Tripping through Time, Psychedelic Medicine's Past and the Promising Paths Ahead, with Dr. Dave Smith

In this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Dr. David Smith about the history and future of psychedelic medicine. He will discuss early research on psychedelics (including experiments the CIA ran), the potential health benefits and disorders they may treat, any potential side effects we should worry about, the current state of research, and why he remains cautiously optimistic. (You'll also hear about some of your favorite bands and how their contributions kept some of the earliest clinics open.)
 
Dr. David Smith is one of the founders of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics, founded in 1967 during the Summer of Love. He is a recognized national leader in the treatment of addictive disease and the psychopharmacology of drugs. Now in his eighties, he continues to serve as medical director for several medical centers and is chair of addiction medicine for a residential center for teens with substance abuse. He is a diplomat of the American Board of Addiction Medicine and the California Society of Addiction Medicine and founding editor of the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Causes or Cures Podcast, your gateway to understanding health and groundbreaking medical research in a fun and easy to understand way. With Dr. Eeks as your host, join us as we sit down with the world's leading doctors and scientists to unravel the mysteries of health. From practical tips on well-being to the latest breakthroughs in medical research, we cover it all. Don't forget to subscribe. Now, let's ignite our curiosity and together dive into today's episode.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Hi everyone, and welcome to this episode of Causes or Cures. I'm Dr. Eeks, your host. Thanks so much for joining in. I hope you guys are doing okay. So, there's been a lot of chatter in the news and on social media about the use of psychedelics as medicine, particularly for mental health-related issues like PTS and depression. My guest today is Dr. David Smith, who is going to discuss the history of psychedelic medicine, research on these drugs, including the experiments the CIA ran for their interest, and what's happening today. What's so great about Dr. Smith is that he's been there from the beginning. So he is a tremendous source on this topic. He's also going to discuss the potential medical benefits of psychedelics, any risks, things we have to worry about, and why he's cautiously optimistic. And you will also hear how some of your favorite bands and my favorite bands helped fuel this psychedelic medicine revolution. Dr. Smith is one of the founders of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics, founded in 1967 during the summer of love. He is recognized as a national leader in the treatment of addictive diseases and the psychopharmacology of drugs. He is the medical director for several medical centers, chair of addiction medicine for a residential center for teens with substance abuse issues in California. He is a diplomat of the American Board of Addiction Medicine. And he is also past president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine and the California Society of Addiction Medicine. And also the founding editor of the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs. So he really knows a lot on this topic. I hope you guys learn a few things. And let's connect to Dr. Smith. One second. So on the line, we have Dr. David Smith, but we're going to call you Dr. Dave. Thanks so much for joining us on causes or cures today. This is an exciting topic for me, the potential of psychedelic medicine. But first, can you tell us a little bit more about you and the work you do?

SPEAKER_03 2:56

Thank you. My name is David Smith. I'm a physician with a specialty in addiction medicine. I'm here in the Hayde Ashbury District of San Francisco near UCSF Med School, where they have, where I went to medical school and where they have a psilocybin research center doing some of the cutting-edge work on psychedelics and therapeutic purposes. I founded the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics in June of 1967 during the Summer of Love. In my training at UCSF, I was deeply involved in psychopharmacology and clinical toxicology. The early phases of my career revolved around the study of psychedelics in both human and animal models. When the Summer of Love hit, it shifted to focus over dealing with bad trips and the long-term negative consequences of psychedelics. However, I found that there was a lot of misinformation and overstatement of the dangers. At the present time, I'm a retired adjunct professor at UCSF Med School.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

Okay. So I read your paper, The The Potential of Psychedelic Medicine, a personal account. And you write about researching various psychedelics in the 1960s at UCSF on humans and animals. And, you know, I'm going to ask you to talk more about that research, but you know, some people may not even know what the term psychedelic means, where it's kind of like a trendy term. So I thought, could we start there from your perspective as an addiction specialist? What does psychedelic mean?

SPEAKER_03 4:50

Psychedelic refer to a unique class of psychoactive chemical compounds that act through a specific receptor in the brain. That receptor is on the serotonin receptor. It's called the 5HD2A receptor, serotonin receptor agonist. It produces a profound alteration in light vision, removes barriers to incoming sensory stimuli, and produces a major alteration in the perception of yourself and your environment. That alteration in perception can be used for medical purposes, and that's what psychedelic medicine is. Psychedelic medicine is the application of this class of chemical compounds to deal with various mental health conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder, refractory depression, end-of-life existential distress, and substance abuse disorders. That's what psychedelic medicine is. Psychedelics have been used for centuries for ceremonial purposes in the indigenous cultures, and have been used for spiritual enhancement. The reason I talk about that in that sense is this has been talked about for millennia, but now the studies are coming along and documenting it. They have scales that measure uh spiritual enhancement. This is these end-of-life studies where the individuals have enhanced uh spiritual enhancement on scales, decrease in existential distress with uh depression. You can measure it equal to, in some cases superior to, classic antidepressant medications. One of the reasons this is being studied in such a way is there's so much you know fluff out there. As you mentioned, it's become the popular term. Uh, there's a this article on uh in Harper magazines, Moms on Mushrooms. I'm not opposed to that, but that's kind of the fluff that gives this area. That's why people are suspicious of it. In other words, in medicine and science, we have to prove our point, and we have to apply it to conditions for which other treatments have not been as effective.

SPEAKER_01 7:43

Moms on mushrooms and the and psychedelics can or they get a bad rap, and in medicine and science, you have to prove things.

SPEAKER_03 7:51

Yes. I moms on mushrooms can take it and it improves the quality of their life, and you don't have adverse effects. Uh, I'm not opposed to that. But what I'm saying is that we're not going to get it rescheduled from Schedule One in so that it can be used therapeutically for the large number of people that could benefit from it by moms on mushrooms. We're going to have to have sound guidelines. Uh, that's what we're doing here at our center. The guidelines are preparation. You have to have a lot of preparation. You have to know exactly the dosage, you have to know uh why you're taking it. And uh our guides emphasize, as does the literature, stuff will come up that you had no idea. That's the intergenerational trauma. You may take it for uh PTSD, and then coming bubbling up out of that primitive area of their brain calls intergenerational trauma or trauma that's repressed. It turns out the thinking part of the mind, what we're talking to now, only remembers 15%. The body remembers 100%. And a lot of these conditions are because of unresolved trauma. And if you delve deep into these primitive areas, the brains where psychedelics act on the default mode neural network and rewire that area of the brain and open it all up, out come from trauma and memories that you really had never dealt with, and you really didn't even know were there, and that's not why you took it. So, but they found interestingly enough, we have some of our what we call adopters that are psychonauts that that are like, for example, a burning man. And individuals take a psychedelic for to so they can enhance the enjoyment of burning man, and then they freak out. Okay, that's a bad trip. But they've sat with them, and it turns a bad trip into a good trip because they didn't take it to have a bad trip or deal with trauma, they just took to enhance their recreational experience. That's why the integration is so crucial. And then some of the follow-up uh is found that well, I took it at Burning Man, but the insights that I got were very different than why I did it. We found out at our clinic, too. We had individuals would take it at a Grateful Dead concert, have a bad trip, come in, we talk down the bad trip and find out the what was happening is that unresolved trauma, what was being mobilized, but that's not why they took it. So when you take this class of compounds, they're not addicting, but you have to be very careful with them because stuff can come up that you're not prepared to deal with. I'm not opposed to recreational use, but I think the recreational use without preparation and without integration is what's given these compounds uh a bad name in the broader political and legal world.

SPEAKER_01 11:08

Right, right. That makes sense. And I think that would be scary for the person too, if they're not prepared for such a bad trip and not knowing what to do. When you were doing early research on this, what were some of the research questions you were hoping to answer?

SPEAKER_03 11:27

Well, initially I was studying the pharmacology, how it interacts in the brain. They just had bicycle day here on uh April 19th, and that was the day that Albert Hoffman accidentally discovered LSD. He accidentally synthesized it, but he had no idea it was so powerful. Uh, and he had the first recorded LSD experience riding his bicycle up in Basel, Switzerland. So that is bicycle day marks the day that it was discovered. It was an amazing discovery because prior to that, medicine viewed the brain as like an organ, like the pancreas. It had different sections, uh, different components, but it had no idea of the potency of this neuroelectrical wiring. So the idea that microdoses of a drug could produce profound alteration in vision and sensory perception. One of the things that it does is produce this phenomenon called synesthesia, which one sensory modality is translated into another, was very profound. That began the era of psychopharmacology because the LSD molecule interacts similar to serotonin. And that was what began the discovery of antidepressants. So that was the part that I was really interested in, and there was a lot of research going on at UCSF, uh, was right in the center of that area of psychopharmacology, it had professors that were outstanding. That was the part that I was very interested in and involved in. And then there was the whole issue of its toxicity, the negative part. And that's when I began doing animal experiments to see what the dosage was in terms of the toxic effects, and I would compare it to a compound like methamphetamine. And methamphetamine was much more toxic to the animal than was the psychedelics we studied. Then the Hayed Ashberry counterculture hit, and there was all the use of psychedelics, and we had these uh bad trip centers where we would talk people down, and then that deteriorated into the first speed scene. We coined the term speed freaks for the severe toxicity of methamphetamine. And uh I published an article in 1968 entitled Speed Freaks versus Acid Heads. We found that you had one component of our clinic. This is all in the on Clayton Street, very small area, but uh addiction was a crime then. We actually, that was the only place where you had a community-based outpatient program for the treatment of addictions, not like it is now, where there's treatment programs all over the place. There was no treatment then because addiction was a crime, and addicts were guilty of aiding and abetting a felony on an outpatient basis. So it was all contained into this small area. So at 558 Clayton Street was our top-down center for the bad trips. Uh, four on Clayton was the center for methamphetamine addiction, uh, because they became psychotic and violent. And then the heroin hit, and we set up 529 Clayton Street for the heroin addiction, which is very different, the dependence and withdrawal. So we had these kind of these three centers all within a block and a half of each other. Uh the Bad Trip Center, the medical park, the speed center, for the psychotic violence, and the heroin detox. And they all had to be medically evaluated because that's kind of the reason they came in and then assigned to the follow-up care. So that was the human clinical part. And of course, that's all changed dramatically now. And this latter stage of my career, uh, I'm focusing back on the therapeutic aspects of psychedelics. It's called the third psychedelic revolution. And it's appearing in the popular press, Michael Pollan's book. Um and it's starting to hit the popular press.

SPEAKER_02 16:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 16:19

So the general public is becoming educated about it, and of course, that will shift the paradigm.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

Right.

SPEAKER_03 16:25

If you get the general public understanding this, then it's gonna shift public attitude. It shifts public attitude, and you have good clinical studies, then hopefully the lawmakers will be scheduled from Schedule One. Because around here, there's a lot of this going on, psychedelic therapy underground, outside the university. When I say underground in the hate ashbury, it's about six inches underground. I mean, there's psychedelic therapists all over the place, they grow the mushrooms in the park, da-da-da-da-da-da. But it's still underground. And a large number of people in the dominant culture don't understand the drug culture, don't want to interact with it, they don't want to go into that world and they need it. And what they should be able to do is to go to a legal psychedelic center, see an appropriate therapist, be evaluated, get a known dosage, have preparation, treatment, and follow-up. It should be overground for the large numbers of people that need it but are very negative towards the drug culture. In other words, this psychedelic medication should be viewed as medication. And you don't have to go into the illegal world of the underground to get an antidepressant, but you do if you want to get a psychedelic because it's Schedule One. Now, there's a bill in front of the legislature now called uh SB 519, the Wiener bill, that would provide a safety net for qualified therapists that are using psychedelic medicine. I know that many of our psychedelic therapists are very reluctant to be public about this because they're afraid that the medical board will come down, law enforcement will decide to do something. If you're doing this legitimately, then it should be viewed as the legitimate practice of medicine. And all the research, uh, that's what I said in my article. This is the new frontier of mental health.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

Right. Can you talk a little bit more about it? Seems like research was happening in this area, you know, 1960s, and then it was shut down. And then now there's renewed interest. What shifted? You know, what happened? Why was it shut down and sort of, I guess, ignored for a long time? And then all of a sudden, it seems okay, they're coming back to it.

SPEAKER_03 18:57

Well, this is known as the third psychedelic revolution. Uh, it was shut down because it was rescheduled to Schedule One. There was a strong political aspect to it. Uh uh, and this was actually uh during the Nixon administration, John Ehrlichman said, uh, we can't stop people's right to protest, but we can't associate hippies with drugs and blacks with drugs and arrest them to disrupt their protests. Remember, one of the big reasons that Timothy Leary was called the most dangerous man in the United States is he said, turn on, tune in, drop out. They said, make love, not war. Well, those are not good soldiers. Those are not people that want to kill people.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

Right.

SPEAKER_03 19:49

And there was the anti-war protests, civil rights protests. So they had to demonize it and indicate that psychedelics were the reasons that society was, these weren't good Americans. They don't want to go fight in the war, they don't want, they're not materialistic, they say things like make love not war, they uh are in Ashbury Free Clinic, healthcare is a right not a privilege, we're gonna be challenged, healthcare inequity. Those were very unpopular concepts of the dominant culture, but very appealing to their culture. And so you started seeing the cultural divide that continues today. And psychedelics were viewed as the, you know, the vehicle. For example, last year there were 88,000 deaths associated with alcoholism. Alcohol is a far more dangerous drug, but they didn't demonize alcohol. Uh demonize the psychedelics. Then Rick Doblin came along with called MAPS, Multidisciplinary Society for Psychedelic Studies, because he had positive experiences with MDMA and started funding control studies. Michael Pollin's book says uh if you're going to talk about the third psychedelic revolution, the part of uh 215, 216, 2015, 2016, then Rick Doblin is the key person because he funded studies. See, the government won't fund these studies because it is counter to their political narrative. Therefore, it has to be private funding that does it. But the private funding, if it produces good science, it ends up in the journals. Also, interestingly enough, as you can tell when you read my paper, many of the best studies occurring outside the United States. And it gets published into peer reviewed uh journals, becomes part of a body of Scientific fact. And scientific fact, if presented long enough, overcomes prejudice, overcomes uh political opposition. And so you start seeing this in the United States. Now, the key aspect of it is it has to get into the university first. So John Hopkins, UCSF, universities are advancing it. It's amazing out here. They have these addiction medicine fellows. Uh they're uh getting training in it at UCSF. They have top talent from around the world are coming to American universities. When it comes to American universities, the research is advanced, and then the the physicians in training get trained in it, and then they're the ones that go out enter into the practice world. I'm finding that these young physicians know a whole lot more about it than uh traditional.

SPEAKER_01 22:57

Right, right. Now, what are your thoughts? I mean, now these have been used in different ways, and as as you cover this, yeah. So the US government researched these drugs, uh, not necessarily from a therapeutic standpoint, but as an anti-personnel agent, right? What are your thoughts on that? What became of that research and you know, what were they doing there?

SPEAKER_03 23:21

Okay, this was kind of the Edgewood Arsenal experiment. What they did was they sprayed LSD into bummers physiologically, they took all sorts of you know blood pressure and they monitored the psychopunction, and some of them freaked out. And then they had in the 50s, they had Operation Climax, which they uh here in San Francisco, in which the CIA used this as a uh mind control, they were studying it as a mind control drug, as a non-lethal incapacitating agent. So what they did was prostitutes recruited Johns from these bars in North Beach and brought him into this uh room in uh Pine Street, and the CIA watched it through two-way mayors and they slipped LSD into them and saw what happened. So that was during the Cold War era. Uh weird, but the motivation, highly suspect. The motivation was a military motivation in the sense that they felt during the Cold War Korea and Russia were doing the same thing. It was an interesting chapter because parallel to that was also the therapeutic research uh that centered down in Southern California. Dr. Sidney Cohen was one of my mentors. He wrote the book, The Beyond Within, and Edson. Gary Grant took it. That was also the time that Bill Wilson, co-founder of AA, used it for spiritual enhancement, which is an interesting chapter because there's opposition in the traditional AA, which I'm part of. I'm very much involved in AA in terms of my own recovery. But there is traditional opposition to the use of psychedelics for spiritual enhancement. And now they have, as part of the third psychedelic revolution, they have these uh come to believe groups in which they say they can combine post-p recovery and the use of psychedelics for refractory condition because psychedelics should are viewed as medication. In other words, in AA they say don't play doctor. So it's an interesting chapter, but that early stage is what you want to focus on. Uh Kim Keasey, they had these CIA-funded experiments in which they would give people LSD in the VA. And Kim Keasey took LSD in the VA and had this uh psychedelic experience. And then he went and started the marry pranksters, and which they all took LSD and free love and psychedelic counterculture, and the Grateful Dead got involved. Grateful Dead was down in Palo Alto, and out of that came psychedelic music and uh uh Summer of Love, which you know the psychedelic phase was the Trips Festival in 1965, and Human Being and 1967, and he wrote an article, uh, Kim Kease called The Revolt of the Guinea Pigs. The CIA gave him LSD, but had no idea the genie that they were releasing. It's a bizarre chapter. And when I started Hate Ashbury Free Clinic, our funding was through rock and roll. But then there's all these rooms. In fact, there's a recent book out called Chaos that suggested that we were funded by the CIA, which is of course totally untrue. I still get asked about it. We were funded by Bill Graham and the Grateful Dead. They were not uh backed by the CIA. You could say that the CIA released the genies and helped Kim Keesing to marry pranksters, so there's an indirect element to it. But conspiracy theorists pick certain facts and say, well, A leads to Z, even though all the steps in between are incorrect. So that's one of the things that happens is uh, you know, I'm writing my autobiography, and now I'm clarifying that because I am one of the last surviving people that lived through all of that. And I know what the facts were and I know what happened. But lots of new people are seizing on this to write their own accounts of uh what happened. And amazingly enough, these are all over, you know, particularly the right-wing media and the public recordings. That's why psychedelic journal, UC Berkeley with Michael Pollan, they have a fellowship on psychedelic journalism. Psychedelic journalism is very crucial so that the general public will get accurate facts about this. Specifically, my focus is on the therapeutic and ceremonial use of these compounds. That's what we want to advance. That this should be considered a legitimate practice of medicine in appropriate settings with uh appropriate training, appropriate screening, appropriate outcomes, uh, just like any other medication.

SPEAKER_01 28:53

Right, right, right. So it's it's interesting that people still think your clinic was funded by the CIA. So you were funded by the Grateful Dead, not the CIA. Right. That's cool. That's one of my favorite all-time bands. Love the Grateful Dead.

SPEAKER_03 29:05

Oh, yeah. Well, psychedelic yeah, psychedelic music. Original Grateful Dead House is just the 10 Ashbury is just about three blocks from where I live. And this was the center of the psychedelic revolution.

SPEAKER_01 29:20

That's neat. Did you know the band members? Any of them?

SPEAKER_03 29:23

Oh yeah, yeah. We did all the medical services at the Grateful Dead concerts to our rock medicine unit. We were known as a deadhead Kaiser. We took care of thousands of deadheads that went to the concerts. It was a cultural revolution. I the band members did benefits. I'm not, I was not not a friend. I was like the cleaner in pulp fiction. You know, there would be a mess, and I'd come in and clean it up. But it wasn't for the Grateful Dead and Bill Graham and the Jefferson Airplane and Janice Joplin, the clinic wouldn't have survived those early days until we got government funding.

SPEAKER_01 30:06

Wow. That's that's really interesting. Interesting chunk of history. So based on your clinical experience and research thus far, what are you most confident about in terms of using psychedelic medicine in terms of treating what conditions?

SPEAKER_03 30:25

Well, science and clinical experience are going hand in hand because remember when this all started, they didn't know how the brain worked. They just saw the observations. Well, now psychedelics are a tool for the study of the brain. And their neuroscience has found very specific receptors and wiring in the deep areas, primitive areas of the brain. One of the key elements is the default mode neural network, which is considered the center of self. It's a thin band of neurons way at the base of the primitive area of the brain that is considered the spiritual center of the brain. Hyperactive default mode network leads to depression, anxiety, rumination, obsessive thinking. Decrease activity in the default mode neural network leads to spirituality, clear thinking. That area is being studied. Psychedelics decrease activity in the default mode neural network, as does meditation and mindfulness. In other words, meditation and mindfulness or the interconnected recovery group process decrease activity in that default mode neural network. From a physiological point of view, hyperactivity is sympathetic, over stimulation, parasympathetic is decreased activity. Psychedelics are helping us understand why that works. And the Dr. Ken Roy, a close friend of Ryan, has written this article on the neurobiology of spiritual valid, and it calls mindfulness and meditation and soothing music as top-down, uh targeted activity, top-down, from the top of the brain down. Psychedelics are from the bottom of the brain up, and it has showed us you know, people look at these techniques, they look at well, psychedelics is over here, and mindfulness is over there, and spirituality is over there. Well, it's not the brain, how the brain works. The brain is the target organ. So psychedelics have helped us understand how this works. Once you understand how it works, then you see why it would be applied to clinical conditions. One of the most promising is post-traumatic stress disorder. You've had a traumatic event, the trauma gets trapped into the primitive area of the brain, like uh you're in war and there's an explosion, and see all your friends blown up, and you have persistent uh anxiety and distress because these thoughts are trapped into this primitive area of the brain called the cingulogy gyrus, and it's like a hamster cage. Psychedelics open up the hamster cage, allow the trauma memories to be filtered out into other areas of the brain when they're processed. Post-traumatic chest syndrome appears to be that trauma memories are trapped into the deep area of the brain and it can't be processed. Like that's what they're finding out now. There's a traumatic event like your parent dies. There's grief. The brain processes that into it in the prefrontal cortex. But they're finding out that there is an ending called prolonged grief syndrome, where the grief and sadness last for months or years. And that appears to be that these trauma memories are trapped and can't be processed. They say with trauma has happened, but it's your brain's ability to respond to the trauma that allows you to live a more balanced life. Now, there can be trauma memories where these traumatic events come to consciousness, and you, but then you have the tools to process them. Refractory depression is the same way. You have depression, standard medication hasn't worked. Uh, you view yourself as I'm always a depressed person, and this bad stuff always happens, and uh then the psychedelics uh uh relieve the depression. The interesting aspect of it contrast the classic antidepressant, classic antidepressants you take every day. Psychedelics you take one to two intensive experiences, sometimes over a couple uh weeks, and it lasts for up to six months. That's what's got some of the researchers so interested in this. How can a drug rewire the brain so it's last months after the drug is no longer in the body? And that has produced a fascinating area of research. Uh the studies with with these compounds, different ones that are being studied, not just LSD and psilocybin, but ayahuasca, uh bufotanine, uh, MDMA, they all share a similar mechanism of action called a fibase D2 receptor, uh serotonin receptor, but they have different intensities, potencies, and uh different durations of action, and they are being used for refractory uh uh substance abuse disorders. Our clinical experience treated literally thousands of alcoholics and addicts in my career, and a lot of people get it right away. You know, I drink, I use, bad stuff happens, I've got to not do that more. And I'm gonna work this program, go to AA, get counseling, uh uh, change, you know, my patterns of life. But then after people that get it relapse, and it appears that unresolved trauma is a major factor in why people relapse, because getting it is a thinking part of the prefrontal cortex. Feeling it is much more deep in the primitive area of the brain. And then you've got all the stuff that's much less proven with micro-dosing, where you take small quantities over a long period of time, and there's some interesting science there that it helps regrow atrophied subcortical dendrites that are associated with chronic depression. In other words, the psycholytics appear the science has to continue, but it appears in certain studies that they actually regrow and rewire those primitive areas of the brain. I don't want to overstate the science, but that would really be fascinating.

SPEAKER_01 37:26

So, what you're saying, and you know, lots of people they want things to work right away. And I know, you know, with a lot of the stuff out there, that's just not the case. But if I took psychedelic, say, for depression or PTSD, are you saying that it will help me right away?

SPEAKER_03 37:45

Yeah, the studies with ketamine and withsocybin and with mDMA, they have an immediate rewiring effect for when it works. And they're finding that you know it's not 100%, but it is robust enough that it has now been validated. And then they look at well, how long is this effect gonna last? And they're finding it goes up to three to six months. And one of the drugs that is being studied the most because it's legal is ketamine. But the benefit lasts for three to six months, long after they've stopped taking the drug. The history is is fascinating because in Europe, when in the 50s, when these class of compounds became known, the French psychedelic researchers thought it was like shock therapy. They would strap people down, give them LSD, like shock treatment. There was the California, particularly Southern California, that brought the humanistic element into it. The LSD and the sentence setting and the integrative experience. And that has become the standard. In other words, the intense experience followed by the integrative psychotherapy. That appears to be why there's long-lasting effects. And remember, this is a total parallel discussion, but for refractor depression, ECT is coming back. In other words, we have we're now deaths of despair. There's a lot of very serious depression in our society. Suicide rates are going up, alcoholism rates are going up, existential distress, death of loneliness uh is going up. And we need all the tools we can get. They have to be validated. Uh, but I believe that psychedelics will be a very valuable tool. And if done right, it's a very low risk tool. Uh critics say, well, Jay, you know, they can have all these bad experiences. Well, it turns out the the control studies, the adverse rate in these control studies is about 0.06. They have less adverse effects with psychedelic therapy than they do with standard antidepressants.

SPEAKER_01 40:10

Wow. Now, what is the most common adverse event? And that's a very low, low percentage. But what is the number one complaint?

SPEAKER_03 40:19

Uh anxiety, panic, and those are resolvable. There are no physical adverse effects, but they can have dysphoria, they don't like it. And then very often, what I have found, and what I've found very interesting, the the uh anxiety and dysphoria can be translated into well, what caused that? Well, memories of my ancestors or trauma memories from the past. Well, let's talk about that. I I view psychedelics as like a Geiger counter for the subconscious. Carl Jung says, until you make the unconscious conscious, you will call it fate.

SPEAKER_01 41:06

That's true. I I can relate to that. I wanted to ask you just about, you know, in terms of, you know, we're talking about conditions, but you started this podcast out by talking about um spiritual enhancement. And now I kind of when I look at health, I take a mind, body, spirit approach. But so what is this? When you use the word spirit, what do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_03 41:31

Well, spirituality in this context is the fun is going outside of yourself and interacting with uh others in the universe. And one of the big debates is what happens if we introduce spirituality into the practice of medicine? That's a big debate now. And the psychedelics are our role of doing it. They're looking at these death and dying studies. The people are dying, they go into the hospice, the doctors treat, but they don't do anything to deal with the spiritual dimension of living, the existential distress that they and the families have. That can all be measured. And in a very simplistic way, in the death and dumb studies, they found these individuals when they took psychedelics into their life, went to meet their maker in a much more understanding sense, much more belief in the afterlife. I know that was my experience when I took psychedelics. I experienced the afterlife. I had visions of seeing my deceased parents, which I had lost when I was very young. I really believe that psychedelics introduced you to this other world. This other world has spiritual dimensions, that there's an afterlife, there's an energy. It doesn't have to be in anthropomorphic terms, as stated in classical religion. It can be a spiritual energy. And psychedelics produced a totally different view of what spirituality and transcendence and transformation is. I know that uh this really, you know, I came to me, I was on a uh American Society of Addiction Medicine is the national group of physicians specialized in addiction. And there's over 7,000 physicians. We just had a meeting and on a on the writing committee of a book called The History of the American Society of Addiction Medicine. It was the medical profession that helped transform the medical treatment of addiction in our society. And I was the last surviving member of the group that founded it. And I, in a talk, I was assigned the prehistoric period before there was a field of addiction medicine, you know. And then all the names came up. And I had, I gave my lecture, I showed my slide, but it was filled with great satin. Because they were all dead. That night I attended an AA meeting, and I talked about this, and I felt the spiritual energizing jolt that the essence of their spirit that helped build this was still there. Well, that's spiritual. Going outside of yourself, sensing yourself and the universe. It's one of the things that I believe that the psychedelics are an important route to spiritual route, but not the only one. And that's why they've been studying, you know, mindfulness, prayer, group process, focus, target, and activity, uh, all impacting on this area of the brain. And psychedelics are one way.

SPEAKER_01 44:49

Yeah, it's interesting because uh, you know, when you think about when you consider the approach to health, whether or not you consider the spirit dimension makes a difference, you know? Of course. Yeah. So if like some people just completely ignore it uh and don't believe in it at all, well, that that's a huge difference versus somebody who does. I'm always struck by that, you know, because it's still sort of that, oh, you never combine spirit with science. I I tend to I tend to believe and I've I feel like I've experienced that the spiritual dimension. It's certainly something that I've worked on and I find beneficial. I certainly don't have all the answers, but I always was kind of struck by that. Like even if you're a patient in the hospital and your provider doesn't believe in the spiritual dimension, and you do, right? It's just uh it's interesting.

SPEAKER_03 45:38

The need to introduce spirituality into medicine. Psychedelics are one of the roots of integrality into medicine. There is this, as you said, this belief for totally separate dimensions. That's not true. Spirituality impacts those areas of brain. Well, then what what does it matter? Well, it matters in the sense that uh they've actually done one study that found out that you know in individuals that have uh potentially fatal medical conditions do better, live longer, have decreased problems with them. It makes their uh interactions with their family better, their better patients on the ward, they demand less narcotic. Now, those are quality of life issues, but of course, medicine now is dictated in many cases by money and insurance. How can you bill for spiritual experience? You can bill for a procedure. How can you bill for a spiritual experience?

SPEAKER_01 46:47

Yeah, you're right. Yeah, everything is just money and having a code that you can, you know, send a bill home to. Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 46:56

Yeah, you can't you don't have a code for seeing God. You have a code for uh taking the pill.

SPEAKER_01 47:03

Yeah. I mean, and that's one of you know, the people who tend to then go to alternative practitioners or those people who embrace mind-body spiritual realm or that overlap at least, that's what they criticize modern medicine for. One of the reasons, anyways.

SPEAKER_02 47:20

I agree.

SPEAKER_01 47:21

Yeah. I think it's a long way to go. I think there's you know, to get people to acknowledge a spiritual realm. I mean, and maybe I don't know, I'm not sure what that would look like. I know people who will never do that, or or or just are I guess believe that there isn't such a thing, you know? So yeah.

SPEAKER_03 47:40

Um but the people that don't believe, you know, I have had individuals that were non-believers that read about suicidal and took the psilocybin and now they're believers.

SPEAKER_02 47:54

Well, that's interesting, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:55

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 47:58

Once you take like a psychedelic and you see it and you experience, then you're become a believer. And then what you do with that belief is that belief for therapeutic purposes? Do you dorm a psychedelic rock band or whatever? There's all sorts of stuff that can happen. My focus is on the therapeutic aspects of it. You know, I've studied this a long time, but I had a serious auto accident and uh took psilocybin and the tremor memories disappeared. But I also experienced the afterlife and oh, you know, uh experienced the afterlife? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 48:41

And I also had uh Native American background and uh they had a ceremony, and uh, you know, I already was a believer, but I really believe after this. Okay, and I brought that up in an article.

SPEAKER_01 48:56

Oh, I'd like to read that.

SPEAKER_03 48:58

Yeah, I've had other people uh say the same thing. I know another individual that he had he lost his dog, loved his dog.

SPEAKER_02 49:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 49:11

Took some sibin and he re-experienced, you know, being with his dog, and it helped heal a lot of the pain and sorrow. That's called existential distress.

SPEAKER_01 49:22

Well, God, I will need that when my dog goes. So, I mean, and that's that's really interesting too. And um, so you must have not leave not a lot of fear. You know, so many people have so much fear over stuff, but I guess you just don't have that fear.

SPEAKER_03 49:35

Well, because I've studied it for so long, but when you enter this other world, you don't really know what's gonna happen. And that's why the preparation, I know my guides said uh, well, you're taking it a specific reason, but you don't know what's gonna come up.

SPEAKER_01 49:54

Right.

SPEAKER_03 49:54

So that's why preparation, uh set in setting, yeah, known dosage, why you're doing it, integration after.

SPEAKER_01 50:04

Right, right, yeah. And yeah, and I mean I know today too, and they're putting so much stuff in everything. Um, it's you want to know what you're getting is is safe and then the real deal.

unknown 50:15

Right.

SPEAKER_01 50:16

Thank you so much for your time. I have one more question for you. I know we're a little over here. Um, this is very interesting, and it's it's great, it's great to get your perspective from you know, this is the very beginning of this, really, this journey of psychedelic medicine. Now, your paper, you say you are cautiously optimistic going forward. Why is that?

SPEAKER_03 50:38

Well, I believe that uh the change in public attitude, the increasing science, uh, the quality of psychedelic researchers now, like at the major universities, like UCSF, as I mentioned, Andrew Penn and Josh Woolley and Jennifer Mitchell, and then out of John Hopkins, and uh the the mainstreaming into academic medicine will advance this agenda. The cautious part is this is not my first rodeo that uh was a lot of promise of the psychedelic drug group in the 50s and early 60s, and then it got popularized and used in a different context, it was politicized, you had all that stuff with the Cold War and the CIA, and you know, there are negative factors out there that could compromise the psychedelic movement, and so I say cautiously optimistic, but you know, the William Faulkner says past history is not dead and buried, and it's not even past. We have to be aware of what went wrong in the second psychedelic revolution to keep the third psychedelic revolution moving ahead. I know we're having uh every year we have a seminar out of UCSF and the San Francisco Medical Society. There are articles in uh San Francisco Medicine by my co-partner of the seminar, Dr. Steve Heilig. So to keep the ball moving ahead in a positive way. That's what our here in my uh our building here, that's what the uh uh hate Ashbury Psychedelic Center is about, is move this ahead in an objective, educational, informative way. And so that's the optimism. The pessimism is this bad stuff has happened. I'm not really worried about moms on mushroom. Mom wants to take mushrooms and doesn't harm them and they like it, that's fine.

SPEAKER_01 52:52

Okay. Well, thank you so much, Dr. D, for your time today. It was very interesting. I appreciate it. I appreciate the history lesson too. Very fascinating stuff. And if you have the paper that you wrote up that you two were talking about earlier, I'd love, I'd love to read it.

SPEAKER_03 53:07

Okay. Well, it's we'll send it to you.

SPEAKER_01 53:09

Awesome. Thank you so much. And enjoy the rest of your day.

SPEAKER_03 53:13

Okay, thank you very much. And it's nice talking with you. Keep up the good work.

SPEAKER_01 53:17

Thank you, Dr. Dave. All right, bye-bye.

SPEAKER_03 53:20

Bye.

SPEAKER_01 53:23

All right, guys. Thank you so much for tuning in today for this episode of Causes or Cures. I hope you stick around. Subscribe, share, tell your friends, and thank you to all of you who already subscribe. If you have any feedback or comments, you can reach me through my website, bloomingwellness.com. Ideas for guests. Just tell me who you want on here and I will reach out. Well, I think that's about it. Yeah. That's it. I hope you guys enjoy the rest of your day. And hopefully we'll see you here next time. All right. Till next time. Bye bye.