Women, Psychedelics, Autonomy and Eugenics with Erika Dyck

[Music] [Music] Welcome to Synchronicity. My guest this week is Erica Dyke. We had an awesome conversation about, as you can tell from the titles, the whitewashing of women in psychedelics and specifically how Saskatoon and Canada actually was kind of an epicenter for the original psychedelic research back in the 50s and 60s for a variety of reasons which we get into but how the women who were often critical components of this research have just completely been omitted from the history books and the reason I'm so interested in this is if you've heard the earlier episode I spoke about Michael Pollan's book being quite good but one of my critiques of what of it was that he just really did not represent or do any type of exploration into women's role in psychedelics and I think as you'll hear in this episode there's a lot of things that women can provide and bring not that men can't but that the balance of those energies and kind of perspectives can ultimately be much better for the overall kind of picture of what we're getting with psychedelics. You know I think Michael Pollan mentioned Maria Sabina obviously the Mexican woman who introduced Alan Lawson to psychedelic mushrooms and Kathleen McLean but outside of that really not too much focus on it and I think it's very important whether it's women minorities just underrepresented people in general that we do shine lights on what they've contributed and what they continue to contribute to whatever we're interested in because it can be very easy to forget that white men and white people in general have been running things for a very long time and that doesn't mean that other groups of people haven't been contributing and in most cases or a lot of cases they've been exploited so the the more we can do to kind of shed light on what the role of women and other underrepresented elements of society have contributed is a very important thing to do. I also want to mention something that's going on and you'll hear about all this in the episode we get into eugenics that was going on in Canada some really fucked up shit also a something that's very close to my heart from the people who know me you know mental illness right I what is mental illness how we classify these things is more ambiguous and probably less cohesive than people imagine reality is something right we kind of can have a consensus agreement on what constitutes normal and what constitutes not normal and that is a slippery slope right because if someone doesn't fit into the normal aspect of society it is not a very far it's a stone throw from stripping them from kind of regular rights that other people enjoy and we've seen this throughout history and many different permutations so yeah this conversation is is very fucking awesome and I think you're gonna enjoy it I want to mention a new podcast that is coming to mind pod network in the coming days it's out now you can go check it out Mara James MA you are a Mara James has a podcast called unbroken chain and it is phenomenal I've listened to every episode there seven maybe eight by the time you'll hear this and it really is an answer to my prayers my friend Sean done from very eight pit me up and was like listen Mars my friend Mara has this podcast it's really good so yeah check it out Sean and lo and behold it is the answer to my prayers like I said I've been looking for a show for a podcast that is not only based in steeped in feminine wisdom but and not only has a woman you know running the show but something that can balance out kind of the the more make mindfulness aspects of spirituality and I think the more I can do with mind pod network and we can do to kind of make inroads into that kind of calcified intersection of capitalism and spirituality the better we're gonna be for it and that's exactly what Mars doing it is I won't I don't want to give it away but I it's just fucking incredible truthfully I haven't enjoyed a podcast this much maybe ever truthfully it's incredible so that'll be up on mind pod network soon but go check it out on iTunes and other places unbroken chain is the name of the show I'll this this episode is brought to you by sinus infections I a month ago said went to the store I said hey got anything that's gonna just make me feel like shit for a month that it's just not gonna go away and I'm not gonna be able to sleep and I'm gonna have to blow my nose all the time and I'm using the nitty pot a million times just have to take a thousand showers do you have anything like that that I can pick up sir and he was like yeah I got just the thing for you it's called the sinus infection so I took it home started getting involved and yeah man holy shit all of those things promised guaranteed it's been pretty much a nightmare but I will say I believe I'm coming out from the end of it at this point it kind of was a gift it made me reanalyze and kind of just put the focus on what I was putting into my body and how often I was putting things into my body I mean nothing really will do that quite like an illness to me you reevaluate what the fuck you're doing but yes on its infections thank you for sporting the show big sponsor love it now time for a real ad thank you to myster who is supporting the show go check out their products at getmeister.com 15% off at checkout when you use the code sync s y n c I'm getting a care package of some stuff that I'm gonna have some individual product reviews in the coming episode so stay tuned for that this is my friend Davis he's been on the show before doing some really cool stuff also has a very cool kind of project that you'll be hearing about that I'm involved with in the coming weeks okay I think I've covered everything I need to cover yep yep yep yep yep okay oh no no no big thanks to Patrick name check patreon patreon I'm there whatever blah blah blah blah that's it how about we just get to the episode without further ado here is Erica day Erica how are you sorry to make you rush back to your office oh no no that's all right I knew it was gonna be that way cool I want to just get started sure okay cool so thank you for coming on I actually got tuned into you I I don't know who retweeted it but I read the article that was an interview with you basically talking about the whitewashing of women from psychedelic history which I knew obviously happened but didn't realize kind of the extent of women's role with some of the early psychedelic pioneers and then I just kind of researched more of what you'd been studying and I think we're gonna have a lot of fun stuff to talk about here so thanks again for doing this cool yeah no I'm happy to so I guess let's let's start with LSD and in the clinical setting and I heard I think it was on Paul's third wave podcast where you said kind of what got you interested in you said it wasn't an interesting story I actually found a pretty interesting but what what what what was kind of the what did you find out when you started researching the history of LSD back pre kind of Timothy Larry Leary like 60s explosion what were some of the kind of the main takeaways you discovered yeah I mean as I probably said in the other one I don't remember exactly what I said but I started off because I was interested in why this windswept place on the Canadian prairies had you know become the the epicenter for this interesting medical research and in a variety of different ways in sort of public policy sides and health policy in creating different approaches to public health care services I was originally interested in why this particular place had become a hotbed of research in a variety of different areas a lot of it relating to health care policy but also different kinds of medical research that was in the context of looking for why kind of socialists were coming together with different kinds of research ideas and within that context I found this group of people who became dedicated to the work of psychedelic research and of course these were the people who also coined the word psychedelic and so I was really interested in this period in the early 1950s that extended really into the mid 1960s and it captured a kind of earlier not quite generation but an earlier phase I suppose of this exploratory research with hallucinogens you know before they had that word psychedelic to use right and as they were trying to figure out what kinds of tools these were for understanding different levels of consciousness for insights into mental disorders to chemically alter our perception so that we might trigger a kind of empathy and all those kind of questions started to really fascinate me particularly as they worked in tandem with different ideas about how to deliver health care policy so what was your kind of initial impression of LSD being used clinically did you have either personal or anecdotal experience before that that kind of influence your idea of what you would be studying or did you just kind of go in like oh what is this I wouldn't say that I was naive enough like I'd heard of LSD you know I was familiar to some degree with it but but it wasn't because it wasn't LSD that led me to this project right right this really the politics that led me to LSD if that's a way of answering the question you know I was born in the 1970s so I grew up in a time when those just say no campaigns were in full swing and that was the kind of rhetoric that I grew up with and certainly was part of my you know health education you know in your gym classes and whatnot we're trained to see a frying egg in a pan right right right and so I mean that's the context in which I grew up that doesn't necessarily mean that's those that reflects my beliefs but but certainly it wasn't really an open culture for discussing these things as having any kind of real lasting value and I always found it quite ironic my father's a farmer and you know we sort of had these parallel conversations about the way that we use chemicals to enhance productivity and food production and the way that we accept certain chemicals in our bodies to change the think or the way we experience pain or whatnot and yet other chemicals are considered you know in no-fly zone in places where you're not allowed to talk about that it's super taboo and so that always kind of interested me though like how these things get decided who wait whose interests are at heart well I mean I just you know in doing my cursory research of of what you're studying it seems like that's kind of a common theme through everything whether it's kind of the eugenics stuff or the psychedelics or the reproductive rights like there's and what I found particular interesting psychiatry and kind of mental illness and how these things kind of intersect and how a lot of these policies aren't really developed with baby the most altruistic intentions but maybe there is some other element getting weaved in there so in the early days of psychedelic research what were what was going on well you know it's interesting and and thank you for the question I mean I think that I think that in some ways they didn't really know what was going on and you know it's easier for me in hindsight to give some coherence to the work that they were doing you know the luxury of looking back on this and also you know not too many people from that time speaking back to me and saying no that wasn't how it was but I think that at the time despite really clear ideas about what they were hoping to achieve it didn't really cohere naturally until much later so initially people were I mean if I say initially when I'm talking about the early researchers in Saskatchewan at least so 1951 was when they first got started they were there were two parts to that I think one is that they were curious about what these experiences help them to understand so really self experimentation was the driving person the early days and the second piece was they were quite aware of the relative research flexibility or freedoms that they had to explore things and to sort of challenge big ideas in some respects they were given that as a mandate from the health performers against or on the political side of things you know what can you do and it wasn't just carte blanche but certainly they were encouraged to think about you know what are some creative ways like how do we think outside the box so to speak in terms of treatments for in the domain of mental health research which of course had been stagnating it for a long time and really wasn't going anywhere so I think those things combined to allow them to have maybe not just the creativity but also the confidence to try new things and that allowed them to I think I that allowed them to really sustain the kind of research with psychedelics that maybe they wouldn't have done otherwise yeah that's that's interesting to me that there was so much self experimentation going on which to us kind of you know 50 60 70 years later seems like oh well that's not how you do a scientific experiment but it's given that it was so novel and it was such a kind of explosive catalyst for the mind it makes perfect sense that you know they would give it a shot and then I can only imagine you know how the research evolved because of that and it's very interesting because it's just it's not how at least in my understanding clinical studies are done these days right you have someone administering these in a set and setting you know drawing on years of research of course but it's not like these people are as far as I know you know researchers aren't taking LSD with their patients when they're trying to get to the bottom of what's going on or before at least not as part of the study so that's fascinating yeah and I mean it's interesting if we kind of you know if you think about this in a historically contextualized ways we sort of flip the switch here a little bit now we think of it as being like probably unethical take drugs with our patients right or we don't even take medicines with our patients if we want to frame it in that way but if we but if we kind of turn the clock back a little bit and we imagine what's going on in the 1950s so 1952 is the first year in in Europe at least and it's two years later in North America that we get the first anti-psychotic medication and that really starts to turn the scales I suppose in terms of the the way that we are accepting psychopharmaceuticals into that treatment space so before that you had people maybe had other different treatment options and we could argue that they were largely ineffective but nonetheless the treatment options available were were different not drug related but there was psychoanalysis on the horizon and certainly in a way and one of the ethical approaches or the sort of moral or ethical approach that was governed by the psychoanalysts was that you had to go through therapy first before you could provide right right right so in that sense it actually kind of fits the model you know it even though we're adding a chemical substance now that much of the kind of mainstream research or mainstream therapies at the time if we think about it in terms of psychoanalysis required therapists to experience it first themselves yeah that is a very interesting thing that out now because that's kind of fallen by the wayside but but I think it actually kind of makes sense you know and it also allows us to imagine that this could have been considered ethical well I mean not only is it does it seem not unethical it seems like for anyone who's taken a psychedelic something you would hope someone had gone through before experimenting on other people are giving it in a therapeutic sense because you know as opposed to something maybe like an antidepressant if you're not depressed you don't have any real need to take that LSD will have an impact on your consciousness regardless of where you are in the spectrum of mental wellness so it does it does actually line up quite a bit but I mean obviously to us now it feels like you're crossing a line there that that's not something you're supposed to be doing you're you're supposed to be this distant kind of applicant you know a plier of this stuff to other people but that's that's fascinating that they were doing it so like what are the early who are some of the early pioneers in Saskatchewan for LSD research well I guess the the main guy who comes to mind is Humphrey Osment he's of course the psychiatrist who coins the words psychedelic through his correspondence with Aldous Huxley he had arrived in Saskatchewan in October of 1951 from England and he came over with this family was wife and then one child he had two other children after that and they he became very quickly the superintendent of the largest provincial mental hospital in the region and he was there for 10 years he worked very closely of course with staff in Wayburn but also with a research psychiatrist in Saskatoon named Abram Hoffer. Hoffer had grown up in Saskatchewan had gone away to train and got a BA in agriculture before or sorry not a BA BSC and a PhD in agriculture before he went into medical school and ultimately into psychiatry he came back to Saskatchewan and really was interested in different kinds of I mean today we might say preventative approaches to mental health and nutritional approaches he ends up getting even more I think I would argue he's even more well known for the work that he did an orthomolecular psychiatry or vitamin based therapies which kind of is consistent if you think about you know the way that they were approaching psychedelics was something that you take once and this gives you insight in it said to want a path of recovery right this was really attractive to a government that was also very keen on developing a system of health care that was financially feasible a lot cheaper than a lifetime of dependency on a particular psychological substance on long-stay possible care what a novel idea yeah but the vitamin therapies kind of fit into that model as well because these were not patentable substances they weren't gonna make a lot of money they're relatively accessible people can take them on their own it's not going to create a big financial burden for one to take to improve their nutrition he argued in order to prevent psychosis and so you sort of see these things working in tandem and that kind of I think gives a bit of a flavor of the the I don't want to put too strong a point on it it's not that they are all ideologically committed to the same goals necessarily and yet I think they're very interested in the interface between sort of public health and not clinical interventions well it what's interesting to me about it it's kind of like the same approach of Timothy Leary's idea of dosing everyone you know it's like the actually if you were gonna do that it would probably be best to have some protocol that you could you know and a context in a certain setting where it could be useful for people rather than just putting in the water supply and freaking everyone out it's it's fascinating because like to me just share a personal story here I had a kind of break from reality in 2003 and 2004 I took I had taken LSD many times before but I took it this one time and didn't end up stop tripping for about three months it was a three-month trip there is no LSD obviously in my system that would have had that type of impact it long been released but it shifted something in me where I was tripping for three months through the dreaming and waking state it's why this podcast is called synchronicity everything was a big synchronicity but something that happened during that time period is people on the street street people would flock to me I mean it was the weirdest thing I think I've ever experienced just being out there schizophrenic people bipolar people homeless people people people who didn't have kind of an interfacing with regular consensus reality found me and I was able to have coherent conversations with schizophrenic people it wasn't that we were talking you know about politics or anything like that but I could see the threads that connected their seemingly disparate thoughts so the idea of finding something like a psychedelic to kind of give a window into the schizophrenic's mind to me is a fascinating kind of exercise and also would potentially have put kind of some of these early studies and researchers kind of on a an amazing platform to study this stuff rather than just looking at it like hey you're on this spectrum you're crazy we're gonna treat you with this thing to kind of numb what's happening because to me you know it's not a maybe a popular opinion but I think some of the clinical diagnosis we give for mental illness you know are about as close to a rough approximation as we can get with what we're using so was there any kind of interface into looking at LSD related to mental illness rather than kind of a preventative you know we're gonna do this for healthy people and you know try to solve you know whatever internal kind of complexes or issues that were going on was was that something that was done absolutely I mean I think very quickly this translated from some degree of self-experimentation that I say that perhaps I should clarify some of the researchers took it only once some took it several times it wasn't necessarily something that people revisited frequently it was they did definitely consider it a sort of window into psychosis yes and some of them went in in various specific directions so Humphrey Osmond worked with a psychologist named Robert Summer and they collected biographies that were written by people who hadn't identified as schizophrenics or who had been labeled as schizophrenics who there's some contention there and part of what they were very interested in and part of what I think kind of drove this program was this desire to understand for lack of a better way of putting it empathy plays in healing so in some ways in healing so making people feel better but also healing in the sense that it might make people feel better to accept the way that they are not sort of fixing but confronting differences getting insight into differences and so what you were relating in your and your experience is very much what many of the people felt was very was sort of critical for this exchange between a psychiatrist for example or a psychologist or social worker or a psychiatric nurse or whomever and the patient in this case they wanted to sort of flatten that hierarchical relationship generating empathy and helping to get insight into disordered or what had been considered to sort of patterns of behavior and thinking they also I mean this is I think critical they Humphrey Osmond Abram Hoffer and a variety of others but they're sort of the leaders in this they helped to co-found schizophrenics anonymous just an organization that you sort of model itself in some respects on alcohol and alcoholics anonymous which is you may know like they don't say you know we're not alcoholics anymore we're fixed they say well we're gonna help each other you know live a better life and that sort of the mantra of schizophrenics anonymous - it's like yeah okay we are schizophrenic we don't have schizophrenia we are schizophrenic it's part of who we are how do we learn to live like this how do we accept ourselves you know stop trying to like the one I remember reading this at one point someone was like well I can't cut off my arm and get rid of the schizophrenia right right right I need to generate some insight into my disorder I don't want to feel ostracized and alone I want to connect with people but the cues for connecting are sometimes quite different if you have disorder perceptions of personal space of patterns of behavior all sorts of things but coming to some acknowledgement and realization that you know that's actually okay yeah and that you know that actually gave people a foundation from moving forward and finding a way to live their lives in a in a more tolerant way you know or to tolerate and live with these right you know aberrations from mainstream I mean I'm intentionally using weird language because it became kind of a self actualization model and more about resurrecting autonomy for people then about fixing healing or reorientation changing that see now this is this is where I think this intersection of kind of women's role during this time really kind of merges with the function of the substance which is this empathetic quality that kind of really it can evoke it doesn't always evoke but what was fascinating to me is when you were talking about some of the kind of you know ignored aspects of women's role it was it was amazing to me that you know a lot of these people when they were scientists people early you know forerunners of psychedelic exploration psychonauts they were doing this with their wives right they they wanted a trusting and loving presence for them to experience kind of an altered state of consciousness can you talk a little bit about kind of what women's role were and kind of how that interface with the history of psychedelic research yeah I mean I think similar to the way I was talking about where they got started you know he wasn't that they got a big grant they went to the lab and they all you know white jackets and you know the it's a different kind of scientific enterprise and not one that I think is you know less valuable or less important but it was a different approach and part of it was about kind of research inspiration as much as it was about research and so to that extent I think you know these sort of informal settings in which people took these had a lot to do with their their deep curiosity about like okay things aren't working in this field we need to do something they went to extreme lengths and to be fair I mean we might think now that you know well they were just having fun and this was all recreational and there's no doubt that after some time and after some experience there were elements of yeah it's kind of hard yeah but I do think that certainly in some of those initial phases and certainly when you know even after people had found that it was pleasant the first time that people took LSD or masculine in these cases most of them were quite apprehensive most of them were quite nervous or anxious and so you have these sort of dinner parties where I mean they're quite care it's interesting because on the one hand it looks recreational and and there's an element of that for sure on the other side they're quite careful and rigorous about the way that they take care of each other through these experiences and that translates then later when they start to apply this E and a clinical setting is you know things like set and setting you know Timothy Larry becomes associated with it but really the language of setting setting was already published in the in the 1950s by some Saskatchewan group we're talking about the need to like we need to have comfortable spaces you need to be able to you know if you want to have it inside you want to make sure there's fresh air you want to be able to go outside if you want you want to have freedom of movement never want to be alone it's best to have a trusted person in the room and of course for many people that was their spouse and over time I did find that you know after a few sessions maybe and again some people only did it once but for some who went on several sessions they would deviate from having their spouse there they might do it with a colleague or or in some cases like Duncan blew it a psychologist was doing it in the therapy sessions as well with the client or patient yeah but that that's more rare than than common what's interesting to me about psychedelic research and just the psychedelic scene in general is we know that women are a part of it we know this anyone who is partaken you know studied the scene we know they're there but it's just they're not prominently featured even I love Michael Pollan's book the the latest one but really the only person who gets a mention extensively there's two people Maria Sabina and Kathleen McLean and meanwhile this is this is a terrible injustice not only for the fact that women are being kind of excluded from the conversation are being brought up but because precisely when we're talking about the wives being there the feminine presence and an altered state of consciousness for a male for a kind of machismo kind of ego state is a necessary counterbalance I mean it is very easy to go off the rails if you just have a bunch of guys you know meatheads taken psychedelics watch what happens you know so it's just it's something though this is one of the reasons I really wanted to get you on here is because I think it's very important that we remember to include and acknowledge women's role in psychedelic research and just the psychedelic community in general because I think one of the things that blew my mind way back in the day it wasn't I think it was an arrow with it I think it was on Reddit early days of Reddit there was the psychedelics subreddit and I just remember going in there and it was just this massive argument about the nature of psychedelics and reality and it was just people yelling at each other and it was guys was just you know people who had gone on their own little ego trip and I was blown away because to me the psychedelic experience has always been such a unifying kind of this is what it's about we're all connected there's more than what our limited perspectives are but here are people who have taken God knows how many psychedelics and are at each other's throats babe arguing about the true nature of reality and to me that's that's a major schism that basically has to be kind of closed and healed if we want to move forward with some of the real potential of these things I mean how do you see women's role women's role in the psychedelic research and just community right now what's your take on that it's a good question for a historian I'm like oh yeah I mean okay so I'll start with backwards in some ways it didn't surprise me that women's names were left off of papers historically I mean not not to excuse it or justify it but you know that it wasn't unique to the psychedelic community right stretch and yet it is it's so interesting I found you know as I was interviewing people you know almost ten years ago now in some cases you know in some instances their wives were there you know here they were in their 80s or 90s and they're talking to me and the the wives are sharing some of their insights with me as well and it was very clear from watching that interaction that these were partnerships and they had been partnerships in that moment as much as they were partners you know into their retirement years but the way that they kind of moved back and forth to help understand and describe the experience really struck me as having such deeply that was sort of deeply committed to this we might say today gendered language whether it was describing things like empathy and the kind of language that was used to think about care and empathy and again this is a huge generalization that women just have these in a right right but you know I think that I can get away with this talking about a kind of 1950s cultural mindset where I think some of those gender divisions might have been even more rigid than we experienced today and so it's jarring in the one sense and in the other sense it kind of is rather progressive you know you think about the rule that these women played in helping to develop the language of psychedelics and the language of care and and I think really and I tried to drive it this in the article or in the interview a little bit I think that the support of those wives however it manifested of course it's a lot of idiosyncrasies here but I think it allowed those husbands we're talking a hetero-normative world here to feel more confident in their explorations in the way they talked about it I mean some of this stuff took them to places that weren't really part of a machismo language right right so we're talking about my I mean men I interviewed most of the people who well I should say all of the people I interviewed who had been patients were men and in the sampling that I had access to at the time and of since that's that since grown but in the sampling I had access to it was a majority of men that's partly why this was the case almost every single one of those men openly wept you know and talked about cheaply they talked about their mothers now maybe that's partly influenced by the kind of Freudian language that was also in place yes yes we're blaming you know I don't want to totally decontextualize it but there was this really sort of tender relationship that people wanted to revisit and it seemed that psychedelics in many instances took them to that place now it's anecdotal these were a few examples but nonetheless there was just a kind of reconciliation with the people in their lives whether they were their wives whether they were their mothers family members and a kind of recognition of relationship building that needed to occur in order for them to feel good about themselves whether they were being treated for alcoholism or whether they were gaining insight into their other kinds of disorders and it's not that those are female spaces however I do think that the process of working through that on the other side the sort of integration phase if you will yeah had a lot to do with leaning on the women and other people in their lives as well and men in their lives I mean but women played such an important role in that integration phase and yet the part that gets the sort of spark the excitement the papers the you know the the headlines is that interruption phase or that disruption moment right and and a lot of the work of the integration fell to the women and so I mean I think it's partly what we get excited about and you know it's harder to write a really exciting project about integration yeah it's not sexy what the toast was what did you see you know and so I think it's partly human nature that we're sort of like attracted to these these things that things that appear quite dramatic and it's not and again I don't want to overplay the fact that women weren't involved in that side either but I think at least historically we tended to sort of devalue this other part when we know from talking to people who went through it that those were really incredibly important aspects of the overall experience yeah I mean those that's the transformative that's the that support the women were providing there it is really I would argue the point of doing a substance like LSD I mean it's wonderful to go and see all these things and have all these experiences but if there's no practical benefit from it it is it's just purely recreational so and I get it too I mean like listen no one wants to go hear about how they had this crazy ayahuasca ceremony and then now they're you know what's their main takeaway oh everything is connected I'm a better person now that's boring they want to hear about the weird lizard eagle you saw so I get it but it is kind of it's a shame that that's not focused on more because that kind of it it it ekes out kind of the role that these substances can potentially play as time goes on I mean what what speaking of that what's kind of your prognosis of the current state of psychedelic research and I know I'm asking to look forward again I mean sorry what a what are you I mean what do you think is gonna happen in the next five ten twenty years I mean I don't want to predict the future but I'm making you I think it's a really interesting opportunity I think this current iteration of the so-called psychedelic renaissance is a really interesting opportunity for us and I hope us as a culture I hope that we take that opportunity to look widely and think deeply about what this potentially means and I'm I'm not that interested in you know I'll be disappointed I think if you know we we get you know we're allowed to use LSD in treatments and that's the end of the story right it just gets added to another list and it doesn't allow us to ask some deeper questions that I think is really in my mind at the heart of a psychedelic ethos or a psychedelic way of thinking which is I think to crack open some of these rigid boundaries that over the last fifty to seventy five years have really hardened around our understanding of what constitutes health and wellness what you know what is indeed pathological what rights that conveys or confers you know to be deemed insane yes certain rights removed from you if we rethink what it means to be insane or you know and again I'll flirt with this different language but if we reopen those doors to madness or the doors of perception if you want to borrow Huxley's phrase and think about that we have an opportunity to do that so on an intellectual level I hope that it forces us to think through some of the diagnostic categories that we've set up I we've set them and sort of the power that gets connected to them secondly I hope I don't know who's listening or who will ultimately listen and feel nervous but I hope that it also sort of in tandem with that helps us to generate some confidence as a culture or as a community to ask different questions about the financing of Big Pharma and our addiction to Big Pharma as a way to not only fix lives but also to regulate lives and I think that psychedelics offers a different model for imagining our connection to those experiences and and and maybe coming back to some of those historical ideas about questions about autonomy questions about you know when when do I feel well and when do you feel well and we may have different thresholds for wellness but what allows us to sort of be okay with ourselves if you know that may sound a little bit flaky but I kind of hope that this iteration of the psychedelic renaissance is bigger than the psychoactive substance itself but allows us about these things in a more philosophically creative way which I I think was at the heart of some of what some of you some people were talking about those things in the past - I don't want to suggest that's a new thing but I think it's an opportunity we we've really I think become siloed in the way that we think about these different questions and we've got a financial and economics way of thinking about this we've got a scientific way of thinking with this we've got the humanities over here and this and that I think we have an opportunity to put those things together and think about the impact that psychedelics and psycho pharmacology have on our modern culture and I hope be a bit more creative about it I could I I love the way no no I love the way you said that and it's been my general impression that that is the emerging theme not just for psychedelics but just everything stuff is coalescing and it doesn't mean it's gonna come together in some utopian dream of you know everyone's gonna figure everything out and we're gonna be great all the time but it does provide that opportunity to at least examine the questions we're asking like you're saying and that idea of autonomy of what can you do and when can you do it you know putting that back into the individuals or communities hands rather than kind of some lord over you saying hey you got to do this is incredibly important I think I mean I'm sure you could probably speak to this too that some of the what made psychedelics so dangerous to the people in power back in the 50 60 70s to the present day is that it does loosen those boundaries I my first psychedelic experience was when I was 15 years old I mean that's a weird time to do it your brain is still developing but I absolutely describe it as until I did that I was walking around with my head up my ass completely I just thought I was the center of the universe I thought everything was kind of here for me this is how I live yes there's other people but I I'm living the illusion of central position and once that kind of get shattered that illusion you really start to look at things in a different way and if the system is kind of set up to not have you question that they become very dangerous substance that need to be regulated as schedule one in this country at least so it's very it's a very tricky situation because as you know like big pharma I mean Jesus I mean it's just it's a very very destructive force at this point I mean first they're gonna get you hooked on something then they're gonna give you something to get off of it it's very disturbing I mean I I truly hope like you that this this renaissance that's happening right now and it really is from underground to getting more kind of mainstream really does provide that opportunity for people to kind of start asking these questions because I mean what what could be more important as we're kind of facing kind of global crisis is like you know we don't want to be just saying the same things over and over again that would be a travesty yeah and the other thing you mentioned that I really it just this has always been I have a special place in my heart for people who study this or speak about it or have gone through the experience kind of bringing yourself back from the brink of madness I was listening to an audiobook by Ron Chernow it's the Warburgs about a Jewish German family and one of the members of this family they're a big banking family was this guy E.B. Warburg and he essentially was this very brilliant he was having these psychic premonitions he put together this massive library but he also went totally crazy like Freud song Jung song they said he was too far gone but he did psychoanalysis stayed in a sanatorium I think for like eight years and then basically had to go through these battery of tests to prove that he was saying and he was and people were just blown away that someone who had been so far gone from consensus reality was able to not only intellectually analyze his illness his mental illness in quotes while he was going through it but had the wherewithal to kind of pull himself back from it because those I feel like if we start paying attention to those examples and situations we do get kind of a new lens to look through some of these like clinical diagnoses you know the spectrum of mental illness which to me has always felt kind of like I said a rough approximation we're viewing symptoms but we're not really sure what's going on there and the ability for psychedelics to kind of you know make inroads to that specific area I think is just one of the most powerful things about it yeah I mean I think I mean it's exciting to imagine an experience that allows us to be vulnerable and instead of taking that vulnerability and exploiting it you know taking that vulnerability and making it productive and sort of feeding feeding back into the system with that you know and I whether it's vulnerability or empathy I think these are important qualities to bring into this conversation and and I'm excited in many respects for for the ways in which they they might begin to help us think through some of these you know we've kind of got ourselves in a bit of a cul-de-sac or you know into a bit of an entanglement when we think about the like ballooning costs of health care you know the addiction to big farmer whatever it might be right and and it does seem I mean it's not coincidental I don't think that we we first invested we I just mean that generically you know psychedelics first made their you know sort of a critical appearance in Western science this is not to discount earlier iterations but if we think about the 1950s and 60s in terms of the history of psychiatry mental health you know that was right at the time that we were also like you know we've done this locking people up for a hundred years locking people up for their lives over the past century in mental hospitals and we were just at the cusp of trying to overturn that system or that paradigm even and it seems that was eclipsed or overturned in some ways by pharmaceutical remedies yeah and we've had about 70 years now of experience with pharmaceutical remedies and what we see is that the rates of mental illness are going up yes skyrocketing right I mean it's yeah so we've actually we've just like changed the language that we use and the lens perhaps that we use to describe and capture this population and we haven't actually made any inroads to feeling better about you know fixing healing feeling better about who we are in the first place any of those kinds of things right does seem that we need a sort of break in the way that we conceptualize which is not going to come from a new drug like patenting a new drug there's no so much that we're going to be giving to everyone yeah why I'm kind of you know I'm excited about the opportunity that this experience allows us to have yeah I'm I share your excitement and I am a very optimistic person by nature but I also recognize the very steep hill that needs to be kind of climbed and hopefully it's not Cisaphysian because there's just so much stacked up I mean especially in the United States here I mean it is just absurd how out of whack and how to out of touch people are just not only to their own lives but just the role of pharmaceuticals is just out of control I mean I I it's it's it's shocking to me that you know this is a problem that isn't on everyone's mind just because everyone knows someone on some type of medication that's a prescription medication period like I don't know unless you just only know really young and healthy people that's just not how things are treated yeah I mean I'm shocked whenever I get to talking with someone and they're candid about it when they tell me they're on an SSRI or some other type of antidepressant and then just like you know I don't say oh you shouldn't be on that's not my role whatever but just the prevalence of is just it's it's astounding and if we do have any other tools at our disposal whether done kind of from a clinical and an above board sense so to speak or just kind of the underground that's forming for a lot of these healings I mean I think that really is kind of like we have to take that opportunity and run with it and be excited about it because if we're not I mean like you said I don't think they're gonna invent some pill that's gonna solve everyone's problem I'm not holding my breath on yeah yeah it's so I also wanted to touch on just a little bit because as I was doing research I think it's a fascinating topic to before we go it could I'd not to like leave on this but your book facing eugenics I am not abundantly familiar with what was going on in Alberta could you just provide some insight on that because I this is a very interesting topic sure yes the book kind of grew out of a project that I was working on with survivors of the eugenics program in Alberta so people who've been sterilized without their consent or knowledge in many cases and the the sort of I'll just give you a couple of sort of bare bones general things Alberta was one of two provinces in Canada that had a sterilization policy in place under kind of the eugenics program it was put into place in 1928 I was overturned in 1972 so quite a long period throughout the course of the program there were a little close to 4,000 people who were recommended for sterilization and just under 3,000 people were ultimately sterilized what was the rationale for this well it changed a few times that sort of policy language but the overarching sort of guiding principles if you will we're targeting people who were institutionalized in facilities that are whatever mental hospitals and training schools so institutions for people who were considered then people in people-minded which was often determined by like ostensibly by an IQ test but really in practice what this meant was that you had a number of people very vulnerable people some of these kids had never lived in a family setting some of them had been you know orphaned for a long time so whether or not they actually had low IQs problematic as those tests are there's actually kind of a chronic institutional care situation as well and there was an assumption that a this was causing well there was it was creating a lot of financial dependency on these large-scale institutions and if you could get rid of the next generation dependence and some of that language was pretty blunt so unlike some jurisdictions if we naturally think of Nazi Germany right targeting you know Jewish populations but also I mean the first policy in Nazi Germany which was in place in 1933 focused on people in mental hospitals and in sort of mental hygiene clinics or again sort of this the sort of malaise of language describing inferior intellect and failure intelligence physical and mental disabilities the language changes over time of course but but really targeting people who we don't think fit along these lines of mental ability now that gets grafted onto races and genders in different ways as well in Alberta what I found and what others have found is that the sort of target populations if you will no no population was described in the in the policy is like we are against Ukrainians or something great but Ukrainians were disproportionately represented Wow we also found that indigenous people were underrepresented in some respects early on and by the end of the program they are vastly overrepresented in the targeted populations Alberta's interesting and unique in one respect in that they had consent laws in place initially and they removed the need for informed consent in 1937 even Germany didn't do that and the argument was that they were they were sterilizing people who were they considered to be incompetent and therefore incapable of giving consent and so what happened is there was a court case in 1995 six where one woman successfully sued the provincial government and this little long in euros her name and in the wake of that finding where it turned out that actually her IQ test had been added up incorrectly even based on their own logic that's sterilized in the wake of that finding there was a class action suit forming and it was settled out of court so that's been kind of silenced but there was this sort of opportunity in some respects for people like myself historians but other scholars legal scholars sociologists community activists to start to work with that group because this history has kind of been written out of the history books I've never heard of this so that's why I asked yeah yeah we're done here you know we're better now we don't do that anymore and we thought you know there's a lot of community frustration about the ways in which human rights have been really trampled on particularly and again from where I'm coming from particularly when things like competence intelligence intellect ability are called into question and so in response to that we we tried to work together with the community to help people put together some history of this so that people can be aware of it we helped we went to schools we did some curriculum development to try to bring awareness to the ways in which people were treated and and to help to ask questions about you know some of the lingering after effects we don't have the policies in place anymore but we know that you know children are still apprehended in different systems we know that there are certain challenges to raising children in these environments and and again so sort of thinking about this along the lines of human rights and and the ways in which psychiatry and not just to be upon psychiatrists but the ways in which we kind of accept these classification systems and that translates into a kind of political power or access to political power that is not evenly distributed and we certainly know that it is not necessarily born out in the reality of people's lives I mean that is another soapbox no I I mean again like that it's it's eloquently said I obviously had no idea about that my I my family is of Ukrainian descent back in the generation so my ancestors are fuming right now I mean that's that's truly fascinating and I think again the theme that I see in a lot of your different research and kind of looking back is a shedding light on stuff that happened but also this kind of this theme of healing right this this idea of like if we're gonna look at this stuff can we continue to carry and bear witness with this as we move forward because just forgetting about it I mean that's if you want to look for an example of how what happens look at Donald Trump if you just want to pretend shit isn't happening you're gonna end up with someone like that and no one wants that well unfortunately that's not true but most people let's say a lot of people don't yeah but wow I mean that is that is mind-blowing I mean of course using I've always found listen I've had good psychiatrists I don't see one now but when I was had my little you know break from reality I got diagnosed with bipolar at the time got prescribed lithium by a very nice psychiatrist eventually came off of it because I realized I didn't need it so I I don't I'm not anti psychiatry but it is used as a cudgel a lot to just completely I mean it is one of the easiest tools to use if you say this person is certifiable they're insane you've just stripped them from so many human rights and civil rights that it's hard to imagine for most people because you're you're literally branded as someone who like you said I mean there's the idea that they're taking away the consent because they're deemed that they can't have consent I mean that's the slipperiest of slopes for everything I mean that's that's that's truly truly nuts I mean what is kind of been the the coda to that I mean what's going on now was there any resolution to more people know about this I mean well in terms of resolution I'd say it's very vague the there you know there wasn't out of court settlement so there was a monetary settlement for some of the people as as I understand it was pretty paltry can and not only just considering you know how do you put a price on you know one's ability to reproduce I don't know I'm going to pretend way into that but but I mean there are a lot of legal fees and really and what this came with was also a promise that this was not supposed to be something that was raised in public discourse again which of course me at least you know those of us who are in the privileged position to be able to fight against that which is not everybody right right we were outraged with this and so trying to sort of craft that and of course it's kind of ridiculous I mean you can't really do that but this this sort of engagement in what we described as the politics of forgetting and the politics of this whitewashing was so damaging I think you know not remembering this past not just for history's sake but as you say I mean this is so important for the ways in which we try to understand and untangle these issues today they're not over right and of course you know reproduction as as I understand it continues to be a pretty hot issue yeah people people are pretty yeah it's been a it's been really interesting sort of waiting through some of these things and it and I guess it's it's demoralizing in some respects that some of these issues that were alive and animated you know before Nazi Germany are still alive and animated and sort of we we tend to it seems or there are instances of which you can see attempts to say well you know but but we weren't that bad or better now or something and I think it's actually quite a dangerous position to come from and and again I mean I am a historian so I'm you know that it is my nature to to want to look back but I think it's really important to be able to have some of that foundation and not not to you know lay out the fact necessarily but but to appreciate and get that insight into how these things have translated into you know our understandings about whose lives have value or their thoughts have value and you know and I in my mind that's kind of where the psychedelics come in as well because I'm very interested in these questions of power and autonomy they they come together very very naturally in my mind you know the ways that we make assumptions about you know who can contribute or whether their contributions are valid or good or you know very generous no I mean it's it they're completely connected and I mean to speak to the point I mean if I'm a big Carl Jung fan I mean if you if you don't face your shadow collectively or individually it's gonna haunt you the rest of your life I mean it's just it does not go away you can repress repress ignore ignore but that doesn't really deal with anything eventually you're gonna sweep everything under the rug and have a big old lump under your rug and it's gonna look weird so yeah I mean I I definitely it's interesting because you know I was when I was learning about you and seeing kind of be seemingly disparate I you know areas of research they they very much are connected and I and I do get the sense that that idea of autonomy or just freedom right the ability to choose what is happening and then also how that how that relate how you can relate that to other people right I mean it's not just where these islands making our own decisions that don't have an impact on anyone else these things come together in a very real and kind of substantial way it's it's really I just think what you're doing is very cool is what I'm basically saying it really is well I wrap up with three quick questions and then one kind of open-ended one so we'll do that they may seem silly but they're very important what is your favorite color I'm gonna say blue today cool what is your favorite number nine good one what is my number for like 20 years that's a great number what is very mystical number what is your favorite animal favorite animal that's a good question I do not know my favorite animal I'm gonna say a rabbit oh I think you know you might be the first person out of like a hundred fifty something to say rabbit that's pretty cool and then last question what's a practical tip that's helped you in your life that you could share with people who are listening could be anything listen to lots of people perspective good to have as much as possible I had a great time Erica thank you so much for coming on so quickly I again I'm gonna direct people to go check out what you're doing and what you've written just because these issues are really really important and I don't think we hear about them enough so just thanks thanks a ton well thanks so much for inviting me it's been a real pleasure and it's been fun chatting awesome speak soon alright thanks Erica take care I know.

[Music] [Music] [Music] Hope you enjoyed that episode I know I did Erica go check her out online she's interviewed specifically about the the whitewashing of women you can just google that and you'll find it I think it was with chakruna if I'm not mistaken she also has she's it was edited she has a book she was part of coming out in December 2018 called psychedelic prophets the letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphrey Osman and Humphrey Osman as you heard in this episode was one of the people who was involved with early psychedelic research I'm really excited for this apparently there's a lot of young stuff and LSD conversations masculine a mess going to conversation so I'm really excited for that I believe it's on McGill Queen's University Press in Canada like I said 2018 December coming out go check it out I hope you like this episode as I mentioned before subscribe rate review positively on iTunes I don't know go do that I like it makes me feel good probably make you feel good too so that's it and I will see you next week