Dr. Albert Y. Leung

The only way to remove the greed element from this VC is to make a few key changes to our no-longer democratic system.  Limit Congressional members’ terms to maximal 6 years for congressmen and 12 years for senators, with  no special perks or free healthcare for themselves unless fellow citizens are included.  Members of Congress (of both parties) have been too cozy with moneyed groups that breed corruption when they stay in Congress for too long.  Some, like the head of the executive branch and his family, have been openly doing personal business with our money resources, hugely benefiting themselves and ignoring the welfare of most Americans.   The way it is now, too many congressmen and senators are themselves too corrupt to speak out, hence letting the other branch(es) continue to do their dirty work to enrich themselves.

I believe if we have limited terms for congressmen and senators, there will no longer be tax-free income for billionaires, nor further money-making openly by government officials and their families using our government resources to enrich themselves. That may start us on the correct path to a real democratic society more like that of the Scandinavians and Canadians.   We have arrived at our current nondemocratic status (like a banana republic in bygone days) only within the recent decade or two.  In my opinion, when our Congress has no term limits, it is  prone to be corrupted by money and power.    If not for this main reason, I don’t understand why we let narcissistic or selfish people control our nation’s finances, unless most of our Congress members are corrupt and have inch-thick skin, as they are now?  I feel sorry for our grandchildren’s generation and theirs.

I had published all my work in four papers by 1969.  And I am never interested in making money by exploiting or restricting others.  This is unusual, especially after I rejoined the psychedelic movement only about six years ago when the field was filled with ‘goldrush’ entrepreneurs, especially one group was first a non-probit organization getting free advice and services from well-known experts but then went for-profit and got most of the typical moneyed investors.  They are all sticking to synthetic psychedelics and seem not to be aware of the vicious cycle (VC) of synthetic drug therapy that I have been talking about for years. 

During most of my long independent career I have not dealt with psychedelics.   And I was only employed fulltime for less than six years by two companies.  I came back to magic mushrooms after retirement because I reactivated my membership in LinkedIn to try to promote my book, My Life & Rollercoaster Career, self-published in 2018 (CreateSpace/Amazon), which is my memoir and my Newsletter (1996-2004) combined.  It did not have anything on psychedelics, except a short description of my PhD research when isolating norbaeocystin and I spilled the concentrated extract ready for crystallization.  When back on LinkedIn, I quickly noticed the chatter online about psilocybin and magic mushrooms.  I promptly forgot my book.  But I found out one key thing that prompted me to eventually form my PBN Naturals Worldwide Consortium.  Incidentally, norbaeocystin is the closest analog to serotonin and psilocybin.  After it is dephosphorylated, it becomes 4-hydroxytryptamine, a nonidentical twin of 5-hydroxytryptamine (=serotonin).  Since serotonin is a hormone and neurotransmitter present throughout our body, its function as a serotonin substitute has never been studied.

I grew my fungal mycelium in different vessels, flasks of different sizes on shakers and eventually in a home-make 5-gallon Carboy fermenter with aeration.  The mycelia all grew into little pellets up to maybe 0.5 cm in diameter.  I collected the little pellets by screening or filtering them through a sieve or coarse filter, rinsing them with distilled water and freeze-drying them.  Then, I’d do my isolation of their psychedelic compounds.  All the time I was working with growing and extracting the fungal mycelia, I never realized my process would produce a truly clean and natural mycelia containing PBN with NO synthetic contaminants from toxic fossil fuels, or new unknown chemicals from biotech conversions that would require isolation and extraction from synthetic brand-new chemicals with which we have no history of interactions.

Consequently, the typical drug model, active principle(s) in multicomponent herbal medicines, cannot be applied to anything but synthetic drugs.  The notion that coffee is caffeine held by some drug scientists a generation or two ago is no longer possible.  But many of my drug-trained colleagues still hold onto the concept of an active principle in multiple-component herbs, unaware of, or ignoring other more important, also active, chemicals present.  Some still practice it, leading to repeated false or irrelevant results.  Seriously, how much of our published psychedelics research in the past century  was due to uncertain identity or impurities containing highly active compounds (like LSD in psilocybin for whatever reason)? 

For above reasons, I don’t consider our modern synthetic drug therapy scientific.  Nor is it based on human experience and accumulated wisdom, as with traditional medicines   Regardless, both therapies have merits despite their deficiencies.   Which is why I have been advocating the use of both, but with prudence.   

In my last post, I mentioned using both synthetic drug therapy and tried-and-true traditional medicines in treating our illnesses.  That is only when we have no other alternatives like it is now, when we have available only synthetic drugs along with the vicious cycle (VC) they cause that in turn leads to unavoidable side effects and new diseases.   They can be ameliorated by traditional medicines if available.  However, the best alternative is to avoid or bypass using synthetics altogether.   Now is as good time as any other to start for the following reason. 

Since the synthetic drug era began about 150 years ago, we have been making both ingestible chemicals (as drugs & additives) and non-ingestible chemicals (for our  convenience & pleasure) nonstop and ongoing.  They must be hundreds of thousands, or millions, in number by now.  Who knows what their tonnage is, and will be, a few decades from now.   Since over 50 years ago, I already had succeeded in growing  a totally natural magic mushroom mycelium (Psilocybe baeocystis) containing PBN (psilocybin baeocystin norbaeocystin), the closest analogs to serotonin (a hormone and neurotransmitter throughout our body which we might have studied closely and have invented specializations of which we are so proud.  What exactly do or can these closest analogs do to our mental and physical health other than making them rest at serotonin ‘receptors’ (whatever and wherever they are).   It has been over half a century since my discovery of 2 of these closest analogs to serotonin, no scientists have even succeeded in repeating my work despite it has been published in 4 detailed papers.  When I rejoined the psychedelics movement about 5 years ago, on reviewing my work, I discovered we can actually rinse/wash my fungal mycelium with distilled water, dry it, and we would have a totally natural psychedelic product.  No extraction with solvents or reagents is necessary.  Hence, no contaminants from synthetic chemicals such as from biotech, enzymatic, or other technologies eventually will require extraction of the chemicals from mixtures of culture fluids.           

More on the VC  in my  next post.  So, until then!

Since the VC is the origin of the major health problems in our country, I will spend the next few posts rehashing this issue and its closely interrelated problems that I have been describing for years in my posts and books.

Synthetic drugs and additives have one thing in common.  They are all made from toxic petroleum or other fossil fuels.  Hence, they are inherently toxic.  Our recent forebears were smart and correct in designing scientific tests (in vitro, in vivo, small creatures, etc.) to be sure they are effective, or at least safe, before subjecting them to clinical trials in humans, then after approval, release them for patient use.  This last step is the same trial-and-error process our ancient ancestors used when they were developing our traditional medicines eons ago.  This process of our traditional medicines has lasted not just decades but millennia or countless years when we inherited traditional medicines from our ancestors.  In contrast, our modern synthetic drugs have gone through scientific treatment, tops a few years, and we consider them safe and effective (but in ‘animal’ lifetimes) and try them in humans.  Even though our human lifetime is only 60 to 80 years, some of the toxic effects of synthetic chemicals may only start to appear, hardly proving that they are safe and effective. 

For above reasons, I don’t consider our modern drug therapy scientific.  Nor are they based on human experience and accumulated wisdom.   Regardless, both therapies have merits despite their deficiencies.  Which is why I have been advocating the use of both but with prudence.  More on the VC  in my next post.  So, until then!

Wrong identity or impure test materials can mean unreliable or misleading results.  Remember what the basis was for the so-called ‘ginseng-abase syndrome’?  Something labeled ‘ginseng’ from a  store!?   Or the MD declaring he could do acupuncture because he was used to  sticking needles in patients.

Now closer to home (our psychedelics) – just consider 1% LSD present in a dose of psilocybin for whatever reason; that would double the psychedelic effects because LSD is up to 200X stronger than psilocybin.  So, my colleagues, be careful!   Has any of our colleagues published research that shows this purity/identity issue of any commonly used or researched synthetic psychedelic, one way or another?

In the next post, I want to continue to connect the vicious cycle (VC) of drug therapy using synthetic chemicals with the persistent poor health of Americans, exploited or caused by the drug industry.   The only way to eliminate this VC is by government-owned healthcare as most truly democratic, educated, or civilized nations like Canada and the Scandinavian countries, whose multibillionaires pay taxes unlike ours who don’t pay any.

The latter were produced mainly for our pleasure and convenience which over time in mere decades have degraded into minute entities.  These enter our body through our drinking water and adding to the damage done to our body by our ingestible drugs and additives (plus the new microplastics).  One thing most of us overlook is that these inherently toxic synthetic drugs and additives made from toxic petroleum don’t show their toxic effects in a day or two, or even a month. 

Unlike our traditional medicines that are time-tested for years, centuries, or millennia, synthetics show their ugly face in decades, shortening our lives or making us barely able to walk or think clearly even in our fifties or sixties.

Now the vicious cycle (VC) that I have been describing all these years is not just caused by ingestible synthetic drugs and additives but also by these pollutants in our environment due to degrading synthetics.  So far, except for some very minor attention starting to pay to these pollutants, the whole field of synthetics is still flourishing and unstoppable.  I have no idea whether any of our world nations are doing anything about them.  Regardless, whatever they do, in my opinion, is not enough to slow down any of these synthetics, either edible or inedible.   As world citizens, we have to do our part to make our fellow humans safer and healthier.   I have been trying to bypass at least some of the synthetics, but I haven’t found a computer/business partner.  The ones I have bumped into so far are money chasers with whom I have nothing in common.  So, I will keep on writing!   Because I am a perpetual optimist…   

I can’t imagine having to continue to take the toxic synthetic drugs for another 40 years!  I would have been long gone and no longer writing, or fast-walking 20 to 25 miles a week at my age, a young 88. 

Coming from tropical Hong Kong to Ann Arbor, Michigan, for graduate studies in 1962, I developed hay fever within 3 years.  The attending physician in the student’s health service took one look at me and extended to me his greeting, “Welcome to hay fever town!”  Since then, I had to take all kinds of drugs (antihistamines, nasal decongestants, etc.) for at least 20 years and suffered through all the side effects.  

Then, between the 1^st edition (1980) and 2^nd edition (1996) of my Encyclopedia of Common Natural Ingredients Used in Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics (Wiley), I was seriously involved in building a library of Chinese herbal medicines while growing my business to include a manufacturing facility and a lab.   By around 2000 my library had probably the best and the most extensive collection of traditional Chinese herbal books and journals in America in a single location.  That was when my company, Phyto-Technologies, won a SBIR research grant for $1.5M.  All the above information is recorded in the memoir part of my last book, My Life & Rollercoaster Career (CreateSpace/Amason, 2018).  

After over 20 years of taking synthetic drugs for months yearly, the magnolia flower buds got rid of my hay fever.   No more synthetic drugs for my hay fever or runny nose since around mid 1980s.  Now, whenever it  strikes me, maybe once to a few times yearly, xinyi always works.  So far this year, a couple of weeks ago it struck me again.  But all I  did was to take 1 dose of xinyi (2-3 tablespoons of crushed buds in a cup, filling it ¾ full with boiling water, let stand for ~10 min & screened off the fuzz).  Yesterday, it was a bad one, I sneezed not long after getting up in the morning and my nose was dripping.  As I needed to go out and I didn’t want to keep blowing and wiping my nose.  So, I took a dose 30 minutes before I went out.  The sneezing and dripping stopped in 10 to 15 minutes.  I was able to interact with others with not much inconvenience.  When I came home 4 hours later, I didn’t want to use a handkerchief anymore that day, so I took another dose.  I slept with no problems last night.  It’s now early evening; my hay fever is no longer there. 

Here, I want to make one point about natural medicines.  Unlike synthetics, we have tried unsuccessfully to make using them precisely scientific at least for a short time, like the past 8 decades.  We still have to depend on the trial-and-error experience just as our ancestors.  These synthetic drugs would have disappeared decades or a century ago if not for the vicious cycle (VC) they continue to cause.  By now, if you have not heard of the VC, you are either asleep, a synthetic drug maker and peddler, or an interdependent associate (insurance agent, advertiser, promotor, or crooked politician).  Please ponder it!  Our poor health is mostly caused by synthetic chemicals (drugs & additives).

We need both!   Synthetics have caused countless side effects and new diseases while herbal medicines need intensive efforts to preserve before they disappear in the healthcare world run by ignorant or arrogant scientists educated and trained by Big Pharma, some are greedy.

We have tried to make the former scientific, but we don’t have the means to make it so, in our complex body full of countless  entities like tissues, cells, and cell contents, especially chemicals.  We are still struggling to make them comply with some manmade rules for its cellular (in vitro & in vivo) and small -animal entities.  But after approval of our human clinical-trial step, we still must do exactly as our ancestors had done, subjecting patients to the trial-and-error process.  We have been doing this over the past 8 decades, or more.  Yet we have not learned our lessons. 

The most  obvious and notorious recent ones include Thalidomide in the 1950s/1960s when pregnant patients who consumed it later gave birth to seriously deformed babies (some without arms or legs).  The more recent example within the past decade is Ingrezza (valbenazine)  used in treating tardive dyskinesia that is caused by antipsychotic and gastrointestinal drugs.  This is a typical case that belongs to the synthetic drug-therapy’s vicious cycle (VC).  Just wait for another decade or two and see what  side effects and new diseases Ingrezza will cause.  When it was approved by the FDA in 2017, I was so naïve as to wait for the drug industry to finally recognize the VC as I had described it and start doing something to discontinue (or at least avoid) synthetic drug use.  Instead, this toxic synthetic drug became the star money maker, approved by our FDA.

The discovery of my totally natural Psilocybe baeocystis fungal mycelium for a new safer and less toxic therapy was a serendipity.  It occurred around 2020, over fifty years after my advisor/mentor and I published my graduate research detailing my isolation of the two new psilocybin analogs we named baeocystin and norbaeocystin in 1968.  From 1968 to around 2020, over half-a-century, I did not have anything to do with magic mushrooms.    Regardless, I spent two-and-a-half years doing postdoctoral work with Professor Einar Brochmann-Hanssen in the biosynthesis of opium alkaloids and was co-author in five published papers.  Then, I was employed and fired by two companies for a total of five-and-a-half years before I became an independent consultant for fifty years.

Around 2019–2020, I decided to promote my new book online, My Life & Rollercoaster Career. Published by CreateSpace/Amazon in late 2018, it combines my memoir with eight years of newsletters (1996–2004) in a single volume. The memoir covers my family, education, life in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States, and personal challenges such as inattention and possible ADHD. The newsletter reprints my career experiences, first published monthly, then bimonthly, and later quarterly. I eventually stopped because of my consulting schedule, grant work, and travel. In those newsletters, I discussed both synthetic drug therapy and traditional medicine. Although the two are very different, each has strengths as well as limitations. Used together, their strengths and weaknesses can complement one another.

After I returned from retirement to join LinkedIn to promote my book, within weeks I noticed chatters on psilocybin and magic mushrooms.   I rejoined the psychedelic movement and basically forgot about my book promotion. I have then noticed that many businessmen treat their endeavors as if they were ‘goldrush’ adventures.  They also don’t distinguish between natural therapy and synthetic therapy, claiming the former scientific but unaware of the experience and wisdom of the latter.  After working with a few such groups, I decided to form our PBN Naturals Worldwide Consortium to produce natural PBN mycelia cooperatively so as not to gouge or exploit others less fortunate.  

It was only then, when reviewing my long-neglected PBN work, that I realized one of the steps in my routine extraction of the Ps. baeocystis mycelia for isolating psilocybin and analogs involved a rinsing step with clean distilled water before drying the mycelial pellets for extraction.  I never paid attention to this step at the time.  But now, that simple step is the key to our commercial totally natural PBN mycelia with no synthetic contaminants like chemicals produced by synthetic, enzymatic, and biotech processes.  That is the principle I use for our organization – PBN Naturals Worldwide Consortium.  Together, we can produce totally natural mycelia containing pure PBN!  This technique can be applied to other natural products, especially unregulated herbal supplements where two products from two different companies, with identical herbal ingredients on their labels, can be as different as night and day!  The industry is full of products like these.  Join our Consortium if you want to help us change things. 

Over my 60-year professional career, I have written about drugs and herbs in articles, newsletters, books, and online posts. During graduate school, I worked on liquid cultures of Psilocybe mycelia and isolated two new compounds closely related to both psilocybin and serotonin, which I named baeocystin and norbaeocystin. After that, I was not involved with psychedelic mushrooms for about 53 years. In 2020, when I rejoined LinkedIn to promote my book My Life & Rollercoaster Career (2018, CreateSpace/Amazon), I noticed extensive online discussions about psilocybin and other psychedelics. Within weeks, I had reentered the psychedelic movement.  My book was promptly forgotten. 

Within months, I began to see the movement as a kind of gold rush, led in part by greedy selfish businesspeople who were second- or third-tier leaders but considered themselves technical experts. After I distanced myself from them, they either collapsed or faded from view. I had seen this pattern several times during my long consulting career.  I think my undiagnosed ADHD might have something to do with it because my inattention when dealing with their technical ignorance and arrogance might have shown myself to be dumb to them.  

The fact remains that no one has produced fungal mycelia containing PBN since I first published it in 1968, more than half a century ago. To date, PBN-related materials have been only synthesized or produced through biotechnology or enzyme conversion. All of these methods require extraction and may introduce synthetic impurities. As a result, they remain within the vicious cycle (VC) of drug therapy and do not eliminate the risk of using test materials with the wrong or uncertain identity in research problems that have generated a great deal of unreliable data. As I discussed in the five key issues in my June 9, 2026, post, which few of my scientific colleagues have addressed, more published studies based on uncertain or incorrect test materials are likely to continue. Examples include treating caffeine as coffee, curcumin as turmeric, or citing the notorious “ginseng abuse syndrome” paper as though it accurately represented ginseng, along with many other cases of misidentified herbs.

We can’t continue to let the VC and a handful of narcissistic gazillionaires holding the world’s wealth hence the power, dictate the direction of our health and fate.  With my approach, at least starting with totally naturals (fungal mycelia containing natural PBN), we can start to bypass the VC that has controlled our research focus and health for so many decades!  More on our PBN Naturals Worldwide Consortium in my next post.  So, stay tuned!