Hamilton Morris
Appearances
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, that's the idea. I've taken it a bunch. It was pretty much the original synthetic drug. I mean, it was used as a treatment for malaria for a long time. It's still used in medicine. For malaria? For malaria.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, there was like a... Can you get prescribed it? You can, yeah. Oh, wow. You can. I mean, it's mostly used in hospitals for treatment of, I believe it's used for cyanide poisoning under some sort of methemoglobinemia, I think is one of the reasons that they use it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And there is some evidence for this. Right. And you can even make a case that is evidence based, but somewhat tenuous that the entire Reagan administration war on drugs was astrologically mediated.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
This is the thing where you have a pharmacologically active substance that does have very real effects. Like the anti-malarial effect was established. It was also – it is an MAOI. These are like real effects of this drug. But then –
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
the overlay comes where it's like also the mitochondrial rejuvenator maybe for some people it might be or treatment for covid i'd like to see some some strong evidence for that maybe it doesn't hurt i don't know or depression or whatever and you know it becomes this kind of um So if people were routinely taking hundreds of milligrams, it might be more effective.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
concerned but i've taken it many many times i'm not certain that it has an effect it seems to be a little bit of a stimulant that's what i thought at first but then it didn't seem dose dependent to me which made me feel like it wasn't like this is you know this is one of the kind of best ways to assess whether something is a placebo effect is if the effect isn't dose dependent
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It still could be pharmacologically active, but that's definitely like a tick of the potentially placebo box. Like if if 10 milligrams doesn't do twice as much as five milligrams, there's a that I think is moving in the this might be placebo direction. Interesting. Because it's like with most things, you have a dose dependent effect. You can create a dose response curve.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
There are things that might be exceptions, like certain enzyme inhibitors, where if at one dose you have total inhibition of the enzyme, going beyond that, assuming there is an off-target activity, may not confer additional pharmacological activity. So yeah, methylene blue, it's definitely active for some things. It's definitely an actual drug. It is useful for some applications.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I've used it myself many, many times. I'm not totally sure I understand what its benefits for a healthy person are.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah. It's pretty wild where you have Nancy Reagan was an actress, was a kind of low-level actress, and is sort of like a character who is sort of analogous to Melania Trump in a lot of ways, where she... wasn't taken seriously. Everybody's making fun of her.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, so I make a podcast on Patreon, and I did this for a long time while I was focusing on chemistry, partially because it allowed me to continue making stuff, but also because it has historically been very hard for me to get funding to do any kind of research. And so...
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I recently have started just filming completely independent documentaries, trying that out to see if I can do that because it has been so hard for me to get any sort of like media outlet to simultaneously allow me to do this work and not interfere with it in a way that makes it purposeless for me.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So I filmed a bunch of these weird chemistry documentaries that I'm currently editing and I'll post them online. on the Patreon. One about this exploration of tellurium chemistry. One about this creation of a new LSD analog. Another about Shulgin's research on Parkinson's treatments. All these kinds of weird little science mini documentaries.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So I've been making those independently and it's been a lot of fun.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I actually think there might be something that is active in their saliva, but I'm not sure about that. It may just be a glue, but I thought that there might be some kind of like something in their saliva.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
She's not like a Michelle Obama type person who has political ambitions, who, you know, is using her role to disseminate ideas that are constructive. She spends something like $40,000 getting a new set of China for the White House and everybody makes fun of her ruthlessly. And this is where our taxpayer money is going and how frivolous and how stupid. And so she's having this
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
pr crisis and she's also really into astrology both her and ronald reagan are really into astrology and they have an astrologer named joan quigley and she this is a fact this is like a 100 established fact
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
um in the midst of this pr crisis she's consulting with joan quigley about what to do and joan quigley tells her which is probably pretty good pr advice you need a mission you need something that you can bring to the american people that will show that you are concerned and your mission because neptune is in the 12th house will be america's struggle with drugs
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
right so this is like unfathomable human suffering may have come from this borderline random astrological whim and when you add to that there's some other kind of interesting little bits and pieces of evidence there's a cia whistleblower named miles copeland who wrote in a book called the game player about the cia
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
using astrology computers that have been compromised by the government to deliver disinformation to foreign heads of state. So you give this astrology computer to the president of Ghana and you say, enjoy. And the output of the computer is aligned with U.S. interests if they want to, for example, organize a coup or something like that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So, there are all these, like, and this is, again, this is written about by a person who did work in the CIA. It's very difficult to corroborate all of this. Maybe he's making it up, but what a weird thing to make up on top of that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, and there was a bizarrely large amount of... that were actually invested into astrology computers during that period in the 1970s, including military funding. Again, so, okay, it's pretty wild. So I actually have the astrology computer, the Digicomp DR70 astrology mini computer that arguably is responsible for the war on drugs. There it is right there. It's a beaut. Wow. The one on the left?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, the one on the left. Blow that thing up? That's crazy. Yeah. where did you get that I got it from Nancy Reagan's astrologers astrologer that's the best that's the best story it's got an ignition like a car you put a key in the computer to turn it on to rev that bad boy damn how many gears is that
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
that's so crazy dude but anyway so so this is an example like i'm very very interested in this idea i've probably collected every little bit of evidence and and and is it possible yeah it's definitely possible it's possible it played a role it's possible there's more to it you could make an argument that the reagan administration war on drugs was astrologically mediated but
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
at what point is this factual? At what point is this ignoring real factors that were going into this? At what point am I doing it because it's funny and interesting? And so you have to be self-aware and you have to be responsible about these things because it's so, so, so easy to manipulate people.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And it's something that I've become, I've always been acutely aware of it in the realm of psychedelic journalism. I mean, this is like, one of the areas where journalistic failure is the norm, right? It is the exception if a journalist isn't failing miserably in their coverage of drugs. We're just used to that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Well, maybe if anything, well, I mean, yeah, you could, that would be maybe a slightly more cynical interpretation. But yeah, journalists often don't do that well. They do, it's a hard job to be sympathetic to a very unsympathetic occupation. It's a hard job, but yeah. But they've done a really, really bad job with drugs and they continue to do an unbelievably terrible job.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
But what's interesting is we tend not to notice the way these manipulations play out until a decade or so has passed. Like you look back at the scare stories of the past and it's. It's literally laughable. It's a joke. Ha ha ha. Your brain on drugs. How stupid is this? Ecstasy makes holes in your brains. How stupid is this?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
All these things, you know, I had this huge archive of news reports on MDMA and you have like, you know, cops. like lecturing other cops about like this is a pacifier like the MDMA user puts the pacifier in their mouth to enhance the the the drug pleasures that they experience it's all just like nuts but But the same thing is happening now.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
We just are worse at noticing it until a little time has passed. So whatever the dominant narrative is – and I guess crucially before I even get into the examples because the issue is that these narratives are so dominant that – People don't even haven't even started to question them yet. And often there is some truth to it, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Like this whole drugs cause brain damage narrative that was the sort of scientific orientation of the 90s. It's potentially true, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
under some yeah like drugs can damage your brain under some circumstances right for a typical person holes in their brain is not really the major concern it's more like disruption of their social and professional and educational existence through dependence on a substance that probably isn't in most instances causing irreversible neurological damage but it can still yeah have very negative manifestations of one kind or another
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So now we went through this era of like a hyper reductionist conceptualization of addiction problems in the United States. So the entire opioid problem in the United States can be exclusively tracked to Richard Sackler, right? It's just, that's it. That's the whole thing. It's like, It's very convenient. Wouldn't it be nice? It sure would be nice if it were that simple.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
If you could blame everything on Richard Sackler.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, that's it. That's the whole thing. That's why all those people died. Just one guy. But it's like, give me a break. He definitely played a role. I'm not saying it's completely false. But it's such a laughably reductionist... understanding of human motivations for drug use that I struggle to understand how any adult who has lived in the real world could think it is truly that simple, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It's like the basic idea that I think people struggle with is that they think drugs are responsible for drug problems, which is a very superficial read.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
of course they are strictly speaking but the reality is that to even get to a point where you want to hurt yourself with a drug or you want to you're willing to develop a problematic relationship with a drug there's usually some kind of social psychological problem that is putting you in that position to begin with yeah so just merely having act like you offered me kratom at the beginning of this yes podcast yes and i declined the kratom right why did i decline the kratom
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I'm not even saying that kratom is bad. That's not the point. But the point is that I'm aware of it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, people become dependent on it, definitely. Which in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing. I'm very dependent on caffeine. Right, right. So dependence in and of itself is not necessarily bad, although I would argue it's not.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
The long-term effects are not all that well studied. It seems reasonably safe with occasional use. I mean, it is an opioid. It's a low-potency opioid. So dependence is not uncommon with people that use it regularly. And then you have the sort of withdrawal syndrome that comes with that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Unlike more common opioids that are related to morphine, it doesn't really tend to cause respiratory depression, which is a big thing because the main reason that people don't like opioids or that there's this extreme fear of opioids in the United States is because they kill people. The caffeine example shows that people are somewhat comfortable with dependence.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Dependence in and of itself is not usually conceptualized as a big problem
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
and bananas yeah and it is really bananas yeah it's a great that's a great film i think i think so too i really love that film yeah yeah i don't really hear people talk about it very much but i think it's like no nobody talks about it yeah whenever i bring it up to people they've never heard of it it's a bad name i think that's part of the as a forgettable name and the original name was supposed to be called honeymoon in auschwitz but they thought that was
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
But as soon as people start dying from using a drug, then that dramatically changes the way it's perceived by the public for obvious reasons. And because Kratom tends not to kill people, relatively speaking, it's extremely safe compared to morphine type or fentanyl type compounds. then it doesn't carry those same problems. That's not to say that it's without problems.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And, you know, there's a lot of people that are able to transition off of other opioids onto Kratom, and that's probably a better move. It's very complicated. There's not a simple answer to these questions. It's like whenever people say, is this good or bad? There's no answer to it. It's like...
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
If you were drinking yourself to death and you're able to transition onto like one can of this per day, I would say that's probably better. But if you're just not doing anything and then you become dependent on this, I would assume that that's a step in the wrong direction probably.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And then there's also the obvious issue that if you're taking a drug to address a problem that you are likely to encounter continuously for the rest of your life, then you're setting yourself up to use that drug continuously for the rest of your life. So if the issue, like I do use Kratom occasionally as an alternative to ibuprofen if I've been like exercising a lot and I'm in pain. Yeah. But.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
then you have to ask yourself, like, do I plan to be sore after exercising a lot in the future? Because if you will, then the answer is you may be using this all the time. Or, I mean, another example would obviously be using some kind of hypnotic to go to sleep. It's like your chances are you're going to be going to sleep quite a few times across your life. So if you don't develop healthy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Once or twice. Yeah. If you develop a healthy technique for falling asleep, then you're setting yourself up for a lifetime of dependence. So why did you decline the Kratom? Uh, I recently, especially I've seen a lot of people becoming dependent on it again, not really necessarily a big problem, but it's just made me a little bit wary.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And I, you know, I'm not somebody that is like immune to addiction by any means. Like, like I'm looking at your Zen. Uh, no, no, I don't want one. Uh, but, but my podcast is sponsored by, um, Lucy. Lucy. Yeah. Yeah. I have those two. I like the Lucy's better. Yeah. And so I'm friends with the guy that owns it. He'll send me a crate of these things and I know how it goes.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It's like, I'll consume the entirety of it. And then it's not until it's all gone that I have a moment to reflect and think, is it really good that I just consumed?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
too controversial or something. So it was changed to Mr. Death, but that's sort of a forgettable name, but it's an amazing documentary.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It's crazy. I mean, nicotine is so unbelievably addictive. It is something else. It's also relatively, I don't want to say totally innocuous, but it's not. You can be crazily addicted to it and it's not necessarily a big deal, which is one of the reasons that it's so easy to get miserably addicted to it. It's like if I take that Zin, if I were to consume that Zin, not that I want to, I...
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It wouldn't be a big deal. It wouldn't necessarily be a big deal. It would really just be setting myself up to continue using it. And I'm really good at convincing. If I can convince myself that something is beneficial for me, then I can almost always... use it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So like, I've never been drawn to any kind of self-destructive pattern, but if it's, but if it's like, oh, you're on this podcast and it would really kind of, uh, sharpen your thinking a little bit and, you know, it would be a little bit better probably if you were to consume that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And then I can justify same thing with things like Ambien for sleep where it's like, oh, well, I'm doing a thing tomorrow. Is everything okay?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Ambien? Ambien, yeah. Very easy to... Because you always have to do something the next day, and so it's very easy to convince yourself, oh, I should really... Do some mental gymnastics to prove to yourself that it would be beneficial for you.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It would be... It would be productive. It would be damaging not...
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
There's a few stimulating things that seem to reduce blood flow to the brain paradoxically. Really? I mean, the pharmacology isn't mediated purely by the vascular effects. It's mostly through the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor. Right. But it's hard. It's hard to know how much of this stuff is self-deception. Are you really?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
What is the difference between thinking that you're working better and working better? And how would you know? And could something make you feel like you're working worse, but you're actually working better? This is the whole paradox of
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
nootropic drugs and people say oh how do you know if a nootropic works and people say oh i think i i think my memory is really improved conceivably something could be damaging your memory and you would think that your memory is improved by virtue of being unaware of what you've forgotten it's like a dunning-kruger type scenario right yeah right yeah i love these ones i think these are better than the zens these are just nootropic pouches with caffeine and nootropic stuff in them yeah they don't have the uh
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
No, no, no. That's not it. I've never licked a toad.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah. I mean, I would like to think that I'm not reckless. I'm just I think I'm reasonable.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, I would. I mean, some degree of fear is warranted. It's just about finding the appropriate balance where you're not so afraid that you're paralyzed and you don't do anything and prevent yourself from having worthwhile experiences, but also having enough fear that you're not taking unnecessary risks and potentially harming yourself.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah. And I thought it was a joke. It was one of these things where the super burst into my apartment holding this mushroom. And he was like, what did you do? What did you do? And I, of course, have never talked to them about mushrooms. So it was surprising that he would even make the association. And I was like, oh, that's a good one. It's pretty funny.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And yeah, I think to some extent there will always be uncertainty, but you can learn. I was just working on a... a piece about the chemistry of LSD type compounds and made a new analog of LSD. And me and the chemist that I was working with all tested it on ourselves. And I didn't know with certainty that it would be safe, but we were very cautious and we increased the dose somewhat slowly.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And we were able to, or I was able to look at the metabolism of related compounds and make an educated guess about how it may be transformed in the body and how it may or may not be risky. And which is not to say that it couldn't have some sort of unanticipated toxicity. It absolutely could, but you can make a foundation of knowledge based on everything that has been
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
published on a compound or related compounds and you can make an educated guess and then you can proceed cautiously and everything was fine. Really? I was fine, yeah. I enjoyed the compound.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It was a bit less potent, maybe about a quarter to a fifth the potency and much less visual. It was a less dazzling but still very pleasant experience. And shorter acting.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
No, no, no, no. Oh, no? I don't think that's a correct interpretation. I mean, that was the subject of the documentary, was the association between Lutcher's pseudoscientific beliefs and how this... fed into his delusions and his self-deception. And I think it was a kind of, it wasn't as if like there was some kind of gotcha moment, like he was only interviewing him.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I mean, I find it interesting that people always seem sort of amazed by the work that I've done or they treat it as if it's like very unusual when Vice is producing tons of drug related documentaries and continues to. So that in and of itself was never a hard sell. Pretty much every mainstream media outlet is continuously producing stuff about drugs.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
The only difference is I was doing it in a relatively informed way that was pretty well received by people. So the the selling aspect was never difficult with vice and it all did very well and was insanely low budget at the beginning yeah so you know it was all gradual i wrote for the magazine did a column then there was this producer named santiago stelly who was really responsible for
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
most of the early vice video work, pretty much the entire vice pivot to video was a product of this one guy, Santiago Steli. And he was brilliant. He's still, he's, he's around. I mean, he left the United States and has long since gone from vice, but he, I think had, it was responsible for a lot of that early internationally oriented character. And he, uh, would work on crazily low budgets.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So, you know, we were going in those early shoots, the total budget of those things would have been effectively nothing. You know, we'd shoot on a, what was it, like a $5? or something like that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Or even before that, mini-DV tapes. I mean, these were really... Yeah, I remember those days.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It was crazy, but the formula was very smart, which is spend no money whatsoever, just crank stuff out. And this is at the beginning of YouTube. And those things, I mean, they were making money off of them. I think it was actually taken off YouTube, I think because of some kind of copyright issue with one of the...
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
pieces of music in it, but the Crystal Coal LSD, Underground LSD silo piece that I did had something like 40 million views on YouTube. This was probably made for like $1,100 or something like that. You know, this is just... And then they were making so much of that type of stuff and doing all these brand deals. They had a good model for a while.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I mean, one issue is that you have to pay people at some point. People are willing to work that way when they're 21, but eventually you want a situation where you're actually being compensated for the work.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Right, right, right, right. yeah which is a dangerous road to go down um because even if people do want to do that you can fall into a pattern of exploiting people and creating a lot of bad blood which absolutely did happen oh yeah there was a lot i mean it's unusual to find somebody who isn't a vice hater
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah. I would say it's like pretty much 100% of people. I Thomas is one of them. Well, yeah. But Thomas is my very close friend. Thomas Morton.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
We lived together for years.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
He's great. I'm a huge fan of his, man. he's brilliant yeah um but he was someone who i think worked really well in that environment there was a certain type of person that maybe had a more impulsive style of creating things that responded very well to the lack of bureaucracy in that environment which was unusual like the the typical pattern that you have
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I mean, the subject of the documentary is his involvement with Zundel. And there's, you know, an extensive interview with an analytical chemist in the documentary about, dissecting why his testing of the Auschwitz gas chambers was methodologically flawed.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
with journalism is you have tons of middlemen tons of people micromanaging everything that you do i mean i worked for national geographic for a period and i was shocked that this actually may be the norm they expected me when working on a documentary to write an entire screenplay for the documentary that would then be approved by executives and then my task as an interviewer wasn't to
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
talk to people but it was essentially to reverse engineer the scripted statements in question form oh wow so like jesus yeah dude so that you could come as close to a entirely manufactured piece as possible while still
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It produced bad results as well. So there were a lot of things about that model that I think were brilliant and ahead of their time and were copied by lots and lots of people. I mean, they were kind of some of the early people to...
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
sort of professionalized youtube documentary work it is also before youtube but this kind of no budget fully independent style even though it was coming from a media outlet that was the idea is like you don't need this typical professional production apparatus you can just throw people out and make something right and at what point what was like the straw that broke the camel's back with vice
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
There were a few things. I mean, one was you had overvaluation of Vice in general. So it was kind of coasting on this massive, what was it, like a $6 billion valuation, something nuts that was definitely inflated, not to say that it wasn't worth something. You had an increasingly resentful and tired workforce and an increasingly large number of enemies
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
that had been cultivated by executives at the company. You also had increasing desire from rival media outlets to discredit them, which gives an incentive to write articles about how they're bad or irresponsible.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
You also had a very ill-advised transition from streaming online video, which they had built their brand on to cable TV, which was a dying art. In like 2016, right? Yeah, at a time when this made really no sense. It's like, I think it kind of speaks to how ill-advised that decision was that I couldn't watch my own show because I don't have a TV.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It was one of these things where I sort of thought, okay, well, if this is what is going to bring resources in and allow me to make documentaries, whatever. But in the back of my head, I was always thinking this seems like a bad idea. And then on top of that, you had this sort of – gradual erosion of their identity, which had begun probably because there were different eras, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
You have the kind of Gavin McInnes era, which is oriented entirely around ultra edgy humor. Vice is basically a humor magazine, a humor art fashion magazine, totally, totally different. And then it goes from that to a
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
sort of transitional literary era that doesn't get talked about very much where there was this brilliant guy named Jesse Pearson who is the editor of the magazine and he's a sort of intellectual who wanted to use it to publish fiction and art photography and things like that and that was around the time that I started working there and it was actually like a really cool era to be there and
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Right. Right. And this is, you know, I think it actually is a very important lesson. And I say this just because this wasn't This was the subject of the documentary. This wasn't some kind of like he was just talking to a guy who was doing electric chair repair. And then he may have initially been interested in him for that reason.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Then it goes from comedy vice to literary vice to news vice. That's around the time that the HBO thing... Is that when Spike Jonze came along? He came along... Well, he was always in the background. Oh, was he? But he came along more during the Viceland pivot as someone that was in the office every day. I don't really think that he had...
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
all that much of a... I mean, I think he probably got paid well, but I don't know that he played all that much of a role other than... Yeah, so then there's news and that's around the time where they start to have mainstream appeal and everyone's saying like, oh, this is real news. This is the real news network. And then...
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
they get hit hard by culture war um propriety concerns because the edginess that they built their brand on suddenly became deeply unfashionable and dangerous reputationally so they have to pivot to some kind of like social concern there was actually like i don't know if you there's a journalist michael moynihan who
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
wrote a great piece and did an interview with Barry Weiss about this kind of pivotal moment where young employees at Vice decided that the old covers of the magazine were too offensive to be displayed. And so they all had to be moved out of the lobby into the private office of Saroosh, who was one of the founders of the company. And I was there while this was happening, and I remember it
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I remember seeing it and thinking that it was unsettling, but also just ignoring it. But he was, I think, correct to point out that this was indicative of rot within the company where you have you have the employees saying your entire this entire company is so offensive that we can't look at what it has created. And, you know, they start making increasingly bad stuff.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
After I left, it became kind of like one of the premier sources of anti psychedelic journalism.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Again. anti-psychedelic shrouded in sort of social justice type concerns because this is, we were talking about like the scientistic orientation of drug scares in the 90s that shifted in the 21st century to a moralistic orientation. So now if you want to scare people away from using MDMA, you don't say, hey, it's gonna make holes in your brain.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Although I actually think he probably did know about the association with Zundel originally.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
you say, hey, this is a tool of capitalist oligarchs who are trying to commodify your spirit and make you a more efficient worker while funding the genocide in Gaza, right? And creating super soldiers. And this is a tool of the imperialist American war machine, right? And so this is the new, and people say, oh, okay. Oh, you're right then, MDMA is bad.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Thank you so much for telling me this important information. So it's important to recognize that the anti-drug messaging evolves with the culture and what the culture wants. In the 90s, they wanted medico-scientistic explanations for why not to use drugs. Now it's about moralistic explanations for why drugs are bad. So why don't you use cocaine?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It's not because there was a rat with a lever and he pushed that darn lever until he died and you don't want to end up like that rat. That's what you'd say in the 80s or 90s. Now it's like, so you want to, you want to participate in the exploitation of Latin American workers who could be enslaved by the cartel and you're going to get high off of this, this blood money, this product.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
But of course, all this is a product of prohibition. And this whole idea, this is one of the issues with moralism and with scientism is that they can both obscure the real issues, right? That's not to say that there aren't actual moral concerns with certain types of drug consumption, but moralism has been weaponized very effectively by commercial interests and by government interests.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
You even see this now with like the White House Twitter page. Right. And they do that like weird cartoon of the crying woman. And it's like very you see this. I haven't seen this. It's like kind of it's like this. There's like an ice and ice on their Twitter. The White House Twitter. The White House Twitter page has an image of like an ice person arresting a crying Mexican woman.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I would expect not, but I don't remember because all this was made when I was... a child, but yet the story for those that aren't aware is that there was this untrained, uncredentialed electric chair repairman who, had seemingly done a decent job, uh, designing electric chairs.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And it's like it's like a very. superficially inhumane creepy image and you look at it and you think oh that's kind of an odd look like arresting a crying woman right what is going on here but then it's like well this is a fentanyl dealer and then you say oh okay oh wow okay there's a fentanyl dealer okay yes yes yes
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And again, the point here I'm not saying is that fentanyl is always good, but by using that, by using the word fentanyl, suddenly you can completely change the interpretation of an image that would immediately be recognized as sort of unsettling and inhumane. And these things are weaponized very, very effectively and it's important to recognize them and see how they have become tools, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I did this thing for my podcast where I covered A trial in the DEA headquarters, which was oriented around prohibiting to obscure psychedelics so obscure that they, for one of them, were not able to provide any peer reviewed scientific evidence that a human being had ever consumed it. Right. So we're talking insanely fucking obscure.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
This was recently. This was like maybe four or five months ago. I covered the entire trial. So it was a two-week trial. And it was like a group of scientists who were petitioning the DEA not to prohibit this extremely obscure...
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
scientific research chemical called doi okay and what i saw going to dea headquarters every day for this hearing was up close and personal the entire propaganda mechanism at play right you walk through this
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
lobby and it's like faces of fentanyl faces of that and really yeah and it's all these little these photos and and i was looking through them and thinking huh this is interesting faces of fentanyl and then i'm looking and and it's like really really old people So it'll be like Janice taken by fentanyl age 87 or something. I'm thinking like, what's the story with Janice?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
There's no, how did Janice die of a fentanyl overdose? But there's no context. And I looked at the website and realized that this is like, you can just submit random shit. There's no verification of anything. These are just things that have been submitted. And that there was even someone, a mother whose son was used to, in this campaign without her understanding.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So it's like right off the bat, you're being hit with a literal wall of propaganda that is all oriented. They have a golden fentanyl chandelier in the office. Is this the hallway? Yeah, yeah, that's it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, that's that's it. Bizarre. That's exactly what I'm forever. So then there's like forever to forever. Eighty eight. Anyway, as you can see, this is just very I'm not saying people don't die from fentanyl. Obviously they do. But this is also without question propaganda. Right. That is.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
neglecting to recognize the real reason that people are dying of fentanyl overdoses, which is prohibition and a lack of regulation of the drug market where people are driven to use completely unregulated, uncontrolled black market substances that might be contaminated with fentanyl.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And with fentanyl, it's actually amazing that this is their chosen propaganda tool because it's the worst possible example. This is a drug that most people don't even want to do. They've surveyed people and said, do you want to use fentanyl? The majority of people don't want to use fentanyl. So How lucky for the government. You have a substance that people don't even want to do.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And yet this is a problem. Well, then you have to ask yourself, how did we develop a problem with people using a drug that they don't want to use? Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
There wasn't, as far as I know, any major instances of his designs, uh, failing in a way that caused some kind of, uh, terrible suffering or something like that to the best of my knowledge. I'm not, I don't have like an encyclopedic knowledge of the results of Lutcher's execution device designs, but, um, he had gotten embroiled in this quest to demonstrate that the Holocaust didn't really happen.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And the answer is prohibition created this. It's their fault that this has happened. Like if people had access to, I mean, I think Kratom actually represents one example of like, you know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, I mean, conceivably you could, but maybe Bezos doesn't want to dip into it. You can buy it in a gas station.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, and I think that while there are problems associated with it, I do think that having a semi-regulated supply of an opioid relative to just totally untested, totally unregulated powders represents a step in the right direction where people will still get into trouble, but you'll have a much... smaller number of overdose deaths.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I mean, the bigger issue, of course, is that I alluded to this earlier, and it's maybe a controversial statement to say that drugs aren't the cause of drug problems. But when you look at 2021, a record number of drug overdose deaths in the United States, you have more people dying of drug overdose deaths than ever before in history.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah. And that's I would say that that's probably not a coincidence. We're going to blame the Sackler family for that. I think that there's I think you had a very clear indication. Everyone knew that opioids were addictive. There were endless news stories about it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And so if you're going to say, oh, the Sacklers pulled the wool over everybody's eyes and nobody knew that opioids were addictive by 2021, that's not a valid argument.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And yet you have record awareness and record overdoses. So what's different? The difference is there's a fucking pandemic and everyone is miserable and unemployed and isolated and atomized and sitting in front of their computer, feeling lonely and sad. And they are psychologically ultra susceptible to developing drug problems.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
That's an interesting way of putting it. I mean, just one quick story. It actually involves Thomas. I don't think he'd mind me telling the story. I think it's like, so Thomas and I lived together. And Thomas' father died from cancer. And he was in a very typical scenario that people are in when they have a loved one die of cancer. His father had been prescribed morphine for the cancer pain.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
and i remember him coming back to the apartment that we were living in he had this big bottle full of these blue five milligram morphine sulfate tablets it was just like completely full and he put it on the counter and he said uh help yourself you know you can have as many as you want and i took one i thought it was okay it made me really constipated i wasn't really into it And that was it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
That was the end of my experimentation with morphine sulfate. Thomas, on the other hand, became addicted to morphine. So we have two people living in the exact same apartment with the exact same access to the exact same drug. Yet one of them becomes dependent and the other one doesn't. Why is that? If it were just the drug, wouldn't we both have become equally dependent on the morphine?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
We both had access to the same bottle, but it wasn't just the drug. Thomas was going through a lot of emotional pain as a result of losing his father. I was in a relatively emotionally stable situation and was less susceptible to addiction for that reason.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
so if you deny all these psychological environmental social aspects of addiction you're fundamentally misrepresenting the problem you'll never help anyone and everyone's different in um regards to like their chemical makeup too right like depending on like emotions or what their lifestyle is like we're like
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
these bags of hormones and different chemicals that is constantly fluctuating like we're never in a solid state oh absolutely right right so like drugs are going to interact with everybody differently right right so like i experience extremely severe hangovers like i could have three drinks same here and i would the next day i would be just off the next day would be useless i wouldn't be like vomiting and you know have like a splitting headache i would just feel like kind of yeah
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And he was contracted as a sort of scientist, despite having no training in chemistry, to collect samples from the interior of the gas chamber in Auschwitz and have them chemically analyzed. But the issue is that... In addition to these samples being at that point probably at least a half century old, one wouldn't expect any of the – like hydrogen cyanide is very volatile.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Other people can have five drinks with lunch and it's nothing. So they're fundamentally responding to this in a different way as a result of likely genetic metabolic differences between us. So the punishing effect of the alcohol hangover just doesn't apply to them as much. And those same people are going to be more susceptible to alcoholism. So there's a lot of factors.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Oh, yeah. Well, you become tolerant as well.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
That's the other thing. But yeah, I mean, the way you describe it, you make it sound crazy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
To me, it's crazy. Yeah. But, you know, people drink coca tea in a lot of South America. They're consuming cocaine every day. It's not a big deal. It kind of depends on the culture, how you're doing it, what the dose is. I mean, people take 80 milligrams of Adderall a day. It's so crazy to me, dude. But for those people, it's just normal.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
In the same way that nicotine very rapidly becomes just normal. Right now, if I were to take that Zin that's staring at me intently from over there, it would be wild. It would be... Really? Oh, yeah. It would be wild. Wow. It would be a wild ride that I will not take.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
and uh because i have no tolerance i stopped using nicotine um for now i may okay i may be back but it's been a little while and i'm gonna see how far i can go with this and um it's been so far it's been fine you can live without it yeah um did you notice any any sort of crash or any sort of like withdrawal a little a little bit yeah but that's useful as well yeah i think is to to actually
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
analyze what it is that you feel that you're missing, what it is that it was doing for you, because it's not always entirely intuitive. I mean, I felt that way with cannabis. I don't think I would have really known, but for me, and I think for a lot of people, I would use it just to reduce my annoyance or anger. That became the kind of thing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It's like you're annoyed, you're angry, smoke some weed, chill out. But then, again, it's sort of like taking Ambien to go to sleep. A typical life involves numerous occasions where you feel annoyance. And if you don't develop a healthy way of contending with annoying situations, you're just going to be all... bent out of shape.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
You can do it. Whether or not it's good just depends on so many factors. I would say all else equal, it's probably better not to. But again, you do have people that struggle horribly with insomnia. Maybe if they just take five milligrams of Zolpidem before bed, It's better for them. It just kind of depends. For me, is I travel a lot. And when I'm traveling, I'm always working.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And so it never feels like, oh, I'm just going to tough it out and not sleep before... a strictly scheduled chemistry project where every day matters. Like it just feels too, again, but this is my rationalization. There's too much at stake. I can't, like I'm about to go on a big chemistry voyage and it's like, you better believe.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, that can happen. It doesn't tend to, I had a little bit of that when I first used it. Once you become a little bit tolerant to it, the dominant effect is a sort of ultra disinhibited delirium. So that's like the kind of Roseanne Barr type effect.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
situation where you're like tweeting some crazy shit that you don't remember like that's the real so it's not so much for most people that they started seeing unicorns it's more like your entire sense of social professional caution goes out the window because you're just totally disinhibited you know you have these examples of people like masturbating on planes or things like that and it's like they're often on shit like ambient
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So that's the first issue is that this is not something that you would expect to – remain on the surface for even, I would imagine, months, let alone decades. Well, it's pretty much a gas. That was how it was used in the gas chambers. That's why they were gas chambers. So because it is a volatile substance, it doesn't have a tendency to deposit on surfaces.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah. And I could imagine it. I could imagine how, like, on one hand, you could see someone being a sex criminal and using that as an excuse. On the other hand, I could see it's crazily disinhibiting. It really, it really does whack you out.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Right. Yeah. I think one of his mistresses said that he had, quote, crazy Ambien sex. That's a direct verbatim quote.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Basically, it's binding to the same site on the GABA-A receptor as a benzodiazepine with maybe a little bit more selectivity. So it's not so different from Xanax or Klonopin. The main difference with Ambien... is that it is metabolized very, very, very quickly. So if you take something like Valium before you go to sleep, you'll still be under the influence of it when you wake up in the morning.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Whereas Ambien and related Z drugs have been chemically engineered in such a way that they're very rapidly metabolized intentionally, with the idea being that you won't have any morning grogginess because... two hours after taking it, it's already largely then excreted or metabolized, biotransformed.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, that would seem like the simplest explanation to me that there's just some cross-contamination occurring. It's possible that there's some intentional adulteration. The idea of doing something like that has existed for a long time. There was even a cigarette brand that had opium in it at one point.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
But after that, then there was a tobacco industry internal letter that was released to the public. That was kind of interesting where they, it was, I can't remember what tobacco company it was, but they were talking about the concern that competitors would put this drug etorphine in to cigarettes. So they weren't suggesting doing it themselves. They were saying, what was the drug called?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Etorphine. Etorphine. Yeah. Which is like a so-called Bentley compound. These are ultra potent opioids that are sort of chemically related to morphine. At that time, it was a very – a fentanyl, not chemically related to fentanyl, but similar in terms of its potency. So the idea was the same.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And then I realized that he wasn't joking and that he actually thought that I had, like, infected the building with spores in some way. Oh.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I think the idea there was that there was like a Prussian blue type substance
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
What if somebody put a essentially microdose of a high-potency opioid into cigarettes in order to make them even more addictive? So – People have tossed around that idea with fentanyl. I don't actually know that this is really so common. It's talked about all the time, but you have to be very careful with, and it does occur.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I'm not saying it never occurs, but I'd want to really have a better sense of how prevalent this is because it's the sort of thing that people will talk about and report on because it's sort of sensational and frightening. But is this really a widespread issue?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
cyanide complex that would have been detected but again the samples were diluted because you wouldn't expect this to penetrate more than like a fraction of a millimeter into the chamber wall and he was chiseling off huge pieces of yeah yeah so that it was very crude the way he was taking the samples right right so it's sort of a portrait of self-deception yes and yeah the danger of
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Right. But the other thing is you get into this weird cycle where a drug like fentanyl is associated with fatal overdoses. That's pretty much the only thing people ever say about fentanyl is that it's killing people. And so when somebody dies of a drug overdose, everybody thinks that's fentanyl because fentanyl is the drug that kills people. So you get this self-reinforcing cycle.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And I've seen this happen personally on a number of occasions where somebody dies of a drug overdose, everyone says that it's fentanyl, and then the toxicology comes back and it was... Heroin, something like that. So people still die of drug overdoses. And it's important. Again, I think people will often misinterpret what I'm saying.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
They'll say, oh, he's like a fentanyl apologist who's saying nobody dies of fentanyl. They absolutely do. But the point is, if you decide that every drug problem is a product of then you will misconstrue the problem and may fail to recognize that while the problems with fentanyl are real, it has also become a major propaganda tool.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So maybe that's the case that this is true. But also you could imagine having a bottle of pharmaceutical cocaine and being impressed by it and thinking, oh, this is the real stuff.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And then because of this association with purity and goodness, then you don't have a come down. People do this all the time. Don't feel dirty, right? Because it's pharmaceutical grade. Right, right. So people do this all the time with alcohol where they'll say, oh, that's, you know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
the like of course you get a hangover with the terrible alcohol but this is something like really nice this is some nice stuff what gives you a hangover from alcohol is alcohol so so so you know and i'm not saying that there couldn't be some you know minor contribution from sugar or whatever but if it were the sugar then anyone that ate a piece of candy would have a hangover the next day which is not typically the case
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So, yeah, it's the alcohol that is responsible, but people will buy into these ideas about how like a really high purity alcohol is not going to produce a hangover or whatever. So it's the same. People do this all the time.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah. Well, the interesting thing about placebo or expectation is that these factors exist even in the presence of an active substance. So people always talk about placebo as if those factors only exist when you give somebody a sugar pill or something that's pharmacologically inactive. But those same
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So expectation effects apply even in the presence of a pharmacologically active substance, which can make it very difficult to interpret clinical trial results. I mean, this is why anytime you're working with the human mind in that way, there's so many complicating factors that have to be taken into consideration.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So is it possible that their pharmaceutical cocaine was vastly superior to whatever street cocaine they were getting at that time, which maybe was methamphetamine? It's possible. Or it's possible that the idea of a hyper pure pharmaceutical product allowed them to experience it differently.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Pseudoscientific inquiry.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Right, and so the hypothesis that this ethnobotanist Wade Davis had was, just for those that aren't familiar, that using a combination of this puffer fish toxin, TTX, and scopolamine, you could effectively convince somebody that they had died and been revived as a zombie. And people outside of Haiti were very skeptical of this claim because it wouldn't work on you. It wouldn't work on me.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Why are we supposed to expect that it's going to work on them? And Wade Davis's counterargument was that the effect of a drug is not just pure pharmacology, but it's dependent on the cultural matrix in which the drug is consumed. And if you administer this drug in a culture where people believe in zombies...
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
and believe in resuscitation and believe in all of these things that you can induce this effect. And I think it's inadequately studied. There really isn't a lot of corroborating evidence. It hasn't been tested.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
How do you study that? You know, you'd have to go back and spend more time with voodoo practitioners and take more samples and really critically evaluate it. But I think that it's inadequately documented to say with certainty that this was a widespread phenomenon. I think that fundamentally Wade Davis's hypothesis is plausible. I wouldn't go so far as to say- What was his hypothesis?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
That zombification is a ritual in haiti that involves the administration of puffer fish that contains a toxin ttx that causes a death-like paralysis the victim is buried alive
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
and thinks that they have died they are then exhumed and given scopolamine where they are kept in a sort of pharmacologically zombified state and enslaved by the voodoo sorcerer the bokor so this is like this was the idea um and it's pretty outlandish but it's plausible i mean again so the bokor has control of them after they become a zombie Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It's like a theatrical way of convincing somebody that they are your slave. Wow. And again, people say, oh, that's crazy. I mean, there's cults and religions all around the world that do things that are not that different.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So if you create a system of belief... that allows somebody to think that this is real and this is what needs to be done. People do all kinds of weird stuff. So I do think that what he was proposing is a possibility. How widespread it is, that's another question. Whether it was a one-off thing. Maybe it never happened, but I think that fundamentally what he was describing was possible.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
He blew my fucking mind. He's got I mean, he's got. Well, did you talk about it? Was this recently?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Oh, okay. Did he talk about the, the symposia stuff at all?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Well, if he didn't talk about it, I don't know that I want to, I'm sure he did. Like, I just don't know. Well, there was an activist group. This comes back to what I was saying at the beginning about people being very careful about how they're being manipulated by journalists and these drug issues.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So there was this activist group that Travis Kitchens was actually a part of, an anti-drug activist group. And they... had people who were, I think, like entirely cynical in their orientation. And then they had people like Travis Kitchens who were not cynical in their orientation, but were looking for a place, an outlet for a critique of...
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
maybe capitalism or for-profit motivations in psychedelic research something like that like you know i'm not suggesting that there's no valid criticisms of psychedelic research or anything like that there absolutely are yeah the issue is that a lot of the people who are
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
engaged with critical psychedelic thought are fucking nuts and are like ultimately anti-drug in their orientation and so they kind of contaminate the entire movement right it's like in the same way that there's like valid objections to almost everything but it's like there's valid objections to smoking weed but if somebody's like life is oriented around
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
being anti-weed, chances are there's something kind of weird about their reasoning there. I think this similar thing happened with psychedelics. So there was this group and they sort of terrorized the psychedelic community, stalking people.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
essentially any time i gave a talk one of them would either be there online or in person to harass me this went on for years and i was um always thinking like damn you know these psychedelic conferences are very expensive the tickets cost like hundreds of dollars often and i think who the how the are they i can't even afford to go to these things and i'm being paid to go to them
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So how are these people going to these conferences just to harass me? What is going on? Wouldn't it be interesting if they were being paid by someone? And this was something that I was, an idea that I'd been toying with for a while, but it's a very paranoid idea that I felt uncomfortable talking about publicly because it's just a bad road to go down. Your ops are paid ops.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, you just don't want to be that guy. So, but I'd had a number of these things happen that were very, actually a lot of things happen.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Like I, another example would be, I was giving a talk at this New York City psychedelic conference, had nothing to do, because I was working at this lab in Philadelphia that was receiving funding, research funding from a pharmaceutical company to develop new psychedelic drugs. So the talk had nothing to do with that. It was actually just about how different psychedelic drugs are made.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And afterwards, this woman speaks during the Q&A. She has a prepared statement. And she's like, I want you to answer before this audience whether you think your pharmaceutical company's polymorph B is truly a novel invention. And if not, what are you giving back to the indigenous people of the world? Oh, my God. And like the audience erupts into applause. And I was thinking like, oh, wow. Whoa.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I mean, this is just nonsense. The work that I was doing had nothing to do with indigenous people or indigenous knowledge. And this patent that she was referring to had nothing to do with any of the work that I was doing. So I was thinking in the stage lights were in my eyes and I couldn't see who the person was. But I was thinking like, wouldn't it be fucking crazy?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
crazy if she were an employee of a competing pharmaceutical company and they were just weaponizing their employees using moralism to try to interfere with the competitor's drug development wow but it's like this is the sort of thing you don't even want to say this out loud right yeah so so i kind of made peace with this i was like it would be crazy but you will never know. You will never know.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And it's better to just assume that that isn't the case because you'll go crazy if you even think that thought. But then I found the dissertation, the PhD thesis that was written by the woman who asked this question, which has a The transcription of her asking the question and acknowledging that she was the one that did this and she was an employee of the opposing pharmaceutical company. No way.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
USONA, yes. Yes, actually. Wow. Yes. And thanks to the CEO, the billionaire CEO of the company in the beginning of her PhD dissertation. Wow. Yeah. So this was really crazy. This is one of these like, oh, shit, it's real. Like, it's real. It's actually real. And this is the sort of thing that's going on.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So this company, USONA, was very, very good about employing people who would harass business opposition using moralism as their technique. They
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
They've branched their pharmaceutical company into, there's a for-profit, one of the owners has a for-profit called Ceruvia, and then they have all these non-profit arms that are oriented toward supposedly preventing the approval of bad patents that just happen to be patents of all of their pharmaceutical competitors. It's really actually kind of amazing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And so they promote the work of any journalist who is writing anything negative about their competitors. And it turned out that one of the executives at USONA was paying or had paid one of the members of this group that Travis Kitchens was a member of to, again, also harass their opposition. It's pretty wild. Oh, my God.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And the same person, I don't know if you follow Michael Pollan, but the same person is Michael Pollan's major informant in all of his psychedelic reporting. And that bias is very much evident in all of Michael Pollan's stuff as well. So there's some wild, yeah, there's some really wild stuff going on. And this is like a real example of this sort of thing happening.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And people do that to me. And it's funny because... As an impulse, it's not necessarily a bad thing to do. The issue is that they often get it wrong. So this USONA thing is a very extreme example, and it's now 100% confirmed that this occurred. And not a single journalist has ever publicly discussed this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
The only narrative that has ever been publicly promoted has been USONA's narrative, which they promote publicly. through association with the grants that are given to journalists to report on psychedelics, right? There's actually like... And again, the way that I'm describing this, I want to be very cautious and not suggest that it's like purely calculated. I do think that there's a...
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
complexity in all of this. It's a little bit hard where there's a bit of self-deception at play. Maybe they really believe what they're saying, whatever, whatever, whatever. But this is one of the reasons that MDMA was not approved was this group that was in part funded by an executive at USONA, but also funded, actually two executives at USONA, but also funded by a major anti-psychedelic
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
organization called the Sarlo family foundation. Oh yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah. So they, they fund like most of the anti-psychedelic, um,
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
people at the moment yeah travis was telling me about that family yeah it's a very interesting story actually behind all this shit is fascinating and it's kind of sad to me that no journalists have covered it that a lot of people that even dip a toe in the water get sued i might i hope you know it's it's like you have to be the people that how could they sue you if you dip your toe like just to talk just people talking about it or like they're saying they're being defamed or something
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you can just legally harass people very easily. Harass people with lawsuits. Yeah, yeah, and they know this. So, yeah, and this is all to say... I saw all this play out, and it was one of the most shocking things I've ever seen. It was mind-blowing. And you can see some of this stuff on YouTube, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So if you go to the YouTube MDMA Advisory Committee hearing, you can see some of these people who were being paid by the Sarlo family foundation to run an anti-MDMA campaign lying to the FDA and getting away with it. including the main person was this woman, Nishay Deveno, who was sort of the head of the anti-MDMA campaign.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
involved with the Chaos production in various ways from the beginning. And it's an interesting story. It's, you know, I think that the book is very good. I read a manuscript of it long before it was published. I'm not sure that I am persuaded by the book's thesis, but I still think it's very interesting and provocative.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And she just was firing off bullshit at a rate so fast that no one could even contend. She's saying that MAPS, the company that was developing MDMA as a treatment for PTSD, was a therapy cult company. She was saying that one of the therapists had pinned down a patient while the patient screamed, get your fucking hands off of me.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
But this was like a completely decontextualized snippet of a account of a ketamine therapy session that had nothing to do with maps. That was not at all what she described. It was like, the patient was reliving the trauma of having been abused by their father and was speaking to the memory of their father saying, get your fucking hands off of me. So it's that kind of, anyway, this stuff is messy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It's a messy, big story. But the reason that I even bring it up.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I think it transcends money, but money is a big part of it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
No, no. Oh, okay. I mean, of course, the real issue was not... It also obviously wasn't a psychedelic mushroom. Right. It was, like, some, like, Copernicus species actually identified it for him. And... But it was indicative of severe water damage. Oh, right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
No. Okay. There's, there's different, this is kind of a bag of a can of worms. And I could like try to breeze through it. And it's a lot of names that people won't know. But the basic is that there's, there's two different groups that were primarily responsible. One is the Sarlo family foundation.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And the story there is really convoluted and bizarre, but it was that this millionaire Holocaust survivor had been given MDMA by a maps employee and And had this cathartic emotional release of the trauma that he experienced during the Holocaust and decided that he wanted to leave a portion of his fortune to maps.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And this enraged his estranged daughter who stood to inherit that money and also felt horrified. hurt that her father had had this sort of emotional connection with this other woman. I don't think there's any evidence that it was sexual. And so... She then can, and then her father also is very old and in the midst of this controversy develops Alzheimer's disease.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So he's effectively taken out of the conversation. So now it's an issue of was this elder abuse and a sort of Anna Nicole Smith type exploitation scenario or was this somebody who truly had this healing experience and due to weird internal conflict within his family, this turned into a problem, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Anyway, whatever the case may be, and I, of course, lean toward the more likely scenario being that he actually had a cathartic emotional release from using MDMA and that he genuinely considered this experience valuable and that he was not being manipulated.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
although i wasn't there don't right um whatever the case may be his foundation then began to fund anti-psychedelic reporting and and so that was uh very odd Yeah, very, very odd. The other one is a bit more familiar, which is that USONA is developing psilocybin.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
yeah well he didn't have like a um well yeah there was a thesis but there wasn't like any conclusion right he had like i think he ended up with like three or four different conclusions of like why they were murdered right right i should maybe be a little bit i do agree with aspects of i mean there's maybe two two theses in this one is that the story of the manson killings as they are typically portrayed is flawed and incomplete and has yeah inconsistencies that i would agree with
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And so if they can position themselves as morally superior to their competitors by funding opposition or sicking their employees or the people that they're paying onto anybody that is potentially critical of them, then it's good for their business. That's simple. That's, you know, an old story.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
feel bad for well-intentioned people that are stuck in the middle of this because it's really hard. Because I know that many well-intentioned people have gotten caught up in it. Like there's an interesting story in the New York Times where they're kind of covering some of these things and you can tell that the journalist who I've spoken with a tiny bit, just bought the story.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
They're photographing one of the representatives of the pharmaceutical company, but they never mentioned that he's even an employee or an executive at the pharmaceutical company. It's pretty weird. How did that happen? I guess they didn't
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
ask or whatever and then they and they're they're very good at creating these fake things that they've done to help people that sound good until you really think about it like they'll say oh you know well we've done this amazing work we actually were able to shoot down a patent for viagra and mdma as a combination therapy and you think wow and you think like oh thank you so much for your what's wrong with viagra mixed with mdma it sounds like an amazing drug okay so you get it yeah
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I mean, they're saying, oh, it's not a sufficiently novel invention, therefore it shouldn't be patentable. But it's like, what have you even achieved here? This is not a thing that exists. You just prevented someone from developing this as a medicine. Nobody has been helped by this in any way.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
But if you frame it the right way, credulous journalists will say like, oh, good work, sir, for your advocacy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Anyway, this is a whole crazy thing, but this has been a big, big story, and it's been disheartening to me to see how hard it has been for the journalists that have even tried to draw attention to any of this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Really, like, there's two journalists, Rachel Neuer and John Semley, who've really worked very hard to do this, but the majority of journalists have just uncritically repeated the narrative of Um, as it has been presented to the public by many of the people who are responsible for creating this mess to begin with.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah. Right. Yeah. subject of the book is attempting to bridge the gap possibility.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah. I read and I really enjoyed Travis's article and I hung out with Brian and like him as well.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah. So I'm sort of sympathetic to both sides of that. I would say maybe there's a less nefarious implementation of psychedelics in the church. Maybe it could revitalize Christianity in a way that wouldn't necessarily be bad. It's obviously not my thing. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I have complicated feelings about religion because I'm a pretty – I think socially a lot of harms have come from religious thought, and generally it's not really my vibe. But at the same time, I do think that our culture is atomized and lacking any kind of –
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Um, any kind of unified goals and having a sort of, uh, culture system that in a value system that people can connect with one another through, it can be beneficial. You know, I think about like my, my grandmothers or things like that and, and how, um, socially beneficial religion was for them in their old age and it provides a community that's really missing from a lot of people's lives.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So there's good things. There's also countless examples of exactly this sort of problem that Travis is describing existing where psychedelics are used as tools of manipulation. I'm actually pretty close friends with a guy that was in a psychedelic cult and it really fucked him up. And it fucked him up in complicated ways.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Like it's not really the story that you typically hear about things like this. And some of it I think is so sensitive to him that he's never even fully told me. So I have to sort of fill in the blanks a little bit. But I think part of it was that he got involved in this group when he was very young. I think he was maybe like 13, something like that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
and he loved psychedelics and they love psychedelics so right off the bat you have this thing everyone is enjoying this thing that is transformative and transcendent and amazing and interesting so that part is good that part is connection but then the leader of the group is also espousing other values that at least superficially seem good because the psychedelic stuff is good so he's saying oh you know it's bad to eat meat or whatever okay fair enough
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Bad to eat meat. Okay. Psychedelics are good. Eating meat is bad. It's bad to be violent. Okay. Also, fair enough. Nothing wrong with not being violent. That's good. And on top of that, you have to believe in God and the Christian Bible. All right. Okay, maybe. And also being gay is bad because it's not what the Lord wants.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So then, you know, you start to see how this kind of like, and I suspect that this person was gay. And I think that the... the homophobic orientation of this particular group, um, may have broken him out, may have really had a detrimental effect on, on him. Um, psychologically, because I mean, and the same thing can happen without psychedelics, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
That can happen to people just with normal Christianity. Yeah. But I think that this exacerbated it and there, there was even more to it. I don't know that I, how much detail I should go into, but there was, there was more to it that, um, that taught me a lot of the complexities associated with these things. And this is just part of the difficulty of religion.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Like, I don't know that it's necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I think it could be good, but these things are complicated. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I'd been familiar with him for a while because he wrote this book, The Chemical Muse. It's quite a while ago, actually. So I'd read The Chemical Muse and I felt that most of the ideas that were being articulated in that book were totally believable, not particularly controversial.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
This idea that there is ancient Greek use of psychoactive substances of one kind or another seemed totally plausible to me. Why wouldn't there be?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It's very interesting. Yeah. And Hillman is in an interesting position that's sort of analogous to someone like John Allegro or Brian Murasku, where you have... texts that the majority of readers cannot access or translate. And so you are essentially blindly basing your interpretation on the authority of someone who you don't know and don't know what their intentions are.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And this is the case for a lot of things. It's probably the case for science for most people. I'm, lucky and that there is a domain where i'm able to critically assess things and look at the primary evidence and make some kind of a balanced assessment of how likely something is to be true or false but when it comes to reading allegro or something like that i don't know or i just don't know and um
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
What do you think about how complicated drugs are in our current society as we've discussed and how you could even look at our entire published record about drugs and so much of it would have additional complexity that wouldn't even be evident to some people? one a thousand years from now, maybe, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Would they know that there are additional layers to fentanyl as a tool of propaganda or would they just look at the superficial take on this that fentanyl was a problem? Would they understand all of the legal pharmacological complexity involved in all of this? Maybe not.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And so I always have avoided these debates about ancient practices because I feel that it is so hard to understand what is going on right now that what hope could I possibly have of understanding what was happening thousands of years ago?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
They're medium bizarre, I would say. Medium bizarre. Yeah, because, I mean, and I say this as someone that, you know, I've interviewed David E. Smith, who was the founder of the Hey Dashberry.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It's extremely interesting. And it also speaks to a sort of tension that's become... prevalent in our culture, which is I like to talk to people even if they have really weird beliefs that I don't agree with or whatever. I just think it's interesting to talk to somebody and hear their perspective. And it can be an exercise in critical thinking. It can be an encouragement.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
to evaluate the evidence on your own and try to understand why he believes this and why it may be true or may not be true. And I think that's all good, but we in general have this, like there's this idea of platforming, like you, by even speaking to somebody, this is a tacit endorsement of their character and all of their beliefs. And so you should only speak to good people who you agree with.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And any deviation from that represents some kind of uh, danger to a free society. That's a bad road to go down. Um, and I think, yeah, I think in general, even if somebody has beliefs that are wrong, there's a lot that can be learned from it. That's interesting. I don't know, again, with, Hillman, I think he's so fascinating.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I just don't have the time to even attempt to fact check most of the claims that he's making. I did a little bit and it seemed like, what is this word? Lacedace. Lacedace was a trafficker or a pirate.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Right. So it seems that that translation of the word is child trafficker is at the very least non-standard. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, he was in the PCP episode of my show. Okay. So I've known him and followed his work for most of my adult life. He's a very influential psychedelic researcher. He created what was once called the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, which was the premier peer-reviewed scholarly journal dedicated to research on psychedelics.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Right, right, right. And then, of course, the opposite is also true, where you have one group of scholars that believe in Christianity and will have a bias in that direction. And then you have Hillman.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Who's, I believe, satanic.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It's interesting. Yeah. I don't know enough about this to say, but I could see, I mean, are you, are you familiar with the origin of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind? Do you know about this?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It was later renamed the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, but it's a big journal. And so it's not surprising to me that one of the preeminent researchers on psychedelics was doing
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I mean, it's an interesting idea exclusively from this perspective of thinking about... It's interesting in general, but this perspective of thinking that even the way that we conceptualize something like our own consciousness or sense of self or internal monologue could be totally different, that every aspect of our consciousness could have been so different from the way it currently exists on the basis of different religious beliefs.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And I think that this kind of... bicameralism or whatever it's called what does that mean by camera it's been so long i think the idea is that you see your consciousness as like a projection of god into your mind as opposed to a sense of uh individuality and personal agency okay and so
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
My neighbor had mushrooms growing out of their wall and I was being blamed for it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
know you think about something like this or you know there's another kind of vaguely analogous idea the sapir-warf hypothesis i don't know if you know about no where it's like also called linguist linguistic determinism but the idea is that just the language that a person speaks can change their interpretation of reality and this is by contemporary linguists considered not evidence-based but it's an interesting
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
idea like if you didn't have a word for orange might orange cease to exist or would orange be lumped in with red if you only had red right or oh interesting like to what extent is our reality defined by the language that we use to conceptualize and categorize things.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
psychedelic research there's nothing and that he's in hate ashbury which is the center of this entire hippie movement sure um and that he's providing free medical care to impoverished people in that community again not really surprising to me he was treating enormous numbers of people so i do think that It's very easy. And I fall into these sorts of patterns of thinking myself.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, which is, on one hand, disappointing. You think, well, why wouldn't you do it? But, you know... He's hard to swallow. He's a jagged pill to swallow. And I think that he's actually operating in what I imagine is good faith. But there's a lot of, like, there's a YouTube channel, Professor Dave Explains. It's pretty great, I think. And he's constantly debating...
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
flat earthers and things like that and it's exhausting like you kind of i know this is like a big thing with uh graham hancock for example where he's he's like getting angry at egyptologists that don't want to debate him but it's exhausting i'm not talking about graham hancock specifically but i understand generally why experts in a certain field may be reluctant to debate people that they conceptualize as having fringe beliefs because in some instances it's like
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
extremely difficult and does cause problems and you can see the professor dave stuff i mean he he's like he's called professor dave on youtube yeah yeah he's pretty great but he's you know he's like a real um warrior when it comes to this sort of stuff like but he he goes after people in these debates about abiogenesis flat earth um lots of different scientific topics yeah and it's it's hard
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It's like it's not it's a skill in and of itself that I don't think you would necessarily expect a typical expert to have because it involves a sort of flair as a debater and performance that are not typically part of their profession.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, it seems very, very, very, roughly speaking, plausible, maybe.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I don't believe so. No. But the idea of harnessing human metabolism as a mode of affecting chemical transformations, I think is...
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I say this, I'm not saying this like you're stupid if you think this way. But it's very easy when you're scrutinizing historical documents to... look selectively at what suits the narrative that you're trying to present to the public and to not critically assess alternate possibilities. And, you know, I know this very well. I've spent a lot of time looking at World War Two psychedelic research.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
broadly represented I mean the alchemists were very very interested in urine without question the element phosphorus was discovered in urine from urine analysis I think the ancient Romans were drinking piss in some of their initiations I don't know about that but it seems possible I mean but the idea there is that yeah there's clearly some kind of transformation of foods that's occurring one issue is that
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
um many not all but many metabolic changes are oxidative in their character and increase the polarity of a drug in order to facilitate its excretion in urine this is kind of like if you were to There's a lot of things that can happen in the body. But if you were to broadly talk about what like phase one metabolism is, it often involves oxidation that increases polarity of a drug.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And one problem with that in terms of harnessing it for drug manufacturing is that the reason the body does this is specifically because it facilitates excretion and typically but not always deactivates a drug. So this is this is like our evolved process for reducing the activity of drugs. There are active metabolites.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
There are instances of drugs that become more active through biotransformation, but they're often intentionally engineered that way. Not always.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
There certainly could be. I mean, yeah, without question.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I mean, look at the ingredients in most products today. They have an insane number of different things that are each intended to alter the activity in its own little way, changing the taste, changing the color, modifying the pharmacology in various ways. We do that all the time.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So I see no reason that people wouldn't be aware of the, at the very least additive, if not synergistic effects that come from the,
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
But I'm not the person for the – especially when it comes to these very broad discussions. Like I could investigate the influence of a specific plant or a specific thing. But most of the practices that he was describing were so complicated that they don't really lend themselves to any kind of casual critical analysis. It's not the kind of thing –
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Like I could, you know, you could design experiments, you could dedicate yourself to it, but it's not something that you could just, you know, on a podcast say like, yeah. Right. Yup, it works.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
That's not good. At the point where there are mushrooms bursting through the drywall, it's like...
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And wouldn't it be interesting if the Nazis knew about LSD, for example? Right. So I'm already operating from a perspective of wouldn't it be interesting if the Nazis knew about LSD? So anything I look at, I'm hoping that it will support that. Meanwhile, it's very easy to ignore large amounts of evidence that don't support that. And it's just a critical thinking exercise in general.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm friends with Dana Beal.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a character.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, he's one of the original New York City psychedelic weirdos.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And everybody knows Dana Beal. I don't doubt that he's doing that. I would say that's a very separate thing from Brian Roth's work, which is funded by DARPA and is published and publicly available and brilliant and beneficial to all of humanity. It's not...
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
it's actually not clinical work it's basic scientific research that has been the most important work ever published on the structure of the serotonin 2a and 2b receptor and he very recently published a new paper
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
that goes even further in elucidating how different psychedelics interact with the protein and how these different types of interactions produce either psychedelic or non-psychedelic effects. So there's nothing even remotely nefarious about any of the work that Brian Roth is doing. It's some of the most important cutting-edge pharmacology on serotonin 2A agonists that exists.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It depends on what benefit you're describing and what you're looking for and who the patient is and what the disorder is. Exactly, because you conceivably have a full spectrum of... psychedelic to not psychedelic. And maybe at one point on the spectrum for a certain type of person, you're getting the benefit and maybe not. And what about the duration? And what about the environment?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And what about a million and the frequency of dosing and a million things? It's very hard to say what is optimal. I try to keep an open mind because I think people can be very moralistic about things like this, or they'll say like, Oh, you're just commodifying this and destroying the spirituality and destroying the the whole thing that makes this valuable and making it into the next Prozac.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Okay, I understand the argument, but... we should explore everything and see what's out there. Because Brian Roth's work, you could look at this two ways. You could say, oh, he's studying non-psychedelic psychedelics. But part of studying non-psychedelic psychedelics is also recognizing what creates a psychedelic. You can kind of move in both directions.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
One of the big subjects of this work has been biased signaling at the serotonin 2A receptor and whether whether a receptor interaction that is associated with something called beta-arrestin or GQ is responsible for the psychedelic effect. And this work has allowed us to better understand what makes psychedelic psychedelic in terms of their molecular neuropharmacology. It's been very important.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So I don't see these things as like two things that exist in opposition to one another. You could argue in the same direction say that studying psychedelics shows you what you need for maybe like a in this instance GQ biased path that would be more likely to be psychedelic, but I think the basic thing is like the psychedelic experience is Incredibly powerful and is
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
may be unsuitable for certain types of people and maybe not beneficial. And if you had a way of dialing it down a little bit, that could allow certain benefits of psychedelics, which may have little to do with what we typically associate with the psychedelic experience, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
There's a neuroscientist, pharmacologist named Chuck Nichols, and he did a lot of work on the anti-inflammatory effects of different psychedelic compounds. So he's showing that there could be a therapeutic effect from psychedelics that's completely separate from what we typically conceptualize as the therapeutic effect of psychedelics, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I know it's less fun to talk the way that I'm talking. I'm sympathetic to the funness of exploring these ideas, but more and more as I see our culture fractured by...
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Same thing goes for treatment of addiction, treatment of cluster headaches, right? Thinking that the point of a psychedelic experience is to have this religious, transcendent, hyper-visual experience, I think, is somewhat reductive because who's to say what they can or can't do or should or shouldn't do? So I'm... in support of people that are
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
There's no way to know whether another human being is experiencing anything similar to what you're experiencing. That's a really good point. There's a lot of unknown when it comes to the internal experience of another organism. But...
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
What we do know, and it sounds incredibly abstract, but it's actually a robust predictor, is that when you give a rodent a 5-HG2A agonist that has GQ bias signaling and even balanced, it seems to cause their heads to twitch. And that head twitch is strongly associated with psychedelic effects in humans. There are exceptions, but for something as abstract as this sort of wet dog shake head twitch,
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
thing yeah it's pretty good it's better than you would think it's the sort of thing where if you're looking at a scientific paper you could laugh at it and say oh they're saying this mouse switching its head predicts psychedelic activity in humans these silly scientists they're they're so they don't get it at all turns out it's actually pretty damn predictive wow yeah
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
delusions of one kind or another and a lack of critical thinking skills i feel less sympathetic to the the playful non-critical reinterpretation of the world like using the world as this kind of fanfic canvas to paint whatever narrative that you want i mean that's one of the nice things about fiction is you can explore these ideas and you don't need to pretend that they are
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Under some experimental conditions, yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah. Yes. It's so hard to say because what constitutes performance enhancement could be radically different between people. Sure. And what's the goal? Performance enhancement for a guitarist might be totally different for an air traffic controller.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah. I mean, it's definitely a psychologically interesting experience that I,
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
maybe certain types of people are drawn to right interested in consciousness and yeah i would i would hesitate to say that it can make you smarter but i think it can make you more aware of certain things and it can be very inspiring for some people and for someone like me that's not religiously inclined it can give you a taste of what i imagine religious experience is like for people that are
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I think it's interesting. I think it is. I'm not persuaded that the code of the simulation is being revealed through this process. I mean, I appreciate the attempt to assess something like that. I think it's an idea. I think it's very cool.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I've gone to the website of the guy who's at the forefront of this laser, DMT laser examination technique, has some weird stuff like eating chocolate and viewing it through a glass of water. Oh, really? I haven't seen that one.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
The obvious issue is that if you're taking a drug that causes visual hallucinations in order to see this otherwise invisible phenomenon, that it could very well be a product of hallucinations.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I would say it is a problem. But it's a common problem. I mean, same thing with the machine elves, as you said. And this has been studied from pretty much the beginning of psychedelic research. Heinrich Kluver coined this term form constants, and he was very interested in this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
idea that people's visual distortions or hallucinations under the influence of mescaline appear to have certain themes like a honeycomb pattern or a spider web type pattern or like a sort of tube type pattern or whatever. And now you hear people describing often seeing Alex Gray type imagery. Is that because many people who are interested in psychedelics have been exposed to Alex Gray imagery?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
True, whereas I feel like there's a tendency where people use these same sorts of Idea like a what a fiction writer might do but they project it onto Reality, right and this is like the new way that people tell stories.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Is it because alex gray was able to capture some kind of some kind of characteristic that is maybe just present in the psychedelic experience because we have similar central nervous systems and and other visionary people i mean one thing about alex gray is that he's using a lot of motifs that have also been explored in religious
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
artwork as well so it's not as if he's the the only person to um ever explore these types of images they do obviously have a a particular resonance with people that use psychedelics but i think that there's this interplay between human biology and psychology and art where yeah it's all yeah it's all yeah it's all interwoven yeah
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I would definitely bet against that. That would be, you know, that would be the last explanation that I would go for, which is not to say that it's impossible. But, when you're kind of creating the flowchart of possibility, it's usually good to start at the most likely scenario. And then if you can't explain something with the most likely scenario, you then go to the next most likely scenario.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So the most likely scenario in this situation is that a combination of suggestion, expectation, and the visual hallucinations that are produced by DMT are causing people to see characters that they are interpreting as being similar, but they can't really say that with certainty because nobody's able to take a snapshot of whatever it is that they're seeing.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And it's obviously a better story and it would feel better if you saw the same thing as someone else than something that was subtly different or totally different. And what even are these characters? If you draw them, are we really totally sure? The very fact that they're unrecognizable and not in a language that we speak gives them a lot of latitude to be different.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And then there's also just the kind of language that we use to describe things that are unfamiliar. You know, if you see something that is weird, what do you say about it? If you see lights in the sky, do you say that's a UFO? Do you say that it's gods?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
language you use to describe the unfamiliar and the inexplicable. So when you look at earlier psychedelic experiences, I don't think I'm aware of the word alien being used very frequently. People saying this seems alien. Often I do see descriptions of things being like Egyptian or associated with other cultures.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
um but i don't think alien in in the like 19 early 1960s type stuff now you'd see that more frequently because aliens have become a much bigger part of our culture subsequently um and the same thing goes for the way different
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
indigenous groups conceptualize these things, which are very much based on their... I would imagine that if you were to go to Peru and do this experiment, the matrix line thing might be less... less frequently encountered as an explanation because the matrix, I mean, it kind of depends on who you talk to. I'm sure there's people, indigenous cactus users who have also seen the matrix.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It's a pretty popular movie, pretty good movie. Yeah. But, but assuming that they haven't seen the matrix, I have a feeling that that is, And the current popularity of simulation hypothesis thinking wouldn't be the first explanation that they go to. Hold on, let me crack open this fresh can of... But I don't mean to be a hater on this kind of thing. Like I do find all that stuff very interesting.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And... And careful observation of the world is how you discover things. So it's like, I understand how you could look at, you know, someone, you know, looking at a laser through a water glass or whatever and say like, this is fucking, this is like, this is ridiculous.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
But it's like you probably could have – I'm sure there were people that would have said the same thing about early microscopists, like looking into a droplet of water and saying, like, what are they doing? Like, oh, they think they see little, like, organisms in this droplet of pond water. Like, it's crazy.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Again, it's so hard with these sorts of things where there's a term for it like being locked out or something.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
um it's so hard with these things where once you create the idea it becomes sort of meme that is spread and i've had the same experience before i thought no where i remember um smoking not dmt but dpt many years ago and i was using a candle to smoke it and just wasn't getting dpt dpt yeah and just wasn't getting an effect from it and had that thought of like, oh, interesting, maybe I'm tolerant.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Maybe I can no longer experience the effect of DPT. And then I moved the bowl a little bit deeper into the flame so that it was really touching the wick and the change in temperature was sufficient to vaporize the DPT. And then I got an insane, insane experience.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
But if I just stopped there, I might have said, oh, maybe something is preventing me when the real issue is just was insufficiently heated. So, you know, it's actually people love to talk about DMT because it's so visual and fascinating. But there's all these.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
aspects of it that don't get talked about as much like how hard it is to smoke and how harsh the smoke is yeah and these vapes that are now much more common make it easier yeah if you're smoking dmt crystal from like a meth pipe yeah it can be pretty hard it's much harder it's a it's like not the story that people like oh my friend he tried to smoke dmt and the smoke was really harsh yeah
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Like that's not the story that gets shared.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Right. So I think that would be my first guess would be, you know, is this really somebody that's locked out or maybe they are just not really smoking it and getting the hits or for whatever reason. Yeah. And, To even begin to assess that, you'd want to do something like give them an IV bolus dose of DMT to see if they're truly unresponsive, I sort of suspect.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Because even in these DMT-X experiments where they give people DMT repeatedly over long periods of time, the accumulation of tolerance is very minimal. It does occur, but it's very minor. So the idea that somebody would... have some kind of total tolerance outside of an extreme situation. Like they were smoking it all day, every day for like three months or something. It just seems unlikely.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It seems like the more likely explanation is that they're just not smoking it right. But again, this speaks to the mythology and the mysticism surrounding a lot of these substances. Like I'm sympathetic to that. There's something kind of strange about them and it's, they don't always lend themselves to the most analytical interpretations.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yes. It was like first discovered synthetically. Yeah. Yeah. It was Mansky did the first synthesis in Canada as a potential reference for a like strawberry plant alkaloid before it had been found in nature. Yeah.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And I do believe that, but the paradox is that it's simultaneously, uh, all natural and all synthetic, depending on how you want to think about it.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
They're both the same. And... Somebody will say, oh, but there's a difference between, for example, toad-derived 5-MeO-DMT and synthetic 5-MeO-DMT. And I've often said, well, okay, if there's no chemical difference, then there can't be a difference. But this does neglect the psychological contribution of the user.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
This, again, comes back to the expectation, beliefs, what you project onto the experience. So then if the case is that there is a difference and that difference is not derived from the chemistry of the substance, but from the psychological expectation of the user, then why can't you reformulate your expectation accordingly so that you have the same associations with the synthetic substance?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
You could change that. So if the idea is and it typically is that the natural is better, natural is good.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
synthetic is worse you can totally change that bias if you want to if you want to you can make a very persuasive case that the synthetic is better because it's better for the environment and so you are not harming toads in the process of acquiring the substance and you're not contributing to the potential exploitation of an endangered species
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
that only exists in a small part of the world or something like that. And so this is like a better experience because you're doing it more conscientiously. Like you could formulate that exact same expectation and projection onto the experience if you wanted to.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah. I was, um, I was aware of the pharmacology of the peptides that were present in the venom of the phylum Medusa by color. And so I wasn't expecting to have, you know, an LSD type psychedelic experience or anything like that. At the same time, when I made that many, many, many years ago, there was relatively little information.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
There was like a Peter Gorman article that had been written about it. He was, I think, the first outsider to document that process for High Times. And there was maybe a couple scholarly publications, but there really wasn't all that much out there on it. A little bit was there, definitely. And so I kind of knew what I was getting into.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I knew that it wasn't exactly the sort of altered state that I'm typically drawn to, which is a more classically psychedelic state. This was maybe something closer to... I mean, because in a lot of cultures you have also these ordeals of one kind or another that are also done to produce an altered state. It could be fasting.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It could be rites of endurance where you go on a very long hike, something like that. The intention is to create an altered state through suffering. And so it was a bit more in that direction, I'd say.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
mean the therapeutic benefit is typically if you're talking about like a sort of FDA approved conventional therapeutic benefit it's preventing pain during surgical procedures typically in the context of dentistry or it's sometimes used by EMTs or things like that in emergency medicine because
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
it's rapid acting so that's the benefit is that it kills pain it may also have some confined psychotherapeutic benefit maybe in treatment of PTSD or things like that it's been investigated but for the most part the benefit and this is actually one interesting historical quirk of nitrous oxide is that it was originally a recreational drug and then became a medicine and
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Often it goes the other way around where you have something like ketamine that's a medicine and then people realize that it has a really interesting effect outside of a medical context. With nitrous oxide, it was used for fun exclusively at first. There were nitrous parties and people would... Yeah, yeah. I remember. Yeah, like from a silk bag. Oh, a silk bag.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
This is like, I guess, pre-balloon era.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Yeah, it's it's not again, I would say it's not the most psychologically interesting effect. It's more like pure, hyper intense euphoria, which is one reason that people become addicted to it. Yeah. Like miserably, especially during the pandemic. Actually, it seemed like a lot of people started ordering it. And and also there was the all these giant cans of.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
nitrous you can order a lot of people developed issues with it now they're trying to prohibit it i don't think that's the path obviously but isn't uh wasn't kanye west addicted to it horrendously it probably still is from everything i can tell horrendously addicted yeah i think it may do you think that has anything to do with his psychological idea how what do you think happened there if you were i know this is like super speculative but like
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And I wouldn't go so far as to say that it completely explains it. I think it may be a contributor. I mean, I know people that know him. I know a little bit of the backstory, but a lot of it's publicly known. But when somebody is a celebrity and they're a billionaire and they're very, very powerful, they end up in an interesting power dynamic with medical doctors, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
which is that they can find a doctor to give them whatever the fuck they want. And the doctor is in a weird position where they want to please their billionaire client. And they also don't want to kill them or hurt them because it could result in the revocation of their license and the loss of the billionaire client. That's a lie.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So how do you please this person, give them what they want and not hurt them? And then if you decide, okay, this is getting a little nuts, we've got to pump the brakes on this, you know, and the billionaire knows that they can just find someone to replace you instantaneously.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So you can engage in a cycle of self-deception where you say, well, it's better me than somebody else because I really care about Yeh. And I'm going to be the one that's going to give him this and I'll be a little bit more cautious or whatever. This is what happened with Michael Jackson as well.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
So I try to be a little bit sympathetic to the doctors who will face criminal charges for doing this because they are like no one wants to be sympathetic to those doctors. They're in a difficult position. Like imagine you're Michael Jackson's doctor and he's asking you for propofol and you think no. no, I shouldn't do that.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
You know, I think that it is you said you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. I think that culturally we can develop an appreciation for carefully constructed ideas that are responsibly bounded by the limits of evidence. And. And when you have something like that, then it's all the more interesting because it's real. You're not playing games with imaginary ideas.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
But you also know that if you say no, they're just going to find someone else to give them the propofol. So what do you do? You give them a little bit and you try to monitor and you hope for the best and they end up in a really complicated situation. There's also, of course, that's a sympathetic response.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
analysis of what's going on there's also of course the very real possibility of exploitation and predation from people that are just using them for money and there's probably plenty of that as well so there's a dentist that i think he like lives in the same building as kanye and is enabling him with huge amounts of nitrous oxide that's like it i think um
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And, you know, this isn't – I'm sure that dentist is in a complicated position because Kanye is definitely capable of getting nitrous elsewhere. So what does he do? I don't know. But when you use nitrous continuously, it can result in all kinds of negative effects.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Like when I was in high school, the thing that people would always say, oh, you do a whip, don't you know you lose 10,000 brain cells or something like that. That was kind of the little like –
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
prohibitionist narrative that is not the case assuming that you're co-administering oxygen but it does result in the destruction of b12 so it can cause a b12 deficiency which then results in demyelination of neurons and creates a multiple sclerosis type syndrome where people start to lose sensation in their extremities and eventually lose the ability to walk.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
That's pretty extreme, which is reversible in most instances with B12 administration, but you don't want to get to the position of being in a wheelchair, even if it's potentially reversible. This is like
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
representative of a really severe degree of neurological damage so that's one of the things that can happen with continuous use and there's different people that have again this comes back to individual genetics as well because the way that you metabolize the the way that your body metabolizes homocysteine and some other things related to B12 metabolism also play a role in all this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It's a little bit complicated. So some people are more susceptible. Also, even your diet and your age, like vegans would be more susceptible because they have a reduced B12 intake, which is primarily from animal products anyway. Like there's a lot of things that go into this.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
But then you also have the reality that you're just continuously entering this dissociated state and it's going to make you all,
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
whacked out and could he could be doing that instead of taking treatments for bipolar disorder and becoming manic and deranged and maybe surrounded by people that don't have the desire or power to try to rein him in it seems like it's probably very difficult based on everything that I've seen and somebody can I mean it is amazing I don't know if you know people with bipolar but I feel like it's something that is often talked about as if it's not really that big of a deal it's kind of like
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
like schizophrenia is really really bad but like bipolar you just take like a pill and whatever but it is amazing how much damage somebody can do to their life when they're manic in like two days like i have a close friend of mine like if you are fully manic you can just destroy everything in a couple days so you are dependent on people reigning you in which is also complicated because the
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
When somebody is in that state, they don't want help. They will perceive any intervention as somebody attempting to silence them or oppress them in a paranoid delusion. So it's not easy. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
And again, I say this as someone who is extremely sympathetic to the excitement. I can't tell you how many of these things I've had myself. One that I've been looking at for years that's very fringe is this idea that astrology has been weaponized by the government, right?
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
I don't know. And the insane stress of being publicly scrutinized the way that he is. It's all very unrelatable, I would say, to the typical person. This is just like a life that is so abstract, so different from anything that a typical person would ever encounter.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
and it although you could say that it touches on issues that are relatable which is like what to do with people who need help but don't want to accept it um and is it you know humane to allow somebody to behave in a self-destructive manner and what is the line between personal autonomy And the need for a society to step in and prevent somebody from harming themselves. Right.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Where do you find that? These are complicated.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Oh, okay. This is in the final season. Okay. And it is an element. It's a noble gas.
Danny Jones Podcast
#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
It has a nitrous oxide-like effect. So this is one of – and it's always being explored as a healthier alternative to nitrous oxide because it doesn't induce this – damaging effect on b12 and myelin biosynthesis so it's a little bit safer arguably but it has all the same psychological risks do we use that in the u.s only experimentally it hasn't been approved by the fda for anything okay
Search Engine
The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
My name's Hamilton Morris. I am a chemist. I have a podcast that's about chemistry and pharmacology on Patreon. I made a documentary series about psychoactive drugs called Hamilton's Pharmacopia for many years, which you can watch. Watch for free on my Vimeo channel or a lot of other places. And I'm generally very interested in the chemistry and pharmacology of psychoactive drugs.
Search Engine
The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Yeah, so TNFD is an unusual substance. It's not chemically related to any of the botanical opioids or to fentanyl. It's kind of its own chemical structural class. It's a tricyclic that is closer to a lot of antidepressants. And that is actually... the area where it was developed.
Search Engine
The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
So there's a French pharmaceutical company called Servier that was exploring these tricyclic antidepressant type structures. And this pharmaceutical company, Servier, had a bad reputation already. They were the major supplier of fenfluramine in Europe, which is a very cardiotoxic and potentially neurotoxic diet drug.
Search Engine
The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
So the first time I tried TNF-TN was probably around the first time that I tried metragynine, probably around 2009, and I had to order a box of pharmaceutical Stablon tablets from France. And I had a kind of similar... I just have to say, you're a mailman.
Search Engine
The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
These are both, to this day, legal and certainly legal then. No one had ever even heard of this stuff really outside of, you know, people were really interested in this at that point. And it was a widely used antidepressant. And crucially, at that time, nobody knew that it was an opioid. So I took it and I thought, wow, this stuff makes you feel pretty good. This is interesting. I get it.
Search Engine
The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
This is a great antidepressant. I wonder. And so I followed TNAPT with interest after trying it. And What I noticed was an increasing number of reports of people abusing it, using massive, massive quantities, taking hundreds of these 12.5 milligram tablets. And there were some posts on various forums and Reddit with people saying these things like,
Search Engine
The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
I used to use heroin, and I swear that this stuff feels just like heroin to me. My pupils are pinpoints. I get this euphoric nodding effect. I really wonder if this stuff is an opioid.
Search Engine
The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
The mechanism that was considered the explanation for its effect was that it was a serotonin reuptake
Search Engine
The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
enhancer not inhibitor enhancer i even wrote an article for playboy years ago that described all of this like gee whiz isn't it strange that two drugs with diametrically opposed mechanisms one that enhances serotonin reuptake and one that uh inhibits serotonin reuptake are both antidepressants the brain sure is weird right right so there was something about this that was paradoxical.
Search Engine
The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
And then more and more people kept taking higher and higher doses. The evidence that it seemed to exert some kind of opioid type effect was continuously accumulating. Then there was a medical case report of somebody that had overdosed on TNF team tablets and their overdose was reversed with naloxone, Narcan, the opioid blocking medication.
Search Engine
The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Yeah. So this was a kind of like, isn't that odd that this serotonin reuptake enhancer is blocked by an opioid blocker? Yeah. Like, what's the deal with that? So it was pretty clear that there was something going on, but no one had firmly established it.
Search Engine
The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
And the answer was kind of the obvious answer that everybody expected, which is that it was a full agonist at the mu opioid receptor.
Search Engine
The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
For reasons that aren't fully understood, there are opioids that don't cause profound respiratory depression, relatively speaking. And for that reason, they... don't tend to cause fatal overdoses because that's the mechanism through which opioids exert their effect in terms of killing people is respiratory arrest.
Search Engine
The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
I mean, I wouldn't want to make that claim. I wouldn't, you know, say, hey, if you're struggling with opioid dependence issues, transition onto TNF. That's not something that I'm saying. But conceivably, that would work. And that's also one of the things that Kratom is very popular for, is getting off of opioids.
Search Engine
The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Because when it comes to our methodology for treating opioid addiction in the United States— Pretty much the name of the game is simply replacement therapy. That's it. If you go to a doctor and you say, I have a problem using heroin, they'll give you methadone or they'll give you buprenorphine, both of which are opioids.
Search Engine
The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
And the idea is just here is a safe, regular supply of an opioid that you can take every day that is considered to have a slightly lower abuse potential. But that's pretty much it.
Search Engine
The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Oh, certainly. Yeah, I think that's very much a possibility. One really important distinction that I want to make is that I think there is a huge difference between giving someone an opioid that they recognize is an opioid and providing something deceptively where they don't know what they are consuming. That is unacceptable. And unfortunately, it is incentivized by the existing legal framework.
Search Engine
The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
So if you were to say, hey, this is an opioid and it has this or that risks associated with its use and you should use it in the following way, that would potentially make it impossible to sell.