Who is hamilton morris

That — the season finale of this episode is a bit about LSD synthesis, but we never really showed its synthesis. That story seems so bizarre and how did you find out about — I mean, I wonder can I share that with the audience, because it —.

HM: Yeah, are you all familiar with the Pickard Lab and that whole tale? Again, this is something that felt very obscure to me, when I was first — it was almost like an inside joke with me and my roommate. This former stripper, Krystle Cole, wrote this book Lysergic , self-published book.

You know, it looked as — full of typos, whatever. And this is really, like, obscure, psychedelic drug scene stuff that no one knew about. And I — she had a early YouTube channel and I went and interviewed her. I think it has about 10 million views. But she was — her and her boyfriend, she had two boyfriends and they were in Doubletree in Houston and there was all sorts of weird mayhem that took place involving injecting his penis with Salvinorin A, and weird stuff.

HM: Okay, so well, that was the thing. So I was like, this is a pretty good — this is like, how naive I was at that time, I was like, this is a pretty damn good story; I should make a movie about this.

It ended up going for a large amount of money and I really hated myself for a while afterwards, for not having bought the rights to it. And it still may be adapted into some kind of a feature film. At some point you have to admit guilt so that you can tell the story that people want to hear. That if you really look at the studies, the association with violence and PCP use is not firmly established.

And this is sort of just a weird stereotype that keeps getting repeated. Of course there have been violent episodes involving people on PCP in the same way that there have been with people who are drunk or on cocaine or crack or nicotine or whatever. I mean, it happens that people are intoxicated and behave violently.

And they become closer and they talk about life and relationships and future goals. This — I love this book, read it. Chasing the Scream , by Johann Hari. BW: So, he eventually had to completely change that and decide that marijuana would drive you insane. And he found this case where some Mexican immigrant had killed his family with an axe and this became this kind of reefer madness story that they used to make — you know, to —.

And it — there was no evidence that he — this person — you know, he had mental illness, probably never even smoked marijuana. There were — it was just like, they grafted it on to this story to give his excuse for making something more illegal and getting public outrage about it. I watched so many, and so many so quickly. Can we allow that to happen again? HM: Yeah, this girl, high school student Gaelle Caroff in the Netherlands, jumps off a bridge, may or may not have been on psilocybin-containing mushrooms, all the mushrooms are banned.

I think the meaningless of life is sort of an uplifting idea, but he writes this, and then several months later kills himself and the mother, in her grief, is going through his journal, trying to figure out what happened. Points her finger at the salvia, it was the salvia. Dedicates the rest of her life to this crusade to make salvia illegal in the United States. It — pretty much the same thing happened with 2CT7, which was — became illegal immediately after the same guy that wrote The Hurt Locker , wrote this awful Rolling Stone article about how dangerous it was.

You know, really if you go through — you could go through the DEA list of controlled substances and find one person behind almost every single one of them. And if no one dies, then the opposite is true. That Vice purchased and is now filling with all original content. BW: Okay. I mean, it was a big — had a lab in the center of a volcano that was never discovered.

Even you know, the technical details of how people were doing some of these syntheses. Audience Member 1: I was just curious what you think with the progression towards legalizing things like marijuana and the research on psilocybin the more traditional drugs, there will be less of a drive to continue to create sort of these off the wall drugs like spice or kratom or krocodil or things like that?

Will there be less of a drive, or are we just hedonistic by nature and always going to look for that next high? If someone creates a derivative of the THC molecule that lasts twice as long or has some other kind of qualitative difference.

Audience Member 2: You fixed it, great. Great, well thank you very much. I was just wondering from your perspective, looking at drugs in a much more objective and your curiosity about them, what your reaction to this is and what you think.

Which is why I feel comfortable not demonizing it, because I have no reason to. My personal experience has been nothing but positive. Obviously people die; obviously people have tremendous difficulties with dependence and addiction. And the flip side is that I have friends that, you know, use buprenorphine and other maintenance therapies and lead very happy, productive lives and think that it benefits them in some way.

Audience Member 3: I saw that you recently published a paper regarding the recreational use of dissociatives. I was wondering if you could discuss the other side, regarding like, methoxetamine? And he is someone that had really crippling phantom limb pain. He had to use cannabinoids or opiates or something to allow him to function because he had this clenching pain in his missing hand.

And he was also very knowledgeable about the structure activity relationship of these arylcyclohexylamine dissociatives and went about designing what he thought would be the perfect dissociative that combined all these structural motifs that he thought would optimize the therapeutic properties of the drug.

And that drug was methoxetamine. And, it became pretty popular. Or, you think some types of drugs should be prohibited or not, or short situations that all drugs should be prohibited because unknown consequences basically for people who doing them?

HM: I certainly believe in, at the very least, decriminalization. The drugs that are on the list of controlled substances are drugs that people enjoy using. So, a lot of it has to do with this sort of puritanical mindset where we think being high is bad. A lot of it has to do with, you know, developing a sense of personal responsibility with that freedom, because I think another problem is that a lot of people think of using drugs as a naughty thing.

I certainly, in general, am in favor of experimentation. So, having the freedom to try that out and see if it helps you is a wonderful thing. And I did a shoot at one of these ketamine clinics and interviewed quite a few of the patients, and they said it saved their lives. Audience Member 6: Hi, good evening. You briefly mentioned at the beginning the role of accident in drug discovery. You spoke to Shulgin before his passing about his method of discovery and documentation.

So, given that a large amount of our human relationship to drugs have been predicated on accident and that knowledge structure has been sort of embedded in ethno-pharmacological wisdom, different tribes, different cultural attitudes to taking drugs, if now at our sort of main Western civilization, with the end of the drug war perhaps in sight, is there a way of preserving that chance attitude of discovery in the long history of drugs within societies, like in the Amazon for example, with an eye to more mindful use of these drugs by Western society as a whole?

HM: Probably, yeah. I think so. Not really, no. But also that drug education would then need to change. In what way would that need to change? I mean, in terms of what sort of risks are involved in experimentation? Things like bad trips and stuff like — what do you think someone should know ahead of time? And, there are quite a few things that people need to know. You need to know what a milligram is, you need to have a sensitive digital scale, you need to keep track of your own body in some way.

You know, you have to start thinking about drugs in a context outside of the way most people conceive of them as something you use at a party with friends. Figure out that tricky math problem of these two 10 milligram tablets being the same as a single 20 milligram tablet. Hide Show Writer 1 credit. Hide Show Thanks 1 credit. Hide Show Self 8 credits. Self - Psychedelic Chemist. Self - Guest. Self - Correspondent. Self - Host. Show all 17 episodes.

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Thank you! Profiles Clandestine chemistry and psychoactive drugs in film: Hamilton Morris talks about his career The journalist and scientist discusses his work documenting clandestine chemistry and the societal impact of psychoactive drugs by Bethany Halford December 31, Subscribe ». You might also like Biological Chemistry.

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Clear synthesis instruction may very well be a good thing. I recall at one point in my career, responding to a suspected meth clan lab. I suspect that if the subject had known the folly of his actions and that it does not work , he would not have electrocuted himself, allegedly attempting to electrochemically synthesize meth from a salt lick. Join the conversation.