Mushroom Revival Podcast
Mushroom Revival Podcast
Healing with Mushrooms: Psilocybin's Promise Against Heroin Addiction
The opioid epidemic continues to devastate families and communities across America, leaving researchers and clinicians desperately searching for new treatment approaches. What if a compound found in mushrooms could help break the cycle of addiction? In this riveting conversation, Alex Dorr welcomes Dr. Stephanie Daves from Temple University's Center for Substance Abuse Research to discuss her groundbreaking work exploring how psilocybin might combat heroin addiction.
Dr. Daves shares her personal journey into addiction research, motivated partly by witnessing the devastating impacts of substance use disorders firsthand. She explains the science behind addiction as a chronic disease—not simply a matter of willpower—where individuals prioritize obtaining and using substances despite severe negative consequences to their lives and relationships.
The heart of their conversation revolves around fascinating research showing how psilocybin targets the serotonin 2A receptor, which changes in the brains of rats exposed to heroin. While psilocybin didn't prevent rats from taking heroin when available, it significantly reduced drug-seeking behavior during simulated relapse scenarios. Dr. Daves hypothesizes that beyond psychedelic experiences, psilocybin may work through anti-inflammatory pathways in the brain, potentially offering a new mechanism for addiction treatment.
They explore the distinctions between two therapeutic approaches: high-dose sessions producing profound psychedelic experiences versus microdosing protocols where individuals take sub-perceptual amounts. Each approach may benefit different individuals or conditions, highlighting the need for personalized treatment strategies. The discussion also touches on how environmental factors and social connections play crucial roles in recovery, drawing parallels to the famous "Rat Park" experiments.
Despite promising results, the conversation reveals significant challenges in addiction research, including lengthy study timelines and difficulties securing consistent funding. As communities continue fighting the opioid crisis, this research offers hope through innovative approaches that might help address both the biological and psychological aspects of substance use disorders.
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Welcome, welcome. You are listening to the Mushroom Revival podcast. This is your host, alex Dorr, and we are absolutely obsessed with the wonderful, wacky, mysterious world of mushrooms and fungi. We bring on guests and experts from all around the globe to geek out with us and go down this mysterious rabbit hole to try to figure out what the heck is going on with these fungal friends of ours. So today we have Stephanie Dawes to come on to talk about psilocybin, potentially reducing heroin-seeking behavior in rats and the potential for maybe that to translate into humans later on and addiction overall. So, stephanie, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:Good Hi, Alex. Thank you for inviting me. It's great to be here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks for coming on. Where are you tuning in from? And for people who don't know you and your work who are you? What are you up to?
Speaker 2:Okay, I am at the Center for Substance Abuse Research at Temple University in Philadelphia. I am at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine here we're in North Philadelphia and my work focuses on understanding mechanisms that might reduce or help people to stop taking drugs. So we work with preclinical models and I have a research lab here at the School of Medicine and I work with graduate students and postdocs and we do preclinical work as well as some clinical studies, trying to understand what are the mechanisms that contribute to drug seeking behavior.
Speaker 1:And how did you? Did you get into addiction and drug use before you got into psilocybin as a as a potential treatment, or did you get into mushrooms first? How did your journey begin?
Speaker 2:Well, my journey began many years ago as a graduate student. I'm an assistant professor right now, but it took many years for me to get to this point. Originally, I studied molecular and microbiology at the University of Central Florida as an undergraduate student and I decided I wanted to be able to understand more deeply about mechanisms that contribute to mental health, and I went on to graduate school at Vanderbilt University and there I was very fortunate to work with researchers that were working with human samples from people that had bipolar disorders schizophrenia and there was a lot of overlap between these mental health conditions and drug use. When I was finished with graduate school, I then went on and did extra training. It's called a postdoctoral fellowship. I did two of them, one at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, and he also had mental health conditions. So it was really important for me to be able to engage in research that not only studied addiction, but also mental health, mood disorders, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder. I really wanted to understand about the connections and the comorbidities that exist between these conditions.
Speaker 2:Now that I have my own lab, I'm really focused on trying to understand mechanisms that might help people stop taking drugs, and it's very, very complicated because oftentimes people have a very long journey of sobriety. It can take many, many years to have full recovery and addiction is really a chronic disease. A lot of people don't realize that. But being able to have medications that can help maintain sobriety, maintain abstinence, is really what I'm hoping I'll be able to understand one day.
Speaker 2:So the psychedelics and psilocybin came into this because I had done some gene expression profiling of the brains of rats that had been exposed to heroin and we determined that a receptor that psilocybin binds to the serotonin 2A receptor, which changed in the brains of rats that had been exposed to heroin. I really didn't know very much about psychedelics before this point, but I just knew that this gene was changed and the strategy that my lab uses is we identify gene expression changes that are a result of drug exposure and then we use either pharmacological or genetic tools to manipulate those genes and see if that can then reverse the drug taking or the drug seeking behavior. So we started injecting rats with psilocybin and looking to see how it impacted their heroin taking behavior.
Speaker 1:Well, I have to say I'm really sorry to hear about your brother. The opioid epidemic is so invasive One of my best friends in high school died from an oxy overdose as well and I know so many people who it it. It's so severe, it's, it's um, yeah, it. It takes a hold of of so many people's lives and and everyone that they're they're connected with. So I think this research is is incredibly important to help um, not only the the person taking the opioids, but also all their friends and family. And it really it really has a ripple effect on so many people's lives. And I'm really curious about.
Speaker 1:You know the mechanisms of addiction. I, you know, I've heard that, you know, you just said it. It's a disease. Maybe people throw around the word addiction too loosely. I know people are like, oh, I'm so addicted to my phone, you know, and is that a different addiction than heroin? Or is it the same mechanisms in the brain? Is it a gene that someone has, if, if, that they can pass on to their kid, and those specific genes or that specific gene um makes them into a more addicted personality person? Can you just kind of give an overview of, like, what addiction is?
Speaker 2:That's a really good question. Thank you, alex, and uh, you'll have to remind me if I forget some of those questions, because there's a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I rapid fired them, Sorry.
Speaker 2:That's okay. I think it's very important to acknowledge the suffering that addiction causes families, communities, and it's not something that just happens to the individual that has the addiction. It really impacts so much of their life, their quality of life, their friends, their family. And when addiction is diagnosed, there is a DSM-5, which is a handbook that psychiatrists or clinicians can use in order to be able to diagnose somebody with a mental health disorder, and there was a great review that was published a few years ago in the New England Journal of Medicine by Nora Volkow. She is currently the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and she really went through what are the different degrees of severity of substance use disorder and what causes someone to be addicted.
Speaker 2:So oftentimes we use addiction and we refer to anybody that's using drugs as being addicted, and that's really not true. There is a big change in the legislature in this country. There's different laws that are happening in different states, so using some drugs can be legal in some states and people can use them recreationally and then in other states it might still be illegal. So we do know that there are people that are using drugs recreationally or medically, and to say that all those people using drugs are addicts is really not true and it wouldn't be a correct characterization. So, in terms of the severity of substance use disorder, there are different grades of it and at the very basic level, somebody can be using a drug and they continue taking more and more in order to produce a sense of euphoria. They might be developing tolerance, they might be escalating their use, but people that become addicted, they then place more emphasis on getting the drug and being able to have access to the drug than they do other responsibilities in their life, so they could be not going to work or not taking care of their families, for example. They're using all of their money in order to procure more drugs and they're really continuing to take the drug despite there being severe negative consequences. So that really is a big factor in what would cause someone to be diagnosed with addiction. And there's other criteria as well in that DSM-5 manual that go through. What are all of the different characteristics and how severe do they have to be? In terms of the tolerance, in terms of the amount of effort and resources that someone devotes to trying to get more of the drug, and then also the withdrawal and the physical dependence on the drug, so to say people that use drugs are addicted, that wouldn't really be the correct characterization.
Speaker 2:Now, can people be addicted to other things? Definitely, I am a mom of four and I have children that like to play video games, and sometimes they don't care what the consequences are. They can get a bad grade in school, they can be grounded, it doesn't matter, they want to play the video game. So they might give up all of these other things that normally they might enjoy being able to have a reward like a food reward or being able to go outside with friends, things that they might normally enjoy. They might be willing to give up those things in order to play more of the video games.
Speaker 2:So you can think of that as an analogy for how somebody might be addicted to a drug. They might be willing to give up spending time with their family, going on vacation, being able to have a car, a house, things that might normally cause someone to be happy and have pleasure, all at the expense of getting the drug or in you're talking about the, the HTR2A receptor, and I'm not exactly sure how to eloquently ask this because it's a little beyond my domain, but basically that gene is related to addiction for certain things.
Speaker 1:I read at the end of the paper that maybe it's unclear about nicotine and cocaine and maybe there's another gene, if I'm correct, but I think alcohol and opiates are related to that gene, if I'm correct. And so, speaking of genes, no matter what the name is, it seems to me and please correct me if I'm wrong no matter what the name is, it seems to me, and please correct me if I'm wrong if there's certain genes related to certain chemicals that, if I'm understanding correctly, make someone have harder withdrawals and make them seek out that drug more. And I'm curious if certain people have those genes and certain people don't, or everyone has those genes and the drug just flicks them on, so to speak.
Speaker 2:That's a good question. Yes, so that reminds me I didn't answer your question about whether addiction is something that can be inherited. We do know, based on GWAS studies, which is sequencing of DNA in people that have addiction. We do know what genes they have, what genes are expressed, and it's not very simple in that we can just look at their genes and say these are the addiction genes.
Speaker 2:We know that there are behavioral traits that might cause someone to be more impulsive or have other behavioral tendencies that are associated with drug-seeking behavior, or people that might be more responsive to drugs. And we do know that addiction can run in a family, so there might be some people that have relatives, parents, grandparents that were using drugs or alcohol for much of their upbringing, and there are incidences in which people also then develop drug use or cigarette smoking as a result of that. It's hard to say whether it's environmental or it's all genetic, because both of the things go hand in hand. But we do know that there are some genes that are likely to be expressed in people that are drug seeking. However, it's not the same for everybody. So we don't know the addiction gene.
Speaker 2:It's not just one gene or a few genes, and it's definitely not the serotonin 2A receptor, because if it was, then it would be very simple and we could probably cure addiction. But it's not that simple. But HTR2A is the gene that encodes the serotonin 2A receptor. So the serotonin 2A receptor is a protein, and it is a protein that can interact with psilocybin, and there have been studies that have been done with DNA from people who had opioid use disorder, and it was determined that there were variants in the DNA levels or the DNA expression profiles of the serotonin 2A receptor that were associated with opioid dependence. So that means that there's just slightly different expression patterns of these genes that might be related to whether or not somebody has heroin or opioid dependence.
Speaker 1:So this is not my domain and I'm sure that a lot of our listeners these words are pretty foreign to them. Like what is the serotonin 2A receptor? I've heard that thrown around so many times in relation to psilocybin and it sounds great, but I still don't know what it means. I could copy and paste it and regurgitate it, but don't have a deep understanding, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners do not as well. So, like what does a protein do in the body? And when someone says that psilocybin is an agonist to the serotonin 2A receptor, what does that actually mean in layman's terms? Like if you're talking to like a golden retriever or like a five-year-old?
Speaker 2:Okay. So the serotonin 2A receptor is a protein that typically is at the surface of a cell and when drugs like psilocybin are a match for that receptor, they can bind to the receptor and then they cause changes in other protein pathways or other genes within that cell. In the case of the serotonin 2A receptor, when psilocybin interacts with it, it can also induce hallucinations, delusions or psychedelic experiences, and when we think about this receptor as a protein, you can think of proteins as really things that do work within the cell. The central dogma of molecular biology is that DNA is made into RNA and then RNA is made into protein, so proteins are really a reflection of our DNA. Now we have tons of proteins all over the body. They have different functions.
Speaker 2:There's some within the heart that are important for the heart to be pumping. There are some within our muscles that help our muscles to allow us to move and walk, and then there's some within our brain that control all of our thinking, our cognition. So when psilocybin gets into the brain, it's binding to this receptor, this protein in the brain, and then it's causing not only some of the effects of psychedelics the psychedelic experience, but also other things as well, and part of my research is looking at some of the things in addition to activation of that serotonin 2A receptor that could be important. One hypothesis we have is that psilocybin might be causing anti-inflammatory effects, and looking at some of those things in addition to the serotonin 2A receptor might be another way to understand how psilocybin could be therapeutic so I also read in the paper and I would love some more clarity on this that, um, you wrote that psilocybin did not affect heroin taking, but blunted heroin seeking behavior during relapse.
Speaker 1:Um, so I'm curious, if you can, if you can, uh, divulge on that a little bit more, on what exactly the effects on these rats in your study were on relapse, and also, yeah, what effects did it have?
Speaker 2:Sure, we measure rat self-administration of heroin. And when we gave psilocybin to the rats, they still took the same amount of heroin. So we concluded that psilocybin to the rats, they still took the same amount of heroin. So we concluded that psilocybin didn't impact heroin. Taking Now our model that we use it allows each rat to control their own drug intake. They have a catheter in their jugular vein and they're trained to press a lever and get an infusion of heroin right into their body. So when we gave them locibin, they still made that choice, that they still wanted the heroin.
Speaker 2:However, we also do what's called a relapse test, and it's really not relapse, but we put the rat back in their home cage that they live in and then we allow them to go through abstinence, which means they have no heroin self-administration sessions, they have no access to the drug. We put them back inside the chamber where they had previously taken the drug, maybe three weeks later, and we gave them psilocybin and we measured how much they pressed that lever, but we didn't give them any heroin. Psilocybin, and we measured how much they pressed that lever, but we didn't give them any heroin. So we used that as a measure of relapse because we're looking. Do they go for the lever that had the heroin? Are they seeking the heroin?
Speaker 2:And we concluded that the rats that had psilocybin before that relapse test, they didn't have as much of a desire to press the lever. This is very different from how we might measure relapse or recurrence of drug use in humans, because if you previously had drank a lot of alcohol, you went through sobriety and then maybe you saw a sign for a bar. You stopped at the bar, you went in and had one drink. Maybe that one drink led to five more drinks, so that might be considered recurrence of use or relapse. We are not really measuring true relapse because the rats don't get more heroin, but it's the closest thing that we typically do with our preclinical studies.
Speaker 1:Have you heard of. It's been a few years since I've actually read um both these papers. But there's one paper, I think in the 60s, that came out um that they they had rats. The same thing it was, but it was with two water bottles, one with with, I think, regular water and one I think it was heroin water if I'm maybe it's cocaine or some drug, and they gave him a choice and but they were locked in a cage and they always took the, the drug infused water, and so the publish was was closed and they're like, drugs are bad, you know.
Speaker 1:And then some of the rats like kept, you know, drinking it until they died and refuse food, and you know. And so they're like oh, drugs will make you not eat and starve yourself and kill yourself and blah, blah, blah. Someone redid the study and please stop me if you know this study. But they said well, if I was a rat trapped in a small cage, of course I would also pick the drugs, because that's kind of a miserable life. What if I introduced like a rat park?
Speaker 2:And yes, yeah yeah, so they.
Speaker 1:For people who don't know this study, I'll give a very quick recap. But they introduced a rat park and they had them all play together and they got to socialize and got to run around, they had a wheel and everything and then they put them back in the cage and they gave them a choice and they shot. They saw a? Um, a really high reduction of of drug seeking behavior after the introduced introduction of a park, um, and socialization. So it kind of gave them more to look forward to. And I think this is going back to your statement of like. Is it nature versus nurture or like environment versus predestination in your genes or DNA? I think yeah, I think it's both. And environment plays a big factor, especially when it comes to relapse. If you go back to old friends that are also abusing drugs and they're like, hey, come on, man, take a little bit, you know, or you're just like in a rough environment, like it's hard to recover from addiction if you don't also change your environment as well.
Speaker 2:Yes, and there's a lot of research that's been done on the impact of social experience and how that can reduce relapse behavior or drug seeking. There are even drug self-administration chambers that have been developed, where a rat can press the lever for the drug, but then they can also press another lever and a door will open up and they can play with another rat.
Speaker 2:So they can choose do I want to play with a friend or do I want to get the drug? And usually the rats will choose to go play with the friend. And it's hard because it makes you wonder are we really modeling the correct behavior with rats and mice? Is there something that we're missing? We know there's a lot that we're missing with some of these models. So I would argue it's definitely more important that we look at how rats are changing their drug taking behavior instead of some of these relapse behaviors.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think relapse is also incredibly important, because it's where I think a lot of people who struggle with addiction get stuck in is that constant relapse and just kind of getting stuck in the loop and hoping they can get better and then they relapse. And if during a relapse, they're seeking that drug less, I think that's a huge win. Of course it's not that simple and, like you said before, if we figured it out we would have cured addiction by now. But I think, like one step at a time, and each win is a major win against this battle, for sure.
Speaker 2:Right and environment is so important, and that's one of the concepts behind some of the 12 Steps programs. You can go to meetings, you can be around other people that are on a similar journey with you and you can have a sense of community, of people also trying to support your goals, as opposed to say, hanging out with people that are continuing to use drugs. But it can be really challenging because some of the people that you're closest with your family members they've watched you do the drugs over and over again and they may start to lose faith or they may become tired of hearing about it. So environment is just so important. If you don't have a good support system, then it can really impact whether you're successful in your sobriety the biochemistry.
Speaker 1:I saw two words in your paper that I wasn't familiar with and I was hoping that you could explain what they are. I'm going to try to pronounce them Ketanserin and volananserin, if I'm pronouncing those correctly.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's correct. So those are drugs or compounds that would really do the opposite of psilocybin. The way that we designed our study is that we wanted to test our hypothesis that when we activated the serotonin 2A receptor with psilocybin we could reduce drug seeking. But then if we blocked the activity at that serotonin 2A receptor, we would hypothesize that the opposite would happen. And that's exactly what we saw that catanserin and bolinanserin. They really do the opposite from psilocybin and we saw an increase in drug-seeking behavior with rats that had been treated with those compounds. So they would be causing the serotonin 2A receptor to have different signaling pathways and it would really be antagonizing some of the effects that psilocybin would be accomplishing.
Speaker 1:And I know I brought up that I briefly stated at the end in the conclusion of your paper. You briefly talked about how nicotine and cocaine potentially might be acting on a different receptor or gene. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:There's been a lot of studies that have been done with the serotonin 2A receptor and HTR2A with nicotine, alcohol, cocaine and HTR2A with nicotine, alcohol, cocaine, and we do know that there are some associations between that receptor with other drugs. But we know that psilocybin has a lot of different targets. So one other target is the serotonin 2C receptor, for example, and we know that that receptor, when we use drugs that specifically target that receptor, sometimes, example, and we know that that receptor, when we use drugs that specifically target that receptor, sometimes there can be the opposite effect of the serotonin 2A receptor. So we don't exactly know all of the mechanisms of how psilocybin is functioning with each of these different drugs. But I will say there's been a lot more clinical research with nicotine and alcohol and psilocybin.
Speaker 2:There's clinical trials that are going on right now to test the efficacy of psilocybin for reducing nicotine use or alcohol use and even opioids. But the nicotine and the alcohol studies are much further along and some of these studies have been published. The alcohol studies are much further along and some of these studies have been published. It's really fascinating. There's a group at Johns Hopkins that has been studying nicotine and alcohol use and how psilocybin could be reducing it, and they've shown that, if you take patients that have tried to quit smoking for many, many years, when they've been given psilocybin, they really have a reduction in their cigarette use over time.
Speaker 1:And I just think that that's amazing, because these are not people that just casually smoke, these are heavy smokers and it's really changing their behavior you know, I've always wondered if it's more of a a purely kind of chemical interaction happening in the body in in terms of psilocybin and its effect on addiction. I'm sure it's also just like we're talking about nature versus nurture. I'm sure it's always a combination. But, um, also the just the insight of looking at your life and saying, oh, I've been smoking a lot of cigarettes, it's not the best for me, I should probably stop or cut it back. And having that kind of like out-of-body experience to process your life, I'm sure it's both. But is your theory that most of the benefits of psilocybin is the anti-inflammatory effects, which lowers our seeking behavior when it comes to, say, opioids or nicotine and alcohol, and we're just not like on edge as much. And that anti-inflammatory response would you say that is your hypothesis? Or I'm just curious, like what's going on, what exactly is psilocybin doing to help us alleviate some of our addiction cravings?
Speaker 2:Right, and really that's the $1 million question. Can we really figure out what psilocybin is doing? Because then we can also develop other compounds that are like psilocybin or maybe more specific? As I mentioned, psilocybin targets a number of different proteins within the brain and I think that there might be people that may never take a psychedelic. They have a negative connotation of it. They may not be willing to. So understanding how psilocybin is impacting the brain to reduce drug seeking is really the major goal.
Speaker 2:In my lab, our initial hypothesis is that psilocybin was impacting inflammatory signaling, and in our paper that you referenced at the beginning of the podcast, we had used a compound that was anti-inflammatory. We injected it into the brain and we saw the very same effect that psilocybin produced, that it reduced the drug-seeking behavior. So we're going to study this in more detail, look at more anti-inflammatory compounds. It would be nice if we could find something else that functioned, that did the same thing as psilocybin, but maybe there wasn't any effect when somebody took it. And that also brings up another point that I wanted to mention. There are two different protocols for how people are using psilocybin clinically. So one is that an individual could take psilocybin under the care of a clinician, a medical provider, and that person would be there to make sure that the patient is safe. And they're taking a relatively large dose and they have a psychedelic experience and, as you said, it allows them to really look inside and determine do I want to continue taking the drugs, what is my motivation here, and really have a change of mind about what they want to do in the future.
Speaker 2:But the other way is microdosing, and people microdose all the time for different reasons. But from what I have heard and I've spoken with I had the chance to speak with somebody recently who is a life coach who helps people with microdosing protocols. When you microdose, you don't have any psychedelic experience, you don't even know that you're taking a drug. There's no hallucinations, there's no delusions, nothing. And it would be very similar to how people are taking any other medication, where you may not have any feeling.
Speaker 2:It's almost like just taking a small white pill. Right, you don't feel it, but there are small changes that are happening in your brain and, with a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy, you're able to go on a journey like what you described and able to change your behavior. One of the things that we're working on in my lab is trying to understand if microdosing can also have a similar effect on drug taking. But right now, as far as I know all the clinical studies, the clinical trials with psilocybin and drugs, they're using very large doses and they're giving the patients one, maybe two doses and then they're looking at the long-term outcomes of drug-seeking and drug-taking behavior. So it will be really interesting to see if microdosing also has an impact on drug-taking.
Speaker 1:I just read a paper and actually brought them on the podcast, jack and Albert Dahan. They they released a meta analysis on seeing, you know, the correlation between subjective and objective effects of psilocybin and ketamine um on various things and they had the most interesting findings on um substance abuse versus other things, um, and they found that the subjective effects or, like you know, any trippy hallucinations or visuals or insights or things like that accounted for 54 to 60% of the healing for substance abuse, as opposed to only 5 to 24% when it came to depression. And I thought that was really interesting. Like, depending on what you're using it for, having more of the kind of hallucinations or the trippiness accounted for more of the healing of of you know, whatever it is Um, and that's for me.
Speaker 1:I, when I microdose, I actually like to feel it a little bit. To me, I feel like that's the only time I actually get true benefit Um, and I done it for many, many years and only when I'm like riding the edge of like did I take too much, you know? And I'm like definitely feeling it, but but it's enough to kind of ride that wave Um or it's just just below the amount where I can comfortably ride that wave, um, and just like edging that uncomfortability. You know, um, that's when you know I'm, I can operate my daily life but also get those insights and you know, like new perspectives on my life, of kind of like shakes the routine and gets me out of my normal, like rigidity, if that makes sense, which is really helpful for like addiction. You know when you're just like in a habit loop or like addiction. You know when you're just like in a habit loop for me personally but it for other people, you know.
Speaker 1:I know a lot of scientists are working on. You know how do we get the benefits of psilocybin without the trip for people who they just don't have time, they're busy, they have five kids and two jobs and you know they're like I don't, I can't do that. You know I can't have like a six hour session and then the full day integration the next day. I'm like I don't, yeah, like I wish, but you know I can't have that. So I'd rather just pop a pill and, you know, stop my, my oxy addiction, and without the trip, you know.
Speaker 2:I would think, though, if you had the ability to spend one day having a trip and being able to cure your opioid addiction, wouldn't that be worth it? Maybe one day I think so Right yeah I think so, as opposed to taking a pill chronically for a long period of time.
Speaker 1:It is kind of the Western medical system to have your bottle of magic pills that you pop every morning. It's definitely the system that a lot of people are used to. So having a journey or this ceremony and this day that you take to really process a lot of things is very foreign for a lot of people. It's not really in a lot of people's cultures, or yeah, they're just not used to that.
Speaker 2:Right and I think, as you mentioned, there might be different protocols that work better for different people for different conditions, and then there might be some people that don't want to experience the full psychedelic experience. So I don't think it's a one size fits all and I think there can be benefits for people for a variety of different conditions. Is that the clinical trials with psilocybin? It can be really difficult to have a placebo effect, because patients like with that placebo pill, they might know that they're not having any psychedelic experience.
Speaker 1:Right, a lot easier for microdosing, for sure. But yeah, that's the one of the big flaws of large dose psychedelic studies is it's kind of impossible to do a placebo and you know pretty soon after if you've gotten the placebo or not, which is a thing, but I don't. Yeah, you know, nothing's perfect and you know the more data that comes out, the more evident that these results will get. And I'm curious I've never done a, you know, like an actual published study. I've done little experiments but and I've interviewed so many people and it seems like everyone has a different struggle, either from getting funding, or you know if they're working with a scheduled substance like psilocybin, or you know you're working with heroin, like getting the permits from the DEA is like they're like the red tape is a nightmare and we have to like keep it in a safe and blah, blah, blah. Or you know working with people or, in your case, animals, like what was the hardest part of doing this study for you?
Speaker 2:Well, we didn't have any problems getting the heroin. I do have a safe right next to me right now. Actually, I think the hardest part is maintaining the motivation to continue the study. It takes years and years to do this work. We started the study in 2019, and it was only published in 2024.
Speaker 2:It started off as a very small idea that I had when I first started my lab in 2018. I got a very small grant in order to start doing some of the gene expression analysis, but we've been applying for funding ever since 2020, and we still haven't gotten it, despite the fact that we've published our work. So it's been really, really hard to continue this project and wondering should we give up? Are we going to get funding? I think maintaining that motivation is really challenging.
Speaker 2:We've had a couple of different people come through the lab that have worked on this project the lead author, gabriel Flores. He's now a research assistant professor at Yale. He worked on this project for a long time, but there were a number of other people within my lab that helped him, and people that oftentimes work in labs, either graduate students or postdocs. It's a transition period for them. They're getting training and then they're moving on to the next step of their career, so it can be transitional and it really takes so much effort to put everything together and get it published and I think having that waiting period of going through the steps for publication and getting funding is really the hardest part.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's getting harder and harder now that we're stripping a lot of federal funding from.
Speaker 2:Right. The uncertainty of not knowing what will happen is just excruciating.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have a my best friend works in restoration and biodiversity conservation and things like that. And, yeah, getting federal grants and funding has just gotten a ton harder as of recent because these huge grant pools have just been stripped almost overnight. So, yeah, it's gotten a little tricky navigating. It's always been tricky, but especially as of recent, it's gotten a little tricky navigating. It's always been tricky, but especially as of recent, it's gotten a little harder, depending on what field you're in, to get certain grants or certain funding, which is unfortunate. There's a lot of great research and projects that I think should be really easy to get funded right. But yeah, it's also country-based as well. I think, you know, certain countries are just really into funding certain things. Um, I am curious like, if you know, say, portugal, who decriminalize all drugs, or if certain countries are easier to get funding for drug abuse things. It seems like, maybe for opioids. It seems like the US reigns, unfortunately, supreme for the opioid epidemic.
Speaker 2:Right, and we do have a lot of prescriptions for opioids that we give out here that other countries are not giving out. So have we created the problem ourselves, right? I mean you mentioned OxyContin at the beginning. Yeah, giving out prescriptions for OxyContin led to a lot of people overdosing, and now we know that there's TV shows and dramas that are being made that are talking about what happened back in the early 2000s. Have we created part of this problem ourselves? Have you seen?
Speaker 1:the show Painkiller.
Speaker 2:I can't watch anything about that.
Speaker 2:It's just it's really hard after having lived an experience with somebody who's suffering from addiction, and for so long too. But what I wanted to emphasize I do hope that I can get funding to continue my lab, but I just want to help people that have addiction. If there's people that want to quit and they can't, I just want to be able to help people go through that journey. There's people that don't want to quit and you really have to be in a position where you're motivated to don't want to quit and you really have to be in a position where you're motivated to.
Speaker 2:Here in Philadelphia, we have the Kensington neighborhood, where there's open-air drug markets, and the rate of opioid overdose has been really high in this area for a long time. During COVID there was a bump in opioid overdose deaths in many parts of this country, but really in Philadelphia it didn't change by that much because it was already so high, and this is something that this community has faced for a long time, which was one of the reasons why I wanted to come here to Temple. So I'm hoping that in the future, even if the funding situation is not very good, that I can at least do something to help people who are suffering from addiction.
Speaker 1:Well, on the complete opposite side, what has been the most rewarding aspect of doing this research and was it the day you published? Was it something during the process that, yeah, just felt like a huge relief? Or what was your biggest accomplishment? Or it could be an everyday thing, it could be just getting up in the morning. Yeah, something you liked throughout the whole process.
Speaker 2:I do really like the team of people that I work with. I've been very fortunate to work with people that are very dedicated to their research and being able to see a project from the beginning where we start with absolutely nothing, just some ideas, and able to see all the way through to the end, that now we have this published body of work, we have protocols that we can implement and work with other people on, and being able to try to understand some of the mechanisms that we can't study in humans. That's always been my goal is to try to have the human data inform what we do in our lab. So we know that psilocybin is already in clinical trials, but we don't really know how it's working in the brain. Being able to give some insight into what might be happening is really the most rewarding.
Speaker 1:So what future research would you like to do? Say you got all the grants in the world, you had a billionaire. A group of billionaires were like we'll give you a blank check, whatever you want to do, and you had all the team resources available to you. What would you like to do? And or vice versa, if it's not you, what would you like to see done in the field?
Speaker 2:Wow, there's a lot of ideas. As a professor, I think we probably have many, many ideas for grant applications and different things that we would like to pursue if we could. One thing that I would really like to pivot into is clinical research, and I've started doing some of that with the team here at Temple. We have some amazing doctors in the emergency department and pediatrics who are working with patients that have either been exposed to opioids in utero or are coming into the hospital with opioid use disorder, and they treat them on an everyday basis. So being able to work with some of those patient samples whether it's peripheral blood samples or tissue samples and trying to understand different mechanisms that are changing as they go through their road to recovery or associated with their treatment outcomes that is a primary goal that I have.
Speaker 2:Work in our animal models into humans, because, like I had mentioned before, how we're doing our relapse tests and modeling abstinence isn't really the same as what patients are going through. So I want to be able to do research that's as close to the human condition as I possibly can, and then a really big goal if I had all the money in the world, I would really like to do some intervention work with children that are exposed to drugs in their household at a very young age, maybe from communities that don't have the best education system or the best resources, to try to help those children to have a different outcome long term, because I do think that a lot of our societal problems start with children and if we can change the path, the trajectory that they're on, that we can help them to be able to have a better future.
Speaker 1:So where can people follow your work? I don't know if you primarily use ResearchGate or Twitter or have a website or whatever, or if you're going to release a paper in the future. Where can people see that substance abuse?
Speaker 2:research. I don't have social media. I don't really like to brag about the work that we do. I'm very proud of the people that do the work in my lab, but I try to be more humble. We do use PubMed, which is a government-funded website that has publications, and all of our publications are on there and they're free to the public. So if you click on my website, then you're able to get a link to all of my publications on PubMed, and that's probably the best source to go through Beautiful Well.
Speaker 1:Thanks, stephanie, and thanks for your work. I think this has huge potential and, as the opioid epidemic is increasing unfortunately, I would love to see these natural solutions be implemented and people to have access to the help that they need, and also kids, you know, and family members everyone affected getting some support. That, I think, is crucial. So, thank you.
Speaker 2:I agree. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:And thank you for everyone tuning in and trimming in wherever you are in the world, if you like this episode and you want to support the show. We don't have a Patreon or any way that you can directly donate, but we do have a mother brand mushroom revival and we have a whole line of organic, functional mushroom products, from capsules, gummies, powders, tinctures and we have a special coupon code just for listeners of the podcast this pod treat for a surprise discount. We, we change it, so, uh, who knows what you're gonna to get? And if you don't want to spend any money, that's totally fine. We have a giveaway going on where you pick a winner once a month and you get a box of mushroom goodies.
Speaker 1:And we also have a bunch of free resources on our website from e-books that you can download for free and a ton of educational blog posts with recipes and educational content, and my newest book, the Little Book of Mushrooms, is on there as well. And also, you know, if you learned something cool during this episode or even another episode, spread the word, you know, tell your friends and family and just let people know about how cool mushrooms are and the benefits of psilocybin, etc. Tell a random person at the grocery store, whatever keep the mycelium spreading. So with that, thank you everyone. Much love and may the spores be with you.
