Podcast Bio – Ayahuasca Podcast: Sam Believ with Lex Pelger

In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with Lex Pelger.

Lex Pelger is a science communicator, writer, and educator specializing in psychedelics, cannabis, and human consciousness. With a background in biochemistry and molecular biology, he bridges complex scientific research with the public. Lex has authored graphic novels about cannabis, led storytelling events on psychedelics, and currently publishes Cannabinoids and the People, a newsletter covering the latest cannabinoid science.

We touch upon topics of:

  • (00:48 – 02:42) Lex’s journey into psychedelics and plant medicine
  • (02:56 – 04:50) Science, mysticism, and the study of the “supernormal”
  • (05:28 – 07:13) What it means to be a “drug writer” and bridging the knowledge gap
  • (07:44 – 10:08) Cannabis and grandmothers: why older adults should consider cannabinoids
  • (10:51 – 12:46) Social and cultural impact of cannabis in families
  • (13:52 – 18:55) The power of storytelling vs. clinical studies in changing perceptions
  • (19:30 – 20:55) Psychedelics as a cultural tool: structured rites of passage in society
  • (21:12 – 23:36) Challenges in visually depicting psychedelic experiences in media
  • (24:49 – 27:41) Lex’s personal Ayahuasca experience in New York
  • (28:43 – 29:54) Traditional vs. modern Ayahuasca ceremonies
  • (30:45 – 33:37) “We are drugs” – the role of endogenous psychedelics in human experience
  • (34:30 – 38:48) Understanding the Endocannabinoid System and its role in homeostasis
  • (38:53 – 44:24) Lex’s favorite cannabinoids and their unique properties
  • (44:53 – 50:39) The benefits and science of CBD: anxiety, pain, neuroprotection & sleep
  • (50:48 – 53:40) Cannabis, autism, and groundbreaking cases of psychedelic therapy
  • (53:51 – 55:39) Lex’s work, books, and research contributions

If you would like to attend one of our Ayahuasca retreats, go to http://www.lawayra.com.

Find more about Lex Pelger at http://www.lexpelger.com and his Substack newsletter, Cannabinoids and the People. You can also follow his cannabinoid science updates at CVResearch.info.

Transcript

Sam Believ: You’re listening to ayahuasca podcast.com.

Lex Pelger: We are just these like psychopharmacological beans that are just a wash in drugs constantly. We have drugs who wake us up in the morning. We have drugs that make the food taste good. We have drugs to make the sex good, so we have more babies. We have drugs to, I think even for.

Finding the divinity or the oneness of everything, which is, the constant lesson that people get out of psychedelics, specifically ayahuasca, as I’m sure I know, I remember one Chapman being like, the idea that people just wake up like this and they’re like, the earth matters. Nature matters.

We are all connected. It’s just one of the most important things to come out of this. And the idea that these plant medicines, the reason we chose them is ’cause we already have them and that they’re only helping us to do what we were already designed to do. And if we misuse them, it wears the way of that part of what we were trying to do.

Sam Believ: Hi guys, and welcome to ayahuasca podcast.com. As always with you, the whole Sam belief. Today I’m having a conversation with Lex Ger. Lex is a science communicator, writer, and educator with a focus on psychedelics cannabis and human consciousness. He has a background in biochemistry, molecular biology, and uses his experience to bridge the gap between complex scientific research and the public.

Lex is known for his work in demystifying the science behind plant medicines and their therapeutic uses. In this episode, we talk about what it means to be a drug writer connection between science and spirituality, why grandma should use cannabis, endocannabinoid deficiency, psychedelic storytelling, indigenous versus Western approaches, C, B, D, cannabis and autism and more.

Enjoy this episode. This episode is sponsored by Laira Ayahuasca Retreat. At Laira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Laira, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you, Lex. Welcome to the show. Ah, thanks. Having me on. Lex can you tell us a little bit about your story and what brought you to this line of work with psychedelics and plant medicines?

Lex Pelger: Yeah, it’s pretty classic, really. A pretty normal trajectory. I was always fascinated by science ever since I learned about punt squares in seventh grade and genetics. And I probably would’ve remained an atheistic, rationalist, materialist scientist until in university I took some magic mushrooms and went on a walk with some friends around Boston on the Freedom Trail actually, and.

They just opened my mind in the way that they do for a lot of people and made me a slightly less rationalist. Materialist and a little bit more mystical. And so they just continued to fascinate me more and more. And so once I moved to New York after college, I got into the scene there and talked to other people who were using it, and I started to become a drug writer.

Through the course of this, I was always, I always loved books and writing. And this my angle became knowing the neurochemistry of what was happening, but also knowing all the stories out in the world of people using it for underground healing, but also people using it for partying and kind of what happens at the very intentional use as well as the very, very hedonistic use and all the different ways that people can go.

And so that’s how I would try to explain it to people. Eventually my focus shifted more to cannabis mostly ’cause people said you have to, you have to have a book, you should write your first book. And so I chose cannabis as my first thing to write a book on. ’cause I thought it would be fast, which was my great hubris because then it was five years just to even get the basics of the human history of cannabis and the depths of the endocannabinoid system.

But I ended up writing some graphic novels about that actually based on Moby Dick. And that’s still how I’m trying to explain that. But yeah, it was pretty, pretty classic. Scientists sees the light because of psychedelics and they changed his life for the better kind of story.

Sam Believ: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that.

As a scientist, I think there’s this interesting phenomenon when they say science is all rational, as long as you allow them one miracle, like the big Bang, for example. Do you have any, do you have any

Lex Pelger: thoughts about that? Yeah, for sure. Because I’m still working on this long graphic novel series, I’m gonna do 135 books like the 135 chapters of Moby Dick, but I’m already researching what my next books are gonna be about and it is the super normal or supernatural, because most, I started reading Jeffrey Kreel, a researcher out of rice, and realized the data around telepathy and ESP and.

Reincarnation and all of this stuff is just robust and along with entities and all that stuff. And all of a sudden I learned more about this and it’s oh, here’s a field of science that’s been ignored since the real research started around the 1880s. And I’m like, oh, here’s another realm where science is yet fearing to tread.

And if you even try to do research in this you get shut down immediately. The success of that new podcast, the Telepath tapes. Is a good testament to that. But also the art the author really, like Arthur Kessler, was a great science writer and talked about the the blind spot of the earth going around the sun and how humans could have broken through on that well before the Renaissance and just didn’t.

And they always held it there as a blind spot. And he saw a similar blind spot around this interconnectedness, radio between us, whatever it is. Mostly I with that stuff, I feel like it’s fun because I’m never gonna find a real answer. Anyone who studies this stuff knows that. But the more and more you study the phenomena and you hear the theories out there, the more you get closer to some kind of semblance of what might be going on.

Like in so many fields, I’m just, I’ve been reading the phenomena around the supernormal for, five years now, and just starting to get a sense of how wide it is and how fascinated it is.

Sam Believ: Understanding completely. I myself, I’m not a scientist, but I am an engineer by trade, so for me work with plant medicines also made me ask a lot of questions and, my worldview’s a very different one from what it used to be, but in a way that it’s not completely formed yet as you’re saying. There’s there doesn’t seem to be an end to it. It’s this potentially endless exploration. What do you said you’re a drug writer. Can you tell us about what is a drug writer?

Lex Pelger: I focus on trying to explain how these drugs work to people who might be. Curious all the way to pretty against it. I always saw my angle, especially the cannabis work, as trying to convince grandmas that this is the something worth considering for their pain and anxiety and sleep and. Troubles that come along with aging, but also I think to be a good, honest drug writer and science communicator.

You, you want to share the hard side too? So while I’m telling the benefits of grandmas, I’m talking to stoners about all of the clearly proven negatives around cannabis, especially which might be fairly moderate as far as things go, but are certainly there. And I think the way that you can win a reader’s trust is by being as honest as you can about both the benefits and the harms of what you’re talking about, as well as knowing the scientific literature, which is fairly helpful to, in understanding what’s going on around cannabis and psychedelics.

But I always say that the most important stuff about psychedelics especially was figured out by medicine women working in the underground in the seventies, and. All of this new scientific clinical research is great. It has to be done to bring it out into wider acceptance, but it’s a lot of reinventing the wheel and that the best data around psychedelics especially is in the wisdom of talking to people.

Have been working with them for 30 years, especially in a healing ritualistic context, both in the US and indigenous use as well.

Sam Believ: Yeah, it’s interesting that we are very hesitant at least like scientific world is hesitant to using existing knowledge. Indigenous people literally been doing it for thousands of years and underground, tens of years, but still legit information, but they’re like.

It’s illegal, right? So we need to start from scratch. I don’t know why this is, but tell us why you focus on Grandma so much. Why do grandmas need to smoke weed?

Lex Pelger: One reason is that scientifically it’s the clearest gains, but really it’s a personal reason. My grandmother PA passed from Parkinson’s, just as I was starting to study this and I didn’t know enough to push that.

She should certainly be taking a lot of CB, D at least. She was not the kind of person who probably would’ve tried THC, but a lot of CBD would’ve helped her. And it pains me that I didn’t know enough to try to better convince her to take it and. After I spent five years on the road interviewing people about their use I just heard so many stories of older people.

Older, just being 50 and above. Not that old. I’ll be 50 in eight years. But. How much it helps with not only the aches and pains, but for a lot of the really serious conditions, especially around neurogeneration. And I think the thing it’s most proven for clinically in terms of like standardized science is for MS for multiple sclerosis because that is both a neurodegenerative disease and an autoimmune disorder.

It’s the body. It’s a body’s immune system attacking the myelin sheaths around the neurons that help the electricity to flow. And so in the Venn diagram of what cannabinoids do, they are both very potent for neurogeneration and they’re very potent for autoimmune disorders. And since MS is in the center of that Venn diagram, that’s where you hear about so much benefit.

I know. Our mechanic back home is a really sweet guy, and his wife suffered from MS for a long time and finally started using CBD. And for the first time in years she could run up the stairs again and just go about her day in a completely different kind of way. And the interesting part about the cannabinoids is they’re not always a silver bullet.

That happens sometimes for sure, but they are so often something that helps ease what’s going on. And with their general non toxicity. There’s just so many elderly people who are missing out on cannabis because it’s gonna be the second or third or fourth or fifth thing that their doctor might recommend, and I think it’s really important for.

Any of us to come outta the closet about our cannabis use, especially older people, because you never know who the person you’re talking to might pass it on to someone they know, or it might be them themselves, and they finally start trying it, and it really helps them a lot. So I think that’s where cannabis can do the most help for the world with the, greatest with the least amount of risk.

Sam Believ: But speaking of grandmother as well what about like emotionally or culturally, like the impact of s being able to have those kinds of conversations with your grandparents or the connection that will be formed, because you’re s smoking weed for example. Is there a value in that or just just the medical side of things?

Lex Pelger: I do think there is a big social side and growing closer side that doesn’t get focused on enough. You hear just so often, I’ve heard stories of people who finally came out to their parents or the grandparents about using cannabis and it turns out they were interested or at. They didn’t hate it. And eventually they got to use cannabis together and it was just a beautiful experience and it opened things up.

You hear the same thing about psychedelics, so of course those stories are more rare because the stigma and the fear is stronger there. But for talking to your parents and grandparents about cannabis now, it’s just so much easier, in terms of coming outta the closet. Even 10 years ago, this was a much harder.

Conversation to have. And now everybody’s heard about the CBD thing. That has jumped the shark. And with the, I think the majority of people in the US now in states with medical or legal access, it’s just people get that there’s something there. And studies consistently show that the two greatest trustworthy source of information are your doctors who are still often very dinosaur like around this stuff.

Not always, but often. Then the other source is friends and family. And so talking to people about this, not only could you help them medically, but sometimes those small amounts of THC that these that people start using every day can just help so much with the anxiety or the PTSD or the negative emotions that they’re carrying around.

And being able to share that and help your family I think would be a really beautiful thing. I didn’t do, I didn’t cause a lot, a whole lot of changes in my family. But I wish I had for my grandparents for sure. So I always hope that this, writing, these videos, all this stuff I write a cannabinoid, I write a newsletter called Cannabinoids in the People every week.

And it’s a exhaustive list of all the new cannabinoid science and it’s usually a hundred new papers a week. And. It’s 7,500 words. Nobody’s going through all of that, but I do, my hope is that I get the best of that science out there that otherwise wouldn’t have been seen. And it’s gonna help some people spark a conversation, whether it be MDs or regular readers who are gonna be like, oh, for your thing, look, there’s something new about your thing.

And getting that out there will help, spread the word and make those little bit of changes in the world that help.

Sam Believ: Yeah. Also from the social point of view I know you focus a lot on storytelling, so I can imagine parents or grandparents, that could be pretty, pretty cool storytelling that happens there.

Talk to us about why you focus on storytelling. I know you do storytelling events and storytelling versus clinical studies.

Lex Pelger: I appreciate that you’ve done your background research. Not many people would’ve cat caught the storytelling events because those were seven plus years ago because my firstborn just turned seven.

And so I focus on stories because Plato said those who tell the stories roll the world and. They’re so much more convincing than clinical data. I like the science because that’s how I’m wired, but I know that’s not what convinces people. What convinces people is stories. And so one of the most important or most interesting things to me that I’ve ever done was I was actually trying to promote these graphic novels and so I did a open mic storytelling tour around the US and Canada, and.

Using working with a lot of local psychedelic societies to set up events. And they were beautiful because it wouldn’t, it wasn’t tons of people. It might be 20 to 30 maybe in a big city, 40 people, and you would just put a mic up and let people tell their stories about psychoactives. And generally people would focus on psychedelics, but all the different psychoactives came up.

And the cool part is you can still listen to these stories. They are on the lorenzo Hagerty’s podcast which keeping you the first psychedelic podcast, which just keeping you mind keeping my mind right now. But I have been linked to at at lex paler.com. So I have these audios of these stories.

You can hear them and they’re so convincing. I learned so many things. I had been studying psychedelics hard at that point for a lot of years, and I kept learning stuff from people about how they use psychedelics to make their lives better. And the fascinating part was how the stories. Telling Nights often had a similar trend to them that was just beautiful and perfect and completely unplanned because the first people who would tell stories for like the first half of the night would often be guys who were broadish and had came here because they had a story to tell.

They knew they were gonna talk and they would tell a story about how they discovered psychedelics and how it changed your life. And they’re often, quite interesting stories. But. As a night wore on and people realized what a sweet vibe it was and how accepting everybody was in the event.

People would get up to tell stories and they would say, I’ve never told this to anyone before, or I’ve never told this publicly before. And they would share a story about sometimes a very difficult experience with LSD or Ayahuasca that was not good or didn’t feel good sometimes, months or years later, they would realize what lesson they learned.

But sometimes not, sometimes it was simply hallucinogenic persisting perceptions disorder and it would just be really hard times for months. And they’re not sure less than they got out of it. And people would also tell stories that about how these things healed. Stuff in them that people said was unhealable.

The one thing I kept hearing again, that I hadn’t heard much before was for obsessive compulsive disorder, which is. Not very well treatable with any current tools that we have and people would use. Fair. People are comfortable with psychedelics, and I heard this story half a dozen times over the course of the trip from different people.

They would use a fairly high dose of psychedelics and they would go into it being like, I’m going to reprogram my own brain during this trip and. Dial down this OCD and people would do it sometimes it was one magnificent session that completely changed your life, and sometimes it was working over the course of six months or a year.

But they would use psychedelics very intentionally to rewire their own brain and. The thing about the stories is that’s so much more convincing. You can look at all this science about the neuroplasticity of what psychedelics can do, and there might be some case reports out there, stuff like this. But none of that is very juicy.

That’s not gonna particularly make people think I should put in the work. And the scary work of using psychedelics for my OCD, but if you hear a couple of stories from other people who did that is gonna be so much more convincing. ’cause you’re gonna hear not a dry scientific report but you’re going to hear about a, a.

Rough and tumble, sometimes good, sometimes bad experience of a real person who had to figure out on their own how to get this done. And that’s why I think the stories are so important. And it’s also why I hope that we will build more and more spaces for doing psychedelics together and have cultural containers for them.

In so many of these indigenous spaces. There are certain ways that you do psychedelics, usually around the elders in community, or they set you up to go off on your own and things like that. And I think the best. View of that I’ve ever seen from the Western perspective is Aldis Huxley’s the island. I think it’s the closest thing we have to a blueprint for how psychedelics be well integrated into Western society.

And his idea was you only need half a dozen good trips in your life. Like Alan Watts said, you get. The you get the message, you can hang up the phone. And so the idea that at 18 you do a trip with your, a mom or your priest or your rabbi and in your thirties you do it with a trusted loved one.

And at certain phases in your life, there are cultural containers for, to do a psychedelic to help you figure out how you’re doing and where you’re going is what I would love to see. Come on more and more, and I think it’s happening out there more and more. But I haven’t been in the US for a while and I’ve been more focused on cannabis this last year.

So I think that stuff is happening more and more, but I’m not as tapped into what’s happening in the underground or gray area ground as I used to be.

Sam Believ: Yeah, it’s a really interesting thing to think about, how would society work if psychedelics were a normal part of it? Not a free for all, but culturally appropriate and controlled, but not too much. For example, they say the ancient Greeks were dropping on stuff and they were doing it once a year with the cookie on. I’m just thinking about for normal people. Yeah. A couple times in a lifetime, maybe on a certain events, a rites of passage style way, but for, let’s say somebody who wants to be a politician or something like that, to have a quota of a certain amount of.

I was ca ceremonies or psychedelic experiences so that, that they come to the position of power from a right point of view. Because I think yeah I’m very excited about the idea of using psychedelics as a tool to make our society more sane regarding psychedelic storytelling as well.

I’m, currently working on a documentary with a friend of mine about Ayahuasca, and it’s just it’s extremely hard to show people like what happens in the ceremony because it’s all internal. So storytelling is as close as it gets to be able to convey this information. Do you have any advice for us on storytelling or on visual depictions of psychedelics?

Lex Pelger: That is tough. If you wanted to go to the next mile. There is that Ayahuasca film Blueberry which came out I don’t know how long ago. But apparently I haven’t even watched a film. Apparently it’s not the most amazing film. But the, I have watched the psychedelics scene in that film and it is.

Often called one of the best depictions of what a Aya experience looks like when you’re actually in it. And actually, the last time I was in Paris with a buddy, it turns out that there was a show like that at a museum. And that same creator had made a 3D dimensional show of psychedelics in a headpiece.

You could look around and see, which was an interesting way to do it. It’s about as close as you’re gonna get while being sober, but. It’s true. The visuals of it are really tough and

part of me feels like people mostly. Have a sense of what a psychedelic experience is now because it’s been in the zeitgeist for so long. Back in the fifties when people were doing this, they didn’t know what it was gonna feel like. They didn’t have any like cultural programming about, what it was supposed to be.

And now we do. And. I don’t think the visuals are as important a component of explaining it to people as the storytelling of the really smart people get it. I think the words from a trustworthy old medicine person are gonna be more convincing than, videos of people having their experiences and witnessing a ceremony, for those people, it’s gonna be hard for ’em to talk about it. ’cause they don’t often the people, the regular participants don’t have the words for it ’cause it’s such a hard thing to describe. But for people who’ve been working for with this for a long time, I’ve seen some pretty amazing descriptions of what’s going on.

And so I think. To, to me, the best way to convince people who are interested but nervous about this is to be talking to medicine people about, dur in just a regular conversation about what they see happening, how they think the medicine works, both the theory and the feeling of it and the background of how much work it took them to get there.

But but also I’m glad you’re doing a documentary like that because it helps to spread the word, but yeah, that’s a big, you bit off something big, huh?

Sam Believ: Yeah. I’m not the, I’m not the, I’m not the video guy. I’m just the guy that knows few things about ayahuasca and obviously I, I run an Alaska retreat one of the biggest in Colombian.

Definitely one of the most reputable. So we have access to a lot of people and their stories and surprisingly, people don’t mind sharing. A lot of people after having this life changing experience, they actually want to share, they wanna spread the word. Same as to myself. Like I had the Naas experience that changed my life and now I started a retreat and the podcast, and who knows what else I’m gonna start.

But it’s the desire is to spread the word. You want everyone and your grandma to feel that experience, right? But my friend we were filming it with, he’s a, he’s an Emmy nominated documentary director. Actually like a few days ago, he won another trophy. It’s a cinema. I think it’s like.

It’s a big trophy for documentary people apparently. So I believe in him and he is he’s gonna try Ayahuasca for the first time himself. And he is gonna document he’s, he quit antidepressants. He documenting all of, it’s like a typical story of a somewhat depressed person coming to plant medicines for healing.

And, yeah we’ll get a, there will be many storylines intertwined, like Columbia’s story because we’re located in Columbia and Columbia’s story with, choosing wrong drugs and coca and then how psychedelic tourism started here, but then when somewhere else, because of Narcos and all of this it’s, that’s what the documentary will be about.

So not just about ayahuasca, but also about the larger context. So talking about Ayahuasca, I know you had your own experience and you surprised me because you said you had it in New York.

Lex Pelger: Yeah. Yeah. I was actually hosting at my house. I had a big couch surfing Oasis, and so we had our ceremony c yeah.

There was a person who would come through and they would have the ceremonies at our place. And yeah, it was nice of, of course you hear that you, if you can avoid doing the city you should because all the vibes around, I certainly get that, but at that point in my life, I didn’t have the option and the city was the place.

And we had a good vibes in our apartment. We had a, from all of the hosting of travelers coming through, it just felt like a very safe, warm place because all of our art on the walls. And so it was a really, it was a really nice time. And it for me, those experiences weren’t that intense for me.

I’m, I am a bit of a hard head is the term for it. It takes a lot to get me somewhere because I did so much experimentation in my twenties, I just tried a lot of things because I wanted to know what the psychoactives were. And so now. It takes a lot for anything to hit. Which is fine.

I just, I don’t really bother much anymore. I’ve gotten the messages. Even this year my my wife is ah, I might, I might do something for helping with direction and it’s pretty nice for me at 42 to be like, huh, not really worried about direction. It’s pretty clear right now.

Like I don’t need to ask the eing a bunch of divinations. I don’t particularly feel like I need the plant medicine right now, I know what work I have to do. Be a good papa, be a good partner, be a good person. And so the, but the interesting part about it to me is it’s almost like having read an important book.

Having done these in your life, they will always be in you and you’ll never forget them, even if it’s been a long time since you’ve had psychedelics. They’ve al they’ve already altered you. And those lessons have sunk in. And I certainly understand someone like Sasha Shulgin who said he likes to do mushrooms every, he, I think he liked to do ’em every nine months or so.

He saw it as a I guess scrubbing of his brain and that it was a good. Like almost a good, just like regular tuneup of his brain. And I certainly see where people are coming from with that. But I know for me personally, every time I’ve done any psychedelics for the last number of years, not a ton happens and not a lot of great insights come through either.

It’s it’s all very con confirmatory, it’s kinda I understand this, I’ve heard it before. Keep going in this direction of acting like a decent human being. So these experiences are certainly some of the most important things that ever happened to me.

And also right now I’m not feeling that called to them either.

Sam Believ: Yeah. That makes sense. And have you had a have you ever sat with, without asking like a traditional setting with the shaman in the jungle style environment?

Lex Pelger: No. No. Yeah, I do hope to do that. But right now travel is tough with little kids, but I do appreciate the idea.

Sam Believ: We’re not in a jungle here, we’re in a Colombian countryside, but for most foreigners, it they call it jungle because they kind. It’s hard to tell a difference. It’s pretty wild. So you are invited you can come with your kids as well. We got kids as well. And we have a, I’m an indigenous shaman from a long lineage, so doing it properly.

I’ll tell you more details at the end of the episode, so if you ever feel cold.

Lex Pelger: Oh, cool. Thank you. And especially being able to bring kids. I like places like that, it’s just a better vibe. Especially ’cause that’s how it so often was done. Little kids are allowed to wander through and the adults are acting a little bit different.

It’s fine. It just seems so much more connected to life and the universe to have little kids around.

Sam Believ: In a traditional setting. They kids drink as well. In sha in shaman’s, families, kids have ayahuasca before they even have milk. The way it works is they apply some ayahuasca on a nipple and then.

They get their first milk. So it’s like all together. It’s, it’s sounds a bit extreme, but I’ve seen, when I went to the jungle for the first time, I’ve seen kids that drink ayahuasca and they, they seemed better than the kids that don’t. So that’s an interesting that’s an interesting thing to do.

But why do you say that we are drugs?

Lex Pelger: We are drugs. I don’t think that was me. That was do Was that Dali? I think it was Dali. I’ve heard it from you okay. Yeah, I like it because. For me, one of the most fascinating things about all these plant medicines is that it’s all harnessing neural systems that we already have and that we can get to in a sober way.

That’s there is the book Zigzag Zen by Alan Bader, and he talked about how. Zen Buddhist, or Buddhism in general got to the West and specifically us, and he interviewed all of the major early teachers of the West who helped to bring this here. And it turns out that all but one of them said, first they found.

That other space using psychedelics. And they realized they didn’t wanna do the rollercoaster up and down to get to that space. They wanted to be able to get there on their own. And so they discovered that Buddhism and meditation was a way to get there on their own. And the only person who said that she didn’t use psychedelics to first discover this, turns out she was lying.

And she did too. So the entire history of Buddhism in the United States comes from people who use psychedelics to see it. And then soberly went there to get it as well. And. All of this stuff is in us. We’re producing DMT in our brains already. So exactly where no one even knows why it’s there.

No one knows. But the reason that cannabinoids work so well is ’cause we have this incredibly widespread endocannabinoid system that goes all the way back to life before it left the ocean sponges and things like that. And the stimulant class as well. For all those major classes of drugs, they’re just harnessing what we already have and pushing it a little bit farther.

But humans can push those things farther on our own using all of these different techniques that, religious mystics have been using for a long time. Or people who have something that might look like a pathology that leads to an imbalance of a certain neurotransmitter and. Comes out in a way that can, I think, very appear or perhaps feel very drug-like.

And so in one sense we are just these like psychopharmacological beans that are just a wash in drugs constantly. We have drugs who wake us up in the morning. We have drugs that make the food taste good. We have drugs to make the sex good so we have more babies. We have drugs to, I think even for finding the divinity or the oneness of everything, which is, the constant lesson that people get out of psychedelics, specifically ayahuasca, as I’m sure I know, I remember one Chapman being like the idea that people just wake up like this and they’re like, the earth matters. Nature matters. We are all connected. It’s just one of the most important things to come out of this. And so the idea that. These plant medicines, the reason we chose them is ’cause we already have them and that they’re only helping us to do what we were already designed to do.

And if we misuse them, it wears the way of that part of what we were trying to do. And so I think it’s a beautiful balance. I used a lot of drugs in my twenties and early thirties and it was a really good feeling. I mostly rode them well. I had addiction issues, but it wasn’t with drugs.

And I think it’s really wonderful when you can, with the help of a community and your own insights and reading the wisdom of those who went before. Use drugs to chart out a path that’s gonna leave you in a better space at the end of your life, a better person. And if used well it’s a beautiful thing to see.

Sam Believ: Yeah. And talking about endocannabinoid system talk to us what do you mean by endocannabinoid deficiency?

Lex Pelger: Yeah, that the endocannabinoid deficiency is more of a theory from this researcher Russo. And it’s the idea that a number of diseases that we have is because we don’t have enough endocannabinoids in our system.

And we certainly know that people with certain types of trauma and other diseases, they have lower levels of some of the famous endocannabinoids like anandamide and two a g, and that perhaps supplementing those with. Outside cannabinoids like C, B, D and THC from the plant can help top up your own endocannabinoid system.

And so it’s a reasonable idea, but it’s such a widespread one that it’s hard for scientists Exactly. Prove it. More what you would be looking for is specific diseases, but the idea that helping to balance your endocannabinoid system can lead to overall health makes a lot of sense because. I’ve seen scientists say that a good definition of endocannabinoid system is a, your overall homeostasis system for your body.

It is your system of balance, and so much of health is just imbalance in something. And the best metaphor, one of my favorite metaphors for the endocannabinoid system comes from Martin Lee of project CBD. He said the endocannabinoid system is a bit like an octopus with about 10,000 arms, and it sits here at your center and it can just twiddle dials all over your body and brain.

So if your kidneys are slightly out of whack with a certain thing, the endocannabinoid system will respond and slightly tune stuff because. One of the powers of the endocannabinoids is that unlike a lot of the drugs that we take or are in us, the endocannabinoids are lipids. They are fats, and so they don’t go into water.

That’s why you can’t inject them. That’s why it’s been harder to study them over the years. But also we have a very fine tuned lipid sensing system in our body. And we used to think that was just because we eat lipids and you need to know how many lipids are round food wise. But it turns out they’re also a widespread signaling system.

And it seems like an incredibly important signaling system. And so the idea that this endocannabinoid system has evol, has been with life since almost the beginning, and is in every mam, is in basically every field of life, but insects. And that’s because it is. Slightly changing things all over the place and it’s involved with almost all the major neurotransmitters that you’ve heard of, a whole bunch of minor signaling pathways that are important to scientists, but don’t get a lot of, popular press.

And it’s so much fun how big it is, and it’s a reason that in these graphic novels, the whole idea I decided to use Moby Dick as my guiding star is because the endocannabinoid system is so widespread that I needed a good way to explain it. And the metaphor I came up with is to treat the human brain like the ocean and all of the different neurotransmitters swimming around down there are different types of fish.

So dopamine would be a shark serotonin would be a dolphin. And then I made the endocannabinoids be whales. And so it’s like we have been exploring the ocean and then all of a sudden, 25 years ago, we found out that not only are whales in the ocean, there’s millions of whales in the ocean, and they’re incredibly important.

There’s this whole class of them down there doing all of these different kinds of changes. And so that’s why I need something so big to explain it because the. How the endocannabinoid system interacts with all the other major systems you hear about, just goes on and on. And I’m gonna need a couple of chapters for each neurotransmitter.

You can see the start of that. I have a bunch of writing that project CBD focused on each neurotransmitter to get the basics of what’s going on with them. But it really. It really goes to show why cannabis just keeps getting proven in clinical literature and in surveys and in people’s anecdotal data.

Everything people are saying about how well it works is backed up by how much we know about the endocannabinoid system and it being this system overall balance.

Sam Believ: What are your favorite

Lex Pelger: cannabinoids? Anandamide is my great white whale. That was the first discovered endocannabinoid neurotransmitter.

It discovered 91 by the father endocannabinoid Dr. Lumm and his someone working with him, bill Deva. And the reason that Dr. Deva named it anandamide is ’cause ananda is a Sanskrit word for bliss. It is one of the three holy words in Sanskrit, which is said to be. A mystical language in its own right, like Hebrew, like a couple other script stories.

People like how you actually say it changes the world. So Ananda Peace is a sacred word in Sanskrit, and he decided to apply that to this neurotransmitter and I. I think the more and more we’ve been learning about it over these last decades, the more that Appalachian makes a lot of sense. And so that’s why I’m explain.

I’m using these books to focus on Anand Demine explaining how much this great white whale does in our neural ocean system, but. Personally, the one that matters the most to me is THC. And in the metaphor that would be an elephant because elephants are just whales of the land. They’re very similar species.

They’re both top of the food chain. They’re K two species according to social biology. But THC is really important to me because. It’s changed my life so much. Before psychedelics did, I started using cannabis, I don’t know, 17 or so. And the funny part is cannabis and THC have always been such a double-edged sword for me, and that’s why it almost, I feel like making me a better writer about this stuff, because from the very beginning, cannabis would induce a lot of social anxiety.

And even through college, even though I knew it was the worst thing I could do before going to a party, I also had, compulsion issues and self-control issues. And I couldn’t stop myself before going to party, even though smoking cannabis before the party made the party so much worse. I kept on doing it and I finally, in my twenties and thirties in New York got a more reasonable use where I just do it by myself at my house most nights.

And I have taken some tolerance breaks over the years. Just. To prove I can, but I don’t like them. Even after I get through the withdrawal, I don’t quite feel like myself. Like it’s nice that I can get around without smoking most nights. But I feel better when I do. And one of the greatest proofs is.

When I am in a bit of a mood now, my wife will say, don’t you wanna go to the basement? Which is our family metaphor. And she wants me she doesn’t like it when I start to skip weed for a couple days. She would prefer that I do that. It brings me to a space that often feels more like myself, especially ’cause I’m using.

Fairly not potent stuff and at pretty small doses and it feels like this microdosing of THC is has been helping me with mental balance my whole life. And it also helps, I would definitely say with my spiritual work because. I use that and I finally feel free to stop thinking about my regular, job and come up here and dive into my old books and make my little prayers and quotes on the walls and do the work that I think is the work that’s gonna matter the most of what I’m doing.

THC is such a double-edged sword for so many people. Cannabis addiction is real. The moderate links to schizophrenia, especially if you start it as a young adolescent, are real. People getting psychosis from rapid cannabis withdrawal is rare, but certainly happens. I just posted some case reports of that last week and.

I think for all of the power of cannabis and I, and you can go on and on about how healing it can be. It’s really important to say the negatives that can happen both for young people who are at risk of psychosis and for older people who are at risk of getting too high and having a terrible time, and also never trying to medicine again.

And once I started working for some CBD companies, I heard the, their constant mantra of start low and go slow. And that’s so true for any drug, but I think it’s especially true for even CBD and especially THC. Just start with the smallest doses and work your way up. So C-B-D-C-B-D is probably the last one though because CBD has kept diapers on my baby’s butts since they were born.

I’ve been working for CBD companies nonstop since I became a papa and needed a real job. And so it is an amazing medicine with. Very few downsides though. The sleeper cannabinoid, I should mention is PEA. That is a, an endocannabinoid that’s found in every cell and body of the body and brain.

And it is incredibly safe. It’s a very potent immune system booster. So it’s very good for regular diseases and it’s also a cool painkiller. I have a whole page about that. I maintain a cannabinoid science site called CV Research Info for CV Sciences. One of the big companies I work for and.

I have all the data on PA that’s ever been done, and it’s just such a powerful molecule that you just buy on the internet really easily and can do a lot of good for people. So when I walk people through how to use cannabinoids, I say, start with C, B, D, then start with micro doses of THC, and if you still need help, move on to PEA.

And so I think those are the three most helpful things that people can buy and start using right away.

Sam Believ: Cool. You mentioned C, B, D, and actually as I was preparing for this episode. I heard some of your previous podcast appearances. I went ahead and bought some CBD on internet. I have I’ve never used CBD before.

I, I rarely even smoked weed. I am yeah, I don’t have the habit, but I, it sounded exciting, like things you were saying. Talk to us more about CBD. Why does one use it? What is it for? Because obviously you said enough to make me buy some.

Lex Pelger: That’s good. Yeah. The hard part about CBD for people who are feeling in pretty good health is you might not notice that much any kind of huge difference.

It can help with anxiety, it can help with mental equilibrium. But if you’re feeling pretty good, c, BD is just gonna keep you feeling pretty good. I do believe it is an incredible thing for protecting the brain from aging in general and protecting the body in general. And it. Some of the things that it has the most use for, I think is for pain.

As well as for neurodegenerative diseases, pretty much any neurodegenerative disease, you should be taking 50 to a hundred milligrams of CB, D every day. And again, you might not notice a giant difference. Some people don’t. But it’s going to be protecting your brain. You’re gonna have a longer window of a good period.

It’s gonna keep the decay away for longer. And I would usually recommend taking CBD in a full spectrum extract. Because full spectrum extracts, they will have not only the minor cannabinoids like CBG and CBN and things like that. It’ll have micro doses of THC and micro doses of THC are very good for the brain.

I have another page about that on CV research info. But. Also you have the terpenes, which are the things that give the smells to the plant. And some of those are very healing in their own right, like beta kaylene and ol. And then you have the other plant components the flavonoids, aph, phenols, stuff like that.

And it seems like. All of those working together with the CBD does better than the CBD on its own. There’s not as many studies all in full spectrum extracts, especially ones that are head-to-head isolated CBD versus a full spectrum. But when that happens, the full spectrums tend to do better. And I think those micro doses of can of minor cannabinoids have a lot to do with it.

The thing about CBD is. Some people only need 10 or 20 milligrams a day for whatever it is they’re dealing with, but people need to know that they could go to very high doses. Unfortunately, it can be expensive to take even just a hundred milligrams of CBD per day. But when you’re dealing with a serious condition that might be the thing that’s worth it because you have lots of data in children with epilepsy because.

Probably a lot of people know about Charlotte Web, Charlotte’s Web and the story of children with very severe pediatric epilepsy who CBD isolate completely changed their lives. And that was one of the big things that brought CBD to the public consciousness in the us. And now these kids are often getting hundreds to thousands of milligrams of isolated CBD per day and.

They are generally fine. The main thing you have to watch out for is sleepiness which is annoying and also an upset gut. Loose stools and things like that. And so that doesn’t happen to everybody. But that is enough to make kids stop using it or to lower their dosages, and that’s the main risk to watch out for anybody.

And generally that isn’t happening at less than a hundred milligrams. But. It is one of the reasons you wanna start low and go slow just in case you’re very sensitive to those kind of effects. But it is, it’s pretty amazing the, when you look at the clinical studies of CBD, how many different. Areas that you can find evidence for.

So I would say to any listener out there, if you are struggling with some, if you or a loved one is struggling with something some kind of disease or disorder, just go to PubMed where they keep the biomedical literature and look up CB, D and the name of the thing you’re looking for, and then click on the side and just look for reviews where they review the evidence.

Great reviews come out every week on all of these different diseases, and you’ll find one within the last year or two that just summarizes everything that’s ever been done, and you can get a better sense of this makes sense for you. And if it’s a disease that is well known, there will be a study for it.

Also feel free to reach out to me. Pelger@gmail.com is an easy way to get me. And you can also check out the CD research at info site. I’m constantly updating that and putting new studies online and making summary videos about that. And so it works. It really, for so many different things, it’s worth trying.

The last one that is worth mentioning is sleep, because. The three main things that people are using CBD for according to the studies of why is pain, anxiety, and sleep. And sleep is the one where it’s actually the least proven because sleep is hard to study. And also because with C, b, D and sleep, it’s very odd.

And this, I learned more from being on the road and talking to people than I do from the literature. C, b, D for sleep, about a third of people. CBD helps ’em to sleep. A third of people, CBD, wakes ’em up so they shouldn’t take it before bed. And for the last third of people, CB, D doesn’t really affect their energy or sleep levels at all.

And there’s no way to know which of those categories you’re gonna be in without trying it. And so I would tell people, if you wanna try it for sleep, just take it before bed. If it helps you sleep, great. If it keeps you up. Take it in the morning. A lot of times people can’t sleep because of anxious thoughts.

If you take CB, D in the, at breakfast and lunch, you’re gonna be less anxious and go to and get to bedtime with less anxiety and have better sleep. But the funny part about CBD is if you take, if you give someone high levels of isolated CBD. It tends to make them more alert. There, there’s a bit of a biphasic response, so little bits can help people sleep and lots tend to wake them up, but everyone’s response is different.

So more than almost anything else with sleep, you have to figure out what works for you.

Sam Believ: The other pretty great story about CBD and autism. Can you share.

Lex Pelger: Yeah. Yeah. The actually, and since you are in the psychedelics, I’ll share another one too and I’ll make ’em both quick. But I have a nephew who, who has autism and my it’s my cousin’s kid and she was one of those involved mothers who did everything to try to help. And he was, looked like he was gonna be one of the kids who just wouldn’t be able to ever leave his house or assisted care kind of living, which isn’t the end of the world. But she wanted, more for him.

And she tried all of these different methods and finally I convinced her to try just a dropper full of CBD every day and within six months. That completely changed everything. He was a brand new kid. He joined the basketball team. He joined the local band. He’s now doing his own thing, working on his own.

And it just completely changed their lives and in a way that she didn’t imagine was possible. And the science of this makes sense. We know that CBD. Helps to and the cannabinoids helped release BDNF, which is a major brain growth factor that helps with synaptic plasticity and the growth of new connections, and perhaps even neurogenesis the creation of new brain cells, which is something we didn’t even, scientists weren’t even sure happened.

So even still, they’re not positive it happens, but if it is happening, the cannabinoids are making it, are helping it to happen. So there’s science backing up that this helps autism. And there’s so much research on it now if you go to see the research info, I think I already made the video on that one.

And the amount. I just, I couldn’t include all the data by any means. So that would be the first thing to try with autism. The other one, the story that I got from New York was for LSD because this was a papa who I met at an event. And he had an 18-year-old kid who was non-communicative. He had never talked and he was responding.

They knew he was in there. They could, there was a back and forth and a relationship. But there was never any speaking. And finally one day this dad just said, what the hell? And he gave the kid most of a dose of acid, which is not exactly what I would recommend, but that’s what this guy did.

And then once it hit. This kid just started talking. They had their first conversation in the, in their entire lives during this acid trip. And then it wore off and he went back to, where he was before. But it was just overall a really positive experience. And the guy said, unfortunately, my ex-wife and I, it’s very not good.

And if she had found out I would never see my son again. And so we only did it that one time. And, it was hard for him because he thought that there was help here that could have helped develop their relationship. He was never gonna be able to have a chance to explore it. But it’s something I’ve been hearing more and more over these last years is low dose to even high dose psychedelics for people with autism and helping them to process the world.

Sam Believ: Yeah, there’s all kinds of really cool stories and. I do believe in the sort of miraculous feeling they can come from those medicines. Lex, thank you so much for this episode. I think it was really interesting. Can you tell people where to find you and more about your books or your your other work?

Lex Pelger: Sure. Yeah. Thanks for asking. So I got, there’s two graphic novels that are published. The queer one is the history, one on the AIDS crisis and Reagan and medical cannabis. A lot of heroes in this one. And then this is the a science history of the discovery of the structure of the CBN molecule in the 1940s and the like 80 years of scientific searching to get the first structure of a cannabinoid.

And of course, the cannabinoids are elephants, hence the. Book title, so you can find those@lexpaler.com. If you wanna stay abreast of the science my newsletter on Substack is cannabinoids and the People. So I put all the new stuff there each week. And for anyone listening to this, if you wanna make a cool a hundred bucks my new sponsor is a cannabis health research initiative.

It’s a survey project out of Johns Hopkins to, get people to talk about their cannabis use over the course of a year and add that to the scientific literature similar to the T 21 project that happened outta the uk. And so I’m working with realm of Caring to write their newsletter about this, but also just spread the word that this cannabis health research initiative is a place where you can, any listener can make some money and also actually add to the scientific literature around cannabis.

That I think is a really great thing to do. And just for a personal side, I do a lot of sharing about the books I read. Books are really important to me, so if you look up Lex re’s books on the major platforms, I’m putting out content ar around those as well. But yeah, I really appreciate the chance to talk.

You really, it’s great to have someone who ask great questions and has great experiences themselves and it was very enjoyable. Thank you.

Sam Believ: Thank you Alex. Guys, you’ve been listening to our podcast. As always, we do the whole Sam and I will see you in the next episode. I hope you enjoyed this episode.

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