Transcript of One Reporter’s Life-Altering Psychedelic Trip New

From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroeff. This is The Daily on Sunday.

Well, I'm glad I was coaching. I actually just— I had to share this with you guys.

Last fall, as I was finishing up an interview with my colleague, the politics reporter Robert Draper, he very casually mentioned—

I spent Thanksgiving in Tijuana, Mexico, undergoing ibogaine psychedelic therapy.

—that he'd just returned from a marathon hallucinogenic drug trip.

This was the most radical thing. How long was that last? 10 hours. I felt nauseous, but they teach you these deep breathing exercises before you go in, and you use that to stave off, you know, any kind of nausea.

Now I should just say Robert isn't exactly the kind of guy I'd have expected to tell me something like this. He's a seemingly staid veteran journalist who covers the American right and the MAGA movement. But he told me this drug was something he felt he had to try.

Yeah, it was really, really interesting. I mean, the whole— I have to find a way to write about it at some point.

The drug in question is called ibogaine, and it's illegal in the United States. But early research suggests it could be a game-changing treatment for a range of conditions, things like PTSD, addiction, even cognitive decline. So today, Robert Draper and I talk at length about his experience on ibogaine. It's Sunday, April 12th. Robert, welcome to The Sunday Daily. It's great to have you here.

It's great to be here. Thanks, Natalie.

So I just wanna start by saying that I have so many questions for you about how you wound up having this experience. I am very excited to talk with you about it, and I wanna recognize that that might not totally be the case for you. This might be something slightly uncomfortable for someone who has made a singular career for himself as a journalist in profiling others. You are a reporter's reporter, Robert, and I recognize that talking about yourself is not something that you may be used to or find the most fun in the world.

Is that fair to say? That's more than fair to say, yes. I mean, I, I think that my My interest in learning about others is in inverse proportion to the interest I have in disclosing things about myself.

Okay, well, we are gonna proceed with caution in that case. I wanna just start with how you first came to know about ibogaine. Just talk about how this got onto your radar screen in the first place.

Yeah, I first heard of ibogaine from a kind of unlikely source, a former United States Senator, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who had become aware of its usage in treating military veterans for PTSD and traumatic brain injury. Sinema decided to try it herself. She said, and these are her words, that it was the opposite of a pleasant experience, but it was a really transformative one for her. Hmm. She'd been working to produce legislation in the state of Arizona to fund clinical research for ibogaine, and someone who'd done that right before her was, I think, an even more unlikely political advocate. And that's the arch-conservative former Secretary of Energy, former presidential candidate, and former governor of Texas, Rick Perry.

He was also into ibogaine.

Yes, he was into it. In fact, he became interested for the same reason Sinema did, that in his capacity as governor, he'd met a lot of combat-afflicted veterans who were sort of at the end of their rope. And he saw what ibogaine had done for them. And so he decided to try it himself. And, you know, again, Perry-like cinema emphasized to me that this was nobody's idea of a party drug. It was a very, very powerful substance.

And I want to get into the power of that substance. Tell me about ibogaine.

What is it and how does it work? Sure. It's a psychedelic, a drug that is derived from a natural source, actually from the bark of a West African shrub. Known as Tabernanthe Iboga, found principally in the country of Gabon and used in initiation ceremonies in that and other African countries. But it had been circulating in Europe and the United States really going back to the 1940s, but particularly so roughly around 1970 when a heroin addict named Howard Lotsoff, kind of chasing the next high, had an opportunity to try ibogaine and found that it cured him of his addiction to heroin. Wow. He began then to advocate for the drug, to help underwrite studies into the drug. And so it has continued to exist since then, Natalie, but in the underground because it's a Schedule I drug, meaning that it's illegal. That's right. The Controlled Substances Act stipulated that it, like LSD, has no accepted medical usage. And so you can't get it legally in the United States. You have to go elsewhere to try it.

And what do we know, Robert, about the way in which it actually functions, in which it has the impacts that Perry and Sinema were telling you about?

Yes. And I want to emphasize, Natalie, that there have been studies on this, but a lot more study needs to be done. Stanford, in particular, in January of 2024, produced this clinical research of 30 combat veterans, and it seemed to activate in them a type of brainwave known as theta rhythms, which in turn promote neuroplasticity. There's also research indicating that ibogaine increases the signaling of particular molecules within the brain that have been linked to drug addiction as well as to depression. So all of these on top of the fact that, that the study seemed to indicate that ibogaine treatment can reduce brain aging by 1.3 years per treatment. So there, there's a lot of potential for ibogaine. Um, studies indicating that because it enhances neuroplasticity, that it could prove to be a cure for neurodegenerative diseases like dementia, ALS, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's. But again, I want to stress that there has been no conclusive reporting on this. No, totally fair caveats.

It sounds like a lot of these potential benefits center on the idea of neuroplasticity. Can you quickly say what that is and how this drug potentially impacts it? Yeah, I mean, neuroplasticity basically means—

I mean, to put it in sort of the rawest, crassest way, it's sort of the opening and the flexibility-making of the human brain. And where a brain may have shut down owing to a particular trauma, it will in effect lubricate or open the molecules of a brain. And allow it to become more receptive. And that has kind of been the elixir enhancing neuroplasticity that scientists have chased for a while in grappling with these neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, and for that matter, traumatic brain injury. Fascinating.

It's like the drug, by affecting neuroplasticity, kind of opens parts of your brain that were shut down up, allows you to work inside them. And Robert, is the current interest in ibogaine part of the gradual uptake that we've seen of psychedelics to treat mental illness? For example, I know about ketamine being used in therapeutic settings. I know people turn to ayahuasca, another plant from South America that is used ritualistically for similar reasons. To kind of break out of mental health problems.

Yes. And I'd add to that microdosing of psilocybin and MDMA. And I think that what we're talking about here are not only an exploration of psychedelics for therapeutic purposes, but an implicit skepticism, if not outright rejection, of a lot of traditional medications and a viewpoint that had been held for decades, that whatever ails you, go to the pharmacist and grab these pills and that's your only hope. There have been intriguing studies done over the last decade indicating real therapeutic usage of these psychedelics, which of course definitionally then flies in the face of the notion that a drug like these should be Schedule I, which is kind of the conundrum that the Trump administration is supposedly grappling with.

From what I understand, though, this drug, ibogaine, is much more intense than some of these other ones. I want you to just sketch out what's different about this drug from some of the others that we might be hearing of.

Yeah, I mean, to put it candidly, I mean, this is— it's not a party drug. You'd never go to the Burning Man Festival, you know, and do it and dance around a fire. It's, in fact, a drug that it's so powerful that you run a real risk of cardiac arrest because it can, it can cause arrhythmia, which is an irregular heartbeat. It can elongate the spacing between heartbeats. And so if you already have a heart condition, you absolutely should not be taking it. When you do take it, you should have heart monitors hooked up to you. You should have professionals nearby. So there is nothing about this that says, you know, woo woo, we're having fun on psychedelics. And in that sense, even before we get to to what actually happens to you when you're on ibogaine, it sets itself apart from drugs like LSD or MDMA or psilocybin mushrooms.

Okay, so given that, given the intensity of the experience that we're talking about here, what made you want to try it for yourself? What was it that made you say, like, this could be of use for me?

Sure. I mean, I admit this is not easy, you know, for me to talk about, but I had a very tormented relationship with a very tormented older sibling. Eli was his name, and when he was 23, he was killed in a vehicular accident. I was 22. We were 18 months apart. Wow. But he was kind of a human wrecking ball. How so? Well, I mean, my younger brother, who's a psychologist, believed that Eli was a sociopath. Oh, wow. He was brilliant in many ways, but unfocused. He was this physically immense person, 6'5". And misanthropic, alcoholic, prone to violence, and generally a sullen person. And the household kind of trembled whenever he walked into it. And I was, as the middle child, my parents weren't, you know, they were just doing the best they could to manage, you know, a household. But I was often used as the intermediary, the placator and the buffer. Yes, it sounds like he and I shared a bedroom so that he would stay away from my younger brother, who he was terribly abusive towards. And he was abusive towards me too. But, you know, his death and really even his life had left me with not only survivor's guilt, but just a kind of, um, in many ways, a low self-esteem, feelings of lingering joylessness.

And I could see tangible ways in which those elements were showing up in my life, you know, that while they weren't like causing me to engage in destructive behavior, I do think that they were in many ways holding me back. They were deep thumbprints into my psyche that carried over into my personal relationships. And so I, I had not explored this in any really, really fulsome way and saw ibogaine as an opportunity maybe to do so.

Can I ask, what were your hopes? Like, as you're going into this process, what are you thinking would be the best case scenario to come out of this?

What are your kind of dreams about this? What I mainly hoped was that the drug would sort of kind of open emotional apertures in me and connect me more to whatever is pleasant about life, whatever is pleasant about others, would maybe cause me to look at myself in less of a self-lacerating way.

And to be clear, even though you did end up writing about this for the Times Magazine, it sounds like you weren't originally doing this for journalism, like that wasn't one of your motivations here?

To be emphatic, I was not, and I had no intention of writing about this.

So when a person, you, decides they want to try ibogaine, what is the process? Given that it's illegal in the US, what are the logistics of making that happen?

Well, I guess to begin with, you better be prepared to buy a ticket because, as you say, you can't get it in the States, so you go elsewhere. And I think most people go to Mexico, though there places all over Asia, Europe, and parts of Africa. Some of them very kind of boutiquey, very spa-like. But the one that Sinema and Perry had gone to, and a number of veterans that I'd interviewed, was this place called Ambio Life Science, located just south of Tijuana, Mexico. And it's, it's not cheap. It costs, um, $8,350 unless you're a veteran or first responder, in which case they give you a $1,000 discount. That's significant. Yeah. Yeah. And there are organizations such as a group called Vets for Veterans that can offer grants to allow military veterans to go there without having to pay so much money. So once I determined that Ambio was where I'd like to go, I reached out to the people there and learned that they have a very long waiting list, but that there are frequently cancelations if you're willing to be flexible. And I. Then said, you know, any chance you've got anything in the month of November?

This was in, I suppose, August that I reached out to them and they said Thanksgiving. Wow. You know, I didn't have any plans anyway, so I said, okay, sure, sign me up.

All right, we're going to take a little break and then we'll talk about your experience on ibogaine. We'll be right back. Okay, Robert, you've made the decision that you're gonna go down to Mexico over Thanksgiving to take ibogaine. Where does the story of this trip begin? What happens first?

I took a plane to San Diego Airport and spent the night in an airport hotel, as did the other 10 people who would be part of my group. The next morning, we all gathered in the lobby. Two SUVs picked us up and we were ferried across the border, past Tijuana, and then took a ride down sort of a rubble-strewn alleyway that dead-ended into this compound that was looming over the Pacific Ocean. The place looks kind of like a Southwest villa, you know, with a very, very gracious outdoor patio with a swimming pool overlooking the ocean.

It's like a very, very nice Airbnb, I'm imagining.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. With a large kitchen setup to cook dinners for a dozen or so. And, and you, have a sense of professionalism and efficiency from the very beginning, that people are friendly, but nonetheless with their own agendas. The, you know, the first thing they did after showing each of us to our rooms was to search all of our belongings to make sure that we hadn't brought any drugs or alcohol. Our phones were eventually confiscated so that when, when you're on ibogaine, there's actually like a danger that you'll drunk dial and, uh, and They're protecting you from yourself in this case. That's right. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. Everyone is screened in advance, not only to make sure that they don't have some kind of heart or other condition that could endanger their, their welfare, but also just to make sure that they really kind of emotionally and psychologically know what they're doing.

Right. They're ensuring you're committed to it. It sounds like.

Yeah, that's right. And, uh, and, and so 36 hours passed before we did the ibogaine. And in those 36 hours, there were documentaries we watched. There were Q&As, there were individual sessions, and there were group sessions, all of them designed in totality just to make us understand fully, you know, what we're getting ourselves into. There was a welcome tutorial documentary that we saw that was hosted by the co-founder of Ambio, Trevor Miller, in which he talked about what was likely to happen, but no guarantees, with our ibogaine journey. And he said that maybe 75 to 80% of you experience nausea and will end up vomiting. And that's, yeah, yeah, no, I know that that's, I mean, vomiting is not my thing. I don't enjoy it, but I also had figured, you know, if that's the price that I pay, then okay. And he equated ibogaine to a roller coaster and he said, you know, there will, there will be ups and there will be downs, but the one thing that you don't want to do is try to get off the roller coaster.

Okay, so you're there, you're surrounded by these other people who have agreed based on the same premise. They are fully in. Can you just tell me about them, if you're willing to talk about these other folks you were surrounded by? Did you learn why they were there?

The majority of them were combat veterans, and a number of those suffered from substance abuse and suicidal ideation. In a couple of cases, traumatic brain injury. There was an Army Ranger named Rick who was really, really quiet and had said that he, he had undertaken ayahuasca and tried other things too, but the memories that he had in combat had really been bedeviling him for a long time. There was a, a woman who was from Eritrea. She started talking about the war there and couldn't even finish her sentence and broke down in sobs. And so we were left to imagine. Whatever she had dealt with before she fled that country. Uh, there was a fellow Texan, a woman named Erin, a corporate consultant who had experienced trauma that she didn't detail that took place in her childhood. And, uh, so they were, you know, very forthcoming in talking about it in most cases. And I should say that like you could see they were wearing it in their physical posture, just this great weight, not only what had brought them there, but of all of the attempts that they had undertaken before. To rid themselves of whatever demons, you know, possessed them.

I'm imagining people kind of hunched over inward.

Yeah, it was a really, really somber first meeting. And I think that we were in essence saying to each other, you know, we're all kind of a mess, you know, and we're all here because we're pretty much at the end of our rope.

Okay, so when the process of actually taking the drug begins, What does that look like? Take me through that start to finish.

Yeah, the process really begins well before the drug is administered. We had blood tests, heart tests. We were all fitted with intravenous ports. Each got a couple of IV bags filled with, um, a proprietary blend of vitamins that basically just keeps your body nourished in anticipation of a period when you're going to be fasting and your body's going to be undergoing this really, really rigorous experience.

God, it's like you're about to run a marathon.

Yeah, it— I mean, there— I will say that MBO does so much of this out of an abundance of caution, and as sort of elaborate and even daunting as it is, on a certain level it's reassuring because they're leaving nothing to chance.

So you have this intense 36-hour prep session. Now it's time to take the ibogaine.

How do you actually consume it? So we were administered our first of 4 dosages of ibogaine. It came in the form of a capsule, big fat capsule. And we were then led down to the treatment room, which is in the basement and is this long rectangular room where there were 11 mats on the floor.

How close are you sitting to everybody else?

Like about roughly 4 feet apart. Okay. Something like that. And so where I was in a corner, The person to my right was the corporate consultant from Texas A&M, and then directly behind me were two of the combat veterans. And situated in front of each mattress is a mirror and a maraca.

A mirror and a maraca. Yeah. Wow.

This is so you can, like, first sit and just kind of look at yourself, have a dialog with yourself. The maraca is actually to synchronize yourself with the music that will soon be coming up. And then to the right, of your mattress in addition to the blanket and the pillow. To the right of it is the bucket for, um, for nausea. And so we all got on our respective mattresses and then in come the heart monitors and they put the patches on your chest. And so now you're, you know, you've got a machine that you're hooked up to. Does this sound appetizing to you, Natalie?

Yeah, I'm, I'm struggling to imagine wanting to be in a scenario where You know, the first thing that happens is in come the heart monitors. Yes. But I, I mean, I'm impressed. I'm impressed that you didn't run out of the room, frankly.

Nobody did. Nobody did. I mean, again, throughout the evening and early morning, there are people there, about half a dozen or so medics, and, um, just to keep an eye on, you know, your heart monitor, any other difficulty you may have. And then at around 11:00, PM or so, the lights were dimmed and the music was turned on. What was the music? It was— the first couple of songs were music from the indigenous community where ibogaine is used. And the one telltale feature of that music is the buiti mouth harp that's played in this very staccato fashion throughout. So I sat there and I started, you know, rattling the maraca along to the music. And I felt a little bit goofy doing this. And so after maybe 45 seconds or so, I decided that I would stop. I also noticed I was beginning to get lightheaded. We were all equipped with these very heavy-duty eye masks. So I lay back and slid on my eye mask, and the moment I did so, the hallucinations began in earnest.

This is your first inkling, it sounds like, that, okay, this trip is really underway.

Yes. And as I even mention that, I'm actually getting goosebumps because it remains so present to me, the sensation of realizing this is not at all what my imagination or what any of the available information had told me it would be.

What was it? I'm dying to know.

Yeah, well, the first were— it was like a film strip, like 6 images, and they were all of what appeared to be tribal chiefs. And then those images dissolved, and then they were replaced by new images. And I don't remember all of them, but I remember very distinctly that some of them were quite troubling. There was a battlefield and there were bodies strewn across a battlefield. There was another one of what looked to be a lot of starving children. And all of these were static images. But then the next image that came up was the only one that was not static, which was a pile of rocks and then these long black snakes slithering out of the rocks. Oh, terrifying. Now, you know, a good therapist will tell you, Natalie, that actually snakes symbolize transformation. Terrifying transformation. Yeah, right, right. But I did think, yeah, this, you know, this, this could be unpleasant. And while I was seeing these things, I was feeling something that again no one had quite prepared me for, that my whole body would feel like it was buzzing. It would feel like that that I'd been strapped up to something that gave forth electrical currents and somebody just turned the knob a little bit.

It didn't hurt, but it's just my whole body was beginning to feel like its neurons were firing. And I noticed my hands began to sweat. And so I realized the intensity of this experience is like nothing I could imagine.

And were you— were you anxious at this point? I mean, for—

No, I was not. Not for a second. I actually had this kind of almost clinical fascination as I saw all of this stuff. It was more wondrous than it was terrifying. And I actually welcomed the idea of just completely surrendering to the drug. When I realized how powerful it was, I thought, actually, this makes the job of surrendering easy because this is— this is not a drug I can defeat.

You don't have a choice.

You must surrender. That's right. And the thing about it is that your mind is very aware of everything. Nothing is muddled. Your mind is quite clear. And so I was having, you know, a dialog with myself as I was seeing all of this stuff, you know, and asking myself, you know, what does this mean? I remember one of the first things I saw that had obvious meaning to me was I saw a little piece of what looked like legal paper and On it was some handwriting, and I instantly recognized that handwriting. It was my handwriting when I was in second grade and when I was just deciding to become a writer.

I remember saying to myself, "You have to remember this." You know, the experience you're describing where you are aware, it has the feeling to me of, like, being awake during your own surgery. You know what I mean? Like, you're watching the thing happen. And maybe that also explains why you remember so many of these images so well. Well, it's—

I tend to have a pretty good memory as it is. But look, this was a 10-hour journey, and I probably remember 2 hours of it, you know? So there's— so a lot of it has been lost in the recesses. But there were some things that were just unforgettable, particularly when photographic images came up of members of my family. Hmm. And, you know, I saw my mother and I saw my father and I saw my younger brother and I saw my older brother. And there would be images of each of them and of them together. And some of them were of actual photographs in our family photo albums and some of them were not. And then they would kind of crumble and the faces themselves would crumble. and then an image of my wife Kirsten came up and Kirsten's mother died recently and she's been going through a lot of grief over that. So I remember actually having a dialog with the ibogaine saying, please don't make her face crumble. It's just too, it's too painful to see that. And it showed some clemency. It did not. Instead just held her image there, a really lovely image of her.

And then it was just replaced by another. Eventually, I saw images of myself, and those were striking to me because they were definitely not photographs that exist. They were instead images of me in a state of almost preposterous self-assurance. I seemed so confident, not happy in a giddy way, but just pleased with my place in the world. And it was, you know, unquestionably me, but on a certain level, almost unrecognizable. And I realized, you know, in looking at that, the ibogaine was trying to project for me an image of myself as I should have it. And to me, that was striking, just as it was striking that when an image of my brother Eli came up, it went quickly away.

And so— So did you— you saw Eli?

You saw your brother? I did. But he was just one of many. And so, you know, it was as if Ibogaine was saying, that's actually not what we're going to talk about tonight. We're not going to talk about your brother. We're going to talk about you.

And what did you— if you remember, what were your feelings when you saw, for example, the images of your family or of you in this kind of confident state?

I remember I had the capacity to say, that's an unmarred version of me. That's a me I recognize and yet that I haven't seen before.

I mean, an image of me that I recognize but haven't seen before is a really powerful idea.

Yeah. Yeah. It really sort of took my breath away. And now while all this is going on, I should say that there were these interruptions, you know, that I'd hear the two veterans behind me were just like this sad Greek chorus of pukers. They— it seemed like the—

The worst Greek chorus ever.

Right. But I also, you know, throughout it, like, heard things. I heard Erin next to me saying to the medics, this bed is not comfortable at all. I need to move. It's not comfortable. I asked her later, you know, I'm so sorry about your discomfort. Was, you know, did they do anything about that? And she said, I don't know what you're talking about. I loved my bed. It was so comfortable. Oh, wow. So I just, I, you know, that was a hallucination. Yeah. Yeah. And I was hearing, I heard like another person scream. That did not, in my view, detract from it. They weren't so powerful as to make me think, you know, I'm never gonna remember this because all I remember is Derek behind me puking. But they were just sort of part of the whole 10-hour psychodrama.

So when does it end?

It ended at, let's see, I think at 8:30 in the morning when I heard a voice say, it's time for your magnesium. And I lifted up my eye mask and saw a shaft of light coming through a window. And I realized then, you know, okay, it's behind us now. And so there was certainly relief for me when it was over. And so they, they hooked us up with a couple of IV bags of magnesium and it took about 2 hours for them to drain. And I was hoisted up to my feet and a person allowed me to lean heavily on them until I made my way back to my room. And that's how I began Thanksgiving.

00:31:56

All right. Well, let's take another short break, and then we'll hear about what stayed with you after all this. We'll be right back. Okay, Robert, you had just gone on this trip for an entire night. How did you feel?

Like crap. I really felt terrible. I mean, in fact, I struggle to think of a day when I felt physically worse than the one I did on what they call, with lovely understatement, gray day, a day of introspection. Gray day. Yeah, it was actually the only introspection I was undergoing was why the hell did I do this to myself? Because I mean, you're, um, it felt as if, you know, I'd been kind of run through a shredder or something. When I closed my eyes, I was still seeing hallucinations. I was still seeing the film strips of images and I could barely stand on my own power. I could barely walk. And I thought, you know, tomorrow evening, you know, it's going to be my last evening here. And then the morning after that, I head back and I, If I'm like this, I can't function. The New York Times is gonna fire me. My wife is gonna divorce me. I mean, I'm just gonna be like this worthless pineapple of a human being.

And, and, uh, you're basically in the midst of what sounds like the worst hangover ever. Yeah. You're struggling. You're struggling.

Yeah. I struggled and I ultimately, after being unable to have dinner, went to sleep Thanksgiving evening and woke up the next morning at 6:30 just feeling like a million dollars. I mean, I was, I was stunned by how good I felt and my body no longer ached. There were no longer any hallucinations. The drug had moved its way out of the system and really felt terrific. And as did all of the others. And so that afternoon we were given an opportunity on what would be our final day there to try yet another psychedelic. It is called 5-MeO-DMT, which is a drug that is derived from the toxic secretions of the Sonoran desert toad. And it's a very, very intense but also short-lived drug. It only lasts about 10 minutes or so.

Still, right when you're feeling better, they're offering you another opportunity.

Well, the truth is, you know, that— I mean, everyone felt better that day than they did on their gray day, but a number of the people didn't feel so well. They had a very, very ricketty, to say the least, ibogaine experience. And what 5-MeO-DMT has been described as is it's almost a euphoria-inducing drug that has the effect of sanding off the very rough edges of your ibogaine experience.

And so, and is that what it was? What was it like?

Well, it comes, the drug does, in the form of something you smoke. Someone gives you this long-stem pipe and you breathe in deeply. And then you fall back with an eye mask on. And at first I didn't know what to make of the drug. I was still hyper-conscious of the fact that I hadn't eaten much in the last day and a half. My mind was just, you know, racing about. And at a certain point I started rubbing my chest and it's something that I do right around my solar plexus, almost as if I'm trying to kind of push away something or protect myself from something. You do that generally, you're saying? Yeah, I do that generally. But then I just then, while lying there, had this memory of a photograph that my younger brother had unearthed recently, which was a photo of me probably at the age of like 4 or 3. And it was me and my brother Eli on the lawn of our house in Houston. And he was lying on top of me. Whoa. My mother had taken the photograph. And it was clear that she wouldn't be taking a photograph of me if he was like beating the crap out of me.

But you can also see that my face looks alarmed and I look like I'm being suffocated. Whoa, Robert. But from there, my mind suddenly jumped forward in time to my years as a, say, 12 or 13-year-old. When my older brother would have me on the ground, his knees on my upper arms, pinned to the ground, and hitting me in the solar plexus with his fingers, doing that repeatedly to me as he had done. Hurting you? Yes. And I began to make this connection then, this very physical connection to this thing that I often do. And it was really a startling reminder of how present he was as a kind of physical and violent force in my life when I had spent so much time more thinking about the tragedy of him dying so young rather than what he had inflicted on me and on my younger brother.

And suddenly you're on this trip and you're having this vision that leads you to another vision and you're realizing all of this, like that motion that I do to myself is connected to this experience of, of what I mean, you called it torture, what sounds like trauma.

Yeah. And I can think about moments in the present day where I've rubbed my solar plexus and it's usually in moments of stress or a moment where I'm feeling some discomfort. I'm feeling him on me, I'm now realizing. Wow. And so that was a pretty sort of startling thing. It felt very much like a kind of psychic bookend had been presented before me.

So I have to ask, what was it like returning home after all this?

I did feel in the first few days in particular, almost like walking around in a spacesuit, you know, on the moon or something, you know, just, um, still not quite sure how to relate the experience that I'd had to all the phenomena around me. And did you feel heavy? No, no, I did not. No, I felt, um, sort of more gravity-defying, but recognizing that gravity is there and at some point I will have to succumb to it. The drug stays in your system in terms of what it does to your neural pathways for a period, you know, for over a month. And you're returning to invariably, you know, to real life with all that that means. And so I've just had to kind of let this integrate itself into the demands of my everyday existence.

What about that neuroplasticity piece that we talked about. Like, do you feel that in yourself, that you had parts of your own mind opened in some way, that you were able to see yourself differently? I'm thinking of obviously the image of you at your most confident. Like, did that remain? Did that unlock something?

00:39:29

"Yes, but..." is what I would say. I mean, it— Like so many therapeutic treatments, I think there's always the prospect of backsliding, a moment where, you know, you run into conflict and, and feel the worst of yourself rising up in you. What has happened with me is that it has spurred a different kind of internal dialog in me that, and it's, I'm still at pains to describe how it differentiates itself from whatever the usual blah, blah, blah inside me is taking place. But I, but I do, um, but I do have like, you know, more searching questions of why did I do that or how am I letting this affect my own self-regard? And it has definitely added a kind of depth to how I regard the outside world and my place in it. Hmm. There is, you know, a space, a journey that connects, you know, the kid on the grass with a brother on top of him to this sort of transfigured image of this other version of me that is out from under that earlier predicament. That's free. Yeah. And so that's, I suppose, you know, the journey that I've been on.

But understanding both points, the beginning point and the endpoint is a clarifying and useful experience for me.

Well, Robert, thank you for letting us into your journey and for sharing everything you did. We really appreciate it. Sure thing, Natalie. Today's episode was produced by Tina Antolini. With help from Alex Barron. It was edited by Wendy Dorr and engineered by Rowan Nimistow. It contains music by Marian Lozano, Rowan Nimistow, Dan Powell, and Diane Wong. Our production manager is Frannie Carthoff. That's it for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kitroeff. See you tomorrow.