July 15, 2021 • 47 mins
The pioneering physician explains why there are no good or bad drugs, just good or bad relationships with drugs. There’s no one who has shaped my own thinking about drugs so much as Andrew Weil. Andy is famous as the force behind integrative medicine – the synthesis of traditional and alternative medicine – but he first became known to me and many others for his writing on drugs and consciousness, with books like The Natural Mind, From Chocolate to Morphine and The Marriage of the Sun and the Moon.
Our conversation covers an incredible diversity of drugs and topics: the wonders of the cannabis plant, the implications of psychedelics going mainstream, the potential of placebo medicine in better understanding chronic pain, the value of kava in treating anxiety, the psychoactive pleasures of eating a ripe mango, even the ways in which cannabis and dogs have evolved similarly in their relationships to human beings. There are, Andy explains, infinite ways of altering consciousness. Psychoactive drugs can show us possibilities, but how we foster those possibilities is up to us.
Listen to this episode and let me know what you think. Our number is 1-833-779-2460. Our email is psychoactive@protozoa.com. Or tweet at me, @ethannadelmann.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Ethan Natalman, and this is Psychoactive, a production
of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the
show where we talk about all things drugs. But any
of views expressed here do not represent those of I
Heart Media, Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed,
(00:22):
heat as an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they
may not even represent my own. And nothing contained in
this show should be used as medical advice or encouragement
to use any type of drug. Welcome Psychoactive listeners. This
(00:44):
podcast episode is a really really special treat for me
for for a number of reasons. I mean, first of all,
the guests today, Dr Andrew Wile is internationally famous, tensive
millions of people know his name, have read his books,
have watched his videos. And that's not because of so
much of the stuff about drugs. It's because of his
(01:04):
work on integrative medicine, on basically integrating the best of
conventional medicine and alternative medicine in really remarkable ways. He's
written about a dozen books, been translated to dozens of languages.
You know, everything from healthy eating to us spontaneous healing,
to spontaneous happiness, to stuff about diets, to stuff about cancer,
(01:25):
to you name it really about how to lead a healthier,
better life. But the real reason I asked Andy t
beyond there's actually two reasons is that before he really
emerged as the pioneering figure in integrative medicine and started
all the writing and started a medical program about this,
he wrote a trio of books about drugs psychoactive drugs
(01:50):
that were formative for me and formative for a huge
number of people beginning in the nineteen seventies. Uh, and
how we think about drugs and alteration consciousness. And then
the last reason quite frankly, I wanted to have a
yahn Andy, is because going back thirty idea years ago, Um,
you played a major role in my life, not just
(02:11):
um your intellectual influence, but as I was going through
probably the greatest emotional trauma and physical trauma of my life,
you played a pivotal role by helping me see how
they were really integrated with one another. So maybe we'll
have a chance to get into that. So Andy, thank
you so much. I mean I have to say too,
is that one of the things I really admired about you,
(02:33):
is that, even as you become this globally famous person
talking about food and diet and health, you've never shied
from putting out the most provocative and I think correct
ideas about drugs. And that goes back to I guess
when you were just what a college student or something
like that and beginning to study all this. So what
were the origins for you about thinking and talking about
(02:54):
drugs in the ways that has such an influence? Oh gee,
I told some of that story in my first book,
The Natural Mine. But I've read about mescaline, uh, right
after I graduated from high school, and I just fascinated
me and I wanted to know more about it, and
so I began reading everything I could and asking people
if they knew anything about the psyched that I think
(03:15):
the word psychedelic wasn't even used then. And um, as
an undergraduate at Harvard, I majored in botany and had
the good fortune to be mentored by Richard Schultz, who
was the godfather of modern ethnobotany. And you know, as
I began studying that and learned learning about psychoactive plants,
it struck me that there was a great dearth of
(03:37):
knowledge about them, and people in the medical field scientific
field really had not studied them, did not know what
they were talking about. And that was certainly true of cannabis,
you know, it was true of the psychedelics, and so
it fascinated me to try to get reliable information about them.
And as you know, um, well, I I experimented personally
(03:59):
with mescal and psychedelics while I was an undergraduate. But
then in my last year of medical school, I organized
and carried out the first double blind human experiments with marijuana,
and I you know, at the conclusion of that study,
mainly it was to show that you could study marijuana
on a laboratory and get away with it, because many
(04:19):
people said it was impossible. And we concluded that marijuana
was a relatively mild and toxican that in people who
were familiar with its effects, you couldn't really show uh,
deficits and performance. Um And I thought that marijuana would
be legalized within ten years, that it was just a
matter of getting the correct information out there. Yeah, sorry,
(04:41):
it took so long, Andy, boy, was I wrong? Well,
at least it's happening, and at least we're one of
the first countries. I mean, Colorado Washington were the first states,
even before other countries started doing it. But one thing
that hasn't changed is you still can't get to National
Suit on Health to really spend any money to look
at the medical benefits of marijuana. Yeah, what's it gonna
take to get it out of ski to one. You know,
it may just become increasingly irrelevant as more and more
(05:04):
states move towards legalizing this stuff, and the absurdity of
federal prohibition just persists. I mean, there's even some ambivalence
about moving out of schedule one to schedule too. I
think the real objective is basically just to deschedule it
and treat it like any other substance, and then the
pharmacy companies can come up with their specific versions of it.
But by and large, you know, the cat is out
of the bag or whatever the metaphor is. So I
(05:26):
think we're moving forward there. You know. Now, you also
at that point in your life you were interacting. I mean,
Timothy Leary and Richard Albert who became ron Dust were there.
They were doing those experiments. As those things began to
evolve into less than scientific experiments, but you were trying
these things and then all this leads to you going
down into Latin American the Amazon, and uh, how did
that shape who you became in subsequent years? It was
(05:49):
a very great influence. First of all, travel has been
a big part of my life, and I think there's
no substitute for spending time at other cultures and seeing
that there are other ways of of interpreting reality. Uh,
and whether that's about drugs and or health and medicine,
it's I think a problem in America is that so
many Americans really have no experience of of anything outside
(06:13):
of it. One of the things that I learned in
my looking at other cultures views of drugs and drug
plants is that every culture says that some drugs are
okay and we're going to use them, and other people's
drugs are not okay and we're going to prohibit them
and try to make them go away. But there's really
no agreement from culture to culturists to which are the
(06:33):
okay drugs and which are they not okay drugs. So
that was an interesting perspective to say. Yeah, I mean,
we've also talked about plants, his allies and plant allies.
What did you mean by that? Well, I think that
plants can be very useful to us, and I feel
that it's foolish to try to banish a plant or
demonize a plant, as we've done with cannabis. You know,
(06:55):
that is a multi use plant that only wants to
serve human beings. It lets us manipulate its genome, It
produces fiber, medicine, edible oil, uh and intoxicant. And yet
in our culture, we've tried to banish that plan and
make it go away. And that's stupid. We let a
you know, a multibillion dollar industry and hemp text will
(07:16):
slip away to China, and a multimillion dollar industry and
edible hemp products go to Canada just because of that
stupid attitude that we've got another plant that I looked
at a lot as coca. I think that's a perfect
example of how to go completely wrong in the relationship
with a drug plan. When Europeans first came to South America,
(07:37):
they saw native people's chewing coca, they thought it was
a satanic habit and tried to stamp it out. And
then they realized they can get more work out of
natives if they let them chew it and taxed it
and then European scientists got cocaine out of it and
released it to the world as a wonderful thing, you know,
created a wave of cocaine addiction, uh, and then blame
(07:57):
the plant for this and the ultimate steps then trying
to stop native people from using their sacred plant. I mean,
just ridiculous. There's obviously been these issues of class and
ethnicity and race. I mean, oftentimes, when we look at
why certain substances and band and others are tolerated, has
less to do with the relative risk and dangers of
these substances than with who uses and who is perceived
(08:19):
to use these substances. And we've seen this in the
US with cocaine and opium and even alcohol in some
respects and cannabis. But I think in Latin America you
had these sort of westernized elites looking down their noses
at the coca chewing indios and wanting to ban that stuff. Exactly.
At one point, the Europeans sent in people from the
World Health Organization to give Stanford Bennett and Wexler intelligence
(08:42):
tests to Andian natives UH and try to blame low
scores on their use of coca caused mental deterioration, and
that was justification for eradicating it. And with cannabis in
the US, it was introduced by way of Mexican migrant
workers in the South and black jazz musicians starting in
(09:04):
New Orleans, and that was those, you know, and then
later became associated with political radicals and hippies. So it
was those associations that made the dominant culture view it
in a certain way. You know, I'm thinking back, there's
another drug plant substance um. You know. I remember you
and I first met back in seven I just started
teaching at Princeton. I was teaching a drug policy seminar.
(09:26):
You were just beginning on your integrative medicine work and
still very connected to drug stuff. And so I invite
you to give a talk at the university, and I
remember you invited your parents up from Philadelphia to be
in the audience. And I'm expecting you to talk all
about marijuana and cannabis and messlin psychedelics, and you spent
half the talk talking about coffee. So what was that about? Well,
(09:48):
it just struck me. You know, first of when people
offer me coffee, I often say I don't touch hard drugs.
I'm not a coffee user. And I think coffee is
a quite strong drug, and many people who use it
have no awareness at all that it's a drug, let
alone a strong one that causes physical addiction and many users,
and it just is one of the cultural incongruities that
(10:09):
I like to get people to focus on. It just
points up how inconsistent we are in our attitudes about
psychoactive substances. Yet it's a vast majority of people who
drink coffee seemed to do so in a way that
doesn't really undermine health. And there are some health benefits
associated with coffee, right, there's certainly our health benefits associated
with coffee. But when I was in active clinical practice,
(10:31):
I used to say that I produced about one miracle
cure a week just by getting someone to stop drinking coffee.
And it can be caffeine. I remember a friend of
mine who had serious knee problems, and he went to
a half dozen doctors, some who recommended various forms of surgery,
and then finally somebody quarrying about his diet, and he
revealed that he was drinking a six pack of diet
coke every day. The doctor said, stop that, and then
(10:53):
knee pain went away. So I mean it's basically the
caffeine and coffee, which is a key ingredient, or is
a caffee plus other stuff. Well, it's caffeine plus other
things because other forms of caffeine tea does not. You
don't see that as that's such an association of physical
addiction with tea consumption, and the stimulation of tea is different,
(11:14):
possibly because it's the caffeine is modified by other substances
and tem We know, I've seen you, know, I remember
you being an advocate for drinking tea instead of coffee
and green tea, and then I've seen you in recent
years getting very excited about uh much a tea. You
even have a little dot com website where this is.
But so, what's so special about macha and can that
(11:36):
actually be abused as well or is it pretty difficult
to do? So I've never seen anyone abused much. First
of all, it's expensive, so it's a luxury item. And uh,
I guess cocaine is too, and people certainly abuse that.
But mauches is a beautiful color. It's brilliant green. It's
the only form of tea in which you consume the
whole leaf. It's got a higher content of antioxidants and
(11:58):
other healthful substances. And it's got a fascinating cultural history
associated with then Buddhism and with Samurais and with the
ceremony and uh, something that I like very much. We'll
be talking more after we hear this ad. Go back
(12:31):
to coca, right, I mean sometimes you know, I mean
Coca cola, right. Hang. I don't know whether it was
Litto's cocaine or or coca leaf extract in it until
nineteen hundred and so far as we know, there was
no major problem, any bigger problem with co cola addiction
when it had cocaine or cocaine, and then then there
is now. I mean, I sometimes wonder would we all
(12:53):
be better off if you know, Coca Cola would puts
a coca back in it and maybe substituted for caffeine.
What do you think I have long advocated for introduction
of coca I think it's got many potential therapeutic uses.
I think it would be a very good thing to
have to teach people how to use coca the whole leaf, uh,
and why it is different from and a much safer
(13:16):
thing to use than isolated cocaine, and if it would
replace coffee in our society more globally, I think that
could be a good thing. I think it is it
is less less associated with it with jangling stimulation and
aggressive energy that can happen with too much coffee consumption.
And I don't want to trash coffee, as you know.
Even my general belief is that there are no good
(13:37):
or bad drugs. They're only good or bad relationships with drugs. Yeah,
I mean, I think that was really a pivotal idea
that you put forward in that first book, The Natural Mind,
and and carried forward. Right. Then, on some level, people
all having innate need to alter their states of consciousness, right,
and the different plants and drugs are useful vehicles for
(13:58):
doing this, And it's about the relationship you have with
these substances. Yeah. And there are of course non drug
ways of altering consciousness that may be preferable. You know.
It's everything from um skydiving to sex, to music to fasting.
I mean, there's endless ways to alter conscious and that
drugs are very convenient because they work very rapidly and
(14:21):
don't require a lot of work, and they also have
their disadvantages. But I think the root idea here is
that alteration of consciousness is a human need and drive,
and that if a society doesn't come to terms with
that in some way, it's going to get into trouble,
as I think we have. And which of the most
successful societies that achieving that sort of insight, you know? Uh?
(14:43):
I think traditional societies, indigenous societies are much better at
that than we are. And in many cultures you can
see still there has been stable use of psychoactive plants
um causing no problems, and then offer we've come in
and meddled with those societies and created the kinds of
(15:04):
problems we have here. An example is opium use in
countries like Afghanistan, for example, in Iran, which is a
very stable culture, opium was mostly smoked by older men
when they had stopped working, and it was a social drug,
not closing problems. And the US went into these countries
and tried to eradicate opium and that use was replaced
(15:27):
by heroin use and younger people. So I think that's
there are many examples of that kind of thing where
our shortsightedness has has backfired and led to worse problems
than were there to begin with, right, you're reminding me,
there was this classic article by Joe Westernmire and the
Archives of General Psychiatry, maybe forty years ago more, and
(15:48):
he called it the pro heroin Effects of anti Opium Loves,
pointing out that both in Southwest and Southeast Asia, how
when these governments um suppressed when had been legal opium monopolies. Uh,
that what happened was, you know, people still wanted the opioid,
but they went to the drugs that could be more
easily smuggled, condensed, you know, in this sort of way,
(16:08):
are hidden from the authorities, and that was had horrifying impacts,
especially when HIV and injection drug use came around in
the nine eighties and nineties, you know. So no, no,
it was definitely that element, you know. But I mean also,
like you know, with with with a thing with drugs,
as you said, right, is that the upside is that
there were fairly easy and accessible way to achieve some
(16:30):
not just mild, but sometimes substantial alterations of consciousness. But
that's also their downside, right, that people can go to
them too easily. Um. But one thing I've heard you
talk about at times is how one of the benefits
of these drugs, whether it's cannabis or psychedelics especially, isn't
helping one appreciate insights or or potential uh that then
(16:54):
one can accomplish without the use of these drugs. Yeah,
I think that's especially true of psychedelics. They can show
you possibilities that you otherwise would never have believed in.
But when they wear off, you don't necessarily know how
to get back there, how to maintain that, and you
have to find other ways to do it. But I
think that's the magic of psychedelics. And you know, everyone
(17:14):
talks about them now is being useful for mental health conditions,
But I see tremendous uh widespread applications of them in
physical medicine as well and chronic pain and autoimmune disease.
I think they're quite remarkable. Yeah, I've heard you talk
about some of your personal experiences, the ways in which
psychedelics had some physical impact on you. Well, you know
(17:39):
a famous one that's been quoted many times. It is
my instant loss of a cat allergy lifelong cat allergy
as a result of an LSD experience in which I
was feeling terrific and uh, I interacted with a cat
and had no allergic response and never have since. So uh,
you know, I'd love to open at some point and
an allergy lost clinic using that. Uh. By the way, ethan,
(18:02):
have you you know that also the the there's less
written about the the spiritual potential, the potential for spiritual development.
But you know, if I don't know whether you're familiar
with this, have you seen the the YouTube clip housewife
on LSD. No, no, please google that and all your listenership.
Just google housewife on ls D on YouTube. It's a
(18:24):
video of an experiment. I think it's from the nineteen fifties,
and it's like youatric clinic in l a of a
housewife who takes a dose of LSD. Everything is so
beautiful and lovely and and a lie. I wish I
could talk in technicolor. You can't see it being never
or not. I feel sorry for you. You know. It
(18:45):
was striking some years ago when Roland Griffiths said Hopkins
and others did this study testing the spiritual effects of
psychedelics in a fairly scientific way, and I think it
helped open things up into other areas well. It's all
happening now. Who would have I mean, I'm quite an
As I saw last month, Vogue had a cover story
on psilocybin mushrooms. I mean, if that's not mainstream, I
(19:07):
don't know what it is. Well, there was a period
right back in the late fifties or early sixties when
Gordon Wasson was exploring when this stuff was showing up
on the cover of Life magazine and Carry Grant and
other famous actors and actresses were trying these things. And
then of course it all got blown out. But it
looks like maybe this you know, people have learned the
lessons from the past, and they're going to be more
careful about how this uh, how this thing evolves. The
(19:31):
interest is so tremendous out there. In the past few years,
when I was traveling a lot and speaking all over
the country, no matter what I was talking about, whether
the subject was integrated medicine or healthy aging or nutrition,
I would get questions about psychedelics. You know, this is
really on people's minds. So if you're Integrative Medicine Center
(19:52):
in Arizona, right you have thousands of graduates, they're sort
of spreading the world all around the country, in the world,
what are they being taught and what are they teaching.
There's about things like cannabis and about psychedelics or even
other psychoactive substances. There's quite a bit of curricular material
on cannabis, on medical applications of cannabis, and they're also
(20:12):
we have teaching about psychedelics, and a lot of people
in our training programs are interested in in learning how
to be psychedelic guides and how to refer patients to
psychedelic therapy. So we are trying to accommodate that interest
m hm. And so will there be are you doing
any research on psycholics at the university? Now? There was
(20:33):
research going on there um on psilocybin, but I think
that stopped now and whether there will be more in
the future, I don't know, uh huh. And when you
sort of take what's going on now and you go
back to your days in the uh what was it
the early seventies or something, traveling around the Amazon region
and I presume doing psychedelics with indigenous groups and all this,
(20:57):
you know, what's how do you compare can Trashed what
those groups were doing when you were in your younger
years and observing this with what's going on now, with
all this new research in the U s and elsewhere. Well,
you know that that what I saw was mostly use
of psychedelic plants by shamans, and they would deal with
patients who came to them or clients that came to them. UM.
(21:20):
I think what's happening in our culture now is that
the possibilities of psychedelic therapy are being embraced very widely
by uh, you know, much much more diverse groups of people, UM,
and particularly particular interest on using it for conditions like
anxiety and depression and PTSD and o c D and
(21:40):
so forth. And I think it's you know, we're going
to see these things made available for therapeutic use fairly quickly.
How important is it that they're being done with the
assistance have trained psychotherapists or counselors or whatever, as opposed
to doing you on your own or with a friend.
I think that's all all important. I mean, it's fine
if people want to do things on their own with friends,
(22:01):
that's fine. But for you know, therapeutic use, I think
it's it's very very important that you do this with
a qualified guide. And I'm happy to see now that
there are a few institutions who are offering training programs
in how to be psychedelic guides? Are there other I mean,
you know you're seeing the research being done a lot
with psilocybin. I think with mescalin we'll think we'll get
(22:25):
into m d M A in a moment. Not so
much with LST, probably because it still has that bad
rep left over. Are there other planted substances of psychedelic
power that you think might prove well? Actually ayahuasca d MT,
I mean, are the ones that you think are going
to prove interesting in the in the future that they're
not really doing the work on, you know what you
mentioned ayahuasca d m T certainly, but also now there
(22:48):
are a lot of pharmacologists and pharmaceutical companies that are
working to develop analogs of some of these compounds that
may have more specific corapeutic effects and fewer of what
are perceived as adverse effects. And one of the things,
Ethan that's I think driving this is that our health
(23:10):
care system is so burdened with conditions that don't respond
to conventional treatment, things like chronic pain syndromes and and PTSD,
and there's a real desperation to find methods that work
and the possibility that some of these compounds may be
very useful for that, I think is making them much
more acceptable. M h. I mean I can imagine that
(23:32):
you're that you're fairly critical of the widespread use of
these antidepressants, the prozacts and all these other society. But
is there any role for them? I mean, do they
help some people? Is it something that should be out
there still? I think that there are some of these
psychiatric drugs that are useful, particularly for treatment of bipolar
disorder for example. But the antidepressants have a pretty poor
(23:55):
track record. You know, they don't live up to the
claims made for them by manufacturers, and the theory that
they're based on I think is weak. Um, if you
look at the ads and psychiatric journals for the drugs,
you would think that there'd be no depression or anxiety anymore,
but that's not how it is. So I think that
there is a great need to find better methods and
(24:18):
that those will fall by the wayside. Yeah. Well, I mean,
we know the psychedelics as well as ketamine, which is
the psychedelic in the way, are showing interesting results. Are
there other things that you recommend or suggest to patients?
Who are struggling with serious depression. I think there's a
lot of new treatments. The one that I'm interested in
is transcranial magnetic stimulation. You know, it's a non drug approach,
(24:43):
relatively safe, and really good data on that as being useful.
There's a quantitative e g. Neuro feedback and novel method
that you know offers great promise. UM. Now, since there's
a lot of things out there that you know, are
not yet in the etical mainstream but show great promise
that their cost effective, TOM effective M. I mean, I've
(25:05):
also seen this stuff about the important role of exercise
in dealing with depression. But I'm wondering if any of
the kind of lower potency, more common stimulants, the tease
kind of you know, all these other sort of South
American stimulant plants, is there anything there in terms of
addressing depression. I frankly, among the stimulant plants, I would
(25:26):
say no. UM. But there may be other things out there,
but I don't think any of them have the power
of the psychedelics or you know, some of the major
pharmaceutical drugs. I just don't see anything out there that
works the way except However, kava for anxiety. You know,
that's a very significant, powerful herbal remedy, quite safe, and
(25:49):
it's a South specific thing. Yeah, oceany. It's a root
of a pepper plant used as a social recreational intoxicant
than in many of those island cultures and now of
available here. It's quite safe. Uh. It is a very
effective anti anxiety agent, much better than any of the
drugs that we use for that. Let's take a break
(26:12):
here and go to an ad h. Let me bring
you back to the issue of stimulus. Right when we
(26:32):
talked about caffeine, coffee, tea, much as things like that. Um,
but you know, there's also a very interesting history with
good old dextroamphetamine amphetamy, right, and for a long time,
but we've seen it. It's use in military. I think
there was a long period when long distance pilots in
the US I think Navy would be allowed to use
extra amphetamine. And they found nobody ever had an accident
(26:53):
within effect. The principal cause of accidents was people suffering
from fatigue. Um, it wasn't from this. And I've sometimes
wondered if you were to construct not you personally, but
but a huge study where like ten thousand people were
to just continue the normal life to control group, and
ten thousand people would be taking a five milligram dexter
(27:14):
amphetamine every day and then they'd be evaluated after three months,
six months, a year, five years on various quality of
life indicators as well as any harms. I sometimes wonder
whether or not the group that was taking the UH
the low dos amphetamine every day over many years might
land up faring better than the control group. Well, that
that is possible, even and you know, there is no
(27:37):
there's a great enthusiasm for some of these newer ones,
like adderall for example, and incredibly widespread use among students.
And I've talked to many UH college students who say
that they can't afford not to take adderall because they
know the person next to them is taking it and
that's going to give them an edge on studying and exams,
which is true, right. I mean, it's a short term
(27:57):
performance enhancer for everything from sports to study into exam taking.
It's like with many of these things, if you just
use it occasionally in the right ways, it's probably perfectly okay,
if not good exactly. What about fighting to get a
coca chewing gum um so that people for their afternoon
break instead of taking that coffee which is harsh on
their stomach, or the diet coke um. Do you think
(28:17):
that could work? Oh, I definitely think it could work.
I've written a scientific paper about that, and I tried
to get that going. This is years ago, and now
there is It looks as if Columbia might be close
to legalizing coca uh and commercializing it. You know, there's
been some effort in Bolivia, less so in Peru, but
the Colombian seemed quite enthusiastic about it, and maybe you know,
(28:40):
this will stinally start to happen. Cocus in schedule to
not schedule one, so you know, it is technically available
for medical use, but there's no source of it here.
But I would love to see that happen. I think
it is such a useful plant and it's just a
shame that we've been denied the use of it. Yeah. No,
I mean I think the former president of Bolivia, Able Morales,
you know, who had been ahead of the coca growers
(29:02):
union beforehand. I mean, he was a big advocate for
this thing, and he would even go to the United
Nations meetings in Vienna and publicly chew the coca leaf.
The problem, however, was he wasn't much when it came
to the diplomacy of advocacy for this stuff, so it
never went anywhere, you know, I mean, while perusing a
shambles politically. So hopefully Columbia can move forward on this.
It might. It's there, there's progress there now. You know,
(29:25):
one of your other books that you wrote in the
early years, which I remember taking to read with me
on my honeymoon, was The Marriage of the Sun in
the Moon, right, and you know, you start off with
hunting for mushrooms and you're looking at different types of
alter states of consciousness. But then the next chapter was
about eating mangoes in Central America. I mean just explained
that one. Well, I get high eating very right mangoes,
(29:47):
and that's just an example of, you know, another way
of altering consciousness. I think they're just infinite ways of
doing it. So, um, that book was really essays about
my period of travels, most the Latin Americus, some elsewhere,
but just about things that I'd done and seeing that
I found made me high. Everything from being in the
(30:08):
Native American sweat lodges to watching total eclipses of the sun. Yeah,
actually I remember you and I went together on a
trip to this southern coast of Turkey for a solar
eclipse about fifteen twenty years ago, and it was it
was my only experience of that and and it was
really quite traumatic when it happened. Was that kind of
special sort of altered states. I forgot we had all
(30:29):
that history. So talk to me about the placebo and
placebo effect and how how central I mean it seems
to play. I mean, I guess there are ethical issues,
and the extent to which physicians can use it in
many ways are recommended. A bigger problem is that physicians
are just uncomfortable with it because they don't understand it.
They think placebo medicine is a form of tricking patients,
(30:51):
and that's not how it is. Placebo responses are pure
healing responses from within. To me, that's the meat of medicine.
That's what you want to make happen more the time,
you know, I'm mostly here the word placebo used in
phrases like how do you know that's not just the
placebo effect, And the most interesting word there is just
or we have to rule out the placebo effect. No,
(31:13):
you want to be ruling it in. You want to
make it happen more the time. I'm happy to see
that in fairly recent years, and this is a result
of functional MRI scans of brains that we've been able
to you know, people have been able to show that
placebo responses are associated with activity in particular brain regions,
and this makes them more real. Uh, two doctors. So
(31:35):
I think the views on them are changing. You know,
I never give patients sugar pills, but I often give them,
say herbs that I think are weaker forms of medicine
and pharmaceutical drugs, but I believe in them because I
know they work, and I can convey that belief to patients.
And I don't really care how much of a favorable
(31:56):
response is due to the intrinsic action of that herb,
and how is due to a mind mediated mechanism and whatever.
I'm just want to see the good result m H.
And it can operate both on the planet. I mean,
in dealing in terms of immense pain or pleasure or
absolutely the fact that there's there's accumulating evidence that a
great deal of chronic pain is not really arising from
(32:20):
the body it's a problem in the brain that the
brain is misinterpreting receptions from the body, and there are
ways of retraining the brain to make that go away,
and that may have profound implications for getting us out
of the opioid crisis that we're in at the moment.
And you've had personal experience of that even Yeah. No,
I mean, you know, I it's funny in my life
(32:41):
with this thing. I remember it was you were part
of a working group of academics I had at Princeton
in the early nineties trying to think through it over
the optimal drug policy. And one of these sessions, you know,
I had had a recurrence of really bad back pain.
I had been diagnosed with her need discs, and uh,
you started advising me at that time and you suggested
I read this book by John Sarno, Feeling Back Pain,
(33:03):
And that was really pivotal in my life. I mean,
it was coming to realize it wasn't the hurting yet
disc that were causing the pain, but rather underlying emotional
angst that was turning itself into physical pain. Yeah, very dramatic. Yeah,
I think I think that view is gaining more ground
these days. Yeah, it was interesting because I thought you
(33:24):
was Sarno's book coming out and uh, and then I
remember when you wrote your breakout book, Spontaneous Healing, the
chapter on back pain was ethan story. And then I
remember my you know, I was on TV all the
time talking about drug post before, but my only time
ever being on OPRAH was sitting in the front row
is your patient talking about the back pain experience? And
I thought, guys, you're on OPRAH. That's gonna change. Everybody's
(33:46):
going to see the light. But it's amazing how long
it takes for that type of insight and wisdom to
really get out there, right. You know. That's what I
said when I did my Marijan experiments that I thought
it would be legalized in five years. It was just
a matter of getting the correct information and out. And
I saw, however, that people believe what they want to believe,
and don't believe that they don't want to believe, and
you can show them all kinds of stuff, but they
(34:08):
don't change their views. It was also include serious physicians
who should know better, right exactly. And one of the
things I think moved me was the evidence that showed
that for people who had these herniated disks. The people
who had surgery had an immediate relieving of the pain
that was dramatic, but that if you compared them three
years later with people who have not had surgery, they
(34:29):
had the same incidents of pain all over again. But
it was also I remember, it was hard for me
to believe that that intensity of pain and the fact
that I couldn't even stand up straight and that my
toes were numb, it was hard to believe that there
was not some physical cause for that saying. And that
was the leap that had to be taken you. But
(34:50):
you took it. I took it, and I got there,
and it changed my whole understanding of the of mind
body relationship in a in a in a really important way.
In fact, I think it was just a few months
after that that I took M D m A for
the first time, and that was I think a very
important thing for me in my in my marriage at
the time. But I have a question for you now.
M D m A has not worked for me for
(35:11):
the last fifteen years. What might work? Why not? First
of all, why does he keep working for other people
for decades and other people who just stopped working and
then what might be an alternative. Well, I do see
that pattern. You know, we change as we get older.
Maybe your biochemistry has changed. I don't know the answer
to that, but maybe you got what you needed from
it and it doesn't work anymore. This is what I
(35:31):
was saying earlier about that these drugs can show you possibilities,
but then they don't really show you how to maintain
the possibilities, and you have to work and to find
some other ways of doing it. Mm hmm. I remember
you telling some story about um yoga and showing the
possibilities or something. Yeah, that's a you know classic. I
was learning to do yoga. This was in the around
(35:53):
nineteen probably sixty nine seventy, and there was one posture.
I couldn't get the plow where you lye on your
back and try to touch your feet behind your head
on the floor, and I just could not do that.
I had was about to give up. I thought I
was too old, my body was too stiff. I could
get my toes about a foot from the floor, and
there was excruciating pain in my neck. And one day,
(36:16):
it was in spring, I took LSD with a group
of friends in Virginia. It was fabulous day. I felt
terrific and my body felt totally a lastic and I thought, yee,
I had to try that. And I lay on my
back and was lowering my feet and I thought I
had about a foot to go, and they touched the ground.
I couldn't believe it, and there's no pain, and I
raised them and lowered them. I was just, you know,
so delighted. The next day, I tried to do it,
(36:38):
and I got within a foot of the floor, and
there was excruciating pain in my neck. But now there
was a difference. I knew it was possible, and I
was motivated to keep at it. In a few weeks,
I was able to do it. If I had not
had that experience, I would have given up. Yeah, I
wonder you think you can help with our writing blocks,
that's all. That's a lot harder. Yeah. I've always I've
(37:00):
always admired an envy you for your incredible I mean,
you know, you start off being a journalist when you
were in college, right, and you've been writing ever since
and just been incredibly prolific. But at this point in
my life, I'm not that interested in writing very much anymore.
I think I've said everything I have to say. You know,
I heard you say that to me fifteen years ago
and you kept writing, so we'll see. Well, you know
another thing I remember remember visiting you a two signs
(37:22):
sometimes in past years, and you always had dogs around.
And then I heard you saying someplace it means another
podcast that there's a similarity between cannabis and dogs in
the relationship to you remember it. Just stand on that
because I found that fascinating. Well, you know, dogs are
really unusual. They are the the only animal that has
(37:45):
thrown in its genetic lot with us. You know, sometime
in the distant past, dogs decided to co evolved with us,
and they have adapted behavior and remarkable ways. You're the
only animal that can hold our gaze, for example, um,
and you know that's remarkable. And they've learned to read
human emotions. Well. Cannabis, in a similar way, has decided
(38:08):
to co evolve with human beings. As far back as
we can go in history, we can't find truly wild
hemp that has no association with human beings as far
back as we have evidence for, it always grew in
association with human settlements, and it has allowed us to
manipulate its genome and it wants to live with us
(38:29):
and serve us, and so I say, it's the dog
of the plant world. Is there something similar with mushrooms
going on as well? That's more complicated. There certainly is
a there's a sudden explosion of awareness of mushrooms in
our culture maybe around the world at the moment that
people are, you know, becoming fascinated with mushrooms, or more
(38:50):
species of mushrooms, food, mushrooms being cultivated. There's oldest interest
in and psychedelic mushrooms. It's a change and consciousness. Whether
the mushrooms are driving that or it's us, I don't know,
something's happening. I remember you used to organize these conferences
to tell your ride mushroom conference until you're right, Colorado.
Remember that's one time. Remember hearing Paul Stamus give a
(39:11):
very playful talk about the ways in which some of
our mushroom spores found a way to keep putting themselves
in interesting places where human beings gathered, including around the
local courthouse or something like that. Right, and then Terence
mckennah had a whole theory around mushrooms and human evolution
as well. I think, right, yeah, well, there are some people.
I think he was the chief advocate of the idea
that it was still psychedelic mushrooms that really provoked the
(39:36):
leap from apes to humans and development of the modern brain.
I don't I don't buy that one, but uh a
lot of people like that idea. Uh huh. How about
the idea if they came from outer space could be possible? Right,
there was an old there was an old science fiction
movie called The Invasion of the Mushroom People. So maybe
(39:58):
you know there's another fact, which is that you know,
here we have uh opioids outside but endorphins inside. We
have cannabis outside um, but the endocannabinant system inside. I
remember hearing you talk about oxytocin and such. Well, it's
fascinating the the interconnectedness of the natural world. You know,
(40:21):
why why do we have receptors in our brain that
fit molecules made by poppy plants were by hemp plants.
I mean, that's remarkable, and we have our own idogeneous
psychedelic probably d m T. To me, that just points
up some deep, profound relationship between us and the natural world,
whether it's plants or mushrooms. You know, we're connected. M hm.
(40:45):
Are you still doing psychedelics yourself? Not really. I mean
I feel like that that was part of a different
phase of my life and I don't really feel that
motivated to use them anymore. I think I got I
got what I needed to get from them. Yeah, I'm
sort of torn because, you know, yeah, sometimes it feels
like psychedelics are wasted on the young. You know that
they they're all into the colors and this and that.
(41:05):
But that's the real value of psychedelics, um, you know,
is about going deeper. And I've analogized it to you know,
growing up fairly traditionally Jewish, and fact, I still fast
on young people are every year, and I think it's
a basically a good thing to do, good for the soul,
good for reflection, and that on some level doing psychedelics
like once a year is a kind of good sort
of annual ritual to stir up the emotional intellectual sediment
(41:28):
that can settle, because that's one thing that psychedelics and
a higher dose can really do, is stir up all
sorts of sediment. I do know, as most people I know,
generally as we age we get more hesitant, and I
don't know whether it's that we're more wary of it now,
or it's just that we really did learn everything we did,
or I don't know. I just find that I'm not
motivated to do it. Uh. Alan Watts wrote a blurb
(41:50):
for The Natural Mind, my first book, and the last
line of it was, when you get the message, you
hang up the telephone. And I sort of feel that,
you know, that's my sense that I did a lot
of experimentation with psychedelics, especially in my thirties, forties, fifties,
and I think I learned from them what I had
to learn, and I don't I don't feel that I
(42:10):
need to do that again. But if the opportunity presents itself,
I mind, I'll say, yeah, yeah. Well, you know the
other book that you did, part I think of your
Andrew Wild's Drug Trilogy, UM, was Chocolate to Morphine. It
was really a fantastic drug education book. We made sure
to order use numbers of copies and give them out,
you know, through Drug Policy Alliance. UM. And I remember
(42:32):
back in the day the Republican Senator of Florida, Paul Hawkins,
wanted to have the book banned from schools and all
this stuff. But it does raise the issue of what
about the kids, right? I mean, you think about how
the whole war on drugs is oftentimes justified as one
great big child production act. But I mean, what's your
view about what parents should be doing visa the their
kids on psycleactive drugs. I think they should be exchanging
(42:55):
truthful information with their kids, and that's why I wrote
that book, uh, to facilitate that. I don't want to
make general rules for whether kids should or shouldn't use
drugs or at what age it's appropriate. Frankly, I'm more
concerned about the vast medicating of kids with psychiatric drugs. No.
I think we have no idea what their effects are
on the developing brain, and we're doing this tremendous experiment
(43:16):
with our nation's youth. Now. A lot of kids are
on multiple psychiatric drugs, very strong ones, and as I say,
we have no idea what the long term effects are.
I mean, there's also concerns about this growing number of
synthetic substances, because you know, tendency for younger people just
kind of be reckless about this thing and pop whatever's around.
And this incredible proliferation of these synthetic drugs which is
(43:37):
also I mean obviously not being used as broadly as
the as the you know, the antidepressants and the really
enty drugs and things like that, but clearly a concern. Well,
I think as we move toward legalization or general availability
of these drugs, it is appropriate to think about, you know,
what are the rules for younger ages, for people in
(43:58):
sensitive occupations. I think that's on society is gonna have
to come to terms with. When I think of the
few people I know who did psychedelics, either with their
parents or with their teenage kid, I mean the cases
I know of, actually we're quite beautiful stories, you know,
and it's something you can't really talk about. Nobody could
ever talk about quite openly or publicly. But we tend
(44:18):
to say, you know, we here, we have laws that
you can't touch marijuana or alcohol to your twenty one,
and yet there's something about integrating this in perhaps in
a responsible way. Well, we will see. It's going to
be an interesting time. I mean it's even a question,
you know, like growing up Jewish, we're having wine on
the Sabbath, and then you see buy and large Jews
having higher rates of drinking but lower rates of alcoholism.
(44:40):
Whether or not that kind of acculturation really helped to
uh provide a protective effect. And conversely, I mean, now
we're a point with cannabis legalization where cannabis is becoming
so widely accepted. And I fought for this all my life,
and I feel very proud of the accomplishment, but I
worry at times about cannabis beginning to be used in
such a cavalier way a that it's specialness begins to fade.
(45:02):
I mean, do you see that as a risk that's
probably already happening? And I see that. You know that's
a risk with psychedelics as well. You think so even
with psychedelics, Oh, I think that's that's happening. Sure. What
about the whole microdocing thing. You know, I don't know
what to make of that. I know a lot of
people who are doing it and claim that they've gotten
very good results in terms of enhanced creativity or lowered
(45:24):
anxiety or improvement of depression. You know, I've tried it
a bit. It's not something that I was really motivated
to continue with long term, but fascinating to watch it happen. Well, Andy, listen,
it's great to catch up Thank you so much for
having this conversation with me. Look forward to seeing you
before long, okay, and wish you all the vest on
(45:45):
your your next ventures, even if you think you've given
up writing U, which I don't really believe. We'll see
good to talk to you, okay. Take care. Psychoactive is
a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's
hosted by me Ethan Neatleman. It's produced by Katcha Kumkova
and Ben Cabrick. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel,
(46:07):
Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronovski for Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams
and Matt Frederick for I Heart Radio and me Ethan Nadelman.
Our music is by Ari Belusian and a special thanks
to Avivit Brio, Sef Bianca Grimshaw and Robert Beatty. If
you'd like to share your own stories, comments or ideas,
(46:27):
please leave us a message at eight three three seven
seven nine sixty. That's one eight three three psycho zero.
You can also email us as Psychoactive at protozoa dot
com or find me on Twitter at Ethan Nadelman. And
if you couldn't keep track of all this. Find the
(46:47):
information in the show notes. On the next episode, I'll
be talking with Yale law professor James Forman Jr. Who's
Puliticer Prize winning book, Locking Up Our Own provides a
truly unique perspective on the war on drugs. You know,
(47:08):
without taking heroin into account, one cannot understand African American
attitudes towards the drug war. The heroin really devastated Black communities,
and I think set the stage for some of these
punitive Black attitudes. Subscribe to Cycleactive now see it, don't
miss it.
Hi, I'm Ethan Natalman, and this is Psychoactive, a production
of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the
show where we talk about all things drugs. But any
of views expressed here do not represent those of I
Heart Media, Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed,
(00:22):
heat as an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they
may not even represent my own. And nothing contained in
this show should be used as medical advice or encouragement
to use any type of drug. Welcome Psychoactive listeners. This
(00:44):
podcast episode is a really really special treat for me
for for a number of reasons. I mean, first of all,
the guests today, Dr Andrew Wile is internationally famous, tensive
millions of people know his name, have read his books,
have watched his videos. And that's not because of so
much of the stuff about drugs. It's because of his
(01:04):
work on integrative medicine, on basically integrating the best of
conventional medicine and alternative medicine in really remarkable ways. He's
written about a dozen books, been translated to dozens of languages.
You know, everything from healthy eating to us spontaneous healing,
to spontaneous happiness, to stuff about diets, to stuff about cancer,
(01:25):
to you name it really about how to lead a healthier,
better life. But the real reason I asked Andy t
beyond there's actually two reasons is that before he really
emerged as the pioneering figure in integrative medicine and started
all the writing and started a medical program about this,
he wrote a trio of books about drugs psychoactive drugs
(01:50):
that were formative for me and formative for a huge
number of people beginning in the nineteen seventies. Uh, and
how we think about drugs and alteration consciousness. And then
the last reason quite frankly, I wanted to have a
yahn Andy, is because going back thirty idea years ago, Um,
you played a major role in my life, not just
(02:11):
um your intellectual influence, but as I was going through
probably the greatest emotional trauma and physical trauma of my life,
you played a pivotal role by helping me see how
they were really integrated with one another. So maybe we'll
have a chance to get into that. So Andy, thank
you so much. I mean I have to say too,
is that one of the things I really admired about you,
(02:33):
is that, even as you become this globally famous person
talking about food and diet and health, you've never shied
from putting out the most provocative and I think correct
ideas about drugs. And that goes back to I guess
when you were just what a college student or something
like that and beginning to study all this. So what
were the origins for you about thinking and talking about
(02:54):
drugs in the ways that has such an influence? Oh gee,
I told some of that story in my first book,
The Natural Mine. But I've read about mescaline, uh, right
after I graduated from high school, and I just fascinated
me and I wanted to know more about it, and
so I began reading everything I could and asking people
if they knew anything about the psyched that I think
(03:15):
the word psychedelic wasn't even used then. And um, as
an undergraduate at Harvard, I majored in botany and had
the good fortune to be mentored by Richard Schultz, who
was the godfather of modern ethnobotany. And you know, as
I began studying that and learned learning about psychoactive plants,
it struck me that there was a great dearth of
(03:37):
knowledge about them, and people in the medical field scientific
field really had not studied them, did not know what
they were talking about. And that was certainly true of cannabis,
you know, it was true of the psychedelics, and so
it fascinated me to try to get reliable information about them.
And as you know, um, well, I I experimented personally
(03:59):
with mescal and psychedelics while I was an undergraduate. But
then in my last year of medical school, I organized
and carried out the first double blind human experiments with marijuana,
and I you know, at the conclusion of that study,
mainly it was to show that you could study marijuana
on a laboratory and get away with it, because many
(04:19):
people said it was impossible. And we concluded that marijuana
was a relatively mild and toxican that in people who
were familiar with its effects, you couldn't really show uh,
deficits and performance. Um And I thought that marijuana would
be legalized within ten years, that it was just a
matter of getting the correct information out there. Yeah, sorry,
(04:41):
it took so long, Andy, boy, was I wrong? Well,
at least it's happening, and at least we're one of
the first countries. I mean, Colorado Washington were the first states,
even before other countries started doing it. But one thing
that hasn't changed is you still can't get to National
Suit on Health to really spend any money to look
at the medical benefits of marijuana. Yeah, what's it gonna
take to get it out of ski to one. You know,
it may just become increasingly irrelevant as more and more
(05:04):
states move towards legalizing this stuff, and the absurdity of
federal prohibition just persists. I mean, there's even some ambivalence
about moving out of schedule one to schedule too. I
think the real objective is basically just to deschedule it
and treat it like any other substance, and then the
pharmacy companies can come up with their specific versions of it.
But by and large, you know, the cat is out
of the bag or whatever the metaphor is. So I
(05:26):
think we're moving forward there. You know. Now, you also
at that point in your life you were interacting. I mean,
Timothy Leary and Richard Albert who became ron Dust were there.
They were doing those experiments. As those things began to
evolve into less than scientific experiments, but you were trying
these things and then all this leads to you going
down into Latin American the Amazon, and uh, how did
that shape who you became in subsequent years? It was
(05:49):
a very great influence. First of all, travel has been
a big part of my life, and I think there's
no substitute for spending time at other cultures and seeing
that there are other ways of of interpreting reality. Uh,
and whether that's about drugs and or health and medicine,
it's I think a problem in America is that so
many Americans really have no experience of of anything outside
(06:13):
of it. One of the things that I learned in
my looking at other cultures views of drugs and drug
plants is that every culture says that some drugs are
okay and we're going to use them, and other people's
drugs are not okay and we're going to prohibit them
and try to make them go away. But there's really
no agreement from culture to culturists to which are the
(06:33):
okay drugs and which are they not okay drugs. So
that was an interesting perspective to say. Yeah, I mean,
we've also talked about plants, his allies and plant allies.
What did you mean by that? Well, I think that
plants can be very useful to us, and I feel
that it's foolish to try to banish a plant or
demonize a plant, as we've done with cannabis. You know,
(06:55):
that is a multi use plant that only wants to
serve human beings. It lets us manipulate its genome, It
produces fiber, medicine, edible oil, uh and intoxicant. And yet
in our culture, we've tried to banish that plan and
make it go away. And that's stupid. We let a
you know, a multibillion dollar industry and hemp text will
(07:16):
slip away to China, and a multimillion dollar industry and
edible hemp products go to Canada just because of that
stupid attitude that we've got another plant that I looked
at a lot as coca. I think that's a perfect
example of how to go completely wrong in the relationship
with a drug plan. When Europeans first came to South America,
(07:37):
they saw native people's chewing coca, they thought it was
a satanic habit and tried to stamp it out. And
then they realized they can get more work out of
natives if they let them chew it and taxed it
and then European scientists got cocaine out of it and
released it to the world as a wonderful thing, you know,
created a wave of cocaine addiction, uh, and then blame
(07:57):
the plant for this and the ultimate steps then trying
to stop native people from using their sacred plant. I mean,
just ridiculous. There's obviously been these issues of class and
ethnicity and race. I mean, oftentimes, when we look at
why certain substances and band and others are tolerated, has
less to do with the relative risk and dangers of
these substances than with who uses and who is perceived
(08:19):
to use these substances. And we've seen this in the
US with cocaine and opium and even alcohol in some
respects and cannabis. But I think in Latin America you
had these sort of westernized elites looking down their noses
at the coca chewing indios and wanting to ban that stuff. Exactly.
At one point, the Europeans sent in people from the
World Health Organization to give Stanford Bennett and Wexler intelligence
(08:42):
tests to Andian natives UH and try to blame low
scores on their use of coca caused mental deterioration, and
that was justification for eradicating it. And with cannabis in
the US, it was introduced by way of Mexican migrant
workers in the South and black jazz musicians starting in
(09:04):
New Orleans, and that was those, you know, and then
later became associated with political radicals and hippies. So it
was those associations that made the dominant culture view it
in a certain way. You know, I'm thinking back, there's
another drug plant substance um. You know. I remember you
and I first met back in seven I just started
teaching at Princeton. I was teaching a drug policy seminar.
(09:26):
You were just beginning on your integrative medicine work and
still very connected to drug stuff. And so I invite
you to give a talk at the university, and I
remember you invited your parents up from Philadelphia to be
in the audience. And I'm expecting you to talk all
about marijuana and cannabis and messlin psychedelics, and you spent
half the talk talking about coffee. So what was that about? Well,
(09:48):
it just struck me. You know, first of when people
offer me coffee, I often say I don't touch hard drugs.
I'm not a coffee user. And I think coffee is
a quite strong drug, and many people who use it
have no awareness at all that it's a drug, let
alone a strong one that causes physical addiction and many users,
and it just is one of the cultural incongruities that
(10:09):
I like to get people to focus on. It just
points up how inconsistent we are in our attitudes about
psychoactive substances. Yet it's a vast majority of people who
drink coffee seemed to do so in a way that
doesn't really undermine health. And there are some health benefits
associated with coffee, right, there's certainly our health benefits associated
with coffee. But when I was in active clinical practice,
(10:31):
I used to say that I produced about one miracle
cure a week just by getting someone to stop drinking coffee.
And it can be caffeine. I remember a friend of
mine who had serious knee problems, and he went to
a half dozen doctors, some who recommended various forms of surgery,
and then finally somebody quarrying about his diet, and he
revealed that he was drinking a six pack of diet
coke every day. The doctor said, stop that, and then
(10:53):
knee pain went away. So I mean it's basically the
caffeine and coffee, which is a key ingredient, or is
a caffee plus other stuff. Well, it's caffeine plus other
things because other forms of caffeine tea does not. You
don't see that as that's such an association of physical
addiction with tea consumption, and the stimulation of tea is different,
(11:14):
possibly because it's the caffeine is modified by other substances
and tem We know, I've seen you, know, I remember
you being an advocate for drinking tea instead of coffee
and green tea, and then I've seen you in recent
years getting very excited about uh much a tea. You
even have a little dot com website where this is.
But so, what's so special about macha and can that
(11:36):
actually be abused as well or is it pretty difficult
to do? So I've never seen anyone abused much. First
of all, it's expensive, so it's a luxury item. And uh,
I guess cocaine is too, and people certainly abuse that.
But mauches is a beautiful color. It's brilliant green. It's
the only form of tea in which you consume the
whole leaf. It's got a higher content of antioxidants and
(11:58):
other healthful substances. And it's got a fascinating cultural history
associated with then Buddhism and with Samurais and with the
ceremony and uh, something that I like very much. We'll
be talking more after we hear this ad. Go back
(12:31):
to coca, right, I mean sometimes you know, I mean
Coca cola, right. Hang. I don't know whether it was
Litto's cocaine or or coca leaf extract in it until
nineteen hundred and so far as we know, there was
no major problem, any bigger problem with co cola addiction
when it had cocaine or cocaine, and then then there
is now. I mean, I sometimes wonder would we all
(12:53):
be better off if you know, Coca Cola would puts
a coca back in it and maybe substituted for caffeine.
What do you think I have long advocated for introduction
of coca I think it's got many potential therapeutic uses.
I think it would be a very good thing to
have to teach people how to use coca the whole leaf, uh,
and why it is different from and a much safer
(13:16):
thing to use than isolated cocaine, and if it would
replace coffee in our society more globally, I think that
could be a good thing. I think it is it
is less less associated with it with jangling stimulation and
aggressive energy that can happen with too much coffee consumption.
And I don't want to trash coffee, as you know.
Even my general belief is that there are no good
(13:37):
or bad drugs. They're only good or bad relationships with drugs. Yeah,
I mean, I think that was really a pivotal idea
that you put forward in that first book, The Natural Mind,
and and carried forward. Right. Then, on some level, people
all having innate need to alter their states of consciousness, right,
and the different plants and drugs are useful vehicles for
(13:58):
doing this, And it's about the relationship you have with
these substances. Yeah. And there are of course non drug
ways of altering consciousness that may be preferable. You know.
It's everything from um skydiving to sex, to music to fasting.
I mean, there's endless ways to alter conscious and that
drugs are very convenient because they work very rapidly and
(14:21):
don't require a lot of work, and they also have
their disadvantages. But I think the root idea here is
that alteration of consciousness is a human need and drive,
and that if a society doesn't come to terms with
that in some way, it's going to get into trouble,
as I think we have. And which of the most
successful societies that achieving that sort of insight, you know? Uh?
(14:43):
I think traditional societies, indigenous societies are much better at
that than we are. And in many cultures you can
see still there has been stable use of psychoactive plants
um causing no problems, and then offer we've come in
and meddled with those societies and created the kinds of
(15:04):
problems we have here. An example is opium use in
countries like Afghanistan, for example, in Iran, which is a
very stable culture, opium was mostly smoked by older men
when they had stopped working, and it was a social drug,
not closing problems. And the US went into these countries
and tried to eradicate opium and that use was replaced
(15:27):
by heroin use and younger people. So I think that's
there are many examples of that kind of thing where
our shortsightedness has has backfired and led to worse problems
than were there to begin with, right, you're reminding me,
there was this classic article by Joe Westernmire and the
Archives of General Psychiatry, maybe forty years ago more, and
(15:48):
he called it the pro heroin Effects of anti Opium Loves,
pointing out that both in Southwest and Southeast Asia, how
when these governments um suppressed when had been legal opium monopolies. Uh,
that what happened was, you know, people still wanted the opioid,
but they went to the drugs that could be more
easily smuggled, condensed, you know, in this sort of way,
(16:08):
are hidden from the authorities, and that was had horrifying impacts,
especially when HIV and injection drug use came around in
the nine eighties and nineties, you know. So no, no,
it was definitely that element, you know. But I mean also,
like you know, with with with a thing with drugs,
as you said, right, is that the upside is that
there were fairly easy and accessible way to achieve some
(16:30):
not just mild, but sometimes substantial alterations of consciousness. But
that's also their downside, right, that people can go to
them too easily. Um. But one thing I've heard you
talk about at times is how one of the benefits
of these drugs, whether it's cannabis or psychedelics especially, isn't
helping one appreciate insights or or potential uh that then
(16:54):
one can accomplish without the use of these drugs. Yeah,
I think that's especially true of psychedelics. They can show
you possibilities that you otherwise would never have believed in.
But when they wear off, you don't necessarily know how
to get back there, how to maintain that, and you
have to find other ways to do it. But I
think that's the magic of psychedelics. And you know, everyone
(17:14):
talks about them now is being useful for mental health conditions,
But I see tremendous uh widespread applications of them in
physical medicine as well and chronic pain and autoimmune disease.
I think they're quite remarkable. Yeah, I've heard you talk
about some of your personal experiences, the ways in which
psychedelics had some physical impact on you. Well, you know
(17:39):
a famous one that's been quoted many times. It is
my instant loss of a cat allergy lifelong cat allergy
as a result of an LSD experience in which I
was feeling terrific and uh, I interacted with a cat
and had no allergic response and never have since. So uh,
you know, I'd love to open at some point and
an allergy lost clinic using that. Uh. By the way, ethan,
(18:02):
have you you know that also the the there's less
written about the the spiritual potential, the potential for spiritual development.
But you know, if I don't know whether you're familiar
with this, have you seen the the YouTube clip housewife
on LSD. No, no, please google that and all your listenership.
Just google housewife on ls D on YouTube. It's a
(18:24):
video of an experiment. I think it's from the nineteen fifties,
and it's like youatric clinic in l a of a
housewife who takes a dose of LSD. Everything is so
beautiful and lovely and and a lie. I wish I
could talk in technicolor. You can't see it being never
or not. I feel sorry for you. You know. It
(18:45):
was striking some years ago when Roland Griffiths said Hopkins
and others did this study testing the spiritual effects of
psychedelics in a fairly scientific way, and I think it
helped open things up into other areas well. It's all
happening now. Who would have I mean, I'm quite an
As I saw last month, Vogue had a cover story
on psilocybin mushrooms. I mean, if that's not mainstream, I
(19:07):
don't know what it is. Well, there was a period
right back in the late fifties or early sixties when
Gordon Wasson was exploring when this stuff was showing up
on the cover of Life magazine and Carry Grant and
other famous actors and actresses were trying these things. And
then of course it all got blown out. But it
looks like maybe this you know, people have learned the
lessons from the past, and they're going to be more
careful about how this uh, how this thing evolves. The
(19:31):
interest is so tremendous out there. In the past few years,
when I was traveling a lot and speaking all over
the country, no matter what I was talking about, whether
the subject was integrated medicine or healthy aging or nutrition,
I would get questions about psychedelics. You know, this is
really on people's minds. So if you're Integrative Medicine Center
(19:52):
in Arizona, right you have thousands of graduates, they're sort
of spreading the world all around the country, in the world,
what are they being taught and what are they teaching.
There's about things like cannabis and about psychedelics or even
other psychoactive substances. There's quite a bit of curricular material
on cannabis, on medical applications of cannabis, and they're also
(20:12):
we have teaching about psychedelics, and a lot of people
in our training programs are interested in in learning how
to be psychedelic guides and how to refer patients to
psychedelic therapy. So we are trying to accommodate that interest
m hm. And so will there be are you doing
any research on psycholics at the university? Now? There was
(20:33):
research going on there um on psilocybin, but I think
that stopped now and whether there will be more in
the future, I don't know, uh huh. And when you
sort of take what's going on now and you go
back to your days in the uh what was it
the early seventies or something, traveling around the Amazon region
and I presume doing psychedelics with indigenous groups and all this,
(20:57):
you know, what's how do you compare can Trashed what
those groups were doing when you were in your younger
years and observing this with what's going on now, with
all this new research in the U s and elsewhere. Well,
you know that that what I saw was mostly use
of psychedelic plants by shamans, and they would deal with
patients who came to them or clients that came to them. UM.
(21:20):
I think what's happening in our culture now is that
the possibilities of psychedelic therapy are being embraced very widely
by uh, you know, much much more diverse groups of people, UM,
and particularly particular interest on using it for conditions like
anxiety and depression and PTSD and o c D and
(21:40):
so forth. And I think it's you know, we're going
to see these things made available for therapeutic use fairly quickly.
How important is it that they're being done with the
assistance have trained psychotherapists or counselors or whatever, as opposed
to doing you on your own or with a friend.
I think that's all all important. I mean, it's fine
if people want to do things on their own with friends,
(22:01):
that's fine. But for you know, therapeutic use, I think
it's it's very very important that you do this with
a qualified guide. And I'm happy to see now that
there are a few institutions who are offering training programs
in how to be psychedelic guides? Are there other I mean,
you know you're seeing the research being done a lot
with psilocybin. I think with mescalin we'll think we'll get
(22:25):
into m d M A in a moment. Not so
much with LST, probably because it still has that bad
rep left over. Are there other planted substances of psychedelic
power that you think might prove well? Actually ayahuasca d MT,
I mean, are the ones that you think are going
to prove interesting in the in the future that they're
not really doing the work on, you know what you
mentioned ayahuasca d m T certainly, but also now there
(22:48):
are a lot of pharmacologists and pharmaceutical companies that are
working to develop analogs of some of these compounds that
may have more specific corapeutic effects and fewer of what
are perceived as adverse effects. And one of the things,
Ethan that's I think driving this is that our health
(23:10):
care system is so burdened with conditions that don't respond
to conventional treatment, things like chronic pain syndromes and and PTSD,
and there's a real desperation to find methods that work
and the possibility that some of these compounds may be
very useful for that, I think is making them much
more acceptable. M h. I mean I can imagine that
(23:32):
you're that you're fairly critical of the widespread use of
these antidepressants, the prozacts and all these other society. But
is there any role for them? I mean, do they
help some people? Is it something that should be out
there still? I think that there are some of these
psychiatric drugs that are useful, particularly for treatment of bipolar
disorder for example. But the antidepressants have a pretty poor
(23:55):
track record. You know, they don't live up to the
claims made for them by manufacturers, and the theory that
they're based on I think is weak. Um, if you
look at the ads and psychiatric journals for the drugs,
you would think that there'd be no depression or anxiety anymore,
but that's not how it is. So I think that
there is a great need to find better methods and
(24:18):
that those will fall by the wayside. Yeah. Well, I mean,
we know the psychedelics as well as ketamine, which is
the psychedelic in the way, are showing interesting results. Are
there other things that you recommend or suggest to patients?
Who are struggling with serious depression. I think there's a
lot of new treatments. The one that I'm interested in
is transcranial magnetic stimulation. You know, it's a non drug approach,
(24:43):
relatively safe, and really good data on that as being useful.
There's a quantitative e g. Neuro feedback and novel method
that you know offers great promise. UM. Now, since there's
a lot of things out there that you know, are
not yet in the etical mainstream but show great promise
that their cost effective, TOM effective M. I mean, I've
(25:05):
also seen this stuff about the important role of exercise
in dealing with depression. But I'm wondering if any of
the kind of lower potency, more common stimulants, the tease
kind of you know, all these other sort of South
American stimulant plants, is there anything there in terms of
addressing depression. I frankly, among the stimulant plants, I would
(25:26):
say no. UM. But there may be other things out there,
but I don't think any of them have the power
of the psychedelics or you know, some of the major
pharmaceutical drugs. I just don't see anything out there that
works the way except However, kava for anxiety. You know,
that's a very significant, powerful herbal remedy, quite safe, and
(25:49):
it's a South specific thing. Yeah, oceany. It's a root
of a pepper plant used as a social recreational intoxicant
than in many of those island cultures and now of
available here. It's quite safe. Uh. It is a very
effective anti anxiety agent, much better than any of the
drugs that we use for that. Let's take a break
(26:12):
here and go to an ad h. Let me bring
you back to the issue of stimulus. Right when we
(26:32):
talked about caffeine, coffee, tea, much as things like that. Um,
but you know, there's also a very interesting history with
good old dextroamphetamine amphetamy, right, and for a long time,
but we've seen it. It's use in military. I think
there was a long period when long distance pilots in
the US I think Navy would be allowed to use
extra amphetamine. And they found nobody ever had an accident
(26:53):
within effect. The principal cause of accidents was people suffering
from fatigue. Um, it wasn't from this. And I've sometimes
wondered if you were to construct not you personally, but
but a huge study where like ten thousand people were
to just continue the normal life to control group, and
ten thousand people would be taking a five milligram dexter
(27:14):
amphetamine every day and then they'd be evaluated after three months,
six months, a year, five years on various quality of
life indicators as well as any harms. I sometimes wonder
whether or not the group that was taking the UH
the low dos amphetamine every day over many years might
land up faring better than the control group. Well, that
that is possible, even and you know, there is no
(27:37):
there's a great enthusiasm for some of these newer ones,
like adderall for example, and incredibly widespread use among students.
And I've talked to many UH college students who say
that they can't afford not to take adderall because they
know the person next to them is taking it and
that's going to give them an edge on studying and exams,
which is true, right. I mean, it's a short term
(27:57):
performance enhancer for everything from sports to study into exam taking.
It's like with many of these things, if you just
use it occasionally in the right ways, it's probably perfectly okay,
if not good exactly. What about fighting to get a
coca chewing gum um so that people for their afternoon
break instead of taking that coffee which is harsh on
their stomach, or the diet coke um. Do you think
(28:17):
that could work? Oh, I definitely think it could work.
I've written a scientific paper about that, and I tried
to get that going. This is years ago, and now
there is It looks as if Columbia might be close
to legalizing coca uh and commercializing it. You know, there's
been some effort in Bolivia, less so in Peru, but
the Colombian seemed quite enthusiastic about it, and maybe you know,
(28:40):
this will stinally start to happen. Cocus in schedule to
not schedule one, so you know, it is technically available
for medical use, but there's no source of it here.
But I would love to see that happen. I think
it is such a useful plant and it's just a
shame that we've been denied the use of it. Yeah. No,
I mean I think the former president of Bolivia, Able Morales,
you know, who had been ahead of the coca growers
(29:02):
union beforehand. I mean, he was a big advocate for
this thing, and he would even go to the United
Nations meetings in Vienna and publicly chew the coca leaf.
The problem, however, was he wasn't much when it came
to the diplomacy of advocacy for this stuff, so it
never went anywhere, you know, I mean, while perusing a
shambles politically. So hopefully Columbia can move forward on this.
It might. It's there, there's progress there now. You know,
(29:25):
one of your other books that you wrote in the
early years, which I remember taking to read with me
on my honeymoon, was The Marriage of the Sun in
the Moon, right, and you know, you start off with
hunting for mushrooms and you're looking at different types of
alter states of consciousness. But then the next chapter was
about eating mangoes in Central America. I mean just explained
that one. Well, I get high eating very right mangoes,
(29:47):
and that's just an example of, you know, another way
of altering consciousness. I think they're just infinite ways of
doing it. So, um, that book was really essays about
my period of travels, most the Latin Americus, some elsewhere,
but just about things that I'd done and seeing that
I found made me high. Everything from being in the
(30:08):
Native American sweat lodges to watching total eclipses of the sun. Yeah,
actually I remember you and I went together on a
trip to this southern coast of Turkey for a solar
eclipse about fifteen twenty years ago, and it was it
was my only experience of that and and it was
really quite traumatic when it happened. Was that kind of
special sort of altered states. I forgot we had all
(30:29):
that history. So talk to me about the placebo and
placebo effect and how how central I mean it seems
to play. I mean, I guess there are ethical issues,
and the extent to which physicians can use it in
many ways are recommended. A bigger problem is that physicians
are just uncomfortable with it because they don't understand it.
They think placebo medicine is a form of tricking patients,
(30:51):
and that's not how it is. Placebo responses are pure
healing responses from within. To me, that's the meat of medicine.
That's what you want to make happen more the time,
you know, I'm mostly here the word placebo used in
phrases like how do you know that's not just the
placebo effect, And the most interesting word there is just
or we have to rule out the placebo effect. No,
(31:13):
you want to be ruling it in. You want to
make it happen more the time. I'm happy to see
that in fairly recent years, and this is a result
of functional MRI scans of brains that we've been able
to you know, people have been able to show that
placebo responses are associated with activity in particular brain regions,
and this makes them more real. Uh, two doctors. So
(31:35):
I think the views on them are changing. You know,
I never give patients sugar pills, but I often give them,
say herbs that I think are weaker forms of medicine
and pharmaceutical drugs, but I believe in them because I
know they work, and I can convey that belief to patients.
And I don't really care how much of a favorable
(31:56):
response is due to the intrinsic action of that herb,
and how is due to a mind mediated mechanism and whatever.
I'm just want to see the good result m H.
And it can operate both on the planet. I mean,
in dealing in terms of immense pain or pleasure or
absolutely the fact that there's there's accumulating evidence that a
great deal of chronic pain is not really arising from
(32:20):
the body it's a problem in the brain that the
brain is misinterpreting receptions from the body, and there are
ways of retraining the brain to make that go away,
and that may have profound implications for getting us out
of the opioid crisis that we're in at the moment.
And you've had personal experience of that even Yeah. No,
I mean, you know, I it's funny in my life
(32:41):
with this thing. I remember it was you were part
of a working group of academics I had at Princeton
in the early nineties trying to think through it over
the optimal drug policy. And one of these sessions, you know,
I had had a recurrence of really bad back pain.
I had been diagnosed with her need discs, and uh,
you started advising me at that time and you suggested
I read this book by John Sarno, Feeling Back Pain,
(33:03):
And that was really pivotal in my life. I mean,
it was coming to realize it wasn't the hurting yet
disc that were causing the pain, but rather underlying emotional
angst that was turning itself into physical pain. Yeah, very dramatic. Yeah,
I think I think that view is gaining more ground
these days. Yeah, it was interesting because I thought you
(33:24):
was Sarno's book coming out and uh, and then I
remember when you wrote your breakout book, Spontaneous Healing, the
chapter on back pain was ethan story. And then I
remember my you know, I was on TV all the
time talking about drug post before, but my only time
ever being on OPRAH was sitting in the front row
is your patient talking about the back pain experience? And
I thought, guys, you're on OPRAH. That's gonna change. Everybody's
(33:46):
going to see the light. But it's amazing how long
it takes for that type of insight and wisdom to
really get out there, right. You know. That's what I
said when I did my Marijan experiments that I thought
it would be legalized in five years. It was just
a matter of getting the correct information and out. And
I saw, however, that people believe what they want to believe,
and don't believe that they don't want to believe, and
you can show them all kinds of stuff, but they
(34:08):
don't change their views. It was also include serious physicians
who should know better, right exactly. And one of the
things I think moved me was the evidence that showed
that for people who had these herniated disks. The people
who had surgery had an immediate relieving of the pain
that was dramatic, but that if you compared them three
years later with people who have not had surgery, they
(34:29):
had the same incidents of pain all over again. But
it was also I remember, it was hard for me
to believe that that intensity of pain and the fact
that I couldn't even stand up straight and that my
toes were numb, it was hard to believe that there
was not some physical cause for that saying. And that
was the leap that had to be taken you. But
(34:50):
you took it. I took it, and I got there,
and it changed my whole understanding of the of mind
body relationship in a in a in a really important way.
In fact, I think it was just a few months
after that that I took M D m A for
the first time, and that was I think a very
important thing for me in my in my marriage at
the time. But I have a question for you now.
M D m A has not worked for me for
(35:11):
the last fifteen years. What might work? Why not? First
of all, why does he keep working for other people
for decades and other people who just stopped working and
then what might be an alternative. Well, I do see
that pattern. You know, we change as we get older.
Maybe your biochemistry has changed. I don't know the answer
to that, but maybe you got what you needed from
it and it doesn't work anymore. This is what I
(35:31):
was saying earlier about that these drugs can show you possibilities,
but then they don't really show you how to maintain
the possibilities, and you have to work and to find
some other ways of doing it. Mm hmm. I remember
you telling some story about um yoga and showing the
possibilities or something. Yeah, that's a you know classic. I
was learning to do yoga. This was in the around
(35:53):
nineteen probably sixty nine seventy, and there was one posture.
I couldn't get the plow where you lye on your
back and try to touch your feet behind your head
on the floor, and I just could not do that.
I had was about to give up. I thought I
was too old, my body was too stiff. I could
get my toes about a foot from the floor, and
there was excruciating pain in my neck. And one day,
(36:16):
it was in spring, I took LSD with a group
of friends in Virginia. It was fabulous day. I felt
terrific and my body felt totally a lastic and I thought, yee,
I had to try that. And I lay on my
back and was lowering my feet and I thought I
had about a foot to go, and they touched the ground.
I couldn't believe it, and there's no pain, and I
raised them and lowered them. I was just, you know,
so delighted. The next day, I tried to do it,
(36:38):
and I got within a foot of the floor, and
there was excruciating pain in my neck. But now there
was a difference. I knew it was possible, and I
was motivated to keep at it. In a few weeks,
I was able to do it. If I had not
had that experience, I would have given up. Yeah, I
wonder you think you can help with our writing blocks,
that's all. That's a lot harder. Yeah. I've always I've
(37:00):
always admired an envy you for your incredible I mean,
you know, you start off being a journalist when you
were in college, right, and you've been writing ever since
and just been incredibly prolific. But at this point in
my life, I'm not that interested in writing very much anymore.
I think I've said everything I have to say. You know,
I heard you say that to me fifteen years ago
and you kept writing, so we'll see. Well, you know
another thing I remember remember visiting you a two signs
(37:22):
sometimes in past years, and you always had dogs around.
And then I heard you saying someplace it means another
podcast that there's a similarity between cannabis and dogs in
the relationship to you remember it. Just stand on that
because I found that fascinating. Well, you know, dogs are
really unusual. They are the the only animal that has
(37:45):
thrown in its genetic lot with us. You know, sometime
in the distant past, dogs decided to co evolved with us,
and they have adapted behavior and remarkable ways. You're the
only animal that can hold our gaze, for example, um,
and you know that's remarkable. And they've learned to read
human emotions. Well. Cannabis, in a similar way, has decided
(38:08):
to co evolve with human beings. As far back as
we can go in history, we can't find truly wild
hemp that has no association with human beings as far
back as we have evidence for, it always grew in
association with human settlements, and it has allowed us to
manipulate its genome and it wants to live with us
(38:29):
and serve us, and so I say, it's the dog
of the plant world. Is there something similar with mushrooms
going on as well? That's more complicated. There certainly is
a there's a sudden explosion of awareness of mushrooms in
our culture maybe around the world at the moment that
people are, you know, becoming fascinated with mushrooms, or more
(38:50):
species of mushrooms, food, mushrooms being cultivated. There's oldest interest
in and psychedelic mushrooms. It's a change and consciousness. Whether
the mushrooms are driving that or it's us, I don't know,
something's happening. I remember you used to organize these conferences
to tell your ride mushroom conference until you're right, Colorado.
Remember that's one time. Remember hearing Paul Stamus give a
(39:11):
very playful talk about the ways in which some of
our mushroom spores found a way to keep putting themselves
in interesting places where human beings gathered, including around the
local courthouse or something like that. Right, and then Terence
mckennah had a whole theory around mushrooms and human evolution
as well. I think, right, yeah, well, there are some people.
I think he was the chief advocate of the idea
that it was still psychedelic mushrooms that really provoked the
(39:36):
leap from apes to humans and development of the modern brain.
I don't I don't buy that one, but uh a
lot of people like that idea. Uh huh. How about
the idea if they came from outer space could be possible? Right,
there was an old there was an old science fiction
movie called The Invasion of the Mushroom People. So maybe
(39:58):
you know there's another fact, which is that you know,
here we have uh opioids outside but endorphins inside. We
have cannabis outside um, but the endocannabinant system inside. I
remember hearing you talk about oxytocin and such. Well, it's
fascinating the the interconnectedness of the natural world. You know,
(40:21):
why why do we have receptors in our brain that
fit molecules made by poppy plants were by hemp plants.
I mean, that's remarkable, and we have our own idogeneous
psychedelic probably d m T. To me, that just points
up some deep, profound relationship between us and the natural world,
whether it's plants or mushrooms. You know, we're connected. M hm.
(40:45):
Are you still doing psychedelics yourself? Not really. I mean
I feel like that that was part of a different
phase of my life and I don't really feel that
motivated to use them anymore. I think I got I
got what I needed to get from them. Yeah, I'm
sort of torn because, you know, yeah, sometimes it feels
like psychedelics are wasted on the young. You know that
they they're all into the colors and this and that.
(41:05):
But that's the real value of psychedelics, um, you know,
is about going deeper. And I've analogized it to you know,
growing up fairly traditionally Jewish, and fact, I still fast
on young people are every year, and I think it's
a basically a good thing to do, good for the soul,
good for reflection, and that on some level doing psychedelics
like once a year is a kind of good sort
of annual ritual to stir up the emotional intellectual sediment
(41:28):
that can settle, because that's one thing that psychedelics and
a higher dose can really do, is stir up all
sorts of sediment. I do know, as most people I know,
generally as we age we get more hesitant, and I
don't know whether it's that we're more wary of it now,
or it's just that we really did learn everything we did,
or I don't know. I just find that I'm not
motivated to do it. Uh. Alan Watts wrote a blurb
(41:50):
for The Natural Mind, my first book, and the last
line of it was, when you get the message, you
hang up the telephone. And I sort of feel that,
you know, that's my sense that I did a lot
of experimentation with psychedelics, especially in my thirties, forties, fifties,
and I think I learned from them what I had
to learn, and I don't I don't feel that I
(42:10):
need to do that again. But if the opportunity presents itself,
I mind, I'll say, yeah, yeah. Well, you know the
other book that you did, part I think of your
Andrew Wild's Drug Trilogy, UM, was Chocolate to Morphine. It
was really a fantastic drug education book. We made sure
to order use numbers of copies and give them out,
you know, through Drug Policy Alliance. UM. And I remember
(42:32):
back in the day the Republican Senator of Florida, Paul Hawkins,
wanted to have the book banned from schools and all
this stuff. But it does raise the issue of what
about the kids, right? I mean, you think about how
the whole war on drugs is oftentimes justified as one
great big child production act. But I mean, what's your
view about what parents should be doing visa the their
kids on psycleactive drugs. I think they should be exchanging
(42:55):
truthful information with their kids, and that's why I wrote
that book, uh, to facilitate that. I don't want to
make general rules for whether kids should or shouldn't use
drugs or at what age it's appropriate. Frankly, I'm more
concerned about the vast medicating of kids with psychiatric drugs. No.
I think we have no idea what their effects are
on the developing brain, and we're doing this tremendous experiment
(43:16):
with our nation's youth. Now. A lot of kids are
on multiple psychiatric drugs, very strong ones, and as I say,
we have no idea what the long term effects are.
I mean, there's also concerns about this growing number of
synthetic substances, because you know, tendency for younger people just
kind of be reckless about this thing and pop whatever's around.
And this incredible proliferation of these synthetic drugs which is
(43:37):
also I mean obviously not being used as broadly as
the as the you know, the antidepressants and the really
enty drugs and things like that, but clearly a concern. Well,
I think as we move toward legalization or general availability
of these drugs, it is appropriate to think about, you know,
what are the rules for younger ages, for people in
(43:58):
sensitive occupations. I think that's on society is gonna have
to come to terms with. When I think of the
few people I know who did psychedelics, either with their
parents or with their teenage kid, I mean the cases
I know of, actually we're quite beautiful stories, you know,
and it's something you can't really talk about. Nobody could
ever talk about quite openly or publicly. But we tend
(44:18):
to say, you know, we here, we have laws that
you can't touch marijuana or alcohol to your twenty one,
and yet there's something about integrating this in perhaps in
a responsible way. Well, we will see. It's going to
be an interesting time. I mean it's even a question,
you know, like growing up Jewish, we're having wine on
the Sabbath, and then you see buy and large Jews
having higher rates of drinking but lower rates of alcoholism.
(44:40):
Whether or not that kind of acculturation really helped to
uh provide a protective effect. And conversely, I mean, now
we're a point with cannabis legalization where cannabis is becoming
so widely accepted. And I fought for this all my life,
and I feel very proud of the accomplishment, but I
worry at times about cannabis beginning to be used in
such a cavalier way a that it's specialness begins to fade.
(45:02):
I mean, do you see that as a risk that's
probably already happening? And I see that. You know that's
a risk with psychedelics as well. You think so even
with psychedelics, Oh, I think that's that's happening. Sure. What
about the whole microdocing thing. You know, I don't know
what to make of that. I know a lot of
people who are doing it and claim that they've gotten
very good results in terms of enhanced creativity or lowered
(45:24):
anxiety or improvement of depression. You know, I've tried it
a bit. It's not something that I was really motivated
to continue with long term, but fascinating to watch it happen. Well, Andy, listen,
it's great to catch up Thank you so much for
having this conversation with me. Look forward to seeing you
before long, okay, and wish you all the vest on
(45:45):
your your next ventures, even if you think you've given
up writing U, which I don't really believe. We'll see
good to talk to you, okay. Take care. Psychoactive is
a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's
hosted by me Ethan Neatleman. It's produced by Katcha Kumkova
and Ben Cabrick. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel,
(46:07):
Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronovski for Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams
and Matt Frederick for I Heart Radio and me Ethan Nadelman.
Our music is by Ari Belusian and a special thanks
to Avivit Brio, Sef Bianca Grimshaw and Robert Beatty. If
you'd like to share your own stories, comments or ideas,
(46:27):
please leave us a message at eight three three seven
seven nine sixty. That's one eight three three psycho zero.
You can also email us as Psychoactive at protozoa dot
com or find me on Twitter at Ethan Nadelman. And
if you couldn't keep track of all this. Find the
(46:47):
information in the show notes. On the next episode, I'll
be talking with Yale law professor James Forman Jr. Who's
Puliticer Prize winning book, Locking Up Our Own provides a
truly unique perspective on the war on drugs. You know,
(47:08):
without taking heroin into account, one cannot understand African American
attitudes towards the drug war. The heroin really devastated Black communities,
and I think set the stage for some of these
punitive Black attitudes. Subscribe to Cycleactive now see it, don't
miss it.
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