 I wish I had gone with my instinct the first time I injected heroin. I would tell myself, leave it. I've hit 20,000 rock bottoms. I've been as low as you can go and you can't go any further. I don't want to be that example for my daughter. I can't be dead on my bathroom floor because that's not fair to her. In 2020, Serene, who asked that we not use her last name, reached out to two brothers named Rory and Ryan Van Tynen. Based in Waterbury, Vermont, they had started a non-profit with the goal of building a community that can help people to overcome addiction and improve their mental health. I contacted Rory and Ryan as I had seen an article called Cultivating Connections and I had read both their stories. Rory had taken the psychedelic drug ayahuasca in 2019, which was a last-ditch attempt to overcome a 10-year heroin addiction that had derailed his life. Neither Ryan nor Rory believed that hallucinogens are a cure-all, but without the ayahuasca, he'd either still be using or he'd be dead. The key was to accompany the drug with the cultivation of meaningful human relationships. I'm at such a weak point because I'm in so much pain, not so much physical and mental pain. I really want to help. I don't know what I can even help, but I want to. I have that urge. Yes. Psychologist Andrew Tartarski is the founder and director of the Center for Optimal Living in New York City and he specializes in addiction and harm reduction therapy. What are the promises of psychedelics when it comes to treating things like addiction? Our core beliefs, our behaviors, our patterns of relating, our patterns of coping get encoded in neural networks, which is why they're so difficult to change. Psychedelic substances have this really interesting and unique capacity to loosen those structures and in some cases dissolve them so that people have the opportunity to kind of rework their relationship to themselves and the world and develop new structures that are more adaptive, more effective. Rory and Ryan have not asked for money, for endorsements. They expect nothing from me. I hope the ayahuasca will help me find my center of self again. But Tartarski also warns that this powerful tool is creating new problems for some people suffering from addiction or mental illness. When administered by untrained practitioners, these drugs can do more harm than good. If you face a traumatic experience and it is overwhelming to you and you don't have the kind of support to be able to titrate and kind of manage the emotional intensity that comes up, it can actually be itself another traumatic experience. But also, one of the ways that people deal with overwhelming emotional experiences is by becoming psychotic. And we've had a number of people coming to us for therapy following a series of psychedelic experiences that left them completely paranoid and psychotic. How do you guys feel about doing the ceremony next week? Yeah, sure. So I came to learn about psychedelic medicine when I was 23 and had my first experience that really helped him with depression. In the following years, I saw Rory really struggling with addiction and so I talked to Rory about ayahuasca and psilocybin. Once the ayahuasca had stayed clean from opiates for 13 to 14 months, which was by far the longest clean time I'd ever had. When your child has a bad opioid addiction, it wears you out and eventually you realize you can't be attached to the outcome. You know, Rory has struggled with addiction issues for a long, long time. He had tried rehab a number of times and he had overdosed a number of times and he wasn't seeing any way out. It's clear that the ayahuasca has led to some real changes in his ability to control his addiction to the opioids. My main goal is to not have to be on anything so I can be a better mother for her. Rory is the most important person in my life, even above myself. If I did not have Lily, I wouldn't bother. I don't know how to get better. You know I've tried. You know I've been asked to do it. You're doing the steps to get better. You know how to get better. You're doing it. You're walking the path to get better. Yeah, but using it is still not. But the methadone is clearly not helping if that's, you know what I mean? It's not helping keep me sober. It's not helping with pain. I'm going to say almost every dealer I've met around here is through the methadone clinic. The wonderful thing about methadone and similar substances, buprenorphine, is that if there is a physiological depletion in a certain brain substance that leads people to need a drug in order to stabilize and feel normal, if you can replace that with another drug that actually meets that physical need, you can actually help stabilize somebody medically. Medication-assisted treatment doesn't address, you know, the complex emotional, relational, you know, psychological factors that may be expressed in that addictive process. And here's where psychedelics can really powerfully facilitate those insights. I think this ayahuasca experience can help open Serene up to the possibilities for the future. Serene, hey. The way I envision coming out on the other side is like beating a bird, like a caterpillar is turning into the pupa and then coming out the butterfly. One of the dangers is that people go into the experience with unrealistic expectations for cure. And I think this is a big problem because of all of the hype of that psychedelics and go through the experience feeling no cure and maybe feeling worse. And that that can really precipitate, you know, profound depressions and suicidalities. So proper preparation, you know, measured expectations, or even no expectations, that is to go into the experience as an experience that, you know, you'll discover what it will be like. You're going to have this sleeping bag? Sure. I'll be here. Glory there. Thank you. Choice up. Delish. It's a bit of stringent, right? It's still it. It is. It's hot. When you look at that scene, how do you respond as a psychotherapist? My sense is that, you know, they are very, very well-meaning, kind, supportive, caring, seem to have had their own experiences that were very positive and they wanted to pass this on and share this with Serene. But these guys are not therapists. I don't believe that they have any training or any capability of dealing with, you know, the emergence of serious, painful experiences that could be overwhelming, re-traumatizing and could even manifest in a psychotic kind of experience and really dangerous behavior. So they're completely unequipped to do that, A, B, they were also taking the substance. A lot of people will not say these are powerful substances with, you know, negative potential so they should be banned, but rather they should be heavily restricted to a class of therapists or doctors or authorities who know what they're doing. What do you think about that? As a psychotherapist and as a psychedelic-assisted therapist, I believe that psychedelic-assisted therapy should be performed by very well-trained therapists. So, you know, they weren't equipped, they're not, you know, professionally trained, they were themselves intoxicated, but prohibition only creates problems for people. People are going to use drugs. They want to use drugs, they'll find them on the internet, they'll find them in the park, they'll find them with their friends. So the more help and support and information we can make available to people, the more we can reduce the risks associated with that. Me and Rory got kind of lucky with the experience that we had and then we tried to recreate that for someone else and it's not really, you know, just a simple process. Were you surprised to learn that after this experience, Serene went back to using heroin? No, not at all. Rewriting your relationship to that substance means understanding the relationship, really making the connection between that substance and what function and meaning it's playing in your life and gradually over time kind of letting go. These are very, very exciting times when growing body of research change the way that we both look at psychedelics, viewing them as potential, you know, wonderful tools that we can use for the benefit of humans in many different ways. But also I think it's going to challenge us as a society to question the demonization of all drugs.