Kyle and Joe - Contexts of Psychedelic Use

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Psychedelics Today. This is Joe, your host here with Kyle. So today we are going to chat about a couple of things. We wanted to kind of dig into, call it four or five different use cases for psychedelics. And we want to kind of discuss them at length because we feel like people who are into one form of use aren't necessarily supportive or maybe even be totally negative towards people interested in the other ones. So it's kind of just giving each other, each subset of people kind of context around each use case so that, you know, we can kind of get a sense of what's going on. So we want to kind of get a sense of what's going on. about um psychedelic therapies what it's like to work um in psychedelic states and i think a lot on integration um because that's kind of one of her specialty areas is psychedelic integration um so also shane moss the comedian um who is kind of i think he kind of headlined with duncan trussell at the maps conference he did yeah and he did like the biggest ever psychedelic comedy tour he did well over a hundred stops i think all over the country recently just drove himself all over the country and and uh i actually got to shake his hand recently at the um the boulder dmtx event he was in the audience he's pushing really hard to be number one test pilot uh cool so he's working daniel mcqueen over pretty hard for uh number one so those two will be there um shane's got a ton of um psychedelic experience um i think as part of developing comedy and and stuff to talk about with uh his psychedelic comedy tour he had to do a bunch of drugs so you know free base dmt all that kind of stuff uh and jonathan thomas thompson uh psychedelic parenting he'll be there as well so that's a pretty uh star-studded cast you got eric osborne katherine mclean jonathan thompson eric osborne um you could check that out if you want to dig into that it's legal mushrooms in jamaica uh in treasure beach i think it's called uh so it's like the west coast of jamaica and a really nice cool place um so check that out michaelmeditations.com sorry for that uh weird segue but you know a lot of people are asking like how can i do this stuff legally how do i not have to go into the middle of a rainforest to do you know this is a decent option it's still a jungle still tropical which might be a plus for some folks especially uh when is this one november 26 yeah that's when everything starts getting cold and rough um so yeah yeah jamaica's not too far away no i love jamaica i uh i really really really want to go check out what eric's doing down there um and there is a chance we'll be able to do some breath work down there with eric uh so stay tuned listeners yeah um yeah so i'm wondering too like what you think about like the therapeutic use um it is kind of tricky like you just brought that up about um like he's kind of uh stating in this therapy and i don't know how it is down jamaica is probably totally different but you know here in the states i mean that's probably like a huge ethical issue to say that you're doing therapy um with not being like a licensed professional um so it is interesting like when i think of like psychedelic therapy in that sense doing it in a therapeutic contact context like i'm thinking that um you know with a licensed professional somebody that has a background in either psychiatry counseling psychology you know a master's or a phd or something like that and it is like this weird thing where you have people that could probably have really great experience and probably um can facilitate that therapeutic context but um like in the in the sense of ethics and um i don't know i think stuff like that relax i i get it like obviously there's possible medical interactions but you can pretty easily screen for those um or contraindications um and you know people put in sometimes 12 years to become doctors so i kind of get it like they are incentive to not allow for a more peer-to-peer based model so i'm actually looking at eric's website right now um let me read this real quick micro meditations retreats are focused but flexible you can participate in our topic-based discussions or take time for yourself this is your experience and it should take the shape you want it to micro meditations does not endeavor to be compared to ayahuasca tourism while we deeply respect the work of those shamans this is not our model our retreats are for the good of the people and not for the good of the people those who are looking for middle ground between the intuitive and the intellectual our facilitators are not shamans or healers but they do have years of experience in dosing and holding space for the first time and experienced voyagers so it's kind of in a way uh very similar to the way we talk about breathwork um so you know they offer connections to licensed um therapists back home kind of the same way we say this is an adjunct to therapy like hopefully you're in therapy back home and you do this and then you go back to therapy and you hopefully can work through a lot of that material um i think eric said katherine might be made available for some um aftercare counseling stuff over skype and i think eric's wife might be a therapist too who would be offering kind of integration coaching so you know there's obviously if you're going to go do mushrooms for a bunch of days and you're actually symptomatic um hopefully you're in therapy already and hopefully you're going to be in therapy when you come back so like it's just like anything right like i went and got a bunch of surgeries i had to do a bunch of stuff before the surgeries and i've been doing stuff for a year after the surgeries it's you know one intervention out of a series of interventions and um yeah so obviously five days of uh heavy doses of mushrooms and beautiful environment like that i think would be very therapeutic um especially if you're able to like kind of um um i want to say kind of choose your own adventure but i don't really know the best way to put it um eric and i talked a bunch of times the last couple weeks and it sounds like um there is room for a lot of that like if you're super spiritual, you can do it more spiritually if you're kind of an atheist neuroscience type like you can do it that way too it's you know totally fine whatever way you choose to do it which which is nice it's the same way i approach breathwork like if you're a really wild um deep into your yoga kind of person like that's that's great and if you're not if you're exclusively into like the broncos patriots rivalry like there's room for you too it's not you know there's no limits um but yeah therapeutic use man i think i think a lot of this revolves around insurance companies and people just trying to kind of cover their ground like i don't want to devalue what doctors researchers and you know licensed therapists are doing but i i feel like we have to find a new way in the same way like capitalism is collapsing the federal government's collapsing universities are collapsing like i think this idea of licensure may in a lot of ways collapse uh for a lot of industries i i think i still want a licensed airline pilot and a licensed heart surgeon but you know for stuff that might be less crucial maybe it's okay to go to an unlicensed mechanic for your car you know maybe they're skirting taxes or something but that's something you got to deal with outside of that yeah i mean i know a lot of therapists are switching to coaching because they get sick and they're sick and they're sick and they're sick and they're sick and they're sick and they're sick but um you know also too with the therapeutic thing something just popped in my mind i think to kind of um yeah stay in that conversation of what it is so um we i posted that uh that you know mdma that breakthrough therapy on instagram and then somebody reposted it and then somebody was like oh well that's not you know that's like dangerous it's high high abuse drug and this and that and they were just kind of like downplaying it but i chimed in said well you know the way not just in this recreational setting they're not just giving people mdma and having them do whatever like there's there's pre-sessions you're getting therapy also during the mdma session and then you're having a bunch of follow-up sessions so i think like that therapeutic use also entails a lot of therapy before and then kind of like that therapeutic container during and then a lot of therapy and integration work afterwards um and something really interesting i just had a conversation with somebody about ketamine clinics and um they were talking about how they were like one of the first people to get treated with ketamine in the u.s um supposedly and they just sent me some articles and um so i was looking up a place in new jersey that does ketamine uh infusions and i was just seeing if they had like any therapy attached to it and it doesn't seem like it it just seems like they give you an infusion go on your way and my guess is that that's the treatment they're not doing therapy there they're just giving you a treatment and then i'm you know probably like breath work too you know it's like you're coming here for like an experience psycho-spiritual development whatever it is um here's this drug we're using it off label to help treat your depression but then you go afterwards and do therapy um so yeah like maybe what we're reacting to is a little bit of lack of nuance in people's discussion of this stuff it's like um there's there's a lot more to the equation than a single session with somebody and and you know maybe that's something that's missing from like from the conversation is that you know people are thinking yeah it's it's doing the drug and then going home and then you're fixed and it's not that and that everybody says it's not that but um i don't know there's it's it's just something that needs to be solved in the community because people just don't seem to get it and people seem to draw weird weird walls up where they they don't necessarily need to be um like we're kind of so this is a really small movement and we all got to kind of be on the same team and you know let's talk to each other fairly and and really build up this community to be a community that that's moving this thing forward like i think there's some different ideologies in the community yeah definitely like i i personally think there's some sort of um psychedelic uh agenda it's like these this whole class of psychedelics has their own agenda and it's like putting it on to people but you know and people are executing it um so that's interesting but i i don't know that's speculation obviously i don't have any i don't have a manifesto from the psychedelic drugs to read you um yeah okay so i think that i don't know anything else on therapy therapeutic use no i think we covered it um do you want to jump into say psycho-spiritual and maybe like personal development work sure yeah so this is often um what we see in in breath work and i think a lot of folks are doing this in um in peru doing ayahuasca and i know what was the name of the place that recently closed crossroads so like crossroads people were going down and doing a lot of um five mu dmt and iboga or ibogaine treatments and under the context of psycho-spiritual work so similar was that or was it for addiction treatment both both oh both okay yeah so um i know people that have been down for psycho-spiritual retreats and i think david at oka ibogaine center of mexico does psycho-spiritual retreats too so it's like you're not super symptomatic you're not um using heavy drugs and putting your life at risk regularly um with drugs like you're you're not super addicted to dangerous things maybe other things but not dangerous things and you're getting to have this wild experience um with the hope of exploring your mind exploring what it is to be you like lenny says exploring your relationship to the world maybe developing a newer deeper relationship to the world um and i think you know i think that might be it like you're you're kind of just exploring what's going on in your mind it's kind of like who am i how do i get to know myself obviously not through my day job what else is there is there another path to gain self-knowledge that's the way i model it um what am i missing i must be missing something um i don't know i guess i i mean i model it the same way kind of um you know you might have this wanting an experience to help you develop meaning in life or develop a relationship with the with the universe and how you interact with it with the universe i mean that's the way i think of it i think about like my earlier years um when i was in that phase of like self-discovery like just trying to figure out who i was as a a teenager kind of coming into an adulthood and um just feeling so lost and confused you know obviously i wasn't uh doing it in a therapeutic context and it seemed more of like a self-discovery context of you know i had these big existential questions or these big life questions and i was trying to seek answers to them um and so yeah i i think you know in the terms of breath work too like that we model it as psycho-spiritual development um or spirit yeah psycho no personal development and spiritual development i think is how we we phrase it um you know because you know people coming there like we you don't want it to be advertised as therapy like we're doing therapy like we're you of whatever you're doing you know this is an opportunity to engage in the process to figure that out yourself figure that out who you are and how you want to be in the world and um i think that's important because then you can go back and then and then do that therapy afterwards um it's one of the fundamental philosophical questions from like a philosophy degree it's like what is one to do with one's life how is one to act in the world yeah yeah um i forget what i was saying you got anything it's cool um i was thinking too um yeah we and you know maybe somebody has a phobia like a kind of a light like maybe they're horrified of cats or like agoraphobia or something and they're not in therapy for it and they don't want to go into therapy because they don't like that label but maybe they're eventually going to go check out some of these different alternative methods like ayahuasca ibogaine five mtmt which my overkill for agoraphobia but maybe it's fine and then you know maybe breathwork too or trance dancer one of a million therapy modalities that could help um yeah i think one of the problems with the way we do it's the only way that we know how to do research right now but you know maybe in the future we'll find something better but we have to do science on individual diseases it seems like or constellations of diseases so it's like we're doing ptsd but they're not necessarily going to get the mdma therapy or whatever it's legal at the time um so we we're going to have to do a lot of research and we're going to have to do a lot of research hopefully off-label use is going to be prescribable for it we'll see how it plays out yeah and i think this type of technique allows for like the greatest flexibility and maybe even um maybe i don't know if i want to say benefit but i think maybe the most benefit too sometimes because you're not putting like these structures around it you know it's like make it could be not yeah it could be an opportunity to really tap into your creativity or um maybe handle some of these questions that you're asking yourself um and you know i think like when hearing uh rick doblin talk about this stuff about the future of like what maps wants to do and i've heard him definitely talk about it at conferences before how they want to have like centers and maybe it is a center where they do therapy and then they have a um a part where you could come for self discovery and um yeah i think i don't know yeah i think it's a really great model um yeah so i like the idea of it being really open-ended and it's really your body having wisdom and um you know if you wanted to layer some spirituality on it it's like your body interacting with the spirits of the plants or or molecules and and creating some new hole or running through some process um kind of like an alchemical process you get put in the oven you're broken apart and you get put together again um so i think that's it on self-exploration spiritual use um let's jump over to ceremonial or um i think that's the way to put it spiritual ceremonial so like this is the context of say an ayahuasca shaman traditional mexico mushroom use or salvia use um ibogaine use and in africa or at a center like um oka where david is doing stuff in mexico and he's in that buiti tradition do it like following that same set of of ceremonies so like you're initiated into the buiti as soon as you do that work and that's you know that's part of that whole cultural ceremonial religious thing um or peyote as well peyote is there others there's got to be others yeah like san pedro and what's that stuff they blow into each other's noses is that hape or i feel like there's a dmt snuff they they blow into each other's noses i don't yeah it's made from like a yopo seed yeah um so that's not that's not they have is uh usually some sort of tobacco with other herbs um i believe the stuff that my friend experience was new new and that was tobacco with i think the inner bark of cacao plant jeez as a snuff yeah holy moly what was that was that like a psychedelic experience was it kind of like a cacao ceremony but like i don't know oh no i i i never i didn't try it okay um but they were just uh i think he did i don't remember him though the only the only the stuff that i had was um i don't know somebody brought it back from like australia or southeast asia so i don't even know what type of herbs were in there but i think it had some sort of tobacco in it yeah it was an interesting experience um so yeah these are very valuable and very you know valid experiences for us in the Western world, we're kind of pulled really far away from our origins. We are all descendants of successful tribes. And as a result, when we get back into those tribal ceremonial settings, working with a group of folks, it can feel really good. It can feel better. In breathwork, we often hear like, this is the first time I've ever felt safe. Like I could not believe how safe I felt in that group. And a bond can be built so quickly just by dropping a lot of walls and working with each other in that way. And it's pretty incredible and enormously valuable for healing. Similar to how MDMA therapy works, the fear center kind of relaxes a little bit and lets you at those things so you can work on them. It's kind of like the group, in a sense, allows for that too. Maybe with a. Drug, like you're kind of compounding that a little bit, which is very interesting. You've got a lot more experience with shamanic kind of stuff than I do. What are your thoughts on this stuff? Like ceremonial use? Well, I think it's coming back to the relationship that you have with the plant and the plant spirit and then how are you working with that? And depending on where you go, I mean, everybody's studying different things. So, I mean, South American shamanism might be much different than North American shamanism. And the people that use peyote might do a little bit something different than, say, the ayahuasqueros. But the concepts are relatively the same where you're having a relationship with this plant spirit and then you're working with the spirit of that plant. But then you have that whole kind of cosmology to work with, in a sense, where you're working with different. archetypal energies and you're working with the spirit. And that can be uncomfortable for some people that don't believe in that, that don't believe that they're working with the spirit. Or also, you might be putting your power in the hands of, say, like a shaman. You're going down there and you're thinking that the shaman is healing you or he's the one or she is the one working with the energy and they're coming around and possibly blowing tobacco smoke on you or. smudging you and clearing your energy out. So, I think with that, it's also a little bit more dynamic where you're having a relationship with the spirit, with the shaman. You're having somebody doing healing work on you. But some people always say. There's a guy, Louis Mel Madrona, who wrote a book, Narrative Therapies and I think Coyote Medicine. But as he says, he does like 75% of the work. The shaman does, say, like 15% of the work. And he's just like the trickster that makes you believe that you're healing yourself. Or no, no, no. I'm sorry. 15% of the work is yourself. And then like, say, 5% is the shaman who's just kind of tricking you. So, most of the work to be done is like the person doing the healing work and their relationship with creator or the universe, whatever that is. That's funny. There was this argument I read in. I was in college. This might have been my third year college. It was this high-end, how do you put it? Hindu philosopher, Vedanta philosopher. And he had this really structured argument about how we have 35% free will. It's like, dude, how do you come up with that number? It's pretty incredible. But yeah, in a lot of ways, between genes, culture, family, raising. We carry a lot of stuff forward. And how do we really account for free will anyway? That's kind of a wild argument. Anyway, sets a tangent. But yeah, I think you're right. There's a lot going on there. And the trickster medicine does. There is something really powerful in that archetype. I think Hermes, one of the greatest gods in the Greek pantheon, Thoth Hermes. Mars, I think. No, it wasn't Mars. Mercury was his name in the Roman pantheon. He was the trickster archetype. He was this messenger of the gods who was a trickster. So, it's almost like, how do you get that communication clear? It's not looking pretty unless you put in a lot of effort and develop that relationship. Right. Yeah, I was asking my one teacher about, say, psychedelic use in Western culture. And he just kind of said. Yeah, most people don't have a relationship with the plant. We just take the things and then that's it. We just view it as that. But when you're working with the plant spirit, to really get the maximum benefit out of that is to understand what the spirit of that plant wants. And you don't need to ingest it all the time. Could be taking parts of that plant and putting it under your pillow and dreaming with it and sleeping with it. Could be just tasting it or making different teas and stuff out of it that might not be so psychoactive. Yeah, I think a lot of it comes back to relationship and then how you work with that other energy. And if that's spiritual, if you believe in that, that's how you'd work with it. But I know that's not everybody's cup of tea. And yeah, people can get turned off by, say, the dogma of it. And it is kind of strange working in the ceremonial context where. People have their teachers and then this person is the best shaman and then ego and weird dogmas come into play. And I think it's an important conversation to really think about your own narrative and your own cultural narrative. And I don't know, because I always think when we get into these realms, like, what are you experiencing versus what somebody else is telling you you're experiencing? And I think a good, say, analogy, or thing for that is Jeremy Narby with his book, Cosmic Serpent, how he talked about these people down in South America who use ayahuasca. In their narrative, they see the snake, right? But maybe in Western culture, we see the double helix. We see the spiral of that. And so, I think it's important when you are doing some of that work is to really understand. What is the lineage and the tradition of these medicines and whatnot, but also really think about your own story, your own narrative. What do you believe? And how do you develop a relationship by yourself with that as well? And honoring the tradition. It's a weird paradox, but I think. I just started reading Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and there was a lot in the first couple chapters that was so amazing. And one of the lines was. Any truth that he received from outside himself was barely meaningful to him. But when he found the truth on his own, like when he found the meaning on his own, it was exponentially more valuable and meaningful to him and helpful. So, I think there's something there. I don't know exactly what it is, but there's something really important in that message. Yeah. Well, I don't know. I spent a lot of time trying to study from all different types of teachers and traditions and this and that. And I get annoyed by this thing or annoyed by that thing. And part of it is just for myself is developing my own narrative of it. What do I actually believe from my experiences? Why am I always going to somebody else to fix me? It's like in our breathwork or even in therapy and stuff like that where you could. I always stress like, "You are the master or the author of your story. You know your story the best. Nobody else does. You do." So. I think Tim Leary was one of the pioneer. Not really pioneers, but he was one of the early guys working on group therapy. And I think this is before psychedelics. And the argument was that these people are the experts on them. Why would some expert be better at giving you insight into you? Why not enable them, give them tools to understand themselves better? It's kind of what all this stuff is and the ceremonial and therapeutic tools. That's kind of what we're really doing. We're kind of reclaiming that, but in a solo context. And maybe that's why integration circles are so effective and so awesome. So we can just come together and really feel authentic with each other. And as a result, feel safe to dig deeper into yourself. There is this. What was it? There's this dream work book you and I have talked about where. By Robert Johnson, The Active Imagination. I can't think of the book off the top of my head. What's the name again? Well, I know it was based on Jung and Active Imagination, but I can't think of the actual book. But I know it was by Robert Johnson. Yeah, Robert Johnson. Yeah. So he had this thing where when you're interpreting your dreams, is it really about going to a dictionary to like, "Look at this book." Yeah. "Look up what that symbol is defined as." Or is it your relationship to that symbol that should take priority? I think that is it. And they had. this concept of what feels what do you feel in your body like does your body have a reaction when you you know put a name to something like that you know that snake that you are horrified of in your dreams like you say um i don't know uh mother or something like that and that really like triggers your body then you know maybe that's the thing especially if your body's like kind of giving you the nod from inside so that's i think there's something there too um that seems like a super tangent to me you know i i um i think it is relevant in this whole space because people are like oh you know grandmother ayahuasca told me x i'm like yeah but maybe think about that a little bit yeah well i mean it is i think valid having a concept of like a spirit if you're coming from that ceremonial context um but maybe are you saying that because you've sat in ceremony a bunch and that's like what you're clinging to um absolutely absolutely um so let's jump to ceremony we've done the three let's talk about recreational cool that's my favorite so i'll let you jump in on that so okay for thousands of years even in the most recent prohibition of alcohol in the 20s people have strived to do whatever they can do to alter their consciousness um through plants or whatever um or foods alcohol alcohol has been around for quite a while i actually just um read the odyssey uh like two weeks ago and there was a lot in there about wine and wine having not just like drunk effects like i think there was psychoactive effects yeah a lot of ad mixtures and like it was kind of by different islands and different like families like you'd have different wine recipes so like they were definitely having quite the time we're also saying too like the fermentation process is a little bit different than it is now yeah they're probably doing open air and some really weird stuff and probably in like a dirt hole not always i'm sure they had like pots and stuff um but yeah there's this long tradition and even probably yeah i think through like we all kind of i hope at this point know about the eleusinian mysteries and and that we're pretty sure they're using a psychoactive brew and it was kind of um it was all the way secret at penalty of death to like talk about it or exile which might be the same in those days and um yeah that was an ergot based thing kind of an lsd type thing um and people were no longer afraid of death after that ceremony so yeah we have this whole use and it was kind of in a festival setting too it was like you go into the chamber you drink the stuff and then you're hanging out fasted for a while probably for a day you know with everybody else super high in this religious ecstasy hopefully right and um yeah we have a lot of people who are like oh my god i'm not going to have all these native american rights and how who knows how long ayahuasca has been around and um yeah marijuana we've got a really long sorry cannabis we've got a really long relationship with cannabis as a as a species so like and it's not all religious it would be like people chilling out like hurting the sheep getting stoned in the field you know maybe it helps with the pain maybe it we're just hardwired as creatures to get high um i think there is a strong argument to be made there like we we look to get high oh man i forget what the name of that book was but it was it was about i was i think the flow states project the um stealing fire book talked a lot about that how we are just like always seeking highs um yeah and um it's true and i i think you know what what's changed do we want to be like are we bringing back the mayflower make the mayflower great again it's like come on get it get a grip and relax a little bit it's okay like if you're against drugs for recreational use you've probably been drunk a bunch of times so like what's the difference that's a known more harmful substance than most of these drugs we speak about and you know based on the david nutt study if you if you need to look that up um like some drug harm scale i think it was would be a good google search there but yeah like i if you could like like you kind of hinted at earlier um if you could use psychedelics or drugs in a recreational contact and have a therapeutic result um you know why would you want to get in the way of that the the the fear is that you know 10 people out of a million have a bad result um it's probably greater than that but you know what was there were some numbers recently it was like um the eu um death toll from drugs and you wouldn't believe the numbers like uk was off the charts compared to the rest of the eu for for drug deaths per million really yeah and i think it's around um draconian drug policy maybe like because the drug laws are so hard um it's more difficult to get a more pure product maybe um or maybe it's something to do with the english i don't know if you're in england let us know we would love to hear your opinions on that um i yeah i don't know like i i personally have to say that a fair amount of my recreational use or celebratory uses dobblin kind of coined it at sci science and in oakland like i think it was very helpful i think it worked worked a lot of stuff through and uh you know never smiled so much in my life so i don't know sometimes it's a little bit of a shame but i think it's a little bit of a shame but i think it's a little bit weird but um if you're with a crew kind of like we talk about in our class if you're like take this appropriate safety precautions like you're in pretty good shape um you're probably very probably going to be just fine but you know when you're popping four pills at once of god knows what you know it's rolling the dice you know maybe you're going to be stuck on the floor for three hours to 12 hours maybe longer maybe you have to go to the hospital like so so maybe that's what people are freaking out about and it's it's all to me comes back to prohibition and issues there because we can't just buy um like tropicana brand mdma or like you know uh what's the big grocery store brand kroger store brand lsd like we can't just buy that um if we could we would know exactly how many milligrams micrograms we were getting and um hopefully we could you know on the label you'd say like it was you know this chemist process or this chemist process that you would know like what the process for synthesizing it was or whatever or extraction or yeah so there's there's a lot to be said there like did you use that um acetone wash or did you use a more clean process that is less toxic yeah oh no i was just gonna say like or ask you why do you think you know the record recreational use is kind of um looked at through like say like a negative light everybody's doing it obviously in some some sense but um there's also kind of like this uh that you shouldn't be doing that and you know i also think that kind of comes back to say drug war policies and stuff like that like why you know anthropologically i guess we have typically two to three drugs that every culture is okay with um ours are caffeine alcohol tobacco and other cultures it could be like opium tea and you know x whatever and everything else is demonized that's the bad people's drugs that's what the barbarians use and um you can see this right at the start of the the drug war in the states where it was uh-oh these black jazz musicians are sleeping with white women and making white women uh smoke marijuana cigarettes and let's panic because there's gonna be mixed-race babies and that's kind of what the newspaper people like put out what was the guy's name hurst william randolph hurst he was the gun father of yellow journalism and he played a critical role in um in that drug war along with um who is that main character in chasing the scream uh i forget but he was kind of like the guy who just went after everything um and uh he in the long run it turned out that he was actually providing um mccarthy heroin he's the same guy that was like persecuting all the communists so um these two like supposedly red-blooded americans you know drink beer whiskey and you know do manly stuff like they were still in it even though they were the guys that were most against it um but so there's that aspect there's also a lot of baggage from the 60s and the i think the 60s being this counterculture thing at least in the states and some of europe where it looked like the establishment was going to lose all control. And as a result, it was like, let's pull out the stops here. We're going to do everything in the media we can do to make this shit look really bad. And they're going to keep on it. And, you know, I think a lot of it just comes down to spending on media. Like how much money did you spend on media to, to spread that, spread that message? And the answer is a lot. You know, if you looked at the cost of William Randolph Hearst doing that stuff and the, the early marijuana drug war and, and, you know, the Reagan, just say no campaign, tremendous amount of, um, like obviously they didn't spend it all cause they probably got favors, but you know, if it was to cost dollars, it would have been tremendous. Um, even if you're not getting the media on just putting a lot of people in jail, like, you know, just that, that alone is huge for influencing the shape, the shape of it. And I, I'm still kind of mad at Oprah for misrepresenting, um, those, I think it was those rat trials that we talked about. Like they were feeding the methamphetamine, you know, crazy toxic doses of methamphetamine and you could see the brain damage and it was because they had an error in the lab and no one came around and said, Oh, sorry about that. Everybody wrong drug. Uh, Nope. Nope. They just kept on persecuting, putting people in jail. And I, you know, I hold a little crutch, like, why are you putting so many people in jail? Yeah. Relax, relax. They're humans. They probably have jobs, uh, and they probably have a family. Like, do you really want to put them in jail? So I like, I react kind of strongly against that. Um, you know, even if it's crack, like, so what you, you make it worse by putting them at risk of going to jail would be probably a 10th of the price or a hundredth the price. Um, if it wasn't illegal and it was like a regulated market and people would have less negative interactions, I would know their dose and, uh, you know, the hospital would need to get involved. We could spend that money on treatment if people chose to get therapy. Like I really like that model in Portugal and, uh, like Switzerland. I don't know if Spain's doing an inch. I feel like Spain has something really interesting happening, but I'm not totally up on that. I, so it's people. Just, just in general, people telling other people what they can and can't do, which to me, I don't like it. I don't like that. Um, like you're going to tell me how many cups of coffee I can and cannot drink or, you know, I, it to a, to a degree I get it. Whereas like on the interstate here, it's not okay to go 150 miles an hour cause you're going to put X number of other people's lives in immediate danger. You know, perhaps people still need to go to jail if they're on drugs. And they're being unruly in public. Like you don't want to do 10 hits acid and go out on the main street. Like it's not going to be good for anybody in that. That probably shouldn't be legal. Like if you're fucking around in public like that, like no, like that's not okay. I, I I've seen some very disruptive folks in public that were clearly on, uh, strong hallucinogens or opiates or whatever crack. And I was like, yeah, that's the kind of, that's the kind of attitude and behaviors that should probably get you taken out of public. Like I, I get that part, but you know, I don't know what the penalty should be. Right. You know, so like just the same way you treat drunks, throw them in the drunk tank for a little bit, which isn't a pleasant thing. If you're super tripping, I think it's not a very therapeutic environment. It could be traumatic, but at least you're not compounding the social, you know, the negative social perceptions of drugs. Yeah. I don't know. That's kind of a rant and a half there, but yeah, I mean, it's an interesting debate. Um, because I know, well, I don't know what your take on people that use psychedelics regularly. Like, um, cause I know we've gotten into this a few times where it's just like, well, um, how many times do you really need to take, take a substance? Um, how many, how many times do you need to escape? or what frequency or what, what's your dose? What's your frequency? Like, what's your reason? Um, and yeah, we, we did kind of want to talk about this. Like, I think people should, feel that out for themselves, but they should probably have kind of a support network. It's not going to be Joe listening to Terrence McKenna podcast, taking a lot of mushrooms every week. Um, like once a week, like five grams. Like, I think that's a little much if you're, if you're just all alone listening to psychedelic salon, Terrence McKenna, like you might get pretty symptomatic after a while because that's not, you know, we're not meant to just listen to one person. We're meant to just listen to one person and do intensely, um, powerful drugs that, that do some really interesting things to our brains. Like if we're in community and we're talking about it and we're having regular, um, grounded discussions, like I, I was at a retreat a while ago and there's a lot of this discussion around like, um, this guy, Melchizedek, who had these transmissions, spiritual transmissions from angels. And, um, people would just like read it and go, Oh yeah, this is great. It's come from angels and like, it makes a lot of sense. And I'm like, ah, dude, like, do you really want to put your trust in, in a book that somebody else wrote or transcribed from visions he had? Like, you know, maybe he was just on acid, you know, how do you know what he was on and people's minds can do incredible things on acid, but it doesn't necessarily make it the truth or your truth could be very true for that guy. Melchizedek, he's a deck, but why not put in the effort to figure that shit out for yourself and do it in a healthy way in community? Um, this whole messianic thing and putting people first, like similar to the ayahuasca shamans, like, do you really want to make them the new Jesus or that? Do they really want to be your like leader of the church of Scientology? Like you don't want to, you don't want to elevate people to that level, even if it's just a book and the author of a book like there's, there's, I think some psychedelic, there are some psychological harms there by disempowering yourself. Like you, you lose your sense of agency by, okay, I didn't get the message, but at least I have this book and I guess it's okay. So I'll, I'll treat it like it's, um, the way I should feel about my soul is the way I feel about this book. And I think, I think that might be a better way to put it than I put it before. Um, yeah, I don't know. And this whole conversation about, about like recreational use to is making me think a lot about the different compounds and different classes of drugs. You know, like w w we focus mainly on like psychedelics on this podcast and you know, maybe cannabis or ketamine or whatever, which w we should get somebody that talks about ketamine on here soon. Um, but then I'm wondering too, you know, I know like Europe has these laws around opiates and they have like safe injection and they, uh, moderate a lot of that. But, um, yeah, it's just interesting to think about like the different uses of drugs and like when's overdoing it, you know, overdoing it on psychedelic. What, what does that really mean to society? Um, maybe somebody runs out of their house and maybe it gets naked. Um, but what's it like overdoing say like heroin? I mean, there's a huge epidemic going on right now and people are dying from fentanyl overdoses and this and that. So, um, it is interesting to view like these different substances and how they affect people in the recreational setting. People can do heroin at these safe injection sites, maintain a career and keep it secret. And nobody even knows that they're doing this and they're, they're doing it in a safe, totally safe environment. No overdoses reported from these safe injection sites. A big campaign for one in Denver right now, by the way. So I'm going to try to reach out to those folks. That's really interesting. I think we've talked about it on the show before, but the major, we could have a metric almost of like how, how, what was the quality of your most important relationships? Like maybe before you start doing drugs, you kind of take an inventory and then you check in, I don't know, every couple of weeks, like has the quality of my relationships degraded. And we see that even with leaders in the psychedelic field, um, you've been around for a long time talking about this stuff, educating people. And turns out your whole world has been collapsing. Hopefully your significant other family has told you. Um, but you know, maybe not, maybe they're not going to tell you. We see that with McKenna, we see that with Leary. Um, there's a lot of contemporaries that have had family issues due to psychedelic use. And you know, I, I don't know what the answer is, but the answer clearly isn't chasing, um, chasing younger women or whatever. Like that's not the answer for a healthy life or a happy life. Like, yeah, sure. Maybe exciting, but that's not what you should be doing. If you want to progress your life forward in a, in a holistic, physically appropriate way. Like I think it's kind of pathological, especially if you have a series of things like that. And just reading about Leary, you can see that he had a pattern of that. And I'm sure it's well, I, I think even pinchback kind of came out about that, like early in his earlier days. Um, he, he was, you know, doing some kind of inappropriate, not, not perfectly healthy for him and his social life. Mm. Okay. I kind of like that, the do an inventory of your relationships and conversations. Because I think, you know, if you think about it like a mental health perspective, I mean, that's something clinically significant that's having a negative impact on your life is obviously not healthy for you. I don't know how to do that. Is there a measure like in your experience with psychology? Like, is there a measure for relationship quality? Particularly relationships? I don't know. I mean, if you go through, you know, like the DSM, if you're trying to diagnose a disorder, there's a bunch of like things you could view and check off. And some of it's like, oh, you've been sleeping too much. Do you do this too much? Do you, you know. Right. So. Yeah. So, like, I think that's something people should explore. If there's any grad students out there, please feel free to develop that idea. Let us know when you have it finished or are working on it. We'd love to chat with you about it. Because I think there's something there. Yeah. Well, I don't know. So, while you're talking about all this stuff, I kept thinking about, like, the opium use in Asia. And I haven't done, like, any research on it in a while. But I just remember, like, in school how they just said it, like, how damaging it was to society. And everybody just sat around opium dense smoking. There's no context around drugs. And there's no treatment. Like, obviously, some mothers were like, oh, no, I haven't seen my child in three weeks. Like, maybe he'll come home. Maybe he'll come home soon. He probably, like, you know, went and stole a couple pots and sold them and went back to the opium den. But, you know, there's no medical science around this stuff. I just read Oliver Sacks' Hallucinations the other day. And fascinating book, fascinating guy, obviously famous neurologist, I think. And he talked about, at one point, holing up in his apartment. And I think he was either smoking morphine or injecting or something. And he realized that he pretty much, like, lost 18 hours. He was like, oh, this isn't right. I think I just lost some time. The sun was going down, not coming up. What's going on? Am I tripping? Nope. You've just lost all your time. And he goes, yep. Obviously, it's very easy to just lose days, weeks, months, or years of your life with opiates. So, we have to be really careful around them. You know, that's kind of, you know, what's going on with pills. Like, it's really hard to be careful. And it's really easy to get physically addicted. And I think Gabor Mate talks about how predisposed we all are to addictive patterns. You know, if it's buying classical music albums like him or buying drugs and using. Or, you know, maybe it's like me. Like, you just get addicted to flow states and you put yourself in increasingly dangerous situations. So, you get really hurt for a couple of years. You know, like, that kind of thing. Or, you know, ICU. Like, you get addicted to these things. And everybody has addictions. Odds are good everybody has an addiction. Like, I don't. A healthy addiction, though. We would hope so. That's perhaps what we should strive for. Like, it's this dichotomy, though, of like, you know, say the DMT people who want to smoke NNDMT or 5-MeO regularly. Like, it's almost as if it's an escape. And then they have this split between here's my physical lower existence and here's my self. Spiritual upper existence and experience. And one is clearly better than the other. And I think it's really problematic to divide it like that. I think we have to think of it as a whole in order to have a healthy relationship to this stuff. We don't want to say, okay, I'm only me when I'm smoking DMT. Or, there's this lyric in one of the songs by The Weeknd I was listening to recently. You're familiar with The Weeknd? No. Really? He's this guy. He's got this really popular song about cocaine. Maybe if I heard it. You probably would. I don't know the lyrics, but I'm super. It's like, when I'm fucked up, that's the real me or something like that. He's talking about, like, calling women at 5 in the morning and going over their house. Oh, he's a Canadian. He's from Toronto. Good for him. He's super rich now. It's crazy. He's very successful. But, yeah, is it really you? Is the fucked up you really you? Is it any different from the day-to-day you? Like, the person that goes to work and does their day job they hate is the same exact person when they are smoking DMT or doing breathwork or doing something they love. It's just a different period of time, different part of the process. And I think there is a lot of value in trying to integrate all these parts, pull them back into one thing. Yeah, I think so, and I think it really comes back to, like, intention. Like, a lot of these things I view as tools. I just had this thought, like, I was probably, like, the last person that people would ever suspect to have a podcast based around psychedelics, you know? I was really against a lot of this stuff when I was in high school. Like, my friends started drinking and started smoking. And, you know, there was a moment where I kind of pushed them away because I just couldn't wrap my head around it. And a lot of this comes from, like, my existential crisis of almost dying and having such a powerful peak experience at that age. And then coming back and trying to wrap my head around why people would want to alter their consciousness and, like, escape reality. Because I thought reality was the greatest thing at that point. And I was like, oh my god, like, we are so lucky to be here right now. Like, this is amazing. And people are just escaping from it because they don't realize how magical it actually is. But then, you know, I hit my wall and I finally ended up, like, escaping like everybody else a little bit. But realizing how powerful that was. And so I've always kind of viewed them as tools, like, they're there when you need them in a sense. And so, yeah, what's the balance? Like, when is it? Like, you're just constantly, like, escaping or when do you need, like, a little tune-up and, like, a little recheck? Because, like, you know, I had this experience where, you know, I had this accident and went through this, like, state of ecstasy where I was so blissed out and then I finally hit a wall and then I was, like, down the dumps. And then it was, like, that experience with psilocybin that, like, brought me back to life. I was like, oh my god, like, I wasn't thinking clearly for the past, like, year or so. Like, I was letting my emotions get the best of me. And that experience was like, hey, get back with it. Like, you remember what this is all about. And I'm like, oh yeah, I do. Like, this is why I'm so appreciative of everything. And maybe that's why I've never really fell into, like, heavy use is because of that previous experience when I was 16. But yeah, I don't know. I think I view it as a tool. I don't necessarily think that people using it in a recreational setting is bad. I don't think, like, how some of this stuff is used is terrible. Because sometimes it has benefit. But I think about it like this, Kyle. Like, you had, like, you were snowboarding. Obviously, snowboarding is super fun. Especially if you're not falling super hard. And you probably had a few other things going on in your life that were awesome. So, think about somebody who, you know, their peak experience was when somebody else won a Super Bowl. Like, that was the best moment of their life was when somebody won the Super Bowl. It's like, come on. Like, is that really the best moment of their life? I mean, it's like, you know, it's the best moment of their life. It's the best moment of their life. The best moment of their life. It's like, come on. Like, is that really the best thing that's ever happened in your life? And then that person runs into something so powerful, so amazing, like a psychedelic. And then they're just like, I don't have this. You know, for me, I grew up skiing. You know, I'm very privileged to be able to ski my whole life. You know, I grew up skiing. relationship you have with a family or friend. then maybe that helps like i so you're right though there it's a really complicated discussion what is you what is overuse like we can look at it and go that's clearly overuse but we can't necessarily say like that's borderline right well i kind of like this concept of like checking your relationships you know seems like a pretty good measure of things or like maybe i just i keep saying this i've been crushing out audiobooks lately at like 4x speed 2x 4 i just finished this um book called personal mba by jack welch and his wife suzy and it's um how you can i don't know it's a lot of business metrics business talk and one of the things was like how do you check numbers over time like maybe you you look at progress in your job maybe you look at um career development and maybe you even take your bank account into the equation or like your credit card debt like just put out a chart and go like month to month like how am i looking like this i hate to say it like that but we're in this world where money kind of matters a lot and it's going ostensibly money's matter for a long time and uh you know assuming u.s dollar doesn't collapse that's why i got some bitcoins unless that gets hacked and destroyed so you know what's cool man if you get some bitcoin u.s dollar collapses quite a bit your student debt tracks to that pay off your student loans with like 50 dollars currently bitcoins me and my friends were gonna buy a bunch when they were like 10 bucks four bucks and i just keep thinking about that i'm like dude i'd have so much money right now if we actually pulled the trigger on that years ago i know a lot of people who are at least three or four people who paid off their student loans like 60k and bitcoins and i'm like in ethereum it's crazy but uh you know that's a side note but you know take an inventory maybe it's not just your relationships maybe it's a multi-factor thing i i think crossfit is really interesting in that they have methods to measure a lot of things um maybe it's like you could put a one to a hundred scale of how well you did in a difficult yoga class maybe that's one thing um if your physical body's falling apart that's not great maybe you throw everything into it like your blood pressure you go get your blood pressure checked at a at a pharmacy or something and you know track all these metrics over time and you know for you figure out what you think good is and figure out what you think bad is and try to keep trending towards good if that's if if those metrics help you work towards what you think the right result is i i think relationships play into it obviously relationships are more important than money most of the time money is kind of secondary but important too like you can't just be like oh i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do this you don't want to be racking up every single credit card to 40 000k in the negative all of them yeah that turns negative so um unless you plan to run away to russia or something forever pull a snowden so i you know i think we kind of run our course on this conversation um so let's maybe we're like an hour 15 of recording so maybe um yeah that kind of covers that oblivion thing we'll cover that other subject later but um our class if you guys want to help us out we've got a class that we put together included 12 or maybe even 13 master classes from experts in their respective sub areas of psychedelics and the course is really around helping you make better more informed decisions around drugs and psychedelics and how to stay out of the hands of the police and hospitals and we're putting ourselves at risk when we're taking black market substances so you know we we talk about stuff like test kits and how to test for fentanyl in drugs that was mitch gomez from dance safe the executive director there really helped us with that one how to identify emergencies with drugs um how to integrate how to prepare integration starts before the experience just reading holotropic breathwork the book last night and groff was pretty clear on that um and we get into a lot of stuff from how to do psychedelic first aid um even how to choose the right ayahuasca center how do you know what ayahuasca brew is safe to drink and what isn't um how to be safe in the amazon as a lady and uh wait is that true no that was yeah well the last episode of the zoe helena is that her last name yeah helena anything you want to add kyle on the class yeah um yeah so we have i think like 12 12 exclusive interviews um which is awesome angmar gorman from this uh psychedelic i always screw this up psychedelic education continuing care program um with katherine mclean have neil goldsmith on their uh author of psychedelic healing yes um we have our breathwork teachers lenny elizabeth gibson we have ashley booth from the aware project talking about her time at crossroads um and a few others we have um another friend of mine who uh talks about spiritual emergence processes which i think is a huge topic for this field because um i think a lot of people come to spiritual emergence through psychedelics or breathwork and um it's a really nice map if something does come up kind of for you guys for navigating crisis something spiritual happens and you don't know how to talk about it or or how to even think about it you're very confused and then phenomena can keep coming up like that is something that happens and it's something um we need to be aware of like how to relate to that in a healthy way is important and and this kind of stuff is huge that's why groff the groffs spun up the spiritual emergence network um and it's kind of partly why we're here and also we have a private facebook group for students of the class and um you'll have access to us there we we communicate quite a bit on there and um you could talk to other students and like kind of get ideas on how other people solve certain problems um and i think we're giving we're providing a journal soon kyle you're putting the finishing touches on a journal project and trying to finish it up while school just started so we'll get it we'll get it to you guys soon and uh also we have some active meditation so a breath work kind of meditation that kyle's putting together and katherine mclean provided a really interesting um a meditation as well so i think that's it for that um you can get that at psychedelics today.teachable.com or you can find links all over our site at psychedelics today.com um also you could sign up for one of those legal mushroom retreats psilocybin assisted retreats in jamaica with eric let them know you found us or you found him through us and um that'll help us quite a bit and uh you know always just you know leave us a review somewhere facebook itunes wherever and we would love it or just hit us up on social we'd love to hear you hear from you um any last words kyle thanks for listening um hope you guys enjoy a little bit of joe's and i ramble um things have just been kind of hectic on on our end so we just figured we'd get on and chat we hope you guys enjoy this we'll have some interviews lined up soon so don't worry yeah but thanks for listening and yeah let us know how we're doing all right thanks for listening guys take care bye you you Thank you.