Psychedeliology (HALLUCINOGENS) Part 1 with Charles Grob 01:08:15

I know I usually save my secrets for the end of the episode, but I'm going to tell you my secret favorite candy. It's Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

It's really Reese's anything. But Reese's peanut butter cups are the thing that I'm like, have I had a bad day? I get these. Have I had a good day? I get these. Chocolate, salty peanut butter, the textures. I love everything about them. Also that there's two. So I'm like, oh, I get this one for later, which is one second later. Anyway, Reese's peanut butter cups. I love you. That's all. If you're me, you can shop Reese's peanut butter cups now at a store near you. Found wherever candy is sold. And I am.

Hey, Fidelity. What's it cost to invest with the Fidelity app? Start with as little as $1 with no account fees or trade commissions on U.S. stocks and ETFs. Hmm. That's music to my ears. I can only talk. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Zero account fees apply to retail brokerage accounts only. Sell order assessment fee not included. A limited number of ETFs are subject to a transaction-based service fee of $100. See full list at fidelity.com slash commissions. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC. Member NYSE SIPC.

Oh, hey, it's the lady eating berries off a bush in the park, Allie Ward. And here we are. We have arrived at an episode six years in the making. I have had this ology and this specific ologist on my list for years. We had a few near encounters and then a pandemic lockdown and then scheduling issues. Finally, it happened. I had researched the top folks in the world doing psilocybin and hallucinogenic research. And over and over, he came up as the lead or the co-author on papers.

And I watched this documentary on fantastic fungus applications. And there he was on the screen and with me wistfully saying, that's my ologist. We've even emailed. So a few weeks back, we finally lined up our times and dates. And I packed up my little purse filled with mics and SD cards. And off I went about an hour south, just past LAX. And I pulled into this parking lot near the UCLA Medical Center. I was early. I

I was nervous. And in he walked, his gray beard and long hair pulled back into a low pony. He was wearing a navy blue windbreaker with an easy smile, a very chill demeanor. So we ducked into this stark, near-empty office in this new building because his old office of decades had recently been, I think, condemned and torn down. This guy fell out of the ceiling one day.

Oh my god. We have family of raccoons living in like an attic. And the ceiling just came down. So we sat in this sparkling new office, which she deserved. Zero raccoons or hallucinations of them. And we got into it, as you will hear. But first, just a quick thanks to everyone who sent in such great questions for this ologist via patreon.com slash ologies. You can join for $1 a month, and I may read your questions and your name.

And thanks to everyone out there wearing Allogies bathing suits and hats and shirts via allogiesmerch.com. We got them there for you. And of course, for no dollars, you can support just by telling friends and texting links and social media-ing or leaving a review, which I'm bound to read because I never miss one, such as this still warm one from Laura who wrote, I am a farmer who listens to podcasts all day long as I weed all

herbs and pruned tomatoes. Your interviews tickle my brain and are an absolute joy and a treasure. So Laura at Constellation Farm,

I do not enjoy tomatoes, but I like you and herbs and mushrooms. So let's get into it. So psychedeliology has been used in the literature. Thank you very much. But just a few times in published books, but I'm going to take it. And it was coined by a psychiatrist in 1950s from the Greek word for soul or mind, psyche, paired with delune, meaning to reveal. And he meant it to mean mind manifesting.

And this psychiatrist, Humphrey Osmond, also came up with this jaunty rhyme.

To fathom hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic. So psychedeliology, it is. So this guest is a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine and the director of child and adolescent psychiatry at the Harbor UCLA Medical Center. And he's the editor of the reader Hallucinogens. And in this two-parter, we'll learn all about the history of psychedelic research in the Western world,

Wow. And its origins in ethnobotany, how much LSD is too much LSD, what juices are squirting in the brain when you are tripping out, who should not take psychedelics, how this guest's research has helped terminally ill patients, some serendipitous library time, late night phone calls, talking to dead people, antidepressants and mushrooms, and the secret government experiments with hallucinogens.

And side note, there is one brief mention of suicide and there are clearly themes of intoxication in the episode. But strap in, lay back, come take a journey with clinical psychiatrist, researcher, author, and psychedeliologist, Dr. Charles Grobe. Oh, so many questions. And the, so ologies is a, every episode is a different ology. Okay. And so I think the ology for this probably would be

or psychopsychopharmacology or... Psychedelology. Whatever I can find in the literature. Psilocybology. Whatever rolls off the tongue. Whatever rolls. Whatever branding works. But the first thing I'll have you do is if you could say your first and last name, just so I make sure everything's pronounced. My name is Charles Grobe, G-R-O-B. I'm an MD. I'm a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at

at the UCLA School of Medicine. And for the last 31 years, I've been the director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Harbor UCLA Medical Center. Amazing. And I know it's Dr. Groh, and pronouns he, him?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You can call me Charlie. That's, I don't care. That's fine too. My daughter says I need to start introducing myself as Charlie. Really? Why? Charles is too formal. Oh, I feel like there's such a reverence for you in this field that like Dr. Grobe feels more appropriate. Yeah.

Whenever I hear the term Dr. Grove, it can sound fairly daunting, but I figure they must be referring to my father, who was the true, the originator of Dr. Grove. He was a big chief of medicine in New York for many years. Yeah.

And I understand that your dad told you when you figure out what you want to do, you can call me at any time. Any time, day or night. When I figure out what I'm going to do with my life, call him. So I figured it out. It came to me one night when I was a research assistant at Maimonides Medical Center Dream Research Lab. My task was to monitor sleep EEGs and to wake up the person who was sleeping and dreaming. It was in a sensory deprivation.

chamber and there's another person to send her down the hall so i had to organize all of this and i would periodically when i saw the rem episode was coming to an end i would wake them up and say

Allie, Allie, what's going through your mind? So, and then you would tell me. Usually dream recall is pretty good. If you have someone waking you up and it's pitch dark, no sounds. And to stay up all night, I had to read interesting material. And Stanley Krippner, who's a pretty renowned psychologist in this field, who's now in his 90s, and he's still active. He's still writing. He's still speaking. He's truly remarkable. So,

So Stanley Krippner, side note, 92 years old right now, and he has been working in the field of altered consciousness and dream telepathy and weird, how does this happen kind of brain stuff for decades? Though, of course, there are critics of his data and his studies. I mean, it is a slippery thing to try to science. He was one of the major investigators on the study. And in his office, he had a wonderful collection of

Books on psychedelics, scientific articles on psychedelics, lay articles on psychedelics, anything you could imagine, anything that had come out. And he gave me free license to roam through his files and books lined up in shelves. And I just read. God.

constantly in there. And then one night, I pulled a book. It was like a coffee table book with a lot of pictures. Good narrative by J.B. Priestley, a British philosopher called Man and Time. And I was reading and staring at some of the pictures. And I went through a part where there were pictures of mummies. And, you know, about 20, 30 minutes later, my subject started going into a dream. I waited until her REM was

you know, dissipating. It was, you know, leaving. So I woke her up and I said, well, what's going through your mind? And she said, oh, I'm in a desert and I see a pyramid. And then I was on top of the pyramids sliding down. So I thought, whoa, that's a pretty good hit. Yeah.

And that evening studying dream telepathy was just weird enough and spooky enough to open this lifelong curiosity about the very question of consciousness. And just like dreaming, there are so many mysteries around psychedelic experiences, like how they create hallucinations,

seeming portals to other dimensions, what was fact, what was lore, what was fiction, but it was enough to convince him to dedicate his life to figuring out how and why they worked and if they could help people medically. So it was right around then that I knew there's something in this field that I'm interested in and I was just so excited reading these books about their incredible potential and so on this particular night, it was about, you know, three, four in the morning, my father had said, wake him up. Yeah.

Without fear. I had to call them up, woke them from a deep sleep, had no idea why I was calling them. I needed to make sure everything was okay, everything was fine. But, Dad, I figured out what I want to do with my life. What's that? I want to study psychedelics. They're fascinating. So much we can learn about the brain, the mind-brain interface. We can learn so much about mental illness. And there are these remarkable treatments that seem to be helping people for whom standard conventional treatments are not helpful anymore.

So he was silent for a while, and then he said, well, you know, son, there may be something to what you say, but no one will listen to you unless you get your credentials, which meant I had to go back because I had dropped out of school after the middle of my junior year. Yeah.

I wanted to travel. I also had infectious myocardial necrosis, needed to rest up. And he wanted me to get back to school. He was very clever how he got me back to school. And years later, he said, you know, maybe I shouldn't be. But I was a little surprised you stuck with that vision, that determination. So he kind of understood what I was trying to do. From one Dr. Grobe to another, right? Yeah, he actually had one mushroom experience. He did? In Mexico. Yeah, very, very...

straight lice, big-time doctor, and never had much interest in recreational substances or explorations with psychedelics. He would drink alcohol at a social event. That was about it. But one day I told him I was going to go to a talk that evening given by a Mexican psychiatrist named Salvador Roquette.

He's renowned for doing very unusual work with psychedelics, kind of sensory overload with sometimes combinations of psychedelics, sometimes one high dose on its own. So I introduced my father to Ritter Rockett after the talk.

and Raquette was talking about his operation in Mexico City. So my father said, oh, you know, just so happens in a few weeks I'm going to be in Mexico City giving a talk at the medical school. So Raquette said, oh, you must come and visit me. So he wrote down his address, and I'm thinking there's no way he's going to go, especially because my mother was going with him, and she's much more conservative than him. So they met with Raquette. He showed him around, told him what he did, and then he said,

Just so happens we're having a group session tonight. Why don't the two of you join us? Sorry, what? And my mother right away said, oh, I could never do that. I have four children. Really? Like she would be a bad influence? No, no, no. She would decompensate. Couldn't. Oh.

care for her kids and so my father without missing a beat says oh what time my mother was furious at him he had to tell it's not going to do it he was just talking through his hat and to prove it because raquette also said if you're going to come don't eat anything the rest of the day so to prove to my mother that he was not going to go they went out and had a big lunch oh no after which he said you know i changed my mind again i'm going oh dear oh dear

So my mother's furious, but my father goes. So it's a group of about 20 people in a large room sitting along the wall, and there's this very intense music, and simultaneously,

Three videos are going. One of beautiful, aesthetically pleasing scenes from nature. Another of erotomania of anything you could imagine. And the third of documentary footage of warfare, bodies in the street, executions. So his doctor dad is tripping in a room with visuals of like a beautiful screensaver of nature. Another of essentially vintage portraits.

porn and then another wall footage of an actual bloodbath and I'm hoping that the attendance was free because that sounds like a mixed bag oh and all of this was on like a heavy lunch of like spaghetti or beans or something just fucking kill me and

the music was just really intense, really driving. And the patients there were emoting very loudly. I'm sure. And my father started to feel really sick. So he made his way to the bathroom and retched his guts out. Yeah. And then collapsed and thought this was the end of him. Meanwhile, one of the helpers saw he was missing from his spot, went into the bathroom, found him, dragged him back, propped him up against the wall. Then my father tells me he proceeded to have this...

incredible vision of a primitive desert road people walking across the desert, one behind the other, connected from one to the other by their umbilicus. And he realized these were his ancestors. Oh, wow. It was this very, very profound experience. And he got, I think, a great deal out of it. He changed in

in some fundamental ways. Like, I think he became less of a type A personality, more capable of, you know, enjoying himself. But he had a remarkable experience. Of course, my mother was furious. I was going to say, what she said to me, oh, you should have seen how he looked. He looked terrible. Yeah.

And rookie mistake eating a big lunch before, right? No, you never do that. But he was just, that was their relationship. Oh, God. Go to these crazy situations. Yeah. What a massively profound dream or vision. Like all of your ancestors tethered

by this life-giving flesh rope leading right up to you, like the best version of a human centipede. And you have so, so, so many great grandparents you don't have a clue about. And if you have kids and a few generations, your progeny might not even know your name or your face unless you make it into the history books or you get arrested or something. But tickle the brain with some chemistry and it flashes in front of you like a Willy Wonka time.

tunnel, at least for Dr. Grobe's dad, Dr. Grobe. Was this before or after you decided to study this? Oh, this was after. This is why he did it. Why did he do it? I mean, it could have been to connect with me. It could have been because he was curious. Who knows? You know, we talked about it a lot afterwards over the years, and he always kind of lit up when he would talk about it, get kind of animated, but he never was inclined to do it again. Mm-hmm.

You know, it's interesting because I have heard from so many people, it's one of the most impactful experiences of their lives when done in a setting that is complimentary to what they need.

And in books like journalist Michael Pollan's First Person Journey, How to Change Your Mind, and the Netflix series of the same name, I have heard that a well-orchestrated, doctor-approved trip like this is impactful on par with the birth of a child, which sounds like a little sketch. It sounds like a little bit of hype, but people swear by it.

So what is happening chemically to make this big of an impression? So I've talked about molecular neurobiology with Dr. Crystal Dilworth in the past about the role of neurotransmitters. Now, is a trip like a barge of fireworks exploding, but on a subcellular level?

but is it serotonin? Is it dopamine? Well, it's with the classic psychedelics like psilocybin, LSD, dimethylchipamine. It's primarily the serotonergic system. The sub-receptor is primarily the 5-HT2A or the serotonin 2A receptor. It seems to get stimulated. There are a

probably have a role in this also. I mean, there are other ways of looking at this. Robin Carhart-Harris is now at UCSF as his default mode network theory, which is that the default mode network is tasked in central nervous system to hold it together and to ruminate on things and to be somewhat obsessive, somewhat negativistic. That kind of goes offline. And then a short time later, there's a re-equilibration process.

And the default mode network is far less active. And individuals have these very profound spiritual opening experiences, very profound insight to their own psychodynamics. And they feel this is connected to what appears to be what's so interesting about these classic psychedelics. Not that they facilitate...

an antidepressant response. You know, ketamine does that also. And I'm not so wild about ketamine in part because within a week, maybe two, you're back to baseline. But with psilocybin or LSD or maybe...

Ayahuasca with DMT, not always, but it can be a sustained therapeutic effect that persists over time. And is that because when you're in that state, when you go through equilibrium again, your baseline default network is just a little bit less active? Yeah. Those networks in the brain kind of go offline for a brief period of time, allowing the system to re-equilibrate. It's actually...

very fancy model and mechanism. I find it an appealing psychobiological model. Just a quick overview. So there are a few types of hallucinogens from a neurobiological standpoint. So first, there are alkaloids like tryptamines, which have similar chemical structures, and they include psilocybin, which can convert to psilocin once digested. And then there are the compounds of LSD and DMT,

with DMT offering a much shorter trip experience. And there are also compounds called phenethylamines, like mescaline, which occurs in the cactus peyote. And MDMA is sometimes called a hallucinogen, but others argue that it's actually an empathogen, which aids in social connectedness. Now, ketamine, which is being explored for treatment-resistant depression, is called more of a dissociative anesthetic.

Now, ayahuasca is a South American indigenous medicine, and it's composed of several different plant compounds. And some deliver what's called monoamine oxidase inhibitors, meaning that they prevent the

the brain from sweeping away amounts of dopamine and serotonin and norepinephrine from the synapses. That also means that the amount of neurotransmitters in the gut can be affected, which can lead to that kind of sacred act of purging, which is just fire hosing your problems out of both ends of your body, respectfully speaking.

Now, the second punch of ayahuasca is also DMT, which occurs naturally in plants and in our brains in very small amounts, unless you've just sipped some ayahuasca tea, where your entire digestive and central nervous system becomes kind of a funhouse water slide of dreams and nightmares.

And, you know, it's interesting, too, that you worked in a dream research center. Yeah, yeah. Is there anything correlating between dreaming and hallucinating? That's interesting. Anything like that? Yeah, yeah.

If you talk to some people who, and this is particularly the case, I think, with plant hallucinogens, plant psychedelics, that they will talk about having a very introspective experience akin to a waking dream. Yes. They knew where they were. They knew what was going on. They knew why they were there. They knew they were altered. But they're in a reverie. They're having a vision. A story is playing out. There can be dialogue. There can be purpose.

Yeah. Yeah.

And as this 2017 Journal of Current Neuropharmacology paper titled Dreams and Psychedelics, Neurophenomenological Comparison and Therapeutic Implications explains. So psychedelic states are closest to lucid dreaming, which is characterized by this mixed state of dreaming and waking consciousness.

and has the potential for long-term beneficial effects on psychosocial functioning and well-being. So tripping is not really dreaming, although some hallucinogens can also promote vivid dreams, meaning that they're an oneirogen. And one of those substances is a Central African rainforest shrub called iboga.

You know, that's like in West Africa. There they talk about, you know, you feed the initiate, iboga, until they have a vision of an ancestor, often in the form of this waking dream, or they die of a cardiovascular collapse, which either or. They're very serious about their sacraments. They don't mess around. And that's true. And also it's true that Ibogaine has some cardiac risk.

And there have been some, you know, unfortunate fatalities, not in this country, overseas, you know, where an individual's significant history for cardiovascular disease was not properly recognized or taken into account. So it's like...

Before you run a marathon, check with a doctor. Before you do a VOCA, maybe say... You should. Not that the doctor will know what you're talking about, but he needs to take an EKG and see if you have an arrhythmia. Probably the people who ran into trouble had latent arrhythmias that they may not even have been aware of.

A lot of people don't know they have an arrhythmia. Their chest may go through funny flutters and flips and turns, but you tune that out. A lot of people tune that out. They don't want to talk to the doctor about something that could be serious. Right. No, it's a real bummer. It is a bummer. So yes, we need a cardiology episode coming up. I'm on it. Also, yes, if you're going to toss any drugs into your system or stop doing any that have been prescribed previously,

please, please talk to your doctor and be frank with them. They have absolutely heard weirder questions. You can see our radiology episode for things found up butts. But if you died from shyness or ignorance, they would be hella sad. So talk to your doctors. You would need people to be absolutely direct and revealing. I know of a case, this sad case, a 74-year-old man living in the Northwest who

who had never taken a psychedelic, but read the Michael Pollan book and felt, okay, he was ready. This was his time. He arranged for an underground therapist who had a good reputation. He met with him a couple of times, and the guy came over to do the session. And he took a moderate to high dose of

And within an hour, he had died of a cardiac arrest. The doctor said there was no history of cardiac disease, but he had never checked him for cardiac disease. The guy had never complained and probably rarely went in to see the doctor. Is this Iboga?

That was mushrooms. That was mushrooms, really? So you can get cardiac issues with mushrooms in vulnerable people. So here we're planning a new study that will include people we in the past have screened out, like people with cardiac history, older people. We always had an upper age limit of 60, 65, maybe 70, but not to go over because we're always concerned that adverse outcome could cause our study to shut down and other studies to shut down.

So to be on the safe side, there was an upper age cap because just one tragic study can really hinder research across the whole field globally. But that is changing as more people toward end of life are willing to take that risk.

maybe just because they're boomers and they tripped when they were younger. Who knows? Also, there are more medical safety nets available, Dr. Grob says. But now, because we're looking at a pragmatic model, what are the real-life implications going to be? We need data on people with cardiac vulnerabilities. We'll have a crash cart there to resuscitate people. We'll have people trained in CPR, ready to

dive in, and hopefully nothing will happen, but we need to collect this data. That really hasn't been done. I collected some data in both my psilocybin treatment of advanced cancer anxiety study, and I also collected data in our ayahuasca study in Brazil years ago, but we never published the Brazilian data because it was summer, it was incredibly hot and humid, and my primary collaborator took the EKG

sheets and just tossed them in a desk drawer. And when he went back to retrieve them at the end of the summer, the ink had kind of dissolved. Oh, no. Absolute nightmare. Well, I'm curious too, because you mentioned ayahuasca as well. Because I know we're talking about mushrooms, but when it comes to ayahuasca, mescaline, psilocybin,

even LSD, like structurally are the really big differences or are they kind of working in the same pathway? They look chemically, some of them look similar. They all have an indole ring, which is a kind of a five sided ring with a nitrogen atom in there. That's

pretty commonplace for the tryptamines. And a tryptamine, remember, is an alkaloid found in many plants and even in humans. And the common feature is this chemical structure called an indole ring, which diagrammatically, if you looked at a drawing of it, it looks like if you glued the big dipper and the little dipper together at the ladles. So that's the base structure

And then little tweaks and additions give you other compounds like serotonin or melatonin or DMT or psilocybin. So one little extra chemical doohickey here or there and you have a different neuromodulator that changes brain activity.

So there are similarities. In fact, there's similarity to the essential neurotransmitter serotonin. Serotonin is 5-hydroxytryptamine. Psilocybin is 4-phosphorloxy-N-endymethyltryptamine. So it's only adding a phosphorloxy molecule or psilocin and endymethyltryptamine. You flip the 5-hydroxy over to the 4 position and suddenly you've got a psychedelic. Psilocin isn't used

generally in treatment because it's very short-acting. But there are people interested. Also, there's now a run for profiteering where people haven't really looked at psilocin so they can get a patent. That's a problem in the field is that the big money and interests are circling the wagons. They're ready to attack and milk whatever they can get out of this. So yes, psilocybin can be synthesized. And in lab trials...

Volunteers are not choking down dried mushrooms and hoping that there's a standardized dosage. They're really carefully controlled weights and delivered in pill form. So mushrooms, if you look at different mushroom species, you look at what percent concentration psilocybin, what percent concentration psilocin. There's another alkaloid called beocysteine, which no one has ever looked at as far as I'm aware. That would be interesting.

They really want to do some novel research. Look at baocysteine. Mushrooms of baocysteine are fundamentally different than psilocybin cubensis, which has primarily psilocybin. With the baocysteine, like I think azurescence or cyanescence, I think there's greater focus, greater acuity of thought there.

and maybe less carried away by vision and reverie. That's been my observation. But no one has formally looked at that. That's all anecdotal stuff. See, mushrooms vary in their potency depending on where they grew, when they were picked, what the climactic conditions were, what time of the day or night. So you want to get the equivalent of one to two or one to three different

So in clinical settings like the 2023 study titled Single-Dose Psilocybin Treatment for Major Depressive Disorder, a 25 milligram dose of synthetic psilocybin was administered once in a specific setting, which we're going to get to in a bit.

And the study found that psilocybin treatment was associated with a clinically significant sustained reduction in depressive symptoms and functional disability without any adverse effects.

So those findings add to this evidence that psilocybin, when administered with psychological support, can hold promise as, they say, a novel intervention for major depressive disorder. But of course, in these trials, they're screening out folks who might be at risk for complications physically or a subsequent psychosis that could last for months. Now, when it comes to dried mushroom amounts,

A pretty big whopper of a trip might be around three grams. Five grams and beyond is considered what's called a heroic dose. Now, on the tiny end of the scale is microdosing, which is a regimen of a few times a week at 0.1 to 0.3 grams, like a tenth of a trip.

But can your brain have this imperceptible brush with mushrooms, like on a Tuesday at work, and still see benefits? Now there's this whole controversy over microdosing. Yeah. And it was very exciting to hear about these reports at first. And the anecdotal reports look very good. But as of yet, there's no rigorously controlled, methodologically sound study that demonstrates that microdosing is any better than a placebo. Mm-hmm.

So I think the case is still out. It's not been resolved. It's a tough model to administer. I looked into it years ago. And you've got to administer it under supervision in a research setting. And then I've always believed the FDA would insist they have to stay there all day. And that's, you know, 8 to 12 hours.

You know, it's hard to recruit people just to sit around on a microdose. But that's what it would take. I mean, some people are coming up with models where you give the patient the microdose, tell them to take it home, tell them to take it at a certain time. Maybe they turn on a Zoom or another video. But there are too many ways where that can go off the rails, I think. Yeah.

Why can't we figure out if microdosing has benefits? So anecdotally, some people say it's been extremely helpful for them. Just asking so many people I know who are a little bit bummed out and looking for answers. But as we know from research into antidepressants, the placebo effect tends to be as powerful as the administered pharmaceutical because

because hope is one hell of a drug. But on the upper end of the microdosing spectrum, like three milligrams of psilocybin instead of that big 25 milligrams given for big trips, or like a half a gram of dried mushrooms, 0.5 grams. One study showed those larger microdoses giving light kind of buzzy perceptible effects were more beneficial to overall mood and well-being than a placebo. But

But what about the big, big, big doses? Who does that? And what about the studies about the larger doses and those kind of transformative experiences, like the one, the end of life ones that you've done? Well, I didn't use a heroic dose. Terrence McKenna would say, he would say, use a heroic dose.

In the dark and on the floor. How big is a heroic dose of mushrooms? A lot. Is it like 40? 10 grams. Okay, 10. That's a lot. That's a lot. Now, I asked Dennis, who's my good friend, his brother, who was my collaborator on the ayahuasca site, who I've known, one of my best friends.

And he said, Terrence never did that. He talked it up, but he was too smart to do that himself. So beware. Some people say, beware the underdose. I'll say, beware going over the top and dosing too high. Above all, we want to preserve safety because this won't go forward as a field or get any kind of legal sanction unless strong, consistent safety parameters are adhered to. So, yep.

Big trip studies like Dr. Grob's use 25 milligrams of straight psilocybin, which, according to this 2022 paper, The Therapeutic Use of Psilocybin, Practical Considerations for Dosing and Administration, there's an assumed 1% of psilocybin per one gram of dried mushrooms. So a 25 milligram straight psilocybin would be about 2.5 grams of mushrooms.

And several studies indicate that this type of therapy is most effective for, say, cancer-related depression and anxiety or treatment-resistant depression or alcohol use disorder or tobacco addiction. But do not expect your doctor to just scroll out like shrooms on a notepad and send you on your way.

And can you tell me a little bit about the history of the legality of it? I understand that like in the 50s, the government was all about it. And then some stuff went down with LSD research and then it was just like verboten. No one talked about it. Yeah. What went down was Tim Leary and all the publicity. He loved getting attention. He loved the notoriety.

His involvement with the mind-expanding drug LSD has resulted in his being praised by a faithful minority and damned by an irate majority. A man very much in the news, here is Dr. Timothy Leary. Drugs are like alcohol. They're instruments which expand consciousness. They speed up the mind. Turn on, tune in, and drop out.

He paid a price. He had kind of a tragic life. You know, he spent years in maximum security prison. He was arrested in Algeria by Eldridge Cleaver, a crazy wild story. Arrested again in Switzerland. I got to know him at the end of his life because I was good friends with his old student, Ralph Metzner. So I would drive Ralph over there when Ralph came into town to see Tim. He's a remarkable guy, brilliant, but he paid a price. Dr. Grobe says both Leary's wife and daughter died by suicide.

And Ralph Metzner was one of Timothy O'Leary's research partners in Harvard alongside this spiritual and yoga guru and a psychologist named Ram Dass, who I just found out today, Ram Dass was born Richard Albert. He's a white guy from Massachusetts. I had no idea. But anyway.

before that. LSD was first discovered 1943, April 19th, 1943 by Albert Hoffman. It was a fluke, serendipitous, unintentional phenomena where what's believed to have been the case is that Hoffman had a cut on his hand. He was using a very low dose, but he absorbed some through the cut

And there must have been a cut in the glove he had on as well, because he was pretty fastidious about conditions. So he was working for a pharma company. And at the time, he was studying the medicinal uses of a plant called a sea onion or a maritime squill. Anyways, he absorbed an appreciable amount.

and felt like he was, he didn't feel ill, he felt he was losing his sense of balance, his orientation. So he got back home, slept it off. Then a few days later, actually the first one was April 16th, the second one April 19th. That was the first intentional LSD experience.

He measured out an exceedingly small amount because he was going to start extremely low dose and then gradually over some days or weeks work up the dose. And he was testing on himself, which is an old model. Yeah. Auto experimentation. So he self-administered 250 micrograms, which is a high dose. Yeah.

I was going to say, I don't know a lot about LSD, but I know that's a lot. It's not today's recreational dose. When I was in college, we would take very high dosages. I have never done LSD. And frankly, I would be terrified to just buy it off some jabroni. But according to the 2020 study, acute dose-dependent effects of lysergic acid diethylamide in a double-blind placebo-controlled study in healthy subjects, people start feeling effects every

at 25 micrograms of LSD. And a ceiling effect was observed for good drug effects at 100 micrograms. Now at 200 micrograms, you're talking further ego dissolution and anxiety and a trip that could last the better part of a whole day. Now that day, Albert Hoffman took 250 micrograms.

So then Hoffman again felt ill. He felt he needed to get home. So he was a lab assistant. He got on his bicycle, which the famous bicycle ride, which took forever. It took him forever to get home. He gets home. He takes to his bed. He tells his wife that he's dying. He had been injured in an experiment and to call the doctor. So she, she was very concerned. She did what he said. She called the doctor. By the time the doctor got to the house,

He was having a fantastic experience. This is extraordinary. He was watching objects morph into other objects. With eyes closed, he would have these visions, often of nature, natural settings. Groovy. He just had an amazing time and thought there's something to this. He spoke with his colleagues at Sandoz Pharmaceutical in Basel, Switzerland, and they started talking

manufacturing it and sending out samples to some of the leading psychiatrists around the world, mostly in Europe and North America. And this was in the early 50s. There was a great deal of excitement. Psychedelics were the cutting edge of psychiatric research. And there was enthusiasm in Europe, enthusiasm in the US. There's a lot of work going on in Canada. So everyone got excited about this. And then the Department of Defense popped its head up like a meerkat, being like, what y'all doing?

Because remember, the Second World War had just wrapped up and nuclear weapons had entered the scene. Mechanized death was a big business and it still is. So in the early 1950s, the bureaus of military defense like the CIA and the FBI were like, oh, hey.

They thought it might be valuable in helping their agents resist brainwashing and interrogation, but also making it more likely that an enemy agent who was captured will spill up their secrets. So it's called the MKUltra program. And it was done under very unethical conditions. Sometimes they would just dose random people without their knowledge. Oh dear. So Dr. Grove, or

or Charlie, says that in San Francisco, the MK Ultra Project had an apartment with a one-way mirror where they would enlist sex workers to bring back regular, unsuspecting clients and dose them with LSD.

And I found a news release stating, the director of central intelligence appeared today in San Francisco and he asked the city's forgiveness for that spy agency's operation of a body house at 2250 Chestnut Street during the mid-50s. That was a press release. First off, a body house? That's a word. Secondly, the CIA called this program, I'm not kidding, Operation Midnight Climax, which is so cheesy. It's so cheesy.

Now, where did I find all of this information in this news release? Via the website CIA.gov. Okay. Now, also, I had to know right now, what stands at 2250 Chestnut Street, now that it's not an acid house government run brothel?

By the grace of God, it is now a restaurant called Tacolicious. And I checked their menu, and unfortunately, they do not serve Michelob Ultra. But back in the day, a nightcap could be spiked as hell, and you wouldn't even know it. So these guys had no idea what was going on. There's also another case of a military scientist who was active in the biological warfare program who had gone to Europe and had seen some very unethical and very dangerous things.

behaviors by his colleagues. And back in the US, in Maryland, his colleagues dosed him at a kind of a clandestine meeting. He flipped out. They took him to New York, put him in a hotel room with an agent to keep an eye on him, took him to a military intelligence station,

psychiatrist who was trying to make sense of what was going on. And they were concerned that this guy was going to spill the beans and blow their cover. So what happened to him, and this was not revealed until the 70s, and only because his family wouldn't allow it to be swept under the rug. This was like early mid-50s. He jumped to his death from a 20th floor or the 19th floor. Wow.

Yeah, and intelligence didn't come clean about what had happened until the church committee in the late 70s, which was investigating MKUltra and other...

questionable ethical, questionable legal activities of the intelligence service. So that was going on. The military was really playing it loose with safety and ethics, sadly enough. And one research team via the nonprofit Shakruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicine dug into nearly 50 studies in this era and found that test subjects were often incarcerated people and those in mental hospitals.

administered very high doses of psychedelics for long periods of time. And people of color were also routinely exploited and subjected to what the paper even called brutal experimentation, saying that black participants were given more than double the dose at 180 micrograms of LSD compared to white participants who got 75. And white participants endured eight days of LSD administration, while black participants endured four.

chronic LSD administration for up to 85 days. Now, as for Frank Olson, that scientist who was dosed,

Well, according to the book, Prisoner in Chief, Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, Sidney was his boss, Olson had formerly been in charge of the airborne distribution of biological germs. So Olson was a guy who was able to disguise cans of shaving cream and bug spray to hold lethal toxins. He even designed a lipstick case

that could kill on skin contact. But after his acid trip, it's said that he realized that the experiments were not ethical and he wanted to leave the research. As for his suicide from the 19th floor,

Decades after his death, his family had been fighting this, had gone to Washington and gotten a settlement for his wrongful death. But then in 1994, his son Eric had his body exhumed and found that the blunt force trauma to his head wasn't consistent with his other fall injuries on his back. So in short, this shit was shady.

And so we saw a decline in funding. Well, research was going through in the 50s, although in retrospect, it turns out a number of these studies were funded by fronts for the CIA or fronts for military intelligence. Wow. So that was happening. But then also in...

I think it was the summer of 1960, a relatively young instructor of psychology at Harvard took vacation in Cuernavaca, Mexico. And a friend of his, a colleague, he went and visited Maria Sabina because in 1957, there had been a Life Magazine article of R. Gordon Wasson's adventures going into the highlands of central Mexico, discovering a native healer who used mushrooms in her healing practice.

So this was Maria Sabina, a Sabina or a wise woman from the Oaxacan area of southern Mexico who came from generations of shamans who used psilocybe mushrooms to heal the sick and to help people have visions of things that they lost.

So our Gordon Wasson, a guy who just loved mushrooms and worked as a banker, lies and tells Maria that he's looking for his lost son. She introduced him to the mushrooms. He swore up and down. He would never reveal it to the outside world. And of course, he blew the lid off this by publishing his accounts in Life magazine. Oh, man. So after Larry got into this,

He did some really good work. He had some really fine papers, but he had an unfailing need to call in attention, often negative attention, and he was just freaking people out. He was told by one of the deans at Harvard that he could continue with his psychedelic research so long as he didn't recruit undergraduates to study. He could recruit graduate students, but not undergraduate students.

Tim Leary never met a rule. He didn't feel he had to break it. So he brought in some undergrads and before you know it, they were kicked out of Harvard. Bye-bye. Bye. So when it came to you studying this, how much did you want to dive into the ethnobotany of it and the indigenous uses of it? Oh, well, I'm fascinated with that. I did some writing with Marlene D'Acantarillos, who's an anthropologist. She was a scholar in this area, a gifted writer and

She wanted to co-write with a psychiatrist, and she figured I was the one, so we wrote a lot together. I spent some time in Brazil. I made a number of trips down to Brazil. We did several fairly substantial studies, and we worked with people who were members of a syncretic church, which has permission from the government to use ayahuasca as a sacrament in their ceremonies. We didn't do any research with actual indigenous people, but I learned as much as I could as long as I was down there in Brazil.

Heard some good stories and have a great deal of respect for the indigenous traditions from which we

This is why we're talking about psychedelics today, because the descendants of the indigenous people from centuries ago made a collective decision not to give up their use of entheogenic plants, but rather to hide them from the conquistadors, from the invading, conquering Europeans, particularly the Spaniards and the Portuguese in South America and Central America. And actually, I think there's a lot of focus these days on monetizing psychedelics

psychedelic work, I really think there needs to be a provision in all this that some of the proceeds need to be directed towards the descendants who are often the most marginalized and mistreated and impoverished people in the world, whose environments we have destroyed, whose cultures we have destroyed. But they kept that knowledge secret from the Spaniards and the Catholic friars and held it.

Until some American guy came there, lied, took advantage of a healer, didn't protect her identity, published everything, turned a profit, and then went on to be funded by MKUltra.

So people start getting word of this. And after everyone from John Lennon to Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger and CIA operatives flocked to her village, Maria Savino was driven from it and later died in poverty. And a recent paper titled Ethical Principles of Traditional Indigenous Medicine to Guide Western Psychedelic Research and Practice said,

starts with acknowledging that Indigenous people's voices and leadership have been notably absent from Western psychedelic research and psychedelic-assisted therapy spaces, with the field currently being widely represented by Western peoples. And when Indigenous voices have been engaged...

their presence has often been more symbolic with little distributed benefit going back to their communities. And the lead author of that paper is Jeria Celedwin, who was born into this family of indigenous mystics and healers and poets in Mexico and is a UC Berkeley Othering and Belonging Institute senior fellow. And she points out that Western psychedelics or recreational mind manifesting isn't treated as

as a sacred act and that these medicines are not about the human mind alone. They reveal spirit, the very animating principle of life, she writes. And that paper urges researchers to consider the eight elements of reverence, respect, responsibility, relevance, regulation, reparation, restoration, and reconciliation in trials and practice. And now here we are.

And here I am, a white lady talking about taking indigenous psychedelics because I wanted to Marie Kondo my neuroses. And after a quick break, we'll be back with some of the protocol that's used in clinical settings and what people who do this under doctor or healer supervision are told to do. But first, we're going to take a quick

break from sponsors of the show who make it possible for us to donate to a cause. And consistent with Dr. Groves' wishes to acknowledge indigenous practice, it's going to go to the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines, which is a nonprofit run by a small staff of experts and enthusiastic volunteers who work to bring education and cultural understanding about psychedelic plant medicines to a wider audience. And I quoted some of their work

earlier. And they pioneer initiatives that support and provide a platform for diverse voices, including women, queer people, people of color, indigenous people, and the global South. So that is chacruna.net, which will be linked in the show notes. So a donation will go to them thanks to sponsors of the show.

When U.S. Bank says they're in it with you, they mean it. Not just for the good stuff, the grand openings and celebrations, although those are pretty great, but for all the hard work it took to get there. The fine-tuning of goals, the managing of cash and workflows, and decision-making. They're in to help you through all of it.

because together they're proving day in and day out that there is nothing as powerful as the power of us. Visit usbank.com to get started today. Equal housing lender, member FDIC, copyright 2024, US Bank. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. And as I record this, my dog, Gremmy, is snoring. Snoring.

Sometimes you gotta stop and smell the roses. Sometimes you gotta stop and record the snoring. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's hard to make time for it. And when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever. So if you were thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient and flexible. I love everything about it.

that it is so quick to get a therapist. You just fill out a brief questionnaire so they can figure out what you need, what you're looking for. They match you with a licensed therapist. Boom, makes it so easy. It's more affordable than most traditional therapies. And if for any reason you are not vibing, you can switch therapists anytime for no additional charge.

I've used BetterHelp. It has helped me through some really tough stuff in my life and has really taught me to stop, let myself relax, pet my dog, go to bed early, that I'm worth those things, I deserve those things, and it'll make my life better in the long run. So never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash ologies today to get 10% off your first month. So that's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash ologies. Grammy says it's okay to nap too.

This episode is brought to you by Merrick Pet Care. And y'all know I have a little dog named Gremmy, which is short for Gremlin. And y'all helped me name her. And there's nothing that we like more than seeing her happy, which means tasty dog foods. And Merrick has been crafting high quality dog food for over 30 years. They were founded in Hereford, Texas.

But Grammy doesn't care about that. She cares about smushing her face in it and then licking the bowl. And I don't blame her because they use real ingredients and home-style recipes like real Texas beef and sweet potato or Grammy's pot pie. Grammy's like, Grammy's pot pie. Get away from it. It's mine.

mine. I also like that on the bag, they show what's in it and they always use deboned meat, fish, or poultry as the number one ingredient. And I think Remy appreciates that. So check out Merrick online or in your local pet store and look for their new packaging with real ingredients shown on the bag and inside it. Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum.

Okay, so think about your childhood and think about some highlights. I bet they were probably out essentially tinkering. This is why I love KiwiCo. Each month, they send a kid a crate. It's packed with these engaging hands-on activities. They introduce them to science and technology and art concepts.

There's always something new. They have things like engineering robots or learning about the science of ice cream. They have nine monthly programs to choose from. They have something for kids of all ages, ranging from infants and preschoolers to teens and beyond. If you have a kid, if you know a kid, this is

such a good gift for them because it can cultivate their natural curiosity all while doing things like discovering the science of magic or engineering a domino machine and more. This is why I get KiwiCo for friends, kids, for nieces, for nephews. I love that there's a ton of different types of crates to choose from. And then I love when I get like pictures and videos of the kids who are like playing with them. They're always having such a good time. So help kids make mems. Redefine learning with the

play, explore projects that build confidence and problem-solving skills with KiwiCo. And you can get 50% off your first month on any crate line at KiwiCo.com with the promo code Ologies. So that's 50% off your first month at KiwiCo.com. Promo code is Ologies. They're going to dig it. Trust me.

Okay, so next week, we will answer all your questions. And please trust, there are great ones. But let's continue on with how does a clinical neuropsychiatrist administer psilocybin to willing participants? And what does that feel like? Can you describe for anyone who's never done mushrooms?

what it is like for people experiencing it i myself have taken like 3.5 grams and just like that's a good dose put on a mask i use the yale protocol like imperial college of london this is the suggestion of my own psychiatrist who's like i think this would be good and he's like a buttoned up beverly hills dude who's just like i you know i i think that this is something you should consider so that's fine that's great yeah so i did all this you know and

wrote out my intentions ahead of time, like all that stuff. But 3.5 grams of its normal potency should be a nice dose. Yeah. It won't

spin you out into the hemispheres. You'll have a good experience. Oh, I talked to so many dead people. It was wild. And it was, before I did it, I was skeptical that it would be that big of a memory for me or that big of an experience in my life. And it was completely transformative. Everything feels like before and after that. And I have that as a benchmark of what my optimal living

living experience could be of like how I could look at the world through that window. And, you know, I've talked to friends who have tried microdosing or have tried mushroom gummies here or there, or who have tripped at Coachella and it was weird. And so I have friends who have asked me like what that's like, but yeah,

I know everyone has their own experience, but when you are prepping people for this, how do you describe it? Well, first of all, I'm always wary about recreational settings. Things can go wrong. Things do go wrong. But when you've got a formal setting, first of all, you need to meet the facilitator. He or she needs to kind of do a screening to make sure you don't have any conditions which would screen you out.

And then he or she will describe the range of experience and also get to know more about your background. Very, very importantly, your facilitator should ask you to spend some time reflecting on what is your intention? What do you hope to get out of this experience? Is it healing? Is it a spiritual experience? Do you need insight into a particular issue?

You need to focus on what is your intention. Even journal beforehand about what you hope to get out of this. And it's uncanny how the intention will manifest. Even if you don't realize it at the time, later when you're reviewing what happened, it's always good to write when you're done. When the session is closed, the lights go on, just pull out your notebook and pen and just scribble whatever is in your mind to nail it down. Because what you write down, you'll remember very, very clearly.

I did this. And you know what? Why not? In part two, I'm going to read you some. I got to find it, but we're going to see what's in there. Also, for the record, this was in Oregon. Okay? It's legal there. It was in Oregon. So then you've got, you know, you've got the preparatory experience and

And their intention is really important. Then you've got the actual experience and you've got to allocate six to eight hours. The facilitator should not leave you too soon, you know. And there needs to be good boundaries in the treatment room. There have been some, you know, missteps with boundaries in the past, present. So that needs to be very clearly stated up front, what the boundaries are regarding touch and stuff like that. And what we did was we didn't want to

be overly intrusive to the subject. So we would check in every hour and, you know, kind of, you know, tap their knee or tap their arm and say, how are you doing? What's going on? I'm tripping, doctor. And then we did a blood pressure. And then as long as there wasn't anything

they needed to talk about. It's okay. Lie down, put on the headphones, the eye shades, go deep into the experience. Now, sometimes people will sit up between the hours, take off the eye mask, take off the headphone and say, I got to talk to you about this. And then you hear them out a little bit. And sometimes, yeah, they got a lot to talk about and we want to do it now. But sometimes it's, you know,

We have plenty of time at the end of the session to talk about this and in the days afterwards. So let's just put the mask on. Let's put the headphones on. Let's go deep into the experience. And in his well-known paper, Pilot Study of Psilocybin Treatment for Anxiety in Patients with Advanced Stage Cancer, the methodology...

is laid out. And experimental sessions took place in a hospital clinical research unit, but in a room decorated with fabric wall hangings and fresh flowers to provide a pleasing and comfortable environment, it says. And the volunteers checked in the day before. Their cardiac health was monitored for 24 hours ahead of time. And then they were given a light morning meal the morning of

And at 10 a.m., a placebo or psilocybin was administered. And the subject was encouraged to lie in bed wearing eye shades during the first few hours, as well as to put on headphones and listen to some preselected music. And they were monitored during this whole six-hour session. And they were held a few hours after and told not to drive themselves home, obviously. So they'd had a friend or family member pick them up.

And later interviews collected data on what they perceived and how it felt. And according to the paper, they were asked to rate things like their, quote, oceanic boundlessness, their mood from elevated up to euphoric, anxious, ego dissolution, visual and auditory hallucinations, and their sleepiness.

Which is okay, cool. But sucks if you got the sugar pill, right? So that reminds me of a story that happened. So we had a subject and everybody got two sessions. One was the active drug, one was a placebo. The order was randomized and it was blinded. So neither the subject nor myself nor my co-facilitators

knew what they were getting, but then we knew they would get one of each. So for the first session of this woman who had metastatic terminal cancer and a lot of reactive anxiety, her first session, I was fairly convinced it was a placebo, but you never know. So I was looking forward to a month later, session two. And so we go through a little preamble and administer the psilocybin. She takes it, she lies in position.

At one hour, nothing's happening. At two hours, nothing's happening. At three hours, nothing is happening. I'm getting concerned. What could be going on? Did our research pharmacist slip up and give us a second placebo? But I think, well, we just got to... Then I said I had one of the residents, psychiatric residents, working with me with this patient. And I put him in charge of the music selection. So I said, you know, Preet, I think the music you are playing is just too mellow. Huh.

We need something with a little more oomph to it. What do you have up here? He said, well, nothing up here, but down in my car, I was listening to Dead Can Dance. Do you know Dead Can Dance? Yeah, I mean, I was a goth. Yes. It was Lisa Gerard. Yes, I know exactly. It's fabulous. It's exactly what you need. It pushes you. Yeah. It really amps it up. It's like, yeah, fantastic. Get it. So we pop it in.

And within minutes, the floodgates opened. She was sobbing and sobbing and sobbing. And I thought, wow, well, I know it's the real thing. But also, I didn't want it to intrude, but I was thinking...

in my own mind, what could be going on internally with her? And I thought, well, she must be getting in touch with her limited lifespan and her needing to let go of her attachments in this world. But at the end of the session, when it was finally, we concluded, we did our concluding ritual, then I could talk, well, what was going on? She says, well, I had a vision of my father. And

who died many years ago. And my father and I loved each other very much. But we lived in a family where you didn't talk about emotions. So we never told each other how much we loved them. So in my experience, in my vision, I was telling my dad how much I loved him, and he was telling me how much he loved me. And that was this remarkable experience. And

Yeah, this was a woman who before her participation in the study had been on SSRIs for years. She never felt she needed to go back on. The plan was go back on, but you'll give us a signal. Her positive mood changed.

impact sustained over weeks, months, and their last communication was maybe a year. And I don't think she survived much longer than that. But she still was told that she was deriving great benefit from that experience. And it really was this kind of re-

with her dad, who she grew up in a culture where you just didn't talk about feelings. But internally, in her vision, she was talking about her feelings and he talked about his feelings.

Listen, do we know where consciousness comes from? Not really. Do we know what dark matter is? No, not really. Are there more life forms in the universe? We don't know. What happens when we die? Unsure. But we do have an episode called Quasi-Thanatology about near-death experiences from a very straight-laced researcher on the topic. But more on how or why we might talk to the dead in a bit. Also, just a word of caution.

Don't stop or start any medications, including recreational, without your doctor's blessing. Check yourself for heart conditions. Anyway, even if you're not going to do drugs. And if you do use any kind of recreational drugs, for the sake of

of your internet dad's sanity, please read up on harm reduction, test for fentanyl and all that, obtain some emergency Narcan. Think ahead, okay? Don't do anything illegal, please. But yeah, from a person who once raw dogged getting off a fixer and nearly lost my whole mind with withdrawal anxiety attacks, please consider the risks of going off a medicine. Talk to your doctor.

That was a big question. I have two questions from that. The first one maybe is easier, but if you're on an SNRI or an SSRI or a mood stabilizer, or you have a history of schizophrenia, what kind of contraindications are there? I understand too that if you take psilocybin and you're on an SSRI or any kind of serotonin reuptake inhibitor, that it just won't work.

Well, yeah, yeah. The attenuation of effect, that's well known. And if you don't know, you can see the 2023 paper, Attenuation of Psilocybin Mushroom Effects During and After SSRI-SNRI Antidepressant Use, which concluded that SSRI-SNRIs appear to weaken psilocybin drug effects, and this dampening effect may last as long as three months following antidepressant

discontinuation. And that study was about psilocybin mushrooms specifically. But Dr. Grob says... A colleague on my ayahuasca study, Chase Calloway from Finland, he and I published a paper together in the late 90s about adverse SSRI-ayahuasca interactions causing a condition known as a serotonin syndrome. Because the ayahuasca contains MAOIs and

It's just too much serotonin is swimming around in the sexual nervous system, charging synaptic receptors. So with ayahuasca, it can be dangerous. And we caution people about not mixing SSRIs and ayahuasca. It's somewhat controversial. I know people in Brazil...

who like to argue that, but I know what I've seen. I've seen several cases where that has clearly been the case. Otherwise, like if you take psilocybin or LSD and you're on Prozac or something like that, it's an attenuation of effect, a dampening of effect. And another question I have based on her story and my own story was,

Why do we see so many dead people? I feel like everyone that I know who has done a mushroom trip, like my father died shortly before. I definitely talked to my dad a bunch. It felt like I was talking with him. I feel like I had a weird vision of my dead grandmother who came in. When it first started to take effect, I told my sitter who was my husband, I was like, it's so crowded here. There's so many ancestors who have come to meet me at the train station. And then you mentioned your dad's bilicus.

why do you think that it causes something in our brain to think about that? It taps into something very, very primal, something very, very deep. And I think it's a great mystery. Yeah. And it really explains, I think, religions that are based on ancestor connectedness. And you see that with the Iboka, the Bwiti in West Africa, in Gabon. Like I said earlier, the direction is have a vision of an ancestor connected

Or we're going to keep feeding you this aboca, this chopped up aboca. You'll have a vision of an ancestor or you'll die, whichever comes first. So they're very serious. You better conjure up a grandpa pretty quick. You're like, grandpa's here. Sometimes I wonder if some of these young people may be thinking on the spot needed to watch. Yeah, it's all good.

Can I ask you some questions from listeners that they sent in? Yeah, sure. Some questions. I told them you specifically were coming on. A lot of people wanted to know about access. People wanted to know what's your opinion on legalizing all hallucinogenic mushrooms. How do you feel about Oregon recently legalizing it? Where are we at with it? If someone wanted to do this, like my psychiatrist is like, just get a hold of something. I so far haven't been arrested for talking about it. Right, right. Nor have I. Not quite.

So ask tremendous experts trippy questions. And next week, we will cover so many juicy ones from set and setting to criminalization, a critical look at the stone ape theory, fMRI studies, neurodivergence, astrophysics and psychedelics, how to be a good trip sitter, and my own experience following clinical guidelines for a big trip, which for the record, I did in Oregon where it's illegal. Sure.

So stay tuned and make sure you're subscribed for next week's intense and very wonderful conclusion of this. And of course, we have links to Dr. Grobe's work in the show notes so you can follow up and see what he's been working on. Also, if you like podcasts, I'd like to take a moment to shout out my friend Rose Eveless' new one called Tested, A Surprising History of Women's Sports.

It's about a group of female track and field superstars that are told they're too fast to be women. And Rose Eveleth, you may remember from our Futurology episode and as the host of the podcast Flash Forward, Rose is an award-winning reporter and writer. I'm honored to say they're a friend of mine. So subscribe to their new series, Tested, which will trace the very surprising 100-year history of sex testing in elite sports that led to this moment.

And Rose will ask a question that goes far beyond sports, which is what is fair and who decides? So you can look for Tested wherever you get podcasts. So that's my little plug for Rose. And as for us, we also have a new show called Smologies available wherever you get podcasts, which each week we release a new G-rated and shortened episode of Smologies Classics that are suitable for all ages, all occasions. So if you're going on a family road trip, get some Smologies in your ears.

Now, you can become a patron of Ologies at patreon.com slash ologies, and we'll be asking wall-to-wall Patreon questions for next week's episode. Ologies merch is available at the link in the show notes. Aaron Talbert admins our Ologies podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Noelle Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Susan Hale is our managing director. And frankly...

our trip sitter every week. And Kelly Ardoire does the website and piecing together the fractals of audio are Jake Chafee and lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme song. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret this week. It's that I will tell you more about my own mushroom experience next week. I've mentioned it briefly here and there in other episodes, but might as well

get into it. Also, people are always like, Allie, why don't you just go to a professional salon to get your hair colored? Why do you do it with box dye in your bathroom? And I finally got my haircut. I look like an overgrown doodle with roots. And so I was like, you know what, I'm going to have a professional handle this. I'm worth it. But I have so much hair that whenever I get it done professionally, these poor colorists are like trying to whack their way

like frosting my yak hair with a dye. And by the time they're done, it's been on my head so long that it's turned to not copper as intended, but it always comes out this like brownish purple. And then it cost me $200 instead of like $12 in my bathroom. But I took myself to a place, I treated myself and I must report that my hair right now is purplish brown.

But we tried. Maybe the stylists are just trying to tell me I'm not a good fake redhead. But anyway, I'm temporarily brunette now, which is just how it's going to go for a bit. Okay, next week, we're going to get into more mystical neurobiological stuff that are deeper than my hair problems. Okay, bye-bye. Have a great trip.