The Fight for Legal MDMA - 5CAST (#12) ft. Hamilton Morris

Summary

5CAST w/ Andrew Callaghan Episode 12: "The Fight for Legal MDMA" ft. Hamilton Morris
September 27, 2025

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode of 5CAST features Andrew Callahan in conversation with Hamilton Morris—celebrated journalist, chemist, and psychedelic researcher—to examine how a network of activists, paid operatives, and pharmaceutical rivalries derailed the FDA’s approval process for using MDMA in PTSD therapy. The episode unpacks the convoluted interplay between activism, media manipulation, and corporate interests that led to the defeat of MAPS’s landmark push to legalize MDMA-assisted treatment for trauma, despite outstanding clinical results. Rich with Hamilton’s inside knowledge and trenchant criticism, the conversation reveals the dark politics at the heart of psychedelic legalization, calling into question motives behind recent anti-psychedelic reporting, the co-optation of “progressive” causes, and endemic dysfunction in both journalism and advocacy.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Who is Hamilton Morris? (01:21 – 02:22)

• Hamilton is best known for “Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia,” an investigative docuseries on psychoactive substances, blending scientific rigor with immersive storytelling.
• He’s also an active psychedelic chemist, independently creating new compounds and now working outside legacy media on Patreon documentaries.

“[I] invented a bunch of new psychedelic drugs, published it in scientific journals... Now I am totally independently making documentaries about the chemistry of psychedelics.” —Hamilton Morris [01:39]

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2. The Media’s Longstanding Neglect & Misrepresentation of Drug Issues (04:06 – 06:42)

• Hamilton recounts how Vice’s willingness to commission reporting on psychoactive substances was once unique but also stigmatized in mainstream journalism.
• Even as attention to psychedelic medicine increased, legacy media remained ill-equipped or disinterested in nuanced, honest coverage.
• Drug policy is persistently marginalized, though overdose deaths far outnumber major wartime losses.

“It’s totally normalized for journalists to do an absurdly bad job covering [drugs]… that’s just expected.” —Hamilton Morris [05:24]

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3. Shift in Drug Reporting: From Hype to “Psychedelic Negativity” (12:11 – 18:15)

• Early 2020s reporting was overwhelmingly positive about “the psychedelic renaissance.”
• After 2018, with new clinical evidence, activism and media focus swung toward “entrepreneurship of psychedelic negativity”—with outlets like Symposia launching campaigns framing drug legalization and commercialization as exploitative, colonial, or dangerous.

“There’s a term for it... ‘Entrepreneurship of psychedelic negativity.’ Almost its own micro-economy of people writing about ‘the gentrification of consciousness.’” —Hamilton Morris [16:44]

• Convoluted claims against MDMA therapy included accusations of the “gentrification of consciousness,” anti-veteran rhetoric, and moral panics over patents that distracted from core issues of drug prohibition.

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4. The Role of Symposia and Paid Activism (23:55 – 33:27)

• Symposia, an activist journalism collective, is identified as primary agitator against MDMA legalization. Morris alleges it was infiltrated by unhinged actors and funded by USONA, a pharmaceutical competitor to MAPS’s MDMA efforts.
• The group mixed valid critique with outsized “policing,” cancel campaigns, and documented encouragement of sabotage (up to “militant tactics”) against rivals—a campaign that ultimately self-destructed in scandal, infighting, and exposure of members’ questionable behaviors.

“The sorts of people that tend to appoint themselves as police officers to protect a space are often the least ethical, craziest people in a given group.” —Hamilton Morris [24:17]

• Funding sources and personal vendettas (e.g., the Sarlo family foundation) were often obfuscated or misrepresented, misleading grassroots activists.

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5. How USONA Manipulated Media and Public Opinion (27:49 – 33:41)

• USONA, via direct funding and influence on Symposia and allied journalists at Vice, planted negative stories about their business opponent, Compass Pathways, often without factual basis.
• These tactics included leaking, planting “cancel” stories, and mobilizing activists for reputational and operational sabotage.

“USONA would... issue all their stories through this one Vice blogger... Vice was a perfect tool for this particular thing. No one has been surprised at all that this happened.” —Hamilton Morris [27:49]

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6. Collapse of Clinical MDMA Approval (45:50 – 53:19)

• Despite decades of effort, positive trials (67% of participants in remission), and elaborate safety protocols, the FDA was swayed by public hearings influenced by Symposia and its supporters.
• Misrepresentation and exaggeration of isolated abuse incidents, false testimony, and coordinated public comment “astroturfing” eroded institutional confidence.
• Result: MDMA for PTSD remains Schedule 1, with vulnerable populations denied access to breakthrough therapy.

“So this keeps going…. There was one group that was particularly active in anti-psychedelic reporting. They became... they were terrorizing everyone in the psychedelic world. They were called Symposia.” —Hamilton Morris [22:54]

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7. Journalism, Legal Threats & the Weaponization of Law (09:59 – 11:33, 65:25)

• The old rationale for working at legacy outlets—legal protection—is eroding, and legal threats are now widely used as tactical censorship.
• Morris discusses ongoing legal threats (defamation, harassment) from Symposia and affiliated philanthropists, noting the role of “fact-checking” as a shield against lawsuits rather than a pursuit of truth.

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8. The Deeper Political and Personal Motivations (62:45 – 64:03, 121:23)

• Much of the movement against MDMA therapy was rooted not in authentic anti-capitalism or concern for patients, but in personal vendettas and rivalries:
  • A major funder (Susie Sarlo) opposed MAPS after a family inheritance dispute.
  • USONA’s agenda was driven by vengeance against Compass, not patient safety.
  • Paid activists used progressive language as smokescreen for business and personal goals.

“It has nothing to do with anything but a personal vendetta.” —Andrew Callahan [121:35]

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9. The Failure of Policy, Advocacy, and the Left (61:08 – 62:14)

• Infighting and “cannibalistic” tendencies within left/progressive activism made the broader movement vulnerable to manipulation and self-destruction.
• Legitimate concerns around abuse, indigenous knowledge, and ethics became tools for sabotage rather than reform.

“Cohesion is required and it’s so easy to manipulate. As we’ve now seen, we had one pharmaceutical company and one family exploit a couple psychos on the left and cause a massive amount of damage to psychedelic progress.” —Hamilton Morris [61:30]

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10. Lessons for Policy and Harm Reduction (83:14 – 87:56)

• Hamilton makes the case for full drug legalization and pragmatic, regulated approaches over punitive, prohibitionist models.
• The destruction of MDMA’s prospects is a microcosm of larger failures—misplaced blame, media distortion, and overfocus on marginal risks.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the scope of media manipulation:
  • “When a story gets complicated enough, it just starts to sound like the gibberish of a conspiracy theorist.” —Hamilton Morris [30:46]
• On “paid protestors” and controlled opposition:
  • “It’s typically not true, but I find it really interesting here that the company USONA is using this sort of like anti capitalist, anti fascist language to do their bidding...” —Andrew Callahan [33:27]
• On the FDA rejecting MDMA:
  • “The FDA ruled against it… No. Yeah, the FDA ruled against it.” —Hamilton Morris [53:14]
• The most dangerous drugs are the legal ones:
  • “Benzodiazepines are a really good way to fuck yourself up... it’s very easy to medicalize your own use.” —Hamilton Morris [79:42]
• On the tragic irony of “anti-abuse” activism:
  • “If the stated goal of preventing sexual abuse were real, then having a formalized, approved clinical framework... would be the best way to prevent that type of abuse.” [122:37]
• On how movements get sabotaged:
  • “A major moral of this story is just how much damage a group of psychos can do... Like, people that have stuff to do are busy. They don’t want to be in a Twitter war with crazy people.” —Hamilton Morris [118:56]

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Timeline of Important Segments (Timestamps, MM:SS)

• Intro to Symposia drama: 00:00–01:17
• Hamilton’s background & current work: 01:21–02:52, 73:58–76:01
• History of drug reporting at Vice: 04:06–08:03
• Legacy and pitfalls of journalistic ethics: 08:35–10:51
• Paid activist sabotage of MDMA trials: 12:11–19:00, 44:03–58:28
• Allegations, legal threats & inside stories: 31:21–43:11, 65:25–66:28
• MAPS trials, FDA hearings, the “cancel campaign”: 45:50–53:41
• Effects of the MDMA rejection: 58:28–61:08
• Dangers of left/progressive self-destruction: 61:08–62:41
• Funding, vendettas, and why MDMA was really derailed: 62:45–65:21, 121:23–121:52
• Advice for listeners and final thoughts: 127:35–128:04

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Conclusion & Takeaways

The effort to legalize MDMA for PTSD therapy suffered a decisive defeat not due to bad science or medical risk, but because of orchestrated activist/media sabotage, funded by rival pharmaceutical interests and unresolved personal vendettas. The episode exposes how progressive rhetoric and identity politics can be weaponized—by those with something to lose—against the very movements they seem to serve. Hamilton Morris and Andrew Callahan offer a clarion warning for future activism and reporting: always interrogate motives, follow the money, and don’t let manufactured outrage distract from real solutions.

“Be suspicious of the news, regard it with suspicion, but also be smart about it. Be critical. Make your own news... it’s an existential responsibility to develop a well calibrated detector and understanding the world.” —Hamilton Morris [127:35]

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[Links to Hamilton's Patreon and coverage suggested by hosts]

Transcript

[Hamilton Morris]

There was like one group that was particularly active in anti psychedelic reporting, this group called Symposia. They've actually advised people to start engaging in terrorist tactics. It just kept getting worse and worse and worse. The problem was that these people were uncontrollable. They were seriously insane. One of the people is pretending to be indigenous and was outed for lying to the FDA and beating her boyfriend with a broom. The other one distributed underage revenge pornography and stalked ex girlfriend. The other is living with his wife who is a co worker, which I think is ethically questionable. And the other dedicated her life to trying to destroy an indigenous man who she had consensual sex with, but could only get New York magazine to publish it because every other magazine wanted to speak with the person who's being accused. New York magazine was the only publication that lacks enough standards to allow this to be published. And one of them, I don't know, he's probably just going to be like a freelance psycho harassing people on Twitter.

[Andrew Callahan]

And those are the core symposium members? Yeah, those are the people that stopped MDMA from being legal for use for PTSD therapy.

[Hamilton Morris]

It's almost inspiring if it weren't so horrible.

[Andrew Callahan]

All right, we are here right now with an extremely special guest, Mr. Hamilton Morris. Thank you so much for joining the Five. We're going to get to some super spicy, potentially lawsuit inducing conversation pretty soon. But before we get into that, for those who don't know, can you tell the people about what you do and what you're working on right now?

[Hamilton Morris]

Yes. I made a documentary series about psychoactive drugs for many years, over a decade. Humanity has a complex relationship with psychoactive substances. Come with me as I travel the world to study their chemistry and impact on society. And while I was doing that, I also worked in a lab and created new psychedelics. Did that full time for years. Invented a bunch of new psychedelic drugs, published it in scientific journals occasionally. And now I am totally independently making documentaries about the chemistry of psychedelics that you can watch on my Patreon.

[Andrew Callahan]

Hell yeah, we gotta make the people pay for that. How much is it? From us?

[Hamilton Morris]

Five bucks.

[Andrew Callahan]

We're gonna put the link in the description. If you're watching this, you actually have to get Hamilton's Patreon. It's required if you guys want to.

[Hamilton Morris]

Continue to watch this programming.

[Andrew Callahan]

What's the next one you got coming out?

[Hamilton Morris]

Man, It's a massive scale LSD chemistry project or something very close to lsd. I created a new LSD type molecule with this chemist, Alex Stratford. And then we tested it and learned a lot about how LSD is made.

[Andrew Callahan]

Who was the first guy to make it?

[Hamilton Morris]

Albert Hoffman. Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

And Timothy Leary was the first guy to publicize information about it.

[Hamilton Morris]

He was the first real LST evangelist. Arguably. There was actually another. There were some people before him. I mean, it's a pretty dazzling chemical. Most of the people that tried it, including Albert Hoffman, were blown away because the experience is pretty damn wild. But Leary was the one who was able to make it into a media event. I love Timothy Leary. He's extremely funny, I think. I, like, people hate on him now because they think his lack of seriousness and scientific rigor somehow destroyed the psychedelic movement. But I think that's a pretty dumb take.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, the psychedelic movement has definitely reached a crescendo in the past maybe 10, 15 years, right?

[Hamilton Morris]

Oh, yeah. I'm doing an ayahuasca trip tonight. Literally changed who I am.

[Andrew Callahan]

You ever did mushrooms?

[Hamilton Morris]

Jessa Common says ketamine therapy changed her life. My inclination would be to make this available, at least in therapeutic settings and maybe more generally.

[Andrew Callahan]

I remember when I first started watching your show back in the day on Vice, which was called Hamilton's Pharmacopia. You were one of the first people that I could see who had publicly available documentaries talking about drugs that were not that widely discussed at that time.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, yeah. It's weird because at that point there was very few people doing it, despite there being a huge audience for it. Like, it was this obscure subject that anytime I made anything about it, millions of people would watch it. So there was clearly an appetite for it. And then that interest just kept growing. Yet it remained a subject that was treated as if it was somehow obscure. Like when Vice disintegrated, a few of these post mortem analyses would say, like, you know, they were so crazy, they even had a guy who was reporting, reporting on drugs. Like, as if this was like, so unthinkable that there would be somebody who would specialize in reporting on this domain.

[Andrew Callahan]

Science problem.

[Hamilton Morris]

Wow, what an experience.

[Andrew Callahan]

So they saw that as a factor in the downfall, or they saw just a notable point of discussion.

[Hamilton Morris]

Like a notable point. Like this wild media organization even was so crazy that they had somebody who was reporting on drugs.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, I remember seeing that meme back in the day where someone. It was like a dildo thrown onto a whiteboard.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, of course. Yeah. Classic.

[Andrew Callahan]

You know what I mean? But I feel like you were one of those people that really launched Vice to that new level back in those days.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, There were a lot of things that they were doing, but it was definitely a domain that legacy media has and continues to fail at miserably. And drug issues, for whatever reason, remain this, like, marginalized thing where it's totally normalized for journalists to do an absurdly bad job covering them. Like, that's just expected that it will be absolutely terrible.

[Andrew Callahan]

And why do you think that is?

[Hamilton Morris]

I'm not. I think because no matter how serious it is, right? You're like, over a hundred thousand people in the United States die of drug overdoses in 2021, 2022, more people that died than in the Vietnam War. Like, it's a huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge deal. At least Americans that died in the Vietnam War. And yet it remains this kind of, like, thing that no matter how many people die, no matter how much consequence it has on medicine or scientific research or any number of extremely important areas, people just don't take it seriously, or they have some kind of weird resistance to actually understanding it. The filtered aqueous calcium ethyl sulfate is treated with an aqueous solution of sodium carbonate, forming sodium ethyl sulfate. The cation exchange is visually monitored by the precipitation of insoluble calcium carbonate, which settles to the bottom of the bucket.

[Andrew Callahan]

So back in those days, do they still have that big Williamsburg office?

[Hamilton Morris]

No, smaller. When I started, it was. There were, like, different. It started out as one thing, then it doubled in size, and then it moved to a different location. When I started, it was much smaller.

[Andrew Callahan]

What was the culture of the company back then?

[Hamilton Morris]

It was. It's funny because there is an era that never gets talked about with Vice because you have these, like, very dazzling figures like Gavin McInnes that everyone likes to talk about because they're controversial and they're involved in all these politically sensitive domains. Or Shane Smith, because he was a showman. But the main guy during that period was this editor, Jesse Pearson, who doesn't really get talked about that much because he was just a very talented guy who made great stuff. And there's nothing really controversial about him. But, you know, he was making. Taking Vice into this sort of interesting counterculture literary magazine. And he'd have people like William Volman contributing. There's a lot of really good journalism, publishing, fiction, a lot of interesting art stuff. During that period, I was doing all kinds of stuff that you wouldn't even typically associate with Vice, like getting an original translation of a Stanislaw Lem science fiction short story that had never been translated to English before, stuff like that. So there was A lot of cool stuff going on, but it didn't quite fit the stereotype. So people sort of forgot about most of that type of stuff.

[Andrew Callahan]

What marked like the distinct end of that era and the beginning of a new one.

[Hamilton Morris]

It was the pivot to news. It was because Vice was essentially a art and comedy magazine, right. And then they started kind of dipping a toe in the water of like, maybe we can do real news and we can even rival organizations like the New York Times or cnn. And at first that seemed ridiculous, and then people were really responding to it. And so the news became an increasingly dominant dimension of how the company presented itself to the world.

[Andrew Callahan]

And how do you see that pivot looking back now?

[Hamilton Morris]

I mean, I've always had. I'd be curious how you feel about this, like, because you actually study journalism. I have never.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, I had a communications degree at a small school.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yes, to a certain extent. So I have like. I've never studied journalism in any way. My sense of journalistic ethics is entirely self constructed based on my sense of what is right and wrong. I don't even really know what is like. I know that I have to tell the truth, but I don't know what is taught to a student. I know that a lot of the people that I see that do have like graduate degrees in journalism and things like that tend to be some of the worst journalists that I see. And I actually have a snarky hypothesis for that, which is that one of your primary tasks as a journalist is to assess whether or not you're being scammed by somebody. And so if you pay a hundred thousand dollars or your parents pay $100,000 for you to get a master's degree from Columbia for a journalism degree, you're probably not very perceptive to scams. I'm at Columbia because it's the best.

[Andrew Callahan]

Place to learn journalism, period.

[Hamilton Morris]

If this is like what you're doing to become like a blogger at some. Definitely, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

And also like the way things have changed now. I'm sure it was like a bit different eight and ten years ago, but you're more likely to have success as a journalist now in the field and just like through developing your own personal following than you are through a newsroom hierarchy.

[Hamilton Morris]

And I of course agree. I think like the entire old way of doing things is kind of broken down and has become very independent, which is kind of amazing for people like you and me. It's not great for these legacy institutions because they're going to continue to experience brain drain, because anybody that has a following of more than a couple thousand people, can make more money than they would working at the New York Times with an independent news show of some kind. And then the main advantage of these legacy media institutions is legal protection, so that journalists can take risks and they can say things that are dangerous, but the institution is there to protect them with lawyers, to allow them to be free to say whatever it is that they want to say. But that is also breaking down, I think. I think so, too.

[Andrew Callahan]

You're talking about the CBS settlement and the Paramount lawsuit and stuff like that.

[Hamilton Morris]

I wasn't referring to that specifically, but that would be an example. But more and more, I see fact checking not as something that is done to establish factuality, but it's something that is done to limit legal liability of a media outlet, like the fact checker doesn't really care about what is true. They care about what can result in a lawsuit.

[Andrew Callahan]

So. Meaning that if somebody has more capital, they're going to be more cautious about criticizing them.

[Hamilton Morris]

And that's the whole point should be that if you have a big institution, the advantage is the freedom to actually say things and not be afraid of somebody intimidating you with a lawsuit of one kind or another.

[Andrew Callahan]

And that's why we need court reform.

[Hamilton Morris]

Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm getting legally threatened as well, and I'm planning to ignore it. But even getting to the point of saying, all right, fuck it, I'm going to ignore it, that required lawyers to say, okay, I think you can ignore this.

[Andrew Callahan]

So the thing that you're getting legally threatened about is what we're going to talk about today.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yes.

[Andrew Callahan]

So the audience is going to get an extremely juicy insider look into a thing that could land you in trouble. But if you do, will help you.

[Hamilton Morris]

Thank you. I appreciate that.

[Andrew Callahan]

What's up, everybody? My name is Andrew Callahan, and you're watching five Cast, our broadcast podcast type of deal, which is also available on Spotify, Amazon and Apple podcasts. Today, we're sitting down with the illustrious Hamilton Morris, as you guys have seen, and we're going to discuss many complicated and intricate things before ultimately diving into how and why a paid activist group called Symposia, who are funded by an allegedly nefarious pharmaceutical company called USONA, successfully interfered with the FDA's plans to legalize MDMA after a series of highly successful clinical trials in which it was proven that MDMA helped many patients, including U.S. army veterans, cope and heal from their PTSD, anxiety and depression.

[Hamilton Morris]

I feel normal again, if that makes any sense.

[Andrew Callahan]

My world changed. This therapy is the sole reason that my son has a father instead of a folded flag. Let's back up a bit to give.

[Hamilton Morris]

You guys a refresher.

[Andrew Callahan]

These trials began back in 2018 after the end of the Zandemic and were arranged by a group called maps, the Multidisciplinary association for Psychedelic Studies, who recently hosted a conference in Denver that we shot some footage at. Thanks for the press pass, fellas. So in these trials, around 80% of participants achieved significant remission, with some no longer even meeting the diagnosis criteria for PTSD. After just two to three supervised MDMA.

[Hamilton Morris]

Assisted therapy sessions, 67% of them lost their PTSD diagnosis.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yet still, as I mention, the FDA advisory panel decided to pull the plug last minute as a result of external pressure from symposia who ran a multi year cancel campaign accusing various figures in the MDMA world of abuses of power, sexual misconduct, cultural appropriation, the gentrification of consciousness, and of course, the hyper capitalization of sacred indigenous medicines. Now MDMA is back to being a Schedule 1 narcotic, lumped in legally with heroin and punishable by up to three years in prison and or a $10,000 fine. So we're back to more being in jail for drugs and treating mental health disorders by bombing people's brains with Prozac and other mind numbing SSRIs. But anyways, I think this story is very important because the phrase paid protester often reads like some George Floyd era phony baloney Soros bullshit conspiracy used to delegitimize righteous anger about something. But the suits have truly entered the vampire castle for real this time and are using progressive language to destroy progressive causes. And alternative media is complicit. Anyways, like I mentioned, Hamilton's going to cover a lot of ground today. This episode actually took me two separate watches to really digest in its totality. So if you want to watch this whole thing on half speed and low pitch, I don't blame you. So what the heck is going on.

[Hamilton Morris]

With the whole psychedelic world?

[Andrew Callahan]

No, no, no, with the, with the legal threats you're getting.

[Hamilton Morris]

Oh, with the legal threats I'm getting. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, these legal threats that I'm getting. So in the psychedelic world, there's been a weird turn that has taken place where there is a period where pretty much all of the reporting that you saw was extremely positive. We are in the early stages of what future generations may one day describe as a kind of psychedelic renaissance. I thought it was like vaguely corny, but as far as problems go, it Was a very minor one to have. You know, everyone is writing these stories like, gee whiz, magic mushrooms. You thought they were a drug, but they're actually a treatment for depression. And there's actually a study going on at Johns Hopkins University and they're finding out that these magic mushrooms occasion mystical type experience. So I was like, all right, whatever. We get a bunch of news articles saying that psychedelics aren't bad. This is not really a very exciting revelation to me, but it's a hell of a lot better than stories about how it's good that someone's getting arrested for possessing drugs or something like that, which is kind of the norm. And this was around the time that I left journalism to just do chemistry full time for a couple years. I was like, this is all on autopilot. Like, people are going to write. The clinical trials will progress. People will write their puff pieces about the pharmaceutical companies and how they're doing something good. Which as far as I'm concerned, they are actually like, I think it's a good thing to develop MDMA or psilocybin for treatment of depression. But as soon as I left the public sphere, I just started to notice more and more of these extremely negative articles coming out that seem to nonsensically scaremonger in various ways. There's a. A term for it that this scholar, Oliver Davis, gave. He called it the entrepreneurship of psychedelic negativity. And it's like. It almost was like its own micro economy in this world of people writing these articles about the gentrification consciousness or the.

[Andrew Callahan]

Whoa, whoa, whoa, we gotta back up a bit. What is the gentrification of consciousness? How do you gentrify something that doesn't exist? Well, it does exist, but not in a tangible form.

[Hamilton Morris]

You'll have to write a think piece about it. I don't know.

[Andrew Callahan]

No, I mean, what the hell does that mean?

[Hamilton Morris]

Who the fuck knows what that means?

[Andrew Callahan]

He read the article. What are they saying?

[Hamilton Morris]

That means that it's bad, that psychedelics are being developed as medicines because conceivably somebody might make money off of it.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh, like white capitalists?

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

And okay, so this has to do with Native Americans? Vaguely, because they use psychedelics like peyote for ceremonies. So they're saying that, like the suits making things like the sacred medicines of the indigenous peoples available for therapy is gentrifying the medicine?

[Hamilton Morris]

Basically, yes.

[Andrew Callahan]

Okay, cool. So I figured it out.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah. All right, dope.

[Andrew Callahan]

So you're seeing a bunch of negative puff pieces about different kinds of drugs.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, the psychedelic industrial Complex. A lot of this kind of moralistic hand wringing about patents, weird articles about the ethics of treating PTSD in veterans.

[Andrew Callahan]

They're sticking up for veterans.

[Hamilton Morris]

No, no, actually this is like essentially anti veteran. They're saying essentially they got PTSD by fighting wars for the American war machine, therefore they deserve to suffer. This is the basic idea.

[Andrew Callahan]

Even for Vietnam vets, they feel this way. 17 year old kids who got drafted, this is vets. If you're drafted and you have ptsd, you're not a part of the American war machine. You had no choice.

[Hamilton Morris]

Right. And it's almost entirely impoverished people who are doing it because it afforded some opportunities in education or health care and because they're being pummeled with different types of propaganda. And it's not a very compassionate way of thinking about people's motivations for being involved in the military. Even if you're anti American war and anti military, which I generally speaking am. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that I think that veterans shouldn't receive effective treatment for PTSD because it promotes the American imperialist war machine.

[Andrew Callahan]

It's asinine.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, yeah, it's a. So. But you saw more and more and more of this stuff and you know, I'm looking at it and I'm just thinking, oh God, this is. Everyone has to write with this tone, has to always be. And another one of these articles making psychedelics look bad for something seemingly innocuous or not even bad at all. And so I started wondering more and more about how things were getting this bad, how it had gotten to the point that more and more of the reporting was just this sort of nonsense. And I started talking to people about it. You know, one of the things that had become very prominent was this patent scaremongering. This was like immensely prevalent. And there was, at the beginning, there was this patent attorney named Graham Pechenek and he told me the story himself, actually, where he had gone to a MAPS conference and he felt bad that no one was really interested in his work as a patent attorney. And then he kind of started strategically scaring people about patents and suddenly everyone was interested in what he had to say. So this started out with a frightening people about some, I can't even remember who someone patented DMT vapes. And, and so he's, you know, tweeting about this like, oh my God, DMT vapes are being patented. We've got to, we've got to end this DMT vape patent. But this is just such an irrelevant distraction. Because DMT is a Schedule 1 controlled substance federally. So the idea of patent police being what we have to. There's no such thing as patent police either by the way. But the idea of like some imaginary patent enforcement force that is going to come and arrest people for possessing patent protected DMT vapes is just ridiculous. It's a non existent problem. It has never occurred. Also the patent that he was battling was terrible and unenforceable. The whole thing was just ridiculous. And whatever people say, lots of ridiculous stuff. But what worries me is you can frighten people about irrelevant issues. So then you have people worried about DMT patents instead of drug policy reform instead of actually recognizing the real issue which is federal prohibition of DMT and trying to change the laws so that we could even live in a world where this ridiculous concern of patent infringement on your DMT vape would be a reality. Like that's like, I definitely we, we should be so lucky is to live in a world where that is a legitimate concern. But it's very much not the case. And then maybe one more just brief example of like how bad this guy. Because I think people listening to this, they don't even know. Like I'm friends with this, this guy named Timothy Tyler and he, he of these three strike law ultimate horror stories where I think he'd like sold weed or something when he was like 18. And then maybe when he was 19 he got caught selling LSD and was sentenced to life in prison and only got, he was in prison for like 25 years and only got out of prison because Obama directly pardoned him. So this is like drug war worst case scenario. Like you would have died in a cage for selling a relatively small amount of lsd. Not that any amount justifies being locked in a cage for the rest of your life. And just by direct intervention of the President of the United States were you able to be set free. And I remember I was like driving with him to a conference. I was doing work at a university that was being funded by one of these pharmaceutical companies. And he was like, I don't know man, like aren't you worried about that company? And I was like, no, not really. They've been pretty cool to me. And he's like, well I heard that they patented psilocybin. And I was like, yeah, they patented like one form of it for treatment of like one type of depression. And he's like, but that's not good. Like what are my friends gonna do who sell mushrooms? And I was like, oh, your friends can't sell mushrooms right now it's like federally illegal. Like, but this was like. And the point here is not to say that this guy, like this shit is very confusing for people. And so when you add all this like journalists fanning the flames of fear with irrelevant issues, people don't identify what the actual problem is. Like you had people that were concerned that patent infringement was the issue with selling psychedelics as opposed to federal prohib of every commonly used psychedelic which are all placed in Schedule 1, which is the most restrictive legal category that's reserved for drugs that not only have the highest abuse potential as conceptualized by the government, but no recognized medical use. So yeah, so this keeps going and I don't know if I should, I should just go right into this kind of homie. So there was, there was like one group that was particularly active in anti psychedelic reporting. They had become, and I think like every community has some version of this group, like comedy. Had that guy Seth Simons, you know what I'm talking about? He was like the person who got.

[Andrew Callahan]

Shane Gillis.

[Hamilton Morris]

Shane Gillis canceled.

[Andrew Callahan]

So he's the one who went and found that Asian quote from back in the day, made it a whole thing. Destroyed the guy's career for a couple years.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So and that was his specialty was like, let me dig up up something that proves that somebody is a fascist or a racist or let me find a joke that I can take out of context to prove that someone is wicked in some way.

[Andrew Callahan]

That guy.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, yeah, that guy. Yes.

[Andrew Callahan]

Weird hustle.

[Hamilton Morris]

It's a weird hustle. But I think every community like, I guarantee there's like someone listening to this in the like fly fishing community or something and he's like. And there's like a dude like that who's like trying to prove that fly fishing is racist or something. Or like just like there became a type of person that became obsessed with proving the wickedness of their adversaries within whatever niche community they were a part of. And so this group were terrorizing everyone in the psychedelic world. They were called symposia. They've actually just totally self destructed at this point because they all started accusing each other of impropriety. And by the end of it, every single one of them had their own allegations. I want to say that I resigned from symposia at the end of last year because I was concerned about a former colleague's conduct and the trajectory of the institution as a whole. Whole. A major factor was that symposia failed to investigate A formal complaint of unethical behavior filed against one of the members of the organization and then subsequently failed to address a multitude of additional issues that were presented to the team. Which is of course, a typical and classic parable of the left eating itself. Which is sad, because I'm not just suggesting that there weren't actual problems and don't continue to be actual problems related to psychedelic research and the medicalization and therapeutic implementation of psychedelics. They're real problems and we talk about them for the next 10 hours. But the issue is that the sorts of people that tend to appoint themselves as police officers to protect a space are often the least ethical, craziest people in a given group there. It's like the sorts of people that want to be cops are usually the last people that you want to be a cop. And so this group group started out very vocally pledging their absolute support for a pharmaceutical company called USONA. The AT1 time leader of the group, who went by the pseudonym David Nichols, which was oddly stolen from a prominent psychedelic chemist, which makes it confusing to talk about. And so he. He had announced his absolute support for the pharmaceutical company Usona, but around this, in the same announcement, advised people to start terrorizing and engaging in terrorist tactics against any individuals involved with usona's competitor, Compass. And this became kind of the de facto stance of all reporting, creating this highly simplistic moral binary where USONA were the good guys and their business competitor Compass were the bad guys. I think we also need to ask who are the gatekeepers in such a model Model. And as some of these places talk about mainstreaming psychedelics, we have to ask, what is the mainstream? What are the effects of mainstreaming psychedelics and are the benefits supposed benefits, what they're claiming? And so I'm like watching all this stuff unfold, working in a lab that's receiving money from Compass, thinking, geez, this sure seems really unfair, but damn if I'm the last person that should be talking about this. I have a legitimate conflict of interest. So I'm thinking, oh well, maybe another journalist is going to come along and talk about this or something so I don't have to be the one. Because this is weird. And I just started watching more and more weird stuff, just kept getting worse and worse and worse. Where the USONA was, instead of like issuing press releases, they would just seemingly issue all of their stories through this one Vice blogger named Shayla Love.

[Andrew Callahan]

Vice is involved?

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, Vice is involved. Actually, Vice was the primary instrument of this, because Vice doesn't even have any kind of fact checking whatsoever. Maybe for a very brief period at the magazine, they had fact checking, but you could. VICE was a perfect tool for this particular thing. Like any single, any person I've ever talked to advice about this. No one has been surprised at all that this happened. So they would say things. Representatives or funders of USONA would leak these stories to this Vice blogger, Shayla Love saying these things like, oh, you know, Compass is interfering with legalization efforts in Oregon and we gotta sound the alarm on this.

[Andrew Callahan]

So they were making it seem like Compas was actually gatekeeping and blocking the.

[Hamilton Morris]

Legalization of psychedelics, which is a very powerful idea because that's kind of what you would expect would happen, right? You have a bunch of ultra rich people getting involved in funding multi million dollar clinical trials on psychedelics. It's costing a huge amount of money. Wouldn't non medical use of psychedelics represent a threat to their business? So it makes intuitive sense when you think about it that a pharmaceutical company would do that. The issue was that it just wasn't true. And if you read the article, it's very bizarre. It's. It's like the evidence that they have for this interference didn't come from any of the people that were part of this initiative, Measure 109 in Oregon to legalize psilocybin. In fact, they explicitly said that there had been no interference. It came from a random asset psychiatrist named George Keepers, who had received a friendly email from someone involved with one of these pharmaceutical companies and that was it. So there's actually no evidence for it whatsoever. Again, this is almost hard to talk about. Like, as I'm telling you, I'm like, damn, this is a complicated story and it involves all these names. But the real takeaway is that there was an enormous amount of extremely bad reporting that was coming out that was distorting the way people thought about these things. It's an ironic twist that this false information about Compas interfering with legalization efforts in Oregon came from a funder of usona, a company that was providing direct financial incentives to Maps, saying they would give them money if they halted all drug policy reform. So the company that was actually interfering with drug policy reform was then planting an idea that their competitor was doing exactly what they were truly doing.

[Andrew Callahan]

So double gaslighting.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, double gaslighting. Again. Complicated. Complicated shit.

[Andrew Callahan]

Infowars.

[Hamilton Morris]

So who does fund you guys? Where do you guys get funded from? So we are not currently discussing our funders, Infowars. And I mean, this is like one of the Weird things about journalism and storytelling is when a story gets complicated enough, it just starts to sound like the gibberish of a conspiracy theorist.

[Andrew Callahan]

No, no, no. I'm following you.

[Hamilton Morris]

Okay, okay. It's like. But you know, when you talk to someone, they're like, oh, Alan Dulles and Sidney Gottlieb, they were working with Operation Paperclip. And we're going to have visual aid for this. Okay, okay, okay. All right. Okay, so I'll go into it.

[Andrew Callahan]

So at the juncture we're at right now is that you have this pharmaceutical company making it seem like their rival pharmaceutical company is trying to block the legalization of psychedelics, but it's actually them that are trying to block the legalization of psychedelics. They're using VICE to disseminate negative press about this company while simultaneously encouraging terroristic action. When you said terroristic, do you mean like car bombs and stuff?

[Hamilton Morris]

I can read you exactly what they wrote, actually.

[Andrew Callahan]

They call for violent action against a rival pharmaceutical company. Yeah, yeah, I definitely want to see it.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, yeah. I could pull it up right now.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, for sure.

[Hamilton Morris]

This is the screen. Grab support Usona. Absolutely. Exclamation point. This is the first line. But no, I mean shutting down Compass independently, fucking with their business operations in ways designed to raise the cost of operating. Hey, they want to exist according to the logic of capitalism, let's leverage that logic to make it too expensive to operate. Here's a post I made over on Kat's earlier Compass post. Kat being another person who is paid by the CEO of of Usona, reportedly, although I have not been able to. I've heard that from two people, but haven't been able to verify it. But I suspect that it's the case. What do we do? Shut it down. There are plenty of strategies that could be developed to make that happen, ranging from milquetoast to militant. Facebook isn't really the best place to discuss some of those tactics. This is a Facebook post, but it's public. But some spur of the moment ideas I could imagine right now might be be organizing call ins to Compass and or associated research institutions such as Maps to express disgust and result in tying up the lines, thereby making some aspects of general operations untenable or at least frustrating. The same could be applied to the individuals involved. 2. Continued writing coverage of how the for profit commodified approach puts us all in jeopardy and threatens more open access models of medical treatment treatment. 3. Check out the strategies some folks use to oppose Huntington Life Science. This is where this is like threatening People with weapons. I'm not necessarily advocating any of those strategies, but there's a good precedent for relatively small groups of people tanking major corporations through utilization of militant tactics. And then it just goes on. It's multiple paragraphs.

[Andrew Callahan]

Interesting. So this is all like, pretty fascinating because this idea of like paid protest and controlled opposition oftentimes gets like thrown around, especially in the conservative media sphere, to like delegitimize anger and outrage when it comes to things that are happening.

[Hamilton Morris]

The Tesla rally, some of these guys are paid agitators and paid protesters.

[Andrew Callahan]

It's typically not true, but I find it really interesting here that the company USONA is using this sort of like anti capitalist, anti fascist language to do their bidding and kind of mobilize like gullible people against the people that are actually doing the good. The good thing.

[Hamilton Morris]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is, as far as I know. This is the only example of this that I knew about. And I only. So I always had this weird thing where I was like, why is this anti capitalist dude saying, support a company that's run by like a former Exxon and Shell oil futures trader and a billionaire bioscience dude? Like, it just didn't make sense. Obviously people are routinely hypocrites, so it's not that crazy. But like, there was something where I was like, I fucking strongly suspect that this dude is getting paid by usona. And I started seeing this more and more with USONA employees harassing me at talks that I gave. It's like a couple stories, but, you know, just weird stuff. There's one where a USONA employee who never identified herself as such was like, I want you to explain what you're giving back to the indigenous people of the world or something like that. And the audience erupts into applause. Yeah, thank you. I have a two part question about.

[Andrew Callahan]

The psilocybin polymorph, a compound that Compass has recently patented.

[Hamilton Morris]

And so from your perspective as an obviously very accomplished chemist, Hamilton, who has, as I understand, recently made a career transition to work with that company, I wonder what your thoughts on the legitimacy of that patent as a new innovation. First, and if you're able to speak to that. And two, how you think that patent impacts the supply chain and particularly in the context of the issues of indigenous reciprocity that we've been talking about this afternoon. It was none of that one sense. Like arguably, you know, everyone who lives in the United States does. I'm not like saying that there isn't. I'm not saying that it's like, not something worth discussing. Yeah, but there was nothing that I was doing that was based on indigenous knowledge. I was synthesizing completely novel tryptamines that contain atoms that are never found in triptamines in nature. Like, Florian, like, this is just like, totally synthetic stuff that is not derived from indigenous knowledge in any way. It actually, if anything, was derived from, like, a. A steampunk cannabinoid baron from New Zealand. That. Dude, if someone deserved reciprocity, it would be the.

[Andrew Callahan]

I wish someone would describe me that way. So someone's tripping on you at a conference about not giving back to indigenous people? They're a paid plant from a pharmaceutical corporation.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yes.

[Andrew Callahan]

How does that make you feel?

[Hamilton Morris]

It makes me. It makes me feel sad. It makes me feel hurt. It makes me feel vaguely disgusted by all of this. And, you know, it was. It was not even just this woman. There was another USONA employee who hit me with one of my least favorite, actually. It's like, this is like my true Achilles heel. I made multiple pieces about psychedelic toad venom. But, like, one of the most pedantic, irritating criticisms is people will say, oh, it's not really a venom. Technically, it's a poison. Like many amphibians, Bufo alvarius possesses a powerful defense against predators. When bitten, the toad secretes a milky white fluid from its parotoid glands that can poison its attacker, making them extremely ill and sometimes causing cardiac arrest.

[Andrew Callahan]

That makes your blood boil?

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, it makes my blood boil.

[Andrew Callahan]

Do you start yelling? I can't picture you yelling. No, I'm sure you've done it before.

[Hamilton Morris]

There's a video recording of this. I actually was able. I was able to contain my volcanic rage.

[Andrew Callahan]

So what did you say?

[Hamilton Morris]

I said, you know, I don't sound like. Oh, that's a teleological distinction, and it's really not a recognized one by anyone in the toxicology community. Like, there's a hyper restrictive definition of the word venom, that it has to be injected by a fang. It's not the dictionary definition of venom. I think a better one is to think about venoms as something that are actively delivered defensively as opposed to, like, a passive substance, which would be a poison. Anyway. It is a venom. Venom. All scholars who have ever studied this have called it a venom. Anyway, so the USONA employee, after I gave a talk about this, corrected me, saying that it's not a venom.

[Andrew Callahan]

And they're coming and tripping. They're being rude to you and interrupting your talks because of your association with Compas or just because they feel like you're a leading figure in the pro.

[Hamilton Morris]

Psychedelic legalization movement because of the Compass stuff.

[Andrew Callahan]

Okay. Specifically because of your chemistry work with Compass.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, yeah, that was the reason. Yeah. And because I was considered, I think they had pretty much totally monopolized any media coverage. Everything was pro usona. New York Times wrote an article with a kind of glowing profile of the work that was done by Usona, profiling this guy Bob Jesse and never even mentioning that he was employed by the pharmaceutical company. Very weird stuff. And USONA did something very complicated where they divided themselves into all of these different companies. So usona, USONA is a non profit. They received their money from a for profit massive biotech company called Promega. So the profits from Promega are swept into usona. There's a lawsuit from the shareholders of Promega suing the owner of Usona for funneling profit into. Because they have a huge amount of money. I think they have. I looked on Guidestar and just the property that USONA owns alone is like 80 million in Wisconsin. But then USONA has additional companies connected to it that are the same company, the same tax ID number, but they don't represent themselves as being connected. So there's Freedom to Operate, which is their patent liberation company where they target anybody that holds patents that are competing with Usona and try to destroy them. Then there's Portasophia, which is a psychedelic prior art database where they index literature that could be used to interfere with competitors patents, but notably do not list prior art art for the patents held by the owners of usona.

[Andrew Callahan]

So this is really like. It's almost like a deep state situation.

[Hamilton Morris]

Well, it's. It's like this is the thing. It's like I have a lot of stories so like we could talk about this forever. I'm annoyed that I have to be the one to say this stuff because it's so fucking obvious, right? It's so obvious that these, these like billionaires do not have people's best interests in mind and that they create these like pledges to know the not making money off of psychedelics pledge and frame themselves as doing this advocacy work when the reality is they are incentivizing maps, ceasing drug policy reform work, paying activists to terrorize their competitors, creating a fraudulent prior art database that doesn't index any of the work that would interfere with their own patents and asking for donations from the public as if what they're doing serves the commonwealth in some way when it's just about their own own shitty business.

[Andrew Callahan]

What's the connection between them and Symposia? Is that jumping too far ahead?

[Hamilton Morris]

No, it's not jumping too far ahead. So Symposia had a lot of people that were involved. It was kind of like the gutter that collected the dregs of the psychedelic world. And most of the people were nut cases. Occasionally there would be someone who's actually, as I said previously, there are legitimate criticisms of the psychedelic escape. So like, sometimes someone would come along and they would be legitimately anti capitalist and they'd say, oh, look, there's this group, the Critical Psychedelic Studies. They're shining light on the problems with sexual abuse or whatever. And there was this guy named Travis Kitchens who had written some anti psychedelic articles that were like, why the state shouldn't fund ibogaine research. Because I can't remember what his reason was. I disagreed with it. And so I'd always been suspicious of this guy. But because he wrote for Symposia and because he wrote anti drug articles that struck me as anti drug, he's subsequently written some articles that I really like. So he. He had written to me before and I hadn't responded to him because I was suspicious. And he said, you know, we really need to talk. And at this point, I already knew that Symposia had been receiving money from the Sarlo family, which is another thing. But the Usona connection was the one that I had heard indirectly from an enormous number of people. And he said, you know, you're not going to believe this, but these people, they're not legitimate. They're actually receiving money to behave this way. And I was like, yeah, I fucking know. Everyone knows. No journalists are writing about it, but everyone knows. And he's like, oh, and you know they're receiving money from Bob Jassy from usona. I started telling people about this and. And Bob, Jesse admits to secretly providing money to David Nichols at the time that he announced his absolute support for USONA and began to advocate terrorist action against individuals involved with compass. We then confronted him at the MAPS conference and he admitted to doing this. Can I ask you a quick question?

[Andrew Callahan]

You may.

[Hamilton Morris]

Hi. Okay. I don't know if we've met. Maybe we met a long time ago. I think we might have been on.

[Andrew Callahan]

Stage once a long time ago, but.

[Hamilton Morris]

Didn'T actually say hi. Yeah, but your reputation was procedure. Good to see you. So I feel like this is sort of an aggressive question. I feel bad asking, but a couple of ex symposia members have contacted me and they told me that you had been providing them with money and intel in what they felt was a effort to destroy Compass. No, no.

[Andrew Callahan]

Let's see.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, not directly my money, but I'm.

[Andrew Callahan]

Responsible for having sent to symposia before.

[Hamilton Morris]

Things really blew up and got nasty.

[Andrew Callahan]

Two separate donations, small amounts of money.

[Hamilton Morris]

And not for the purpose of getting her to do anything. So why do you think they said that? Yeah. And why were you giving them money? Well, because for a little while, they were saying things no one else was would say. You know, the same reason you would give lucid news money, and then because I know that you were involved with the Sarlo Family foundation, and they've, you know, paid an enormous amount of money to Nisha and to symposia to so run this campaign against maps. $185,000.

[Andrew Callahan]

I didn't know that, but that was long after I left that foundation.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, long after. And they're suing me now, or attempting to. Why? Because I said that they had done.

[Andrew Callahan]

This, like, that's all.

[Hamilton Morris]

The dating thing.

[Andrew Callahan]

Real suing you for something like defamation or national damage.

[Hamilton Morris]

Defamation.

[Andrew Callahan]

Well, guess what? My understanding, not a lawyer, is that truth is an absolute defense against defamation.

[Hamilton Morris]

He then came up to me and said that we couldn't use the audio because audio is sacred. Then he said that you talked to me about it off the record. I mean, at this point, I don't even really care. It's just. But the question is, why would somebody do something like this? And I think it's. They thought they could control this extremist group of nut cases and give them a little money, give them a little intel, and sic them on Compass. Because it had worked so well with other people. Like this Vice blogger, Shayla Love, was totally obedient to the interests of Usona. Anything they told her, she would uncritically repeat. So you should be able to do the same thing with everyone. It had worked very well for them in the past. And the problem was that these people were uncontrollable. They were seriously insane with wizardry and everything like that. Yeah, it kind of is. They. They. That's. That's what patents are.

[Andrew Callahan]

They're like magic spells, essentially.

[Hamilton Morris]

And it did. Like, the introduction of his book lays that out. I. I pasted it, tracing it back to alchemy.

[Andrew Callahan]

Like, literally.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, he traces it back, actually. It's amazing. Dangerously insane. This is why funding terrorist organizations to do your bidding is usually a bad idea.

[Andrew Callahan]

Every time we do it, it always backfires.

[Hamilton Morris]

It hasn't ended well. Yeah, it's Just. You'd think we learned that lesson. It hasn't ended well.

[Andrew Callahan]

So a lot of this is coming into the fold right now specifically because of the bad news that was, I think, received this year, if not last year, about mdma.

[Hamilton Morris]

A few hours ago, the FDA rejected MDMA therapy as a treatment for ptsd. Yes.

[Andrew Callahan]

For those who don't know about any of that, can you kind of give them a brief overview of what happened with the MDMA stuff?

[Hamilton Morris]

Oh, man. Yeah, I can try. I can try. But it's a. It's a complicated story, but MDMA is this drug that people had been investigating therapeutically for decades. It was made illegal in 1986. The DEA's own administrative law judge had actually recommended against its placement in Schedule 1. He had felt that the case made for its therapeutic use didn't warrant its placement in Schedule 1. He thought people should be able to pursue it medically. But the DEA ignored their own judge's ruling and placed it in schedule one. So this guy, Rick Doblin, was totally radicalized by this. He actually was selling MDMA at the time to fund the legal defense to prevent the prohibition of mdma, which is pretty badass.

[Andrew Callahan]

He said, I want to be a psychedelic psychotherapist, and we just laughed.

[Hamilton Morris]

Here we are, what, 41, 42 years.

[Andrew Callahan]

Later, where he has just stayed on that path. That's pretty awesome.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah. Yeah, he's a really cool guy. Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

We had a guy in Seattle named Phoenix Jones. He was a superhero who would, like, go out with a gold cape to kind of, like, bust up drug dealers and drug operations. My name is Phoenix Jones, and I'm the leader of the Seattle superhero movement. He got caught with a giant underground MDMA lab and distribution center where he would sell all the mdma, still dressed as Phoenix Jones, which I thought was dope, but it kind ruined his reputation as a superhero.

[Hamilton Morris]

So Rick Doblin went on this quest to reverse the prohibition of mdma. Really does everything by the book. He decides that in order for people to take him seriously, he has to get a PhD from Harvard. So he gets a PhD from Harvard, then he initiates clinical trials. It takes him close to 40 years to get to the point where he's pushed MDMA through all three phases of clinical trials as a completely independent, nonprofit pharmaceutical company, which is, like, unheard of. Of, because clinical development of a drug costs hundreds of millions of dollars. He was able. He's an insane fundraiser. He was able to get the money to do this, and it was, like, extremely inspiring. Everyone was very, very excited about this. And he'd done everything as well as you could possibly do it. Like, there's a bit of a tangent. I feel like this is going to go on forever if I go on these tangents. But I'll just say very briefly. There had been an issue in the 1980s with one of the most prominent, prominent psychedelic therapists sexually abusing patients. And so Rick knew that that had derailed things at the beginning. So he designed the entire therapeutic protocol to absolutely minimize chances of sexual abuse. So each patient had two therapists that were watching over them, A male and a female. And the entire thing was recorded with a video camera. And he thought this would be enough, that there would be no chance of any kind of sexual abuse. And it worked for the 300 hundred plus patients that were part of these trials. Except after one of the therapeutic sessions, one of the therapists had a two year sexual romantic relationship with a patient. So this was like a catastrophic thing. The therapist lost their license, the map, severed all ties, issued an apology letter, paid the victim's therapy costs, did everything in their power to prevent it, and everything in their power to make amends in the wake of this thing that had occurred with. But symposia latched onto this, realizing that if they could exploit this woman's sexual relationship with a therapist, they could use it to derail the entire MDMA movement. This is complicated. And they were also receiving money from this other group as well. And so they hired a firm to issue press releases to journalists. I guess there's like journalists that actually just respond to press releases and will do uncritically stories that are told to them as there is. Yeah. And so they get all these stories in Vox where they're getting interviews about how they're crusading to protect women from sexual abuse or whatever. And the whole thing is very unsettling. They have a citizens petition to the FDA to have a hearing to call into question the legitimacy of the clinical trials. And during this hearing, it was disastrous. All of the symposia members were able to sort of like game a lottery in some way where they were disproportionately represented. Represented in the public commentary period. Five of the people, I think it was five of 20 people that spoke, were contributors to symposia, and they had no qualms whatsoever. Even though it's a serious crime about lying to the fda, or at the very least, dramatically manipulating the fda. Like even some of the true things they said were said in such a way as to Frighten people in nonsense manipulations of one kind or another. Like, there was this one really horrifying guy named Brian Pace.

[Andrew Callahan]

My name is Brian Pace. I am a lecturer teaching psychedelic studies in the Department of Plant Pathology at.

[Hamilton Morris]

The Ohio State University. He says very seriously, like, if MDMA is approved, these harms will scale.

[Andrew Callahan]

Harms and misconduct will scale if they.

[Hamilton Morris]

Are allowed to train and certify therapists. And he's right, the harms probably will scale, but the harms were extremely minimal and outweighed by the benefits, which will also scale. Harms always scale with benefits. I mean, that's just what you'd expect. It's like if you allow people to ride bicycles, the harms associated with riding bicycles will scale, as will the benefits. It's just a nonsense, bullshit statement. But if you say it the right way, you can really frighten people. It was a lot of that, really. The most notable instance was the kind of ringleader of simp. Posia, at this point, claimed that a MAPS therapist named Veronica Gold had pinned down a patient while they screamed, get your hands off of me. But that she would not stop. Veronica Gold, Aliko's supervisor, trainer, and phase three therapist, describes pinning down a patient as their distress escalated to the point of shouting, quote, go away. Get your effing hands away from me. End quote. But Gold did not stop. And I remember hearing this and thinking, this is crazy. I thought I knew about everything that was going on. I hadn't heard any. I never heard this woman's name before. I hadn't heard about any of this. And I look at her citation for this claim, and it's a book called Integral Psychedelic Therapy with a chapter written by this therapist. But it's not a MAPS trial and it's not mdma. And the section that she's describing is a patient who's speaking to the memory of their father saying, get your fucking hands off.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh, it's a ghost.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

Like being pinned down by your dad's ghost.

[Hamilton Morris]

Well, actually, the pinned down thing was completely fabricated.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh, it sounds horrible or potentially therapeutic, but sound like it was.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah. So this was insane to watch. And it was horrible. Like, you know, to me, this is just another chapter in the endless, moronic harassment campaign by this group of psychos. But for people like that woman, Veronica Gold, that's like their life. Being just publicly humiliated in front of the FDA by some nut case who has no qualms about destroying the reputation of a stranger. If it serves this agenda of preventing the approval of MDMA and Were they.

[Andrew Callahan]

Successful in preventing that?

[Hamilton Morris]

The FDA ruled against it. Holy shit.

[Andrew Callahan]

So there's no legal mdma?

[Hamilton Morris]

No. Yeah, the FDA ruled against it.

[Andrew Callahan]

Even despite the fact that the clinical trials were a success?

[Hamilton Morris]

Yes. A few hours ago, the FDA rejected MDMA therapy as a treatment for ptsd. It's a setback for the growing movement to use psychedelics for treatment of mental health conditions. It comes as the agency was under intense pressure from politicians and veterans to approve the drug. But back In June, the FDA's own advisory committee said there wasn't enough evidence the therapy was safe or effective.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yo, yo, what's up, everybody? As we've kind of established here, the FDA's rejection of MDMA as a treatment for PTSD has stirred up quite a bit of controversy. And of course, the media has been all over it like flies on shit when things go wrong. So I thought it'd be good to take a quick break here and show you just how quickly political messaging can pivot. As we know different outlets p different agendas shaping the story to fit their own narratives, which is why independent reporting matters. And we here at Channel 5 are 100% committed to bringing y' all raw, unfiltered coverage straight from the streets. But before we hit the streets, we get informed using what, you might ask, Ground News. Ground News is a dope ass news aggregate that lets you see exactly how different media outlets, both left, right and center, are covering the same story as it unfolds here. As you can see using the Ground News biased distribution tool, the left and the right are covering the FDA's rejection of MDMA quite differently. For example, despite the right wing's history as being the most vocal enemies of legalization, the FDA's rejection of MDMA happened under Biden. So you already know the right wing Fox News had something to say about it that made Biden sound bad. Says here on the Fox headline, veterans cross border for forbidden psychedelic treatment. That's changing lives after combat. Funny, they never seem to be that sympathetic to illegal drug users beforehand. Or people illegally crossing the borders. Ha. Ground News. What's even weirder is how the left, longtime supporters of the legalize it movement, is backpedaling. For example, the left leaning global News headline reads RFK Jr. S embrace of psychedelic therapy sparks mixed feelings from field experts. Ask yourself why the media machine's doing a full 180 and get back to me later. Ground News. Something else that doesn't get nearly enough attention is how many news stories aren't actually newsworthy at all. That's why? Ground News shows you how many actual sources numerically are covering a story. So you can determine if an article is legit or just echo chamber algorithmic nonsense engineered to destroy your mind. Another feature we love to use their Blind Spot tool, which shows you the stories that might not be appearing in your typical media bubble. Come on, everybody's got one. And for that reason, we all trust Ground News to help Channel 5 cut straight through the noise. And right now, you can subscribe for 40% off the unlimited Access Vantage plan, bringing the cost down to less than five bucks a month. Just scan the QR code to here or click the link below to sign up. Guys, supporting Ground News helps support us, which means we can keep making videos like this, giving y' all coverage that isn't watered down or dictated by corporate interests. So check it out, stay informed, and most importantly, don't let the media tell.

[Hamilton Morris]

You what to think.

[Andrew Callahan]

All right, back to Hamilton.

[Hamilton Morris]

Okay, I want to give. I want to give credit to them for doing this horrible, horrible thing, but the reality, I think, is that this was already somewhat precarious. And whenever you have something that's precarious, it doesn't necessarily take all that much to shift the balance. So it was already a revolutionary idea to approve MDMA as a treatment for ptsd, and it didn't take all that much. There were other, I think, very small issues with the clinical trial. One was that they didn't record whether or not MDMA causes euphoria.

[Andrew Callahan]

It does.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah. There you go. So you were able to figure it out? Yeah. So they didn't record it because as is obvious to anyone that knows anything, it does cause euphoria. And so this. The idea was that this limited a objective appraisal of the abuse potential of mdma, which has been studied endlessly.

[Andrew Callahan]

So abuse potential meaning if you take MDMA during a therapy session, like, your therapist gets weird and starts fucking with you and shit. Is that what they're talking about?

[Hamilton Morris]

I think they were like. Or you'd become addicted to MDMA after a therapy session.

[Andrew Callahan]

I mean, getting addicted to MDMA sounds difficult, especially with the comedown, but I guess if you HTP it every time, you could live like that forever.

[Hamilton Morris]

Well, then it's also. No pharmaceutical or insurance company is going to allow someone to continuously use MDMA psychotherapy for PTSD in a way that would allow addiction. The whole thing was just absurd. So I feel like we've gotten really into the details on all of this. And there was a journalist, Rachel Newer, who was writing about this for the New York Times. And it was so hard for the journalists that were trying to do this. And this is the thing that really gets me is, like, now I see all these people, people with Twitter bios that are like, psychedelics and mental health reporter for. And now that it's easy to talk about this, now that news outlets are, like, willing to buy your shitty story about this or that, like, ketamine medicine, like, have we gone too far? Kind of like whatever your, like, little scare story is. But, like, the people that are still really working on this are taking enormous risks and telling the true story of the. This stuff sucks tremendously. Like, it will result in lawsuits, it will result in legal harassment. And the only reason I'm talking about this publicly is because this narrative has remained almost entirely unchallenged.

[Andrew Callahan]

I mean, it's pretty unbelievable. How did you feel whenever the FDA ruled against MDMA therapy?

[Hamilton Morris]

Oh, I was so depressed and I was. And I haven't even gone into the RFK junior Appointed psychedelic czar of the United States who was advising symposia during their hearing. Right. Like weird shit or his wording was he provided them an opinion during the hearing.

[Andrew Callahan]

But I mean, like, it's obviously something that you feel strongly about. Like, what. What bummed you out the most about that situation?

[Hamilton Morris]

So many things. One is that there was a certain momentum that was being built where it seemed like a major change in the practice of psychiatry was on the horizon. That MDMA would be approved, psilocybin would be approved, approved, novel psychedelics would be approved. Because I'm not someone that's going to claim that psychedelics will cure all diseases or will end all war or will usher in a new era of humanity. But I definitely think they can help people, and I definitely think they're as good or better than the standard of care in many of the indications that are being studied and should be available. And so MDMA for PTSD was considered the safest bet. That was considered the one that like, of course, course, of course. MDMA for ptsd. Of course that one is going to work. So to get rejected on the one that everyone was confident was going to work was immensely discouraging, especially when you consider that this was the culmination of a lifetime of work by Rick Doblin. Against all odds, doing this as an independent nonprofit pharmaceutical company, actually right up until the finish line when they shifted to a for profit by necessity. But, like, it was like a genuinely inspiring story story. And, you know, you see this a lot with psychedelics. This is why I think people need to be more aware of all of this. Like I had spent two weeks at DEA headquarters covering this effort by the DEA to prohibit these two very obscure psychedelics that are used in scientific research. I just got to see exactly how the mechanisms of prohibition work within the DEA headquarters and it's not pleasant. And it highlighted the absurdity of all this like gentrification of consciousness type stuff. It's like we've got real good old fashioned narcs, like people that are just down to lock people in cages for the rest of their lives for having drugs. There's no shortage of those people in the government right now and their paychecks depend on that. And if people instead focus on nonsensical issues about who patented a DMT vape and, and not old fashioned Nixon, Reagan era prohibitionist law that's still in place, we are not going to live in a free society.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, I think that's kind of a microcosm of like the whole left right now in general. I mean, I think now they're realizing it's too late, but for a long time it's like people are so busy with this just like infighting and moral grandstanding that they don't realize that the enemy's so unified and most importantly that the demons you're trying to slay, like, they look at these little trivial disputes as just like hilarious cannon fodder as they should.

[Hamilton Morris]

Like you look at some Bernie Sanders Instagram post where he's like, the United States must halt all funding to Israel immediately. And all the comments are like, yeah, there's a word for it, Bernie, it's called genocide. Maybe try using it. It's like he's on your side. He's like, you're, you're. But he didn't use exactly the language that you want. He's doing what you should want a representative to do. And yeah, so this kind of cancer cannibalistic tendency of the left is very unfortunate because cohesion is required and it's so easy to manipulate. As we've now seen. We had one pharmaceutical company and one family exploit a couple psychos on the left and cause a massive amount of damage to psychedelic progress.

[Andrew Callahan]

So the leftists that got soaked up into the symposia orbit were in fact fact genuine. Like far leftists who had that cannibalistic virus. Because okay, so the stoner theory here is like, oh, fuck this corporation who stopped MDMA from being legal, from being legalized. That's just like big pharma and The Sackler family and the SSRI lobby, like, trying to stop acid from healing the world, bro. I mean, obviously, we know it's not that simple.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

So what is the deeper agenda of the other side?

[Hamilton Morris]

There's multiple agendas, and the deeper agenda is. Is a complicated story, but it's because a very rich Holocaust survivor was befriended by a board member of MAPS who gave him mdma. He had a cathartic release of his emotional trauma related to surviving the Holocaust, decided to leave his fortune to Maps. His estranged daughter Susie was horrified that she was going to lose part of her inheritance, and then finally funded the opposition campaign against maps.

[Andrew Callahan]

That's what happened, and that's why MDMA was banned from being legalized.

[Hamilton Morris]

That's a potential major reason. Yes.

[Andrew Callahan]

So there's. What are some of the other reasons that could possibly be in the shadows here?

[Hamilton Morris]

I think also USONA funding symposia played a role as well. USONA was absolutely delighted by the rejection.

[Andrew Callahan]

What's USONA's deeper agenda?

[Hamilton Morris]

Vengeance against Compas. Yeah. Compass Vengeance was a big one in.

[Andrew Callahan]

Terms of company rivalries. Just arbitrary profit motivation.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah. And I think these are very skilled businessmen that run usona. I think that they want a form of domination, maybe even more than that, a sense of moral superiority, which was driving a lot of what they were doing.

[Andrew Callahan]

Okay, so it's not as simple as, like, the people who make Prozac are trying to stop veterans.

[Hamilton Morris]

No, because here's the thing about that take is the people that make Prozac. Prozac only really care about money. And so if there's money to be made, they'll just buy the thing that's profitable. Like, if you can make money selling psilocybin, let Pfizer buy the company that's selling psilocybin. That's the way this stuff works. The real question is, why did it take so long to get to this place that we're at right now?

[Andrew Callahan]

I'm just tripped out. Because the clinical trials for MDMA were a big success, yet somehow they were.

[Hamilton Morris]

Able to flood the minds of the.

[Andrew Callahan]

People at the FDA with all these, like, you know, sad stories of the past. And that was able to basically put pump the brakes on the entire operation.

[Hamilton Morris]

There are a couple of other reasons as well that are complicated and potentially boring, but I'm happy to outline them. One is that it's increasingly common in contemporary pharmaceutical development to outsource toxicology to other. One pharmaceutical company might do liver toxicology and then sell it to another one. So MAPS had A deal with another pharmaceutical company for the liver toxicology that then fell through, creating this sense that they had never done liver toxicology work on mdma, which they had, but the licensing of the toxicology work was in some kind of, like, contractual weird negotiation thing, stuff like that. It's. But it's not. It was nothing real. It was nothing like they found out that it actually causes, I don't know, thyroid cancer or something like that.

[Andrew Callahan]

So, like, I know you said that right now you're receiving some legal threats.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yes.

[Andrew Callahan]

And is this from symposia? Is it from the pharmaceutical company?

[Hamilton Morris]

Symposia are pursuing legal threats against another journalist right now through the Sarlo Family Foundation. The Sarlo Family foundation has threatened me now as well for saying that they're an anti psychedelic organization. And they wanted me to say that they are not an anti psychedelic organization. They are a pro children's safety organization.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh, so worried about kids getting psychedelics.

[Hamilton Morris]

They just love children's safety.

[Andrew Callahan]

Dude, why do people always throw up that I'm here for the game kids thing, but it's just like the easiest thing to hide behind.

[Hamilton Morris]

It's classic. Yeah, it's absolutely satanic panic era.

[Andrew Callahan]

You know what I mean? Like, my problem isn't with you and everything you do, it's the fact that these, like, little monolithic children. This monolithic children unit, like, can't be exposed to the stimuli.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

Because when I was a kid, I was seeing all types of up.

[Hamilton Morris]

I mean, yeah, arguably it's not bad. I mean, arguably, it's like exposure to these things can actually have a protective effect. I mean, this is like the idea, at least in part, with. With like, childhood exposure to alcohol consumption in France, things like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

Speaking of childhood exposure, I'm surprised symposia didn't offer me some money because of the hppd.

[Hamilton Morris]

I know you could be. Well, actually, there's another guy who's paid by the Sarlo family who I think does do HPPD research because hppd.

[Andrew Callahan]

I mean, because, you know, for those who don't know, I took a lot of shrooms when I was 14, and I have permanent, you know, visual damage floaters, static at all times, and, you know, walls will do wobble and stuff. But I've gotten over it. Also some depersonalization stuff that accompanied that in my teenage years. You know, I would have been the perfect person to get recruited by that lobby. And for a long time, I was kind of anti psychedelic in general because my friend was. We had a rap group Together back in the day called Self Evident. We were pretty sick. We were opening for that slam poet, Sol Williams. We were on some real hand hip hop, lyrical miracle status in Seattle. At the time, we were young poets for some reason. Marijuana led him to LSD and I guess he had some underlying schizophrenic genetics and he just lost his mind. He was homeless for the next 10 years. Got no worse drugs. And so between that and hppd, I was like, all right, I'm gonna put the psychedelics to the side. Instead. I started drinking all the time and now I'm like, damn, that's not good either. So in a dream world, I would have waited till I was 18 to begin taking psychs, right?

[Hamilton Morris]

And I had a very, very similar thing happen as well. I was with a friend who had a psychotic break while we were tripping together. And it was terrifying, absolutely terrifying. And it took me a long time not to think that you're playing a game of Russian roulette every time you consume a psychedelic, because I'd just seen what appeared to be one of the worst things that can possibly happen occur. It's only now, with the benefit of hindsight and also having read epidemiological analyses of the incidence of psychosis among psychedelic drug users, which doesn't differ from the general population, that I'm realizing that they act as a stressor for certain vulnerable people the way many things can, right? It could be going moving away to go to college, it could be getting into a car accident, could be a new job, it could be breaking up with your partner, whatever. But a psych experience can be a very, very powerful stress. I mean, it can make you feel like you're dying. It can be insanely frightening for people. And some people are close to the edge already and that can be what it takes to drive them over. So I am critical of a lot of anti psychedelic reporting because I think it's not constructive, but I also think it's totally destructive not to acknowledge harms. And I think it's good to talk about harms because then you're just going to fuck people up in a different way. If you never talk about HPPD or you never talk about the potential, potential difficulties associated with it. I think with hppd, I mean, you probably know more about this than I do, but the numbers at least existed, I think in the Grinspoon analysis in the 90s was like 1 in 50,000 or something like that. It was considered very rare. They had two different types, right? There's type one and type two, where type one is transient, occasional flashbacks that aren't disruptive to functioning. And then type. Type 2 is like continuous visual distortions that are highly disruptive to functioning. And they said that the latter type was like something around 1 in 50,000 people. I don't know if those numbers have subsequently been changed.

[Andrew Callahan]

I've heard it's like 1 in 20.

[Hamilton Morris]

1 in 20 that have lasting inability to function due to visual distortions, inability.

[Andrew Callahan]

To function, but have the presence of multiple HPPD symptoms. According to Dr. Henry Abraham.

[Hamilton Morris]

Okay, that seems like a lot. I mean, and I guess for people listening to this, again, I'm not trying to diminish it. It's kind of like when someone says, I have depression, and it's like, okay. Or like, I'm depressed, and it's like, do you feel sad or do you meet the diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder? That's not to say that feeling sad isn't a big deal, but like, the. The kind of crucial letter in the HPPD acronym is definitely the D. Like that it's a disorder. Not that, like, you look at a bathroom floor that has like a repeating tile pattern and it looks a little weird for a second. Or you look at some Venetian blinds and they have a moire pattern that's like a little bit weird for a second. Like something that actually interferes with your ability to function, which, as I understand it, you do experience that.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, but I mean more so in, like in the onset, you know, when it's first happening to you, like accepting that your perception has changed. It's like takes a year or two to really. Or even more for some people to just be like, oh, my God, this is how I see now. I can't believe I see like this.

[Hamilton Morris]

And is there anything. Is there. You said there's a derealization. Is there tinnitus or anything like that as well.

[Andrew Callahan]

But what's derealization and depersonalization, which typically comes like in the second or third year of it. But, yeah, I always figured, like, I never really talked about it because I didn't want to seem like I was super anti psychedelic because I've seen it have such positive impacts on people around me. But have you, you know, heard about any effective cures for it or anything?

[Hamilton Morris]

No, I haven't. I haven't heard of any effective cures. It would be interesting, though, to see. I. I could. Yeah, I could name a million things. I've heard people talk about benzodiazepines. Obviously, I don't think that's a good strategy. It'd be interesting to try like a drug that blocks activity at the receptor that psychedelics bind to. There's one called Catanserin. There's another called Pimavanserin that are both relatively easy to get and they're also like very easygoing substances. Actually are like really nice for sleep.

[Andrew Callahan]

You think you could get me some?

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

For real?

[Hamilton Morris]

Yes. Sick.

[Andrew Callahan]

How.

[Hamilton Morris]

How fast could I get it for you? Yeah, probably two weeks.

[Andrew Callahan]

So you can just get shit like that.

[Hamilton Morris]

I have Catanserin. I've done self expression experiments with it. I also have Pimavansrin.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh, man. But you can just get stuff. Have you done adrenochrome before?

[Hamilton Morris]

The lab that I was working in had a vial of adrenochrome that we would joke about. I've never done it.

[Andrew Callahan]

Doesn't it reverse aging and get you special Hollywood powers?

[Hamilton Morris]

That's their reputation. Yeah. Big in the Clinton Foundation. Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

I mean, I'm pretty sure they got a headquarters nearby.

[Hamilton Morris]

It's easy to make. That one's very easy to make. Yeah. What's the deal? If everyone's so obsessed with adrenochrome, why is no one making adrenochrome?

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, I mean, it's a good. I mean, you'd kind of be the guy for that.

[Hamilton Morris]

That. Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

Now, as far as like the hardest psychedelic to make in general, as far as synthesis goes, what have you had the most difficulty with?

[Hamilton Morris]

Oh, damn. All right. I mean, I could go on with that one. Like, I mean, there have been quite a few psychedelics that I have tried unsuccessfully to make them. I mean, that's a big part of it is I really like the. The challenge of making weird things. And a big part of the fun for me is like pushing the boundary of what can be made. So there's stuff like, you know, the chemical in salvia, salvinorin A can be modified to be even more potent. So I did a little bit. Salvia's fucking horrible.

[Andrew Callahan]

Do you like salvia?

[Hamilton Morris]

I love salvia. Holy shit. As the salvinoran a coursed through my blood, I reached a state of bliss I never knew possible.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh, it's coming over me. You're a seasoned veteran of this game though, so. Okay. Anyways, you've got figured out a way to make salvia strong.

[Hamilton Morris]

But I love salvia from day one. I'm a lifelong salvia lover and so, I mean, that chemistry is not so challenging, but it does have some interesting quirks due to different stereocenters in the Salvadoran a molecule. But I made things like the ethoxymethyl ether of Salvadoran B. But the main thing is I've been actually working on this documentary about the quote, quest to create the world's first tellurium containing psychedelic. And this is just about broken me. It's been a damn nightmare.

[Andrew Callahan]

Like getting the interviews or making it.

[Hamilton Morris]

Making it.

[Andrew Callahan]

Okay.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, it's, it's like the. For. I've been working on this since 2023 trying to make this drug and filming the process, which I dramatically underestimated because I had a lot of success at the beginning when I was first trying, which made me, me think that the whole thing would be really easy or a lot of apparent success at the beginning. But then as the project progressed, everything started falling apart and I realized that aspects of the chemistry had to be done in total darkness. Other aspects had to be done in -60 degrees Celsius in an oxygen free environment. And yeah, it's been tricky.

[Andrew Callahan]

Holy shit. Do you have a lab in your house?

[Hamilton Morris]

No, no, no, definitely not. I was working at this lab, Kaikion analytics in Spain.

[Andrew Callahan]

So if you work at a lab, you can kind of just get froggy like when you're off work and just get in there and just start making.

[Hamilton Morris]

This was what I was doing. I mean this was the, the only thing I have ever done in labs is make psychedelics above ground.

[Andrew Callahan]

You've got a dream job for yourself.

[Hamilton Morris]

I enjoy it. Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

You can make LSD easily.

[Hamilton Morris]

I just made a really interesting variant of lsd. I don't know if I have to bleep this out, but it was propyl fluoro 1 propynyl nor LSD N6 propyl fluoro. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Hmm.

[Andrew Callahan]

But like making LSD is hard, right? Is that for you? Is that just like the easiest?

[Hamilton Morris]

Oh, this is actually like an interesting thing of like, what does it mean for something to be hard to make? Like I remember reading this thing for forensic drug chemists and it was like a number rating scale of synthetic difficulty of like, is it harder to make PCP than to make fentanyl? To make heroin, to make whatever. And the reality is like hardness is so much dependent on environment and all these other things. Like one of the main, main things that made LSD hard to produce was difficulty obtaining the precursor materials. But that's actually gotten quite a bit easier in recent years.

[Andrew Callahan]

So what is the base precursor material?

[Hamilton Morris]

This is definitely like a bleep out kind of thing.

[Andrew Callahan]

Okay, I'll bleep it.

[Hamilton Morris]

Out.

[Andrew Callahan]

Okay. Do you have to order it from China and go down to like, this.

[Hamilton Morris]

Is another bleep out thing? What? Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

Nice. Have you ever done tranq before?

[Hamilton Morris]

No, but it's interesting. Have you done it?

[Andrew Callahan]

No, hell no. I've only seen people with their arms falling off.

[Hamilton Morris]

Right.

[Andrew Callahan]

But I mean, I understand they're doing it the wrong way.

[Hamilton Morris]

Actually, that's something that I wonder about because normally when you see like with a crocodile type stuff, it's like the issue is people injecting substances that are impure dangerously with, you know, non sterile needles and things like that. But there's actually evidence that xylazine is intrinsically dangerous and causes tissue necrosis even when administered under medical circumstances in any animals. Like they.

[Andrew Callahan]

So it's just bad news.

[Hamilton Morris]

It's something you don't want to inject, I don't think.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, I interviewed these guys who synthesize it kind of in Philadelphia and they'd always say, okay, well any addict who.

[Hamilton Morris]

Has an arm falling off, they must.

[Andrew Callahan]

Have missed the vein and it's their fault.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, yeah. It seems like it's dangerous to inject it.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, you can't do it period.

[Hamilton Morris]

I wouldn't.

[Andrew Callahan]

What else would you not do?

[Hamilton Morris]

I mean, most of the stuff that people do regularly I think is a little bit dangerous. It's kind of weird how if you say like that you tried a drug called 2ct7, everyone will think like you're crazy. But if you smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol every day, people are just like.

[Andrew Callahan]

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[Hamilton Morris]

So easy.

[Andrew Callahan]

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[Hamilton Morris]

It's so easy.

[Andrew Callahan]

Again. Use the QR code on screen. As I mentioned, plug in my Coupon code channel 5, all caps channel 5 for 15% off. Stay connected, avoid scams and Saily through international waters without fear. All right, back to Hamilton.

[Hamilton Morris]

I think, actually most of the common patterns of drug consumption are surprisingly dangerous, and people overestimate the danger associated with some of these, like, weirder things that I'm interested in. Not to say that there aren't dangerous. Of course there are.

[Andrew Callahan]

What are some of the most dangerous drugs that are accepted among common society.

[Hamilton Morris]

In terms of drugs that aren't as.

[Andrew Callahan]

Stigmatized that you feel, like, carry a lot of danger that could, you know, bless the people with some real game.

[Hamilton Morris]

Because I'm not trying to scare people.

[Andrew Callahan]

Unnecessary, but I mean, like, some shit to be careful with.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, to be careful with. I mean, I think benzodiazepines are a really good way to fuck yourself up. And they're very seductive because people try them and most people are, like, a little bit anxious, and so they try them. They're like, oh, I had anxiety all along. That's why I felt that way. And the reality is that's just being human. Like, everyone is, or probably like 90% of people are a little bit anxious or a little bit tense about something all the time. And so it makes you very susceptible because you take Xanax or Klonopin or Valium, or Ativan or whatever. And you try and you're like, oh, damn, that's the solution to all of my problems. And it's very easy to medically your own use where you think like, oh, I've got an anxiety disorder. I need to be taking this stuff. And then you set yourself up to become dependent on these things, which will ultimately not address the underlying issues with anxiety and make you horrendously dependent. And. But the nice thing about alcohol is that there's very little medical pretense. So if you're having a beer, it's like you're having a beer because you're trying to relax. You're not doing it because you're like, oh, damn, my generalized anxiety disorder is acting up. I need treatment right now. Like, you know that you're doing it to loosen up and have a good time. But I think people paradoxically get into more trouble with medicalized use than with recreational use in some circumstances, particularly with addictive drugs. This I don't think applies quite as much to psychedelics, although there are issues there as well. Because if you can medicalize your use of something that's potentially addictive, like amphetamine and Adderall, or really anything, then you've created a justification framework where you've given yourself permission to do something that otherwise might seem dangerous or unsafe, safe or unsustainable.

[Andrew Callahan]

One thing you talked about too, is how the kind of movement for legalization of psychedelics took a big setback with the MDMA block as it currently stands. Like, when I drive on the highways here, I see, you know, ketamine clinic advertisements everywhere. What is the status nationwide of psychedelic legality?

[Hamilton Morris]

Well, ketamine is an interesting one because it was already approved. So ketamine is, according to some World Health Organization documents, the most widely used anesthetic is approved in the world. People say, oh, that shit's horse tranquilizer. It's everything tranquilizer. It's used on horses, it's used on cats, it's used on dogs, it's used on people. It's a drug that every organism that is involved with human medicine ends up getting injected with at some point, right? It is very effective. It has a very high therapeutic index. No one is allergic to it, or essentially no one is allergic to it. And so it's kind of like the first line. And because of that, you already had enormous numbers of people that were familiar with ketamine, knew how to administer it, and were able to prescribe it off label for psychiatric use. So they Never even had to get permission from the FDA to do this because a physician can use a drug off label if it's already approved. Then subsequently they also developed an FDA approved antidepressant ketamine formulation. But the majority of those clinics that you see advertisements for are not using the FDA approved formulation. They're using off label ketamine preparations.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, but are any of any. Is LSD legal anywhere?

[Hamilton Morris]

No, not in the United States.

[Andrew Callahan]

Shrooms.

[Hamilton Morris]

They are in some states. Yeah. In like Denver, Colorado I think they're decriminalized in Somerville and possibly Cambridge, Massachusetts and in Oakland I believe as well. And you run into a bit of a cannabis type situation where if something is legal in a city or in a state, there's always the concern that the federal government will retain the ability to indiscriminately raid people, people if they so desire. Which is what used to happen with cannabis clinics and cannabis dispensaries.

[Andrew Callahan]

You think all drugs should be legal?

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, definitely. And that's not to say that all drugs are safe. It's just that I think that prohibition of drugs doesn't represent an effective strategy for the reduction of harms associated with drug use. We've tried it. We gave it an incredible shot. We've spent half a century and a trillion dollars trying that strategy. And it has been catastrophic. Catastrophic. And that money could be spent giving people treatment, agonist replacement therapy, psychological counseling, giving the homeless places to live, helping address the reasons that people actually use drugs in the first place. Like arresting people. Just 100 doesn't work. It's not even a question of whether or not it's ethical. From a pragmatic standpoint, it 100% does not work. It's such a shame to me with like Elon Musk talking about throwing like USAID in the wood chipper. It's like throw the damn DEA in the wood chipper. Like there is an actual predatory taxpayer funded organization that exists to terrorize US citizens that does no help to anyone, does nothing but harm, and no one is even talking about abolishing the dea.

[Andrew Callahan]

Well, what are we going to do about the cartels?

[Hamilton Morris]

The cartels are probably a product of the dea. I mean this is the thing. Once you have a regulated market, then the black market by definition disappears. Right? It's like, what are the cartels selling? Fentanyl. Well, isn't that lucky? Turns out most people don't want to use fentanyl to, to begin with. So if you have a regulated market, the fentanyl trade is basically over. Except For. For a very small number of people that actually want fentanyl. And those people should help themselves to fentanyl if they want it.

[Andrew Callahan]

When you say regulated, do you mean like stores?

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, potentially. Yeah. Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

I mean, if you look at harm reduction facilities in San Francisco, they have everything shy of giving you the actual product.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah. And I know that sounds extreme to people. They're like, oh, my God, buy fentanyl in a store. Obviously it wouldn't be like a convenience store where children can buy fentanyl. There would be some. Some degree of, again, regulation. It would be restricted in a way that has worked pretty well for cannabis. I mean, you can access it. Yet they check your id. When you go into the dispensary, at least in New York, you have a person who speaks to you and describes what you're getting into. I mean, I think that they already do that with opioids. They've done it for decades with methadone. So. And it works really well. We're not a methadone clinic. We're a treatment program that uses methadone to fight against the opiate addiction they do with buprenorphine. It works really well. It's clear that a lot of the problems that are associated with drug use are a product of the way that they're conceptualized in a society and can be dramatically reduced. Again, it's not to say that there aren't any problems, but like, I did this Vice piece years ago where the footage was lost, it was never released because something happened. But there was this Peruvian psychiatrist named Tyosa who was performing the psychosurgical procedure where he was removing part of the brain of cocaine addicts anterior cingulate gyrus and was experiencing like a. What he felt was a dramatic therapeutic effect. And everyone's like, oh, this is the fucking Dr. Mengele of Peru. You're carving up the brains of addicts. This is totally inhumane. Horrible press for this psychosurgical procedure. So he decided, okay, I've got to figure out something else that doesn't involve brain surgery. And these were like the most severe cocaine addicts in Peru. So he's like, psychosurgery works, but everyone is saying that it's inhumane. Is there anything else we can try? And then he's like, oh, what if we give them coca tea? And it turned out that that was as effective as the psychosurgery. So it's like, give the cocaine addict cocaine in a dilute tea. And that works pretty well and facilitate.

[Andrew Callahan]

It in a way that doesn't like, encourage black market distribution.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

I had some friends in Vancouver, bc, they had this group called the Dolph Drug User Liberation Front, and they opened up actual store where they sold packaged and tested heroin, fentanyl, and cocaine in Vancouver for a while. And they're actually successful in reducing the fatal overdose rates in the downtown east side. And, of course, the cops raided them, took this person, Aris, to jail. And it was just crazy because last time I went, I saw Aries, and they were like, oh, everything's good now. But, yeah, I mean, it works. It's just the idea to conceptualize is so against how we've been programmed. It's like you can't sell anything but alcohol and cigarettes in the store. I mean, I guess now weed, we've reached a point where it's normal to sell weed, but if you ask somebody from the 50s about that, they'd probably.

[Hamilton Morris]

Be pretty shook, and they would think it would be disastrous. And it hasn't been. It's amazing how quickly it goes. Like, there's maybe a period where it's a big deal where people are like, oh, my God, I can get a cookie. And. And, like, someone, you know, eats too much of a cookie and writes a think piece about it for the New York Times or whatever, but then you get over it, and then no one even cares anymore. And that's the hope, is that the culture just evolves in such a way that these things can be normalized and not sensationalized.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, because if they opened up a fentanyl store, I mean, I don't know anybody who'd be like, oh, great, I'm gonna go try it.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, me neither.

[Andrew Callahan]

But it's just the mind of. I don't know. It's just the mind of the people who aren't around that many drug users.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

I guess they don't understand it.

[Hamilton Morris]

They also. It's like people are getting fentanyl anyway. They already are fentanyl stores. They're just not regulated in any way, and they're more dangerous. So what you're really doing is just objecting to the concept of a safer fentanyl store. You ever tried it in a medical context? Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

Patch.

[Hamilton Morris]

I had a infusion before a procedure.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh, okay, cool.

[Hamilton Morris]

You didn't.

[Andrew Callahan]

You didn't check it out?

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was unconscious.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh, that sucks.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, because I always figured I've never done an opiate before, which is insane.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah. You're not missing much. Really? I don't think so. I feel like all these movies Made them seem so much more amazing than they really are.

[Andrew Callahan]

You think that's a social engineering program?

[Hamilton Morris]

I think it's, you know, it's just like a better story. If heroin is like the absolute most amazing thing a human being can experience, as opposed to it just being like vaguely mid.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah. So you think the train spotting dream is not real?

[Hamilton Morris]

I don't know. I think maybe for some people it's really amazing.

[Andrew Callahan]

For you, what's been the most beneficial psychedelic that you've used in your life?

[Hamilton Morris]

Maybe ibogaine.

[Andrew Callahan]

What is that stuff?

[Hamilton Morris]

It's this tree. Well, ibogaine itself is an alkaloid, but there's a Central West African tree called Eboga that is the foundation of a syncretic Christian religion where they think that the tree of knowledge of good and evil in Genesis is Eboga. And they have this intricate mythology surrounding this plant. It's like half Christian, half part of the, I guess, traditions of Gabon. It's pretty beautiful, actually. The whole thing is amazing. And they strip the bark off of the roots of this plant and have a religion where everyone consumes it. And it's highly psychedelic and it's very much my vibe. I feel.

[Andrew Callahan]

Where does it rank in comparison? If you were to rank it in between psilocybin and mdma?

[Hamilton Morris]

It's just, it's. I consider it like the experience for me was like the most rational I've ever been. It was almost like I was tripping less than I'd ever been tripping before. Like my mind entered this state of totally detached objectivity and I could see everything as it felt as if it really was. It was amazing.

[Andrew Callahan]

When's the last time you took it?

[Hamilton Morris]

It's been years.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh, damn, that's a bummer.

[Hamilton Morris]

Although that's the beautiful thing about psychedelics is that you can use them one time and that might be enough. You don't hear that with other classes as much where people are like, yeah, I tried beer like four years ago and that was enough. It was a amazing. But like, I don't think I'm going to go back anytime soon.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, dude, you're making me think maybe.

[Hamilton Morris]

I should get some psychedelics going with the hppd. Obviously there's additional caution warranted, but yeah, I. I would say that it's potentially. You could, like, start very low and cautiously in a very calm environment and see how you responded and then figure it out from there.

[Andrew Callahan]

What do you think is the safest one I could do out the gate?

[Hamilton Morris]

Well, that's the other weird thing. About HPPD is to what extent is it actually a function of the visual effects of psychedel or the emotional effects? So if it were purely the visual effects, then you might think the more visual the psychedelic, the more dangerous it is. So I'd say like whatever you do, don't smoke DMT because it's highly visual. But I don't think it is that simple. And it wouldn't surprise me if something like DMT actually was less disruptive than something like ibogaine, which tends to be much less visual. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, short answer is I have no idea.

[Andrew Callahan]

I probably want to do something with less visual symptoms. That's why I've been able to do MDMA like, like many times.

[Hamilton Morris]

Interesting.

[Andrew Callahan]

Because it doesn't present any visual stimuli. It's just a euphoric feeling. And I've taken, I've taken sassafras actually, which mda, which some say has a visual component. And it was. It's been fine. It's just, it's just the hard psychs are the ones that I'm scared of, but every time I do them I learned something.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, I think it's. It would be interesting especially because you're so publicly part of this if, I.

[Andrew Callahan]

Mean, I mean HPPD disclosure movement.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, yeah. So if it makes sense.

[Andrew Callahan]

I only talked about it once time.

[Hamilton Morris]

But I hear people mention you talking about, they're like, oh Andrew, Andrew has. You need to talk about that. And so if it made things worse, not that I would want anything bad to happen to you, but it would be good to know that as well. And if it made things better, that would be awesome to know. And of course it would just be one data point and all the different people that have it, but. So I'm not suggesting that you should, but whatever happens, it would be probably good for people to know.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, I'll definitely document it. I want to try that thing that you mentioned first. The one thing. Get me in two weeks.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, yeah. Catanserin.

[Andrew Callahan]

I was also thinking you're in like a pretty unique position because you introduced so many unique ideas and new substances that people may abuse, you know, if they don't do it with the proper supervision or care. I feel like you have this unique thing going where people could like blame you for things going wrong in their life.

[Hamilton Morris]

Oh, definitely. Yeah. You know, and even with a tiny bit of reason, I mean there is some legitimate responsibility applied, which is why when people say what is your favorite or what is the craziest? There's Always these superlative questions related to drugs. And it makes me a tiny bit uncomfortable because I know that if I say ibogaine is my favorite or whatever, that then it becomes an advertisement for that particular substance. Sometimes literally. Like I've seen people cut up interviews that I've done and post them on Instagram to advertise ibogaine clinics or whatever. So that is a reality that I've seen. Or even for me, because I'm so interested in obscure drugs that no one has heard of. I know that if I talk about it during this interview and I say, let me tell you about how amazing, amazing the ethoxymethyl ether of salvinorin B is or whatever, which by the way, I've never tried, I've only synthesized it, so I can't tell you that it's amazing, but I do suspect it's very interesting. And then people want to talk about it and then there's a responsibility associated with that. You know, I wrote an article years ago for Vice about a chemical, methoxetamine, and after that article it became a big thing. I wrote another article about a chemical, fibromo dmt. After that article, people started selling it. Right. So I, I've seen that that happens. I know that that happens. And there is an associated responsibility.

[Andrew Callahan]

How do you grapple with that?

[Hamilton Morris]

You just gotta be cautious. And part of that responsibility is not even people necessarily hurting themselves. It might be those drugs becoming illegal. Most of my life I've researched a drug that I don't even typically talk about publicly because I don't want to draw attention to it.

[Andrew Callahan]

So it's not just about glorifying it, it's just even mentioning it could result in a catastrophe.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, because not so much. I mean, I would say that the greatest catastrophe is prohibition. That's the most realistic thing that can happen with these things and it takes very, very little. Like with this recent DEA ruling of these two drugs, one of them, Doc, had been implicated in one death without a clear causal relationship. It was found in a dead person's blood. The other one, they couldn't provide evidence that a human being had ever consumed it. And so they were depending entirely on Reddit.

[Andrew Callahan]

What's the drug called?

[Hamilton Morris]

Doi.

[Andrew Callahan]

Okay, no one's ever done it.

[Hamilton Morris]

There isn't a peer reviewed scientific or medical paper demonstrating that a human being has ever done it. People have reportedly consumed it, but there isn't a single paper, which might sound weird to people listening to this, but that's actually a pretty low bar. Like if you Said Hamilton. Proved to me that people have done cocaine. I would have no difficulty proving it with lots of scientific studies that show people being arrested with cocaine in their blood and drug tests that show the presence of cocaine and hair and urine and whatever. With doi, they have never been able to even demonstrate that the human being had consumed it, let alone abused it, let alone that it was a public health risk. And just Reddit comments were the basis of the government's decision to place this in the most highly restrictive legal category, which for DOI is a terrible, terrible catastrophe, because this is, like, one of the major drugs used in psychedelic research by actual scientists.

[Andrew Callahan]

So there's always these sort of, like, ridiculous setbacks that are being leveraged by people who don't know what's going on.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

I think about responsibility too, sometimes. Like, I used to always say when I was first doing interviews and podcasts, I would be like, man, don't get a job. Just quit your job. Just hit the road. It will figure itself out. And I always felt like people would email me sometimes and they'd be like, hey, man, I was so inspired by that interview.

[Hamilton Morris]

I just broke the lease at my.

[Andrew Callahan]

Apartment and I'm hitchhiking across the country and I'm like, jesus. And if you die or something, or you get picked up by a serial killer and get your head chopped off, I don't want to be the guy they look at.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, it's. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, but you also don't want to self censor as well. You want to be real to your. To your feelings.

[Andrew Callahan]

And so I want to make it clear to the people out there, you're more than a pundit who explores psychedelic culture. You're a chemist, you're a scientist.

[Hamilton Morris]

Sure.

[Andrew Callahan]

Real brain that functions beyond the world of content. You're doing things the average viewer cannot possibly comprehend. You were synthesizing. You told me that you can read every element on the periodic table.

[Hamilton Morris]

You asked me if I could read every element on the periodic table, and I said that I could, but I'm not even sure what that question means necessarily. I can read the names of them. Sure.

[Andrew Callahan]

It means that you're not. I'm just trying to make it clear that you're more than the drug guy from Vice. You have a very broad career and you've done a lot of cool stuff.

[Hamilton Morris]

That's kind of you. Thank you. Yeah, but I also don't mean that like, it makes it sound like I have some kind of elite stance on this sort of thing, which I don't I think that cultivating a informed relationship with these things is totally possible. But I appreciate this from a cautionary perspective.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah. Well, you just had such a high profile during that time. I mean, especially when they went to hbo. Like, you were straight up on tv like Kevin Hart.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

And I just remember seeing that shit and being like, dude, I wanted to be you when I was younger.

[Hamilton Morris]

Interesting.

[Andrew Callahan]

Well, I wanted to be on Vice.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

Not necessarily be you. I wanted to be somebody with a Vice show. Could be Action Bronson, Maddie Matheson, Eddie, people like that.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, it was a fun time.

[Andrew Callahan]

I want to talk about Vice a little bit. You tired about talking about Vice?

[Hamilton Morris]

No, I actually don't talk about Vice very much.

[Andrew Callahan]

If you look up Vice on YouTube, there's like this big narrative that Vice, like, collapsed or they sold out. I'm not really a Vice hater to that degree.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

I think that they made a lot of really great content, much of which you were a part of. But obviously there was a financial collapse of the company that occurred, I guess, sometime between 2015 and 2020. You left in 2021, kind of on the heels of that. Coll.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

Looking back before you left, what do you think caused the fallout and kind of the disintegration of the company?

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah. Yeah. I'm not a Vice hater either. In fact, I'm very grateful for having had the opportunity to do so much stuff, especially because I've seen how difficult it is to sell stories to other publications. I mean, it's very hard. I'm making things completely independently now, partially by necessity. It's like, I'm not going to sell my show to National Geographic. I have to make it on Patreon. And Vice allowed me a huge amount of freedom. So to be clear, I'm actually not a Vice hater. I'm a Vice appreciator. And if anything, I feel a sadness. I feel like a sense of lost potential because something bad happened, which was a lot of things that happened at different companies in different ways, happening in concert in a very major and destructive way. One is like hiring executives that you pay multi million dollar salaries to, which is a pretty common thing at major media institutions. But I think the president of Vice, Nancy Duboch, was making like 2 million or something like that a year, maybe even more.

[Andrew Callahan]

And she wasn't like a journalist.

[Hamilton Morris]

No. And I think that's probably more than like the editor in chief of the New York Times gets paid. Right. So it's like right off the bat, that's like the budgets of These companies are a zero sum game, and if you pay the CEO or whomever millions of dollars, that's money that you're not paying to journalists. And ultimately, you need to support people who are being tasked with risking their lives to tell stories and taking these enormous risks on a daily basis. So part of it was coasting on the coolness of the early 2000s, where they had a bad habit of underpaying people significantly, which was fine, you know, when I was 21 or something like that. Like, oh, yeah, yeah, well, you know, we're going to pay you for this magazine article, but, you know, we can't pay you to do this video, but, like, we can allow you to make the video. Like, that was kind of the way a lot of stuff was at the beginning, where they would come up with some little way of shortchanging you. But it was so fun to make these things that it was easy to say, all right, fuck it.

[Andrew Callahan]

And it's like the hippest thing around. So you're thinking, like, all right, even if I don't get paid for this particular piece, I'm still going to be able to grow my profile and maybe make different bags and do different hustles outside of this.

[Hamilton Morris]

Right, right. And when you're 21, it's really easy to manipulate people when they're young because you have that feeling of, I'm sure you had this as well, where. I think you've talked about this before with all gas, no breaks, where they were like, oh, we can just. He's just a mic stand. We can just find someone else to be Andrew. Right. So that's a game that all these people love to play, where they want you not to recognize your own worth. And, you know, it's like, oh, well, you know, you want to go to the Amazon and get paid? Well, there's someone over there, and they'll probably go for free. So you can play those kinds of games with people, especially until they recognize their value. And so that was part of it. Overpaying executives, underpaying the people who are responsible for carrying the company. Like, my show was depending on exactly what metric you looked at, either number one or number two. Between my show and Desus and Marrow, and instead of really investing in supporting the show, there was a lot of. Of resistance. They also did let me get away with a lot of crazy stuff. So I don't want to be too. Sound too ungrateful, because there is part of me that recognizes that there was something really cool about the entire enterprise. There was that then there were of course culture war type cancellation type issues with a lot of the executives at the company who had built their brand on being ultra edgy and partying hard and selling advertisements by having sex with executives and having. It was sort of. There was a lot of press about the non standard workplace environment. I never really saw that much. I mean people definitely partied, but it wasn't like.

[Andrew Callahan]

It wasn't like lines of coke in the bathroom, people banging by the fridge or anything.

[Hamilton Morris]

No, definitely not.

[Andrew Callahan]

That's what I thought it was.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

There was a bar inside of the New York office though, right?

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah. But everyone was working so hard. Like, I mean I don't really drink so it's not that surprising. But I never drank single drink at that bar and I don't think I know anyone that did.

[Andrew Callahan]

It was just there as a courtesy.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah. And yeah, maybe someone who's touring could go get a drink at that bar. But everyone else was probably so stressed about getting whatever it was they were making done that they weren't even thinking about having a good time. So that was part of it. There was a massive campaign to destroy them. Once the story of someone's destruction becomes a story in and of itself, it has this sort of of self sustaining destructive effect. You see this actually a lot on YouTube where like someone almost becomes more famous for their disintegration than for who they really are. And then people just keep making videos like this happened with this guy idubbbz.

[Andrew Callahan]

I don't know if you know also Brendan Schaub. I don't know if you know, Brandon.

[Hamilton Morris]

Shop is another one.

[Andrew Callahan]

They just tear him apart.

[Hamilton Morris]

Right.

[Andrew Callahan]

I mean it's kind of happening with Will Smith right now. I'm not sure if you saw his recent freestyle.

[Hamilton Morris]

I have not seen it.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh man. This is the Bounce Back.

[Hamilton Morris]

Here come the Bounce Back.

[Andrew Callahan]

He's on this sort of hip hop revival PR run. It's really bad. And I with the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. So it's really hard to watch. But I know what you're talking about when someone's. When they're like the Ukulele Apology Lady.

[Hamilton Morris]

Toxic Gossip Train, chugging down the tracks of the of misinformation. Right, right. And it's like all these people like Brendan Schaub or Idubbbz or the Ukulele Apology Lady. I only know them because of watching people attack them. That is becomes the spectacle that overtakes whatever the thing being commented on actually was. So there was a lot of Schadenfreude and Glee associated with their downfall, which I also kind of get. Right. Like, they annoyed a lot of people. There was a kind of grating element where going back many years, you could tell that there was an appetite for their destruction.

[Andrew Callahan]

Well, they were the coolest. And you can't be the king of counterculture for too long. Cause it's all about new young energy. Right. I mean, if they would have just corporatized and stood on it, I don't think there would have been such glee about the downfall if they were just like, we're gonna sell out entirely and we're just gonna become like, absolutely nerded out to the core. But Vice was at the top of the food chain when it came to like countercultural content output. So I feel like everyone's like, oh, vice versa. It's only. Cause they're really number one. You'll just see that. And I think that because they weren't paying journalists a lot, you have two really dangerous things happening at one time. You have high cultural capital on the underground, but kind of some resentment being harvested on a grassroots level within the company.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

Those are the two worst things that could possibly collide.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

Because people from within are like, yeah, we're cool. But did you know these fucking dudes who are up top aren't cool. And we're actually the cool ones and we're not getting paid. That's how you see. And we might have to cut this out, but I see Eddie Huang. Eddie Huang, he made a whole bucking movie about how Vice sucks.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

And I'm like, I don't know, man. There's been so many people milking, like the Vice sucks train. But I'm like, I still see stuff on Vice where I'm like, this is tight. They made the documentary about us for All Gas, no Breaks after the Vice had sold out and hired executives. And I. I think they did a pretty good job.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, I saw that. I thought it was good.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah. Like, it's not as if they're not making anything dope anymore.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah. It's like. It's also weird because a lot of what made Vice so good was, at least for me, the hands off approach. That there was very little bureaucracy and micromanagement of what I was doing in a way that would have been totally impossible elsewhere. I could. I got away with some crazy. Crazy.

[Andrew Callahan]

The second time you said that. What is the most heinous thing that you were able to get away with on the company? Die working for Vice.

[Hamilton Morris]

I mean, I made a episode of My show that demonstrated entirely how to make MDMA from start to finish in tutorial. I wouldn't call it a tutorial. It was documentary work, but it showed in tremendous detail exactly how MDMA is made. And the entire time I was doing it I was thinking, am I going to get away with this? Am I just going to actually telephone revise the entire process in exquisite detail? And the answer was yeah, I got away with it. And I made an advertising campaign for the show that ran in the New York subway system that also showed how to make MDMA and just told people that it didn't and that was enough.

[Andrew Callahan]

And how easy is it to synthesize into mdma?

[Hamilton Morris]

Depending on how you do it, it's pretty accessible. Yeah, there's a way that became popular that's very accessible.

[Andrew Callahan]

Do you like mdma?

[Hamilton Morris]

Not really MDMA itself, but I like some related drugs.

[Andrew Callahan]

The come up is terrifying. I've always felt that way.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, Yeah, I found that like earth.

[Andrew Callahan]

Shattering, like all the blood in your body hits your head and like how would you describe with ornate words what it's like to get hit by the MDMA train?

[Hamilton Morris]

I find it very unpleasant, but for me the feeling is that I think I feel like a little bit of shame associated with drug use will believe it or not and. Or there's always this feeling, especially with like weed, where I'm like, oh, I'm being lazy or I'm. This is hedonistic and excessive and unnecessary and I shouldn't be doing this, I should be working or I should be involved in something that's more purposive and productive and constructive. And there's something about the come up of MDMA that makes me feel like I've just done something really irresponsible or I'm like, oh man, really? Like I. Is this really like the thing I need to do that now? I need to go into a flood of intense euphoria and I have stuff to do and this is going to potentially interfere with the stuff that I have to do because maybe I'll be emotionally destabilized and feel sad in the wake of this and isn't that irresponsible? And so I have that kind of this like cycle of regret usually during the come up.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, last time I did MDMA was at burning man in 2019. I had this juggalo in the tent next to me named Gary and he knocked on my RV and he's like, hey man, you want some mdma? I got these moon rocks for you, right? And so he gives me three. I thought they were half a point each right inside of the tablets or the capsules. So I get three. I'm thinking it's a point and a half. So after I take him, Gary comes back to the RV and he's banging the lure. He's like, andrew. He's like, there was actually two points of MDMA in each of those. And I was like, fuck. So I know, I'm like, I'm not gonna throw this up. I have six points of mdma. I have to hit my bloodstream. So I walk out onto the outer playa of Burning man. And it just hit me at one time, you know. Next thing you know, I'm butt naked.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

I don't know why I'm sweating so hard. I jump over the trash fence and the Bureau of Land Management rangers just tackle me and then throw me over the fence. And I was like, trying to find my girlfriend and she was like, what's wrong with you? And I was like, I love you. Even if you had aids, I would still have sex with you. You know, just saying crazy shit that, you know. I was like, why the fuck? I was only dating her for two weeks, you know, just saying shit like that. I'm like, fuck. Somebody saved me. And I went to this place called the Zendo Project.

[Hamilton Morris]

It was like a.

[Andrew Callahan]

It was a tent. It was a tent where you have a bad trip. They call me now.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rick Doblin runs a lot of that.

[Andrew Callahan]

Oh, word. So I go in there. Everyone else is having the worst trip of their fucking life. It's like people like, as if they're about to jump out of a fucking 10 story building. You know what I mean? Like going into the fucking loony bins. I'm like, why would I come. Come here to calm down, you know? Ended up going back. Gary kind of gave me a massage and shit.

[Hamilton Morris]

Ended up smoothing out 600 milligrams of munic. Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

Damn. Big time. I hadn't done it since Andre Nicotina concert four years prior. And so it was just. It was a nightmare. But I want to do it again.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah. Get a scale, Weigh it more carefully.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah. I would do one point.

[Hamilton Morris]

That seems like a responsible one.

[Andrew Callahan]

And it's a good thing for maybe an anniversary trip, you know, Definitely. You could really bond with somebody you love off at one point.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

Two points. You could bond with anybody. So vice, yay or nay?

[Hamilton Morris]

I say certainly in the past. Yay. I don't know what they currently are doing, actually. They asked me they were like, we're bringing back the magazine. Will you write an article for it? And I was like, yeah, I want to do something about how Vice became the major outlet for pharmaceutical propaganda from usona. And they editor was like, oh, I don't know about that. I feel like that wouldn't be good. And I'd asked Shane Smith about it and Shane Smith was fine with it. I was like, well, Shane is okay with it. And he's like, oh, okay, well I don't know, I'm going to need to talk with people about it. I don't know if they're going to be okay with that. And then never got back to me. But. And I was trying to explain to him that actually it would make Vice look good. Like in the third season of my show I did an episode, the Mistakes episode, that was entirely dedicated to mistakes I'd made in my own reporting.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, Rattle Ethical transparency.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah. And it was good. No one used it against me. They appreciated that I was transparent about any problems with my previous reporting. And I think that's a good thing to show how these things happen. It's good for other journalists, it's good for the public. If the idea is that just everything that comes out, we're going to pretend that it's true. Even though everyone knows that journalists make mistakes and no one ever issues retractions or corrections of any kind unless it's like the New York Times and get like a little tiny thing at the bottom. But for the most part we just pretend that everything that comes out is true. And if there's something wrong with it, people just hope nobody notices. That's a bad way to do things.

[Andrew Callahan]

Super bad. Yeah, we've been doing the same thing. Like we had this documentary about ground racing in West Virginia and we spent so much time with this greyhound racing advocate and kennel owner named Steve Sarris from Brockton, Massachusetts that we sort of got psyoped by his propaganda and we ended up putting out like a pretty much a greyhound racing, a sort of pro greyhound racing piece. And then we learned after that he was kind of full of. And so we issued a whole follow.

[Hamilton Morris]

Up statement that's yeah, this kind of thing can happen. You spend a lot of time with someone, they make a good argument and it kind of makes sense. I mean that's the case for a lot of issues where people don't. Yeah, most people probably don't have a strong opinion about greyhound racing. And so if someone's like, no, it's actually really, really good. I could See myself being like, all right, fair enough.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah. I just noticed that I tend to have a little bit of bias favored toward the person that I spent the most time with when I'm covering a story. The person who gave me the most access and showed me the most, like, kindness and gave me the most cumulative, like, hours of their time, I end up just feeling like more comradery with unless I'm totally convinced that they're a piece of shit. Like, if I'm, you know, at like a QAnon rally, it's not like I'm gonna be won over because I spent eight hours with someone as opposed to the opposition, for 30 minutes. But with the greyhound racing topic, like, I just happened to go to this guy's kennel, and it was really well put together, and he, like, showed us a great time. His opposition, I only had, like an hour with him, and they were kind of cold, but still they were kind of in the right in the end.

[Hamilton Morris]

Right.

[Andrew Callahan]

You ever had that kind of conflict.

[Hamilton Morris]

Of interest with someone that I enjoyed? Oh, definitely, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've had people who I was friends with. There was like, a chemist. I don't know if I should say his name, but I guess I'll just say Casey Hardison, who then got accused of some, like, really foul stuff. And I didn't know about it at the time that I was interviewing him, so that's not quite the same. But it definitely can happen that you like somebody and it makes you more sympathetic to their perspective. Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

Like, I was about to interview this escaped New Orleans inmate named Antoine Massey, you know, the one who broke out of jail. And then I figured out he had, like, a bunch of crazy ass charges for, like, domestic battery and false imprisonment. And I was like, fuck.

[Hamilton Morris]

Right? And also when you were talking to people, I think as a journalist, you never want to be a moralist. You never want to be like, dreams judging people, because it would make it impossible to interview anyone. But that can get a little bit out of hand. Like, I was spending a lot of time interviewing the rapper Big Lurch, the. This guy who ate his girlfriend at the time while he was high on pcp. Do you know the story?

[Andrew Callahan]

No, but that's up, man.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, yeah, but it's like, okay, so if you're interviewing Big Lurch, at some point you've accepted that he ate someone. This is, like, indisputable fact. So you're kind of past that. You're like, yeah, like baseline. You ate someone, and that is going to be an accepted fact. Of our conversation. And so I'm not going to, I'm not going to be angry at you because then we can't have a conversation. We're just going to accept that you ate somebody. But then, you know, then he starts saying all the stuff where he's like, you know, I'm a Republican. And I was like, oh really? He's like, yeah, yeah. I, I just, I hate pro life. I don't, I hate abortion.

[Andrew Callahan]

You're like, you aborted a living person.

[Hamilton Morris]

Then I was like, you know what? Actually wait a second. No, I don't, I'm not going to, to listen to Big Lurch saying anti abortion stuff because you ate a woman.

[Andrew Callahan]

Yeah, that's pretty up, man. Do you feel like the psychedelic movement has been co opted by posers?

[Hamilton Morris]

Co opted by posers? I mean there were a lot of people that hated the financial interest or like, oh, these companies selling like microdosing classes or whatever. I don't really care about stuff like that. Like if you're not harming someone, let people do whatever they want. Let them have their, their microdosing classes or their mushroom supplements or whatever. Like that's not my, my issue. I don't even mind people writing dumb shit for the most part. It's really what bothers me is when people get involved in this very delicate space and introduce ideas that corrupt the movement or interfere with freedom and progress. So is it such a, such a big deal that this guy frightened everyone about DMT patents? No, but every single person that became afraid of DMT patents was using their energy to be afraid of an irrelevant concern and not federal prohibition of dmt. And the same is the case for so much of this stuff where it's like people like railing against compass and the clinical development of psilocybin. It's like, okay, you don't like the medical model, that's fine. Fight for policy reform so that you can use it non medically and wherever you live. And that way you don't have to spend your life waving your fist at a pharmaceutical company. You can be free to do whatever you want, which would be ideal.

[Andrew Callahan]

Definitely. So is it safe to say that symposia kind of really destroyed the fight for legal mdma?

[Hamilton Morris]

Well, so it was a kamikaze mission. After they had this disastrous campaign to destroy mdma, it came out that the lead woman was accused of beating her lover with a broom in a very Tom and Jerry style whole domestic abuse type situation. So she, she had beaten a man with a broom and the really crazy Thing is that one of the main symposia, people who had tried to have Rick Doblin canceled once for patting someone on the shoulder, non, sexually and transiently, but also because of an appearance on Joe Rogan, where Joe, this clip is, like, so unbelievably innocuous. I'm sure you could find it. But it's. Joe Rogan is saying something like, it's crazy to believe that people used to live without technology. You know what I mean? Like, cavemen didn't have technology. And Rick Doblin is like, well, many people still live without technology, like people that live in the Amazon. And so this guy said that Rick Doblin had compared indigenous people in the Amazon to cavemen.

[Andrew Callahan]

It's like, well, they're all in the.

[Hamilton Morris]

Stone Age, which he never said. But also, it's just so ridiculous. So it turns out this guy who had spent his life as attacking people, had distributed underage pornography and had stalked people, broken down their doors, slashed their tires, and was a complete psycho. Like, I had been harassed by this person as well. They'd harassed everyone. And they had been actually. I think it's actually more interesting. Symposia had always been careful not to say that they were officially a member of symposia, just an ally of the group, which makes you wonder how much did they know all along? I think it's almost more so suspicious that they arbitrarily made a firewall between themselves and this one ultra psycho person. So one of the people is pretending to be indigenous and was outed for lying to the FDA and beating her boyfriend with a broom. The other one distributed underage revenge pornography and stalked ex girlfriend. The other is living with his wife, who is a co worker, which I think is ethically questionable. And the other dedicated her life to trying to destroy an indigenous man who she had consensual sex with, but could only get New York magazine to publish it because every other magazine wanted to speak with the person who's being accused. New York magazine was the only publication that lacks enough standards to allow this to be published. And one of them, I don't know, he's probably just gonna be like a freelance psycho harassing people on Twitter.

[Andrew Callahan]

And those. The core symposium members. Yeah, those are the people that stopped MDMA from being legal for use for PTSD therapy.

[Hamilton Morris]

It's almost inspiring if it weren't so horrible.

[Andrew Callahan]

It's insane.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. It was a small number of. And I've known a lot of these people for years. Because they were always part of the psychedelic world. They were kind of like the feckless, dumb people who didn't really have anything to contribute. And then they came together and became immensely destructive.

[Andrew Callahan]

Hi, Hamilton. We know each other, but my name's Brian Pace.

[Hamilton Morris]

I'm with the. Oh my. You give the microphone to him. Of all the people in the audience. So I'm. I'm with. I'm with the center for Psychedelic Drug.

[Andrew Callahan]

Research and Education at the Ohio State University.

[Hamilton Morris]

I'm also the politics and ecology editor at Symposia. I think, like, one moral of this story is just how much damage a group of psychos can do. Like, they really scared everyone. Because part of it is that people are doing shit. Like, people that have stuff to do are busy. They don't want to be in a Twitter war with crazy people. Like right now this interview comes out. They're kind of destroyed at this point, although maybe this would be enough to get them back on their feet. But they have allies. Shayla Love at the Atlantic will write an article about how I'm a misogynist for criticism criticizing her reporting. It will then be amplified by a finance blogger named Josh Hardman, who works with the patent attorney, who frightened people into thinking that DMT vapes were threatened by patent law, who also frightened people into thinking that hand holding had been patented. Another completely absurd thing that even was repeated by John Oliver. So these people will all. And then they have other. There's other. Olivia Goldhill at Stat. She's an ally of this group who's a part of the so called entrepreneurship of psychedelic negativity. She'll, you know, maybe write an article. There's someone named Katie McBride. She's also part of this. Like, I'm not saying that they're like a conspiracy where they're all working together. There's just a kind of weird cluster, but they do know each other. And then there's Michael Pollan's publication, the Microdose, which is also engaged in ultra passive aggressive coverage and elevating symposia weirdly, but and attacking people like me in subtle ways whenever they can. Amplifying lies that people tell about me. This is Michael Pollan's official newsletter. Actually, I think he just doesn't watch it. And it's being run by someone who's got Sunday morning cartoons playing in their head.

[Andrew Callahan]

And symposia is literally. Is that a dumb person? Yeah.

[Hamilton Morris]

I like.

[Andrew Callahan]

I'm gonna use that one. So symposia is a useless group of paid out activists. Trying to throw a wrench in the game for no reason.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yes.

[Andrew Callahan]

What's their reason?

[Hamilton Morris]

Just money to prevent sexual abuse would be. No, no.

[Andrew Callahan]

That's a smoke screen.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah. Yeah. What is a real reason they got paid? Reportedly we can censor this, but reportedly $185,000 by Susie Sarlo. And that's not including the money that Bob Jesse paid them while he was part of the board of directors of usona. So. And that's just what I know about from people telling me it's possible there was more.

[Andrew Callahan]

And why did Susie Sarlo pay them?

[Hamilton Morris]

Because she wanted to get revenge on Maps because she lost a portion of her inheritance.

[Andrew Callahan]

He is the sister or daughter of the Holocaust.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yes. Yeah. Oh, my God. Wow. Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

So this has nothing to do with anything but a personal vendetta. And they're using identity politics on grassroots paid activists level to prohibit the rival pharmaceutical organization from getting legal MDMA approved so that she can have a better chance at getting her settlement in the future.

[Hamilton Morris]

I don't think she's even getting that money, but it's very close. I don't think she's even getting the money. I think it's just a personal vendetta at this point. I don't think she's getting the money that she donated to Maps back. Although they did create some kind of civil lawsuit for elder abuse, claiming that they'd given him drugs and he was. Had Alzheimer's disease and couldn't consent to. To consuming the drugs or giving this money to maps. I actually met the woman who is accused of elder abuse at the MAPS conference. And she seemed like a nice lady to me. I don't think she.

[Andrew Callahan]

She wasn't beating up old people with brooms.

[Hamilton Morris]

She didn't seem like the type to. To strike anyone with a broom.

[Andrew Callahan]

I wouldn't beat any old people.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah. All right.

[Andrew Callahan]

So what are we going to do about these people? What's the plan? How are we gonna take them down? What can the people of the world do? The five cast viewers to destroy these bastards?

[Hamilton Morris]

I guess just be aware that anytime you see some psychedelic journalist trying to frighten you over something that seems like it might be bullshit, take that possibility very seriously and ask yourself, why is this really an issue? Like if someone at a USONA related company is telling you that you need to be afraid that some pharmaceutical company patented a combination of MDMA and Viagra, ask yourself, why should I be afraid of that? What is the how is my freedom being reduced produced by this? Who is going to benefit if this is prevented. Why is this an issue? Because they've been extremely good at poisoning the discourse with of one kind or another. And the true tragic irony of this is, if the stated goal of preventing sexual abuse were real, then having a formalized, approved clinical framework for the therapy to be administered would be the best way to prevent that type of abuse. Because you'd have to an entire protocol that could be obeyed or violated, and you'd have resources where people could lose their jobs. One of the really frightening things about underground therapy, doing underground MDMA psychotherapy, Nisha also threatened to out a bunch of MDMA therapists. So she's also a narc in addition to everything else. And one of the things about underground therapy is that you're already working outside of any kind of a legal framework. So if something goes wrong, it's very hard to find resources to get help. It puts you in a weird position to say, hey, I was doing this underground on MDMA therapy. I was taking this drug illegally, and this therapist actually like, spooned me, and I think it was inappropriate and what should I do? Like, the cops are just gonna be like, okay, are you accusing them of assault? Are you, Are they drug dealers? Like, they're not gonna try to adjudicate whether a therapeutic transgression had occurred. They're just going to figure out whether or not it was a drug crime. So in their like, stated quest to prevent sexual abuse, all they did was prevent the creation of framework that would have real accountability and a protoc prevent the very type of abuse that they claim to be so dangerous. And they knew that if they could.

[Andrew Callahan]

Find an example of sexual abuse in particular with how incendiary that stuff is in the press, that'd be the best shot they have at delegitimizing the opposition.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yes. And they. Even the one who was distributing underage revenge pornography would go to participants in the trials and try to coerce them into saying that they had been brainwashed by maps or that they'd been abused. So they would take vulnerable people who had a PTSD diagnosis and would tell them that they were crazy and that if they didn't think that they had been abused, it was because they had been brainwashed. Right. This is insane that they did this. And I know one of the women who underwent this kind of like post therapy abuse from symposia where they were trying to convert her to being one of them and saying that she was a victim and it completely with her head. Because you have someone who has ptsd, which is an extremely serious disorder, who then receives this experimental, unapproved treatment, has a miraculous recovery. But you have issues with trust. Then a stranger comes to you and says, hey, you think you got better from ptsd? No. You've been lied to. You've been manipulated. The whole therapeutic recovery that you thought you experienced was just brainwashing by a cult, and you actually weren't healed at all. That's a really good way to fuck with somebody's head. And it had an extremely negative effect on the woman who was a victim of this action activist group who are supposedly trying to help victims.

[Andrew Callahan]

It's crazy to think how outspoken this group was about, like, progressive causes, like, pulling every identity culture war thing they can possibly think of and try to make the other side look bad.

[Hamilton Morris]

Because it works. That's the other thing is it's. It's like they took a page out of the book of USONA as well. Of, like, oh, we'll say we're a nonprofit, then we can do no wrong. Nonprofits are very much capable of harming people, and nonprofits are very much capable of. Of doing creepy things with money. And I think that people need to be very careful of these organizations. And even, like, you're saying, like, paid protesters, right? Like, it's, like, almost uncomfortable talking about this because it feels like it buys into every conspiracy theory. But the point is that this kind of thing really does happen. And it was one of the most horrifying and destructive things I've ever seen. And basically, not a single journalist wrote about it. They denied it. They. Even after Rachel Newer took these tremendous risks to publish it in the New York Times, Katie McBride, who's like an ally of symposia, published some article basically saying that it was all irresponsible, everything that had happened in the New York Times. So I encourage anyone listening to this to read Rachel Newer's reporting in the New York Times and understand that not only is everything that she said true, it is the tip of the damn iceberg.

[Andrew Callahan]

And there's no George Circle involvement, no.

[Hamilton Morris]

Just one crazy lady and one pharmaceutical company. Usona. Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

Well, thanks so much for your time, man. I appreciate it. Any parting words to the. The youth of the world, the children of this planet?

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah. Be suspicious of the news, regard it with suspicion, but also be smart about it. Be critical. Make your own news. Have a good stance on all of this to the best of your ability, because we're going to live in a world. World of increasing dishonesty, and. And it's an existential responsibility to develop a well calibrated detector and understanding the world.

[Andrew Callahan]

Hell yeah.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

And also subscribe to the Homies patreon.

[Hamilton Morris]

Oh, yeah. Patreon.com hamiltonmorris we're gonna put the link.

[Andrew Callahan]

In the description in the pinned comment. If you don't subscribe, we're gonna.

[Hamilton Morris]

We're gonna. We're gonna terrorize you.

[Andrew Callahan]

Thanks, man.

[Hamilton Morris]

Yeah, thank you. Hell yeah.

[Andrew Callahan]

I hope I asked some good questions.

[Hamilton Morris]

I thought it was great.

[Andrew Callahan]

Channel 5 Live Worldwide, Hollywood and Vine, the Authority, Channel 5 News, Channel 55. We don't with custers and 5 is the best number.