Psychedelics Playlist: The Manifested Mind, Part 3

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welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind? My name is

(02:51):
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part three of our exploration of psychedelics. These compounds that
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

(03:11):
one it's not best to jump in midstream, right. Yeah,
it's a continuous, though at times meandering journey history of psychedelics,
not an all inclusive history, and so we've stressed multiple times,
you know, there's no way 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

(03:33):
implore you to to check out some of the sources
we've mentioned here and explore them for yourselves as well
as you know additional resources. Right 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 Terence McKenna done
Michael Pollen as well. We have 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

(03:55):
of the same ground as some some history, some science,
and especially this re sent renaissance in psychedelic research and
how it there's renewed interest I think since like the
early to mid two thousands, 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

(04:19):
they're not just a recreational drug. Though there are also
plenty of people 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
discuss some of these viewpoints that are brought up regarding
uh the beyond medicinal uses of psychedelics, uh and uh

(04:44):
as far as the 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. Uh, We're
probably gonna get into most of that in the following episode.
This episode is largely going to deal with some of

(05:06):
the original studies that were 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 a flourishing body of

(05:27):
psychedelic research going on during the nineteen fifties and early
nineteen sixties, especially focusing on LSD and the treatment of
things like alcoholism 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 van at Woodstock and start corrupting

(05:50):
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. I've also watched like
British documentaries where they pre for fungi. But I'm I'm

(06:12):
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 been with
us the last two episodes. Is that of all the
psychedelics that we've looked at, the most focus has been

(06:33):
on psilocybin mushrooms, right, and even LSD is derived from ergot,
which is a fun guy. So so that so the
the fungal element here is is very rich. And second yes,
so so yeah the kingdom fun guy because fun guy
are their own kingdom. Uh. We often associate them with

(06:54):
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 plant species on
a scale of ten to one, and they all descend
from a single species that derived from a common ancestor
with animals about eight hundred million to nine hundred million

(07:16):
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,

(07:36):
you know why in some cases, we have this uh,
this close relationship because ultimately fungi 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 fungui dependent species due to their just a

(08:00):
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. Because

(08:22):
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
licensed orbilists 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 a

(08:45):
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
served England, 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

(09:08):
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

(09:30):
mushroom tea to be partaking of medicinal fun guy, Because
of course we have penicillin to consider, 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

(09:51):
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 microbio 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 nutrit exchange of trees growing around their roots

(10:12):
like fungal gloves and exchanging nitrogen for sugars uh. And
then 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 blowing
lye weird to think about, because we're talking about a

(10:34):
fungal network of hi fi. 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.

(10:55):
It allows for the plants to distribute resources such as sugar, nitrogen,
and foster risk. Uh, 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 Statements, for instance, who did

(11:16):
we mention? I mean the pole several times? So yeah,
he's he's like a mushroom answer for everything. Guy. Uh,
you know, very important figure in 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 Paulin says that

(11:39):
that initially he thought this was mere metaphor you know
that clearly Statements is just being overly enthusiastic and metaphoric
about what's going on with these 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

(12:02):
make the case that mushrooms, in 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. Uh.

(12:25):
I'm not saying 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
hear Eduardo Cone, Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University, UH,
speak on basically the same topic at the twenty nineteen

(12:46):
World Science Festival. 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 and the soil within forests as
a as a type of communication or even thought. Yeah,

(13:08):
he gets 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 a quote
from his book How Forests Think quote. Life is a

(13:31):
constitutively semiotic. 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

(13:55):
would hold, 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,

(14:18):
I'm very interested in his his thoughts and his work.
I 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 people's 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.

(14:39):
And he says that these approaches break down the way
language tells us what we are. They help them find
a path forward, path of healing and problem solving. And
he also point out that the shamans of the Amazon
but basically have a message for the rest of the world,
and they want us to know that the world is
a living world and we have to connect ourselves with
the mind of the forest save ourselves from the planetary

(15:02):
depression that we are now entering into. And I found
this really interesting because this is UH. Even though Cone
to my knowledge, didn 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

(15:27):
and um and at least in mckinna's definition, and overall,
you know bohemian thread of human cultures to save us,
uh 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 of

(15:48):
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 a

(16:10):
symptom of our disconnection with nature. And he says the
solution isn't simply to to you know, take a psyched
caedelic 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

(16:31):
I said, perhaps we can get him on the show
to discuss these these topics and 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 that 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 we are in many cases have great difficulty in

(16:55):
being part of some sort of a larger system. Uh.
You know, it's 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, we don't
understand each other, we don't understand nature, you know, we're

(17:17):
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
that is either truly profound or extremely banal. Yeah, I mean,

(17:39):
I yeah, I get it because I know a lot
of people out there, probably shaking their hands, is saying like, well,
that just sounds like hippie 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, you know, you look at
the literature, the science, pivic literature that that is that

(18:02):
shows us and is continuing to show us what psychedelics
can do. I think at this point it's you know,
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 condition or another, or
does it go beyond that? You know, I I think

(18:23):
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
is 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 the mid
to late nineteen sixties. Right, yeah, Well, on that note,

(18:44):
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, most of
these substances are nothing. Humans have used them for thousands

(19:05):
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 psychedelics and

(19:26):
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 Hoffman worked
for in the nineteen thirties and forties, uh Sandoz, which
I guess held the patent on LSD, was just given
it out like candy. Basically, they were I think they

(19:46):
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 need.
It's 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 use
is for it. You you kind of just let everybody

(20:07):
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 and how they might be used to treat addiction, depression, UM,
obsessive compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, autism, and end of life anxiety.

(20:31):
So in his book, Michael Pollen chats with Stephen Ross,
m D of the n y U Pselocybin 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

(20:54):
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. Yeah, it
was huge. Wasn't just a blip. Yeah, And initially, reach

(21:15):
the 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

(21:37):
and 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,

(22:00):
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 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,

(22:22):
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 this 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,

(22:46):
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
thought 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.

(23:07):
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 ultimately we have this

(23:29):
this push for biochemical answers to you know, concerning mental issues,
and this propels the the the young field of neurochemistry,
leading in time to our modern understanding of neuro transmitters
and their role in our mental states, leading to the
discovery of serotonin and the development of ssr I antidepressant drugs.

(23:51):
But then you know, some 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 negative symptoms that have been referred

(24:14):
to as the delirium tremens Yeah. So this led to
inn 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 according to pollen uh alcoholics, and they found

(24:39):
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 quote buried in plain sight. Um,

(24:59):
but anywa, 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 see in an an anti LSD

(25:21):
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.

(25:42):
Even so, there was definitely some anxiety, 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

(26:04):
an experience that was was playing a 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

(26:25):
was especially in Canada that that LSD treatment 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

(26:45):
giving somebody the drug triggers a change in the body
that defeats alcoholism. That that there's something important going on
by about the nature of the experience that people have
on psychedelics, uh, that contributes to their recovery and and
staying sober over time. Right right, Yeah, This sort of

(27:05):
this metaphorical shaking of the snow globe as as some
call it, 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,

(27:27):
and they failed to reproduce the you know, the same
robust results. Uh. And this ended up giving fuel to
critics of of LSD, but also supporters again stressed the
importance of set and setting, right. I mean, this is
something that I guess we'll come back to the sentiment.
It's 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

(27:47):
setting in research. But but still there there was enough
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 hall 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

(28:12):
incidentally create a credited his own sobriety to a life
changing mystical experience he had on on Bella Donna, which
also has psychoactive properties and was used in a treatment
treatment at Towns Hospital in New York City in ninety four.
That's when when he had the substance as part of
the treatment. And so you can see that in a

(28:33):
lot of the alcoholics anonymous messaging like the idea of
the the 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

(28:54):
with the common kinds of mystical experiences that people have
on psychedelics, 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

(29:18):
the way, would later try LSD with some researchers in
l A 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 muddy the like the messaging of
the organization itself, right, like, uh, you know that you

(29:41):
would turn to another chemical? Um. Yeah. 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. Today's episode is brought to you by Slack.

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you get your podcasts. Alright, we're back now. I think
this is a good place to start discussing the fact
that there are widely acknowledged inherent difficulties with doing rigorous

(32:17):
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 a placebo controlled test.
You have to do this if you want to sort
out specific pharmacological efficacy versus the placebo effect. You know,

(32:39):
the effect that 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 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 and report their nausea

(33:01):
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 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

(33:21):
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 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,

(33:43):
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 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.

(34:04):
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 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

(34:28):
hard because most of the time you can definitely tell
whether you've received a large dose of psilocybin versus a placebo. Right,
I mean, even even if the individual, the test subject
in question, 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

(34:50):
the the the experience is going to be like, just
through media and culture. Yeah. Well, and the effect 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

(35:12):
probably part of the active test group. Right. But but yeah,
even but even if the effects are not that strong,
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

(35:35):
working with is on LSD or psilocybin versus a placebo.
Like you know, people who are on these drugs 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

(35:56):
be able to sense. One example that has been used
in history worcle research is niacin, which causes physiological 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

(36:18):
you still are going to have this blinding problem. But
then there's another problem that makes it worse, a problem
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 and it was in the first episode I think
where we talked mostly about the importance of set and setting. Uh,

(36:38):
people's takeaways from psychedelic assisted therapy seem hugely dependent on
their expectations on the environment and on the guide. Yeah.
I think it was a police 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,

(36:58):
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
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

(37:23):
with you, you know, the researchers in question in a
likewise manner, that sort of thing. In other words, I
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 of what you
normally do in a drug trial. You explicitly do want

(37:43):
to bias the subject's expectations and interpretations of their drug
experience in a way that suggests it will help 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 being bag jair for instance,
listening to some ambient music and attended to by you know,

(38:05):
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 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

(38:28):
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 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 and this in this study that didn't replicate the

(38:50):
original set and setting, people are not getting nearly as
positive a benefit. Uh, And that just seems to show
again how dependent the experience is on 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.

(39:11):
It was what it was the mind state it was creating.
Exactly what could be gained from that mindset. Yes, psychedelics
seem to 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

(39:34):
compound curious your alcoholism, but that taking psilocybin allows you
to have an experience of profound emotional significance that helps
people overcome alcoholism. 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

(39:56):
or guide present is maybe not a very good recipe
for getting 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 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

(40:18):
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 don't apply especially well to psychedelics, and
some methods of achieving objectivity appear to directly counteract the
most powerful clinical potentials of these compounds. Another problem we

(40:42):
could talk about from the history of psychedelic research is
not a systematic methodological obstacle, but it's more like a
historical trend that 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

(41:05):
time to tend to lose objectivity and become more endorsers
and enthusiasts 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. Your voices are often the loudest. Right now,
and again, I want to be clear, I'm not saying

(41:26):
all people, all scientists who work with psychedelics to this
or maybe not, probably not even most, but but but
some significant numbers do follow this path, right and and
and and again, their voices are the loudest. And uh,
in terms of loud the psychedelic voices, few voices were
louder than Timothy Learies. Um. So, like one example of

(41:48):
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 highly criticized, and it
basically seems like he was intentionally I seeing the experiments
to make psychedelics seem more clinically useful. Uh, you know,
which is a shame, because the research does actually suggest

(42:09):
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. An example of this is 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 um, you know, back

(42:32):
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, 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

(42:53):
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 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, you know, visiting family or whatever. It's
it's the as the days go by, as the weeks

(43:13):
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 Albert, who was also known as Ramdas, would later
explain that, you know that the aim of the project
was solid and had a reasonable therapeutic model, but would

(43:33):
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,
but then a tendency to rush things. And it's almost
like he had more system one thinking, you know, than
system to thinking. And of course, uh, this is not

(43:56):
the preferable balance for serious scientific inquiry. 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 that
this was done under the supervision of Timothy Leary's Harvard
psilocybin project, but it wasn't, I think, directly carried out

(44:16):
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 religious people.
And this is sometimes known as the Marsh Chapel experiment
or the Good Friday experiment because it took place on

(44:38):
Good Friday nineteen sixty two. So Walter Panky 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 the Marsh Chapel
of Boston University. Half got psilocybin, half got an active

(45:00):
placebo which was niacin. And remember nias 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 this experiment Good
Friday Service day as among the most profound and significant

(45:23):
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 tranquilizing people with thorazine after this experiment.
And and and these were they, These were the researchers, not

(45:45):
like the old church ladies right who may also keep
thorizin the pastor tranquilizing with thorizine. 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 Rick Doblin of
of maps uh an organization. I don't know if we've

(46:07):
mentioned already, but I think you'll refer to later. Yeah,
it's the Multidisciplinary 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 the Zendo Project,
which aims to promote proper psychedelic peer support, especially for individuals,

(46:28):
especially first timers who are having a difficult trip. So
I think they've like set up operations that um, you know,
major cultural festivities such as burning Man before. But I
think this is a really interesting project. I'd 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, I mean this

(46:51):
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 psychedelics, so we should really
stress is not just giving somebody a compound and then

(47:13):
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. Uh, the therapist of some kind who
either like guides you through the experience itself or sort
of holds the space with you while you have your

(47:35):
experience and then later helps you talk through it and
go through the integration process. 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
of the traditional uses of psychedelics. Like when we talked

(47:56):
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
that role. And then outside of the you know, the

(48:16):
traditional usage or the research or medicinal or psychotherapist usage,
there was 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
were talking about Doblin. Yeah, Well, the follow up and

(48:38):
analysis of the original 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 the questionnaire given

(48:58):
to subjects to a value ate 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 a is
very positive and profound, many of them struggled with intense

(49:20):
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

(49:45):
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
you use psychedelics in a way to enhance the experience
of so called healthy normals. This was a case where

(50:06):
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

(50:27):
of curing a particular malady, of seeing if something that
the substance is 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.

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(53:47):
on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts. Thank alright, we're back, alright, 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

(54:07):
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 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

(54:28):
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 mid nineteen sixties. First
of all, I think some of it you could chalk
up to a somewhat legitimate reaction to the perceived over

(54:48):
enthusiasm of people like Timothy Leares some of the scientists
involved in psychedelic research. We're clearly not practicing the most
rigorous objective science, and we're in 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

(55:08):
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 profound and well spoken.
I mean he was, he was a very charismatic guy.
But you can you can understand I think, you know,

(55:29):
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, this is what
we were talking about before the break. How scary it
seemed that some psychedelic enthusiasts were recommending psychedelics to so

(55:52):
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 of these solutions could
include drugs, even drugs that have a potential for abuse,

(56:13):
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 it to affect
change on themselves. Yeah, I mean it's quite a pilled,

(56:33):
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 of climate change is
because there is a certain amount of judgment to be

(56:55):
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
the murderer or the you know, somebody who did something

(57:16):
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 only the changes that were uh,

(57:39):
you know, offered or at least advertised by you know,
the psychedelic counterculture, but also the fear of change via
political ideologies, the fear of communism, uh, 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 why there's a lot of

(58:01):
fear around the idea of treating normality. You know, 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 is one letter that
was quoted in Pollen's book that I thought was interesting,
where Huxley was writing to Osmond in about people taking
compounds like mescal and an LSD, and Huxley wrote, quote,

(58:25):
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, is a

(58:47):
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. 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 the UH in the

(59:11):
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 of these substances.

(59:33):
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, what 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 be skeptical

(59:54):
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

(01:00:14):
UH you know, as 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 the powers of a psychedelic substance

(01:00:38):
to somehow fix that for us on an individual level
or a cultural level. Yeah, I think that's 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 one of a a lot of
these studies show, quite frankly, is that there is a

(01:01:01):
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 I think is probably the

(01:01:21):
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 to people that kids who

(01:01:42):
took acid, quote, won't fight your wars, won't join your corporations.
I mean that that's scary to the authorities, right, right,
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 mean that turned out not quite to

(01:02:03):
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 Pollen said quote. LST truly
was an acid, dissolving almost everything with which it came

(01:02:25):
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

(01:02:45):
spiritual and the material. 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 ungoverned bowl Dianician force that blithely washes all
those lines away. That's beautiful, and that comes back to

(01:03:06):
Terence mckinna's definition of them 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

(01:03:28):
generation was utterly unfamiliar Normally, 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

(01:03:50):
psychic landscape unrecognizable to their parents. 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 and himself points out, like he grew up in
the dark times of of you know that he basically

(01:04:12):
grew up in the moral panic period. Yeah, so didn't
really experiment much with psychedelics when he was younger, 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

(01:04:34):
this where he points out the idea of rights of
passage that expand the consciousness. They are supposed to be
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

(01:04:54):
children anymore. They've been initiated into some other tribe. No,
I think it's a great point. I mean, yeah, this
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, well, maybe we'll
get into more detail about these studies in the in

(01:05:15):
the next episode. But there are at least a couple
of studies I've been reading from the last decade 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 over

(01:05:35):
time 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.
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

(01:05:59):
a psycho logical personality trait that's known as openness to experience.
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 and in various research, Like openness is highly correlated

(01:06:21):
with with like lack of prejudice and lack of authoritarianism,
and 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

(01:06:43):
to new experiences, you become more attractive to travel, and
in traveling you're 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 it and uh people around you
are different and yet the same, and it forces you

(01:07:05):
to sort of reconsider who you are in the whole scenario.
So if this is true, yeah, 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

(01:07:25):
Nixon or something, that these personality changes could be perceived
as a direct threat to the 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

(01:07:47):
have to try and figure out what the nineteen sixties were,
you know, like what was the nineteen sixties experience? And
certainly you and 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

(01:08:08):
Love captured what the sixties felt like. I but I
never had a chance to ask him what he really
meant by that. 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

(01:08:29):
doing doesn't reflect your values. Like I can't relate to
the experience of you know, of of grown up uh
in the nineties sixties. Uh. You know, you know, a
middle aged person looking at the young generations and things
and asking, oh, 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,

(01:08:50):
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 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

(01:09:12):
a rise out of any new thing, be a Pokemon
or Harry Potter. I think there's one for Teletubbies. Teletubbies. Yeah, yeah,
so so yeah. The fact that there's kind of a
generational divide and a and a in 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. We've discussed, we've discussed in the

(01:09:33):
show before, and we'll in the future. You know, we
certainly have some issues with with mobile technology and with
social media and the effects that those uh technologies 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

(01:09:54):
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,
and they didn't see their values necessarily reflected their values
that had just carried them through a World war and

(01:10:14):
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
not only consciousness changing, but but also foreign. And remember
remember that most anti drug messaging in America has depended

(01:10:36):
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
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.

(01:10:59):
But I 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 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

(01:11:20):
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 and uh and and he apparently
his handlers were even concerned at different times that leftists
might try and slip Nixon LSD. Uh. I'm sure somebody
was working on a plan there, one of those sixties pranksters.

(01:11:41):
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
to be an event there at the White House. But
if the event turned out to be an all female events,
so Nixon wasn't actually there, and I think she got

(01:12:03):
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 Ye, this sounds like
an Abby Hoffman's so it didn't. The scheme didn't actually
make it through the front door, so they didn't actually

(01:12:23):
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 there be like
a Scrooge moment? Right? Would they see themselves objectively? Would

(01:12:44):
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 things
like that, 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 I think they'd
even just say like smoke weed or something. I'm I

(01:13:05):
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 set and setting
are so important. I mean, what if you take a
drug and the setting is the is the Nixon White House? Right?

(01:13:27):
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 is not
so much. You know, what have we um? You know,
what if Hitler took acid? Kind of a thing. But uh,

(01:13:49):
you know, if we look at when l s d
uh came into being. It was first synthesized in eight
in Switzerland, m D m A was first created in
Germany in wealth and in both cases no one realized
what they discovered. You know, it wasn't ntild later that
they took him off the shelf and looked at him again.
But what if these substances are leaked out into Europe,

(01:14:10):
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 mckinna and Food of the Gods wondered
what would it have been like if the Nazis had
found out about LSD quote it is frightening to imagine
some of the possible consequences had Hoffmann's discovery been recognized

(01:14:31):
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, Uh McKenna spoke a
lot about these topics, but so but I am not

(01:14:53):
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 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 other episodes of Stuff to
Blow your Mind in the past, But yeah, that seemed

(01:15:13):
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 Reich. They were
in a state of total war. They were interested in rockets, yes,
but they weren't interested because of any space exploration advantages.
They it was about weapon delivery. It was about pursuing

(01:15:36):
their own awful and and and racist ideology um, this
conquest mentality. Yeah. Absolutely. But on the other hand, uh,
you know, Hitler took a lot of drugs, especially after
is apparently taking a lot of stimulants, a lot of opioids,
and so you know, one you can't help but wonder, right, like,

(01:15:57):
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 that 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 sowner line
that you know, just get the dictator to take a
psychedelic and they will be cured. I mean, it's hard

(01:16:17):
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 were
more widespread in general throughout the world, you know, and

(01:16:37):
throughout industrialized society is going way back. I do wonder then,
like if the you know, the common if the common
drug of choice among industrialized societies in the eighteenth and
nineteenth century had not been alcohol but had been psilocypin
or something. Yeah, And I think that's ultimately the more
interesting question is not what if Hitler had taken out

(01:16:59):
as to 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 sufficient
to prevent the horrors of the Second World War and beyond.

(01:17:22):
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 of of
key individuals. Yeah, if only were that easy. All right,

(01:17:42):
we've been going a while. I think we got to
wrap it up for this one, but we we got
to 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
join us for part four of our psychedelic series here

(01:18:03):
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
going to 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
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(01:18:24):
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(01:18:47):
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