Robin Carhart-Harris

I am here with Robin Carhart-Harris.

Robin, thanks for joining me again.

Thanks for having me on.

So remind people where you are doing your research on psychedelics.

I'm at the University of California, San Francisco.

I have my lab there.

What's the focus of your research at this point?

It's consciousness science and how it's encoded in brain activity.

That's a big part of it.

How can we use psychedelics to try and tackle that question?

And it translates into therapeutic applications of psychedelics as well.

I also look at harms.

Yeah, so try and cover much of the full gamut of psychedelic science and research.

Yeah, well, I want to get into all of that.

I guess, big picture to start, what are your impressions of the state of the field at this point?

Where are we with research on psychedelics and therapeutic potential and safety?

I mean, how vulnerable are we to having the rug pulled out from under all of this by some new regime of there being a war on drugs?

I mean, what's your perception of the field, high level?

Well, it's rich and complex.

We rode a wave through a kind of peak of a hype cycle, perhaps after Michael Pollan's bestseller, How to Change Your Mind, published in 2018.