Psychedelics Today

In this episode, Joe interviews Ryan and Rory of Cultivating Connections, a Vermont-based nonprofit and podcast dedicated to fostering deeper connections between themselves and the members of their ritual, as well as promoting the idea of intentioned rituals, answering questions and giving advice on creating your own ritual, and eventually, hosting larger group rituals. They talk about how Ryan's depression and Rory's heroin and crack addiction (and eventual overdose) and experience with ayahuasca led them to realize that their biggest problem was disconnection, and through sharing a joint in the woods and talking openly, they realized they could help each other by continuing to embrace that connection with each other. They discuss the weekly ritual that blossomed from that: the different things they've tried, the specific details of what they do, and the big moments that made them believe that what they were doing was helping them grow and change.  While they admit that they wouldn't be where they are today

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle sit down and discuss some very scientific (read: hard to understand) articles. First, they talk about one on Salvinorin A and its interactions with a different receptor than other psychedelics (kappa opioid receptors) and what that could mean, and a related article from Wired- a first-hand account of taking salvia as part of a brain-imaging study at Johns Hopkins University. The biggest takeaway from these can be summed up in researcher Manoj Doss's closing quote: "Not only does this tell me how little we understand psychedelics, it also tells me how little we understand how to study them.” They then review a recent double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study on LSD, which showed results we expect to see, but the full details haven't been released yet. This leads to a discussion about intergenerational trauma and researchers finding that children of Holocaust survivors often display more trauma-related behavior than their parents, commonality between

In this episode, Kyle interviews Doctor of Psychology, faculty member at Esalen Institute, Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Dharma teacher, and former Buddhist monk, Dr. Michael Sapiro. Sapiro talks about his recent travel pilgrimage to the northeast US, living in a camper with his dog and spending a lot of time in the woods working on himself and his connection with others. He talks about the "ways of knowing" that is taught at Esalen Institute, where people ask their cognitive brain about an important decision, then ask their body, their intuition, and even their ancestors and/or spirit guides, paying attention to their reaction to each interaction. He talks about methods to deal with body reactions, breathwork, the importance of self-talk, metaphors, cutting karma so you aren't perpetuating old ancestral wounds, the concept of post-traumatic growth, the difference between selfishness and self-focus, and knowing when to be passively working on yourself or actively engaging with and helping others

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle sit down and discuss a recent segment on CNN highlighting Brian Muraresku's book, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name, about the role psychedelics have likely played in the origin of religion and western civilization. They talk about psychedelics throughout history, like the Eleusinian Mysteries, soma use in Hindu scriptures, therianthropy and the idea of psychedelics leading towards these human-animal hybrid visions, and even the idea that Moses was huffing acacia or some other type of mind-altering plant available in that area at the time. Does it matter to the movement if all of this is historically accurate? And why do we romanticize ancient psychedelic use so much? They then spend some time on a very important but unpleasant topic: accountability for misconduct in the psychedelic space. With no well-known Yelp-like website to review facilitators or retreat centers, and abuse (or at least unethical relationships) seeming

In this episode, Joe speaks with Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine, Psychiatrist (specializing in the treatment of OCD), and Psychedelics Today Advisory Board member, Dr. Matt Brown. Brown talks about osteopathic medicine and his thoughts on energy: how the principle of osteopathic medicine is that "mind, body, spirit" and the things we interact with contribute to what makes up a person, and by shifting things within each body system (neurological or respiratory, for example), change can be made, just like the way small postural shifts can lead to a decrease in pain or anxiety and how smiling can fool your brain into feeling happier. With bodywork emerging as such a powerful tool and breathwork facilitators learning interventions to help clients work through stuck energy, there is clearly a huge connection between the different energies in our bodies and how they affect us, but how much do we really perceive these shifts, and how do we measure these energies and create usable data out of it all?   They also disc

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle sit down and discuss several items in the news, including Mark Zuckerberg donating $500,000 towards Oregon's Measure 110, national psychiatric associations coming out as in opposition to Oregon's measure 109 due to concerns over medical treatment being determined via a ballot iniative, voters in Mississippi being able to vote on medical cannabis and voters in Arizona, Montana, South Dakota and New Jersey being able to vote on legalization measures (with polling data showing 65% of New Jersey voters likely in favor), Denver's Kole Milner offially pleading guilty in his ongoing psilocybin investigation, a recent study looking into the effects of chronic THC exposure on the 5-HT2A receptors typically studied more with psychedelics and the question on if cannabis is psychedelic or not, the University of Toronto joining forces with Sansero Life Sciences to study the effects of microdosing and smaller doses of psilocybin, NYU Langone teaming up with MindMed to sta

In this episode, Joe interviews environmental and cultural activist, founder of advocacy group Cosmic Sister, and purveyor of psychedelic feminism, Zoe Helene.  In this very open and free-form conversation, Zoe discusses her past corporate life in a male-dominated high tech world leading to a major change in her life and the creation of Cosmic Sister, the concepts of othering people and ableism, the importance of Michael Pollan's concept of coevolution/coextinction, how psychedelics potentiate identity-fluidity (most seen in gender-fluidity), how people usually talk about ayahuasca retreats damaging communities but rarely talk about the ways they benefit Indigenous people, the way Americans have a very fleeting, media-controlled attention span on social issues, how living in a patriarchy affects everyone, and how most men don't think about the ways it affects them. They spend a lot of time talking about ancestry and colonization: the Mycenean and Minoan civilizations and their use of plant medicines, the trib

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle sit down and dissect 3 recent items in the news. First, they discuss a 2-year study on 18 older long-term AIDS survivors (OLTAS) with a high degree of demoralization and trauma, in which participants underwent 3 hours of individual psychotherapy, one 8 hour psilocybin session, and 12-15 hours of group therapy. While the study predictably showed improvement in demoralization after a 3-month follow-up, the bigger takeaway is the effectiveness of group therapy and the ability to replace hours of individual therapy, (in this case) cutting therapist time almost in half. With many people struggling to connect with facilitators but finding connection in groups, could group therapy work better to help with healing while also cutting costs? This brings up the concept of AI therapy and what improvements we could see by adding technology to this fairly established clinical model, both in cost and effectiveness. They next talk about Decriminalize Nature Oregon groups ur

In this episode, Joe interviews Del Jolly: co-founder and Director of psychedelic research nonprofit Unlimited Sciences, previous Business Development Manager at Charlotte's Web, previous Outreach Director for Decriminalize Denver, and member of the Board of Advisors for cannabis nonprofit, The Realm of Caring. Jolly talks about his path to Unlimited Sciences and its purpose: to collect as much data as possible through an observational research study through Johns Hopkins University, where participants are asked to provide as many details as possible about their psilocybin use. Like "Cannabis moms" Heather Jackson and Paige Figy collecting years of data from cannabis users through The Realm of Caring, Unlimited Sciences aims to do the same with psilocybin. They want data from recreational users as well, and they want to know where these users are, since location often establishes comfort levels (think about how much more relaxed someone would be in a decriminalized area like Denver vs. a country where you cou

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle sit down and discuss recent items in the news. They first discuss an update to last week's Michigan story: that this week, the Ann Arbor city council unanimously voted to decriminalize entheogenic plants. While this is great progress, remember that these substances are still illegal- just decriminalized, and as the saying goes: don't be the low-hanging fruit. This brings up the concept of likening the ability to get these substances to earning (and keeping) a driver's license, and the idea of temporary autonomous zones.  Next, they talk about the formation of a global group called the Psychedelic Medicine Association (PMA), formed to bridge the gap between the medical establishment, patients, and the industry in general. While there are already organizations doing this to an extent (like the very website you're on right now), most doctors don't have the time needed to really dive in, and shorter sound bites or articles vetted by those in the know could be ve

In this episode, Joe interviews shaman, motivational speaker, author, minister, and healer, Vanessa LeMaistre.  LeMaistre talks about her path towards shamanism: from being told she was different as a child, to traveling to India at 25 and falling in love with yoga and meditating on the Ganges river, to a tarot card reading inspiring her to earn her Master's degree at Naropa University, to trying coca for the first time (without realizing ahead of time that that's what she'd be doing), to training with Michael Harner. Ultimately, what led her towards accepting her fate as a shaman was both healing from the devastating death of her infant son, Kamden, due to a very rare disease, and numerous ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru, where shamans told her that her ancestors were calling to her. She talks about living with the odd uncertainty of feeling like she should become a shaman, tarot card readers, a neighbor at an ayahuasca ceremony's entity attachment and her interest in getting into entity extraction, her connect

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle discuss recent items in the news and dive into cannabis-assisted psychotherapy after Joe recently helped with his first session. They discuss Compass Pathways' projection that their upcoming stock price could be $14-$16 a share, giving them a possible valuation of as much as $544 million and the problem of having Peter Thiel as one of their leading investors, as it has recently come to surface that he met with white nationalists in 2016 and had good things to say about them. This, in addition to his concerning data-mining company, Palantir Technologies, soon going public puts a lot of the wrong attention and bad press on Compass Pathways. They talk about UC Berkeley launching a new center for psychedelic science and education with Michael Pollan as one of the co-founders, Decriminalize Nature Ann Arbor putting forth to the city council a resolution to decriminalize entheogenic substances on September 21st, and progress in Washington D.C. and Chicago's decrim

In this episode, Joe interviews Ash: Netherlands-based psychedelic entrepreneur with his hands in many psychedelic spaces- drug manufacturing company Synergy Trading, nootropics company Cerebra Nootropics, and podcast, Shifty Perspective.   Ash talks about his path from trying San Pedro on a farm, to trying DMT and living on the road and in squats for years, to moving to Belgium from the UK, to finding his way into the world of CBD after a friend recommended it for his epileptic girlfriend at the time. When she went from 12 seizures a day to none within a month of starting regular CBD use, he started a CBD company to sell to consumers at much cheaper prices than had been established, as well as to provide CBD for researchers. He eventually moved to the Netherlands and started a nootropics company, which has started manufacturing Micro1p, the world's first legal lysergamide microdosing product, which uses LSD's active ingredient (available only through their website, and only to specified countries (the U.S. i

In today's Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle discuss several recent items in the news that further the advancement of psychedelics, including: Canadian company Havn Lifescience following Compass Pathways' lead and registering with the Canadian Securities Exchange under the symbol HAVN, Amsterdam-based psychedelic retreat company Synthesis announcing that leading Clinical Psychologist Dr. Rosalind Watts has joined their advisory board (which also includes Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, who joined in November), European psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy company AWAKN Life Sciences Inc. announcing the launch of its Commercial Clinical Research Division with Professor David Nutt and (past Psychedelics Today guest) Dr. Ben Sessa at the helm, a recent study at the National Center for Biotechnology Information that further proved that psychedelics promote structural and functional neural plasticity, and a new app called "Trip" from Field Trip Psychedelics Inc., which was designed to help people through psychedeli

In this episode, Joe interviews Wade Davis: Ph.D., Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, explorer, ethnobotanist, star of the recent documentary, "El Sendero de la Anaconda," and author of several books, including  bestseller The Serpent and the Rainbow, which was optioned for a movie, starring Bill Pullman and released by Universal Pictures in 1988. His new book, Magdalena: River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia, comes out on September 15th.  Wade discusses his history with Richard Evans Schultes, the strange phenomenon behind the growth of ayahuasca compared to other more benign plants, how set and setting can shift expectations across generations, how Indigenous people treat plant medicines in comparison to the western world, the difference between ayahuasca and yagé, Haitian zombies, Voodoo, and the mystery of how Indigenous people have been able to identify plants and learn of their combined effects through the plants speaking to them. He also speaks about his hatred of cocaine a

In today's Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle discuss recent items in the news. They cover a new LSD microdose trial to study the effects of 5, 10, or 20 µg on acute pain, seeing how long participants could hold their hands in 37.4° F water. Led by researchers from Maastricht University with help from the Beckley Foundation, this is the first study of its kind since Eric Kast first studied the effects of LSD on acute pain in the 1960s, and could help lead to LSD being prescribed for acute pain over the more standard and very addictive and dangerous opioids. This leads towards the topic of pain in general and our relationship with it- can we figure out how to have pain not affect us the same way by not giving it the same attention we're used to giving it? They talk about Compass Pathways filing an application with the SEC for a NASDAQ listing, as well as already raising over $80 million towards funding clinical trials for psilocybin-based therapy for treatment-resistant depression, and the ways corporati

In this episode, Joe and Kyle interview Sara Reed, MS, LMFT, creator of Mind's Eye Health Solutions, and Director of Psychedelic Services at the Behavioral Wellness Clinic in Connecticut. Reed talks about her path to psychedelics- from graduating with a masters in emerging family therapy and wanting to do research specifically with black Americans, to working with Dr. Monica Williams and eventually MAPS, to being selected as one of the therapists for a phase 3 MDMA-assisted psychotherapy trial (which focused on people of color), to making the transition from practicing with MDMA to ketamine based mostly on one woman with racial trauma and her amazing transformation through ketamine-assisted therapy.  They talk about her process and practice, from the screening process to building relationships and rapport, trying to determine if ketamine is the right path, what dosing she prefers, and setting expectations; to the post-session check-ins and integration, how she practices everything through a cultural lens and

In today's Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle have, in Joe's words, "a wildly rambling show." They cover topics in the news, including MAPS' recent completion of their Capstone Campaign, a non-profit fundraising effort to fund the final research required to seek FDA approval of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy (through which they raised $30 million from several high-profile names), MindMed's new LSD-MDMA "candy flipping" phase 1 trial set to commence later this year, Representative Earl Blumenauer's (D-OR) fundraising efforts for legal psilocybin and Oregon's ballot initiative becoming a measure that people can vote on in November, and the Usona Institute resuming their previously COVID-halted psilocybin studies. They then talk about a lot of different things: how to achieve psychedelic states without plants or drugs, Grof's conclusions from 5000 sessions with clients, the dangers of Jim Jones-esque hero worship within communities, the seldom talked about global sacredness of tobacco, how big money coming in

In this episode, Joe interviews Dr. LaMisha Hill, licensed Counseling Psychologist, board member of the Alameda County Psychological Association, and Director of Multicultural Affairs for the Office of Diversity and Outreach at the University of California, San Francisco. Hill talks about how race and gender of underrepresented people come into play in the psychedelic sphere- in studies, professions, and even in people's consideration of psychedelics as a possible healer for them: how most psychology follows the same well-worn, Euro-centric, fairly western, mostly-for-well-off-college-students paradigm, how even when culture and history are added later on, it's never the center of it, how ignorance (or flat out erasing) of history leads to entire groups of people feeling that they're not welcome in this world, how classicism is a much bigger problem than people make it out to be, and how to most people, there is a certain image that comes to mind when PTSD and trauma are discussed, and it rarely includes hist

In today's Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle sit down and discuss recent items in the news, including the passing of Tav Sparks; author, therapist, co-director of Grof Transpersonal Training, and creator of "Movie Yoga," and scientist Jordi Riba; one of the early pioneers of ayahuasca research and one of the first ever to bring it into the lab.  They discuss the ayahuasca episode of the new Netflix docuseries "Unwell," and 2 articles from Marijuana Moment: psychedelic activists in Oakland creating a guideline for plant medicine healing ceremonies and the new initiative to allow for legal use in controlled settings, and 4 state attorney generals and 50 current and former law enforcement officials sending a letter to Congress endorsing a federal marijuana legalization bill after a recent poll showed that 62% of likely voters support it. As Joe says, "It's about time... 20 years ago." And lastly, they discuss Bright Minds Biosciences' recent tweet claiming that the future is in what they're working on: mo