two thousand eight, back when I was
but a wee lad of fourteen, but I've rarely felt
motivated to contact Josh and Chuck. Well, hey, you should
contact them, dude. They'll probably listen to you. They're pretty kill,
especially after the move over towards antisocial media. Your show. However,
I've only just discovered suffice it to say that I
haven't been seen without earphones, and since then, and with
(39:01):
a myriad of other videos left to check out, I've
been info binging and we uh, We're gonna go through
parts of this story here Dan uh So. Dan said,
from a very young age, I've always just been so
into learning, learning about anything I could, discovering at first
how stuff works, then later stuff you should gave me
(39:21):
plenty and plenty to think about. And I certainly got
into thinking, but as anyone who knows me knows, with me,
there's always been a yearning for something more than just thinking.
I got it first into psychedelics, then deeply into philosophy,
a stud a philosophy of religion, uh, biology, chemistry, geography,
critical thinking at a level which, from what I can guess,
is sort of like high school for you guys. It
(39:43):
was at college where I first discovered critical thinking, which
leads me back to the point of my email. And
then he goes on to summarize just a little bit
about how he passes A levels, got into a good university,
and he realized that he didn't just like learning and
(40:03):
something was missing right because he wanted to study, uh,
something other than philosophy. But then he decided he needed
to study philosophy, so he went to the department and
asked them if he could study in their department to
my delight. They said that I'd impressed them so much
in their interview that they love to have me as
a student there in their faculty. But I'd have to
(40:26):
wait until the next year because there's no aya i'd
be able to catch up on what I had already missed.
I was devastated. Before long, everything hit the fan. It
went down the pan, out the window, to the dogs,
and spread around in a few other areas. The fan
was powerful. It got very messy. I won't go into
the details because I could write you ten emails about why, what, who, where?
But I found myself with a pretty bad heroin addiction.
(40:49):
And I'll summarize a little bit here. Uh. He ended
up eventually dropping out of university, and he decided to
go to rehabilitation, and he had a lot of help
from his parents or pushing on that, and he was
relatively isolated. And in this time he began focusing on
what he was hearing and remembering lots of stuff he'd
(41:12):
forgotten in his addiction. I'll pick it up here, remembering
back the philosophy and books such as Manufacturing Consent by
Noam Chomsky, the no Logo by Naomi Klein, as well
as existentialist and dystopian literature like Nausea by Sartre, Fear
and Trembling by Kirka, Guard Human, All Too Human by Nietzsche,
and of course Brave New World in N four And
(41:33):
he says, after leaving rehab and after many relapses, right
up until basically the time I found your podcast a
few weeks ago, I find myself now writing this email,
remembering back to my A levels and thinking to myself
how critical thinking classes were an odd thing to find
back then. This is why I'm emailing you. I am
writing to thank you for confronting me with the power
(41:55):
of critical thinking and helping me to remember why I
was so fascinated with knowledge to begin with. And Dan
goes on to say, thinking in itself is half of
my problem. I over analyzed and overthink to the point
that I have no firm ground to establish myself upon.
But in discovering your podcast, I've learned some new things,
been reminded of a lot I've learned before, but most importantly,
(42:17):
been inspired to go out and learn more. I know
I have the power to shape my life with knowledge, thoughts,
and ideas, but I had forgotten I don't want you
to feel responsible in case I trip up again. But
it is in this reignition of my passions I'm able
to say no to heroin once more. This time, five
or six weeks ago, I was laying in a squat
injecting any vein I could find, with no friends, no family,
(42:40):
no values, morals or any hope, just an iPod. And
today I stid proud, saying that even though it's early
days again, I found the courage to pick myself up
off the floor yet again. It doesn't matter if you
fall over as long as you can stand up afterwards.
You know, Dan, we we can't read the whole letter,
and they're probably parts that we shouldn't read, but uh,
(43:01):
this this is uh, this is a powerful thing, and
we I know that I can say. I can't I
can't speak for everybody on the show, but I can
definitely say that keep going, man. I hope that when
you hear this this this is um a few months
old now, but I hope when you hear this episode
(43:21):
that you're able to, you know, lift your chin up
and think about the amazing role you're on, the amazing streak. Yeah, yeah,
I keep keep going strong, Dan, I think maybe you
give Ben and Ben and I a little too much
credit there, for sure, But we are certainly glad that
you appreciate what we're doing. What we're doing here, and
(43:42):
we appreciate the effort that you're putting in every day.
So keep going, man, and uh, we'll be here. So
keep listening. We hope we'll be here, yes, But and
also for for anybody else listening again, there are there,
There is light at the end of the tunnel, and
and we hope that you have enjoyed this episode despite that,
(44:04):
this is despite it being a very heavy subject um.
And we will keep you updated as we learn more
about the legal status of hallucinogens used to treat addiction
and the upcoming studies, because there are a lot that
are still out there. The one thing I'm super hooked
on is caffeine, and I haven't found any study about that.
(44:25):
You and me both, buddy, You and me both, and
probably most people actually want to look around, I don't
know how many people. I don't think there are many
of that aren't addicted to caffeine here. I don't know
how we would do this job without it. Yeah, yeah,
you know, it's strange out One one thing for anybody
who is contemplating twitting caffeine. Uh, you know, I guess,
(44:46):
do do what you will, but do be careful. If
you get the caffeine headaches and you take a pain
reliever to stop those headaches, check the pain reliever first
because a lot of them contain caffeine as well. Uh.
And those caffeine headaches are real. I have tried a
couple of times to stop, and man, I get splitting
headaches when I don't have enough. That's terrifying. So anyway, wait,
(45:11):
what what is that noise? I'm not sure, but I
think it means it's time for our movement with normal. Hey, Neil,
how's it going? Man? It's going okay, how are you?
We're doing all right? Pretty pretty heavy subject here today.
But but there's there's an inspiring thing or possible good news.
You know, if we have if we have this ability
(45:33):
being civilization, not the three of us, but if we
have this ability to help people out of an addiction,
you know, it's it's food for thought for sure. What
do you think? Yeah? I mean one thing that occurred
to me when you guys were talking about alternatives for
treating serious addictions, like like heroin and opiate addiction. Um,
(45:54):
how you know there aren't a ton of inroads being
made to alternatives and things like a methodone And it
kind of got me thinking about this documentary I saw
years ago called Methodonia that's sort of about like how
many methodone clinics are privately owned and almost treated like franchises,
like of a McDonald's or something, And so there's a
lot of profit, there's a lot of money to be
(46:14):
made in in that kind of treatment, and you know,
to your point of like, well, are are they really
trying to get people off it? Are they just substituting
one addiction for another? And a lot of people that
that take methodon end up taking it, you know, for
the rest of their lives or for a very coolent time.
And it kind of got me doing a little internet
rabbit holing, and I found this article from the Boston
Globe from last year about how this private equity firm
(46:36):
Bank Capital spent seven hundred million dollars acquiring a chain
of methodone clinics in the Boston area. And it just,
I mean not to say that because someone's making a
profit on something that means necessarily an insidious thing, but
It just does kind of get you thinking, especially when
there are you know, more natural alternative I did not
know that they were privatized. Yeah, it's a mix, but
(46:57):
I mean there's definitely a large, a large contingent of
private methodical Well, I guess from a business perspective, it
sounds terrifying to say it, but from a business perspective,
there is a built in demand. Yeah. No, this might
be one of the this is the worst moment we've
had with you. You got me internet rabbit holing. But
(47:20):
while I was doing that, I did receive a call
saying that I want a free trip to the Bahamas,
So I may not be back next week to have
another one of these downer moments. Wait, oh man, wait, wait,
don't don't leave us. It's a bitter sweet don't know. Man.
You can skype. You can skype, man, we can skype
in our producer. Yeah, let's try it. We're on the
(47:40):
we're on the forefront. I am going to check out that.
I'm going to check out that issue about privatization of
methodone clinics. And also no no offense to know, but
I hope that if you do go on a cruise,
it's it's not too long because you know you're part
of the show, right, or just take us with you, right,
(48:02):
or take us with you right, and listeners, you are
also part of the show, and in our opinion, the
best part of the show. So I think it's wrong
for us to say we hope you enjoyed this podcast
as much as we enjoyed making it. But we do
hope that this piqued your interest and that you found, um,
you found something worthwhile or something you want to look
(48:22):
into more. We'd like to hear from you. You can
find us on Facebook and Twitter, and we have a website.
Stuff they don't want you to know dot com. Yeah, uh,
it's all about the journey when you're typing, I guess
I know. On that website you can see everything that
we have ever done, all of it, all the audio podcasts,
(48:42):
all the videos, everything, and so many great pictures of
you and me, buddy, oh man, I forgot about those.
But if you can get past the pictures of our
of our but ugly mugs, you might find some stuff
in there that's pretty interesting. That's right. If you want
to write to us, you don't want to do the
social media thing. We understand go ahead and send us
(49:04):
an email. We are conspiracy at how stuff works dot com.
From one on this topic, another unexplained phenomenon, visit YouTube
dot com slash conspiracy stuff. You can also get in
touch on Twitter at the handle at conspiracy stuff
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Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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