October 21, 2010 • 42 mins
Hallucinogenic drugs are currently illegal, but they were once commonly used in psychological treatment. In this episode, Josh and Chuck discuss the rise and fall of psychedelics in treating mood disorders -- and why they're starting to gain favor again.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from houseff works dot com? Whoa, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles Cheek Bryant Chee. Yeah, man, yeah,
(00:23):
I wanted to start this one out like a twelve
year old, So that's what I'm going with, a twelve
year old on acid. Maybe maybe it just happened before
in France actually really thanks to our old friends at
c I A. Oh, they just kids. They just a
whole town to see what would happen. And one kid
came at his grandmother and tried to strangle her. Really yeah,
(00:45):
I can't remember the name of the town. Funny, but well, no,
people were like showing up at the hospital. There a
lot of it was funny in that, like, you know,
all these nineteen fifties French chees are losing their stuff
for no apparent reason, right, right, but you know the
suicides that resulted from that not very funny. Before we
(01:08):
get started, I think we should do like an official
c o A for this one. I think that is
a very good idea because what Josh and I are
about to talk about are illegal drugs, and we are
not endorsing the use of these and they are illegal
after all. We'll probably say this later on too, but
we just find it fascinating that they used to be
used for certain things and they're starting to be used
(01:29):
again in certain scientific research labs for these things. It
is extremely fascinating, which is what we're talking about exactly.
I guess this could be a follow up to our
our mk Ultra cast. It's a follow up and uh,
it's an epilogue and a prologue. Yes, yeah, very nice
because we kind of came into the the c I
A l s D MK Ultra podcast like right in
(01:52):
the middle of the history of LSD much well towards
the beginning. But um, one of the things after nineteen
forty three when Albert Hoffman, right, the chemist who created
LSD tried it. Yeah it was attempt uh and tried
(02:13):
it on himself intravenously. As I understand it, he injected it.
It says, first he took it by mistake, yeah, because
it was a blood thinner. And then he took it
for real. Yeah. After that first bike ride home he
was like, I gotta do some more and then I
read uote I became aware of the wonder of creation,
the magnificence of nature. Yes, to create Dr Hoffman. Yeah,
(02:34):
and he was just some Swiss guy, Sam chemist. Um.
He was at the first person to come up with
a synthetic hallucin Jim Back in nineteen fourteen, a German
chemist who worked for Merk the pharmaceutical company, came up
with M D m A, better known as ecstasy. Yeah.
And here's a tip for you, chuckers. Um, anytime, according
(02:57):
to the Associated Press, you write about a designer drug
and used it by its designer name, capitalize it. So
ecstasy is always capitalized the word ecstasy when you're talking
about the drug, guest, and not just the euphoric feeling
you get from life. That's different. That's lower case, okay,
but it should be all caps. Yeah. Sure, So it
(03:21):
was m d m A was created. Yeah, and it was. Um.
I guess it served as a it's not a catalyst,
because I think it's changed, but it was to be
used in the synthesis of other chemicals, and it kind
of sat on the shelves for a little while until
somebody along the way, and then I wonder what happens
(03:42):
if I take this stuff? And they did, and the
CIA again looked at it. I wanted to see what
it could do. Passed it up. UM, and a guy
by the name of Alexander Shulgin, right, yes, he's a
dow chemist and a night seen seventy eight. At the
age of seventy four, he published a study on the
(04:04):
Ufork effects of M D M A. It was the
first time anyone had ever published a study here. But
he was seventy four and he first noticed the Ufork
effects because he liked to take it and go to
cocktail parties of yeah. UM. So he's like, hey, man,
this stuff is the bomb, and here's my study on it.
Here that my findings, and let's everybody start taking this.
(04:28):
So he starts giving it to his friends, um, including
some psychiatrists. Did he give out passifiers? Not yet that
that's coming though, that's very very close. PASSI fires came
about night um. So Shilgin gives some to a friend
who's a psychiatrist. Psychiatrist some of the more avant garde
(04:49):
psychiatrists UM start giving it to their patients, and then
it gets called adam for a little while. For a.
While this is going on, it's being used by established psychiatrists.
A mysterious financier in Dallas, Texas finds out about this
stuff and starts taking it, hires an underground chemist and
has it made himself, and then start selling it at
(05:12):
clubs all over Dallas. And so this, this illicit use
of this substance, simultaneous to its emergence on the club
scene and about the mid eighties, led to the outlaw
of M D M A. We'll get into it more,
but the point is to this very long and rambling intro,
(05:35):
both of these drugs and others were legal at one time,
were put to good use, beneficial use, and then outlawed,
possibly unfairly, and then now we're starting to see them
come back into use, hallucinogens being used to treat mental
illness and mental harm in legitimate circles, very legitimate. Quick
(05:59):
question was that Dallas person was at Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.
I don't know. I don't think anybody knows who it is.
Still gotta start maybe, I think to begin with, so, Josh,
you mentioned the c I A. I do want to
point out it wasn't just the Americans. Uh, the Canadian
government and British's British is it works. Britain's m I
(06:23):
six also experimented with LSD and between nineteen fifty and
sixty five, forty thou people all over the world had
been treated with LSD and and treatments. Yeah, um, Carrie Grant, Yeah,
can we go back to Hollywood in in the nineteen yours,
(06:45):
So a couple of guys set up shop Arthur Chandler.
What was the other guy's name, Oh, Hartman Hartman, Mortimer Hartman,
who was a radiologist too acid Harman and said, you know,
I'm gonna get into psychiatry. These guy set up a
shop called the Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills right in
(07:06):
the middle of Beverly Hills. And this is back in
the day when things were it was clean living going on,
aside from the rampant alcoholism and cigarettes being smoked, adultery.
Probably some marijuana us going on here there, but that
was among the hop heads. Yeah exactly. So he sets
up a couple of rooms with a couch and uh
(07:27):
starts booking patients at a rate of like six or
eight hours of session, depending on what was going on
with the person, and five days a week. There were
books solid hundred bucks of pop hunter, which is a
lot of money back then. And I guess that included
the drugs. The drugs and the time that you were there, right,
So they would sit with you, they will give you
some blinders to block out distractions, and then you would
(07:51):
go into sort of like the more meditative sort of
acid trip. Essentially you were hard, they would because you
were on pharmaceutical grade l s D produced by the
Sandoz company. We're talking about Alice Huxley, novelist, and actually
he died tripping. Did you know that? Really? Yeah, he was.
(08:12):
He had m throat cancer, I think, and uh, the
last thing he ever wrote was a note to his
wife requesting UM such and such milligrams of LSD or
micrograms of LSD injected intramuscular intramuscularly. And that was about
six hours before he died. So he died and a
(08:32):
grateful dead record. That was his last request before the
grateful dea. Uh. Screenwriter screenwriter Charles Brackett took it. Director
Sydney laments it. Lay or lament I think, okay, I
always sad may, but I think I'm wrong. He took
it a few times, went through sessions, called it wonderful.
(08:53):
He re experienced his own birth, which apparently a few
people did. I've never heard of that. I haven't either.
And muh Claire Booth Loose was a playwright married to
Time magazine publisher Henry Loose. She was also an ambassador
and possibly an agent um for the US government. And
they both took acid so much that Henry Loose and
(09:15):
Time Magazine said we need to write about this. This
is awesome. Yeah, there's a lot of good press that
Time Magazine gave LSD in the fifties um as a
basically a cure all um. And again Carry Grant got
into it big time. Apparently he had like at least
a hundred trips I believe. Yeah he was. Yeah, let's
(09:35):
talk about him for a second, because he was one
of these guys that carefully constructed his persona. He worked
very hard. Apparently he was the The line he always
gave was a lot of people want to be Carry Grant,
and I'm one of them, indicating that this suave, Mr
Cool persona was completely fabricating, created by himself so he
(09:56):
could get you know, the fame and everything, but deep
down he's suffered as a human until he started taking acid, right,
and then he had um, well, he had some pretty
interesting revelations, one of which I read one of the
somebody thought to write down the stuff that he Some
(10:18):
of the insights he had, um, some were kind of deep.
Others were like, if I have to look at a man,
he should be required to comb his hair and brush
his teeth and wear a clean shirt. Yes, it was interesting,
so it kind of ran the gamut. But yeah, he um,
he became a real devotee of LSD. He yeah, and um,
(10:44):
well she got him into right who wrote that we're
part of this we're basing this part on a Vanity
Fair article art. Yeah, um, it's called the Carrying the
Sky with Diamonds. But he was a huge advocate for LSD.
He wasn't the only one, um, but he lived to
see it outlawed and public sentiment turned against it. Right,
(11:05):
it's just like m D M A um psilocybin, magic
mushrooms and part of the well, really one of the
you could say that Timothy Leary almost single handedly led
to the tremendous suffering of a lot of people who
might otherwise have been helped by LSD with his his
naive bravado of you know, the establishment just needs to
(11:30):
get over its hang ups and we should all take acid.
Whether or not you agree that that's a good idea,
it's a stupid thing to say. Leary was originally a
Harvard psychiatrist, right, yes, and he started taking I think
mushrooms and then he eventually started taking LSD and was
fired from Harvard because he turned into a hippie. And um,
(11:53):
that was pretty much the beginning of the end of LSD. Yeah,
they may have continued to use LSD as treatment for
mental patients mental illness and depression if not for Timothy Leary,
who was trying to spread the word about acid. Uh.
Back to Carry Grant real quick. He was so into it, Josh.
He had a couple of stories written about him in
(12:15):
nineteen fifty nine and Look magazine the Curious Story behind
the New Carry Grant gave a glowing account of LSD,
and then This is the Best the following year the
Good Housekeeping magazine. It got the Good Housekeeping Seal of
Approval in the nineteen sixty issue and they called it
the Secret of Grant's Second Youth. I want to get
a copy of that magazine. How awesome would that be? Yeah,
(12:38):
And that's kind of like the theme of this podcast
is so weird that these things were considered incredibly wonderful
and benign um and now they're they're just viewed as
just so they're evil in their outlaws simply because they
were made illegal, right prohibited um. And again there's kind
(13:00):
of a movement toward saying, hey, you know, maybe Timothy
Leary did give this a bad name, Maybe that that
um underground chemist in Dallas, uh really kind of put
a terrible spread on this, and we should look at
these again, right. She kind of tell one more story, Yes,
from Hollywood of the nineteen sixties. Esther Williams, famous uh
(13:21):
diva actress from the MGM studio friend of Carrie Grants
called Carrie Grant up after these articles and said, hey,
can you introduce me to your doctor, Dr Hartman. He
did so. At the time, she was aging, just had
gone through a divorce, her husband left her with huge
debt with the I R S. And she was still
(13:41):
struggling with the death of her sixteen year old brother.
She goes in the office, she takes acid, does her session,
goes home, to her parents, still on acid, has dinner
with them, and then goes into the bathroom mirror, says
good night to her parents, looks in the mirror, and
I'm gonna read this quote. I was startled by a
(14:03):
split image one half of my face. The right half
was me, the other half was the face of a
sixteen year old boy. The left side of my upper
body was flat and muscular. I reached up with my
boys hand to touch my right breast and felt my
penis stirring. It was a hermaphroditic phantasm. And I understood
perfectly in that moment. When my brother died, I took
(14:26):
him into my life so completely he became part of me. Yeah,
that's a pretty huge thing to understand and pretty jarring
way to come to terms with that, right. Yeah. But
that's what they're finding out now, though, is that these
people are having these breakthroughs in the throes of their
final days of let's say cancer, and they have these
epiphanies before we get to that. So LSD is outlawed.
(14:48):
We're following a timeline here. Yes, LSD is outlawed in
I think st something like that. Um at the very
at the latest nineteen, they shut down the shop in
Beverly Hills. Yeah, then Sandoz stopped making it and it
got it was outlawed and pushed underground. M d m
A made it until and m d m A story
(15:09):
is linked very closely to a guy named Dr George
Quarte who is Johns Hopkins researcher. This floored me. So
in about the time, the d e A is reeling
from being caught totally unaware by the crack epidemic. Uh,
and basically a lot of people think looking for a
(15:32):
whipping post um, they they start considering outlawing m d
m A. At that moment, this guy, Dr George rocquarde
Um publishes a study that he says, this drug deplete
your serotonin levels permanently causing brain damage. Right. Yeah, well
(15:54):
that that didn't that. So this guy, who was unknown
at the time, publishes the study starts to get UM
National Institute of Drug Abuse funding. So basically this is
his job. He starts a career um creating scientific evidence
in favor of banning drugs leads to the outlaw of
(16:16):
m d m A. Right that wasn't quite enough, they
scheduled it. Uh. The FEDS went after m d M
A even harder, and in two dou two they came
up with this thing called the Rave Act. It's, um,
what does rave stand for? Reducing Americans vulnerability to ecstasy?
I wonder how long they sat around looking at the
(16:38):
word rave, saying we've gotta make it fit, yeah, to
make it fit yeah. So UM, the the Rave Act
basically said, if you are a club owner and somebody
gets caught taking ecstasy or has ecstasy at your club,
we're gonna shut down your club. It was a huge,
huge law and it was bolstered by another UM. Another
(17:00):
study by Dr George roccaride UM that found that he
tested on ten monkeys is a big one. He injected
them with m d M A UM, A bunch of
them went psychotic, some of them UM showed early signs
of Parkinson's all of a sudden, and two of them
died almost immediately after being injected. So people started asking
(17:22):
questions about this, like, what what are you talking about?
People have been taking this drug forever and this has
never happened. So they started kind of going after recording
and UM they found out that he had actually injected
him with methamphetamine. The first thing that took them off
as he injected him because people were like, well, you
don't inject ecstasy, so that's kind of a weird way
(17:44):
to do it. And then they found out it was methamphetamines,
which he blamed on a mislabeling of a drug shipment
which they traced back and they went, not the label
right here. Yeah, the drug providers like, don't blame us,
it's pretty clear. So this is by this time, the
Rave Act has already passed her and the Rave Act
didn't get past, but something that included that, um was
(18:06):
passed by that time. The study that record A produced
was pretty was published in Science, the journal Science. Like,
that's as eyebrow as you get as far as scientific journals. Um.
And finally he gets beaten up enough that he he
prints a full retraction. The Science runs this retraction saying,
(18:27):
the whole the whole study that I produced, just forget
it ever existed. But that doesn't happen much, No, it doesn't.
That's very unusual the record A, I get the impression
is kind of this, um, well, it just kind of
seems like the scientific community views him largely as a
shill for the government. Yeah. Um, there's a couple of
(18:47):
articles that he shows up in on a Reason and
Reason magazines were checking out. Yeah. And you know, the
other interesting thing about that whole story about the big
fake study he did with meth amphetamines as to see
is that the Parkinson's Foundation, the people Parkinson's researchers, said,
I don't think that that's true. That doesn't make much
(19:09):
sense to us either, that they would show signs of
Parkinson's right. So they looked into it. People went about
reproducing his study um and the people who run the
Parkinson's Foundation actually issued a statement saying ecstasy does not
do this, so they basically came out in favor of ecstasy.
It's kind of neat to watch from the outside because
(19:30):
there's this guy who's again kind of viewed as a
show for the government, who's beating up on this drug
that a lot of people who are also in the
scientific community feel is being unfairly outlawed, and so there's
kind of beating up on him in retaliation. It's kind
of neat to see eggheads beat up on one another.
(19:51):
NERD fights and the n I d A. It went
so far that the n I d A just kind
of quietly pulled their fact sheet on ecstasy, and it
was like, um, let's just take this down the website.
After the retraction, we'll rewrite it. I'm sure it's back
up now as something else. But it doesn't include immediate
death and Parkinson's disease. I would imagine that's right. So
Timothy Leary dies, he gets shot into space, he's out
(20:15):
of the picture entirely. Everybody gets sick of hippies generally. Um, George,
record is that, basically the guy who's single handedly getting
ecstasy outlawed, his work comes into great, great question, and
people start going back and looking at m D m
A again, and they start looking at LSD again, And
(20:35):
that's where we find ourselves right now. Slowly but surely,
people are starting to run studies on whether or not
you can use these hallucinogens to treat mental illness. And
the results are pretty astounding actually, And you know where
they're leading the charge in Switzerland, in Los Angeles all
these years later, same place, Yes, hippie freaks. Yeah so yeah, Josh,
(21:00):
they are I think in Switzerland, uh and solo then
Switzerland they have been experimenting with LSD um psilocybin which
you might know is magic much rooms ketamine you might
know a special k That kind of surprised me that
that was in there. Yeah, I hadn't heard much about
that one either. And they're getting these, uh these studies
(21:23):
published in Nature Reviews, Neuroscience, and other you know, leading
industry peer reviewed publications. Yeah, it's not all under the
table back room experiments. Oh no, these are very heavily
um overseen. You have to be a very legitimate researcher
to get government approval. They're not funded though still they're
(21:44):
they say they're still having a hard time with funding
and they're just the sort of looking to get some
restrictions loosened. They're not saying make all this stuff legal, right,
they're not battling a legalization on the legalization front at all.
But what they're one of the reason why so many
people are kind of starting to put their reputations on
the line. Um, it's because the results that they're seeing.
(22:07):
So we have antidepressants, right, Um, they take weeks to
kick in, they have all sorts of side effects, and
what they're what we're seeing in these studies now are
that the the things like ketamine uh M, d M
A l s D are having like a huge impact
right out of the gate. There's one study, UM that
(22:27):
came out in July, I believe, UM, and it found
it was a study of twelve people who were diagnosed
with PTSD post traumatic stress disorder. Yeah, that's one of
the big ones. Yeah, that's huge at UM. That's where
you well, it's what we used to call shell shock.
Is you go through traumatic experience and you relive it
over and over again. UM, and it's it's debilitating. UM.
(22:52):
They found that of the twelve people in this study,
ten of them, after going through the study, UM, after
take king M d m A no longer met the
criteria to be diagnosed with PTSD afterwards, ten of the twelve. Yeah.
And for my understanding and most of these studies is
it's not like you have to stay on ecstasy your
whole life. Like a lot of people have these epiphanies
(23:14):
and they quit taking it and they have changed their
outlook and that right, Yeah, that's the impression I'm getting to. UM.
Ketamine apparently it's good for depression in the same way. UM,
just a very tiny dose I can get you over
severe clinical depression. Or that's the results. The early results,
we should say, yeah, um, and everything from quitting smoking,
(23:36):
two suicidal thought, yeah, cluster headaches, Harvard studying. Those are
migraines for men, right, what they call my migraines. I
know they're so debilitating that you consider suicide or you
know not everyone does obviously, but it's just this awful,
awful pain. You can't leave your house, you get to
sit in a dark room, and so it's helping there.
(23:57):
And UM, what I thought was interesting John's Hopkins. You
might have heard of them, a little reputable institutions or
required is from was it they didn't experiment where they
gave psilocybin too emotionally stable individuals like this wasn't even
people that were mentally ill, people that had never taken
hallucinogens before, which is interesting that you would be. I
(24:19):
think they had a sixty four year old that signed
up for this. Yeah, it's crazy, and they said sixty
four and they said the experiment a year later they
said the experience is one of the most meaningful and
spiritual experiences of their entire lives, and that those were
mentally stable folks and this is a year on it
(24:40):
still had an impact on them. Um, they're also finding
that UH, O, c D and basically mood disorders are
the primary target of hallucinogenic treatment, right, psychedelics for treatment,
and the reason being, we think, is because they target
serotonin in the brain. This is an other reason why
(25:00):
they're not addictive. They don't they don't employ the reward
circuit in the brain, which is how we become addicted
to things were flooded with dopamine re member. It just
affects the mood serotonin, And we don't really have a
very good grasp on serotonin and exactly how that works.
But we do know that UM, there's correlations between UH
(25:23):
high levels of serotonin or low levels of serotonin and depression, right.
And we know that UM using antidepressants which block the
reuptake of serotonin UM reduces symptoms of clinical depression in people.
So we know that serotonins in there somewhere. We know
that the more serotonin have, the better generally or low
(25:46):
serotonins bad UH. And then we also know that hallucinogens
target this somehow. That's pretty much where the research stands
right now. It makes you wonder where would we be
if LSD and m D M A hadn't been in
the wilderness the last few decades. Well, yeah, they may
have a pill, like a low dose pill because a
lot of these studies, just so you know, back in
(26:07):
Carrie Grand State, that mean it was full full on
acid trips. But a lot of these, like the psilocybin pills,
they will give you be very low dose. So I
don't I get the feeling that it's not like this
huge mushroom trip that a lot of these patients are
going through. Because it said of the people recognized when
they did not have the placebo. So if it wasn't,
(26:30):
then it was probably a pretty low dose. Yes, would
be my guess. Um, would you if if everything was
legalized UM and m d m A came to be
prescribed for just happiness, right, would you take it? Would
(26:50):
you take a happy pill that was legal and didn't
have side effects? Not to say m d m A
doesn't have side effects, there's a UM like basically the
three days after a depression that follows when you're serotonin
levels are repleting themselves. I don't think I would because
there are quote unquote happy pills now, and I mean
(27:11):
it's not like I'm against any depressants. Or things like that,
because people definitely benefit from those who need them. But
I just I don't need that kind of thing, so
I would not Uh, I would not serve you are
not alone, Chuck. There was a survey conducted for this
BBC series on Britain of British people that found that
(27:31):
seventy of them said that they would not take a
happy pill it was legal and had no side effects.
It's interesting, yeah, because it kind of I think that
for a large segment of the population, there's just the
idea of synthesizing happiness is untoward. Yeah, you know, yeah,
(27:53):
it's it's a little weird. I mean, that's not to
say I'm a square and I don't like to get
down another aspect, Josh. I mean, we're we're talking right
now about literally the effect it has on your brain
and your serotonin levels and your moods. They've also found
that UH patients, cancer patients in particular, who consume hallucinogens,
(28:15):
or people with just um traumatic events from earlier in
their life, they have the ability to relive some of
these memories and events from their past. They can unlock
buried traumatic episodes, deal with them psychologically, put them to
rest and come out the other side with a new understanding,
free from these demons. UM. You remember in the hypnosis
(28:39):
episode where we were talking about how the way it's
viewed now is that you you are you're accessing the
subconscious scies. Yeah, more easily. It's like popping open a
control panel. That's what this. This is what they're seeing
with M D M A. Apparently, Uh, you are able
to access things UM from a very empathetic way. I
(29:02):
think the term I've heard for it is called UM
a psychotherapeutic catalyst like kick starts things. And I think
one researcher called it it's psychotherapy sped up. The psychiatrist
called it it's like psychotherapy on acid. So this hasn't
(29:27):
LSD specifically hasn't been the greatest friend to everybody who's
ever taken it. And what's funny in this article that
UM that's on the site, can we treat mental illness
with hallucinogens? Tom Schif has to go to the sixties
psychedelic rock scene to find examples of people who have
(29:48):
had a bad, bad time on acid. Uh. And apparently,
what what the conventional wisdom is is if you are
predisposed to mental illness. LSD can exacerbate that. Yeah, if
you have a bad trip, you're going to have a really,
really bad trip because you're already predisposed to mental illness. Yeah,
he's Brian Wilson and Sid Barrett as the two examples,
(30:11):
and those are stellar examples, they really got to say.
But they're also counterintuitive to what we're seeing with UM.
Like PTSD, you are already suffering from a mental illness.
So here's some m D m A. Probably LSD would
be horrible to give to a PTSD survivor. Yeah, right,
I would say, so, UM, and what else can we
(30:33):
talk about? Pamela Secuda, Sure, Yeah, it's a very interesting story.
This was a woman UM aged fifty seven at the
time of this article, who was in the final stages
of colon cancer. She had outlived her prognosis. She was
anxious and depressed. She was worried about her family, her
husband and what they were gonna do without her. It
(30:55):
was not a good life. She was living here at
the end and she was prescribed any depressants. Of course,
it didn't work, didn't do a thing for so she
volunteered for an experiment at u c l A in
two thousand five and started taking psilocybin, the magic mushroom
pill in pill form. She had a lot of breakthroughs.
(31:16):
They brought her husband in at the end of one
of the sessions and he said, there's my Pammi. She
was just beaming with light and I haven't seen her
that joyous and so long. She was totally alive and happy.
And she continued to take it until she didn't need
it anymore. She had these breakthroughs and then all of
a sudden, her husband and uh, Pamela were going to concerts,
(31:39):
They went hiking at the Grand Canyon, they went on vacations,
They did all these things that she hadn't been doing
in a long time because of these epiphanies she had
under the influence of psilocybin, and sadly she died well, yeah,
she died. Yeah, that's what she died from in two
thousand six, and her husband said she died in his arms.
(32:00):
But her husband was very appreciative and they actually did
a benefit about a week before she died for the
institute that was doing this work at U c l A.
So it's pretty interesting. Yeah, the definitely and one of
the applications that they're finding is end of life care
for UM using m D, m A or LSD. You're psilocybin. Sure,
(32:21):
we're special k. Apparently what about this eyebo gain. They're
finding that iba game works really well. I be gain
is a m it's from a hallucinatory root plant in Africa,
I believe UM. And they're finding that you go on
a thirty six hour trip. That's a long time, but
they're finding that it's really effective in breaking UM addiction
(32:45):
and like serious addictions to like heroin, yeah, cocaine. So
being on this stuff just for thirty six hours creates
a break in the addiction cycle itself. But what they're
finding this most notable about it is it there's a
lack of withdrawal symptoms that you see in every other
type of addiction removal, especially with heroin. Like heroin, you're
(33:09):
supposed to have physical withdraw stom withdrawal symptoms, and people
who are taking eyeba gain are not experiencing that like
they would if if they tried to kick the habit
without it. It's pretty remarkable. It is very remarkable. It's
very interesting. We should probably say, I don't know if
we have yet that This podcast is in no way
an endorsement of going out and buying yourself some street
(33:32):
drugs and you know, seeing what happens. It's a study
of what we findly be very fascinating. The fact that
this is there's been a resurgence in this and these
you know, qualified doctors U. C. L. A. Johns Hopkins,
they're saying we should look into this stuff. Yeah, and
they definitely are, and they're getting some very interesting results.
What about the A A guy. We should mention that
really quickly. That was pretty funny. Oh yeah, Bill Wilson, Yeah,
(33:54):
one of the co founders of A A. Yeah. He uh.
He apparently took LSD in the fifties, wasn't. Yeah, And
this is after he was long after he was sober
from alcohol since the thirties. I think, um so, he
takes LSD in the fifties and is like, this is
really helpful. Um So, I think everybody who comes into
(34:18):
a should take LSD. Uh. And they were like, Nick,
you should probably not do that. So they talked him
out of it. But the reason why he found it
helpful when is that Hallucinogen's part of a twelve step
program is to really reflect on past wrongdoings and then
elucidate them to another human being. And apparently lsd M,
(34:43):
d M a UM these other drugs help. They serve
as a catalyst for that process. So that's why Bill
Wilson I thought this, This is really helpful because again
it's like a therapy sped up. Fascinating, very fascinating. I
will say this though, I'm gonna go out on a
limb and say, even though we're not saying, oh, you
should go out and do these things, I will say
(35:04):
that some chemically created in a lab pill called an antidepressant,
isn't I mean, what's the difference the differences I think,
in my opinion from what I've seen, Uh, one's marketed
and legal and the other is illegal. Yeah, it's as
simple as that one is made by murk and one
(35:27):
is not made by murk but used to make this,
which is ironic. Public sentiment counts for everything. Yeah, you know,
it's the same reason the alcohol. You can go into
a bar and get completely wasted out of your mind
and get in a car, but you can't walk into
a bar and smoke a joint or shoot heroin or
shoot heroin. And we're not labbying for anything. It's just
interesting that the things that society has deemed acceptable. Alcoholism
(35:52):
is just fine. Well it's not just fine, but it's
it's legal and you can do it, even though it
kills all these people, and this is not acceptable. It's
just it's funny how we've evolved to think some things
are evil and some things are just great. I wonder
what the future holds, Josh. I wonder myself. We'll find out, Yes,
we will, if we lived that long. That is about
(36:13):
it for this one. You should probably check out Can
we Treat Mental Illness with Hallucinogens on the site. Be
sure to check out Carrying the Sky with Diamonds Vanity
Fair article type in George Rick Quarte R I C
U A R T e uh into Reasons website that
will bring up some cool stuff. There's a killer Time
(36:36):
magazine article from I think two thousand or two thousand
one UM on ecstasy on M D M A uh
it was. That's really It's called the Happiness and a
Pill something like that, Josh from the future. We are
in New York right now, but tonight Thursday, the twenty
(36:58):
one October. I know that our producer and comfitan and
den mother. Jerry will be at a fundraiser for the
co ED, the Cooperative Cooperative for Education right today, Yeah, tonight.
If you're in Atlanta and you are about to pop
another chef lonely Hearts frozen dinner for one and drink
(37:22):
a bottle of wine for two by yourself, and you're
looking for love in the Atlanta area, stop what you're doing,
Grab twenty bucks and go to the Metropolitan Club in
Alpharetta from seven to ten pm tonight, Thursday, October twenty one.
Co ED is holding their Fall Fiesta, a t L fundraiser.
(37:44):
It's gonna be awesome, right. The twenty bucks buys you
that wine that you're going to drink by yourself, better wine,
probably asked, and you get to drink it amongst friends,
meet Jerry. There's also going to be food, better food, entertainment,
and all sorts of chances to win or auction bid. Right,
that's the that's the proper verb. Yeah, they're auctioning off
(38:04):
cool prizes like African safaris and uh signed sports memorabilia
and stuff like that, and you never know, you could
find love there. We're making zero guarantees whatsoever, but It's
worth a shot, isn't it. Yes, And if we weren't
out of town right now, we would be there tonight,
Yes we would. So. Um again, if you don't remember
who co ed is. Co ed are the is the
(38:26):
great nonprofit that took us to Guatemala and we did
a two part podcast on it which is awesome. Um.
And they pull money together to buy books for schools
in Guatemala, which then in turn rent the books. Uh.
And that that rental fee is is put into an
escrow account which after five years is substantial enough to
buy all new textbooks. So what they start as a
(38:49):
self sustaining system um of ownership of textbooks, and it
has a huge effect. It's not just textbooks. They do
computer labs too, So um, if you want more information
on coed or the Fall Fiesta a t L tonight,
go to their website www dot c o E d
UC dot org. Right, that's right, all right, let's do this.
(39:09):
So that that's it man, Nice job, buddy. I guess
it's time now for listener mail, right, Yes, I have
a listener mail, Josh from Rhea and this was about
Octopus or OCTOPI. We were corrected the octopis not right,
but she says it she worked at high is so right. Well,
we have these people seeing actually the Latin thing the
(39:33):
Jerry just left at that. Hi, guys, your podcast on
OCTOPI made my day to day. Thank you. I work
as an aquarist at a San Francisco aquarium and one
of my favorite responsibilities is our cephalopod gallery. Nice. I
get to do enrichment with giant Pacific octopods, make sure
all of our eight legged friends stay out of trouble.
(39:53):
And I'm currently teaching a two spot octopus how to
open a jar to get his favorite food, which live crabs.
I'm right there with you fromstr octopus. Uh. It was
great to hear someone besides myself get a little too
excited about these critters. And you know, we've got great
feedback on this. People love the octopus because are so freaky. Uh.
(40:14):
The story about Lucratia mke evil especially cracked me up.
I work with the g p O. That's the giant
Pacific octopod that might give her a run for money.
For the past few weeks, I've been walking around with
what my colleagues call octopus kisses up the length of
my arms. But I'm afraid my husband is getting a
little suspicious about the number of hickys I've been acquiring.
(40:34):
So that's from the little suckers. These little suckers clearly, Uh,
these were given to me while I tried to remove
the individual from blocking the flow to his tank and
stop his flooding of the entire aquarium. It's never a
boring day with cephalopods in your life. Guys, thanks for
all the great podcast. If you're ever in San Francisco,
one of my favorite places, Josh, let me know and
(40:56):
I'll see if I can't work out some behind the
scenes cephalopod goodness. And that is from Rhea, and she says,
and don't worry, by the way, I have trouble pronouncing
hecto caudles as well and have taken the calling in
the sperm tentacle. Sperm tentacle works. The spermacle is what
(41:16):
she says. She says, it's time to rename that organ. Yes, well,
thanks Ria, right, thank you. My dad always said life
is better with steffalo pods in it. Really. Yeah, Uh,
if you have a fantastic saying that your father, mother, grandfather,
some old timing person told you we want to hear it,
(41:37):
Wrap it up in an email, spank it on the bottom,
and then send it to stuff podcast at how stuff
works dot com For more on this and thousands of
other topics, does it how stuff works dot com. Want
more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the
(41:57):
house stuff works dot com home page. M hmm. Brought
to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camry. It's ready,
Are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from houseff works dot com? Whoa, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles Cheek Bryant Chee. Yeah, man, yeah,
(00:23):
I wanted to start this one out like a twelve
year old, So that's what I'm going with, a twelve
year old on acid. Maybe maybe it just happened before
in France actually really thanks to our old friends at
c I A. Oh, they just kids. They just a
whole town to see what would happen. And one kid
came at his grandmother and tried to strangle her. Really yeah,
(00:45):
I can't remember the name of the town. Funny, but well, no,
people were like showing up at the hospital. There a
lot of it was funny in that, like, you know,
all these nineteen fifties French chees are losing their stuff
for no apparent reason, right, right, but you know the
suicides that resulted from that not very funny. Before we
(01:08):
get started, I think we should do like an official
c o A for this one. I think that is
a very good idea because what Josh and I are
about to talk about are illegal drugs, and we are
not endorsing the use of these and they are illegal
after all. We'll probably say this later on too, but
we just find it fascinating that they used to be
used for certain things and they're starting to be used
(01:29):
again in certain scientific research labs for these things. It
is extremely fascinating, which is what we're talking about exactly.
I guess this could be a follow up to our
our mk Ultra cast. It's a follow up and uh,
it's an epilogue and a prologue. Yes, yeah, very nice
because we kind of came into the the c I
A l s D MK Ultra podcast like right in
(01:52):
the middle of the history of LSD much well towards
the beginning. But um, one of the things after nineteen
forty three when Albert Hoffman, right, the chemist who created
LSD tried it. Yeah it was attempt uh and tried
(02:13):
it on himself intravenously. As I understand it, he injected it.
It says, first he took it by mistake, yeah, because
it was a blood thinner. And then he took it
for real. Yeah. After that first bike ride home he
was like, I gotta do some more and then I
read uote I became aware of the wonder of creation,
the magnificence of nature. Yes, to create Dr Hoffman. Yeah,
(02:34):
and he was just some Swiss guy, Sam chemist. Um.
He was at the first person to come up with
a synthetic hallucin Jim Back in nineteen fourteen, a German
chemist who worked for Merk the pharmaceutical company, came up
with M D m A, better known as ecstasy. Yeah.
And here's a tip for you, chuckers. Um, anytime, according
(02:57):
to the Associated Press, you write about a designer drug
and used it by its designer name, capitalize it. So
ecstasy is always capitalized the word ecstasy when you're talking
about the drug, guest, and not just the euphoric feeling
you get from life. That's different. That's lower case, okay,
but it should be all caps. Yeah. Sure, So it
(03:21):
was m d m A was created. Yeah, and it was. Um.
I guess it served as a it's not a catalyst,
because I think it's changed, but it was to be
used in the synthesis of other chemicals, and it kind
of sat on the shelves for a little while until
somebody along the way, and then I wonder what happens
(03:42):
if I take this stuff? And they did, and the
CIA again looked at it. I wanted to see what
it could do. Passed it up. UM, and a guy
by the name of Alexander Shulgin, right, yes, he's a
dow chemist and a night seen seventy eight. At the
age of seventy four, he published a study on the
(04:04):
Ufork effects of M D M A. It was the
first time anyone had ever published a study here. But
he was seventy four and he first noticed the Ufork
effects because he liked to take it and go to
cocktail parties of yeah. UM. So he's like, hey, man,
this stuff is the bomb, and here's my study on it.
Here that my findings, and let's everybody start taking this.
(04:28):
So he starts giving it to his friends, um, including
some psychiatrists. Did he give out passifiers? Not yet that
that's coming though, that's very very close. PASSI fires came
about night um. So Shilgin gives some to a friend
who's a psychiatrist. Psychiatrist some of the more avant garde
(04:49):
psychiatrists UM start giving it to their patients, and then
it gets called adam for a little while. For a.
While this is going on, it's being used by established psychiatrists.
A mysterious financier in Dallas, Texas finds out about this
stuff and starts taking it, hires an underground chemist and
has it made himself, and then start selling it at
(05:12):
clubs all over Dallas. And so this, this illicit use
of this substance, simultaneous to its emergence on the club
scene and about the mid eighties, led to the outlaw
of M D M A. We'll get into it more,
but the point is to this very long and rambling intro,
(05:35):
both of these drugs and others were legal at one time,
were put to good use, beneficial use, and then outlawed,
possibly unfairly, and then now we're starting to see them
come back into use, hallucinogens being used to treat mental
illness and mental harm in legitimate circles, very legitimate. Quick
(05:59):
question was that Dallas person was at Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.
I don't know. I don't think anybody knows who it is.
Still gotta start maybe, I think to begin with, so, Josh,
you mentioned the c I A. I do want to
point out it wasn't just the Americans. Uh, the Canadian
government and British's British is it works. Britain's m I
(06:23):
six also experimented with LSD and between nineteen fifty and
sixty five, forty thou people all over the world had
been treated with LSD and and treatments. Yeah, um, Carrie Grant, Yeah,
can we go back to Hollywood in in the nineteen yours,
(06:45):
So a couple of guys set up shop Arthur Chandler.
What was the other guy's name, Oh, Hartman Hartman, Mortimer Hartman,
who was a radiologist too acid Harman and said, you know,
I'm gonna get into psychiatry. These guy set up a
shop called the Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills right in
(07:06):
the middle of Beverly Hills. And this is back in
the day when things were it was clean living going on,
aside from the rampant alcoholism and cigarettes being smoked, adultery.
Probably some marijuana us going on here there, but that
was among the hop heads. Yeah exactly. So he sets
up a couple of rooms with a couch and uh
(07:27):
starts booking patients at a rate of like six or
eight hours of session, depending on what was going on
with the person, and five days a week. There were
books solid hundred bucks of pop hunter, which is a
lot of money back then. And I guess that included
the drugs. The drugs and the time that you were there, right,
So they would sit with you, they will give you
some blinders to block out distractions, and then you would
(07:51):
go into sort of like the more meditative sort of
acid trip. Essentially you were hard, they would because you
were on pharmaceutical grade l s D produced by the
Sandoz company. We're talking about Alice Huxley, novelist, and actually
he died tripping. Did you know that? Really? Yeah, he was.
(08:12):
He had m throat cancer, I think, and uh, the
last thing he ever wrote was a note to his
wife requesting UM such and such milligrams of LSD or
micrograms of LSD injected intramuscular intramuscularly. And that was about
six hours before he died. So he died and a
(08:32):
grateful dead record. That was his last request before the
grateful dea. Uh. Screenwriter screenwriter Charles Brackett took it. Director
Sydney laments it. Lay or lament I think, okay, I
always sad may, but I think I'm wrong. He took
it a few times, went through sessions, called it wonderful.
(08:53):
He re experienced his own birth, which apparently a few
people did. I've never heard of that. I haven't either.
And muh Claire Booth Loose was a playwright married to
Time magazine publisher Henry Loose. She was also an ambassador
and possibly an agent um for the US government. And
they both took acid so much that Henry Loose and
(09:15):
Time Magazine said we need to write about this. This
is awesome. Yeah, there's a lot of good press that
Time Magazine gave LSD in the fifties um as a
basically a cure all um. And again Carry Grant got
into it big time. Apparently he had like at least
a hundred trips I believe. Yeah he was. Yeah, let's
(09:35):
talk about him for a second, because he was one
of these guys that carefully constructed his persona. He worked
very hard. Apparently he was the The line he always
gave was a lot of people want to be Carry Grant,
and I'm one of them, indicating that this suave, Mr
Cool persona was completely fabricating, created by himself so he
(09:56):
could get you know, the fame and everything, but deep
down he's suffered as a human until he started taking acid, right,
and then he had um, well, he had some pretty
interesting revelations, one of which I read one of the
somebody thought to write down the stuff that he Some
(10:18):
of the insights he had, um, some were kind of deep.
Others were like, if I have to look at a man,
he should be required to comb his hair and brush
his teeth and wear a clean shirt. Yes, it was interesting,
so it kind of ran the gamut. But yeah, he um,
he became a real devotee of LSD. He yeah, and um,
(10:44):
well she got him into right who wrote that we're
part of this we're basing this part on a Vanity
Fair article art. Yeah, um, it's called the Carrying the
Sky with Diamonds. But he was a huge advocate for LSD.
He wasn't the only one, um, but he lived to
see it outlawed and public sentiment turned against it. Right,
(11:05):
it's just like m D M A um psilocybin, magic
mushrooms and part of the well, really one of the
you could say that Timothy Leary almost single handedly led
to the tremendous suffering of a lot of people who
might otherwise have been helped by LSD with his his
naive bravado of you know, the establishment just needs to
(11:30):
get over its hang ups and we should all take acid.
Whether or not you agree that that's a good idea,
it's a stupid thing to say. Leary was originally a
Harvard psychiatrist, right, yes, and he started taking I think
mushrooms and then he eventually started taking LSD and was
fired from Harvard because he turned into a hippie. And um,
(11:53):
that was pretty much the beginning of the end of LSD. Yeah,
they may have continued to use LSD as treatment for
mental patients mental illness and depression if not for Timothy Leary,
who was trying to spread the word about acid. Uh.
Back to Carry Grant real quick. He was so into it, Josh.
He had a couple of stories written about him in
(12:15):
nineteen fifty nine and Look magazine the Curious Story behind
the New Carry Grant gave a glowing account of LSD,
and then This is the Best the following year the
Good Housekeeping magazine. It got the Good Housekeeping Seal of
Approval in the nineteen sixty issue and they called it
the Secret of Grant's Second Youth. I want to get
a copy of that magazine. How awesome would that be? Yeah,
(12:38):
And that's kind of like the theme of this podcast
is so weird that these things were considered incredibly wonderful
and benign um and now they're they're just viewed as
just so they're evil in their outlaws simply because they
were made illegal, right prohibited um. And again there's kind
(13:00):
of a movement toward saying, hey, you know, maybe Timothy
Leary did give this a bad name, Maybe that that
um underground chemist in Dallas, uh really kind of put
a terrible spread on this, and we should look at
these again, right. She kind of tell one more story, Yes,
from Hollywood of the nineteen sixties. Esther Williams, famous uh
(13:21):
diva actress from the MGM studio friend of Carrie Grants
called Carrie Grant up after these articles and said, hey,
can you introduce me to your doctor, Dr Hartman. He
did so. At the time, she was aging, just had
gone through a divorce, her husband left her with huge
debt with the I R S. And she was still
(13:41):
struggling with the death of her sixteen year old brother.
She goes in the office, she takes acid, does her session,
goes home, to her parents, still on acid, has dinner
with them, and then goes into the bathroom mirror, says
good night to her parents, looks in the mirror, and
I'm gonna read this quote. I was startled by a
(14:03):
split image one half of my face. The right half
was me, the other half was the face of a
sixteen year old boy. The left side of my upper
body was flat and muscular. I reached up with my
boys hand to touch my right breast and felt my
penis stirring. It was a hermaphroditic phantasm. And I understood
perfectly in that moment. When my brother died, I took
(14:26):
him into my life so completely he became part of me. Yeah,
that's a pretty huge thing to understand and pretty jarring
way to come to terms with that, right. Yeah. But
that's what they're finding out now, though, is that these
people are having these breakthroughs in the throes of their
final days of let's say cancer, and they have these
epiphanies before we get to that. So LSD is outlawed.
(14:48):
We're following a timeline here. Yes, LSD is outlawed in
I think st something like that. Um at the very
at the latest nineteen, they shut down the shop in
Beverly Hills. Yeah, then Sandoz stopped making it and it
got it was outlawed and pushed underground. M d m
A made it until and m d m A story
(15:09):
is linked very closely to a guy named Dr George
Quarte who is Johns Hopkins researcher. This floored me. So
in about the time, the d e A is reeling
from being caught totally unaware by the crack epidemic. Uh,
and basically a lot of people think looking for a
(15:32):
whipping post um, they they start considering outlawing m d
m A. At that moment, this guy, Dr George rocquarde
Um publishes a study that he says, this drug deplete
your serotonin levels permanently causing brain damage. Right. Yeah, well
(15:54):
that that didn't that. So this guy, who was unknown
at the time, publishes the study starts to get UM
National Institute of Drug Abuse funding. So basically this is
his job. He starts a career um creating scientific evidence
in favor of banning drugs leads to the outlaw of
(16:16):
m d m A. Right that wasn't quite enough, they
scheduled it. Uh. The FEDS went after m d M
A even harder, and in two dou two they came
up with this thing called the Rave Act. It's, um,
what does rave stand for? Reducing Americans vulnerability to ecstasy?
I wonder how long they sat around looking at the
(16:38):
word rave, saying we've gotta make it fit, yeah, to
make it fit yeah. So UM, the the Rave Act
basically said, if you are a club owner and somebody
gets caught taking ecstasy or has ecstasy at your club,
we're gonna shut down your club. It was a huge,
huge law and it was bolstered by another UM. Another
(17:00):
study by Dr George roccaride UM that found that he
tested on ten monkeys is a big one. He injected
them with m d M A UM, A bunch of
them went psychotic, some of them UM showed early signs
of Parkinson's all of a sudden, and two of them
died almost immediately after being injected. So people started asking
(17:22):
questions about this, like, what what are you talking about?
People have been taking this drug forever and this has
never happened. So they started kind of going after recording
and UM they found out that he had actually injected
him with methamphetamine. The first thing that took them off
as he injected him because people were like, well, you
don't inject ecstasy, so that's kind of a weird way
(17:44):
to do it. And then they found out it was methamphetamines,
which he blamed on a mislabeling of a drug shipment
which they traced back and they went, not the label
right here. Yeah, the drug providers like, don't blame us,
it's pretty clear. So this is by this time, the
Rave Act has already passed her and the Rave Act
didn't get past, but something that included that, um was
(18:06):
passed by that time. The study that record A produced
was pretty was published in Science, the journal Science. Like,
that's as eyebrow as you get as far as scientific journals. Um.
And finally he gets beaten up enough that he he
prints a full retraction. The Science runs this retraction saying,
(18:27):
the whole the whole study that I produced, just forget
it ever existed. But that doesn't happen much, No, it doesn't.
That's very unusual the record A, I get the impression
is kind of this, um, well, it just kind of
seems like the scientific community views him largely as a
shill for the government. Yeah. Um, there's a couple of
(18:47):
articles that he shows up in on a Reason and
Reason magazines were checking out. Yeah. And you know, the
other interesting thing about that whole story about the big
fake study he did with meth amphetamines as to see
is that the Parkinson's Foundation, the people Parkinson's researchers, said,
I don't think that that's true. That doesn't make much
(19:09):
sense to us either, that they would show signs of
Parkinson's right. So they looked into it. People went about
reproducing his study um and the people who run the
Parkinson's Foundation actually issued a statement saying ecstasy does not
do this, so they basically came out in favor of ecstasy.
It's kind of neat to watch from the outside because
(19:30):
there's this guy who's again kind of viewed as a
show for the government, who's beating up on this drug
that a lot of people who are also in the
scientific community feel is being unfairly outlawed, and so there's
kind of beating up on him in retaliation. It's kind
of neat to see eggheads beat up on one another.
(19:51):
NERD fights and the n I d A. It went
so far that the n I d A just kind
of quietly pulled their fact sheet on ecstasy, and it
was like, um, let's just take this down the website.
After the retraction, we'll rewrite it. I'm sure it's back
up now as something else. But it doesn't include immediate
death and Parkinson's disease. I would imagine that's right. So
Timothy Leary dies, he gets shot into space, he's out
(20:15):
of the picture entirely. Everybody gets sick of hippies generally. Um, George,
record is that, basically the guy who's single handedly getting
ecstasy outlawed, his work comes into great, great question, and
people start going back and looking at m D m
A again, and they start looking at LSD again, And
(20:35):
that's where we find ourselves right now. Slowly but surely,
people are starting to run studies on whether or not
you can use these hallucinogens to treat mental illness. And
the results are pretty astounding actually, And you know where
they're leading the charge in Switzerland, in Los Angeles all
these years later, same place, Yes, hippie freaks. Yeah so yeah, Josh,
(21:00):
they are I think in Switzerland, uh and solo then
Switzerland they have been experimenting with LSD um psilocybin which
you might know is magic much rooms ketamine you might
know a special k That kind of surprised me that
that was in there. Yeah, I hadn't heard much about
that one either. And they're getting these, uh these studies
(21:23):
published in Nature Reviews, Neuroscience, and other you know, leading
industry peer reviewed publications. Yeah, it's not all under the
table back room experiments. Oh no, these are very heavily
um overseen. You have to be a very legitimate researcher
to get government approval. They're not funded though still they're
(21:44):
they say they're still having a hard time with funding
and they're just the sort of looking to get some
restrictions loosened. They're not saying make all this stuff legal, right,
they're not battling a legalization on the legalization front at all.
But what they're one of the reason why so many
people are kind of starting to put their reputations on
the line. Um, it's because the results that they're seeing.
(22:07):
So we have antidepressants, right, Um, they take weeks to
kick in, they have all sorts of side effects, and
what they're what we're seeing in these studies now are
that the the things like ketamine uh M, d M
A l s D are having like a huge impact
right out of the gate. There's one study, UM that
(22:27):
came out in July, I believe, UM, and it found
it was a study of twelve people who were diagnosed
with PTSD post traumatic stress disorder. Yeah, that's one of
the big ones. Yeah, that's huge at UM. That's where
you well, it's what we used to call shell shock.
Is you go through traumatic experience and you relive it
over and over again. UM, and it's it's debilitating. UM.
(22:52):
They found that of the twelve people in this study,
ten of them, after going through the study, UM, after
take king M d m A no longer met the
criteria to be diagnosed with PTSD afterwards, ten of the twelve. Yeah.
And for my understanding and most of these studies is
it's not like you have to stay on ecstasy your
whole life. Like a lot of people have these epiphanies
(23:14):
and they quit taking it and they have changed their
outlook and that right, Yeah, that's the impression I'm getting to. UM.
Ketamine apparently it's good for depression in the same way. UM,
just a very tiny dose I can get you over
severe clinical depression. Or that's the results. The early results,
we should say, yeah, um, and everything from quitting smoking,
(23:36):
two suicidal thought, yeah, cluster headaches, Harvard studying. Those are
migraines for men, right, what they call my migraines. I
know they're so debilitating that you consider suicide or you
know not everyone does obviously, but it's just this awful,
awful pain. You can't leave your house, you get to
sit in a dark room, and so it's helping there.
(23:57):
And UM, what I thought was interesting John's Hopkins. You
might have heard of them, a little reputable institutions or
required is from was it they didn't experiment where they
gave psilocybin too emotionally stable individuals like this wasn't even
people that were mentally ill, people that had never taken
hallucinogens before, which is interesting that you would be. I
(24:19):
think they had a sixty four year old that signed
up for this. Yeah, it's crazy, and they said sixty
four and they said the experiment a year later they
said the experience is one of the most meaningful and
spiritual experiences of their entire lives, and that those were
mentally stable folks and this is a year on it
(24:40):
still had an impact on them. Um, they're also finding
that UH, O, c D and basically mood disorders are
the primary target of hallucinogenic treatment, right, psychedelics for treatment,
and the reason being, we think, is because they target
serotonin in the brain. This is an other reason why
(25:00):
they're not addictive. They don't they don't employ the reward
circuit in the brain, which is how we become addicted
to things were flooded with dopamine re member. It just
affects the mood serotonin, And we don't really have a
very good grasp on serotonin and exactly how that works.
But we do know that UM, there's correlations between UH
(25:23):
high levels of serotonin or low levels of serotonin and depression, right.
And we know that UM using antidepressants which block the
reuptake of serotonin UM reduces symptoms of clinical depression in people.
So we know that serotonins in there somewhere. We know
that the more serotonin have, the better generally or low
(25:46):
serotonins bad UH. And then we also know that hallucinogens
target this somehow. That's pretty much where the research stands
right now. It makes you wonder where would we be
if LSD and m D M A hadn't been in
the wilderness the last few decades. Well, yeah, they may
have a pill, like a low dose pill because a
lot of these studies, just so you know, back in
(26:07):
Carrie Grand State, that mean it was full full on
acid trips. But a lot of these, like the psilocybin pills,
they will give you be very low dose. So I
don't I get the feeling that it's not like this
huge mushroom trip that a lot of these patients are
going through. Because it said of the people recognized when
they did not have the placebo. So if it wasn't,
(26:30):
then it was probably a pretty low dose. Yes, would
be my guess. Um, would you if if everything was
legalized UM and m d m A came to be
prescribed for just happiness, right, would you take it? Would
(26:50):
you take a happy pill that was legal and didn't
have side effects? Not to say m d m A
doesn't have side effects, there's a UM like basically the
three days after a depression that follows when you're serotonin
levels are repleting themselves. I don't think I would because
there are quote unquote happy pills now, and I mean
(27:11):
it's not like I'm against any depressants. Or things like that,
because people definitely benefit from those who need them. But
I just I don't need that kind of thing, so
I would not Uh, I would not serve you are
not alone, Chuck. There was a survey conducted for this
BBC series on Britain of British people that found that
(27:31):
seventy of them said that they would not take a
happy pill it was legal and had no side effects.
It's interesting, yeah, because it kind of I think that
for a large segment of the population, there's just the
idea of synthesizing happiness is untoward. Yeah, you know, yeah,
(27:53):
it's it's a little weird. I mean, that's not to
say I'm a square and I don't like to get
down another aspect, Josh. I mean, we're we're talking right
now about literally the effect it has on your brain
and your serotonin levels and your moods. They've also found
that UH patients, cancer patients in particular, who consume hallucinogens,
(28:15):
or people with just um traumatic events from earlier in
their life, they have the ability to relive some of
these memories and events from their past. They can unlock
buried traumatic episodes, deal with them psychologically, put them to
rest and come out the other side with a new understanding,
free from these demons. UM. You remember in the hypnosis
(28:39):
episode where we were talking about how the way it's
viewed now is that you you are you're accessing the
subconscious scies. Yeah, more easily. It's like popping open a
control panel. That's what this. This is what they're seeing
with M D M A. Apparently, Uh, you are able
to access things UM from a very empathetic way. I
(29:02):
think the term I've heard for it is called UM
a psychotherapeutic catalyst like kick starts things. And I think
one researcher called it it's psychotherapy sped up. The psychiatrist
called it it's like psychotherapy on acid. So this hasn't
(29:27):
LSD specifically hasn't been the greatest friend to everybody who's
ever taken it. And what's funny in this article that
UM that's on the site, can we treat mental illness
with hallucinogens? Tom Schif has to go to the sixties
psychedelic rock scene to find examples of people who have
(29:48):
had a bad, bad time on acid. Uh. And apparently,
what what the conventional wisdom is is if you are
predisposed to mental illness. LSD can exacerbate that. Yeah, if
you have a bad trip, you're going to have a really,
really bad trip because you're already predisposed to mental illness. Yeah,
he's Brian Wilson and Sid Barrett as the two examples,
(30:11):
and those are stellar examples, they really got to say.
But they're also counterintuitive to what we're seeing with UM.
Like PTSD, you are already suffering from a mental illness.
So here's some m D m A. Probably LSD would
be horrible to give to a PTSD survivor. Yeah, right,
I would say, so, UM, and what else can we
(30:33):
talk about? Pamela Secuda, Sure, Yeah, it's a very interesting story.
This was a woman UM aged fifty seven at the
time of this article, who was in the final stages
of colon cancer. She had outlived her prognosis. She was
anxious and depressed. She was worried about her family, her
husband and what they were gonna do without her. It
(30:55):
was not a good life. She was living here at
the end and she was prescribed any depressants. Of course,
it didn't work, didn't do a thing for so she
volunteered for an experiment at u c l A in
two thousand five and started taking psilocybin, the magic mushroom
pill in pill form. She had a lot of breakthroughs.
(31:16):
They brought her husband in at the end of one
of the sessions and he said, there's my Pammi. She
was just beaming with light and I haven't seen her
that joyous and so long. She was totally alive and happy.
And she continued to take it until she didn't need
it anymore. She had these breakthroughs and then all of
a sudden, her husband and uh, Pamela were going to concerts,
(31:39):
They went hiking at the Grand Canyon, they went on vacations,
They did all these things that she hadn't been doing
in a long time because of these epiphanies she had
under the influence of psilocybin, and sadly she died well, yeah,
she died. Yeah, that's what she died from in two
thousand six, and her husband said she died in his arms.
(32:00):
But her husband was very appreciative and they actually did
a benefit about a week before she died for the
institute that was doing this work at U c l A.
So it's pretty interesting. Yeah, the definitely and one of
the applications that they're finding is end of life care
for UM using m D, m A or LSD. You're psilocybin. Sure,
(32:21):
we're special k. Apparently what about this eyebo gain. They're
finding that iba game works really well. I be gain
is a m it's from a hallucinatory root plant in Africa,
I believe UM. And they're finding that you go on
a thirty six hour trip. That's a long time, but
they're finding that it's really effective in breaking UM addiction
(32:45):
and like serious addictions to like heroin, yeah, cocaine. So
being on this stuff just for thirty six hours creates
a break in the addiction cycle itself. But what they're
finding this most notable about it is it there's a
lack of withdrawal symptoms that you see in every other
type of addiction removal, especially with heroin. Like heroin, you're
(33:09):
supposed to have physical withdraw stom withdrawal symptoms, and people
who are taking eyeba gain are not experiencing that like
they would if if they tried to kick the habit
without it. It's pretty remarkable. It is very remarkable. It's
very interesting. We should probably say, I don't know if
we have yet that This podcast is in no way
an endorsement of going out and buying yourself some street
(33:32):
drugs and you know, seeing what happens. It's a study
of what we findly be very fascinating. The fact that
this is there's been a resurgence in this and these
you know, qualified doctors U. C. L. A. Johns Hopkins,
they're saying we should look into this stuff. Yeah, and
they definitely are, and they're getting some very interesting results.
What about the A A guy. We should mention that
really quickly. That was pretty funny. Oh yeah, Bill Wilson, Yeah,
(33:54):
one of the co founders of A A. Yeah. He uh.
He apparently took LSD in the fifties, wasn't. Yeah, And
this is after he was long after he was sober
from alcohol since the thirties. I think, um so, he
takes LSD in the fifties and is like, this is
really helpful. Um So, I think everybody who comes into
(34:18):
a should take LSD. Uh. And they were like, Nick,
you should probably not do that. So they talked him
out of it. But the reason why he found it
helpful when is that Hallucinogen's part of a twelve step
program is to really reflect on past wrongdoings and then
elucidate them to another human being. And apparently lsd M,
(34:43):
d M a UM these other drugs help. They serve
as a catalyst for that process. So that's why Bill
Wilson I thought this, This is really helpful because again
it's like a therapy sped up. Fascinating, very fascinating. I
will say this though, I'm gonna go out on a
limb and say, even though we're not saying, oh, you
should go out and do these things, I will say
(35:04):
that some chemically created in a lab pill called an antidepressant,
isn't I mean, what's the difference the differences I think,
in my opinion from what I've seen, Uh, one's marketed
and legal and the other is illegal. Yeah, it's as
simple as that one is made by murk and one
(35:27):
is not made by murk but used to make this,
which is ironic. Public sentiment counts for everything. Yeah, you know,
it's the same reason the alcohol. You can go into
a bar and get completely wasted out of your mind
and get in a car, but you can't walk into
a bar and smoke a joint or shoot heroin or
shoot heroin. And we're not labbying for anything. It's just
interesting that the things that society has deemed acceptable. Alcoholism
(35:52):
is just fine. Well it's not just fine, but it's
it's legal and you can do it, even though it
kills all these people, and this is not acceptable. It's
just it's funny how we've evolved to think some things
are evil and some things are just great. I wonder
what the future holds, Josh. I wonder myself. We'll find out, Yes,
we will, if we lived that long. That is about
(36:13):
it for this one. You should probably check out Can
we Treat Mental Illness with Hallucinogens on the site. Be
sure to check out Carrying the Sky with Diamonds Vanity
Fair article type in George Rick Quarte R I C
U A R T e uh into Reasons website that
will bring up some cool stuff. There's a killer Time
(36:36):
magazine article from I think two thousand or two thousand
one UM on ecstasy on M D M A uh
it was. That's really It's called the Happiness and a
Pill something like that, Josh from the future. We are
in New York right now, but tonight Thursday, the twenty
(36:58):
one October. I know that our producer and comfitan and
den mother. Jerry will be at a fundraiser for the
co ED, the Cooperative Cooperative for Education right today, Yeah, tonight.
If you're in Atlanta and you are about to pop
another chef lonely Hearts frozen dinner for one and drink
(37:22):
a bottle of wine for two by yourself, and you're
looking for love in the Atlanta area, stop what you're doing,
Grab twenty bucks and go to the Metropolitan Club in
Alpharetta from seven to ten pm tonight, Thursday, October twenty one.
Co ED is holding their Fall Fiesta, a t L fundraiser.
(37:44):
It's gonna be awesome, right. The twenty bucks buys you
that wine that you're going to drink by yourself, better wine,
probably asked, and you get to drink it amongst friends,
meet Jerry. There's also going to be food, better food, entertainment,
and all sorts of chances to win or auction bid. Right,
that's the that's the proper verb. Yeah, they're auctioning off
(38:04):
cool prizes like African safaris and uh signed sports memorabilia
and stuff like that, and you never know, you could
find love there. We're making zero guarantees whatsoever, but It's
worth a shot, isn't it. Yes, And if we weren't
out of town right now, we would be there tonight,
Yes we would. So. Um again, if you don't remember
who co ed is. Co ed are the is the
(38:26):
great nonprofit that took us to Guatemala and we did
a two part podcast on it which is awesome. Um.
And they pull money together to buy books for schools
in Guatemala, which then in turn rent the books. Uh.
And that that rental fee is is put into an
escrow account which after five years is substantial enough to
buy all new textbooks. So what they start as a
(38:49):
self sustaining system um of ownership of textbooks, and it
has a huge effect. It's not just textbooks. They do
computer labs too, So um, if you want more information
on coed or the Fall Fiesta a t L tonight,
go to their website www dot c o E d
UC dot org. Right, that's right, all right, let's do this.
(39:09):
So that that's it man, Nice job, buddy. I guess
it's time now for listener mail, right, Yes, I have
a listener mail, Josh from Rhea and this was about
Octopus or OCTOPI. We were corrected the octopis not right,
but she says it she worked at high is so right. Well,
we have these people seeing actually the Latin thing the
(39:33):
Jerry just left at that. Hi, guys, your podcast on
OCTOPI made my day to day. Thank you. I work
as an aquarist at a San Francisco aquarium and one
of my favorite responsibilities is our cephalopod gallery. Nice. I
get to do enrichment with giant Pacific octopods, make sure
all of our eight legged friends stay out of trouble.
(39:53):
And I'm currently teaching a two spot octopus how to
open a jar to get his favorite food, which live crabs.
I'm right there with you fromstr octopus. Uh. It was
great to hear someone besides myself get a little too
excited about these critters. And you know, we've got great
feedback on this. People love the octopus because are so freaky. Uh.
(40:14):
The story about Lucratia mke evil especially cracked me up.
I work with the g p O. That's the giant
Pacific octopod that might give her a run for money.
For the past few weeks, I've been walking around with
what my colleagues call octopus kisses up the length of
my arms. But I'm afraid my husband is getting a
little suspicious about the number of hickys I've been acquiring.
(40:34):
So that's from the little suckers. These little suckers clearly, Uh,
these were given to me while I tried to remove
the individual from blocking the flow to his tank and
stop his flooding of the entire aquarium. It's never a
boring day with cephalopods in your life. Guys, thanks for
all the great podcast. If you're ever in San Francisco,
one of my favorite places, Josh, let me know and
(40:56):
I'll see if I can't work out some behind the
scenes cephalopod goodness. And that is from Rhea, and she says,
and don't worry, by the way, I have trouble pronouncing
hecto caudles as well and have taken the calling in
the sperm tentacle. Sperm tentacle works. The spermacle is what
(41:16):
she says. She says, it's time to rename that organ. Yes, well,
thanks Ria, right, thank you. My dad always said life
is better with steffalo pods in it. Really. Yeah, Uh,
if you have a fantastic saying that your father, mother, grandfather,
some old timing person told you we want to hear it,
(41:37):
Wrap it up in an email, spank it on the bottom,
and then send it to stuff podcast at how stuff
works dot com For more on this and thousands of
other topics, does it how stuff works dot com. Want
more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the
(41:57):
house stuff works dot com home page. M hmm. Brought
to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camry. It's ready,
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