Paraidse or Inferno ft. William Leonard Pickard

everyone welcome to your brain on science it's really great to have everyone with us today uh and we have a treat for you guys we have a very special guest uh Mr Leonard Picard is here with us today and he's going to talk to us about his experiences related to psychedelics and this is going to be a bit of an open conversation so you guys will get a taste of a little bit of everything yes and so for those who don't know Leonard Picard is known allegedly as the largest producer of LC in the 20th century but he also has an educational background in various drugs pharmacology drug policy and more and he's been directly affected by the war on drugs and sentenced to prison for two life sentences of which he has been released and is now living in Santa Fe and we're just so grateful to bring him on today to hear his story so welcome Leonard I'm very uh happy as well to be released and living in Santa Fe and great and grateful for it um before we get started I'd just like to uh say hello to uh your audience uh I hope they appreciate uh your marvelous advancements as graduate students and Neuroscience your important work that you are doing and encourage all students that are listening to this program to pursue that a similar path be as educated as you can join in this great celebration with strong scientific support my dear friend the late Sasha Shogun always said get that PhD so that Sasha's uh encouragement ring in your ears amazing some great words so let's get right into it all right so let's take everyone back um so why don't you tell us a little bit about how you became involved with psychedelics right socially academically um in terms of your work uh and what it was like you know living in the 60s and in the 70s and experience having all these experiences going on around you um and you know being really ensconced in psychedelics and the movement then so well I mean that's quite an open-ended question it really is I could probably go on for days but um let's see according to government uh my first interaction uh with the Psychedelic world was at 21 that's someone I got 60 55 years ago at the uh while working as a lab tech at The Retina Foundation for experimental biology in Cambridge extracting mitochondria from beef heart in which we heard about this marvelous change in society among the young people at the time in California due to an exotic neurochemical I thought this was quite unusual according to the government a small quantity was synthesized there shared about Beacon Hill then a travel occurred between Cambridge and Berkeley I became a manager of the bacteriology department at Berkeley at 22. and did some unusual things in the basement of the biochemistry building um young future Nobel Laureate Carrie Mullis was just upstairs working rather late doing interesting things and at that time this is 1968 or so Kerry made what they call the magic gram and a single gram of a Nobel laureates pure LSD of course there were no analytical instruments that we could use at that time but there were certainly a lot of willing volunteers so there's some extraordinary nights in Berkeley in those years was all lit up with a burning barricades and the anti-war demonstrations against Vietnam Telegraph Avenue which has always been kind of a lively hotbed of descent was wall-to-wall with very long-haired young people having these uh these marvelous experiences and no older people to talk to about it was don't trust anyone over 30 was the Mantra there was no internet people communicated by telephone letters um no computers uh if you wanted a bit of data you had to go through a card file in the library catalog downstairs into the bowels of the uh the library among millions of volumes pull out a heavy text and perhaps there's your information an all-day event that we can do now with the keystroke yeah so in those days uh

there were pockets of young people that are having these um unusually profound religious magical philosophical experiences but we can only talk to each other um about it uh to Elders it would sound much too far out in a situation like that continued for the next 30 or 40 years when risk one's career if we're an academic and mentioned the word psychedelic or an interest in it that was absolutely forbidden and would extinguish any hope of tenure now of course it's extraordinary to see among throughout the United States centers opening Emory Michigan Wisconsin Hopkins Yale UCLA Berkeley uh stunning I um remain floored at the exceptional change in society that we're undergoing it's a period of enormous enthusiasm and great hope but it was also in the early 60s although something of a smaller perhaps less public event due to more insular communication um and then the great government oppression stepped in um perhaps it's uh too big at this point to fail uh perhaps they're too many eyes too many distinguished on us too many Advanced degrees billions of dollars flowing into space it's unlikely that it will truly significantly reverse as it did say in 72-73 but I do expect to shoot a drop or we see uh small inklings of it with some you know descent in the Psychedelic community and some reportable issues um inappropriate therapist Behavior here and there um unexplained death uh there are little issues that are seen but so far nothing truly floored that the media would attach to as we continue to process people that people through clinical trials worldwide with looser standards that may change yeah but presently it's truly a honeymoon season and uh the greatest celebration I've seen in my lifetime when you were released and seeing psychedelics being like everywhere now and like all in the media and I'm sure you've heard about it too well um in prison but it's through like letters and writing people but well no I had a very attenuated form of information occasionally a copy of the New York Times had float around but uh generally all we had uh the TVs hanging from the ceiling with uh hundreds of men staring at them all day a Fox News on we'd hear a little bit of that but generally I had only inklings of the phenomenon that was occurring socially of course I was aware of Roland's great work at Hopkins and his uh strongly voted article in the Journal of psychopharmacology and the uh the tremendous uh suggestion that for treatment resistant suppression these were particularly efficacious that to me was the watershed moment so you had heard about those clinical trials yes I was aware of all that um I sent my son in 17 to visit Roland's lab very kindly received him uh so yes I was aware of all that work um but not the extremes to which uh it would be interpreted uh so broadly is effective for a wide variety of psychiatric illnesses um and just to address that at the moment we do see um I'm in Venture space right now so I see a lot of applications for investment um and we see every medical indicator being claimed you know Alzheimer's Parkinson's marital problems so autism um every neurodegenerative disease none of course the mechanisms for all these different difficulties traumatic brain injury what have you uh TRD or uh why widely uh variable yeah and the idea that a single class of compounds um could be more effective than established drugs for these is wildly

speculative but the such hope and so many high quality uh trials occurring that I expect that in the next few years we will see marvelous and newly effective medicines but I do feel that uh 90 of the claims of indicators or applications will wash out and fail but uh we're going to learn more in the next 18 months than we've known in the last Thousand Years about this class of compounds right and that's so cool yeah even if it doesn't necessarily work for everything we wanted to right we're still gaining so much important information about what these psychedelics can do so right we're it will work for some things the question is which ones um I think most applications will fill i people are applying it to an intractable pain for which morphine's been very effective for quite a long time um applications that are almost opportunistic yeah in the sense of well let's claim this and let's uh drive a seed round or an a round for it but other things are you know inherently promising they're great work for example by Gilgamesh that's uh Dolly sames serve chemistry Columbia's laboratory and his great postdocs there are doing a wide variety of variations on the ibogaine molecule in order to reduce cardio toxicity and of course the anecdotal reports of people that have had strong addictions to opiates cocaine what have you and even non-drug severe abuse in their childhood we keep hearing these um almost strongly significant anecdotal reports if those hold up clinically then we're truly on to something um I think we will have several new drugs that will surpass any known treatment in the pharmacopoeia in Psychiatry yeah in the next 45 years but I think most will be expensive experiments yeah but I think you know maybe needed because these ideas are finally able to be tested right there was so much restriction and I'm sure I'm the last person that needs to tell that to you right um but so much restriction and it might be opportunistic but it's also very useful because we need to understand that I think people need to fully understand that these will not work for everything everyone right and having real data to back that up is going to be vital and maybe opportunistic but also um very smart to get into some of these areas that are wide open I think and need people to be studying them so yeah and in terms of like I mean it's not just uh it's not just psychedelics that we're looking at we're we are in an evolutionary moment in genomics yes the proteomics metallomics uh we are you know goodness uh AI yeah the sophistication drug development um so um it's a new era neurochemistry itself yeah it's a much broader feel in psychedelics yeah where we'll modify personality we're modified memory and learning so it's we will enter an age where it would be possible to cognitively enhance an individual I don't mean psychedelic experience I mean statistically increase one's ability to own a standardized exam for example or recall of information a greater cognitive performance spearman's G is generally used as a measure of cognitive performance it's a battery of about 20 tests beyond the standard Binet Beyond IQ all sorts of neurological assessments involved in spearman's G and G may be able to be um significantly if not profoundly Advanced by genomic or pharmacologic means so that will be the true Revolution you know with a lot of capability comes a lot of responsibility and that's something that we can talk about with almost anything in science right with now that we have the ability to the most basic example to alter you know

genes in a human being it alter genes and animals and it's things that we've seen right and it gives rise to all these moral arguments and that in the field of psychedelics is already you know such a big deal the ethics of the work being done and especially I think in your time considering the ethics of that and there was already so much of a stigma so it's a little bit hard to tease that apart right so with all of these new advancements methods of course it's very exciting and you sound very excited about it do you think that we can leverage this to um make changes that might not you know be necessarily pharmacology like the changes that we're looking at with psychedelics if we can have changes that are equally as large and sort of I keep saying the word changes but like life changing right with all of these methods do you think the intersection of that is interesting and the moral arguments that can rise from all of that well yes well bioethics of course is an exploding feeling oh absolutely these particular Technologies you know with psychedelics I think the original Vision uh certainly among the young hippies uh of my era was to um increase human compassion you know those are the Warriors people who were coming home named and uh we the vision was to stop War to reduce materialism reduce uh the influence of the corporate state if you will um to have new sets of values to have greater altruism among each other a type of Brotherhood and Sisterhood we're all listen to each other and stood each other welcomed each other it was peace and love throughout the realm that was the idea and then psychedelics seemed to be pointing uh toward that was possible to achieve it with the many Visions we saw the type of Heaven that could be created if we were kinder to each other of course one doesn't need a drug to do that and many people have a bad Vision without any drug um so the question is of the bioethical standards of all this we will modify human personality by pharmacologic and genomic means uh with and without psychedomics psychedelics have profound magical theological confrontation a type of long night of the soul searching transformative very widely can be very strenuous and you get a glimpse of the Divine and a glimpse of hell and you feel the unity of man and all living creatures that's a very valuable thing to have yeah we will have drugs that will produce a kaleidoscope perceptions and feelings by um presently I'm enjoying looking at some of the um many uh quasi churches that are being formed under the Religious Freedom referation Act here in New Mexico we're seeing uh quite a number of Ayahuasca churches being formed groups that are seeking legal approval as Earnest religions um circling around psilocybin use long-standing tradition of the Native American Church involving peyote is being expanded to uh users of San Pedro cactus and elixirs and teas many of these many are occurring and presently it's sort of a real mix there's no true guides other than the Supreme Court ruling and the udv versus U. S customs it's greatly successful so I think that we're going to see a wide variety of new substances that have never been anticipated generated by AI drug development um truly exciting somewhat frightening promising yeah a wonderful time to be a graduate student in Neuroscience wonderful and very daunting yeah because you know as you mentioned there's so much that we can do we have so much capability now so to be able to do it is another it's a big task it's a big responsibility but I think one we need all I can recommend is keep your science uh strong and ethical and unbiased you know if you

come up with a result that you don't like you keep repeating it you still don't like it but it's valid and can be replicated you know reported yeah just happened to me on Friday literally you know if it doesn't we're going to find out what works and what this there's so many people looking at this um so that will be uh quite a moment yeah what works right um so speaking of like graduate school like you studied at Harvard for a graduate program correct oh yes and I still am affiliated with Harvard but I won't name that here okay um I was just curious about how you became interested in the fentanyl work that you did while you were doing your studies there okay so when I arrived at the Kennedy School of government as a grad student after decades in the deserts and mountains doing strange things in monasteries and earlier prison tour and suddenly I wound up at the Kennedy School uh a lovely place I strongly encourage any students listening this for whom neurochemistry can be a little more burdensome in memorizing all those receptors subtypes and you want something uh perhaps a little less stressful on the forebrain you might consider public policy I certainly did arriving at the Kennedy School under my mentor Mark clyman the late Mark Clement a noble ethical and extraordinarily brilliant man he was also Rick Dublin's Mentor at that time a few years earlier and was instrumental in helping structure maps to configure to fda's approvals mark looked at my understanding of the underground they were all into criminal justice and when they found someone that could speak to the technology of um of drug advances and also public policy so they kind of latched onto me and made this Charter uh well now the Legacy compounds this is 96. the Legacy compounds currently on the street are methamphetamine or horrible speed methamphetamine cocaine marijuana we won't concern ourselves about but there were no uh unusual analogs very rarely when we see any type of variation on the legacy of molecules or maybe you know five drugs you could find on the street nothing on the internet was on its fledgling State and they were there weren't no drug traffic at that point so my uh chartering instruction in the ultimate thesis was to determine that we since we knew that drug development was moving forward quickly and we would see thousands of new compounds and some of these would be problematic to predict what the next great malaise would be on the street what would be the new cocaine heroin or Methamphetamine so I spent some time looking at synthetic approaches to all the Legacy compounds what was known about them how to synthesize them I had no interest in anything other than psychedelics but looked at them all and I came up with a worry some uh issue in which a um a synthesis of a unusually potent uh um opioid unknown at the time relatively unknown small outbreaks um in Moscow a little outbreak in Boston maybe killed 100 people but nothing else just a blip in the death rate from opioids pharmaceutical opioids and this drug was called um Fentanyl no one had heard of it I began looking it was in Pediatric and aesthetic um I began looking very closely there was a small outbreak in Moscow so I flew to Moscow and interviewed the head of the MVD that's the Russian equivalent of the FBI a major general sergeyev over so 5 000 agents across 11 time zones and uh he was mostly concerned about heroin coming up from Afghanistan all the War veterans Russian war veterans

coming back being involved in the trade and even though there were you know 50 or 60 people dying around Moscow from fentanyl to him it was trivial and exotic the Russian Source on that was eventually located and seized and it was kind of an interesting sideline it turned out to be uh from 7 20ish 20 year old type winners of the Russian Olympiad chemistry Olympiad who had holed up with part of the Russian Mafia the voras they're called and Kazan Azerbaijan and began making Fenton and sending it up to Moscow where it sort of got on the radar and I found it but once that group was um serving time and the lab dismantle there wasn't any more a little outbreak in Boston in 93. so I'm walking around lecturing at The Faculty Club at the Kennedy School and School of Public Health that look um if you're looking for the next major drug uh this could be it it's as ubiquitous precursors I mean you can buy a tank car of it for 50 cents a kilogram uh cheap precursors um a difficult synthesis but that can be modified and make it simpler which eventually took place um the question is will the attic population use it only heroin addicts would even dream of injecting them so I began to interview the heroin population in Boston I found myself in many coffee shops sitting with Heroin users young men and women sitting there all day tapping their feet waiting for the Candyman to appear and we're sipping coffee I found some survivors of the small fentanyl outbreak did a big survey of you know a few hundred of them and uh ask questions such as if fentanyl were available this drug called fentanyl um prefer to heroin would you use it if there were no heroin how fast does it come on received how does it make you feel um and there are results from that indicated that fentanyl was unfortunately a substitutable or heroine among opiate users and that was the doorway the key to the whole thing now you can make all the Exotic drugs you want but if no one uses them they won't enter the market so that was the key ubiquity of precursors you can buy things cheaply and make it to a synthesis that could be simplified three and once it's out there people will use it so I am kind of exhausted myself going around Cambridge pointing out that this thing's coming didn't ring bells for anyone else right like you know there was Outlet breaks in Boston and Moscow and people were just assuming this is some you know maybe we won't see this again it's like little things it's not important enough and but you were well there was a researcher Gary Henderson at the time it was a forensic chemist also friends of Sasha and we you know Gary was aware that you know the stuff is going could be a problem but Gary thought that if the lab went away the drug would go away and we didn't have to worry about it proliferating uh Sasha weighed in with um a couple of sentences and an article in an article called future drugs in 71 and we talked about it a little bit but there was no serious look at um this material becoming a major epidemic everyone thought well they'll be sporadic tiny labs and some people will die but when the lab goes away so all the phenomena I will not catch it won't be a pharmacological wildfire that will Circle the planet as it has become so um we didn't think it would become the great killer um most people thought it would not become that I but the Kennedy School he said do you

want to risk your career on this prediction and at the time they were serious of course you know so speculative it was considered science fiction why should this thing catch hold but because I was familiar with the underground manufacturers and their motives I felt that all it would take is one reasonably skilled unscrupulous underground manufacturer who didn't give a damn about human life yeah they're on the street they take one it would only take one because there is a variation of a fentanyl called car fentanyl which is four thousand times the potency so that a single individual in a single clandestine laboratory for example in Mexico over China could make the equivalent of the world's heroin Supply annually in a few weeks so yeah my next opportunity to do anything about this I found myself of course arrested in a trial for psychedelics in which case they began talking about my work at the Kennedy School and um of course this was you know put down of course by the opposition as the judge this trial is about LSD it's not about fentanyl but I went on for two days and presented all of the overheads and slides and work and got all the documents and testimony entered into the federal public record and perpetuity in 2003 um the last thing I said was in 2003 that trial was we're going to have a big problem yeah but of course discredited um 10 years went by I mean well I'm doing live uh 10 years went by 12. and the amount of actual um adults from opioid still remained at about 3 000 emergency department admissions a year pretty steady from Pharmaceuticals then I'm sitting in prison watching TV one day and there was a large cluster of deaths perhaps a thousand people from a fentanyl batch out of Toluca Mexico I thought oh my you're it's starting because once a simplified recipe gets into uh unscrutable it's unscrupulous underground hands that tends to proliferate and it's enormously profitable and cheap to make so at that point there was no technical barrier against making this stuff anyone with a scrap of paper with a recipe on it could do it then the floodgates were opened and our problems began the Mexican cartel began to get the precursors and the rest is of course history it's so interesting that you were able to do the research to predict that and I before I came to VCU and started psychedelic studies here I actually did epidemiological data analysis on Fentanyl and its analogs in Detroit in the city so I worked with the medical examiner and compared tax reports to the deaths and doing um chronic opioid like brain analysis and it was very sad to see the increases in the numbers from 2014 when I you know went to college to now even like you know when I was working it was about 2018 2019 so it's really starting all those analogs were really starting to stack up yeah right the European Monitoring Center on drugs and Drug addictions he's um hundreds of variants on these molecules I'm mostly coming out of China because they have the phds that can do these variations but what we're seeing in America primarily at this point is a Mexican origin you know I've looked at this for a long time and um I'm I don't uh have a great hope that it's going to suddenly resolve or turn around you know the death rate you know it's several hundred thousand a year or more and it's worldwide so this thing is entrenched with us and will be with us throughout your lifetime what will make it go away um but then maybe you know uh immune

receptor vaccines that up here you know that block the effects like a long-term naloxone if you will or that may be a type of um you know quasi-religious Awakening among users um not to try anything you know we're seeing fentanyl uh appearing on the street mixed Soul as fentanyl sorry sold as uh MDMA yeah even cocaine too yeah I think it's things uh when especially when talking about harm reduction with psychedelics is fentanyl is one of like the biggest concerns right having to yeah so according to testing and the question is why you know I think it's because it's so cheap and therefore it Alters Consciousness and small amounts of it can be counterfeited as almost any drug oh this will alter your mind um unfortunately uh you know you risk your life therein so you were able to predict this right at the time do you think if people took you seriously if people were like this is real and your research means something do you think anything could have been done at that time to even mitigate where we're at now because you know you're right if one semi you know competent chemist was able to understand the recipe to this or understand what this drug does and it got into those hands then there really isn't stopping the Snowball Effect that comes after that but do you think and this is purely speculative anything could have been done to mitigate this at that time well at the time I proposed a number of things it should be done I said this is going to happen but I didn't leave it there I suggested a number of things to um to block it and uh among these were precursor controls of the uh the core precursors at that time oh uh NPP and a and PP they were called if you control these put them into a precursor control schedule and made them illegal so they one couldn't easily buy them then that would keep it out of the hands of underground manufacturers for a number of years of course no one heard that and so they were only um controlled internationally in 2017 or so by the Chinese I think DEA put them in the Federal Register about 2010 after the DeLuca episode of a thousand deaths I suggested also that um one could actually forensically you know identify specific International Labs from a special spectroscopic analysis of C samples a type of signature program there's a heroin signature program that exists when you see samples one can tell if it's from Afghanistan or if it's from Colombia or its country of origin and that can be useful for interception if you will but uh the same thing could be done could have been done with fentanyl but only in the last couple of years has the program been implemented only on the biological side I suggested that um a fentanyl tool recently was very difficult to see you have a person coming and look like they're dying from a heroin overdose it's a fentanyl overdose their eyes are pinned but they have no heroin on the toxic exam the bloodstream um the analytical instrumentation did not exist sufficient to identify fentanyl I suggested that it indeed it must radio immunoassays occurred at that time I hope we're not getting hyper technical here no it's not great yeah you know it's a it's uh hindsight is always 20 20. yeah absolutely I think phenol is like the genie that's out of the bottle and I really don't think we're going to be able to get it back in the bottle I think Fender will be superseded by other things that are even more interesting some may be even more lethal yeah but the point I'm trying to make here and I'll try to just simplify it and uh is that you know the future is dividing into uh several directions several possible scenarios we're going to have wonderful new medicines wonderful new healing medicines and that's where of course all our hearts are but within those tens of thousands of AI developed analogs we're going to have some little horror some little beasts that have never been seen that will take in Memorial lives so the future is both um glorious and uh scary

mm-hmm yeah definitely I think so a big thing to come out of the first of all the Psychedelic boom in the 60s and the 70s and now with the fentanyl um one of the big things is this War on Drugs right the government thinks that they can regulate the flow of drugs on the streets and these deaths through increasing incarceration and laws and you know oftentimes uh court cases that we don't fully understand um in terms of you know really how effective they're going to be in doing all of that so as someone who serves time due to I you know we would argue this War on Drugs and this very intense stance the US government takes on drugs and classifying them all as being a certain way even those like non-harmful or non-violent right yeah all would be considered under the same umbrella do you think that this is well do you think this is an effective way first of all to approach any issues having to do with drugs right and non-violent crimes involving drugs and a little bit about your experience I think with all of this and what you take away from it yeah well um even though I uh even though it's a miracle that we are speaking that I'm not uh dying in prison and even though uh the suffering uh was unspeakable um that Still Remains somewhat conservative with regard to complete legalization I'll probably catch a great deal of flack about this from this um this presentation um I'm very much in favor of harm reduction and um decriminalization of natural plant substances I'm behind the decrim movement I think penalties should be considerably lowered for most drugs but I think that things like fentanyl need to be very strongly enforced I I'm not terribly in favor of making cocaine or Methamphetamine completely legal that would introduce a whole new populations that heretofore had not Trident due to its illegality or inaccessibility or moral stigma if you will uh I don't think uh you know Mom and Pop would do well on uh ten dollar a gram cocaine I think we would have uh I think it would produce a certain Devastation Society so I do feel that you know the classical narcotics should remain uh controlled but uh less far less penalized do you think that there could be a separation between those for with the fentanyl for example those who um you know get caught with something that was adulterated with fentanyl that like perhaps they didn't know it was Fentanyl and how they could still go to prison for having it versus like those who are purposely obtaining it or purposely manufacturing it do you think there should be a separation well I think a person is ignorant that they're excuse me that their sample contained uh this drug is more heavily penalized I should be in consideration by the court of course yeah just curious but we're moving in Realms of Law and drug policy uh yeah most of your listeners might enjoy other Tales yeah sorry just that was a quick question good um yeah so why don't we talk a little bit about your book the uh Rose of paracelsus um so what was your inspiration for writing the rose and also why the name it's a very interesting very unique name um and it was I think great to sort of come across but tell us a little bit about the inspiration and why you the motivation behind it um goodness well you got the hard questions 15 years hard hitters here 15 years into two life sentences things look rather bleak I cannot imagine yeah you know it's a very empty cell there's no children no loved ones everything is gone there's no money no job no respect most friends have gone but some stay and a few new ones are made but it's all very remote one is completely disempowered one has no hands no voice no one will listen to you in prison the guards don't want to hear anything you

say um what to do I um thought I would tell a story and somehow get it out there in the real world somehow and try to remember not only what the world looked like having not seen trees or flowers for a decade and to try to remember some of the beauty in some of the heart and the feeling of why people did what they did that allegedly were at the higher levels of psychedelic distribution the underground chemist of your what was their motivation what were their Lifestyles like what did they think how did they behave who did they love who loved them um I thought that might be of interest to some of the young people yeah and so within that framework I began to write in pencil and a little each day and it became quite a habit and it would overtake days and weeks after the first year I looked at this great manuscript of handwritten material and by that time I'd learned enough about writing that I realized I should throw it into the trash bags so I did and began again a little even more seriously using everything I'd learned and felt and tried to write lines that were like a kind of long poem of song lines that one say was were singing to one's grandchildren they're singing to Distant Lover or singing to one or other ears to hear it and I thought wouldn't that be a handful of people that you know one day would find this particular Adventist absolutely I uh I wrote it with that spirit in mind I wanted to talk about the Beauty and the passion and the pathos of um living underground or the great division that was oppressed and um one had to fear of guns and being captured and living like that every second of every day for one's entire life all because of the particular Vision in one's youth that said that these things may be wonderful for the human spirit and heart how are you able to connect with all of that so you have some beautiful themes in the book right you talk about heaven and hell Darkness and Light white flowers and a lot of spirituality so in a place you know mentally physically yeah in a dark and a desolate place in your life and in your head how are you able to connect with all that because I can't even connect with the good in the world sometimes in my very normal very regular life how are you able to do that well I mean you're very blessed as you Elena um and it's important that we all remember that in whatever is going on our lives even in the greatest imaginable Darkness there is still a light and uh we too are blessed so I try to hold on to that yeah you know the words became more comfortable and I began to have a sense of Freedom about saying things so I began to get you know Wilder and um reaching out it was kind of a death song If you will um in the writing of the Rose I had no idea I would ever be free right you know the future was um you know falling over in some Bleak cell when nobody gave carrot at all ultimately it would be that to become weaker and more detached and finally fall down so that was the future but there was this lovely little thing called a pen in my hand and even though no one in the prison would listen I could speak to the mythical friend a mythical loved one of my own children that had very little contact with her

father for their entire lives that I might never see am I never over talk to them or explain to them a lot of contact for decades um sorry I wrote it for him loved ones and Friends and children that um one day they could hear their father's voice and maybe understand a little of why we did what we did and why we risked Our Lives to do it yeah I really appreciated the way that it was written it was very poetic it was the beauty that you were going for like very much came across like there were moments where I was very touched by the care that went into the words and I did really like the you know that play on Heaven and Hell and Darkness and Light throughout the book and how you spoke about specifically the moments with the children and the how the children were always cared for by the six in the book like it was something that I thought was very well done I hadn't seen children in so many years and hadn't seen my own you know that uh and this happens to a lot of men you know that uh when a little girl comes on TV or something it's like uh you know it's a type of Heartache just to see them you know even though I'm free now and my children are all grown up and you know we're friends um you know when I see um you know four or five-year-olds kind of like they were when I left um it's the most beautiful thing in the world yeah so in the book we do talk about children and uh in the loving way in the six of course always strongly cared there were a number of um stories about children that had some difficult moments due to disability or abuse and how they were rescued or cherished or put on the right path by the six and perhaps that was you know my way of trying to express those feelings in words when I could not do it uh physically or verbally create a creative with those yeah men in long periods of captivity um you know don't entirely lose their Humanity I often lecture sometimes universities and uh I always put up a slide of these ants you know what is the ants doing up here and I tell the story of the ants which um the prison yard was simply dirt and gray 34 walls and um there were no pets there were no dogs no cats no kids nothing living and so men would do strange things like um capture a tarantulas for example in the Arizona desert and tarantulas are don't bite really they walk very delicately in like a little old ladies very soft and furry legs men would capture these things and keep them as pets and they would find a pigeon who perhaps had their one leg cut off and trying to fly through razor wire and feeded bits of bread and raise it and other men would um make a little cardboard running Wheels because you couldn't build anything or construct anything but you could slice a bit of cardboard stolen from the kitchen and sort of glue that together somehow or not and just and make a little running wheel and then they would capture a mouse and cherish the mouse and feed it and put it on the running wheel and the mice really love this and so um guys that had mice and running Wheels would attract little crowds at night for men to come in just to see something living running freely and being cared for it got so extreme of course that you would see around a small ant hole in the yard groups of you know guys in their 60s and 70s great big strong tatted up you know

individuals who had seen the horror of Life they're all standing around looking just standing there looking at the hole in the ground and maybe putting out little bits of apple or crackers something they had stolen and got out of the Chow hole and got the dinner dining area and got through multiple metal detectors and phalanxes and guards searching their pockets and they got it out on the yard and they would go to the [ __ ] and feed the ants and remark about their strength and holding up a bit of cracker or something of that nature and then became very fond of the ants after dinner and would you know feel low when they went away in the winter and uh eagerly anticipate their arrival in the spring and the cycle of winter and spring forever any point did you think about you know the road that you had been on and did you now you're away from your children and you know in your head at that time that was the rest of your life did you ever think about the past and maybe wish that you had done differently well you know at uh at 16 17 18. I was raised in an academic family and my intention was to go into neuroscience at my doctorate in neuro and teach and do research that was the path the only thing I ever considered and uh of course um when this exotic neurochemical began changing an entire generation of my peers and people have been begin to talk about their realization of the beauty of the forest and the oceans and the unity of our hearts and Universal Consciousness realizing that they actually had Minds so all this happening and thought well this is quite different and it seemed to be extraordinarily important and so we thought that we were you know heirs to something of Great Value to our species and there are species needed to go in different directions and not destroy this Earth we needed to uh love the plants and animals in each other not create great killing machines we saw that as a fundamental flaw that the human heart had made a great error and so a number of us went that way now of the barrier to entry in the Psychedelic community um is open and we're seeing you know thousands of new people coming and having in their experiences in the classical manner um it's um a joyous time to observe this I have considerable hope yeah for the future and how does it feel to know that you ushered in this era right like you were part of Us opening up our minds to you know understanding these substances and the neuroscience and you mentioned that Neuroscience was your big love and your big dream when you were younger and now we are both phds studying neuroscience and psychedelics like how does that feel for you that you have not only inspired so much change socially but also academically exactly well I would contest that first of all you are you both are highly trained enormously promising very young and you are responsible for a huge amount of the future you can't see it now but your work will unfold before you and open a vast Vistas for tens of thousands of people you're research and your directions will influence a very large segment of the future uh so you can't put it all in one person um you trust your trust in yourself trust I have faith that your own activities will be of enormous benefit I know they will and in terms of the past and the early stages of this phenomenon there were if you're speaking of underground chemistry um you know there were identifiable quite a number of people uh owsley Augusta Stanley osley uh I just had lunch with his wife uh here recently you know uh Roney uh I also he put out the

very first um large-scale batches uh 65 66 he over his lifetime he made about 500 grams that's a million doses uh Nikki uh sand and dear friend and Tim Scully same um were these Central figures in the group called the Brotherhood of eternal love in the early 70s put out or throughout Nikki's life whether it put out um Nikki 13 kilograms that's uh 250 million doses by DEA standards the Kansas lab presumably in which I was presumably involved according to the primary government witness put out uh that same equivalent every year for 20 years of course from my view that's far-fetched but no one can really speak to the truth what matters or no one will right well that's a government tends to inflate figures but before the 60s and the underground chemist just going back through the early area you know the indigenous peoples of course for thousands of years um the Beloved and Bria Sabina the first Karen Daron who was being disintered on socially seeing such beautiful songs there's collections of Maria's songs one of which uh one of which he's singing uh trying to heal one of the villagers in guadalaja Jimenez in Oaxaca for their mushroom ceremony and mushroom villada and she's calling upon the spirits and she's intoxicated of course with uh two princess and uh she's going uh describing herself hummingbird woman am I uh Eagle woman a woman of the whirling Whirlwind am I woman of the shooting stars am I yeah beautiful yeah it's like kind of leaves you a little breathless right yeah I'm glad Maria's being looked upon so favorably these years you know the villagers were very upset with her um in the mid 50s she encountered the banker Gordon Lawson from New York had an interest in psychedelics and exposed him to it and this all appeared into the primary magazine at the time I just saw an original issue perhaps 57 and there's Maria around the campfires and I recall seeing that article at 12 but I had no idea the light life before me afterwards um there's a lovely history to all this um fragments that would have been told in various ways but I have yet to see a uh the truly respectful comprehensive history of the whole thing yeah I mean it's difficult to encapsulate all of it right and especially because everyone tells a different story so it's hard to get at the heart of it and this is also important to people in a lot of different ways right like the religious aspect to it the cultural the spirituality aspect of it we talk about oh you just mentioned one of your big Visions with your with all your colleagues and your peers at the time was to help Humanity see its own Humanity right love and peace and all that and that's a very spiritual um and that hearkens back to you know a lot of the cultural uses it you know it's used in a lot of practices but um these substances can do this for us but the power dynamics that we exist in right like our the way that our culture is and I'm specifically now talking about Western American culture right the Dynamics that we exist in um we're gonna have we're gonna talk about psychedelics and capitalism in a couple of episodes I think that it's these substances go a long way in helping people understand spirituality um but can we really understand it while existing in this structure that you know can promote greed and power imbalance or power one way or the other I think is so difficult and that's partly what makes the history so difficult because we don't have the like

we can't contextualize it in the same exact way yeah that's really an important observation is I mean it's um you know right I well I'm presently in Venture space I um every week I look at I work for JLS Fund in New York and uh you know we uh every week we interview any number of young Founders um you know chemist uh Physicians you're a pharmacologists that are out of their pitch decks and they're looking for investment to start up a fund so fun you know pitch pitch after pitch and uh occasional one will be funded many um seem very promising and some seem opportunistic uh some are without strong scientific report support and seem hastily done others are have very distinguished boards and um May well survive but this is all a very corporate world yeah I mean it's SEC FDA approved SEC controlled Boards of advisors term sheets convertible notes you've got uh Chief Financial officers and chief scientific officers and this is a whole new way of looking at what only a few years ago was entirely in the hands of the underground where it has been forever yeah uh even now uh the underground if you will that would be normal humans that are just curious about uses that no one going gee I'm depressed over my loss of my husband and I need to I'm going to take this drug to heal him uh it's just people in the forest walking hand and hands nibbling on a bit of mushroom in the Moonlight around the oceans around the campfires and that's how it's been for a very long time and the thing that God has gone on successfully and changed lots of lives enhanced Aesthetics and appreciation of Art and music in each other now um it's heavily corporatized heavily politicized heavy medicalized and uh sometimes uh I think of the young people that sometimes come to me and Whisper what about the sacred foreign what they're saying you know it's a question of uh I don't think that um that essential heart will be extinguished by the current trappings of corporatization it all comes down to the individual looking inward with the assistance of these um sacraments if you will yeah and you know that unspeakable connection with the Divine that change that opening of the human heart and mind that's extremely precious and there's no value that can be put upon it monetarily and it cannot be regulated okay it can't be controlled um hopefully it's reproducible but there it is so this kind of special elusive magical Eternal most precious moment um is being bounced around in accounting Realms and yeah it's like the social ritual and like the spiritual ritual that psychedelics have been known to be taken you know in the context yeah in the context that you're taking these has been kind of washed away and medicalized it's like it's within these this wall now in this box and I think that that's something that definitely I hope the field addresses moving forward is that we can't just put these things in this box of a treatment it's still going to be a spiritual use it's still um this profound powerful experience for people that you know can be you know used to treat people like we've mentioned before but I think only recognizing it that way which is kind of what's going on right now is a loss for the community and you know what it's a big part of it I think is in efforts to control right like to control the way that these drugs are used if you're able to say hey this is the way that we're going to present these drugs to you and you don't know enough to use these on your own and get those benefits out of them without us or without our trained therapists or without the way that we're

using them I think it's easy to monetize something like that because now you're monetizing an experience that you're selling to people that you're telling people you can't get this on your own right anywhere else and I think it's easy to do because of the misinformation and um this is probably something that was very different from your day but now we have articles and headlines where people are like psychedelics and psychedelic medicine is the next big thing and it's the answer to all of our problems well the truth is it's probably the answer for a lot of people's problems but there's a lot of other uses to these drugs and we are selling them in one way and it's to sell them I think it comes back to like monetizing all of these drugs so this whole legalization and this medicalization do you think that it can exist alongside the spirit the spirituality that these drugs are supposed to in a lot of cultures and a lot of religions stand for right so I guess it's kind of going back to what we talked about before but yeah the whole legalization and medicalization aspect of it well it can exist in parallel and does exist in parallel I mean both paths are happening above ground if you will discourse of course is on the billions that are flowing into the space and the main streaming of it you know in the 60s we dressed and had long hair and wore unusual clothes among them were bell bottoms so I knew the party was over when I saw bell bottoms and Macy's yeah they're coming back um yeah there's there are two paths one is of course people who have serious medical problems and we hope that this class of compounds can be helpful for them at the much larger part of the iceberg which generally is unspoken about is the continuing illegal use um it may be of great value but still is prohibited in society and that's a much larger group of people but we don't hear much about it because the corporations can't make anything from it it's all still underground still between friends still very hush-hush and that's all going on um norovolkl the great norovolco MD who directs uh Knight on the National Institute of drug abuse um is a friendly and she um thinks that they continue medicalization will increase underground use and the question is that a negative right now I make this statement rather often but it may be a value to do so here right now the emphasis is on um treating people with identifiable psychiatric issues but that's only recently that's only since um since Roland did his great work in 2015 and to some extent Rick recognizing its value of MDMA and PTSD in the 90s and um oh goodness um before all that though the UN the underground generally felt it was not wise to give these materials to anybody with obvious problems the person's having difficulty in the relationship or you know a skitzy or uncertain or you know seemingly unbalanced in any way which considered um you know sinful to exposing these materials you didn't want to set up all right holding hands you didn't want them to be in any type of psychic pain or people around them it could be very difficult long period and that worked well with very little uh public problems from these materials uh now in order to get them you have to go you know one is sick when there's a definable Neurosis if you will um of course all ranges are being treated I mean the Oregon model allows individuals to come in without pronouncing any type of clinical presentation so multiple experiments being done through multiple States in completely different structures and this is all good you've got so many experiments are going on involving these social experiments the treatment providers the state regulations the drug designers there's a thousand emerging Points of Light so we shall see

how it all evolves and trying to predict the outcome the next 45 years is uh is truly challenging yeah I think Rick's in a very good position with maps to um to have FDA approval so that will be the Bellwether moment for the entire industry but FDA is a funny Beast you know they can uh you know most things even don't make it a phase three percent negative phase three and even after that FDA behind closed doors and some hotel in Bethesda makes some sort of decision based on goodness knows what yeah those aren't public minutes and they may be a political influence on it looks as though the Biden Administration is acting favorably and you've got uh Cory Booker on Rand Paul's new breakthrough therapies act and that's extremely promising litigation and uh you've got our veterans working hard in DC Jesse Gould at heroic hearts uh you know the legislators on the hill listen to the war Fighters they listen to their military uniform uh and the uniform military is saying um they were in great pain in some instances Ayahuasca or this and other material held them enormously and you know coming from those uh those men and women uh people on the Hill are starting to hear yeah there was just a bill in Virginia that was there's a Senate bill and a house bill and neither of them passed Unfortunately they got tabled but it was really cool I spoke in favor um in front of the Congress people for one of them and I got to hear out the testimony from a lot of the Veterans as well like within this session and it was really moving and I was moved to like tears and then I was like how did you table that like I was so moved and none of these people were listening like it made me mad but that's in Virginia nowhere very moving very moving yeah you know the recitation of trauma among Soldiers the changes they went through and the particular Horrors and the war to them I mean if this these materials can be helpful so be it I think the Virginia just um it was a knee-jerk reaction they're just early it's a few years ago was unheard of right you know it's just uh it's wild and responsive legislators are becoming States or it's a domino effect we're seeing uh we better be right we talked a lot talks a lot in the present in the current um there's a lot of big organizations that are helping move this forward right in both uh in sort of medicalization and legalization and decriminalization um but it's you know a lot in the science as well and exploring the capacity of these drugs and actually understanding these drugs and I think one of the biggest uh we can't talk about psychedelics without talking about maps and Rick Dublin and like you mentioned yeah and you've mentioned him a few times um so how does your relationship with Rick doblin does that sort of inform uh the way that you are I don't know approaching these drugs now yeah and all of this all of the research and all of the studies that are happening with MDMA and PTSD and just like this big boom of research that Maps has really help supporting and I have a question about what you mentioned that Rick Dublin also went to the Kennedy School did you know him when you were also there and was he the same as he is now we did Luke was there a few years before me but we had the same Mentor ah socialize a bit I uh have always been greatly in favor of uh Rick's Vision I uh in the very early years I recall sitting in prison when I first saw the first issue of maps which Rick had drawn a little Eagle kind of coming out of an egg and fledging being born it's kind of a little rough thing and I said this is perhaps 88 I'm sitting there in prison looking at this thing going this fellow has a major courage uh coming on speaking publicly and promoting this idea of you know let's openly use this material for treatment or what have you I thought it was in immensely Brave act you know my life had been spent indoors away from everyone

never breathing a word having an entirely different personas of extremely clandestine secret and so here's this uh marvelously a Visionary and brave individual speaking openly about it and I very much admire that when I would bounce into Rick on the street around Cambridge I always said how much I honored his path and uh he's done very well I was at Rick's uh oh goodness his PhD defense and uh 96 in the Kennedy School in a little Forum with his mentor and various researchers and yours truly and the special agent in charge of the DEA Boston office attended as well Paul Brown this is in the heights of the Kennedy School you know yeah uh you know guards at the front door and what have you and uh Rick got his PhD then and incredible yeah Rick has a he's he hasn't changed he's still um smiles a lot and very easy to relate to uh it carries the vision in the heart and uh I think he's the perfect uh representative for this revolution is being widely honored and I honor him as well yeah that's awesome um so I think I just wanted to I think we're going to end I if that's fine with you um I had one quick just from the book quote that I wanted to ask you about because I really liked it um and so this quote um it relates to that concept of the darkness light Heaven and Hell and it starts off and then goes into saying uh Paradise or Inferno for those who dared assume the difference and I really think a lot of what we've been talking about is kind of talking about that balance right between the bad that could happen the good that's happening and so um I just wanted to one let you know that I really like that quote and to um just maybe can we end like kind of talking about that concept and what it meant in terms of like your writing and then just moving forward well that paradise Inferno quote I think was in the latter part of the books congratulations on getting through about 600 pages of very difficult English I love that kind of writing it was like as soon as I started it I was like oh my gosh like yes we were texting each other back and forth about it yeah quite wonderful uh next month uh the book is premiering at the Turin Book Festival it's been translated into Italian wow great theoretical physicist Carla robelli wrote the preface one of the founders of quantum gravity Theory wow interesting legs the Heaven and Hell thing I think we were talking about in some of the classical changes that are observed in psychedelic experiences some of the phenomena particularly with the acid if you will of course the book is about big ass and Global acid okay um some of the classical changes that are rather commonly seen among people newly entering the realm and among those would be like a birth experience a sense of being born you know you may require 800 micrograms or more to go uh death experience if you think you're dying and how can your heart even beep with these incredible changes that are going on um you know senses of the unity of course as we've mentioned before of living things um and one was uh one of the characteristic things is a heaven and hell experience and I hearkened back to a scene at Berkeley um where an individual I can't say who was um experimenting one night with Carrie mullis's first gram the inventor of the polymerase Chain Reaction the 1996 Nobel Laureate who had the uh insight into the polymerase Chain Reaction while on his motorcycle taking a good part the same part of the same gram and it kind of came on uh up around Booneville just below Mendocino as he's roaring up from Berkeley and there it is and he sees the DNA molecules uh twisting and combining in the he had the insight into PCR on asset got the Nobel Prize for it and she admits in his book Dancing in the minefield

um but that night uh sad individual was on Kerry's asset uh sitting by the biochemistry building rather late going through rather serious changes and there was a little dog sitting I was sitting the individual sitting on a bench this little dog poking around and the dark sometimes looked very ill and unhappy and diseased and uh you know twisted and you know it was the plants around looked kind of malevolent and the people were strange it was feeling great discomfort and Universal malaise and that was kind of hell and then in the next moment a dog was happy and warm with soft and fluffy the great big eyes and the trees were just Lush and beautiful and the lovely gases that we breathe and everyone's walking around state of health and Open Hearts and smiling eyes and that was Heaven and this image went back and forth and back and forth the question for the individual was what was the difference between the two and was when in the midst of hell the individual thought of love amazing and important that's just one small story and uh you know millions of personal anecdotes of uh you know these phenomena can't truly be characterized and maybe some overarching characterizations the phenomena we just discussed but everything seems uh very personal yeah definitely this question what does it mean to you I like that yeah I think this is a personal a very personal topic for everyone right like you have to come to your own conclusions about your own experiences yeah right just too you know as I suppose they end our conversation today although we could talk for days yeah we really could but perhaps we can talk again with suggestion in your own careers clearly you have the vision and the talent it's a very important building that you go forward with that talk to her don't be afraid to talk to anyone share um while these speculative ideas yeah you know always speak up always Reach Out always dream read read talk to everyone indulge The Joy the density of information in this evolutionary moment for ourselves and our species um and you Shine Your Light Shine Your Love gorgeous yes and with wonderful words to live on yeah and I think that's the perfect way to sort of end this so thank you so much for speaking with us and to our listeners um and sharing your experiences and your sort of I think profound thoughts um and I hope that everyone that has stuck around um has questions or any ideas please reach out to us and engage but thank you everyone for listening and thank you so much for uh sharing everything with us today thank you for having me it was lovely