Month: July 2026

In contrast, natural medicines (e.g., herbs) with chemicals therein, have been with us since we appeared on this planet eons ago.  Hence, we are no strangers to one another.  When we compare our experience with modern synthetic drugs (a measly 2 centuries) versus that of traditional medicines (millennia or countless years), it is like a grain of sand on a sandy beach. 

Being unaware of this difference when dealing with synthetic drugs based on our drug principle, ‘synthetic and natural chemicals are the same if they have the same chemical structure and both are pure’.  But how pure?  Nobody seems to  raise this question for 200 years since the synthetic era began. 

World pharmacopoeias (like our USP/NF), the ‘bibles’ of identity and quality of drugs and additives, only give a range of their impurities up to around 3%.  Which is for manufacturers of herbal or chemical supplements and drugs to follow.  However, once these products are on the market, there are no rules from USP/NF or government agencies like the FDA to test for them in the finished commercial products on the market.  With drugs, you can still analyze the drug chemicals in them, but not those in herbal supplements or traditional medicines because there are still no meaningful rules for guaranteeing the ID and quality of herbs based on any assumed active chemical.  Which is why our herbal supplement industry is such a mess.  The way it is now, 2 herbal supplements made by 2 different companies with labels containing the same herbal ingredients can be different as night and day.

Modern drugs (or drug therapy using synthetics) are very different from herbs or traditional herbal medicines.  The former is based on faux science unless its advocates (most of my colleagues) include the trial-and-error step after our modern drugs have been approved via the clinical-trial process.  Otherwise, we would forever be scratching our heads wondering why its VC continues to produce endless side effects, enriching the drug makers & associates, while continuing to exploit most Americans’ health and finances. 

In short, the two types of therapeutics, synthetics and traditional medicines or herbs, both have merits and faults. The former is based on science without the experience and wisdom of the trial-and-error process which require time to acquire, without which many more generations of Americans and fellow humans will continue to suffer more from its VC – being sick more often and croak earlier.   The latter, herbs and traditional medicines, are experience and wisdom already accumulated over millennia or countless years.  We just need to take the better features of each and combine the two to work in a complementary manner to benefit every fellow human who needs such therapeutics at affordable cost.

Can you imagine if I were born in a country like ours now with all these synthetic drugs but clueless and incompetent yes-men in charge?   They would drug me to try to make me do better in school; but the final aim would be to please and enrich their boss by selling more drugs?

Regardless, when I got older, my older sister protected me from school bullies; and later my younger sister helped me in other ways.  Then in college in Taiwan, because of my slowness in transferring what I hear onto paper, I could not take notes.   A couple of women classmates noticed my struggle. They lent me their notes to copy, otherwise I wouldn’t be here today, because I would flunk too many subjects I didn’t like.

So, I always have a lot of respect for women.   Without them, I would not have done what needed to be done to get my BS, MS, and PhD degrees and later build a reputation in my diversified fields.  When I was building my career and companies, I hired competent female  assistants as well.   Realizing my handicaps, they took over the tedious menial work, at their insistence, so that I could concentrate on writing, planning, and traveling. 

I believe women are the ones who will eventually resolve our country’s poor health.  We have arrived at this condition because of two things:

1. We have ignored the inherently toxic nature of synthetic drugs, hence their toxic impurities as well.  This property creates side effects and new diseases that require more new drugs to treat, leading to the perpetual vicious cycle (VC).  
2. This VC is used by greedy businessmen who (unlike women with mother instinct) have no compassion for others and turn this VC into a perpetuating high-income business. 

This VC does not benefit anyone else other than the makers of toxic drugs and their interdependent associates (insurance agents, investors, pushers, crooked politicians, etc.).  Most people, including those involved in the money-raking aspect of the VC don’t realize its ugly side.  If they do, I still think many of the greedy men will continue to get involved in it. 

In my next post, I’ll repeat how the VC was created decades ago which has caused fellow Americans such poor health.  Yet most of my technical (scientific) colleagues seem to ignore it or are unaware of it.  By now, this vicious cycle as I have described should be searchable online, or in my last book published in 2018, My Life & Rollercoaster Career (CreateSpace/Amazon, 548 pages).

Regardless, after I was forced to retire in 2010 because I lost a client that was responsible for 75% of our business,  I started to write my memoir around 2017.   Then I was obligated to reveal things about myself, otherwise I would feel insincere.  Since I had already written my Newsletter, Leung’s (Chinese) Herb News from 1996 to 2004, I included all 42 issues of it with my Memoir and published all in a combined volume, My Life & Rollercoaster Career (CreateSpace/Amazon, 2018).   Together, they cover my personal and professional life and work over nearly nine decades. But I am not done yet. I believe we are about to enter another industry built on faux science.   Which is driven by greedy, clueless gazillionaires and their followers towards new specialties based on vague healthcare ideas and confused products shaped by AI and other questionable sciences that even most leading scientists in the fields don’t understand.   And we just plunge blindly in, propelled by greed, because everyone is doing it?

Most of my colleagues and friends (except a few who were close to me) did not know my problems.  And I had/have quite a few.   I have inattention (part of ADHD?), and get easily bored when in group conversations, especially in business and money matters that don’t concern or interest me.  I often tune out and have no idea what others are saying.  

I am very slow in reading, especially numbers.  It takes me 3 or 4 times longer than most people to get a number with 5 or 6 digits right.  Also, I’m very slow in going from my thinking to writing/speaking.  Hence, I can never dictate to anyone (e.g., my assistants).   And it takes me literally hours to write a couple of pages that would  only take 20 or 30 minutes for others.  That handicap prevents me from casually answering any texts. Which is why I don’t do social media other than LinkedIn.  I might read ones that are forced on me because I don’t know how to block them from entering my phone.  Now, I can’t even get back to LinkedIn on my laptop to post things, I have to post my documents on my blog from my phone access. Another consequence of my problem of being forgetful is that I can selectively/subconsciously blog certain things less important to me than others at a particular moment.  For example, I was interviewed by Dan Van Atta which was published on September 30, 2004 in New York Academy of Sciences blog.  That was when I was in the middle of my grant research, among other important activities worldwide, I only discovered my interview a few weeks earlier when I searched for something online.  This article popped up, and I had totally no recollection of having given that interview.  But it was all true, except no pharmacologist automatically specializes in pharmacognosy.  On the other hand, a pharmacognosist can also be a pharmacologist if he/she wants to see how a particular natural medicine works.                                   

I mean a system different from the one I have been describing for decades: one based on toxic synthetic chemicals that cause side effects and new diseases, trapping patients in a vicious cycle (VC) that only enriches the drug makers and their interdependent associates (insurance agents, promotors/pushers & crooked politicians).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

This is the issue I have been addressing, not addiction, which other health professionals describe as a problem of our weak willpower, applying  only to mostly synthetic narcotics.   Our VC is for all drugs that are now countless in number.  But we don’t seem to even realize this.  Maybe we ignore it, because we are hoping someday, we may have our chance to drink from that fountain of gold. 

For some reason, men seem to be more narcissistic and less compassionate for others than women – I guess men have no innate mothering instinct/nature?  I have now lived to at least 10 years beyond the male life expectancy in the USA.  I am still physically fit and mentally lucid.  Though I am tired of not finding support in my final endeavor to move our physical and mental health towards a better, normal path.   During my long independent career, I have  had no problem working with technical colleagues, founders, and CEOs of the companies I was advising.  My problem was with businessmen of second, third, or lower levels in the big companies.  Invariably, they  were all men and seemed to consider themselves more knowledgeable than I in the subject their top bosses hired me for.  This fouled up their products that are now typical of those on the herbal supplements market.   In one or two cases they were startups that happened in recent years, I simply resigned and have had nothing more to deal with them since.  They  have then gone under or disappeared.    In other instances, happened a decade or two earlier, their products linked to my name are no longer genuine and the two are  different as night and day on TLC/HPTLC analysis.

I believe this unfortunate situation happened because of my unique personality combined with the  greedy and heartless nature of many businessmen.  In the next post, I’ll describe how my born nature (undiagnosed ADHD?) can be misunderstood by some businessmen and why I think the future of Americans’ poor health and deficient healthcare can only be resolved by women executives, not by greedy and selfish men, the likes of Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, Gates, and others.

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.