May 10, 2012 • 34 mins
Can psychedelic drugs help prepare terminal patients for death? Can MDMA ease the pain of dying through the ultimate transcendent experience? In this episode, Julie and Robert discuss what some researchers believe may be the future of end-of-life care.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb. Yeah, my name is Julie Douglas. Julie.
We are always discussing outrageous natural experiences, natural experiences that
can color the mind with the feelings of the paranormal.
(00:25):
The ultimate in all of these experiences is the one
that we've spend a great deal of time thinking about
his death. My dad always said, everybody does it, so
they couldn't be that much to it. But and to
a certain extent, that's that's true. There. It's one of
the few things that is certain in any life until
we reach some point where we're actually able to cheat
(00:46):
death entirely. We're all going to go through this at
some point or what it depends how you look at it,
either go through or in there. And we have devoted
just countless centuries, just as long as humans have been
able to comprehend and ruminate on their more reality, we've
been trying to figure out how this works and how
best to prepare for death, or you know, we have
(01:07):
tried to divert our attention away from it. Right, And
when I think about diversions. One of the things that
comes to mind is altering our minds right in the
form of drugs. Well, that's that's one certainly one of
the major interpretations of the use of things like psychedelics,
And that's something we're gonna discuss here, because on one hand,
(01:28):
there is definitely the heavy recreational view of psychedelic substances
the nineteen sixties, the culture genre culture, the idea of
just hippies staring dreamily into the sky. Or if you
go to a concert and you see some young person
with giant eyes staring at their hands the entire time, right,
(01:49):
and then you may say, well, this person is clearly
not getting anything out of this experience. This is just
clearly an escapist experience that they're enjoying. But then the
other side of psychedelic experience is rich history that we
see in various cultures, the use of them as a
ceremonial tool, as a religious tool to have some sort
of heightened experience that will gain supposed insight into what
(02:12):
life means, what death means, and all these questions. And
then there's science, right, and then there is science, yes,
And so what we're talking about here is the intersection
of I guess what you could say, hallucinogenic medicine and
the idea of end of life care. Recently, there was
an article in The New York Times about this, a
(02:34):
really great article called how psychedelic drugs can help patients
Face Death. And we're going to talk about this, but
before we talk about that, we should probably talk about
other therapeutic uses for hallucinogens. Now, I have never founded
the doctor and had hallucinogenic prescribed to me, so in
what cases this is not something that is actually going
to show up at your local drug store. But there
(02:56):
have been a number of experiments, a number of clinical
studies to see what uses they may have, because clearly
they have a powerful effect on our mind and the
way the mind works, and that's at the root of everything. So,
needless to say, doctors have looked at that and said, well,
there's got to be something here. Perhaps there's something here
that we can utilize to treat other conditions. Yeah, they
(03:16):
have actually found that ecstasy or m D m A
as it's known, and we'll talk about a little bit
more for their is an effective treatment for severe PTSD.
They're also studies of people with cluster headaches who took
LSD and reported their symptoms were greatly diminished, and psychedelics
have been used for alcoholism and other addictions. Now, a
(03:37):
lot of this has been off the radar because obviously
illegal drugs are sort of persona non grata here in
the United States, so it's been very hard for scientists
to be able to research these without a lot of
different constraints. So recently, the last thirty forty years, people
have been giving a little bit more scientific heft to
(03:57):
this idea that we can use these drugs as therapy.
So we inevitably have to turn to the character of
Timothy Learry here, who I don't know. Do you watch
the TV show Madman, Well, yeah, I've caught it before,
and I understand that this week there was a foray
into LSD, right, and Timothy Leary shows up, well, okay,
alright in the show. Obviously, he actually entered the Great
(04:19):
Void himself in the late nineties. But we're talking about
a psychologist, a writer, and one of psychedelic drugs most
ardent supporters. He conducted experiments at Harvard University with something
called Pilo sybin And we'll talk a little bit more
about that, and I'm sure you've heard the phrase turn on,
tune in, and drop out. That's a guy who uttered it.
(04:39):
There's also an album by that name. It's like a
spoken word like psychedelic guidance album. It's actually pretty cool
worth checking out if you're into that kind of music.
It's been copiously sampled over the years. Learry is a
very interesting character. Obviously an educated man, an expert in
his field. Prior to his engagement with psychedelic substances, it
was around five and his wife committed suicide and left
(05:03):
him with a school age son and a school age daughter.
So he has this going on in his life. And
then at age thirty eight, he goes on this trip
to Spain. He suffers this mysterious illness and just without
the aid of any kind of drug or what have you,
he has this mind altering experience, this moment that he
claims really allowed him to sort of see through the
limitations of his perspectives of the world before then. And
(05:24):
it's in the years following that that he actually begins
experimenting with psychedelic substances. He begins to incorporate it into
his work and explore the possibilities of it and things
as they tend to do. As we've discussed with good
old Lily the dolphins, right right right, when you bring
LSD into a study, especially back in these days, it
has a tendency to sort of get out of control
a little bit. Yeah, there's a lot of things spiraling
(05:46):
out of control. Mainly this is because the researchers at
the time, especially John C. Lily right with the dolphins,
are taking the LSD. So this made me changing their
perspective a little bit. And certainly it is darkening the
doors depths of science in a way that feels like
this drug is not being given sort of its due
diligence because it's now being associated with counter culture, especially
(06:09):
with Leary, because he really kind of took it up,
became a celebrity, and you know, there are a lot
of drug raids. Jordan Lyddy arrested him. Did he one
of the raids that I did not know that? The
Concord prison experiment was one of the big ones with him. Yeah.
But but there's this other part of Leary that is
really trying to look at this diligently and try to
really apply scientific method to this. But then he's got
(06:32):
all the craziness of the other part of his life,
that sort of I would say, putting a dark cloud
over his efforts well. And also he just becomes increasingly
less academic and more spiritual as the day's progress and
his the years progress. In his later life, he's making
the rounds, he's giving speeches, but he's more concerned with
the evolution of human consciousness. And he was a big
(06:54):
advocate of cybernetics. He really thought cybernetics, right, we're going
to be the key to our future, and reallys he's
right on U. I guess what we should talk about
is the Concord prison experiment because that's where you can
see his bias really seeping in. Right. They're testing psychedelic substances. Specifically,
they're testing psilocybin on the group of thirty two prisoners
to see if they can adjust their recidivism rates. Right,
(07:15):
So recidivism rate is that the person is going to
be laid out of jail and then they will do
something else which will land them back into jail. And
as we know, the recivism rate has always been historically high,
like at this point in this study, it was recidivism rate. Yeah,
so he's interested. Can you Basically the question here is
by applying these psychedelic substances to these prisoners, can you
(07:37):
change them? Can you make them a less violent person?
Person it's less likely to engage in criminal behavior. I mean,
you're talking about taking somebody who is a prisoner, a
person with a criminal path and is statistically likely to
engage in crime. Again, right, and Key reports that it
definitely helps them, that they become less antisocial, etcetera. But
(07:57):
the fact of the matter is it did not really
affect the prisoners at all. That rate of recidivism was
the same, although he claimed that there was a reduction. Yeah,
there was a little squeaking of the The interpretation of
the data in the study was made to lean more
in favor of the findings. Again, he saw himself in
a very specific way that clouded his judgment. I think
(08:18):
here's a great quote. He says, we saw ourselves as
anthropologists from the twenty first century, inhabiting a time module
set somewhere in the dark ages of the nineteen sixties,
on this space colony. We were attempting to create a
new paganism and a new dedication to life as art
and that's from the study itself. No, no, that's him
as a general No, no, that's sort of one of
(08:40):
his general mission statements. But I think it gives a
good idea of why he might have gone off the
path of scientific method there. Okay, so we we mentioned
this guy. We mentioned Leary because he kind of helped
to put the kaibash on funding for hallucinogens because obviously
this guy all interwoven with counterculture. Nixon at one point
called him the most dangerous personal live. Yeah, clearly that
(09:03):
was the case. Funding dried up. We didn't really get
to have a good chance to study the effects of
hallucinogens as a therapy, as a motive therapy. So let's
talk about some of the drugs that are now currently
being researched. And let's also talk about this guy named
Stanislav Groff, because he's really important and that he I
(09:25):
think was taking up where literally left off in terms
of sort of falling off the map of the scientific method. Okay, Well,
first of all, we have psilocybin, and this is the
hallucinogen acceubstance that is obtained from certain types of mushrooms
that are indigenous to tropical and subtropical regions of South America, Mexico,
in the United States, in the sort of Georgia, Tennessee
(09:48):
area where I grew up, this is mostly known as
something that would grow on cow patties in pastors, I
have to say, like a lot of teenagers hanging out
in the dark, Yeah, trying to steal cow pies and
see what they can harvest from them. So these are
naturally occurring substances. Then you have in d m A,
which is synthetic. Okay, this is a psychoactive drug, and
(10:08):
it's chemically similar to methamphetamine and hallucinogenic mescaline, and it
produces feelings of increased energy, euphoria, emotional warmth and distortions
and time perception and tactile experiences. The last three of
those also apply to the psilocybin right rights say, and
they they are helpful in reducing anxiety and enhancing self
(10:30):
awareness as well as empathy, which is really important, it
turns out when you are dealing with end of life care.
So this guy, Stanisloft Graff, much of today's research is
actually predicated on some of his work with psychedelic medicine
in the early sixties, he began giving the drug psilocybin
to cancer patients at the Spring Grove State Hospital near
(10:51):
Baltimore and documenting their effects, and he described cancer patients
who were completely clenched with fear, who under the influences
of l s D or DPT, experienced relief from the
terror of dying. That is really important because this, again
is where our current researchers are licking, you know, at
(11:11):
in the past. They're not looking at Leary, but they're
looking at this guy to say, maybe there is something
to this, Maybe there is a different way that we
can approach end of life care. Because it's one thing
to say that, you know, we all are going to
die at one point, but it is certainly another thing
to say, you know what, you have six months to
eighteen months to live. So that's an entirely different situation.
(11:32):
All Right, we're gonna take a break and when we
come back, we're going to talk about how these drugs
could be very beneficial. And we're back. So, if one
is staring down death, and one knows that it is
imminent sometime in the next few months, the next few years,
how can substances such as m d M A and
(11:54):
psilocybin actually aid the patient and sort of smooth the
transition in to death. Okay, Well, there are a couple
of people that in the York Times article they focused on,
and in fact there's a documentary out there too that
talks about this guy named Charles Grobe and Pam Secuda,
who is the patient that the article and some of
his studies center around. Pam Secuda, fifty five years old.
(12:18):
She learns, or she learned, I should say, that she
had stage four a metastatic cancer. She was then given
six to twelve months to live, and she actually ended
up living four years. But about two years into it,
she sought out help for the anxiety and depression that
accompanied her feeling, her constant feeling that the other shoe
was about to drop. So she found out about the
(12:38):
study being conducted by Charles Grobe. He's a psychiatrist and
a researcher at Harbor Harbor u c L, a medical
center who at the time is giving solicibon to end
stage cancer patients to see if it would allay their fears.
She was given psychological tests who established that she was
psychologically sound, but also another test to to kind of
(12:58):
see what her level of depression and anxiety was, and
she was given a placebo during one session, and in
the second session she was giving the psilocybin. Now, that
session lasted for about six hours. She wore headphones that
piped in different music and nature sounds, and she also
(13:18):
had black eye shades on and that was meant to
encourage her to look inward. And I mentioned all of
this because in a little while we'll talk about how
this setting is really important. At the four hour point,
she began to cry because she started to really empathize
with her husband but what his feelings would be when
she passed on. And then she says that she released
(13:39):
all of this well of emotion and all of this
energy that she had been putting towards her situation, and
she began to look at it completely differently. And she
came out of that session really feeling like she could
approach death in a positive light, which is amazing. And
her husband even says that she had a completely remarkable
(14:00):
change in her demeanor because I remember that she's been
living with this condition for two years now and again,
feeling like that other she was going to drop in
this one session completely changed her perspective, and a huge
component of it seems to be her ability to empathize
more with her husband and what he's experiencing and sort
of see the situation outside of herself right which she
(14:23):
saw is very specifically, she saw that she was robbing
her present with these thoughts of the future. When you
can say that we all do that on some level
during the day, Oh yeah, I mean it comes back
right back around to some of the things that we've
been saying and things that have been said in Buddhist
philosophy for for ages, and the idea that so much
of our suffering is tied to worrying about the past
(14:44):
and fretting over the future and focusing on self, and
those are huge obstacles to overcome in the best of circumstances.
If you're facing the end of life, that they can
be even more insurmountable. What appears to be happening is
that we see that focus on self fade under the
substance as well as the worrying over the future, and
instead she's putting more focus on what is happening in
(15:06):
the present and what other people that are close to
her are feeling. Another good example that the article points
out as Laurie Reemer, a forty eight year old survivor
of adult onset leukemia, because she's surviving. She knows at
this point that she's in remission, but still her life
is going to be cut short. She knows she's got
like a decade or two decades remaining. Yeah, she said
that she was fine when she thought she was near death.
(15:28):
It was when she went into remission that she really
became obsessed with, Okay, well when is this going to happen,
and really having a lot of anxiety about it, intense
fear and anxiety around relapse in death. Maybe that's because
she had survived the first bout and so it felt
I'm sure there are a lot of psychological factors that
made her feel like this, this may happen again, it
(15:49):
may not be so lucky. She participated in a study
at Johns Hopkins University where rolling Griffith's was administering silas
have been at a higher level than grobe was to
see if he could elicit any mystical insights to help
patients with their conditions, and Remer said when she underwent that,
she said that her mind became like a series of
rooms and she could go in and out of these
(16:11):
rooms with remarkable ease. In one room there was the
grief her father experienced when Remor got leukemia, and another
her mother's grief, and in another her children's and yet
another room was her father's perspective on raising her. She says, quote,
I was able to see things through his eyes, and
through my mother's eyes, and through my children's eyes. I
was able to see what it had been like for
(16:33):
them when I was so sick. And this is someone
who went into this as an agnostic. She came out
of it saying, I now have the distinct sense that
there's so much more, so many different states of being.
I have the sense that death is not the end,
but just part of a process, a way of moving
into a different sphere, a different way of being. That
in and of itself is pretty amazing that she had
(16:55):
that perspective change. But Griffith's, the person who administered the substance,
has said that for fourteen months after participating in a
solicitin study that was published in the Journal of psycho Pharmacology,
believes last year of subjects said that it was one
of the five most meaningful experiences of their lives and
(17:16):
thirty said it was the most meaningful experience. Yeah, so
it kind of makes me wonder, well, what exactly is
happening in the brain when this is going on, because
obviously this has a lot to do with how these
people are perceiving life now. Well, luckily, as we've discussed
another podcast, we are able to look inside the brain
(17:39):
and get an idea of what's going on. There's a
psychiatrist at Imperial College London by the name of David J. Nutt,
and Penis team used an m r I to scan
healthy volunteers dosed on psilocide and in order to capture
this transition from a normal, waking consciousness to the psychedelic state,
they found it during these states of quote unquote understrad
(18:00):
in consciousness that there was a deactivation of regions of
the brain that interface our senses and our perception of self,
which false ride in line with what we were talking
about with her description of the way it felt, and
with the idea that our obsession with self, our ego,
our need to place ourselves at the center of this
story are tied in with our suffering, especially as we
(18:22):
approached that. Yeah, and I did see that One of
the regions that was dimmed was the anterior singular cortex,
and we've actually talked about that quite a bit. I
think most recently we were talking about envy, and we
were talking about one study in which they saw that
people who were experiencing envy were actually what we were.
You were seeing these parts of the brain, the anterior
(18:42):
singular cortex where pain is processed, lighting up, so that
we know that this part of the brain perceives pain,
even if it's emotional pain, it's the same place that
also processes physical pain. So it's interesting to see that
that would go offline here as well. But another part
of is that is also very intriguing, and that researchers
wanted to try to get at, was why patients were
(19:06):
able to hold onto this feeling, this memory for so
long after having just one experience with these drugs. And
it turns out that encoding the experience is really really
important here, and that's what the researchers are doing. They're
following up with the patients for weeks and weeks afterward,
and they're dissecting what happened, and they're talking about the
memories and just like you would do that in would
(19:28):
say a trip that you took, um it begins to
really form these long term associations. So trip yes, yes, she,
I should say. Let's say you, yes, he took a
trip to Paris, and you kept talking about it with, say,
your significant other, and you've got the blueprint of that memory.
And the same thing is happening with with the the
psychological trip that these patients are taking. Really, the whole
(19:51):
experiment here reminds me a lot of travel and how
the memory is encoded. I think about any trip that
I take a trip to another city. Let's say I'm
going to Paris, France and I've never been to Paris,
France before. I would ideally want to put some research
in beforehand, figure out where I'm going to go, what
I hope to get out of this trip, what I
hope to gain from the experience, then go on the trip,
and then when I get back process it. Be its scrapbooking,
(20:14):
writing some blogs about it, talking about it with people.
But I go into this trip with a certain expectation
and I leave it with this aim of processing and
learning from it. Okay, so I hear a little bit
of priming going on, right, and that's what they're talking
about here that it's not just a let's do some
up and see what happens. They're talking about, Let's prepare
them for this. Let's set the room up right, Let's
(20:35):
make sure they're items to remind them of people they love,
that we have the music and the ambiance is appropriate.
And then after the experience, let's discuss and let's see
what we can learn from this and then move forward
with it. And the priming thing is really important here
because they are talking to these patients about seeking relief
from anxiety and depression, and they are saying that you
want to administer this drug, and what we're hoping for
(20:57):
you to do is to be able to conquer your fears,
I'll lay your years and so already, and we've already
seen this from the Placebo podcast that we did that
even when you sometimes talked to a doctor, your symptoms
will be reduced just by the very act of making
an appointment or talking to someone. So already they are
primed to have this experience. And this is really important
because there are limitations to this, to this sort of
(21:20):
drug therapy, right, And I was thinking about this. There's
a book called Rational Mysticism by John Horrigan. It's really
great and he talks really about inducing these various states
of being. And we've talked about him married of times,
but anyway, he is talking about one experiment, and this
is a Leary experiment, by the way, and it's at
the Miracle of marsh Chapel and it's in nineteen sixty two.
(21:43):
It's a double blind study, which is a good thing, right.
It's called the Good Friday Study. They have ten Divinity
students who are given the solicibbon and another ten were
given a placebo and the Good Friday Service they're actually
in the basement of the church, is piped to them
while they're in the base. Okay, so these are Divinity students.
They are primed to have some sort of experience where
(22:04):
they feel closer to God. That's where they're hoping the
outcome is. But what they find is that eight of
those ten Divinity students who got the solicition and have
not great trips here, Like they have some enjoyable moments,
but they're kind of having some problems with reality. And
part of this reason is because again the setting and
(22:25):
the priming, they're not quite there because they have another
ten students that they are looking at them like they're
complete animals, or wondering what's going on, or because they
really don't know what's happening. They don't know these other
people are being dosed, so they just think they're being
crazy and they start kind of poking fun at them.
So you're not in a room where you're by yourself,
you have headphones on, you're looking inward. That's really important
(22:46):
and I think that's why we should probably note that
so far the very new research about this, at least
of late, has been successful because it is in these
conditions that are carefully created and you can't just go
out I guess my point is and go into a
you know, pick out a cow patty and it hoped
to have this experience that's going to reduce your fears. Yeah.
(23:09):
Buddhist and at one point psychedelic experiment or Alan Watts
has a really fascinating quote on the matter. He said,
psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight,
but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by
the various methods of meditation in which drugs are no
longer necessary or useful if you get the message hang
up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments like microscopes, telescopes,
(23:32):
and telephones. The biologist does not sit with I permanently
glued to the microscope. He goes away and works on
what he has seen, which I think is a wonderful
quote that it's nicely with these research approaches, because if
you just pick up a telescope and you know nothing
about the cosmos and you just look into the sky,
it's gonna be pretty yeah, but you're not gonna learn anything.
There's not gonna be anything to really grasp other than WHOA,
(23:53):
that was kind of neat. It's like looking through a kaleidoscope.
But ideally you would want to know what you're looking at,
and you would want to process it towards and that's
what lots of talking about. Yeah. In Rational Mysticism also
talked about a guy named David Nichols who's the chairman
at the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at Purdue University, and
he's conducted a number of experiments with MSDM that's ecstasy,
(24:14):
but he has concerns about its toxic effects in cases
of repeated doses, because we know that there are animal
studies that bear out evidence that repeat doses can damage
their tonein receptors. So again, it's not just something that you,
I guess what I'm trying to say is kids don't
feel like this is something that you need to go
out into and explore. Um. Yeah, we're not advocating the
(24:36):
use of the substances at all, certainly recreationally. Yeah. Yeah.
So again, the research is in its very early stages,
and the article does bring up a very good point.
It wonders whether this type of therapy is ever going
to really come to fruition, given that drug companies could
give two times about it. There's no money really in
something that can be obtained from nature. Yeah, so certainly,
(24:58):
I mean, as far as I mean, it's concerned because
it's the kind of thing that you can cultivate on
your own, and if it was legalized and everyone, well
not everyone, but certain portions of the population would simply
cultivate it and you would probably I guess, buy it
at your local farmers market, and then where's the cut
for big farm right. Well, although as we have seen
with herbal remedies, that does have a bit of a
(25:20):
market too, so maybe there's a chance for that to
be marketed to people. But then there's also the problem
that there's a legal drug use and all that. Okay,
so let's say that in the future there is the
possibility of this. This completely changes that the face of
end of care giving or or even hospice. Right, you
could have this administer to you by hospice worker, or
go into a clinic and have an administered to you. Yeah,
(25:43):
we should also know not pretend that individuals and hospice
care are not you know, you don't have people dying
up to their gills and painkillers. I mean, it's not
like that. We we're hesitant to administer powerful drugs two
individuals who are dying, and nor should we. I think
it's important to stress that I don't know what to
sort of say, like, yes, we are administering well, you know, morphine, right,
(26:06):
So in other words, you could administer another drug that
would be beneficial to someone, right, because if you're talking
especially the very end of life care, not used to
I'm staring down my last few years of life, but
I am on my deathbed. Different rules that apply, you know. Well,
and here's where the gray area starts to come in UM.
You know, who can have it? Who can't? Do you
have to undergo psychological evaluation if you're really ill patients
(26:29):
seeking comfort? What about chronic pain? You know what if
you're not to really ill, but you have horrible chronic pain.
These are the sort of questions that start to arise
when you talk about UM using something that is illegal. Well,
in the New York Times article, they mentioned one of
the possibilities, what does it mean that everyone over the
age seventy to use it? Right? Right right? Which which
(26:51):
reminds me of a Patton oswal about different rules that
apply after each birthday. And it was something like, after
ninety you were legally allowed to kill a person. Because
if you're ninety and you can kill somebody with your
bare hands, I think with the rule, yeah, yeah, but yeah,
I can see the reasoning there. I mean, it's like,
you reach ninety years old, you've accomplished a lot, you've
suffered through a lot. Maybe you get to have one
free strangulation, maybe you get to experiment a little with
(27:14):
these substances now that you're in the clear. Well, and
this always point really, this always points back to cannabis too,
and all the debates about that about whether or not
we should legalize drugs. You know, are we hamstringing ourselves
by making them illegal? Will things really turn into a
crazy maelstrom of drug laden activity if we were to
(27:34):
do that. I don't know anyway, but it does bring
that up, that debate up once again. But in any case,
it does kind of remind me that in order to
get to these altered states, that doesn't necessarily have to
be through drugs. As you talked about, there are other
ways to enter into this, And we talked about lucid
dreaming as a way to gain perspective. Even traveling we've
talked about as being a completely dissentering experience that can
(27:57):
change the way that you frame reality for you yourself,
and even the overview effect. We talked about that, and
about astronauts glimpsing the earth as they were returning and
having these epiphanies that we were all one big humanity role. Yeah,
I mean, and then you know, roll into that meditation,
various forms of meditation that are practiced in various traditions,
(28:19):
even fiction. I'm a big supporter of mixed stuff up
if necessary, pick and choose from the cosmic buffets which
you like, fill in the gaps with your own creations
and try applaying that. I'm not saying at all cure
everything in your approach to death, but it couldn't hurt.
As we're discussing though, the use of psychedelic substances on
the death bed, it's interesting to you point out that,
first of all, I'll just suxilate. The author on his
(28:40):
deathbed asked his wife to inject a hundred micrograms of
L S D into his muscle tissue, and she obliged,
and that was in the n died in his home
that way. And of course Leary was probably the biggest
fan of psychedelic experiences and knew that he was dying.
He was doing a prostate cancer. So here's a quote
(29:00):
from him on the matter. He says, I'm looking forward
to the most fascinating experience in life, which is dying.
I've been writing about self directed dying for twenty years.
You've got to approach your dying the way you live
your life, with curiosity, with hope, with fascination, with courage,
and with the help of your friends. So there you
have it. It's a fascinating area of discussion. A lot
of gray area there as well. It's frightening to think
(29:22):
about because we're talking about death. Yeah, it's not to
feel good sort of thing, right, but again it does
you know, we all are going to approach it at
some point too. But it does really change the stakes
when you know what your death sentences. And certainly nobody
likes to suffer or see others suffer. So it's an
interesting topic to cook into. And I think it's important
to look at these psychedelic substances in a frame of
(29:42):
reference that is a little departed from the criminal legal
fun not fun, uh, you know, mess up your life,
stay normal sort of dichotomy is that that are so
often referenced. All right, shall we look at some psychedelic
male from our Psychedelic Robot? Yes, let's bring it over
all right. First of all, and this is a response
(30:02):
to our plant communication episode, but it ties in loosely
with us because we mentioned at the think the start
of the podcast, if we were to die and become
re incarnated as a plant, what would we choose? And
Chris writes in and says, hey, Robert and Juli, I
just listened to two of your podcasts for the plant
communication one. I was surprised you wanted to be the
plants you were. If I were given the choice, I
(30:23):
would want to be a Californian red oak I think
that is their name, the ones that grow hundreds of
feet tall, uh and are really big so you can
drive cars through them. Not only would you have a
nice long life, you would be protected by humans and
have a nice view. Well you couldn't see anything, but
it would be cool anyway. So that's Chris's thoughts on it.
I don't know. I wouldn't want to be a tree
(30:45):
in the next life that someone drives a car through
and destroys my roots system, but that's just me. I'm
still sticking with Moss on that one, alright. We also
did an episode on lucid dreaming, which we referenced in
this podcast, and I have a few responses to that.
Don Old rights and says, hey, guys, I just finished
listening to your lucid dreaming episode and wanted to add
to it. I've been interested in lucid dreaming for years
(31:06):
now and have on numerous occasions lucid dreams myself. You
mentioned briefly various medications that could affect dreams, but failed
to touch on one in particular. Kalia zaka takchi is
an herbal supplement used by shaman's to induce lucid and
or prophetic dreams, commonly intended to help find answers that
that may be plaguing an individual or their tribe. It
(31:28):
is often smoked in a cigarette with equal parts callia
and tobacco. In fact, lucid dreaming in general seems to
be very common shamanistic ritual practice around the world. Love
the show. Thanks. We also heard from Brian Brian and
writes and says, Hi, Robert and Julie really enjoying your podcast.
Keep up with great work on the subject of flying
and dreams. You mentioned that most people fly in a
stiff superman pose while dreaming. I've never had it that easy.
(31:52):
To get off the ground required vigorous flapping of my
wide stretched arms and where it's much better if I
start off running downhill. Take off feels as if I'm
swimming in molasses and seems to take all of my
strength to pull off. Once I'm off the ground, I
can pick up speed and fly very easily, but still
always using my arms as if they were wings. Just
thought you might be interested in a different flying technique.
(32:13):
Thanks for the great show, and uh so there you
go a different method of flying about. And then we
also heard from Max. Max writes in and says, dear
Robert and Julie and the Lucid Dreaming episode, you discussed
flying in dreams to be stiff. Although I've also experienced
flying stiff and dreams, I'm usually able to steer the
flying by moving my arms and legs. When I'm able
to steer, I seem to fly much longer, probably because
(32:35):
when flying stiff, I seem to crash as soon as
I realize I'm flying. I think that when I realized
I'm flying, my logic takes over and tells me that
I cannot fly, resulting in the crash. Thanks for the
great podcast and the hours of thoughts inspired by them, Max,
those are really cool. I was just thinking about how
we were talking about how logic is somehow there's the
idea that logic is still somehow online, um when you're
(32:58):
lucid dreaming, which is not usually the case in dreams,
but we do see logic and the methods well. And
I was just thinking too in my own experiences of flying.
There are times that I plummet to the ground and
I have to tell myself like no, no, you can
do this, and it's um and so I was just
thinking like, yeah, maybe there was other times when you
see the logic centers really coming online and you have
to kind of stay back off a little bit. You know,
(33:18):
I'm gonna fly here. So let us know what you think.
We would love to hear about your dreaming or lucid
dreaming experiences. We would love to hear your thoughts on
psychedelic substances and our journey into death. Like I said,
there's a lot of gray area in there, and we'll
be interested to hear people's different takes on it. And
we're not opposed to hearing from people who have really
dealt firsthand with preparations for death and staring down into life.
(33:41):
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Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb. Yeah, my name is Julie Douglas. Julie.
We are always discussing outrageous natural experiences, natural experiences that
can color the mind with the feelings of the paranormal.
(00:25):
The ultimate in all of these experiences is the one
that we've spend a great deal of time thinking about
his death. My dad always said, everybody does it, so
they couldn't be that much to it. But and to
a certain extent, that's that's true. There. It's one of
the few things that is certain in any life until
we reach some point where we're actually able to cheat
(00:46):
death entirely. We're all going to go through this at
some point or what it depends how you look at it,
either go through or in there. And we have devoted
just countless centuries, just as long as humans have been
able to comprehend and ruminate on their more reality, we've
been trying to figure out how this works and how
best to prepare for death, or you know, we have
(01:07):
tried to divert our attention away from it. Right, And
when I think about diversions. One of the things that
comes to mind is altering our minds right in the
form of drugs. Well, that's that's one certainly one of
the major interpretations of the use of things like psychedelics,
And that's something we're gonna discuss here, because on one hand,
(01:28):
there is definitely the heavy recreational view of psychedelic substances
the nineteen sixties, the culture genre culture, the idea of
just hippies staring dreamily into the sky. Or if you
go to a concert and you see some young person
with giant eyes staring at their hands the entire time, right,
(01:49):
and then you may say, well, this person is clearly
not getting anything out of this experience. This is just
clearly an escapist experience that they're enjoying. But then the
other side of psychedelic experience is rich history that we
see in various cultures, the use of them as a
ceremonial tool, as a religious tool to have some sort
of heightened experience that will gain supposed insight into what
(02:12):
life means, what death means, and all these questions. And
then there's science, right, and then there is science, yes,
And so what we're talking about here is the intersection
of I guess what you could say, hallucinogenic medicine and
the idea of end of life care. Recently, there was
an article in The New York Times about this, a
(02:34):
really great article called how psychedelic drugs can help patients
Face Death. And we're going to talk about this, but
before we talk about that, we should probably talk about
other therapeutic uses for hallucinogens. Now, I have never founded
the doctor and had hallucinogenic prescribed to me, so in
what cases this is not something that is actually going
to show up at your local drug store. But there
(02:56):
have been a number of experiments, a number of clinical
studies to see what uses they may have, because clearly
they have a powerful effect on our mind and the
way the mind works, and that's at the root of everything. So,
needless to say, doctors have looked at that and said, well,
there's got to be something here. Perhaps there's something here
that we can utilize to treat other conditions. Yeah, they
(03:16):
have actually found that ecstasy or m D m A
as it's known, and we'll talk about a little bit
more for their is an effective treatment for severe PTSD.
They're also studies of people with cluster headaches who took
LSD and reported their symptoms were greatly diminished, and psychedelics
have been used for alcoholism and other addictions. Now, a
(03:37):
lot of this has been off the radar because obviously
illegal drugs are sort of persona non grata here in
the United States, so it's been very hard for scientists
to be able to research these without a lot of
different constraints. So recently, the last thirty forty years, people
have been giving a little bit more scientific heft to
(03:57):
this idea that we can use these drugs as therapy.
So we inevitably have to turn to the character of
Timothy Learry here, who I don't know. Do you watch
the TV show Madman, Well, yeah, I've caught it before,
and I understand that this week there was a foray
into LSD, right, and Timothy Leary shows up, well, okay,
alright in the show. Obviously, he actually entered the Great
(04:19):
Void himself in the late nineties. But we're talking about
a psychologist, a writer, and one of psychedelic drugs most
ardent supporters. He conducted experiments at Harvard University with something
called Pilo sybin And we'll talk a little bit more
about that, and I'm sure you've heard the phrase turn on,
tune in, and drop out. That's a guy who uttered it.
(04:39):
There's also an album by that name. It's like a
spoken word like psychedelic guidance album. It's actually pretty cool
worth checking out if you're into that kind of music.
It's been copiously sampled over the years. Learry is a
very interesting character. Obviously an educated man, an expert in
his field. Prior to his engagement with psychedelic substances, it
was around five and his wife committed suicide and left
(05:03):
him with a school age son and a school age daughter.
So he has this going on in his life. And
then at age thirty eight, he goes on this trip
to Spain. He suffers this mysterious illness and just without
the aid of any kind of drug or what have you,
he has this mind altering experience, this moment that he
claims really allowed him to sort of see through the
limitations of his perspectives of the world before then. And
(05:24):
it's in the years following that that he actually begins
experimenting with psychedelic substances. He begins to incorporate it into
his work and explore the possibilities of it and things
as they tend to do. As we've discussed with good
old Lily the dolphins, right right right, when you bring
LSD into a study, especially back in these days, it
has a tendency to sort of get out of control
a little bit. Yeah, there's a lot of things spiraling
(05:46):
out of control. Mainly this is because the researchers at
the time, especially John C. Lily right with the dolphins,
are taking the LSD. So this made me changing their
perspective a little bit. And certainly it is darkening the
doors depths of science in a way that feels like
this drug is not being given sort of its due
diligence because it's now being associated with counter culture, especially
(06:09):
with Leary, because he really kind of took it up,
became a celebrity, and you know, there are a lot
of drug raids. Jordan Lyddy arrested him. Did he one
of the raids that I did not know that? The
Concord prison experiment was one of the big ones with him. Yeah.
But but there's this other part of Leary that is
really trying to look at this diligently and try to
really apply scientific method to this. But then he's got
(06:32):
all the craziness of the other part of his life,
that sort of I would say, putting a dark cloud
over his efforts well. And also he just becomes increasingly
less academic and more spiritual as the day's progress and
his the years progress. In his later life, he's making
the rounds, he's giving speeches, but he's more concerned with
the evolution of human consciousness. And he was a big
(06:54):
advocate of cybernetics. He really thought cybernetics, right, we're going
to be the key to our future, and reallys he's
right on U. I guess what we should talk about
is the Concord prison experiment because that's where you can
see his bias really seeping in. Right. They're testing psychedelic substances. Specifically,
they're testing psilocybin on the group of thirty two prisoners
to see if they can adjust their recidivism rates. Right,
(07:15):
So recidivism rate is that the person is going to
be laid out of jail and then they will do
something else which will land them back into jail. And
as we know, the recivism rate has always been historically high,
like at this point in this study, it was recidivism rate. Yeah,
so he's interested. Can you Basically the question here is
by applying these psychedelic substances to these prisoners, can you
(07:37):
change them? Can you make them a less violent person?
Person it's less likely to engage in criminal behavior. I mean,
you're talking about taking somebody who is a prisoner, a
person with a criminal path and is statistically likely to
engage in crime. Again, right, and Key reports that it
definitely helps them, that they become less antisocial, etcetera. But
(07:57):
the fact of the matter is it did not really
affect the prisoners at all. That rate of recidivism was
the same, although he claimed that there was a reduction. Yeah,
there was a little squeaking of the The interpretation of
the data in the study was made to lean more
in favor of the findings. Again, he saw himself in
a very specific way that clouded his judgment. I think
(08:18):
here's a great quote. He says, we saw ourselves as
anthropologists from the twenty first century, inhabiting a time module
set somewhere in the dark ages of the nineteen sixties,
on this space colony. We were attempting to create a
new paganism and a new dedication to life as art
and that's from the study itself. No, no, that's him
as a general No, no, that's sort of one of
(08:40):
his general mission statements. But I think it gives a
good idea of why he might have gone off the
path of scientific method there. Okay, so we we mentioned
this guy. We mentioned Leary because he kind of helped
to put the kaibash on funding for hallucinogens because obviously
this guy all interwoven with counterculture. Nixon at one point
called him the most dangerous personal live. Yeah, clearly that
(09:03):
was the case. Funding dried up. We didn't really get
to have a good chance to study the effects of
hallucinogens as a therapy, as a motive therapy. So let's
talk about some of the drugs that are now currently
being researched. And let's also talk about this guy named
Stanislav Groff, because he's really important and that he I
(09:25):
think was taking up where literally left off in terms
of sort of falling off the map of the scientific method. Okay, Well,
first of all, we have psilocybin, and this is the
hallucinogen acceubstance that is obtained from certain types of mushrooms
that are indigenous to tropical and subtropical regions of South America, Mexico,
in the United States, in the sort of Georgia, Tennessee
(09:48):
area where I grew up, this is mostly known as
something that would grow on cow patties in pastors, I
have to say, like a lot of teenagers hanging out
in the dark, Yeah, trying to steal cow pies and
see what they can harvest from them. So these are
naturally occurring substances. Then you have in d m A,
which is synthetic. Okay, this is a psychoactive drug, and
(10:08):
it's chemically similar to methamphetamine and hallucinogenic mescaline, and it
produces feelings of increased energy, euphoria, emotional warmth and distortions
and time perception and tactile experiences. The last three of
those also apply to the psilocybin right rights say, and
they they are helpful in reducing anxiety and enhancing self
(10:30):
awareness as well as empathy, which is really important, it
turns out when you are dealing with end of life care.
So this guy, Stanisloft Graff, much of today's research is
actually predicated on some of his work with psychedelic medicine
in the early sixties, he began giving the drug psilocybin
to cancer patients at the Spring Grove State Hospital near
(10:51):
Baltimore and documenting their effects, and he described cancer patients
who were completely clenched with fear, who under the influences
of l s D or DPT, experienced relief from the
terror of dying. That is really important because this, again
is where our current researchers are licking, you know, at
(11:11):
in the past. They're not looking at Leary, but they're
looking at this guy to say, maybe there is something
to this, Maybe there is a different way that we
can approach end of life care. Because it's one thing
to say that, you know, we all are going to
die at one point, but it is certainly another thing
to say, you know what, you have six months to
eighteen months to live. So that's an entirely different situation.
(11:32):
All Right, we're gonna take a break and when we
come back, we're going to talk about how these drugs
could be very beneficial. And we're back. So, if one
is staring down death, and one knows that it is
imminent sometime in the next few months, the next few years,
how can substances such as m d M A and
(11:54):
psilocybin actually aid the patient and sort of smooth the
transition in to death. Okay, Well, there are a couple
of people that in the York Times article they focused on,
and in fact there's a documentary out there too that
talks about this guy named Charles Grobe and Pam Secuda,
who is the patient that the article and some of
his studies center around. Pam Secuda, fifty five years old.
(12:18):
She learns, or she learned, I should say, that she
had stage four a metastatic cancer. She was then given
six to twelve months to live, and she actually ended
up living four years. But about two years into it,
she sought out help for the anxiety and depression that
accompanied her feeling, her constant feeling that the other shoe
was about to drop. So she found out about the
(12:38):
study being conducted by Charles Grobe. He's a psychiatrist and
a researcher at Harbor Harbor u c L, a medical
center who at the time is giving solicibon to end
stage cancer patients to see if it would allay their fears.
She was given psychological tests who established that she was
psychologically sound, but also another test to to kind of
(12:58):
see what her level of depression and anxiety was, and
she was given a placebo during one session, and in
the second session she was giving the psilocybin. Now, that
session lasted for about six hours. She wore headphones that
piped in different music and nature sounds, and she also
(13:18):
had black eye shades on and that was meant to
encourage her to look inward. And I mentioned all of
this because in a little while we'll talk about how
this setting is really important. At the four hour point,
she began to cry because she started to really empathize
with her husband but what his feelings would be when
she passed on. And then she says that she released
(13:39):
all of this well of emotion and all of this
energy that she had been putting towards her situation, and
she began to look at it completely differently. And she
came out of that session really feeling like she could
approach death in a positive light, which is amazing. And
her husband even says that she had a completely remarkable
(14:00):
change in her demeanor because I remember that she's been
living with this condition for two years now and again,
feeling like that other she was going to drop in
this one session completely changed her perspective, and a huge
component of it seems to be her ability to empathize
more with her husband and what he's experiencing and sort
of see the situation outside of herself right which she
(14:23):
saw is very specifically, she saw that she was robbing
her present with these thoughts of the future. When you
can say that we all do that on some level
during the day, Oh yeah, I mean it comes back
right back around to some of the things that we've
been saying and things that have been said in Buddhist
philosophy for for ages, and the idea that so much
of our suffering is tied to worrying about the past
(14:44):
and fretting over the future and focusing on self, and
those are huge obstacles to overcome in the best of circumstances.
If you're facing the end of life, that they can
be even more insurmountable. What appears to be happening is
that we see that focus on self fade under the
substance as well as the worrying over the future, and
instead she's putting more focus on what is happening in
(15:06):
the present and what other people that are close to
her are feeling. Another good example that the article points
out as Laurie Reemer, a forty eight year old survivor
of adult onset leukemia, because she's surviving. She knows at
this point that she's in remission, but still her life
is going to be cut short. She knows she's got
like a decade or two decades remaining. Yeah, she said
that she was fine when she thought she was near death.
(15:28):
It was when she went into remission that she really
became obsessed with, Okay, well when is this going to happen,
and really having a lot of anxiety about it, intense
fear and anxiety around relapse in death. Maybe that's because
she had survived the first bout and so it felt
I'm sure there are a lot of psychological factors that
made her feel like this, this may happen again, it
(15:49):
may not be so lucky. She participated in a study
at Johns Hopkins University where rolling Griffith's was administering silas
have been at a higher level than grobe was to
see if he could elicit any mystical insights to help
patients with their conditions, and Remer said when she underwent that,
she said that her mind became like a series of
rooms and she could go in and out of these
(16:11):
rooms with remarkable ease. In one room there was the
grief her father experienced when Remor got leukemia, and another
her mother's grief, and in another her children's and yet
another room was her father's perspective on raising her. She says, quote,
I was able to see things through his eyes, and
through my mother's eyes, and through my children's eyes. I
was able to see what it had been like for
(16:33):
them when I was so sick. And this is someone
who went into this as an agnostic. She came out
of it saying, I now have the distinct sense that
there's so much more, so many different states of being.
I have the sense that death is not the end,
but just part of a process, a way of moving
into a different sphere, a different way of being. That
in and of itself is pretty amazing that she had
(16:55):
that perspective change. But Griffith's, the person who administered the substance,
has said that for fourteen months after participating in a
solicitin study that was published in the Journal of psycho Pharmacology,
believes last year of subjects said that it was one
of the five most meaningful experiences of their lives and
(17:16):
thirty said it was the most meaningful experience. Yeah, so
it kind of makes me wonder, well, what exactly is
happening in the brain when this is going on, because
obviously this has a lot to do with how these
people are perceiving life now. Well, luckily, as we've discussed
another podcast, we are able to look inside the brain
(17:39):
and get an idea of what's going on. There's a
psychiatrist at Imperial College London by the name of David J. Nutt,
and Penis team used an m r I to scan
healthy volunteers dosed on psilocide and in order to capture
this transition from a normal, waking consciousness to the psychedelic state,
they found it during these states of quote unquote understrad
(18:00):
in consciousness that there was a deactivation of regions of
the brain that interface our senses and our perception of self,
which false ride in line with what we were talking
about with her description of the way it felt, and
with the idea that our obsession with self, our ego,
our need to place ourselves at the center of this
story are tied in with our suffering, especially as we
(18:22):
approached that. Yeah, and I did see that One of
the regions that was dimmed was the anterior singular cortex,
and we've actually talked about that quite a bit. I
think most recently we were talking about envy, and we
were talking about one study in which they saw that
people who were experiencing envy were actually what we were.
You were seeing these parts of the brain, the anterior
(18:42):
singular cortex where pain is processed, lighting up, so that
we know that this part of the brain perceives pain,
even if it's emotional pain, it's the same place that
also processes physical pain. So it's interesting to see that
that would go offline here as well. But another part
of is that is also very intriguing, and that researchers
wanted to try to get at, was why patients were
(19:06):
able to hold onto this feeling, this memory for so
long after having just one experience with these drugs. And
it turns out that encoding the experience is really really
important here, and that's what the researchers are doing. They're
following up with the patients for weeks and weeks afterward,
and they're dissecting what happened, and they're talking about the
memories and just like you would do that in would
(19:28):
say a trip that you took, um it begins to
really form these long term associations. So trip yes, yes, she,
I should say. Let's say you, yes, he took a
trip to Paris, and you kept talking about it with, say,
your significant other, and you've got the blueprint of that memory.
And the same thing is happening with with the the
psychological trip that these patients are taking. Really, the whole
(19:51):
experiment here reminds me a lot of travel and how
the memory is encoded. I think about any trip that
I take a trip to another city. Let's say I'm
going to Paris, France and I've never been to Paris,
France before. I would ideally want to put some research
in beforehand, figure out where I'm going to go, what
I hope to get out of this trip, what I
hope to gain from the experience, then go on the trip,
and then when I get back process it. Be its scrapbooking,
(20:14):
writing some blogs about it, talking about it with people.
But I go into this trip with a certain expectation
and I leave it with this aim of processing and
learning from it. Okay, so I hear a little bit
of priming going on, right, and that's what they're talking
about here that it's not just a let's do some
up and see what happens. They're talking about, Let's prepare
them for this. Let's set the room up right, Let's
(20:35):
make sure they're items to remind them of people they love,
that we have the music and the ambiance is appropriate.
And then after the experience, let's discuss and let's see
what we can learn from this and then move forward
with it. And the priming thing is really important here
because they are talking to these patients about seeking relief
from anxiety and depression, and they are saying that you
want to administer this drug, and what we're hoping for
(20:57):
you to do is to be able to conquer your fears,
I'll lay your years and so already, and we've already
seen this from the Placebo podcast that we did that
even when you sometimes talked to a doctor, your symptoms
will be reduced just by the very act of making
an appointment or talking to someone. So already they are
primed to have this experience. And this is really important
because there are limitations to this, to this sort of
(21:20):
drug therapy, right, And I was thinking about this. There's
a book called Rational Mysticism by John Horrigan. It's really
great and he talks really about inducing these various states
of being. And we've talked about him married of times,
but anyway, he is talking about one experiment, and this
is a Leary experiment, by the way, and it's at
the Miracle of marsh Chapel and it's in nineteen sixty two.
(21:43):
It's a double blind study, which is a good thing, right.
It's called the Good Friday Study. They have ten Divinity
students who are given the solicibbon and another ten were
given a placebo and the Good Friday Service they're actually
in the basement of the church, is piped to them
while they're in the base. Okay, so these are Divinity students.
They are primed to have some sort of experience where
(22:04):
they feel closer to God. That's where they're hoping the
outcome is. But what they find is that eight of
those ten Divinity students who got the solicition and have
not great trips here, Like they have some enjoyable moments,
but they're kind of having some problems with reality. And
part of this reason is because again the setting and
(22:25):
the priming, they're not quite there because they have another
ten students that they are looking at them like they're
complete animals, or wondering what's going on, or because they
really don't know what's happening. They don't know these other
people are being dosed, so they just think they're being
crazy and they start kind of poking fun at them.
So you're not in a room where you're by yourself,
you have headphones on, you're looking inward. That's really important
(22:46):
and I think that's why we should probably note that
so far the very new research about this, at least
of late, has been successful because it is in these
conditions that are carefully created and you can't just go
out I guess my point is and go into a
you know, pick out a cow patty and it hoped
to have this experience that's going to reduce your fears. Yeah.
(23:09):
Buddhist and at one point psychedelic experiment or Alan Watts
has a really fascinating quote on the matter. He said,
psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight,
but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by
the various methods of meditation in which drugs are no
longer necessary or useful if you get the message hang
up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments like microscopes, telescopes,
(23:32):
and telephones. The biologist does not sit with I permanently
glued to the microscope. He goes away and works on
what he has seen, which I think is a wonderful
quote that it's nicely with these research approaches, because if
you just pick up a telescope and you know nothing
about the cosmos and you just look into the sky,
it's gonna be pretty yeah, but you're not gonna learn anything.
There's not gonna be anything to really grasp other than WHOA,
(23:53):
that was kind of neat. It's like looking through a kaleidoscope.
But ideally you would want to know what you're looking at,
and you would want to process it towards and that's
what lots of talking about. Yeah. In Rational Mysticism also
talked about a guy named David Nichols who's the chairman
at the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at Purdue University, and
he's conducted a number of experiments with MSDM that's ecstasy,
(24:14):
but he has concerns about its toxic effects in cases
of repeated doses, because we know that there are animal
studies that bear out evidence that repeat doses can damage
their tonein receptors. So again, it's not just something that you,
I guess what I'm trying to say is kids don't
feel like this is something that you need to go
out into and explore. Um. Yeah, we're not advocating the
(24:36):
use of the substances at all, certainly recreationally. Yeah. Yeah.
So again, the research is in its very early stages,
and the article does bring up a very good point.
It wonders whether this type of therapy is ever going
to really come to fruition, given that drug companies could
give two times about it. There's no money really in
something that can be obtained from nature. Yeah, so certainly,
(24:58):
I mean, as far as I mean, it's concerned because
it's the kind of thing that you can cultivate on
your own, and if it was legalized and everyone, well
not everyone, but certain portions of the population would simply
cultivate it and you would probably I guess, buy it
at your local farmers market, and then where's the cut
for big farm right. Well, although as we have seen
with herbal remedies, that does have a bit of a
(25:20):
market too, so maybe there's a chance for that to
be marketed to people. But then there's also the problem
that there's a legal drug use and all that. Okay,
so let's say that in the future there is the
possibility of this. This completely changes that the face of
end of care giving or or even hospice. Right, you
could have this administer to you by hospice worker, or
go into a clinic and have an administered to you. Yeah,
(25:43):
we should also know not pretend that individuals and hospice
care are not you know, you don't have people dying
up to their gills and painkillers. I mean, it's not
like that. We we're hesitant to administer powerful drugs two
individuals who are dying, and nor should we. I think
it's important to stress that I don't know what to
sort of say, like, yes, we are administering well, you know, morphine, right,
(26:06):
So in other words, you could administer another drug that
would be beneficial to someone, right, because if you're talking
especially the very end of life care, not used to
I'm staring down my last few years of life, but
I am on my deathbed. Different rules that apply, you know. Well,
and here's where the gray area starts to come in UM.
You know, who can have it? Who can't? Do you
have to undergo psychological evaluation if you're really ill patients
(26:29):
seeking comfort? What about chronic pain? You know what if
you're not to really ill, but you have horrible chronic pain.
These are the sort of questions that start to arise
when you talk about UM using something that is illegal. Well,
in the New York Times article, they mentioned one of
the possibilities, what does it mean that everyone over the
age seventy to use it? Right? Right right? Which which
(26:51):
reminds me of a Patton oswal about different rules that
apply after each birthday. And it was something like, after
ninety you were legally allowed to kill a person. Because
if you're ninety and you can kill somebody with your
bare hands, I think with the rule, yeah, yeah, but yeah,
I can see the reasoning there. I mean, it's like,
you reach ninety years old, you've accomplished a lot, you've
suffered through a lot. Maybe you get to have one
free strangulation, maybe you get to experiment a little with
(27:14):
these substances now that you're in the clear. Well, and
this always point really, this always points back to cannabis too,
and all the debates about that about whether or not
we should legalize drugs. You know, are we hamstringing ourselves
by making them illegal? Will things really turn into a
crazy maelstrom of drug laden activity if we were to
(27:34):
do that. I don't know anyway, but it does bring
that up, that debate up once again. But in any case,
it does kind of remind me that in order to
get to these altered states, that doesn't necessarily have to
be through drugs. As you talked about, there are other
ways to enter into this, And we talked about lucid
dreaming as a way to gain perspective. Even traveling we've
talked about as being a completely dissentering experience that can
(27:57):
change the way that you frame reality for you yourself,
and even the overview effect. We talked about that, and
about astronauts glimpsing the earth as they were returning and
having these epiphanies that we were all one big humanity role. Yeah,
I mean, and then you know, roll into that meditation,
various forms of meditation that are practiced in various traditions,
(28:19):
even fiction. I'm a big supporter of mixed stuff up
if necessary, pick and choose from the cosmic buffets which
you like, fill in the gaps with your own creations
and try applaying that. I'm not saying at all cure
everything in your approach to death, but it couldn't hurt.
As we're discussing though, the use of psychedelic substances on
the death bed, it's interesting to you point out that,
first of all, I'll just suxilate. The author on his
(28:40):
deathbed asked his wife to inject a hundred micrograms of
L S D into his muscle tissue, and she obliged,
and that was in the n died in his home
that way. And of course Leary was probably the biggest
fan of psychedelic experiences and knew that he was dying.
He was doing a prostate cancer. So here's a quote
(29:00):
from him on the matter. He says, I'm looking forward
to the most fascinating experience in life, which is dying.
I've been writing about self directed dying for twenty years.
You've got to approach your dying the way you live
your life, with curiosity, with hope, with fascination, with courage,
and with the help of your friends. So there you
have it. It's a fascinating area of discussion. A lot
of gray area there as well. It's frightening to think
(29:22):
about because we're talking about death. Yeah, it's not to
feel good sort of thing, right, but again it does
you know, we all are going to approach it at
some point too. But it does really change the stakes
when you know what your death sentences. And certainly nobody
likes to suffer or see others suffer. So it's an
interesting topic to cook into. And I think it's important
to look at these psychedelic substances in a frame of
(29:42):
reference that is a little departed from the criminal legal
fun not fun, uh, you know, mess up your life,
stay normal sort of dichotomy is that that are so
often referenced. All right, shall we look at some psychedelic
male from our Psychedelic Robot? Yes, let's bring it over
all right. First of all, and this is a response
(30:02):
to our plant communication episode, but it ties in loosely
with us because we mentioned at the think the start
of the podcast, if we were to die and become
re incarnated as a plant, what would we choose? And
Chris writes in and says, hey, Robert and Juli, I
just listened to two of your podcasts for the plant
communication one. I was surprised you wanted to be the
plants you were. If I were given the choice, I
(30:23):
would want to be a Californian red oak I think
that is their name, the ones that grow hundreds of
feet tall, uh and are really big so you can
drive cars through them. Not only would you have a
nice long life, you would be protected by humans and
have a nice view. Well you couldn't see anything, but
it would be cool anyway. So that's Chris's thoughts on it.
I don't know. I wouldn't want to be a tree
(30:45):
in the next life that someone drives a car through
and destroys my roots system, but that's just me. I'm
still sticking with Moss on that one, alright. We also
did an episode on lucid dreaming, which we referenced in
this podcast, and I have a few responses to that.
Don Old rights and says, hey, guys, I just finished
listening to your lucid dreaming episode and wanted to add
to it. I've been interested in lucid dreaming for years
(31:06):
now and have on numerous occasions lucid dreams myself. You
mentioned briefly various medications that could affect dreams, but failed
to touch on one in particular. Kalia zaka takchi is
an herbal supplement used by shaman's to induce lucid and
or prophetic dreams, commonly intended to help find answers that
that may be plaguing an individual or their tribe. It
(31:28):
is often smoked in a cigarette with equal parts callia
and tobacco. In fact, lucid dreaming in general seems to
be very common shamanistic ritual practice around the world. Love
the show. Thanks. We also heard from Brian Brian and
writes and says, Hi, Robert and Julie really enjoying your podcast.
Keep up with great work on the subject of flying
and dreams. You mentioned that most people fly in a
stiff superman pose while dreaming. I've never had it that easy.
(31:52):
To get off the ground required vigorous flapping of my
wide stretched arms and where it's much better if I
start off running downhill. Take off feels as if I'm
swimming in molasses and seems to take all of my
strength to pull off. Once I'm off the ground, I
can pick up speed and fly very easily, but still
always using my arms as if they were wings. Just
thought you might be interested in a different flying technique.
(32:13):
Thanks for the great show, and uh so there you
go a different method of flying about. And then we
also heard from Max. Max writes in and says, dear
Robert and Julie and the Lucid Dreaming episode, you discussed
flying in dreams to be stiff. Although I've also experienced
flying stiff and dreams, I'm usually able to steer the
flying by moving my arms and legs. When I'm able
to steer, I seem to fly much longer, probably because
(32:35):
when flying stiff, I seem to crash as soon as
I realize I'm flying. I think that when I realized
I'm flying, my logic takes over and tells me that
I cannot fly, resulting in the crash. Thanks for the
great podcast and the hours of thoughts inspired by them, Max,
those are really cool. I was just thinking about how
we were talking about how logic is somehow there's the
idea that logic is still somehow online, um when you're
(32:58):
lucid dreaming, which is not usually the case in dreams,
but we do see logic and the methods well. And
I was just thinking too in my own experiences of flying.
There are times that I plummet to the ground and
I have to tell myself like no, no, you can
do this, and it's um and so I was just
thinking like, yeah, maybe there was other times when you
see the logic centers really coming online and you have
to kind of stay back off a little bit. You know,
(33:18):
I'm gonna fly here. So let us know what you think.
We would love to hear about your dreaming or lucid
dreaming experiences. We would love to hear your thoughts on
psychedelic substances and our journey into death. Like I said,
there's a lot of gray area in there, and we'll
be interested to hear people's different takes on it. And
we're not opposed to hearing from people who have really
dealt firsthand with preparations for death and staring down into life.
(33:41):
You can find us on Facebook and Twitter. On Facebook
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(34:03):
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We put a lot of work into that and we're
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(34:24):
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