Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life Podcast. I hope everybody's having a beautiful day. I hope the sun is shining and the wind is at your back. I hope you are in the mood for an epic show today because that's what I've got for you. I have the one and only Gareth Moxie with me today, and it is an honor and a privilege to introduce him. He's a luminary in the field of entheogen, provision, and harm reduction advocacy based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Gareth stands at the forefront of psychedelic therapy, armed with a profound commitment to education, healing, and transformation. Gareth's journey is one of relentless dedication and growth. Trained as a psychedelic therapist at the prestigious Synthesis Institute, he has become a beacon of hope for many, specializing in the application of ibogaine for addiction detoxification, particularly for opiate addiction. His expertise extends to the realms of 5-imiodmt and psilocybin, substances he employs to facilitate deep psycho-spiritual exploration. With decades of experience and rigorous training, including certifications from the Orenda Institute and the Five Education Program at Tendava Retreats in Mexico, Gareth is a master in guiding individuals to transformative journeys of self-discovery and spiritual awakening. His work transcends the clinical. It is deeply rooted in advocacy and awareness, raising within the psychedelic community. Gareth has been instrumental in documentary projects like Dosed, which illuminate the profound healing potential for psychedelic medicines. Beyond his psychedelic therapy work, Gareth is also a passionate advocate for medical cannabis, producing high grade cannabis oil tailored to the specific needs of his clients. His extensive knowledge of cultivation and extraction techniques ensures the highest quality of medicinal products. Together with his partner, Blair, and their beloved canine companion, Millie, Gareth continues to create holistic healing experiences in Vancouver. Their offerings include comprehensive ibogaine and iboga treatments, psilocybin therapy, and 5-MeO DMT sessions, empowering individuals to embark on a profound journey of healing, transformation, and self-discovery. Gareth, thank you for being here today. How are you? Thank you so much. That was such a wondrous introduction there. I'm doing very well. Thank you so much, George. And a pleasure for me to be here, and thank you so much for inviting me. Yeah, I'm excited to have you. I think you've been inviting people all over the world for quite some time to find alternative methods of healing. Have you always been a person that's inviting people to help, or have you always been that kind of individual that's looking to figure out a better way? In some ways, I guess there's a part of me that's been involved in that. I come from a long history of psychedelics. When I was younger, I used to live close to Stonehenge in the UK. And in the 70s and 80s, there was a free festival that used to happen at Stonehenge. And that used to run for the whole of June. And back then there was a hard kind of core group that were the main part of the festival movement. In some ways, you could consider it kind of similar to the dead scene, you know, in the Grateful Dead. Like we all lived in buses and trucks and trailers and stuff and traveled in big groups around the country in a very similar kind of way. We weren't following a band. per se, but we were a psychedelic movement. And, you know, if you wanted to find some LSD, then you went and saw that crowd, which is the same as the dead scene. So at a young age, I found my, I only lived like 40 miles away. So even at 16, we would shoot on up to Stonehenge and score ourselves some black hash and a bunch of microdoll LSD or something or other. And so that was my introduction to psychedelics back then. And things were quite a little bit different in Britain then. The festival scene kind of grew out in the late 60s, early 70s, the free festival scene. And in Britain, the police don't have guns. And so it's a much more level playing field. when it comes to interactions with the police and stuff. And so so there was a big free festival movement and there was no organization behind that. We would show up on common land, a kind of a rough roadway or drag would be made out of vehicles. There would be a stage and then people would come and, you know, bands would play on the stage and we would be kind of the infrastructure that sold, you know, veggie curry and rice and hash and LSD and stuff and and we were allowed to to do that is because the police just didn't ever come onto free festival sites or anything like that. So there was a level of freedom that I I got to experience in my younger years and and during that time. You know, I had helped some people through some difficult psychedelic experiences, so yeah, that's kind of. In in one of the reasons why you know we we did the work that we do is something of a vocation. Yeah. It's a psychedelics for a way for people to, you know, really kind of find a truer part of themselves. When I was 16, I was supposed to go and become a dairy farm manager and work on dairy farms and and fit into the system and stuff like that. really wasn't my path and the first dose of mushrooms or lsd kind of very quickly um took me off on on a different different path so the whole psychedelic thing I think most of my major decisions in my life have been made whilst I've been in in a psychedelic state you know because I feel I'm moving more from my heart you know in in that respect so so the psychedelics have been a big influence I guess I could say in in my life and have been an important part of it so yeah it sounds it's it's so it's always mesmerizing to me to get to hear a little bit of the journey of the individual with whom I'm speaking and it you know when I hear terms like freedom or the psychedelic experience shattered my idea of what I was supposed to be or knowing more like It seems to me like that is sort of at the root of so much mental anguish. Like so many of us, maybe not till later in life, get to have that experience. We're like, wait a minute, I'm not supposed to be doing this. No wonder I'm so unhappy in my life. It seems like a thread that kind of runs through that particular Ariadne maze. It's like sometimes people get the realization that they've had their ladder leaning up against the wrong wall. So true, so true. And some changes need to be made, you know? Yeah. And when they're not made, it just stacks up. Like the more you push that kind of stuff down, the more, the more it just, it begins to bulge out in different areas, whether it's maybe your weight or your relationships or some misplaced anger. And then, then all of a sudden, you know, you're, you're looking over the wrong wall. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's a way of people finding themselves, you know, or a deeper part of themselves and connecting with that. I think that's an important thing. I mean, psychedelics aren't for everybody, but in some respects, I feel that for those who they could serve well, it's kind of a birthright that you should be able to take these substances in. In the right settings as well. Of course, when I was taking them as a youngster, I took them in all the wrong settings. And the way that we do things now are quite different than we used to when we were younger. Yeah. Sometimes I wonder, is it all medicinal? Because it does seem like use at an earlier age on some level is the forerunners into maybe finding the right path, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was just about to say something about that. And it drifted away. And I'm having a senior moment. But yeah, I mean, you know, people have a better understanding of themselves and also the world that they live in. Yeah. So, yeah. And I, you know, I think... Well, as you get older, they can mean different things. And it's really also the intention behind it. You know, I was involved in Burning Man 20 years ago, and that could be considered much more of a recreational scene. But for me, it was very important as part of my newfound sobriety. I recovered from alcohol with LSD almost, it will be 24 years ago this August. Wow, congratulations. No, thank you. Well, I was retreading in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous. And. Yeah, it was just it was extremely important to me. I mean, I was doing everything I could at the time to kind of stay sober and doing traditional things was what was I thought was the best thing to do. And, you know, I think that all recovery has some uses. You know, I've done time in traditional rehab and stuff. And at the time, I thought, well, that was a waste of time. But actually, it wasn't. You know, I mean, they're all building steps to getting where we want to go to, you know. So, yeah. Yeah. Uh, the, the LSD was a very important, um, thing for me. And, uh, a lot of the things that I learned in AA or in recovery and stuff, um, I just couldn't implement, I just couldn't put them in place. It was all, it was, and a lot of people speak about this, like they can get all the theoretical stuff, but it's feeling it, you know, and, and the LSD journey, it was like the penny dropped. And I got the message then that life would just be awesome if it was very simple, just don't drink. And I'd been told that in AA as well by old-timers saying, oh, you know, Gareth, if you don't drink, you can't get drunk, you know? And back then I was like, oh, yeah, of course, yeah. Fucking wise words, you know? And then later, you know, after the LSD experience, I mean, it just kind of, a lot of those lessons were kind of dropped into a more of a heartfelt space. And then I just didn't want to... keep on doing what I was doing, which was self-harm, really, in many respects. That's what a lot of drug use is. That's so well said. It's so difficult to have something become heartfelt unless you can't experience it from an altered state of awareness because that's so well put. I was going to ask the question, like what was different between the traditional model versus using the LSD model? But I think that explains it well. And it gives you empathy with other people to, to know they can hear it, but they can't feel it. Like, That's amazing. Yeah. Well, we work with a lot of people that that system has failed them. Myself personally, that was something I had to get away from. That was a big part of the message was, oh, Gareth, you've got to stop hanging out with those people. Because I don't believe that I had a disease and then standing up sometimes three times a day, standing up and say, hi, I'm Gareth and I'm an alcoholic, a drug addict and all of the above. I don't think that that's conducive to healing. You know, or it certainly wasn't for me identifying like that. And I was saying, oh, I am an alcoholic and I am a drug addict. I'm not trying to downplay people's experiences in alcohol use disorder or addiction, you know, but that's not exactly who they are. You know what I mean? They're suffering from an affliction at that time, but I don't think it's a disease model. Like most people don't get a bunch of insights and get up and walk away from cancer. you know, so if people get a bunch of insights through their addiction, or not, you know, sometimes, and I've known, a friend of mine was addicted to heroin, and he went to this treatment center, that treatment center, the other one, and then he hit like 38 or something, went, oh yeah, I think I'm done, you know, his family are like, finally, you know, after God knows how much money, but you know, it was almost, again, like the penny dropped and he went, yeah, no, I'm done with that. So, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, yeah, to continuously identify with the fact that you have a disease and you're defective and stuff, I don't think that that's helpful in the bigger picture. Now, if that's what people need in order to stay sober, then have at it. You know, I just don't think that's the, thing for everybody you know and it's um it's a very old institution now it's almost 100 years old and um I knew about what they wanted to do with uh um that bill wanted because of weyburn in saskatchewan they were using lsd in in the 1950s with a 45 success rate of total abstinence with one or two sittings of lsd which you know of course there's no medical value to lsd And there were hundreds and hundreds of papers written on LSD in the 50s. You know, so I knew all about that. And I'd had about six months sober. But that was my MO. I would stay sober for six months. And then I would get some weird idea that, you know, I could drink a beer or something. And I would do that. And then I would be drunk for another six months. And, you know, everything would be back in the toilet. And, you know, then I'd come crawling back six months later. And hi, you know. a newcomer again. And everybody's like, Oh yeah, I've been waiting for you. So, you know, it's so interesting to see that pattern. You know, when we, when you get up and you identify as something, you have this negative feedback loop and those vibrations or those thoughts or those things corrode the containers. When you get up and you repeat that thing, and there's no wonder you come back in six months, like you've already programmed yourself to come back in those six. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So but it wasn't working. Right. I mean, it just wasn't it wasn't the penny wasn't dropping. And that was the big message that I got from the LSD that time was, oh, you've got to stop hanging out with those people and go and find life. And actually, I did. I got involved with Burning Man. You know, which is what most people wouldn't consider the smartest thing to do in recovery. But actually it was, you know, it was engaging with my people and art and stuff, you know. And then I quit drinking. Yeah. And Burning Man and re-engaging in life was a big part of being able to do that, you know. And then also some psychedelic use, you know. bit more responsibly than when I was in my 20s in the uk you know we used to take lsd so that we could be out all night selling more lsd and remain drag and do you know what I mean so we used to take it a lot a lot and then this was before mdma came on the scene as well so if you went to festivals back in the day then you took lsd that's what everybody did you know there was all these different types of lsd and stuff like that so it's quite prominent back then as well Yeah. What is your relationship with it now? I really like it. I really like LSD and I haven't taken it in three years this summer because we've just been too busy. Right. And, you know, so I'm trying to coordinate with some friends that we're going to get together and do some LSD sometime this summer. But, you know, it's just been a busy summer and... Which is, yeah, that's just me probably not taking as much care about myself as I should. I should be allocating a little bit of time and saying, okay, no, that weekend has been put aside for LSD. And I just find it a real, how can I put it? It's just a deeper check-in with myself. And I haven't had a chance to do that with LSD in a long time. So that's kind of my relationship. I do have a relationship where I'm trying to have a relationship where I'm just trying to find the time. I work more often with 5-MeO on a personal level. I find that that gets in there. We get a lot of vicarious trauma through the phone calls, if not even the phone calls with the people that are in addiction, but the phone calls with the parents of the people that are in addiction. So I find that I get this kind of you know, almost like kryptonite or something. It gets on me, for want of a better word. And then when I work with the 5MEO DMT personally, then it's like a psychic shower which cleanses that off and kind of gives me a bit of a reboot. And the time-wise, the timeline for that is a little bit shorter. You know, LSD is normally like... 12 hours, right? And then it's a couple of days to kind of come back from that. Whereas the five MEO is, I'll be in for like an hour or so. And then I'm out. And then I sit for my mentor. And then we, you know, we'll chit chat for a while, and then I'll get in the car and drive back to Vancouver, you know, so it's kind of an afternoon thing. And And I think that probably serves that purpose just as well, maybe not in some ways even better, just because of the nature of the 5-MeO work, you know? Yeah. They're quite different signatures. You know, they're deep journeys within the psyche, but the signature is a little bit different. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that you say that you can sort of get the kryptonite on you. Like, you can't be in surgery without getting blood on you. You know what I mean by that? And, like, it's just part of it, I think. And it takes... It seems to me, I don't work in any of the fields where I'm guiding people through difficult situations, but it seems like it takes a certain type of individual to do that, and not only do it once or twice, but continue to do it. What is it that drives you to continue to be on that path? Well, I spent so long... On a shitty path. In addiction, you know, so, you know, when you trace it back and look back at it, I mean, you know, a lot of my addiction started at a very young age, you know, so it was an integral part of me, whether that was, you know, as far as back as I can remember living in Quebec, you know, I used to, I'd get home and If my mum wasn't around or couldn't catch me, there was always these Macintosh apples in the fridge. And I'd get into them and I'd eat two or three and my stomach would be, oh, and then I'd be, oh, and it would hurt my stomach. But I just couldn't help myself. And it was the same with honeycomb fruit. cereal you know and I'd eat so much of that stuff that it made the roof of your mouth raw you know and um so those are just consequences of this so it's always been there in one way form or another I'm neurodivergent I have adhd so again that's a you know being dopamine deficient I i understand while I why I was being dragged into that kind of thing that dopamine thing So it's been a, it's been a, it was a long time and it really affected my life and all my relationships and stuff. And so when you find something that, that a tool that somebody else can use, because they're, they're the ones that do the work, not us. We, we set the stage and we're the support team. The people that are doing the medicine work are doing the work. So, but when I, when I found a formula, um, for this. And, you know, there wasn't really anything more important. There couldn't be anything more important. You know, I got sober at 35. And the most important thing to me at that time was staying sober. And actually to making it to 35 was a pat on the back and not really having or where I should be in life, you know, in terms of material possessions and equity and things like that, none of that shit ever mattered. And, and it, and now just being alive, you know, when the odds were that I maybe shouldn't be, um, now I just want to kind of continue that work as, um, as a vocation, you know, um, Blair and I, It's not easy in this. You know, it's always a bit of a winding road and ups and downs and finances and stuff like that. Now there's so many more people being involved in medicine work as well. So it's not easy. But then I couldn't imagine ourselves doing anything else somehow. And so it is kind of like a vocation. And so, and we, like I was saying, we don't do a lot of the hard work. What we do is we set the stage and it's the people that come and take the compounds are the ones that are doing the real hard stuff. And like I say, we're Houston or something, you know, should there be anything go awry or anything like that. And then we're the support for people afterwards as well. but when people are coming in for opiate detoxes they normally stay with us for two weeks and we're just kind of like a private residence and we work with one or two people at a time and so we have active people in addiction come in and stay with us which is in some respects easier than people that work in rehabs and stuff because we have medicine on our side and those people don't you know so so In some ways, the work that we do is eased a little bit by the medicine that we're doing. Yeah, it's interesting that you bring up the idea of a lot of people seem to be moving into or attempting to use different types of, plant medicines and theogens and psychedelics to help people now. You've been around for quite some time. Do you think that this particular wave of plant medicine is similar to the last wave of plant medicine in the medical container? You mean kind of like the wave of the 60s? Yeah, exactly. Do you think it's following a similar pattern? It's a little bit different as it's more legit. It's more legitimate now. And I don't think it's having quite the cultural shift that the 60s did. I mean, you only got to look at the early pictures of the Beatles and then Sgt. Pepper's, and you can see what four years of LSD did to culture. So I don't think we're having any kind of a shift like that culturally. And then that's also when a lot of psychedelic stuff was shut down. You know, because they were doing an awful lot of stuff with LSD in the fifties and the sixties. And then once the genie got out of the bottle in 70, they, they shut it all down. I think there's been quite a bit of hype around this. There's this panacea or magic bullet thing because there's corporate interest in this now. Huge. It's a little bit different. I think there's been a bit more of an emphasis on training. And I took advantage of that as well. I mean, I went and trained with Ibogaine with some people that were serving Ibogaine. And so I went and spent, I think, seven weeks with those guys. And they taught me the rudiments of working with Ibogaine. And we did a bunch of different treatments. and stuff. Um, but now I think there's, even though there's quite a lot of training programs out there, there's also people that are just picking it up, you know, and now suddenly they're five MEO shamans or something, you know, I'm like, Oh God, you know, and you know, I, I feel fortunate that, um, that we've been able to do some of these courses. Um, it's an investment in ourselves and also an investment in the, in the movement. We all want to have negative stories coming out of the psychedelic world. Of course, we're going to because we're all humans. There has been some negative stuff coming out like in the MDMA trials in Canada. Every now and again, you hear of some practitioner with a God complex going off the deep end or something or other and smoking too much 5-MeO. You know, so I would like to see some kind of standards, but at the same time, it's a multidisciplinary world that we live in. And so, yeah, it's a little different from that time in the 60s because all of the, you know, academic stuff just got shut down. and then you couldn't get LSD. But at 16, I could get LSD by going to Stonehenge. I could probably get 20 different types of LSD back then as well. There was so much of it. It's the same now with MDMA. Actually, now here in Canada, they're allowing exemptions for certain people to take MDMA and stuff, but there isn't one for Ibogaine. um so so it's important that um I think a certain amount of standards are going into a container where we're holding people through a very vulnerable uh expedition or you know however you'd like to to to call it but you know that's a vulnerable time for that person and and they need to be supported and held in the best possible ways which is quite different from I used to sell lsd to anybody that had two pounds fifty You know, now there's this huge screening thing that happens and, you know. what are they going to go home to? And, you know, so it's all of this. Now it's a quite a different thing where it was, you know, two pounds 50. There you go. And so, but then also that has its, has its place as well. You know, the intention is to use LSD recreationally and listen to your favorite band and hang out with your friends and have a really good time. Well, that's spiritually uplifting thing to do, you know? So it's really the intention and stuff behind, Sometimes I wonder, sometimes I wonder when I look at like some of these trials that where there's been, you know, where there's been some inappropriate behavior and relationships and it makes me wonder. when you sit with someone that takes a large dose of whether it's MDMA or it's, you know, psychedelics or entheogens, I think that that has a radical effect on the facilitator as well. And you can't really measure that, but if someone's, If someone is going into a state to heal themselves that may have had sexual trauma and the facilitator on some level is unhappy in their relationships or has something else going on in their life, that person that takes the psychedelic is radically going to affect the facilitator in ways that they might not be able to imagine on some level. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I can think that kind of thing happens. And that's why... They just have to check the on a regular basis, right? You know, so but yeah, yeah, you can be affected. There can be a transference and stuff going on, you know, as this is altered states as people are going through those altered states, you know. But then, you know, that's also very important that, you know, facilitators, facilitators have a good understanding of what they're doing. Right. So, you know, I mean, or what they're what they're holding, what they're supporting. And I think that maybe sometimes the people that are stepping into the field without some kind of formal education don't really understand that bit. There's a little bit difference between somebody who's just sitting for somebody and supporting them, I feel. A sitter might not be trauma-informed. Do you know what I mean? In some respects, I feel that it's good that people can be supported in some ways. But it's got to be done right, I feel, you know, with integrity as well and not, you know, with some nefarious ideas that the practitioner might have. war stories all the time, you know, about weird stuff that's, that's happening in such and such, or, you know, this happened at so-and-so or, you know, this shaman behaved this way in Peru, you know, so we're all humans at the end of the day, you know, and yeah, humans can make some pretty large mistakes. Yeah, it's true. It's, If I mix it up into a different type of question, do you think that the altered states of awareness that one can find themselves in, these altered sort of environments, what is it? It really changes... our relationships to our social roles. And you know, like that can be very damaging to society if people have these preconceived notions, especially authority figures have these ideas about how society should work. And then someone comes back from the well with this water and tries to bring it to the community. Like, hey, look at this, look at me now. Like that has a radical way of dissolving boundaries. And do you think that that radical shift is something that maybe people are afraid of in the bigger community. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, in some ways, I mean like the sixties and seventies, like shake things up on society, you know, and then, you know, there was things like black Panthers and weather underground and, and stuff, which is kind of radicalized out of a situation. Yeah. So, so I think that newfound consciousness back then was, was was more radical you know we're not quite seeing quite so much of that now but uh sorry where were we going with that again well I i just I feel like it's I feel like I guess another question is while we haven't seen the radical cultural shifts yet. Yeah. Might this be, might we be in the late fifties and like we are on the cusp of the radical change. You know, if you look at maybe what's happening in colleges, you almost had a Kent state with some of like the, the things that were happening there, you know, like maybe it bubbling up. And when you look at, like lycos and maps being denied this thing might this be a pathway out of the medical container into a larger community but people are like you know what it's not going to work let's just do it let's just do it the literary way um well I think there's a certain percentage of the population are afraid of that and they they were like now we've got people smoking cannabis that because there's cannabis stores yeah they might not have been doing it when they're dispensaries but now in vancouver we have cannabis stores so people are like you And, you know, a lot of older people are starting to try gummies and things like that. But with the psychedelics, it's also happening. People are coming to us now because there's more of this stuff going on. And they did that in the 60s. But now they would like to come and do it in a bit more of a contained space. But I think some people are still, you know, psychedelics were getting such a bad rap during the 60s and the 70s. A lot of public service announcements, people thought their chromosomes were going to change. You take LSD, you're going to jump off of a building and weird shit like this. I think that that stigma has had a bit of an overall effect on society. They first got in with psilocybin because nobody knew what the fuck psilocybin was. They never really knew what LSD was, but psilocybin, it's the way it's spelled and everything. So I think it kind of came in around the back door just through people's ignorance at the FDA or whatever. But whether we're going to see a shift again like that or some kind of a shift, I don't know. The green movement was kind of born out of the psychedelic movement, I feel. Because when people do psychedelics, then they're They think about nature more and things like that. But generally speaking, I don't know if it is having that much of a shift. People are still incredibly greedy. And I know people in the psychedelic space that are just assholes really you know uh self-serving so I do you know I mean it's um yeah it's an interesting thing and I don't know if it's gonna have um effect on society in the way that it did before and we all thought it was you know we're like oh there's gonna be this huge you know resurgence of psychedelics and everybody's gonna be finding themselves and you know, it hasn't worked out like that so far, you know, and synthesis almost went under as well. They almost went bankrupt and they were like the, the, the gold standard, you know, and there again, they tried to extend too much and probably looking to getting too big. And do you know what I mean? So, so I don't know. We'll have to wait and see. Yeah. I'm, I'm hopeful that, you know, it's, it's in the whole thing that's happened just with, um, with MAPS or Lycos or an MDMA. Well, I'm not overly surprised there. Given what kind of happened with the rollout and the trials and things like that. So, you know. And then also, you know, some of these ketamine clinics are, it's all done by Zoom. You get your lozenges, you know, and then you connect by Zoom or something. And it's all kind of like do it at home. And I don't know if I agree with that, you know. But then again, it's also making things cost effective. So how much is it going to cost an insurance company for two qualified therapists and a 10-hour MDMA session? I think they would rather just pay for antidepressants or something. So it's interesting to see how it's going to unfold. I like the idea that that there would every big city would have, you know, psychedelic, a place where you could go and take psychedelics and explore your own consciousness, as is your birthright, you know, so it should be able to be done in a safe place, you know, but unfortunately, at the moment, it's not reaching all of the people that it should be reaching, you know, so, and that's because of things like the FDA you know turning down the application for MDMA therapy and then how many veterans are killing themselves daily you know and then there's a hundred overdose deaths a day in America from fentanyl we have eight a day in BC you know four in Vancouver and four throughout the rest of the province you know and Ibogaine is not even being spoken about so So we're a long ways off in some respects. The veterans are still killing themselves from their PTSD. So it's a bit of a long road. And we always want things to change like that. I thought weed was going to be legal by the time I was 25, you know? And, of course, Britain will be the last place on the planet where you can allow legal cannabis. So, yeah, it's going to be a long road, and it's not going to be quite as we had imagined, I think. But I think that, you know, we're progressively moving forward if people are going to be able to find the space or, you know, you can go and get mushrooms downtown now. That's the genies out of the bottle. So, you know, it's it's the drug war has been a colossal failure. And if anything, it's made everything much, much worse. You know, so, and to think that you'd be able to keep drugs out of the hands of people in a capitalist society, you can't keep drugs out of high security prisons. Drugs are a currency in there. You know, so how will we expect to keep it out of the free world? It's ridiculous. You know, so what is the drug war going to be replaced with is I feel is important. You know, how are we going to dismantle this and have drug peace again? instead of a drug war. The people are dying of fentanyl. Well, that's because of the drug war and the capitalist society that we live in. They can somebody could send like five grams of pure fentanyl through the mail from China to Canada. And then some gangster is going to make that up into a kilo of dope in his bathtub or whatever, you know, with his Vitamix. I don't know how they do it, but they do. And then they knock out pills. And so the drug war just means that drugs, you go to downtown Vancouver, it's a free for all. I can get as much methamphetamine, crack cocaine, cocaine or opiates as I want. There's nothing standing in the way of me doing it and there's nothing standing in the way of a 14 year old kid doing it as well. So I think what, you know, the whole, the way that we've looked upon the drug war really is kind of like humanity's self-inflicted wound. I see their intentions in the beginning, why they did that. But if we'd had heroin dispensaries here in Vancouver 15 years ago, we wouldn't be losing eight people a day in the province. Heroin is quite a benign substance to somebody who's been using it for a long time. And what kills people is the variation in the strength of the gangster-controlled narcotics. And that's why we lose fucking kids in Starbucks bathrooms and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, I'm hopeful that the drug war seems to me, don't do their drugs, do our drugs. You know what I mean? It's crazy to think about. But on some level, iboga has begun to make its way into the lexicon. I know in Kentucky they've been having a lot of – my friend Doc Askins has been working and did a podcast recently with some people in Kentucky that are using it to really help people, veterans especially, with addiction and stuff like that. How do you feel? Is iboga something new that you've been working with over the last five or seven years or recently? What's the relationship with that? When I recovered from alcohol with LSD, that was when I kind of, 24 years ago, was when I was going like this on the internet. Because a friend of mine had an Apple computer and that was the way I got on there. And so then I looked up psychedelic recovery and And that's when I found Ibogaine. I mean, I'd known about Iboga since I was 16, because after a huge mushroom journey, I got this book called Plants of the Gods, which is a book by Albert Hoffman and Schultes, I believe. And so that goes through all of the psychedelics around the world. And I got that at a young age. So I found out about Iboga at a very young age. And it was on my to-do list, you know, my bucket list. That sounds really interesting. I'd love to do that one day. And... So after the LSD journey, I was like, oh, yeah, I'm going to go to Canada because I'm Canadian by birth, English parents. I'm going to go to Canada and I'm going to open an Ibogaine clinic. And that was like 23 years ago or something or other. And then a mutual friend of mine that I knew through Alcoholics Anonymous, actually, he was going to be my sponsor. But he started drinking ayahuasca and then came to me and said, Gareth, I'm sorry I can't be your sponsor anymore because I started drinking ayahuasca and I'm out of here. And then I did LSD a couple of weeks later and I was like, yeah, I'm out of here too. But we had a mutual friend. who I was going to ask to be my sponsor at one time. And his name is Rocky, Rocky Caravelli. And he'd be somebody interesting. I would love to. I'd love to. Yeah, I'll put you two together. Okay, please. And anyhow, so I learned all about Ibogaine on the internet. And... Then my friend Chris said to me, he said, oh, Rocky's had a relapse, relapse on opiates and methamphetamine. And I was like, oh, he needs to do Ibogaine. And he's like, what's that? And then I explained it to him. And then he went to Rocky and explained it all to him. And then Rocky looked it up. And then Rocky saved money and went and got a treatment like six months later down in Mexico. And Rocky and his ex-wife run Awakening in the Dreamhouse. They're in San Miguel now. So that was an early connection I had with Ibogaine. And I was finding out through our mutual friend how his treatment went and how he was doing and stuff. So I, at that point, was like, oh, I'm going to go. Because I was living in California illegally at the time. And I was like, I'm going to go to Canada. I'm going to open an Ibogaine clinic. so it had been on my list to do list or you know planning to go and do this I wasn't about to start giving lsd to um people with alcohol use disorder which I've done a bit since then but not I wasn't about to do that at the time so and um I was all set to go to canada and I had my little truck and my little caravan and stuff and um Then I met my ex-wife at a Burning Man party in San Francisco. And the whole Canada thing got put on a back burner for quite some time. We bought a 1955 school bus to drive to Canada and then we had to rebuild that and everything. And then when I arrived here, because I was importing my wife from the States, I had to, for tax reasons, I kind of had to have a normal job and things like that for importing her in as a resident. And it was during that time actually that she was already up and everything and I had an opiate relapse. I was just about to go to the UK and some personal reasons which gave me a whole bunch of stress gave me back pain, and I was a painter back then, and I had to do a bunch of baseboards. And so I got T3s from the doctor, which is the very smallest amount of opioid. There's a tiny little bit of oxycodone in there, but that started to relapse. And so within a very quick time, I was doing Dilaudid, and... Yeah, and then I went to the UK and took Iboga while I was there. And then that gave me all of the clarity to move forward with what I wanted to do. You know, I was still working in construction, really wanting to work with Ibogaine, you know, after recovering from alcohol use disorder with LSD. And then having this kind of experience opiate slip-up and then me taking Ibogaine or Iboga in the UK kind of solidified what I really wanted to do and it gave me the the oomph to go and do it. I remember I came back from Britain and I was the head painter on a big casino job. And we all got called into the office to talk about where we were and everything. And I just showed up, come back from Britain for a couple of weeks holiday. And they're all like, oh, welcome back. And I said to them all, yeah, I'm not going to be here for very long. I'm going to become an Ibogaine provider and I'm down with construction. Very seriously. And they were looking at me like, what's that what is he what's this okay very good but let's get this job finished yeah but that's where I was like I'm not going to be doing this much and then it was very firm in my mind that I knew the path that I was going to head off on and that was in august and by um february of the next year I was being trained in mexico to work with ibm and do detoxes so Is that sort of mindset, that shift in mindset that I'm not going to be doing this, is that something that you see in the patients that you help that come in with addiction or something like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's that kind of like, oh, I'm going to make changes. You know? Yeah. I'm done with that, and this is the path that I'm going to go on. Yeah. That path gets a little bit, you know, that's what, that's the intention of most people that come to work with us anyhow, is they're done with this shit and they just need to move on. But the opiates have a very, strong um uh pull on people um and the withdrawals from opiates are horrendous and then also what happens afterwards the post-acute withdrawal syndrome the depression the malaise anxiety insomnia can go on for months so the longer somebody's been using opiates the longer that goes on And so working with the Ibogaine can allow people to disconnect from that, you know, and have the ability physically and mentally to be able to walk away from opiates. And other drugs as well, other drugs of choice or behaviors as well. You know, gambling, porn, shopping, stuff like that. You know, they're all distractions. You know, it could. They could be looked as some soft addictions. You know, as as a species, we're very much involved in self soothing, you know, and comfort and you know. Yeah, we do a lot of addictive things like, you know, look at oil for Christ's sake. You know what it's doing, but you know we we all were born into it. So yeah. It's interesting to me to think about how an individual doing the work to create the best version of themselves may be the way we heal society. What are your thoughts on that? Well, yeah. I mean, kind of one at a time, right? Well, I mean, people do have to work on themselves. I know. It's hard. Because then it makes the world a much easier place if people have done at least a little bit of work on themselves. But we're all works in progress. Right. Like I, I didn't have a particularly, I had a troubling relationship with my father when he was younger. And then I just went to back to Britain cause he passed away last October and I spent three weeks with him and he's a very different person than he was when I was a kid. You know, and I'm a very different, different person than, than I was when I was in my twenties and thirties, you know, so we're, we're all works in progress. Yeah, and so I think they were the work probably gets a little easier as well when we get a little older. But you know that just naturally happens. You know that we're not. That we seem to to get better. We hope anyhow with age you know and then we work on ourselves and yeah, that makes life easier for ourselves. As well as everybody around us. Yeah, there's that saying that you know people end up in therapy because somebody didn't go to therapy. So. As someone who has experience in altered states of awareness, what do you think are some of the major differences between LSD and Iboga and the effects that it's having? Oh, they're very different. Very different. Like Iboga is one of the most unique experiences going, I think, for people that are used to psychedelics and a lot of... I've tried a lot of different psychedelics. I mean, because they all, they're all psychedelics. They all work in a certain manner, whether they're tryptamines, phenylethylamines, you know, it's a deeper journey into your consciousness. But iboga and ibogaine is very unique and their actions are very unique. It's a classic tryptamine like LSD and DMT, but it's also dissociative psychedelic like ketamine and 5-MeO, and it's also an Oneric. And the Oneric is like a waking dream, daydream. So the actions of itself are like very heavy daydreaming. So it's more like going through, it's more like going through a dream, a dreamscape, and then different stuff can arise. I'm not overly concerned about what happens during the treatment. Like when I did it, I totally overdosed myself with something I bought online. I thought it was 30% total alkaloid. Turned out it was 60%. So I took twice as much as I should have done, and I dosed myself high anyhow. So I kind of squeaked through. I feel that I should have died in that experience, but I didn't. And I made it through, but the whole experience was, um, this, that artist pink, she has a song called razor glass and it's all about getting fucked up drinking and stuff. And, um, when the medicine started kicking in that video started playing in my head clear as a bell, like I was watching it on TV and then we'll get to the end. And then it got back to the beginning and started again and went like this for about 15 hours as I dry heaved into a bucket. So you know, was that deeply moving and theogenic experience? It was pretty horrific, but what came afterwards and the clarity that I had afterwards in the next three months was really what that was. The beauty of that experience. The time itself was and then also some people don't remember their Ibogaine experience. Kind of like if you take too much LSD on the dance floor, you don't remember between midnight and 4. You know, you probably had a pretty good time, but there's a memory gap on that. And so Ibogaine can be like that. I've known people to go through a treatment and you know, this thing overtakes them and they go through something and then as it come out the other side, they don't remember it. Right. doesn't mean to say that shift hasn't changed that there's a shift that happens and then it's what happens over the next few months and that's why we focus on getting loads of Ibogaine into people because the more that they take over a period of time the better they will feel over the next three months or so and with the neuroplasticity of the brain that's what we're looking for is that you know time for those new pathways to kind of set up and that's what it takes is a period of time like that you know so So it's quite different in a lot of respects from an LSD journey or other tryptamines. True. Garrett, can I hold you over for another segment here? I know that we're coming up on an hour. How are you doing on time? Yeah, I'm good. Okay. Let's take a short pause here. And I will, for those tuning in right now, I appreciate your time. We'll take a short break and then we'll log back in and go with part two here coming up. So to everyone watching, thank you for hanging out. We'll be back shortly. Gareth, hang on just briefly afterwards. I want to talk to you real quickly. Okay, sure. Okay.