Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Blog, Internet resources, online reading groups, articles and interviews, Illuminatus! info.

Tuesday, June 6, 2023

Podcast on the new Hilaritas book about cannabis

This is an interview that seems to be in Mike Gathers' wheelhouse and I thought it was worth a listen. As I mentioned recently, Hilaritas has just published Sebastián Marincolo's book, Elevated: Cannabis As a Tool for Mind Enhancement. 

Some of the topics of conversation: What desirable states can be enhanced with cannabis and cannabis as an underrated tool for therapy (underrated in comparison with mushrooms and LSD). (As Michael Johnson remarks here, cannabis seems to be promising as a way to help people with autism.) Michael wrote a foreword for the book, another reason to buy it. 

I was struck by Marincolo's comment that he had to give up his career in academia to pursue serious cannabis research. The website for the podcast has useful links. 

4 comments:

Eric Wagner said...

Thank you for sharing this and thanks to Mike Gathers for all these terrific interviews.

michael said...

Tom: that's Michael GATHERS commenting on cannabis and autism, not Johnson. The former Michael is the kinda guy who can do a kickass podcast; the latter Michael...uhh...couldn't to save his life.

Cleveland Okie (Tom Jackson) said...

Michael, Yes, that Mike Gathers in the podcast, but if you follow my link, you can see I am referring to your comment on the YouTube page for the podcast.

michael said...

Ahhh! You're right.

The really wild thing in the book, to my mind, is Chapter VIII, on the endocannabinoid system (ECS) and how it might underpin most of the things we admire in humans, like empathic understanding, synesthetic based creativity, episodic memory retrieval, enhanced introspection, and other Good Things. We need more research in these areas. If Marincolo is right, he's one of the first to really draw out the implications here.

At the moment we're in a weird spot, because there are thousands of research papers on the ECS, including how it regulates almost all systems in the body - including neural regulation - but your doctor probably has no idea what it is: it's not taught in medical schools. That may be changing as we speak, but like I say, it's kinda weird right now.