#2 The future of psychedelics
Micro-dosing, therapeutic psychedelics and a Q&A with Molecular Biologist, Nick Milne, PhD
Happy Sunday! Welcome to the second edition of Etcetera. This month’s newsletter explores the uses of psychedelics, and asks the question ‘will we be micro-dosing soon?’. You’ll ‘Meet My Friend’ Nick Milne, PhD, an expert on psychedelic molecules. If you are new here - subscribe to get my newsletter next month.
A few days ago I scrolled past a peculiar ad. I’m never sure what exactly the Instagram algorithm gods have in store for me, but here I was, staring into the void of what my micro-dosed brain could look like.
I fundamentally don’t like the idea that I am a worker bee who needs to ingest psychedelics to increase my productivity (and thus increase the profit of whoever is hiring me). If I am not productive enough to keep up without psychedelics, then the system is flawed and my workload should decrease.
It reminded me that while I was researching the impact of addiction on entrepreneurs for my PhD, I found that micro-dosing with psychedelic drugs - typically LSD or psilocybin mushrooms - is commonplace in silicon valley. Those who do it swear that it improves their performance.
Is micro-dosing psychedelics the latest fad in a trend that has us spending our money and potentially sacrificing our health in an attempt to increase our value in the labour market?
On the flip side, I see that the therapeutic potential for psychedelics is absolutely huge (I just don’t agree with applying them to make us “better” workers).
Like Gwyneth Paltrow claiming that she popularised mask-wearing in the pandemic (lol), silicon valley-ers are wrongly bragging that they are popularising psychedelics. In reality, psychedelics have been used for both medicinal and ceremonial use in indigenous cultures for thousands of years.
Psychedelic history
Psychedelics were re-popularised in 1957 following one serendipitous vacation to Mexico when an American banker and mushroom enthusiast brought back a sample of psychoactive mushrooms to the US. Later, he sent them to a Swiss chemist, Albert Hoffman, who is known for discovering LSD. Hoffman started producing psilocybin (the psychedelic component) for research purposes.
One such participant in psychedelic research in 1965 was 33-year-old Arthur King. Arthur was a patient in the alcoholic ward in a hospital in Baltimore. In an attempt to cure his alcoholism, he underwent an LSD psychotherapy session. Under supervision from the chief of psychosocial research called Dr Sanford Unger, Arthur swallowed the LSD pill, laid on his bed and began to feel the drug’s mind-altering effects.
Arthur recalled one poignant moment of his LSD trip. Dr Unger held out a small vase with a single red rose in it. Arthur looked at the flower and noticed how it opened and closed as if it were breathing. Then, when Arthur thought about taking a drink of alcohol, he noticed the rose suddenly turned black and dropped dead before his eyes. He never drunk alcohol again.
44 years later Arthur was tracked down by a journalist. He was still sober. He was still married to the same woman as he was in the ’60s. When asked about the long-term impact of his LSD experience he simply said: “It saved my life”.
Prohibition
Given such promising research in the ’60s, why did psychedelics have such a political backlash? The counterculture, the antiwar movement, the crusade for sexual liberation, and the rising popularity of yoga, and meditation have all been considered a consequence of the rise of psychedelics throughout the ’60s (all horrible stuff obviously). But, fearing such content hippies strolling around, President Nixon’s administration’s cracked down on psychoactive drugs. This became part of a broader political reaction against the liberation movements in the 1960s. All psychedelics were made illegal as part of the “war on drugs”.
A sad consequence of the prohibition on psychedelics was that studying them became basically impossible. All the advancements in research using psychedelics to treat languishing mental health and addiction stopped.
2020’s - the start of the post-prohibition era?
Bearing in mind that the demand for anti-depressants in the UK is threatening to exceed supply and that prescriptions have more than doubled in the last 10 years, researchers are increasingly exploring the use of psilocybin in the treatment of depression. Preliminary analyses from the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London indicate game-changing results.
Researchers have found that like Arthur, patients in psychedelic therapy often have epiphanies or revelations. They are able to see the bigger picture and access deep insights about themselves and the world.
Some are heralding the 2020’s as the decade of psychedelic breakthroughs. In America and Canada, both psilocybin and MDMA are being fast-tracked by the FDA after being labelled breakthrough therapies. Jamaica has just launched the world's first psilocybin research centre.
Yet the research I am most interested in how a single psilocybin trip, guided by a trained professional, can relieve “existential distress” in cancer patients. One study which was randomised and double-blind (the gold standard) found that psilocybin “produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer”. In response, the Canadian government is allowing people with terminal cancer to legally consume psychedelic mushrooms as part of their end-of-life care (hurrah).
There is a clear benefit in using these substances in a therapeutic setting! But nevertheless, the question remains, will we be micro-dosing any time soon?
Meet My Friend ft. Nick Milne, PhD
Nick (a fellow Kiwi in Copenhagen) is a co-founder of Octarine, a crazily awesome startup that uses micro-organisms to produce cannabinoid and psychedelic molecules.
Nicola: Can you tell me about your company?
Nick: We are a drug discovery company. We believe in the power of psychedelics to transform both mental health and a range of neurological conditions. There is a mental shift in the way that these molecules are perceived, which is great for humanity.
What we do, which is inspired by our background as biologists, is discover ways to produce these molecules. We use yeast fermentation (to produce psychedelics). We engineer yeast to produce cannabinoids or psychedelic molecules. Our production facility will look like a brewery. We will have these big fermentation tanks and yeast grows in them and instead of making alcohol they make new therapeutic molecules.
Nicola: What is the general perspective on psychedelics?
Nick: When we started this company cannabinoids were still a little bit iffy but peoples’ perceptions were changing. Now three years later it’s fairly mainstream. It isn’t too controversial to say you want to give people cannabinoids to treat various illnesses.
Psychedelics are kind of 5 - 10 years behind cannabinoids, it’s a much further leap for people to be ok with psychedelic drugs. But cannabis is helping push that a little bit. If people are more willing to accept cannabis, maybe they are more likely to accept psychedelic drugs.
We still face a lot of stigma for working with these molecules, and we find that a lot of people can’t look past the fact that these are illegal molecules. But the data is so impressive I think it’s causing people to look past the fact these are illegal molecules and to think wow these have real potential that we should make the effort of doing something about.
Nicola: Why is so much focus on the harm of psychedelics?
Nick: A lot of the blame lies with governments that enacted these policies. Nixon and the war on drugs had a trickle-down effect. It was Nixon that banned these molecules before other countries did, and then all the other countries followed. Research funding into the therapeutic potential of these molecules dried up from this change.
Research was being conducted to look at the therapeutic potential of these molecules, but it shifted to look at the abuse potential of these molecules.
Nicola: In terms of using psychedelics in the workplace, do you see that becoming a trend in the future?
Nick: It’s only in the last year or so that proper research has begun looking into micro-dosing or looking beyond trying to treat sick people, but we just don’t really have the data to draw any solid conclusions.
I don’t think that stops it from becoming a trend. But I don’t see it becoming a long term trend because firstly these molecules are (currently) illegal and when approved they will be strictly regulated as pharmaceutical therapies and not consumer products. It’s difficult for me to see people being able to legally buy and consume psychedelic drugs without strict medical supervision.
Nicola: What do you think of legalising psychedelics for consumer use?
Nick: We can see many places where cannabis is legalised for consumer use. With psychedelics, there are two possible consumer markets. One is where it’s like how you can buy cannabis, which is not likely to happen. The other is where it’s legalised but it’s heavily regulated, for example in Oregon and in the Netherlands.
In Oregon psilocybin will be legal but you can only take it under controlled supervision. Anyone will be able to pay money, go to a clinic in Oregon and have a supervised trip.
Nicola: Do you think this will be a mainstream way of treating depression in the next 10 years?
Nick: It’s not very far away. I think MDMA is like 2 years away from being approved. Psilocybin is probably 4 years away. The data is so convincing, I think it will cross the line and get approved.
I would expect in 20 years that people will be taking cannabinoids in a pill from their doctor and getting prescriptions to go to clinics for supervised psychedelic trips.
OK, so mainstream micro-dosing seems unlikely (phew we aren’t android workers). But I can definitely imagine a future where people go for an afternoon “trip” to a clinic sometime. Beyond the consumer market, the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs has definitely made me hopeful for a future where we exploit all the resources available to us to improve chronic mental health struggles. We already use tramadol and opioids for pain, we should aggressively pursue all therapies which could alleviate suffering.
I know many people assume psychedelics are a big no-no, so let’s end with this:
“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.” (Isaac Asimov, 1919–1992)
Thank you for being one of the readers who read my writing in February. This month 10% of the profit made from my readership was redistributed to Wellington Homeless Women’s Trust, a charity dedicated to providing support and accommodation to homeless women in central Wellington, NZ.
Some things I consumed in January:
This article ‘People with extremist views less able to do complex mental tasks, research suggests. This is ESSENTIAL reading (lol sorry for the caps). It’s fascinating to me that our cognition and way of perceiving information could relate to our political worldview. Please read this.
Rana el Kalioby’s book “Girl Decoded: A Scientist's Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Intelligence to Technology”. Rana is the founder of Affectiva, the AI company responsible for producing the machine learning algo I am using in my PhD. This book weaves in Rana’s experience of being a Muslim woman in a tech startup scene in the US and details her mission to humanise technology.
This video where scientists cloned an endangered black-footed ferret for the first time. This is intense! They used the genes of an animal that died 23 years ago!
Bill Gates new book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need”. An interesting point / counter-point to Vandana Shiva’s work on biopiracy.
This great newsletter you might like called “Wild Ones”. Wild Ones is a weekly digest of thought-provoking research, creative and inspiring ideas, and practical tools from ecolinguistics and environmental communication. Written by Gavin Lamb, PhD, check out his writing here.
This article “Mars Is a Hellhole” details why Elon Musk’s desire to escape to Mars, a fundamentally uninhabitable planet is rooted in greed and ego. It’s an interesting read.
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