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hey leo here for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to be talking about correcting the stigma of psychedelics part two [Music] you all right let's continue where we left off with part 1 if you haven't seen part 1 go do that there I talked a lot about psychedelics and historical and cultural contexts from all around the world I also talked about the many medical applications of psychedelics which are legitimate scientific and clinically demonstrated medical benefits in this part what I want to do is I want to start to unravel this demonization yet at the heart of this stigma and to demonstrate that first of all that it is there because a lot of people are in denial about the fact that psychedelics are stigmatized they think that no ilio psychedelics are not stigmatized that's just how they are no it's a stigma and not only is it a stigma but it's a deliberate stigma which I want to show to you and and then we're going to talk about why this stigma exists and what some solutions for it might be so let's start with this issue of the stigma actually being a conscious premeditated thing that society has constructed it's not an accident and there's some very good underlying reasons for why this is the case and what I want to present as evidence number one this is perhaps the most outrageous piece of evidence that I've ever come across in all my research it just blew my mind when I read this quote and I want to read to you because it's really amazing this is a confession from the Nixon administration and Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichman this was long after the Nixon administration he was now at the end of his life and this is an interview that he gave in 1994 to Harper's Magazine and here's what came out in that conversation and they were specifically talking about the drug war the war on drugs and how it got started why I got started so here here's what he said the Nixon administration the Nixon campaign of 1968 and the Nixon White House after that had two enemies the anti-war left and black people you understand what I'm saying we knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or to be black but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and the blacks with cocaine and then criminalizing both heavily we could disrupt those communities we can arrest their leaders we could raid their homes break their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news did we know we were lying about drugs of course we did and quote the source for this is Harper's Magazine an article called legalize it all and I actually made a blog post on my blog a while back maybe I'll link it under this episode so you can read this if you want and you can actually click on the link to Harper's Magazine it's an online article you can go read pretty amazing stuff so this goes to show you that definitely there's a stigma around drugs this drug war is not just some accidental or benevolent impulse from the government to keep our kids safe from drugs it's a lot more nefarious than that now of course you might say well Leo yeah I mean in this case the Nixon administration was corrupt and maybe they did push the drug war too hard but if we look globally we look at other countries they also stigmatize and criminalize psychedelics and other hard drugs so how do you explain that I mean surely the Nixon administration wasn't responsible for the whole drug war because the drug war really goes on all around the world not just in the United States and that is true to some extent many countries around the world especially first world countries do make it illegal to consume psychedelics of course laws do vary from country to country certain countries are more progressive and more lacks with their laws others are more stringent that's true but the reason that is is because the underlying motive which was compelling the Nixon administration to start this war on drugs is really the same motive that every government and every society faces all around the world especially these days when we're living in a sort of globalized first world highly consumerist and materialist economy capitalist systems are the lifeblood of every nation these days almost without exception even in eastern countries and so the problem here is that psychedelics what they do is they question this entire paradigm they question the status quo of culture of society of capitalism of government so it's really the fox guarding the henhouse government is not your friend it's not some benevolent angel that is sitting there and trying to protect your kids and it's trying to do the best for you the best for your mind the best for your consciousness the best for your personal development it's not trying to create the most conscious human beings as if it wasn't obvious already at this point see culture is not your friend cultures job is to seduce you into getting so sucked into the reality of culture which is a fiction it's an illusion so sucked into it that you just go along without questioning anything and you just become part of the herd that's what culture is about and then of course culture is architected and engineer and all the government systems are architected in such a way that the power flows up to the top it's all about control of power that's what it's about and of course psychedelics are antithetical to all of this because what psychedelics show you is they showed you the more compassionate softer side of life and higher consciousness at higher levels of consciousness you can no longer lie and cheat and steal and disproportionately accumulate power and manipulate the way that governments love to do to maintain the status quo psychedelics also questioned all cultural norms all traditions all the conservative values and agendas that conservatives cling to and love and hold so dear all of that is questioned and culture and government are highly biased towards conservativism in the same way that your mind is biased towards conservativism nature generally biases bias towards conservativism because if something works in nature it tends to have a homeostasis to it that means that if something is working your mind or the cells in your body or whatever a species a population of anything a business a corporation of government it wants to maintain that but then you if we use study history you see that there's a problem in that you have this conservative force of homeostasis trying to keep things the same but then also you have the force of evolution which is always moving towards progress and things are changing and so you always have this tug-of-war between the old and the new and how do you reconcile these two because if you have too much new coming too quickly it's too revolutionary you can't cope with the change and you sort of self-destruct and there are risks with going in new directions trying out new things whether it's in business or in your family life from your personal life or as a society there's risks with with new technology with new developments and there's risks when a species is trying to adapt to a new environment there's risks with that but on the other hand there's also risks with staying still because you stay still then you end up like the dinosaurs so this issue goes much deeper than just one or two corrupt administrations although certainly I've presented evidence to you here of that so we have a combination of that plus we just have the combination of the systemic corruption which is widespread across all governments and it's not just with psychedelics governments are generally conservative about everything every new technology every new development governments have to be careful with and the history of human civilization has been a history of new technologies coming up about new weapons new artistic movements new forms of media the Internet and this goes back way early and that printing of books and all of those have been disruptive technologies which have challenged authoritarian power structures and many of these technologies have been advancing democracy which you might feel like well democracy's a great thing if there was a technology that had that advanced democracy surely everybody would love it not those who are in power they hate it because when you're in power you're at the very top of the hierarchy at the top of the pyramid all the wealth all of the material all the resources flow to you so of course when you're sitting on top of that it feels good it feels like you're on top of the world and you don't want that system changed anyway but change is inevitable so history goes on and those people usually get overthrown and they get kicked out of office they get killed or eventually they just die off and they're replaced by a newer generation who tends to be more democratic this is just a trend that we see throughout history our culture demonizes psychedelics in many ways firstly in America specifically I'm talking about we have had over 50 years of propaganda and misinformation about the scientific and Klimek clinical facts about psychedelics a lot of people just don't know the facts there's a deep ignorance in our culture about these substances and a lot of it is simply because few people have actually tried them and I've had the direct experience it's really outrageous that the people who denounce psychedelics the most and the people who criminalize psychedelics and the people who do all the drug enforcement and also all the lawmakers that they themselves have never actually done psychedelics they have no direct experience of what they're talking about and what they're demonizing there's also a missing context in our sure which I tried to address in part 1 of this series where we talked about the history of psychedelics the rich history and how most religions have strong influences from psychedelics all around the world all cultures for 10,000 years and even going back further than that all the way to prehistory before we even had records there's a lot of factually incorrect information out there and our culture about psychedelics about their dangers and risks there's a lot of myths and urban legends which I will address later in this episode there's also this blurring of the line between psychedelics and hard drugs and people just try to lump them all together and they think that well that's good enough psychedelics are just like any other kind of drug and Leo if you're just talking about this what you're doing is you're just drugged just to find your drug use man that's all it is that's all this this series is about it's like you started doing drugs and now you're just trying to convince yourself and you're trying to convince others and try to convince me that what you're doing isn't drugs but actually it's drugs this sort of mentality and there's a lot of irrational and prejudiced reactions that then come about from this you have to understand that our schools have been teaching misinformation about psychedelics for the last 50 years so that's a big deal that means that several not even one but multiple generations now of adults are alive who have been completely misinformed and they were misinformed at a critical time in their life when they were still developing their minds so literally they were imprinted and indoctrinated with these ideas about psychedelics and so now even when a rational case is presented to them even when science is presented even when clinical evidence is presented they just don't want to listen because their ideas were set ages ago generations ago and then they taught that to their kids and then they taught that to their kids you see that's the problem with indoctrination is that it's a it's this pernicious virus let's talk about the double standard of risk and danger that accompanies drugs and psychedelics because this is a really important point in the u.s. psychedelics are mostly all classified as schedule 1 substances this includes LSD mescaline MDMA DMT and psilocybin all these are schedule 1 the same as heroin crack cocaine and even meth is not Schedule one meth is schedule 2 which is a category lower Schedule one is the worst category it's considered the most dangerous and the most banned but this is quite ridiculous especially when you go to the government website and you read what is the definition of a Schedule one substance here's there are three part definition this is straight for their website firstly to be called a Schedule one drug it has to have a high potential for abuse number one number two it has to have no accepted medical treatment or use and number three it has to lack accepted safety standards so there has to be no safe way in order to use these substances that's point number three all three of these points are not valid for psychedelics they're just scientifically and historically untrue so let's tackle each one is there actually a high potential for abuse with psychedelics not if you use them responsibly not if you have the proper understanding of what they are and you know the right dosages and you are given the right education about how to use them then there's actually very little evidence that people kill themselves or harm themselves irreparably through taking of these substances and in fact I'm gonna go a lot more in depth on this topic I'm gonna show you statistics here in a minute and charts that back up what I'm saying here the second point is that there is no accepted medical treatment or clinical use of these substances this is just flout right flat out scientifically and clinically untrue there are studies and there is research and there are actual clinical applications happening right now all over the world with LSD with MDMA with psilocybin mushrooms with ibogaine these substances are incredibly effective at helping people to deal with depression with anxiety with PTSD troops coming back from wars like Afghanistan and Iraq are greatly helped by MDMA for overcoming PTSD this is clinically proven now and there are in fact uh clinical trials being run right now to make these methods legal in the United States and I mentioned Rick Doblin with with the maps program who's a serious researcher and scientist who is working to introduce these treatments including LSD MDMA psilocybin and ibogaine for treating all sorts of conditions that I'm talking about here these these substances have been proven to be effective in research for end-of-life people who are going through through crippling cancer and they know they're gonna die and then these mushrooms for example can help them a lot and of course as I talked about in part one is with addiction these substances are proven to be extremely effective for treating the worst addictions to opioids to heroin to cocaine to alcohol to smoking so this is just flat-out false and the third point is there's a lack of accepted safety standards for using these substances clearly untrue the psychedelic community has shown that there could be thousands hundreds of thousands of people using these substances responsibly not just that but also we see historically and also culturally all across the globe we see societies that actually do accept psychedelics that do educate their children properly about psychedelics they have a whole culture around it like in South America or in Africa and also throughout history this was the case in various cultures from Greece in Rome to basically every single continent around the world and that this this this was integral to their spiritual life this was integral to healing themselves and actually contributing to building a high quality high consciousness empathetic society one that didn't just devolve into hedonistic materialism and consumerism the way that our society is doing today and all the costs that come from that many of those costs people don't even consider as the has the downside of not doing psychedelics the three most dangerous drugs you know what those are Alcohol Tobacco and opioids prescription opioids and the fourth one is antidepressants which are being sold by them by the tens and hundreds of millions prescriptions are being written all over the world for antidepressants and they come with all sorts of nasty side effects you can't even stop antidepressants once you're on them because of the risks of suicide and I mean they have a whole host of risks not to mention that they interfere with your your hormones with your whole blood flow system with all your all your neurotransmitters they can also be addictive and they interfere with your sex drive all this sorts of nasty stuff which psychedelics don't do let's talk about the statistics here to back up what I'm saying it's very illuminating to take a look at actual death rates and the top causes of death in the United States and all around the world so I'm going to be presenting some statistics here for you I just went and I gathered the most recent and accurate statistics that I could find on death rates for various things so here's heart disease in 2016 six hundred and thirty three thousand eight hundred and forty two people died from heart disease four hundred and eighty thousand died from smoking that's an average that's not just from 2016 but that's an average dead that government statistics cite an annual average all these numbers are going to be annual averages they don't all come from 2016 some of these dates are from 2014 or 2015 so they're roughly the same ballpark but they're not identical years from alcohol we have thirty thousand seven hundred twenty people dying every single year from prescription opioids twenty thousand one hundred and one died in 2015 from heroin twelve thousand nine hundred ninety in 2015 from antidepressants I actually I really wanted to find that statistics how many people die from antidepressants every year but that statistic is not readily available because part of the drug statistics is because our cultural lumps a lot of these drugs together that we don't always have concrete statistics on death rates for every single type of drugs and every single category of drugs for car accidents thirty five thousand ninety two people die every year from firearms almost as much thirty three thousand five hundred ninety nine how many people do you think died from falling just tripping and falling every single year this is a shocking number thirty one thousand nine hundred fifty nine people died in 2014 from falling now of course you have to understand that probably most of those are like old people who have mobility problems or senile or whatever but still over thirty thousand people died from falling every single year puts stuff into perspective nearly five thousand people died from food poisoning every year three thousand five hundred thirty six people die from drowning three hundred forty people died from ATV accidents ATVs are all-terrain vehicles those like four-wheeler dirt vehicles fifty people die every year from lightning strike thirty people die every year from falling television sets and furniture that tips over seven people die every year from playing on playgrounds kids of course and this is an entry cystic how many kids are injured from toy accidents now these are deaths these are just injuries but still these are like hospital reported injuries two hundred and fifty four thousand two hundred kids were injured by toys in 2015 now what you have to do is you have to put psychedelics into this context because if you just say well psychedelics can kill people sometimes people will post on my forum they'll post articles like Oh somebody took some mushrooms and then he committed suicide yeah of course that happens but you have to understand when we're talking about a population of 330 million people just in the US a lot of [ __ ] happens from very innocent things like toys playgrounds TV sets falling over you see so what needs to happen is you need to put the psychedelics into context the trick is that it's very hard to actually find any statistics that are reliable on psychedelic deaths I did a lot of searching I actually couldn't find any statistics from any government organizations anywhere in the world about deaths from psychedelics like zero none they don't really exist the trouble is is that if there are drug statistics a lot of them are just like drugs to to you know drug deaths but drug deaths this is a way too broad of a category to tell us anything about psychedelics because most drug deaths actually result from either legal drugs or prescription medications that have been overused or antidepressants or heroin or crack or meth and I'm going to show you some charts here which will show you the top 10 categories of drugs that people die from and overdose from and psychedelics are not amongst any of those category so what that should tell us is that first of all we need our government to keep much better statistics on this stuff so that we actually have the science to to make informed decisions that's important we want to guessing about this stuff but secondly what this tells you is that if psychedelic deaths were significant they would certainly be counted and they would be much more easier to count so what this shows us is that realistically the amount of people who die from psychedelics is extremely low extremely low like very very very very low occasionally you might hear a horror story here or there but you also have to keep in to take into account that you know what did this person actually consume did he consume what he thought he was consuming or instead of a psychedelic did he actually consume some sort of stimulant something that was called a psychedelic but actually wasn't you also have taken to account did he mix it with alcohol did he mix it with we did he mix it with all sorts of other stuff did he mix it with antidepressants when you create these sort of combinations and cocktails of substances that creates most of the problems with psychedelics it's very unlikely that a psychedelic by itself would kill you it's virtually impossible to do that with a month with mushrooms or with with LSD for example the only way that that would happen is if you're taking these mushrooms or LSD like walking along a cliff or on a rooftop or a balcony and then you take it and then you jump off I mean that could certainly happen but but the the substance itself is not gonna poison here it's not gonna kill you that's just not how these substances work let's take a look at some of the charts here so first what I have for you is a very important chart which is how scientists rate the addictiveness and the lethality of various drugs so what you see here is you have the vertical axis and the horizontal axis on the vertical axis is depicted the addiction potential of the substance in question and on the horizontal axis is the lethality of the substance so of course in the top corner we have in red heroin and morphine these are they're really hard the bad drugs you want to keep your kids away from those highly addictive and also potentially very dangerous due to overdose also up there we have cocaine notice we have nicotine and alcohol look those are pretty high nicotine is very very addictive nicotine is one of the most addictive substances air is alcohol has a moderate addiction level but it's actually one of the most lethal substances we also have MDMA which is ecstasy we're gonna have other charts about ecstasy that I'm going to show you here in a minute keep that in mind but remember also that ecstasy or MDMA is not a true psychedelic it's in its own category it's a technically it's an EM pathogenic so keep that in mind as we keep going that's gonna be important we actually have caffeine there in the middle and then marijuana there it has some addiction potential but very low low thala tea and at the very very bottom we have the psychedelics notice LSD and psilocybin in the bottom most corner they have the lowest possible addiction potential and the lowest possible lafalot II much lower than nicotine than alcohol even than caffeine and as I'll show you here with other charts that their risk is even lower than Tylenol so here is a chart the next one that shows us emergency room admissions for various substances these are not deaths these are just emergency room admissions so of course a lot more of these than deaths so at the top is we've got opioids we got cocaine we've got sedatives like xanax we've got marijuana we've got antidepressants like prozac we've got meth we've got NSAIDs which is Tylenol and other pain relievers like that then we have ecstasy MDMA and at the very very bottom we have LSD and psilocybin those are the true psychedelics so much much lower now of course you could say well Leo that's because psychedelics aren't very popular and if they became much more popular then we'd have a more admissions and a lot more deaths well that is that's an interesting question that's actually something that needs to be proven and tested you can't just jump to that conclusion I mean certainly if LSD and psilocybin was legalized and more people were doing it then you have more issues but also on the other hand if they were legalized and there was an education program that went along with it and also our culture started to to think about these substances in the proper way and not stigmatize them and you rashly taught how to dose them properly how to use them properly which substances not to mix them with then I think that these substances would still be very low on this list they would still be much less problematic than opioids and cocaine and antidepressants and even Tylenol let's go to the next chart this is a drug overdose death chart for 2014 so here you see at the top heroin cocaine oxycontin xanax and so on going down the list method meth Val vicodin valium to the bottom see all of these are either prescription drugs or hard drugs opioids there's no psychedelics on this list so what that tells us through inference is that psychedelics would be lower than the lowest on this list so they would be lower than valium so less than a thousand seven hundred because if they were higher there they would there be a category for them the reason there aren't categories for these things most likely is because the deaths are so low that they are in the single digits so if they are reported they're just like reported as freak accidents in the same way that you would report deaths for chainsaws I'm sure a couple of people every year or maybe even a couple dozen maybe even a couple hundred died from chainsaws but when you're thinking big picture when you're thinking systemically about how to run an entire culture or entire society you have to weigh those costs against the benefits of allowing chainsaws see so this argument that all well just because a people died that now has to be banned and demonized and criminalized this is not an argument at all it's a complete double standard because most things including cars and chainsaws and all sorts of other stuff even children's toys come with these risks you just can't stop it when you're talking about dealing with hundreds of millions of people here in this next chart this is some of the only evidence I found it's the closest thing I found to psychedelic deaths as a statistic this comes from the UK they did a study where they tracked MDMA use and death and so here what you see is that in 2015 approximately 50 maybe 55 people died in the UK from MDMA now you might say well that's a pretty big number 55 people and that's in the UK so if it was in the US then that number would be significantly larger because we have a lot more of a population here so that might say that hundreds of people probably die every single year from MDMA in the US and that might be like a pretty significant statistic you might say well that's reason enough to ban it but you have to understand something very important about MDMA first of all like I said it's not a true psychedelic so you can't extrapolate from this and say well the same number of people roughly speaking like a hundred people a year die for mushrooms that's not at all the case and secondly it's especially not the case when you understand that MDMA is notoriously impure MDMA is used at nightclubs in raves music festivals it's like ubiquitous there so hundreds of thousands millions of people take it in the party scene all the time it's taken by youngsters a lot of teenagers who go to these raves people in their early 20s and the biggest problem with MDMA is that they give you these pills they hand out these pills at these music festivals they're consumed with large quantities of alcohol and God knows what else and these pills are almost never pure a lot of these pills are not even pure and ma a lot of these pills don't even have MDMA in them even though they give them to you telling you that it's ecstasy but it's not really ecstasy it's a much cheaper dirtier substitute which has none of the properties of MDMA and also comes with all sorts of side effects and health risks and when that is consumed mixed with a bunch of alcohol and God knows what else weed and everything else at these raves these these very rowdy sort of social environments with this loud music is it's a totally inappropriate setting and it's not at all what I'm talking about when I'm talking about responsible psychedelic use for personal and spiritual growth is a totally different animal so from that kind of stuff we get a hundred or 200 people dying every single year and that makes sense and just by outlawing it you're not preventing it anyways in this case you see if you actually made MDMA legal and if you could go to a pharmacy before you go to the rave and actually pick up some 100% pure MDMA in a properly dose tablet you might actually prevent many of these deaths and also if you had an education program that put people through some sort of rigorous process where they are taught about dosages about what happens when you mix substances with alcohol with weed and how that potentiates them or even causes potentially lethal combinations when you combine them with antidepressants the problems that happen there a lot of people will take psychedelics on antidepressants or MDMA on antidepressants and that just creates them a volatile mix that can result in all sorts of problems so the key here would be education and also the purity of the substance because pure MDMA take it at a reasonable dose is not gonna kill you it's only when you do something very irresponsible with it that that happens and the reason that happens is because people are doing it undercover in the dark hiding it because otherwise they would be they would be stigmatized and they'll be criminalized here's another chart from that same study from the UK which compares deaths from tobacco alcohol and MDMA you can see the whopping difference and that's MDMA I'm not even considering that as a true psychedelic on this chart mushrooms in LSD would be virtually invisible if we plotted those here's another chart this compares the death rates for various substances a chart from Vox tobacco alcohol prescription painkillers cocaine heroin and marijuana the illicit marijuana is zero deaths because they actually couldn't find any statistical data for marijuana deaths from just pure overdosing on marijuana couldn't find it because it's so rare doesn't really happen in this next chart this is also data coming from that UK study which which compared this was a pretty rigorous scientific study that they did in the UK which tracked drug use over like ten year period and it compared all these substances and then it wanted to list them and here they're using two colors per substance they got the red color and the the turquoise color the red color is the harm that this substance causes to other people to society at large and the turquoise color is the harm that this substance could cause to you personally to your physical health so notice the alcohol is number one followed by heroin crack cocaine meth regular cocaine tobacco is pretty high up on the list and all the way down at the very other end is we have mushrooms LSD and MDMA notice that mushrooms in LSD have virtually no red bar which means that they cause virtually no harm to other people they can cause some harm to you if you just use them totally irresponsibly that's an interesting graphic and the next graphic is the same graphic the same study the same the same data it's just broken down into very very fine categories they're by different colors and I'm not gonna go through all those colors if you want you can look deeper into the slides into these pictures and and see see what all those colors represent that can be illuminating and this last slide that I want to show you is poignant for illuminating this stigma that I'm talking about in all these episodes and why I wanted to shoot these episodes in the first place because there's a big disparity between what people and our culture thinks about psychedelics their dangers and their problems and the reality of it so this chart perfectly shows that so what you see here is how scientists rated the danger of these substances versus what people think the dangers of these substances are so the first thing to note about these charts is that people completely overestimate the danger of most drugs except for alcohol notice that's the only one here that people underestimate and also notice that alcohol is the most dangerous drug more dangerous than heroin or cocaine or anything else that's quite amazing most people don't know that also notice how low scientists rated the dangers of LSD and mushrooms the only true psychedelics on this on this list and also MDMA is also fairly low same notice now the difference between how scientists rated LSD in mushrooms versus what people rated LSD in mushrooms as far as their danger potential see completely out of whack like completely out of whack that's what I mean by this stigma this is the problem with telling your parents that you do psychedelics see if you tell your mom you're doing psychedelics she's gonna freak out most likely if she hasn't done all this research because she has been taught she's just been told to assume that LSD and mushrooms are almost as bad as heroin and that's what you see on that chart there is that people think that these psychedelics are almost as bad as heroin whereas in reality they're significantly lowere see your mom wouldn't freak out if you told her that you're going to a party and you're gonna have some shots she'd be totally cool with that I mean if you're an adult but if you tell her you're doing a party or that you're just gonna stay home and do some mushrooms or LSD she'll freak out see that's the stigma that's the problem that's what we need to fix is that people stop thinking that way and also if someone in in the news like a celebrity or something is seen drinking alcohol taking shots no one's gonna care but if someone sees them taking some elysee or some mushrooms and they're gonna freak out then they might get their career might be damaged from that and so forth and if a serious person like a scientist or a researcher or an academic comes out and says that they drink alcohol nobody really cares about that if they say they smoke no one cares about that but if they say that they do LSD or mushrooms that's it that's the end of their career they're stigmatized for life now forever they're that kooky person who does these weird things that are dangerous and that are so bad that's the stigma that I'm talking about now of course I don't want to build a one-sided case here for psychedelics I do acknowledge that there are dangers and there are risks as with almost anything when you put it into context very often especially in our culture these substances are misused and there's different ways in which they're misused they are overdosed they are used in the wrong set and setting they are used with the totally wrong intentions they're used in party environments for raves and music festivals they're combined with alcohol weed and antidepressants in dangerous cocktails that should never be combined like that people if they were properly taught they would not do that sort of stuff or at least they would know better and access to high quality pure psychedelics is quite rare most of the psychedelic that are available are the ones that are most suited to partying and even there they are very low quality to the point where you might be getting a 50 percent dilution of the original thing mixed in with 50 percent some other kind of crap or even something totally different than what you were told you're getting when you're getting LSD you might not be getting LSD when you're getting MDMA on the streets you're probably not getting real MDMA you have to go out of your way to get the pure substances this is not just something that you'll find in a pure form in a party setting so these of course create dangers and a lot of these dangers can be alleviated if we had a sensible drug policy and also we we had removed this stigma that I'm talking about removing and we had the proper cultural context which we don't have these days all of these things you might of course say well yeah Leo because we don't have them that's why they should stay illegal but what I'm saying is then no that's backwards we to correct the cultural context we need to educate people about these things we need to bring science and the clinicians and therapists into this stuff and have them lead the way and then we can create a culture of responsible psychedelic use and that would be the much better situation than just demonizing them and then sweeping this stuff under the rug I'm going to post these slides separately that you can download and take a look at through either a PowerPoint or some pictures so if you want to look at those closer you can now let's address the many different myths that exist around psychedelics so the first myth is that psychedelics are addictive this is flat-out false not only our second outlooks not addictive they're actually anti addictive they cure addiction they cure heroin addiction crack addiction alcohol addiction and they're very effective for that you know the guy who founded AAA I think his name was Bill Wilson AAA was founded on a program of curing yourself alcohol addiction through LSD and also various psychological and spiritual principles that was the foundation of AAA and as you saw in these charts psychedelics are the least addictive of all these substances caffeine is more addictive than psychedelics the next myth is that psychedelics are dangerous well we've shattered that myth here yes there is danger but as we've seen the danger is completely within reasonable norms and if you really want to be concerned about the danger of things you should be more concerned about the danger of tylenol and caffeine and tobacco and alcohol than you should be about psychedelics the other myth is that psychedelics have no legitimate medical uses that's clearly not true if you want to go and do the research you will see that there's a credible scientific evidence showing you these uses go to check check out maps org that's the program which is actually working with the US federal government right now to legalize some of these psychedelics for clinical use under a clinician supervision and some of those programs are actually going through the FDA approval process right now and the results are looking very promising and so we're anticipating that within the next 10 years these things will actually be legalized for clinical use which will be a huge a huge victory which is coming way too late but hey better better late than never another myth is that psychedelics cause psychosis this is not true in very rare situations what psychedelics can do is they can push a person who's already mentally unstable off off the edge so if you have a history of a severe neurosis and psychosis and mental instability then you probably want to stay away from psychedelics but this is not an issue for for normal well-functioning human beings another myth is that psychedelics cause brain damage there's no credible evidence of this at all if you take psychedelics I've been taking psychedelics now for a whole year various kinds you don't feel like your brain is getting slower like it's getting damaged when you're taking them and there's just no scientific data to back this up psychedelics are a new-age fad that's another myth this is clearly untrue as we illustrated in part one of this series where I talked about and showed all the historical and different cultural contexts in which psychedelics have been used they were not used by hippies in the past they were used by serious people they were used by intelligent people they were used by philosophers they were used by shaman they still are to this day so it's not a new age fad at all psychedelics are fun and recreational that's another myth they can be like MDMA especially and the problem is that people think that they understand psychedelics because maybe they have taken some MDMA or they have heard about MDMA but MDMA is not a true psychedelic a true psychedelic will take you deep inside yourself especially if you don't do it at a party setting and that's not always a fun experience it's not always pleasant some of the psychedelic experience I've had are are so deep and so profound that I'm not quick to go back and have another hit I'll wait months um sometimes I'll wait multiple months just because it's scary to go back psychedelics are very very deep and you have to be a lot of consciousness work you have to be integrating all this stuff before you really want to go back for a second hit and we've also seen all across the world different cultures using psychedelics not just for fun and recreation they've used it for serious spirituality they've used it for enlightenment work they've used it for rites of passage for their teenagers and and their young adults they've used it for healing various kinds of psychological conditions addiction fear whatever kind of problems exist in in their cultures another myth is that psychedelics are a slippery slope which are gonna lead to heroin that's the that's the biggest concern parents have psycho no first you're gonna do some some weed then you're gonna do some mushrooms then you're gonna do some LSD then you can do some DMT then you're gonna go and do some heroin but the problem there is that you're assuming that all these things are just one type of substance when we've clearly shown that there they're different substances they're very different chemically they're very different in the effect they have on your brain some of these substances truly are addictive like alcohol and heroin and crack but LSD and mushrooms are not so they're not gonna send you flying down that slippery slope especially if you are properly educated about how to use them in fact what they'll do is they will make you a a much more responsible individual you're gonna care a lot more about your impact in the world you're gonna tread a lot more carefully and you're gonna you're gonna start to take your personal and spiritual development a lot more seriously so you're not gonna want to [ __ ] up your life with heroin after you've seen some of the profound spiritual truths that you can see on mushrooms or on LSD or on DMT another myth is that psychedelics are just hallucinations and so that therefore they have nothing to teach you so call Leo is just a hallucination so what can I possibly learn from a hallucination it's hard to appreciate just how much you can learn from that without actually doing it yourself this is a point on which you have to just keep an open mind you have to acknowledge yourself that if you've never done it then you really have no right to criticize it or to judge it what should you do is go out and do it and then come share your thoughts with me and then tell me that all is just hallucinations well people don't appreciate is that what you think of as reality itself might be a hallucination so what is the true hallucination what you're experiencing right now or what you experience on psychedelics now of course if you haven't done psychedelics you'll say Leo that's crazy of course what I'm experienced right now it can't possibly be a hallucination this is real but that's exactly the problem and that's exactly why I need a psychedelic is to show you that you're wrong and the last myth that I'll talk about here is that serious people don't do psychedelics there's this idea out there floating around this is not true serious inventors and engineers and artists and philosophers and thinkers and academics and scientists and therapists and clinicians and shaman and spiritual leaders have done psychedelics for thousands of years and they do it still today they just do it in the privacy of their own home they don't talk about it because they know that there's this stigma floating around so they don't want to make make a big big splash about it publicly maybe they talk about one or two of their friends who are very open-minded and are interested in the sort of stuff but they do it and they reap huge benefits from it it's just that you don't hear it being talked about because our culture is extremely low consciousness and our culture is skewed towards promoting consumerism and just mindless materialism and of course in that sort of conversation there's no room for having any kind of deep meaningful conversations about the true nature of reality or what psychedelics could reveal to you and in fact as soon as you start talking about the truths of psychedelics to to ordinary people they start to think you're crazy it's not that you're crazy or is not the psychedelics make you crazy it's that our culture is crazy it's so shallow and so mindless that when you start talking about deep issues about reality with people they don't even know how to make sense of that sort of stuff this is a real fault of our culture and over time our culture will simply have to evolve into this it's not really a choice our culture is evolving towards higher and higher consciousness you're not going to stop it you can resist it you could cling to your old values and traditions but you're not going to stop it this is a longer-term trend this is a trend that's been happening for a thousand years and it certainly isn't over now because of some silly drug war so let's talk about why this stigma exists the stigma around psychedelics exists because psychedelics threaten culture science religion politics business and industries like big pharma and the military-industrial complex notice that all of these social structures are all about protecting a status quo even science size is very defensive and tends to be very ideological and dogmatic when it comes to defending itself just like religion just like politics just like business just like big industries just like culture at large all of these systems are predicated upon holding firm beliefs about the nature of reality and what psychedelics do is that they make you question these beliefs they flip these things inside out and they melt your notions of conventional reality they make you question things like what am I doing with my life what's healthy what's unhealthy what's fair what's unfair why do we have this kind of government why am I going to work this 95 job this mindless job why am I just chasing money why am i chasing sex why am i involved with this industry why am i part of the military-industrial complex why am i inventing weapons to kill people why am i participating in these polarized partisan politics of bickering back and forth between the left and the right and the the alt-right and the social justice wars doll this kind of nonce why is all this going why am i part of this they start to make you see the nonsense of all this psychedelics also make you radically open-minded which is very threatening to everyone else around you because when you open your mind to radical new possibilities and you start to really develop yourself and grow it's it's very threatening to everybody else you would think that others would be happy for you but no they're not because their entire reality is based upon these belief systems they have all these firm beliefs about who they are and what their country is and how business should be and what family is all about and what religion is all about and what life is all about and all of these happen to be a house of cards and so in a sense the most threatening thing to the status quo to this house of cards to this illusion is truth the devil is scared to death of the truth because the truth will rub him out like literally the devil is dissolved by the light of truth and that's what psychedelics move us towards and that's exactly why we need more psychedelics not less but of course that means that is is sort of a rough adjustment because there's just tug of war going on within you but also within our society at large between selfishness and selflessness between ego and between truth between the devil and between God this struggle is going on inside of you and outside of you and if you'd been doing conscious work and personal development work and maybe moving a little bit towards enlightenment then you have felt this tension within you and it's hard it's hard to walk this tightrope between these two forces there's a lot within our culture that's going to distract you and that's by design it's not an accident that's by design see the devil has infested all these systems very carefully and by devil I mean the ego both the individual ego and the collective ego another reason that we have this stigma is that psychedelics turn people into liberals that's a fact you're not going to be able to stay a conservative while you're doing psychedelics it's just it's not gonna happen well psychedelics will reveal to you is that all you're conservative well maybe not all but many of your conservative positions are just that their ideological positions and they will melt before the light of truth and that could be a good thing could also be a negative thing for you because if you're very attached to your conservative positions it's gonna be a problem see what psychedelics do is they they remove boundaries that's what truth is truth is the absence of all boundaries that means there's no more boundaries between us and them me and other reality and hallucination all these boundaries get blurred because they weren't there in the first place they were artificial they were conceptual and what this makes you do is this makes you have a deeper concern for the well-being of everything you become much more holistic in your perspective on life you have a more global concern you no longer just care about your state your political party your country your family your ideology your religion you care about everybody and this rubs many conservatives the wrong way because they think well Leah that turns me into a liberal that's what those bleeding heart liberals are all about yeah those liberals are more evolved than you I'm not just saying that because I'm a liberal is just something you're gonna discover as you do conscious work the more conscious you become the more liberal you will become now I'm not saying that every silly thing that liberals believe is true that's not what I'm saying at all actually you will become much more radical than your average liberal because what psychedelics do is they make you selfless and compassionate that's an inherent part of pursuing truth is as you pursue the truth you must shed layer upon layer upon layer of your ego all of your identify identify - country - political party - whatever you have to shed all of those such that really you're going hyper liberal because you have to even shed all your liberal ideologies all your liberal beliefs all all your liberal identifications you become so liberal you stop thinking of yourself as a liberal because a lot of liberals they're still very selfish they're still very ideological and that prevents them from going to the next level and this is what spiral dynamics is about I've talked about this model in the past and it's extremely applicable to what we're talking about right now because another way to look at why there's this stigma against psychedelics is if you're a student of spiral dynamics and you know that model then we've got stage blue stage orange stage green then we have tier 2 which is now stage yellow and stage turquoise stage yellow and turquoise is a very small percentage of society less than 1% and this is where you get into tier 2 where you really get higher levels of consciousness and you get a a really widening of your concern because you're becoming less selfish so you have a much broader or much more global perspective on the world stage blue is the stage which is very bureaucratic and you might say traditional conservative or religious then you have stage orange which moves away from that and it's very success oriented me oriented science oriented and Technology orient and materialistic it's like hyper materialistic pursuing materialism without any limit and then after that you got stage green which is all the traditional classical hippies and New Agers and the people who like free love and go to gatherings and music festivals and smoke a bunch of pot but then you go beyond green it's a yellow and to turquoise see so right now in our country what we have is we have this clash between stage stage green and stage blue fighting in the midst and also oranges in the middle but really what our society is about is just it's just corrupted infested with stage orange corrupted infested with materialism and so each one of these stages as you can remember from spinal dynamics it resists growing to the next stage and what spiral dynamics tells you is that as you evolve your consciousness as you become more personally developed you're moving up these stages and that it's a linear progression you're not gonna jump over stages but what will happen is you will resist every single transition so if you're at blue right now you're gonna resist orange if you're at origin resist green if you're agreeing you're gonna resist going yellow and so on and that's just natural that's just homeostasis this happens both individually within you but also happens collectively we're seeing this play out collectively right now in our politics and in our culture and that's what all these cultural wars are about and what psychedelics will do is that they will they will dissolve all these stages and they will move you all the way towards turquoise if you want to think of it this way a powerful psychedelic like DMT is like pure powdered stage turquoise you want to know what stage turquoise it feels like take some DMT and that's what you got it's such a radical state of consciousness that it cannot even be conceived at at stage green or orange or blue like it's a totally different reality we're talking about a totally different reality even it basically stay the same but your perspective on everything changes so radically that it's like you're living in a different world your politics change your behaviors change like everything changes like it changes so much it's ridiculous and that's what we're moving you tour is with all this self-actualization business so of course psychedelics hasten that but also that's precisely why it's resisted so now you understand why it's resisted and the other reason we have this stigma is because psychedelics honestly they are misused I read a lot of trip reports from foolish people who use these psychedelics in foolish ways I read reports or messages on my forum about people experimenting with them and just doing the stupidest things ignoring the most basic protocols because they haven't done their research they don't take these things seriously they think that they're just toys and then some of them experience bad trips and that's not the reason why we have this stigmas because yeah you do you can have some bad trips some harrowing experiences on these substances but that's actually not a bad thing that's a good thing that's a good thing because that shows you how screwed up and dysfunctional your psyche is if you're having a lot of bad trips you got a lot grown to do and those bad trips are actually part of your growth process not a bad thing at all a couple of bad trips for some of our politicians and some of our leaders would be just the right medicine to give them the kind of humility and compassion that they need to have if they need to be leading a nation of over 300 million people and this demonization business is not something new it's not something original to to the US or to the 20th century there's been a long history of it throughout history think about the persecution of witches by the church that was a thing witches were persecuted for for hundreds of years and witches are not a myth witches are real witchcraft is real it's been persecuted precisely because it's a threat to Orthodox Christianity that's why Christians are so freaked out by witchcraft that's what the ego does to anything that threatens its status quo how about the Spanish explorers the conquistadors that came and conquered the Aztecs decimated the Aztecs and the Mayans of of Mexico and and the Americas the Aztecs had the Aztecs had a rich tradition of mushroom ceremonies using mushrooms for spiritual purposes and one of the first things the Spanish explorers did when they came here is they put a lid on that thing and they they persecuted the Aztecs for that because of course for the same reason they're Orthodox religion was threatened by that the Catholic missionaries in Africa also do the same thing with the booty tribe that I talked about in episode part one who used the eye boga plant they also try to demonize eye boga and try to really eliminate it from their culture but then the eye the booty fought back and they and now they're still using it in fact actually it's been legalized for them to use in that in that part of the world and there's a lot more of these examples many of these probably weren't even well documented in history because simply history is a collection of Orthodoxy so all the unorthodoxy that's stamped out doesn't get recorded in history they don't teach it to you in school or in the history books what this is from a larger perspective is this is a battle between the exoteric and the esoteric the exoteric is all the materialistic stuff all the material trappings of religion it's all the ideology the beliefs and rituals all the stuff we don't like about religion all the stuff atheists move away from and the esoteric is actually the true spiritual mystical kernel that actually was that the inspiring source for all the exoteric but the people who are engrossed in the exoteric all the orthodoxy they are so engrossed in that precisely because it's a great distraction from going inside and and accessing the truth which is esoteric so the esoteric is constantly being demonized and it's being suppressed by the exoteric and what's really sad now the 21st century is that this now is not happening through some Spanish Inquisition it's happening through commerce through business through the shallow materialism of stage orange spiral dynamics consciousness which is just really taking over the whole globe it's hard to escape at these days no matter what country you go to even in the East it's taking over in China Japan other places like that they're becoming highly commercialized highly exoteric to the point where we're really getting disconnected from what life is about which is growth which is about connecting to existential truths which can only be accessed esoterically and not exoteric lee that's why we have all these people who are on opioids on prescription antidepressants who are on alcohol and tobacco suicide racer' through the roof we have all these mass murders and killings and terrorism and all this stuff what is all this this is the excesses of EXO terrorism backfiring on itself and the lesson from all this to be drawn is hey dummy look inside turn inwards esoteric is what you want turn inwards the solutions are all inside and psychedelics can be a catalyst to help you with that so what's the solution to this psychedelic dilemma that we're facing well I think it's legalization do I think all drugs should be legalized including heroin and crack cocaine no I think that's probably going too far I don't think we need to legalize heroin and crack cocaine and some of these are pretty nasty drugs that should not be available at the pharmacy but as far as mushrooms LSD mescaline DMT five-o neo DMT and others like that these should definitely be legalized they have way less risk than many other things which are perfectly legal I think what we need is not only legalization but actually we need funding from our government we need leadership and funding of science and research into these substances one of the greatest shames that happened with this drug war is that not only were these substance outlawed for consumers but they were also mostly outlawed for researchers and clinicians and there's still so much more about this field we can learn it's a it's one of the most remarkable frontiers of science that almost no one ever talks about we haven't even scratched the surface of all the psychedelic substances that could be found out in nature and that could also be synthesized chemically in the laboratory and we don't even have a clue as to what the full potential is here these substances could have remarkable cures for all sorts of ailments that we have and we could potentially find much more powerful psychedelics that could have even greater consequences for our spiritual development we don't know so what we need is a lot of investment and money into this sort of stuff like the maps program that Rick Doblin is running and what is promising though is that more and more research is starting to come online in the last ten years the government has sort of loosened its grip on this ban on research and so we're seeing more and more this happen in the US and also around the world which is very promising because the more research that comes in the more amazed we are what we find and actually this is going to be important for understanding artificial intelligence it's gonna be important for understanding mmm how consciousness happens where it comes from what does it mean what is the connection between brain cells and neurons and consciousness and different states so this is a really exciting field and what we should really be doing is embracing it funding it and then what I would really like to see as a solution the ultimate solution to this whole issue is that we need a high quality education campaign which is truthful and based on science and research within our school systems stop all this negative propaganda and demonization and what I would like to see as far as how people could legally use psychedelics is as follows I would like to see a program like an online course maybe a 10 or 20 hour online course that anybody could go and take in the comfort of their own home they pay some amount of money if they take this course they can get a certificate which is a license for using psychedelics in this course they will be taught about all the stuff I talked about here and much more they will be taught about the history the scientific evidence the clinical uses they will be taught about all the risks and all the dangers they will be taught about dosages how to distinguish different substances how to weigh them how to consume them proper methods proper protocols all this will be drilled into you then you will go to a local center like a DMV sort of thing but for psychedelics like a little clinic there run by the government they will give you an exam like a DMV exam for driving your car you will take that exam you make sure that you know all the safety protocols for that and then what they do is they give you some psychedelics of your choice you get to trip there in a safe room with them they get to watch you make sure that you're cool you go through a few of those experiences while you're being monitored to make sure you're doing it all safely and properly you get your bearings straight and then you get this license and this license allows you to go to a pharmacy and to purchase LSD mushrooms mescaline DMT five Meo DMT this sort of stuff and then you can use it legally and responsibly at home and I think that would be the most sensible solution and then lots of people could start using it responsibly and also educating those folks who go to raves and all that and misuse these substances and there'd be a lot better support system for for those sorts of settings and should actually reduce the risks and the dangers that come from that which is very rampant right now drug culture party culture nightclubs I live here in Las Vegas it's a town full of party drugs so and people are getting hurt by them just because they're not being properly educated and they don't have access to the pure substances that they easily could what's really cool is how this field will develop in the next fifty to a hundred years I think the society is gonna be blindsided by some of these developments in the next 50 to 100 years governments are not just gonna be able to put a lid on this thing the way they have been forever that's not gonna fly and what's gonna happen is gonna be a bill growing and sort of bubbling underground community there already is it's already existed for a long time but now just in the last five or ten years it's been it's been bubbling more and more psychedelic conferences are being held around the world serious researchers and academics are putting their name to some of these studies and doing this sort of research people are coming out and talking about the amazing benefits that they have experienced in their own lives so all this is really good stuff and what we're gonna see is we're gonna see a major evolution people these days are very well aware of the internet revolution and the social media revolution the technological revolutions the cell phone revolution that's technology and there will of course be much more technology but what's really interesting is this psychedelic technology which has been laying there dormant for the last 50 years and has just been suppressed and what could happen when this technology is fully Unleashed with groundbreaking research being done and new substances being synthesized and end and carefully test it to make sure that they're safe and then education and changing our culture that could be a huge thing this could be a huge boon for society and a lot of new scientific developments could happen here another thing that people don't really appreciate on psychedelics is how much more creative they make you have any deep insights they can give you about not only your own life but and the advancement of human civilization within science within technology and inventions of all sorts and within art so we could have like a renaissance if if this is done properly now of course the dangers is doing it the way the hippies did it in 1960s which is that everyone just goes crazy with psychedelics and it's done very responsibly and it's just done in this very idealistic sort of utopian manner of like oh yeah all the world's problems will be solved by psychedelics no that's not what I'm saying here you still need to get the right education you still need to do consciousness work you still need to do personal development work so you still need to read books you still need to do all the other stuff but this can be a catalyst just you know like with anything you need to strike the right balance the hippies in 1960s they swung the pendulum too much to one direction and then we swung it quickly back in the other direction and both directions are wrong there's a balance somewhere in the middle like certain cultures have demonstrated in the past who have used it effectively that's something we could learn from and folly when were open-minded and willing to let go of certain preconceived notions that we have and we're just open to change a lot of this is just being open to change a lot of persons the velvet is just being open to change you think you want change but a lot of people they only want change as lip service they don't realize the full cost of change causes challenge it I mean change is challenging it's emotionally laborious it can be scary but then again you can't prevent it even if you tried you can only stall it for a little while that's what we see throughout history is that we see conservativism it's a strong force but progress is a stronger force it always wins out that's what evolution is about that seems to be a fundamental feature of consciousness is that it wants to evolve it wants to spread it wants to diversify it doesn't like being solidified and bottled up with authoritarian power structures see all those tend to break down there is this equalizing egalitarian Democratic quality to consciousness because the only reason you want to bottle something up or cling to it or solidify it is because you're uncomfortable with change but everything is changing your body is changing and you're gonna die so this game of playing this rich it self this game is not gonna win it's a fundamentally unwinnable game you always lose that game it's only a question of how long will you hold on and how much suffering will you create in that clinging process which is largely unnecessary it's a self-inflicted wound so if you're suffering in your life or you see your culture suffering you kind of put that into perspective and and understand why this is happening why there are these tensions why it seems so difficult in a sense it's it's very difficult but in another sense it's actually very easy if you would just let go and surrender and have some humility and have some openness it you just gotta be willing to explore and set truth and consciousness as your number one priority above your ego above your materialistic cravings and all that our society right now is drowning in meaninglessness and spiral dynamics change Orange there is a incredible potential to self-actualize the entire human race and this potential has never existed the way that it does right now in the way that it has for the last 50 years really we have the magic pill to enlighten every single human being on the planet we have it right now 30 milligrams of 5 amiyo TNT up your nose we'll show you the truth and one of the most amazing things and why I love psyckadeli so much is because they are so objective we can take spirituality we can take religion and we can throw away all the [ __ ] that comes with it all the stuff the ego has corrupted it with and we can show people scientific atheistic agnostic religious whatever we can show them what spirituality is all about with a very methodical clinical precise process I see a world in the future where maybe a hundred years from now or a thousand years from now a child is born and they do not get to graduate elementary school without doing 30 doses of five Meo DMT so by the time that they graduate elementary school they they have access to the deepest most profound truths in all of existence already and then based on that foundation they can go and learn and do everything and become well functioning members of society and then based on top of that we can build an entire society but you don't let a human being be a human being without trying 5mu no DMT that's what's gonna happen in the future in the same way that with with self-driving cars in 20 years and 50 years you're not gonna be able to drive your own [ __ ] car because you can't be trusted because people drive drunken people drive texting this is not gonna fly it's too dangerous the only reason we tolerate now is because there's no better alternative but that's gonna change quickly the same thing is gonna happen with these psychedelics we have that ability right now we're really on the cutting edge people do not appreciate what's special time this is that we're alive in right now in a sense every era is a special time there's always something happening there's always a new revolution and I hate it when people say all right now it's like we're in some special time but in other sense for really in a special time with psychedelics this is a technology that human society if we survive will look back on this in a hundred years and 500 years they will look back and then they will see what barbarians we were and just how blind and ignorant we were with our attitudes towards psychedelics in the 20th and the 21st century they're gonna be blown away by this because for them it's just gonna be the new normal everyone's snorting fire on you that's gonna be the new normal and you will really appreciate that when you try it for yourself so everything I said here it's all good theory it's all good talk whether you like it or not these statistics you might think I'm just justifying and rationalizing that is the case these are just rationalizations justifications what you got to do is go try it yourself that's the ultimate solution try it yourself and see what's up and then if you still disagree with me then come back and and we'll talk about the disagreements but try it responsibly try it at a non-party setting try it with a serious intent to grow your own consciousness try with an open mind try it with the intention to surrender fully to whatever is revealed to you and to not bring your own prejudices and preconceptions into the experience and then I think you'll be in for a pleasant or maybe a rude awakening depends on how you hold that stuff all right that's it I'm done here please remember to click that like button for me and come check out actualized org this is my website I've got my blog I'm posting new stuff there I'm gonna post a list of the dangers and risks of psychedelics I'm gonna actually have a link down below to that post because I want to be fair and accurate about this I don't like when people present a one-sided like polemical case about a topic I like to get all the sides so there are some risks and dangers and you can go read up on those on my blog check out the forum a lot of people post their trip reports on the forum which is cool I love reading trip reports on the forum so post away there and the life purpose course the book list and stick with me for more deep topics to come you