Name: Hamilton Morris on the Future of Legal Psychedelics (Best of Office Hours)
Uploaded: 2022-01-31T18:17:09.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Hamilton Morris on the Future of Legal Psychedelics (Best of Office Hours)' from Tim Heidecker on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-01-31. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Hamilton Morris on the Future of Legal Psychedelics (Best of Office Hours)' from Tim Heidecker on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-01-31. Transcript available.

So what do you think that looks like in the next three to five years, like a
commercially legal psychedelic product?
There's three different pharmaceutical companies that have received
authorization from the FDA to test psilocybin for treatment of depression.
So if any of those companies succeed, then at some point in the future, maybe
in the next five years,
you'll be able to go to a specialized clinic and have a specialized therapist
who's been trained for psychedelic assisted psychotherapy administer psilocybin
to you legally as a treatment for depression.
But that's still going to be a kind of specialized and expensive treatment that
will only be available to people with health insurance.
Right. So at the same time, there has to be work done to change drug policy so
that everybody has access to these things, even if they.
So we're still talking about like a heavily, heavily regulated prescription
psychedelic experience.
Exactly. Yeah.
What about what about on the recreational side?
Is there.
There is. Yeah, I mean, in Oregon, they're legal in a few different cities in
the United States.
They've decriminalized psychedelics in most instances that simply means that it's
harder for them to arrest you for it.
It doesn't really allow for any kind of legal sale of psychedelics.
I mean, that's a step in the right direction, but it's not everything.
Whereas in Oregon, there is now provisions where people can administer psilocin
and psilocybin if they want to in certain frameworks.
Right. So that's the direction that everything is moving.
So. But also the government is still making psychedelics illegal as we speak.
So it's happening in two different directions simultaneously.
The research, the research you're doing.
Is it.
Is it.
Is it.
Organ.
Is it.
Is it.
Are these new.
Chemicals.
You're.
Creating through combinations of things or.
Yeah.
Explain what you're doing because.
There is the purity of the actual plant that you ingest and that that feels so
like.
Direct and connected without like the middlemen of other agents coming other
substances coming in.
But.
But obviously with Vic's experience here, that's a.
That's an extraction of the plant.
Right.
Essentially.
And put into some kind of.
Candy.
But you're doing something different.
Yeah.
And it doesn't.
These things don't need to come from plants like LSD.
I think most people enjoy LSD and that doesn't.
Most people enjoy.
Since you brought LSD up, is that, is that a thing that's like dangerous to do?
Or is that safe?
Cause I, they always talk about or joke about like flashbacks and stuff like
that.
But is that a real thing?
And is it safe?
Is LSD safe?
Yeah.
I wouldn't say that it's catastrophic.
I wouldn't say that it's categorically safe for everyone at any dose.
I mean, especially if you're vulnerable to psychosis, it could potentially be
dangerous.
But I would say that it's essentially impossible to overdose on it.
It doesn't, it's not associated with death.
So you wouldn't want to drive a car while you're on it.
You know, there's potential to hurt yourself or jump out a window or something
like that.
But even that's pretty rare.
For God's sake.
Let me get back to my question.
I got questions.
Yeah.
You're, but you're doing something different than extracting the psilocybin
from a plant.
Correct?
What can you, is it in layman's terms as best possible, explain kind of what
you're doing in the lab?
Yeah.
I mean, so people only know about a couple psychedelics, normally LSD and psilocybin
and maybe mescaline or a couple of other things.
But there are hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, if not tens of thousands
of psychedelics.
So there's an enormous number of things that you can do to these structures to
modify them, to make them longer lasting.
Some of them last for several days.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
Some of them only lasts for a minute or two, like DMT.
Uh-huh.
And so you can play with different modifications of the molecule to augment
certain properties to maybe make them better for treatment of depression or
obsessive compulsive disorder or PTSD or whatever.
Or just make them better suited to therapeutic use because something like LSD
has such a long duration that if you have to have a therapist or two therapists
sitting with each patient for eight hours.
It's very expensive.
Therapy is already really expensive for a standard 50 minute session.
Most people already don't have access to that.
Right.
So then when you get all that up to eight hours, that makes it like a really
intensive procedure from a psychological standpoint.
Sure.
Okay.
So what are you doing in the lab?
Making new drugs.
Synthesis.
Organic synthesis.
From one.
Right.
Okay.
From what sources?
Like what?
Is that?
From indole.
I mean, usually the starting material is an indole.
So this chemical called indole usually is the, or some.
That's what Phil Braun is right now.
Indole.
That's an inside joke from the show.
Very good, Tim.
And that, so what is that?
Is that a plant or a organ?
Is it a moth?
Is it, what is it in the world?
It's not a moth.
It's a naturally.
Are moths psychedelic?
Because they're all over my fucking house right now.
One way to find out.
It's just a chemical.
I mean, the problem with explaining this stuff is it's just, it's chemicals,
chemicals that have different reactivities and you connect them like Lego
pieces to create new little molecular sculptures that have different types of
activity.
Some of them might be shorter acting or more potent or more potent or more of
this or less of that.
And it's, you know, it's the same way any, you make a psychedelic the same way
you'd make anything else.
The way you'd make, you know, any other type of drug.
I assume, yeah, I assume your, what you're, what you're working on is very
structured and scientific and there's a, there's a plan in place and you're
taking it very seriously.
Do you, how do you, I guess, how do you test this?
Do you just take it?
Well, there is a, there's a thing that mice do when they've been given a
psychedelic called the head twitch response.
If a mouse is given a psychedelic drug, it twitches its head in a very specific
way.
And that combined with supporting information about what receptors it binds to
can provide a strong indication based on the behavior of a mouse that a certain
drug is psychedelic.
What the hell?
Um, okay.
That explains it.
That explains it.
If a mouse, uh, twitches its head, do you take, do you say, okay, maybe I'll
take a lick?
Yeah.
That's the first step before something is considered as a medicine.
I mean, historically it would be the opposite.
You'd look at the head twitch response and you might say, that's a reason not
to make this a medicine because that's indicative of it being a psychedelic.
Traditionally, this is something that you'd want to strip out of any
pharmaceutical.
For example, there's an HIV medication called the Favirins that's psychedelic,
but they spent a lot of time trying to remove that activity.
Right.
Because they didn't want people who had HIV to have to take a psychedelic every
day.
Right.
Now it's sort of the opposite.
People are using that model to assess whether or not a drug is psychedelic
because it's now understood that that can have a therapeutic effect.
Right.
If you don't know what to do then.
You don't know what to do.
You don't know what to do.
You don't know what to do.
You don't know what to do.
You don't know what to do.
You don't know what to do.
You don't know what to do.
You don't know what to do.