Jan
3
“DAVID: You mention Aldous Huxley’s book Doors of Perception in Molecules of Emotion. I’m curious — have you ever had a psychedelic experience, and if so, how has it influenced your perspective on science and life?
CANDACE: I can say that I’ve had some unusual experiences. I basically missed the ’60s, and even the ’70s in terms of experimenting with drugs at the normal time, because I was a young mother, and I was always in a very responsible authority figure role from a very young age. But later on I experimented with marijuana and some of the psychedelics. I think the biggest influence was marijuana, which I didn’t even try until I was like thirty-five years old. I think that had an impact on me, because it erases boundaries and gets you into interesting altered states. I’ve experimented with that, and less with some of the psychedelics. Has this influenced me? Sure. Spending time in an alternative reality, which is noncompetitive and loving, must have taken away my East Coast competitive nature. Of course, now I am convinced that marijuana should be avoided since it wreaks havoc with one’s endocannabinoids.
DAVID: What type of potential do you see for new types of psychoactive drugs in the future?
CANDACE: I’m never moving in that direction. In my book I talked about not using drugs with an almost puritanical insistence. This is at least where I am now — that we’re at our best when we have our natural drugs. It’s like our own natural chemicals, unadulterated, are just totally amazing. But this a great ideal. I mean, I’m a major user of supplements, vitamins and things like that.
DAVID: I thought the primary point that you were making in your book was that using any type of psychoactive drug on a regular basis will cause the brain to compensate for the drug’s continued presence by reducing the number of receptors that bind to it.
CANDACE: Exactly. Anything you take changes your brain, because there’s a law that a natural system will always compensate when you perturb it. So in some very romantic idealized way I see our perfection is like, let it all hang out. Let it be what it is. But yet that’s an ideal. I smashed my arm playing on the ski slopes four weeks ago, and I’m now taking Vicodin for my broken arm. I’m trying not to take it. But, heck, it helped me, and it’s okay.” “Molecules of Mind and Body”, David Jay Brown’s interview with Candace B. Pert, quoted from “Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse” by David Jay Brown
CANDACE: I can say that I’ve had some unusual experiences. I basically missed the ’60s, and even the ’70s in terms of experimenting with drugs at the normal time, because I was a young mother, and I was always in a very responsible authority figure role from a very young age. But later on I experimented with marijuana and some of the psychedelics. I think the biggest influence was marijuana, which I didn’t even try until I was like thirty-five years old. I think that had an impact on me, because it erases boundaries and gets you into interesting altered states. I’ve experimented with that, and less with some of the psychedelics. Has this influenced me? Sure. Spending time in an alternative reality, which is noncompetitive and loving, must have taken away my East Coast competitive nature. Of course, now I am convinced that marijuana should be avoided since it wreaks havoc with one’s endocannabinoids.
DAVID: What type of potential do you see for new types of psychoactive drugs in the future?
CANDACE: I’m never moving in that direction. In my book I talked about not using drugs with an almost puritanical insistence. This is at least where I am now — that we’re at our best when we have our natural drugs. It’s like our own natural chemicals, unadulterated, are just totally amazing. But this a great ideal. I mean, I’m a major user of supplements, vitamins and things like that.
DAVID: I thought the primary point that you were making in your book was that using any type of psychoactive drug on a regular basis will cause the brain to compensate for the drug’s continued presence by reducing the number of receptors that bind to it.
CANDACE: Exactly. Anything you take changes your brain, because there’s a law that a natural system will always compensate when you perturb it. So in some very romantic idealized way I see our perfection is like, let it all hang out. Let it be what it is. But yet that’s an ideal. I smashed my arm playing on the ski slopes four weeks ago, and I’m now taking Vicodin for my broken arm. I’m trying not to take it. But, heck, it helped me, and it’s okay.” “Molecules of Mind and Body”, David Jay Brown’s interview with Candace B. Pert, quoted from “Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse” by David Jay Brown
