PT 655 - Martha Hammel and Tasia Poinsatte - Aspen Psychedelic Symposium

Hello everybody and welcome back to Psychedelics Today. Today on the show we have Martha Hamill and Tasha Poinsett, both here to talk about the Aspen Psychedelic Symposium, which starts in June. It's going to be a fun one. I'll be there, I hope. No, I'll be there. Kidding. So we talk a bit about what's been going on in Colorado in the psychedelic space. There's been quite a bit, and there's a lot to say about that. We talk a little bit about some federal things and talk mostly about the Aspen Symposium and some interesting conversations on Iboga. So stand by for that. We'll get on with the interview after a couple ads. Thanks for listening. If you're building something in psychedelics or even just thinking about it, you probably know how hard it is to execute in this space. ElephantGate is an acceleration program that invests $150,000 into early stage startups building the infrastructure for the future of psychedelics. 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Martha, could you introduce this symposium that you're leading the project on? Yeah. So this is our third year hosting the Aspen Psychedelic Symposium. We did one in 2023 and one in 2024, hosted at the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen, Colorado. This gives an opportunity to bring in some amazing speakers from around the world to talk to our local West Slope Colorado community about psychedelics. Yeah, and I think this is important to note that people think Colorado is a monolith, and it's certainly not. There's a lot of different regions, and the identity of the western part of Colorado is super distinct from what we would call the front range being Port Collins, Denver, Boulder, Colorado Springs, that kind of thing. So just wanted to point that out because there's a lot of people that are going to watch that don't know that kind of stuff. And Tasha, are you helping coordinate this event, helping produce it? Yeah. So the nonprofit I work with, Healing Advocacy Fund, has been involved with helping organized the symposium since its inception in 2023. And really, we just saw it as this wonderful opportunity to host a symposium in Colorado at a time when Colorado was stepping into this huge change in our laws, both decriminalization of these naturally occurring psychedelics, standing up regulated therapy model for psilocybin mushrooms. In 2023, we were just getting started. And so it's exciting to come back in 2026. And we have a fully live program in Colorado. and there's just so much happening to dig into. And so I think it just seems like a natural fit. And of course, as somebody who lives in Denver, I always love the opportunity and the excuse to get out into the mountains and spend some time in Aspen in June is just a win-win from our perspective. Yeah, endlessly pretty. I think I've been to one or at least one, if not two Aspen Psychedelic Symposiums. And I had a lovely time last year. there was even a film that was screened. I think it was a Lucy Walker, like an early cut of the Lucy Walker film was screened and it was just mind blowing. It was part of the whole festival. I want to call it a festival. It was really a conference symposium. And, you know, it was a great event in that. Well, Martha, you and I have had these conversations about Aspen being a sort of place for ideas and being a sort of place where it's safe to have conversations? Because in a lot of the world, it's kind of difficult to. Right? Could you speak to that at all? Yeah. Aspen's always been a place for having discussions and really dreams for the future and has a really long psychedelic history. I'm sure most of your listeners are familiar with Hunter S. Thompson, the author most famous for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but also a really active political advocate. And he lived right outside of Aspen in Woody Creek. And in the 70s, ran for sheriff. There was the sheriff's department in Aspen. And prior to that was very conservative by the book and were out there charging the hippies with a cannabis possession. And they were really trying to maintain a more traditional conservative vibe in the town. And in the early 70s, Hunter Thompson ran for sheriff. He lost by just a handful of votes, which most people know that story. But the next election in 1976, he ran the campaign for Dick Kynes, who won. And we've had three other sheriffs since then, all who have followed Hunter Thompson's legacy in progressive drug policy, community policing, and really supportive of these movements. So the people in Aspen are comfortable with the idea of psychedelics and have been for 50 years. Right. When we hear of John Denver, which I remember Sandor Iron Rope kind of giving props to John Denver last time, which is really fun. You think of John Denver, he was certainly not a sober person and psychedelics. likely played a big part in that culture. So yeah. And before we toss it back over to Tasha, could you give us a little bit of an idea of what is Aspen Psychedelic Resource Center? Yeah. In 2021, Skippy Mesereau, who is on the Natural Medicine Advisory Board now, He was a city council member in Aspen and started looking into what it would look like to decriminalize plant medicines locally. And he convened a group of community members. And there were about 30 of us who got together over the course of the summer of 2021 to write and propose legislation to decriminalize psychedelics. eventually I took over as campaign manager as we were going to make that a ballot initiative and spent the next two years talking to business leaders and government and the school board and out at the farmer's market and knocking on people's doors and just talking to every single person in town about a decriminalization of plant medicines and as we were doing this the Natural Medicine Health Act started gaining momentum. City of Aspen ended up voting yes for the Natural Medicine Health Act by 81%, which is a lot of the advocacy and outreach that we were doing. And the moment that it passed, all of these people that I had reached out to started reaching back out to me saying, okay, now what? What are you going to do? You've been talking about all of this harm reduction and education that's going to happen, are you going to do something about it? And Laura Betty and I founded the Aspen Psychedelic Resource Center in response to those questions. And that's what we've been doing. We've been doing outreach and education in Aspen and supporting the implementation of psychedelic policy reform at the community level. Thank you for that. And Tasha, you've been working hard on this topic in Colorado for a long time now. Before we dig into any of that for you, can you talk to us about what is HAF, Healing Advocacy Fund? Yeah. So Healing Advocacy Fund is a nonprofit that is active across the three states that have changed their laws to enable a legal psychedelic therapy program. So that's Oregon, Colorado, and New Mexico. And really our goal as an organization, broadly speaking, is to support safe access to psychedelic healing for those who can benefit. And we see the state access models is the primary pathway right now to expand access, especially to people who aren't, you know, psychonauts who don't have a lot of experience, but are starting to learn about the potential mental health or health effects that they could experience working in a structured setting with psychedelics, but, you know, might not feel comfortable or supported to take that step otherwise. So these licensed models in these three states, Oregon and Colorado are live, and the New Mexico is coming online within the next year or so, are the place where we're seeing at scale people being able to access within a licensed framework, with, you know, training and accountability for the facilitators, testing of the medicine itself. And our role as an organization is really all of the advocacy around that. So when we, I say broadly, first kind of took a step down this path in the state of Oregon back in 2020 with the passage of their ballot initiative, there were so many open questions and a lot of people felt really, you know, this is unsafe. People are going to get hurt. They're not going to be adequately supported. And so the focus of the organization initially was how do we make sure that that's not the case? How do we make sure that the people that are getting licensed as facilitators have really gone through the process to have the skills to be able to support people in these experiences leading up to during and afterwards, so that we can increase the likelihood that they really are going to have a beneficial, transformative experience and reduce the likelihood of harm, which, of course, you're never going to reduce it down to zero, but, you know, at least hopefully mitigate it as much as possible. So that was kind of how we got started in Oregon. In Colorado, we got started once we passed our ballot initiative here. And the focus definitely is still fundamentally on, you know, what is the core structure of the program to support the client experience And then around that we also doing a lot of advocacy to try to bring down costs to try to make this more affordable and accessible for people especially low income people And you know it is a challenge. And so identifying creative strategies for how to do that. And then more broadly, we also are engaged in education, primarily focused on healthcare providers. And you know, how do we integrate this and educate people that are providing mental healthcare, primary care doctors, et cetera, to understand what is psychedelic therapy and how can they support people to access this type of care if it's the right option for them. So in that capacity of kind of the education side, we really see ourselves aligned with organizations like Aspen Psychedelic Resource Center, NOAC Society, and a whole bunch of other grassroots nonprofits that have either existed or have sprung up in Colorado since the passage of this ballot initiative. and I think coming back to the symposium that is part of what is so special about the Aspen Symposium is it's a little bit of a smaller event and it's an opportunity for a lot of these different groups to come together to share this beautiful space and this time together and to kind of deepen those connections because we are so much more successful and there's so much more potential here when we work together and really kind of bring up each other's strengths. So really appreciate the chance to work with Martha. And also Aspen Public Radio, who I want to give a huge shout out to because we haven't mentioned them yet so far, is the third non-profit partner on this symposium. Yeah, with Aspen Public Radio and their involvement, a very serendipitous connection. A community member, Ron Beller, had a conversation with the board chair of Aspen Public Radio, Will Dolan, at the same time that I was talking to the executive director of APR, Breeze Richardson, about doing something like this. And it was one of those magical connections where everyone had the same idea at the same time. And they've been, we would not be able to do this without Breeze. And I also want to give a shout out to Kevin Matthews, who was programming, supporting us with programming for our two previous ones. And then Laura Betty, my amazing business partner at APRC. Great. Love that. So there's so much to say about everything we've said so far, but I want to keep going to chat more about the symposium. What are we looking at so far? Is there a theme? Do you have some people that are coming out? Yeah, I guess I'll jump in and then hand it to Martha. So we're really excited. The programming is final for the symposium. So we have an amazing list of speakers coming from across the U.S. as well as internationally. and really solid representation from Colorado because so much of, you know, what's happening in Colorado, I think there's a lot to lift up and a lot to learn from our process here. Broadly speaking, in terms of the theme, I think, you know, we've discussed a few orienting sort of values for this year's symposium and words that have come up have been stewardship. How are we stewarding this process of change in our laws in a responsible way? And how can we also, you know, steward the psychedelic experiences? So I think that plays out sort of across a number of different realms there. Ecological integrity, which is an interesting one, but in June in Aspen, in Colorado, in a year where we've had, you know, some of the hottest, driest weather on record, this question of what we're doing in our work with psychedelics, how it ripples out into our relationship with communities in the world around us, and what does it look like and feel like to live in ecological integrity? How do psychedelics tie into that? And then a systems change theme. And the systems change, I think, is really responsive to one of the questions or sort of comments we get a lot about this, at least the sort of the state regulated psilocybin therapy model is like a concern that there's maybe too much focus on the individual healing process. And so with this systems change piece, it is, you know, the individual healing process is at the core of everything, right? You know, we need to be in our healing process in order to access most fully our capacities. But we're starting to open up a bit and also ask, how are these changes that we're making in terms of psychedelic access rippling out into other structures that we have within our society, the way that we structure healthcare, looking at food systems, looking at social networks and, you know, cultural divide type of issues. And so it is a very multidisciplinary conference or symposium. There's going to be focus still on the clinical research and what's happening at the level of the individual. What are we seeing? Looking at some of these, in particular, these edge cases of like neurodegenerative conditions, pain conditions, stroke recovery, some of the areas of the field that are just starting to take off, keeping the mental health piece at the center, but then also expanding into these other areas of focus. So I think it's going to be really ripe for fascinating conversation, learning, and part of our hope is just to also inspire people to be willing to start to reimagine the structures that we are all embedded in within our daily life. I know that's kind of a lofty goal, but it seems like it's what's needed right now in this moment in human history. And it feels like Aspen is kind of the place to have those conversations, being at the cutting edge of so much kind of innovation and ideas. So that's sort of my framing. I'll hand it to Martha, though to add to that. Yeah, I really see the symposium as an opportunity to create a container and platform ideas that we are interested in seeing platformed. I mean, everything that we, because of the partnership with Aspen Public Radio, there's an opportunity for all talks, not just at the symposium, every event that we do in Aspen gets recorded and has the opportunity to be rebroadcast on Aspen Public Radio. And I really like to create a container for emergence. We put speakers on stage and we don't give a lot of guidelines in terms of topics or coaching. it's not something that we I it's not we don't have a specific motive for what's going to be said we're creating a container for conversations and we always like to say we want people to leave with more questions than answered more questions than answers at all of our events so who who are some of the folks here that are going to be joining us on stage this year well zach leary is returning as our mc to guide us through the whole experience he's been with us since the beginning and we're so grateful for his input um izzy from maps is one of our keynotes Leonard Picard will be one of the headliners. Leo Roseman from Ripples and many others. Great. Great. I love that. So this idea of ecological integrity is huge, especially in the last week. those of us in Colorado might have been feeling it all winter and we're a little nervous, maybe more nervous than most, given what we're up for later this summer. But I think the idea of ecological integrity, I like the phrasing because I think it helps us protect ourselves from greenwashing each other or ourselves. it's like is that actually true so and I think it's inclusive of cultural issues so if we look at all the current debates around groups in Gabon being included at the table in these really interesting Ibogaine conversations Iboga conversations and more you know I think Colorado had some inclusion of some language suggesting that we only want Nagoya compliant Ibogaine, which is nice. I got to meet in Aspen, actually, at the Ibogaine. What was it called? The Ibogaine Symposium at the Aspen Institute this past summer? The Aspen Ibogaine meetings. So in both April and in November, a group of people coming together to discuss Ibogaine policy. Yeah. So I was lucky to make it this year, but I got to meet some of the folks from Blessings of the Forest. And then I had further discussions with other people about what is Nagoya compliant and this idea that there should be some sort of reciprocity to under legal United Nations Treaty, everywhere signed but us, by the way, in the United States, I think. And, you know, to be expected. and you know what what does that look like and it looks like negotiating and not a short process so a lot of us get concerned about it how is this actually going to look how how is there enough space in American capitalism to allow for something like an Aguaya compliant process which I think is really important question but I don't I don't have any good answers other than yeah of course we should be discussing these things. But I don't. Yeah. So do you see the Nagoya compliance, kind of the reciprocity angle as part of this ecological integrity conversation? And anything you want to add to what I mentioned? I'll just say absolutely. And I think Iboga is such a fundamentally important example of why these conversations matter, because we're talking about ibogaine derived from iboga, this plant that grows in a specific climate in central West Africa, in central Africa. And the worst possible outcome I can imagine from this growing interest in the properties of ibogaine is that we start to put human pressure on this plant to the point that we bring that plant to extinction. I mean, what a tragedy that would be for humanity, for the world, to, you know, lose this gift that exists that we're only beginning to scratch the surface of understanding its potential. And I don't know how familiar listeners are with Ibogaine, but, you know, the pharmacology, the types of experiences people are having, there's so much mystery and learning there. And if we don't approach this with care, there are risks, you know, and so really having at the center ecological integrity, stewardship, and a sense of responsibility and relationship with that plant is fundamental. And then, you know, expanding a little bit out from there, that relationship being mediated through conversation, relationship, and dialogue with the people that have stewarded and have held that relationship with that plant for thousands of years in the case of Iboga. In terms of what it looks like in practice, I mean, I do think the reality is that it is a dialogue. It's an ongoing conversation about how do we do this respectfully. I think Iboga is also an exciting example in that, that, you know, the understanding is that there is a desire from the Buiti people, from the Gabonese to engage in these conversations. And there is kind of, you know, at least what we're hearing, the message we're hearing at the events that you mentioned is we recognize the potential of the healing of this plant for the broader world. You know, there's not a desire to kind of keep it specifically held and only accessible within that part of the world, but it is, you know, with that comes this great responsibility for care And so I mean I think the state models are actually an amazing opportunity to pursue that and build that out And right now Colorado has a piece of legislation moving through the legislature on Ibogaine which does specifically require benefit sharing And I think having that enshrined in statute is a really important you know model to set when we look ahead to potential future states or federal work with Ibogaine And this is one of our panels discussing international frameworks for the medicine community. I had the pleasure of traveling to Gabon this past January to attend a conference put on by Reset Health that brought together a few hundred Gabonese individuals working with Iboga and government officials, doctors, witty leaders to really discuss this. And Gabon cares about Nagoya. They care deeply about the medicine, the wisdom of the medicine and their natural resources and want to find ways to protect the medicine, protect the people, protect each other in a way that supports everyone to thrive. they they're open to sharing their knowledge they know they have something really special and they only want to do so in ways that would be supportive to everybody yeah thanks for that it's um it's fascinating right like people people have been on this kind of um conversation on reciprocity for a number of years now ibogaine is just the latest one um that people seem to be on top of which is good um i've been writing extensively about sonoran desert toad extinction for years and years and years to the point where i've lost friends and colleagues over it because people find it annoying and it's i think the only topic that I felt physically in danger over. Wow. But, well, that and one other. But the other one was MDMA, so that's different. So the stuff, this conversation is a through line all the way back to Maria Sabina and mushrooms, I think early peyote prosecutions from European colonizers. you know there's this has been a thing for a long time over harvesting a peyote is is a classic problem that is also not discussed enough colorado thankfully took that quite seriously and made sure it was not included and popularized in this um an mha natural medicine health act push i think that was really smart um but yeah i began it's uh it's it's interesting to me because we're we're talking about yeah not depleting the stores of iboga and in the rainforest um which is important um we haven't spent a lot of time talking about total synthesis and like how expensive that is versus getting it from a plant um but again that's one molecule out of a whole plant that we don't we haven't adequately studied iboga and ibogaine to to know how much better whole plant is or how different it is and then we have vulcongo which is a totally unscheduled plant that i think some people are importing and doing a few steps of chemistry on to get to ibogaine hydrochloride and you know it's it's a fascinating conversation because some people are saying uh nagoya is i i know somebody who says they're nagoya compliant and they negotiated straight up with just people in gabon um and they showed me the treaty and contract and stuff and um they've not consulted any of the buiti they've not gone anywhere close to blessings of the forest and it's um you know allegedly nagoya compliant so it's you know is nagoya compliance with a nation a monolith is it the you know this is all stuff that we can flesh out on those panels but you know just wanted to throw out that this is super complicated it's not just like one plant one tribal group um it's a lot of different tribal groups and um yeah go ahead if you had anything to say yeah well and then not just the plant itself but the wisdom um and the intellectual property of the wisdom and the healing and the generations a little bit more for me So the medicine holders, the Iboga medicine holders, and this is, I mean, I'm speaking to this coming from somebody who went to Gabon for 10 days. So I hope all of your listeners understand that this is like a completely novice perspective on this. But my understanding of Iboga is that it's generations of teachings and teachings that exist in the rivers and in the trees and in the songs of the cicadas and in the ways that the fireflies are moving around and dancing around. And there is a real value to that and a real necessity. As we're exploring, working with these medicines, it's not just the medicine it comes with. You can't fully take it out of its context. And. Well, people do. Yeah. But we. And there's a lot of success in a lot of places. There should be exchange for the knowledge and the wisdom. I mean, even if you're not taking the actual, even if we're not exporting the actual plants, and the Gabonese government is willing to have those conversations about export. This is part of those meetings that we had when we were over in Gabon. But the real value is the wisdom. and making sure that those structures, that there's reciprocity for the wisdom and the knowledge as much as. And reciprocity too, I mean, who owns the wisdom, right? The forest and the people and making sure that that has an equal exchange. Just because I'm a pain in the ass about language, I want to say there is extraordinary value in the traditions. There's extraordinary value in the molecule and the plant. They can be seen together or separate. And I think there's a lot of value in analyzing all three pillars. And yeah, I'm not trying to discount your point. Just some people won't follow what you're saying. And I want to be a little clear. Well, I think for me, this kind of comes back to one of the fundamental pieces we're trying to get at with the symposium, which is that none of this exists within a vacuum, right? And so even somebody taking the molecule that is ibogaine in a clinic in Mexico, there is still a context that surrounds that regardless of that individual person's, you know, intent or even knowledge when they go into that experience. I mean, interestingly, I've heard not verified reports that people have had as part of their experience, you know, visual imagery of African tribal people without even necessarily consciously knowing that that's where Ibogaine derives from. Again, I'm not going to comment. I don't know. I don't know when that happened, where. But one piece of it that I think is really meaningful with the work that Blessings of the Forest does is that they're not just focused on Ibogaine or, sorry, Iboga as a plant itself. They're focused on the community of plants, the ecosystem. How do we protect the health of that ecosystem so that we can protect the health of the plant? And so they're planting, they're supporting smallholder farmers in Gabon to plant biodiverse polycultures where that plant, Iboga, is actually thriving within this broader community. And we don't really know, you know, the extent to which that even might impact the properties of the plant. It's not to discredit that ibogaine as a molecule can have benefit for people. Absolutely. And I think, you know, as we move forward in Colorado, there may be that this legislation that's moving through would create the option for what you just described, Joe, which is the semi-synthetic conversion of Boconga to obtain Ibogaine in that way. And that may well be the more ecologically sustainable path. It may be the more legally viable path. And I still think, there is this question or this piece of this whole conversation of doing the right thing because it's the right thing. And I think when we're thinking about societal structures that we are creating and implementing, there is this stewardship component that perhaps comes into play in an even greater extent than when you're thinking about an individual's choices about their own experience. When it comes to an individual's choices about their own experience, though, what we really want to ensure is that there is this supportive framework around Ibogaine, because it is not inevitable that the Ibogaine experience will be beneficial. It can be very challenging, you know, and so having these pieces in place, and I think part of what Martha's getting to is like, part of how we understand how to structure that container, very often may be informed to greater or lesser degrees by the knowledge of these wisdom keepers in the Bwiti tradition, whether explicitly or not. And so recognizing that, and perhaps it needs to, you know, we don't actually know exactly what's happening with everyone who accesses Ibogaine outside the US right now. We don't know how well supported they are. And that's part of why we are creating this state model in Colorado and Oregon and New Mexico is that we actually have a way to follow up with people and kind of see how these psychedelic experiences are playing out over time? Are they receiving the support? Is that benefit sustained over time? And so all of these, you know, to Martha's point, like a lot more questions than answers. And I think we're really just trying to dig in on some of these more challenging questions in the field with a group of people who have brought so much knowledge and passion and experience into the various facets of the work that they do all in one, you know, beautiful mountain town in Colorado. I'm a bit of a rambly no it was great thank you for doing that and i think um i think it's fair to say that we don't know the optimal ways to do maybe any of this um digging our way out of a trillion dollar war on drugs and um it being illegal to actually research this stuff for a long period of time um you know we're we're digging up you know building building something new in the face of a lot of roadblocks and fear and uh i want to point out ibogaine um how it became illegal in the united states do either of you know the story so this brings us full circle um in 1972 um there was a presidential candidate named ed muskie and hunter thompson actually faked a story about ed muskie being addicted to ibogaine and a truly bizarre substance and uh there's nobody was really using it at that point in time but people latched on to Hunter writing about it and said, we need to make that illegal. And they added it to CSA. So just really, really fascinating and terrifying just to know how the apparatus has worked historically and how much work we all have ahead of us to build this kind of science-based drug policy and a constantly progressing psychedelic health care and beyond infrastructure yeah and martha i think perhaps a thing that we're picking i'm picking up from you is that yes this stuff should be integrated into health care in some way but you you don't want to necessarily see it be totally ripped out of a sort of spiritual religious framework and I think I think that's a fair thing maybe it did I characterize that well enough I mean there just so much wisdom I'm always a fan of asking questions to people who have more knowledge than me. and you have people who have been working with this medicine for generations and generations and generations and who have been stewards of this land and stewards of this wisdom and they know what they they're doing um you know i talk about psychedelic use all the time, like exploring the mountains. We in Colorado understand our mountains here. And we've only been living here for not that many generations, as opposed to the Indigenous people who were here for so long before that. But if you're navigating unfamiliar terrain, maybe hire a guide who's been there before and who understands the weather patterns and who understands the river currents and who knows which snakes to avoid you know so that i need to point out that there's like a spiritual subtext here around like in the experience there are a lot of things that can be um interacted with in one way or another and a lot of the traditions have experience interacting with those things and guiding people through interacting with those things and you know this is not super dissimilar from how i like to talk about holotropic breath work lsd psychotherapy assorted shamanic traditions from around the world so it's it's a yes and it's yet another robust shamanic tradition? Well, I mean, I actually don't even mean it in a shamanic context. Even for experiences afterwards, or like say, and so again, I don't know. Tell me what you mean. Yeah, no, I don't know enough about iboga to be able to give a really clear example. But say, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know enough about the medicine to really give something solid. solid but i'm trying to think of an analogy that would well you work on that martha tasha can you tell us where we stand in colorado on colorado ibogaine policy and development of ibogaine into colorado's uh nmha framework yeah well as i mentioned there's a bill moving its way through the legislature right now that would do a few things. It would make some adjustments that could make the addition of Ibogaine to the NMHA more feasible, such as the, allowing the semi-synthetic conversion. It would also create this pilot research opportunity in partnership with the Behavioral Health Administration, where there could be sort of a separate avenue of FDA approved, or sorry, yeah, FDA approved clinical research with Ibogaine with support from the BHA. So that's kind of a separate thing. But really what needs to happen in Colorado to fully move forward is that the state agencies tasked with regulating the natural medicine program, which is the Department of Revenue, the Department of Regulatory Agencies, need to give the full green light, which they haven't yet. What they do have is they have the recommendation from the advisory board, as you mentioned, to add Ibogaine to the regulated program and do so in a way that is compliant with the Nagoya protocol. And I think that what it's going to come down to is, you know, that they're continuing to have these very in-depth, fascinating conversations with a whole host of different people, including, you know, people from Blessings of the Forest and others directly working with or living in Gabon, as well as these clinics and, you know, in Brazil and Mexico about how this can be safely structured. So really what's needed, you know, is that decision green light or no and that's kind of the point that we're at in colorado cool thank you and have there been conversations about how to get it in here other than vulcongo and a semi-synthetic process there have been so many conversations about how to get it in here um you know there's there's a number of different options and each one of them i think comes kind of with its own set of challenges At the core of it, the core challenge is that it's a tropical plant. That is, if it's possible to grow in Colorado, it's extremely hard to grow in Colorado. So you're needing to have some sort of importation opportunity, or perhaps it could be grown in other states and then transferred to Colorado. But all of those come with their own host of sort of challenges around them. There's a desire to, you know, pursue this federal exemption concept. And I think that it's an open question as to whether that is going to move forward, which could then allow importation either of Boconga or of Iboga for the purposes of providing Ibogaine at these clinics. And actually, to speak about the agricultural and growing process, I think this I can give a good example of what I was trying to say. So if, say, we're trying to grow iboga in Colorado, we would, instead of just trying to do it here, it would make sense to talk to the people in Gabon who have been growing it for a really long time about what they've learned in their interactions with this plant for generations, because they've been cultivating this for generations. And so there's a wisdom. It doesn't grow well in a high alpine desert. I'm pretty sure they would say that. I mean, if you're going to try to grow it here, it would be, yeah. But there's a wisdom lineage to a very distinct interaction with the plant that isn't necessarily this spiritual shamanic context. Is it traditionally cultivated? Is that a relationship that the Buiti have with it, or is it always wild harvested? I never actually dug into that. it's definitely cultivated there's um very specific traditional processes for the cultivation um and it's wild harvested okay both hand and there's a long tradition of cultivation it's not just like a last 20 years thing um i mean i want to say yes but uh once again i'm not let's get an answer later um maybe maybe you guys can help me find an answer on this one and we can report back because i think that's an important thing you know none of us are bwiti initiates is that accurate i'm not that is accurate i am not yeah yeah cool so yeah we can report back and try to find some folks that can't speak well to this. I've tried my best at the Ibogaine meetings to record with some of the Blessings of the Forest crew and wasn't able to pull it off for some other conversations that were more pressing, I guess. So Joe, I can connect you to some people in Gabon who are working on this process. So I'll be sure to do that. Yeah. All right. Well, where can people find info about the symposium? I know we need to wrap here. Aspenpsychedelic.org slash symposium. You can buy tickets on the Wheeler Opera House website. There's a ticketing link on our website, aspenpsychedelic.org. Amazing. And Tasha, where can we find your website? we are healingadvocacyfund.org and yeah for any listeners who are interested in following along more closely with the state regulated programs definitely recommend visiting our site signing up for a newsletter we try to keep folks updated to the best extent that we can final question somebody out there listening asked if there are any veterans speaking this year do we know that offhand? I don't believe so. Sounds like I'm not sure. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Certainly that's not a focus of this year's symposium, but there may be somebody who is a veteran, but that's not, we're not specifically platforming veterans issues at this symposium. There are so many amazing topics that we want to be platforming and not nearly enough stage time. Tasha and I are constantly in this conversation of, oh, but we want to give this person a little extra time. And, oh, can we squeeze in just a little more space for somebody else? This conference is a single track. So we only have so much stage time. I think the total is 11 hours. And it's an impossible challenge not to be able to give everybody the stage that we want to. I don't envy the challenge, but thank you. That's why we keep coming back. Yeah. And I will say I do, I do also really appreciate the single track structure. It creates sort of this cohesive group experience that I think is a little different than when everybody's sort of siphoning off to their different rooms. And so it's, it's a special one for sure. In my experience. Yeah, for sure. All right. Well, thank you both. Speaking of veterans, wait, can I just, one more thing. Speaking of veterans, there is somebody in our local Aspen community who has been really trying to get a veterans-focused symposium up and running. And if any of your listeners are interested in seeing that happen, specifically the person who just asked the question, reach out to me through the Aspen Psychedelic website and let's figure out how to platform some veterans issues. Right. I would love to support that. So yeah, reach out to me as well, friends. All right. Let's hang out backstage. Thank you both for your time. And I'm excited about this one. There you have it, everybody. Martha and Tasha, hope you all now are well informed about the Aspen Psychedelic Symposium. If you can make it amazing, tell your Colorado friends in case they can and I'll see them there. All right. Thank you all for tuning into psychedelics today. This is Joe Moore signing off. This podcast is produced by psychedelics today, a limited liability company in Colorado. 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