Michael Pollan Answers Psychedelics Questions From Twitter

Trippy Hippie asks,

What if LSD connects your brain to other dimensions

and planes around you?

Yeah, what if?

Maybe it does. Maybe it did with your brain.

Hi, I'm Michael Pollan,

author of This is Your Mind on Plants.

Today I'm here to answer your questions on Twitter.

This is Psychedelics Support.

[upbeat music]

@AlfredRomero asks, How does LSD work?

It's a great question, and we know part of the answer,

but not the whole thing.

LSD is a molecule that is shaped a lot like serotonin.

Serotonin is a very important neurotransmitter

involved with mood and a whole lot of other things.

There are receptors in your brain

that are configured to receive serotonin.

And as it happens, the LSD molecule

fits into those receptors even more tightly

or perfectly than serotonin itself.

That's one of the reasons that LSD lasts so long

'cause it just fits so snugly into that receptor.

It is an agonist.

In other words, it makes that receptor do something

rather than hibit from doing something.

But beyond that, we don't really know.

There's a cascade of effects from the time

we've activated those receptors to the changes in perception

and consciousness that people experience.

You would be amazed how little we understand

about how the brain works.

@carbonbuns.

I'm never going to try LSD.

What if it triggers some freak reaction

and erases my memories or completely rewrites my brain?

I don't know of any cases where that has actually happened.

There are certainly people who have had psychotic breaks

on a psychedelic.

Many experiences can lead, can trigger schizophrenia,

but psychedelics are one of them.

So the fear of going crazy is definitely out there

and it's why many people avoid psychedelics.

It doesn't happen very often,

but if it happens once [laughs] that's a big problem.

@ANGELCOR3 asks,

How do I avoid having a bad trip?

In the research trials that have been going on

for the last couple of years,

they will give you some really helpful advice.

They call them the flight instructions.

This is what they tell you before your trip begins.

If you feel like you're going crazy, dying, melting,

dissolving, don't fight it.

Go with it. Surrender.

Relax your mind and float downstream,

as John Lennon famously said.

Even with that good advice,

there are scary things that may happen.

You may confront dark things about yourself.

You may confront trauma,

and I think people have to understand going in

that that's part of the deal.

And that's why a guided experience is so important,

that there's somebody with you

to hold your hand through those hard times,

and even more important that there's someone

to talk it through afterwards,

help you process it, interpret it.

@iaintnoewizkidd asks, What is ego death?

And why do you all want it so bad? [laughs]

So, ego death is the experience that some people have

on a high dose of psychedelics

where they feel their sense of self absolutely crumble.

I had an experience once myself

where I saw myself,

and I know this sounds weird 'cause he was doing the seeing,

explode in a cloud of Post-it notes

that then fell to the ground and spread out

in this coat of blue paint.

And I looked at it and I said, That's me.

The reason this is appealing is if you accept it,

if you surrender to it,

the feeling can be quite ecstatic

because after the walls of the ego come down,

you have this sense of merging with the cosmos

or with nature or with other people.

After I did describe this in my book

How to Change Your Mind,

I heard from underground guides

that everybody was asking for ego death. [chuckles]

It doesn't always happen, but when it does,

it's one of the more interesting life experiences

you can have.

@MadamAlexa10 asks, Serious question,

How does microdosing work?

How often do you do it and around how much?

So, microdosing is the practice of using tiny doses

of psychedelics, like LSD or psilocybin,

essentially 1/10th of what would be a normal dose.

You're not supposed to feel it,

it's just kind of subperceptual,

and many people believe that it improves their wellbeing,

their productivity, their creativity.

But it's important to state

that we really have no idea if this is true.

The placebo effect is very powerful with all drugs,

and it's particularly powerful in the case of psychedelics

which we impute so much magic and power to.

@ShepsworthBntly asks,

Why does DMT cause geometric hallucinations

as opposed to acid or shrooms,

which are a bit more subtle and flowy?

Timothy Leary spoke a lot about set and setting.

Set is your expectations

going into a psychedelic experience;

setting is the physical setting you're in.

So on ayahuasca, which we associate with the Amazon

and the jungle, people are constantly seeing cobras

and panthers and things like that.

I tend to think it's not the medicine or the drugs

so much as the expectation,

that our experience is really shaped

by what we expect to see.

And if you have an organic drug like magic mushrooms,

then the imagery is probably gonna be much more natural

than if you have a synthetic drug

where people tend to see more geometry

and human-created shapes.

But I have to say it's probably all in your head.

@KellyRek asks, How does #LSD

affect those with #schizophrenia?

Well, in general, it's not advisable

if you have schizophrenia to take a psychedelic,

and in the current research,

people at any risk for schizophrenia are excluded.

The thinking being that it would make your condition worse.

But nobody really knows for sure.

In general, though, psychedelics introduce a certain amount

of entropy or chaos into mental functioning.

That is very valuable if you're locked in with an addiction

or obsessive thinking or depression,

all of which are the products of very rigid, fixed thought.

On the other side of the spectrum, though,

you have people with schizophrenia

whose brains are already heavily disordered

and they probably don't need any more disorder.

That at least is one theory,

but there's a lot more research to be done in this area.

@JackedU31248551 asks,

How do psychedelics help anxiety?

They make you forget? WTF?

So, one of the most promising

and moving uses of psychedelics,

beginning in the '50s and '60s and continuing recently,

has been in giving them psilocybin specifically

to cancer patients.

And I've interviewed many of these people

and they have the most moving stories to tell

about how a single experience on psilocybin

allowed them to confront their mortality,

confront their cancer in many cases,

and it actually lifted their fear,

completely removed the anxiety they felt

about the prospect of death,

allowing them to die with peace and equanimity.

And what a gift this is.

We have so little to offer people in that situation.

You know, normally we give them morphine to deal with pain

or dull their experience of things.

Here is something that sharpens their experience,

helps them explore their predicament,

and for reasons we don't totally understand

reconciles many of them to death.

@HDSouthAfrica asks,

Can #Ayahuasca treat substance #addiction?

I'm researching firsthand.

There's been some research done in Brazil to test ayahuasca

as a treatment for depression,

but I don't know if it works specifically with addiction.

That said, most of the psychedelics appear to be helpful

in treating addiction,

and so there's some reason to believe that it might work.

Let's see what you find out, HD South Africa.

@drugbot asks, Anyone have experience with DMT entities?

So this is a very curious phenomenon

of the DMT experience specifically.

Many people report that they see

these little elf-like creatures,

sometimes they're called machine elves or just elves,

and they're very friendly and they're little

and they're very welcoming.

And it's one of the more kind of common bits of imagery

on this particular psychedelic.

Terence McKenna, who was kind of a philosopher

of psychedelics a few decades ago, popularized the notion.

To test this idea it would be important to find a population

of people who have never heard this theory of machine elves,

give them DMT, and see if they see them.

And if they do, well, that'll be really weird.

@8a8n8g asks, How are psychedelics medically used

for addiction therapy yet they're a Schedule I drug?

Make it make sense.

Well, it doesn't entirely make sense.

A Schedule I drug is a category in the federal drug laws

that means that a drug has no accepted medical use,

and this is where psychedelics all lie.

At the same time, this recent renaissance of research

into using psychedelic compounds as a medicine

has discovered that psilocybin in particular

can help people break addictions.

It's been tried with alcoholics,

it's been tried with cigarette addicts,

and it's been tried on cocaine addicts,

and it seems quite successful.

More than 50% of the people who tried psilocybin therapy

gave up their cigarette habit.

As one researcher put it to me,

psychedelics shake the snow globe in your brain,

and when the snow resettles,

it settles in a very different pattern,

allowing you to break your patterns.

@brodysupreme asks, Imagine the first person who did LSD.

They were probably going insane.

Well, Brody Supreme, that first person was Albert Hofmann,

a chemist in Switzerland,

and he was working with a fungus called ergot

that grows on a grain.

So, Albert Hofmann's job was to look at all the chemicals

in ergot and go through them one by one,

tweaking them to see if he could find a useful drug.

LSD-25 was the 25th,

and he accidentally got a little bit on his fingers

and felt very funny

and realized he had a psychoactive substance.

And that's when he decided to take a big dose,

and he did think he was going nuts.

As the effects began to subside,

he realized he wasn't going crazy

and stepped out into his garden and felt the beauty of it.

But it began with the conviction he was insane.

@hirxbenjaboii, Do blind people trip on LSD?

Great question.

I have no idea, but somebody should ask them.

@RebelPoet6 asks, Why is psilocybin, DMT, LSD, and MDMA

being so thoroughly studied, but not peyote?

Could it be because peyote isn't so easily monetized?

Why aren't we studying the efficacy

of ceremonial versus therapeutic use?

So, peyote is a cactus that grows in Southern Texas

in a very small band of land.

It contains mescaline, which is a powerful psychedelic.

Peyote is used by Native Americans

in their religious observances

and their healing ceremonies.

It's so precious and in such short supply,

the more peyote we used in research,

the less there would be for Native Americans.

And, you know, it seems to me we've taken enough

from Native Americans.

And if we wanna do this research, concentrate on mescaline,

the synthetic version of the chemical produced by peyote.

Now, mescaline has challenges in a research context.

The big one is it lasts a really long time, like 14 hours.

You will be done with mescaline

before mescaline is done with you.

So it's a lot of therapeutic time,

a lot of therapeutic support.

It just may not be practical.

Would it be valuable?

It could be because mescaline, unlike other psychedelics,

doesn't take you to another dimension.

It really anchors you here,

but more deeply here and now than you've ever felt.

It also is a drug that you can talk on

and engage with other people.

It has some of the qualities of MDMA or ecstasy,

which is a very relational drugs.

So I could imagine it being used in group therapy.

@JesusTheRam asks,

Could LSD be used as a wound antiseptic?

Doesn't seem like a good idea.

I mean, if that LSD gets in the bloodstream,

you're gonna have, you know, you're gonna have a trip.

I would not advise using LSD as a first aid.

@gatorneiljr asks, Didn't Cary Grant's doctor

prescribe him LSD for depression?

I remember reading he once told a friend

that it was the best thing he ever did in his entire life.

Well, it's true.

Cary Grant received psychedelic therapy in Los Angeles

in the late '50s.

He had many sessions

and he claimed that it was absolutely liberating.

@AOC tweets, It is ridiculous that Congress upholds

war on drugs-era were barriers on federal research

into substances like psilocybin, ibogaine, and MDMA

when early results are indicating major promise

in treating PTSD, addiction, and more.

I'm trying, again, to lift them

so we can pursue the science.

The research itself is not being stopped

because of the drug war.

The FDA and the DEA has approved

these university research trials.

The barriers right now are to federal money

being used to support this research.

So far, with one small exception,

NIH money has not been available for psychedelic research.

It's just considered too controversial.

So all the amazing research that's been done

to look at the potential of psilocybin and MDMA

to treat trauma, to treat addiction, to treat depression,

has all been done using private money, private philanthropy,

but really if the research is gonna gain legitimacy

and scale up as it needs to,

the NIH is gonna need to step in.

And anything politicians can do to encourage that

is, I think, really, really helpful.

The one exception I alluded to is there is an NIMH grant

that was given to someone in a laboratory at Yale

who was studying psilocybin as a treatment

for obsessive compulsive disorder.

So this may represent a crack in the wall

and a new opening toward federal support

for psychedelic research,

which is really overdue at this point.

@katieweston asked, Why are psychedelics so frowned upon?

You know, there was a lot of baggage

that got attached to psychedelics in the '60s.

They were regarded as really disruptive to society,

and in many ways they were.

But their identity is changing right now

and that's what's really interesting to watch,

in that they may help us to address

the mental health crisis.

We have a tremendous mental health crisis.

One in five Americans have struggled

with their mental health.

And so, we may look at psychedelics within five years

or 10 years as important tools of healing

rather disrupters of society.

So, those are all the questions for today.

Before I leave you, I just wanna remind you

that right now taking psychedelics as illegal,

it's risky to your mental health, so proceed with caution.

And thanks for watching Psychedelics Support.