After decades of legal and professional prohibitions, serious research is again being conducted on psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD, using new imaging tools to understand their functions in the brain, and developing treatment strategies for use with conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), chronic pain, drug dependence, anxiety and depression associated with end-of-life issues. Last week (mid-April) saw a major conference on psychedelic research (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).) Dr Inaba offers comments and insights going back to the psychedelic home-ground of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury in the 60s.
Transcript (edited):
CNS: Hi and welcome once again to the CNS Addiction Podcast. I am Howard LaMere here with Dr. Darryl Inaba. This week in San Jose, the largest conference on psychedelic science in 40 years is being held. Attendees will discuss what has been going on in the research community and the treatment community as it relates the use of psychedelics for the treatment of depression, obsessive compulsive disorders, anxiety, post traumatic stress disorder and addiction to drugs and alcohol. Darryl you must have some perspective on all of this given your time at the Haight-Ashbury clinic.
DARRYL: Well this is really exciting and Im sorry I wouldnt be able to attend. Psychedelics have been used by human beings for a variety of purposes for thousands of years. In the 60s we started to look at them, but then got freaked out by misuse and bad trips and the very dramatic things happening to individuals who were experimenting unsupervised, who didnt know much about the drugs they were using. But some of the same people who were around back then used these drugs to treat schizophrenia, or dementia, or alcoholism. As a matter of fact, they used it to treat depression. They prescribed it for people who were aging and getting paranoid. I remember seeing tapes from Spring Grove, Massachusetts in 67 on how they used these substances to help people who were senile, and becoming paranoid that their spouse or their children were out to harm them. And I saw it used quite effectively. So the possibility of re-looking at all of this and perhaps pursuing it a little bit more aggressively as scientists is an exciting thing to me.
Also the line-up is intriguing. Dr. Stanislav Grof from Europe is going to be in attendance along with Dr. Andrew Weil and many others. I think there will also be a presentation on entheogism, the field of finding God within the human spirit or the human being, which is a throwback to Greece and Greek times. There were herbs and other substances that were believed to help individuals reveal their soul and reveal their spiritual self. That is of great interest to me as well because in many cultures throughout thousands of years of history, psychedelics were used as spiritual agents something to get people in touch with their Gods or with their inner spirit and I think thats a fascinating thing.
CNS: Especially when used in a very specific and ritualized way as opposed to recreationally which is what happened in the 60s.
DARRYL: Right. There was an article in the New York Times talking about one of the colleagues of Dr. Roland Griffiths who is doing a lot of research with psilocybin, which is the active chemical found in the Peyote cactus, San Pedro cactus and a couple other cacti. Psilocybin has been used by Native Americans for years for very spiritual purposes and is one of the first drugs to gain legal status to use within a religious setting. The Great American Church uses it for religious practices. But it was strange that as I read about its use by modern day physicians and scientists who are looking at its use as a treatment for depression and other psychiatric disorders, I read about people describing their experiences saying that it enables them to separate their mind – it frees their mind from the confines of their body, and that they are able to think of their mind as something greater and beyond their body and that concept has always confused me. I am Asian, that direction is the opposite of what Asians want to do with psychedelics. In Asia, meditation and other spiritual things try to integrate your mind and your spirit. Western cultures are always trying to do the opposite – to separate their mind from their bodies. I dont know what to make of that.
CNS: Maybe its because of the dominant .for lack of a better term materialism, in the Western culture.
DARRYL: So materialism leads to wanting to separate the mind from body?
CNS: Well, I think materialism has become so dominant a psychological, emotional factor that there is a perceived need to put it down in order to let the spiritual side come in.
DARRYL: I can see your point now the body is materialism and the mind is the spiritual system.
CNS: This classic philosophy of dichotomy goes back to Greece and Rome and is contradictory to Asian cultures.
DARRYL: The problem we saw in the 60s was psychedelics became a totally uncontrolled, totally available for people to use to define themselves. That led to horror stories. Even to this day people who take these powerful drugs run the risk of deep personification, cause detachment from self and a loss of who they are and whats going on. Sometimes they were called psychonogenic because so many people thought they could reproduce the psychosis rather than help treat psychosis or emotional problems. Some people called them psychotomimetic meaning the influence or the way you feel under the effects of these drugs is similar to how a schizophrenic might feel. I dont think that is totally correct, but in the 60s we discovered that when you experience a drug with a tremendous ability to change your stream of consciousness to change the way youre looking at and experiencing the world around you something called peaking occurs where the person totally disassociate from the environment. They are on a stream of thoughts and thinking that can result in a paranoid or panic attack. This is also known as the bum trip – people get so afraid of what theyre experiencing that they forget theyve taken a psychedelic drug and that feeds the panic and then they disassociate and experience a huge anxiety reaction. It became very clear that in order to limit that reaction, psychedelics must be taken in an appropriate way. You cant just go out there and drop acid by yourself and think youre going to experience a good time because these substances are also very much hypnagogic, meaning they have the ability to create a hypnotic state where the environment, the people youre with and your surroundings have a big influence on what youre going to experience. These things can actually mold and shape what a person is thinking and what they are dealing with and, if something goes wrong say you get busted for walking around a park naked or something like that a horrendous panic attack can result. So, in the 1960s you always buddied- up – you never dropped by yourself – you always buddied up and the proper way involved at least 3 people and one was served as trip captain This was a person who had taken acid or taken mescaline, taken psilocybin, taken these major – we call them all arounders – psychedelic drugs but on that day they were not going to take anything, they would be the responsible driver if you will.
CNS: The designated driver.
DARRYL: Designated driver, exactly – the designated psychedelic guy. And they would take care of transportation and if someone had all of a sudden a craving for a sour pickle they would get the sour pickle! If someone wanted to hear music, the captain would take everyone to the music venue, you kind of trusted that person to do that and that was a great thing The captain tripper. But when you buddy- up you have another person who took the same psychedelic somebody who took the same dosage, the same amount, so you had a point of reference and someone to interact with and that combination really decreased the bad reactions. The thought of people taking psychedelics again because theyre depressed, not under the supervision of a therapists or a psychiatrist and without the guidance of a Captain Trip, watching the doses, making sure things are all right, or making sure its okay to take the trip it in the first place. I would never give one of these drugs to anyone with a tendency towards schizophrenia because it might precipitate a reaction rather than help their symptoms. This conference might bring to light better uses and some better effects and eliminate the kind of horror stories created by psychedelics during the 1960s.
CNS: The connection with spirituality attempts to find a way to look at these aspects in a way that is different from the way traditional religions have approached the subject. There are scientific components, and if these drugs do have that kind of unitive characteristic that is perhaps a part of the basic wiring of a human being.
DARRYL: It was I forget who it was .it might have been Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, maybe that gothic guy back in that day – maybe Humphry Osmond, the guy who coined the word, psychedelic back in 1950s and 60s but whoever it was, talked about the doors of perception. Maybe you remember who wrote about the doors of perception.
CNS: I think that was Huxley.
DARRYL: Might have been Huxley. The reality is, these psychedelics are substances that cause the brain to be wired differently, creating synesthesia which is a crossing over of senses resulting in misperceptions of things, but this allows you to see things in a totally different way. In that context, everybody who took those drugs – even those who had panic attacks, write about experiencing the world around them and people around them in a totally different way in a totally unique way – lots of times in a very, very loving, peaceful, beautiful way some times in a very scary, terrifying way. It is the same world and the same things you interact with on a day by day basis but seen from a totally unique perspective. In that sense, it is not hard to understand why to me anyway why throughout thousands of years human beings have found these substances to be spiritual. Theyve been able to transcend the boundaries of daily life and see things in a very different way. I think those are the doors of perception and I think there is some reality to the entheogen concept of these substances. Here in Ashland we have a legalized use of Ayahuasca or we have a legalized use of dimethyltryptamine in a local church. They were able to convince the DEA and the federal government that they are using it for spiritual purposes. Theyre not using it to get people into a new psychedelic drug or to abuse it and theyre willing to cooperate with the federal government to monitor the drug they bring in, monitor how it is used and to make sure theyre not abusing it or giving it to people who dont want it. In that way, they are able to get spiritual growth from it. If they were able to convince the DEA, then Im certainly convinced that part of this can be an entheogen process where people can grow.
CNS: Well it will be interesting to see what news comes out of the conference and of course it will be interesting to see how this new research and new methods of treatment evolve.
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