- A Oliver Hockenhull DocumentaryReleased: November 1st 2013 (USA)
Plot Summary (imdb):
A stylish, in depth look at the renaissance in psychedelic drug research in light of current scientific, medical and cultural knowledge. The film explores these socially taboo substances as adjuncts to psychotherapy, as crucial but neglected medicines, and as technologies of consciousness. From Neurons to Nirvana: The Great Medicines features interviews with some of the world's foremost researchers, writers, and pioneers in the growing field of psychedelic psychotherapy. These radical healers and dissenters are using everything from ancient concoctions to newly created designer molecules to the once demonised psychedelic drugs of the 1960s. They argue convincingly for the legal right to incorporate these substances into therapeutic practice. - Written by Anonymous
Through interviews with leading psychologists and scientists, Neurons to Nirvana explores the history of four powerful psychedelic substances (LSD, Psilocybin, MDMA and Ayahuasca) and their previously established medicinal potential. Strictly focusing on the science and medicinal properties of these drugs, Neurons to Nirvana looks into why our society has created such a social and political bias against even allowing research to continue the exploration of any possible positive effects they can present in treating some of today's most challenging afflictions. - Written by Anonymous
The Answer to the Question, "Who are we?". This film explores the questions that western society has stopped asking. The possibility that the class of medicines that have been banned by a few biased, frightened and politically motivated people, may show us the Answers to the Questions, is enough reason to watch this film. - Written by RipRap
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My notes and quotes
from watching the documentary
LSD• In popular press - hallucinogens are portrayed as a recreation, an escape or a dangerous invitation for abuse.
• More people die each year from using simple pain relievers than from all illegal substances combined. Of those which are - the vast majority of deaths are caused from street cocaine and heroin - almost no deaths are down to psychedelics.
• 1950's - a great hope that LSD was going to revolutionise psychiatry
• 1960's - LSD had moved out of mainstream medicine into recreational use. Some thought things were beginning to spiral out of control, therefore the efforts began to put the lid back on LSD to try and "restore social control that appeared to be on the verge of breaking down."
• Vietnam war - US government questioned by society in terms of its involvement.
• Government wanting people to sign up and fight - but LSD and its freedom thinkers wanted no part. - Many protests and reason why government didn't want LSD readily available to the masses. "Make Love Not War"
• You do see out of the box with LSD. You do see past culturally imposed values.
• The whole goal was to crack open the mind and break away from the constraints of a culture that we felt was inhibiting the human potential and that we might embrace a new realm of possibilities.
• In order to ban a drug - you have to paint it as having extreme dangers linked to it - this being addiction.
• FACT: You cannot become physically dependent or addicted to a drug such as LSD
• Difficult to deal with this in a scientific manner really difficult because dealing with irrational fear based reactions instead of what the drugs have done for people in the past and the possibilities for the future.
• LSD put scientists on the path of a new "neurotransmitter" - SEROTONIN
• Psychedelics stimulate our serotonin circuits - ultimately enhancing connections between the emotional brain (middle) and the behaviour/informational brain (lower).
• LSD resembles serotonin on a chemical structure and has very similar effects
• LSD originated and proved to be one of the most important tools for neuroscientists in helping to understand the brain.
• Wise well-crafted insight and knowledge when undergoing a trip - coming from the deep consciousness/unconscious of oneself. Drawn into transcendental, mystical realm of the self beyond the profound unit of states.-the profound awareness at the core of the mystery of what / who we are.
LSD - there is no other - there is only 'one'.
Magic Mushrooms - Psilocybin
• A way to explore a continent that no-one new existed
• A psychiatric assisted trip is like an expedition - a chance to experience somewhere new and come back to reality and speak to others about your journey with those who may also be able to provide insight into where you have been.
• Provides a short term and long term alleviation of anxiety - associated with the fear of dying. - Cancer patients
• The Good Friday experiment? Using science by taking a look into whether psilocybin can catalyse a religious "mystical experience"?
• MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE: A subjective experience in which an individual reports contact with a transcendent reality, arriving at some knowledge or insight previously unavailable
• The coming together of science and spirituality
1960's Cultural Revolution - a result of the 'psychedelic experience'
•People became motivated to become a part of world movements (anti-war, environmental, civil rights, animal rights, etc)
• No racial barriers in hippie counterculture - Cultural barriers gone because he/she is "just like me".
• Unitive mystical experience - everyone comes together as a part of a deeper sense of self. A core element that binds us together. The interconnectedness of all people and things. Everything is all one and psychedelics help us to identify with people we may not usually.
• The experience at its core is more real and more true than every day waking consciousness.
• Lucid dreaming - Awareness that when you are dreaming you know you are dreaming. Psychedelics have a similar effect.
• We still don't know and these drugs provide us with the tool and experience to find out
a sense of being more at one with the universe
• Psilocybin tuns off blood flow in key parts of the brain. These part control and integrate the way in which the brain processes information - nodes with regulate what you do and how you feel. By switching these areas off - this liberates the rest of the brain so it can do other things - this leading to the expansion of consciousness.
• Core of John Hopkins Research finds that there is this quantum change of perception of life itself, attitudes, moods and behaviour.
• Most people are endorsing that this experience is the most personally meaningful and spiritually significant experience of their entire life.
• We are just relearning to let it be ok to call these things real again
MDMA
• Illegal substances in a therapeutic setting are completely safe - it is the recreational use that gives the substance a bad name.
• MDMA is not a hallucinogen - floods the brain with serotonin. Acts as an immediate acting/ instant anti-anxiety or anti-depressant - non sedating.
• Enhances memory in terms of the experience, early traumas and current repressed issues
• PTSD: The need is growing for treatments that current psychotherapies and medications only work partially and in certain subjects. The need is growing for psychedelic medicines,
• PTSD - problems in treatment because too much anxiety and emotional numbing in order to revisit the trauma in a therapeutic way.
• MDMA allows people to face fears without being overwhelmed and hang on to the emotional connection.
• It induces a heart opening and empathy with other people.
• It allows access to an experience that people need to have as part of being human - empathy.
• Psychedelics are there to open the door as long as you are ready to accept that the substance and experience are not the solution.
Cannabis
• Has been around for 4000 years - understandably widely experienced and tested with a broad range of actions
• In ancient times (with no understanding of the chemical effects on the brain) the experience to be had on substances such as cannabis where thought to be magical and provided by the gods.
• Popular with Queen Victoria in 1800's used cannabis as a relaxant and to treat period pain, child birth.
• Cave paintings provide us with a visual insight in to altered states of consciousness and awareness.
• Legal medicine in Britain until 1971.
• Banned when young people started using it.
• Prohibition is doing the exact opposite of what the war on drugs is saying its benefitting
• No research because the government wont allow it - then say there is no medical value due to research.
• Less harmful to health than alcohol or nicotine
• Ultimate threat of these substances in modern society is their ability to break consensus trends and cause people to look at things in a brand new way
people rose up and started protesting - specifically against wars such as the Vietnam war.
• The government drew parallels between this antisocial anti-system activity and drug use - particularly cannabis.
• Ronald Reagan - "Drugs are menacing our society. They are threatening our values and undercutting our institutions"
• Ronald Reagan Jr when questioned about his mother Nancy's "Just Say No" campaign:
"Its not marijuana the mind altering substance, its marijuana the anti-thesis of the state"
• A lot of learnt knowledge that can be more easily passed on in a better regulated system.
• Instead of dealing with behaviour and mental issues, people are medicated pharmaceutically. The problem with this is people see the benefits of prohibited drugs as having more of a positive effect than that of the legal pharmaceuticals available. So one can see no reason not to use these substances.
• Not all the rules are here to protect us. Sometimes we have to cross lines and search passed those boundaries in order to find what we are entitled to have.
• We fund studies on harm in the US - we don't fund studies on benefit
Ayahuasca - Yaje
• Vine of the soul
• Amazonian Indians - human rights - ecological destruction
- Origin of their knowledge about the plants they are trying to protect came from the hallucinations of their shamans
• Television of the forest - can see images and learn things
• Its not such a radical proposition to see plants as teachers.
• Its only the alienation of western science that creates that apparent split.
• For thousands of years around the world medicine was based on plants
• A coevolutionary mechanism
• Famous botanist said "Plants have substituted biosynthesis for behaviour"
• Plants medicate relationships with the rest of nature and environment through chemistry
• The plant has an incentive to form a relationship with human beings
• Shamans and the "out of body" experience: The capability to look at the world in a way that is more than just the body-based limitations that we originally evolved to use to understand the physical world.
• You can drink this stuff and it shows you this spectacular images that teach you things.
it shows you exactly what you need to know in that exact moment to mature and develop ones own psyche.
• Shamanism - always been a form of psychotherapy with the use of these substances which is now coming together with clinical psychiatry and neuroscience.
• Forces us to acknowledge the mind spirit and soul
• Wouldn't drink this out of ceremony - not a party drug. Causes people to purge not enjoyable. Its not anything you do lightly and want people helping you through it.
• The ideas it shows you rips through the placenta of ordinary consciousness to achieve some kind of illumination - but nobody said the journey was meant to be pleasant
• Afterwards o feeling of clarity and lightness which is powerful
• Purge of the psychic contents that weighs on you
• Shamanism - the survival of a tradition almost as old as man himself
Certain drugs are powerful devices for expanding this awareness toward its real possibilities.
SSRI's
• Medicating ourself into a state of happiness with pharmaceuticals promotes drug dependancy
• Companies are not interested in hearing about a treatment that a patient need take once or twice that can make a huge difference to people.
• Its not that they don't want you to be on drugs - they want you to be on drugs...on corporate drugs
• All psychoactive substances are in the public domain.
• If a government / pharmaceutical company cant patent it - they want to prohibit it which creates a black market, creates crime etc.
No theory of the brain or how its related to consciousness will ever be complete if it doesn't take these phenomena into account.
For various complicated and miss-placed reasons, these substances, which historically have always been totally scared at the centre of the cultural evolution of man, they have been shoved in the bag of illegality.
It would be interesting to use these substances - not just for medicines and disease states but to also enhance human and spiritual growth - more empathic and overall better human beings.
The psychedelic experience is transformation at every level, physical, emotional, mental, spiritual.
Psychedelics have catalysed in many people a creative process that has lead them to make major profound discoveries which have changed the face of the world.
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List of scientists, psychologists, theorists, ethnobotanists, etc
that feature in this film and worth looking at in terms of opinions, sources and info
Amanda Fielding - Founder, The Beckley Foundation
Dr Charles S. Grob, M.D - Prof. of Psychiatry, UCLA School of Medicine
Chris Bennett - Author, On the Role of Cannabis & Religion
Dr. David Healy - Director, Dept. of Psychological Medicine, University of Cardiff
David E. Nichols, PH.D - University of North Carolina, Medicinal Chemistry
David Nutt - Neuropsychopharmacologist, Imperial College, London
Dennis McKenna, PH.D - Stanford University School of Medicine, Heffter Research
Dr. Gabor Mate, PH.D - Addiction and ADD Expert, Best selling author
Gillian Maxwell - Project Director, "Keeping The Door Open: Dialogues On Drug Use"
Dr. Ingrid Pacey, M.D. - Psychiatrist, MDMA Medical Researcher
Jeremy Narby, PH.D - Anthropologist & Author
Dr. Julie Holland, M.D. - Psychiatrist and Editor, Ecstasy the Complete Guide
Kathleen Harrison - Ethnobotanist
Michael Winkelman, PH.D - Arizona University, Co-Editor "Psychedelic Medicine"
Dr. Michael Mithoefer, M.D - Clinical Investigator for MDMA/PTSD Studies
Rick Doblin, PH.D - Director, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
Roland Griffiths, PH.D - Prof. of Behavioural Biology, Johns Hopkins University
Dr. Stephen Ross, M.D - NYU Psilocybin Cancer Project
Wade Davis, PH.D - National Geographic Society
William Richards PH.D - Lead Researcher, Johns Hopkins Medical School