Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic
 salon.
 So, here we are back together again without a week in between.
 I have to admit that if it wasn't for this new book I'm working on, I'd be putting out
 two or three podcasts each week.
 I've got, I guess over a hundred hours of material that's already been recorded and
 my list of people I plan on interviewing keeps growing each week.
 I guess that's just a long-winded way of saying that it's nice to be back here with you again.
 Now as promised in the last program, I'm going to play the remaining 30 minutes of a trilogue
 between Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake that they held in Santa Cruz,
 California in June of 1998.
 And their topic, as you'll recall, is skepticism and the balkanization of epistemology.
 And when we left our merry triloguers in the last podcast, I think Terrence had just said
 something like, "Something is making the conversation difficult."
 And that's where I had to cut it off.
 Well as you'll soon hear, it didn't take them long to go on from difficult to uproarious
 laughter.
 So let's listen.
 Question authority, that's the word.
 Something that is making the conversation difficult and it has to do with propositions
 such as "Vitamin C is good for you" may or may not be true and people of good faith may
 differ.
 But when someone says, "People were cloned in vats 12,000 years ago and placed here by
 the denizens of an invisible twelfth planet," that's a different kind of proposition than
 that vitamin C is good for you.
 I agree with you.
 I think you have a good point there.
 Yes, but watch it.
 I think the way to the, I mean I believe in this area, diversity and free market approach
 is fine.
 I think what I'd do to denizen the people who have that belief is, insofar as I had
 funds and had any research responsibilities and so on in that area, I'd commission a review
 by somebody based in Santa Cruz.
 His first thing would be to leaf through the common ground catalogue and just look at what's
 available of theories of where we came from.
 There's hundreds of them in that catalogue.
 The index of advertisers really runs over pages.
 Just start right there and then do a review article with all these different theories
 classified, a kind of taxonomy of crank theories in a given field.
 Then you'd have a sort of summary at the end and you could have a sort of audience
 ratings within this class of theories.
 This would be sort of a national non-science foundation.
 Yes.
 It's called speculation, I was told.
 I think it's a huge field and it's in bookstores now.
 It's speculation.
 Have our books been hated yet?
 Some have, some haven't.
 Now take your work with angels, for example.
 I was shocked, shocked.
 Well, there you are, you see.
 I think a lot of my enterprises would fall far.
 If you had editorial control, I think I'd rather quail at the thought of sending them
 to your editorial desk because I'm not sure your judgment would be so capricious.
 I'd never know quite what mood you were in, whether or not my work on angels would get
 the imprimatur or not.
 Well, it does pass that historically our press is rather...
 It's deeper fluff.
 It's deeper fluff, perhaps more pernicious fluff.
 Well, Zechariah Sitchin at least made a claim for deeper fluff in his translation and his
 apparently gaining the ability to translate the Sumerian cuneiform writings and give us
 fresh translations and interpretations of old texts and so on.
 He was at least making a claim for deeper.
 You're denying him that claim.
 So even there, it's hard to locate a given exemplar in the two-dimensional scale of fluff
 that we've agreed.
 Well, but his cosmology calls for a twelfth planet.
 Where is it?
 There's a site on the internet that claims that every 100 inch or more telescope on earth
 is under the control of a worldwide conspiracy that does not want you to know that this twelfth
 planet is clearly visible.
 Now that's where I blow the whistle.
 Well, you don't need to do that.
 We just need a sophisticated...
 We need existing mechanisms extended, a consumer's report on speculation books.
 And in this consumer's report, you'd have...
 It would be like consumer's reports on washing machines and so on.
 You'd have this theory here and then you'd have a series of columns that said, "Any improbable
 requirement," and then you'd have, "Requires twelfth planet," and in this column there'd
 be a lot that didn't.
 And then it would say, and then the next column, "Evidence for special requirement," and then
 for the sun, the sun is smaller, and then it'd say, "None known," and so on.
 I think that's marvelous.
 And you could do the Zetetic and Microsoft and not concentrate on the New Age exclusively.
 All of these institutions are extraordinarily improbable.
 You know, Paul Feyerabend, in a wonderful essay in his book Against Method, points out
 that 95% of the scientists who have rejected astrology cannot cast a natal horoscope, and
 that the ability to actually cast a horoscope never seemed to be required of these high-tone
 scientific critics of astrology.
 It was something they felt perfectly free to dismiss without understanding.
 Quite.
 But you see, this would be the same, there has to be this dismissal level that we all
 operate, where there are certain things we pay attention to and certain ones we don't.
 In my case, you know, I include UFOs, I don't include UFOs, I include telepathy and so forth.
 When it gets to UFOs, weird extraterrestrial chariots, conspiracy theories, the CIA, I
 turn off.
 I mean, there may be UFOs, but it's not something I take any interest in, really.
 Although I meet many people who tell me I should.
 So I think we all have our own criteria here, and opinions vary, times change, and so on.
 Well, the hypothesis of causative formation, of course, favors deeper fluff.
 For example, astrology, which I think is very interesting, I think it's quite valid to reject
 it on scientific grounds without being personally able to cast a horoscope.
 Anyway, you can consult the World Wide Web and get a horoscope from any date and place.
 So the thing about astrology is that people say it works, and an argument could be made
 that even though the zodiacal reference frame that it's based on has no longer any basis
 in the sky, that it works because people believe in it, because it's in the M field, and because
 it's deeper fluff, basically.
 Homeopathy could be an example of a naked morphogenetic field, nothing but belief.
 That's very recent, started very recently, it must have built up this field very rapidly
 because for a short time they did expensive research.
 And I think it could be that scientific research done according to the best principles has
 a greater weight in impressing itself on the morphogenetic field or something, the racial
 memory.
 But this is actually a radical form of relativism, because what you're saying is if enough people
 believed in the Urantia book, it would be true.
 Yes.
 No, not.
 Not true, work.
 It would work.
 Astrology works for people.
 Alchemy no longer works because people stop believing in it.
 But probably the real truth is that astrology works for the people it works for, and the
 people it doesn't work for never mention it and have moved on to something else.
 Well, there's extensive research in astrology that passes all the tests of statistical significance
 and so on.
 Well, there's some, but I mean the reason people believe in it in newspapers and magazines
 and astrologers and so on has nothing to do with that evidence.
 They use it as a kind of background reinforcement.
 No, it's nothing to do with astrology really.
 I wouldn't call that astrology.
 No.
 Well, you see, I think that you could apply this approach, this consumer type evaluation
 approach to different sciences too.
 And you know, my latest thing in the Skeptical Inquirer, what I'm trying to do is extend
 the skepticism to the sciences themselves.
 And there's a very interesting paper in the current issue of the Journal of the History
 of Medicine on the history of double-blind techniques.
 Double-blind techniques were invented by Benjamin Franklin in Paris in about 1890.
 And they were investigated.
 Franklin was commissioned by the king, Louis XVI, to head up a royal commission to investigate
 the claims of Anton Mesmer.
 And the whole of Paris was talking about Mesmerism.
 The whole of Europe was talking about Mesmerism, animal magnetism and so on.
 And Franklin and the members of the royal commission were firmly of the opinion that
 this was some kind of delusion, that people believed in this, but it might just be a product
 of their mind or their belief.
 And so in order to test this, they developed blind methodologies where people didn't know
 who'd been treated or who hadn't.
 And their blind methodologies actually involved blindfolds, that's why they're called blind.
 They blindfolded people and then so they could still tell or detect the animal magnetism.
 And often they couldn't.
 So the blind techniques were then later employed in the 19th century, but then became the standard
 armamentarium of the skeptics against these marginal phenomena, first applied to hypnotism
 and animal magnetism, Mesmerism.
 When they were employed in the 19th century, they were applied against homeopathic claims.
 People said it's all just suggestion.
 It's all just their belief.
 So to test that, already with this precedent, they used blind techniques.
 And some of them I think did turn out to be suggestion, but some were not.
 And the homeopaths took seriously this criticism and they were the first group in the whole
 of scientific research to internalize blind techniques by running their own blind trials.
 They didn't just have the skeptics, they internalized it.
 This kind of debate went on in the earlier parts of this century against a lot of medical
 cures and claims, some of them apparently respectable use of enzymes that would cure
 this or that, and some of these were totally phony.
 How did you turn it?
 It wasn't until after the Second World War that the standard randomized double-blind
 clinical trial became the norm in medical research, and it didn't really become widespread
 until the 50s or 60s.
 So this is another case of blind techniques being internalized.
 Within psychology at the beginning of the century, when they were studying phenomena
 of the mind known to be subject to distortion, blind techniques were used in psychology.
 They were used in parapsychology in the 1880s.
 They had the same thing and they started using them.
 The result of my survey of blind techniques published in Journal of Scientific Exploration
 and summarized in the Skeptical Inquirer shows that this internalization of the use of blind
 techniques has in fact gone furthest in parapsychology.
 Eighty-five percent of published experiments are double-blind in recent journals.
 In medicine and psychology, where everyone pays lip service to the idea of blind techniques
 in practice, the number of blind papers or double-blind is in the region of six to seven
 percent of all published papers in the top journals.
 In British medical journals it's about six percent.
 In the American ones it's higher.
 I've just done a review of Annals of Internal Medicine, the New England Journal of Medicine,
 and the American Journal of Medicine, where the percentage of blind or double-blind trials
 is close to 20 percent.
 But that still leaves 80 percent of the papers not blind.
 Now in biology the number of blind papers out of over 900 reviewed is 0.7 percent.
 In the physical sciences, chemistry, physics, inorganic and organic chemistry and physics,
 the number of blind papers out of hundreds of papers reviewed is precisely zero, zero
 percent.
 We then interviewed top professors in leading departments of physics, chemistry, biology,
 and molecular biology departments at Cambridge and Oxford and other universities.
 And there, most people in physics and chemistry departments neither use nor teach blind techniques.
 They're just not used.
 They're not known.
 In some physiology departments they do, in some they don't.
 In psychology departments, of course, they do.
 In medical, they teach them at least.
 But at the most, the science is totally innocent of the idea of blind techniques, the idea
 of scientific objectivity.
 So biased, so unlevel is the scientific faith on which modern science rests, is that just
 because there are scientists in these areas, they believe that by putting on a white coat
 they become completely objective, not subject to the biases that bias medical people, patients,
 ordinary people, observers of phenomena, where everybody is.
 They're objective, true.
 And so I think there's a scientific investigation of this, I suggest, using, checking out blind
 techniques in the laboratory.
 Do you get different results in a physics experiment if you do it blind compared with
 doing it under open conditions?
 Actually do it by experiment?
 Does it happen?
 That's so biased has been this, that there's no skepticism being extended to normal science
 itself.
 And in my consumers' report on different sciences, I'd have a column, "Blind awareness of need
 for blind methodology, use of blind methodology, percentage of papers using blind methodology."
 And in physics and chemistry the awareness of the possibility of bias would have to be
 practically zero.
 And probably in the new age as well, they both could profit from this.
 It would probably wipe out most of the things I'm objecting to.
 Well the popularity of double blind methodology in parapsychology is obviously due to the
 difficulty of convincing people of the validity of results.
 And in other words, under the special weight of skepticism that's applied to the special
 fringe of speculation.
 So somehow there's a fundamental dialectic of the evolutionary mind that has to do with
 the balance and interplay between speculation and skepticism.
 These are the two forces at work and we want them to both be healthy and freely interplay.
 And then if a new technique like double blind experimental work comes up, then the interplay
 of these forces will guarantee that it's used.
 Maybe Terence, to summarize your case against the new age fuzz, is that there seems to be
 an area in the evolving mind where the speculation is not balanced by an appropriate amount of
 skepticism.
 You want to shine a flashlight of skeptical consideration onto that area of unbalanced
 fuzz.
 We're interested in balanced fuzz here.
 Well speculation and skepticism begin to sound like novelty and habit.
 So maybe these things are just counter flows in the intellectual life of the culture that
 redress each other.
 And though we do have certain long-running forms of fuzz, it does tend to correct itself
 over time.
 But we are seeing in the present historical moment an incredible fragmentation, syncretic
 theorizing and a richness of ideological competition that is just perhaps slightly overripe but
 due shortly to self-correct.
 What do you mean?
 What I see is on the fringes a whole lot of small cults like in California, all vying
 for space in Common Ground magazine, where you've got a huge competing market.
 What's keeping all those in check is competition.
 And if one cult does particularly well it grows, others fade away if they don't get
 enough supporters.
 There's a free market in these products and there's a great deal of competition.
 People who believe in, what are they, a pro-bono proctologist from distant star systems may
 not believe in some of the existence of the twelfth planet and are often in fact opposed
 to these other cults.
 So there's no uniformity.
 It's a free market, in fact a rabble, a clamor of competing claims.
 That's on the fringes.
 The main ground is occupied by a kind of Stalinist central control of all government funding and
 official science, which excludes this stuff.
 I think that, as I suggested before, a real free market approach opening up, getting rid
 of this monopolistic control, which forces people out onto the margins, would allow a
 more informed debate.
 And I think there's plenty of scepticism around.
 The fact that these crazy California and Hawaiian cults are not reported daily in the New York
 Times is because the people who run the New York Times are sceptical.
 And a lot of the gatekeepers of the major organs of our culture are extremely sceptical
 and I would say in some cases excessively sceptical of these things.
 It's not just the science community, it's the kind of hard-nosed New York Times editor
 community too.
 In Britain, most of our newspapers are not quite as hard-nosed as in the US, they're
 slightly better at allowing the unusual in.
 But the fact is that in the mainstream of our culture, scepticism reigns supreme and
 these things are actually forced to the geographical fringes, like California and Hawaii.
 And you happen to live in that ecosystem of competing cults, etc.
 I live more in the world where scepticism is the dominant paradigm.
 So there's a kind of bloom of superficial fluff now as merely a symptom of the rigidity
 of this monopolistic control system that's played outside...
 But I think it means that it's forced into this kind of fringe loony community.
 If these things were able to compete in the open marketplace much more, I'd...
 Ordinary scepticism, common sense.
 Common sense I take not just to be our own individual common sense but a sense held in
 common.
 In other words, a kind of common... a consensus view of what makes sense and what doesn't.
 And this changes with time and it's hard to document because common sense fluctuates the
 subgroups and subcultures with different common sense.
 But this is what's actually the opinion that peer review committees are designed to constitute
 within that subculture.
 That's the common sense.
 This is worth funding and that's rubbish.
 So it's the evolution of common sense and I think that will be influenced by these players
 of habit which common sense is generally conservative and novelty.
 And we've got that going on all the time and I don't think that much of what we do or say
 about what ought or ought not to happen or propose criteria by which we have a fantasy
 of ourselves as editors of some science fiction.
 I think we've got to wrap here on fluff.
 Honestly, I think we've completed a more or less Fluckian model for a bloom of fluff at
 this time.
 I'm not sure there is a bloom of fluff because there's always been, like in Norman Crone's
 book on millenarianism, you read all these lunatic cults over centuries with Emperor
 Jones and people killing themselves and these gas people in Japan and so on.
 I don't know if it's the fringe is larger now than before percentage wise.
 I think the publishing industry would tell you that it's an incredible bubble fluff at
 the moment.
 A bubble in the popularity of fluff.
 In sales and popularity and public interest.
 And that could have to do with the loss of public faith in science.
 And public faith in traditional religion.
 Which is the other ingredient in the rise of fluff.
 New kinds of people are making their voices heard.
 People from outside the male patriarchal usual membership in the club.
 And so they bring different value systems and different notions of what constitutes
 truth and insight.
 People from outside Western cultures and dare we say it, Limbers.
 It's not for nothing that the word mysticism is occasionally paired with the word menopausal.
 Never heard of that.
 Yes, but I think in the compete we've another five minutes.
 If you like.
 Yeah, we can always edit.
 I think in, I think that again the free competition is the answer because you have these different
 products, these different claims and it is actually in the end sorted out by market forces.
 New Age has a big publishing thing.
 Traditionally with religions you had competition between different sects.
 And if you have this thing you have mutual criticism.
 It's been impossible in Europe since the Reformation to believe wholehearted claims of the pape
 without question because there's a whole group of people whose entire institutional structure,
 the Protestants, is designed to question and reject them.
 And in almost every issue of Christian doctrine there's a sect that affirms and another that
 disputes it.
 So there's a wide range of opinion as there is in Hinduism, many schools of thought, Buddhism,
 different schools of thought.
 But I'm a little surprised because you seem to be implying that here is yet another area
 where the solution to all problems is the practice of untrammeled capitalism and the
 unleashing of unrestrained market forces.
 Welcome to the new millennium.
 Well in England where the Church of England is an established church but there were Methodists,
 Baptists, Congregations, Presbyterians, etc.
 Spiritualists, Unitarians.
 As in America, I mean we exported this diversity to the United States.
 It was founded in the midst of this efflorescence of religious diversity in England after the
 Reformation.
 The result of this was that they did compete, not through market forces in the normal sense,
 but they're competing for followers and if the Baptists grow at the expense of the Congregation
 they become more powerful.
 But all of these have been based on a kind of competition, different claims and a kind
 of scepticism because it didn't come from within that group or church or sect.
 It would come from other ones about them.
 And in politics you have this institutionalized if you have two or more parties.
 Their job is to be sceptical of the claims of the other.
 In law courts we have the adversarial system where you have prosecution and defense whose
 job it is to be sceptical of the other.
 In most walks of life scepticism is normal.
 We expect it in politics, courts of law, etc.
 Journalism.
 Journalists are more influenced by politicians and courts of law than they are by scientists
 or the New Age.
 And there the general rule is rules of evidence.
 Here both sides of the argument.
 That's the norm, the human norm.
 It's only in science that anyone can imagine that you could have a sort of total, pyramidal,
 hierarchical system of truth, textbooks, or in schools all teaching the same stuff, the
 basic consensus view.
 It's like the church before the Reformation.
 And I think that's the problem, that because of that we then have a fringe of sects and
 cults like you did around the edges.
 This is the Reformation model here, it's quite a relevant one.
 I think since the Reformation this greater diversity has meant that no absolute claim
 by any church is going to go unchallenged even by other Christians.
 And so scepticism and hearing different sides of the argument are built into our social
 model about religion.
 We know there are different religions on offer, different brands of Christianity, in some
 sense in competition with each other.
 And this is a much healthier situation than just having a single one.
 In science, because there's no way of these sects around the fringes ever achieving recognition,
 even if they were remarkably successful, it would take years and years and years before
 they'd ever get an NSF grant, generations.
 I come back to this idea of dissolving central control.
 In your line it would probably be bad because you're speaking in terms of rejecting relativism
 in favour of some kind of absolutism which is the alternative.
 I think it's still based on a kind of Bokomian model of some kind of central control of science
 and thought.
 But the reality is that that situation doesn't exist today.
 It exists only in science.
 It's the only relic of that old world view.
 It's the only universal system which is not open to the normal processes of challenge
 from competing points of view, having to justify itself in terms of evidence.
 This is almost the definition of science somehow, that it's to be an alternative to the diversity
 that has been experienced in world cultural history in the sphere of religion.
 Very early on people knew that in every town they had different gods.
 That was expected because there was no burden of the belief in monotheism and therefore
 religion, as far as theogony is concerned, had multiplicity of gods and goddesses and
 principles and spirits and forces and angels and so on.
 This multiplicity was acceptable even though some people thought that gods were more powerful
 than gods than other ones, who agreed that we've got a lot of gods and probably there
 are other ones.
 And so everything fit together in a context of diversity.
 Well early marketers brought the news that gods weren't saying the same things in every
 place.
 They didn't say the same things.
 And that launched skepticism.
 Some said it would happen in 2012 and others in 2013.
 But the fact is that science appealed to people who had lost faith in religion because there
 was, I think now pretty well dashed, hope that there could be a unique global planetary
 system of thought in which it's established the truth of everything relative to other
 things.
 And that's why it would be possible, many people would think it appropriate, that there's
 a monopolistic control of the funding in scientific research.
 Because each thing is going to be supposedly to reinforce, validate and confirm everything
 else because it's the idea of scientific truth.
 Now I think the idea of a free market in science would have to require giving up the idea that
 there is some kind of absolute scientific truth and the question would be settled either
 true or false according to this universal canon.
 And I don't believe in this idea.
 I think that's why a free market in scientific research would be good.
 However, I think that Terence, your insistence on clear thinking represents a deep wish that
 there could be some more or less universal body of truth that we are expanding in the
 evolution of mind by testing new speculations for fuzz and saying eventually after at least
 30 or 40 years of research that there is or isn't fuzz.
 That is to say, it's consistent with a formal system of logic, a kind of mathematical Aristotelian
 system of truth that is consistent with the obvious, provable, it's fair, it's true or
 it's false and so on.
 And this is, I think, a kind of thinking which is now outdated and I hope it would be very
 nice if true, but it's simply not something that we can really expect in any reasonable
 amount of time.
 There are inconsistencies and furthermore we're used to accepting them.
 So it could be that if science was liberalized in this way and was released from the yoke
 of Aristotelian logic and proof and statistical significance on the level of 100%, then it
 would become very much like religion where you would have groups like Anabaptists and
 Hindus and Shiites and so on who would believe in this or that sub-logical system.
 Environment.
 Yes, there would be one such group.
 Yes.
 And you have to wonder if this kind of diversity is going to be acceptable by this human species
 in the future or not.
 And what's the alternative?
 Well, there's some kind of death of the evolution of the mind in the dead-end road of a logical
 system, belief in a consistency of a logical system which is actually not consistent.
 Wow, how is that for a big question?
 Is the evolution of mind coming to a dead end?
 And if you're still hanging on wondering how the three of them answered that question,
 well, so am I.
 What happened after you heard Ralph pose that question is that none of them said a single
 word for 11 seconds.
 Then they sort of let out a collective sigh and decided to stop the tape.
 If you were my age, you'd be able to remember the Saturday afternoon adventure movies that
 were continued from week to week and at the end of one show the hero would be swinging
 over a pit of crocodiles on a vine that breaks just before the screen goes black and a big
 "To Be Continued" sign appears to the collective groans of several hundred kids.
 Well, that's how I felt when this discussion just ended.
 My hope is that they'll pick up on that question at the beginning of the next tape, but we
 won't know until I podcast it, and I'm not sure when that's going to be.
 Right now I'm planning on getting a couple more of last year's Palenque Norte talks from
 Burning Man podcast first, so until I get those talks out I'll be waiting in suspense
 with you.
 By the way, did you catch that part near the end where Rupert was talking about how skepticism
 works well in the marketplace of ideas in everyday life, but that in science it isn't
 a balanced market because fringe ideas seldom have an opportunity to take root and grow?
 That has obviously been true in his own case, and now you can find hundreds, perhaps thousands
 of other instances where the scientific community as a whole rejects a radical new hypothesis
 right out of hand, without any investigation at all.
 But fortunately the internet is changing the new ideas marketplace a bit, and so we now
 have public investigations of new technologies like things like zero-point energy that the
 Irish company Sterron has made available for public inspection by a widely diverse and
 quite large group of internationally recognized scientists.
 Without the power of the internet to communicate directly with potential researchers and investors,
 a small company like that wouldn't have a chance of creating a breakthrough of such
 magnitude.
 Let's hope their tech stands up to the test that's now being given.
 Now I'd like to go to the old email bag and pass along some information and ideas from
 some of our fellow saloners.
 The first one is from my good friend the Dope Fiend, whose podcast you can pick up at dopefiend.co.uk.
 In fact Dope Fiend is the founding father of the Cannabis Podcast Network, which is
 home to a wide range of programs that you might be interested in.
 In fact just this morning I listened to KMO's Psychonautica podcast for this week where
 he played an interview he did with Matt Pallimary, who you've heard here in the Psychedelic
 Salon a couple of times.
 It was a great interview in my humble opinion.
 It doesn't repeat anything from the interviews Matteo has done here in the salon.
 As always, good job KMO, keep those podcasts coming.
 Anyway, Dope Fiend writes, "I wanted to comment on something your listener James said to you
 in an email at the end of episode 88, continuing the conversation on first-time psychedelics.
 While I agree that mushrooms, particularly the more friendly Mexican mushrooms, are probably
 a good starting point, I couldn't disagree more on research chemicals.
 Firstly, James seems to think that research chems are legal.
 This is categorically not true.
 Research chems are chemicals which have not been granted any sort of legal status by the
 FDA.
 The only way they would be legal is if the researcher had a special license to study
 them.
 In fact, the law states that any chemical not approved by the FDA, even if you discovered
 it yourself five minutes ago, is illegal.
 What's more, while mushrooms and other natural substances are known to have been used by
 people for hundreds of years, there is no real recorded history of use with many research
 chems, and so little knowledge of whether some people might have an adverse reaction
 to those.
 The exception may be those chems explored by the Shulgens, but even these are nowhere
 near as thoroughly tested and investigated as the natural psychedelics.
 As far as I see it, anyone taking untested chemicals is not only breaking the law, but
 far more importantly is taking their life in their own hands.
 Therefore, I'd say they are definitely not the best place to start one's psychedelic
 experimentation.
 Good luck with everything, and I'll see you in the salon.
 Dope Fiend.
 I want to thank Dope Fiend for clearing that up, and I have to admit that it was a failure
 on my part to not mention that at the time.
 Dope Fiend is correct in pointing out that this class of compounds, loosely called research
 chemicals, while they may not be listed on any of the DEA schedules, almost all of them
 do fall under the "analog drug law" which is a truly insidious piece of legislation.
 I don't want to get into a long discussion here about the insanity of the war on drugs,
 because there are a lot of other places and podcasts that focus on that issue.
 But as Dope Fiend pointed out, it really is important to have your facts straight about
 the legality of these substances.
 Usually if a plant or chemical makes you feel good or opens your mind to cosmic awareness,
 well, it's probably illegal unless protected by a powerful lobby in Washington.
 Even more important, as he points out, however, is the fact that while there have been thousands
 of years of human use of these psychoactive plants, most of these chemicals aren't much
 older than a single human generation or so, which really isn't much time to build up a
 safe morphogenic field around them.
 The bottom line here is that Dope Fiend and I agree that, particularly for a first time
 experience, research chemicals are not the best choice.
 Another email that I'd like to comment on is one that came from Marco, who joins us
 in the salon from his home in the UK.
 After saying some very kind words about his enjoyment of these podcasts, he writes, "It
 was Chateau Hayuk who pointed me to the website in the first place, so kudos to them for helping
 to spread the word."
 Well, Marco, that's really nice of you to let me know how you found us, and I want to
 thank Jock and the rest of Chateau Hayuk for making the connection.
 And Marco also attached a picture of some art he created, and I wrote back and asked
 if I could post it on our blog, because I think that many of our fellow salonners will
 resonate with it.
 And of course he said yes, otherwise I probably wouldn't be telling you all this, would I?
 So if you stop by the program notes for this podcast, you'll see what I mean.
 And you can find our program notes page just by typing "psychedelicsalon" -- all one word
 -- psychedelicsalon.org in your browser's address box, and that'll get you there.
 So thank you, Marco, for sharing your art with us.
 Another salonner turns out to be someone I heard interviewed on KMO's Sea Realm podcast
 a few weeks ago, and that's Nat Bletter.
 Nat is an ethnobotanist, and I'll put up a link to his work on cross-cultural medical
 ethnobotany with the program notes for this podcast.
 Before I forget, I should mention that I'm going to begin answering some of the more
 general email questions on that same program notes blog that you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
 That way I can answer some of the more frequently asked questions in a place where they might
 reach others who are thinking about the same thing.
 And so this weekend I'll add Nat's comments about the Fairy Dream Flower, and I've also
 got a few more questions about ayahuasca that I'll try to answer in the notes from the Psychedelic
 Salon blog, which is the official name of the site you'll find at psychedelicsalon.org.
 Now getting back to the email Nat sent, it appears that an earlier email he sent didn't
 get through my rat's nest of spam filters, and I missed the fact that he was going to
 be speaking at the Ayahuasca Monologues lecture in New York City with Daniel Pinchbeck and
 others.
 But the good news is that it's now available online.
 And I just checked the link that Nat sent and it took me to a very interesting looking
 list of a whole series of ayahuasca monologues, and each one appears to be available in online
 video.
 So I'll post that link with the program notes for this podcast, but I'd better warn you
 that this looks like one of those websites that'll suck you in for a while.
 And as soon as I get this podcast posted, that's where I'm heading.
 So Nat, thanks for the information and thanks for being here with us in the salon.
 Before I go, I want to once again thank our fellow salonners, Terry, Corey, Patricia,
 I think you go by the name Patty actually, and Adam, all of whom sent in donations to
 the Psychedelic Salon in the past couple of weeks.
 I really appreciate it you guys, and thanks for everything.
 Also, I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
 are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareLike 2.5 license.
 And if you have any questions about that, you can click on the Creative Commons link
 at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage.
 And for any questions, comments, complaints, or suggestions that you might have, well,
 just send them to Lorenzo@matrixmasters.com.
 Thanks again to my friends at Chateau Hayuk for the use of your music here in the salon,
 and also a big thank you to you for being here with us again here in the Psychedelic
 Salon.
 So for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
 Be well, my friends.
 [Music]


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