Episode 78
Forward Thinking Treatment Modalities

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Description

On this forward-thinking episode, we have multiple special guests, Dana Lerman, MD & Scott Bienenfeld, MD, co-owners and founders of Skylight Psychedelics, Social Worker & Journalist Joe Schrank, as well as Clinician Kevin Franciotti, LAC. We highlight the evidence-based yet controversial treatment modalities of ketamine, psychedelics, and plant-based medicines and the potential these new modern interventions hold. The current mental health and addiction treatment landscape is not moving the dial on these saddening epidemics. Though, with conversations like these and widening our scope of new medicalized frameworks, we can begin to truly help more individuals lead intentional lives and expand our nation’s well-being.

Talking Points

1. How did Skylight Psychadelics come to be?
   
2. Joe Schrank’s take on expanding recovery services
   
3. Autonomy and treatment
   
4. Inner-healing Intelligence
   
5. Input from Kevin as a counselor on the front lines
   
6. Cultural acceptance
   
7. Deep-rooted trauma and ketamine treatment
   
8. It is not a panacea
   

Quotes

”The definitional authority of recovery lies with the individual, people get to say what their recovery is. So when these things became more prevalent with the use of psychedelics or plant-based medicines, the backlash in the current paradigm is ‘that’s not recovery’. And my response is, maybe it’s not your recovery. But recovery is a positive change and improvements. There are alot of we can look at a life comprehensively and determine if somebody is doing better… So expanding the idea of what recovery is critical because we have been doing the same thing for decades, and it’s gotten nowhere. So why not try these medicines, especially if it is medicalized.”

-Joe Shrank – Social Worker & Journalist

Episode Transcripts

Episode 78 Transcripts

hello everyone my name is Brandon Burns welcome back to a very special episode of Finding Peaks again Brandon’s chief executive officer Peaks recovery centers for all the folks out there grab your popcorn grab your soda because we’re about to have another excellent show here at finding Peaks we just recently did an episode with uh Kevin frenchiotti again to nailed it nailed it I don’t have to do it I don’t think I have to do the bio this time but excited for him to be with me kind of in the co-host chair today uh joined by Scott being enfeld bean and Feld Dr Scott beanenfeld in that regard thanks again man that is that is going to be challenging me for the rest of time we know each other
Dr B’s good with me as well too uh and again uh or not again and also we have uh Dr uh Dana Lerman as well too joining us on the show and uh Joe shrank as I understand his last name in that regard a journalist writer very creative very thoughtful opinionated is what I’m learning about him as well too and I love it welcome to this show Joe and in that regard I kind of just want to let you guys starting with uh you Dr B uh describing kind of you know what those titles and letters mean and where you’re joining us from sure so MD stands for Shaman no just kidding um it’s medical doctor uh although that would be awesome I’m not I’m not minimizing that at all that would be amazing um uh so Dr lehrman and I are both Physicians uh Joe schrank is a social worker Kevin licensed addiction counselor correct right okay and uh so Dr lehrman and I are the co-founders of co-owners co-medical directors of Skylight psychedelics um and we are a company that is medically based and we really do two main things um we prescribe ketamine which is a dissociative anesthetic psychedelic
medication it’s not a classic psychedelic we’re going to lump it in there today I think maybe we’ll parse out um to treat all sorts of um mental health disorders and addiction uh depression PTSD severe anxiety addictive disorders all sorts of things and so we prescribe that nationally to patients and clients to be used in their therapist’s office and we also train therapists uh Nationwide to be able to implement this modality in their offices um and Dr lehrman and I joined forces many months ago and we’ve been um kind of you know spreading the gospel about this and one of the big uh attractions turns out to be forward-thinking addiction centers you know that want to try to implement this the research is starting to come out and it’s clear that medications like ketamine and other psychedelics um can really be helpful for this so thanks for having us yeah absolutely appreciate that introduction and and Joe you want to give it a little bit of to the viewers out there where you’re coming from and how you’re joining us today
yeah I’m Jose rank I’m a social worker by training I’m also a journalist I founded the fix.com which is now defunct long story um but you know I always thought media never really gets this particular issue of addiction recovery drug use drug policy they never really get it right so that’s why we did that I’ve worked with Dr B for many years in a bunch of different capacities and crisis management and that kind of thing like getting people to treatment and then following them and maintaining their care
um and I make beautiful very big proponent of expanding the tent of recovery beautiful well I appreciate everybody’s introduction insights excited to have everybody on here let’s get wild with it you know and in regards to uh ketamine assisted therapy you know uh starting with any of the docs on the screen here you know uh what led you to this uh as and as I know uh both of you have different backgrounds and training experiences from that MD level but you know how did you guys come together how did Skylake psychedelics uh come to be in that regard yeah that’s a great thing I like this story um so I actually am a board certified internal medicine and infectious disease and I was a covid doctor on the front lines of coronavirus and um during the pandemic I had my own covid consulting company the covid consultants and we were selling tests Nationwide and doing business risk mitigation helping companies stay open and through that process I received a medical license in in all 50 states also through that process I was severely uh burnt out and suffering from my own uh my own personal struggles as a human being and then add in a pandemic and I was in trouble so I actually found myself in the middle of the pandemic and an Ayahuasca retreat in Costa Rica
releases coming back from that experience I have completely changed gears and went into the field of cydelic medicine I did a year-long training course in psychedelics as a therapy and um I was realizing that it’s the wild west out there with ketamine and ketamine now you can go online and order a prescription to send right to your doorstep and no one’s monitoring you and you’re just having these big experiences by yourself and so I realized that it was important to really Loop in people’s therapists
in just uh treatment modality so I decided that I was going to look for a partner and my sister is a social worker and she mentions Scott and Scott he’s already said but he is a pretty impressive background being trained in Psychiatry addiction Psychiatry forensic psychiatry um and you know has really been in the ketamine space for several years so I had one phone call with Scott and by the end of phone call we this was maybe not even an hour-long phone call but after at the end of that hour um we were partners and
have been really moving forward with uh launching Skylight psychedelics which has been pretty successful to date so far getting ketamine in an affordable way to people and getting their therapists trained also in an affordable way and it’s been really the most rewarding thing that I’ve ever done in my entire career as a physician because as an infectious disease provider you have this bag of tools and it has a lot of different really strong medicines but not medicines that access people’s root traumas and okay that’s what Academy does and so people debate all the time whether or not ketamine is a classic psychedelic uh to me it is and psychedelic the word really means mind manifesting and ketamine definitely does that so um that’s really the back story of how Scarlet psychedelics was formed and and what we’re doing and how I got here yeah no beautiful uh you know Dr B because I’m still trying to get into my brain here of how to fully pronounce that name so I’m gonna stick with Dr B because that that feels great uh do you want to add a little bit of insights into it from your own Journey up until you know kind of um you know arriving at Sky like psychedelics yeah absolutely um right my initial hack coming out of residency and Psychiatry was forensic psychiatry I started my career working in the prison system I used to work at sing running a unit of um the most severely mentally ill inmates coming back to the community and we were working on ways to prevent them from coming back to get incarcerated again and you know wouldn’t you know the number one reason people go back to jail is substance abuse even if they have severe mental illness right and so I got kind of very interested in addiction medicine that way got board certified in it and I’ve been working in it for over 20 years I’ve worked with Joe schrank for a long time who actually probably taught me more about the addiction space than any textbook so thank you Joe about like the realities of kind of what it’s like out there in the world not just in the doctor’s office about um I don’t know maybe like six or seven years ago I was tapped by an anesthesiologist who was working with ketamine in downtown Manhattan using IV ketamine primarily and intramuscular and tell me listen you know all my patients get off their antidepressants like use it to treat pain I’m looking for a psychiatrist you want to check this out ketamine started popping up in the psychiatric literature really around the year 2000 but it got really hot like kind of the mid 2000s so I remember reading all these papers thinking wow ketamine treating depression and PTSD that’s really cool but I’ll never do that because I’m a psychiatrist in my office in Upper West Side of Manhattan um so long story short I wound up kind of going down there and I never looked I brought a bunch of my patients down there and watched this and you know the next thing I know I was working in a Surgis Center doing intravenous ketamine sessions with patients like tons of them and I wound up treating a lot of people with substance abuse disorders because people with addiction almost always suffer from severe underlying mental health issues maybe it’s trauma mood disorders anxiety bipolar disorder whatever the case may be and I it was very scary at first because I’m thinking oh my God I’m going to treat these patients with a potentially addictive substance that we’ve now come to understand ketamine actually is really not an addictive substance there are people who abuse it for sure but by and large ketamine puts the brakes on addiction more than anything else and I saw how effectively how rapidly it was treating these underlying mental health disorders and getting people better getting people to return to function like really quickly like in a matter of days to weeks and every case is different but I was really Blown Away by it I got very deep into working with this medication um and then you know covet happened and everything kind of got separated and I wound up just kind of working on my own in my practice you know with a nurse practitioner we would do the IV ketamine surgeons I still do it um you know then Dr lamman you know Dana found me and and we kind of connected that way but uh so that’s kind of my journey through it I found that you know taught kind of to Dana’s Point um you know treating it addiction Joe can speak to this better than anybody um so much of it it’s really difficult it’s a really hard profession being an addiction medicine doctor because people it’s a constantly relapsing remitting disease there’s a lot of stigma attached to it there’s so much controversy between jujit do 12 steps you should not are there underlying medical problems is it biological diseases it’s spiritual I mean all these things you know you don’t have these discussions about asthma right or like um or strep throat right you give the penicillin and it’s done um and so uh so it’s been amazing but it’s not easy and and ketamine is like one of these tools in the toolbox that really is is a game changer here um you know in terms of treating a lot of different things and and again everything’s Case by case nothing’s a Panacea perfect for everybody for every situation but um it’s been a really interesting Journey so far for sure love it appreciate all those insights and then you know from from your perspective Joe and I I would I suppose I missed an opportunity to share this with you on the front end uh you know but one of our vision here at uh Peaks recovery centers as an inpatient dual diagnosis facility here in Colorado is to disrupt an industry through quality of care and I’m recognizing more and more that disruption is is really challenging and that’s what entices me so much about these medications the other plant-based medicines that are within proposition 122 here on the ballot here in the state of Colorado and you know you seem like a disrupter in that regard Joe and so I want to bring you into the fold in that way and you know just share with us your passion around you know that concept of expanding recovery Journeys well um yeah I guess you could say disruptor I’m not sure that’s what most people would say they might say something else but um you know they can have their feelings about it look I was always and I I I’ve taken certain things to Heart in educational settings one of them being you know Jesuit High School men for others like I thought they were Syracuse I thought they meant that and so that’s you know I mean part of the reason I became a social worker social work is really very different than the accepted Paradigm of what recovery is and I think that that’s been one of the conflicts that I’ve had um over the years because you know in social work you meet the client where the client exists you outline their particular options and support their decision even if you don’t just even if you disagree with their decision you don’t quit on people you don’t say things like you’re not ready and come back when we when you know you have no teeth you know keep using keep using meth just keep smoking that you know there’s so it’s it’s always been very much a conflict I’m a recovering person myself I I go to AAA I’m an AAA dude I responded well to it um I responded well to it as a young guy um it’s been good for me over the years but I’m not an Evangelical about anything you know and I’m not an Evangelical about recovery I think that one of the big problems that we have in recovery is knowing seems to be able to agree upon what success is um so in other words people who have extinguished their use of potentially life-threatening drugs in a recreational setting to me that’s like that’s a Triumph but that might include that they still use cannabis and I don’t have any sort of moralistic problems with that but the rehab industrial complex does and you know they bang their hat on the recidivism the profit margin is in Failure like the diet industry so it’s a really big problem when you want to stand up at recovery conferences and say these things but I mean that’s fine it’s okay I don’t I don’t really have any negative associations with what people think about me per se but my personal view is that the definitional authority of recovery lies with the individual that people get to say what is their recovery if their recovery is harm reduction to me um if an IV heroin user says I’m committing to using only clean needles that’s how far I can go right now
to me that’s their recovery so when these things became more prevalent with use of uh psychedelics or plant-based medicines or whatever the backlash in the current Paradise that’s not recovery and my response is maybe it’s not your recovery but you know recovery is positive change recovery is um improvements you know there’s a lot of different ways that we could look at a life from a comprehensive way and determine if somebody is doing better in life and just quickly as an example I had this client who was um kind of old and crusty pretty much just drinking himself to death alone in this big house in L.A and um the family had no idea what to do he was inebriated and fell at Christmas and knocked over the baby high chair you know all the big family drama and so they took him to Betty Ford and he walked out he was like I’m not going through those meetings and anyway so the short version of the story is you know I had a hard to harvest them and I just said bottle I like you but no one else really does and so you have some choices in life and one of the choices is that you die alone in this house and your house he provides your body after you have some kind of horrible alcoholic death so we got the Scotch bottle away from him and got him a vape pen his blood pressure dropped he lost 20 pounds he agreed to uh move into a condo and have help we taught him the miracle of uber um instead of driving and all I heard from the eight people is he’s not sober like no [ __ ] man he loves that vape pen he’s not sober yeah you’re right you got me you got me there but so I think that trying to say is our 78 year old friend Bob in recovery yeah I think he is does he benefit from his use of cannabis without question does he benefit from extinguishing use of alcohol without question and so so expanding the idea of what recovery is is really critical because we’ve been doing the same thing for decades and it goes nowhere the death rate is is higher than ever the overdose rate is higher than ever the um and so why not use these things especially when they’re medicalized you know I’m a big proponent of of Physicians administering medicine um you know that’s one of the reasons I like these guys they are license credential board certified Physicians so it’s not I don’t know I think people hear oh you can use psychedel I think they hear like San Francisco hippies and Golden Gate Park or that they’re going to a rave you know it’s like no that’s not what it is maybe it’s a branding issue I don’t know yeah well that’s what we’re doing here today Joe is we’re trying to get the brand correct in that regard and I and you know I appreciate all those insights and especially around the Cannabis recovery Journey there I think that’s one of those things we’re trying to meet in real time as a challenge at you know Peaks recovery centers we’re not trying to influence any particular path or adopt or you know State wholeheartedly this is the way we think you should go but um you know if somebody is an IV heroin user and at the end of the day part of the recovery Journey means picking up a vape pen of that sorts and continuing forward but they never touched that event at the bit you know uh the IV heroin use again to us I mean I want to couch that with you and likewise as a positive outcome in direct National and it really obtains that autonomy that you know Kevin and I really got to talk about on just the prior episode to joining this around there are so many restrictive measures from the rooms all the way to addiction treatment centers uh you know psychiatrists all that sort of stuff and it seems like the most disruptive thing that we’ve got to really get right you know moving forward is that sense of autonomy the autonomy aspect is the empowerment and if clean needles is all that’s being is taken to be empowerment for the individual I think we start there from a harm reduction model and then when that person is you know Finds A New Path towards you know their journey through that autonomous lens we’re right there as social workers therapists doctors and so forth to nurture that next step in the journey and by removing the coercion in my experience at least for individuals who come to Peaks it’s a there’s a difference between you know mom and dad dropping Johnny off you know with the luggage bag and saying deal with it versus like Johnny getting out of the car being like I’m ready to do this right you get two incredibly different outcomes namely when uh you know when somebody is not convinced or does not want to be there you know in that regard at the end of the day you spend what is 30 to 45 days kind of outside of the clinical curriculum trying to just get through that sort of you know we’ll call it a little tea trauma experience in that moment and so I think that’s what we get back in a really big way around these plant-based medicines around ketamine interventions and so forth and I just love to hear the reverence certainly from all three of you and Kevin on the prior episode about how this is working in regards to the medications and so you know through that lens of autonomy you know question back to the docs uh in that regard you know what are you seeing from a patient standpoint are you seeing a lot of individuals who came in and said man I’ve been told to do all of these other things I was fortunate when I did that now I have this you know in front of me and you guys seem open to the direction post this intervention what are you seeing on behalf of your patient demographic as they walk into your office in that sense
oh totally I think that’s absolutely what we see and you know listen I think that part of it is that you know look addiction like hardcore addiction is trauma right whether it caused the addiction or it’s the addiction itself and everything that happens or the interpersonal relationships there is so much trauma around this disease you know it’s probably the rule um and one of the things is that I think that when people find their way to psychedelics and find their way to ketamine therapy or whatever it is um it really is a kind of a new open pathway and and a lot of a lot of our patients um kind of show up uh as you know listen this is this is mine you know I’m owning this they’re not being coerced into their um into their treatment um and they’re really able to and Dr lehrman can really speak to this you know these medications like they really do get at the root kind of cause of of what’s going on they might not heal it instantaneously and we would like to believe that it does but it’s certainly as as Dr lamman has really kind of talked about a lot it shines the light on and maybe that’s kind of current things that might be distant past trauma or whatever but it’s kind of very open honest process which can be really hard by the way it’s not you know unicorns and rainbows all the time I mean psychedelic treatment is can be intense it can also be wonderful it’s a lot a lot that goes on um but I think that it’s really you know people are kind of coming to it
with different philosophies coming in but almost always on the other side of it is people also they don’t ever regret I mean it’s always like wow this is this is really thank God I found this you know and you can see you can just Google like psychedelics and depression I don’t tell people to Google anything in Edison it’s the dumbest thing you can do as a doctor because 50 because you have cancer and you’re done exactly but in this realm actually it’s like 98 of of the stories are amazing and they’re true you know it’s like it’s pretty crazy um and so the research is really happening there’s organizations that are really supporting it um and we’re here you know not only along for this ride but we’re trying to really spearhead it one of the things we’re trying to do with skylight psychedelics is like really have people be able to gain access to this from both training professional side the licensed providers but also the patients right there at least some Financial barriers things like that we’re trying to democratize too and really kind of give people a chance at this
yeah totally Dr Lerman can I have something yeah thank you you read my mind um yeah I know this is one of my passions about psychedelics because I feel like this is psychedelic medicine and that um a lot of people don’t understand that the way psychedelics really work we could talk about all the neurotransmitters and all the neurogenesis and neuroplasticity but the way that they really work is that they are the ultimate concierge doctor right they are the ultimate concierge doctor because they are you and so when you eat psychedelic medicine or when you take psychedelic medicine you are allowing access to your own inner healing intelligence right this is not stuff that we have been taught in medical school we have not been taught this growing up I mean I teach my kids this now but this is the language language that we’ve never really heard before right what the hell is an inner healing intelligence right you’re crazy you’re cuckoo but it’s an inner healer that every single person has and our society does not um unfortunately get behind that idea right but psychedelics are basically we all have this I’m sure many people on this call have heard me say this before but we all have the sack of rocks that we carry around right and we’re all kind of lugging this saccharox around and some of us have big boulders in there and all different size rocks and a lot of times you can go to therapy and throw out a few Pebbles a few bigger rocks but oftentimes you still have this big sack that you carry around and the way that I like to look at psychedelics is that they are the key to opening that sack and really allowing you to just take a big look inside and start working through all the things right and that’s just how they work they allow you access to what is in your luggage right and so there’s nothing else that does that right all these ssris all this conventional Western medicine I mean those medicines work 30 of the time for people with depression and and anxiety and whatnot I mean these medicines
and conventional standards rehab these things don’t work so it’s time to actually try something that works and you know what I like to think of western western medicine approaches listen sometimes they’re helpful for people and it’s not always all bad and I don’t try to be an absolutist about it but it really seems like Western medicines try to keep people in this kind of window of not feeling too great and not feeling too terrible but you’re just in this window and you sweep your [ __ ] under a rug and you don’t ever look at it and you’re just in this space right psychedelics it’s okay to be really happy and it’s okay to be feel something like we are not feeling as a society like it isn’t psychedelics allows us to get in touch with our root stuff look at it work through it process it for the first time and then move through it yeah it’s beaut yes because I think it’s important to real access you know people with addiction I know Scott says not all people have a trauma or something I would I would say probably honestly if it’s not 100 it’s 99.99 of people who have addiction they got there because of something right and they may not even know what it is but psychedelics will surely show you what what happened at some point right it’s not what’s wrong with you anymore it’s what happened to you yeah I think one of the most interesting things about the Psychedelic realm in medicine that’s kind of emerging is that in a lot of ways and no other medication can really do this it is like Psychotherapy and a pill in a weird way right like there is like it happens whether you have like a therapist there or not but you definitely want to have somebody there right because um it can be pretty funky and that’s where we get into this idea called integration right which is where you take all the intense experiences and then you have somebody help you kind of kind of you know work it into your life and understand it and contextualize everything um but really there and listen there are plenty of medications prescribed right look you know psychedelics like psilocide but these things are schedule one they’re classified as schedule one drugs right no medical value and addictive right which they’re neither right we know we know that they’re not but there are tons of psychiatric and other medications that are much lower schedules legal prescribable time that are that will kill you in overdose right that are that are dangerous they’re super addictive and psychoactive and everything like that um so I think this field is really I mean there there is like a sea change Happening Here definitely yeah I mean that’s my absolute hope uh you know that to me this is this is a conversation about innovation in an industry where like the medications 30 of the time it works to sit in a group circle and you know communicate you know a clinical curriculum or a medical curriculum in that regard but generally speaking uh and and I’ve shared this on past podcast episodes here at Peaks Vista research contradiction they’re the third party uh addiction treatment center outcomes uh Center that we use for our outcomes at Peaks and they’ve been on the show talking about for the last 30 years our outcomes have remained flat at 33 or lower and so this invites in an opportunity to really expand on that reduce some of the restrictive measures of our industry and uh insert autonomy that I think is going to get us a bit further uh as far as outcomes goes uh overall or more of appreciation and more of a community awareness around what resources are actually accessible to somebody’s Wellness at the end of the day and before I dive into a few more I have tons of questions that are I’m getting curious about but I want to see Kevin if you had anything like top of mind that you wanted to throw at the screen here I mean yeah for now it seems a lot of what we’ve been talking about is the promising kind of paradigm shift that psychedelics assisted therapies are representing not only in the inherent quality of the healing potential of psychedelics but also in the therapeutic model the theory behind what elicits change and this idea of the inner healing intelligence that Dr lehrman spelled out Joe’s encouragement for community support and and Dr B uh just just talking about the role of integration therapy the role of creating a therapeutic container around it and as a practitioner as a as a counselor working with people experiencing non-ordinary States and working with them before and after you know I love that analogy of the of the bag of rocks and you know do we want a person to be confronted with giant Boulders that they’ve been carrying alone you know as a practitioner I feel like I’m standing over their shoulder with the flashlight kind of helping like oh what should we look at now what does it describe that to me how can we assess this together and process it in real time and then implementing behavioral changes on the other side so what what Joe is talking about is so important to have that community resource that supportive structure because at the end of the day you know we have a couple hours a week at Best of patient contact time and folks are going to go back to their existing resources their families their communities their Church groups their spirit virtual peer support networks and we we really need to update the Paradigm and educate people on how to support this new therapeutic model which is is so important so that’s that’s kind of what I’m operating at right now and Joe I’m kind of interested in you know you talk about a big umbrella and you know several months ago we talked about uh the on your podcast the update around acceptance of people using psychedelics as tools for integration in in recovery settings and one way or another there’s there’s going to have to be a grappling with this reality that people for whatever reason whether they’re stabilized and secure in their relationship with substances in an abstinence-based model in a harm reduction model and yet they’re still struggling with other things that they seek healing through with psychedelics how is the community going to need to Grapple around these people to support them in the same way that you’ve discovered with cannabis
well look I mean I’m not sure that there is a robust community of people who are supporting cannabis use in the context of recovery it’s growing certainly in Los Angeles um you know we’ve seen more and more of that I think that Community is one of the things that helps all areas of mental health right one one way or another you know the ancient Greeks said be not idle be not allowed and so in other words do something and do it with somebody so my personal feeling is that all humans deserve to have their tribe and to be safe and comfortable in however that looks they don’t deserve um to be lambasted or shamed because they’re recovering in a way that’s different than the individual who has announced to the world that they’re the standard of recovery so in other words you know when a celebrity comes out um
Dan levod came out and said she’s Cali sober that she uses cannabis massive backlash from people she’s not sober she’s going to relapse she’s going to do this she’s gonna do that I was like you know but how do we know it’s not abstinence that leads people to relapse because so many people who attempt abstinence return to their previous pattern of self-harming drug use so maybe abstinence is what’s doing it um you know she’s a young woman she gets to try on hats she gets to see what’s going to be right for her uh so I think it’s still it’s got a long way to go before there are certain systems that I think help
um cultural acceptance one of them would be the VA you know I think that it’s the largest Health Care system in America it has really robust capacities for research it has a captive population I think if the VA started using psychedelic medications which would help those guys tremendously and was vocal about it and had some kind of continuing care support system whether it’s mutual Aid or recreational interactions whatever it is that would go a long way Sports changes the culture right music changes the culture so those kinds of larger systems that are that would Embrace alternatives to really what is the Christian rights Stranglehold on recovery because it’s based on this act of redemption that there’s nothing there’s not a doctor there’s not a medicine there’s only another recovering person in an act of Providence that can help you nothing else can help you and Americans love that they love half of America thinks gay marriage causes hurricanes so you know I don’t know how we’re gonna move past those ideas other than to say um that we’re not doing very well with addiction like I don’t see how you know especially in AAA we’re one of the the big tenants is if nothing changes nothing changes you know if you always do what you’ve always done you’re always going to get what you’ve always got right so okay if we always only send people to AAA we will have continued growing death rates and a population of people you know the truth of the matter is very few people respond to AAA um certainly not enough to make it the only thing that’s offered to somebody and you know and and I’ll stop but let me ask the doctors if you two were oncologists and you were in remission from cancer could you say well there are four options but we only use radiation because I used radiation and that’s how my cancer got better and if you don’t do what I did you’re not really improving your cancer but yeah that’s a crazy way to treat any problem much less a medical problem okay can I jump in with an analogy here in medical analogy so as infectious disease physician um we get patients who come in and have bacteria in their bloodstream and we usually trade place it back to a certain source and sometimes we get patients who come in who have repeated what we call bacteremia bacteria and bloodstream and the reason why they get it is because there’s some deep seated infections somewhere in their body that we are not treating with our regular duration of antibiotics and we need to go and get to the source of the of the bacteria in the bloodstream okay I would make the argument that we fail at treating addiction because you don’t get to the source of why that person is it right that is and that is the greatest argument for the introduction of psychedelics into the addiction space right because you have why would anyone think that it’s going to go away if you don’t get to the root of the stuff right the question is is in therapy sessions and in all these different things that you’re doing in rehab are you actually getting to the source of the issue many people don’t even know their problem many people are dealing with such repressed trauma that happen and it takes so much work to get to that root of that problem right and psychedelics they’re like a missile right and and jumping on that analogy you know in terms of why it is effective why ketamine is effective in this regard is because the deep-seated trauma that people are experiencing you know human beings have a reflex to deal with trauma it’s all denial right like we don’t want to deal with it and and if we start to deal with it we go into fight or flight mode our adrenal glands start pumping right the adrenaline flows and every and people get anxious it’s hard and that’s that’s normal I mean that’s it’s not healthy um but dealing with trauma often results in people feeling overwhelmed by emotion and it’s too hard to go there people get triggered all sorts of things one of the things that and if you ever observe a ketamine session you’re bound to see this is it it it’s called a dissociative anesthetic partially because it dissociates different parts of the brain from each other that normally communicate very tightly and one of those the frontal part of the brain which the deep emotional parts of the brain right so when people start thinking about their trauma the emotions start just exploding and they can’t deal with it right it’s like a wave of neurotransmitters panic attacks ensue it’s too much it’s like nope I’m not I can’t go there and what ketamine does by dissociating that it allows a sort of thinking frontal part of the brain to be separate from that kind of that emotional Olympic system the Deep part of the brain that that’s exerting these feelings so people can actually like
see the traumatic event and sort of experience it not even with with prompting right it happens sometimes spontaneously right but without that fight or flight that adrenal gland overload that prevents it in other in other modalities and it happens on its own it’s incredible when I first brought patients down to to do this treatment they were talking about traumas and things that happened in their past I never even knew about um that they never talked about and it was fascinating to watch people just kind of get to this place of frequently expressing acceptance forgiveness and it’s not Amnesia this is not it doesn’t wipe your slate clean right this isn’t like we take the trauma we erase it it’s quite the opposite as as Dana talks about shines a light on it and but but people can sometimes and I’m not saying like people are cured instantly and this can be a protracted long process and everybody’s different and all traumas are different and degrees of trauma and all of that but in many cases ketamine has the ability to do that and it’s fascinating and it kind of allows people to kind of like have a process like kind of get some of the poison out the emotional poison that’s associated with it and and you know and I think that’s a big part of why we’ve seen success totally hey and and Joe you you stole my thunder man I’m I’m so big on like you know when I think of disruption of this industry I think about all the independent philosophies that exist and I used in the past episode with Kevin you can review it with the reviewers in the background on you know you walk into a broke you know an emergency room with a broken arm what would it be like for the position to be like hey I have a new idea about how to heal this I’m gonna I’m gonna I’m gonna make sure it’s you know the bones are mended and all that sort of thing but I’m not going to put a cast on because you know what I got well without a cast because I was you know in some off country or whatever and I didn’t have access to this but this is how it it seems so fundamentally absurd to insert philosophies within the general practices of medicine uh and and that in the way that we know it and yet we do that within substance use disorders and even at um even though it’s a little bit more sutured up not to play on medical words here on the the mental health professional side of things I think they get a little bit more right it’s more wrapped around well that’s not even entirely true I guess ultimately what I want to say though is it’s interesting in these aspects of Behavioral Healthcare Behavioral Healthcare medicine clinical interventions and so forth we want to state that it ought to be in this sort of way or use some moral framework or philosophy at the end of the day and insist on that as a path and so you stole it from me Joe I guess I just wanted to give it back that we’re in alignment in that way it’s just one of those things where I don’t think that moral posturing has any place in in the care of people who are trying to improve their lives with either emotionally or their mental health or their substance misuse issues and there is a tremendous amount of moral shame based you know it’s actually the the one of the more arrogant things to tell people you’re doing it wrong and you could be me but you you have to do it like me um you know it’s a very strange way to try to align with people uh is to impose that kind of thing on it and I I don’t know I’ve never you know I mean we hear all the time evictions of disease all right well then why aren’t they treated like patients with the standard of care why are they treated like criminals um and why are we brow beating them into some specific way because really what that total abstinence modality is designed to do is to make the people around them feel better no it’s not really designed to help the individual because their that abstence might be their best play Maybe um but it might not the truth of the matter is is I’m not sure that everybody everybody universally should be abstinent from all substance use but it makes the the culture like parents want to hear total abstinence and wives and spouses and so on and so forth because they have been sold that that if drugs are the problem elimination of drugs is the solution um maybe maybe maybe not I don’t you know it’s a very it’s a very individual thing we don’t um and that became a really popular thing in the rehab business you know I call it the um the sun-dried tomato principle where something becomes wildly popular and you guys might be too young but there was a time when sun dried tomatoes were on every menu everything was just like sun-dried tomato and um foreign
treatment became like the buzzword of the industry and the truth is nobody had visualized anything it was all the same bro repetitive stuff nobody had any respect for the individual for their culture for their gender for their gender identification nothing it was all just you’re a drug addict and you don’t care and you know all that same moral stuff so I think that that is one of also one of my hopes for the Psychedelic and plant-based Community is they are nicer people I will give them that like you know I’m a Bay Area guy and all those guys in Oakland were like please tax us we’re going to build a playground we’re gonna put a high school we’re going to put a computer lab at the high school like they just wanted to be accepted I’ve never heard of any beer company putting in computer labs at a high school you know so I think it’s a real opportunity for the expansion of community in lots of different ways absolutely well I appreciate your fiery passion uh Joe no doubt um we’re gonna have coffee after this at some point too can’t can’t wait to to talk more with you about all of this and appreciate your insights and uh you know one of the things you know we did a little a little preview to this episode with the with the docs and Kevin and I got on there and I I get so excited about the potential of innovation here that I thought this is going to get rid of TMS it’s going to get rid of the industry you know on all those sort of things and you know the doctors uh you know hey Brandon slow down let’s get let’s let’s get this right size that you know we’re not necessarily looking at a Panacea here right we’re looking at something that gives you you know incredible insights into that uh into that sack of rocks right and now we’re looking at it but I love hearing that uh the reverence around this from you know both Kevin as a as a licensed addiction counselor here in the state of Colorado and certainly uh from the practitioners that are physicians in front of us and uh would just love to uh hear more you know about that that side of it that reverence and and why we’re thinking about it differently than a Panacea
well nothing’s a Panacea I don’t think you want one right and look you you mentioned TMS you know look this is a really exciting time for Psychiatry actually I mean Psychiatry should be really embracing this I mean there haven’t been changes in the psychiatric technology in a long time and now we have this field that’s really called Interventional Psychiatry right where you’re actually not just talking to somebody or writing prescriptions but you’re actually doing things um uh you know TMS is is administering uh you know magnetic fields around the brain and it’s fascinating stuff and now we have um you know injectable medication uh both for addiction and and ketamine and now plant-based medicine is emerging I mean it’s super exciting so I think we have to have reverence for the idea that the technology and mental health Delivery Systems is is kind of getting with the programs getting modern you know um even though I guess psychedelics is is that modern I don’t know Kevin is it I don’t think it’s modern right it’s ancient right um but we’re modernizing the idea that it can that it can help people and figuring out exactly how to do that and listen there’s some fascinating research going on in this that you know people are looking at all different ways to administer psychedelic medication in in conventional Psychiatry it’s commonplace to kind of prescribe multiple antidepressants because they work on different neurotransmitters make sense somebody’s not getting well on on Prozac and it’s not working well you can add Wellbutrin it works on a different neurotransmitter system you know the same thing can possibly be true in psychedelic medicine and they might be talking about um uh you know combining different agents at the same time for the same reason and and it’s just fascinating um so so stay on it for sure and I think that’s what makes the natural medicine Health act so exciting right now because we need to have multiple Pathways of people to experience this medicine experience these healing potentials both in terms of the regulated model that potentially will exist with a psilocybin delivery system and then as we anticipate Maps bringing MDMA through the finish line for treatment of PTSD through the FDA you know these are going to be medicalized Frameworks with specific medicines but then also acknowledging the autonomy of individuals to make informed decisions about what types of medicines they choose to ingest and what they choose to do in terms of leading an intentional life leading to increased insights into their well-being their mental health conditions that have been adequately treated by traditional means and it’s just a really exciting time to be here in Colorado and is working about to witness Oregon getting started on this model next year I’m looking forward to having multiple Pathways of places to steer our patients towards who have been insufficiently treated through one specific way of doing things now we have a plethora of doing things yeah and that’s guys are also well spoken I just feel like I’m babbling at times and in front of this room of giants uh you know and and one of the things that I want to be cautious of our time here and and just create kind of an open heart open-minded kind of question for the viewers out there but you know one of the sensitivities that’s arising and we’re getting better at our ketamine protocols and this sort of thing but we’ve generally kind of turned it as a treatment program towards like Mental Health primary patients it’s not true in all considerations but one of the things we’ve noticed in the background you know when you know Johnny comes back from the ketamine infusion you know intervention uh is like oh what was that like and it and it’s really mind opening and it’s insightful and they gained from it and they want to share in those experiences and then those without the Mental Health primary disorder you know the substance use side of things you know an opioid use disorder alcohol use disorder they turn around and say well I want to do that and that’s where I think we’re caught off guard by the historical nature of the industry it’s like oh are we seeking something now and like no no we can’t do that for this particular you know disorder or type and there’s a sensitivity there that’s arising and we’re getting better as a company about how to negotiate that how to navigate it actually how to you know get it in the right uh true to the right individuals and you know a question for the docs and you know even Kevin and your experiences uh what is that like for you all uh in consideration of the the suds of the world and what your experiences are around that um and just hopefully you can you know give some insight to the viewers out there that there’s actually probably a lot of potential on that side of the coin um and then what what do we have to do to kind of get that right from a lens and remove kind of that historical fear that we’ve had as treatment centers
look I think that I would just maybe change the mindset of oh can I do that right to oh that’s really interesting can I be evaluated for that right because I think everything if you get back in medicine and mental health gets into a really solid clinical evaluation you know so maybe they are um good candidates maybe they’re not you know I I don’t know I can’t speak to that it’s not you know data might disagree I don’t know you know give it to everybody but but I think but but I I honestly think that I could see where that could that could dovetail into some craziness in the culture of addiction treatment and all of that but I do think we need to get away from it right I mean it might well be determined in the not too distant future that
yeah you know Academia infusions just lowers your chance to relapse with alcohol period whatever is called right and and that’ll be a game changer you know so yeah I think it’s really important to highlight that this is not a pleasurable experience for most people okay this is not when you buy a line of K or Rave this is a very different experience okay this is in a in a journey space where you have you know and most providers there’s an alter there’s uh psychedelic art it’s very comfortable it is not typically um the way that we like to promote it being being um utilized is is in a very therapeutic space with very intentional music you have a you have an eye mask on where you’re creating this inward experience and then you give we give a medicine that causes a dissociative effect where you are it is not always amazing you are not always seeing Jesus in that room and I don’t think that the majority I have a lot of clients who say
you know I really don’t like this but I know it’s helping me like I don’t it’s work and we say that word a lot in psychedelics this is work you are doing work on yourself right this is not coming here get high and let’s see rainbows and you’re gonna feel better right this is it brings the Deep stuff up to the surface so you could work with it that’s exactly what it’s doing so does not this is
IV and you’re gonna have this Randall time right like we promote therapists being there or therapists being there afterwards to integrate those things that came up for you I mean it’s a really important thing to highlight that this is not you’re getting you’re getting high
I think it’s a critical thing I think because from from the cultural perspective I hear from a lot of young people I should do ketamine treatment they think they’re going to a rave I’m like look I don’t know I don’t give medical advice you need to talk to the doctor just you know and Scott you’re exactly right you know sure be evaluated to see if you’re a good candidate for this or for any um intervention for help you know I think that um it’s there isn’t one answer for all people we didn’t all get sick in the same way we’re not going to all get better in the same way and so I think it’s important to find um the individual path that’s going to resonate for any one person and help them what I think is that you know Nathan hating hippies is a bad reason to not use psychedelic medicines which is pretty much how they were vilified in the 60s was Nixon hated counterculture and you know uh it was going to lead to Anarchy and draft dodging you know whatever they were saying whatever the rhetoric is that they were putting in and there are verifiable people from the Nixon Administration saying yeah we knew we were lying yeah we knew you know they cultivated these racist messages against certain medications uh because they didn’t like the culture around them not because they weren’t effective or couldn’t help anybody and that’s really the thing that I think needs to shift is maybe it’ll help you maybe it won’t I don’t know but you should certainly have the option to find out but can I just say and I think this is still recording can I just say that I think that you know I’m very liberal with who I prescribe ketamine too you don’t have to come to me with treatment resistant depression that is that’s total crap honestly if I’m not gonna make someone go and take multiple different medicines that have a 30 chance of working and each time you add a medicine or change some the change of psychiatric medicine that person has a lower likelihood of responding right that’s something that we all right so why are you gonna onboard someone who they’re not accessing their stuff that they really need to work on they’re the slew of side effects and most of these patients get stuck on these medicines for years and years and years their life no no we’re not saying use ketamine every single day or you need to have this for the rest of your life we’re saying have a seidelic experience do some deep work on yourself and you’re probably going to improve regardless of what diet nonsense you walk in the door with yeah and you know the other the other piece of that too that we haven’t spoken about today but is you know inside we have another epidemic going on that’s part and parcel with addition but it’s suicide right youth suicide I mean the racist suicide have gone up and in Psychiatry there’s like a couple of medications that are proven to help with that not very well mind you and you know ketamine kind of got its start because people who were suicidal were getting better quickly and that’s a huge deal so I think that needs to be talked about as well uh might be for another podcast but but that’s important yeah absolutely it I we all need to hang out more uh not just you and me Joe but the I think collectively there’s a lot of passion in this room and it reminds me of my own passion and what I’m energized about here on behalf of the industry uh in that regard and uh I think we’re at the the tail end of our hour here um I love the passion I love the insights um I’ve Loved getting to know you guys at least formally now um from our informal emails of the past uh but for the sake of time and for the viewers out there because we know from a psychiatric standpoint the kids on the the YouTubes and the Facebooks only watch things for three to nine seconds at a time so we’ve given them thousands of seconds of our time in that regard and uh to before taking this out uh as a show and as an episode uh you know Dr B I know you’re in New York City and uh Dr Lerman you’re in Boulder Colorado and uh certainly Joe out in La so I would just like for each of you to kind of go through how you can be found your website uh things you’re willing to give out as far as contact information goes podcasts other projects you might be a part of and then I’ll take it out from there but maybe we start with the Dr B in that regard data um you can find me at Skylight psychedelics.com or on Instagram psychedelics Facebook LinkedIn um we’re National so we’re in every single single state so if you have a therapist and you’re looking for ketamine to be using with your therapist we are more than happy to evaluate you for that yep same for me you can find me there as well Skylight psychedelics.com and all of our contact information is there Beautiful Joe what do you got what do I got I’m on all the social media platforms unless I’ve been uh some uh sometimes I get kicked off for fighting with red State people that’s happened more than once um denial ends is my website and that has all my writings and services and so on and so forth and I’m happy to talk to anybody I’m a very um I’m really into economic justice so if you’re a single mother and you have no money don’t let that stop you from calling me um if you’re a York City model with a lot of money be prepared for a Big Bill so that’s kind of that’s kind of how I work
you’re so you’re so colorful in your in your passion I love it man I can’t wait to do this coffee with you in the background um but in that regard I’m gonna take it out here at uh finding Peaks again chief executive officer Brandon burns with Peaks recovery centers inviting all of these uh incredible guests uh professionals onto this platform to uh help open the hearts and the minds of the viewers out there around proposition 122 here in the state of Colorado and The Innovation possibilities that exist within this framework and then hopefully at some point uh it’s given nationally you can find us on all the tick tocks uh the Facebooks the twitters those types of things out there like us follow us communicated with us through those platforms we much appreciate it as a following finding Peaks at peaksrecovery.com thoughts insights ideas about this particular podcast questions for you know our guests as well too we can get back to them but you direct these episodes at the end of the day and appreciate you reaching out to us and with that we’re all set and done here until next time thanks for viewing everybody