Why Psychedelics May Be The Future Of PTSD, Addiction, And Depression Treatment

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

The fundamental message coming from the field of psychedelic psychotherapy and psychedelic research is.

That there's a reason for hope. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Now, I know a lot of you out there are healthcare practitioners like me, helping patients heal using real food and functional medicine as the framework for getting to the root cause of the issues. Now, in my practice, this often means looking at lots of internal variables to find the most effective path to optimize health. and reverse disease. But up until now, that meant we were usually ordering tests for one patient from multiple labs. Now, I'm sure many of you can relate to how time consuming and complicated lab ordering can be for functional medicine practitioners like me and our patients. That's why I love using Rupa Health. With just a few clicks, I can order from 30 plus lab companies. That's over 3000 tests for free in one single portal. That means one invoice for all labs paid online upfront. Plus, patients get practitioner pricing and receive full patient support through easier personalized collection instructions, automated follow up, super bills, and answers to testing questions and so much more. Just go to rupahealth.com, that's R-U-P-A-Health.com, to.

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Hi, this is Lauren Fein, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Mental health problems are the number one driver of indirect healthcare costs, loss of productivity, and diminished quality of life. And unfortunately, we are only moderately successful at treating mental health issues with modern medicine. However, now through the exploration of psychedelics and plant medicine, we are in a pivotal moment of reimagining mental health treatment. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the Doctor's Pharmacy exploring the healing and evolutionary benefits of plant medicine. Dr. Hyman speaks with Rick Doblin about using psychedelics to heal from trauma, with Alberto Violdo about how plant medicine repairs the brain, and with Wade Davis about the rich history of psychedelics. Let's dive in.

People have looked at the word psychedelic and again, how do we do this public reframing? How do we take something so demonized and so beaten down and suppressed? And so a lot of it is framing in public education. So that's where I'm so glad to be talking to you as part of this public education. But the word for psychedelics before that was hallucinogens, psychotomimetics, mimic psychosis. and so entheogen was developed as a counter word to abandon the word psychedelics with all of its cultural connotations. But I think it's propaganda in the positive side. So hallucinogen is propaganda in the negative side, that you're going to take this, it's going to be fake, it's going to be hallucinations, not going to be real, it's all a delusion.

Right.

You know, and then entheogen is, oh, it's all about meeting God and you're connected to God and. I see the value of that word, but I've focused, and you can see that MAPS has the word psychedelic in the title, that our mission was to try to reframe the word psychedelic, reclaim it the same way gay and, you know, has done or queer, you know, the same way that the.

Powerful you quote, Stanislav Grof, and you say, you know, the study of psychedelics is what the, you know, telescope was to astronomers and the microscope was to biologists. And I think that's a very interesting frame because it's like we're on a frontier that we have just had so little understanding of and so little effective treatment for. And we now actually are, I mean, it's very helpful to me to think about the ways in which these compounds can really help so many people who are really struggling and suffering. And the amount of trauma is huge. I mean, I think one in four people, and I've talked about this on the podcast, have been sexually abused, including me. And I think that's kind of a, a really big, big phenomena, and that's a big trauma, but there's so much other trauma. Gabor Maté talks about the micro traumas, there's living in our current society, and the macro traumas of real abuse. So I think all these compounds have some role to play in our collective healing.

Yeah, they do. And so, you know, Bhutan has, the country of Bhutan has developed a national index of happiness. and many people have heard about this. So what MAPS we're talking about now is to develop a national index of trauma. And we just had a meeting with some people at the UN and how we might actually do this. And then the goal is a world of net zero trauma by 2070. So now that it seems like we're maybe two years away or less than two years away from FDA approval of MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD, it seems likely. Psilocybin, I think, will be shortly thereafter for psilocybin for depression. And so as we start mainstreaming psychedelics, we already have five or 600 or more ketamine clinics in the United States. So we will eventually have thousands, you know, hopefully tens of thousands of psychedelic clinics around the world. And can we over time, over a generation or two, help reduce people's multigenerational trauma and move to a world of net zero trauma. There's some statistics that I recently have incorporated into one of my PowerPoints about how there's supposedly, or there are predictions that there'll be over a billion climate refugees by 2050.

Yeah, yeah.

So the stresses on the human species are going to increase. we're really good at denial. And, you know, that's the classic story of addiction. And so, you know, we still have people in the fossil fuel industry saying, you know, you know, let's do more of this, you know, so there's, we tend to do things at the last minute. And so the crisis, the species extinction is increasing, the environmental degradation is increasing. On the other hand, there is this hope of through the brilliance of our mind, can we sort of remedy some of the problems through the sort of primitive nature of our mind as well? So it's a touch and go situation, I'm sure.

It's quite a vision.

Yeah, so this idea of 2070, a net zero world, that what we need is this idea of a spiritualized humanity. So that is really our goal is mass mental health and a spiritualized humanity. You could say that humanity is now like lemmings going over the cliff. And how do we stop that? We need more people to wake up. And so one of the things that I think was also good about Timothy Leary is that he didn't say, oh, we need to give, he did do this, but he did think about giving LSD to leaders. And there's an incredible story about, Put.

It in the G20 meeting water.

One of the lovers, the mistresses of President Kennedy came to Leary and said that she and some of her friends were sleeping with the major political leaders. This is in the early 60s and could he help train them so that they could be more effective with their LSD experiences with these guys to help them become more enlightened. So there's some very interesting, there's a book that Mary's Mosaic, is about this woman that mayor may supposedly did do LSD with John Kennedy. Wow. Mary's Mosaic. Okay. But the theory for, for me is slightly different. And I think it was also for, for Leary is that you need to ground mental health in the masses of the population, that there's always going to be Psychopaths and that, that you can, you know, but it's the massive people that give them their power that make them so destructive, you know, and that they can manipulate people's fears and anxieties. And if you can help people not have such fears and anxieties or find a process to work through it, then the psychopaths aren't going to do so much damage. So that's, for me, the theory of change is more of this idea of mass mental health. And that's why we need drug policy reform. That's why we need you know, these 25,000 or more therapists trained just in this decade and all these clinics. And so I think it's a vision of hope, in a sense, that the human species can pull itself out of this tailspin, hopefully not at the very last minute. And that's where I think public education, what you're doing with these podcasts, is so important for people, particularly I want to say this, that there are, there's a lot of people committing suicide out of despair. There's, there's what's called deaths of despair, which is alcoholism, drug overdoses and suicide. But the message, I think the fundamental message coming from the, the field of psychedelic Psychotherapy and cycle research is that there's a reason for hope, that it's going to be a while before these things become mainstream, before everybody can have access, before it's insurance coverage. But there are technologies that are being developed that are not actually different from what we've done thousands of years ago. I mean, we as a culture, you could say, as a Western culture, have suppressed the irrational or the emotional, you know, and the psychedelics, both for power reasons to have hierarchies of the churches that are the intermediary between you and church, but also it help facilitate the flourishing of our rational mind. And we have produced miracles of technology, the fact that we can talk like this, that I can see you. I mean, this is amazing, you know? So hopefully the brilliance of our mind will be able to overcome the primitive nature of our psyche and help us to evolve. And that's the race that we're in.

I mean, these compounds have been used for millennia by humans throughout the world. And even some say early Christianity was influenced by ergot alkaloids that were from kind of mold that was growing on grains and that created these mystical experiences, psychedelic experiences like LSD. So, I think, you know, this is not new to humanity. This is just something that's been suppressed and marginalized, but it's actually central to the human experience throughout history that we've co-evolved with these plants. That's one of my favorite courses I took in college was plants and humans. It was like all about this stuff, you know, all about the cultural use of plants, but for food is medicine, for psychedelic experiences healing. And, I think, and we're now kind of seeing, you know, places where people can go and get help. And it's a lot of it's underground right now. There's other countries that are doing this kind of work. For example, in Iboga, which is a, you know, West African bark is being used now in Mexico in these clinics to deal with addiction and can end the physiological addiction, but also give these people a really profoundly different way to look at their trauma and their past and seems to reset their neuroplasticity. So there's these clinics opening around, there's different centers around the world. Where do you see this sort of besides the United States emerging?

Is there places where it's already in Switzerland? So, you know, again, Switzerland is where Albert Hoffman lived and he was the one that worked for Sandoz and invented LSD, first off in 1938, and then had his unexpected experience where he realized, well, like back in 1943. And then in '58, '59, he got.

Some on his fingers.

Somewhere, how, yes. And then he also was the first one to identify psilocybin in the mushrooms. So there's a tradition of psychedelics in Switzerland, of psychedelic discovery. And so in Switzerland right now, they have compassionate use of LSD, MDMA, and there's a group of 30 plus psychiatrists that are permitted to give MDMA and LSD to their patients. So that is kind of the advanced place. There are clinics, as you notice, Ibogaine is because of the zeal of the drug warriors in America, Ibogaine is illegal in the United States. but it's not criminalized most of the rest of the world. So it's legal in Mexico, it's legal in Canada, legal in England, much of Europe, much of South America, and it's not a drug of abuse. And the irony is that we can have over 100,000 people die of opiate-related and fentanyl-related overdoses, and yet we still have the National Institute on Drug Abuse is not funding research into ibogaine, even though it's clearly helpful for helping people overcome dependence on opiates. It resets the brain. It's incredible. And it gives us psychedelic therapeutic spiritual experience. So I think we're at this situation where there is this recognition that there are tools that have been around sometimes for Millennium that our culture has really not figured out a way to incorporate them. and that that time of suppression is coming to an end and that the need for these tools is apparent to more and more people. So, you know, we are involved in Ibogaine research. We've done studies with Ibogaine clinics in Mexico and New Zealand and did long-term follow-ups. There's a for-profit company, Atai, that's trying to work with Ibogaine. There's a study that we've supported in Barcelona with a group called I Seers and Claire Wilkins, and they're helping people withdraw from methadone with increasing doses of ibogaine. Bruno Rasmussen is this therapist, psychiatrist down in Brazil is doing work with ibogaine. So it's breaking through in different ways. But I think from the for-profit perspective, from for-profit pharmaceutical companies, these drugs are in the public domain. and the traditional pharma investors want drugs that they patent. So, MDMA was invented by Merck in 1912 and is in the public domain. LSD is in the public domain. Psilocybin is in the public domain. Ibogaine, so that's been a challenge is to find the resources. And then you have your classic pharma tricks where you try to patent this and that of what you've done to prevent other people from doing it, to justify your hundreds of millions that you got to put in to making them into a medicine so you can see both sides of it. So it's, it's a, I mean, one.

Of my questions I have is, you know, these, these compounds are extremely safe. You know, we see that, you know, solace, Melody, there's really no sort of lethal dose. There's not terrible side effects unless you have some very serious pre-existing psychosis like schizophrenia, you can kind of trigger things. But what's fascinating to me is that, is that despite that, you know, safety, they're now trying to come up with these new molecules that are altering the structure of function somehow. But we don't know what the side effects of those will be.

So they're saying, oh, they're going to.

Be shorter duration or it'll be this or that. And I think that worries me a little bit.

Yeah. So this gets back to where your earlier question about scaling, you know, and how do we make so, so that a lot of these for-profit companies are thinking, oh, yeah, the problem is that these experiences take longer and we got to squeeze it into the normal therapeutic model that we have, like to have an hour experience. Can we make a psilocybin experience? It's 15 minutes or something or, you know, but you can do that with, with 5 meo DMT or, or things that are shorter. But I think that this, there, there's this assumption that somehow shorter is better where I don't think that's true. And also, as you say, well, with the spice. So there was a whole lot of interest in, in cannabis alternatives, cannabis like molecules that wouldn't show up on drug tests. And there's been, you know, those are more dangerous than the cannabis itself. So a lot of times this search to get away from these tried and true things produce ones that are are technically legal, but they're more dangerous in many ways. We do know, I think it's possible to produce psilocybin-like molecules, MDMA-like molecules that are relatively comparably safe, I would say. But I do want to say that there's physiological safety and psychological safety. So, when we think about the psychedelics, I would say that MDMA is more physial and ibogaine are more physiologically challenging in certain ways. You can take MDMA in non-therapeutic settings. This doesn't happen in therapeutic settings, but you can dance all night, you can overheat, and people have died from hyperthermia. And sometimes people have drinking too much water as a harm reduction method, then they die from hyponatremia. So I would say that MDMA and ibogaine have more physiological challenges. Ibogaine has an impact on the heart that you have to be careful of, but that the classic psychedelics are safer physiologically. You won't overdose. You cannot overdose on psilocybin or let's see, but they're more challenging psychologically.

Yeah.

And so, I would say it's important for people to realize that you need a safe supportive context when you're dissolving your sense of self.

The set and setting, right?

Yeah, yeah, also from Timothy Leary so that we get back to. Now, there's another thing, talk about sustainability that I'll give credit to Timothy Leary for. So, what I'm talking about is the future of drug policy reform. One way to think about it is what's called licensed legalization. And so, if we think about alcohol, the way alcohol is regulated in our society, it's pretty light, right? You can go to a bar and you can get a bar fight. and you know, you get busted for that. But the next day you go back and you go back into the bar and you can buy alcohol, you go to a liquor store, you can be arrested for drunk driving and you could lose your driver's license, but you can still get alcohol in a bar or liquor store. So I think there should be a license to do drugs and that particularly for alcohol and other things and also for psychedelics and that the idea is that it's not that hard to get the license, but if you misbehave, you lose the license. and then it makes it a little bit harder and you have to do re-education or something like that. And it turns out that the person that proposed that was Timothy Leary.

Wow.

He talked about how it's like you need a pilot's license to drive a plane. Well, you should have a LSD license, you know, and it's similar to that. So he did have that kind of relatively conservative theory. And, and I think the one downside of it is that we don't trust our governments, and a lot of times there's changes in policies. And so, if you have a license, then there's a list of everybody that's got the license that the government has. Now, the government has so much information already, you know, they know your credit cards, they know, you know, what you're buying. If you go to a marijuana dispensary, they're, oh, you charge this marijuana dispensary. So, I do think that the future, I would say, would be licensed legalization of some kind, and that these second dollar clinics, would be a site of initiation. The idea is that you wanted to have a license for LSD or MDMA, you go to a clinic, you have it basically for free, paid for by all the taxes, and then you understand what it is, and if you don't have a terrible, terrible experience, then you get a license and you can go do it on your own. And that's the same way with driver's license. You have to drive in a car with an instructor making sure you know what you're doing before you get a.

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And, and this is, even at Harvard, even at Harvard.

Yeah, right.

Exactly. Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics at.

MGH, Massachusetts General Hospital. Which is really remarkable considering how marginalized these were. And I guess my question to you is how do you see traditional psychiatrists interacting with this information knowledge? Are they resistant? Are they excited? Are they open to it? I mean, I think we really are in a moment where psychiatry is really about to change. And it seems to be potentially a big threat to traditional psychiatric organizations.

Well, Max Planck, who was a physicist, the Planck constant is named after him. He had a saying that I have learned a lot from. And what he said is that science precedes funeral by funeral.

Yeah, yeah.

So you think science, they're the most open to continual inquiry. And the whole idea of science is you try to disprove hypotheses or to prove hypothesis. That even in science, people get entrenched ideas. And so for Max Planck to say science precedes funeral by funeral, you know, it's kind of a disappointing indictment.

Well, it's like, basically it just changes. It's hard to change paradigms and views, for sure.

Yeah.

So I would say that what we're seeing with traditional Psychiatry has been more openness than I would have anticipated. And I think that it's because a lot of the young generation of psychiatric residents and people in medical schools and Psychiatry, there's, they've grown up now over the last 20 years with more and more stories about the therapeutic value and the spiritual value of psychedelics. And they've grown very disillusioned. A lot of people have grown disillusioned with psychiatry, where, as I said before, you see a patient for 15 minutes, you adjust their medications, that's the way you maximize your income, but you're not really relating much on a human way with these patients. So I think that there's also an understanding among a lot of psychiatrists. We do a lot of work at the Veterans Administration also. We're starting. It took us like 30 years or.

So to get into the VA.

But you're a patient man, Rick. Well, you know, the resistance was great, and the only way to get through it was being patient. But that there are people that they've seen for 20 years or 30 years or 40 years since Vietnam that they're giving SSRIs to, and they're not getting better. So the same way, I think there's a sense in traditional Psychiatry that the tools that they have work for a bunch of people, but there's a large bunch of people that they are not helpful for. Yeah, well, that's exciting to hear. But one of the reasons why, when I say we do political science, not regular science, the reason I chose MDMA as the drug that I thought would make it through the system first, rather than psilocybin, let's say, or LSD, is because what we say is that the therapists who are working with the patients will be more effective if they've tried the drug themselves. And we don't say psychiatrists should get ECT, electroconvulsive therapy, if they should get psychoanalysis, right?

Yeah, but the ECT is the treatment.

Or you don't want a psychiatrist necessarily to take antipsychotic drug. But that's where the drug is the treatment. But in psychedelics, it's the therapy that's the treatment that the drug makes more effective. the human relationship. So, what we've said is that for therapists who are in our program, we have FDA protocols to give MDMA to therapists as part of their training. That's incredible. So, there is more resistance in traditional psychiatry to themselves doing LSD or psilocybin, more fear, more anxiety than there is to doing MDMA. So, but overall, I think that traditional psychiatry is warming up to psychedelics.

We're right now experiencing the psychedelic renaissance. and, and, and I literally just met this man who was the CEO of Sandoz, which is some big C Pharma company that, it's a European Pharma company that was actually the company that, that discovered LSD. One of the scientists here discovered LSD. And, and he now is going to be the chairman of maps, which is the multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. In other words, it's a, a scientific group that is looking in rigorous ways at the use of psychedelic medicine for healing trauma, PTSD, depression, for death, going through the process of dying, for healing all kinds of sexual trauma, everything from iboga to ayahuasca to psilocybin, to MDMA, to what they call the toad or 5-MEO. And there's so many of these kinds of medicines. and you've been doing this work for so long and I've done this work with you and it's been so helpful for me. And I think people are kind of maybe scared a bit, wondering about it, but I just met this man this weekend whose family, he was a Hungarian Jew and 150 of his family members died in the Holocaust. He says, I know every one of their names. I know every one of their names in Hebrew and I live in a constant state of trauma, of fear and anxiety and PTSD. and he's made it to adapt, but his biology is registering this. And I see it. He's, I've never really talked about this. You're the first person I've told this to. And I'm like, wow. And I think that the traumas that we have either from this life or ancestral life are actually real. And now we're understanding them. There was a beautiful article in Scientific American that talked about the biology of trauma that happens in past generations from Holocaust survivors. And now from the 9/11 women who are pregnant during 9/11 and their babies and offspring and what they experience. And, they're able to measure changes in cortisol and receptor function for trauma and stress responses. And, it's like now we're understanding that actually this is not just psychological but biological. So, can you talk us through how some of these plant medicines and these compounds from the ancient world that have been used for thousands of years in these cultures can be now brought into our psychiatric world and our emotional healing as well.

First, let me tell you the plus is that these plant medicines are extraordinary. They rewire the brain. They repair the damage that's been caused by trauma. Now, all of these plants work on the serotonin receptor, on the serotonin 1 receptor. So, the problem with the Western use of these plants is that we're trying to put them into a Western medical psychological context, and we're forgetting about the sacred. We're forgetting about the element of the sacred. And the second one is that we're not doing, when I was in the Amazon, for example, working with the shamans with the plant medicine, they would have me do a dieta, a diet. And when I looked at what the diet was, it was supplying the brain with the raw building blocks to repair the hippocampus. We know that the hippocampus, which is where you have, where you store memories, you have new experiences. The hippocampus is what allows you to wake up in the morning with the person you've been married to for 40 years and go, wow, who is this wonderful being I'm waking up with? And if your hippocampus is damaged, you're going to wake up and go, who is this person in my bed? Get him out of here. You cannot have a new experience. so what the Dieta of the shamans did was to repair the hippocampus with serotonin, with the DHA, with blueberries, with the plants that we know repair the hippocampus in six weeks. So this is the, what we, this, and we know that we know that DHA, breast milk, for example, is 40% DHA because a baby brain needs it to grow. DHA will trigger the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factors that increase your production of neurons. We have stem cells in the hippocampus that every day manufacture around 1500 neurons. If you step on the accelerator, you can manufacture many more because we have stem cells there. You switch on the production of stem cells and repair the hippocampus. and then you prepare the hardware to run the new software that's being offered to you by these plants. So the fallacy is that we're looking at these plants as chemicals and we're not including the context that we need to maximize their possibilities. But still we're getting tremendous benefits in and they will be approved very shortly for for PTSD, for a number of treatment of a number of diseases.

Well, you're saying just kind of blew me away, Alberto. I, I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just, I had an Insight when you were talking that, that I've never had before, which was that these compounds I always thought opened up your, your spiritual Consciousness, your, your psychological healing, your spiritual healing, but, but what you said just made me really aware that the compounds in these plants also heal the structure and the biology of your brain, not just the psychology. So it's like a, it's like a double benefit. And I'm like, holy cow, this is actually right. Because I, from a functional medicine perspective, I know that phytochemicals from the food we eat does this. But why wouldn't I think that the phytochemicals in these ancient psychedelic plants also do a rewiring. And I had a, I had a, I had back issues my whole life, and I recently had an injection in my back, and, and they used ketamine in the injection. I'm like, why are you using ketamine in the injection? Which, which is kind of a psychedelic dissociative drug. And they're like, well, it actually increases the neuroplasticity and neural connections and helps to grow new nerves and heal the nerves.

I'm Wow.

And so I think this is really what you're talking about.

Well, this is essential because we cannot separate the biology from the psychology or the spirituality anymore. We cannot bring, these sacred plants come from a very feminine shamanic tradition, and we're trying to use them in a very masculine patriarchal, reductionistic environment. And they still work. They're magical. They're fantastic. but we need to know the biology behind them. And all of these psychedelics are basically working on serotonin receptors. And if you have enough serotonin in your gut to support the repair of the brain structures, then you're gonna really get amazing benefits. So you gotta also change the diet and not just administer the ketamine or the psilocybin. We gotta learn to eat properly. You gotta, you gotta, you gotta support the body, gotta support the brain. But it, but now we can get the same results by increasing the endogenous production of serotonin, but much more slowly than you can, of course, when you give a mega dose of, of DMT or, or psilocybin. I was really lucky to have met Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD.

Yes, wow.

And actually we were in a meeting in Basel 40 years ago and we were invited to one of the neuroscientist rooms for an experience and everybody was being offered a mind altering substance, psilocybin, but then we get to Hoffman and Hoffman says, I don't do anything stronger than LSD. But the amazing thing, Mark, is that all of these, all of these substances, they're receptors in the brain for them. And the reason they're receptors is because the brain manufactures them endogenously. So the shaman say, okay, you had your experience with ayahuasca or with mushrooms, you know the pathways, you rewired the brain for bliss. Now let's support it with your diet, but even more than with your diet, with fasting. So go into a vision quest, supported with your fasting so that you can begin to produce these endogenously. And then you'll begin to repair your brain, repair your sleep, you'll begin to sleep better, you'll begin to lower your production of cortisol and adrenaline that's produced by the limbic brain, the ancient Neanderthal brain, and you'll be able to create health. And then you create health, then you take control of your health destiny. And so the important thing was to be sure you didn't get stuck in Jaguar, because eventually Jaguar medicine was designed to take you beyond death to an experience of the death of an old self and the birth of a new self. To me, that's literally the birth of Homo luminous that'll have even a new body, because you cannot just have a new psychological self without a new biological self. And then you had to bring it to hummingbird. What's your new life map? What's your new life journey about? I know you and I have been speaking about how what's our new life map now that we have done well in our fields, in our careers? How do we create a bigger vessel that's more sacred? And then you got to bring it up the eagle so that you awaken your vision of what you were born to do here in this life. What was your self-aggrandizing. We have too much of that. With deep humility, what is it that you came to be part of, a sacred dream that humanity has the opportunity to dream together at this time of great crisis?

Yeah, it's amazing, Alberto. I actually, I have a little bit of a different theory. I mean, all that you said about the four archetypes of animals, the serpent, hummingbird, eagle, and the jaguar are so important as a framework for understanding. It's all in your book, your new book, which I think everybody needs to get. It's really an extraordinary book, the Wisdom Wheel and Mythic Journey Through the Four Directions. But, you know what? I have a little bit of a different framework because as a doctor, and you mentioned this early on in the podcast, you said, Fisetin helps to kill the senescent or aging or zombie cells. Now, I'm thinking there's no endogenous pathway for strawberries, right? And so my theory is that we co-evolved with these plants and we use these molecules in our plants to activate different healing systems in our body and we just need to get back to that. And so yes, there may be certain things like that are natural receptors for opioids, right? For like morphine or for the endocannabinoid system. We actually name the system after marijuana. cannabis, endocannabinoids and stuff. The opioid receptors we call them. They're not, you know, they're not for opium poppies, right? But those are true. But there's so many of these phytochemicals and we don't naturally, I think, have all these. So there are these molecules that are in the plant world that now I'm sort of uncovering and you're uncovering the science is uncovering about how we actually can, these compounds turn on longevity switches, heal our bodies, heal our brains, repair us like Fisetin, for example, or Quercetin that you mentioned. These are just staples now in my diet and also in my supplement regimen. And so I kind of think, I call it symbiotic phytoadaptation. Like we've co-evolved symbiotically and adapted to eating these plants. And now because our diet sucks, we're not eating these plants. And that's why we see our health degrade, our psychological health, our physical health.

Our emotional health, our spiritual health, all degrading because we're not eating these plants or taking these plants. But yeah, let me jump in on that because polyphenols, polyphenols are part of the phytonutrient. There's a nutrient side and then we have the polyphenols that are the genetic switchers that begin to flip on the genes for health and silence the genes for disease. The polyphenols are produced by a plant as response to stress or to predators. So it's a defense system, the flavonoids, the quercetin, the fisetin, the plants are producing this and even the psychedelics. So I remember being in the high desert in Peru, working with shamans that worked with the San Pedro cactus, and they would stress the cactus, expose it to, you know, don't give it any water to stress it. The minute you stress it, it produces these protective or defensive polyphenols that when we ingest them, begin to switch on the genes for health, but also switch on the Nrf2 detox pathway. This is the pathway that activates the Nrf2 protein that's normally bound to the cell membrane. That are like the navy seals. When they're turned on, they migrate from the cell membrane to the nucleus and begin to again flip on the genes for health. The protective genes, you begin to produce glutathione again. Superoxide, the antioxidants that the body will shut down at age 35 because this is part of a legacy of a biological program that predestined us to die after reproduction. But that we have overridden with our longevity program at these three species. But it's still operant in us. So we kickstart the production of the antioxidants, so glutathione, superoxide, and suddenly we have this hormetic effect that's dose dependent, where we have this tremendous repair process that's triggered by these plants. And that the shamans identified the ones that, you know, we don't use the strawberries or the quercitins in the Amazon because they have other plants they use and we don't employ them here because we can't get them at the reliable dosages. But this symbiotic relationship that you talked about with the plants is extraordinary.

There's so much talk, Mark, about the psychedelic revitalization, right? And, you know, as someone who, you know, not only did I inhale, I liked it. In fact, I always say that, you know, it's interesting when we talk about these social transformations of our lifetime, the one ingredient that's always expunged from the record is the fact that millions of us lay prostrate before the gates of awe having taken a psychedelic. I mean, I wouldn't write the way I write. I wouldn't think the way I think. I wouldn't treat women the way I treat women. I wouldn't treat gay people or people of color the way I treat them or interact with them. I certainly wouldn't see the natural world as I do, and I wouldn't understand the nuances of cultural relativism and the real gifts of anthropology.

Yeah.

Had I not taken psychedelics, you know.

And this is one of the things that I think is way before they were now like in vogue. This is, you know.

Oh, no, I mean- 50 years ago. Yeah, 50 years ago. And, you know, when I first went to see Schultes in 1974, I knocked on his door. He was, you know, the great Amazonian explorer, you know, mentor of Andy Weil and Tim Plowman, who were like my big brothers at the time. And I just knocked on his door and I said, I've saved up money in a logging camp. I want to go to South America like you didn't collect plants. And at the time, people didn't even know where the Amazon was, right? and rather than ask me for my credentials, he just said, well, son, when do you want to go? And two weeks later, I was on my way. But before leaving, I remember he had one critical piece of advice. First of all, he said, don't bother with leather boots because all the snakes bite at the neck. And then he said, At the neck. At the neck. And he said, don't come back without trying ayahuasca. So this was back in 1974. So of course, I tried ayahuasca amongst other things. But my point is that much as I revere the role that psychedelics have played in the social transformations of our lifetime, and I probably come down on the side of Ram Dass as opposed to Tim Leary or George Harrison with Ram Dass, you know, get the message, hang up. I mean, I'm sort of in the school that, you know, I'm not sure how much psychedelics can teach us if you use them again and again and again. I'm not sure how much more there is to be learned. I tended to be some- They open.

The door you can see.

You walk through, you know. But that's just a matter of personal orientation and choice. I don't have any judgment on that. But I think that some of the expectations are a little inflated. I mean, I think that psilocybin can be very useful for end of life care, not to eliminate the fear of death, but to make it perhaps manageable or understandable or or whatever. I think that ecstasy can be terrific in couples therapy and post-traumatic stress and everything. But I think the most important of all these plants and the most important role they can play is in the most important healing journey of all, which is our relationship with the natural world. And certainly, you cannot take San Pedro cactus, the cactus of the four winds, a plant that's been used by human society since it sparked the first civilization in the Andes, Chavin, at 2500 before the Christian era. You cannot take that mescaline containing denizen of the northern Andes without having a more visceral, almost sensual connection to the natural world. So I think in that way psychedelics continued to be very, very powerful and potent medicines.

So not just for trauma, not just for healing. I mean, they create a template upon.

Which anything can happen. I mean, this is one of the, you know, I mean, I think Andy Weil, you know, said there's no such thing as good and bad drugs. There's good and bad ways of using drugs. And I think he also said, you know, these psychedelics just create a template upon which cultural forces and beliefs can go to work, you know? And of course, all the early pioneers spoke in those terms, set and setting, you know? set you bring the experience, the setting in which you take the substance. But, I'm definitely of the school that believes that these are true medicines.

Yeah, yeah, no, I've definitely had similar experience to you. It really shaped as a young man, my view of my relationship to myself, to the natural world, to the human culture that I lived in. And it really, you know, once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's sort of like, you know, I, I didn't take a course in biology till third year of university. And then I found Schultes and I found the Amazon. And I often look back and think how lucky I was that I found that. Because, I mean, it's kind of astonishing. You would never think that you could go through university and graduate if you didn't know the difference between a photograph and a painting. And yet we graduate students all the time who don't know the formula of synthesis, right? The fundamental formula of life. I mean, I don't think you should be able to run for political office if you don't know that formula. I mean, the very fact that carbon dioxide and water sparked by photons of light gives us carbohydrates, our food, and oxygen, our air. I mean, this is biblical verse, if you will.

It is. I mean, we are so intertwined and we think we're so separate. And if all the plants died on.

The planet, we'd be dead pretty quick. When I was at Harvard, I, the night that I actually figured out the Krebs cycle and photosynthesis and all the, all, you know, all the pathways, I just went berserk. I was like so ecstatic. I actually was rushing from student to student and kind of screaming at them in the library. Do you know how this worked? And I actually got escorted out by security. I think that's the only student ever kicked out of a library at Harvard for pure kind of intellectual ecstasy.

It's amazing. I think it reminds me of what Einstein said. He said, I'm not interested in the spectrum of this or that element. I'm interested in the thoughts of God, the rest are details. And what you're talking about when you talk about photosynthesis and the Krebs cycle.

How our mitochondria create energy from oxygen and food, there ain't one intertwined cycle. Well, it's so funny because Suzanne Simard is wonderful. She's at UBC and I remember when she first presented her work on mycelium, it was at a very obscure little gathering. No one seemed in the audience to grok how significant it was, but I went right up to her and I said, Suzanne, you're going to change the world. And she has. Around mycelium.

Mycelium in general, not psilocybin.

No, no, just her work in... Understanding the underground network. So we're understanding how plants work in very sophisticated ways. But I only say that because back in the 70s when we didn't know some of these things, a book came out called the Secret Life of Plants. that made a big deal about plants responding to Mozart and everything.

Yeah, I mean, they have 20 different senses. They have more senses than we do.

Well, at the time, Tim PloumAn, who was a great musician, great poet, and certainly a great botanist, he hated that book. He just hated it. And he used to say, why would a plant give a shit about Mozart? And even if it did, why should that impress us? They can eat light. Isn't that enough?

They can eat light, yeah. that's true. That's amazing. They transmute light into energy.

In other words, yeah, I mean, you know, I think biology is just so extraordinary and it's, you know, certainly I think how close I came to not studying it. I find it haunting. And ethnobotany was your PhD thesis, which is.

Well, you know, I, ethnobotany is more.

Of a description than an academic discipline. You know, it's, it's looking at the world through the lens of of plants, and particularly how people use plants and how plants are important to people. And basically what happened to me, I, you know, these things are so accidental, I mean how life unfolds. It's true.

Well, I call it Nostradamus God, not necessarily accidental. Coincidence.

Well, I was, you know, people say how did you end up going to Harvard? And well, the truth is I used to fight forest fires during Vietnam in our fire camps. I was and our fire camps were full of draft dodgers. And we were these obedient Canadian lads and one of these American draft dodgers would tell our bosses to piss off. It was irresistibly charismatic and one of them had the Life magazine with the Harvard student strike of 1969 on the COVID and I thought, well that's got to be the college to go to become cool like these Americans. So I applied, not really even knowing anything about it, I got in. and my parents didn't have the money to go to Boston from Vancouver, you know? So I got to Boston and I realized I'm Logan Airport with a big trunk. I don't know where Harvard is. And I saw this character with a Harvard t-shirt on and I thought, he's.

Got to know where it is. He didn't know either.

That was before GPS and Google Maps. I dragged my trunk through the subway, got to Harvard Square. It was crazy. And then I realized my mother had made a mistake and the dorms weren't open for a week, so I had no money. and I dragged my trunk until I hit a church, knocked on the door, and a pastor opened it up, and he kindly welcomed me. And I fell in love with America, but he was also a war resister, and his basement was full of kids about to flee to Canada. So I got completely caught up in the Underground Railroad. Totally radicalized. Spent my first year at Harvard making trouble, including the last university-wide student strike. And then the day to declare your major was the next day and I hadn't given it a thought. And I just by chance walked through the Peabody Museum of Ethnology for the first time. I came out in the light of spring, saw an acquaintance. I said, Stuart, what are you going to major? And he said, anthropology. And I said, what's that? And he said, well, you read about Indians and like, Forrest Gump. I said, that'll do. And that's how I signed on as a student. And then after two years of just reading about Indians and books, my roommate and I I wanted to live with native people. And we were in a cafe in Harvard Square. It's a true story. And there was a National Geographic map on the wall right beside us. And David looked at the map, looked at me, looked at the map, looked at me and he pointed to the High Arctic. Well, I had to go somewhere and I watched my left arm lift and it hit the northwest Amazon of Columbia. Had it landed in Italy, I might have become a Renaissance scholar. But having decided to go to the Amazon just on a whim, there was only one man to see, Richard Evans Schultes, a legendary botanical explorer who had sparked the psychedelic era with his discovery of the so-called magic mushrooms in Mexico in 1938. 1938.

Wow, so that had really been unknown to Western society before that?

Yeah, it was Schultes, I mean that's another great story. I mean Schultes was a young pre-med student from East Boston, His family didn't have the money to attend the dorms at Harvard. He took the course that had been taught for over 100 years at Harvard, Plants and Human Affairs.

Actually, I took that at Cornell. It was Plants and Humans. It was my favorite class.

But in this class, they used to get drunk all through prohibition because the professor disliked the government. But when it came to the plants that were then known as a Fantastica, They had to do a term paper or a book report. Schultes races to the back of the hall to get the thinnest book possible. He's got so much other homework and puts it in his satchel and goes back to East Boston. That night, botanical history was made because that book turned out to be the only monograph available in the English language that described the stunning pharmacological effects of peyote, Henry Kluver. Schultes read throughout the night of these visions of orb-like brilliance. And he went to his professor the next day and said, I have to know this plant. And that was the beginning of Schultes' quest. And that summer, he goes out to Oklahoma Territory, and four to five nights a week, takes peyote, and he comes back to Boston, a new man. And then he sets off on this mystery of Teonanacatl and Ololiuqui.

And that's the story right out of Indiana Jones.

So he didn't know there was psilocybin in Mexico. He went to Mexico. No, what happened is he was studying peyote, At the time, there was a prominent anthropologist at Smithsonian called Safford who said that this legendary teonanacatl, which in Nahuatl means the flesh of the gods, it was reported as a drug by the early Spanish chroniclers. But no one knew what the botanical source was.

Early Spanish chroniclers actually sort of experienced.

The... Well, we don't know if they experienced it, but they chronicled almost everything. They were very good observers, very good scientists. And they reported Teotihuacan as a sacred plant, right? And obviously the church was drawn to anything like that in order to destroy it, right? And Safford had maintained that Teotihuacan was in fact peyote, and Schultes didn't believe it, but he had no evidence until he was in the National Herbarium, found a plant specimen which had a note attached to it by obscure German engineer called BP Reiko addressed to the former director of the National Herbarium, a man called Dr. Rose. And the note said, Dear Dr. Rose, I understand your man Safford says Teuwen a Cottle is peyote. It's not. He's an idiot. It's a mushroom. I've seen it, yours sincerely. And so Schultes having just jumped off a Greyhound bus from Tulsa, leapt on another one from Mexico City and hooked up with Reiko, who turned out to be an ardent Nazi. And this is 1938, and together they move into the mountains of Oaxaca to Wautla, to the Mazatec community, and begin the search for Teonanácatl. Meanwhile, there was another team led by Bernard Bevan, who was British Secret Service, also looking for it. So in this kind of scenario, right out of Indiana Jones, you have these two sides looking for the origin of this ancient Aztec hallucinogen and Schultes was the first to collect specimens.

It seems like these cultures all around the world have used these plants.

No, actually, what's fascinating is that they don't use all these plants. What's really interesting is that of the 120 or more hallucinogens identified from nature, 95% of them are from the New World, not because the forests of Ecuador, West Africa or Southeast Asia are deep poprate, but people there had other roots to the divine. For example, in Equatorial West Africa, the manipulation of plant poisons, including using them in judicial tribunals as punishment, is one of the most ubiquitous traits of material culture. But with the exception of iboga, ibogaine, or the containing plant in the family. There are not many hallucinogens in Africa or in Southeast Asia. Most are found in the Americas because in the Americas, that's the vehicle to the divine. I mean, it's like the Haitians used to say to me in Haiti, you white people, church and speak about God and go to, I mean, I'm sorry, you white people go to church and speak about God. Indians eat their magic plants and speak to God. yeah, we dance in the temple and become God. The root of these plants is, you know, the use of these plants is firmly rooted in culture. So, in fact, that, that, that anomaly is really marked. You know, Siberia and the new world are basically where you find the vast majority of the hallucinogens.

Well, it seems that somehow the cultures have used these in a way that, that helped them actually stay connected to the world, to make meaning out of life, to do things which sort of seemed to be really foreign to most Westerners. And what really struck me, I mean, as a doctor who focuses on the role of food and plant compounds that regulate our biology for health, the medicine in plants is very diverse. And what you're talking about are these compounds that somehow we've been able to use to open our mindset, to change the way we think, to see our relationship to the world differently, to fill our place in nature. And, and, and I always wonder, how, how did that kind of get discovered? Or how to, actually, more importantly, how, how do we sort of make sense of the fact that these molecules work in our brains on these receptors that change the way we feel and think and see? Because, you know, Is it just an accident? Did we co-evolve with these things? Do we need them to wake up? Are they part of the things we need to actually thrive, like we need broccoli or we need... Well, you know.

I think humans are kind of innately curious. We're all natural philosophers. And I mean, one of the things that I find so fascinating is a question of how were these plants discovered? You know, particularly in something like ayahuasca, which is, of course, not a plant as much as a preparation. so if you think of ayahuasca, it's a combination of sort of the leaves of the nondescript shrub in the coffee family, Psychotria viridis, which is chock full of these powerful tryptamines, 5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine, dimethyltryptamine, and these tryptamines are orally inactive, right, because they're denatured by an enzyme found in the human stomach called monoamine oxidase. That's why tryptamines traditionally are snuffed or smoked or injected, I suppose. And if you think ethnographically, the Yanomami, for example, blowing up their noses, the powder they call ebene, the semen of the sun, they call it, derived from the blood red resin of several species in the genus Virola. Those powders are chock full of tryptamines, but they blow them up their nose specifically because tryptamines are orally inactive.

Yeah.

And they're very powerful. I think it was Dennis McKenna who said, you know, having that stuff blown up your nose, or maybe it was Terence who said it, you know, or maybe I said, I can't even remember. But anyways, like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with Baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity. I mean, it just creates a total. In fact, I used to, I did argue with Schultes that you couldn't really classify ibogaine as hallucinogenic because by the time you're under the influence, there was no one home. anymore to experience hallucinations, right?

Yeah.

But the death of the ego.

But the interesting thing is that the only way for these tryptamines to be taken orally is if they're taken in conjunction with some other compound that D-nature is the MAO in the human gut, which of course are beta-carbolines found in the Woody Leana, Banisteriopsis caapi, are MAO inhibitors of precisely the sort necessary to potentiate the tryptamines. Well, the really interesting question is not not just how that combines to create this powerful psychoactive substance, but where did that knowledge come from? In a floor of 80,000 species of vascular plants, because how did the indigenous people learn to combine these morphologically distinct denizens of the rainforest to create this biochemical version of the whole being created in the sum of the parts?

That's ayahuasca.

Ayahuasca, or yage, for the north. And of course, the only scientific explanation is trial and error, which statistically is quickly exposed as being a meaningless euphemism.

It'll kill you before you figure it out.

Well, it's not going to kill you. It's just that, I mean, 80,000 species, you're going one by one.

No.

And if you ask the indigenous people, as Schultes did in 1941 when he was with the Siona Sequoya, and he documented 17 folk varieties of the woody liana, all of which were referable to his Harvard-trained taxonomic eye as being the same species. and when he asked them about the nature of their classification, they kind of looked at him as if he was a fool because any real botanist knew that you took each one of the 17 on the night of a full moon and each of the 17 sang to you in a different key.

Yeah.

Well, that's not going to get you a PhD at Harvard in Plant Systematics, but it's a lot more interested in counting flower parts.

Yeah.

But it also speaks about a different way of knowing.

You know, a different way of knowing.

You know, that, when I was doing the work in Haiti, this was a really important thing for me to try to understand. I was sent to Haiti to find the drugs used to make zombies. Well, no drug can make a social phenomena. We did believe that a drug could bring on a state of apparent death so profound, that it could fool a physician, in which case that drug could have some medical potential possibly. But when it came time to really understanding what a zombie was, it was a cultural phenomenon. And you had to distinguish the reaction, for example, hypothetically, to a dose of tetradotoxin, this very powerful neurotoxin that brings on peripheral paralysis, dramatically low metabolic rates, consciousness is retained until the moment of death and so on. And one of the things that allowed me to sort of take the zombie thing from the phantasmagoric to the plausible was the identification in Haiti in the folk preparations that were known as the zombies cucumber, not the zombies, the poudre zombie, rather, zombies cucumber was the antidote. the consistent ingredient was a marine fish in this order of fish, the tetrodotoxin, which does have tetrahydrotoxin. So they're blowfish and it's the fugu toxin. It's a fugu, the same as fugu. And because there was this huge literature because of the use of the fish in Japanese cuisine and also people dying in survival conditions and so on, we knew exactly what tetrodotoxin did to someone. And in Japan, there were actually cases, In many cases, people nailed into their coffins by mistake and in Hokkaido, you're actually laid by your grave to make sure you're really dead.

Because if you don't prepare the blowfish properly in a restaurant or at home, you could end up dead.

Well, no, it's not that. That's a bit of a Calvinist interpretation of what's going on in Japan. If it was simply a matter of these specially licensed chefs eliminating all of the toxin, why would anyone bother? There's lots of fish in the seas of Japan that you don't have to go through that effort to eat.

I've had blowfish. You can feel it on your tongue.

Well, but the real role of those specially trained chefs is not to eliminate the toxin, it's to reduce the amount of toxins so that the connoisseur still enjoys a pleasant after effects of a mild intoxication, which can be euphoria, flushing sensations up and down the body. And it's really one of the a substance that kind of walks the line between food and drug. But the point is that a victim of tetrodotoxication in Japan, nailed in their coffin, if they're lucky enough to survive, they say, oh, that was really terrible. I ate the fish. It was too badly prepared. I'm glad to be alive. End of story. But someone raised within the worldview of the Haitian zombie knows what a zombie is, why a zombie is created. And when he or she suffers that same condition, it becomes a template for all these belief systems who go to work. So you really had to understand the psychology of what a zombie was and the sociology of what it implied to realize how it was, in fact.

A.

Fate deemed by the people to be worse than death. Yeah.

Well, you know, I just want to sort of loop back. This zombie story is very interesting. And I read the book Serpent in the Rainbow. It's a great read for people who want to understand how this all works. But you mentioned about the sort of the infinite variety of plants in the rainforest and how these ancient shamans were able to figure out how to combine the plants to activate the ingredients and make them absorbable and actually create the visions and the transformations that people experience with ayahuasca. and I was down in Peru and sort of on the border of Bolivia and we were in the Amazon jungle on the beach and it was way up some tributary, no electricity, nothing. And there was an ayahuasca shaman who was named Panduro who's now died. But I asked him, how did he figure out that these plants could go together? It's not trial and error, it was something else. He says, well, the plants told him. plants spoke to us. And so my question too is, are human beings capable of this kind of communication with nature? And is it really a true story or is he just sort of making it up?

It's very difficult to know what is, I mean, it's obviously at one level it's a metaphor because plants literally don't speak. We know that. On the other hand, if we go back to this fundamental revelation that all human beings share the same genius, right? Okay, imagine if every scientist you've ever heard of in the West had spent their entire lifetime, all of them, trying to understand Central Park. The plants, the birds, the soils, the relationships, all of that human genius had come together just for that purpose. I think we know Central Park pretty well, don't you?

Yeah, you bet, yeah.

Well, these people of the forest are exactly that. They're true natural philosophers, you know, who are using all of our human genius to understand a world upon which their lives depend. So they have that same adaptive imperative that we do. And once you, once you can truly understand that and accept that, then in a way, it doesn't come as that much of a surprise that with all of the human genius that they share together with the kind of the perspicacity of their attention to the world around them, that you would have these kinds of observations, experimentation, you know, deductions and results, you know. And I think also informed by.

Some.

Of these experiences that take them outside of the rational, in a sense, in the best sense of the word. I mean, the psychedelic experience, I think, is its own teacher to society.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

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