Psychedelics: The Manifested Mind, Part 3

What are psychedelics? How have these substances influenced human minds and culture? What exactly do they invoke in the brain and how could a renaissance of scientific study into their properties improve our lives? In this series of Stuff to Blow Your Mind episodes, Robert and Joe explore the world of entheogens. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, are you
welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind? My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part three of our exploration of psychedelics. These compounds that

(00:23):
lead to the mind manifesting experiences which we've been describing
in the past couple of episodes. Now, if you're just
tuning in, we recommend that you probably should go and
check out the previous two episodes. First, this is probably
one it's not best to jump in midstream, right, Yeah,
it's a continuous, though at times meandering journey. The history

(00:43):
of psychedelics not an all inclusive history, and so we've
stressed multiple times, you know, there's no way that we
can cover all of the studies, all the curious tidbits
of history, all the various um traditional uses of psychedelic substances.
So certainly we implore you to to check out some
of the sources we've been ation to hear and explore
them for yourselves, as well as you know, additional resources. Right,

(01:04):
and so in the previous episodes we mentioned some books
that have been part of our guides on the way through.
I know you've been enjoying some of the works of
Terrence McKenna and Michael Pollen as well. Been reading on that. Yeah.
Michael Polland's most recent book, How to Change Your Mind,
is a great book about psychedelics that covers a lot
of the same ground as some some history, some science,
and especially this recent renaissance in psychedelic research and how

(01:27):
it there's renewed interest I think since like the early
to mid two thousand's, especially about the clinical significance of psychedelics,
how they could actually be used to treat mental conditions, addictions,
various problems people have, UH, and that they're not just
a recreational drug, though there are also plenty of people

(01:47):
who would make the case that it might not be
a bad thing to use them recreationally. We're we're not
going to try to evangelize or demonize either way or
recommend that you use them. We just want to be descriptive, right,
But we will we will discus us some of these
viewpoints that are brought up regarding UH, the beyond medicinal
uses of psychedelics, UH and UH as far as the

(02:09):
modern stuff, like again we're living in an exciting time
when they're they're all these these current studies going on,
and we're revealing more and more about how psychedelics can
be used to uh to help treat various UH problems,
psychological problems, addictions, etcetera. We're probably gonna get into most
of that in the following episode. This episode is largely

(02:29):
going to deal with some of the original studies that
we're taking place, especially in the nineteen fifties. Yeah, uh so, Yeah,
this is a thing that comes as a surprise to
a lot of people who, you know, if you think
about the the origins of the drug war, the counterculture
of the nineteen sixties, and I don't know, maybe you
have some various ideas about the square nineteen fifties, it
might come as a shock to you that there was

(02:50):
a flourishing body of psychedelic research going on during the
nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties, especially focusing on LSD
and the treatment of things like alcohol is him in
the nineteen fifties and then later the use of psilocybin
and various types of research in the early to mid
nineteen sixties. YEA, Psychedelics did not just emerge from a

(03:10):
van at Woodstock and start corrupting the youth of America.
Uh Now, now, before we go any further, I do
want to take a step back for just a little bit,
and I wanted to talk about about fun Guy or
fungi if you will, Um, just in fungi if you're
making a pizza. Isn't that the Italian way to say it.

(03:31):
I've also watched like British documentaries where they for for fungi,
but I'm I'm more of a fun guy, so I
like go like go for I tend to go for
fun Guy. Let's go with fun Guy, all right? So, um,
I just want to take you a step back and
just talk about just how weird and wonderful the entire
Kingdom of fun Guy really is. Yeah. Well, and we
should say the reason for that, of course, if you've

(03:52):
been with us the last two episodes, is that of
all the psychedelics that we've looked at, the most focus
has been on psilocybin mushrooms, right, and even LSD is
derived from urgat, which is a fun Guy. So so
that so the the fungal element here is is very
rich and second, so yeah, the kingdom fung gui because

(04:14):
fungi are their own kingdom. Uh. We often associate them
with plants in kind of an informal way. Um, you know,
but we and they were considered plants of until the
later half of the twentieth century. But there's something different,
of course. Uh. They're thought to outnumber plants species on
a scale of ten to one, and they all descended
from a single species that derived from a common ancestor

(04:36):
with animals about eight hundred million to nine hundred million
years ago. Is it true that, uh, phylogenetically, humans are
more closely related to fungi than to plants. I think
that's that that is, that is what I have read,
and and it's an amazing thing to think about. It's
also something that you know, it's that fact that leads
some people to wonder about our relationship with fung gui. Um.

(05:00):
You know why in some cases we have this uh,
this close relationship because ultimately fun guy have a lot
more in common with us than they do with plants. Um.
And and again that's interesting considering the close relationship who
we have with them, and not only us, so there
are other animals as well. I mean think that the
leaf cutter ants that stand out is one of the
most impressive fung gui dependent species due to their practice

(05:24):
of fungal agriculture, their mushroom farmers. Yeah, because you think
about how humans use fun guy. We've certainly been focusing
on psychedelics, but certainly fun guy factor into our cuisine,
into our medicines, both in in major ways, but in
also in ways we don't you know, major and obvious ways,
but also in ways we maybe don't think about as much.

(05:45):
Because certainly you think about cooking and mushrooms, you think
about culinary mushrooms that you buy at the store, which
I love mushrooms one of my favorite ingredients. Yeah, of course,
not every edible mushroom can be cultivated. I got to
learn about this over the weekend. I went with a
lie S servalists on a on a mushroom foraging walk
and we get to pick a few different mushrooms that
cannot be uh cultivated at least can't be cultivated in

(06:08):
a you know, a dependable manner, and got to bring
some home and eat them. Is that why chantrell's are
so expensive? You can't grow them on a farm. Yeah? Um, well,
I forget the exact species you know, but there are
several varieties like that where if if local restaurant is
serving them, they have to depend on foragers bringing them
in and selling them. And so a lot of a
lot of foragers, a lot of mushroom enthusiasts kind of

(06:32):
pay for their hobby by selling their mushrooms to local restaurants. Interesting,
but yeah, so there's that level. I would obviously we
eat them, but they're also you know, ingredients in many
different foods, especially modern processed foods, and they're an important part,
an essential part of the fermentation process yeast. Yeah, and
you don't have to be drinking some sort of weird

(06:54):
mushroom tea to be partaking of medicinal fun guy, because
of course we have penicillin to get it, which you
know is I would love to do a future episode
of our other podcast, Invention on penicillin because in terms
of fungal inventions or discoveries however you want to describe it,
like that is that is a major one and and

(07:14):
it is totally fun. Guy depended it came from mold growth, right,
which of course is a fungus. And then on top
of that, you know, we also have we talked about
the microbiome a lot, but we also have a microbiome
which is a small but significant portion of the human
bodies overall microbiome. UH Fungi also play a crucial role
in the nutrient exchange of trees, growing around their roots

(07:36):
like fungal gloves and exchanging nitrogen for sugars. Uh and
this forms the basis of what some researchers call the
wood wide web, which is kind of that that's a
little too cute. That's a little it's a little too cute,
because ultimately it's like really just mind blowingly weird to
think about, because we're talking about a fungal network of hype.

(08:00):
Remember that a mushroom. We we often think of the
mushroom as the thing itself, but the mushroom is just
the fruiting body um and the you know, the the
spores viewing death emergence of a larger organism. And so
the these this network of hi fi underground and growing
around the trees and between trees. It allows for the
plants to distribute resources such as sugar, nitrogen, and phosphorus,

(08:24):
you know, between one tree and another. Uh and by
some definitions, this comprises a form of communication these types
of thinking can get really psychedelic on their own. Oh absolutely, Um,
mycologist Paul stainments, for instance, who did we mention the
previous several times? So yeah, he's he's like a mushroom

(08:46):
answer for everything. Guy, uh, you know, very important figure
and modern mycology. And he's gone so far as to
to suggest, according to Michael Pollen in his book, that
these networks are in some sense conscious, that they're aware
of their environment and they're able to respond to challenges accordingly,
and Paul and says that that initially he thought this
was mere metaphor you know that clearly statements is just

(09:07):
being overly enthusiastic and metaphoric about what's going on with
the systems, but that he thinks that growing evidence actually
suggested it might be there might be more involved here. Well,
I think this depends heavily on just simply what you
mean when you use the word conscious, because there I
think you can definitely make the case that mushrooms, in

(09:27):
very interesting and surprising ways, are aware of their environments,
you know, able to respond to to stimuli and stuff
like that. I think it would be much harder to
make the case that, you know, the thing that we
think of as like the hard problem of consciousness, meaning
that it is having a subjective experience. There's something that
it's like to be the mushroom. H I'm not saying

(09:50):
that that's not true, but I don't know what the
evidence for that. I think it's much more of a
stretch to make that case. Now. On a on a
similar similar lines, though, I got to your Eduardo Cone,
Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University UH speak on
basically the same topic at the twenty nineteen World Science Festival.

(10:12):
He's the author of a book titled How Forests Think,
and he's worked extensively with Amazonian people in his work,
especially considering concerning their use of psychedelic substances. But he's
focused on the same issue of like the use of
fungal networks in the soil within forests as a as
a type of communication or even thought. Yeah, he gets

(10:33):
into this as well. So just to give you an idea,
because it's ultimately, you know, kind of a heady concept,
but but it's basically this idea that not that you
have non human entities that quote unquote think via an
ability to represent, produce and interpret signs interesting and so
that this is uh. This is a quote from his
book How Forests Think. Quote. Life is a constitutively semiotic.

(10:58):
That is, life is through and through the product of
sign processes. What differentiates life from the inanimate physical world
is that life forms represent the world in some way
or another, and these representations are intrinsic to their being.
What we share with non human living creatures, then, is
not our embodiment, as certain strains of phenomenological approaches would hold,

(11:20):
but the fact that we all live with and through signs.
We all use signs as canes that represent part of
the world to us in some way or another. In
doing so, signs make us what we are. Interesting semiotic
definition of life. I don't know if I've ever encountered
that before. And I took a class on semiotics. Oh yeah, No,
I was that kind of Weirdough. Well, I'm very interested

(11:43):
in his his thoughts and his work. I'd I'd love
to actually see about having him on the show in
the future. But like I said, he's worked extensively with
Amazonian peoples and explore their use of ayahuasca, and he
said that Amazonians use several technologies including psychedelics, but also
dreams to connect with the mind of the forest, and
he says that these approaches break down the way language

(12:06):
tells us what we are. They help them find a
path forward, path of healing and problem solving. And he
also pointed out that the Shamans of the Amazon like
basically have a message for the rest of the world.
They want us to know that the world is a
living world and that we have to connect ourselves with
the mind of the forest to save ourselves from the
planetary depression that we are now entering into. And I

(12:29):
found this really interesting because this is UH, even though
Cone to my knowledge that never mentioned Terence McKinnon his work,
but some of this like lines up with the messages
that mckinna had in The Food of the Gods and
his other work regarding UH. This idea of an archaic revival,
a necessary reconvergence with the natural world through psychedelics and

(12:51):
UM and at least in mckinna's definition, and overall, you
know Bohemian thread of human cultures to save us u
from the you know, the doom of a nature deprived,
ego driven dominator culture, to save us from silent running. Yeah,
yeah in a way. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, there it matches
up with this theory. I mean this, uh, this viewpoint

(13:12):
of modern life will come back to this that you
see this throughout a lot of the a lot of
psychedelic literature and also just sort of counterculture nineteen sixties messaging,
including Silent Running, which is very much a product of
that time, the science fiction film that we've discussed previously
on the show. Now Cone mentioned in the world Science
Festivally he thinks even our modern fascination with psychedelics maybe

(13:34):
a symptom of our disconnection with nature. And he says
the solution isn't simply to to you know, take a
psyche cadelic substance, but to rather live psychedelically, to live live,
to be in the emergent mind. What exactly do you
think he meant by that quote to, like, what is
the emergent mind being there? Um my understanding, And like

(13:55):
I said, perhaps we can get him on the show
to discuss these these topics in greater depth. But I
think he's he's talking about this basic idea that again
you see again and again in the among advocates of
psychedelic that there's there's something wrong with modern humans, that
we're cut off from each other, that we're we're sort
of in these little individual cells of the mind, and

(14:16):
we are in many cases have great difficulty in being
part of some sort of a larger system. Uh, you know,
it's it maybe a bit elaborate to you know, to
think of it. I mean, I don't know if I
would I would describe it. And my understanding is like
an emergent mind, you know. But but but that's kind
of the vibe I get from the idea that like
we're we're cut off from each other, that we don't

(14:37):
understand each other, we don't understand nature. Uh, you know,
we're all wrapped up in our own egos, and if
we could break through those boundaries, uh, that we would
have a better relationship with each other and with the world.
Like so often in the world of psychedelics and stuff
coming from psychedelic enthusiasts, that that's the kind of statement

(14:58):
that is either true, really profound, or extremely banal. Yeah,
I mean, I yeah, I get it, because I know
a lot of people out there are probably shaking their
hands as saying like, well, that just sounds like hippy nonsense,
and it's not even new hippie nonsense. It's hippie nonsense
I've heard time and time again. But for my own part,
you know, I think, yeah, you can be overly optimistic
about a lot of this stuff. But on the other hand,

(15:21):
you know, you look at the literature, the scientific literature
that that is that shows us and is continuing to
show us what psychedelics can do. I think at this
point it's you know, it's it's more a question of, like,
at what level are psychedelics useful? Uh, you know, is
it is it purely in the clinical world, Is it
purely among you know, people who are suffering from some

(15:43):
condition or another, or does it go beyond that? You know?
I I think it depends on who's advocating on where
that line should be drawn. I mean, some people draw
it all the way at the horizon. Where you draw it,
I think it's clearly a source of the conflict that
led to the demonization of psychedelics and to the sort
of closing of the psychedelic research regime in the in

(16:04):
the mid to late nineteen sixties. Right. Yeah, Well, on
that note, let's let's go to the nineteen sixties. In fact,
let's go to the nineteen fifties. Okay, let's go. Let's
go back. In fact, let's go to the nineteen let's
do it. I'll take you up, and that we'll go
all the way back to the forties. And let's just
discuss twentieth century psychedelic research itself. So, as we've discussed,

(16:25):
most of these substances are nothing. Humans have used them
for thousands of years, and even the synthesized substance LSD,
of course is derived from a good fun guy that
has been around forever as well. Right, But there was
certainly a period of time between Albert Hoffman's nineteen forty
three bicycle ride and Nixon's Controlled Substance Act of nineteen
seventy in which there were tons of studies that examined

(16:49):
psychedelics and and and especially LSD in many cases because
it was more readily available at the time. One reason, also,
I think, is that the pharmaceutical manufacturer that Albert hof
On worked for in the nineteen thirties and forties, uh Sandoz,
which I guess held the patent on LSD, was just
giving it out like candy. Basically, they were I think

(17:10):
they were trying to find uses for it and their
Their method of doing that was like, well, let's just
give it for free to tons of researchers and they'll
find a good way to use it. Yeah, it's kind
of like in the Lorax, the sneed was invented, which
everyone needs. Like, if you invented this thing that clearly
has some sort of use, but you're not exactly sure
how to market it, You're not sure what the the
uses for it, you you kind of just let everybody

(17:31):
play with it so you can figure out how you're
going to make your billions of dollars off of it.
But I don't say that to undermine the fact that
it really does seem like some researchers were finding extremely
promising clinical uses for LSD in the nineteen fifties. Yeah,
particularly in how they might be used to treat addiction, depression, UM,
obsessive compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, autism, and end of life anxiety.

(17:55):
So in his book, Michael Pollen chats with Stephen Ross
m D at the n y U Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study,
which of course comes back to that end of life
anxiety question that was explored earlier. I guess we'll explore
that more, probably in the next episode. Yeah, we will.
But in the book, uh Ross mentions to Pollen that
you know, these efforts involved roughly forty research participants in

(18:17):
more than a thousand clinical papers. So when we're talking
about LSD studies of of the of the nineteen fifties,
for instance, you know, we're not talking about where we're
gonna highlight a few isolated studies, but we're not talking
about like just a study here, study there. You know,
there was a lot of research going on. It was huge.
It wasn't just a blip. Yeah, And initially, reach the

(18:39):
researchers thought that LSD and later psilocybin, that they might
be used to understand psychosis, as they believe that individuals
who are using these substances to play displayed similar thoughts
and behavior, And so clinicians also thought that, well, you
could take one of these substances yourself and therefore get
a taste of what a psychotic episode is like and

(19:01):
then be better able to empathize with a patient exactly.
And in this vein the same compounds we now refer
to as psychedelic were then referred to by many clinicians
as psychoto mimetics. Mimicking the state of psychosis, so your
therapists could take this in order to understand what you
were going through. Now, key figure from this period, uh English, Uh,

(19:23):
psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond entered the picture, and he figured that Okay,
if you had a substance like mescaline, and if it
could if it could induce this sort of symptom, that
these sort of symptoms in in a in a human
who took it, then perhaps uh, you know, schizophrenia was
due to a chemical and balance in the brain, which
is kind of you know, ultimately an eye opening hypothesis. Right,

(19:46):
If if this substance makes my brain do this, then
perhaps what this patient's brain is doing is due to
something you know, very chemical in nature as well, something
that could be addressed perhaps with another chemical. Well, yeah,
I mean, and I think the middle of the twentieth
century period was actually a very important time for understanding
the role of physical causes in mental phenomena. Like I mean,

(20:10):
you know, there was of course the rise of Skinnerism
like B. F. Skinner and behaviorism, which you can have
lots of criticisms about. Maybe it doesn't take into account
cognition and the mind and uh, enough about what our
thoughts and emotions mean, because it was just about what
can we do to control and measure external behaviors because
that's the only thing we have access to as scientists.

(20:31):
That that might not be the right approach, but it
was certainly useful in some ways to kind of clear
out I think a lot of the uh, the kind
of almost religious, kind of metaphysical baggage that had been
coming along for the ride with some versions of psychology
up until then, with you know, Freud and Young and
all that. Yeah. It so so you know, ultimately we

(20:52):
have this this push for biochemical answers to you know,
concerning mental issues, and this prepared alls the the the
young field of neurochemistry, leading in time to our modern
understanding of neurotransmitters and their role in our mental states,
leading to the discovery of serotonin and the development of
s sr I antidepressant drugs. But then, you know, some

(21:16):
also made the connection between the symptoms of psychedelic use
and delirium tremens or the d T s Uh. This
is of course associated with alcohol abuse, alcoholism, alcohol withdrawal.
I think so like if you you're used to extensive
alcohol consumption and then somebody stops, they might experience these

(21:36):
uh negative symptoms that have been referred to as the
delirium tremens. Yeah. So this led to a to the
I think by modern from a modern viewpoint, kind of
a weird idea, a weird seeming idea that you could
use LSD to sort of shock alcoholics into sobriety and
so osmond and a gentleman by the name of Abram
Hoffer conducted these studies with hundreds I think seven hundred

(21:58):
according to pollen uh alcoholics, and they found it effective
roughly half the time. You mean using LSD to treat alcoholics. Yes, yes,
And this particular study, by the way, was one of
the ones that caught the eyes of Stephen Ross decades
later as an example of the therapeutic potential of psychedelics

(22:20):
quote buried in plain sight. Um. But anyway, the the
original researchers here, they expected that the trips in question,
the psychedelic experiences in question, would be essentially just nightmare
fuel that would approximate the feelings of the d t s.
And this was seemingly based on physicians Sydney Katz's reports
that Paul and summarizes as being something like you'd you'd

(22:44):
see in an an anti LSD propaganda from the nineteen sixties,
just about how it's just just pure nightmare fuel and
you know, it was running from demons sort of a thing. Um.
But of course what happened is that they gave a
court in their study anyway, that they found that when
they gave these substances to people, they reported all manner
of things, beautiful things. Even so, there was definitely some anxiety,

(23:08):
some depression, some hallucination uh in individuals when they were
administered psychedelics, but most reported feelings that were described as
transcendental in nature, so that, for instance, an ability to
see one's self objectively, almost as if for the first time.
And so this would seem to be the experience or
this was possibly an experience that was was playing a

(23:30):
role in them then being able to cease their addiction.
And of course, outside of the black box of experience,
the research results spoke for themselves and indicated that, you know,
something was working here. So this opened up the idea
that there was something more to the experience and that
it might be utilized as a treatment method. Now I
know it was especially in Canada that that LSD treatment

(23:53):
for alcoholism was picked up, and I think I think
this one, this particular study was in Saskatchewan, I believe. Yeah, well,
I think that was where Humphrey Osmond was based for
a long time. But that another thing I think to
make clear is that it's it's not thought that just
giving somebody the drug triggers a change in the body

(24:13):
that defeats alcoholism. That that there's something important going on
by about the nature of the experience that people have
on psychedelics that contributes to their recovery and and staying
sober over time. Right right, Yeah, this sort of this
metaphorical shaking of the snow globe, as as some call it,

(24:34):
is playing a role in allowing, uh, some sort of
you know, curative therapy to take place. Now, I should
point out that in terms of this particular study, later
on in the early sixties, the Addiction Research Foundation in
Toronto set out to replicate these results with better controls,
and they failed to reproduce the you know, the same

(24:54):
robust results. Uh, And this ended up giving fuel to
critics of of LSD, but also porters again stressed the
importance of set and setting, right, I mean, this is
something that I guess we'll come back to the sentiment,
so all, I'll save my tangent here for later. But yeah,
we'll put a pin in that and just know that
we're gonna come back to the importance of set and
setting in research. But but still there there was enough

(25:15):
going on here that people were very encouraged, and by
the by the end of the nineteen fifties, LSD was
considered like a miracle cure for alcohol addiction. A lot
of people were excited about it, and Paulin points out
that one of the people that it was that ended
up getting excited about it was none other than Bill Wilson,
co founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Yeah, who who incidentally created

(25:37):
credited his own sobriety to a life changing mystical experience
he had on on belladonna, which also has psychoactive properties
and was used in a treatment in treatment at Town's
Hospital in New York City in nineteen thirty four. That's
when when he had the substance as part of the treatment.
And so you can see that in a lot of
the Alcoholics Anonymous messaging, like the idea of the the

(26:02):
idea of acknowledging a higher power, you know. I think
a lot of times people just interpret that as a
more traditional kind of like, you know, you need a
religion or something, especially if you're meeting in a church
basement or you know, or something. Yeah. But in fact,
it seems like this has something to do with the
common kinds of mystical experiences that people have on psychedelics,

(26:23):
where they, you know, they commune with some kind of
reality greater than themselves. They believe that they've encountered some
other being or some universal consciousness or the universe itself.
It might have something to do with the ego dissolution
that sometimes people experience on psychedelics. Wilson, by the way,
would later try LSD with some researchers in l A.

(26:45):
And he actually thought that it might prove very useful
in treating alcoholism, and that that it might even have
a place in a A. But others in the in
the organization struck down this idea, you know, for for
a few different reasons, one of which being that it
would perhaps m the like the messaging of the organization itself, right, like,
you know, that you would turn to another chemical um. Yeah,

(27:07):
And so for a time LSD assisted psychotherapy was considered
a powerful, legitimate and evidence based method for treating alcoholism
in Canada. Definitely, But maybe we should take a break
and then when we come back we can discuss some
problems with scientific research on psychedelics. Thank thank Alright, we're

(27:28):
back now. I think this is a good place to
start discussing the fact that there are widely acknowledged inherent
difficulties with doing rigorous scientific experiments on the effects of psychedelics.
And so one of these problems is the problem with
placebo control. Now, normally when you want to test and
see if a new drug works, you need to do

(27:50):
a placebo controlled test. You have to do this if
you want to sort out specific pharmacological efficacy versus the
placebo effect, you know, the effect that uh sometimes people
who are given a treatment, even if the treatment doesn't
have active ingredients, just the fact that they think they're
being treated appears to cause uh a feeling that their

(28:11):
condition has improved. They will report less, fewer negative symptoms
or something like that. So, yeah, I imagine you give
a hundred people a new anti nausea drug and then
fifty of them report their nausea going away. Was it
because the compound in the pill relieves nausea fifty of
the time, or could much shore all of that response
just be due to the placebo effect people thinking that

(28:32):
they're being treated. So if you placebo control your drug
trial to find out if there's a difference, subjects get
randomly sorted into multiple groups, with one group getting the
actual drug being tested and one group getting a pill
that has no active ingredients, then you might be able
to get a better idea. If the group who receives
the drug gets significantly more of a desired outcome than

(28:54):
the placebo group, then you can have confidence that the
drug probably actually works. So if you wanted to run
a placebo controlled test of whether, say, psilocybin helps people
kick in alcohol addiction and then stay sober for six months,
you'd want to run a test with people who actually
get psilocybin versus people who think that they might be

(29:14):
getting it but are actually getting a placebo. So why
is this a problem with psychedelics, Well, that's because of
the next issue, which is blinding. Uh So the thing
you've got to do to have an effective placebo controlled
test is blinding and double blinding. This is to avoid
response biases from subjects and from the people who are

(29:35):
carrying out the test. You have to blind the experiment,
meaning subjects don't know which group they're in, and the
people working with the subjects to conduct the experiment don't
know who's in what group. Psychedelics make this hard because
most of the time you can definitely tell whether you've
received a large dose of psilocybin versus a placebo. Right,

(29:56):
I mean, even even if the individual, the test subject
in question, and has no experience of psychedelic use, there's
a very good chance that they have been exposed to
some representation of it, some expectation of what the uh,
the the the the experience is going to be like,
just through media and culture. Yeah. Well, and the effect

(30:16):
of the drug tends to be so powerful on the
mind that it's nearly impossible for you to think, like, no,
I didn't get anything. I mean no, Like if if
you are becoming a Comets tale of disembodied consciousness, you
watch your ego dissolve like sugar and a stream, you're
probably part of the active test group. Right. But but yeah,
even but even if the effects are not that strong,

(30:39):
if the dosage is lower, like it will be undeniable. Yeah,
I mean, maybe not always because some people are very suggestible,
you know, But but the majority of the time people
are going to be able to tell what group they're in. Furthermore,
the experiment ers can usually tell if the subject they're
working with is on LSD or psilocybin versus a placebo,
like if you know, people who are on these drugs

(31:02):
tend to act a certain way that's pretty different than
people who are just getting a sugar pill. Now, there
are some ways of making this a little bit better.
For example, you can use an active placebo, which is
a placebo that does something to the body that the
subject will be able to sense. One example that has
been used in historical research is niacin, which causes physiological

(31:24):
effects like flushing of the face and tingling in the body.
But still a lot of subjects and experimenters can probably
still pretty easily tell the difference between if you've gotten
a large dose of psilocybin or LSD versus niacin. So
you still are going to have this blinding problem. But
then there's another problem that makes it worse, a problem

(31:44):
with conducting psychedelic research the same way you would conduct
other drug research. And that is as we mentioned a
minute ago, the importance of set and setting, And I
remember it was in the first episode, I think, where
we talked mostly about the importance of set and setting. Uh,
people's takeaways from psychedelic assisted therapy seem hugely dependent on

(32:04):
their expectations on the environment and on the guide. Yeah.
I think it was a Poulin who pointed out that
really the only person to ever take LSD without any
expectations of what it might consist of was Albert Hoffman himself. Yeah,
because he took it by accident and nobody knew what
it was yet. Yeah, that's funny. But I mean it's
clearly true that people's experiences on these drugs are highly

(32:28):
dependent on on priming and on stimuli from around them
and what they're told going in and all that kind
of stuff. Yeah, like, for instance, just maintaining a very
like calm therapeutic in a physical environment, having people interact
with you, you know, the researchers in question in a
likewise manner, that sort of thing. In other words, I

(32:50):
would say, to get the most clinical use and the
most positive effects out of these drugs, it seems like
you specifically want to do the opposite it of what
you normally do in a drug trial. You explicitly do
want to bias the subject's expectations and interpretations of their
drug experience in a way that suggests it will help

(33:11):
them with their problems. Yeah. So basically, yeah, if you're
doing a psilocybin study in which the individuals taking psilocybin
are going to be laying on a beam bag jair
for instance, listening to some ambient music and attended to
by you know, you know, very courteous therapists, you would
have to have the same situation going on with the
placebo group, and in doing that you have all of

(33:34):
these like situational effects that may well create like something
kind you know, certainly not the psychedelic experience itself, but
some sort of comforting, suggestible, um uh situation. But this
has also been invoked to explain some of the differences
in like some of the replication difficulties that people have
had with psychedelic experiments, because sometimes, you know, people in

(33:57):
these experiments are given psychedelics with a certain kind of
set and setting, and then the replication attempt it just
sort of gives them the psychedelics, but doesn't replicate the
set and setting and finds that, oh, in this in
this study that didn't replicate the original set and setting,
people are not getting nearly as positive a benefit. Uh,
And that just seems to show again how dependent the

(34:18):
experience is on set and setting. Well, it comes back
to like what the substance does that you know, and
these even these early researchers, they they you know, pretty
early on, we're convinced that it was not something that
the substance was doing to the body. It was what
it was the mind state it was creating. Exactly what
could be gain from that mindset. Yes, psychedelics seem to

(34:40):
be in into whatever extent that they are effective at
helping people and have clinical significance. They seem to be
more a facilitator of experiences than a direct action drug.
It's not that you take psilocybin and the compound curious
your alcoholism, but that taking psilocybin allows you to have
an experience of profound emotional significance that helps people overcome alcoholism.

(35:06):
It seems it's the experience that actually matters. So just say,
locking somebody in a sterile, uncomfortable white room, giving them
a shot of psilocybin without a therapist or guide present
is maybe not a very good recipe for getting the
most positive effects out of the drug. But this is
frustrating if you're like, you know, if you're used to
running drug tests, because it seems that when psychedelics have

(35:29):
a clinical significance, it is in some ways similar to
an active placebo. It just appears to be an extremely
effective active placebo. So yeah, there have been these kind
of difficulties over the years. Like I'd say, the bottom
line is that objective research is so important in medical science,
but the standard methods that we have for objective research

(35:50):
don't apply especially well to psychedelics, and some methods of
achieving objectivity appear to directly counteract the most powerful clinical
potentials of the compounds. Another problem we could talk about
from the history of psychedelic research is not a systematic
methodological obstacle, but it's more like a historical trend that

(36:12):
you know, we're not alone in observing other people who
observe this, which is that I would say, due to
the unique properties of these drugs, a lot of researchers
who focus on this subject area appear over time to
tend to lose objectivity and become more endorsers and enthusiasts

(36:32):
than objective scientists just trying to find out what's true. Well,
I mean, and I don't know to what extend. It's
a lot of them, but I guess the problem is
that the ones who do become certainly more noticeable voices
are often the loudest. Right now, and again, I want
to be clear, I'm not saying all people, all scientists
who work with psychedelics to this or maybe not, probably
not even most, but but but some significant numbers do

(36:54):
follow this path, right and and and and again, their
voices are the loudest. And in terms of loud the
psychedelic voices, few voices were louder than Timothy Learies. Um. So,
like one example of of of what you're talking about
here Timothy Leary's work on the Harvard psilocybin project in
the early sixties. Uh. Some of Lear's methodology there was

(37:17):
highly criticized, and it basically seems like he was intentionally
biasing the experiments to make psychedelics seem more clinically useful. Uh.
You know, which is a shame because the research does
actually suggest that they're useful. It's just the uh, you know,
he was being hasty. He was being hasty, he was
taking shortcuts for example. UM. An example of this is

(37:38):
the Concord prison experiment, which was aimed at studying recidivism
and inmates that were administered psilocybin, and uh, you know,
this is basically the ideas like if you give them psilocybin, like,
how are they going to successfully transfer into uh, you know,
back into normal everyday life or are they gonna wind
up in back in the prison system again? And so
he uh, you know, it sounds like a pretty interesting premise,

(38:02):
but then the execution was flawed. He looked at recidivism
rates ten months after release for the psilocybin takers, but
thirty months later for the control group. And of course
time is vital in all this because you're dealing with
somebody like returning to life. Uh, and so like the
I mean not just like month to month, but like
day to day, week to week is vital in any

(38:23):
kind of study having to do with recidivism. You know,
you know because like the first day back, you know, what,
what's somebody doing there be a visiting family or whatever.
It's it's the as the days go by, as the
weeks go by, as the months go by, they're gonna
have to potentially deal with greater temptation and he and
he was widely criticized by colleagues at the time for this. Yeah,
Richard Alpert, who was also known as Ramdas, would later

(38:47):
explain that, you know that the aim of the project
was solid and had a reasonable therapeutic model, but would
it would but it would have required long term application
and study, and Leary just didn't have the patients for
long term studies. Ultimately, this is something you see throughout
Leary's life. You know, this restlessness, this lack of patients, passion,

(39:08):
but then a tendency to rush things. And it's almost
like he had more system one thinking, you know, the
system to thinking. And of course, uh, this is not
the preferable balance for serious scientific inquiry right now. There
was another classic experiment from the golden years of psychedelic
research in the nineteen fifties and early sixties, and this
one I think we should look at for a minute

(39:29):
that this was done under the supervision of Timothy Leary's
Harvard psilocybin project, But it wasn't, I think directly carried
out by Leary. It was directly carried out by a
guy named Walter Panky. And this was the nineteen sixty
two experiment with the use of psilocybin to occasion mystical
experiences that were subjectively perceived as positive and valid by

(39:52):
religious people. And this is sometimes known as the Marsh
Chapel experiment or the Good Friday experiment because it took
place on Good Friday, nine seen sixty two. So Walter
Pankey at the time was a divinity student at Harvard
Divinity School. And the basic details went like this, So
you had twenty divinity students in the Boston area and
each got an injection before a Good Friday Service at

(40:15):
the Marsh Chapel of Boston University. Half got psilocybin, half
got an active placebo, which was niacin. And remember Nia's
intends to cause flushing and tinkling, so they would feel
something going on. And the basic findings were that the
students in the test group overwhelmingly reported positive and in
some cases, life changing religious experiences, and some later rated

(40:38):
this experiment Good Friday Service day as among the most
profound and significant experiences of their lives. But there were complications.
One subject on psilocybin had some kind of episode which
involved trying to leave the chapel to proclaim a religious message,
and he had to be tranquilized with thorazine. I think
they backed off with the franquilizing people with thorazine after

(41:02):
this experiment. And these were they These were the researchers,
not like the old church ladies right, who may also
keep thorazine on hand the pastor tranquilizing and so I
was like, I was wondering, you know, how did this
experiment hold up over time? What do people think looking
back on it. There have been some later attempts to
analyze and follow up on the experiment. One was by

(41:23):
Rick Doblin of of maps uh an organization. I don't
know if we've mentioned already, but I think you'll refer
to later. Yeah, it's the Multi Disciplinary Association for Psychedelic
Studies and they're they're involved in a number of research
efforts and involving psychedelics and also m D M a UM.
By the way, they also are involved in something called
the Zendo Project, which aims to promote proper psychedelic peer support,

(41:47):
especially for individuals, especially first timers who are having a
difficult trip. So I think they've like set up operations
that um major cultural festivities such as Burning Man before.
But I think this is a really in our project.
I like to see how it develops because I think
it's an important step. If you know, we're going to
see decriminalization of psychedelic substances in the United States, Oh yeah,

(42:10):
I mean this is something we should continue to explore
more as we go on. But I think, um, the
idea of having the proper guides who know what they're
doing is and is a very important part of what
might be considered legitimate psychedelic use. I mean, a lot
of the research on the clinical significance of psychedelic so
we should really stress is not just giving somebody a

(42:33):
compound and then leaving them alone, right, you know it is.
It is psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. So you might have a guide,
a psychiatrist or a psychologist or somebody who is experienced
in working with people. The therapist of some kind who
either like guides you through the experience itself or sort

(42:53):
of holds the space with you while you have your
experience and then later helps you talk through it and
go through the integration SSS. I think the idea of
having positively socially chaperoned and uh and sort of like
expert guided psychedelic experiences is a very important thing that
shouldn't be under emphasized, and it's present in a lot

(43:13):
of the traditional uses of psychedelics, Like when we talked
about the traditional uses with the curanderas in southern Mexico.
I mean that this wouldn't be you just take a
drug out in the void by yourself. I mean you
would be guided by someone who is a is a
religious leader. You would have a shaman and in these uh,
these test cases, you would have a therapist or you know,
or a researcher that was that was filling in for

(43:35):
that role. And then outside of the you know, the
traditional usage or the research or medicinal or psychotherapist usage,
there is still room for an individual like that, like
somebody that is guiding the experience and setting and attending
to set and setting. Yeah. Oh, but so that was
important to mention, but we did get sidetracked, so I

(43:55):
we're talking about Dublin. Yeah. Well, the follow up and
analysis of the Origin Channel marsh Chapel experiment from nineteen
sixty two. Rick Doblin followed up on it in the
nineteen nineties, and he made some criticisms of the original
studies methodology, Like he pointed out that there were the
problems you would expect with double blinding that we already
talked about earlier, um there were some imprecise questions and

(44:18):
the questionnaire given to subjects to evaluate their experience, and
a few other things, like the original study failed to
report the fact that one participant had to be tranquilized,
so it seems like something you probably should have mentioned.
And there was also the fact that, while on the
whole the students viewed their mystical experiences on psilocybin as
very positive and profound, many of them struggled with intense

(44:40):
bouts of fear and difficulty and negative emotions at some
point over the course of their trips, and this probably
should have been reported in more detail than it was,
though the experiences were positive overall, but also so. Dublin
conducted a twenty five year follow up with some of
the seminary students from the original study, and he confirmed
that they reported sustained profound positive effects from their religious

(45:05):
experiences with psilocybin. And I think it's really notable of
the marsh Chapel experiment that this was not like so
many of the studies that came before, research into how
to treat people's problems like addictions or mental illness, but
to use psychedelics in a way to enhance the experience
of so called healthy normals. This was a case where

(45:27):
you know, these people weren't like suffering and needing a treatment.
It was like, could they have a profound religious experience
that they deemed valid on with the aid of these substances.
And the answer appears to be yes. But that's a
very different question than most drug trials investigate, right right, Yeah,
I mean generally it is it is with the aim

(45:47):
of curing a particular malady, of seeing if something that
those substances useful in treating a particular condition or symptoms.
But this is more about, if anything, it's about treating
the human condition itself, right, Uh, seeing what effect it
could have on just sort of baseline human experience. Yeah,
And I think maybe we should take another break and
then come back and explore that concept a little more

(46:11):
than all right, so we sort of know the general
outline of what happened in the mid nineteen sixties. There
was this significant backlash to what had been for a
while now, at least a decade and a half of interesting,
in some ways very promising psychedelic research. But by nineteen
seventy or so, drugs were public Enemy number one and

(46:32):
scientific research in them dropped off dramatically, encountered a lot
of obstacles at that point, and it's only more recently
that we've seen this renaissance of of psychedelic research. So
I guess we might want to look at a question
of like, and this is something that's hard to answer
in a definitive way, but examining some possible reasons for
the cause of the moral panic around psychedelics in the

(46:54):
mid nineteen sixties. First of all, I think some of
it you could chalk up to a somewhat legitimate reaction
to the perceived over enthusiasm of people like Timothy Learies,
some of the scientists involved in psychedelic research. We're clearly
not practicing the most rigorous subjective science, and we're in

(47:15):
some cases turning into enthusiasts and gurus, something more like
alternative religious leaders. And it's not surprising at all that
this caused a lot of skepticism and and uh and
push back within the scientific community. Right, yeah, because here's
here's the leary, this kind of weird and at times
kind of goofy character, um and and at times very

(47:37):
profound and well spoken. I mean he was, he was
a very charismatic guy. But you can you can understand
I think, you know, especially members of the older generation
and more traditional folks, uh, being a little suspicious of
this character. Yeah. Another big part of the backlash I think,
which Paullen definitely acknowledges at length in his book, is specifically,

(48:00):
this is what we were talking about before the break,
how scary it seemed that some psychedelic enthusiasts were recommending
psychedelics to so called healthy normals, you know, just regular people.
Like the ideas, well, we're going to tolerate a lot
of different methods of treating people who are facing problems,
people who have mental illnesses or addictions. Uh. And many

(48:23):
of these solutions could include drugs, even drugs that have
a potential for abuse, because we think, well, it's you know,
it's fighting a problem and it's helping people get better.
But what if a drug implies that the whole of
society is sick and there's something wrong with the baseline
culture that's so called normal people could benefit from using

(48:45):
it to affect change on themselves. Yeah, I mean it's
quite a pilled, a hard pill to swallow, you know,
to to hear, oh, there's something there's something terribly wrong
with us, or there's something terribly wrong with the way
we're conducting ourselves in the modern world. I mean, this
continues to be one aspect of you know, of the
problem with communicating the you know, the the dire threat

(49:08):
of climate change is because there is a certain amount
of judgment to be placed on the way that that
modern industrial society has conducted itself. Well, yeah, I think
that's right. I mean, there's always going to be negative
reaction against any indictment that goes to our general way
of life. Like we we want to indict you know,
antisocial abnormality, like the murderer or the you know, somebody

(49:32):
who did something very unusual. But what if everybody is
doing something that's harmful. If if that's the case you
want to make, you're gonna have a hard time getting
people to accept it. Absolutely. Yeah, Yeah, I mean ultimately nobody,
nobody's gonna want. Everybody is afraid of change. And certainly
the nineteen sixties were a time and where there in
which there was a great fear of various changes, not

(49:54):
only the changes that were uh you know, offered or
at least advertised by you know, the psychedelic counterculture, but
also the fear of change via uh, political ideologies, the
fear of communism, the fear of racial integration. Uh, you know,
all these various changes that were uh, that we're taking
place in society. Yeah, and so you can definitely see

(50:17):
why there's a lot of fear around the idea of
treating normality. So Altice Huxley and Humphrey Osmond they you know,
we're friends and wrote back and forth to each other
in the nineteen fifties. Uh. And there there was one
letter that was quoted in Pollen's book that I thought
was interesting where Huxley was writing to Osmond in nine
about people taking compounds like mescal and an LSD, and

(50:40):
Huxley wrote, quote, people will think that they are going mad,
when in fact they are beginning when they take it
to go sane. And also, as Pollen notes from his experience,
researching the book, that there's this quote drift from the
treatment of individuals with psychological problems to a desire to
treat the whole of society. And uh, this drift, he says,

(51:03):
is a change that quote seems eventually to infect everyone
who works with psychedelics, touching scientists too, And so I
think everyone there is probably an overstatement. I think he's
you know, being a little casual, but it does seem
to me to be a startling trend, maybe one that
should give us pause. I don't know, I mean, it's
worth considering that. But like how many scientists involved in

(51:26):
the UH in the investigation of psychedelics do end up
thinking that it shouldn't just be used to treat people
in a clinical setting who are experiencing one problem or another,
but it's something that so called healthy normals should take
to improve their lives and improve the whole of society. Well,
I mean, it's it comes back to the traditional uses

(51:48):
of these substances. In many cases they were they were
not necessarily taken purely as as as medicine for an ailment.
But in any case, it's just part of you know,
your continued uh, you know what will would we describe
now as in a mental health Uh. Yeah. I mean
that's a good point. And while we certainly don't want
to demonize these substances, I do think also we should

(52:09):
be skeptical of of that impulse. I mean, it's worth
asking the question, is that correct or is that just?
Is that over enthusiasm based on positive personal experiences that
people have had. Yeah? Yeah, And then I guess you
could also say it's it's kind of like if you're
if you're acknowledging that they're big, almost impossible problems in
the world, wicked problems as the uh you know, as

(52:31):
we often refer to them, things that seem insurmountable, the
kind of problems that make us, you know, the lead
us to be convinced that surely only you know, the
return of a savior or the interference on by by
aliens could possibly help us solve Like humans are just
incapable of solving these problems on their own. Then perhaps
we're putting, we might be putting too much stock in

(52:51):
the powers of a psychedelic substance to somehow fix that
for us on an individual level or a cultural level. Yeah,
I think that a good point of comparison. I mean,
while while we certainly don't want to deny the evidence
of the potential positive uses of these things, you don't
want to make them a god either. I mean, you
don't want to drift into the miracle cure mentality, because

(53:13):
one a lot of these studies show, quite frankly, is
that there is a lot of potential for psychedelics in
in treating things like addiction and depression and all that.
But they're not miracle cures. It's not like you know
that this fixes all your problems immediately and then the
world's a perfect place. Now, there's another reason that we
can go to to explain the anti psychedelic backlash that

(53:36):
I think is probably the most obvious one, right, the
countercultural associations with and possible direct effects of psychedelic use.
Of course, we all know these compounds came to be
associated with rebellion and rejection of mainstream culture and rejection
of political authorities. You know, Timothy Leary would would proclaim

(53:57):
to people that kids who took acid, quote, won't find
your wars, won't join your corporations. I mean that that's
scary to the authorities, right, You do you think they're
not going to fight our wars anymore. How are we
gonna how are we gonna fight? They're not gonna be
a part of corporations. They're not going to found Silicon
Valley corporations in the future. Yeah, well that's funny. I

(54:18):
mean that turned out not quite to be true. A
lot of the yeah, a lot of these acid takers
did turn out to be business leaders. It's obviously not
a panacea against business. But I did want to quote
a couple of sections from Pollen that I thought were very,
very smart on this part. So first, the first one
is where Paullen said, quote LST truly was an acid,

(54:39):
dissolving almost everything with which it came into contact, beginning
with the hierarchies of the mind, the super ego, ego,
and unconscious, and going on from their to society's various
structures of authority. And then two lines of every imaginable kind,
between patient and therapist, research and recreation, sickness and health,
self and other, subject and object, the spiritual and the material.

(55:03):
If all such lines are manifestations of the Apollonian strain
in Western civilization, the impulse that erects distinctions, dualities, and
hierarchies and defends them. Then psychedelics represented the ungovernable Dionysian
force that blithely washes all those lines away. That's beautiful,
and that comes back to Terence mckinna's definition of them

(55:24):
is boundary dissolving. Yeah, and I think that's largely correct
based on everything we've read. But another passage that I
thought was very interesting about this counterculture backlash is uh.
It goes like this quote. For what other time in
history did a society's young undergo a searing right of
passage with which the previous generation was utterly unfamiliar. Normally,

(55:48):
rites of passage helped knit societies together, as the young
crossover hurdles and through gates erected and maintained by their elders,
coming out on the other side to take their place
in the community of adults. Not so with the psychedelic
Journey of the nineteen sixties, which at its conclusion dropped
its young travelers onto a psychic landscape unrecognizable to their parents.

(56:10):
That this won't ever happen again is reason to hope
that the next chapter in psychedelic history won't be quite
so divisive. Well, I mean it won't happen quite the
same way again. But as Paul himself points out, like
he grew up in the dark times of of you
know that he basically grew up in the moral panic period. Yeah,
so didn't really experiment much with psychedelics when he was younger,

(56:33):
and really wasn't until quite recently as as an older
man that he was able to really experiment with them
and understand them in a greater sense. So I feel
like there are still going to be generational gaps there. Well,
that last sentence maybe far too optimistic. I mean, the
main part I was thinking about was the beginning of
this where he points out the idea of rights of
passage that expand the consciousness. They are supposed to be

(56:55):
passed on from parents to children. And we've the generations together,
and if the young acquire a consciousness altering right of
passage that the older generations don't have, that can be
terrifying to the older generations. It's like they're not our
children anymore. They've been initiated into some other tribe. No,
I think it's a great point. I mean, yeah, this

(57:15):
was a new ride of passage that the older generation
by and large had no experience with there's one other
possible thing going on in the nineteen sixties that I
think might be worth mentioning, which is and well, maybe
we'll get into more detail about these studies in the
in the next episode. But there are at least a
couple of studies I've been reading from the last decade

(57:36):
or so, one from two thousand eleven and one from
eighteen that are about adult personality change occasioned by use
of psychedelics. So you've got these various ways of measuring
personality traits, and and people might you know, your personality
might overtime sort of be in flux, but you know,
mostly your traits are going to be pretty set by
the time you're an adult. You know, you're around a baseline.

(57:58):
You might hover. But there appears to be some evidence
that using psychedelics can actually change adults personalities. And so
one of the many things that's been observed is that,
for example, use of psychedelics appears to increase people in
a psychological personality trait that's known as openness to experience.

(58:21):
People who take psychedelics appear to increase in openness, and
openness is actually a highly socially significant personality trade. Uh,
It's been associated with all kinds of other things in
societies in various research, Like openness is highly correlated with
with like lack of prejudice and lack of authoritarianism, and

(58:42):
stuff like appreciation for art and for other cultures and things.
I think you'd find the openness personality trait largely associated
with like environmentalism and multiculturalism. Yeah, I mean, just if
nothing else, Like if if you were to become more
neophilic and you know, uh, you know, attracted to new experiences,
you become more attractive to travel, and in traveling, you're

(59:04):
exposed to to uh. I mean, travel itself is kind
of I think has a lot to in common with
psychedelic experience. You know, where you suddenly you're in in
a place that is mostly the same but a little different,
and uh, people around you are different and yet the same,
and it forces you to sort of reconsider who you
are in the whole scenario. So if this is true, yeah,

(59:26):
that that there are these cascading effects from the use
of psychedelics that maybe on a broad scale, say changing
the personality is of a young generation, especially changing them
in ways that might not be so congenial to you
if you are Richard Nixon or something that these personality
changes could be perceived as a direct threat to the

(59:48):
polity of the country. Yeah, and that's exactly how Richard
Nixon saw it. I mean, Richard Nixon is is the
anti psychedelic uh U S president by far? Yeah. I
mean it's difficult to unravel all this because on one hand,
you have to you have to sort of try and
figure out what the nineteen sixties were, you know, like
what was the nineteen sixties experience? And certainly you and

(01:00:10):
I were not around in the nineteen sixties, so we
can't attest to it. Um. We do have some listeners
I know that were and so hopefully we'll hear from
from you on it. Um. I remember my my father
told me once that Jefferson Airplane Somebody to Love captured
what the sixties felt like. I but I never had
a chance to ask him what he really meant by that.

(01:00:31):
Maybe he just meant it was an iconic song of
the time, which you know it certainly was. Um. But
I guess that's one of the things with it with
the sixties. Two is that, like all times, you know,
the older generation is always going to be concerned with
what the young generation is doing and how what they're
doing doesn't reflect your values. Like I can't relate to
the experience of you know, of grown up uh in

(01:00:54):
the nineteen sixties. Uh. You know, you know, a middle
aged person looking at the young generations and things and
ask what are they doing with psychedelics? Uh? But like
maybe on some level, I I understand that in regards
to Pokemon, you know where I'm like, oh I I
had this was not part of my childhood, and yet
it's highly influential for for for these kids. What am
I missing and why should I and to what extent

(01:01:14):
should I be afraid of it? Wait? Were you one
of those preachers going on TV during the Pokemon craze
saying it was causing devil worship? No? No, but but
I do love that kind of I love the sort
of mild moral panics like that that there arise out
of any new thing, be a Pokemon or Harry Potter.
I think there was one for Teletubbies. Teletubbies. Yeah, yeah,

(01:01:36):
so so yeah. The fact that there's kind of a
generational divide and a and a and a moral panic
popping up around something like that in and of itself,
I think just is always going to be the case,
and we see shades with that. I mean, certainly, I
think we have it was we've discussed, we've discussed in
the show before and will in the future. You know,
we certainly have some issues with with mobile technology and
with social media and the effects that though uh technologies

(01:02:01):
are having on culture, and certainly, you know, it can
lean into some sort of you know, crankiness where we
look at younger generations and say, oh, they don't even
know what it's like without social media. That's our grumpy
old men issue. Yes, it's the tech. Yeah, uh, but
we'll have to come back to that. But but but yeah,
the the the older generation looked at the younger generation,

(01:02:24):
and they didn't see their values necessarily reflected their values
that had just carried them through a World war and
of course threatened to carry into one final World war
as well. And so it makes sense that these typical
generational concerns would be exasperated by the introduction of something new,
or at least new from a Western perspective. There was

(01:02:45):
not only consciousness changing, but but also foreign. And remember
remember that most anti drug messaging in America has depended
on xenophobic and or racist messaging. An association was also
made between uh, psychedelics and radical leftist ideologies, so I
think that was very much a factor as well. Well.
I mean, one thing that's interesting, I remember from reading

(01:03:07):
the individual testimonials of the people who were involved in
the marsh Chapel experiment. This is anecdotal, so this is
only just you know, the happen things they happen to report.
But I think multiple members of the marsh Chapel experiments
said that, you know, they had their psilocybin experience and
it prompted them to go get involved in the civil
rights movement. Uh so you know which, of course, by

(01:03:28):
the you know, the conservative authoritarian, uh you know, white
ruling class impulse at the time would have probably they
would have seen that as a political threat. Speaking of
political threats, let's get back to Richard Nixon. Okay, So
Richard Nixon famously considered Timothy Leary quote the most dangerous
man in America. Okay, and uh and and he apparently
his handlers were even concerned at different times that leftists

(01:03:51):
might try and slip Nixon lsd Uh. I'm sure somebody
was working on a plan there, one of those sixties pranksters.
Oh well, yeah, Actually allegedly Jefferson airplane lead singer Grace
Slick uh plan to slip LSD into Nixon's tea at
a White House tea party because apparently she attended uh
the same college as Nixon's daughter, and there was going

(01:04:12):
to be an event there at the White House. But
if the event turned out to be an all female event,
so Nixon wasn't actually there, and I think she got
kind of she got scared off by the security and left. Anyway,
she didn't try to give any to Pat apparently not uh,
well she had they didn't quite make I think she
was accompanied by Abby Hoffman, who was this sounds like

(01:04:34):
an Abby Hoffman's Yeah, so it didn't the the scheme
didn't actually make it through the front door, so they
didn't actually get to that level of of decision making.
But this all does lead to an interesting question that
comes up from time to time, sometimes flippantly and other
times quite seriously. If certain world leaders could be tricked
into having a psychedelic experience, could we change them? Could

(01:04:57):
there be like a Scrooge moment? Right? Would they see
themselves subjectively, would they connect with others or connect with
nature in a meaningful and life changing way. I've heard
people say this. In fact, I remember a lot of
teenage stoners sings like this, like if you just get
all these dictators and you know, we'd stop all the wars,
if we could just get people to take acid, or

(01:05:17):
I think they'd even just say like smoke weed or something.
I'm I mean again, I'm I'm very open to and
and interested in the many of the reported positive effects
of psychedelic experiences, But I do not believe it is
a miracle drug in that way, right, that it can't
just in and of itself cure human nastiness, especially because

(01:05:37):
set and setting are so important. I mean, what if
you take a drug and the setting is the Nixon
White House, Right, if you have a psychedelic experience where
you're just like all revved up on the idea of
slaughtering your enemies and stuff that I don't know, I
don't I'm not sure that would make things better. Yeah. Like,
one specific version of this question that I've kind of
tossed around in my own head from time to time

(01:05:59):
is not so much you know, what have we um,
you know, what if Hitler took acid? Kind of a thing.
But uh, you know, if we look at when l
s d uh came into being. It was first synthesized
in nineteen thirty eight in Switzerland, m D m A
was first created in Germany in nineteen twelve, and in
both cases no one realized what they discovered. You know,

(01:06:20):
it wasn' until later that they took him off the
shelf and looked at him again. But what if these
substances are leaked out into Europe, especially Germany before World
War Two? And granted LSD would have only had like
a year to work its magic. But I'm not the
only one who's thought about this. For instance, Terence mckinnay
and Food of the Gods wondered what would it have
been like if the Nazis had found out about LSD

(01:06:42):
quote it is frightening to imagine some of the possible
consequences had Hoffmann's discovery been recognized for what it was,
even a moment earlier. So there, I mean, he's looking
at it. It's not necessarily a good thing for everybody
who takes it, but like that, it could be a
facilitator of great evil. Yeah, yeah, I he may have
gone into more detail on this in other works or lectures. Certainly,

(01:07:04):
Uh McKenna spoke a lot about these topics, but so
but I am not aware of any additional thoughts he
had on the matter. But I suspect that they would
have probably done much the same as the CIA did
in their experiments with with the LSD, you know, searching
for ways to use it as a weapon or a
mind control substance and then ultimately find it wanting in
that regard. Yeah, and then we've talked about this in

(01:07:26):
other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind in the past.
But yeah, that seemed to be the primary focus of
like defense based research on psychedelics in the nineteen fifties
is can we get it to make people do what
we want against their will or as a truth serum? Right,
and and certainly this was the deal with the Third Right.
They were in a state of total war. They were
interested in rockets, yes, but they weren't interested because of

(01:07:47):
any space exploration advantages. They it was about weapon delivery.
It was about pursuing their own awful and uh and
racist ideology um, this conquest mentality. Yeah, absolutely, But the
other hand, Uh, you know, Hitler took a lot of drugs,
especially after is apparently taking a lot of stimulants, a

(01:08:08):
lot of opioids, and so, you know, one you can't
help but wonder, right, like, what what if out Off
Hitler had taken a bunch of M D M A
and L S d UM in nineteen forty two would
have had any effect. I'm suspicious that that it would
have any effect. Ultimately, Yeah, I don't. I don't think
I buy the Soner line that, you know, just get

(01:08:29):
the dictator to take a psychedelic and they will be cured.
I mean, it's hard to know, but I'm I doubt it.
I mean it would be interesting as an experiment, though, Yeah,
just just to poke one of them up out there. Well.
Another interesting question is instead of like these individuals say,
like dose the dictator cases, if psychedelics and psychedelic culture

(01:08:49):
were more widespread in general throughout the world, you know,
and throughout industrialized society is going way back. Yeah, I
do wonder then, like if the you know, the calm
and if the common drug of choice among industrialized societies
in the eighteenth and nineteenth century had not been alcohol
but had been psilocybin or something. Yeah, and I think

(01:09:12):
that's ultimately the more interesting question is not what if
Hitler had taken analysis D OR or M D M A,
but what if they what if they had been at
large in UM in German culture of preceding the war
UM And you know, ultimately, like the counter argument to
that would be, well, there already was a strong bohemian
vibe in pre war Germany, and it it was not

(01:09:34):
sufficient to prevent the horrors of the Second World War
and beyond. But yeah, I think ultimately, when you see
people like Terence McKenna arguing for an archaic revival, for
some sort of like return and the psychedelically assisted return
to nature and interconnectedness, like they are talking about a
cultural movement, they're not talking about strategic doses, dosing of

(01:09:55):
of of key individuals. Yeah. If only were that easy.
All Right, we've been going a while. Think we got
to wrap it up for this one, but we we
gotta come back in the next. We were originally going
to do just three episodes, but psychedelics took hold, and
now we've been going for three and we still haven't
gotten to the twenty one century revival In psychedelic research,
which we will focus on next time as right, So

(01:10:15):
join us for part four of our psychedelic series here
on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. And I mean, who
knows there might be a part five. We just we
have no idea, We have no idea when this is
gonna end, all right. In the meantime, if you want
to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,
head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's the mothership, that's what we'll find it all Uh,
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(01:10:36):
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(01:10:58):
Big thanks as always to are excellent audio producer Maya Cole.
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(01:11:24):
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