Quality sleep is essential, and that's why the Sleep Number Smart Bed is designed for your ever-evolving sleep needs. So you can choose what's right for you whenever you like. Need a bed that's firmer or softer on either side? Helps you sleep at a comfortable temperature. Quiets their snores. Sleep Number does that. Sleep better together. Jd Power ranks Sleep Number number one in customer satisfaction with mattresses purchased in store. And now, save 50% on Sleep Number limited edition smart beds for a limited time. For JD Power 2023 award information, visit JDPower. Com/awards. Only at sleepnumberstores or sleepnumber. Com.

Bad trips, anti-drug PSAs, and the crackdown under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 helped stigmatize psychedelics in the US. Seriously, those PSAs were a lot. Do you know what you're doing?

What are we doing? What time is it?

It's 6:00. Tea time. Time to take a pill. No. This one was made by a US Government Health Department, and it's a rift on Alice in Wonderland, with the white rabbit on uppers and the Mad Hatter on LSD. Taking LSD. Sleeping pills are beautiful.

Heroine is king.

Now, since that time, hallucinogens have been locked in a category of drugs for high potential for abuse with no medical value. But three trends have converged in recent years to change that. First, the return of clinical inquiry. Globally, more researchers are looking into whether hallucinogens, which people enjoy illicitly for their mind-altering effects, can also help ease emotional trauma. Lsd, psilocybin, AKA magic mushrooms, and MDMA, are being studied for people struggling with addiction and PTSD. Dimethyltryptamine, also known as DMT, is part of ayahuasca and is being studied in the context of anxiety and depression. Second, decriminalization in more than a dozen countries. And in the last four years, Colorado and Oregon voters allowed some uses of substances like shrooms by ballot. And cities in Massachusetts, Michigan, Washington State have followed. So lastly, there's the destigmatization. Celebrities of all kinds are speaking publicly about their therapeutic trips, so to speak. I mean, here was actor Jada Pinkett-Smith during a book tour last year on The Today Show. Ayahuasca really was... That was the turning point. So that in and of itself turned you from on the brink of Suicide. And I never had a suicidal thought again.

Now, in saying that, ayahuasca is not for everybody. It turns out there is a burgeoning industry ready to serve the new influx of people who find themselves turning away from traditional mental health therapy, and a growing branch of churches and spiritual retreats for whom certain legal loopholes have allowed them to meet that demand.

That made this whole ecosystem of retreats and practitioners who were starting to operate ever more openly. Really fascinating because on the one hand, I think it signaled that the mainstream mental health care system was failing many, many people, but also that many of the most vulnerable people struggling with very serious conditions were gravitating toward practitioners who had the least experience and the fewest safeguards in place.

Today, the gap between what we know and what we don't about psychedelic therapy. I'm Adi Cornish, and this is the assignment.

My name is Ernesto Landoño. I'm a national correspondent at the New York Times, and I recently wrote a book titled Trippy: The Peril and Promise of Medicinal Psychedelics.

I notice you do not introduce yourself as a psychedelics user.

That's true. That's probably not going to be the first line of any bio that I post.

Even for a book called Trippy? It feels relevant.

I am somebody who stumbled into the psychedelic's rabbit hole and walked away with a ton of questions.

Which he explores in his new book. He comes to the subject with a healthy dose of skepticism.

If I think of my own I was born and raised in Colombia, very much under the shadow of the war on drugs, which played out very violently. I was conditioned to think that all drug use was problematic and bad, and you know, morally wrong. One thing that was really missing from my understanding of the vast spectrum of mind-altering substances is that some actually are therapeutic and have therapeutic applications that that got washed out during the Prohibition era, starting in '70s.

I wanted to better understand how he went from skeptic to participant. He told me that journey began a few years ago, when, after years of covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he got a new job. Brazil correspondent for the New York Times.

This was a dream come true. It was an incredible assignment. I got to cover five countries. I had editors who were very invested in my success, and it seemed like I had all the runway in the world. But just days into getting settled in this new life and my new apartment, which had a majestic view of the ocean, I became really depressed. I think as I look back on my life, I think I've lived with depression since childhood, but I've always been able to white-knuckle through, and I developed pretty coping mechanisms, including really pouring myself into work. What I knew was that I was feeling so depressed and had reached a point where things felt so out of control that I was starting to think about self-harm. And I was starting to think thoughts that took on a really ominous nature. Interestingly, one of the story ideas I had when I first arrived in Brazil was exploring these psychedelic retreats that were drawing more more and more people into the jungle, including veterans. Somebody had planted the seeds, and I had identified that as something that might be journalistically really interesting.

Yeah, that's a very cool story to pitch to editors, right? Like, Hey, I'm in Brazil, and did you know People are coming here, international visitors, to do some Amazon retreat where they come out saying their whole life has changed.

Correct.

And in fact, it's tabloidy sounding, right? Like, very clickable. Absolutely. So you're walking in this thinking like this is going to be a pretty, I don't know, maybe straightforward story?

Yeah. The original idea was, I'm going to go and find a good place where I can shadow, retreat participants, and this will be a neat story. But then I think there was one night in particular where I was really having trouble falling asleep. I was feeling really low. I probably had had three or four glasses of whiskey. And about So 3:00 or 4:00 AM, having been unable to get any rest, I opened my computer and I googled, Ayahuasca Retreats, Brazil, and I stumbled into this YouTube video recorded by a woman who's been one of the pioneers of this nascent retreat industry in South America.

That's a real AM Google. That's like, I cannot sleep. The vibe is desperation.

Yes. And something clicked for me in that moment. And when you go back and look at that video, much of it sounds bonkers.

When you drink the tea, ayahuasca as an amplifier, we will show you your fears, and then you will get rid of that, and you will move to another realm.

But there was something really calming about the woman's voice, her name is Sylvia, and And the notion that maybe this was an off-ramp, that maybe I hadn't clicked on this link by a mistake. And the next morning, I wake up, I fill out an application form for the retreat. And it's hard to explain why this felt like a sensible idea and why I didn't have more due diligence questions to ask myself and others. But I felt like I was on a path of no return, and I felt this was something I needed to explore.

You write in the that there are a number of people who end up in this place, we'll call it your 4:00 AM place, where in one way or another, they haven't been able to access or haven't availed themselves of whatever mental health support they can find, if they can find it. This world of retreats and this world that is steadily becoming more clinical is their waiting. It's filling a vacuum of a kind.

Definitely. One thing I experience consistently is that a lot of people who sign up for these retreats do so as a hill Mary of sorts. I can't tell you how many times I interviewed people who told me I was so suicidal and I had lost hope in everything else I had tried that I said, If this thing kills me, at least I will have tried the last thing on my list. So That made this whole ecosystem of retreats and practitioners who were starting to operate ever more openly. Really fascinating because on the one hand, I think it signaled that the mainstream that the extreme mental health care system was failing many, many people, but also that many of the most vulnerable people struggling with very serious conditions were gravitating toward practitioners who had the least experience and the fewest safeguards in place. That makes it really interesting, but also a little vertigo-inducing.

Just for us to understand this, what is the current law around medicinal use?

Well, it varies by country. Where I got my start in Brazil, the specific retreat I went to, which is an ayahuasca retreat, is legal. But If you find your way to a spiritual community or a retreat community that is doing this in a ritualistic way, it's legal. In the United States, most of these compounds continue to be schedule one compounds, meaning they are illegal and have been so since the '70s and the '80s.

Under federal law.

Under federal law, correct. But we're starting to see a really interesting movement. On the one hand, we're starting to see states and cities take action to decriminalize some of these compounds, especially the ones that have shown promise in treating conditions like depression, serious depression that does not respond to conventional treatments. Oregon and Colorado right now are the places where you're starting to see a quasi legal marketplace for treatment with psilocybin mushrooms, psychoactive mushrooms. Many other cities have started decriminalizing these compounds or telling the police that it should be the lowest enforcement priority because they see that many people are self-medicating with these compounds, and they don't want that to lead to legal consequences that are going to make their lives harder.

This is also interesting because when it comes to cannabis and the legalization movement there, at first the conversation was about medicinal uses, but it has very quickly been mainstreamed as recreational. This is not the case with psychedelics. Right now, the conversation about psychedelics is, as far as I can see, generally about what its medical benefits could be and whether we are, at least in the US, even in a position to figure that out.

Yes. I think there's a couple of features that are unique to the way the psychedelics movement is advancing. That is that, on the one hand, veterans have become key advocates to expand access to psychedelic treatments and to pour more dollars into psychedelics research. So politically, because many of the people trying to make headway on this issue are tying their brand or their specific lane of research to the veteran mental health crisis, that has meant that this has a significant amount of bipartisan support.

I see, because it taps into this, so support our vets, support military families.

Absolutely. But on the other hand, churches and spiritual communities have become the path of least resistance right now for people who want to use psychedelics in ceremonial or therapeutic settings. So what I've seen, which is really interesting, is a lot of the people who end up gravitating toward these communities are people who come from backgrounds of faith and who have a complicated relationship with organized religion. So from a political and cultural standpoint, I think you're seeing strange bedfellows coalesce.

So there's a loosening the stigma, you're getting more clinical interest, you're getting some little bit loosening of the law. What that sounds like, though, is this weird world where you have therapy straddling spiritual and clinical approaches?

Yes. And I think that's made this a really complicated field from a regulatory and legal standpoint.

I mean, that's very clinical way of saying What? Should this be legal? How do you teach a form of therapy that's barely legal? What do we know? Who should practice it? How do we deal with the spiritual part of it that might be ancestral? It just feels like it's more than the Wild West. It's space.

Absolutely. When you take a look at what's happening on the clinical side, you have well-respected scientists, clinicians, psychiatrists, neurologists, really interested in understanding what exactly happens to the brain of a person after a psychedelic experience or a handful of psychedelic experiences.

Because they don't totally know. We should say that for the record. We have some idea, but there's not as much research as we would like.

Correct. But one of the findings that many researchers have stumbled into is that people report experiencing a mystical phenomena, and it varies from person to person. Some people will talk about connecting with dead ancestors. Some people will talk about taking peaks into past lives. Things that current science really doesn't have very good answers for. But what you also see is that people walk away from these experiences feeling a lot better when people who had been struggling with addiction or PTSD or depression that was not responding to conventional treatments, when they experience an immediate reprieve of symptoms, That's something that's really unusual in psychiatry, and it's why I think the field is so interested in getting a sense of how it can harness the healing potentials of these tools. But there's a lot of unanswered questions. What What people are these compounds dangerous for?

Do you have a copy of your book with you?

I do.

All right. So on page 29, you describe your first ayahuasca experience. So set this up for us. Where are you when you have your first experience?

Yes. So I'm in a very beautiful, lush area of Brazil in the state of Bahia at a retreat called spiritvine, which is run by a woman named Sylvia, who is a psychotherapist by training. When I walk in, I'm very skeptical because I'm hearing a lot of things- I think you call it a cult.

Right. You straight up in the book are like, What is this? The vibe is cult.

There is a lot of woo- woo, and there is a lot of talk that just sounds really just difficult for me to process.

Also, the process of doing it is not a clinical process, right? No. It isn't like, Fill this script, sit down with a glass of water. It's like, fast before you do this, don't have sex, don't do this, don't do that. Your body needs to be, your mind needs to be clear, et cetera, et cetera. So when you walk into the first experience, how much do they lean into it? Is there music? Does it feel spiritual, or does it feel like a psychotherapist is working with you?

It does not feel like being in psychotherapy. You're in this round ceremony room, which has a cone-shaped roof. You're hearing the sounds of the jungle all around you, which is very, very loud and captivating. And after each participant is served a shot glass of ayahuasca, which tastes awful, you lay down in the dark in a little mat on the floor with a blanket and a pillow, and each person has a bucket because many people vomit after drinking ayahuasca.

You're not selling it so far, but continue.

Yeah. I'm not on commission, so I can be transparent about what this is.

I love it.

The light dim and the music starts. The music tends to be percussive early on in the ceremony. I think it's meant to agitate you and to get the mind stirred. As you start feeling the first effects of the compound that you've drank, and as it enters the bloodstream, You really start connecting with the music in a way that feels really, really primal.

Do you mind reading some of that? Okay.

The colors became brighter, the outline sharper and the shapes more ornate with every passing moment. I felt encephized, surrendering to the Majesty of these mysterious visions. Were they the product of my mind? Gifts from another realm? Evidence that Princess, who was another participant, was onto something? Or was this simply what it felt like to be on drugs? I noticed I was smiling as I pondered these questions. Then I felt the unexpected flow of tears that drifted onto the pillow from the corner of my eyes. It didn't feel like conventional crying. There was no heavy breathing, no tightness in my chest, and not a hint of sadness. I had never felt lighter, less burtoned. For a few precious moments, the fog of depression cleared, its shackles suddenly unclasped.

What's it like to read that now?

You know, Adi, it's interesting. I recently recorded the audiobook and had to stop many times because I started crying. This is all really fascinating to revisit because there's a part of me that doesn't recognize the person I was in that period of time now. But I think one thing I felt consistently in writing the book, but also in reading the book out loud recently to myself, was a huge amount of compassion for these earlier versions of myself. One thing that was instantly apparent is that I was not able to offer myself that compassion in real-time.

More with Ernesto Londoño. In just a moment, stay with us.

This podcast is supported by Sleep Number. Quality sleep is essential. That's why the Sleep Number smart bed is designed for your ever evolving sleep needs, so you can choose what's right for each of you whenever you like. Need a bed that's firmer or softer on either side? Helps you sleep at a comfortable temperature. Quiets their snores? Sleep Number does that. Only Sleep Number smart beds let you each choose your ideal comfort and support. Your Sleep Number setting. Sleep Number smart beds learn how you sleep and provide personalized insights to help you sleep better. All Sleep Number smart beds feature cooling, pressure relieving comfort layers for soothing sleep throughout the night. Temperature balancing bedding is designed to move heat and moisture away when you're hot. When you're cool, they hold their energy to help warm you. Sleep Better Together. Jd Power ranks Sleep Number number one in customer satisfaction with mattresses purchased in store. And now, save 50% on Sleep Number limited edition smart beds for a limited time. For JD Power 2023 award information, visit JDPower. Com/awards, only at sleepnumber. Com/easy. Com. Only at sleepnumber Stores or sleepnumber. Com.

Apollo, the God of music, was also the God of medicine. There's been a long time link between music and sound health. That is my favorite fact of the month. Apollo, the God of music, was also the God of medicine. I'm Megna Chakrabarty. Let's explore the world we're living in every weekday with On Point from WBUR, Boston's NPR. Find and follow On Point wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to The Assignment. I'm Adi Cornish. There have been more people coming forward lately about their experiences with psychedelics in the context of their mental health. Ernesto L'OCCo, L'OCCo's reporting for his new book also found that there are still many questions about how and what a safe experience should look like.

One thing that it became apparent instantly is that when you take psychedelics, especially if you're vulnerable to start with. It induces a period of malleable thinking, which I think makes you very easy to persuade, to think differently, to act differently. So you become highly suggestible. And in the wrong hands under the wrong guidance, things can go really bad. One thing that has been a problem in many corners of the so-called psychedelic renaissance is that guides often end up sexually harassing or abusing people in their care. There's, I think, historically been a tendency to be very quiet about these incidents. Many people who've been victims of this form of abuse are reluctant to speak on the one hand, because they feel tremendous shame that they put themselves in this situation and made themselves vulnerable. But there's another layer to the cone of silence, and that is, I think that many people who have come to understand that these compounds are therapeutic and have been healing for them don't want to give the whole field a bat name. So there's a lot of circling the wagons that happens that unfortunately means that predators remain in business.

What about the pressures of it becoming its own marketplace, right? While governments still try and figure out who's doing what, how they should be licensed, the studies, there's lots of people who are now offering some version of it as a mental health service.

Absolutely. I think we're seeing not just experiences that become really pricey, but a lot of upselling that happens when you hook somebody with your protocol or your brand. One of the places where you're seeing a real boom town nature of this marketplace is Costa Rica, which is the sweet spot in terms of feeling remote and exotic enough to entice people to go experience this around nature and in jungle-like settings.

And is also long comfortable for expats.

Right. But yeah, an easier sell than telling somebody to wade deep into the Amazon on a boat and to be surrounded by a lot of insects and snakes. There's this one retreat in Costa Rica that I wanted to highlight in the book, and there's a chapter devoted to it because It's one of the loudest in terms of its marketing. It pretty much guarantees that if you go there, spend a week, and believe in their dogma and their instructions, and have absolute faith in what they're telling you to do, that you're going to walk away with a miracle.

Did you enter as a journalist or a patient or this strange hybrid?

Everywhere I went to do reporting on the book, I was transparent about the fact that I was a journalist and the fact that I was there working on a book. I didn't do any undercover reporting for this book.

But you went into it. So you entered this world, and the marketing to you was striking because it actually promised change.

Right. But yeah, I didn't go to Rhythmia thinking, maybe I will have my miracle. I went to Rhythmia thinking, based on what I've heard so far, this feels like really rich terrain, journalistically, and it feels like a place that I want to see up and close.

What did you find there?

So with Rhythmia, they put you through this really intense protocol of ceremonies where you drink ayahuasca four nights in a row, which is really heavy on the body and the mind. Then you're very strongly encouraged to attend these workshops early in the morning. It means you're kept sleep-deprived for the better part of the week. Then toward the end of the week, they start offering you a bunch of things that can turbocharge your healing journey. The most jarring among them was stem cell therapy for $17,000 that you could put on a credit card right away. What I found, and this was really disturbing was that people who were otherwise smart and rational thinkers in that time and place become convinced that what they're being sold is as good as described. To me, that was a real root awakening of how malleable people can become in these settings, and also that people who are struggling with a lot of pain and a lot of distress become ideal real clients for these products that, for some of them, can lead to a real financial consequences.

You write that despite your personal breakthroughs and the things you saw on the retreats, you also saw that there's this murky legality around the whole thing that is hard to wrap your arms Yeah, the legal landscape is enormously murky.

One place where this is playing out in really interesting ways is in the United States with this boom of psychedelic churches. The bar is pretty high for the government to come in and stop people and say, You're crossing a line.

So it's cultural, it's religious, it's not medical. We leave it alone.

You're also seeing a handful actually proactively go to federal court and sue the government for the explicit right to use and administer these compounds in ceremonial settings.

What questions do you still have that you couldn't answer?

I think when I walked away from my first retreat and felt that this had been hugely transformational for me, my biggest worry was, how long is this going to last?

You mean in your own brain?

Yes. Is this going to be a temporary reprieve or does this get you to higher ground in a lasting way?

That's a haunting question to have behind you, Ernesto. Sure. Don't you think?

Yeah, absolutely. I started answering that question, but it's a question with which I'm in dialog.

With yourself? I think another question is, how do you regulate this field?

We know how mental health interventions are studied and regulated, and we know what the gold standard is in terms of clinical trials. But in this field, which is really the blending of both medicinal but also spiritual interventions and approaches and philosophies, creates a real dilemma. Who should be policing this field? Who should set the ground rules for how this works? Should this be more solidly shifting into the sphere of medicine and our regulatory framework? Or should this be allowed to grow and build as a spiritual intervention? I think those are really, really difficult questions. I think they're questions that we will start tackling more intelligently as we become better at having really honest and constructive conversations about our own experience with mind-altering drugs and our own approaches to improving our mental health.

We're living in an era where, politically, there is a world of people who would say, Look, these psychedelics, these drugs, they have been around for God knows how many years and in so many communities, Indigenous communities, et cetera. Maybe we should be more cautious with how we police them or medicalize them, et cetera. That especially in the US, our history isn't great with figuring out how to deal with mind-altering substances, right? Yeah.

I mean, one thing that I was startled to reflect on was that some of these compounds, when you look at, for instance, peyote in the context of the Native American Church here in the United States. Ayahuasca, which has been used by communities in the Amazon for centuries. They have real reverence for these compounds. They don't call them drugs. I think that's a word that really shapes with people for whom this is a really sacred experience. And I think we have so much to learn from these communities. You don't just use these as a one and done intervention. I think one of the things you hear often, especially from celebrities, is it was 10 years of therapy in one night. It leaves you with the impression that you do this once and then you're done. It'll solve so many of your problems. For many of these communities, you build a relationship with these substances and you approach them like you would approach a meditation practice, which will pay dividends the more you do it and the more you understand its limitations, but also its depth.

Before I let you go, how is your mental health? Have you come away from this experience feeling and this is probably the wrong word, so correct me, cured?

Yeah, that's a great question and one I think about a lot. I feel so much more more resilient than I did at my low point, but I think I will always feel a gravitational pull of depression. I think it will continue to be a recurring visitor in my life and something that oftentimes has a lot of valuable things to teach me. So it's not something that at this point in my life, I want to be completely cured of. I have found value in the way my mind works and operates. I think one of the things that psychedelics led me to, which has been Probably the most healing thing for me is a daily meditation practice. And this happens to a surprising number of people that once you take a peek at the wonders and the wondrous nature of thinking into the mind, and also come to understand that the mind is more malleable than I think we understood, meditation becomes a more sustainable and, I think, effective way of starting to shift the way you respond to your thinking brain. And with psychedelics, I think I found a little bit of a point of diminishing returns, but with meditation, I've found the opposite.

In the end, Did you come away with it thinking that it was the solution you were looking for, right? That night you couldn't sleep.

I feel so fortunate that I stumbled into that experience. I I think it would have been really hard for me to really extricate myself from that grip of darkness I was in. It gave me a window of opportunity to see the roots of my distress more clearly. It was almost like a switch was flipped in a dark room, and all of a sudden I could see the mess and had an understanding of what it would require to start cleaning it up.

But it isn't the thing that long term you think is going to make you healthy?

No, I think it can give you many answers, and it can point in many directions, but then it requires action, and it requires follow through. One of the things I recognized in the aftermath of my experience was that I'd built a really lonely life for myself. It may sound strange, but it hadn't really stopped and thought about why that happened and the series of choices that led to that. It took some real intentional thinking and acting to start re-arranging my life and shifting my priorities in order to be less alone structurally. And opening myself to love and feeling worthy of love was probably the hardest but most meaningful dividend that I walked away with from these experiences.

Well, Ernesto, I didn't expect the interview to go in this direction, but I'm glad it You did. What a lovely lesson to learn for yourself.

Thank you, Audi.

Ernesto Londonio is a reporter at the New York Times, and he's also the author of the new book, Trippy: The Peril and Promise of medicinal psychedelics. That's it for this episode of The Assignment. Just a reminder, we're heading into the summer months, so now is a good time for you to send us an assignment. Assignment. You can give us a call, you can text us, you can just tell us what's on your mind. Our number is 202-854-8802. We might even use your voicemail or text in a future episode of the show. This episode was produced by Carla Javier. The senior producer of The Assignment is Matt Martinez. Dan Dizula is our technical director. And we got help this week from Matt Dempsey. And support for the CNN audio team comes from Haley Thomas, Alex Manisari, Robert Mather's, John Dianora, Lenny Steinhart, Jamis Andress, Nicole Pessereau, and Lisa Namerau. The executive producer of CNN Audio is Steve Ligtai. Special thanks, as always, to Katie Hinman. I'm Audi Cornish. Thank you for listening.

Quality sleep is essential, and that's why the Sleep Number Smart Bed is designed for your ever-evolving sleep needs. So you can choose what's right for you whenever you like. Need a bed that's firmer or softer on either side? Helps you sleep at a comfortable temperature. Quiets their snores. Sleep Number does that. Sleep better together. Jd Power ranks Sleep Number number one in customer satisfaction with mattresses purchased in store. And now, save 50% on Sleep Number limited edition smart bed for a limited time. For JD Power 2023 award information, visit JDPower. Com/awards. Only at Sleep Number stores or sleepnumber. Com.