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It is altitude like in one flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And I want to look for some questions. Now what is in the book? I'm a cybernetic organism.
Living to show about nethertals going. Me, Tim, Paris, and so. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show and I'm going to keep the intro short.
I guess today is Hamilton Morris, on Twitter at Hamilton Morris. That's with two Rs. 1s. Hamilton is a chemist, filmmaker, and science journalist.
A graduate of the New School, Hamilton conducts chemistry research at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. He's the writer and director of one of my favorite documentary series that you can find anywhere, Hamilton's Pharmacopia, Pharmacopia, Tomato Tomato. Take your pick. Lots of vows at the end, in which he explores the chemistry and traditions surrounding psychoactive drugs.
His research has allowed him to study psychoactive plants, fungi, and chemicals, as well as the culture or cultures that surround them. In more than 30 countries, using an interdisciplinary approach that combines anthropology and chemistry. His recent republishing of a book on Bufo Alvarious Hez at the time of this writing raised more than $150,000 for Parkinson's disease research. You can find him as I mentioned on Twitter at Hamilton Morris, Instagram, at Hamilton Morris, Facebook, Hamilton Morris, and on Patreon at patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com, forward slash Hamilton Morris, and the reissued pamphlet on what some of you may refer to as five MEODMT, at least derived from the Sonoran Desert Toad, can be found at www.psychadelictoadofthesonorandesert.com.
Hamilton, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for having me. And I'm looking at a summary of our first conversation, and we covered a lot. We will have no shortage of new material, but for people who didn't listen to episode one, I'll just provide a few points that we explored quite deeply.
Alexander, AKA Sasha Schulgen, who spoke a lot of him. Who's on him as well? What does it is? I tell you about his new book that's coming out.
No. Oh yeah, I don't even know if this has been publicly announced, but sorry to cut you off right as you were. Please cut off. I'm just going to show you what you were saying.
No, you shouldn't. Okay. I guess just very briefly for anyone that doesn't know who Alexander Schulgen is. He was this brilliant medicinal chemist who was responsible for the discovery of an estimated 200 novel psychedelic compounds, and he wrote these two amazing books, P-Call, and T-Call that came out in the 90s, and he died maybe five or six years ago, and they recently found some tape recordings of a class that he gave in 1987, and they're publishing it as a three volume set, and I was sent a review copy of the first volume, and it is so cool.
It is one of the most amazing, because this man is, no matter how you define it, the greatest expert that has ever lived on the gigantic subject of drugs. He understood the anthropology, the chemistry, the botany, the mycology, the law, the history. He understood every dimension of it, and was truly a genius. And at this time in 1987, it was, I think, a very important moment in the history of drug policy and the history of that sort of research.
1987 being when this class was recorded. Yes, and it was, I think, a moment when he was becoming radicalized, when he was realizing that there could be no more playing nice the way he had in the past, because he'd had this very close relationship with law enforcement throughout his career, and then things were getting worse. In part, not to go back to episode one, but in part because he'd done a lot of work for established pharma companies. Yes, yeah, he'd worked for Dow Chemical, he'd done pharmaceutical research, he'd worked with law enforcement, he'd had deep ties to the counterculture, he'd done a little bit of everything.
He was friends with everyone, but during the Reagan administration, it was becoming increasingly clear that things were getting worse and worse with every passing year. There was an idea that, okay, psychedelics have to be illegal because they cause hallucinations, and that's unacceptable in our society, but MDMA is different, MDMA doesn't cause hallucinations, and it can be used therapeutically, and physicians were recognizing that in the 1980s, and then it was placed in schedule one. So that was the first moment, I think, where you started to think, this can't go on the way that's been going on because they will destroy every new medicine that I create, and then on top of that, they had just passed the Federal Analog Act as well. So this was a law that exists to this day, where they said, if you're making something that we will arbitrarily define as an analog of a Schedule One controlled substance, we can prosecute as if it is that controlled substance.
So if you are making DMT plus an arbitrary number of carbon atoms, we can just say that that is DMT and charge you accordingly. So those two things combined, the destruction of any potential use of MDMA and the passage of the Federal Analog Act had made him enraged. This was also the period that led to his writing and publication of P. Call.
So this class that he's teaching is razor sharp and extremely educational, and I think it's gonna be wonderful when these books are published this summer. Will the audio also be made available? I haven't asked them yet, I certainly hope so. Please ask them if they would like a cross-promotional opportunity to put some of the audio on this podcast.
I would be very interested to help them. And so that, here's a bit about Sasha Shulgan, who also, I think it was Dave Nichols. Dave Nichols are nickel. Yeah, Dave Nichols, who is featured prominently in one of the episodes of season three of Your Television Show, who had a lot of correspondence with Sasha and said that he was more, he considered him more of an alchemist than a scientist because he was almost like an ethnobotanist not trying to preserve a first-person objectivity.
I mean, he consumed and tested many of the, if not all of the compounds that he produced, at least for tasting parties and things like that. Yes, and was proud of it. He made no secret of the fact that he consumed the compounds that he synthesized. And I think that there's an idea, it's a very widespread idea that if you have personal experience with psychoactive drug, this biases you in such a way that the research that you do is not trustworthy.
But this is something that we don't evenly apply to other disciplines. No one would ever say that an ethnomusicologist is biased because they've listened to music or because they enjoy music themselves or that a sports commentator is biased if they have a past as an athlete. Instead, we would say that this is something that makes him an expert who is qualified to discuss the subject. So he was very open about the fact that he tried an enormous number of substances but was not dependent on any of them.
He did it in order to better characterize them so that he could speak authoritatively to his students, to law enforcement, and to inform his own research. Really brilliant guy. And this book is a very exciting text. It actually gave me chills as I was reading it because it's so good.
Can you tell people where they should look for this? Yes, I mean, you can pre-order it on Amazon. Alexander Schulgen's family has a press called Transform Press. It's called The Nature of Drugs.
That's great title. It's great telling. For people who don't know PCall, T-call, those are phenethylamines I have known and loved and tryptamines I have known and loved respectively. I mean, these are encyclopedic compilations of not just trip reports or descriptions of experiences but also details related to synthesis.
Yes, and back to the experience. I mean, that's been a big part of this psychedelic renaissance is talking about how the new wave of researchers are these sort of objective, dispassionate people who have never used themselves. But not only is that not true, most of, in fact, all of them have used psychedelics, but they sometimes publicly say that they haven't, which I think is not a good way to go about this. There's a big difference, I think, between long-term and short-term strategies when it comes to being part of a marginalized subculture.
The short-term strategy is to be dishonest and to hide and to lie about who you are and what you care about. Because if the dominant culture tells you that it is wrong, that it's immoral, that it's illegal, that's what you do. You hide, and that way you can protect yourself. But that only protects you.
What if you have children who feel the same way? They're not protected. What about your grandchildren? If you want to actually create a cultural change, you have to be open about who you are and what you care about.
So one of the most disturbing things that I get, sometimes in response to my show, is when people say, oh, you should never talk about this chemistry. Don't you realize if you talk about this chemistry, then they'll make it illegal. You can't talk about that synthetic root. We've got to keep it secret.
You can't show yourself consuming a drug. Then that acknowledges the fact that people actually use these things and we've got to keep it an objective, clinical domain. And sure, if the point is to distort reality in order to sell something, buy it. But that's not what it really is.
And that's not going to help people long-term. Yeah, I could not agree more. This is also a part of the reason why, slightly different example, but in the process of fundraising for say the psychedelic and consciousness research center at Johns Hopkins or for phase three studies for MDMA, cycotherapy, when I was talking to potential donors, it was a prerequisite in my mind that they'd be willing to use their names and not donate as anonymous and thereby reinforcing stigma that I think is largely unearned. So I wanted people to not just take a public stance, but to be proud of their involvement and to show there were some, I know these are slightly different examples, but reputational, upside potential, not just reputational, downside potential.
And also coming back to your ethnomusicology example, we don't even apply the same standard to researchers of other drugs or compounds. So if you're studying opiates or you're studying morphine and you happen to have been administered morphine in the course of being a patient in the hospital, I don't think it is assumed that that somehow jeopardizes your scientific integrity for studying those things later. Oh, of course not. There's a tremendous amount of inconsistency and hypocrisy in the way these things are discussed.
And I think a lot of it boils down to puritanical objections to euphoria and joy. I don't think anyone would care about scientific self-experimentation with topical capsaicin or something like that. Why? Because it's not going to cause any sort of euphoria and might even cause pain and pain is dignified.
Pain is good. Pain shows that you're working hard, you're self-sacrificing. That's all right. If you're having a good time, that's a different story.
Yeah, I'm contemplating where to go next. I still have three pages from our last conversation. I don't think we'll make it through. Just to give a quick disjointed recap of a few things I underlined from our previous conversation.
Bullet, you realized in high school, after taking salvia that psychedelics were misunderstood and likely had more potential than people realized, jump forward. For those who'd like to learn more about psychedelics, neuropsychodelia by Nicholas Langlitz. That's right. He's got a new book as well.
Ah, so many updates. Is it out already? It's out, yeah. It's a meta-primitology book that's about, not about primatology, but about primatologists.
It's like the primatology of primatologists. It's really good. We will put a link in the show notes to that new book as well. So Tim.blog.4 slash podcast.
We will have that. We talked about your experience with your cameraman in a hotel in China with the synthetic cannabinoid, UR144, which led to a quote, fractal of uncertainty, unquote, that was very unsettling. We have covered a number of stories of the unsettling experiences one can have, or the, put it differently, the dangers of use of some psychedelics, or more accurately, use of psychedelics in uncontrolled or improperly supervised settings, which includes documented fatalities. So I don't want to give anyone the impression here that these compounds are without risks, because there's so many other factors that also come into play, not just the compound itself.
And I have to give a disclaimer here. So excuse me, Hamilton, while I do so, but nothing we're going to talk about in this episode is intended to constitute medical advice. We are not doctors, neo-shaments, and this is all for informational purposes only. So caveat emptor, be safe out there, don't break any laws.
But jumping to the next point real quick, low doses, I want you to fact check me if I'm getting any of these recaps wrong, but low doses of drugs, including Zococcal like IOS can be more beneficial than the overwhelming, what do I do with this experience at high doses? That you have had low dose experiences that helped you to see, I think in this case, quote, the nicotine gum was inside of me, end quote. So there's a long story about the nicotine in our first conversation. And we also talked a bit about Ibogaine, a bit about 2CD, and then topics that we might cover next time, which is now this time, including Oliver Sacks and Claudio and that Amhol.
So now, here we are in the present moment. We didn't discuss, we've already talked about Sashulkin a bit, Oliver Sacks or Claudio. How do those figure into your life as influences, or how would you explain either of them, either of those figures? Well, those are just to go back to what we were saying earlier about people who were in the closet about their drug use.
Of course, when Oliver Sacks wrote the man who mistook his wife or a hat and described the medical student as having the olfactory hallucinations after he's in PCP, he's talking about himself. But he didn't want to acknowledge that he'd use PCP because he didn't want to acknowledge that he'd use drugs at all. He was addicted to amphetamine for a period as well, possibly methamphetamine, I don't know. There was a biography written by Lawrence Washler that came out recently that I know Lawrence Washler, but I haven't had the opportunity to read it, it might go into that.
But yeah, he didn't want people to know. As did many people, Carl Sagan would be another example. He wrote a portion of Lester Grinswinn's marijuana reconsidered and talked about his revelatory experiences with cannabis, but didn't want his name attached to it. He had all these prominent brilliant minds that have benefited from the use of these things, but they're afraid to publicly acknowledge that fact.
And that is, I think, damaging. But Oliver Sacks, in general, he's wonderful. He's an amazing writer. I think he's one of the greatest science writers that has ever lived, Uncle Tungsten, the man who mistook his wife or a hat.
He's a really beautifully written book. His book on hallucinations is also very good. So you can hear that airplane overhead, folks. This is audio verite.
Do you hear it, Palm Fronds in the background, also part of our experience in the world of COVID? I would imagine you have had to pause for audio fair amount in your life. The joke that I remember someone told me at one point is, they said, why does thunder come after lightning? Because even God has to wait for sound.
Ha ha ha! Alright, so, Claudio. Yeah. Did you ever interview him or talk to him?
No. Sadly. Yeah, me neither. You know, he wrote some enormous number of books and I've only read the healing journey.
I really enjoyed that book. Me too. Me too. I mean, I can't imagine being a psychologist and working with a patient for months or years and seeing such gradual change, maybe no change at all.
It must be very discouraging for someone that really wants to affect some kind of positive change and somebody that they're working with. And then when you look at the sorts of accounts that are described in the healing journey, it's like a psychological fantasy of having these immediate revelations that affect profound and lasting change in the people that use these substances. And of course, there are similar, you know, for people that are interested in books that describe psychologists administering psychedelics and their patients having very positive experiences. There's another book written by William Richards called Sacred Knowledge.
Excellent book. It's a really, really good book. It's kind of half clinical primer on best practices with psychedelics, but then it also has a number of biographical sections on Bill Richards' life, which is just fascinating. And I've been moved to tears.
Have you seen the video of him administering DPT to the dying cancer patient? No, I have not. This was on 60 minutes in the 70s. And I mean, it's one of the most moving pieces of television I've ever seen.
You say DPT? Yeah, DPT, although I don't believe they specify it in the report. I uploaded it to my YouTube channel recently for anyone that's looking for it. And watching people who are at the end of their life make peace with their own mortality in the presence of their family.
And the effect that that has on their family is it causes so many emotions, one of which is, it's almost infuriating to think that this wouldn't be available to everyone that might want it when you see how beneficial it is. And I remember when I first heard about end of life, psychedelic psychotherapy, when I was in my early 20s, I kind of thought, well, what's the point of that? If the people are at the end of their life, wouldn't that be the lowest priority? Psychologically, when you want to help people that have their entire life ahead of them, that way you can affect the greatest change.
But I had no idea that the way somebody ends their life can have a tremendous impact on their family. And if they are at peace with their own mortality at the end of their life, that can relieve a lot of the trauma of losing a loved one. I have not seen that video, and I'll look for it on your YouTube channel. Bill Richards, for those who want a little bit more context on him, is a beautiful human being.
I've felt very privileged to be able to spend time with him. I don't know if he's still associated with Johns Hopkins, but he was for a very long period of time. He, along with Mary Cosimano, who I want to give a nod because she's just an exceptional human and also very experienced. This was therapists made up by the right term, salutator.
I don't know what term they actually use within Johns Hopkins, but she and Bill have, they have one of the larger sample sets that is in the hundreds of sessions that they have administered legally, mostly involving, I would say psilocybin at this point, probably in the 30 milligram range, something like that. But Bill is not just an excellent, from my perspective, clinician, but he also thinks very deeply about the philosophical theological underpinnings and or implications of administering these compounds. So for all those reasons and more, I definitely recommend that people check out his book, any of that before? I've spoken with him, I've never met him in person though.
And he's so good, it almost worries me a little bit because when people talk about the potential of psychedelics, I think one thing they don't realize is that the people that are working on this right now are the best people in the world. Bill Richards is one in a million. And by definition, one in a million people are hard to come by. You're not going to have someone as compassionate and skilled as Bill Richards working in every psychedelic psychotherapy startup.
And so when we look at how promising the results are from some of this clinical research that's coming out of Johns Hopkins, I think it's important to remember that these are some of the most talented and passionate people to ever enter the field. And it might not be the case that all of these results generalize to a larger population, though of course I hope they will. It's a really important point. I mean, these are people who have been able to withstand, in many cases, decades of not just resistance, but abuse by various establishments.
So they're not fair weather entrance to this space. They've really endured a lot. And that includes many people at Hopkins, including Roland Griffiths and many other research institutions. And I suppose this is as good a place as any to say that since you and I last spoke on the podcast a few years ago, a lot has happened.
I mean, an extraordinary amount of acceleration has occurred in the research space as well as in the for-profit sector related to psychedelics. Is there anything in particular that worries you? Maybe we can talk about the promise, but then there are maybe the concerns, one of which I'm just inferring from what you said, would be the assumption that we can scale results and scale in therapists based on, say, the results obtained through someone like Bill Richards. Although there has been a high level of replicability within the MDMA phase three trials, because they had similar concerns or similar questions at least related to Michael and Annie Mitthofer, who are very, very scold, therapists in the MDMA-assisted psychotherapy space.
And do any particular concerns come to mind for you? Well, yeah, I mean, back to this Shulgen book. There's a really funny moment where he says that every drug has no side effects for the first five years. So if you're gonna use a drug, you have to use it in the first five years when it comes out before people realize that it has any problems associated with it.
And every new drug does have a hype phase. Hetamine is in its hype phase right now. Then after the hype phase, you enter a more sobering confrontation with its limitations. Right now, you have a lot of people with treatment-resistant depression taking ketamine and they're experiencing miraculous results.
Five years from now, some of those people might start to suffer urogenital toxicity of one kind or another that could make people less optimistic about using this as a treatment casually, right? It's known to cause damage to the urinary bladder under some circumstances. And we're going to see in a few years, what happens with more widespread use of it. So, and cannabis is also somewhat in its hype phase where if we're talking about cannabis as an intoxicant relative to alcohol, which sets the bar very low in my opinion, yeah, it's great.
It's not going to cause liver damage. It's not associated with overdose. It doesn't cause the same sort of physical addiction in the vast majority of instances. Though, of course, some people do develop problematic relationships with it.
But I predict in a few years, we're going to start to scrutinize a little bit whether or not it's a good idea to be as stoned as many people are all the time. I mean, again, I think it's almost certainly, it is certainly better than being drunk all the time. But, you know, there's the cannabis hyper-emesis disorder, which is something that wasn't discovered until relatively recently. And it seems that that's a product of new patterns of cannabis consumption.
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Dry Farm Wines. I'm a wine drinker. I love it.
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And one more time, I love this stuff dryfarmwines.com slash Tim. Are there any other compounds that you think are undervalued or overhyped at the moment? For therapeutic purposes. So let's just say, and this could segue to your experience, actually, which I'd love to hear about.
Iboga or Ibogaine for Opiate Use Disorder or Opiate Addiction. What is your evaluation of that? I think there's a lot of promise there. I think there's a lot of promise for pretty much all substance abuse disorders.
And I predict many sorts of compulsions and addictions in general, which is something I didn't fully come to appreciate until I went to Central West Africa and participated in these Evoga rituals, which gave me a far greater appreciation of both the ritual elements and kind of the larger spirit of Iboga beyond its antagonism of the Alpha 3 Beta 4 nicotine acetylcholine receptor. I think this is the first time I've personally ever heard you use spirit. I know, as I said it, I said, oh, did I go there? And I just said the word spits like yes word.
So could you tell us more about your experience? I thought that episode of season three. And do you say pharmacope or pharmacope? I ask this every time.
Pharmacope is correct, but I say pharmacope. Pharmacope is always the battle of, do you say, yeah, these endless ones of these, right? You look like an asshole and say, cratam. Or do you say, cratum like an American and say it wrong.
Both ways are. Leaving aside psilocybin on our friends across the pond. What was your experience like? Could you speak to some of the experience, whether sort of phenomenologically in the drug experience or plant experience people prefer, or considering the ritual elements, what were some of the bits and pieces that you felt were particularly impactful?
Because in that particular episode, in contrast to some episodes like the xenon gas episode, there's relatively little footage of you. Yes. In the actual ceremony. Yes.
And that was very important to me. I wanted to be entirely absent from it. And I have almost complete creative control of my show within the bounds of the law. But one thing was very problematic.
That means just within the bounds of the law, just refers to showcasing chemical synthesis. I mean, even then, I do pretty much everything that I want to do, but I can't, I don't know, depict myself committing a crime. I don't know that I would want to either. But the one thing that was really, there's a lot of pushback was showing myself.
And I didn't want to be a part of that episode. There have been a number of aboga documentaries made where a white outsider goes to Central West Africa and participate in beauty rituals. And I felt that this was one time I didn't want to do that. I wanted to show the tradition.
And more importantly, I wanted to show that the tradition is changing. I think a lot of people have this idea of traditions as being the static, unchanging force. And in some cases, actually, there are many aspects of the beauty of religion that appear unchanged since anthropologists documented them in the 60s. But one big cultural shift that has occurred is there are now opioids in Cameroon and Gabon that were not there previously.
There is no tradition of using opioids in that region. There is no heroin trade there. Historically, pharmaceutical opioids have been far too expensive to be street drugs. It just wasn't a market.
And the naturally occurring opioids don't exist there. So you have a new pharmacological class of drugs introduced to a new culture that didn't grow up watching train spotting and Requiem for a Dream and Christianne F and permanent midnight and daytime television specials about addiction were inundated with this stuff. Imagine if you'd never even heard that an opioid is addictive before. How much more difficult it could be to develop a responsible pattern of use.
And so tramadol is being pressed in ultra high potency tablets, specifically for the West African market and they're extremely inexpensive. And the addiction has become pretty widespread. So what I found so interesting is that what is the clinical application of tramadol? What's the indication?
tramadol is sort of like codyan. It is a low potency opioid analgesic that is unregulated in many countries. It is in Canada. It's not a prescription drug in Canada.
Until a few years ago in the United States, it wasn't a prescription drug. It wasn't controlled. So because it's considered to have a low abuse potential, it paradoxically ends up being one of the more used compounds because it's more available. This is why it's really hard to talk about abuse potential as some sort of intrinsic factor of a drug's chemistry or pharmacology because it's so much dependent on these social regulatory factors as well.
So tramadol is relatively unregulated because it's considered relatively non-abusable, but ironically gets used all over the place for that reason. And it's a mild kind of codyan-like effect. But if you take a lot of it, it becomes less mild. And like all opioids, if you use it chronically, it can induce dependence and in some instances problematic addiction.
So the idea that Ibogaine is an anti-adictive drug is not an African tradition. That is something that was discovered in the United States by a New York-based heroin addict named Howard Lott's Off. You know the story? I don't.
Yeah, he was a guy who in the 60s was using heroin. He was friends with a chemist. The chemist said it was a psychedelic called Ibogaine. I think it's fun.
And that's all it was. It was just a psychedelic. And he tried it. He tripped.
He had a fine time with the Ibogaine. And then when he came down, he realized that he hadn't used heroin and he wasn't experiencing withdrawals. And his concept of heroin had changed. Suddenly he didn't consider heroin desirable.
He saw it as symbolic of death and repulsive and had no desire to ever use it again and didn't. And dedicated the rest of his life to being a sort of crusader for the anti-addictive effects of Ibogaine, which he had discovered. And they were later validated in laboratory experiments with rodents. So it is pretty well confirmed at this point in humans and rodents in a number of different models that Ibogaine is in fact an anti-addictive drug.
I don't know the names of many researchers involved with Ibogaine, Iboga, or any similar compounds. Was that in Deborah Mash's laboratory that those studies were done with rodents? Or was that somewhere else? Deborah Mash may have been one of the early researchers on it.
It's been replicated in a number of different labs. This is one thing that's pretty well characterized at this point. And of course, there are also synthetic derivatives of Ibogaine like 18MC that have slightly different pharmacologies that also exert the same anti-addictive effect that's hypothesized to be derived from antagonism of this one subtype of the nichotenic acetylcholine receptor, the alpha-3 beta-4 nichotenic acetylcholine receptor. So this is not part of the tradition in Gabon because, A, there's no tradition of using opioids.
And because it's a religious sacrament, it's part of a religion called Weiti. So now that opioids are present in that region, they are modifying their traditions to accommodate the treatment of local addicts. And that's what I wanted to document in my piece. I thought the documenting of a local being shepherded through the process by these Weiti elders was really well done.
I thought that was a very strong episode. Yeah, and I think it is important that they understand that they have this amazing medicine available to them because it always also struck me as ironic that everywhere else in the world, people are exclusively using and talking about Ibogaine as an anti-dictive drug, but the one place where there's actually a tradition of using it, where there's now a problem with tramadol, they're just now beginning to recognize that they can use their own medicine to treat people in their community. And it was really cool to see that happening, to see how well it worked. Providing that as a historical and cultural backdrop, what elements of the experience stood out for you personally since I can't ask anyone else about the experience that was depicted in that episode?
It is for those who may have some experiences with psychedelics in the, let's just call it, perhaps in the Western, kind of psychotherapeutic or pseudo psychotherapeutic model where you lay down, you listen to spa music basically with eye shades on, this ritualized setting could not be more different. It's the opposite of sensory deprivation. It's the most stimulating thing I have ever been a part of. It's continuous dancing, continuous music, continuous drumming, no sleep, no food, no water, no break, maximum exertion, and they divide the ceremonial space into different regions dedicated to different purposes.
So for people that are there for medicinal purposes, they occupy a sort of recessed zone where they lay side by side and everyone dances around them. And they take such high doses of aboga that it has an almost anesthetic effect. They'll even prick people to make sure that they're still responsive to the sensation. And if they are unresponsive, that's the indication that they've had enough aboga at time to stop and allow them to recover a little bit.
But there's continuous consumption and everyone must consume babies, children, adults, the elderly, everybody takes aboga. But there is a different dose for each person depending on who they are, what they're doing in the ceremony and what sort of treatment they're trying to receive. And then it's really very amazing. They have people that wear military outfits and they are an army, a spiritual army who guard the aboga ceremony from bad spirits and they have aboga guns and aboga knives that they use to prevent anyone from entering that might interfere with the healing of the participants.
There's a lot of incredibly beautiful symbolism in these rituals, including burying people alive. And I had read about this and I had always wondered if this is still something that's practiced, but they will dig a grave. And you will lay in the grave on aboga with your face up, looking at the stars and just your head protruding from the ground. And you spend the night in the ground to contemplate your own mortality.
Now, I can't see that being integrated to our Western medical practice, but I can imagine how profound that could be, even without a psychedelic. Do they observe any cardiac complications in their tradition? I ask because my understanding is that there have been documented cardiac issues associated with, perhaps not aboga, maybe it's Ibogaine, administration in places like Mexico. Do they appear to run into any health complications?
I asked about that and they told me that they were aware of people that had died using it. And so it seems that they are aware. There's no pretense that this is a medicine that can't hurt anyone under any circumstances. They're aware that it is very powerful and has to be dosed very carefully.
Because Ibogaine binds to something called Herg channels. And these are potassium ion channels that regulate heart rhythms. A lot of topical anesthetics bind to Herg channels. And Ibogaine actually has a mild topical anesthetic effect.
So if you take high doses of it, it can cause fatal arrhythmias. They didn't say that specifically. They didn't talk about observing QT interval prolongation or something like that, but they knew that it had to be used very cautiously. And you had to observe each person as they used it.
There's certainly a lot more to say about how the weath the use Iboga. There are many different directions we could go. This is as good a place as any to ask you to describe, or actually just answer the question, is Iboga itself this plant from which they derive this sacrament at risk or threatened in any way? And this is a question of sustainability as the global demand for this continues to accelerate?
Yes, yeah. I've been thinking about this a lot recently. And I was thinking that it's funny that these drug laws were ostensibly drafted to protect us from drugs, but may have actually had the only benefit of protecting drugs from us. And now that more and more people are recognizing the benefit of these substances, there is going to be a tremendous burden on the natural reserves of things like Iboga, Iowaska, Bufuel various, then not to mention the even more unusual things that are out there.
And for anyone that does recognize the benefits of these things, it's very important to take sustainability seriously. Because medicinal plants and especially medicinal animals are widely documented to be destroyed when they are integrated into a popular medical practice. It doesn't even need to exert a therapeutic effect. Rhinoceros, horn, pangolin scale, these are things that have no pharmacological effect whatsoever.
Although pangolin scales were reputed to contain tram at all at one point, but they absolutely do not. But that's all it takes is someone to say something like that. And before you know it, pangolins are severely threatened or even worse. Human intervention with some of these animals can cause the transmission of viruses, cause pandemics.
I mean, there's a lot of reasons to be very careful about the way that you interact with animals in medical practices unless absolutely necessary to do so. And I feel conflicted about Iboga. Because on one hand, I want so much to sing its praises and talk about the tremendous benefit that I think it had for me, even using it just this one time. But I know that when people hear that and understand that, the natural response is going to be, well, I want to try that myself.
And in Iboga Tree, it has to be about five years old before you can even begin to harvest the roots. There's talk about sustainable harvesting where you only cut off half the roots and leave the rest of the shrub alive. I certainly never observed that in Gabon. Every time I saw anyone harvesting roots, they would kill the entire tree.
There's talk about different types of hydroponic growth or hairy root culture that can be done to increase the yield. It could also be grown on a larger scale. I did see some people that had small Iboga farms in both Cameroon and Gabon. It's possible, but there has to be a strong incentive.
And the consumer has to be willing to pay the price to know that what they're consuming has been responsibly sourced. So you know that I recently wrote and published a blog post on considering a more ethical menu, the piece was targeted at psychedelic users or people who use compounds that often overlap with psychedelic use or administration, like combo, and discussing some of the telescoping potential ramifications of these things becoming 10 times more popular, 100 times more popular, 1,000 times more popular, which is not outside the realm of imagination or possibilities at all. Actually, very easily, it'd be the case. And there are a lot of points that I tried to describe or make in this piece.
And people can find it at Timnop Blog Force Us Conservation. It's kicked up quite a lot of discussion and also blowback because some of my recommendations hit a lot of people directly in the wallet who are providers of various things. If we grab one example, let's just take Bufal various and 5MODMT as an example. How contained is the ecological impact of synthesizing versus procuring it from these toads?
I mean, this is a fairly, I suppose, easy example. And this is maybe a good example to start with because others become maybe a bit more complex to talk about in the sense that if we're talking about MDMA, people can point to deforestation in Cambodia or they can look at the dumping of various chemicals used in producing MDMA in Holland and so on in other locations. But how should people think of synthetics and environmental impact? Is there a way to minimize impact?
In the case of, say, 5MODMT? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.
A lot of the examples that you just gave are interesting because they're completely true. Yes, there's deforestation in Cambodia to extract saffral from these trees. But that doesn't need to be a source of saffral. That's a product of the black market.
That's just because it can be done that way. You can make saffral any number of other ways. You can make MDMA from black pepper. You can make it from catacole.
You can make it from just endless different petroleum products, whatever. It's a relatively simple molecule. There's hundreds of ways that it conceivably could be made that don't involve the destruction of old growth trees in Cambodia. The only situation where that is a necessity is where MDMA is a Schedule I controlled substance and the manufacturing distribution of it is controlled by the black market and it's completely unregulated.
It's sort of like when people say, well, how could you possibly do cocaine? You're supporting the cartels. And I understand the point. But the issue isn't doing cocaine.
The issue is the prohibition of cocaine that makes it a black market commodity that has to be sold by cartels. It could just as easily be a regulated market, like anything else, aspirin. So I think that there's a lot of misplaced moralism in some of these areas. And synthesis does not have to involve destruction of the environment at all.
Five amir diemtia, especially, because you can make five amir diemt from melatonin. And melatonin, I think, is produced microbially. At least a lot of amino acids are produced microbially. Or there's such an enormous industry for the production of amino acids like tryptophan.
They've figured out ways to produce those on an enormous scale with minimal ecological repercussions. So you can take 100 grams of melatonin and convert that to about 100 grams of five amir diemt, which is the equivalent of milking thousands and thousands and thousands of toads. And so the question is why not do that? Well, one reason is that there's a sort of vitalist, animist interest in the fact that it comes from a toad, which I understand.
I actually think that's really interesting myself. I don't want to discount that entirely. And so then the issue is how can we make synthetic materials have the same value as something that is derived from nature? How could you feel that same connection to a synthetic material?
Because we think of a synthetic material as something that is soulless, something that is bad. Oh, it comes from some laboratory in China. That means it's bad. It's dirty.
It doesn't have the sacred goodness of something that is derived from this toad that lives in Sonora and estimates underground for nine months, just like a period of human gestation. And there's so much beautiful symbolism there that of course this is a transformative, good experience. How could you find that same beautiful symbolism in a synthetic compound? Well, what if you knew that the compound was synthesized by someone who cared, who did it lovingly, who was very dedicated to purity?
I mean, you hear stories of Nick Sand clutching the flask of LSD as he synthesizes it and trying to project love into the molecule itself. You know, you can do this to a synthetic compound if you want, and you can confer those same sorts of positive associations. You know, you can have animist, essentialist attachments to anything if you want if you choose. And that's what I think is so funny when people say, how dare you say there's no difference between synthetic and natural.
That's actually not what I'm saying. I do believe that there is a difference. But I think we have control over that difference. I think that difference is a product of the value system that we have.
And we can just as easily shift it if we wanted to. Furthermore, I would say, and this is also what I wrote in that piece at one point, is even if we assume that some of these animal or plant-derived options are 20% superior in whatever sense to a synthetic, I would find it hypocritical to inflict ecological damage or encourage increasing levels of ecological damage in the name of pursuing one's own healing if other tools may be adequate. And for that reason, also if we're just looking at this from a historical and cultural perspective, I think lots of people, and I'm not to malign this, but they want to put a stamp for every plant or animal experience into their psychedelic passport. And I understand the drive.
I'm a novelty seeker. I get it. But it's hard to find. I don't think I would say impossible to find any single indigenous culture that has used the entire pantheon of psychedelics.
It's just not something that we see demonstrated by these traditions that are venerated by the very same people who then reject a synthetic. Let me ask a question before I lose the thread. For those people who might synthesize. So I watch footage, whether it's in your show or I do reading.
And I hear about the dumping of solvents and other things after illicit manufacturer of different compounds. What would your advice be to someone who is synthesizing anything in terms of minimizing how to dispose of their waste or otherwise to minimize damage? Are there any considerations? And I'm asking this is a non-chemice.
I've never synthesized anything. Right. It completely depends on what chemicals you're using, because there are many things that are relatively innocuous. You could be using alcohol as a solvent, and then you could just evaporate it into the air, and it's just alcohol.
It doesn't matter. Where sodium, borohydride, form various boreate salts that are innocuous. And then you can do whatever you want with them. You can put them in your garden if you want.
Other times you might be working with mercury salts that are deadly poisons. And in that case, it is your responsibility not to introduce them into the environment where they could hurt someone or enter the groundwater. And again, this is why having a regulated system is ideal, because you don't have to depend on good intentions of every single person that's making these sort of things. You can leave it up to people that are professionally invested in doing the right thing.
That said, for every story that you hear about clandestine chemists, dumping solvents and waste material into the environment, there are actually a good number of people who are aware of that stereotype, who go far out of their way not to be like that. Casey Hardison, who's a sort of controversial LSD chemist who many people now have some problems with. But one of the things that he was most proud of was that in his entire LSD lab, all of the waste could be put in one trash can. He was extremely aware of, I'm doing something that society says is wrong.
So I'm going to go above and beyond to do it as well as I possibly can so that no one can accuse me of having damaged the environment in the process of creating this chemical. And I've known a number of other chemists who have the same attitude, who actually not only do they do the right thing, they almost take neurotic pride in never doing any harm to the environment, with their synthesis. And there's a whole subclass of chemistry called green chemistry that is dedicated to finding the most environmentally friendly way of producing a given chemical or a given reaction. If someone, let's just say, ends up with their garbage can of waste, I don't know if this is something we can talk about, but hypothetically, how would they dispose of that in a responsible way?
And I know it depends on the chemicals involved, but let's just say some of them are toxic while minimally identifying themselves as someone who is engaged in illegal behavior. Does that make sense? Of course, of course, it's a really good question. And again, I hate to keep saying this again and again, but it comes down to one of the problems when something is illegal is you could be somebody that genuinely wants to do the right thing.
I've got a little bit of mercury waste. I don't want to just pour this down the drain. I want to do the right thing and give it to a hazardous waste disposal company. But I'm afraid that in doing so, I will incriminate myself and end up in prison.
And so I don't want to risk it. This is another attitude that you find. And in those cases, I don't know how to advise people. I would say that before you get involved in anything like that, make sure that you have a plan for absolutely everything.
I'm not suggesting the people indiscriminately start synthesizing these compounds. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that synthesis is an alternative to harvesting them from the natural world for chemists that are trained and want to do so. I do have a sort of utopian vision where more people are involved in chemistry because I actually think that one of the best ways to reduce problematic relationships with drugs is to have people make their own drugs and grow their own plants.
And I think the same's also true food, by the way. I think if more people grew their own food and prepare their own food, they'd have much, much healthier diets. No one would be eating gummy worms. There would be a lot less obesity.
And it's because we are detached from the process of manufacturing a lot of the things that sustain our life. And if people grew their own mushrooms, I think that they would have a much better experience with those mushrooms because they would know everything that went into producing them. I think the same is true of cannabis. I think the same is true of masculine containing cacti.
And I think although this is where it enters a slightly idealistic and unrealistic territory, I think that it's also true of synthetic drugs as well. If you spent a year figuring out how to make MDMA and how to dispose of the waste effectively, there's no way that you would abuse it by the time you were done. You'd have so much respect for what you had created and the work that went into creating it that you would have to take it seriously. So to recap just for the benefits of this podcast, with the assumption that most people are not gonna read the piece that I wrote, even though I'll plug it again, it's nothing for sale there.
Well, actually that's not true. There's one link to your pamphlet on related to 5MEO and synthesis, but all proceeds from that go to sporting research related to Parkinson's disease. Yes. So people can read this at 2.5.4 slash conservation, but a few options in terms of less sending damage.
And I say this, I should say, because we're talking a lot about synthetics as someone who's very fond, extremely fond of whole plant derived or fungi derived psychedelics, whether they be philosophy mushrooms or IOSCA, which is a combination of the Benesteriops' copyvine and most commonly the Chaguna or Secretary of Veritas shrub leaves thereof. I've derived incredible therapeutic value from these things. And I've had to accept the uncomfortable truth that a lot of the sourcing that is currently going on in the psychedelic world is just unsustainable. It is not scalable and totally unsustainable.
I'll offer a few alternatives. For people who may be interested in peyote, I would say please do not use peyote reserve that for indigenous use, consider, like you mentioned, other masculine containing cacti, and the San Pedro regenerates much more quickly. Combo, I would say just don't do it. Most civilizations have survived and thrived and developed deep spiritual praxis without using toads of any type of psychedelic animals.
So I would argue that you do not need to either, or you shouldn't until you have exhausted all other options. The Sonoran Desert toad, Pufal various, we talked about synthesis options that have, I mean, the yield is pretty incredible. Oh, yes, I mean, this is the other thing, is if you believe in this medicine and you want people to have access to it, this is the way to actually make it available. There's no comparison to to toads in terms of how much can be produced this way.
This is how to actually get it out there. And there hasn't been a lot of research published on how toad populations have been altered by their recent popularity, but I think it's very telling. If somebody is selling a product and they say it's great, you have to really scrutinize the claim. But if someone has everything to gain and they're telling you that they're doing something bad not to do it, you have to listen very carefully.
So people that were making their living, harvesting toad venom were telling me, this is not sustainable. The populations are dwindling, and they had every reason to lie about that. They could have just as easily said, don't worry about it. There's so many, they're probably just hibernating, but they did not say that.
They said that there needs to be an alternative available to people. And I actually see it as a source of inspiration. If you care about these things, then you can show your admiration by studying them and trying to recreate them synthetically to better understand them. I think that there's a tribute to nature in all natural product chemistry where you're recognizing this amazing feat of enzymatic synthesis that was conducted by a plant or an animal.
And you're saying, all right, that's a great challenge. I'm gonna see if I can do it as well. I'm gonna see if I can do it. And if there's more in the venom, although I don't actually think that there is all that much that is contributing, why not try that out as well?
You can synthesize Bufotany. You can synthesize serotonin and O-sulfate if you want. You can synthesize any of these compounds and try them in different combinations and let that be a challenge and a way of showing your admiration to the toad. Let's stay on five, any O-D-M-T for a little bit longer.
Well, specifically the toad-derived quote unquote toad as Dafan referred to. And I wanna preface the question. I'm gonna ask that it's gonna upset people by saying I am in love with many of the traditions related to sacred plants in Central and South America. I've spent a lot of time in both places.
I've read libraries full of books and have tremendous respect for these indigenous cultures and traditions. That said, let me ask the question. How much evidence is there to support that there is a long history of indigenous use of the Sonoran Desert toad? As far as I can tell, there's absolutely no history whatsoever.
Yeah. And it's a complicated point that I tried to make in my piece and I think I ended up confusing a lot of people because the history is that there was an anthropologist named Jeanette Runquist who had found a Cherokee midden pile that contained a lot of toads and had concluded, I think maybe even partially on the basis of some work Alexander Shulgin had done and her correspondence with Shulgin, that it was maybe possible that they were using it as a psychoactive drug, which was a compelling hypothesis and it's worthy of consideration, but subsequent investigations have shown that those toads could not have been boofed well there, yes, which is the only species that produces five of the ODMT and that there's really almost no way that it was any psychoactive toad and that there's very strong evidence that they were using the toads as food. So you have no evidence of a psycho-allotod in that region and a history of using toads as food by those same people. It seems pretty clear that you can't point to that and say this is evidence of ancient smoking of poofball various venom, it simply isn't, but to make things more complicated, this misconception served as the inspiration for an independent researcher named Ken Nelson in the 80s.
So he read this article which got a little bit of popular press in magazines like Omni which were very influential in the 1980s and he decided to investigate it himself, thinking that he was rediscovering an ancient practice but he wasn't rediscovering it, he was actually discovering it for the first time, which is just a really actually very confusing turn of events, but that is what happened. He is according to known history, the first human being to smoke the venom of poofball various. I mean, just the trial and error and balls. And also intelligence that are encapsulated by Ken.
I mean, it's really mind-boggling. How much he was able to do and document. Oh yeah, I mean, I think it's inspiring because it shows during the same period in the 1980s when things were looking really, really bad for psychedelic research how one person could make such an interesting and now culturally very important discovery just on the basis of their own curiosity. I'll also add one more thing.
Please Hamilton, call me out if I'm wandering astray and getting things wrong. But I think another element or aspect of this that might be confusing to people is, I think what you're saying from hearing correctly is that there's no compelling evidence to suggest indigenous or historical use up until a handful of decades ago of the Snoran Desert Toad as a source of 5MEO DMT. That is correct. Yes.
What you are not saying is that there's no historical evidence of indigenous use of 5MEO DMT containing plants. That is correct. Yeah, that is the case. But if we're looking at Toad specifically, and I'm kind of beating this dead horse folks because I've seen how popular Toad has become in psychedelic circles and it's very, very worrisome to me just in terms of scalability.
So that's why we're spending so much time on this. I should also say just as a caveat that I have quite apart from the ecological impact seen some very experienced psychonauts get knocked sideways and untethered by 5MEO DMT experiences. Not to say that that is always going to be the case, but at least anecdotally among the circles that I know well, it has been alarming how many examples there are of people getting destabilized by their experiences. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.
Oh, yes. I mean, I think one of the unfortunate things about 5MEO DMT is its name. So people think 5MEO DMT, that must be a version of DMT, it must be similar to DMT, but it's more distant from DMT than Silicyn and Silicyn. It's a pharmacologically and chemically and experientially, crucially, different compound.
It's so different that I don't even think the word psychedelic really fully captures what it is and what it does. It's operating on a level that is different from any other psychedelic. And I'm not just talking about its potency. There's something else going on.
It doesn't cause visual hallucinations for most people. It dissociates you entirely from your environment. You become largely unresponsive at high doses almost as if you've taken an anesthetic and it can produce very violent physical reactions for people as well. It's really like a near-death experience more than what people think of when they think of a psychedelic experience.
For all those reasons and more folks, please consider other options or a synthetic route with respect to toad in the new season, not to go from like horror to horror. You explored Xenon gas. Yes. So I think this is a useful place to talk about not necessarily risks of compounds, but risks that can exist external to the compound or even the dose of a compound itself.
So we were texting about this a few days ago, but you brought a little bit of background on why you have a gas in the most recent season, what some of its effects are, and then talk about what you observe in this clinic that's scared living shit at me. Yes, yes. So for those that aren't aware of Xenon, it is an element. It's on the periodic table of elements in a column called the noble gases.
It's on the rightmost side and at the top you have helium, which everyone is familiar with, then neon, which again everyone is familiar with, then argon, which maybe a few less people are familiar with, then Krypton and then xenon. Xenon is the heaviest noble gas that is not radioactive, then you have radon, which is unstable. And if you've heard of xenon, you probably only know about it in the context of lighting. It's used in car headlights and projector lights and things like that.
It's very, very rare in our atmosphere. It's 0.000087% of Earth's atmosphere. So there's a little tiny bit in every breath that you take, but in order to concentrate enough of it, to fill a tank, you need to distill millions of liters of air. You have to compress it and cool it down to a liquid and then fractionally distill off the nitrogen and the oxygen and finally, after you've removed all the other gases, you're left with a small xenon fraction, which is why it's so expensive, a single breath of xenon costs somewhere in the range of $60.
And that's unfortunate because for anesthesiologists that have examined xenon clinically, it concluded that it has a number of attributes that make it essentially the perfect anesthetic. It is not metabolized in any way. It can be recycled indefinitely. It's extremely potent, more potent than nitrous oxide.
When it's given to a patient, they recover very, very rapidly after the xenon gas is removed within seconds. And the anesthesia also begins within seconds and it has no known toxicity. So it is arguably the perfect anesthetic and maybe even the perfect drug. It's incredibly, incredibly euphoric.
But, and this actually goes back to these again, I was saying earlier about how there's so many different factors that determine addiction. When people were talking about addiction potential, there could be the greatest drug in the world, but it doesn't matter if a single dose of it costs thousands of dollars or it's impossible to obtain. And I think xenon is an example of that. It is a drug that is extremely enjoyable, but it's just something that nobody has access to.
I never thought I would have the opportunity to use it. And it wasn't until I was visiting a chemist friend in New Zealand, I was in 2014. I was on my way back to the United States. I was about to get on the plane and he said, oh, before you go, I need to show you I have this tank of xenon and I couldn't believe it.
That it seems so absurdly extravagant. It seemed almost unpar with using gold or diamonds as a psychoactive drug. And I had that opportunity to inhale one balloon full of xenon and it was a cherished memory of this one absurd, extravagant encounter with xenon gas, which is a source of fascination for anyone that cares about the periodic table. Now, when you say balloon, it was a balloon of sorts.
Mary may not have been a condom. So you talk about this perfect drug. I think you're talking about it as a perfect drug from the standpoint of euphoria. I want you to correct me for wrong.
The first time that xenon ever came on my radar outside of hearing about it in passing maybe in high school on the periodic table was as a possible performance enhancing drug at the Sochi Olympics for endurance. I think it was for biaathlone or any number of other sports but that it was being used for endurance enhancing properties as a performance enhancing drug. I don't know if there's any real plausible mechanism to explain that but what are the medical uses of xenon outside of inducing euphoria? First as an anesthetic but it's not used for that in the United States at this time.
It was used experimentally for a brief period by an anesthesiologist named Mervin Mays and a few others have investigated it but it has not been approved by the FDA for that purpose and all uses experimental. There is a pharmaceutical company called Nobelis that's trying to develop and release a xenon inhaler for PTSD, they actually sent me a prototype of it which is the first time I've heard of a psychoactive drug inhaler for treatment of a psychological disorder. Very interesting idea. I don't know if it will ever come to market but it was really cool to see somebody looking into that.
In terms of performance enhancing, I think that it's basically working as a sort of oxygen deprivation type intervention where in addition to the anesthetic euphoria into facts that conceivably could allow an athlete to get a little extra workout in. I mean, this is I think among elite Olympic type athletes, it would be far too expensive to use under any sort of normal training. And that was about it. I had this one experience, I wrote it up as a fun novelty that I would never get to do again.
And then somebody wrote to me and they said, I was just in the sauna at the gym and some guy said that he owns a xenon clinic. What's the deal with that? And I thought, well, I don't know what the deal is with that. I've never heard of a xenon clinic.
And I said, can you get me this guy's phone number and could I talk to him? And he said, I'll do what I can. He sends me his phone number. We start talking in the English language.
There's almost nothing about this. This is all happening in Russia, Czech Republic, India as well apparently. But if you look online, at least before I released my episode, there was almost nothing about xenon as a psychoactive drug. But these clinics are opening up where they give people xenon as a therapy for a variety of different ailments.
And so I went and spent some time at one of these clinics and it was a fascinating and somewhat frightening experience. It was one of the most surreal, I would say, maybe that's the word, surreal 20 or 30 minutes of television I've ever seen. I won't ruin this prize, but there's xenongas, there's operatic singing. There are breatharians, in other words, people who claim to survive on prana alone without eating food, which ends up being particularly relevant when we get to the horror story that I hope you'll share.
And also the bizarness of hearing how deep your voice becomes. Oh, yes. On xenon. Yes, yes, it's really funny.
It's also funny, there's a number of videos on YouTube of people inhaling xenon exclusively for the purpose of altering the sound of their voice. I think this is another example of this sort of puritanical attitude that people have. So if you inhale xenongas to change the sound of your voice for a YouTube video, that's totally fine. I upload a video of myself inhaling xenongas.
My voice has changed, but like everyone else I get high, the only difference is in the other videos, they want to change their voice. The highness is incidental. In my video, I want to get high, and the voice changes incidental. But in my case, the video is demonetized.
You back an alien hedonist. But I think that it is sort of emblematic of the way these things are carried out in our culture. Two people can inhale the exact same gas. But if you're doing it with the intention of feeling euphoria, that's unacceptable.
But if you're doing it to playfully alter the sound of your voice, then sure, that's fine. You can advertise with that. Since I've been dragging this out with foreshadowing, what was the horror story? OK, OK, the horror story, yes.
So in order to do the work that I do, I've had to cultivate a very non-judgmental attitude. And I often get messages from people saying, how could you possibly let this person say this? Or how could you have talked to this or that sort of person? But I think the best strategy, if you're trying to learn from someone else, is just to listen and to not judge them.