SKRAPS: Deep Dive

A cast will help a broken bone to heal, a tourniquet will help to stop the bleeding in a limb, an aspirin will alleviate a headache, time (and ice cream) will help to heal a broken heart. But how do you heal a broken mind? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is but one of the psychiatric indications with inadequate, frequently ineffective treatment protocols, that has been in the psychedelic spotlight.

There’s no shortage of heartbreaking stories about men and women who have dedicated their lives to the service of their countries and endured unfathomable trauma. Add to this population the other sources of PTSD like car accidents, witnessing or experiencing violence - or even the threat of violence, sustained stress in traumatic situations (hello, COVID frontline workers - I’m looking at you), and you have an explosion in an untreated or treatment refractory population. 

Enter psychedelics.

In this episode, we are privileged to hear from Jesse Gould, a former Army Ranger, and Keith Abraham, a former member of the UK’s Parachute Regiment. These gentlemen both served their countries in combat tours in the Middle East and have suffered the invisible injuries of war. Each found his way to ayahuasca as a means of resolving his PTSD when pharmacological, talk therapy, and wholistic approaches failed him. Ayahuasca healed them when nothing else could; now, through their connected organizations - Heroic Hearts Project and Heroic Hearts Project UK - they are helping other veterans gain access to this highly promising combination therapy of psychedelics and psychiatry in what is now known as psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

In addition, we explore the story of how MDMA assisted psychotherapy, pioneered by MAPS' pivotal trials were done in an interview with Dr. Jennifer Mitchell 

This episode will take you into the personal stories, the science, the history, the future, and the promise of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. Grab a tissue, you’re going to need it. (And then go donate to Heroic Hearts Project so that we can help more people heal.) 

You asked for it and you get it! 

We discuss previously underappreciated personal stories of how the Psychedelic Renaissance was sparked since 1971. 

Description: 

1971 was the year when drug prohibition came into force. Did we tell you the story of how the tables were turned against the prohibition of drugs? Or did we tell you the hurdles that were needed to be overcome. 

Well, that's exactly the point of the episode. We are here to bring to you how the road to psychedelic renaissance was built. And if you think, it came from overwhelming people with data, just like how a typical scientist thinks, you would be amazed at the personalities who paved the way, as much as the ones that broke it for themselves and for the world. 

We discuss the unconventional paths taken by Amanda Feilding of Beckley Foundation, Rick Doblin of MAPS - Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies and more importantly, the trailblazers who initiated the clinical studies before anyone did - The Heffter Research Institute. We interview the original members - Dr. Mark Geyer of UCSD to tell us the never-reported personal stories of the creation of Heffter Research Institute and the Psilocybin studies. 

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Help ‘Em

You can’t fight fire with fire. Or can you? 

You can’t treat addiction with drugs. Or can you? 

You can’t bandage bruises to a brain. Or can you? 

You can never expect a cop to have compassion and fight the system. Or can you?

There are so many dichotomies when it comes to life and how we think it should be lived. We’re already starting to see the strange way that up is down and left is right. So, we’re ready to throw one more in your direction. Join us as we talk to Neil Woods, a former undercover police officer who spent 14 years infiltrating the narcotic underworld only to find that maybe the best way to beat ‘em is to join ‘em. 

Ok, maybe joining them is not the answer, but fighting the drug dealers, the suppliers, and even the users the way that we have for the past 50 years isn’t working; it’s time for something new. Neil has seen the roughest people on some of the roughest streets and come out the other side - not with vitriol and hatred, but compassion and a new vision for a path forward. And he’s not alone. He’s spoken before legislators around the world to try to change the way we think about and manage recreational and problematic drug use. Even if you don’t agree, you can’t argue with a man who has risked it all and forgotten more than you or I will ever know about these wicked ways.

Neil is the author of “Good Cop, Bad War” and co-author of “Drug Wars: The Terrifying Inside Story of Britain’s Drug Trade.” He is a former undercover officer with the UK police, a board member of the Law Enforcement Action Partnershiphttps://lawenforcementactionpartnership.org/ (LEAP) and an all around badass.

Conclusion: War on Drugs is wrong, unethical and impacts society in a bad way. There is no data to suggest it has worked.


In case you missed it, here are some golden nuggets to justify why the war on drugs has been a failure. We are joined by Dr. Julia Buxton, Dr. Jo Neill and Dr. Alex Belser of Cybin Inc for some candid Q&A on this policy. 

In addition, there are some fantastic resources below: 

1. https://twitter.com/BuxtonJulia/status/1406005245424058369?s=20
2. https://julianbuchanan.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/15-benefits-from-the-war-on-drugs/

Tomorrow, it is the 50th anniversary of the war on drugs. But we know the evidence collected since has shown that prohibition has only increased the problems. Join us for a session with experts for a live Q&A on Twitter Spaces. 
How do you get access to Twitter Spaces session: 

1. Join Twitter, 
2. Follow Arun, JoJo and SKRAPS. 
3.  You will see a purple logo at the top when it is time for the session.
4. Alternately, skip steps 2 and 4, by clicking on this link, set a calendar reminder - https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1mnxealWOkQxX?s=20

We’ve spent some time already on the definition of psychedelic - and we’ll spend more time before this series is over. But, Skraps is a podcast whose roots are run deep in the sciences, we couldn’t ignore the topic of the basic pharmacology of psychedelics. This episode is a primer for citizen scientists and holds some intriguing information for the bonafide scientists among us.

As always, we don’t just deliver science, we are going to start with core science and intertwine the stories of the people who made the discoveries - ultimately ending with an understanding of how psychedelics work. We’ll feature the work of Dr. Joanna Neill, a pharmacologist and Chair of the Psychedelics Working Group for Drug Science UK. Dr. Bryan Roth also joins us; Bryan is a professor of pharmacology at the University of North Carolina studying psychedelics with a pretty serious DARPA grant.

For a special treat, you’ll get to hear JoJo absolutely butcher some basic biology and pharmacology terms. Please DM Arun and let him know that you’d like to get the bonus out-takes of PsychedeRx.

“Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men? The Shadow knows!”

But seriously - who knows? And are the men evil? Or is it their hearts? Or is it the means that they employ? Can their cause serve as cover? Can there be righteous justification for some of the horrendous things done in the name of self-preservation? 

In the short gap between World War II and the Cold War, America was battling new enemies, both foreign and domestic. How could that be? How could the superpower that conquered the Nazis and fought off attacks from the Pacific suffer internal moral and ethical turpitude? 

Fear. Fear causes people to do amazing and improbable things. Fear of an enemy, fear of an unknown. They are powerful motivators and ones that Syndey Gottlieb embraced with every fibre of his professional being. The same man whose family would have been Nazi victims engaged in some of the most insidious “experiments” known to man - experiments based on the knowledge and tutelage of the same Nazi scientists who deployed the gasses that would have killed his own family. 

Join us as New York Times reporter and prolific author, Stephen Kinzer introduces us to the most diabolical personalities of the psychedelic journey to date. This episode includes nothing short of the best Bourne thriller - with murder, mayhem, science, spies, brainwashing, and oh so much more. 

And then… let’s bring in Mr. LSD himself, Dr. Timothy Leary. 

All of this came to a pinnacle, and contributed to the 1971 war on drugs. Join us as we explore paranoia, brutality, recklessness and glorification of recreational use led to where we are today. 

Drug discovery doesn’t happen in a vacuum. So much of the world’s geopolitical activities affect what happens both inside and outside of the lab. Lysergic Acid Diethylamide was such a curious drug that there were seemingly no limits to how and when it would be tested. Episode three of PsychedeRx kicks off with an LSD-laden military training exercise. Don’t laugh. It really did happen and we have the tapes to prove it. All in the name of science, right?

We bring back Mike Jay from Episode Two to bring some of the highlights from the lab of Albert Hoffman and how his cult-favorite bicycle “trip.” A day now celebrated around the world. We’ll see how Sandoz, the Swiss pharmaceutical company, passed out LSD to psychiatrists around the world in an attempt to find out just what the heck this chemical could really be used for - including as a possible cure for alcoholism.

As always, we want you to listen in and ask the hard questions. Were these incidents that shaped the reputation and the future of these substances use or misuse? Were they inherently bad, or was it their handling that earned the demonized notoriety? 

Hoffman's Potion Documentary Link:  CLICK HERE

Peyote crosses the border and causes a riot. Drug companies want their taste, and psychedelics reach the social elite. What could possibly go wrong?

In episode two of PsychedeRx, Peyote comes north to the good old US of A. And it’s not just for religious ceremonies anymore, either. Spanish conquistadors and European explorers, seeking to dominate the indigenous tribes, used Peyote to show force by banning its use and denying the tribes their spiritual practices. And we all know what happens when prohibitions are imposed - the use doesn’t stop, it just gets moved underground. James Mooney, an ethnographer dispatched by the Smithsonian Institute, is one of our best resources for this era. He committed to his diary first-hand accounts of the use of and backlash against peyote in tribal rituals.

As Peyote moved north, albeit underground, it became the catalyst for a series of events that were bloodier than an episode of Dexter. Wovoka and the Ghost Dance were the turning point. The execution of Sitting Bull led to the massacre at Wounded Knee - and it was all over peyote and freedom of religion - ain’t that an ironic twist?

Episode two also sheds light on the earliest interventions of the drug companies like Merck and Parke-Davis and their part in our little psychedelic drama. Arthur Heffter separates the resins from the alkaloids and isolates the first real information on dosing. We get a close-up look at how the psychiatrists and psychologists got involved - where they got it right, and where they got it all wrong. Psychedelics also make their way into the world of the social elites through folks like Aldous Huxley and Ken Kesey. 

We’ll close out this week with our first peek at LSD. So remember to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.”