Welcome back to psychedelics today. This is your host Joe more. I hope you're all doing lovely for this episode. I actually traveled all the way over to Philadelphia Pennsylvania and got to link up with Hamilton Morris. If you don't know who Hamilton is, you really, really, really need to check out Hamilton's. Pharmacopoeia. Brilliant show. Three full seasons now and just a really bright clever person.
Really fun getting together with him. You'll see, you'll see we start out, kind of just laughing a little bit. We get into some good jokes later. But yeah, Hamilton's done a lot. He does really great journalism and storytelling around individual compounds. I think he got started kind of doing stuff for vice and it's early days and kind of just worked up to now, having like three seasons of this show. Hamilton's a real-deal chemist as well. Working in a lab in Philadelphia.
Believe he said, they're cranking out multiple new psychoactives or at least I think you'll hear exactly what he says near the end. And for those of you who are curious Hamilton Morris and I do get to talk about his involvement with compass Pathways and you know, why its controversial, why his deal is slightly different from a lot of other people's agreements with compass and find it quite interesting. So we go all over the map, but it's yeah.
Kind of talk about the documentary, talk about some other hopes and talk about compass and yeah, talk about Hamilton's laboratory work now, which is really what he's wanted to do for a long time. I don't think we had any Vice drama though. That would be an interesting Avenue to get into eventually. Yeah. So I hope you all enjoy this interview, with Hamilton Morris. I really had a great time with Hamilton and and can't wait to record with him again. And yeah, if you want to support us, the biggest thing you can do right now is join us.
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We do need to sell some tickets. So it would help us a ton. If you could. I'd love to meet you there. Shake your hand. Give you a hug if I could. So, yeah, I'm really excited about going to this conference, and we might actually even Beyond panels, which I just found out earlier today to be extraordinary. Yeah, anything else anything else? I think that's probably it. So yeah, this this conference is a Monday and Tuesday. It is November 8th and
9 somehow I'm doing a red-eye from Las Vegas on the night of the 7th over to Miami. So I'll also be at the me teleconference. So busy bee, hope I get a nap in and yeah, I'm just generally excited about it. So many people I want to meet and hang out with so I really hope I see you there. Again. It's on November 8 and 9 use the code psychedelics a get 20% off your ticket. And yeah see you there and yeah.
All right, I guess on with the podcast and we'll see you on the other side.
All right, and are we at the school of the Sciences University of this science university of the Sciences right on Philly? Sounds like a fake. I was telling my friends. This is where I was going and I thought I was making it up. There is a yeah, there's even an or McDonald joke about the University of Science. All right p man. He's the best. Yeah. I was just outside Comedy Store in l.a. Like two three.
To go r.i.p. Nor MacDonald out. Front sight to see that. Yeah, I loved him and was now we could tell normal child jokes for hours, but let's just keep rolling. So Hamilton account want to talk about, you know, how did you come into this space of chemistry drugs and, you know film even
Yeah, I mean, I've always been very interested in the subject matter. And when I first started becoming really interested in psychedelics specifically when it started in high school, but by the time I was in college, I was aware that this is a very fascinating and important and impactful area. But also the way that it was handled in the media was almost exclusively by people who had no idea what they were talking about and that
Is just taken as a given like of course, of course, if somebody is writing about psychedelics, they haven't tried them. They have a negative opinion about them right there, vaguely in favor of prohibition. They have no understanding of drug policy. Certainly no understanding of the surrounding science and that's just the way it is. I'm thinking dr. Drew. Dr. Drew, of course. Yeah. It was a very influential, I would say,
Negatively influential, although I would like to go back and re-watch some of those episodes of Love line from when I was a child. I remember listening to that in the 90s and I don't know how flawed my Recollections are. Maybe I'm being unfair to dr. Drew but I do have memories of people calling in and saying things. Like I just try, just took Ecstasy with my girlfriend and we had sex and it was the greatest experience of my life. Like, is that okay? And and he'd say like,
Own, you know, you just experienced more pleasure than you'll ever experience again, and it's all downhill from here and it is a neurotoxin. So you're going to want to avoid doing that. Yeah, so, dr. Drew is one. I mean, honestly, he's not even the worst by right by a huge. Margin. There's, you know, things like there was a somewhat notable piece in Rolling Stone by a journalist, who later won an Academy Award for
writing The Hurt Locker. I'm trying to remember his name. It's but, you know, it was kind of the classic story, like a good Christian boy, who's got it all going for him. He plays baseball. He loves the Lord and then he discovers to ct7 and everything falls apart. And and I think that that story was directly responsible for the scheduling of to
And so, I was aware of how these stories supported prohibition dismissed, any kind of rational scientific interpretation of the events, and we're actually causing so much harm. And I thought, okay. Well, if somebody did something that was honest and scientifically informed.
Wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't that be beneficial to everyone? And it was really not that hard to sell because people are interested in drugs. It wasn't like, I had to convince an editor for four years begging him. Hey, I want to write about this subject and I said, no, no known some people love the subject. It's very fascinating to most people. So, that was kind of the origin was. Let me do my best to tell these stories in a responsible way. And I,
When I was very young, 20 21, and I've learned an enormous amount in the intervening decade. Do you have some chemistry background at that point? Sure, I mean, you know, obviously I was, I was still an undergrad. So, it wasn't like I had a super sophisticated understanding of chemistry, but I would also say it was probably substantially better than most people reporting in that area and it continuously got better over the years partially because
In fact, I would say almost entirely because I started working with Jason Wallach at this University started actually doing lab work and that gave me a much more complete understanding of synthesis and pharmacology and analytical chemistry, which really allowed me to push things further. That's awesome. Yeah. Okay. So that's a really good skill set. And did you pitch directly to Vice? Yeah. I mean at that time there was a really brilliant.
An editor named Jesse Pearson who came from a family with a lot of addiction. He was very interested in drugs. He had used heroin for a long time himself and he was very supportive as were a lot of the people there. I mean, it was, there's a lot of sort of stereotypical ideas about the way vices, but it was a, at the beginning. It was a pretty damn small company that editor-in-chief of the magazine was working in a converted closet.
And there was very little editorial interference, you know, you could kind of do what you wanted. And yeah, it was a great opportunity to start figuring out how how being a journalist or I mean, I don't even know that I would call myself a journalist, but it felt like having a license to be curious about things. Suddenly. I had a reason to ask questions and otherwise were not purposeful in the eyes of whoever I was.
The questions to, you know, if you contact somebody and say, what's your best-selling mushroom strain or something like that? Why would they respond? If you say, oh, I'm writing an article about how the contributions of this specific Mycologist have impacted the underground mushroom world. And I'm curious, if penis envy is your best selling strain and say, well, yeah. In fact, it is actually our best-selling strain and then suddenly, you're learning things because you have this license to ask questions. So you otherwise wouldn't have
Right, and that's it. You know, it's like a separate sort of investigatory skill set like science is one way of answering questions journalism interviews are another way of doing it and I just started trying to test out all these different methods for learning about this world that I found so fascinating, right? I'm just incredibly informative and you done a massive service, you know, I'm sure it wasn't always fun, but it was really, really helpful. I think to the drug World in general.
Psychedelic set to have somebody like you trying to do this intersection of like science culture, journalism and influenced, a ton of folks. I think in a positive way, I hope so. Yeah, and and the other thing is that you know, they're people like Michael Pollan who I respect and like and they have a very specific agenda which is how do we best change the minds of like, semiconservative?
Undecided middle-american types that sort of person who would never use a drug that was not my tactic. I never wanted to appeal to those people. What I really wanted to do was to take areas, especially the most stigmatized ones, the areas of people wouldn't stand up for and I thought, okay. Well, no one is going to stand up for PCP, and yet, brilliant episode. And yet it is a medically recognized.
These associations with PCP and violence are basically a media fabrication and a racist and classist one at that. And so I thought okay. Well no one else is going to do this. I have nothing to lose. All do it. Same thing for methamphetamine. Same thing for synthetic cannabinoids. Same thing for most of these. So whenever there's been a drug, a danger drug or something that everyone feels very comfortable hating. I've always felt. Okay. That's the when everybody feels comfortable. Hey,
Ting. Something. That's the time that you have to be most cautious because that's when people really get into trouble. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think you just read a few history books. You can kind of understand that kind of shaping. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I call it unoriginal hatred. And I think it's one of the most dangerous forces. Hmm, make sense. Yeah. I just finished a book. Recapping the Afghanistan disaster. Was it called the Afghanistan papers? And it was just like,
How manipulated we were and them. Meaning like the people in charge is insane, very blunder full. And that same set of people is doing the drug war and like running newspapers and everything, keeping it down. It really sucks.
So two episodes, I want to chat about the PCP one first off, the most amazing thing in there. Was that gentleman from the process church? I had not seen somebody on video ever actually talked about the process church. So I thought that number that alone was super interesting and that was a PCP head was unbelievable to. It was really funny about Timothy Wiley, is that
He had done this really significant thing. That was probably the major reason people wanted to talk to him and I was totally not interested in that in retrospect. I actually wish I were more interested in it because you know, I've subsequently read a lot about the Manson family and the its contested but the potential at least ideological association between process and family, belief systems and
And I never once asked him a single question about the way that I knew about Timothy while we had nothing to do with Manson or process. It was because early on maybe when I was a freshman in college or something, I started thinking what is the deal with PCP? And if so many people use this drug in the 1970s and you only hear negative things about it. Did anyone like this drug? What it what is going on here? And so I started looking for any articles.
It's somebody had written saying, yeah, I've used PCP and I actually liked it a lot, and as you might imagine, there was very little out there except for an article that Timothy Wiley had written for High Times that they had rejected. So he put it on his website and it was such a strange piece of writing. And I remember bookmarking it and thinking, huh. We will this is really an interesting fellow. Whoever. This Timothy Wiley guy is
And and then I called him and he was so funny and so charismatic and I thought, all right. All right. I think I'm gonna have to make the trip out to spend a little time with this guy. And I feel like that was actually kind of the formative moment for me when I was making the actual pharmacopoeia TV show where I was like, this is what I like. I like talking to unusual people. I'm not interested in PR or propaganda.
Want to, you know, there's also this idea that you have to only show, you know, like the politics of respectability. This idea that we're a marginalized group. And so you can't show a crazy person using drugs. Then you're just supporting the prohibitionist. You have to show a Silicon Valley, Professional micro dosing and then writing code because that's respectable. And that's what we need to show the world. You can you have to show somebody who's dying of cancer.
Sure, who's undergoing psilocybin Psychotherapy? Who's coming to terms with their own mortality and growing closer to their family? Now? There's of course. Absolutely. Nothing wrong with doing that. In fact, I think it's very good to do that. But the flip side is, if you only do that and you ignore every single person that has an unusual relationship to these substances. That's not journalism or anthropology or reporting the truth. That's basically propaganda. So on one hand, I have
Tremendous appreciation for the very real and important clinical work that's being done. But I also have tremendous resentment for the people that would attack me when I showed something. Other than that because I thought, well, that's true and that's good. But that's also not everything that's happening. I never considered that about your show like you receiving a ton of ship for some of those episodes. I on the level. I'm like, this is the best like picture of some of these drugs I've ever seen and like you get to see a broad spectrum.
And it's yeah, it sucks that you're getting heat for it. Yeah, and the funny thing is well, is you might think as an outsider you might think well who's going to object to this? Well, it's going to be christian mothers in Middle America. Those are going to be the people that object to it, but that's actually not the case at all. I have received no objection from law enforcement or conservatives, 100% of the opposition comes from within the Psychedelic Community. That's where all of the infighting and the Discord.
Tends to be localized. Which is, I think also, interesting. So when the, when I was I remember getting kind of nasty messages from a graduate student, who's saying, how could you show this person? He's crazy. You're trying to legitimize these things and you just showed a crazy person who talks about dolphins using sand dollars as walkie-talkies. That's not what we need to see in the news. And I think what we need to see in the news is truth.
Since since that episode of been able to actually have conversations with the number of PCP users, surprisingly normal, folks. And I think we even were able to do two different articles on PCP and like the race impact of our narratives and a lot of those issues. It's just a really fascinating and I don't know abandoned psychedelic compound really interesting to certainly abandoned by the kind of white psychedelic, right? Unity totally, but
A tremendous number of people that use PCP outside of that world and this is Carl Hart, when he was promoting. His book, said this a lot. Where is the Psychedelic Community defending? Methamphetamine defending PCP? And I thought, well, I mean, I've tried and it's, but it's also it's not about defending necessarily. It's about contextualizing and not falling into these traps of drug elitism, which are almost exclusively racist and classist.
Attacks on people that behave in a way that you consider undesirable and you don't want to be associated with them and you see shades of this throughout most psychedelic rhetoric psychedelics are different from other drugs or not. Like the bad drugs. These are the good drugs. Well, on one hand, I do agree with that on some level on the level that. Yes, they not only do not tend to cause addiction at least the classical certain urges psychedelics. Don't cause addiction they tend to
Eat it. So yes, there are very serious differences between them. But if we fall into the same moral binary, then we're all timidly. No better than people. That think that distinction between licit and illicit. Drugs is a pharmacologically or medically meaningful distinction. It's like certain folks. Don't actually want to evolve culture. They just want to like feel better in their community.
Or it's just strange kind of tribal thing. Well, if you have a bad guy that you can attack then you're saying no. No, we're not like the bad guy. We're not like those bad people. Those are the bad guys. We're okay. We're only favor of this one thing. That's okay. We're not into synthetic psychedelics are into natural. So I could only wearn to plan medicines. This is a different. We're not like those, those bag guns. Yeah, the medicine term and then the plant medicine turned, both kind of drives me bonkers. I don't really know.
To do about it. I get it but it's also like, what about acid guys, like? It's still great. I mean, most of the stuff I get it, I get it because I'm also aware. I mean I made aware every single day over and over again each morning when I look at my messages, you know, probably receive
You know, a couple dozen messages every day and it's a constant reminder of how little people know about this area that people really are very genuinely, confused in a lot of ways. And it's not because they're bad, and it's not because they're stupid. It's just because they don't know and Herod Decades of drug war. Yeah, and that doesn't go away easy. I don't think. Yeah. I don't know how to really handle that one. Well,
Another service you did was with salvia, divinorum your episode. There is kind of my reference, if someone's like, oh, that was that bullshit from the 90s, or whatever. Have you seen this episode? And this is like, brilliant and it rehab the image. I think quite publicly of the sub of the plant. And now is another example where I think there was also kind of weird. It's another shade of the same problem that I was talking about earlier, where people said, oh, it's all these people filming themselves.
Being Salvia and putting it on YouTube. That's why it's illegal. That you can't do that. That's not sacred Behavior. It's like well people should be able to do whatever they want. Including film themselves using drugs and put it on YouTube and then but of course this depends on a culture that's mature enough to recognize that. You can't, you can't gauge the internal state of a person based on their external appearance. So somebody could be drooling and laughing hysterically and falling back.
In their chair, they might also be having a Transcendent experience that is having a positive impact on their life or a negative one, but the bottom line is that, you know, drug policy shouldn't be based on what people do or don't upload to YouTube. Right. Should be based on science or at least figuring out a way to have a safe Supply and I just didn't like this idea like it's their fault because they uploaded funny videos to YouTube. It seems kind of
Like that's really not the point. And then I also was really interested in that sociologists, who had used those YouTube videos to do pharmacology work. Basically he would time how long people held in the hits based on the YouTube videos and then estimate the duration of the experience and usable to create a kind of dose-response curve, which is a really funny idea. You take this thing that most people would look at and say, well that's so stupid, teenagers, smoking Salvia and
Videos of themselves on YouTube that couldn't possibly have any value to science. And then, and then you see, why actually this is a quite useful to see people in a naturalistic setting using drugs. The way they actually use them not in a clinical trial, but among their friends at home and seeing how they respond to it, right? Having that is like a alternate touch point to what they were doing at Hopkins. I forget if they published alvia stuff yet, but it's going to be a great, compare contrast, I think.
I don't want to jump into the five Meo episode, which the first one I actually haven't watched the second one somehow you have to watch. I'm going to because I heard so many good things about it. So, the first one, there's, there's a couple issues or I don't actually know how we want to go about this. I'd like to talk about the ecological impact, and also Jerry Sandoval a little bit. Yeah, but let's talk ecological impact first. So you're wearing a cream shirt now, which
I think is the group who helped publish the manual. Yeah, and they've been doing some really great fundraising via t-shirts around like toad conservation. Yeah. I mean, this is a big project that the pharmacopoeia team and cream and Robert Villa. We all kind of work together to get this project off the ground and it has raised at this point about 250 thousand dollars for the Michael J. Fox foundation for basic research on Parkinson's, as
Well, as maybe 50,000 for the artist, gal, Patterson, I was able to use the money from my t-shirts to pay for the legal defense, of a chemist who was arrested, synthesizing, large quantities of MDMA and DMT, although he was in charge of the DMT for whatever reason and also to pay for research on bufo alvarius with the Tucson, herpetological Society. So a lot of good came out of this. A lot of money was raised.
And I think it went toward really good causes, right? Because what what I'm seeing in the space right now is folks like Mike Tyson and others coming up like hyping natural Toad and desert grows back slowly. It's not like you're in, you know a rain forest or in a lush place like Pennsylvania, for instance. It's like slow and a delicate ecosystem and I'm a little nervous about these things, you know, becoming even more.
More threatened than they are. Currently Roberts, helped me become paranoid about it. I think the paranoia is warranted because some people say, oh, well the, you know, the data isn't in hmm or aren't in, and we need to do more research before we can say that there truly threatened by human interference. But I think if you look throughout medicinal history, there's a pretty clear pattern that emerges, especially with medicinal animals.
With plants, you can use agriculture to solve some of these problems. Although it sort of depends on the plant with animals. The results are almost always catastrophic. Rhinoceros horn is an obvious example. Pangolin, scales is another example, the scrotum frog of Lake Titicaca has been driven almost entirely to Extinction has no pharmacological activity whatsoever. This is just a thing that kind of
Interesting looking frog and people put it in a drink called Ronnie Maka. It's just a frog dropped into a blender with Makkah and this is very, very popular. It's decimated, the wild population and this is for something that does nothing. So what happens when you have a toad that reliably induce has a religious experience and users. I think it's pretty easy to do the math and figure out how this could be a big problem and this is
Still a niche community. So what happens when it starts to grow, which it is. So that was kind of a big part of this emphasis, was this pre-emptive effort before things got out of control, because by the time things really get out of control too often too late, and I thought this was a really simple instance of a material. A natural material that could be synthetically replicated easily, and
The Entourage effect, I think is like a very, very fascinating concept because it's a sort of materialist revitalization of spirituality. So we live in a materialist Society. We don't believe in plant spirits, but what if you say the Entourage effect, it's kind of the same idea that plan contains something that an isolated chemical never could. It's um,
Special cocktail of substances. It really is a kind of like Neo vitalist concept and that's not to say that it's totally without scientific value it. I do think that there are legitimate arguments in some instances for some organisms, for an Entourage effect. But I also think the term is widely misused in a pseudo-scientific fashion agreed. Yeah. It's ugly. How regularly people are saying it with no evidence whatsoever. I've reviewed some of discriminators evidence around Entourage.
Fact in plants and I found it really lacking. There's nothing really great there. Yeah, and in this lab before five Imodium T, was illegal used to be able to buy reference samples of bufo. Alvarius Venom, from sigma-aldrich. Now, you can't anymore, we bought a sample, Jason Wallach, and I got a sample and it was nothing but 5 Mod m, t en masse back and then I collected samples, subsequently and tested them. And there were other components that identifying
products based exclusively on mass spec or gcms is not ideal. You have to do a lot of work to definitively characterize the structures. But based on previously, published analyses by Vittorio or spammer in the 60s. It was in line with a number of compounds that are extremely unlikely to exert any degree of psychoactivity. So there was like serotonin, o sulfate was one thing that was found in Trace quantities, bufo Veera.
In was another and then you sometimes encounter these indole acetic acid derivatives that are extremely unlikely to cross into the brain or exert, any kind of serotonergic activity. So when you really look critically at the chemical, composition of the Venom, you are left with two candidates for major contributions to the psychoactivity. There's five Meo DMT, and then there is Trace, bufotenin, and solve various and other species. There's No 5 Mod m t, and in some instances.
Vince has quite a lot of bufotenin. Mmm. It's super interesting. Huh? Let's great. You're able to do that research here. And this is now been corroborated several times in peer-reviewed articles and bufotenin is quite a bit less potent by weight than 5 Mod m t. So an active dose of bufotenin might be somewhere in the ballpark of 50 milligrams. Probably threshold is about 20 to 30 and an active dose of 5, m e0 DMT is you know, you
15 milligrams is the dose that people cite as being the desired dose. Sometimes people go up to 20, but 15 is kind of the solid dose that will cause most people to have a sort of transcendent experience. So it a dose that would contain 15 milligrams of five. Amigo DMT, you're dealing with less than a milligram of bufotenin so a much smaller quantity of a much less potent compound. The contributions are going to be
Miniscule, if present at all. Hmm, and I'm aware of some studies showing that there is no subjective difference in the experience. Think Emily new tog at Maastricht, University. I think. Now it Imperial put that out. Did she? Yeah, I think I'm pretty sure look that up. I was talking with her. I didn't see that she'd publish anything on that. But that's it. A lot of people said, well, okay, do that study and you could do that study. It would be extremely expensive and time-consuming.
Zooming in difficult and you need to, it would be a very difficult study to do. Like it was all naturalistic reports. Yeah. So, you know, no. Actual real to do the double blind. I mean, to do the carefully where the where I where the concentration of 5mu DMT is carefully controlled in both samples. That's a hard argument to make to any kind of Ethics group or even funding group, right? Yeah. I think that there's more important questions to answer than that. At the same time. I'd never
Would want to discourage anyone from doing real research on psychedelics, even if I consider it slightly frivolous. But yeah, I would bet that the difference is not substantial. I mean, I don't really understand pharmacologically how it could be but and having tried both. I don't know. I mean, I don't I don't see any reason to believe that really and people say why I tried this and I tried that and they were different. Well, of course, they were different. What would you expect is that? It's actually kind of interesting how within this.
Like Neo vitalist, / animist concept of the activity of plants people dismiss, their own psychology entirely. It's something that is not brought up. I actually, for whatever reason, find this very commonly in the dissociative Community, more than any other sector of the Psychedelic world. People will say, oh, I tried this ketamine and it fell to, it felt kind of sedating. I think it's a little are heavy. There's a little more are enantiomers. Haven't been here.
That. Yeah, and you're like, oh no, this was really, this is, there's definitely more s enantiomer in this and I'll say, well, did you do have a polarimeter? Did you look at the optical activity? Do you have any reason to believe this? Or are you arbitrarily assigning, these basically fabricated psychopharmacological values to these enantiomers and then saying, based on your so where are is sedative and S is psychedelic. And so if you have a more sedating experience you
And that it is predominantly, are enantiomer cutting. This also doesn't really make sense synthetically either, but I think it's the real reason that this is interesting is that people are dismissing their own psychology entirely and attaching all value to the molecular identity of the drug. And this is coming from someone who is a staunch materialist, who spends all their time, thinking about the molecular identity of drugs, and I can tell you, this is crazy. Like the human mind is a huge contributor. If you take the exact same dose,
Of LSD every year, I would be amazed if it's the same, I would bet against any resemblance between these experiences because you will be different, you will be in a different mood, you will be thinking about different things. You change all the time, much more than the drug. I've been saying it a lot in the LSD world to, you know, I my opinion is, if it's LSD its LSD, like all these other kind of fluff or whatever other kind of label, people are putting on, it just seems kind of goofy, too.
But it's a big part of the culture unless you have some kind of analytical confirmation or you've done actual research. I mean, there's so much and this is again, I'm not trying to say people are stupid or anything like that because this is a world that has been dominated by folk pharmacology and folk chemistry at for so long that you can't really blame people for having developed, their own interpretive framework in this vacuum that hasn't been addressed by science for so long, so,
People will say, okay. I so LSD makes this for that contribution. Well, you know, the first step in making that assessment is trying pure ISO LSD and characterizing what kind of effect that has and then maybe trying a 50/50 ISO LSD LSD combination and seeing if that's different aside from the potency differences, that would be expected. I mean, there's there are careful experiments that could be done to answer these questions. But what I typically see is people have built
A shaky foundation for understanding the psychopharmacology of these things. We're usually they're not even understanding them on the most basic level, which is dosage and chemical identity. So people say a blotter is on 100 micrograms of LSD. I've seen nothing but evidence to the contrary. If you look on drugs data, actually, you might know the answer to this. I reach out to them, to talk to them about this, and haven't responded to me. But, you know, their whole thing is that they can't quantify drug concentrations.
It was like a weird ratio thing last time I looked. Yeah, so they only have ratios but not any kind of quantitative information about the dosage in various substances, except for LSD except on Wednesday. And I know that about, I don't know, I contacted them to ask haven't heard a response. But if you look at their LSD analyses, it is quantitative. There's also some difficulties in doing that Jason, Wallach, published a great paper in a series called Return of the lysergic modes where we did. I
It was not a co-author but I contributed to the work a little bit. And we did quantification of the concentration of lysergic Minds on blotter that have been provided by a gray Market distributor. And this is someone who's really, I actually know the person who did this and they're brilliant. They're not, you know, someone who's doing this kind of thing sloppily with a bottle of Everclear in a hotel room next, to a, you know, like Grateful Dead concert not, there's anything wrong.
With that. But this guy is a very serious and careful person. So the point is, that variation should be assumed in the dosage on these blotters. And if you look at the drugs data, quantification, the only thing you can conclude is that LSD is never 100 micrograms on a blotter. That is the one number that was never found. They have everything in between but never 100. So I would say instead of assuming that it's a hundred micrograms. I would assume that it's anything but 100.
G. What kind of range like 25 Mike still like 250? It's yeah, it's yeah, I think that's actually pretty close to what I write. I saw. But I encourage people to look for themselves, right? And you can't ever take less. So be careful out there. So back to 5. So the episode didn't necessarily address the delicate. This first episode. I think you revisit it and then we'll recent one, didn't really? I
address how delicate the ecosystems are in the Sonoran Desert for the toad. Like, but it seems like you tried to address it, but maybe it didn't make it through the editing room process. We started, it's been a couple years since I've watched that episode in its entirety. I mean, I know that the end of the episode concluded that has to be made synthetically. That that's the only way to do it and I wanted to film the synthesis actually had a a irrational urge to synthesize 5m e 0
Mt. After I smoked bufo alvarius Venom, it was like I was like overtaken by this urge only thing you could. And and there's of course the problem that it is a crime to do so in the United States, but I started thinking, okay. I've spent all this time doing chemistry work. Would it be nice to use my skills to do something? That's good for the planet and good for everyone may be. So I started contacting.
Will that were running clinics and Mexico and I said I know a lot about tryptamine chemistry. I'm happy to synthesize as much 5. Mu DM t. As you want as long as it's all done openly aboveboard. I don't want to hide anything. I want to do this with legal approval and I'll do it completely for free. And and I was surprised that no one took me up on the offer or when they
They would do it in a sort of sketchy way where they'd say. Okay, I can get you know, I know a guy like he's very discreet and say no, this isn't about discretion. I want to, this is the opposite of discrete. I want to do this completely openly and because I think, again, that's part of part of what I'm trying to do is if you are free to do something, you should do it. If you don't live to the extent of your freedom, then you are letting the prohibitionists win.
When you're letting them win battles, they haven't even fought.
If they can keep everyone, so afraid that they don't talk about this stuff that they don't do the things that they're actually free to do. Then we're making things quite a bit easier for them. And sometimes I'll get messages from people saying, oh, you know, I really like something that you tweeted, or I really like something that you wrote, but I would be afraid to retweet it. Because if my employer saw it, then I could lose my job. And I wonder I mean, I'm sure in some instances that is true. But I think in many instances people are so afraid that they don't recognize.
That they actually can be open about these things. Hmm and your show helped. Yeah, I wrapped a 20 or software career where I I maybe told three co-workers over the course that period of time my interests and that's a pretty fucking crazy. But I was still producing the show for years while having you know, their revenues and I was pretty public with my name. Using my real name everywhere and they never caught me somehow. So, for those of you out there, if you're not going to be
Doing a crazy big podcast like you're probably fine. You're probably completely fine and you don't need to be a zealot. You don't need to stand on a soapbox or go around, Mexico trying to synthesize 5, Amino, DMT, or whatever, but you also don't need to live in fear. There's so much interesting stuff here. So, okay. So then in the second episode, I demonstrated a synthesis that is a modification of actually a route that was
Developed by pharmaceutical chemist, For the synthesis of the anti migraine agent. He's a triptans. It's a very, very simple route. Which I think some people don't understand, I would get all these messages from people saying like, oh, you think that chemistry? So Sophisticated, that's easy. It's the whole point. The whole point that I wanted to be easy. Let me brag about how good I am in a lab. That's the dude, and we can do something in a difficult way. Beauty comes from doing something in a simple way.
Way. And so this is a process for the synthesis of tryptamines, that is pretty approachable. And that was kind of the idea was, you know, if you think the toads are the only source for the stuff you're wrong. There's another way to do it. And this is the way that should be pursued. If this is going to continue to gain popularity at the rate that it currently is. Hmm. Agreed. Yeah. I'm aware of kind of dealers that actually sell both somehow.
I find that interesting in a nice transition that yeah, we're just really not at a place where we should be buying that stuff. I don't think. Do you have any more insight into the historical discontinuity of use of smoked? 5ml? Like is it proven pretty well? That there's not a long history of use of smoked 5 Mod m t, this is also very much debated and I have spent an enormous amount of time researching it. And so there's maybe there's
Of three different threads to the 5. Mm. Yo, DMT is Oracle narrative. The first is an indigenous history. So if you include various plants that contain 5, mm, you know, DMT than the use, can be dated back at least hundreds and probably thousands of years. But the problem with that is that all of these plans contain other active substances like DMT or bufotenin in addition to the 5 Mod m t. So this is
a different sort of experience when it comes to bufo, alvarius Venom. I think that the history can be very precisely pinpointed to the contribution of one man. Ken Nelson, how he got there. Involves other people. So there was a Italian chemist inventory or spammer you familiar with him. I know the name discovered a little thing called serotonin.
Huh, and a big deal. Okay, would you call the intera Meehan? And, and he had done, really important early research on the chemistry of bufo alvarius. So, he was, as far as I know, I believe it's been a little while since I've reviewed this literature. So, forgive me, if I'm making it a small mistake, but as I recall, he was the first person to detect 5mu, DMT and bufo, alvarius, Venom and Ken Nelson, saw a monograph that had been
Published called evolution in the genus bufo that contained all of this analytical research that had been done a spammer. So he thought wait a second and he it, okay, the third thread. So thread number one is indigenous. Thread number two is bufo. Alvarius, thread number three is synthetic. So there was also synthetic, five medium team is not a controlled substance. It was sold by various chemical supply companies. So starting in the 70s there.
We're mail-order suppliers of five, a medium to. This was not popular, but it was done occasionally by psychonaut types in the 1970s Andy Wheel City. Had it pretty early when I chatted with him a while back. So it's probably through this route. Yeah. So so you had that so he was aware that 5mm. You DMT was a substance that was done and then he reads this monograph. Wait a second. It's also present in the Venom of a toad. Then to further complicate, this already somewhat.
Placated narrative. There was an anthropologist named Jeanette, run Quest, and she had done an excavation of a Cherokee midden pile and had found an enormous number of toad bones in it. And she hypothesized that these toad bones were the product of the use of the Toads as a drug. And this got a little bit of press in Omni magazine. And if you're familiar with Omni magazine,
It's cool. I was, it was kind of like.
But Bob guccione, the penthouse editor had like a Science magazine said earlier to kind of like wired for the 70s and 80s and they would publish wacky drug stories. So it will look at this and Anthropologist just found evidence of ancient psychoactive toad use. So it got a little bit of press, That's where Ken Nelson first found out about it. As it turns out that anthropological analysis by run Quest was flawed and all contemporary evidence.
Points to the use of those bones, being a product of consuming the Toads as a food source, not as a drug bufo. Alvarius. Was there a 0 and also crucially? Yes, thank you for pointing that out. Crucially. These were not bufo alvarius bones. It was, it would have been geographically impossible. So this was a, you know, it was an interesting hypothesis, but it is has not stood up to any sort of iron scrutiny, but that's another thing that I find. So interesting about this story.
Is you have a mistake that is made and that mistake inspires a very real Discovery. So he reads this article nominee, ancient use of toad psychedelics. He reads the bufo monograph. Sees that there's a species that contains five Amino DMT, and he puts two and two together and realizes, I can do what these people were doing in the past. I can use these toads as a
Drug, and he is the first person to milk, the toad and smoke the Venom and showed that, that is a viable way to use it as drug and he writes a small book. It's locally known in taxes. It's known among Psychonauts. People like Andrew Weil and Wade Davis recognize it and and then it kind of Fizzles out people. It's an oddity people pick up on it. They are.
It in a little bit, but it's not a phenomenon. And the kind of major Resurgence of this comes with send oval and red Egg. And I suppose Mike Tyson as well. And the, the raised profile is a result of a lot of celebrities having these profound experiences with involve areas and helps. It's not a far drive from Los Angeles. I guess. It's probably problematic. Now, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah.
And just to be transparent red against and of all have been pretty well documented as being having a lot of issues in the space. Certainly that, that website 5 m, EO DMT malpractice, dot org is down. We're trying to find a new home for it. If anybody wants to host a website reach out. Yeah, and this is another problem. This is, you know, I remember, when I first moved to New York, it was kind of during the height of Daniel pinchbeck popularity.
And that was, when these phrases like plant medicine were really taking off and there was an idea that was profoundly drug elitist in its delivery, which was that the drugs that were doing, are not drugs, right? These are medicines. These are ancient ancestral healing modalities and to call them drugs is to desecrate something that is in has Bears. No resemblance.
To the things that you call drugs, these are medicines. And if you want to do it, it has to be traditional. And for it to be traditional. It has to be in South America. You have to get on a plane. You have to go to South America and then you have a traditional transformative. Ayahuasca ceremony, and it became a sort of status symbol competitive status symbol. Oh, you went to Iquitos and you had an Iowa. How long were you there? Oh, you only did one. I really find the best. Therapeutic transformation comes from ten consecutive Ayahuasca ceremonies.
But you have to really go deep in with the ship ebo. If you're going to really have the authentic experience and then you know, and then everyone is kind of trying to demonstrate. They have one upped the the previous Outsider and the authenticity of their Ayahuasca experience in early on. I recognized that this was both wasteful and dangerous partially because there is no text of shamanism that you can refer to and say what is legitimate and what isn't legitimate.
So, you have all these Outsiders, who even if they were actually very invested in reading all the anthropological literature and really cared. And we're serious. And again, I'm not even saying these people had to be stupid, but suppose you've read everything and it's ever been published. And then you get to the Ayahuasca Center. And the shaman says, I'm actually from I'm a Martian. And, and I come from a long line of martians and part of
Of my healing modality has to do with my connection to Mars. And who are you to say? We'll wait a second. Wait a second. Wait a second. That makes you're not from Mars. That's not true at all. You're from a different culture. You don't really know what makes sense. What is the manipulation? And people did get heard. I mean, there is the famous case of Kyle Nolan who died and his body buried Timbre. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I thought that, that was emblematic of the problem. And so, why was I getting on this tangent? About plant medicine, like a,
Ginger pinchbeck. Yeah, it's just like us, you know, westerners getting manipulated by various, you know story. So I guess. Well anyway, lacteal, maybe I'll remember it. But one point is that this also dismissed the very real possibility that people could have equally healing transformative experiences in their own culture and that we don't need to have a Zeno Centric view of these things. Where we completely
we dismiss ourselves and our own understanding of our environment and what is comfortable and good for us. I think that there is a tension between appreciating the people who have a history or at the very least, a perceived history of doing these things and recognizing what traditional knowledge they have, and how it can be used to inform our own practices and completely dismissing our own intuition and our own understanding of what is beneficial. You know, I hear this.
And of all the time that there is, yeah, this sort of almost masochistic desire to go through the most intense imaginable experience because that was perceived as more authentic and less like, what would be traditionally considered drug use, it's not drug use. If it's painful, right? That makes it different, right? Have to burn my skin, and then vomit a lot and then it was not drugs. Yeah, and it's interesting. Yeah. It's I think it is like a sign of our culture. People are just so
Powered and disconnected from so much that they have no idea how to get a handle on it. And anybody, that'll show them how just the Jump Right In might have been Sandoval and retic. Oh, oh, oh, right. Okay. Yes. That was it. That was it. Thank you. So, I think a similar thing happened with Sandoval and Reddick, where they introduce a perceived history that makes the idea of smoking toad venom more digestible. Because look, there's a carved Stone toad.
From somewhere and that shows that people have been doing this for a very, very long time. So don't worry about it. And then people put all their trust into these strangers. And now, I remember what I was really saying is that there was an idea that you had to have a shaman, the this makes it again, this tip makes it separate from, you know, using cocaine at a party because you're, you have a Healer, you have somebody that's mediating, the experience in some way and distances it from these bad drug type of tendon.
In seas and the reality is that a lot of these shamans were extremely untrustworthy. And one thing that I struggled with in doing this, is it seemed like any Shaman, I spoke to would have some kind of, even if I didn't know about it at the time. Once the episode came out, someone would say, how could you, what were you thinking? Don't you know what he did to so-and-so? And I think, of course, I didn't know. But but what I
Realized was okay. It seems to be a pattern for everyone like virtually everyone in this kind of plant healing space and so my overarching message was one of self-empowerment and trying to help people recognize that they don't necessarily need a mediator. Of course, it helps especially it's easy for me to say that I've dedicated who knows how much time to thinking about these things and it's completely unrealistic to expect other people.
People will spend a decade reading about this so that they feel empowered to do it on their own. And of course it also helps to have a sitter or to have somebody. There's actually a tragic death recently of somebody who died, someone who I didn't know. Well, but I had talked to on a couple of occasions and it at least preliminarily appears that he died, smoking bufo, alvarius, Venom her on this rumor. Yeah. And in alone and set himself on fire while he was doing it. And it's, you know, so there's no question that.
It's but there, but there's a in between ground between entrusting your safety to a complete, stranger and doing something completely alone. And the middle, ground is a trusted friend, right? I really like Ralph Master talked a lot about these kind of egalitarian groups and I think that might be a huge part of the future. I'm kind of making it a team sport to a degree, but just with safety in mind. Yeah. So with the
Little bit of time left, we can talk. I don't know. It's cool. Kinda want to talk about compass and just see how we want to dig in to that topic. You've been getting a lot of heat online about joining up and I don't know. I feel like I might be one of the more fair people to chat with about it. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, so it's a long story. I do plan to talk about it in detail. Okay? Own podcast at some point, but
The basic, radically condensed explanation, which people don't understand and it's not their fault because they don't know me in my entirety. But I've had a public life that has included making documentaries and writing articles and appearing on various podcasts, but I've also had a private life and the private life has been very much oriented around chemistry and working with the chemist named Jason Wallach who's brilliant and a very close friend.
And someone who I consider responsible for so much of my knowledge in this area. And I've worked with Jason for 11 years at this University and there's no funding for this sort of research. The passion was there. I mean I was doing this, not not only doing it for free. I was losing money. I would take what, little money that I had, you know, left over from pharmacopoeia and I donate it to research or we get someone like Tim.
Paris would do need a little bit of money to do research and that was always greatly appreciated. But the reality was that we were worrying about whether we had enough money for solvents to do these reactions. And on top of that, it never occurred to us that anything that we were doing. Could ever be a medicine despite the fact that we both believed in the small value of psychedelics. So what was the best-case scenario? Ten years ago? The best case scenario
was you publish a scientific article and a Chinese research chemical vendor sees the article and they synthesize one of the substances that you described and it appears on the gray market and some people get to try it and some reports get posted on Reddit. That was the best-case scenario. Was that a tactic people Pursuit. Would you a little bit to get to get them? Like was that kind of did people want to see it show up in the gray market so they could get those kind of subjective reports from the field.
No, I will not say that. All right, but there was an awareness simply because that happened to Charles. Again. It happened with nickels and it's happened with articles. I've co-authored with Jason, then it appears on the Chinese gray Market, a number of compounds from Jason's dissertation of appeared on the Chinese gray Market. That was not something that Jason wanted. But there was an awareness that if you publish information on novel substances that are not controlled that, it will be noticed and
There's a chance he'll appear on the gray Market. It's just happened again, and again throughout history and unit very naive not to recognize that as a possibility. So that was kind of. But that when I say best case scenario, I mean best case scenario not from a toxicological or public health perspective, but from a human use perspective like there's no way these things are going to be medicines. Best case scenario. They're going to be a gray Market commodity for a couple months and they're going to disappear Into Obscurity. Now, there's a chance that some of this research could
Actually become a medicine. And that, as far as I'm concerned, is a very good thing and having the money for this research. Also, a very good thing. So we're doing all the same research that we've been doing for so long. The only difference is now we have resources to actually do it and it's attracting all these other brilliant. Chemist. There's a woman from the Czech Republic and yet who came here recently. So passionate she's here, you know, working 13 hours a day everyday, and, and, and
It's kind of the funny thing is everyone saying it's all about money. It's all about money. Well, maybe for some people, it's all about money. But for us, I know. This is like hard for people to believe, but there is genuine passion. I don't know why. That would be hard to believe considering how long we've all been involved in this. But it's incredibly exciting to do these things that we could never do previously, and now we have the resources and so I just say that on a research level on the larger corporatization issues. It's complicated, and I have no interest.
Acting as a PR person for Compass, but what I will say is that the research that I'm doing with Jason is something that I'm very proud of. And something that I think that anyone who understood what we're doing, would be very excited by it. So are you, you're working for a compass to in there? Helping to fund your research here. Is that kind of the story? Not quite actually working here. I'm a now, graduate student and I am working for the
T. Okay, but also doing and the universe and the Encompass sponsored research. Okay, the university. So it's really am actually working at the University and then I do Consulting for hummus. But actually, for the record, I haven't even received a penny from compass for any of those and end and I'll say one other thing. I say this is somewhat cautiously but because there's this idea that you would only do it for money. There was I want to say his name, but I also don't want to cause any problems but there was a well-off.
He's very passionate about psychedelics and he said, you know, if you start doing this it's going to cause you so much shit that I will match every dollar. The compass pays, you just for you not to have any association with them because I think that and I know this sounds like some kind of a horrible rag or something, but it's true this really did happen. Right? And it wasn't an offhand. Remark. It was something that was seriously discussed with lawyers. And at the end of the day, the reality was that it wasn't.
Wouldn't you know if I if we're about money or just taking this guy's money and done whatever, right, but it wasn't about that. It was about working with Jason something that I've wanted to do for so long and have never been able to do it outside of little stints on the weekends between other projects. And I would think wow, if I can do this much in one weekend with no money. What can I do in a year with actual resources to do it, and it's happening. This is not a hypothetical scenario in the last three months. We've
Raised more psychedelics than in the preceding three years and well, it's averaging tens of Novel serotonergic compounds. I won't say psychedelics, but let's say 5-ht to a agonists and the pace is really exciting. That's awesome. Yeah, it is. I mean, that's just that's like the you know, I understand and I actually am happy about the vigilance of the Psychedelic community and I think it is important to to keep an eye on these.
Things and make sure that everyone behaves in an ethical manner. But at the same time, there's something a little bit surreal about, you know, waking up each morning to invent new psychedelics and people thinking that's a bad thing. It's but, you know, and it's part of the, it's part of, you know, Brian Roth. Does research on serotonergic psychedelics with a DARPA, Grant Nichols would accept.
Money from Nida Nichols. Also, of course, works with compass and is the author of The psilocybin patent or co-author of the psilocybin passive? Yeah. I mean, this is, this is the thing is like, you have a kind of a fringe group of moralists and then the people that have really dedicated their lives to this are on board is, you know, this isn't it's not Bill. Richards saying, don't do this or or David Nicholls. They have some concerns as does everyone, but I think the people and, of course, shogun's, lab is now a pharmaceutical.
Accompany, the lab of dalibor, Samus a Columbia is now a pharmaceutical company. In fact, it's hard for me to find a single William. Leonard Picard consults for psychedelic pharmaceutical companies Ethan Adelman consult for psychedelic pharmaceutical companies. Robin Card Harris, David Nutt. Amanda Fielding has her own company. I mean it has this was actually one of the things that I kind of wanted to cover in the third season, but I decided against it partially because of my concerns about a conflict of interest but also partially because I didn't, I felt it.
The biggest story in psychedelics overnight, everyone is involved in some attempt to commercialize things and we'll see how it all goes. But I think it's very naive and short-sighted to dismiss this as a bad thing. When the reality is that 90% of the country has not used a psychedelic and probably a significant portion of that. 90% would not use it unless it were under some kind of FDA approved.
Completely legal, completely regulated circumstances. And I don't think that the commercialization or pharmaceutical approval needs to exist at odds with a gray Market or with efforts to promote legalization of psychedelics, which I also entirely support. You know, I think that the the ideal situation is essentially what has happened with cannabis in New York, where you have everything, that's what I want, is everything I want in the same way that in New York you have Marinol.
FDA approved, federally legal treatment, that is THC. Then on a state level, you have medical cannabis products Vapes and things like that that can be prescribed by a physician. Then it's also legal for you to sell cannabis to your friend and there will be dispensaries that are taxed at where the and they even had, you know various efforts to ensure that the dispensary licenses were preferentially given to people who are victims of the War on Drugs.
Eggs, whether or not that will actually pan out as hoped is another question of heard some people debate whether that truly empowers the people who were right because I guess there's an idea that it's often the case that the licenses are then just sold to somebody else or it doesn't kind of what happened in Cali. Yeah, so it doesn't have a long-term empowering effect on, but there's no prohibited products really in New York. Is that right? Like pretty much anything? I'm seeing in Colorado. You can see in New York. Yeah. As
I understand it. You can grow cannabis. You can sell cannabis. You can possess cannabis. You can get a prescription for Marinol. You can get a prescription for a cannabis vape and virtually everything in between. And I think that's the goal is freedom so that everyone can do whatever it is, they want to do and if you don't like Pharmaceuticals, then you cannot use a pharmaceutical and if you don't like things that are grown by a hippie type, then you can use a pharmaceutical product or whatever so that you have the
The freedom to choose whatever best suits your needs cool. I like so wrapping on compass, then like, essentially you've got some work through them. You're working at a furious Pace pumping out new molecules, which hopefully someday some of us get to experiment with if they're psycho active in the right ways. And yeah, it sounds like a cool relationship. Will this they'll own some of the data?
Right? And the university would own some of it or how. How would that kind of fly think? Yeah. Yeah, there's joint ownership between the university and then, additionally, once things are published their published there in the public domain and things can be done with that. I mean, that's the funny thing is, people talk about all this stuff is, if it's so evil, it's not as if Hoffman didn't patent, the things that you created or shulgin had, you know,
In for, for the 25 die methoxy amphetamines or for alcohol, 25 die methoxy amphetamines. They had a patent for the ariadne derivatives. He was trying to have improved for treatment of Parkinson's and senile dementia with sharing. And there was also a patent for radio isotopes of bromine being used as tracers. He there's a patent application for methylone. I mean Shogun always wanted to work with industry and get these things.
Proved as medicines. That was always, the point wanted them to go through the FDA. He wanted them to be available to Physicians and the people that wanted to use them. That was the kind of. He never, you know, Sheldon wasn't like some kind of anti-capitalist Crusader, who's trying to destroy industry. I mean, he also recognized because keep in mind he's doing the seminal research at the very beginning, had a bow at the time when they're manufacturing Napalm for the Vietnam War. So I think that he was able
Able to recognize that you can use funds from a big Corporation and you can do very good work with that money. And that's the reality. Shulkin wasn't working on Napalm. He was working on D, om. That's what was happening. And then he used that money to fund the construction of his own lab and to do the research that we all know and love. So I think that it's if you let your
Realism Cloud, the recognition that this is an opportunity to do amazing research. Then nobody wins. I mean, I really can't see a scenario where a bunch of chemists passionately researching something they care so much about is bad and people say, oh, it's a bubble. It's going to burst. Well, if that's the case, then all the more reason to use this opportunity to get as much research done as possible. It feels like a dream to
To me, right? Yeah, like, we need a lot more molecules. We need drug companies to help us go through this whole thing. And last people are thinking, five. Mijo, DMT and Ayahuasca are all the medicines you need, which there's people out there that think that, but it's like we need a lot more drugs than that need. There's so many diseases that we have to address so many people suffering and there's just I think that throughout medical history. Serendipity has been one of the most important for
Is, you know, a lot of those important Pharmaceuticals and chemicals that are known were discovered completely accidentally. One example would be LSD but also things like Viagra and Rogaine and you could just go on and on so many different compounds, Dremel and the tide. So we don't know what, we don't know. I mean Chuck Nichols who's the son of David Nicholls and a steamed?
Just in his own right. Has been doing a lot of research on the anti-inflammatory effects of psychedelics. And one of the things that he found that is most interesting. Is that the anti-inflammatory? Structure-activity relationship does not match the serotonergic one. So you have compounds that people might have thought of that. That's just something that's just a footnote in Peak. All that doesn't mean anything to anyone, especially compared to Ayahuasca or 5 Imodium t or LSD, who cares about? I'm not going to name the compound because I'm not
These published it, but a compound that lets say no one cares about turns out that compound has the most potent anti-inflammatory effect of them all. And so this is what happens when you do basic exploratory research, when you actually start testing things, you will find things that you didn't know that you were looking for. And that's, I think one of the most valuable aspects of all this is, what are we going to find out that we didn't even know that we were looking for? Yeah. Absolutely, I think
I'm excited for a whole host of reasons. But yeah, you know what, 40 50 years left before total climate should show. So we've got a lot of work to do to hopefully engineer our way out of that, maybe with smart drugs, creative problem, solving, and a few other things we can maybe right the ship before the ship starts line, but maybe we'll see. Have you looked at that creativity stuff? That fadiman was a part of way back. Yeah, like I know scientists have done really incredible things and you know, they're in their labs.
Mighty blowing lines of Crystal psilocybin. And then, you know, continuing to work all night on in crate and really incredible stuff and it materializes later, I like, actually comes true.
I'm sure that can go both ways. Yes. I think it can. But, yeah, you know, of course, is Kary Mullis and the discovery of PCR and the I think, still debated possibility, that Francis Crick had taken LSD around the time that the double helical structure of DNA was discovered. And yeah, it's clear that in problem solving, it can be helpful to do something that forces you to think about the problem differently. And that might be a psychedelic in my
Something else entirely, but I think that that should not be too controversial of an idea. Yeah, and, you know, as far as I'm aware, no one's really doing it the way fadiman proposed. So I think, or was executing on it way back then, with others, so I'm hopeful. But, you know, it takes people in labs to make massive change often and you know, your plan apart. Now you're doing the work and I'm excited. So, thanks for being open about
My compass. I know it's kind of a tough topic probably at this point. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's, you know, I really don't. It's like, I wish people could recognize that. It's what it's about. Is it Jason? It's not about Compass. It's just about doing the research. We've always done. And now having an opportunity to really take it to the next level. Where is he? Is he in this lab or see elsewhere? Well, he's not here right now that you have this exact moment, but yet were saying sitting across from his office. Awesome. Yeah.
Well, well, Hamilton anything else you want to shout out or talk about. I have a podcast on patreon that deals with psychedelic chemistry and drug policy issues. And I yeah, that's maybe one thing and otherwise, I don't know. Keep your eyes out for the the publication's when they start to emerge scientific Publications. I mean and you've got a couple fundraising projects probably still ongoing related to gleam and the toad. Yes. Yes. Yeah. The the fourth
Addition of the bufo alvarius pamphlet, which is a reprint of the original text by Ken Nelson. With a preface. The tells the story of how Ken, Nelson discovered bufo alvarius, Venom, as well as a section, dedicated to a process for the sustainable synthesis of 5. Mm. Yo, DMT is currently available. I think last time I checked there were maybe 500 copies remaining and this is probably going to be the last
In of it. So 100% of the profit goes to the Michael J, fox Foundation. You can get it at type in cream shop, Big Cartel. It will come up or it's on my Twitter. And yeah, it's an interesting historical document and it has some fun chemistry as well. Fun and potentially useful. Yeah. I need to grab a couple copies. So soon as they're out I am. All right. Cool Hamilton Morris. Thank you so much. Thank you. I hope we get to do it again.
And there you have it. Everybody Hamilton Morris of Hamilton's pharmacopoeia. I hope you all loved it. I certainly did Newfound appreciation for Hamilton and just really thankful for his projects around 5m e, 0, DMT and Sonoran Desert toad conservation initiatives. It's a really delicate situation out there in the desert ecosystem. So play carefully, squeeze a chemist, when you can not a toad. Yeah, according to the data.
No, subjective difference in the experience, best. I recalled the reports of the data. All right. Yeah. Again, if you want to support us, please, please, please join us or by a friend, a ticket to the microdose Wonderland conference coming up November 8 and 9 in Miami. You can buy tickets at microdose. Top Buzz, use the code psychedelics today to save 20%. And there's yeah a bunch of different tiers of tickets. Just going to be a lot of different companies represented there and famous people in the
Space. Yeah, if you just hear the list of people coming, you'll be pretty impressed. I know, Matt Johnson is going to be there. Some really interesting folks in the ketamine space are going to be there. For some reason. I think Robin Carhart Harris will be there. I hope. I'm right because it would be lovely to meet him. Yeah, and yeah, I hope to meet you there. So again, November 89 psychedelics days the code. And yeah. See you in Miami. All right, everybody signing off for now.
Joe Moore. I hope you have a lovely rest of your day and see you next time.
