The Trip Report Issue 2
Published April 5th 2023
Welcome to the first issue of ‘The Trip Report’ a new fortnightly blog exploring the nascent psychedelic industry and legacy culture. In this inaugural issue, we’ll be looking at the US state of Oregon approving the first psilocybin grower license, US DJ Diplo claiming to run the LA marathon while on LSD, and finally, a new brain image study from Imperial College London exploring the effects of DMT on brain function.
Oregon approves first psilocybin growers' license
The first story we’ll look at this week comes from the west coast US state of Oregon. The Oregon Health Authority (OHA) announced last month on March 19th, that it has officially issued the country's first commercial license for the production of Psilocybin containing mushrooms.
The Oregon Psilocybin Services (OPS) authorised by the state's health authority began accepting applications for four types of licenses in January. The four license types are manufacturing, laboratory, service centres, and facilitators. The first of which, seemingly a manufacturing license, has been issued to Satori Farms PDX LLC, a craft mushroom producer owned by Oregonian Tori Armbrust.
“We congratulate Tori Armbrust of Satori Farms PDX LLC for being issued the first psilocybin license in Oregon’s history and for representing women leading the way for the emerging psilocybin ecosystem. “We are committed to fostering an inclusive partnership with our regulated community to ensure safe, effective and equitable psilocybin services throughout the state” - OPS Section Manager Angie Allbee
The company is the first to be licensed under the state's new novel regulatory framework that began in January 2023 after the beaver state (its actual state nickname) became the first US state to ‘legalise’ the adult use of psilocybin. The 2023 legislation was the result of ballot measure 109 a citizen-led initiative to provide statewide access to ‘natural psychedelics’ that passed in late 2020.
Interestingly the wording of measure 109 stipulated ‘naturally occurring psychedelics’. So I am curious to see how the state legislator will keep ‘big pharma’ and its novel synthetic psilocin patents out of the nascent industry.
The Oregon Psilocybin Services (OPS) has also revealed that it has approved 48 psilocybin worker permits out of a total of 224 applications as of 19th March 2023. The OPS expects to issue further licenses “in the coming months” with public access to psilocybin therapies expected to begin later in the year.
Earlier this month the first batch of ‘psilocybin facilitator practitioners’ or so-called ‘trip sitters’ graduated from the state-approved mandatory training program. Once training is complete practitioners have to pass a state exam to receive their license to practice psilocybin-assisted therapy.
“The graduation of the first cohort of students from approved psilocybin facilitator training programs is a significant milestone for Oregon. We congratulate Oregon’s future facilitators and the training programs they are graduating from on this incredible and historic moment in psilocybin history.” - OPS section manager, Angie Allbee
Tom Eckert the architect of the 2020 ‘legalisation’ legislation and program director at InnerTrek, a state-approved facilitator training company that charges $7,900 for some classes said “Facilitator training is at the heart of the nation’s first statewide psilocybin therapy and wellness program and is core to the success of the Oregon model we’re pioneering here.”
While this system has some aspects to celebrate there are also a few issues with its regulations and implementation. The recent announcement that there are currently over 100 cities that have enacted two-year bans on treatment centres in their jurisdiction and the collapse of the Dutch facilitator training company ‘Synthesis Institute’ has many individuals concerned about the cost of psilocybin treatment, localised access, and corporate profiteering.
2023 has already seen ‘legalisation’ and ‘decriminalisation’ bills advance in California, New York, Virginia, Minnesota, and Hawaii. So although Oregon was the first state to ‘legalise’ psilocybin it won’t be the last. Colorado is likely the next state to ‘legalise’ after its voters passed a ballot in November 2022, with its ‘legal’ access to psilocybin due to begin in 2024.
The US states will join Australia which recently became the first country to approve psychedelics as a 'form of medicine’ in controlled settings.
US DJ Diplo claims to run the LA marathon while on LSD
Mississippian DJ and music producer Diplo, real name Thomas Wesley Pentz, claims that he ran last week's Los Angeles marathon while high on Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD). The 44-year-old said that he didn’t physically prepare for the race and had only ever previously ran 11 miles, less than half the 26.2-mile total distance of a full marathon.
The EDM DJ posted a video to Twitter on March 20th allegedly showing him adding 5 drops of liquid LSD to his water bottle the night before the marathon. In the video, Diplo is heard saying “I think you need like four drops of LSD” before adding a fifth to his metal water bottle.
While the video released to social media doesn’t explain his motivations it did explain that his only goal was to beat the 4-hour 29-minute time of US TV/Media personality Oprea Winfrey. Diplo would ultimately complete the marathon with a time of 3 hours and 35 minutes. A rather respectable time for an unprepared amateur male of his age as generally speaking anything under 4 hours is considered a good marathon time.
It is unclear exactly how much LSD Diplo took from the video ‘evidence’ alone as there isn’t any consensus about what the standard concentration or formulation of LSD should be in the unregulated market.
The number of drops shown to me indicates that the bottle is diluted to a dropper dose of well under 100ug per drop. I have had a little experience in this field myself, LSD which is not marathon running, and I can tell you that a dose over 500ug is a rather, well, challenging experience. It is a trip that requires your utmost attention and awareness. In my experience that high dose is heightened by physical exertion and it can become difficult to maintain for long periods.
LSD has been unlawful for decades there is little research about its effects on humans, well, outside of Sandoz (now Novartis) and the CIA. As such it is unknown whether it can be considered a performance-enhancing drug when it comes to sporting practice and professional athleticism.
If Diplo’s claim turns out to be true he would join Doc Ellis, a former Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher that threw a no-hitter while high on LSD in 1970 in the annuals of LSD sporting history.
Imperial College London DMT Brain Image Study
The final story that we’ll be looking at comes from Imperial College London in the UK. The public research university recently published a new brain image study conducted on DMT. As in they were researching DMT, not taking it and conducting a study while on DMT, although I would be 100% interested in reading that study.
Anyway, scientists at The Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London gave 20 ‘healthy’ volunteers synthetic N N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and then scanned their brains in the hopes of discovering how it alters the function of the human brain.
“This work is exciting as it provides the most advanced human neuroimaging view of the psychedelic state to date. One increasingly popular view is that much of brain function is concerned with modelling or predicting its environment. Humans have unusually big brains and model an unusually large amount of the world.”
“For example, like with optical illusions, when we’re looking at something, some of what we’re actually seeing is our brain filling in the blanks based on what we already know. What we have seen with DMT is that activity in highly evolved areas and systems of the brain that encode especially high-level models becomes highly dysregulated under the drug, and this relates to the intense drug ‘trip’” - Dr Chris Timmerman, study author
In the placebo-controlled study titled “Human brain effects of DMT assessed via EEG-fMRI,” scientists hooked participants up to an EEG (Electroencephalography) and an fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and monitored before, during, and after being injected with 20mg of synthetic NN-DMT. The volunteers were then told to regularly rate the intensity of their experience on a scale of one to ten.
While it isn’t the first study to use psychedelics and brain imagery it is the first to combine EEG and fMRI imagery technology to map the whole brain during an intense and immersive psychedelic ‘trip’.
The Centre for Psychedelic Research founder Prof. Robin Carhart-Harris stated that “Our results revealed that when a volunteer was on DMT there was a marked dysregulation of some of the brain rhythms that would ordinarily be dominant. The brain switched in its mode of functioning to something altogether more anarchic.”
“It will be fascinating to follow up on these insights in the years to come. Psychedelics are proving to be extremely powerful scientific tools for furthering our understanding of how brain activity relates to conscious experience.”
Following the success of this initial study the team is now exploring how to prolong the peak of the psychedelic experience by continuously infusing participants with synthetic DMT. While other study authors and contributors are now advising on a ‘commercially ran trial to assess DMT for patients with depression’.
Unfortunately, these kinds of studies and trials are only really going to help in the research and development of novel synthetic, patentable, and highly profitable psychedelic-based medications and temporary symptom suppression treatments.
The information and data gathered will become evidence of the efficacy of their patented drugs but not proof of the safety of these compounds when consumed in their natural forms. If they can lawfully experiment with these compounds in a lab, then why can't we in a field!?
There needs to be a true grass-roots movement created here in the UK. A movement to campaign and fight for the ubiquitous decriminalisation of psychedelic-related criminal offences alongside all drug-related offences that are violently enforced upon the masses.
Written for TheSimpaLife.com by Simpa
