Joe Rogan Experience #1136 — Hamilton Morris Transcript

Transcript

0:00 I try so hard. and most people apparently didn't know how fucked up we were. Yeah. I'd seen clips of you on YouTube, and it wasn't until I was driving home from that recording and my phone just filled with hundreds of emails that I realized, oh, wow, this is a serious phenomenon that I was not aware of. I think a lot of it might have to do with the long form

1:58 experience with that sort of thing, but I did Dr. Oz last year. And also the audience is such a strange element to add to a conversation. Applause applause applause and everybody goes crazy and they create the worst environment. I was on this So I iced it before I came here. I don't know how much that's worth. But when I took four, I was like, well, I took two for the first time I took it, I took

3:56 The stuff I take is Urban Ice Organics. All right. Yes. Aspirin. population, there'll be a number of sensitive individuals and someone will die. It doesn't mean that the drug is dangerous. It means that it's unrealistic to set a standard where if anything bad happens to anyone, we have to decide that the drug is dangerous and should be banned. Right.

6:29 opinion, safety isn't the point. It doesn't ultimately matter to me whether or not something It's ridiculous. because everybody hates pharmaceutical companies. So why not blame them? Right. But, you know, This is old news. of course it's going to be addictive. And that in and of itself isn't even a bad thing. his wife found out about Kratom because of you.

9:42 I don't know if you're aware of that, but because the government taxed opium and people started using Kratom, then they made Kratom But I feel, you know, yeah. It's closer to that than Kratom. primitive state, and there's so much to be learned. So we're mostly giving people these But when I was on it, I was very coherent. But he says he has a great workout by taking that stuff before he works out.

12:46 I always felt like people that did heroin or opiates or something like that were on a very short road to death. And I was like, he'd go back to work? you could do that. I thought you did heroin. The next thing you know, you'd just be on the floor And what you find is this whole idea of pharmacological determinism is fundamentally flawed. you strip nude. It was simply another tool for a psychiatrist to use and help people release

15:55 psychotherapy renaissance, because this was not just limited to psychedelics, people did And the famous Terrence McKenna line we're all holding when it comes to DMT. I mean, you can go down the list over and over and over again. and the fact that cannabis is still Schedule 1. alcohol. And that took 13 years to reverse. What was that like back then? That must have

18:54 you could say that prohibition Right. And then go to other drugs and go, well, this one, let's try this one. Let's make this drug war. Ideally, there's a little more complexity to it. Sure, there's certainly more complexity You just say, hey, you look like you might be streetwise. kind of illegal, do it but don't get caught. I don't know. I think we've got to get somebody in deep.

21:53 Yes. And one thing that I am certain will help, and it's sort of tragic that this is the case, It's a weird path. and more. I mean, even when they're really old, they're massively motivated by profit. The glasses dig in your head. an escape from the momentum of this life that you've created or that you've found yourself a and maybe give you a different perspective, I think is inherently therapeutic.

26:01 There's so many people that do. I, for whatever crazy reason, feel it a little bit with cannabis. Because if you have that in your mind, at the very least, it's going to reduce that sort of internal shame that you might feel and makes the entire experience healthier and more beneficial. issues in their life right now that they're perhaps trying to avoid, it becomes an uncomfortable

28:36 the exception of salvia because I was terrified of a bad trip. I'd talk to friends who'd describe Are you saying there's no such thing as a bad meal? or what to be careful of in the future. the best thing that can happen is you're going to think you're going to die but that is arguably things and I started calling people that I loved and telling them that I loved them.

31:19 and they're fucking convinced that it's been laced with something awful and that they're going to die. argue that psychedelics cause mental illness, but you can, and in some measures, it seems to seen someone have a complete psychotic break this was that he never recovered never he never typically happens in the early 20s, late teens, the same time that people typically have psychotic breaks and develop schizophrenia.

34:26 some other outlets for his energy would he have never gone down that road we don't know it's by high doses. looking at have actually typically been done before, not all of it. But the aim is to firmly You know, when people are, you know, when you're eating certain types of foods that are Yeah. I like your old show. and probably even for some of the chemicals found in mushrooms.

38:56 It's killing teens, a new drug. Huh. so people would take very high doses of it, They don't jump out of their bags and vials and attack your serotonin or receptors or But one thing that I thought was interesting about it is that he put a lot of the emphasis on the prohibition of psychedelics on Leary. And Leary almost certainly played a role. But I think it's

41:12 synthetic cannabinoid, AMB Fubinica. Who cares about AMB Fubinica? No big deal. Say that it where it's cannabis is good, synthetic cannabinoids are bad. Well, synthetic cannabinoids don't have And so they're thrown into Schedule 1. Well, what happens if 30 years from now, once the therapeutic talk about something but not make fun of it. It's what their job in a certain sense is to get people

43:40 I don't think it's even hard to sell. And when it came up in his trial for his divorce, he said that George Soros puts, he tests marijuana whatever they want most of the time. That's a great excuse from the perspective of the writer. and comment culture that has emerged provides no incentive for truth wrong thing than you'd get for doing the right thing. True, but the initial statement is much

46:44 Even if you, someone calls The potential for it impacting large groups of people is so huge now. been incentivized to do that bad thing. And that's a really sticky thing when we have this culture things. And there's some sort of a sport to getting pissed off about stuff. Instead of just Because it becomes a sort of addiction. It's drug-like in and of itself. I mean, I see it,

49:47 It's interesting that you were saying something because I live in New York. I'm like a whatever, just a nerdy guy that doesn't let me guess you live in williamsburg because it ruins people's lives who aren't your own. And you have to think about people that creatures, you know, and to just categorize something as negative or positive, I mean, one thing that worries me about the way cannabis and Kratom and psychedelics are presented is that it's always couched in

52:29 that's why I think you need to emphasize cognitive liberty. You need to emphasize people's right to We just openly. They're going to get into their lives and fuck them up. And then from The other thing is just, again, this idea of pharmacological determinism. No. You know, opiates cause horrible constipation. It's not an issue of it's so addictive you've got to stay away from it because it's so damn good.

56:23 Dr. Carl Hart was trying to explain to me what that is, moved to love that guy yeah he i have a lot of respect for him but i mean there's a i'd have to Yes, there are proposed ways to do it. So you take a drug like crocodile and it sounds horrible. So there's a scare story that I believe it was in Moscow, somewhere in Russia in, and The problem is that people were injecting completely impure reaction mixtures that had

59:24 There's never been a drug in history. And that is why if you look at the DEA's list of controlled substances, assume that it's a bad thing to feel good. Right there with diarrhea. because you accomplish something. You're not using drugs. Yeah. Whereas in other cultures, Or toad medicine. You could explain them to the layman or you could debate them with someone who was a doctor perhaps that wanted to, you know, to talk about the dangers of them.

1:02:47 Like one out of 10 people gets their body tested to make sure that while they're not working there, they're not putting anything in their body that's prohibited. that you're showing to a stranger. the synthetic cannabinoid epidemic, couldn't get high. This was a way that they could do it. And so they've incentivized people that effects have long since gone. Oh, yeah. Or even be the result of passive exposure.

1:05:14 if you saw about this, where people would get their urine tested for different, to quantify doesn't say anything about anything so it's just it's so juvenile in a way it's just such a it's I feel good having a good time at work. But I think the downside of that, there's so many people that are on Adderall today, right? And people will now, the kind of popular thing to say is,

1:08:09 What do they call it when they prescribe it? Yeah, yeah, and that he used to be on one of the elements of fen-fen, fen-fen? But even if he were on diethylpropion or fenfluramine it's again it's this idea there's a certain exculpatory value that drugs have people make Well, the idea is that to kill himself. But the reality is we can't make those sorts of assessments. We don't know other

1:11:12 really explain it? Because there's a hell of a lot of people that take those same drugs and don't And I just don't think drugs work that way. When people do cocaine they feel And it's not, I don't think it would explain his behavior. and I found that particularly obnoxious. Well, finasteride also has side effects of depression. It does occur, but it's not common.

1:14:02 It never stops. Kill the pigs. and it's a long and complicated story, determine human behavior? No. That's a very good point. There's a lot of factors. There's just, Totally unheard of. No, that was made illegal in 2011. You could buy it online. Drug users don't care about breaking the law. if you were to get high, he's not going to get high off this tiny supply of government mandated or government sanctioned Ibogaine

1:19:34 any drug I've ever studied. There's almost nothing it does not do. I mean, it's, you know, you have only things that is able to cause a regrowth of dopaminergic neurons in people that have parkinson's Yeah. in and of itself. You know, I had a friend who was severely, severely addicted to heroin, and he Why can't I just stop and then realize that the whole thing was a hallucination?

1:22:26 What's an effective dose? clinic, you need to get as much bang for your buck as quickly as possible. You're not going to periods of time, which would be ideal if it were legal in the United States, I believe. but I bet if we walked down the street and asked 100 people, I'd be shocked if one of them knew about it. That's how he would describe psilocybin.

1:24:50 That, if there's, you know, not to sound mystical, presidential race of, what was it, 1970 or whatever it was um that was a hilarious moment and a lot of people i think Yeah. It's more responsibility than I think they'd like to have often. you know, little pile of powder or whatever. And then the drug is made schedule one. Shulgin something weird about it. But yes, people did die because yes, people die from using drugs

1:28:20 He died recently. and lack of education surrounding fentanyl, that you suck or a patch. But anyway, it's not a drug that's well-suited to street use. whereas fentanyl can be made by one guy somewhere. what's going to happen until it happens. His idea was that one of the major burdens of being Did he really? His name was George Marquart. They probably did think that was the case at the beginning, but history has shown that

1:31:51 receptor agonists to kill you. That's a big one. We didn't know that until recently, that they can And I've spoken with the chemists that actually were behind a lot of these operations. they can be very enjoyable. that they make you feel good. So that's part of it. But then the other thing is the urine testing, You know, this bizarre pattern that certain people that smoke all day, every day, it started showing up in the medical literature about a decade ago.

1:34:33 So it's not hard to treat. Is it the cannabis itself? Is it a fertilizer? Is it a pesticide? and it wasn't some kind of fungus No, what's that? not actually exposed to it who smoked it. But still, this is a horrendous thing for the government to Well, I would worry about that with large-scale production. Like, is there anything that's coming up or some new thing that people might not be aware of that might be fascinating to you?

1:38:00 there is no evidence, really, no convincing evidence that I'm aware of. Who was the first person to do this? And I love these little historical That's it. And does it come, is it a pure form of 5-MeO-DMT? The analysis that I did wasn't quantitative, so I don't know exactly what the concentration was. assign it to the dose or the minute number of different tryptamines that are also present?

1:40:54 Seems like an annoying day for a toad. Hebrew and then transcribed and, you know, and translated to Greek and Latin and all of Mexico in Chiapas, there's a tree that grows there as a weed called Mimosa Hostilis. Maybe and you were doing a hot box sort of scenario, would you get high from it? there like if you were in a tent or something like that you were doing a a hot box sort of scenario would you get high from it no i i saw no would you it may be it's about

1:43:21 and they're not aware that it's psychoactive. an aqueous infusion and then dry that out and maybe smoke that. Oh, okay. Well, it's a very generalizable and simple process that applies to almost everything in chemistry. That's not a DMT specific process, but that's what people do. Everything with a basic nitrogen. And he was synthesizing references for these potential strawberry alkaloids and made DMT.

1:46:33 finding that all these plants that people worshipped in various indigenous societies they started extracting DMT. Okay. Would you have to use butter as your nonpolar solvent? Maybe it's just one of those things that sort of gets conflated, right? states without DMT. I mean, maybe it's never been found in the human brain, but also there's enzymes that could be responsible for it but even

1:50:13 They could be responsible. idea behind that, right? It increases the amount of carbon dioxide in your blood? I haven't seen a mechanistic explanation. and they would look at their response to the carbon dioxide inhalation and If you look up endogenous ligand for kappa opioid receptor, it will come up. David Nichols recently wrote a paper that actually goes into alternate mechanisms of how the DMT type near-death experience could be produced by non-DMT compounds.

1:52:30 motivations for a lot of this research in the 60s, finding the endogenous psychotogen that is tests where you look at your urine. So you find 5-MeO-DMT in your urine and your first assumption So even if you're consuming something so if something is so how do to achieve psychedelic states outside of consuming drugs. which is the ability to have these states and still interact with your environment. Because, of course, there's something very physically taxing about breath of fire

1:55:27 Because it matters. Because if you do it in this place that is superficially inappropriate, What is that like? where we're going from here. And you suddenly feel connected to something that's very real, I mean, the iPhone is 10 years old. I know. And that's really when it started. So 10 years ago, It's weird. all these articles and it's so useful. You learn

1:58:47 I got you. but there's still a shit ton of really useful information that you can get out I'll retweet it and people get a kick out of that so they'll send me more cool stuff and so I don't like it. that's unfair and wrong. sort of agree that this is a virtue worth pursuing i think we could change the way human beings to be mean to you. to win and they're trying to get back at you for what you said and you get back at them for that.

2:02:50 than nothing. And everyone's engaging with it. And you're buying into it, you're supporting it, We try our best. television. It's absent in all talk shows. It's like what we're talking about, the oddness of a panel show. I mean, And I'd be like, well, Hamilton, funny you bring that up. I mean, if you watch the news, communicate with each other person to person this This is what we're good at. This is what we've lost.

2:06:11 and occasionally if you have polite dinner companions that put their phone down and just Absolutely. where you can get a licensed therapist to massage you. You know, is a part of the experience of getting a massage. through this, and then work you through an experience. Ibogaine used to be a pharmaceutical in France, although it was used at lower doses that weren't psychedelic.

2:09:04 Union. In the United States, there was a drug called Monase, alpha Do you have any experience with cacao? He was saying that in large doses that raw cacao has some sort of a mild MDMA-like So when people say that chocolate contains caffeine, What about, do you ever fuck with nutmeg? Again, Shulgin was actually by training a biochemist, not an organic chemist,

2:12:43 Yeah. anything else. And most of the reports make it sound more like an anti-cholinergic deliriant hundred years of known use of peyote. Yeah. Well, okay. So there's different histories because 1918. Well, again, it's another one of these plants that has mescaline, of course, but then it has these other accessory alkaloids that modulate the experience so what's really interesting about peyote is it contains this

2:15:34 different alkaloids and it's very long lasting. It causes dramatic pupil dilation. It's extremely nauseating. I made an episode about peyote in the most recent season of my show. And on top of that, the Native American ceremonies often accentuate some of those punishing aspects of it, like water is conserved. And then you have maybe a 12-hour hallucinatory euphoric state that's very beautiful and strange.

2:17:12 No, no. it would take five years before it's the size of a dime if you grow it from seed. It can't be a greenhouse cultivated plant because part of the potency and the value is from its interaction with nature. it's so beautiful. And they would never even consider it because to them it's this prized to peyote, and it's a much more sustainable source of mescaline for that reason. It grows,

2:21:14 the cosmos the way people do when they smoke DMT. This is about fortifying your body, giving And what is the effect? but I could and not want to kill myself the next day. Now, if I try to drink more than three drinks, And about Ambien. She feels terrible about what she said. It's still in the news because they've decided to move the show on without her.

2:23:28 She was an older man. all just was just way too taxing on her physically. Then on top of that, she's on a And it's difficult to get off of it. If it's something like bath salts or K2, they're responsible for everything. disinhibiting drug. So, you know, here's maybe a somewhat analogous example That's offensive. But I had no control over this. immense quantities of Ambien and she would snort it. There's no reason to snort it. It's water-soluble. It has a fast

2:27:58 And, uh, just run over to my apartment and help yourself. And then it hits me, this flash of, and actually did go to my apartment, and once that's physiologically blocked, you become less racist, They gave him some medication, and it reduced racism. It was so depressing. That doesn't make any sense. It's also chemically very similar to 5-methyl DMT. It's not like a

2:32:00 What the fuck? It was very snarky. of negative memories, cognitive and motor functioning people shouldn't be taking it every day because you'll become horrendously dependent on it. Dr. Matthew Walker was on here as a sleep specialist, and he went into depth about it, gaboxetol that I did an episode about on the most recent season of my show, and that really does

2:35:41 You don't really hear too much about people getting real good experiences. Yeah. and the semen of that phallus are the spores. That all of Christianity is an ancient fertility know enough about these ancient languages to make an informed assessment of his claims. But, Yeah, because I haven't seen them integrated And then it doesn't really get vetted in a serious way.

2:38:59 that could potentially be toxic as well. So there are some legitimate toxicity concerns that I think anyone There's nothing else like it. It's legal to possess. And so I don't know. but completely different. And it's hard to articulate. All these things are hard to little bit i'm going to take a really high dose of this muscimol derivative at night to induce

2:42:28 you know, just this rushing sense of becoming a passive observer in my own consciousness and And people say, but, No, It's just hard for people to ingest it because of all the other material in the mushroom and the disgustingness of consuming it. What drugs have gone extinct? So when you talk about a plant like the peyote cactus that grows so incredibly slow,

2:46:05 Something like that. But, you know, you just don't know. Like some places, they might be more potent, like Cuban cigars grown on specific land have a distinctly more potent taste to them? put it in the substrate, and they found that the mushroom Jesus. natural products be natural products because they were derived from a substrate that we created? that human beings have created

2:48:51 Yes, I've met, but not people who I, wacky people. That was one of his books. You know, that's the way. Yeah, it's a complicated situation. say it? Yeah. Doesn't have LSD-like properties, but no history of human use? but there aren't many evaluations of the pure material. So the exact nature of the different Okay. Because it goes into lots of weird stuff. I just don't have enough time.

2:52:40 I will definitely watch it. So listen, this was way better than the first time we did it. Thank you. Yeah.