Today's episode is brought to you by Slack. Before there was podcast, there was radio, Before that, the stage, and before that. You get the idea. Things evolve, Technology changes, and we do too. So now we can listen to a show wherever, whenever. However, why should our work be any different? Why can't we work with more freedom, more flexibility, more choices. That's how Slack works. It's a digital headquarters that works how you work, and Slack is where the future works. Hey, lead the listeners. Take here. Last season on Lethal Lit, you might remember, I came to Hollow Falls on a mission clearing my aunt best name and making sure justice was finally served. But I hadn't counted on a rash of new murders tearing apart the town. My mission put myself and my friends in danger. Though it wasn't all bad, I'm going to be reality. Take I like you, But now all signs point to a new serial killer in Hollow Falls. If this game is just starting, you better believe I'm gonna win. I'm tick Torres and this is Lethal Lit. Catch up on season one of the hit murder mystery podcast Lethal Lit, a tag Taara's mystery out now and then Tune in for all new thrills in season two, dropping weekly starting February nine. Subscribe now to never miss an episode. Listen to leave the lit on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, guys, I'm a Shot Balau and I am Troy Millions and we are the host of the Earnier Leisure podcast where we break down business models and examine the latest trends in finance. We hold court and have exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names of business, sport, and entertainment, from DJ Khalid to Mark Cuban, Rick Ross and Shaquill O'Neil. I mean our alumni list is expansive. Listen in as our guests reveal their business models, hardships, of triumphs and their respective fields. The knowledge is in death and the questions are always delivered from your standpoint. We want to know what you want to know. We talked to the legends of business, sports and entertainment about how they got their start and most importantly, how they make their money. Earni a Leisia is a college business class mixed with pop culture. I want to learn about the real estate game uncleass how the stock market works. We got you interested in starting the truck and company or vendor machine business. Not really sure about how taxes or credit work. We got it all covered. The Earnie Leisure podcast is available now. Listen to Ernie Leisure on the Black Effect Podcast Network, I Heart Radio, app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heeart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, are you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part three of our exploration of psychedelics. These compounds that lead to the mind manifesting experiences which we've been describing in the past couple of episodes. Now, if you're just tuning in, we recommend that you probably should go and check out the previous two episodes. First, this is probably one it's not best to jump in midstream, right. Yeah, it's a continuous, though at times meandering journey history of psychedelics, not an all inclusive history, and so we've stressed multiple times, you know, there's no way we can cover all of the studies, all the curious tidbits of history, all the various um traditional uses of psychedelic substances. So certainly we implore you to to check out some of the sources we've mentioned here and explore them for yourselves as well as you know additional resources. Right and so in the previous episodes we mentioned some books that have been part of our guides on the way through. I know you've been enjoying some of the works of Terence McKenna done Michael Pollen as well. We have been reading on that. Yeah, Michael Polland's most recent book, How to Change Your Mind, is a great book about psychedelics that covers a lot of the same ground as some some history, some science, and especially this re sent renaissance in psychedelic research and how it there's renewed interest I think since like the early to mid two thousands, especially about the clinical significance of psychedelics, how they could actually be used to treat mental conditions, addictions, various problems people have, uh and that they're not just a recreational drug. Though there are also plenty of people who would make the case that it might not be a bad thing to use them recreationally. We're we're not going to try to evangelize or demonize either way, or recommend that you use them. We just want to be descriptive, right, But we will we will discuss some of these viewpoints that are brought up regarding uh the beyond medicinal uses of psychedelics, uh and uh as far as the modern stuff. Like again, we're living in an exciting time when they're they're all these these current studies going on, and we're revealing more and more about how psychedelics can be used to uh to help treat various uh problems, psychological problems, addictions, etcetera. Uh, We're probably gonna get into most of that in the following episode. This episode is largely going to deal with some of the original studies that were taking place, especially in the nineteen fifties. Yeah, uh so, Yeah, this is a thing that comes as a surprise to a lot of people who you know, if you think about the the origins of the drug war, the counterculture of the nineteen sixties, and I don't know, maybe you have some various ideas about the square nineteen fifties, it might come as a shock to you that there was a flourishing body of psychedelic research going on during the nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties, especially focusing on LSD and the treatment of things like alcoholism in the nineteen fifties and then later the use of psilocybin and various types of research in the early to mid nineteen sixties. YEA, psychedelics did not just emerge from a van at Woodstock and start corrupting the youth of America. Uh Now, now, before we go any further, I do want to take a step back for just a little bit, and I wanted to talk about about fun guy or fungi if you will, Um, just in fungi if you're making a pizza. Isn't that the Italian way to say it. I've also watched like British documentaries where they pre for fungi. But I'm I'm more of a fun guy, so I like go like go for I tend to go for fun guy. Let's go with fun guy, all right? So, UM, I just want to take you a step back and just talk about just how weird and wonderful the entire kingdom of fun guy really is. Yeah. Well, and we should say the reason for that. Of course, if you've been with us the last two episodes. Is that of all the psychedelics that we've looked at, the most focus has been on psilocybin mushrooms, right, and even LSD is derived from ergot, which is a fun guy. So so that so the the fungal element here is is very rich. And second yes, so so yeah the kingdom fun guy because fun guy are their own kingdom. Uh. We often associate them with plants in kind of an informal way, um, you know, but we and they were considered plants of until the later half of the twentieth century. But there's something different, of course. Uh. They're thought to outnumber plant species on a scale of ten to one, and they all descend from a single species that derived from a common ancestor with animals about eight hundred million to nine hundred million years ago. Is it true that, uh, phylogenetically, humans are more closely related to fungi than to plants. I think that's that that is that is what I have read and and it's an amazing thing to think about. It's also something that you know, it's that fact that leads some people to wonder about our relationship with fung gui. Um, you know why in some cases, we have this uh, this close relationship because ultimately fungi have a lot more in common with us than they do with plants um and and again that's interesting considering the close relationship who we have with them, and not only us, so there are other animals as well. I mean think that the leaf cutter ants that stand out is one of the most impressive fungui dependent species due to their just a fungal agriculture, their mushroom farmers. Yeah, because you think about how humans use fun Guy. We've certainly been focusing on psychedelics, but certainly fun Guy factor into our cuisine, into our medicines, both in in major ways, but in also in ways we don't you know, major and obvious ways, but also in ways we maybe don't think about as much. Because certainly you think about cooking and mushrooms, you think about culinary mushrooms that you buy at the store, which I love mushrooms one of my favorite ingredients. Yeah, of course, not every edible mushroom can be cultivated. I got to learn about this over the weekend. I went with a licensed orbilists on a on a mushroom foraging walk and we get to pick a few different mushrooms that cannot be uh cultivated at least can't be cultivated in a you know, a dependable manner, and got to bring some home and eat them. Is that why chantrell's are so expensive? You can't grow them on a farm. Yeah, um, well, I forget the exact species, you know, but there are several varieties like that where if if local restaurant is served England, they have to depend on foragers bringing them in and selling them. And so a lot of a lot of foragers, a lot of mushroom enthusiasts kind of pay for their hobby by selling their mushrooms to local restaurants. Interesting, but yeah, so there's that level. I would obviously we eat them. But they're also you know, ingredients in many different foods, especially modern processed foods, and they're an important part, an essential part of the fermentation process yeast. Yeah, and you don't have to be drinking some sort of weird mushroom tea to be partaking of medicinal fun guy, Because of course we have penicillin to consider, which you know is I would love to do a future episode of our other podcast, Invention, on penicillin because in terms of fungal inventions or discoveries, however you want to describe it, like that is that is a major one and and it is totally fun. Guy depended. It came from mold growth, right, which of course is a fungus. And then on top of that, you know, we also have we talked about the microbio a lot, but we also have a microbiome, which is a small but significant portion of the human bodies overall microbiome. UH. Fungi also play a crucial role in the nutrit exchange of trees growing around their roots like fungal gloves and exchanging nitrogen for sugars uh. And then this forms the basis of what some researchers call the wood wide web, which is kind of that that's a little too cute, that's a little it's a little too cute, because ultimately it's like really just mind blowing lye weird to think about, because we're talking about a fungal network of hi fi. Remember that a mushroom. We we often think of the mushroom as the thing itself, but the mushroom is just the fruiting body um and the you know, the the spores viewing death emergence of a larger organism. And so the these this network of hi fi underground and growing around the trees and between trees. It allows for the plants to distribute resources such as sugar, nitrogen, and foster risk. Uh, you know, between one tree and another. Uh. And by some definitions this comprises a form of communication. These types of thinking can get really psychedelic on their own. Oh absolutely, um mycologist Paul Statements, for instance, who did we mention? I mean the pole several times? So yeah, he's he's like a mushroom answer for everything. Guy. Uh, you know, very important figure in modern mycology. And he's gone so far as to to suggest, according to Michael Pollen in his book, that these networks are in some sense conscious, that they're aware of their environment and they're able to respond to challenges accordingly, and Paulin says that that initially he thought this was mere metaphor you know that clearly Statements is just being overly enthusiastic and metaphoric about what's going on with these systems, but that he thinks that growing evidence actually suggested it might be there might be more involved here. Well, I think this depends heavily on just simply what you mean when you use the word conscious because there I think you can definitely make the case that mushrooms, in very interesting and surprising ways, are aware of their environments, you know, able to respond to to stimuli and stuff like that. I think it would be much harder to make the case that, you know, the thing that we think of as like the hard problem of consciousness, meaning that it is having a subjective experience, there's something that it's like to be the mushroom. Uh. I'm not saying that that's not true, but I don't know what the evidence for that. I think it's much more of a stretch to make that case now. On a on a similar similar lines, though, I got to hear Eduardo Cone, Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University, UH, speak on basically the same topic at the twenty nineteen World Science Festival. He's the author of a book titled How Forests Think, and he's worked extensively with Amazonian people in his work, especially considering concerning their use of psychedelic substances. But he's focused on the same issue of like the use of fungal networks and the soil within forests as a as a type of communication or even thought. Yeah, he gets into this as well. So just to give you an idea, because it's ultimately, you know, kind of a heady concept. But but it's basically this idea that not that you have non human entities that quote unquote think via an ability to represent, produce, and interpret signs interesting and so that this is uh this a quote from his book How Forests Think quote. Life is a constitutively semiotic. That is, life is through and through the product of sign processes. What differentiates life from the inanimate physical world is that life forms represent the world in some way or another, and these representations are intrinsic to their being. What we share with non human living creatures, then, is not our embodiment, as certain strains of phenomenological approaches would hold, but the fact that we all live with and through signs. We all use signs as canes that represent part of the world to us in some way or another. In doing so, signs make us what we are. Interesting semiotic definition of life. I don't know if I've ever encountered that before, and I took a class on semiotics. Oh yeah, no, I was that kind of Weirdough, Well, I'm very interested in his his thoughts and his work. I I'd love to actually see about having him on the show in the future. But like I said, he's worked extensively with Amazonian people's and explore their use of ayahuasca. And he said that Amazonians use several technologies, including psychedelics but also dreams to connect with the mind of the forest. And he says that these approaches break down the way language tells us what we are. They help them find a path forward, path of healing and problem solving. And he also point out that the shamans of the Amazon but basically have a message for the rest of the world, and they want us to know that the world is a living world and we have to connect ourselves with the mind of the forest save ourselves from the planetary depression that we are now entering into. And I found this really interesting because this is UH. Even though Cone to my knowledge, didn never mentioned Terence McKinnon his work, but some of this like lines up with the messages that mckinna had in The Food of the Gods and his other work regarding UH. This idea of an archaic revival a necessary reconvergence with the natural world through psychedelics and um and at least in mckinna's definition, and overall, you know bohemian thread of human cultures to save us, uh from the you know, the doom of a nature deprived, ego driven dominator culture, to save us from silent Running. Yeah, yeah, in a way, yeah, absolutely, yeah. There it matches up with this theory. I mean this, uh, this viewpoint of of modern life will come back to this that you see this throughout a lot of the a lot of psychedelic literature and also just sort of counterculture nineteen sixties messaging, including Silent Running, which is very much a product of that time. The science fiction film that we've discussed previously on the show. Now Cone mentioned in the world Science Festivally. He thinks even our modern fascination with psychedelics maybe a symptom of our disconnection with nature. And he says the solution isn't simply to to you know, take a psyched caedelic substance, but to rather live psychedelically, to live live, to be in the emergent mind. What exactly do you think he meant by that quote to, like, what is the emergent mind being there. Um my understanding, and like I said, perhaps we can get him on the show to discuss these these topics and greater depth. But I think he's he's talking about this basic idea that again you see again and again in the among advocates of psychedelic that there's that there's something wrong with modern humans, that we're cut off from each other, that we're we're sort of in these little individual cells of the mind, and we are in many cases have great difficulty in being part of some sort of a larger system. Uh. You know, it's maybe a bit elaborate to you know, to think of it. I mean, I don't know if I would I would describe it. And my understanding is like an emergent mind, you know. But but but that's kind of the vibe I get from the idea that like we're we're cut off from each other, we don't understand each other, we don't understand nature, you know, we're all wrapped up in our own egos, and if we could break through those boundaries, uh, that we would have a better relationship with each other and with the world. Like so often in the world of psychedelics and stuff coming from psychedelic enthusiasts, that that's the kind of statement that is either truly profound or extremely banal. Yeah, I mean, I yeah, I get it because I know a lot of people out there, probably shaking their hands, is saying like, well, that just sounds like hippie nonsense. And it's not even new hippie nonsense. It's hippie nonsense I've heard time and time again. But for my own part, you know, I think, yeah, you can be overly optimistic about a lot of this stuff. But on the other hand, you know, you look at the literature, the science, pivic literature that that is that shows us and is continuing to show us what psychedelics can do. I think at this point it's you know, it's more a question of like, at what level are psychedelics useful? Uh, you know, is it is it purely in the clinical world, Is it purely among you know, people who are suffering from some condition or another, or does it go beyond that? You know, I I think it depends on who's advocating on where that line should be drawn. I mean, some people draw it all the way at the horizon. Where you draw it, I think is clearly a source of the conflict that led to the demonization of psychedelics and to the sort of closing of the psychedelic research regime in the in the mid to late nineteen sixties. Right, yeah, Well, on that note, let's let's go to the nineteen sixties. In fact, let's go to the nineteen fifties. Okay, let's go, let's go back. In fact, let's go to the nineteen let's do it. I'll take you up and that we'll go all the way back to the forties. And let's just discuss twentieth century psychedelic research itself. So, as we've discussed, most of these substances are nothing. Humans have used them for thousands of years, and even the synthesized substance LSD, of course, is derived from a good fun guy that has been around forever as well. Right, But there was certainly a period of time between Albert Hoffman's nineteen forty three bicycle ride and Nixon's Controlled Substance Act of nineteen seventy in which there were tons of studies that examined psychedelics and and and especially LSD in many cases because it was more readily available at the time. One reason also, I think is that the pharmaceutical manufacturer that Albert Hoffman worked for in the nineteen thirties and forties, uh Sandoz, which I guess held the patent on LSD, was just given it out like candy. Basically, they were I think they were trying to find uses for it, and their their method of doing that was like, well, let's just give it for free to tons of researchers and they'll find a good way to use it. Yeah. It's kind of like in the Lorax the sneed was invented, which everyone need. It's like if you invented this thing that clearly has some sort of use, but you're not exactly sure how to market it, You're not sure what the the use is for it. You you kind of just let everybody play with it so you can figure out how you're going to make your billions of dollars off of it. But I don't say that to undermine the fact that it really does seem like some researchers were finding extremely promising clinical uses for LSD in the nineteen fifties. Yeah, particularly and how they might be used to treat addiction, depression, UM, obsessive compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, autism, and end of life anxiety. So in his book, Michael Pollen chats with Stephen Ross, m D of the n y U Pselocybin Cancer Anxiety Study, which of course comes back to that end of life anxiety question that was explored earlier. I guess we'll explore that more, probably in the next episode. Yeah, we will. But in the book, uh, Ross mentions to Pollen that, you know, these efforts involved roughly forty research participants in more than a thousand clinical papers. So when we're talking about LSD studies of of the of the nineteen fifties, for instance, you know, we're not talking about where we're gonna highlight a few isolated studies, but we're not talking about like just a study here, study there. You know, there was a lot of research going on. Yeah, it was huge. Wasn't just a blip. Yeah, And initially, reach the researchers thought that LSD and later psilocybin, that they might be used to understand psychosis, as they believe that individuals who are using these substances to play displayed similar thoughts and behavior. And so clinicians also thought that, well, you could take one of these substances yourself and therefore get a taste of what a psychotic episode is like and then be better able to empathize with a patient exactly. And in this vein, the same compounds we now refer to as psychedelic were then referred to by many clinicians as psychoto mimetics, mimicking the state of psychosis. So your therapists could take this in order to understand what you were going through. Now, key figure from this period, uh English, Uh, psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond entered the picture, and he figured that, Okay, if you had a substance like mescaline, and if it could if it could induce this sort of symptom, that these sort of symptoms in in in a in a human who took it, then perhaps, uh, you know, schizophrenia was due to a chemical and balance in the brain, which is kind of you know, ultimately an eye opening hypothesis. Right, If if this substance makes my brain do this, then perhaps what this patient's brain is doing is due to something you know, very chemical in nature as well, something that could be addressed perhaps with another chemical. Well yeah, I mean, and I think this middle of the twentieth century period was actually a very important time for understanding the role of physical causes in mental phenomena. Like I mean, you know, there was of course the rise of Skinnerism like B. F. Skinner and behaviorism, which you can have lots of criticisms about maybe it doesn't take into account cognition and the mind and uh, enough about what our thought and emotions mean, because it was just about what can we do to control and measure external behaviors because that's the only thing we have access to as scientists. That that might not be the right approach, but it was certainly useful in some ways to kind of clear out I think a lot of the uh, the kind of almost religious, kind of metaphysical baggage that had been coming along for the ride with some versions of psychology up until then, with you know, Freud and Young and all that. Yeah. It so so ultimately we have this this push for biochemical answers to you know, concerning mental issues, and this propels the the the young field of neurochemistry, leading in time to our modern understanding of neuro transmitters and their role in our mental states, leading to the discovery of serotonin and the development of ssr I antidepressant drugs. But then you know, some also made the connection between the symptoms of psychedelic use and delirium tremens or the d T. S Uh. This is of course associated with alcohol abuse, alcoholism, alcohol withdrawal. I think so like, if you you're used to extensive alcohol consumption and then somebody stops, they might experience these negative symptoms that have been referred to as the delirium tremens Yeah. So this led to inn to the I think by modern from a modern viewpoint, kind of a weird idea, a weird seeming idea that you could use LSD to sort of shock alcoholics into sobriety and so osmond and a gentleman by the name of Abram Hoffer conducted these studies with hundreds I think seven hundred according to pollen uh alcoholics, and they found it effective roughly half the time. You mean using LSD to treat alcoholics. Yes, yes, And this particular study, by the way, was one of the ones that caught the eyes of Stephen Ross decades later as an example of the therapeutic potential of psychedelics quote buried in plain sight. Um, but anywa, the original researchers here, they expected that the trips in question, the psychedelic experiences in question, would be essentially just nightmare fuel that would approximate the feelings of the d t s, and this was seemingly based on physicians Sydney Katz's reports that Paul and summarizes as being something like you'd you'd see in an an anti LSD propaganda from the nineteen sixties, just about how it's just just pure nightmare fuel and you know, it was running from demons sort of a thing um. But of course what happened is that they gave a court in their study anyway, that they found that when they gave these substances to people, they reported all manner of things, beautiful things. Even so, there was definitely some anxiety, some depression, some hallucination uh in individuals when they were administered psychedelics, but most reported feelings that were described as transcendental in nature, so that, for instance, an ability to see one's self objectively, almost as if for the first time. And so this would seem to be the experience, or this was possibly an experience that was was playing a role in them then being able to cease their addiction. And of course, outside of the black box of experience, the research results spoke for themselves and indicated that, you know, something was working here. So this opened up the idea that there was something more to the experience and that it might be utilized as a treatment method. Now. I know it was especially in Canada that that LSD treatment for alcoholism was picked up, and I think I think this one, this particular study was in Saskatchewan, I believe. Yeah, well, I think that was where Humphrey Osmond was based for a long time. But that another thing I think to make clear is that it's it's not thought that just giving somebody the drug triggers a change in the body that defeats alcoholism. That that there's something important going on by about the nature of the experience that people have on psychedelics, uh, that contributes to their recovery and and staying sober over time. Right right, Yeah, This sort of this metaphorical shaking of the snow globe as as some call it, is playing a role in allowing uh, some sort of you know, curative therapy to take place. Now, I should point out that in terms of this particular study, later on in the early sixties, the Addiction Research Foundation in Toronto set out to replicate these results with better controls, and they failed to reproduce the you know, the same robust results. Uh. And this ended up giving fuel to critics of of LSD, but also supporters again stressed the importance of set and setting, right. I mean, this is something that I guess we'll come back to the sentiment. It's all I'll save my tangent here for later. But yeah, we'll put a pin in that and just know that we're gonna come back to the importance of set and setting in research. But but still there there was enough going on here that people were very encouraged, and by the by the end of the nineteen fifties, LSD was considered like a miracle cure for alcohol hall addiction. A lot of people were excited about it, and Paulin points out that one of the people that it was that ended up getting excited about it was none other than Bill Wilson, co founder of Alcoholics Anonymous Yeah, who who incidentally create a credited his own sobriety to a life changing mystical experience he had on on Bella Donna, which also has psychoactive properties and was used in a treatment treatment at Towns Hospital in New York City in ninety four. That's when when he had the substance as part of the treatment. And so you can see that in a lot of the alcoholics anonymous messaging like the idea of the the idea of acknowledging a higher power. You know. I think a lot of times people just interpret that as a more traditional kind of like, you know, you need a religion or something, especially if you're meeting in a church basement or you know, or something. Yeah, But in fact, it seems like this has something to do with the common kinds of mystical experiences that people have on psychedelics, where they, you know, they commune with some kind of reality greater than themselves. They believe that they've encountered some other being or some universal consciousness or the universe itself. It might have something to do with the ego dissolution that sometimes people experience on psychedelics. Wilson, by the way, would later try LSD with some researchers in l A and he actually thought that it might prove very useful in treating alcoholism, and that that it might even have a place in a a but others in the in the organization struck down this idea, you know, for for a few different reasons, one of which being that it would perhaps muddy the like the messaging of the organization itself, right, like, uh, you know that you would turn to another chemical? Um. Yeah. And so for a time, LSD assisted psychotherapy was considered a powerful, legitimate and evidence based method for treating alcoholism in Canada. Definitely, but maybe we should take a break and then when we come back we can discuss some problems with scientific research on psychedelics. Today's episode is brought to you by Slack. Before there was podcast, there was radio, Before that, the stage and before that. You get the idea. Things evolve, technology changes, and we do too. So now we can listen to a show wherever, whenever. However, why should our work be any different? Why can't we work with more freedom, more flexibility, more choices. That's how Slack works. It's a digital headquarters that works how you work, and Slack is where the future works. Hey, lead the listeners. Take here. Last season on Lethal Lit, you might remember, I came to Hollow Falls on a mission clearing my aunt best name and making sure justice was finally served, but I hadn't counted on a rash of new murders tearing apart the town. My mission put myself and my friends in danger, though it wasn't all bad. I'm gonna do real as you take. I like you, But now all signs point to a new serial killer in Hollow Falls. If this game is just starting, you better believe I'm gonna win. I'm tig Torres, and this is Lethal Lit. Catch up on season one of the hit murder mystery podcast Lethal Lit, a tig Torre's mystery out now, and then tune in for all new thrills in season two, dropping weekly starting February nine. Subscribe now to never miss an episode. Listen to Leave the Lit on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Conquer your New Year's resolution to be more productive with the Before Breakfast podcast. In each bite sized daily episode, time management and productivity expert Laura Vanderkam teaches you how to make the most of your time, both at work and at home. These are the practical suggestions you need to get more done with your day. Just as lifting weights keeps our body strong, as we age, learning new skills is the mental equivalent of pumping iron. Listen to before Breakfast wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, we're back now. I think this is a good place to start discussing the fact that there are widely acknowledged inherent difficulties with doing rigorous scientific experiments on the effects of psychedelics. And so one of these problems is the problem with placebo control. Now, normally, when you want to test and see if a new drug works, you need to do a placebo controlled test. You have to do this if you want to sort out specific pharmacological efficacy versus the placebo effect. You know, the effect that sometimes people who are given a treatment, even if the treatment doesn't have active ingredients, just the fact that they think they're being treated appears to cause uh a feeling that their condition has improved. They will report less fewer negative symptoms or something like that. So, yeah, I imagine you give a hundred people a new anti nausea drug and then fifty of and report their nausea going away. Was it because the compound in the pill relieves nausea fifty of the time or could much shore all of that response just be due to the placebo effect people thinking that they're being treated. So if you placebo control your drug trial to find out if there's a difference, subjects get randomly sorted into multiple groups, with one group getting the actual drug being tested and one group getting a pill that has no active ingredients, then you might be able to get a better idea. If the group who receives the drug gets significantly more of a desired outcome than the placebo group, then you can have confidence that the drug probably actually works. So if you wanted to run a placebo controlled test of whether, say, psilocybin helps people kick in alcohol addiction and then stay sober for six months, you'd want to run a test with people who actually get psilocybin versus people who think that they might be getting it but are actually getting a placebo. So why is this a problem with psychedelics. Well, that's because of the next issue, which is blinding. Uh. So the thing you've got to do to have an effective placebo controlled test is blinding and double blinding. This is to avoid response biases from subjects and from the people who are carrying out the test. You have to blind the experiment, meaning subjects don't know which group they're in, and the people working with the subjects to conduct the experiment don't know who's in what group. Psychedelics make this hard because most of the time you can definitely tell whether you've received a large dose of psilocybin versus a placebo. Right, I mean, even even if the individual, the test subject in question, has no experience of psychedelic use, there's a very good chance that they have been exposed to some representation of it, some expectation of what the uh, the the the the experience is going to be like, just through media and culture. Yeah. Well, and the effect of the drug tends to be so powerful on the mind that it's nearly impossible for you to think, like, no, I didn't get anything. I mean no, Like if if you are becoming a Comets tale of disembodied consciousness, you watch your ego dissolve like sugar and a stream, you're probably part of the active test group. Right. But but yeah, even but even if the effects are not that strong, if the dosage is lower, like it will be undeniable. Yeah, I mean, maybe not always, because some people are very suggestible, you know. But but the majority of the time people are going to be able to tell what group they're in. Furthermore, the experiment ers can usually tell if the subject they're working with is on LSD or psilocybin versus a placebo. Like you know, people who are on these drugs tend to act a certain way that's pretty different than people who are just getting a sugar pill. Now, there are some ways of making this a little bit better. For example, you can use an active placebo, which is a placebo that does something to the body that the subject will be able to sense. One example that has been used in history worcle research is niacin, which causes physiological effects like flushing of the face and tingling in the body. But still a lot of subjects and experimenters can probably still pretty easily tell the difference between if you've gotten a large dose of psilocybin or LSD versus niacin. So you still are going to have this blinding problem. But then there's another problem that makes it worse, a problem with conducting psychedelic research the same way you would conduct other drug research. And that is, as we mentioned a minute ago, the importance of set and setting. And I remember and it was in the first episode I think where we talked mostly about the importance of set and setting. Uh, people's takeaways from psychedelic assisted therapy seem hugely dependent on their expectations on the environment and on the guide. Yeah. I think it was a police who pointed out that really the only person to ever take LSD without any expectations of what it might consist of was Albert Hoffman himself. Yeah, because he took it by accident and nobody knew what it was yet. Yeah, that's funny, But I mean, it's clearly true that people's experiences on these drugs are highly dependent on on priming and on stimuli from around them and what they're told going in and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, like, for instance, just maintaining a very like calm therapeutic in a physical environment, having people interact with you, you know, the researchers in question in a likewise manner, that sort of thing. In other words, I would say, to get the most clinical use and the most positive effects out of these drugs, it seems like you specifically want to do the opposite of what you normally do in a drug trial. You explicitly do want to bias the subject's expectations and interpretations of their drug experience in a way that suggests it will help them with their problems. Yeah. So basically, yeah, if you're doing a psilocybin study in which the individuals taking psilocybin are going to be laying on a being bag jair for instance, listening to some ambient music and attended to by you know, you know, very courteous therapists, you would have to have the same situation going on with the placebo group, and in doing that, you have all of these like situational effects that may well create like something kind you know, certainly not the psychedelic experience itself, but some sort of comforting, suggestible, um uh situation. But this has also been invoked to explain some of the differences in like some of the replication difficulties that people have had with psychedelic experiments, because sometimes, you know, people in these experiments are given psychedelics with a certain kind of set and setting, and then the replication attempt it just sort of gives them the psychedelics but doesn't replicate the set and setting and finds that oh and this in this study that didn't replicate the original set and setting, people are not getting nearly as positive a benefit. Uh, And that just seems to show again how dependent the experience is on and setting. Well, it comes back to like what the substance does that you know, and these even these early researchers, they they, you know, pretty early on we're convinced that it was not something that the substance was doing to the body. It was what it was the mind state it was creating. Exactly what could be gained from that mindset. Yes, psychedelics seem to be in into whatever extent that they are effective at helping people and have clinical significance. They seem to be more a facilitator of experiences than a direct action drug. It's not that you take psilocybin and the compound curious your alcoholism, but that taking psilocybin allows you to have an experience of profound emotional significance that helps people overcome alcoholism. It seems it's the experience that actually matters. So just say, locking somebody in a sterile, uncomfortable white room giving them a shot of psilocybin without a therapist or guide present is maybe not a very good recipe for getting most positive effects out of the drug. But this is frustrating if you're like, you know, if you're used to running drug tests, because it seems that when psychedelics have a clinical significance, it is in some ways similar to an active placebo. It just appears to be an extremely effective active placebo. So yeah, there have been these kind of difficulties over the years. Like I'd say, the bottom line is that objective research is so important in medical science, but the standard methods that we have for objective research don't apply especially well to psychedelics, and some methods of achieving objectivity appear to directly counteract the most powerful clinical potentials of these compounds. Another problem we could talk about from the history of psychedelic research is not a systematic methodological obstacle, but it's more like a historical trend that you know, we're not alone in observing other people who observe this, which is that I would say, due to the unique properties of these drugs, a lot of researchers who focus on this subject area appear over time to tend to lose objectivity and become more endorsers and enthusiasts than objective scientists just trying to find out what's true. Well, I mean, and I don't know to what extend. It's a lot of them, but I guess the problem is that the ones who do become certainly more noticeable. Your voices are often the loudest. Right now, and again, I want to be clear, I'm not saying all people, all scientists who work with psychedelics to this or maybe not, probably not even most, but but but some significant numbers do follow this path, right and and and and again, their voices are the loudest. And uh, in terms of loud the psychedelic voices, few voices were louder than Timothy Learies. Um. So, like one example of of of what you're talking about here, Timothy Leary's work on the Harvard psilocybin project in the early sixties. Uh. Some of Lear's methodology there was highly criticized, and it basically seems like he was intentionally I seeing the experiments to make psychedelics seem more clinically useful. Uh, you know, which is a shame, because the research does actually suggest that they're useful. It's just the uh, you know, he was being hasty. He was being hasty, he was taking shortcuts. For example. An example of this is the Concord Prison experiment, which was aimed at studying recidivism and inmates that were administered psilocybin, and uh, you know, this is basically the ideas like if you give them psilocybin, like, how are they going to successfully transfer into um, you know, back into normal everyday life or are they gonna wind up in back in the prison system again. And so he uh, you know, it sounds like a pretty interesting premise, but then the execution was flawed. He looked at recidivism rates ten months after release for the psilocybin takers, but thirty months later for the control group. And of course time is vital in all this because you're dealing with somebody like returning to life. Uh, and so like the I mean not just like month to month, but like day to day, week to week is vital in any kind of study having to do with recidivism, you know, you know, because like the first day back, you know, what, what's somebody doing there, you know, visiting family or whatever. It's it's the as the days go by, as the weeks go by, as the months go by, they're gonna have to potentially deal with greater temptation and he and he was widely criticized by colleagues at the time for this. Yeah, Richard Albert, who was also known as Ramdas, would later explain that, you know that the aim of the project was solid and had a reasonable therapeutic model, but would it would but it would have required long term application and study, and Leary just didn't have the patients for long term studies. Ultimately, this is something you see throughout Leary's life, you know, this restlessness, this lack of patients, passion, but then a tendency to rush things. And it's almost like he had more system one thinking, you know, than system to thinking. And of course, uh, this is not the preferable balance for serious scientific inquiry. Now, there was another classic experiment from the golden years of psychedelic research in the nineteen fifties and early sixties, and this one I think we should look at for a minute that this was done under the supervision of Timothy Leary's Harvard psilocybin project, but it wasn't, I think, directly carried out by Leary. It was directly carried out by a guy named Walter Panky. And this was the nineteen sixty two experiment with the use of psilocybin to occasion mystical experiences that were subjectively perceived as positive and valid by religious people. And this is sometimes known as the Marsh Chapel experiment or the Good Friday experiment because it took place on Good Friday nineteen sixty two. So Walter Panky at the time was a divinity student at Harvard Divinity School, and the basic details went like this, So you had twenty divinity students in the Boston area and each got an injection before a Good Friday Service at the Marsh Chapel of Boston University. Half got psilocybin, half got an active placebo which was niacin. And remember nias intends to cause flushing and tinkling, so they would feel something going on. And the basic findings were that the students in the test group overwhelmingly reported positive and in some cases, life changing religious experiences, and some later rated this experiment Good Friday Service day as among the most profound and significant experiences of their lives. But there were complications. One subject on psilocybin had some kind of episode which involved trying to leave the chapel to proclaim a religious message and he had to be tranquilized with thorazine. I think they backed off with the tranquilizing people with thorazine after this experiment. And and and these were they, These were the researchers, not like the old church ladies right who may also keep thorizin the pastor tranquilizing with thorizine. And so I was like, I was wondering, you know, how did this experiment hold up over time? What do people think looking back on it? There have been some later attempts to analyze and follow up on the experiment. One was by Rick Doblin of of maps uh an organization. I don't know if we've mentioned already, but I think you'll refer to later. Yeah, it's the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies and they're they're involved in a number of research efforts and involving psychedelics and also m D M a UM. By the way, they also are involved in something called the the Zendo Project, which aims to promote proper psychedelic peer support, especially for individuals, especially first timers who are having a difficult trip. So I think they've like set up operations that um, you know, major cultural festivities such as burning Man before. But I think this is a really interesting project. I'd like to see how it develops, because I think it's an important step. If you know, we're going to see decriminalization of psychedelic substances in the United States. Oh yeah, I mean this is something we should continue to explore more as we go on. But I think, um, the idea of having the proper guides who know what they're doing is and is a very important part of what might be considered legitimate psychedelic use. I mean, a lot of the research on the clinical significance of psychedelics, so we should really stress is not just giving somebody a compound and then leaving them alone, right, you know it is It is psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. So you might have a guide, a psychiatrist or a psychologist, or somebody who is experienced in working with people. Uh, the therapist of some kind who either like guides you through the experience itself or sort of holds the space with you while you have your experience and then later helps you talk through it and go through the integration process. I think the idea of having positively socially chaperoned and uh and sort of like expert guided psychedelic experiences is a very important thing that shouldn't be under emphasized, and it's present in a lot of the traditional uses of psychedelics. Like when we talked about the traditional uses with the curanderas in Southern Mexico, I mean that this wouldn't be you just take a drug out in the void by yourself. I mean you would be guided by someone who is a is a religious leader. You would have a shaman, and in these uh, these test cases, you would have a therapist or you know, or a researcher that was that was filling in for that role. And then outside of the you know, the traditional usage or the research or medicinal or psychotherapist usage, there was still room for an individual like that, like somebody that is guiding the experience and setting and attending to set and setting. Yeah. Oh, but so that was important to mention, But we did get sidetracked, so I were talking about Doblin. Yeah, Well, the follow up and analysis of the original marsh Chapel experiment from nineteen sixty two. Rick Doblin followed up on it in the nineteen nineties and he made some criticisms of the original studies methodology, Like he pointed out that there were the problems you would expect with double blinding that we already talked about earlier. Um there were some imprecise questions and the questionnaire given to subjects to a value ate their experience, and a few other things like the original study failed to report the fact that one participant had to be tranquilized, so it seems like something you probably should have mentioned. And there was also the fact that while on the whole the students viewed their mystical experiences on psilocybin a is very positive and profound, many of them struggled with intense bouts of fear and difficulty and negative emotions at some point over the course of their trips, and this probably should have been reported in more detail than it was, though the experiences were positive overall, but also so. Dublin conducted a twenty five year follow up with some of the seminary students from the original study, and he confirmed that they reported sustained profound positive effects from their religious experiences with psilocybin. And I think it's really notable of the marsh Chapel experiment that this was not like so many of the studies that came before research into how to treat people's problems like addictions or mental illness, but you use psychedelics in a way to enhance the experience of so called healthy normals. This was a case where you know, these people weren't like suffering and needing a treatment. It was like, could they have a profound religious experience that they deemed valid on with the aid of these substances. And the answer appears to be yes. But that's a very different question than most drug trials investigate, right right, Yeah, I mean generally it is it is with the aim of curing a particular malady, of seeing if something that the substance is useful in treating a particular condition or symptoms. But this is more about, if anything, it's about treating the human condition itself, right, Uh, seeing what effect it could have on just sort of baseline human experience. 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Thank alright, we're back, alright, So we sort of know the general outline of what happened in the mid nineteen sixties. There was this significant backlash to what had been for a while now, at least a decade and a half of interesting, in some ways very promising psychedelic research. But by nineteen seventy or so, drugs were public Enemy number one and scientific research in them dropped off dramatically. Encountered a lot of obstacles at that point, and it's only more recently that we've seen this renaissance of of psychedelic research. So I guess we might want to look at a question of like, and this is something that's hard to answer in a definitive way, but examining some possible reasons for the cause of the moral panic around psychedelics in the mid nineteen sixties. First of all, I think some of it you could chalk up to a somewhat legitimate reaction to the perceived over enthusiasm of people like Timothy Leares some of the scientists involved in psychedelic research. We're clearly not practicing the most rigorous objective science, and we're in some cases turning into enthusiasts and gurus, something more like alternative religious leaders. And it's not surprising at all that this caused a lot of skepticism and and uh and push back within the scientific community. Right, Yeah, because here's here's the Leary, this kind of weird and at times kind of goofy character, um and and at times very profound and well spoken. I mean he was, he was a very charismatic guy. But you can you can understand I think, you know, especially members of the older generation and more traditional folks, uh, being a little suspicious of this character. Yeah. Another big part of the backlash, I think, which Paullen definitely acknowledges at length in his book, is specifically, this is what we were talking about before the break. How scary it seemed that some psychedelic enthusiasts were recommending psychedelics to so called healthy normals, you know, just regular people. Like the ideas, well, we're going to tolerate a lot of different methods of treating people who are facing problems, people who have mental illnesses or addictions. Uh. And many of these solutions could include drugs, even drugs that have a potential for abuse, because we think, well, it's you know, it's fighting a problem and it's helping people get better. But what if a drug implies that the whole of society is sick and there's something wrong with the baseline culture that's so called normal people could benefit from using it to affect change on themselves. Yeah, I mean it's quite a pilled, a hard pill to swallow, you know, to to hear, oh, there's something there's something terribly wrong with us, or there's something terribly wrong with the way we're conducting ourselves in the modern world. I mean, this continues to be one aspect of, you know, of the problem with communicating the you know, the the dire threat of climate change is because there is a certain amount of judgment to be placed on the way that that modern industrial society has conducted itself. Well, yeah, I think that's right. I mean, there's always going to be negative reaction against any indictment that goes to our general way of life. Like we we want to indict you know, antisocial abnormality, like the the murderer or the you know, somebody who did something very unusual. But what if everybody is doing something that's harmful. If if that's the case you want to make, you're gonna have a hard time getting people to accept it. Absolutely. Yeah, Yeah, I mean ultimately nobody, nobody's gonna want Everybody is afraid of change, and certainly the nineteen sixties were a time and where there in which there was a great fear of various changes, not only the changes that were uh, you know, offered or at least advertised by you know, the psychedelic counterculture, but also the fear of change via political ideologies, the fear of communism, uh, the fear of racial integration. Uh, you know, all these various changes that were uh that we're taking place in society. Yeah, and so you can definitely see why there's a lot of fear around the idea of treating normality. You know, so Altice Huxley and Humphrey Osmond they you know, we're friends and wrote back and forth to each other in the nineteen fifties. Uh. And there there is one letter that was quoted in Pollen's book that I thought was interesting, where Huxley was writing to Osmond in about people taking compounds like mescal and an LSD, and Huxley wrote, quote, people will think that they are going mad when in fact they are beginning when they take it to go sane. And also, as Pollen notes from his experience researching the book, that there's this quote drift from the treatment of individuals with psychological problems to a desire to treat the whole of society. And uh, this drift, he says, is a change that quote seems eventually to infect everyone who works with psychedelics, touching scientists too. And so I think everyone there is probably an overstatement. I think he's you know, being a little casual. It does seem to me to be a startling trend, maybe one that should give us pause. I don't know, I mean, it's worth considering that. But like how many scientists involved in the UH in the investigation of psychedelics, do end up thinking that it shouldn't just be used to treat people in a clinical setting who are experiencing one problem or another, but it's something that so called healthy normals should take to improve their lives and improve the whole of society. Well, I mean, it's it comes back to the traditional uses of these substances. In many cases they were they were not necessarily taken purely as as as medicine for an ailment. But in any case, it's just part of you know, your continued Uh you know what, what would we describe now as in a mental health Uh? Yeah, I mean that's a good point. And while we certainly don't want to demonize these substances, I do think also we should be skeptical of of that impulse. I mean, it's worth asking the question is that correct or is that just is that over enthusiasm based on positive personal experiences that people have had. Yeah? Yeah, And then I guess you could also say it's it's kind of like if you're if you're acknowledging that they're big, almost impossible problems in the world, wicked problems as the UH you know, as we often refer to them things that seem insurmountable, the kind of problems that make us, you know, the lead us to be convinced that surely only you know, the return of a savior or the interference on by by aliens could possibly help us solve Like humans are just incapable of solving these problems on their own. Then perhaps we're putting, we might be putting too much stock in the powers of a psychedelic substance to somehow fix that for us on an individual level or a cultural level. Yeah, I think that's a good point of comparison. I mean, while while we certainly don't want to deny the evidence of the potential positive uses of these things, you don't want to make them a god either. I mean, you don't want to drift into the miracle cure mentality, because one of a a lot of these studies show, quite frankly, is that there is a lot of potential for psychedelics in in treating things like addiction and depression and all that. But they're not miracle cures. It's not like you know that this fixes all your problems immediately and then the world's a perfect place now. There's another reason that we can go to to explain the anti psychedelic backlash that I think is probably the most obvious one, right, the countercultural associations with and possible direct effects of psychedelic use. Of course, we all know these compounds came to be associated with rebellion and rejection of mainstream culture and rejection of political authorities. You know, Timothy Leary would would proclaim to people that kids who took acid, quote, won't fight your wars, won't join your corporations. I mean that that's scary to the authorities, right, right, Do you think they're not going to fight our wars anymore? How are we gonna how are we gonna fight? They're not gonna be a part of corporations. They're not going to found Silicon Valley corporations in the future. Yeah, well that's funny. I mean that turned out not quite to be true. A lot of the Yeah, a lot of these acid takers did turn out to be business leaders. It's obviously not a panacea against business. But I did want to quote a couple of sections from Pollen that I thought were very very smart on this part. So first, the first one is where Pollen said quote. LST truly was an acid, dissolving almost everything with which it came into contact, beginning with the hierarchies of the mind, the super ego, ego and unconscious, and going on from their to society's various structures of authority. And then two lines of every imaginable kind, between patient and therapist, research and recreation, sickness and health, self and other, subject and object, the spiritual and the material. If all such lines are manifestations of the Apollonian strain in Western civilization, the impulse that erects distinctions, dualities and hierarchies and defends them, then psychedelics represented the ungoverned bowl Dianician force that blithely washes all those lines away. That's beautiful, and that comes back to Terence mckinna's definition of them is boundary dissolving. Yeah, and I think that's largely correct based on everything we've read. But another passage that I thought was very interesting about this counterculture backlash is uh. It goes like this quote. For what other time in history did a society's young undergo a searing right of passage with which the previous generation was utterly unfamiliar Normally, rites of passage helped knit societies together as the young crossover hurdles and through gates erected and maintained by their elders, coming out on the other side to take their place in the community of adults. Not so with the Psychedelic Journey of the nineteen sixties, which at its conclusion dropped its young travelers onto a psychic landscape unrecognizable to their parents. That this won't ever happen again is reason to hope that the next chapter in psychedelic history won't be quite so divisive. Well, I mean, it won't happen quite the same way again. But as Paul and himself points out, like he grew up in the dark times of of you know that he basically grew up in the moral panic period. Yeah, so didn't really experiment much with psychedelics when he was younger, and really wasn't until quite recently as as an older man, that he was able to really experiment with them and understand them in a greater sense. So I feel like there are still going to be generational gaps there. Well, that last sentence maybe far too optimistic. I mean, the main part I was thinking about was the beginning of this where he points out the idea of rights of passage that expand the consciousness. They are supposed to be passed on from parents to children. And we've the generations together, and if the young acquire a consciousness altering right of passage that the older generations don't have, that can be terrifying to the older generations. It's like they're not our children anymore. They've been initiated into some other tribe. No, I think it's a great point. I mean, yeah, this was a new ride of passage that the older generation by and large had no experience with. There's one other possible thing going on in the nineteen sixties that I think might be worth mentioning, which is, well, maybe we'll get into more detail about these studies in the in the next episode. But there are at least a couple of studies I've been reading from the last decade or so, one from two thousand eleven and one from eighteen that are about adult personality change occasioned by use of psychedelics. So you've got these various ways of measuring personality traits and and people might you know, your personality might over time sort of be in flux. But you know, mostly your traits are going to be pretty set by the time you're an adult. You know, you're around a baseline. You might hover. But there appears to be some evidence that using psychedelics can actually change adults personalities. And so one of the many things that's been observed is that, for example, use of psychedelics appears to increase people in a psycho logical personality trait that's known as openness to experience. People who take psychedelics appear to increase in openness, and openness is actually a highly socially significant personality trade. Uh, It's been associated with all kinds of other things in societies and in various research, Like openness is highly correlated with with like lack of prejudice and lack of authoritarianism, and stuff like appreciation for art and for other cultures and things. I think you'd find the openness personality trait largely associated with like environmentalism and multiculturalism. Yeah, I mean, just if nothing else, Like if if you were to become more neophilic and you know, uh, you know, attracted to new experiences, you become more attractive to travel, and in traveling you're exposed to to uh. I mean, travel itself is kind of I think has a lot to in common with psychedelic experience. You know, where you suddenly you're in in a place that is mostly the same but a little different it and uh people around you are different and yet the same, and it forces you to sort of reconsider who you are in the whole scenario. So if this is true, yeah, that that there are these cascading effects from the use of psychedelics that maybe on a broad scale, say changing the personality is of a young generation, especially changing them in ways that might not be so congenial to you if you are Richard Nixon or something, that these personality changes could be perceived as a direct threat to the polity of the country. Yeah, and that's exactly how Richard Nixon saw it. I mean, Richard Nixon is is the anti psychedelic uh U s president by far. Yeah. I mean it's difficult to unravel all this because on one hand, you have to you have to try and figure out what the nineteen sixties were, you know, like what was the nineteen sixties experience? And certainly you and I were not around in the nineteen sixties, so we can't attest to it. Um. We do have some listeners I know that were and so hopefully we'll hear from from you on it. UM. I remember my my father told me once that Jefferson Airplane Somebody to Love captured what the sixties felt like. I but I never had a chance to ask him what he really meant by that. Maybe he just meant it was an iconic song of the time, which you know it certainly was. UM. But I guess that's one of the things with it with the sixties two is that, like all times, you know, the older generation is always going to be concerned with what the young generation is doing and how what they're doing doesn't reflect your values. Like I can't relate to the experience of you know, of of grown up uh in the nineties sixties. Uh. You know, you know, a middle aged person looking at the young generations and things and asking, oh, what are they doing with psychedelics? Uh? But like maybe on some level, I I understand that in regards to Pokemon, you know, where I'm like, oh, I I had this was not part of my childhood, and yet it's highly influential for for for these kids. What am I missing and why should I and to what extent should I be afraid of it? Wait? Were you one of those preachers going on TV during the Pokemon craze saying it was causing devil worship? No? No, but but I do love that kind of I love the sort of mild moral panics like that that there a rise out of any new thing, be a Pokemon or Harry Potter. I think there's one for Teletubbies. Teletubbies. Yeah, yeah, so so yeah. The fact that there's kind of a generational divide and a and a in a moral panic popping up around something like that in and of itself, I think just is always going to be the case. And we see shades with that. I mean, certainly, I think we have it. We've discussed, we've discussed in the show before, and we'll in the future. You know, we certainly have some issues with with mobile technology and with social media and the effects that those uh technologies are having on culture, and certainly, you know, it can lean into some sort of you know, crankiness where we look at younger generations and say, oh, they don't even know what it's like without social media. That's our grumpy old men issue. Yes, it's the tech. Yeah. Uh, but we'll have to come back to that. But but but yeah, the the the older generation looked at the younger generation, and they didn't see their values necessarily reflected their values that had just carried them through a World war and of course threatened to carry into one final World war as well. And so it makes sense that these typical generational concerns would be exasperated by the introduction of something new, or at least new from a Western perspective. There was not only consciousness changing, but but also foreign. And remember remember that most anti drug messaging in America has depended on xenophobic and or racist messaging. An association was also made between uh psychedelics and radical leftist ideologies, so I think that was very much a factor as well. Well. I mean, one thing that's interesting I remember from reading the individual testimonials of the people who were involved in the marsh Chapel experiment. This is anecdotal, so this is only just you know, the happen things they happen to report. But I I think multiple members of the marsh Chapel experiments said that, you know, they had their psilocybin experience and it prompted them to go get involved in the civil rights movement. Uh so you know which, of course, by the you know, the conservative authoritarian uh you know, white ruling class impulse at the time would have probably they would have seen that as a political threat. Speaking of political threats, let's get back to Richard Nixon. Okay, So Richard Nixon famously considered Timothy Leary quote the most dangerous man in America and uh and and he apparently his handlers were even concerned at different times that leftists might try and slip Nixon LSD. Uh. I'm sure somebody was working on a plan there, one of those sixties pranksters. Oh well yeah, Actually, allegedly Jefferson airplane lead singer Grace Slick uh plan to slip LSD into Nixon's tea at a White House tea party because apparently she attended uh the same college as Nixon's daughter, and there was going to be an event there at the White House. But if the event turned out to be an all female events, so Nixon wasn't actually there, and I think she got kind of she got scared off by the security and left. Anyway, she didn't try to give any to pat apparently not. Uh, well, she had they didn't quite make I think she was accompanied by Abby Hoffman, who was Ye, this sounds like an Abby Hoffman's so it didn't. The scheme didn't actually make it through the front door, so they didn't actually get to that level of of decision making. But this all does lead to an interesting question that comes up from time to time, sometimes flippantly and other times quite seriously. If certain world leaders could be tricked into having a psychedelic experience, could we change them? Could there be like a Scrooge moment? Right? Would they see themselves objectively? Would they connect with others or connect with nature in a meaningful and life changing way. I've heard people say this. In fact, I remember a lot of teenage stoners things like that, if you just get all these dictators, and you know, we'd stop all the wars, if we could just get people to take acid or I think they'd even just say like smoke weed or something. I'm I mean again, I'm I'm very open to and and interested in the many of the reported positive effects of psychedelic experiences, but I do not believe it is a miracle drug in that way right that it can't just in and of itself cure human nastiness, especially because set and setting are so important. I mean, what if you take a drug and the setting is the is the Nixon White House? Right? If you have a psychedelic experience where you're just like all revved up on the idea of slaughtering your enemies and stuff that I don't know, I don't I'm not sure that would make things better. Yeah. Like, one specific version of this question that I've kind of tossed around in my own head from time to time is not so much. You know, what have we um? You know, what if Hitler took acid? Kind of a thing. But uh, you know, if we look at when l s d uh came into being. It was first synthesized in eight in Switzerland, m D m A was first created in Germany in wealth and in both cases no one realized what they discovered. You know, it wasn't ntild later that they took him off the shelf and looked at him again. But what if these substances are leaked out into Europe, especially Germany before World War Two? And granted LSD would have only had like a year to work its magic, but I'm not the only one who's thought about this. For instance, Terence mckinna and Food of the Gods wondered what would it have been like if the Nazis had found out about LSD quote it is frightening to imagine some of the possible consequences had Hoffmann's discovery been recognized for what it was, even a moment earlier. So there, I mean, he's looking at it. It's not necessarily a good thing for everybody who takes it, but like that, it could be a facilitator of great evil. Yeah, yeah, I he may have gone into more detail on this in other works or lectures. Certainly, Uh McKenna spoke a lot about these topics, but so but I am not aware of any additional thoughts he had on the matter. But I suspect that they would have probably done much the same as the CIA did their experiments with with the LSD, you know, searching for ways to use it as a weapon or a mind control substance and then ultimately find it wanting in that regard. Yeah, and then we've talked about this in other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind in the past, But yeah, that seemed to be the primary focus of like defense based research on psychedelics in the nineteen fifties is can we get it to make people do what we want against their will or as a truth serum? Right, and and certainly this was the deal with the Third Reich. They were in a state of total war. They were interested in rockets, yes, but they weren't interested because of any space exploration advantages. They it was about weapon delivery. It was about pursuing their own awful and and and racist ideology um, this conquest mentality. Yeah. Absolutely. But on the other hand, uh, you know, Hitler took a lot of drugs, especially after is apparently taking a lot of stimulants, a lot of opioids, and so you know, one you can't help but wonder, right, like, what what if out Off Hitler had taken a bunch of M D M A and L S d UM in nineteen forty two? Would that have had any effect? I'm suspicious that that it would have any effect. Ultimately, Yeah, I don't. I don't think I buy the sowner line that you know, just get the dictator to take a psychedelic and they will be cured. I mean, it's hard to know, but I'm I doubt it. I mean, it would be interesting as an experiment, though, Yeah, just just to poke one of them up out there. Well, another interesting question is, instead of like these individuals say, like dose the dictator cases, if psychedelics and psychedelic culture were more widespread in general throughout the world, you know, and throughout industrialized society is going way back. I do wonder then, like if the you know, the common if the common drug of choice among industrialized societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth century had not been alcohol but had been psilocypin or something. Yeah, And I think that's ultimately the more interesting question is not what if Hitler had taken out as to d or or M D m A. But what if they what if they had been at large in um in German culture of preceding the war UM And you know, ultimately, like the counter argument to that would be, well, there already was a strong bohemian vibe in pre war Germany, and it it was not sufficient to prevent the horrors of the Second World War and beyond. But yeah, I think ultimately, when you see people like Terence McKenna arguing for an archaic revival for some sort of like return and the psychedelically assisted return to nature and interconnectedness. Like they are talking about a cultural movement, They're not talking about strategic doses, dosing of of of key individuals. Yeah, if only were that easy. All right, we've been going a while. I think we got to wrap it up for this one, but we we got to come back in the next. We were originally going to do just three episodes, but psychedelics took hold, and now we've been going for three and we still haven't gotten to the twenty one century revival in psychedelic research, which we will focus on next time as right, So join us for part four of our psychedelic series here on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. And I mean, who knows there might be a part five. We just we have no idea. We have no idea when this is going to end. All right. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership, that's what we'll find it all. Uh, you'll find links out to various social media accounts. You'll find our t shirt store. Also, if you want to interact with us and more importantly, interact with other folks who listen to the show and have insightful things to share about it and related topics. Head out on over to Facebook. They have the discussion group. 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