Where Drug Therapy Using Synthetic Psychedelics is Heading
By
Albert Y. Leung, PhD
PBN (Psilocybin Baeocystin Norbaeocystin)
Introduction
Let’s not be too carried away when following the ‘goldrush era’ of psychedelics, especially if you are after the synthetic versions. There are some serious hazards. They are made from inherently toxic chemicals derived from petroleum which are brand-new to our planet, with which no living organisms, especially our complex body, have any long-term experience. They enter our body with no divine guidance – only our modern ‘scientific’ misguidance. As scientists, we should be careful in making decisions, not based on for whom we work or to whom we are indebted.
Aesop’s Fable of 6 Blind Men and the Elephant
First, to show our current state of confusion and misinformation in the drug-therapy field with psychedelics (natural & synthetic), this parable illustrates my point. Through their touch, each blind man had a very different idea of what the elephant was (wall, pillar, spear, snake, tree, or brush?). This is not different from the current understanding of health science and its variations. Hence, the ramifications are far reaching.
Hole-Digging
Second, I like to describe our modern science of drug therapy with synthetic chemicals as hole-digging (more and more, deeper and deeper) into the ground, without surfacing even once aboveground to see how these holes (specializations) affect our scenery (total health). After some time, others (non-diggers) might see some of these holes collapse into sink holes (drug-caused diseases), that eventually lead to a ruined environment (death)!
The Vicious Cycle
The above 2 scenarios describe the more obvious features of our drug-therapy system with toxic synthetic chemicals and its adverse effects on our complex but well-functioning body. As this practice was based on the premise of faux science over the past many decades, it has resulted in the vicious cycle – the more toxic the drugs, the more side effects (or new diseases) are generated which require more new drugs to treat. This ONLY benefits the drug- and chemical-makers, irrespective of whether or not the drugs actually work. However, for patients and consumers, it brings mostly pain and suffering, often accompanied by financial ruin because of our national health policies favoring the few outrageously rich who control our country’s wealth, and thus also own much of Congress that makes our laws.
A Slight Oversight
There is a simple criterion among us chemists to consider 2 pure chemicals (a synthetic & a natural) with the same chemical structure to be identical. The question (how pure?), never came up, at least for me, until probably half way through my career, around 30 years ago. Not being a synthetic chemist, I never had to ask that question earlier in my natural-product career. While 5%-10% ‘impurities’ in the foods and herbs we ingest may raise no alarm because whatever chemicals therein have already been always with us since time immemorial. And most, if not all, of our foods and herbs have well-documented records. We already know what is safe and what kills. [See my article: A.Y. Leung, Traditional Toxicity Documentation of Chinese Materia Medica – An Overview, (Invited Review), Toxicologic Pathology 34: 319-326 (2006) http://tpx.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/34/4/319 ]
Not so with synthetics. Even a 1% or 2% there can spell trouble. Imagine an equivalence of a 1% of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) that is up to 200x stronger than psilocybin, present in it. It would double or triple the psilocybin’s effects. What if, instead of LSD, the chemical present is as strong as LSD but toxic, and its effects show up only decades later as one of the most dreaded new drug-caused diseases that continue to spring up decade after decade (e.g., tardive dyskinesia, Parkinson’s disease & Crohn’s disease)?
Expedient Science – Can it be real?
Yes, when taken over by greed and politics, so obvious during the Covid-19 pandemic that no one involved even bothered to hide it. So, the modern ‘scientific’ drug-therapy process, designed by our scientist forebears only decades ago and has since been followed by 3 or 4 generations of health science professionals, including mine. It seemed to be going well until the bureaucrat scientists in charge found it expedient to change some established scientific rules during the Pandemic. For example, vaccines no longer needed to be tested in humans for years, only months or weeks would suffice. It seems that human experience is deemed no longer necessary for modern vaccines by the new vaccine researchers; just computer programming with detailed information on nucleic acids (DNA & mRNA) in their nano/pico environment. This is the hole-digging science I mentioned earlier. The bright young folks who are digging these holes need to broaden their horizon, as we are far from being omniscient, if ever. Detailed information within our deep holes, for decades now, has only brought us to our current state of expedient science. We already have too many specializations that lead to nowhere, only more specialists in things that don’t matter to the health of most Americans. Thus, we still have too many toxic drugs, new diseases caused by these drugs making us a nation of drug takers or addicts (legal or illegal), not because we have weak will, but because the vicious cycle of drug therapy gives the powerful drug makers and their indebted associates the money and resources to continue to brainwash our bright young generations to ignore our deteriorating environment and health.
The way our modern health sciences now operate seems to be largely dictated by greed, not true or appropriate science. If you don’t agree, ask why so many multimillionaires were created during the Pandemic and simultaneously new vaccines were made in months, if not weeks, like video games, built on the computer? Do you really trust these specialists’ money-clouded mind and intellect? Also, ask why some vaccine makers continue to get funding from NIH (or other American agencies) to develop new drugs/vaccines and then turn around and charge us taxpayers whatever outrageous prices they want and apparently getting away with it. What bureaucrat(s) approved them?
One more thing, despite our country being the most advanced in health sciences, why did we have the highest deaths from this pandemic, and there is no easily accessible information on how many of our fellow Americans died from the new vaccines, or related drug-caused diseases. I am just puzzled. Aren’t you?
Besides the long-term uncertain effects of the fast DNA/mRNA vaccines developed for us on the computer as if they were video games, we also have to take the widely touted meticulous hand washing, sanitizing, and disinfecting with a grain of salt. Because we have no clue which microbes are good and which are bad. So, we simply kill them all. This practice will further cause major unknown problems to our general health, just as our indiscriminate use of oral antibiotics over decades has caused new diseased conditions like Crohn’s disease or irritable bowel syndrome, due to the antibiotics killing of bad bacteria along with the good. This indiscriminate killing of our microbiota (microbes on our body), if continued, will only benefit those who take the slightest evidence to invent ‘microbiome’ supplements and promote them to guileless consumers. Not to mention that this will continue to perpetually benefit drug makers.
Keep Your Natural Immunity
If you still have a healthy natural immune system, don’t lose it to junk foods, sugary colored waters (e.g., sodas), or nonessential use of synthetic drugs. If you can afford to choose your own doctor, go to an MD with knowledge of nutrition and/or alternative medicines. Don’t take drugs advertised on TV because their misinformation or disinformation are the cause of many of our health problems. Regardless, Big Pharma & Associates are the only ones benefiting from our health mess, aka the vicious cycle. Also, be sure to be active, at least take walks regularly, if you can.
I had my 85th birthday a few months ago, but I feel maybe 60 or 65. I am still very active, though I don’t run or jog. I just fast walk a mile or 2 every day and 5 to 6 miles 2 or 3 days weekly, at 15 to 18 minutes a mile. So, I keep myself in shape. And I don’t specifically try to kill all the germs around me. I don’t use disinfectants or sanitizers, only a nonfragrant liquid soap or a bar of Ivory soap. Here are my reasons. I grew up as a child during World War II. I had experienced trauma and famine. Then, we lost our family business in Cuba due to the Cuban revolution while I was in high school. I had to pawn my parents’ jewelry to buy food. The last time I had to depend on others for food a couple of times was during the first year of my independent entrepreneurial career 50 years ago. My wife had to get food from a local food bank. Hence, even as an ADHD person, I couldn’t sweep those memories under the rug. So, I am known as ‘garbage can’ at home because of those experiences; and I don’t waste or throw away food!
Anyhow, my mind is still sharp. I want to bypass the synthetic psychedelics with natural PBN products, because I don’t want to see the inherently toxic synthetics to continue to damage our environment and our health But, if it takes me more than 10 months to accomplish my Phase I goals (Education & Information Dissemination), so be it. I’ll simply continue until they are done. [See our buymeacoffee (BMC) Page for my Phase II and Phase III goals: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ayleung852
My main goal is, in 2 to 3 years, along with my likeminded fellow members in our worldwide consortium, we will start producing clean natural PBN (Psilocybin Baeocystin Norbaeocystin) mycelia, with no toxic synthetics, to test in humans. I have my personal reasons too: I was the first scientist to isolate and name baeocystin and norbaeocystin, along with psilocybin, over 55 years ago in graduate school. Since then, no one has isolated them in enough quantities to test their roles in our mental process and mental healthcare, despite some having secured funding but promptly wasted it in publicity and fantasy promotions. Since PBN are the closest sister compounds simultaneously to serotonin and psilocybin, with norbaeocystin a practical nonidentical twin to serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine) after it crosses the blood-brain barrier and gets dephosphorylated in the brain to its twin, 4-hydroxytryptamine. Serotonin is an important neurotransmitter and hormone, present throughout our body. It is toxic if too much is present. However, if it is needed in the brain for whatever functions, our brain, at its discretion (not the lung or kidney) certainly would know when, and how much N to convert to serotonin’s twin, in order to meet the best interests necessary for our survival and wellbeing.
What to do with our Drug Therapy using Synthetics
Incidentally, the drug development and practice of drug therapy with the inherently toxic synthetics are obsolete, due to their illogical premise and design right from the start. Most of our scientist colleagues are ignorant or confused on this. They have gotten things mixed up and tangled in a jumble mess, especially after generations of intensive brainwashing by Big Pharma: natural vs. synthetic, purity vs impurities, appropriate science vs misapplied science, precision vs chaos inside our complex body, modern drugs (synthetics) vs traditional herbal medicines, among others.
You should ask our more empathetic/compassionate synthetic chemist colleagues (not the sociopathic ones) some questions to which I have no answers:
- Where have all the useless and extra chemicals from the synthetic process of making a single useful chemical gone (e.g., drug, food additive or supplement), over the past, say only 40 years? Bearing in mind, for every useful chemical, there must be 5 to 10 extra chemicals (byproducts, intermediates, side products, reagents, solvents, catalysts, etc.) generated or used in the process but discarded.
- Do you test the usually 2% of a drug’s impurities to be sure they don’t have some highly active (but toxic) chemical present to come back to haunt us 30 or 40 years from now? Remember, a 20mg dose of synthetic psilocybin containing only 1% of LSD would add 200mcg of LSD to that dose of psilocybin! How are we sure the psilocybin we use in clinical trials is not just this tiny active dose of LSD? Has there been proof, or simply evidence, to show all the synthetic psilocybin used in psychiatric research over the past 30 years in all the research centers (Johns Hopkins, NYU, Harvard, Princeton, and numerous others) to contain no LSD? If out of thousands of research projects involving psilocybin, only 1 is shown to have doubtful purity of the psilocybin used, no matter how much statistics was used in trying to bring the results back to ‘norm’, it simply won’t work. I want to remind my scientist colleagues and friends who demand scientific precision in life sciences, like drug therapy with synthetics (or herbs), involving our extremely complex and well-functioning body, to ponder this. It is the most common misconception in the science we have been dealing with for 3 generations. Guess what it has brought us, after being hijacked by one of our human elements – greed! The result is the vicious cycle that I have so often written about. It is not what our drug and healthcare professional colleagues define it, blaming the victims’ weak will, repeatedly succumbing to drugs, hence addiction. Please read my posts or blogs and see if you can come up with a better version of the vicious cycle than mine.
What to do Next with our Evolution in Reverse?
So far, most of the research on drug development and drug therapy is based on synthetic chemicals, which, in turn, is based on a process counter to that of human evolution, and also to what Mother Nature has intended for us. However, it will be ideally suited for training and fixing humanoid robots in the near future when we’ll need them more and more to perform routine chores. Unlike our human body, we build them and we know everything about them, hence we can fix anything wrong with them or at least continually improve them.
For human health problems, we have already seriously tried many approaches with different processes, including drug therapy using synthetic chemicals. The last one has mostly failed after 70 to 80 years of intensive efforts, causing not only health deterioration in most humans, but also increasingly damaging our environment by more and more brand-new, intrinsically toxic but useless chemicals, generated by the synthetic process. We should wake up to these continuous and untenable processes of drug development and therapy, and start seeking better options.
After 3 generations of intensive efforts of trying with modern synthetic drug therapy, we have basically failed. The apparently ingenious process of trying to turn brand-new by-nature toxic chemicals made from petroleum into therapeutics to rid us of diseases or pain and suffering, has also not worked! Instead, we now have tens, hundreds of thousands, or countless, of these useless and unused chemicals throughout our environment and in most of our bodies, like time bombs. After all these decades of modern visible (evidence-based) research from molecules to cells, to tissues, to slightly more complex creatures, and then to us extremely well-functioning and complex humans (with countless chemicals, cells, living organisms, among others), most of us technical professionals still don’t know what to do with them, other than to concentrate on our own hole-digging (specializations), and minding our own business. This evidence-based ‘scientific’ drug-therapy with synthetics is evolution in reverse! After all these decades, we finally find out that our success (especially getting drug approval after clinical trial) is nothing but a chance to follow the nonscientific practice of trial and error our ancestors had started umpteen years ago since we became a living species on our planet. And we are still learning and documenting this trial-and-error process, after we have invented brand-new intrinsically toxic chemicals from our most polluting natural resource on earth – inedible toxic and deadly petroleum, along with its ramifications, that are damaging broadly to our environment and specifically to our health!
Isn’t it time for us to rethink and reboot the whole drug-therapy system? Instead of creating and synthesizing chemicals with the weirdest compositions and structures we find interesting and challenging, but which do nothing to help our rapidly declining environment and health, why not, for a change, think empathetically of our health and environment first? If we have to deal with chemicals, look towards those already coexisting with us since life began on earth. Better still, relook at thousands of traditional healing herbal formulas in age-old healing systems like TCM or Ayurveda. I can’t speak for the latter because I have no experience with it. But with TCM, I have grown up using it and am still using some of the well-known, tried-and-true formulas for common ailments such as colds, flus, canker sores, cough, sore throat, joint pain, and others. Or taking tonics (herbs doubling as food and medicine) like jujube, watercress, walnuts, mung beans, goji berries, turmeric, and Job’s tears (‘Chinese pearl barley’) as preventive measures before diseases show up and take over. Now that you know the modern ‘scientific’ drug-therapy process is not our answer because it is nothing but good old trial-and-error after meticulous, successful scientific testing to pass our final criterion (aka clinical trial) of a particular ‘effective’ drug. It’s time to act!!
Concluding Remarks
I have pointed out our Evolution in Reverse (aka drug therapy with synthetics) that has occupied our scientific and financial thoughts for 3 generations, in addition to wasting much of our resources, to the point of no return, unless something is done to rectify the false premise of our drug-therapy process. It is not precise or straightforward as we have described it or wanted it. Our synthetic drug era started around 150 years ago. These drugs being made from brand-new chemicals derived from toxic, inedible petroleum, have within decades proven to be all toxic, creating the vicious cycle. Despite our smart realization of their potentially toxic nature and started to test them with the best technologies we had, such as those used in vitro, in vivo, small animals, and, finally, in humans which we call clinical trials. But all these tests cannot eliminate the trial-and-error step because we are still dealing with our complex and extremely well-functioning body, now with a realistic perspective, that it contains billions and trillions of chemicals, microbes, cells, tissues, and others. The usual sciences can’t handle them, only experience over time can. Hence, no more fast ‘evidence-based’ science as we know it. Only its successful clinical trial that leads us naturally back to our age-old trial-and-error process that our ancestors had initiated eons ago in their search for cures that still exist. Yet, for decades, we have blocked them from entering our modern ‘scientific’ healthcare because of ignorance and/or arrogance along with greed!
Our body and health are not just an entity of our wishful thinking which can easily be taken care of by synthetic drugs made from toxic petroleum chemicals. Our health involves our genetics, how we keep ourselves healthy (e.g., with our natural immunity intact), and more recently learned, a balanced microbiome, among others. Since the synthetic era began, we have not been doing anything significant except making new drugs and taking them in a self-perpetuating manner to financially benefit only drug makers. Compared to drug development and drug therapy, practically no efforts and money have been spent in preventive medicine or in traditional medicines. Now, our population at large have been brain-washed to routinely take drugs without being warned of the problems of new diseases generated by its vicious cycle, which require more new drugs to treat, thus perpetually benefiting drug makers and their associates.
Even though there are many smaller practitioners of traditional medicines that understand the problems modern drugs have been causing, they are only minding their own business and, as far as I know, haven’t spoken out. A few of them had either sold out to Big Pharma or so intimidated by their ‘scientific’ technology that they follow them without understanding the implications, ending up basically betraying the profession they had started. Hence, together, they have built an herbal (supplement) industry imitating chemical drugs, making it easy for the larger leaders to sell a lot of products and make tons of money. Unfortunately, many of these products called ‘herbal supplements’ have practically nothing herbal in them. These have happened within the past 25-30 years and I have recently posted some examples of such products on my LinkedIn profile, maybe also on my blog: www.ayslcorp.com/blog
Although I have not abandoned my herbal profession, I can only take one important issue at a time. The current one for me is natural psychedelics, specifically natural PBN mycelial and mushroom products to bypass the synthetics. I don’t want it to go the way of herbal supplements, where synthetic chemicals are slowly but surely taking over. [See Some basic requirements for the identity and quality of three types of psilocybin products in my blog.]