To Fathom Hell, Or Soar Angelic
From cuddle puddles to the pope doing ayahuasca, some hearts run free. So why are they making enlightenment illegal, especially when helping people is at the root of it
Hello everyone. At the bottom of this story is a piece I wrote about a weed crawl (as opposed to a pub crawl) that just came out in a UK magazine called Perspective.
As I was writing it, thinking about all the marijuana prohibition in the world, I was reminded of a genial Burner visitor I met at Garth’s. We were lounging one starry night in a “cuddle puddle” (a paddling pool filled with cuddly toys and happily lolling humans – and which was which?) We began discussing current laws around psychedelics. The Burner man remarked, “It’s like they’re making enlightenment illegal.”
I also remembered a story the Guardian sent me to report on in September 2021 while I was still living in the cave. A “Psychedelic Wellness Summit” in Las Vegas called Meet Delic. It was organized by husband and wife team Jackee and Matt Stang, both former workers at High Times, the famous New York weed magazine founded in 1974. They’d created a company called Delic which went on to become America’s largest ketamine therapy provider. The parent company, Delic Corp was billed as the first psychedelic wellness corporation (the “Goop of psychedelics.”) Jackee and Matt’s line was that we had to “come out” about our drug taking. Like in the old days when brave gay men and lesbians “came out” and eventually we got gay marriage.
Handy: Matt and Jackie Strang founded “the Goop of psychedelics”
I met some interesting people at that Las Vegas weekend including Chad Harman, a CEO in beige Chinos and a navy blazer who tried to sell me on the idea of low-fat versions of ancient shamanic medicines from the Amazon. His company, Psycheceutical, makes synthesized “pharmahuasca” capsules with the famous vomitty part of the ayahuasca experience taken out.
“We want to make it more palatable,” he told me. “So people can have an experience where they receive all the therapeutic benefits without all that purging and dangerous aspect.”
Chad admitted that he’d never actually taken ayahuasca.
Many of the smaller stall holders were suspicious of the new psychedelic capitalists. “That’s evil, dude,” said one young woman.
The Saturday Guardian never ran the story. My editor told me it was more about the lack of advertising than a fear of “coming out” about the way we take drugs now. It was a lot of work for nothing, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world because I met a shining star called Flor Bollini. Born in Argentina, she was only 39 at the time and had already been profiled in Forbes, Fortune, Vice and Bloomberg. Forbes dubbed her the “Corporate Shaman.” It was a tonic to interview this Argentinian live wire, not just because the “psychedelic space” as they call it here, is on the whole peopled by men.
A former spirit guide for Silicon Valley execs, Flor was now raising capital for her high end trip sitter company, Nana Heals. All sitters would be women and Buffo toad was the medicine. Buffo A.K.A 5-MeO-DMT A.K.A the “God Molecule.” It blasts you into a dimension of unconditional love and has you back on your yoga mat within 20 minutes.
Funky Fungi: working it at the psychedelic festival
I was interested in Flor’s work as I’d once smoked Toad on a vision quest. It was a massive experience and struck me as being a kind of fast-track ayahuasca. When I’d taken it on that vision quest, my shaman had told me that because I’d only had a blissful time and not entered a realm of profound darkness and terror, I hadn’t taken enough. “Blasted off” I think was his terminology.
Flor rolled her eyes when I told her this. She said it was a typical male take on drugs - that you have to stuff your face with them, take “heroic” amounts and all that. Whereas in fact women’s constitutions are very different from men’s- not to mention that their psychology is less ego-based. “Gentle,” was a word she used a lot in relation to entering psychedelic realms.
Speakers at the Vegas weekend emphasized that the burgeoning industry was going to need 100,000 new therapists over the next ten years. But what stripe of therapist would we need for such a radically-changed mental health universe? Flor advocated for women-only therapists because, “when a woman is having a full body orgasm in ceremony she feels safer being held by a woman. And men are more comfortable showing fear with a woman.”
Houston we have mushrooms: 2500 people attended Meet Delic in 2021
Talking of business transparency, Flor added that she’d turned down an offer of money from the giant Thiel Capital (founders of Paypal) because the company’s chief medical officer, Jason Camm, “wouldn’t say if he’d ever tried psychedelics or not.”
She confided that Nana Heals was inspired by an ayahuasca ceremony that told her to work with Toad and train a series of female “Nanas” to serve it as a sacrament in church-like settings. She added that Pope Francis might be able to help. She had a connection to the fellow Argentinian former chemist, from when they both worked at the Partido Justicialista. “He can speak as a scientist and a spiritual leader,” she reasoned.
I nodded, thinking Is this mad or is this the future? It’s probably a bit of both. Flo did agree with synthetic toad secretion so as not to depreciate the Buffo population, although nothing would be taken out of it. We ended the night talking and laughing about female masturbation. I loved Flor’s humor and her warmth, her brain and her passion for what she was doing. Here is a true free thinker, I thought, someone who understands life in its huge richness and nuance.
Ego cleaner: this man explained that DMT is made of mimosa tree root. Not to be confused with 5-MeO DMT which is made from the venom of a Mexican toad.
We kept in touch. We spent a mad day in Los Angeles cruising round in her Tessla – doing a drive-by at Erewhon, La La’s Marie Antoinette crazy-expensive supermarket. The Hailey Bieber collagen and sea moss-enhanced strawberry smoothie costs $19. Flor was even generous enough to help sponsor my last US visa. And then the thrilling moment happened earlier this year - she finally found the funding to launch her so-crazy-it-might-just-work Nana Heals trip sitter enterprise.
And then she died. Last month in Ibiza. The night of October 13. Another of those damn out-of-the-blue deaths. She was 42. I found out on instagram and eventually got in touch with her mother, Susana Cavallo, a psychoanalyst living in Buenos Aires who had worked for 32 years in a psychiatric emergency hospital. She wrote to me, telling me that her daughter was last seen entering a friend’s sauna in Ibiza. Flor had told her mother that she loved to alternate between hot and cold baths. Susana sent her an article talking about how dangerous this could be because it caused vasoconstriction and could lead to cardiac arrest.
Maybe other causes have been found for Flor’s death by now. I’ve not been able to talk to anyone else about it because I never met any of her friends. If anyone reading this knows of her or knows someone who does, please let me know. She was one of those super-dynamic, one-in-a-million “out-there in a good way” people.
Someone once told me that the death of a child is the worst thing that can happen to a parent. “These are very hard and sad days,” her mother wrote to me. But the celebration of Flor’s life that took place in Ibiza shortly after her death comforted her. “I have nothing but words of thanks for everyone, Susana went on. “I can only take comfort in the fact that Flor enjoyed life and had many moments of plenitude and delight.”
She added that helping alleviate human suffering was her daughter’s driving force. “Nana is the name she gave to her beloved grandmother and that name symbolizes the role of maternal dedication and care.” She was moved by the number of messages of condolence and love she’d received from Flor’s friends and colleagues from around the world.
There is no denying that there have been set backs in the psychedelic industry this year. The MAPS study on the use of MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder was turned down by the FDA’s Psychopharmacological Drugs Advisory committee this summer. Only one member of the FDA advisory committee had expertise in psychedelics and statistics show that existing therapies only bring relief to a very few patients. Look at the tragic death of One Direction’s Liam Payne the other week. Clearly he needed some radical therapeutic help – and a bad drug called “Pink cocaine” was not the good drug he needed.
This is the frustrating thing if you are a free thinker/pioneer type. MDMA will be available again for therapy, just as it was in the 1940s. At some point. And weed will be made legal in the UK at some point, just as it was in the US. But meanwhile we sit around tapping our fingers.
Although not everyone does. One regular Jo who sticks in my mind from the Vegas summit was a young Californian who’d bought the domain name “shroomed.com” for $3500. He then set up a mushroom-themed baseball hat company and a podcast. He’d had a crisis during lockdown when he was drinking a bottle of Hennessey a day. He wasn’t going to wait around until the FDA legalized psilocybin. “Street mushrooms cured me,” he told me. “Ask my wife! They told me not to put crap in my body. I just wanted to share my story and help people.”
Curioser and Curioser: turns out there’s a cure to drinking a bottle of brandy a day
“Mr Shroomed,” 35, had met a lot of investors and psychedelic therapists that weekend. “I can tell a lot of them have never done a psychedelic in their life,” he said with a shrug. “That’s weird to me.” Check out his “Shroomed” podcast. I’m delighted to see that he and it are still doing well.
Flor came to mind this morning as I did my morning jog around the grounds of my desert cabin. The Hopi Indians see running as a form of meditation, a way to pray for friends and relatives who have died, also the ones who are still living but unable to run. You don’t have your ear buds in when you’re a Hopi runner.
I wasn’t expecting Flor to appear in my Substack this morning, but here she is. My original idea was to talk about the hypocrisy surrounding marijuana laws. I was intending to talk about how I once tried to sell a column to the British newspapers back in the mid-90s called Hoo Haa. I was in my early 30s. It was a humorous look at the reality of how people took drugs then. I wrote three sample columns and all the newspapers turned me down. Although I did receive one thoughtful reply. I think it was from Andrew Marr at the Independent. He said that he loved the Hoo Haa idea, but that there was so much hypocrisy surrounding this issue. I remember his line that editors didn’t dare to “raise their heads above the parapet.” Well, some people like Flor Bollini did raise their heads. This first Hoo Haa column (written circa 1996 - see if you can tell) is dedicated to her memory.
Remain in the light: Flor Bollini, Los Angeles, May 17, 2022
THE AMATEUR
There is nothing worse than an amateur drugs taker over thirty. In his early youth, David never touched drugs, only alcohol. Drugs were for hippies and losers. And then, when he was 34, he had an eyebrow and a nipple pierced (he was having an affair with an 19-year-old boy). Luckily, the piercings went septic and David had to admit that his body had better taste than he did. So he dropped the 19-year-old and removed the piercings. By that time, however, a new acquaintance had turned him on to orchid feed (a new form of liquid ecstasy which you could readily get over the internet because it claimed to be plant food). David said it was fantastic. He said it made you feel like you wanted to do it with a donkey.
Soon, he was talking nonsense to cab drivers at six in the morning all over London. "When you meet someone at a club and you click, it’s really great, it’s all about synchronicity, you know?"
The cab drivers were fascinated by what he said. He told his new clubbing buddy Martin - an ex-squaddie homophobe fascist transformed over night into a mellow hippie by smoking spliff - about these experiences as he dangled over a mirror one night. David heard Martin laugh and so David laughed and suddenly there was white powder all over his shoes.
David learned many new things in the space of a few weeks. He learned to tie his hair back when leaning over a mirror, he learned to hold the joint away from his Paul Smith shirt when he was smoking if he wanted to avoid tell-tale signs of blim burn (another piece of new vocabulary) although he still struggled to roll a decent joint. His efforts bore more resemblance to the sort of thing beatniks used to smoke or, as Martin said, to stubby wind tunnels. He once met a man who offered to get him some testosterone which sounded exotic enough, but then it turned out that testosterone makes your hair come out and you have to inject it.
He lived for Friday evenings. He said that if you were going to be a 21st century wage slave then larging it at the weekends was the only self-respecting thing you could do. He didn’t always large it. Sometimes his friends would call up and he’d tell them that he’d had a quiet weekend. "Yeah, I stayed in with a gram and a couple of pills."
One night, he was having another in-depth conversation with one of his cabbie friends about his synchronicity thing. He was explaining his conspiracy theory idea that traffic lights stay red longer at night than they do in the day when the cabbie looked in the rear view mirror and said, "You’re talking shit, mate." Luckily, David didn’t remember about this the next day.
OK, that’s quite enough drugs for one day. When you are properly refreshed, you can read (below) about my weed crawl in Desert Hot Springs, the poor but badass cousin of Palm Springs . Some lady freaked out on Facebook when I posted the link there. She reckoned that it was irresponsible to recommend going to DHS, because everyone there shoots up meth. It’s true that DHS is famous for its felons. My Palm Springs hairdresser friend told me that when they let you out of LA jail, they give you a bus ticket that’s free for up to 100 miles. And DHS is 100 miles from LA County Jail. But I’ve been to some very fun and cheap days in the ghetto senior spas of DHS and I’ve never seen anything that louche. The visual in the Perspective version of this weed crawl article is very stealth. It looks like a village fête. Here’s something a bit more racy.
Got a light?
