you're listening to lyahuascapodcast.com. The first thing that I just want people to know and understand about ayahuasca and the DMT in ayahuasca that is very different than other classic trip to mean psychedelics like psilocybin is that with DMT, you do not or if you do, it's extremely minimal, get a tolerance to the subjective effects with repeat dosing. So psilocybin, you get a rapid tolerance to repeat dosing as far as the subjective effects to the point that if you ingest a dose of psilocybin mushrooms and then try to boost yourself, even three or four hours later, the chances of getting much higher aren't very good actually. Things tend to fizzle. You've already accumulated a tolerance to psilocybin in that period of time. And if you try to use it several days in a row, by the second, third, fourth day, you might be eating mega doses of mushrooms, 10, 20 grams, and not very much will be happening. In this episode of ayahuasca podcast, I speak with Ben Malcolm, also known as spirit pharmacist. We talk about the importance of preparing for ayahuasca. Ben explains ayahuasca died from scientific point of view. He talks about the science of how psychedelics work in our brain and about how his own journey was inspired by DMT experience. Enjoyed this episode. This episode is sponsored by Loira ayahuasca retreat. At Loira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Loira, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I'm looking forward to hosting you. Welcome to ayahuasca podcast. As always, we do the whole assembly of today, I'm interviewing Ben Malcolm. Ben Malcolm, also known as spirit pharmacist. He has a bachelor's of science in pharmacology, master of public health and doctorate of pharmacy. He thought psychiatric pharmacy pharmacology. He provides psychopharmacology consulting services related to psychedelic use. And he's also a prolific digital player, I saw on Instagram. Ben, welcome to the show. Oh, thanks for having me, Sam. It's a pleasure to be here. Ben, tell us what came first, spirit or the pharmacy? Oh, this is a good one. I would say pharmacy, pharmacy key before the spirit. I was raised in a very like agnostic type of place where there was just no religion or like, I would say like an a spiritual kind of householder. If there was a spirituality, it was never branded as this is a spiritual sort of like thing that we're doing, right? It would be like, well, if it is spiritual, don't tell anyone that it is, that's for sure kind of kind of thing. And so I was actually probably an atheist by the time I was like 12 or 13 years old, maybe even younger than that, to be honest. And I read a lot of atheist philosophical kind of like literature in in in high school, but it never really led anywhere, right? Like the idea that the universe is absurd and chaotic and there's no rhyme or reason and there's nothing afterwards. And it's just like a like a like a dead end, which literally was just like a dead end for me. Like it was probably, I was actually in pharmacy school already. And I remember, you know, there was one, probably a weekend kind of day or something like that. And I was just kind of sitting around smoking weed, drinking coffee, playing internet poker and underpants, and we're just kind of like, there's got to be more to life than than this. But I'd always hated all of the religious cliches. Like everything happens for a reason or there's a purpose or they were sort of beliefs that had made my skin kind of crawler. There was like some kind of spiritual sickness is how I would describe it, where it's sort of like, I was raised in this place where I think that there was a spiritual sickness, like in my like household growing up that I'd kind of like caught in this, like case of, and it led to these sorts of, right, well, if you can't prove it to me, it's never going to exist kinds of attitudes. And I wasn't leading anywhere that was purposeful or happy for me. And I don't know, inhaled DMT, I would say like was was part of the experience. But there was just some point where I remember thinking, what if you tried? Like, what if what if you just tried to believe on that your life has a purpose, you're here for a reason? What would you do then? What would it be? I was like, I don't know. It's like, well, you would have to go and find what that is then. So I was like, Oh, okay, maybe I'll just pretend. So I got to a point where I felt that the the faith that I had in a very materialist and physicalist view of science was like, obviously wrong, like it was kind of like there's just as much faith in that that materialist physicalist scientific perspective as there is in whatever other religious sorts of beliefs that I thought were like demonstrably false and things of that nature. So I just got to the point where I was like, well, I don't know if I have to like believe it with like a like a level of like 1000 conviction, but my beliefs shaped my reality. And I have to like change what I believe if I want to change my reality. So I got open to the idea that I could try on different beliefs and take my life in a certain direction as a result of those beliefs without being this sort of like diehard person that's convicted and could never like shift perspective again or say like, okay, now there's a different kind of truth that I'm recognizing or realizing. Like, like I always said, like growing up, there'd be like, what religion you are. It's like, Benjaminism. And like, what's Benjaminism? It's like, well, it's the ideology that I personally hold that I reserve the right to change at any point would essentially be my, I just can't answer for like, what do you believe in? And I would still say I'm practicing Benjaminism today, but it looks a whole lot different than the debonals 1213 1415 or in my early 20s. So I'd say that I had a very like hard headed science mind that kind of led me through this this pharmacy path. But somewhere along that path, I recognized that there were drugs that essentially induced a spiritual type of effect or a spiritual type of experience, particularly when taken in an environment where there's a lot of reverence for what's about to happen. And I did a little bit of that. And then all of a sudden, I just had this different sort of like path or direction that felt like, Hey, this is my religion. Like, this is like, there's a sacrament in a way of reviewing this. And this is how I go to church. And this is how I stay in touch with God's spirit, the universe, myself, and all of this. I don't know. And so it's always say that that the pharmacy came before spirit. But I do remember the day it was at a conference called visionary convergence at the big art church in Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles in 2016. And I was just sitting in the chapel listening to some science, the lecture or something and spirit pharmacist. That's that's the brand. Like that's the that's the thing that recognizes kind of who you are in your past. And it also recognizes that there's a niche in pharmacy that you can push for that is just not really in pharmacy right now. Like there's no recognition when I went through the doctor of a pharmacy program that drugs can have a spiritual aspect to them or the specific types of drugs may induce very strong spiritual experiences or reliable types of ways, right? It was all about physical make your blood pressure go down or emotional, like lift your mood or change how you feel or limit how you feel would be another perspective on how those things kind of work or maybe cognition. If you're talking about things like focus or memory and stuff like that, but there's just nothing. It's like, well, the drug can be spiritual. And I think that, well, psychedelics definitely have physical emotional cognitive effects to them, but they have real spiritual effects to them as well. So and so a little bit of background. That's a great answer. I remember when I first found you on Instagram by accident, I believe I just after reading in his spirit pharmacist, I was like, wow, this is this is really great. This is necessary. And I remember I reached out immediately to try to get you in the podcast. I think you were busy the first time. So I reached out again. So there's definitely space for for what you represent. And I believe it's just a great, great correlation between those two things. And regarding your spiritual experience, my mind was very similar. I was, I considered myself an agnostic before, which is a form of atheism where you say, I believe in something, but I don't know what is it. And but after my wasca experiences, I definitely got some clarity on it. And it's, it's wonderful. So how do you as a, as a spirit pharmacist, I think, especially with all your accolades and your, your, your, your knowledge, what do you think? How is, is there a mechanism that you could describe or any theories on how is a spiritual experience induced by ingesting a molecule? Ah, this is a good, good question. And I'm not exactly sure. I think that there was, it was, it was clear that there are certain mechanisms here, right? A lot of the serotonin based psychedelics work critically by stimulating serotonin two way receptors. So I would have to predict that that serotonin two way receptor is incredibly important to the quality of consciousness that we experience overall. This 14 subtypes of serotonin receptor though, and the serotonin two way receptor is the most common subtype throughout the, the body as well. I think serotonin is a really ancient sort of molecule. Like it was probably there in the kind of like primordial soup. And we do know, for example, serotonin is more than a neurotransmitter. This part can be found in the bloodstream, can be released from the gut like a hormone. It can actually have epigenetic sorts of mechanisms like it can bind directly to DNA and change how those sequences are expressed, that process of serotonin elation. So it seems that serotonin is an ancient and enigmatic sort of neurotransmitter that's incredibly important to so many aspects of how the organism functions and it's not linked to this ray serotonin, not depressed, lower serotonin equals depression. Like that is the absolute most reductionistic and probably false narrative about serotonin that exists out there. So I'd have to say that serotonin two way receptor seems critically important to at least the mechanisms of those substances and maybe a biological construct of God or spirituality period. And it starts to kind of like getting to a lot of interesting questions is because I believe, I don't know, there's an intelligence behind evolution. And so it's like, what is the purpose then? Because structure determines function in biology, particularly in evolutionary biology, like things are created in certain images and forms to serve certain adaptive needs of the organism within its nature or ecosystem. So why would human beings be imbued with this sort of natural spiritual biology? There must be a real pro adaptive advantage of having that kind of construct overall. Maybe something to do with hope, right? And times are extremely extremely dim and difficult instead of giving up, there can be a spiritual sense that allows the organism to kind of rise up and keep kind of adapting. So sort of thinking about what are the mechanisms of psychedelics on coping? It seems like they inspire path or active coping mechanisms. So instead of weathering the storm, that's more like a passive coping is more like a dynamic problem solving types of thing. It seems that psychedelic experiences share some overlap with near death experiences, right? So sort of thinking again, like the organisms under an extreme level of pressure, maybe an extreme level of threat, it's literally kind of a do or die situation where it's cease to exist or adapt and evolve. So that kind of dynamic problem solving, I can't take anything for granted, seems like it's in that same sort of biological realm, or endogenously produced psychedelics, because DMT and 5MEO, DMT are known to be produced endogenously. So what are the circumstances that those things are induced by? It seems like maybe birth, death, pregnancy, like life transitions, like through the portal seems times where there's a release of DMT. So I think like, I don't know what the answers are, right? Like it can answer this question from so many ways. It's cortical processing, it's stepping on a serotonin receptor, it's evolutionary adaptive sort of advantage for the organism. And I don't necessarily know what all the answers are, but exactly like that was it. It was like, well, spirit has to be part of science, because these drugs that work in very scientific sorts of mechanisms and things open these spiritual states. So that means that consciousness and spirituality is now included as part of science. And there's just no map of science will ever be complete without the study of consciousness. So I think that this is really a wonderful place to leave that material, physicalist paradigm of science behind, and step into what the quantum physicists have been saying for at least 100 years now, that maybe consciousness creates reality instead in approaching science from a different aspect where we're really studying consciousness now. I don't know, that was very tangential and all over the map. I should start with like an answer, I don't think I even actually answered your original question, but maybe a little wax philosophical on the topic. Yeah. Well, knowing that there is, there is no definitive answer, because we just don't know, I think it was a pretty good answer to kind of, you know, open up more questions. But yeah, I personally also believe that the deeper we go and science, the more it starts to resemble spirituality. Like as you mentioned, quantum physics is like, there's an observer, all of a sudden you have a different result. So which means that your intention, your thought affects the result as well. But as you were speaking, I kind of got this revelation, which might be not revelation for you. But it's like, why do we assume that a chemical process is cannot be spiritual? It's kind of like, you know, we will know when we fall in love, it's a very beautiful thing where we all know that there is underlying changes in your brain, right? So what's the difference when you ingest the empty or mushroom and you have changes, just like where it comes from, that's the difference. But the process itself, there is, if there is a mechanism for it in our brain, then that means it's necessary. And even then, from that point of view, a spiritual experience of a monk sitting in a cave might also be, it's induced by his meditation or, you know, compressing your perineum and moving the energies out, whatever. But in the end of the day, it's still a DMT experience. So how you either increase your natural levels of DMT or decrease the absorption of DMT, it's like, so I just realized to myself, now that those are two, this is the same thing. But on that note, you know, what do you think, what do you think happens in the brain that short term psychedelic experience, like we know the DMT is out of your system in six to eight hours, like when when it comes to ayahuasca, how come it was this short term experience, then sometimes leads to life, lifelong changes? Yeah. Well, I think like, I'll talk a little about the first part that you're, you're mentioning and get to the second part. It's like spirituality and spirit. And I think this is like part of like, why I chose spirit pharmacist and why the version of myself 10 years before I chose spirit pharmacists would be like, what that what happened to this guy, he's a coop, if sort of fell off the edge, all of this something like that, right? Because spirit and spirituality is such an incredibly loaded term that almost has a personal level of meaning to it. Like, if I had to define spirit or spirituality, I'll be like, but anything that makes the organism sort of feel connected in some way connected to themselves, connected nature, connected to the cosmos, connected to bigger ideas or connected to God, like, like, okay, like, I would say that those have like some spiritual flavor or quality, but like, what is spiritual versus what is not spiritual? You know, like, I there are many people that I have spoke to that with horrific sorts of addictions, alcohol, that like when I put an alcohol, like kids, what they refer to as a rock bottom moment, that's usually a spiritual moment, right? That that's really a very, very spiritual kind of moment, like, I can't live this way, I have to change, right? Again, adapt or not, like, like, it's gets to this place where it's like, I have to do this, right? Or if you put on a nice playlist, and you're all by yourself, and you light some incense, and you do a couple of lines of cocaine, and you lay on your bed and listen to it, may you not go into an elevated or higher sort of upstate, and think about your life in self sort of differently, and could you sort of think that is spiritual? Yeah, you could, you know, there are people that wear talismuns and mandalas and counting beads, and they're super duper spiritual, and they're going down to the yoga to get their spiritual mind, body connection all worked out, right? And then there's the guy that's like, oh no, I don't do anything spiritual at all, like I'm completely a spiritual, but boy, when I'm out there in the woods, hunt and deer in the morning, and it's absolutely quiet and unwalking, so careful, because I don't even want to crochet leaf, and boy, there's this sense of peace in all. It's like, right, so he's not labeling not a spiritual spiritual at all, but boy, the way that they're talking about the mindfulness of the moment, and how they're just sort of in it in their environment, and it's sort of like, yeah, that feels kind of spiritual in, in some way. So we essentially get to decide what is spiritual and not for us. I think that because psychedelics have this almost like reliable quality of engendering feelings of sacredness, and positive mood, like it's not just euphoria. It's not just like, well, I just feel really good. It's like, I feel really good in this experience of special to me somehow, like it's just happening to me somehow, like that sacredness of it. And the fact that it doesn't happen all the time, or very often, I think is like, what really makes the spiritual like, like, like, commonality would have to be in some way, and antonym to sacred, like something that's just very banal, common, happening all the time, it will lose its sacredness over some period of time, probably, as a result. So first of all, it's just like, yeah, what is spiritual? What's a spiritual drug? What's not a spiritual drug? Like, I don't get to decide that. That's what spirit pharmacist, like that's part of what spirit pharmacist is or like means is like the person gets to decide if they're spiritual or not, and what is spiritual for them or not, and what substances are spiritual for them or not. And I'm a big fan of psychedelics and think that psychedelics probably are the class of drugs that are most reliable, inducing spiritual experiences that are really helpful for the person. So that's just it, is kind of when you look at the facets of one of these strong spiritual experiences, we'll take like the mystical experience, like the most kind of studied psychedelic spiritual experience through mostly with mushrooms and psilocybin and Johns Hopkins. It's essentially like it's a euphoric, you know, it's positive mood and sacredness. Again, oceanic boundlessness, so sort of like really feeling like the drop has returned to the ocean. Ineffability, so it's like very hard to adequately put into words or use language to describe just how special, sacred and meaningful it was, whatever, existing outside of time and space. So I think that, you know, for the most part, we're sort of experiencing a fairly linear sense of time as things unfold. So anytime that the sense of time gets dilated, suspended, you literally, your consciousness drops out of time for a moment. That's going to feel like, wow, like it was an eternity and it was an instant and it was both. And so you're stuck with that kind of like truth in paradox feeling. And again, like there's this near death experience, like aspect to it, like a psychological death, like an ego dying. And there's a couple of pulls of that. There's like old age ego death where you can kind of breathe in, breathe out and ascend slowly into the heavens and then there's anxious dysphoric ego death where it feels like the ego is kind of circling the drain and I'm dying. What's happening to me? And sometimes people will really fight and struggle in that space. And sometimes people will be able to kind of relax and allow it. And usually they'll sort of ascend straight to heaven if they're if they're able to relax or allow a lot easier to say them to then to do when the moment comes. I don't know if you answered or tried answering the second part, which is what induces the the long lasting changes, maybe from. Oh, yeah. So, so, so exactly like from a pharmacologic angle. Oh, well, maybe neuroplasticity, right? But I'm not like, like, it seems that it's pretty clear that psychedelics have neuroplastic mechanisms that can help an organism adapt or change. And if I had to like poke just one indication on a psychedelic, it would be to change with mindfulness. Like if you adjust a psychedelic with a change in mind and you're really mindful about sort of preparing in some way and following up on that with some certain action steps afterwards, the chances of your life moving in that direction are really good overall. But again, like, like, why does a near death experience change a person's life permanently? Well, because they can't take it for granted anymore. It's sort of like if if I almost died, my life flashed before my eyes and I realized that 50% of my time is wasted scrolling through junk on the internet. When I have real responsibilities, children, things that I'm trying to accomplish in the world, all of a sudden it becomes like, I know for a fact that time is limited and time is incredibly important. It's my most valuable resource. And I will vow not to waste it anymore. And I can't take those things for granted. And I think it works a very similar way with the ego death and that in the psychedelic experience. I think that there's a real spiritual reckoning that forces the organism to prioritize things in life in ways that it wants to move in those directions. And frankly, no matter how short or fleeting or whatever an instant or moment, a drug experience is, it's really difficult to unsee what you've seen. Like, like, I don't know, you've never been to the Grand Canyon before. Okay, it's a big canyon somewhere. I don't think that's going to be life changing. You go and you stare at the vastness of the Grand Canyon and start contemplating the geological processes that unfolded over millions of years to carve this absolutely majestic thing. And you won't be able to forget that you won't be able to unsee that you'll never be able to go back to a perspective of thinking on it's just like a hole in the ground somewhere. Like, you won't be able to. And I don't know. So probably psychological mechanisms, right? Like I can't unsee what I've seen. That's that's a part of it. The intensity of it all, like the near death kind of experience and the ego actually being threatened, not in a physical way in a psychological way. And the sort of non ordinary state that forces the organism to essentially gets priority straight. Well, it's a beauty of your explanations as not just a pharmacist or just a spiritual person, but as a spirit pharmacist, obviously you're coming up with the more complete version, which is both of them together, which is also what I believe we kind of come to healing with psychedelics. And for me personally, when I first learned about it, and I got depressed, so I wanted to drink ayahuasca to undepress myself. And the spirituality was not part of it first. But over time, you start realizing that it is partially spiritual. And then the spiritual part keeps growing bigger. The more I work with it till maybe, I don't know, a few years from now, maybe I'll say it's all just spiritual. But maybe once again, that's to another extreme. And you mentioning near that as well reminded me of one episode that I recorded where a person had a near that experience, and then they had an ayahuasca experience or mushroom experience. And it was very similar. The feeling was almost the same. So you know, as those ancient Greeks used to say, when they were tripping on Kiki on, I don't know, maybe you know a bit about the signs of it, but they said, if you die, before you die, you don't die when you die. And yeah, there's this whole rabbit hole. Anything comes up to you when I mentioned those things. Yeah. Well, there's this seep I can might be out of. There's this quote that I know. And it actually comes, I originally heard this song from an ayahuasca facilitator. See if I can find it. The song is called Celestial Heart. I know that much. But there's a quote from it that I usually use in my lecture about psilocybin for depression and anxiety associated with life threatening the illness, right? Because this is one of the primary applications now for psychedelics or psilocybin is to end this kind of existential suffering or essentially like suffering associated with like fear of death, with the progressive life threatening kind of illness. And it seems very, very effective for that. And so one quote from the celestial heart, hopefully I can read it without crying. It usually gets me, but I feel like I can do it right now. Oh, my celestial heart, with your love that takes me so high, you teach me the way I can live, you show me what it means to die. So it's like through the psychedelic showing you what it means to die, it teaches you how you want to live. Because if you've seen the end or you've crossed the end somehow, get in good words, right? Like it will teach you how to live. If it shows you what it means to die, it will show you what it means to live. And frankly, this is a different sort of topic, right? Like almost like a black and white type of topic, but like the opposite sort of side, like we're talking about a near death experience showing you how you want to live, right? But there's a lot of people that are walking around with some level of suicidal ideation or suicidal thought that is very passive overall. Like it's not a, well, I have the plan, I'm going to go to the hardware store, I got the rope, I wrote them out like that's in an action and planning stage where it's quite serious and dangerous. And there's like a like an imminent risk of them attempting suicide at that point. But most persons with suicidal ideation, it's a lot more passive. And it's been it's probably more of a coming from a feeling of being helpless, trapped, overwhelmed, or like there's a very complex problem. And usually when the brain is faced with a complex problem, it will present the most simple solution almost like a reflex, really, like if sort of like the doctor like taps your knee and you have like a reflex, that means your nervous system responded without thought, basically. And so there's almost like this reflexes that will present the option of dying, like maybe, maybe dying would be the way it out. And so I think a lot of people are grabbing onto this passive level of suicidal ideation almost like as a comfort mechanism, must as like a life preserver, like it, it helps me sustain it here to have this sort of ambivalence, do I want to live, do I want to die? It's like, well, I don't really want to die, it's passive, but I'm not really engaged with living either, right? I'm sort of like walking this place where I don't I haven't decided whether I'm here to live, or I'm here to die. And so I think that by going into one of these ego death types of experiences with psychedelics, which is a heck of a lot more safe than a real near death experience where your life is actually threatened, we're just talking about psychological stuff here. We're not talking about physical threats to the organism, right? That psychological threat is enough to dispel the sort of passive suicidality and get the organism to choose life like 100%. And then if you chose life 100%, then now you're living. Yeah. Yeah, sometimes you need a bit of that actual feeling of dying, whether it's psychedelic or a felt suicide attempt to like yank you back to reality. That's I've heard it from from some people that come to the retreat that have have attended had suicidal ideation. Let's change the topic a little bit and talk about ayahuasca, you know, what do you think about first maybe as a pharmacist to talk to people about how ayahuasca actually works about the two components of it. And in your opinion, you know, knowing the molecules and knowing the nature, how do you think they came up with it, you know, to mix exactly those two? Oh man, well, the last one's hard. I think that I like it felt like if I did like, I don't know how they came up with it, right? I think that there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of biologically active plants in the Amazon. And I think that the chances of just eating or ingesting those two plants, if you sort of think, Hey, let's just eat two plants together and see what happens. The chances of them hitting on that specific combination is really not very high, which implies to me that it was at random or it was random, but it was done over an extremely long period of time, because if you've got enough time with small numbers, like you will hit eventually, right? But I'm kind of thinking that there was some level of intuitive intuition, knowing, understanding, observation, systematic trying of things. I'm not really sure exactly how, but I consider ayahuasca to be an incredible biologic technology that was somehow discovered or invented. And it really is like, like an invention or a discovery, the same way that if you came up with some new electronic gadget today that was revolutionizing the entire world, people would be like, Whoa, it's like people should be having that same level of wow for the invention of ayahuasca, because it really is just an incredible thing that was discovered. And you know, I don't have more insight or knowledge, except for just like, really think of it as like an incredibly advanced botanical technology that probably didn't come about right random chance would be about the summary version it can have there. What was the first part of your question? The mechanism of polyolosco. Mechanism, why? So, yeah, so, yeah, so, so ayahuasca has two ingredients to it. There's banisteriopsy copy or the ayahuasca of vine. And this has a group of chemical or monamine oxidase inhibitors in it. And then there's psychedelic containing plants. And the most common one is chakruna, which has the DMT. There is at least one other diplateris that they can put into it that does have some DMT in it as well. And it's really the combination of these things that creates the ayahuasca experience. So DMT ingested by mouth by itself doesn't have much or any level of psychoactive or psychedelic activity, because you have so much metabolic enzymes, so much monamine oxidase in your small intestine, gut, and liver that all of the DMT is metabolized before it reaches systemic circulation. So the monamine oxidase inhibitors are incredibly important or the ayahuasca vine is incredibly important, because it will block monamine oxidase, which allows the DMT to pass through and have a psychoactive effect. I would note that this is also like a very like westernized version of talking about ayahuasca's pharmacology, and that a lot of other groups may sort of say, well, you skip the part of mentioning the ayahuasca itself or the ayahuasca vine is a medicine. And the ayahuasca vine itself can be quite healing. And there are some groups that will serve vine only brewers and people can still have good healing processes that come from it. But I think that part of this question is like, how does it produce this psychedelic activity with DMT? So I'm sort of answering it through that lens. And I do think that it's reasonable to think that the DMT adds something as far as healing potential or spiritual experience like we've been talking about. So a lot of times because monamine oxidase inhibitors, I mean, yes, they're found in the ayahuasca vine, but monamine oxidase inhibitors were the first class of antidepressants that really were discovered or came on the market either. And it is very well known and notorious from monamine oxidase inhibiting antidepressants that there can be some very serious types of toxicities or adverse reactions that could come about when the wrong food or drugs are mixed with monamine oxidase inhibitors. So some persons that, you know, maybe start reading about different psychedelics and different psychedelic mechanisms that come across ayahuasca may kind of get the impression from the internet that ayahuasca is inherently a really dangerous psychedelic because it has monamine oxidase inhibitors in it. And that's not really true at all. Monamine oxidase inhibitors create a metabolic vulnerability that when mixed with the wrong things can be very safe. But just having the metabolic vulnerability for some short period of time, if you avoid the interacting food and drugs, it's not a high risk type of thing to do overall or it's not an unsafe thing in of itself just to use monamine oxidase inhibitors to boost the concentrations of DMT. Yeah, so that's roughly how we believe ayahuasca is working as far as blocking gut monamine oxidase, which is a loud DMT to be psychoactive. It's great that you touched upon the head to the present part. That was actually my next question that now I know a big part of your work is helping people get deeper off into the presence in their preparation for a ceremony and also explaining them how and why and when it's a good idea and when it's not. But what is the, why is MAOI so dangerous to mix with antidepressants? What is happening there? Which kinds of antidepressants? So let's say for people who are listening and hopefully planning to come to the wire and they, you know, we're going to send them the instructions. They say quit that the presence four weeks in advance for them to understand why and which are the depressants like as a horizon basically talk to us about that. What's the difference between as a horizon, benzodiazepines, which ones are dangerous, which ones are not hopefully, yeah. Yeah, yeah, so I mean it's all in a name, monoamine oxidase, right? So the name of the enzyme is very descriptive to what it does. It oxidizes monoamines. Then the three major monoamines that it oxidizes are serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine. So these are the neurotransmitters that monamine oxidases heavily involved in removing from the synapse, right? So it's usually a neurotransmitter breakdown type of enzyme found in the space between two neurons. That's how monamine oxidase is functioning in the brain. So when it comes to what is dangerous with monamine oxidase inhibitors, it's other drugs that increase those monoamines, serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine. So it's actually relatively simple to predict if a drug is going to be dangerous with Iowast or with monamine oxidase inhibitors, also really need to understand is does that drug increase norepinephrine, serotonin, or dopamine somehow? And so selective serotonin, reuptake inhibitors, SSRIs, yeah, they block the serotonin reuptake pump and increase the amount of serotonin, they're going to be dangerous. SNRI serotonin, norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors. Okay, now we're blocking serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake. Those are going to be dangerous. Cocaine, that's a dopamine norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor. It's got a really boost dopamine in norepinephrine. Probably also going to be dangerous with monamine oxidase inhibitors. So you have lots of different types of substances, maybe from different classes of drug, but the crux, when you sort of think about which ones are dangerous with MAOIs is they all inevitably have the ability to boost serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine. If you're talking about serotonin, serotonin, serotonin, serotonin, toxicity with monamine oxidase, while you're talking about drugs that increase serotonin, whereas if you're talking about hypertensive crisis, which is the other type of adverse reaction or toxicity you can get with monamine oxidase inhibitors, you're probably talking more like the cocaine, the stimulants, or maybe just teramine-containing foods, or fur is there very high and, yeah, teramine usually from a process of fermentation. So it's sort of like, you can kind of look at, hey, what drugs are dangerous with MAOIs, and you get this kind of like laundry list, but I would say that strong stimulants in most antidepressants are probably going to be like, yeah, that's your main share of them. But there are drugs that other classes that might be out of blocks, serotonin, and reuptake, when other drugs in that class really don't, or I would say like the over-the-counter, cough, and cold section is another place, you're going to have to be pretty careful stuff like pseudo-ephedra and stuff like dextromaphorph, and can interact negatively with monamine oxidase inhibitors, and to an extent, certain supplements too, you know, any supplement that says enhances focus, I think that's, you know, supplement code word for treat ADHD, and likely how's a stimulant in it, right, many supplements that say, hey, this is a stress buffer mood enhancer, okay, I think that's a supplement code word for treats, depression, and anxiety, and it likely has psychoactive ingredients that modulate serotonin, norepinephrine, and/or dopamine in them. So some of it is a little bit of a prediction game, but the cool part about all of this right is that the pharmaceutical monamine oxidase inhibitors came onto the market in the 50s and 60s, and so as far as like a western science goes, we actually have a very strong understanding of what drugs truly are dangerous of monamine oxidase inhibitors, and without getting too nitty-gritty in the details, there's a couple of reasons to believe that the pharmaceutical monamine oxidase inhibitors probably have a higher degree of causing toxicity with these types of substances than ayahuasca, that doesn't mean there isn't this risk with ayahuasca, sometimes I hear that, it's like ayahuasca is not a pharmaceutical, so all as pharmaceutical warings are total, you know, bovine excrement, and it's like, they're not total bovine excrement, but some of the washout times, some of the ways that we conceive about the brakes or the reaction potential might be slightly different, like yeah, like that's fair enough. So yeah, that's just it, just avoid the interacting foods and drugs, and ayahuasca is it's really a set of very, very safe substance like overall, like if you start looking at the the measured kind of cardiovascular increases with ayahuasca, you know, sometimes people are really, really worried about it, and it's like, well, it's less than psilocybin or LSD actually, like monamine oxidase inhibitors tend to cause an orthostatic hypotension or a lowering of blood pressure or vasodilation. So like sometimes in ceremony, you might get people that are sitting or laying for a long time, maybe sitting cross like it, they can stand up and they can actually get kind of dizzy because they're having this orthostatic hypertensive type of effect. So anyone that has like orthostasis in their day-to-day life or meds that they take, or maybe they're a little bit elderly, I'm always kind of saying like, hey, let me know if you need to stand up, use the restroom or something like stand up pretty, pretty slowly, and maybe even flex some of the muscles in your legs first if it's really been a few hours, and you know, if you stand up and the world starts going white, sit down immediately, you're probably fainting rather than having a mystical experience. I kind of switched topics there on the, at the end, just third-clocking generic, like more about monamine oxidase. No, it's so, it's all good. I think it's all educational, but yeah, let me first of all appreciate that bovine excrement, bovine excrement phrase. I've never heard this before. It's beautiful, absolutely beautiful. I'm probably going to be using it. And so regarding the blood pressure, that is confusing because you read some places and it says, don't do it if your pressure is low because it will lower it even more. In the other places, it says, don't do it if your pressure is high. It will raise it even higher. And for us as facilitators and retreat operators, I mean, we can't fund science or even be able to get this information. So once there was one person who kind of sneaked his way around our forms and did not disclose some stuff. And by the time he came over and he told us he had the high blood pressure, it was too late. And he basically, he said, you know, it's all on me. I completely, I want to do it, no matter what, if my blood pressure goes up a little bit, he did the science. So we just said, you know, we're going to give it a try. We'll go slow. And we kept measuring his pressure as we were starting with smaller doses of ayahuasca and going up. And in the end, his pressure actually went down a little bit. So it was very unpredictable. What do you think? What is the rule of thumb there? Like, does it raise the pressure? Does it lower the pressure or what is it? So just monamine oxidase inhibitors, like just inhibiting or dosing monamine oxidase inhibitors to persons, you're expecting low blood pressure or orthostatic hypotension. So like a low blood pressure that might cause a fast heart rate if they shift positions, right? So that's what you're expecting out of just monamine oxidase inhibitors. Monamine oxidase inhibitors plus DMT. Okay. DMT is a serotonergic psychedelic. It causes vasoconstriction and probably can increase blood pressure. So as far as like, Hey, what are the overall cardiovascular effects of ayahuasca? It tends to be almost blood pressure neutral and small increases in heart rate or maybe small increases of blood pressure. But they're very, that's what I'm saying, like nominal compared to other psychedelics. And it's probably because the MAOIs are kind of lowering it and the DMT is kind of raising it and you sort of get almost like a wash as far as like how it's affecting the person overall. Now you're on monamine oxidase inhibitors and you start adding drugs that have tyramine or fusab tyramine, I should say or drugs that increase norepinephrine or dopamine. Now because of that metabolic vulnerability, you're a risk of very high blood pressures, hypertensive crisis. So I think that's where a lot of the confusion comes in is some persons are thinking, what happens to my blood pressure by mixing with the wrong stuff? Okay, it's all over the map. You get autonomic dysfunction and you might get a hypertensive crisis might be so high that you have a hemorrhagic or bleeding type of stroke inside your brain, right? But just dosing MAOIs without those interacting types of substances like stimulants, teramin containing thurs, you're expecting it to be neutral or kind of decreased. I think that there's like other layers to this when we're talking about blood pressure effects with psychedelics too, like I'm just trying to answer the question based on what are I think the intrinsic actions of the substance are? I think that there's something to be said about the psychic material that a person is experiencing as well. So for example, I take a dose of ayahuasca, now I'm not expecting it raises my blood pressure. I might even have a slight blood pressure lowering effect, but if I start relieving the time that I was forcefully arrested against my will and was the most traumatic thing that happened to me, while geez, maybe the anxiety and panic that comes along without all of a sudden causes some kind of spike in blood pressure. Panic and anxiety is usually not a pathologic type of thing, like you're not expecting a cardiovascular event out of it per se. But I think that those are some of the reasons why you might get such disparate information about how ayahuasca affects blood pressures, because depending on what they mix away or what's going on with them, then it might be quite different in different persons. It is pretty complex, if it is a predictable event for you, as a pharmacist, it can be hard to predict for us. We spoke about high tarmine foods and generally it's fermented foods, citrus fruits and milk products and what else overly ripe fruits. But why really? It's really smelly age-permented stuff. It's true that over-ripe fruits can start to have some level of turamine content in it, but it's going to be relatively low and not enough to cause the problem. You can eat a ripe endavicado or you can eat ripe bananas, things like that. I'm really not worried about a fruit that's a little bit on the ripe side or something like that. It's really more like the gorgonzola cheese, pickled herrings, things like that that have really been through an aged and fermentation type of process that are probably to be avoided. I don't know, with drugs, oftentimes you do need to avoid them for a good long period of time before ayahuasca. With the turamine-containing foods, I think a lot of diets and deities advocate cutting it out a good period of time ahead of time, five days, seven days, two weeks. It sure depends on the d8a. There might be some advantage of that. I think a lot of gut enzyme stuff is inducible to the point that if you're eating a lot of fermented stuff all the time, your body might respond by increasing the amount of monamine oxidase and that might make it harder for the medicine to cut through all that kind of chemical noise or up-regulated monamine oxidase. There may be some advantage of cutting out turamine in the diet as far as potency of medicine. That's pretty speculative. That's just what I've thought about it. In reality, if you were starting one of those pharmaceutical monamine oxidase inhibitors that have a more serious risk of hypertensive crisis than ayahuasca does, my counseling would be you don't have to start the turamine-containing diet or the low-turamine diet until you put the first pill in your mouth. You've got to avoid turamine-containing foods for a week, two weeks at a time. It's not necessarily like a scientific reality that you need to do that to avoid a hypertensive crisis. You probably just need to avoid ingesting blue cheeseburgers with bacon while you're on ayahuasca, which probably wouldn't be too hard to do at all, I don't think. Maybe there's some kind of biological down-regulation to gut monamine oxidase that could come if you cut the turamine out some period of time and that might make the first cup especially stronger. Thank you for telling that because when it comes to food, we generally lean towards being a little bit more relaxed than some retreat spaces which our visitors appreciate tremendously because they expect salt-less, sugar-less oatmeal every day and they get pretty delicious food. Of course, my approach was always very scientific in a way, okay, we understand the turamine, so no turamine, so yeah, we don't do overly ripe fruits and nothing fermented. With that, what you said just now, I can also maybe reintroduce some of the fruits. We're in a mango season right now, there's a lot of ripe mangoes falling off the trees, and I was like, I would like to give people some mango juice, and I was like, why can't we? And if it's not really that high-end turamine, I mean, we might do it, so I will quote you, and this is a great excuse for me because people will, and what I realize now is that everyone gets their information from internet and the information is not that reliable, so people, if they follow, I say, I always tell people, if you follow diet recommendations from two or three different retreats, maybe even more, you end up with just drinking water, maybe not even that, because there seems to be this movement for the more restrictions I have, the more professional I am, which in a way, in reality, is like, you just don't know what you're talking about, so it's great to have that clarity and be able to say, well, there's their science behind this, this is why we do it this way and not that way, because some people come and they say, it's to this or it's to that, because they wanted to be more stricter, because to them it represents more professionality or more or to the exality. What about salt and sugar? Why some places recommend to moderate it, some places recommend to cut them out completely, is there any mechanism behind salt and sugar? Yeah, probably, some, so my sorts of thoughts around it are that I really don't want to step on detail, like, I think that there is an aspect to it, like, even if their restrictions are not necessarily for, wow, avoid red meat because you're going to die if you eat red meat a week before this, like, okay, you're not going to die if you eat red meat a week before this, right? But I think that there's probably, well, every time that I was going to put that spoonful of sugar or normally I would eat this way and I could it because of dieta, it's like that person just reinforced their preparation, right? They just, I'm giving up something that I would normally find a short term gratification on because I'm focused in preparing for this thing that's going to catalyze the healing process, right? So they are really priming the pump, they're making changes already, they're getting into the habit of practicing restraint and discipline and giving up the sort of short term feel good, gratify me, ego needs a life preserver in this moment, types of things for long term gains and goals as far as what they really want to like focus on. So I think that there can be a lot of really good reasons to do a dieta as far as like, preparation, preparation, preparation, spiritual focus. You know, I think that it's also very true that particularly a lot of North Americans are living lifestyles. They're very fast paced burnout lifestyles where there's a lot of hyper stimulation, either in the types of TV advertisements, like the types of foods like could be laid in with salt and sugar and things of that nature. And it's just sort of true that the quieter you are, the more you can hear. And so I think cutting out stuff that's very, very noisy ahead of time puts the person in a place where they're going to get more out of it or could potentially get more out of it. Like maybe you've been to a rock concert at some point in your life and you forgot to bore your earplugs at the concert and then you're driving home into car or your friend was like, Hey, you want to stop it and get something deep? You're like, what? It's like, because your senses down regulated that quickly in response to being hyper stimulated overall. So I think a lot of persons are a little bit out of touch where their senses or their senses have been down regulated in some way, because they're bombarded by this hyper stimulatory kind of world and kind of slowing down, cutting out the instant gratification things and letting the senses come up a little bit before these experiences really is helpful. You know, I think that again, like to me, it's a little bit more like, well, sugar itself has drug like properties to it, right? Like there is a nutritional substance to it, like there's a carbohydrate, but it functions like a dopamine releasing addictive substance in the person's brain. So it really is like that very like short term, like feel good in the moment, get a hit of something to make it to the next minute of my life, even though I know I'm going to be crashing in the next minute of my life and wanting to have more sugar at that point. Right. So there's, I think, really good reasons to reduce the amount of sugar, not just to drink ayahuasca, just periods like like overall. And then salt, I'm a little bit more like, I think that probably cutting out processed junk foods that are really high and laden with with sodium chloride, like iodized table salt, that sounds like a wonderful change to make going on a no salt diet. I don't know, I think your body needs electrolytes. I think that, you know, the ayahuasca experience, there might be some purging. You know, I typically don't think that there's a huge volume or electrolyte loss that's associated with the purging, but maybe in a person that had really cut out sodium completely and was just drinking a lot of extra water or something like that, I think that there might be some risk of kind of bottoming out electrolytes. So I tend to think that don't go excessive salt. If you're, if you're eating a diet that's high in processed salty stuff, you got to cut that junk out. Right. But if you want to put a little bit of like mineralized sea salt or something on your food, I personally don't really have any kind of problem against that. And almost like, I don't know, like, like the first few times drinking ayahuasca, my advice to the person is usually listen to the people at the facility and follow it, right? Like, like, follow it. Unless that there's something in it that just sounds crazy, and you can kind of ask me about it, and I'll tell you if it sounds crazy to me or not. But like, the first time, like, no matter what I am saying in this sort of interview or what you're hearing or what you're reading, just, just, just follow it, right? The second, third, fourth, and fifth time, you know, you have a relationship with a medicine now. You might be able to ask good questions. Mother ayahuasca, do you care if I eat some onions in the week prior to? She'll give you a clear answer whether she cares about that or not. And then you can kind of change your approach to something that fits you. Or maybe you want to look at the list of 15 things that they tell you to cut out and identify the three things that you really don't want to cut out because then that just showed you where all the attachment is. And you might be attached for a very, very good reason. Well, I don't want to cut out salt because I have a disease that causes me to have a little salt. My doctor said I need to medically take salt a few times a day so that I don't bother my salt and have a seizure. Great reason to continue taking the salt, right? I want to quit. I want to keep whatever having candy bars and smoking pod and drinking booze because I can't. It's like, okay, stop kidding yourself and make some changes and do some hard work ahead of this, right? Like there's lots of good reasons to duty it and a lot of good reasons to follow some sort of instructions that may not necessarily be grounded in a life or death physical reaction leading into these types of things. Yeah, I definitely agree with the psychological side of it when you cut things out from your diet. Maybe it's not going to have any real effect on the strength of the medicine or any adverse effects. But then it's that reverence is that intentionality behind eating that will make your ayahuasca experience better because you are more devoted. What we have done, and I also use myself as a guinea pig, is some things observe and I notice that there is no difference. For example, if I have salty food or if I don't have salty food, the results are the same. In this case, why make food on salty and untasty? Unnecessarily so. But most of the common rules, we observe them as well because also I don't want to be risking it. Regarding red meat, there is actually interesting because first time I went to jungle in Colombia, they gave us red meat with every meal, including breakfast, which surprised me a lot because I was preparing on the internet for the diet. And apparently, the red meat thing is a very sheepy thing because other tribes, they don't have those rules, including the fact that one of the original uses for ayahuasca was to see the hunting ground for red meat. So it's a very interesting sort of difference in those two traditions. What about supplements? What are the worst supplements to take? What's absolutely not allowed in and why? Probably a lot of the supplements, like I was mentioning, without coming up with a list of, hey, these are the three supplements that you want to avoid. The supplements that start to be on my notorious suspect list would be supplements that seem to make some kind of claim about changing mental status or mental health, right? So supplements that increase or boost mood, focus, energy, stress reducing, those types of things. Again, the supplement manufacturer is trying to tell you this has a psychoactive in it. A lot of the times it's unclear what psychoactive that they do have in it. And frankly, a lot of supplements have stuff in it that they don't tell you that is needed to weight loss supplements. Oh my goodness, I think a lot of them have like your hydroxy cut types of stuff, like invariably have some kind of stimulant in it that is probably going to be contraindicated. So I'd say like the stuff that's like neurohacking, right, where it's sort of like, yeah, I am using a stack of things to change my mental state and mental status. Like, okay, like there might be ingredients in there that that don't mix very well. Maybe really big doses of lithium orate, maybe stuff like St. John's war. You know, those are the kinds of all part things. But when a person's like, Hey, I got my, you know, centrum silver one a day multivite. Is that going to kill me? It's like, no, not at all. And I think when persons take huge amounts of supplements, I am encouraging to take some time off of it. Like it just almost as a chemical reverence. Like, like, I can't really see into this black box of supplements that you've that you've got going on, but it seems like there's all just a lot of inputs that are coming into the body. And if you're not going to notice much in the way of a withdrawal syndrome from cutting them out for a few days, then let's kind of offer a few days. This is almost like my my my default. So I think inherently with a world of supplements, because the number of things, because they come in stacks, because generally you're less sure they are what they are than some other things that you might be buying, then practicing cost, cautiously makes sense. And sort of keeping in mind that there's very few cases that I've found where there's a real serious toxicity that occurs, you know, where it seems like supplements are the things that are pegged as the causal sorts of of agent. So overall, I'm kind of thinking the world of supplements is relatively safe, but there's probably, yeah, like, don't don't take away lost supplements with ayahuasca, please, should we? One last thing on the topic of preparation for the ceremony. We spoke about end-to-depressants. Let's say somebody is on SSRI or SNRI to the presence. There was that dawn to go well with with ayahuasca. How were any recommendations from pharmacology point of view? Out tool, paper off, and in that case, some people really like to lower their end-to-depressants amount, and start taking micro doses of mushrooms. What are the, is that a good technique? What are the good techniques for people that let's say are preparing for an ayahuasca retreat? Yeah. Well, I think like sort of showed it to me, I'm backing up and kind of thinking like, hey, what's my history with mental health? And like, why was I prescribed these anti-depressants? And have they really served me and done what I'm hoping to? And why am I doing ayahuasca? Am I doing it because I'm trying to find a different treatment strategy for my mental health condition? And my goal is to absolutely leave these anti-depressants behind forever? Where is it to have a psychedelic experience and experience some of the spiritual effects safely? But hey, there's some upsides to this anti-depressant therapy, and I probably would go back on it at some point in time. I think if it's sort of the latter, you may just want to consider other types of psychedelics because you could probably have those spiritual experiences without going through the kind of disruption that tapering really is going to probably be for most people. Whereas if it's a little bit more of a former, then okay, like let's engage with the taper process. I generally think that those reductions of 10 to 25% every two to four weeks as tolerated is a good rate for a lot of people. If you really sort of do the math there, then it's a pretty big range. 25% every two weeks gets you off in two months, 10% every four weeks gets you off in 10 months, right? So that's a pretty big sort of range still, but I'm kind of thinking that most people should be budgeting at least a month and a half and probably more like two to four months to complete their anti-depressant taper before the washout period, which I think for anti-depressants where the exception of Prozac is almost universally two weeks. You said you liked four weeks at your center. I'm totally okay with centers picking four weeks because I think two weeks later persons can really sometimes be in the thick of like a withdrawal reaction, whereas usually more like four weeks, the acute withdrawal has had more time to pass and you may have just a better sense of the person's overall stability off of the medication at that point, whereas two weeks may be a little bit early days or for some people or they may just still be in a very intense level of withdrawal. I liken this process a lot to weight loss, right? It's like you've got 50 extra milligrams of your anti-depressant you want to lose. Well, you might be able to do that by starving yourself for six weeks, but if your goal is to sustainably lose weight, you already know that's just a terrible crash diet yo-yo plan where you're probably going to put all that weight back on and maybe even end up heavier than you were before. So I think that sometimes it can be very exciting to think the retreat has a ceremony in three weeks. I'm free in three weeks. I should go. But then it's like the planning for the time to taper and discontinue is so short and so tight that you're on this kind of crash course. And even if you can white knuckle it through that period and get there, the chances of you getting that healing experience that allows you to leave the anti-depressant behind and or the chances of you having like a really tough integration period that's all marked by a lot of anti-depressant withdrawal is going to kind of go up. So I think like slow and steady wins the race here. Like, okay, tortoise versus the hair and the anti-depressant taper, the tortoise is going to to win this one if the goal is to be off of it for a long period of time or for the long term. And if a person is in this taper process and they get to a point that feels pretty difficult and they're not sure if they're able to continue, there probably are other types of supplements that could be added. And I do think that microdosing psilocybin mushrooms or maybe microdosing LSD is one thing that doesn't have a whole lot of supported clinical data right now but is an emerging strategy that I hear a lot of positive stories about from people that I'm talking with not everyone, right? Not everyone has this kind of beautiful dried up some of the withdrawal symptoms, but a lot of people do. My thoughts are to start the taper and try to take a couple of steps and wait till you're feeling some level of withdrawal and then see if microdosing could kind of take away those things. I think that when you're sort of thinking about withdrawing from anti-depressants, that's one variable. You thought at adding microdoses, that's another variable. I mean, I don't know, as a scientist, I just hate experiments with two variables because it's going to be really difficult to figure out what's going on. So instead of like, let me prophylactically immunize my taper by starting microdosing first, I would actually start to taper first, take a few controlled steps down, wait till I see the mood going lower, I see my stress is going up, I sleep that the most stress is going up and it's getting harder to fall asleep or, you know, I'm getting some level of withdrawal. Okay, what if I introduce some very small microdoses now? Does all of a sudden some of those things start to improve? And that's how I think a person can taper their anti-depressants safely and maybe help to understand if microdosing is going to be an ally for them or not. Thank you. I think it was a great explanation of how to do it and very, very reasonable, very meticulous. I think that this episode was very entertaining and very informative as well. So I think we can start to wrap it up and wrap it down. And what are your last parting words? Maybe something that there's a spirit pharmacist specifically, you'd like to tell to people that are in the psychedelic space for healing some words of recommendation. And then what are you working people? Yeah, tell us about the consultations you do and then where can people find you? Yeah, I'll say one thing about ayahuasca first that we haven't said or talked about yet. And then I'll do the kind of, you know, shameless spirit pharmacist self-plug. Yeah, so the first thing that I just want people to know and understand about ayahuasca and the DMT in ayahuasca that is very different than other classic trip to mean psychedelics like psilocybin is that with DMT, you do not or if you do, it's extremely minimal, get a tolerance to the subjective effects with repeat dosing. All right, so psilocybin, you get a rapid tolerance to repeat dosing as far as the subjective effects to the point that if you ingest a dose of psilocybin mushrooms and then try to boost yourself even three or four hours later, the chances of getting much higher aren't very good. Actually, things tend to fizzle. You already accumulated a tolerance to psilocybin in that period of time. And if you try to use it several days in a row by the second, third, fourth day, you might be eating mega doses of mushrooms 10 20 grams and not very much will be will be happening. So that's why that a lot of clinical protocols don't involve boosters of psilocybin right now. And that's why you're going to be hard pressed to find a psilocybin retreat where the people know where they're doing. Anyway, that involves giving mushrooms two nights in a row, because the second night, it's like, you're just going to dud the experience like it will give at least a couple of days, like some five day retreats, you know, could have a couple of administrations, right. But the cool part of ayahuasca is this does not exist. So a lot of people are thinking, well, ayahuasca, no, whoa, without that one's like way too scary. And it's just crazy. And oh my god, like the barking and the vomiting, it's like, no, no, no, no, I want to stay away from all of that. All right. But what they don't understand is the ayahuasca is completely titrateable. And that's an incredible property as far as dosing goes, you can give a person like this person. Ah, they didn't they didn't fill out the intake ride or they slipped through or they want 100% truthful. And now they hear they got this blood pressure thing. And God, they travel all this way. What do we do not serve them? We send them home. Or can we actually just give them okay, we normally give 15 ml 30 ml, whatever it is, the strength of the brew to start a person, this person, we can give them two and a half or five ml and observe it for an hour or two and take a blood pressure and hey, it's still normal still. All right. Now I'm going to give them five ml. All right. Okay. First night, we gave them 10 or 15 ml kind of spaced out, no problems there. Second night, I can start them higher, right? So with ayahuasca, in any particular night, you could titrate a person up with a dose. And on subsequent nights, you can choose to have a warm up, a welcome night, a customize you to the medicine because you're a lot more fearful than somebody else, whatever reasons, you're 85 years old and you've never done psychedelics. Sure, you can you can start people in really tiny doses of ayahuasca and build them up. And because it will work throughout an eye and over several nights, I just think that that's one of the most under leveraged sort of properties and principles when it comes to dosing ayahuasca that yeah, people are thinking that it's like the scariest one because you bar for something like that. And it's actually the one that's the most approachable as far as dosing goes because you can literally do just about anything with the oral dosing as far as titrating people where some of the others, it's almost like you have to pick a dose and hope for the best that day. So that's the one thing about dosing ayahuasca that I want everyone to know. And then yeah, spiritpharsis.com is is where I live. I'm a psychopharmacology consultant and psychedelic educator. So that's just what it means. I have different types of consulting services. I do individual consults for absolutely anyone. They're always 60 minutes long. I also have a subscription or a member program that offers a drug information or email question and answer like base service and some more flexibility as far as consulting appointments. And then I have psychedelic education. So I have different written information guides that are freely available to download. I've got different blogs, webinar workshops, and then I have like full length, like kind of premium courses in psychedelic pharmacology. So check me out. I'm on Instagram. I'm on Facebook. I think some of the best ways to stay in touch with what I'm doing is joining the mailing list. I always give my mailing list just the best of what's going on with me. I try to keep the signal-to-noise ratio nice for my email list overall. And you definitely want to miss anything if you join the list. I do a monthly news roundup that talks about different research and psychedelics. That's mostly me and my practice in a nutshell. SpiritFarmacist.com again. That's where you can find me. Thank you, Ben. I appreciate you coming on and educating us once again. I'm really glad you exist because this is very necessary to have somebody both spiritual and an actual pharmacist. So thank you a lot for coming. Guys, thank you for listening. As always with you, the whole assembly. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a like, whatever it is, whatever it is you're listening to us and subscribe and follow. Yeah, thank you and I'll see you in the next episode. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to support us and psychedelic renaissance at large, please follow us and leave us a like wherever it is you're listening. Share this episode with someone who will benefit from this information. Nothing in this podcast is intended as medical advice, and it is for educational and entertainment purposes only. This episode is sponsored by Loira, Iowa's Curitreet. At Loira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Loira, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I'm looking forward to hosting you.
