This episode, we're delighted to welcome my PsyCare colleague Anya Ermakova to the podcast. Anya's wide-ranging experience charts a course between some vital aspects of psychedelic science and the social and ecological practice of harm reduction. She has worked at the coal face of the psychedelic renaissance since 2015, having served as Science Officer for the Beckley Foundation, as well as longstanding involvement as a PsyCare field volunteer and board member of the Chacruna Institute, a non-profit advocating for greater involvement of indigenous and ecological perspectives in the psychedelic research world. Her research interests stretch from the design of clinical trials, to the neurobiology of psychosis, to the conservation of the Sonoran Desert Toad, possibly the only psychedelic amphibian known to science. 

Our chat took us into some fascinating territory, with the jumping off point being Anya's recent work on clinical trials of 5-MeO-DMT, a unique short-acting psychedelic that produces emotional but diffuse experiences quite unlike the content-rich cornucopia of the classical psychedelics. We ranged across the psychopolitics of intense, short-acting psychedelic experiences, to the wonder of psychedelic communities such as that surrounding the work of PsyCare, and through to the ecological consequences of the increasing popularity of 5-MeO-DMT on Sonoran Desert Toads, which are being exploited to serve a booming market in retreats. There's lots of detail on toad milking bootleggers, the need for pluralism in the psychedelic research community, and Anya's own passions and interests that drive her work and reverence for the psychedelic experience.

0:03:50 | Where it all begins: Freud and Castaneda, nutmeg and erowid, academia and PsyCare

0:08:21 | What's the clinical trial environment like

0:12:21 | What's it like taking DMT in a clinical trial

0:16:31 | Differences between psychedelics, DMT dissociation and integration, 5-MeO not visual at all!

0:20:21 | Phenomenology of 5-MeO

0:23:43 | Why short-acting intense psychedelics for medical uses?

0:26:54 | Recreational use of DMT and 5-MeO

0:30:00 | PsyCare and the role of harm reduction, outside of the medical environment

0:35:50 | A harm reduction society? Psychedelic institutions? Non-medical models for psychedelic use

0:38:43 | Will big pharma seek to restrict access to psychedelics to recoup its costs? Non-psychedelic psychedelics

0:42:45 | Communitas and the PsyCare community

0:46:09 | Anya's conservation work and the Chacruna Institute

0:48:32 | Psychedelic vertebrates, 5-MeO-DMT and the Sonoran Desert Toad milking crisis

0:55:05 | Synthetic 5-MeO-DMT, and a new psychedelic tradition

0:59:27 | Plant medicine traditions of 5-MeO-DMT, archaeological evidence of combined use with peyote

1:04:08 | Pluralism, weirdness and the psychedelic research landscape

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