Fungi: habitat, medicinal use, and production

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foreign [Music] folks I'm honored to be here so I'll be talking about psilocybin but just to get this out front I just received my DEA license for Seoul Simon I passed my background checks who knew but seriously I long ago I adopted the The Motto nature provides I don't I consider these to be very potent in serious medicines and they're critically important for our our time my disclosures here I own a company I founded it I'm the sole owner 145 employees and I just recently co-founded micro medical Life Sciences in fact my

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co-founder Dr Pam Crisco and Dr ashanja Sanjay Dubai our chief medical officer will you please stand up so people can see you thank you so much I have numerous patents actually have two more patents that just issued in the past week I've written numerous books on Soul side mushrooms I cannot separate my avocation and my vocation there this is my life's work so it's important to look at the historical record with Echoes from archeology going over back thousands of years and you know this is difficult to document but it's the artists that carried these messages for that putatively are signals of psilocybin mushroom use it really came to the Forefront when our Gordon Wasson and the Valentino Wasson discovered Maria Sabina the mazatek Simon in Oaxaca Mexico and Maria Sabino was not only the shaman she was a Mycologist and so is Valentino Wasson these two great women sort of you know led the charge and The Reawakening of

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the use of psilocybin mushrooms so there are a lot of psilocybin mushrooms over 140 known species you know since 1800s over 5682 collections they're circumpolar they're all over the world existing literally in every landscape except for Antarctica not yet I want to give tribute to my older brother John who went through Yale and he inspired me after stories in Mexico and Colombia eating magic mushrooms and he brought back this book alter state subconsciousness which was amazing to me and my mother and I point this out because 45 years ago I published my first book on psilocybin and I had a DEA license in 1978 under Dr Michael View at The Evergreen State College I want to give tribute also to my father my brother John who mentioned and my mother my father talked to me about

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science my brother John was my inspiration my mother taught me about kindness and courage my mentors Dr Daniel stunts kids skates Dr Michael bug and Dr Alexander Smith all of whom have passed away except for Michael but these people were instrumental in adopting me at a very young age about 19 or 20 years of age I went on to publish numerous new species of solocybin mushrooms and just this past week I was honored with a new species named salasubi stemetsiai that was named after me it's a great honor in the field of mycology to have a species named after yourself so the mushroom life cycle is very not complicated spores germinating the mycelium mycelium grows and is triggered in in the mushroom formation so the mycelium has nuclei that that conducts through the the networks and through the end tips of the mycelium that could be more than eight miles of cells in a single cubic inch and this

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causes epigenesis that then codes for new Solutions uh to environmental problems there are philosophy scientists a very common wavy caps psilocybin mushroom which typically the solicit mushrooms bruise bluish we started in a series of conferences this is in a sense a continuation of these in the 1970s because I had a DEA license I had the cover to be able to accept specimens and so Under the Umbrella of legal protection we had confidence that we could then sponsor these events then um a great voice in this all time moves was the late Terence McKenna his book The Soul side of magic mushroom glorious guy was really the book that set this interest on fire so to speak conference has continued all the way into Amsterdam and in the center as Albert Hofmann Sasha and Shogun as myself there but there's a continuity of knowledge here that's passed over the

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generations now Muslims are having their moments so to speaks has become the Zeitgeist of our time but I also know some of the cultural Heroes Ken keesy the Mary pranksters they were good friends of mine I'm officially a Merry Prankster but he was had many people coming up to him trying to identify asking him to identify solicited mushrooms so he gravitated to me because I'm an expert in that field and in taxonomy so the most commonly used philosophy Mushroom in the world is philosophy cubensis Maria Sabino uses use philosophy zavatakorum so but slocity cubensis is the mushroom that is being used widely um in throughout the world and is the most commonly consumed mushroom so I want to point out a few meta surveys because the meta surveys can inform clinicians about the possibility of doing clinical trials here's 485 000 inmates that were surveyed a one-time use of psilocybin statistically significant decreased odds and and crime larceny property crime and violent crime

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well that was interesting another study came out 1266 community members a one-time use of souls I've been the only psychedelic in the survey specifically a significant reduction of partner to partner violence make note of this please and then association between classic psychedelics and opioid use only one psychedelic was associated with a statistically significant reduction in opioid use disorder and that was psilocybin and a more recent study and this is something that all of us Psychonauts as we're known as know very very well under the influence of psilocybin you relate to Nature much like the astronauts going to the moon or in the space shuttle you look back on the earth and you realize how precious this ecosystem is how important it is to protect so it's called nature relatedness there have been numerous clinical trials especially in using psilocybin for treatment resistant

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depression and a more recent one for the reduce of alcohol binging alcohol use disorder these are double blind placebo-controlled studies so the fact that now we have a lot of clinical studies happening look at this Physicians and other medical experts here 120 universities have registered at clinicaltrials.gov on using psilocybin think about going through the IRB boards think about how many Physicians and Consultants these have been approved because there's a high probability of success low risk and there's not current medicines that can adequately treat the targeted diseases that they are using psilocybin for but there's a problem with these high-dose Soul side of the studies I could not say better than this cartoon how do you the placebo is unblinded within about 20

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minutes so what's the use of a placebo and a double-blind placebo-controlled study if the people who are tripping know it and the people who aren't tripping also know it right so so Dr Roland Griffiths who is a Pioneer and he led the charge at Johns Hopkins still does he published an article that then really opened up the floodgates of other researchers to follow and in this article he is advocating with his co-authors the rescheduling of psilocybin from schedule one which has no medical use and a high potential for addiction to a schedule four now I would wager I normally ask when I can ask this really quickly how many people in this audience have not done psilocybin this is the greatest number of people who have Ever Raised their hands right then ask this question those of us who done high doses of psilocybin to let you know the next day you look at the mushrooms and you say no way I'm not touching those for months

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they are anti-addictive by their very nature these are not substances of abuse now there's over 23 States Delaware has a new bill now they have bills uh or that have or bills or ballots and in Colorado uh in Oregon now has become law the therapeutic use of psilocybin has been allowed in Canada there's a major movement as well so there are multiple active tryptamines and psilocybin is the pro drug for silicon psilocybin DeForest forolates upon ingestion do the enzymes in your stomach silosin docs with the neuroceptors Silicon is a serotonin Agonist so it substitutes temporarily for serotonin your major neurotransmitter we were involved Dr Pam and I in helping construct an app at microdose.me to be able to do a survey of micro dosers now a definition of microdosing is substanceorium you don't feel an effect

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so in this case a placebo double blind control study would be valid in my opinion because the participants cannot tell whether they took the placebo or the microdose of psilocybin so at this app for the apple and the Droid there's a number of challenge tests all of these are validated tests that psychiatrists use currently today and they've survey what are you taking how much are you taking and what are you combining it with are you combining it with lion's mane niacin chocolate niacin is used as also one of the the active placebos in many of these studies but it too in 20 minutes you hot flush you get red so many of these patients also can detect the placebo being being niacin but I have a different view towards niacin so we surveyed we had over now 20 000 people that have responded and in my discussions with Dr Pam because some of these tests of depression and anxiety are subjective I ask her well isn't

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there a psychomotor test that would be independent of expectancy and yes yes there's a finger tapping test many of you Physicians know about this for a traumatic brain injury TBI for Alzheimer's Parkinson's how rapidly can you tap your first your your two fingers in Rapid succession or one finger in 10 seconds so numerous clinical studies use this to measure progression Dementia or neurodegeneration so we put this finger tapping test into our app so micro dosing in our survey we found about 80 uh eight percent of them use what the equivalency of one to three milligrams of psilocybin or one uh one third to one tenth of a gram of psalocybin mushrooms the salt mushrooms have about one percent so a large cohort of these people were using truly a micro dose another mushroom that's commonly used is also philosophy Mexicana this is known

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as truffles uh in in the Netherlands is sort of misnamed but that makes up for the other 10 or so or five percent of the users of magic mushrooms there are two protocols that are very popular James Fatima and our best friends he has a fatiman pro goal you use microdosing one day two days off and the next day you dose the dozing regimen I came up with is four days continuous and then three days as a break we don't know James and I talked we just made these up but we both believe that we need to watch The receptors in order to reset so the the neuroreceptors don't normalize to the stimulus we want the endogenous system to work so I came up with a stem at stock around 2015 and I thought well interesting because psilocybin and silicon is a vasoconstrictor niacinth advaso dilator neuropathies oftentimes present themselves at a deadening of the fingertips and the toes you know and the endpoints of the peripheral nervous

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system and so if we have better vascular delivery of psilocybin then that would help I would believe neurogenesis and then also combine it with lion's mane which is a very very popular nutraceutical mushroom there are four clinical trials that use lion's mane which have very strong evidence in helping patients fight Dementia or slow dementia as well as some in early indications in helping Alzheimer's patients Lion's man contains a compound the mycelium does aeronaccine is that it causes remyelation on the axons of the nerves my hypothesis with psilocybin causes neurogenesis and new tips to grow and neuroplasticity with cross hatching and the remyelination of course is a problem with Alzheimer's and many other types of degenerative neuropathies we went ahead and we published in a nature scientific reports and this was a survey 3486 patients this was more of a qualitative survey but we

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also with people's motivations for why there are micro dosing but we started getting some signal and the signal that we got for using the stock with more than 8 000 participants in in this part of the survey was dramatically Improvement of mood and reduction of the of depression so we went on to publish another paper in nature scientific reports and then we started to disambiguate the data sets and we wanted to look at specifically things that were not subjective that could demonstrate a psychomotor benefit that would be outside of expectancy with a so-called quote-unquote placebo and we found something truly extraordinary this is the top test that I referred to and this is in 55 plus year olds we saw no signal below the age of 55. we all suffer from neuro generation neuropathy as we age and with the 55 plus year olds using the stock compared to psilocybin and any other form but the stock of niacin lion's mane and

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psilocybin are the micro dosing ranges that I describe a significant increase of 48 to 68 tops in 10 seconds in 30 days with a p-value of .005 there's one chance in 250 that this is random wow when I saw this I go okay what's the mechanisms of action so I've started delving into it I attached my scientists surveyed in literature on on pre-clinical drugs that lead to neurogenesis and let's see what the best tests are that are out there we focused it on track a receptors these are map Kinesis track a b and c and they code for enhancing and facilitating um bdnf and nerve growth factors that then stimulate newborn neurons or existing neurons to regenerate track B in particular is the most exciting to us so we started looking at the Synergy and the individual silicon by itself niacin by itself and the particular additive sum that you see in the the third bar

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red and blue when we combine these Beyond expectancy of the added sum we had Synergy we had a massive increase in the facilitation of The Binding of bdnf and nerve glow factors to to to causing nerves to be stimulated into growth so then we then looked at okay we'll combine all three of them and then we came to a new term of art that I did not known science called the maximum calculated value this is where the erudacin from the lion's mane mushrooms the silicon and the niacin had no activity and increasing binding with track A's but together they had Synergy this technology of gunpowder charcoal sulfur potassium nitrate it's a gating item for not for composition patents with a patent office for natural products unexpected increase most scientists they would see one of these things have no activity they would move on saying okay no activity there we were able to show

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synergy and then we're able to also sow Synergy with track B's again maximum calculable value an article just recently published in cell uh 21 co-authors found a massive increase in track B um you know looking at anti uh depressive drugs minor and anti-major antidepressive drugs the mode of action for most of these depressants that have been already on the market is activating the track B site we think we have found something here truly significant when we looked at then some of the analogs the other compounds North eileenson we're looking at Jack a these also codes for antiviral proteins and the endogenous antiviral system that we have for fighting viruses and it stimulates also interleukin tens which are neuro anti-inflammatories so we

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combine neurogenesis with a neuro anti-inflammatory is truly unique in medicine from what I what I understand so the bottom line hypothesis is that niacin um I'm sorry this light got duplicated here uh niacin is a catalyst for neurogenesis it has vasodilation and lower Doses and society and related tryptamines it could be beneficial this Entourage Synergy I believe niacin is a catalyst not to be used opposite psilocybin in clinical studies but to use in combination for those of you who have patents when you have experts teaching away from your invention it increases patentability so it's wonderful 11 clinical studies are using niacin opposite psilocybin as an active placebo so how are these commonly used well the most popular method is to make chocolates so you make the stamant stock for instance into a chocolate and then you you put your chocolates in the refrigerator

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by the way you want to label them [Laughter] if you put the word laxative on them it's usually a pretty good thing so uh as an adversant for your children I mean no children want to take a laxative so but please seriously you should be be very very careful with how these are kept and restored so I believe that this is a potential breakthrough in medicine for neurogenesis neurodegeneration neuroplasticity we all suffer from neuropathies we all suffer from neurodegeneration we have come to a Nexus point in time where our descendants in the future are calling back to us looking at what we are doing today because the ramifications of our activity will Echo throughout time and moreover because there's such a strong Association and one clinical study after another after another are proving that

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these medicines are game changers we're treating a wide array of mental health issues we are losing the body intellect of our society as we age we are losing Einsteins every day because of Dimension Alzheimer's Parkinson and other other diseases we need to preserve the neurological health of our elders so they can pass this down to the Next Generation I believe psilocybin reduces crime I believe psilocybin reduces violence I believe psilocybin makes nicer people I believe that psilocybin increases intelligence I want to thank my co-researchers at my company this is a concerted effort I come up with these ideas and I give them their marching orders and they are incredibly inspired Beyond The Cutting Edge of research

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and so I'm glad we're showing Einstein how many Einsteins are we losing how many young Einsteins that we need to preserve their intellect how many people can become Einsteins if they have good neurological health Einstein said it well is a leap in consciousness and you must be aligned with your spiritual nature this is a potential game changer psilocybin could become a neurotropic vitamin that could be used across the population it could literally change the course of human history these are medicines anciently discovered revered and protected by indigenous peoples we have their wisdom and modern science today to be able to take these medicines for maximum public benefit I believe psilocybin is a scientific breakthrough

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thank you very much thank you Randy thank you Ronnie [Music]