 Good morning and welcome to Moments with Melinda. I am Melinda Moulton and I'm your host. And today I am honored to have Dr. Rick Barnett with me. Hi, Rick. Hey, Melinda, nice to see you. Nice to see you. Thanks just so much for agreeing to be on my show. I'm really excited to talk to you. So to my viewers, I wanna let you know a little bit about Dr. Barnett. He is a licensed psychologist doctorate, licensed alcohol and drug counselor with an additional master's degree in clinical psychopharmacology. He is also the co-founder of the Psychedelic Society of Vermont and he's president, founder of the Carter, Inc. Center for Addiction Recognition, Treatment, Education and Recovery. Is that about right? That's correct, yeah, you got it. All right, well, that's a lot, Rick. Well, let's start at the beginning, which is always where I like to begin. Share with my viewers a little bit about who you are, where you hail from and a little bit about your past. Yeah, born and raised in Stovermont, where I am right now, native of Stowe, there's not many of us here. And I grew up here in this idyllic town and found myself as I got older, getting into all kinds of debauchery and alcohol and drug use as a, maybe somewhat of a typical teenager at that time, but maybe took it a little bit too far and got myself into all kinds of legal and academic and physical troubles, relational problems, wound up in rehab actually at the age of 20 and spent six months in rehab. And then that launched me into a journey of recovery and I was able to finish my college education as a part of being sober and in recovery and went on to get a doctoral degree and another master's degree. And eventually I had moved to New York City, believe it or not, for 13 years lived in New York City, love New York. I was just down there this past weekend visiting and I moved back to Vermont in 2005 to raise my family. And here I am and my career has been in clinical psychology, in addiction treatment and really more recently realizing what's happening with all the psychedelic research going on, knowing from my past, having used psychedelics that these are powerful tools that can be harnessed and integrated into people's lives in a healthy way to make for changes they might be looking for. And so I've been delighted that I was able to do a training program in psychedelic therapy and research in 2020, 2021. I'm in another training for a specific kind of psychedelic compound, which requires a little bit more specified training and I've been able to work with other healthcare professionals to try to bring in this new psychedelic paradigm into our culture in a safe and effective way. It's been an exciting ride. It sure has been, it sure has been Rick. So my next question was gonna be about what inspired you to get into the field of addiction treatment and I'm assuming that it had to do with your own period in your life when you were addicted, correct? Probably that that's what inspired you to get into it. Yeah, exactly. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life. I got sober when I was 20 and I had already an interest in psychology and I felt at the time, believe it or not, I felt it was kind of a cop-out if I were to go from this person who was addicted to going into recovery and then working in the recovery world, I was like, that's too easy, that's too basic. Like why would I just wanna devote my life to dealing with addiction? What I've been dealing with myself and I've got my own recovery story. But that thinking changed because I realized that addiction is really something that is potentially inherent in all of us. We all have the potential to develop an unhealthy relationship with our thoughts, with behaviors, with substances and it really didn't feel like I was sort of putting myself, backing myself into a corner by focusing on addiction because it's such a widespread problem. So I just, I sort of fell into it because of my own personal history and also my fascination with psychology behaviors, human relationships. Sociology. Sociology. It's so interesting that you were young, you were 20. So what was your drug of choice alcohol? And I mean, at the age of 20 to make that realization that you wanna stop taking whatever it was that you were taking is a young age because that's kind of the party age that going off to college and talk to us a little bit about that. What inspired you? What drove you to finally say I've had enough? Well, yeah, I mean, it's extremely young and I'm super grateful that I was able to have the resources available to me to get the help that I needed and to be able to connect with people and have realizations to maintain, to stay on this path because that's a difficult age to make that decision and realize how what a shit show it is to live that lifestyle. But already at that age, I had started using cigarettes at age 10 and I started using alcohol at age 11. I started using cannabis at age 12. So I started pretty young and I sort of off to the races. By the time I was 15, I'd used cocaine, MDMA, was using cannabis on a daily basis, was a daily smoker, was really getting into alcohol and a number of consequences just built up very quickly over the course of those five years from 15 to 20. By the time I was 15, I'd already been arrested twice and so it just got worse and worse to the point where my pancreas basically just gave out and that was really the straw that broke the camel's back because I'd already been kicked out of three apartments in Burlington. I had been arrested three times. I had been in four car accidents. I was kicked out of my family's home. My relationships were all over the place. So it was really my physical health being stopped in my tracks, being in the hospital for a week, recovering from acute pancreatitis where I had that sort of moment of clarity even though I was still somewhat resistant and I was able to be convinced to go to rehab at that time and was open-minded enough. And I honestly, I say this Melinda, the only reason why I was open-minded enough to the message of recovery is because of my psychedelic use when I was actively addicted. I used a lot of psychedelics when I was a kid and there were aspects of those experiences which really stuck with me in profound ways that left me open to the message of recovery which is, it's a whole paradigm shift to go from being inactive addiction to being in recovery. And if I didn't have an experience where paradigm shifts were actually possible, I probably wouldn't have stayed on this path but I knew that paradigm shifts were possible because of my psychedelic experiences. So I've been grateful to be in recovery for over 30 years. That's fascinating. And my generation, when I was growing up, we didn't drink. I mean, our parents were the drinkers and we were like, oh, they're cocktail parties and it's such a dumb thing. I mean, we were psychedelic users and neither my husband or I ever really got into drinking. Because psychedelics were so much more enlightening. But anyway, that's neither here nor there. You were at the press conference that I was at about a month ago and it was talking about the legalization of psilocybin in this state. At that press conference, there was a graph which blew my mind. And I want you to talk to my viewers a little bit about that graph and it listed all the dangerous things that some legal and where they line up and talk to us a little bit about that graph because it was mind-boggling. Yeah, that's a graph that came out of England, Professor David Nutt, who's a psychedelic researcher, drug policy expert, really a fantastic human being who's done a lot to help bring in this new psychedelic era. But he's a drug policy expert, a pharmacologist, a clinician, he understands drugs and he understands addiction. And that graph basically showed that the two legal and most widely acceptable drugs, alcohol and tobacco, cause the most harm in society. And then underneath that, in rank order, you've got alcohol causing all this harm and pain and suffering. You've got tobacco causing all this pain and suffering. And you go through all the different drugs, cocaine, heroin, cannabis, methamphetamine, benzodiazepines, then we get into some of the other drugs like morphine and codeine and then down to ketamine and LSD and MDMA. And at the bottom of the chart, you have psilocybin mushrooms, which is this tiny little, tiny fraction of the population and tiny fraction of harms done from psilocybin. And yet it's a schedule one drug, deemed by the federal government like cannabis, ironically, to be of no medicinal value, no medical value whatsoever and a high potential for abuse. And we both know that that's not true. Psilocybin does have medicinal value and it does not have a high potential for addiction. So that was at the bottom of the chart. So it's a really fascinating chart. It was extraordinary. And what blows my mind is when you go up to Burlington, there's wine bars and breweries and whiskey bars, every other doorway in our towns. It's just, I mean, alcohol is rampant, especially in the last 20 years with these generations who a lot of them have chosen alcohol as their drug of choice because it's legal and now at the end of the day. But I love that graph. Anyway, and- You know, the other interesting thing about that fact about alcohol is if you talk to, in Vermont we have this great network of recovery centers. There's all these recovery centers in all the different counties. Turning Point and Chittenden County, we've got the North Central Vermont Recovery Center here in Lemoyle County and Bennington and Rutland. And we have peer recovery coaches and they have partnerships with the emergency departments where peer recovery coaches can go into emergency departments, help out EMTs when there's a crisis around some sort of addiction. And most of the cases they get called for are not opioids. We're in this midst of this opioid epidemic. People are dying from fentanyl and opioids, but it's alcohol hands down that is the number one problem that these recovery coaches are seeing in the recovery centers in the emergency rooms. So we must not forget that alcohol is a serious, serious issue in our culture. It really is and it's just promoted everywhere. I mean, you can go anywhere and get alcohol. So anyway, why? I just want to talk a little bit about Oxycontin. Michael Keaton was this incredible film is a six part series about Oxycontin and doctors are still prescribing it. And I don't know if you have any, because this may not be your specialty, but talk just a little bit about that drug and the harm that it has created in this country. Well, there's a lot to be said about that. And I would consider myself somewhat of an expert on the subject. I've been engaged in discussions around the opioid epidemic for quite a number of years with a lot of experts in the field from all over the country when it comes to this. And it's a very thorny, difficult issue. And when it comes to Oxycontin, that drug in particular is so well known because it was in the late 90s when there was this pain campaign, so to speak, this national pain campaign to try to better address pain in our patients. And Oxycontin was put forth as this non-addictive new opioid that was originally just for really intense cancer related pain in oncology. And then it was broadly promoted as a good tool for non-cancerous pain, just generalized pain and promoted by the pharmaceutical industry in partnership with various medical organizations to try to reduce the suffering from pain people had. And unfortunately that was the precipitating factor towards people getting prescribed more and more of this particular drug and then the diversion and the misuse of it happening and then people recognizing that it's a problem and being cut off access to it and then switching over to heroin and which eventually led to people being not prescribed pain medications anymore. And so their pendulum swung completely the other way and even 96 year old people with severe cancer pain or people with chronic medical conditions were being forced to come off of Oxycontin because it had gotten such a bad name 20 years later. And even though we've seen a drastic reduction in the prescribing of opioids for pain, we have seen nothing but increasing deaths from opioid related overdoses. And so simply stopping prescribing opioids for pain is not the answer. It's a very, very complicated issue. So that's the role that Oxycontin has played. It's a very powerful opioid that when crushed or snorted can be and has been widely misused. Yeah, well, there you have it. So talk to me a little bit about the rise in the mental health crisis and have you seen a rise in the mental health crisis as a result of COVID? Yes, I would say absolutely. COVID was a devastating thing that happened to all of us and differentially it has impacted people. I mean, Melinda, I get six to 10 calls a week emails, text messages, people trying to get in for mental health care for counseling. And I'm a private practitioner. I don't work in a public agency and people are knocking down my doors. It's difficult for me to find colleagues to refer these people too who are reaching out for help. It's never seen anything like this before. They're just not enough of us to go around. And a lot of that is the, I think the increasing polarization we're seeing in the political world, the anxiety people have around climate change, the isolation we all felt from being quarantined from COVID, using technology increasingly as a way to distract ourselves and being dysregulated by our overuse of technology. So there's a lot of factors that have all sort of come together as a result of COVID that makes this, we are definitely seeing rising rates of suicide, rising rates of addiction and overdose deaths and people seeking help. And so thank God there are new tools on the horizon, which is how we met to help people shift their functioning in such a way improve their wellbeing. Thank you for that. I wanna ask you a little bit about our children. There are a lot of children in this country who are being given antidepressants and drugs for anxiety, and Ritalin and all these different drugs, young people. And I'm just wondering how you feel about that, that if things aren't going the way that they cause this anxiety that these children are being given pharmaceuticals to deal with their anxiety. And there are side effects to that that coming off of these medications can take a long time. Where do you land on that? Yeah, I mean, I feel terrible for a child and adolescent psychiatrist or pediatricians or family docs who are charged with the responsibility of a prescription pad and people come to them for help. And their main tool is their prescription pad. And they are being taught that there are these medicines that can help people and they wanna be of service and patients and their families demand help. And this is what they have to offer. And unfortunately, I think there's a lot of over-prescribing of kids and misdiagnosis and using medicines as a first tool, partly because again, that's what they have at their fingertips to be able to be helpful. And so I don't blame them for being in that awkward position and wanting to help and using that tool. And they also struggle with finding child and adolescent mental health practitioners or child and adolescent organizations that can approach these families and these kids in non-pharmacological ways to use that as a tool first. It's difficult to find those tools as well, those resources. So it's really kind of a cluster for a lot of kids and their families who are struggling with these issues and for us providers to find the right balance. And there are like some of these stimulants for ADHD. There's a great episode of the Andrew Huberman Lab. He does a great podcast and he does his whole exposé on Adderall and stimulants for ADHD. And the evidence is clear. If you truly have an attention deficit disorder or hyperactivity disorder for a small subset of these people, these medicines can be extremely helpful and life affirming and growth oriented. But too often there's just not adequate time or tools to assess these people appropriately, offer non-pharmacological tools as a first line treatment. And that's just for the sort of ADHD side of things. You mentioned anxiety, depression. Again, I think in some cases, having these medicines available is appropriate and helpful but not to turn to them as a first line treatment always as if that's the only thing and not to rely upon them and maybe also think about using them in the short term rather than simply offering the prescription and then this kid who's 10 years old has now been on Zoloft or Prozac for the last six years when they were just going through a phase of development that happened to be particularly difficult at that time. Well, you know what else doctors never look at? They certainly never ask me, what's your diet? And as somebody who's had a gluten and dairy allergy, it affected my mood, it affected my attitude, it affected the way that I looked at life, it affected my ability to not be depressed. And a lot of times it's what we're eating, an overdose of sugar or if you have allergies to certain foods then it causes inflammation which can, and they never go there. It's always let's go to the prescription drug. But anyway. Well, it's also what are we consuming? So when you think about what's in your diet, but what are we consuming with our attention? What are we receiving emotionally? What are we consuming in a broad sense of the term? Also, our diet of social interactions is an important, so these are all non-pharmacological tools that we just need to do better as a society, as bringing attention to and reorganizing so that we don't take the easier software way with just prescribing a psychiatric medicine. Thank you for that. I really appreciate that. So we're gonna talk about natural ways to treat mental difficulty for human beings. And let's move right into your powerful work on psilocybin treatment. Let's explain, I mean, a psilocybin, what is a psilocybin to my viewers? And so explain that. And then also talk a little bit about the human health and wellbeing in using psilocybin in the treatments for mental health. Yeah, so psilocybin for your viewers, most people know what psilocybin is, but it's the active ingredient in what's called magic mushrooms, psychedelic mushrooms. psilocybin cubenzis is the technical name. And it's basically a tryptamine, which is a type of psychedelic drug or a molecule that can interact with the brain in such a way to produce experiences that shift our senses, our sights, our sounds, taste, touch, how we experience ourselves, our perspective of the world, of other people, our connection to nature. It basically affects our receptors in our brain and produces an experience that shifts our worldview in so many different ways, shifts our understanding of our emotions. And it's an experience that can last four to six hours when ingested and people can ingest this in various forms from a capsule form that's ground up powder from the raw mushroom itself, dried mushroom itself. And dosage is really important because there's this whole movement around micro dosing where people take small amounts on a more regular basis versus what's called heroic dosing or macro dosing. I don't like the word heroic necessarily because it sounds like a challenge that we need to be heroes and take large amounts of this stuff, which is probably not a good idea for a lot of people, at least not in a sort of half hazard kind of way. So there's dosage. And yeah, it's a really powerful tool to help people maybe look at themselves or experience the world differently in a way that no other molecule that we have available currently can do. And these are intense psychedelic experiences that as it's being rolled out in the research and eventually into a clinical practice, it's done in a very curated way. In other words, there's a whole process by which somebody maybe comes in for a consultation and they're described, some of what we're describing right here. This is what this drug is. This is what the type of experience it can be. And we can spend three, four, five hours or three, four, five sessions preparing for a psychedelic journey, preparing for a psilocybin mushroom experience, usually in a clinical setting like an office setting in the clinical trials, they have special rooms set up like a living room so it's comfortable. Someone has the administration session or the experience session. And then there's one, two, three, four multiple sessions of integration. So how do we understand what just happened during the psychedelic experience and spending a lot of time helping the person sort through it? So this is whole curated protocol of a particular kind of way to administer and handle a psychedelic drug like this in a healthy and productive way. That's not to say that you and I both know that psilocybin mushrooms can be used recreationally for fun, for ceremony, for celebration, for ritual, for personal growth and wellbeing. It doesn't have to be in the context of a medical condition or a mental health condition. It can be used safely and effectively outside of a medical model. But in terms of the research, that's the direction the more traditional Western model is going in in that medicalized kind of way. Well, I don't need magic mushrooms for my mental health because that's pretty together probably because I've done mushrooms and it's kind of kept me healthy. I think mentally health, but I do use it for summits for social events because I tend to be an introvert and it allows me to open up and to be more receptive and open-minded. But anyway, I love mushrooms and I've taken them for years and they've been very helpful for me. But anyway, that's neither you nor you nor there, but it is. So what advice, now look, we're trying to legalize this in Vermont so that we're not feeling, for me to say this on television, I'm not gonna come and get hauled out and thrown in jail. I mean, there's an understanding about this, especially in Vermont, but it needs to be legalized because right now it is right up there with heroin and it shouldn't be. And so talk to us about your advice for someone who wants to try magic mushrooms. What is your advice to them around this, Rick? Well, I think it's important to do your research, so to speak. If someone's interested in having a psychedelic experience with mushrooms or with other psychedelic drugs, frankly, doing a fair amount of research and listening to podcasts, having conversations with people, reading some books, studying some of this, spending time, making sure that you're developing enough of an awareness and building an educational background to understand what could go wrong, what could be helpful, how to optimize the experience, how to minimize harms that could come from the experience, building community, being transparent with other people, people that you trust and say, hey, I'm gonna do this, what do you think? Finding someone maybe to hold space for you, to do that in a safe and effective way, learn from the experts, learn from the material that's out there and how to have a really good experience with it, even though at times it can go sideways. These, at the higher levels, some of these experiences can be quite challenging for people, so if you're gonna do it, make sure that you're aware that some of it could be difficult and having strategies there, like another person available to sit with you who's not on mushrooms necessarily, who can hold your hand and walk you through something difficult that might come up. So all these things are really important, which is building community, being transparent, open with the right people, reading lots of books, listening to podcasts, and I think it's something that can and ought to be used in personal ways, how somebody decides they wanna use it should be a valid way, just waiting around for a medicalized model so that you can be prescribed a pharmaceutical version of psilocybin mushroom to be taken in an office with a licensed healthcare practitioner. Like I get it, that is a model, that is an important model that makes a lot of people feel safe, but that is by no means the best or only model that should be put out there, which is why we've been working in Vermont to try to at first decriminalize psilocybin so that people can grow and possess and use and share their own mushrooms for the purposes of recreation, for the purposes of celebration, for the purposes of healing, for whatever reason they want to and not live in fear that the cops are gonna come in and arrest you for having four ounces of mushrooms sitting in your refrigerator. That's not something people need to live with, it just doesn't make any sense. Eventually getting to a commercial model like we finally got to with cannabis here, that would be great. So then you have a regulated product that you can go to the store and buy your micro doses or buy your macro dose, whatever amount you want, that would be great. But I think starting with removing it from the list of illegal drugs in the state of Vermont would be a really good first step. That's what we were working on this last time. Absolutely, that's where you and I met was speaking out down at the legislature and in committee. Well, I agree, nobody needs to do mushrooms and feel paranoid. That's like the last thing you wanna feel. So let's get this bill passed and I think it would have passed this year if there had been more time. I really do. At the end of the day, I think it will pass by the end of the next session, next year. Now you were holding a summit, a retreat, which I have my tickets to. It's the Soul Quinox Summit and it is a summit focusing on psilocybin. I titled it The Psychedelic Retreat and it's in September, I believe and I'm gonna be going to that. So with that in mind, will you eventually be able to train more folks? I would like to be trained to be a magic mushroom therapist. I personally have been helping some friends but not in a therapeutic way, but I would love to be able to get certified in Vermont. Will that ever be available to people like me who wanna take it a step further to actually help people? I really hope so. That's part of the goal with the bill that we were working on. It's set up a psilocybin therapy advisory group of which I would hopefully be a member of and that would set up hopefully be able to write a report to the legislature recommending setting up a system whereby licensed or unlicensed people can take a training program and learn all the basics of how to hold space for people and to be able to do so in a legal and safe and effective way, whether it's at a facility or a particular geographic location or in somebody's home, however that gets designed, that's what's happening in Oregon. Oregon passed by a ballot initiative. They have a model there that's being set up now and it's in operation where they have licensed facilities. So specific licensed brick and mortar buildings where people who are not licensed or who are health care practitioners but who have undergone a minimum of something like 80 hours of training with an experiential aspect to it. So they've done the mushrooms themselves and they have the qualifications to sit with somebody and you don't have to have a mental health diagnosis to access. In fact, that's a rule out. You can just come for personal exploration, spiritual growth, whatever it is for creativity purposes have a session. So I'm hoping to set up an improved version of that. We're hoping to do that in Vermont where again, I think all paths are so important Melinda and the medical model is important but so are all the models that exist outside of the medical model. So we need to be sort of all encompassing. We don't need to sort of just dig our heels into one approach only. That's not good for anybody. No, no, we have to be multifaceted. And a lot of my friends in my day, they went to jail and they spent time in jail for pot and for mushrooms and I'm just glad as a 73-year-old woman that my generation is getting a little bit of notoriety that yeah, maybe we were on to something and we didn't deserve to be thrown in jail for what we were on. So I am loving, I have a big smile on my face. I'm not on mushrooms but I have a big smile on my face because this is important to me and it's important to my generation. So thank you for your time, Rick. It's been an incredible pleasure to get to know you. I'm so excited to be with you for three days at your summit and I hope someday that you and I can take mushrooms together and spend a day walking Mount Mansfield and just spending a lot of time together and I look forward to that. So I wanna thank you for your time. Thank you so much. I would love that. That would be fantastic. I think it's gonna happen. So let's keep working at it. Let's hope by next summer you and I can take that little hike and to my viewers, I wanna thank you for joining us with my time here with my friend and I also wanna let you know that I will see you next month and in the meantime have a beautiful summer. We're so glad it rained and to you, Rick, take care and I will see you soon. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you, bye-bye.