: Psychedelic Confessions: Ethan Nadelmann

Listen to Ethan’s podcast Psychoactive
He founded Lindesmith Center
And then the Drug Policy Alliance
Rolling Stone article Ethan Nadelmann: The Real Drug Czar

Mentioned Psychoactive episodes:
Andrew Weil
Michael Pollan
US Senator Chuck Schumer
Juan Manuel Santos former president of Columbia
Nora Volkow National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)
Larry Krasner District Attorney of Philadelphia

Telluride Mushroom Conference
Wonderland Miami Conference
World Ayahuasca Conference
National Institute on Drug Abuse 

Gabor Maté The Jungle Prescription
Sasha Shulgin and Ann Shulgin Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story

Graham Hancock
James Fadiman
Andrew Weil
Michael Pollan
Christopher Bash
Lady Amanda Feilding
Rick Doblin MAPS
Alex Grey and Allyson
Sasha Shulgin
Ann Shulgin
Rick Strassman
Darren Aronofsky
Elias Dakwar
Phil Wolfson

Giancarlo

Hello guys. Welcome to the seventh episode of the mangu.tv podcast. I’m here with Ethan Nadelmann, very excited for this conversation. Described by Rolling Stone; as the point man for drug policy reform efforts and The Real Drug Czar. Ethan Nadelmann is widely regarded as the outstanding proponent of drug policy reform both in the United States and abroad.

He founded and directed first the Lindesmith Center and then the Drug Policy Alliance from 1994 to 2017, during which time he and his colleagues were at the forefront of dozens of successful campaigns to legalize marijuana and advanced other alternatives to the war on drugs. Ethan currently hosts the leading podcast on all things, drugs called Psychoactive. Welcome, Ethan.

Ethan

It’s a pleasure for Giancarlo. 

Giancarlo

So I would like to propose to you something different rather than me asking questions on your expertise on drug policy, I would like your help to educate our audience on a bunch of different psychoactive drugs. I want to make the premise that people listening don’t do these drugs alone, find a guide, find a sitter. like you wouldn’t go on top of a volcano alone, so be mindful. Some of the substances are illegal. Some can give very adverse reactions. So be educated and have an expert guide. 

I choose 12 compounds and we’re gonna see if we can go through all of them and just share our experience. I want to add two variables: One thing people usually underestimate when they talk about the psychedelic drug effect is the dosage; some of these compounds have a very different effects. We’re going to try to be mindful when we talk about the effect in being clear if it’s low, medium, or high.

And then the other thing we have to be mindful of when we talk about this compound is the intention. So what are we looking to achieve? Do we want a recreational or celebration outcome? Do we want a medical or psychotherapeutic session, or do we want a spiritual transcendental session? Let me tell you the compounds I chose and let me know if you think we should remove or add something. I have for you to discuss today, cannabis, marijuana, mushroom, LSD, MDMA, ayahuasca, peyote, San Pedro, DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, ketamine, kambo, and 2C-B. 

Ethan

Huh. Okay. Well, I have never done peyote. I’ve done mescaline once, but I don’t know if it was all that different for me than having done mushrooms. Kambo, I’ve been offered it, and somehow the notion of purging in the way that the Kambo does, I have turned away from that and I haven’t done San Pedro either.

So I think the other ones, I have anything ranging from a single experience, to a half dozen many years ago, to much more recent experience. 

Giancarlo

Okay, great. So Let’s start from the beginning. Marijuana, What’s your favorite use? Tell us a little bit about your relationship with the plant?

Ethan

Well, I mean, I’ll tell you, first of all, that has been marijuana has been basically my friend for many years.

I didn’t start till I was 18 years old. I’m now 64. So, you know, we’ve been friends for 46 years and I say, it’s been an overwhelmingly positive relationship. I should preface that first by saying, I know people for whom marijuana is a terrible relationship. People who not just become paranoid, but become delusional. So people who become addicted to it and in a way that is problematic in their lives. So I don’t want to say marijuana is for everybody. I’m lucky in that virtually all my drug relationships have been, generally or almost entirely positive. But I understand that’s not the case for everybody else.

But marijuana. I mean, I’ve never been a daily consumer. There might be moments when I’m at a festival or with a certain friend who gets high every day and I might smoke multiple days in a row, but I almost have an anti-addicted personality. So if I smoke three, four days in a row, like I don’t want to even smoke the following day, I just want to clear out. What I like is that if I’ve not smoked marijuana for a week or two or more, the first time I do it, it’s delicious. Right? I mean, especially good marijuana. And what happens to me is I start to stretch, I get this incredible desire to stretch and to be in my body. I remember it was funny when I was younger. I might be walking along with my daughter down the streets of Manhattan and she would be so embarrassed and all of a sudden in the middle of the road I’d stop and stretch. Now she’s grown accustomed to it, but marijuana, it helps me get in my body. I love it with things like swimming. I mean, we all know about marijuana and food, we know about marijuana going to the movies, marijuana including edible form for going to the symphony has been beautiful.

For me, the least developed of my sensibilities, food, tastes, sense, and all that is my aesthetic sensibility. So for me, getting high before I go to a museum, really significantly elevates the experience. I have a vivid memory of being in Prague and going to this house in Prague that was the museum of a famous turn of the century Czech artist who had done all sorts of forums and just being captivated in a way that I never would have without the marijuana.

But when it comes to the present day, my typical use of marijuana now, my favorite use, is once a week, when I’m home in New York, I take 10 milligrams of edible marijuana, grab my headphones and head down to the corner where there’s a Chinese massage place. And I have a multi-hour massage and for a very deep massage, you know, walking on the backs of my legs and my sides. And for me, I think that keeps me centered. My own base is my closest thing I have to a real meditation in my life, and my brain just floats, I come out of there feeling great. And I think of it as an integral part of my process of healthy aging. 

Giancarlo

Amazing. Amazing. For me, it’s complicated, I had a problem with abuse. I ended up in rehabilitation. I went to rehab for weed.

Ethan

For marijuana. 

Giancarlo

Yeah. Everybody was like, why are you here? Crystal meth, heroin, crack cocaine, alcohol? And I was like cannabis, for me it was very difficult to use without abuse. And Graham Hancock says that every plant has a spirit, then every spirit has a personality.

So the ayahuasca has the loving grandmother the peyote or iboga, the stern grandfather and the marijuana is the trickster spirit. So it tricks you into believing that you need it every day. And so it’s a tricky one. Okay. What about mushrooms? So just for our audience, a typical low dose of mushrooms, I mean, in the low dose now, there is also the microdose, which is very popular, which is the James Fadiman protocol of 0, 20, 0, 15, just pre perceptional one every three days. So this is becoming very popular now, but the low dose is roughly, I would say, half a gram, a medium dose also called museum dose is maybe two grams and then high dose is when we go into five-plus, into full ego dissolution. So tell us about your relationship with mushrooms.

Ethan

Well, I’ll tell you, I mean, for me, I’ve rarely done the low dose. In fact, the first time I ever really did it, there was a friend of mine having a 50th birthday party whose name happens to be Giancarlo Canavesio and at that party he was making available to his guests, some chocolate mushrooms at about one gram, half a gram, one gram. And I think some other substances may be cannabis as well.

And I had just the perfect dose. And I will say I danced that night like, I don’t think I’ve ever danced in my life. I had a spectacular time at your birthday party, Giancarlo I came away going, I didn’t know mushrooms could be so much fun in the low dose. But think quite frankly, a few weeks ago I was in Europe. Actually, I was in Scandinavia, I won’t say the exact city and somebody was offering chocolate mushrooms and I took it at about the same dose thinking I was going to go to a place with a wonderful DJ and let loose and dance. And it turned out to be a whole bunch of people standing around an ugly-looking bar type thing. And I just had to get through it, find somebody I could talk to and focus on them and just not be too bummed out about the whole thing. So I’m increasingly intrigued by the lower dose use of mushrooms maybe combined with some cannabis for having fun. 

That said, almost my entire experience with mushrooms has been the high dose. It’s been four or five, six grams of mushrooms, of dried mushrooms. And I started when I was about 23, I must’ve done about 10 times back then. And they have played an incredibly important role in my life. 

Giancarlo

Blindfolded with a headset?

Ethan

I never have done them blindfolded. I have friends who told me if you haven’t done them blindfolded, you haven’t really done them, but I would tend to do them I’m going out, maybe in nature, maybe at the beach, maybe going outside to come on and then coming back to my apartment or my friend or friend’s place. But I’ll tell you if I think about it, let’s say I’ve done mushrooms at a high dose, maybe 25 times in my life. And then if you take let’s say the four hours between the time when you’re peaking, and then when the kind of you start to come down. In those a hundred hours of my life, I have had some of the most important intellectual insights of my life. I used to be a professor that really made a difference to me.

I’ve had the most amazing culinary experience in my life. I had what in some respects was the most extraordinary orgasm of my life. I saw the most beautiful sunset of my life. And the moment when I was 32 and actually at the Telluride Mushroom Conference in Colorado, that Andrew Weil used to organize with others.

I had a moment there where my vision of what my life was going to be, this life in drug policy reform, sort of crystallized for me, it wasn’t an epiphany, but it really crystallized in that way. And so I say mushrooms have just played this really, really powerful, spiritual, intellectual, psychological, social, role in my life.

Giancarlo

If there was an arc on those 25 sessions. Would you go back to where you left and then build on it?

Ethan 

Well, it’s funny you asked that because I did it, I think nine times between the age of 23 and 25. And that was very good experiences, overwhelmingly, no bad, no bad ones. Although I do have two bad ones I could talk about, but then what happened was the last one of these experiences; I was 25. I was approaching the end of a long-term relationship that I’d been in since the beginning of college. I was trying to think through what my focus was going to be in life. Was I going to become an activist, or become an academic? Was I going to keep studying what was in my specialty, middle east politics, or go into something new? This was right before I got into the drug thing. And at the end, I remember the mushrooms came on and I started muttering like conflict, conflict, I was just muttering conflict. I was feeling this energy coursing through my body, but just like conflict, conflict. Anyway, my life changed quite a bit. I shifted my focus, and changed relationships, and met the woman who is going to become my wife. I did not do mushrooms for seven years.

And then at Telluride after seven years, I take them for the first time in seven years. And the drug starts to come on fairly strong and it’s like just jumping right back to where I’d been seven years earlier, like conflict, conflict, but then I started to get up, and sometimes when the mushroom energy’s coming on very strong at that high dose, I like to be very physical, so I started running through this field. It was actually the Telluride high school on a summer weekend. Right and running, getting all the energy going. And then the conflict kind of dissolved. And it was in that session that I really reached the realization that my life was really going to be about teaching, about drugs, about psychoactive drugs.

And that it did not matter whether I stayed in the university, or went into politics, or journalism, or advocacy, but that this was going to be my calling in life. And that teaching about drugs would be a vehicle for speaking out about some of the broader issues that we were confronting in our societies.

Giancarlo

And reduce conflict?

Ethan

For me, it was, for me, it was just a settling, it was a centering, and it was very beautiful and very calming. A few weeks later, well a week later, less than that I went into a tv show, Dan Rather; 48 hours on crack street or whatever is one of these in the height of the drug war in 1989 and I walk in, I realize it’s a setup, there’s somebody who’s just been devastated by drugs and a DEA agent. And there it’s all set up, but I just centered right down. And for me  I’ve never looked back since that moment. I’ve known that this was my calling in life, and I feel quite blessed to have realized this is such a young age.

Giancarlo

Wow, because Michael Pollan compared the default mode network that we now know is the neurocircuitry that gets subdued with the tryptamines, including magic mushroom. And Michael Pollan says it is the closest thing to your egoic armor. And he says that it’s like the director of the orchestra of your brain who then falls asleep for the first time. Now all the different instruments are now free to be independent so there is not the structure of your conditioning, cultural conditioning of your biography. So in that moment, you are really allowed to see who you are without this armor of your ego.

Ethan

It’s interesting. For me, I don’t know that I ever achieved ego dissolution even with a very high dose of mushrooms. I know I’m told that I look psychotic and I can’t be out in public. I’m sort of walking around and my arms are flying and my eyes look demonic. I have my partner who’s with me and she’s watching out for me and this sort of stuff. It’s extremely intense, but it’s very in the body. And I sometimes think of mushrooms is almost like putting a power pack on my back and that power pack, like you’re going to fly, like in the cartoons or whatever, puts a power pack on their on their back and they can go fly and it’s like, I’m going to be out there flying in a way, but grounded and it can go into an intellectual, a spiritual, a sexual, a physical direction, and I can guide it a bit, but I can’t control it. And if I try to assert my will too much, the mushrooms will fuck with me. So I have to go in there. I don’t go into typically with a lot of intent. It’s more like, let’s see what’s brewing inside me and what these mushrooms will bring out. And I will say it’s sometimes quite physical for me.

I’m in my body in a deep and profound way. I’m feeling the energy coursing. I sometimes feel almost animalistic when I’m under the influence of these things. I also will say, I’m not very good at listening, if I’m with somebody I I’ve learned, don’t do high-dose mushrooms with other people, like just be in my own trip and hopefully have somebody who can keep an eye on me to make sure I’m like not chewing my arm off or something.

Giancarlo

I had also had a very interesting high dose mushroom when I just started dating Steph my wife and we decided to do these to be together really seriously exclusively. And so she had closed her apartment in Paris, and all her stuff had arrived in New York and there was also Christmas and my mother and my father and her daughter, all the family was here.

So the combination of the move in my subconscious, created a sense of completely, I felt really disoriented. And I didn’t know what to do, so I did five grams of mushroom and that was a full on ego dissolution. And it remains one of the most beautiful, but also terrifying experiences of my life. And in that moment of nothingness where your identity is gone and you feel part of nothing, it’s really frightening. But then coming together, the recoagulation of your identity, then it’s really beautiful because you realize that the key to rebuilding yourself is your personal relationship, is love, it’s all about love and in the 60’s. I really understand what they meant because when you’re completely gone and you lost not just your body, but your identity and when you come back, you realize that the key to understanding who you are is linked to the people you love around you. So to this day, Stephanie sometimes says, can you please do five gram of mushroom again? Because I gave her this love declaration, when I came out, and I hugged my mother. It was like a Ginsburg.

Ethan

Well Giancarlo, for me, there’ve been two times when the mushrooms went in a very dark direction and it was like where everything is just black, when you read about I’ve never suffered from severe depression. I’ve only ever gone through a depressive episode once for a few months in my life. But it was like where everything has a black edge, everything looks like you see the dead side rather than the live side. And I used two different approaches; one which felt a little like cheating was I took some MDMA and that helped lift me out and make a softer, gentler experience.

But the other one, which is the one, I think is the one that one should aspire to is I was on a beach actually in Montauk, New York at the end of long island. And just in a very dark place. I mean, the sand all looked like decaying skeletal matter. And there were some homes up top above the beach and they looked oppressive and the greens looked ominous and all of this, and I couldn’t escape it. You can’t run from a bad trip. I mean, that’s the thing. And so then I conceived it in a way of this trip as this big ominous wave and for anybody who’s ever gone swimming in the ocean, you can’t run from a big wave, what you need to do is to dive into it /   dive under it.

And so I kind of almost literally, but also figuratively, but even literally I almost died down or like going into a child’s position on the beach and into the thing. And I came out the other end of this thing in my consciousness and the depression lifted and all of a sudden those ominous-looking trees now look like a beautiful jungle in four dimensions.

And the homes were the most beautiful architecture I’d ever seen, and the beach was gorgeous and I was just lifted. And so I think that understanding that. When it’s really bad. I mean, yes, people can just hold on and try, but you can’t run. And if you can, if you can dive into the blackness, sometimes that’s what actually brings you out the other side.

Giancarlo

Amazing, amazing. LSD?

Ethan

Well, I have to say LSD, I’ve never done the “heroic dose”. I’m a little embarrassed to say that, I’ve done the kind of hundred micrograms numerous times and that’s been good to me. It feels a bit like a mushroom experience, but it’s got that kind of chugga, chugga, chugga stimulant side too.

It just keeps going and going. And it feels like at the a hundred-micron level, for me, it feels like doing a kind of three or four grams of mushrooms, but with a strong amphetamine underneath it. And so it’s been good. More commonly, what I’ve done is to do, I don’t know what to call it, I tend to think of microdosing as being three/five below 10 micrograms. And what I would normally do would be between 20 and 30, maybe 40. And I regard that as a mini dose now, I just came from this amazing psychedelics and business conference in Miami, the Wonderland Miami Conference. And there were so many involved in the whole microdose field.

And he was saying, no actually microdosing really is in the 20 area, but I felt that when I do it to that level, I find I like it. I’ve had some wonderful times, sometimes combining it with a little cannabis. I found that sexually, sometimes that can be a wonderful combination, a low dose, microdosing of say 20 micrograms, 20 to 25 milligrams for me to get a little bit of available cannabis, is a beautiful combination for that.

So I’ve had wonderful times with friends, but I don’t have that kind of spiritual connection to LSD and I’ve never done as I said, the heroic dose, and I haven’t ever pursued it, and I’m maybe a little scared and I feel like I really should give it a go. But what about you? What’s your experience there?

Giancarlo

Similar, similar, I never did a heroic dose, I’ve done a bunch of hundred, 150. Amanda Naper initiated me in Pulia and that was beautiful, I think it was more like 50 micrograms. I had some difficult times. The thing for me with LSD is that I never did it ceremonially, so I never really feel safe, but like you, I’m intrigued at some stage in one of my usually up and down, I call Rick Doblin and say listen, I’m ready, I want to do a high dose. It was one of my many middle life crises. And so Rick hooked me up with this guide in California somewhere, and they had the protocol of three days where the first day you just get closer to the guide, and then you do some breathing and some yoga, you get ready for day two. They give a little bit of MDMA just to ease. And then you go for 500 micrograms and I was booked and then something happened, the universe thought I wasn’t ready. But I’m curious, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Christopher Bash, this professor of theology. 

Ethan

I know the name, but I haven’t read or know him.

Giancarlo

He did 73 high dose LEDs as the session in the course of 20 years. So roughly every three, four months, it would go for a hundred micrograms. And I was in a psychedelic conference in London and he was there, and he says that 20 years, every four months, that’s a big commitment. And he said that at the beginning go in the LSD realm as a visitor. But then after so many times you become a resident. And he’s really seen the future of humankind, really become part of this cosmic consciousness. 

Ethan

It’s funny you mentioned Lady Amanda, my one and only time at Burning Man about 10, 12 years ago when I was in Rick Doblin MAPS camp and Alex Grey and Allyson had their tent there. It was really wonderful. Sasha Shulgin and Ann, and Lady Amanda were just around the corner from me. And I won’t say who exactly gave me the 100 micrograms of LSD, but it was the last night of Burning Man, and a friend and I just biked all around the playa, and it was a weird night because everybody’s leaving.

And so your landmarks are disappearing, so you’re tripping and landmarks are disappearing but that was a very pleasurable experience. 

Giancarlo

Incredible. Same thing happened to me because the dome is gone. And they take the name of the street down. So it was very disorienting. So maybe one day, we’ll go together on the top of the hill in California. MDMA?

Ethan

Yeah. MDMA played an important role in my life, there was a moment in my early thirties when I had never done it before, and my marriage was not in a good place, really bad. We’re going to marriage counseling and it wasn’t really looking very optimistic. And my wife and I did MDMA and it was, oh my God. It was like chains peeling away, things lifting and the sense of love that we felt. And I remember thinking well we can’t do this all the time. So we sat down and thought, how do we come back to this space without the drug?

And we agreed on certain things while we were under the influence that here’s what we would do. Remember going to see the marriage counselor a few days later. And she was blown away. She had heard about this, but to see it, and in the end we still split up. But I think it helped us to a softer landing where my ex and I have been good friends and very good co-parents for our wonderful daughter for the last three decades or whatever.

So it was great in that respect. And I think it’s played an important role in my other relationships since then, really being able to clear the air, being able to talk and  hear in a very heartfelt way and my great regret Giancarlo is that it really hasn’t worked for me for the last 15 years. I loved it in my thirties and forties, and now I don’t get that much of the upside. I definitely get the downside. And my body’s like telling me Ethan, don’t don’t do it. A friend suggested that I try MDA, which was kind of the predecessor to MDMA, the popular one back in the seventies. And I tried that not long ago and I got a little more of the MDMAish effect and it lasted a little longer, but it kicked the shit out of me physically for a few days.

So I think now I relish the experience that I had, some of my most beautiful memories, especially in relationships with women have been those times. And I think it helps sustain me and in a longer relationship. But I regret that I have to say it’s in my past. 

Giancarlo

Also for me for couples therapy, the magic happens because you can see from the other person’s point of view, with Stephanie under this influence, I would see how she sees me and that really helped. We have a friend that has this  yearly tradition. They go to this couple, they offer a couple therapy in England and it’s basically, again, a three days affair. They have this questionnaire for the couple that you fill up before taking MDMA during and after. And it’s questions geared towards acknowledgement of what is the thing that doesn’t work for you, which way your needs are not met and give you such a clear perspective.

So I remember Sasha Shulgin, at Burning Man, telling me that you can do MDMA once a year. Because you need time for the serotonin.

Ethan

I also wonder are men more likely to burn out on MDMA than women? I mean, just anecdotally, I think women seem to use it longer. And so that the effect, and I seem to remember that Sasha’s wife Ann continue to like MDMA and maybe use it more often, even as Sasha was becoming more reserved about it.

Giancarlo

Yeah, Rick once told me that you have the down, when you try to cope too early. Basically when you have a serotonin depletion, then you have to take the day off. The Tuesday blues you need to be in the countryside, not having a phone, not having to deal. The moment you try to cope is then you have the down. So you need to really, even more than the preparation for the integration, you need a full day where you’re not solicited intellectually. And then of course there is the serotonin integrator 5 HTP that helps, but it’s true that for me too with age recovery is harder.

Ethan

Well, even find that the experience itself. I’ve been trying upping the dose. I think I might try somebody suggested, try a much lower dose one that I would think that I would barely feel it and see what that’s like. So I might try that, but I’ve literally only done it. I don’t know, maybe four or five times in the last 15 plus years. And, and none of them have really been right.

Giancarlo 

I want to add one thing because you know, America is very puritan around this idea of recreational. And so I like to instead of using the word recreation if we call it celebratory. I remember two years ago, I did ecstasy at a party and a little bit like your experience at my birthday party with a mushroom. I had 10 hours of dancing in the ecstatic celebration of life. And that also is good. 

Ethan

I seem to recall. I may have taken a very low dose of MDMA at your party, Giancarlo together with the other stuff. It may have been the only time it’s really worked for me in the last 15 years.

Giancarlo

Now, this is my favorite, of course, ayahuasca.

Ethan

Yeah, I’ve done it a couple of times, once in a Santo Daime ceremony in New York, actually. I remember going into that when I was a little apprehensive because I’m fairly grounded in my Jewish tradition. I have a very strong Jewish identity. My father was a rabbi, it’s been part of my life and Santo Daime, at the end of the ceremony, they’re bringing up people who have been through a serious thing to put Jesus into their lives and a friend of mine says Ethan just relax, see it as recreating a vessel for you to enjoy this experience. And so that was really, it was an interesting experience for me. I had met the shaman from Rio before I liked him, it was fairly strict, men and women were separated and you had to sit in your chairs and you couldn’t cross your legs or your arms. So that was unusual. 

But it was an interesting experience and I would shift back and forth as participant/observer. The first time I did it, which was a few years before that maybe 15, 18 years ago was with a friend, in Santa Barbara, who’s led many people on their ayahuasca experiences. In fact the way I met Darren Aronofsky, the movie director, who is the producer of my podcast, this fellow was our mutual guide on our first trips. And that one was a really remarkable experience where basically, I had a sort of telepathic connection with somebody. It was actually, it’s a strange thing you wouldn’t think about this on an ayahuasca experience, but there was a billionaire who played a pivotal role in the kind of marijuana legalization movement.

And I had a very kind of tempestuous relationship with him and he had sort of written me off, telling people he didn’t want to deal with me anymore. It was all just kind of a weird interpersonal thing. But I knew in my heart of hearts, that there was no way we’re going to succeed in legalizing marijuana unless he relaxed and we had a partnership. And during the course of that experience, I began communicating in a sort of telepathic way, doing this kind of emotional scans of him and drafting this letter to him in my mind about love and letting go and fathers and sons and all this sort of stuff. And I wrote the letter, but nobody saw it.

And a few days later out of the blue, he calls me and says, Ethan, I’m going to give you the money you asked for, and I’m doing this to show you I love you. And he never used that word with me before. So could it be a coincidence? Sure. But the circumstantial elements of that were just remarkable. That was a beautiful experience and actually worked out quite well for my organization because it landed up being a million dollars he came through with you. Sometimes I joke about fundraising through ayahuasca, even though that was not my intention going in. I think if I’d gone into the ayahuasca experience thinking I want to focus on this, the ayahuasca would’ve kicked the shit out of me. It’s just that it came up naturally in the way it did. And I think it allowed that to happen. 

Giancarlo

So my mother’s explanation of this phenomenon is that we have these electromagnetic fields. But they are regulated by the ego, by the default mode network. So when DMT like psilocybin reduces the default mode network. Then it allows the electromagnetic field to expand. How do we explain why in Burning Man, everybody experiences incredible telepathic, synchronicity people. You want to meet people you don’t want to meet. It’s incredible, my idea is that 50,000 people or 60 or 80,000 people with the reduced default mode network create these energetic highways where people can tap into and make things happen. 

Ethan

I mean it sounds reasonable to me. I will admit that I sometimes spent a lot less time thinking about how this actually happens, or why, or the science is in all my studies and work on drug policy. I’ve typically looked at the science or the explanations for what’s going on and the role in the brain. And I say, okay, that’s for other people to kind of dumb down for me and explain, but in terms of why, and then also ayahuasca, it has more of a reputation for the telepathic experience then I think most of the other psychedelics, the other ones have their stories as well, but there seems to be something special going on there. And maybe it’s what you described Giancarlo I don’t know.

Giancarlo

Yeah. I mean, for me ayahuasca, my wife and I had a seven years practice where we drank maybe 500 times. It’s no secret we’ve been very public about our addictions in the past. We definitely, definitely credit ayahuasca if we’re still together and it was like maybe two or three times a year, we would go to retreat. There were like a couple of shamans we would work with and we had a lot of reconditioning to do. We were both in the grip of addiction and it helped us a lot. Sometimes when you do this gratitude exercise, when you have to think about event that you felt really grateful and memory of the mornings after an ayahuasca ceremony keep on coming back, when you’re really heart open and really connected, and you see this incredible sunrise and the nature, and it’s incredible. I have goosebumps. 

Ethan 

Well this goes back to you and I meeting right at the first World Ayahuasca Conference and I think it was 2014 on the island of Ibiza where you’re now living. And I remember I think you were showing a film there and you and I hit it off. And I remember also seeing a really interesting film there with Gabor Maté, The Jungle Prescription. But it’s one where he was working with people who were engaged in the harm reduction program or needle exchange program in Vancouver. So people think about, ‘oh this is just for the wealthy’ or ‘this and that’. But in fact I thought it might’ve been ayahuasca if I remember correctly with people who were really had been struggling with serious addiction, I think the potential, I mean, obviously not just ayahuasca, but obviously of psilocybin and MDMA and a whole range of others for helping people who have struggled with addiction and PTSD.

I mean, everybody’s reading about what’s going on now in terms of scientific research.

Giancarlo

But for me it makes sense. I know you’re not that interested in neuroscience. But when the ego is reduced, because suffering comes from this idea of the ego, if the ego is subdued, you can associate the painful memory, you can detach the painful memory with the emotion.

So the addict who is in this loop of pain has the opportunity of detaching the pain from the memory. So the abusive parent then the childhood trauma becomes visible without the pain. So you can transcend them. I mean, for sure these compounds are revolutionizing psychiatry, for sure. 

Ethan

Just being out at this conference in Miami and just seeing the presentations, and then of course following the literature, it’s extraordinary what’s coming out. It actually seriously undermines some of the pharmaceutical industry with their daily medications, for depression and anxiety and all these other sorts of things, it would be great. We have to be careful because there will be abuses, there will be problems. People are overselling and all this sort of stuff, but I think we’re starting off in mostly the right place with people looking at this. How do we be responsible about this? And hopefully stupidity and greed will not undermine the progress. 

Giancarlo

So let’s talk about that for a second. I wanted to keep it on the personal experience, but since we’re talking about the medicalization. One of the risks of this big company is that integration is not scalable. So in a capitalistic environment where psychedelic companies will compete for customers, the temptation to cut corners in things like integration. For example, it’s going to be cheaper, if you have a psychedelic assisted psychotherapy just for two hours instead of six for the integration. So it’s very difficult we’ll see how this thing plays out.

Ethan

We do. Look what’s going on with ketamine now, right? You have some very smart and responsible people who are providing ketamine and doing it with proper integration thereafter. I think that people should look at the website of Phil Wolfson, who was one of the godfathers of ketamine therapy and I’ve met a bunch of others of late, I see these popping all up. 

But then you also run into people who are some anesthesiologists or something else who just sees an opportunity to make more money and they can get paid a lot of money for administering the very expensive version of ketamine that the insurance companies will pay for. Even though ketamine actually is a very inexpensive drug and they’re doing it in a kind of glary lights, medical environment, maybe you put the eyeshades on, but you come out of it there’s not serious integration. So I mean, ketamine is short-acting, which fits the kind of capitalist, short amount of time model, but ketamine is an opportunity to try to get this thing right. Hopefully, we can.

The other question, of course, I mean, maybe this is just perhaps too ambitious, but because the role of integration is so important after an experience. And because that can also be done in a group setting, it begins to present the idea of encouraging more of a group model for this. Think about one of the upsides of the 12 steps program. They don’t have a very high success rate. They have lots of problems, but they do offer a sense of community for people, which is really pivotal. And just in the last week, I’ve heard about three different people and organizations trying to do online either integration of psychedelic experiences or alternately working with people, struggling with addiction, where they’re creating, not just one-on-one sessions, but also group sessions. One of the silver linings of COVID was it forced so much of this stuff to move online where you can dramatically reduce costs.

And it allows people to be in a group environment, often maintaining some degree of anonymity and comfort, but where that community can be created. And if you then look at some of the potentials around virtual reality, of making a community feel more intimate than it currently does over the internet, but at a much lower cost in terms of people having to travel to one place to be somewhere, there are some promising things on the horizon. I think a lot of good stuff’s going to emerge, but there’s no way to get rid of all the scoundrels in this. 

Giancarlo

But so since you mind’s ketamine. Let’s go back to the personal experience. What’s your personal experience with ketamine? 

Ethan

Well I haven’t had a lot of it. But I will say there were two. One, some years ago there was a fella named Sean Haley. Did you know Sean Haley at all? Sean made a lot of money in Silicon Valley, a usual guy. And then he started experimenting with drug concoctions, and he was trying to deal with his own lifelong depression. And he came up with a combination of high dose DMT, low-dose ketamine. And he began going around administering these to friends. And so I did that once and that was like a rocket, for 45 minutes, but it almost started out as almost like a Cliff Notes version of a mushroom experience or something.

Giancarlo

What was the dosage? 

Ethan

I don’t know the actual dose, all I know is the DMT was a high dose.

Giancarlo

Smoked?

Ethan

Actually it was with a needle, intramuscular just a little jab in the butt cheek. I told him that Sasha Shulgin said I was a hard head, so I needed an extra dose, so he gave me two shots. So it was like a rocket taking off. But then after 45 minutes, it was like a parachute opened and I kinda come floating down to earth. And I stand up, my legs are kind of wobbly from the ketamine and a few hours later, I’m going out to dinner and a movie. And I would say afterwards for weeks afterwards, I felt like my mood was slightly elevated, my sexuality seemed slightly depressed and there was this funny little humming feeling in my forehead, which wasn’t bothersome, but it was just kind of there. And so that was one experience. 

The other one was last year, a friend of mine who is herself a ketamine therapist. I did it with her, at her home, and she was there taking care of the music, and with a little notebook in case I had any notes, and it was my first time doing a real blindfold. And I did it by dissolving a couple of tabs under my tongue. I realized in retrospect it might’ve been a lot smoother just to do the intramuscular, but she didn’t have that available. And I was surprised how profound it was. First of all, I won’t go into a longer story, but the key thing was there was one moment, where I had kind of turned over onto my belly and I was almost entering, into almost like this avatar, like environment. And I was underneath like in some water, like in a swamp or a lake, and it’s dark and I’m thinking, I’m under water. I can’t breathe. And then I go, but I’m breathing and then I go, it’s dark. I can’t see anything. This is, it should be scary. There could be snakes. And I realize I’m not scared and I just keep moving forward. And also I go, my God, I could pass through death like this. And it was the first and only time I’ve had that kind of sensation.

And I was taken with how gentle it was. It only lasted an hour or something like that, but it was very gentle. It was even with the high dose mushrooms. I hadn’t kind of had that escape from the body. But with that ketamine, which I think a relatively high dose, I don’t know what it was, but I was told it was a relatively high dose. I really felt like I kind of left my body in a way, or I was sort of in and out of it. But in this avatar, dark place that turned out to be scary, but beautiful.

Giancarlo

I also had not a very meaningful experience with ketamine, probably not with the right certain settings, but actually yesterday I met a friend who did the full three injections in a clinic here in New York. And he said it was the most valuable experience of his life, it was like a heavenly experience. He felt heaven, he felt this unbounded compassion and this incredible sense of unbounded compassion and love and it sounds amazing. 

Ethan

I mean, you also see now that it’s been approved for management of intractable depression. I mean, that’s very promising. And the fact that until a few months ago, it was the only psychedelic that the National Institute on Drug Abuse would give any grants for it to research on for treating addiction. On my podcast, I interviewed Elias Dakwarprofessor at Columbia, who’s using a combination of ketamine and mindfulness meditation to treat addiction and depression. I think it really has enormous potential and I hope it doesn’t get corrupted and get a bad reputation because of people being reckless and stupid with it.

Giancarlo

But why do you think ketamine is scheduled 3 and psilocybin is schedule 1.

Ethan

Probably first of all, the fact that it (ketamine) already had extensive use, both in emergency medicine, wartime medicine, and veterinary medicine, meant that people were already familiar with it. They’d been administering it to human beings for a very long time. So I think that helped make people feel okay about it. 

I think secondly, the fact that it’s relatively short acting, maybe a thing about it. Thirdly, a lot of people are taking in lower doses where the kind of psychedelic effect was seen as a kind of negative, side effect or something like that. But you were dealing with people, emergency responders who were in parts of the world where they don’t have opioids available using ketamine or people on the battlefield. So I think for all sorts of reasons, it kind of got in, where it was tolerated where the psychedelic side was seen as just negative side effects. 

And it also did not start off becoming popular in the underground. Whereas LSD, had a PR early history in the fifties, early sixties before it got popularized by Timothy Leary and others. But mushrooms have always had that recreational side to it. So I don’t think there were really news reports of people jumping off balconies or that kind of thing. So I think we’re lucky in that regard that it actually was able to get through. 

Giancarlo

Yeah, absolutely. What about San Pedro? Did you have any experience?

Ethan

No, I’ve never done San Pedro. I’ve never done peyote. Maybe that lies in my future. What about you? 

Giancarlo

I’ve done it. Sometimes some shamen would give it to you the morning after the ayahuasca session to open your heart, to ease a little bit in the post ayahuasca. But recently in Ibiza, I did the full on two liters. They give you this. I can’t remember which tradition it is, but where you have the whole plant, not just the bottom. No, I think now that’s peyote. Anyway, it was very diluted but a lot. Like we drank this like two liters, you keep on drinking, drinking, drinking, and they always say that the first session is a bit disorienting.

And then the second time you find your bearings, it was a combination of LSD and there was something really unusual about it. Then the guide let us go free and actually encouraged us to go and walk around. And I remember I was sitting there very confused. I had this image of some big ladies from Louisiana. I don’t know I was really disoriented. And so this other person comes by and says, remember, this is a cactus, it is very hard because it lives in the desert, but then there is a flower. And so that comment turned my trip into something a little bit more beautiful. But I’m not friends with this San Pedro yet. 

Ethan

I learned a lot. I had Michael Pollan on my podcast a few months ago and his latest book, one of the big chapters, is on mescaline and he finds it a very powerful experience, I think. He also makes an important point that given how limited peyote is, and given that there’s a really highly respected indigenous use of this Native American church, then unless somebody specifically invited in by that community to do it that by and large people outside their community should generally not take advantage of use peyote, that you can get more or less the same thing from San Pedro. I mean, it is essentially mescaline as well so do that. I’m curious to try San Pedro and to try mescaline, I only did mescaline once, but for me it was something between a mushroom and an LSD experience. I don’t know if it was all that distinctive. It was powerful.

Giancarlo

What about 5-MeO-DMT, the toad from the Sonoran Desert.

Ethan

I was kind of scared to do it, you smoke it in 15 minutes and it can seem like ages and people’s, everything, all the experiences you hear about the 5-MeO-DMT, whether it’s the toad medicine or the synthetic, people can argue about whether the specialness of the toad medicine, as opposed to the synthetic, and I get their point about it. But anyway, this friend of mine, I said okay, I’m ready. And he says actually Ethan, I’m sorry, I’m out of the smokable type, all I have is some snortable, 5-MeO-DMT, I don’t know if it was from the toad or synthetic. I’ve never been into cocaine, I don’t really snort things, and he put out two long white lines of this stuff. And I said, how long do you think it will last? He goes, well, I don’t have that much experience with it, but you know, maybe a half hour or so. 

So I snorted these two lines. Right. And I trusted him because he’s got a huge amount of experience as a guide. And first of all, it burned like, hell, I mean, really burned like in my sinus cavities and all that sort of stuff. And finally it’s settled down, but I’ll tell you five hours later, I’m lying down there, I’m sort of still in my body. I don’t go through the ego dissolution or whatever that is. It was like a kind of different version of a mushroom trip. At one point my energy is shooting out of my legs. I mean afterwards my host said were you doing Kundalini exercise?

And I said, well, what’s Kundalini, you may not know what it is, but you look like you are doing it right there. And then literally five hours later, I’m coming out of it. And I get up to talk to my friends and I sound like ********************* I can not actually pronounce my words and I wasn’t until the next morning that I could actually talk normally again. And even then I felt like I had to drive back to another friend’s house. I felt disoriented in terms of, I could drive safely, but where I was kind of in doubt. So it was a strange and odd experience.

This was about four years ago. I don’t know what to say about it really. I do think I need to try the 15 minute smokable version and try the toad medicine. That sounds like people have described wonderful things about it, but some people say it’s taken them a good weeks or months to fully get back to some form of baseline.

Giancarlo

Yes. For me it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. And I did it in the perfect condition because we have a men’s group. It’s 10 of us every year. We spend five days, mostly doing ayahuasca during the day. As a personal experience, but also as a collective we would then share. So at the end of day five, when we really have this strong morphogenetic field of support of our friends, then we did this, we smoked the toad and you feel very safe.

It was like in a temple in England. And I was like, if I don’t do it now, I don’t know where I’m going to do it. We were like five days working together. There was all this strong bond and it was like, one of us says touching the heart of God, you felt really catapulted in heaven in this blue light, where you have the sense of forgiveness and compassion and the closest thing to heaven. 

Ethan

Wow, wow, I look forward to it. It’s funny at this conference I was just at in Miami, Mike Tyson was there and just singing the praises of the toad medicine, and I’ve heard other people just talking about how for them, they feel it’s going to be their go-to substance for the rest of their lives. They’ll try the other ones, and whatever they’ll do them. But that 5-MeO-DMT was the one.

Giancarlo

Yeah. It’s funny because I don’t really feel the need to revisit that. It’s interesting. You know, I would, I would do other things, but that’s so precious. I don’t know. So why don’t we conclude with normal DMT, except the couple of injections you had, did you ever have the smoke DMT?

Ethan

No, I mean, actually the one we could talk about is 2C-B. Yeah, because that was when I thought I was going to do it a few weeks ago, but it turned out not to happen. I did it a number of times about 20/25 years ago, and the funny thing about 2C-B is the odd impact, in terms of drug set and setting, that the book by Shasha and Ann Shulgin Pihkal their book Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story. There’s a little section there about 2C-B and describes the experience under whose pseudonym of taking the 2C-B and lapsing into the most devastating self-critical ego wipe, outing, horrible, feel terrible about yourself. I mean just a nightmarish experience and just wallowing and not knowing what to do.

And then Sasha or pseudonym appears at the door and this beaming light emerges and the thing begins to transform. And the next thing that happens is she is having the most multi-orgasmic experience with him that she’s ever had. And so you read that and you go, oh, okay, like multi-orgasmic experience, let’s do it.

Actually, after my marriage, I met this beautiful woman, a journalist American journalist. Who’d grown up in Europe. It was in Paris in the early mid-nineties. I went back to visit her about a month later and we did MDMA together and it was beautiful.

And she lived near the Place Des Vosges in Paris in a little old building there that had been modernized. But I remember we went out and everything was gorgeous and beautiful. And we came back and were in the vestibule of her apartment building. And like you want to stand on corners. Like people won’t go stand on a shelf. I was doing this stuff, filling up the space and then we went upstairs. It was just loving and beautiful and all this, it was just great. Anyway, two days later I said, let’s try the 2C-B. So we do the 2C-B. We retrace our steps, right. What’s this, and God that needs to be fixed, and that’s that, and it was this kind of critical mode.

And I realized it was this critical, and then we finally come back and I look at the vestibule, which looks so marvelous under MDMA, and I’m going, who designed it? And then we went upstairs, and we started relaxing and we started making love. And what I remember about lovemaking was that the tactile sense didn’t feel right.

It felt almost clammy, but the different sensations of sex were almost colorized in a really. And so there was some depth and specialness to the sexual encounter and all of that. After that, I realized Ethan, don’t do 2C-B with your lover, right? This is the drug, take it by yourself, right?

It’s like doing a lower dose of mushroom for me. And when you want to kick the shit out of yourself, do it that way. And so I did, at one time I was in Venice and I had just broken up, actually with this woman. And it was a rainy February day in Venice. And I remember just going down, like walking around Venice by myself and going to the Jewish ghetto and feeling a very spiritual connection with the Jewish ghetto in Venice. And then another time back home in New York, I’ve never liked The Metropolitan Museum of Art. And I decided I’m going to examine my prejudices. So I took the 2C-B. This girlfriend had given me a pigskin vest. Now I still keep kosher. Right? So there, it felt like a little passive-aggressive or giving me a pigskin vessel, I guess technically Jews can wear pigskin. Right?

I put the pigskin vest on, here I did something else, I walked across the park from where I live in the upper west side to the museum. I went to the museum, which I don’t generally like, when I would see an exhibit like 12th-century medieval tapestries, which I would never go to, I go to it. Right. And it was a little more interesting because the tapestries were kind of going up and down the ceiling because I was hallucinating a little bit, but I actually had a chance to spend the whole afternoon in the museum at the quote-unquote Sasha museum level dose, beginning to get a feeling of, why didn’t I like this place, and what might I like? and with my aesthetic sensibilities were enhanced. And so for me, 2C-B was really the one for intensive, pretty hard-nosed, critical self-examination, and then I kind of lost my source to it. And I haven’t done it in the last couple of decades, but I’m definitely keen to try it again.

Giancarlo

Interesting. Interesting. So the reason why I was asking you about DMT, because do you remember Rick Strassman in the eighties, they did this clinical trial injecting DMT to a bunch of healthy volunteers and basically they found some similarities in terms of the entities that the volunteer would encounter. And so now the Imperial College, I can’t say too much because they just started administering the trial dose. They are basically using an IV machine, to put the volunteer into DMT dose for much longer than the 10 minutes. And so this idea of the sponsor is that maybe that compound would allow access to these beings, that they might be independent and sent in independent sentient beings. That with more time you can develop a relationship. Well, what do you think about this?

Ethan

I don’t know. Look, for me the notion of this, as witnessed by my experience with very high dose mushrooms or the high dose DMT, I don’t seem to go through this ego dissolution stuff. I seem to retain my sense of being present in my body with the exception of that brief ketamine experience last year.

It may, because I haven’t really done it with the blindfolds on, and maybe that might make the difference. 

Giancarlo

But not no entities?

Ethan

No entities, not that I can recall. I’m not seeing Jaguars, I’m not seeing entities, I’m not doing that sort of thing, I’m not going through horrifying loss of dissolution of identity.

To me, it’s a way of doing things to my mind and my body that are just creating new connections and thoughts and things and all of that just feels kind of life-affirming. And once in a while, scary and hard. I wonder about that cause I hear about people going through the ego dissolution, and part of it is I don’t think I’ve lived with much trauma in my life. I mean, there’s been a few things but I don’t know why that is. And maybe I’m just, I’m a very grounded person. And so I wonder if the day will come when I do a high dose ayahuasca or DMT in the more pure form or something where I actually go through that, we’ll see! 

Giancarlo

We’ll see, we’ll see, we’ve been together an hour. You’ve been so generous with your personal story and sharing your intimate situation. Thank you so much. So how’s the podcast going? 

Ethan

I should also just say, what I also love is the fact that here it is in late 2021, the world appears to be going in some very dangerous and scary places. But one of the nice things that’s happening is that you and I can talk openly about this and do it for other people, for strangers to listen to, and to do it without real fear.

The ability of people to be in talking first about their own cannabis use a few years ago. And now about psychedelic use, it really represents a transformation or a society. There’s a coming out, not unlike what happened with gay people being able to come out over time. I realized there’s always the possibility. The forces of repression will try to shove this genie back in the bottle and try to hurt some of us who have spoken out and come out. Cause we know, historically those things, these things do go in waves and things can go backward. I think we need to be careful, but you and I are both out there speaking openly about these things and none of us, we’re all only talking about our own personal consumption. We’re not talking about selling these things or making money from them illegally or things like that. 

For me, the podcast has just been a blast because I’m having all these wonderful people on, you know, it might be Andrew Weil and Michael Pollan. It might be the academic doing ketamine research. It was former US Senator Chuck Schumer, who’s the majority leader, talking to him about his marijuana legalization bill. I had the former president of Columbia, the country, Juan Manuel Santos who won the Nobel Peace Prize five years ago. I had the head of National Student and Drug Abuse, Nora Volkow, who used to run away from me. And now she’s willing to be on my podcast.

I’ve had some activists and some brilliant journalists, so it’s everything from talking, having conversations like the one you and I are having here. Talking to politicians, I had the District Attorney of Philadelphia who’s a progressive DA. So it’s really spanning the spectrum and the question for me is whether there’ll be an audience of people who want to hear one day about ketamine therapy, and the next day about the politics of the marijuana bill, and the next day about the overdose crisis in America, and the next day about how New York legalized marijuana, and the next day about the head of the US government’s drug research funding agency.

But I think I’m meeting more and more people, strangers are coming up to me, not just in the US, but in Europe and elsewhere saying, wow, I’ve listened to your podcast. I’m feeling optimistic that there’s going to be an audience. I’m very grateful that Darren Aronofsky, the movie director, reached out to me saying he wanted…

Giancarlo

He had the idea? 

Ethan

Yeah, he reached out to me saying you want…, I knew him a little bit from the Drug Policy Alliance days. He said “do you want to do a podcast on psychedelics” and I said, “no, I want to do one on all drugs.” He said, “let’s do it.” And then he had teamed up with iHeart. So he’s made a lot of famous movies, but this is his first podcast venture. So it’s a good team. It’s professional. It means there are commercials on it, which I don’t like, but that’s the model.

Giancarlo

I can see him behind the scene because you were always looking a little bit for the conflict, you find a way to disagree with your guests. Then I see Darren behind saying, you need the conflict?

Ethan

No, actually he never said anything like that. And as I say in the opening episode, I am a contrarian deep down. And I also think that to have a podcast where I mostly have people on there who I’ve learned from, who I generally agree with, but it can get boring if people are just agreeing. And therefore I see it’s my role to play devil’s advocate. It’s my role to challenge them. Even if I agree with them and say, how do you respond to the critics who say this? So I think that’s part of what makes it more interesting.

Giancarlo

Amazing, thank you very much. What’s the name of the podcast and where can they find it again? 

Ethan

It’s called Psychoactive and it is on all the major platforms.

Giancarlo

Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to chat with you.

Ethan

Great Giancarlo and good luck with this podcast as well. And I look forward to seeing you one of these days in Ibiza.

Giancarlo

For sure, come and visit. Thank you very much.