096 | Psychedelic Pharmacology 101: Contradictions & Tapering Guidelines You Should Know w/ Ben Malcolm (AKA The Spirit Pharmacist)
“I rely heavily on medical information for what I do, but I don’t see psychedelics fitting solely within the medical model. While some people are served by that model, I don’t think you need to have a refractory illness before you should be allowed to eat psychedelics.”
Subscribe and leave a review!
In this episode, Ben Malcolm (the Spirit Pharmacist) brings us into the intersection of psychedelics and pharmacology. We discuss practical considerations, such as guidelines for safely tapering off SSRIs before embarking on a psychedelic experience and navigating contraindications between psychedelics and antidepressants.
Throughout the conversation, Ben offers valuable insights into crafting tapering protocols, including the intricacies of microdosing and potential risks like valvular heart disease associated with psilocybin mushrooms. We explore various facets of psychedelic use, including important considerations like drug interactions and the reintroduction of substances post-Iboga/Ibogaine treatment. Ben sheds light some light on the enigmatic reactivations associated with 5-MeO-DMT and the complex interplay between cannabis and psychedelics.
This conversation provides a comprehensive guide for listeners navigating the terrain where psychedelics meet pharmaceuticals, offering valuable insights and considerations for safe and transformative experiences.
Topics Covered:
How psychedelics fit into pharmaceuticals
How ketamine freed Ben from chronic pain
Guidelines from tapering off of SSRIs before a psychedelic experience
Psychedelics that are compatible or not with anti-depressants
What to consider when embarking on a tapering protocol
Microdosing and tapering
The risk of valvular heart disease with psilocybin mushrooms
Drug interactions with psychedelics to be aware of
Reintroducing substances/alcohol after Iboga/Ibogaine
The mystery of 5-MeO-DMT reactivations and Cannabis
LISTEN
Things Mentioned in This Episode
Show Links:
Where to find Ben Malcolm
About Ben Malcolm:
Ben Malcolm, PharmD, MPH Psychopharmacology Consultant and Psychedelic Educator Founder of Spirit Pharmacist LLC
Dr. Ben Malcolm earned his bachelor’s degree (BS) in pharmacology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, prior to his Masters in Public Health (MPH) and Doctorate of Pharmacy (PharmD) at Touro University California. He then completed post-graduate residencies in Acute Care at Scripps Mercy Hospital and Psychiatric Pharmacy at the University of California at San Diego Health.
After residency he passed his exam to become Board Certified in Psychiatric Pharmacy (BCPP). He began his career as an Assistant Clinical Professor at Western University of Health Sciences (WUHS), College of Pharmacy before transitioning to his current entrepreneurial role as a Psychopharmacology Consultant, Psychedelic Educator, and Founder of https://www.spiritpharmacist.com
Ben envisions a society in which access to psychedelic drugs in a variety of safe and supported settings is available for purposes of psycho-spiritual well-being, personal development, ceremonial sacraments, and treatment of mental illness. His focus is on the intersection between psychiatric medications and psychedelic therapies. He has given several Continuing Education presentations to pharmacists and other healthcare professionals as well as published over a dozen articles in peer-reviewed literature relating to psychedelics or psychiatric medications.
His vision guides his clinical and education service-related professional activity.
Looking for a professional coach to support you on your psychedelic path?
Look no further! Along with being the host of the Modern Psychedelics Podcast, Lana is a 3x certified professional coach who works with people on the psychedelic path.
-
Lana Pribic: [00:00:00] All right. Hi, everyone. So I am here with someone that you have probably seen on Instagram, on the internet. You've probably come across the spirit pharmacist at some point in your psychedelic research, Ben Malcolm. Welcome to the show.
Ben Malcolm: Thanks so much for having me. It's really wonderful to be here.
Lana Pribic: Yeah, I've been wanting to reach out for so long and it's so lovely to have you here. We have some audience questions for you today. We're just going to learn a lot together so just to begin, please introduce yourself to the audience and tell us, yeah, what is your role and your mission in the psychedelic space?
It's
Ben Malcolm: So I'm Ben Malcolm of Spirit Pharmacist, LLC, or maybe just more simply like the Spirit Pharmacist. My background and training is in pharmacy and in psychiatry. So I'm trained as a psychiatric pharmacist. I'm a psychiatrist, but I specialize in psychedelics and how they interface with traditional types of psychiatric medications.
At this point in time, I call myself a psychopharmacology consultant [00:01:00] and psychedelic educator, because I think that it is closest to what I actually do on a day to day basis. I do individualized consulting, or maybe group consulting. consulting in for organizations, providers, and also have a lot of educational related efforts, both in my own kind of webinars, courses, written information guides, as well as, being guest faculty in a lot of different training programs related to helping people get up to speed with best practices around using psychedelics and specifically, I usually talk about pharmacology in those times of training programs.
So psychedelic education and consulting seems to be the bread and butter of what I do. So that's where I title myself these days.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. Okay. So I want to get to the interaction and tapering, but just based on your expertise and how you've woven together psychedelics and pharmacology. What is the vision that you have, if any, for how psychedelics fit into pharmaceuticals?
Ben Malcolm: Oh, so if you just [00:02:00] go to spiritpharmacist. com and go to the about page, I have like a short by biography, but then it really talks about like his vision, like the vision, right? And so my vision is that psychedelics are going to be safely integrated back into society for a number of different types of reasons or purposes.
Religious freedom. Absolutely. decriminalization because no plant should be illegal in the first place. And there isn't really very much good public health safety data suggests that any drugs should be illegal in the first place. Okay. Like those two things. That's okay, religious freedom.
People deserve that. Decriminalization. That's just a public health win. Like before you even start talking about using for medical types of purposes or reasons. I do think that psychedelics are going to fit into a pharmaceutical or medical type of model. And I think that's a really important channel for certain sections of the population to be able to access psychedelics through.
And I think that the research that is leading towards [00:03:00] approval for those types medical interventions of psychedelic assisted therapy is the safety data that we're going to need to set psychedelics free in the other types of use cases as well. So I rely heavily on medical information for what I do, but I really don't see psychedelics fitting solely within the medical model.
I think that's an important piece of it. I think there are persons that are going to be better served with psychedelics through that model. But I don't think that you need to have a refractory illness where you failed several first line pharmaceutical drugs before you should be allowed to eat psychedelics.
Like that just sounds like, you know, prohibition 2. 0, extremely gatekeepery, not in line with what the observational biomedical research currently says about the safety of psychedelics. And so I'm going to support medical use, but I'm not going to just support medical use. Like just medical use feels like prohibition light to me like it's prohibition [00:04:00] light,
Lana Pribic: Yeah. Yeah, I know. It's good to get to hear that. That's your perspective. What is your favorite psychedelic and why? I want to know. I know it's so hard to choose one. I know. I know.
Ben Malcolm: What it depends on what season of my life I was in and what was going on at that time I would say that it's a little bit between I Would say that that at this point in time like ketamine is probably my favorite type of psychedelic like overall but boy, I've cycled through a lot of them, I think if it was kind of like, like maybe this way, like if you're stuck on a desert island and you only had one psychedelic to use for the rest of the life, which would you pick?
I probably would pick ketamine just because it's such a wonderful experience in itself, but because it has such broad medical utility, right? Like it has analgesic effects and things of that nature. And not to say that tryptamine psychedelics don't have other, medical properties, anti inflammatory effects and [00:05:00] things like that.
But there are a little bit less known than ketamine. Yeah.
Lana Pribic: I'm a little surprised by your answer because it's not a classic psychedelic, right? So from a pharmacology perspective, can you tell us what makes ketamine a psychedelic?
Ben Malcolm: My entire twenties, I knew very little about ketamine. And if you would have asked me much about it at that sort of like time or phase of my life, I'd probably say yeah that's not really a psychedelic or that's like the, black sheep of the psychedelic family or something like that.
And that it's addictive and habit forming. And I tried a lot of different serotonin based psychedelics throughout my twenties. And I also had cyclical spastic back pain that would come back during those years and my entire twenties, I couldn't actually do a sit up. Like I would have to actually roll onto my side and get up and get out of bed in this sort of like strange way.
It's like I had this very specific way of moving throughout the world so that I didn't trigger this pain. But I never got the pain like worked up through a doctor's office because it was a traveling back pain, [00:06:00] right? So it was like, I just knew that there was nothing structurally really wrong with me.
And I really didn't want to go down the route of like opioid related painkillers or MRIs repeated and getting worked out. Oh, maybe you have some kind of surgery can shave some kind of piece of bone off your spine. Like all of that seemed like it's probably going to lead to a more entrenched kind of problem over a period of time.
Um, And there was something around age somewhere between 30 and 33, where I started to use ketamine a little bit. And then I think around age 33 I don't know, maybe have ritual, like something between a habit and a ritual so like regular, like once every other week, like once weekly to every other week kind of use.
And I would just get into these kinds of spaces where I would. My intestines would make these like growling sounds like it was like the hungriest you've ever thought you'd ever be in the entire life. And then it would relax. [00:07:00] And then it would, just in the ketamine space, it would guide me.
It would say okay now push on this part of your abdomen and ask it to release. Don't force it to release. Don't push too hard. Just hold it there. Focus on it, acknowledge it, and ask it to release and relax. And it would take some period of time, one or two minutes, but then this big intestinal kind of growling, ripping sensation.
And I noticed like my back just started to feel better and better. And I realized it was not so much back pain, but referred organ pain linked to maybe uncomfortable situations, trauma in the past, difficult relationships that I was still currently engaged or involved with, as well as all of my own back pain.
bad maladaptive habits that had come along to deal with those kinds of emotional discomforts. And I would say that ketamine freed me from the cyclical spastic back pain and taught me how to do it without using the substance. And I think that's, that, that's the thing is that it gets okay, if you do these certain stretchers or hold your abdomen in a certain [00:08:00] way, when you feel a certain thing.
So it really taught me as far as I don't know, just a job where you're in mental health, when you're consulting, it can get very heavy. You're hearing really heavy things like all the time. And it's, if you're a halfway empathic person it's hard not to take on some of that to, to some degree.
And then of course you have your own life and stress to worry about and think about as well. So I see it a little bit like. every now and again, you just find yourself in a bathtub of dirty water and you really have to let the water out and run a new bath. And this kind of have ritual sort of abuse taught me like, okay, these are about the frequencies.
Like every one to two weeks, you really need to carve out a time and space for yourself and do this kind of like sequence of things to to keep yourself well. And so I would say that Yeah, I'm just so incredibly grateful to ketamine for showing me the way out of that decade long pain cycle. Yeah,
Lana Pribic: That's incredible.
Ben Malcolm: because the others didn't.
The others didn't. It was squarely the ketamine that did. So I have a [00:09:00] lot of gratitude for that one and the kind of like season of my life that I'm in right now, but to say the others haven't also had incredible impacts at different times is, they have.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. I feel you on that. Yeah. There's definitely these cycles and waves with medicine, as we change our preferences and our. Attractiveness to certain medicines also change and that's perfectly fine, but it's amazing that you were able to receive such a transformation from ketamine. Wow.
Ben Malcolm: Yeah. I think I was like really lacking in like core strength and like self confidence. There was something like there was like an emptiness like there was and there was just a few experiences where it's I don't know. Everyone wants to call you doctor, but you're a farm D.
You're a pharmacist. Are you really a doctor? Or and there was just like this sense of imposter syndrome, I think, for a few years, and there was something about it that finally clicked and it was like, dude, like you are. And you can heal yourself, and this is how you're going to do it. And then it just unfolded that way.
I can't.
Lana Pribic: Incredible. [00:10:00] Yeah. I'm just reflecting on being a life coach myself, how many aches and pains I have in my body. Just listening to your story. I'm like, Ooh, that makes sense. I should, I need to start prioritizing some tune up dates for myself. Because you're right, the energy does get stored in the body, right?
Emotions get stored in the body when we're hearing them from others. So yeah, thank you for that reflection. Let's Let's extract all that beautiful information in your brain. People have so many questions about interactions and tapering protocols. This is just so important not just for harm reduction, but just for people to be informed and to know what's going on here.
Let's start with, let's start with tapering. What do people need to know? I feel like SSRIs are the biggest one out there, but what do people need to know about tapering off of meds such as SSRIs before a psychedelic experience? Is there a protocol and just general guidelines that you can give people?
Ben Malcolm: [00:11:00] Yeah. I think one thing that's good to know is if you're on an antidepressant, and you don't feel like tapering or stepping off of it, it's 100 percent compatible with ketamine. And more and more information is suggesting it's at least halfway compatible with psilocybin. For example, persons that are taking antidepressants that want to have psilocybin experiences, I think it's about a 50 50 shot whether they can get the experience that they want with normal or higher than normal doses or whether they can't.
So that one's sort of feels like a real individual decision to me at this point in time about whether a person really wants to Go the taper and washout route or they want to try it in combination see how well it works and if it doesn't work then they can go a taper route type of Way because it doesn't seem like it's harmful or dangerous for people to try that in combination MDMA and SSRIs or SNRI types of antidepressants my experience is it tends to really dud and The only persons I've really had tell me that MDMA worked well for them while taking antidepressants is persons that were on like [00:12:00] homeopathic doses, like doses that were well below what psychiatry would consider like the minimum effective dose for depression.
But probably still not too dangerous to try. If you're on a standard dose of an antidepressant, you plan a standard dose of MDMA. Whereas things like ayahuasca and ibogaine are gonna be a lot more black and white. No, we're not mixing them together. With ayahuasca, you're not mixing them together because of the MAOIs.
You can get really serious serotonin syndrome, serotonin toxicities. With ibogaine, you're not gonna mix them together because a lot of them block CYP2D6 and ibogaine is just very sensitive to CYP2D6 and it's something that could, Raise the cardiotoxic potential of ibogaine if we really start bumping up the concentrations because of a drug interaction so that being said, like I think like the first step because I think historically like 15 or 20 years ago would be like Don't mix antidepressants with mushrooms are gonna die of serotonin syndrome And then it was like no one's ever died of mushrooms that we really know of, or it's debatable or controversial whether they've really died from [00:13:00] a, like psilocybin mushroom.
So that doesn't make a ton of sense overall. And then the pendulum swung to no, no, no, don't ever do them in combination because it never works. You can't get any kind of effect out of it. And that also now seems like it's somewhere in the middle like antidepressants produce neuroadaptive types of responses, like downregulation of serotonin receptors that happens to a variable degree across the people that take antidepressants, and it seems like those neuroadaptive effects that happen to a variable degree are what we think is responsible for the drug interaction.
So it's a little bit more like, well, gosh, like I think that some people are going to be able to do this on their antidepressant and get pretty good results and other persons aren't. I think that a lot of thought needs to go into like the decision making point around, do I taper an antidepressant?
Okay. Sure. Spirit pharmacist. I do want to taper my antidepressant. I've been on it for a number of [00:14:00] years. I started it at a time of crisis. The last few years, I've been doing some therapy. I've got some different emotional coping skills. I feel fairly good right now. I've been reading about psychedelics, but frankly, I'm just curious.
about who I might be off my antidepressant and whether I was going to use psilocybin or not, I think I would want to try a taper and wash out. And I would like to plan some psilocybin experiences along with that, just to have some spiritual experiences, continue the kind of self work and personal growth phase that I've been in my life.
Sounds great, right? Versus the person that's a little bit more I started this a year ago. It's been so helpful. I tried to reduce the dose at a controlled way once. It was total train wreck. I'm not feeling that great now. I'm hoping psilocybin could make me feel better. Yeah. And I've got two small kids in the house under five.
It's geez man, it could be we could be signing you up for a really like rough period. It doesn't sound like you're doing right now. You're telling me that the [00:15:00] medication worked pretty well for you and you still feel like it's working well for you and dose decreases are very difficult.
Gosh, maybe we want to see what your sensitivity to psilocybin is like by taking some really tiny doses, maybe even micro doses. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, maybe there's a little bit of effect there. Okay, then maybe we can plan some higher thing in combination because it's not dangerous to do and you could be helped to a degree that maybe tapering the antidepressant is feasible afterwards, right?
Sorts of different courses for different persons with different histories because the antidepressants are used for lots of different types of psychiatric conditions that have lots of different kinds of severities. And there's a lot of just variability as far as Whether they can get off and whether it's a good time to even try to stop it or get off the medication.
All right, they want to try and taper their medication. I think 10 to 25 percent dose decreases every two to four weeks is tolerated is a fairly safe pace. [00:16:00] 25 percent dose reductions every two weeks gets somebody off in about two months. 10 percent dose reductions every four weeks gets someone off in 10 months, right?
So that's a pretty wide range there. Somewhere between two and 10 months is about the timeframe that you should probably budget for a taper. Some persons, for whatever reasons, can go a little bit faster. They'll be taking it shorter, they're less sensitive to withdrawal, they never really felt much from it anyway, the dose is lower.
but I think most persons that have been taking antidepressants for at least a year or two or a few that are not on the lowest dose should budget at least a couple of months. And I think on average somewhere between two to four months is a pretty safe and comfortable face for a lot of persons out there.
Lana Pribic: That's perfect. for people who do want to go ahead and taper off. I think you gave some good general guidelines. Obviously people can work with you personally if they want like a [00:17:00] personalized plan and support, which is like, what an amazing resource.
For people who are choosing to taper and they're like giving themselves, let's say two to four maximum of 10 months to taper off. What are some, Yeah, some like tips and some ways that they can really sail through that period smoothly. Because I imagine it's really hard to taper off of medicine. Yeah.
So what are some ways that
Ben Malcolm: can be, yeah, it can be just different, like so many different people out there, some people like look at me and they're I quit taking heroin crack. I could cold turkey this 20 milligrams of Prozac eight, eight. No, it couldn't be any challenge at all. And I believe them. And then some people will take a dose decrease and run into really severe kinds of symptoms and things like that.
So there's just, it's hard to it's difficult for me to express just how much variability I hear and see when it comes to getting rid or stopping antidepressants overall. I [00:18:00] think that oftentimes it's a little bit easier in the first half of the dosing range compared to the second half of the dosing range and oftentimes going from some medication to no medication is the most difficult kind of step.
So there's different thoughts about how to taper out there. I still am a little bit thinking along the lines of let's try to do some. linear dose reductions that are spaced out every two to four weeks and I usually will start my kind of planning there because I think it's just more feasible than some other types of ways or it's less tedious than some other types of ways.
But there's a new school of thought out there in antidepressant tapering called hyperbolic tapering which basically would allow someone to taper a little bit quicker in the first half of the dosing range but once it switches to the second half of the dosing range or about the minimum effective dose that we think of for depression, it really slows down.
And there's several very [00:19:00] tiny sorts of dose decreases towards the end. And there's some science from pet imaging experiments and things like that, that supports that it may be an easier way for people to get off or stop medications, but it's going to require some really tedious compounding and some not custom and standardized kinds of doses, right?
So that's the thing. It's it's almost like I feel that the regulatory agencies need to force antidepressant manufacturers to make more smaller doses specifically for people tapering or stepping off. Cause the way that things are set up right now, it's almost like you just ask the company patient to take a step off a really tall curb and hope for the best, which is some people can do it just fine.
And it's so much more feasible when you do those kind of linear dose reductions that it's nice when people can. But if a person's maybe gotten down a couple doses and then they take, their third dose reduction [00:20:00] and Oh, that one was so much harder. That's probably a good indication. Maybe to go back to the previous dose.
wait a week or two, and then just try much smaller dose reductions from there. Cause you really might be entering that phase of the taper where you're going to need to go a whole lot slower to continue having a success, do some other stuff, have a therapy session, get a personal coach is going to help you work out.
Talk to a nutritionist and try to change your diet a little bit. exercise and sunshine are natural things that boost the body's serotonin stores and create, more neurotransmitter synthesis. I think the people that, have really like it's really flown by are the ones where it's what was this?
What was the part that made you successful in this? You're like, I don't know. I was just doing so many things, right? I was working on my diet and I was trying this new meditation app before bedtime. And I [00:21:00] was seeing a new therapist every other week and I'd gotten some new recipes and I was trying to do this thing with my diet and I don't really know what part of it was.
Maybe I was just distracted. And so I think that's also a piece of it is that I don't know, maybe like at least the first or second step, I think some level of monitoring to try to understand like, what is my pattern? If I take a dose reduction, how many days is it before I notice changes?
And what kind of changes do I notice? And how long is it before those changes start to resolve or get worse or change into something else? I think once a person has some of those patterns, they may be able to plan subsequent steps a bit better. Okay, I take a step down on my, whatever, Paxil or Paroxetine.
Within 72 hours, I know that I took a dose decrease. About 12, 14 days later, I start to feel slightly better. It seems like by about day 20, I would say that, I'm more or less at [00:22:00] where I was. Okay, we're not going to go to the triggering family reunion on day 10. We're going to be talking with the loved ones and people around us that know us well and that we can trust and say things like, I'm going through this process right now and it's a big kind of like deal for me and if I seem a little different or I'm a little more irritable or short, I want you to know that it's not a personal thing and this is happening for a finite period of time and to the extent that you can, I would really some support and like compassion, right?
I think it's hard when a person takes a step down and it's a week later and their partner's you're off your meds, you need to get back on them. does it, it's oh geez I think some feedback from the partner, if the symptoms are severe and the person's falling apart is very like reasonable, but it would be nice if there was Oh, exactly.
It feels stigmatic to me. Like you're off your beds, better be back on your beds. So your normal again, it just okay the person may need to take some smaller dose decreases or do something different or add some other types of [00:23:00] things. I think supplements can sometimes help persons.
There's not a whole lot of data or evidence for any particular supplement helping a person. But sometimes higher doses of CBD can help with anxiety or sleep. I really like this lavender oil supplement, it's called Calm Aid or Selexin, helpful for symptoms of generalized anxiety. A lot of persons actually feel that just taking small micro doses can help stave off some of the mood or withdrawal symptoms linked with lower doses of antidepressants to the extent where I really feel like we need some better research into the potential of microdosing to be a serotonergic drug tapering aid rather than a mood uplifting thing out of itself.
Okay, test that, but also test its ability to help people stop serotonergic medications, because that seems like the one of the most commonly reported things about microdosing, at least from where I'm sitting in the world. So there's probably lots of different things a person can do in the realms of [00:24:00] supplements, in the realms of their relationships, in the realms of just lifestyle related things that could keep them busy or distracted or otherwise improve their health along the way that makes the whole tapering process a bit smoother.
Lana Pribic: Those are really good tips for in general going through any type of change or any type of transition in life. Those are some really solid tips. Always goes back to basics. Tell us a little bit more about tapering and micro dosing because I know a lot of people who are on antidepressants try to taper off of them and switch to micro dosing.
So what can you share with us about that and things people should know about?
Ben Malcolm: Yeah. So Not exactly sure how it should be done. I'll share that right off the bat. But I think like sometimes people like I'm going to be tapering. So I should start microdosing. I'm like, I'm not sure if we want to start the microdosing, like a prophylactic immunization against antidepressant withdrawal symptoms.
Cause if you start to microdosing and then start your taper. Your taper is going [00:25:00] excellent. You didn't really know if microdosing helping. If your tapering is going bad, you don't know if the microdose is making it worse, or if the taper rate's wrong. So I would actually prefer a person to start their antidepressant taper, maybe take a step or two, maybe do a little bit of monitoring and wait until they feel something a bit different.
I am feeling some of those small electric chalk sensations. I've noticed my sleep. It's getting a little bit harder to fall asleep or maybe there's a couple of times in the last week where I've had a mid nocturnal awakening at 4 a. m. and I haven't really been able to go back to sleep. Geez, it would be nice if some of that stuff dried up or changed.
Okay, why don't we try a couple of micro doses this week, in particular on the micro dosing days. Do you get less brain zaps? Is it a little bit easier to drift off? Are you still having those mid nocturnal awakenings? So I like it that the person has a symptom or a withdrawal symptom to focus on.
microdosing, for the microdosing, cuz I think it puts them in a better position [00:26:00] to clearly and squarely give the feedback that the microdosing was beneficial, or if it isn't, if it flares anxiety in some way, or makes sleep even more difficult, then hopefully that's clear for them to see as well.
Maybe that doesn't mean cease and desist microdosing. Maybe that means we change doses, try again like microdosing is something that I think inherently at the beginning, a person is in kind of an experimental phase where they're building a relationship with a substance. I think that there's room for trying some different sorts of microdoses to see how they affect them.
Maybe at different times of day, maybe different doses on different days. Maybe if it's a workday weekday, it's truly low and sub perceptual. You have mini dose on a Saturday and Sunday where you've got four to six hours to carve out for yourself and it's self care Saturday or whatever. I think that persons probably should not microdose for longer than three months at a time on a consistent basis because of this theoretical risk of valvular heart disease.
And if you're thinking about [00:27:00] what I said earlier, with this taper rates, I suggested that a taper timeframe might be two to 10 months. So if a person is going to use microdosing to help them taper, but they're planning a four month taper, can they even microdose the entire time safely?
It's an open question, and I'm not sure I would have a person continue microdosing that long slash my routine counseling is not to go over three months with the microdosing. So I think if you're one of the persons that's planning a shorter taper, like two to three months. you might be able to microdose along the way, or maybe the first month you do a couple of step downs and then you have the last couple of months of microdosing plus an extra month of microdosing after you're done with the antidepressant.
That might fit pretty good, that kind of plan. But if you're someone that's a little bit longer oh, I've tried tapering antidepressants a few times, it hasn't gone well, this time I'm going to go that six to 10 month plan, I'm going to do week or [00:28:00] monthly sorts of step downs. On the antidepressant.
Maybe it makes a little more sense to do like small courses of microdosing. For example, person takes a step down on their antidepressant. They wait 2345 days. They do two weeks of microdosing to cover them for an acute withdrawal period. then they have 10 days free of microdosing before their next dose decrease, right?
So they have the, I'm covering myself for what I think is going to be the peak or the most acute aspects of withdrawal with just a short couple of weeks of microdosing and then actually give myself another week or two to get my new baseline or understand like where I'm at before I make further dose decreases.
So depending on who you are and how long you're going to take to taper the antidepressant, you may have to, take breaks for microdosing in there, which might necessitate some different sorts of planning just for safety around the kind of unknown unknowns with microdosing.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. You mentioned the heart health thing being [00:29:00] uncertain with psilocybin. Do we know anything about the effects of certain psychedelics on heart health and brain health?
Ben Malcolm: Okay. So the idea with the chronic administration of psychedelics being, potentially, bad for the heart, it's actually bad for the heart valves, right? So it's valvular heart disease. It's a chronic. Type of drug toxicity and it's linked with substances that can stimulate the serotonin to be receptor Or maybe just have a high affinity for the serotonin to be receptor and so there's been a few different classes of drugs that have been able to Lead to valvular heart disease in the past some of them or some of the old school migraine ergo types of medications There are Ergolenes.
LSD is an Ergolene, right? LSD combines serotonin to B receptors at a very high affinity and it's pretty sticky. It also stays on that receptor for quite a long period of [00:30:00] time. psilocybin also in the types of blood concentrations that you see from microdosing has the ability to bind and stimulate this receptor to a significant degree.
So there has not been any kind of trans echocardiographic research with psychedelics that I've seen that measures heart valves. Before microdosing after a month or two of microdosing to like really tell us like is there heart valve thickening that's significant that comes along with psychedelic microdosing and is there a point that becomes dangerous irreversible fibrotic?
heart valves and at that point the fix is open heart surgery. So I think a lot of people in the world of microdosing feel this is a bit mythical or overblown in some kind of way. But it is a serious irreversible type of thing that requires an open heart surgery to fix. I think some of the Even persons in the world of psychedelics have asserted [00:31:00] that looking at this old research with LSD or with other types of things, there was not really a signal for this.
I have a colleague, Kellen Thomas, at Tor University. He's also a psychiatric pharmacist, wicked smart guy. He's read to the bottom of some of this and gone through some of the older literature around it and actually just found that there's just been bad reporting by people in the psychedelic community about this data.
Like people saying, Oh, no one got harmed in that study. And Kellen goes back and look at it. And some number of the people had valvular heart disease and had to get open heart surgery. And it's that's just bad scholarship now, isn't it? So there's a lot of people that are not pharmacologists that are saying there's no risk here.
But they don't really understand where the data is like coming from and okay, we have not demonstrated this with psychedelics yet. But kelvin's mentioned that he's gotten case reports of people that have had problems with valvular heart disease where micro dosing has been involved.
And so I'm thinking we need some serious testing here. And there ain't [00:32:00] no way in hell. What place that the FDA is approving any kind of microdosing on a chronic regimen without serious echocardiographic studies anyway. So yeah, it seems like on the one hand, I think that people want to try short courses with microdosing.
They want to try really small doses of psychedelics in some intermittent way for a month or a few. I don't think they're taking big risks there. I really don't. And I think that there could really be an upside for people there. The efficacy evidence is lagging behind what people are trying with microdosing, but hey, you want to try it in this controlled way for some short period of time to see, I am in favor of persons doing that when they have a strong will to.
Whereas the kind of Hey, I've been microdosing five days on two days off for eight months now, it's just okay, like this is getting to the point where you're chronically taking psychedelics and it [00:33:00] is, it sounds like the type of exposure that could lead to this problem if it had that problem.
Oh,
Lana Pribic: Yeah.
Ben Malcolm: it's with the human justice system, innocent until proven guilty. is nice, right? That's the way it should be set up with a human justice system. You don't want to be assuming guilt. You want to presume innocence and have the person, vindicate themselves or be convicted, right?
I think of the world of public health with drugs. It should be guilty until proven innocent, right? It shouldn't be like we're using psychedelics in some brand new way with, huge numbers of people that haven't been doing this before, but we haven't heard of in the past. So probably just doesn't exist.
And it's just some mythical stuff coming out of the pharmaceutical industry to make sure that you don't start micro dosing. All right. Like I'm sure there are people in the pharmaceutical industry that do want to attack this kind of new movement in psychiatry with psychedelics in some way.
And from a public health, like the master in public health at me is just [00:34:00] thinking like, why don't we do the research and demonstrate it's safe before we start telling everyone it is safe. Like it doesn't. Because what are we going to do? What if we create a public health disaster with microdosing?
It could shut down the whole thing. It could just sour the whole thing, right? It could, it would be horrible if persons that wanted to take small doses of psychedelics to uplift mood ended up needing open heart surgery. Because of the irreversibility and seriousness of it. And the fact that there's been multiple drugs with similar pharmacology or even cynical, similar chemical structures that have been guilty of this problem in the past, it doesn't seem super logical to just assume that there's no issue with psychedelics.
It seems a little magical thinking. Yeah.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. Scary that we don't
Ben Malcolm: Like high dose MDMA on a weekly basis. You can find the case reports of people getting valvular heart
Lana Pribic: Oh and major brain damage too. And brain toxicity. Yeah.
Ben Malcolm: Yeah there's other issues with those types of use patterns, right? [00:35:00] But it's a little bit like, I think it's a little bit like, okay, you can take some of those extreme case reports and it's that's not microdosing true, but canary in the coal mine guys let's do the research and find where the line is.
Cause right now we don't know where the line is, or we're pretty sure the line is over three months, probably over four or five months. maybe that's the risky zone. Less than three months, not long enough to produce this type of chronic drug
Lana Pribic: How long should people wait in between their microdosing rounds?
Ben Malcolm: I usually say about half the length of the microdosing course. So if you microdose for two months, maybe take one month
Lana Pribic: Yeah. Okay.
Ben Malcolm: Yeah. If you're really bummed about that, you could plan one macro dose in that month off. You could do your two month microdosing. Okay, now you're going to stop microdosing for two weeks to fully reset your tolerance to the macrodose, do a little preparation, think about the big trip coming up, find your new [00:36:00] baseline after that course of microdosing.
Okay, I got my big experience. Now I'm going to come down, I'm going to do two weeks of good work, integration, thinking about that experience, and if I want to, I can re engage with the course of microdosing. so that's the thing
Lana Pribic: much stuff that I didn't know in what you just shared. Let's talk about interactions a little bit. Maybe we could just go through some of the main, Drug classes there and you could let us know like definitely don't mix this with this so first of all Let's talk about antidepressants.
What do people need to know? Obviously you said iboga or ibogaine and Ayahuasca are definite no's What else? Yeah
Ben Malcolm: [00:37:00] antidepressants. I don't think there's anything wrong with the antidepressants. The highest risk words are probably going to be things like ayahuasca and Ibogaine. A lot of the serotonergic based psychedelics may not work quite as well. Our persons are taking antidepressants, but like we've talked about whether that's a deal breaker or not might be individual.
Lana Pribic: Yeah I always thought that it was potentially actually dangerous to mix SSRIs with psilocybin, things like that. But it sounds like it just might not work.
Ben Malcolm: Yeah. I mean it may be on exceptionally rare occasions, like some weird idiosyncratic types of thing happened. But Hopkins surveyed people that were on antidepressants that mixed it with psilocybin, and they had, hundreds of respondents, and the vast majority of them said the effects were diminished, rather than intensified, dangerous.
Yeah.
Lana Pribic: Okay. Let's talk about stimulants, which one should not be mixed together and which one should not be mixed with psychedelics. And also, can you explain what you mean by stimulants, what we mean by stimulants when we [00:38:00] talk about them?
Ben Malcolm: Yeah, so maybe we'll start there. So stimulants or medications that have arousing effects to the central nervous system. So they tend to promote wakefulness, but they're typically prescribed mostly for ADHD types of indications, maybe some weight loss, maybe some binge eating, maybe some decongestant, right?
There's a few different uses for stimulants out there, but probably the mainstay of stimulant prescriptions is in like ADHD therapeutics at this point. And probably the The most classic stimulant is going to be like Adderall or brand name amphetamines, right? And then there's also methylphenidate or the most famous brand name of that one is Ritalin.
So I think those are probably the two biggest classic sorts of like stimulants where there's just lots and lots of prescriptions out there. I would say that with stimulants, cause they're controlled substances that the thought process starts with what kind of controlled substance user do I have on my hands.
That's like how I think about it. It's not so much I guess [00:39:00] there are certain psychedelics like I wouldn't mix a stimulant with ayahuasca, for example, I wouldn't mix it with ibogaine. Again, I'd probably avoid it the day of most psychedelic uses just to avoid stacking stimulants with other drugs that increase cardiovascular parameters, particularly other psychedelic stimulants like MDMA you're adding methylene doxy methamphetamine to someone that's taking a regular amphetamine You're stacking amphetamines, like maybe there's some more cardiovascular risk to be worried about or concern there.
But I'll say that most persons that I speak with, at least in my practice, are in the therapeutic zone with stimulants. Their doses are low to moderate and they tend to appreciate some of the therapeutic effects that the stimulant has for them. Maybe there are some problems or side effects or aspects of it that they are not thrilled about or, Hey, in a perfect world, I wouldn't need this, but it seems to be helping for right now.
That's a pretty common story, but there's also persons that are on higher doses of stimulants that have stimulant use disorders that might even be using stimulants in [00:40:00] illicit settings or through routes of administration that are not oral. And at that point, I think you have to pause and think like, how does stimulant use disorders interface with this psychedelic experience?
And does that need to be like thought about and rolled into the overall goals of what we're doing here? So with controlled substances and stimulants, just our example here, but I would have that same thought process for benzodiazepines, opioids. Like I would first think what kind of relationship does the person have to the controlled substance?
Alright, so it's in that low dose oral therapeutic type of zone. Frankly, I think that skipping it for the day for things like psilocybin, MDMA, that's going to be good enough. Skipping it for at least three days before ayahuasca is going to be good enough. It would be the same for Ibogaine because that's the elimination time for amphetamine.
It doesn't show up in your urine after 72 hours or so. So why you would really need to skip it longer to avoid a drug interaction. I'm not really sure about that, right? May you want to skip it [00:41:00] longer depending on what your goals are. Oh yeah, I started at 10 milligrams of Adderall and it worked great for six months and then I was on 20 and it worked great for four months.
And now I'm on 40 and it's been six months and it seems like it's pooping out. And if I go without it, I feel very tired. But I plan to go to the Amazon and I've got a couple of weeks. How long should I stop it ahead of time? It's like, all right, maybe, I could say three days, the absolute minimum, but maybe you want to take a week off ahead of time and it's going to be a rough week and you're going to feel very low.
Okay. And then you're going to do a few ayahuasca experiences. You're probably going to purge a bit and probably going to work through some stuff. And you're going to wait at least 24 hours, probably more like 48 or 72 hours after ayahuasca to think about reintroducing stimulants. And maybe you want to think long and hard about whether you really do want to reintroduce them after a couple of weeks off.
But if you were, I'd probably start with 10 milligrams again, and you'll probably find that it works fairly well again, right? So [00:42:00] sometimes I think some of these longer breaks when a person is really taking some R& R, doing a longer kind of retreat, or is really focused on preparing and is willing to do a little bit more challenging stuff in their preparation, sometimes taking longer times off to reset partially therapeutic, partially problematic sorts of relationships, or when there's side effects or tolerance, I think that can be a helpful kind of thing for people.
Frankly, I met somebody recently that was talking to me about their stimulant use and they were just saying stuff like, man, if I don't take my stimulant, I'm like completely discombobulated. And, we were talking about not using a stimulant the day of the session. And she was like, she lived like 75 minutes from the guide's place or something like that.
And she's Oh I'm gonna have to Uber there because I can't drive if I don't take my stimulants. That's how bad, like the focus issues are. And she was just talking about how stimulants have been an absolute miracle for her, how she went, 40, 50 years of life without it.
And it was just so hard in so many ways. And now I've started taking this and it's just [00:43:00] like someone switched a light in my head and I can think clearly and I complete tasks. And I started to think man is it my own stigma against stimulants that telling me to skip her the day of this psilocybin session?
If a person wants to show up as they like to show up. and that stimulant is a huge piece of how they're doing and feeling and they're feeling very good about it. And they're really, it was a tiny dose too. It was like 10 milligrams, maybe 20, something like that. Am I taking a massive risk by combining it with a moderate dose of psilocybin in that person?
So that was a case that came along recently that kind of yeah, there's a balance between. our thoughts about stimulants, how they interact with psychedelics and cognitive liberty and how a person wants to be in the world.
Yeah. So I say that stimulants can be done with like minimal breaks to psychedelics.
Stimulants can be done with longer kinds of breaks and stimulants can be [00:44:00] inhaled and causing psychosis and disqualifying a person from a psychedelic experience in the near future.
Lana Pribic: yeah. I appreciate that. You're just painting a picture of how many different scenarios and people there are going through this.
Ben Malcolm: That's it. That's it. It's like people like the spirit pharmacist. He's the drug interaction guy. True, right? But every drug is attached to a person and getting to know that person and why they're taking it and what they're bringing, what the relationship is with that substance. is a massive part and almost equally important as considering the drug interaction.
Again, some of the drug interactions are just black and white and dangerous and it becomes almost like paramount, like you have to, like there isn't many other choices here. But most of the scenarios actually are not quite that way. There's a lot more gray than I think some, than we've historically thought anyway.
Lana Pribic: I'm definitely learning that through this conversation. I want to talk to you about Iboga and alcohol. Is there a contraindication there? [00:45:00] Cause I know when I do my Iboga retreats. We're told to avoid alcohol for as long as possible because it it'll reverse the effect of the iboga and I'm just curious if there's like a pharmacology reason there or if it's more just an energetic thing.
What do you know about that?
Ben Malcolm: Alcohol works directly on GABA channels. And I think that we're fairly well aware that drugs that work directly on GABA channels and the other big class of therapeutics out there that have this similar mechanism, not quite the same, would be benzodiazepine types of drugs. So benzodiazepines, as well as alcohol, are things that I think water down or acutely diminish responses to In this video, we're going to be talking about some of the different types of psychedelics, both psychedelics that work on serotonin like psilocybin, and psychedelics that work on maybe glutamate or opioid systems like ketamine and potentially ibogaine.
So I would have to say that yeah, it probably diminishes some of the psychedelic [00:46:00] or psychoactive qualities of ibogaine, but it may actually worsen some of the sedative. Or for example, ibogaine is known to cause like a cerebellar ataxia or a sort of feeling of being having some motor or in coordination or balance issues related to activity in the cerebellum.
And that's also a target of alcohol. For example, a person could drunk that motor in coordination that is a, is an ataxia as well. I don't know if a person like must avoid alcohol for weeks ahead of time for a boga to be safe and work well. But I think that given a boga is one of the most anti addictive sorts of substances and a lot of people struggle with alcohol, it does seem natural to ask persons to abstain from alcohol for at least some period of time
Lana Pribic: Yeah. Yeah. We're told specifically to avoid it well before and after, because if you have the alcohol after Iboga, it'll diminish some of the afterglow and the benefits of it is what we're told. [00:47:00] So yeah, that's very curious.
Ben Malcolm: Yeah. Or I haven't heard so much with alcohol, but I think with other types of narcotic agents like cocaine or other types of opiates, it's also known that ibogaine resets a person's tolerance to those types of things. So reintroducing substances after ibogaine I don't know, that could be quite dangerous.
Because a person may think I was accustomed to using this dose before ibogaine, and that was, what gave some mild effect that I liked and was pleasant. They do an ibogaine experience, they have a big sort of reset that happens to substances, and they're more or less substance naive.
They have no tolerance anymore. or they go back and use those sorts of doses that they're accustomed to, then it can become dangerous and they're. Kenneth Alper has done some nice case series around this and demonstrated that when things really go wrong with ibogaine, there oftentimes is this kind of reintroduction of substance that happens very quickly, or even [00:48:00] during the ibogaine experience, it seems to explain a lot of the toxicity a
Lana Pribic: Hmm.
Ben Malcolm: uh,
Lana Pribic: Amazing. So do you know about Kana?
Ben Malcolm: Not a whole lot. No.
It's supposed to be an herbal SSRI type of medication or herbal SRI. I don't know if it's selective for the serotonin reuptake pump, but people tend to report this sort of like mild euphoric kind of effect to it, which would be consistent with, a mild increase in serotonin neurotransmission.
It seems that some persons are, hoping to create some kind of herbal ecstasy concoction using things like Kana and blue lotus and cacao ceremonially, maybe in some type of combination. So I've not heard of anyone just overtly report. Like I took Kana with substance X and I felt like it was overtly toxic, but given it's serotonergic, I would think that it has.
some level of interaction potential with other serotonergic types of substances and whether it's, one of [00:49:00] these dangerous or more upset stomach anxiety, a bit of a headache. I'm not really sure, but I'm guessing it's towards the latter.
Lana Pribic: plus Iboga is a no go. That's what I heard that from someone who's a nurse practitioner in that world,
Ben Malcolm: yeah, I think probably you want to, Absolutely minimize the number of chemical inputs that are coming into your body with aboga and abogain like overall. That is one where it seems like the less things that you're taking, probably the better. The drug has an incredibly complex mechanism.
It seems very sensitive to, changes in CYP2D6. There's lots of different substances that can block CYP2D6 that could increase ibogaine or noribogaine concentrations. There's also the potential for different types of substances to have effect on E electrocardiogram types of rhythms that could actually increase the cardiotoxic effect or the QTC intervals associated [00:50:00] with iboga.
Whether it's for a pharmacokinetic liver based reason or a pharmacodynamic like within the brain, or maybe even a cardiac conduction type of reason there's an interplay between them with some types of substances and makes good sense that you probably want to avoid
Lana Pribic: Yeah, that's a good point. It's just such a complex plant, but especially if you're doing Iboga, not Ibogaine, there's just so much that we don't know about it. It's probably best to minimize everything else that you're putting in with that
Ben Malcolm: Yeah. There's this one really nice review article that came out maybe a couple years ago about Iboga or Ibogaine, and I'm going to butcher the quote. I'll paraphrase it though, but there's this one piece in the middle of it, you know, it's, it's, I mean, it's a well written article, like all these references and things like that.
They're not saying it just because they didn't do their own research or something. But they really have this italicized quote in the middle of it that is kind of like the true mechanism of ibogaine is totally opaque to pharmacology. It was just kind of like,
Lana Pribic: humbling. Yeah.
Ben Malcolm: like a [00:51:00] humble
Lana Pribic: Yeah, it's definitely a humbling
Ben Malcolm: Yeah.
Lana Pribic: all the ways. What about, okay, I have to ask you about 5 MeO DMT and cannabis. What is going on there? I have had the most intense reactivations of 5 MeO DMT doing cannabis and even other psychedelics. But yeah, what's going on with cannabis and 5 MeO because I know, have you read Tryptamine Palace by any chance?
Like in that book.
Ben Malcolm: I, it's been
Lana Pribic: because he smokes like the bufo or the 5 meo with cannabis in that book, but are they contraindicated? Tell me about that. I need to know.
Ben Malcolm: Oh, I think a lot of persons that I speak with that are five of the other DMT practitioners. Yeah. Might draw a line between like the like, like, again, like cannabis, what kind of cannabis user do I have on my hands? Is this somebody that, uses a puff of blueberry kush at bedtime instead of an ambient, and that's been a nice substitution for them?
[00:52:00] Or is this someone that's holding six sacred cannabis rituals for themselves every single day, but still very depressed and wants to remember their childhood, but their memory feels a bit fuzzy from all the cannabis ceremonies. Like when a person is over using cannabis, it tends to block emotions and kind of get in the way of psychedelic experiences and effects.
Whereas a person is using cannabis on a less frequent, intermittent types of basis. It tends to not be as much of a deal or an issue or problem. 5 MeO DMT is fairly notorious. for creating these states in which a lot of the feelings and sensations from the experience returned to a person. And this is called a reactivation with 5 MeO DMT.
Cannabis is one of the kind of leading substances, particularly THC based cannabis, that can trigger these reactivation episodes. [00:53:00] Another one that gets flagged relatively often is the supplement melatonin for, for sleep. Melatonin is a tryptamine based neurotransmitter. It's a five substituted tryptamine neurotransmitter.
So perhaps it's possible that 5 MeO DMT interfaces with melatonin receptors as well as serotonin receptors. I've never seen any article that tries to really investigate that or test the binding of five substituted tryptamines against melatonin. Melatonin receptors, so I don't know, it doesn't happen to everybody.
But I think part of your counseling with 5 MeO DMT is that, this is an incredibly powerful molecule that tends to change a person. This is transformational work that we're engaging with. So you may notice that you respond to different types of substances differently and You may notice particularly using other psychoactive types of [00:54:00] substances in the days to weeks after that when you use them, it feels a lot more like the 5 MeO DMT experience or it's a lot stronger than you're expecting.
So maybe you want to either avoid those things for a period of time or if you are going to be reengaging with them, do it at times and spaces and places where if there was this reactivation. That happened that you would be able to work with what's happening rather than, Oh, my gosh, this shouldn't be happening right now and leading to dysphoria and panic attacks.
But what is the mechanism? I'm not really sure overall. I will say that cannabis, you can get these sorts of reactivation episodes triggered by cannabis with other psychedelics too. I've had a reported with psilocybin with, with ayahuasca but 5 MeO DMT does seem to be a little bit more higher fire powered, or the reactivations tend to occur a little bit [00:55:00] more frequently than with some other types of psychedelic substances.
Lana Pribic: Okay. Darn. I was hoping you would have the answer to that, but I guess it remains a mystery. Tell me. Okay. I know we're coming up on the hour here. We're past the hour. So I'm gonna start wrapping things up. 5 MeO is my absolute favorite and my obsession at the moment. I just had my first experience with it six months ago.
I'm curious. I downloaded your, you have a 5 MeO guide. I downloaded that. I've yet to read it. Can you share something with us that you find really fascinating about 5 MeO from the lens of pharmacology? 5 MeO.
Ben Malcolm: Oh, something about 5 MeO through the lens of pharmacology. Okay. So like, how is 5 MeO different than some other tryptamines, right? So it's notorious as the God molecule or creating this like true, like non dual type of experience where the subject object relationship just completely collapses and the person finds [00:56:00] themselves in this place of total oneness with source or the universe or God.
So that's I would say that Almost like the quintessential type of 5 MeO DMT experience. And it seems that 5 MeO DMT is very non dual and entheogenic, but it really isn't very hallucinogenic at all. For example, NN DMT tends to have a lot more hyperfractal hallucinations to it than 5 MeO DMT.
Things like 5 MeO DMT. 5 MeO DMT is interesting compared to the classic tryptamines, which include stuff like psilocybin and NMDMT, because 5 MeO DMT can fully stimulate serotonin receptors, whereas things like psilocybin and NMD can only partially stimulate serotonin receptors. 5 MeO DMT does work on the serotonin 2A receptor, which is supposedly the kind of psychedelic receptor, but it's actually stronger and works significantly on the serotonin 1A receptor as [00:57:00] well.
And that might be why you get less hallucinogenic effects with 5 MeO DMT. It seems that drugs that, you work strongly on serotonin 1A receptors, have less hallucinogenic properties to them, the ones that are a little bit more selective than for serotonin 2A receptors. 5 MeO DMT is probably primarily metabolized by monoamine oxidase.
which creates the potential for real serious drug interactions with monamine oxidase inhibitors with it, and may also be able to block serotonin reuptake, which is another reason why it could be dangerous with monamine oxidase inhibitors, whereas NMDT psilocybin doesn't block the serotonin reuptake pump, doesn't increase intrasynaptic serotonin.
So the likelihood of those being dangerous with monamine oxidase inhibitors is much, much less overall. I don't know, I could probably like, I don't know, just keep going with a bunch of gobbledygook. But like you said, I have a [00:58:00] five guide on it that really walks through some of this pharmacologic information in a hopefully linear way that, you can at least glean
Lana Pribic: plan on digging into it at one point. Thank you for sharing that. It's really validating to hear you say that there is a reason that it's not very hallucinogenic because I, yeah, I was talking about that on my Instagram page when I was sharing about it and people were coming at me and being like, what are you talking about?
It's super visual. It's super hallucinogenic. And I didn't find it to be that way, but of course it, Every experience is different for everyone and, yeah,
Ben Malcolm: yeah it's visual in the sense that it's like a total white room with the whiteness and the brightness and. Occasionally, if I've taken like very big doses of it, there is some sort of swirling hallucinogenic patterns that are occurring, particularly in the first few seconds or just after like inhalation.
But once the experience really gets going, I personally have not experienced much that I would consider like hallucinogenic [00:59:00] activity. Entheogenic, yeah very much but less generating a lot of visual activity. And much more like a just a big, whoa, consciousness
Lana Pribic: pure energy, pure consciousness. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you for that. Is there anything else that you feel like you would like to share with our audience and also let us know where people can find you? How can they enlist your support? You're such an amazing resource. And what offerings you have for people if they want to learn more?
Ben Malcolm: Yeah, so people can find me. I think you mentioned like I do a little bit of social media. I'm not credibly active at Instagram, Facebook, occasionally linked in. But if you really want the best of me, spiritpharmacist. com is my website. Yeah. I have a newsletter that I send out on a monthly basis where I basically select six or seven of the psychedelic research articles that came out in the last month that I think are real groundbreaking kind of stuff and summarize that.
So joining my email list is a wonderful way to stay connected with the things I do and also just [01:00:00] get ongoing research updates. I have a nice blog page. If you want some other types of free resources through the blog page, that's where you can find some of the downloads that you mentioned like the five guide, I've got one of breakthrough psychedelics, which are MDMA, I have an antidepressant and psychedelic drug interaction and tapering guide.
That's probably the most popular resource that I've ever put together. And then also run uh, Well, I say I do three things, right? I do psychopharmacology consulting. Yes, you can book a individual consultation, a la carte, if you want to, work with me that way. I sell different types of psychedelic education materials, webinar workshops, as well as courses.
And then I run a member resource and support program, which essentially hybridizes those things. So it's a subscription based program. But instead of just buying one course, you're just renting a library of all the educational resources that I've ever put together. Anything new always just goes directly to the member program.
It comes with an [01:01:00] email based drug information service. So you've got questions that are coming up on an ongoing basis. Maybe you're getting some intake forms that have some different medications or illnesses and you would like another set of eyes on those. That can happen through the drug information or the email based question and answer service with a member program.
And then with a member subscription, you're also entitled to discounted rates on consulting. So you want to consult regularly. You get a break there. You want to extend those discounted rates to your clients or applicants. You can do that as a facilitator or member of the resource and support program.
So I would say if you really want to have a collaborative and longitudinal relationship with me, the member resource and support crowd program is definitely the way to go. Or if it's a little bit more I would like to talk to him one time, or I'm just very interested in
Lana Pribic: amazing. You are well resourced. Wow, there's something there for everyone. I think I'll probably look at joining that membership at some point because I'm just starting my [01:02:00] facilitation journey. So yeah, that's so great to know that's available. Thank you so much, Ben. This has been so informative. And I just wish you all the best.
Thank you for allowing the psychedelic space to benefit from your skills and knowledge.
Ben Malcolm: Ah, thank you for allowing me to be in the psychedelic space. This is a bi directional, mutually beneficial, a beautiful kind of relationship that's unfolding here.
Lana Pribic: Yeah, that's the way it is here. Yeah. Win win. Perfect. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon.
