TRIP: So what are you up to right now?

KJ: I’m actually writing up research that I did in London, on people who are
ketamine-dependent, who take it most days of the week for several years. I have a control group of people that smoke cannabis every day, because a lot of the people that take a lot of ketamine also smoke cannabis every day. Some of the research on memory and drugs, like memory and Ecstasy, is very badly controlled, because the people doing that research don’t allow for the fact that these people tend to smoke cannabis every day. I think that research on memory and cognition and drugs is really not particularly worthwhile if they don’t present urine test results. A good piece of research will present urine results to show that their subjects do not have metabolites of other drugs on board.

TRIP: You talked about the neuroprotective functions of ketamine. It’s our understanding that an epileptic seizure causes a rush of glutamate in the brain.

KJ: Yeah, it does. It’s very damaging.

TRIP: So has there been any thought to using ketamine to help address that?

KJ: Ketamine is both pro-seizure and anti-seizure. It depends very much on the kind of brain it’s going into. Ketamine has actually, and there are papers on this in the literature, been given to people in statis epilepticus, to end a seizure. I think if you put ketamine into an over-excited brain, it will calm it down. If you put ketamine into a calm brain, it will over-excite it. It’s probably pro-convulsant in a normal brain, and anti-convulsant in an epileptic brain. It’s a very complicated drug. I think it can be quite a challenge to end statis epilepticus – that’s when you’ve been constantly fitting for half an hour, and you’re really into the brain damage then. I think ketamine is a very good choice. Valium, phenytoin, and then ketamine, I just throw it all in. Often you can’t end up with Valium, and people die of statis epilepticus. They get pumped full of Valium and phenytoin and they still can’t crack it. If you really can’t crack it, then ketamine is a very good drug for ending a serious fit. If you are not epileptic, then you can have fits from ketamine – I know people who have definitely had little fits from ketamine. As with alcohol, you’re more likely to fit on ketamine if you’ve been doing it for years. That’s why people stop doing things like cocaine and ketamine: they start having fits, and then they get really scared. That’s real end stage ketamine dependence.

TRIP: Are you following up on your research into ketamine addiction with any specific treatments?

KJ: People have asked me if I put some of the ideas I gave for treating ketamine addiction to the test. I would say no, not in randomized trials. These are just ideas you can use for any kind of dependence. I’m actually writing a book to treat any kind of compulsive behavior, for a much wider audience, called Feel the Craving and Don’t Do It Anyway, which is dedicated to anyone who ever woke up in the morning saying “Never again” and had done it again by the time they went to bed. It’s a pretty broad spectrum. The advice I give in my book about ketamine dependence you can use for anything you want to get past. It’s about creative visualization, meditation, I mean, these things have been said before about overcoming dependence, but I wanted to bring together this particular take, especially on the creative visualization, and make it relevant to an addictive psychedelic. The idea is you meditate, you go inside yourself, in the archetypal sense of self, and that sort of thing has relevance to people who have become addicted to a psychedelic experience. But they also use these techniques in alcoholism. It’s not tremendously new. In terms of my own work, I’m not sure I’ll be doing a heck of a lot more work on ketamine as such in the future, other than collaborations with people in various countries, and helping them with discussion and interpretation of what they’re doing. I’m thinking of getting back in research terms to some core psychiatry, some core neuroscience – there are a number of things I’m interested in that don’t have much to do with ketamine at all, that other people aren’t really looking at. One of the interesting things in ketamine is using it as a model of psychosis; they’re several people doing very good work on that. I don’t feel that I’m needed to do that.

TRIP: One of the things that struck me in the book was your discussion of Timothy Leary’s work. Timothy Leary has kind of fallen out of favor in the psychedelic scene. It’s not as fashionable right now to go back to the 8-circuit model and say it’s useful as a reference point. I found it really interesting to see that brought back into play.

KJ: I’m not really a fashionable person. I’ve really read an awful lot of what Timothy Leary had to say. I’ve seen a significant part of what he predicted coming true. He was into the internet at a very early stage (he had a company called Knowhere), and he said that it’s the new LSD, by which he meant it’s the new way of connecting with everything. A lot of his stuff has come true. I think he was an extremely intelligent man. A lot of people don’t realize that he was essentially the father of transactional analysis. They associate the name Eric Berne and Games People Play, but that’s why Leary was invited to Harvard, because his Ph.D. thesis at Barclay was called “The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality,” which was essentially setting out the basics of transactional analysis, of how you are defined by your interpersonal interactions, almost an existentialist idea if you like. He was a very original thinker about a lot of things with a lot of very good ideas, and I think that the anti-Leary feeling, which is of quite long standing, is that Leary’s behavior somehow spoiled things for other people that wanted to do psychedelic research. I think that’s a very naïve view.

I think the view that conservative established forces would not have moved against psychedelics and psychedelic research, that everything would have progressed very nicely if not for Leary, is very naïve and very unlikely. If that were really the case, then that research would have continued but under more controlled circumstances. I mean, we have people doing heroin research and cocaine research, and some of those doctors go off the rails and inject themselves with heroin or misuse their licenses or whatever. You know, in England, we’ve got Harold Shipman who killed 150 people with his heroin license, injecting them with heroin – well, they call it diamorphine there so it doesn’t inflame public opinion. There’s not going to be an end to the use of diamorphine in people with cancer and so on because of this, and indeed, why should there be.

Psychedelics frighten people who are very much into control. People who become politicians and policemen are people that really need to control other people. They have a real need. The question is why do they have that need? I think that one of the reasons is that they are people with serious unresolved birth trauma issues, and they know at some level even though they may never have taken LSD, for example, that these drugs bring them face to face in a confrontation with their birth trauma. They’re absolutely terrified of that. The idea of psychedelics triggers this very core memory in them of the situation where they were not in control at all. One minute they’re floating in the womb and the next this great pressure is on them and there’s toxic chemicals, and they’re dying. I mean, some people think the near death experience is a memory of being born, and that we’re already in the afterlife, because it’s like a second life – the baby thinks it’s dying, it thinks this is the end, and suddenly it emerges into light and there are these godlike beings. So you’re already in the afterlife. I think that people who are very involved in control, a lot of politicians become politicians because they want to tell other people what to do. Why bother going into government, or becoming any kind of senior administrator, if you don’t want to boss other people around? That’s the whole point of it: passing laws, telling people what to do. I mean, somebody needs to organize society, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. But you will find that those people have a great deal of difficulty with situations where they’re not in control, and I think they have a very real fear of psychedelics in particular. I mean, they know that LSD is not neurotoxic. You can read that in psychiatric textbooks. No one even claims that. It’s possible that if MDMA didn’t have these unpleasant effects on serotonergic nerve terminals, there might even be some ongoing place for it somewhere, not well-regarded, but a place for it. But there’s no place for LSD at all. And this is one of the reasons for it.

So let’s not put too much on Timothy Leary’s shoulders in terms of what happened with LSD. He was just the fall guy.