A documentary called ‘Journeys’ which examines the use of psilocibin use in therapy was shown in Las Cruces late last week. KRWG’s Noah Raess spoke with director and producer Christopher Cramer to learn more about the film.
Noah Raess:
Can you tell me about the film that you've just finished up?
Christopher Cramer:
For sure. So the film that we just finished is called Journeys and Journeys is a two hour documentary that is a deep dive into psilocybin assisted psychedelic therapy. And what we did was we spent two years making this project. There's a total of 22 interviews that are compiled within it, with everyone from patients through facilitators, cultivators, ethicists, law makers and lab technicians and testing to kind of boil down the subject and give everyone the right questions and information to be able to follow this. If they want to go to a fellow facilitator, if they want to go to a therapist. They're kind of armed with every piece of information they need to carry on the conversation.
Noah Raess:
I think traditionally the word psychedelic and therapy doesn't really mesh like it doesn't seem like those would work together. How does this form of therapy work?
Christopher Cramer:
It's interesting because when we say traditionally we're not necessarily including indigenous tradition because there is a lot of history of psychedelic therapy being something that is practiced and Western culture, that's really where we get into this idea of psychedelics, not being therapeutic. And a big part of that, I think, stems from the drug war, because we were all children of you know, the DARE program and the drug war was something that came up where we were kind of told everything was blanketed bad. And when they were first coming across scheduling and they started to do the scheduling process, they looked at psilocybin, and there was a lot of people that came out and said, hey, this shouldn't be schedule one, because there are really good benefits to this, that the benefits that they were coming up with were mental health. And we weren't looking at mental health as health. We were only looking at purely scientific, physical ways to be able to affect someone, to be able to take it out of a schedule one substance. And now that we've kind of grounded the culture, we are looking at mental health as health. So psychedelic therapy has been something that's been discussed even with a scheduling program whenever they were holding the trials. The gentleman that started Alcoholics Anonymous came up and said, hey, psychedelics helped me break my addiction cycle. So there is a history there of psychedelic therapy. It just kind of got pushed down because, how we look at drugs because of the drug war. Now, whenever you said, how does this work? It really depends on what your ailment is. And that's probably the wrong word. But what your condition is or what you're looking to work on, you know, if you've gone through PTSD, if you've gone through complex PTSD, you might be looking for something gentler that's more of a day to day process and helping you slowly deal with your problems. And that's going to be more of a mood adjustment. And a lot of people do microdosing. You're going to find microdosing has been very successful with veterans recently, and that is a sudden perceptual dose. That is a daily supplement, kind of like a multivitamin, in which it helps you take the edge off and deal with things kind of like an antidepressant or an SSRI would work. Now, heroic dose or your regular dose or macro dose, depending on which culture you're running in and how they want to call it. Your heroic dose tends to be a very large dose that helps you confront the problem head on, and you're dealing with it in a very intense six hour session. Essentially, that six hours is where you take the dose and you confront your problems. And that might be PTSD again. That might be, treatment resistant depression, that might be, a bunch of different elements that you're looking to take on head on. End of life care, your own mortality. A lot of things that people are using heroic doses to treat. There's a very intense moment. And that six hour session also comes with the days leading up in which you're doing preparation. You're in your right setting, you're setting, you're making sure that you're able to tackle this in a place that's healthy and sets you up for success. And then integration comes after. And that's where you take what you've learned during these psychedelic sessions, and you integrate that into your daily life so that you can actually confront what you're looking to confront and take on what you're looking to do to better yourself.
Noah Raess:
How did you get interested in covering a topic like this?
Christopher Cramer:
I kind of avoided it for years. This topic hunted me down in an interesting way because for years I've had colleagues tell me that I should consider doing a documentary on mushrooms just because there's always been whispers of it being used for therapy and, you know, the stigma that comes with it. It's a very interesting topic, and I didn't know what the story would be at the time, because I kind of like you said, when you say the word psychedelic and therapy together, you don't think of those being what we are finding it to be. And three years ago, I was at a friend's birthday party, sorry, baby shower. And, at this baby shower, his mother came up to me and she had expressed that she had just gone through a psychedelic session. She was a childhood sexual assault victim. She dealt with it for 40 plus years. She had gone to cognitive based therapy. She had done somatic therapy, and she was never really able to confront it. And it's just something that was haunting her and her entire life. She did a single, psilocybin heroic dose session, and she was really able to kind of confront that problem and move past it. And she was so thankful for that experience that she wanted to set up a test interview with me and her facilitator. And even then, I was not sure I wanted to take on this subject. I did the test interview, though, left that test interview immediately, called my producing partners and was like, hey, I think we need to take this on in a larger format. We need to start talking to people and seeing what we can do. And then spent two years putting together this documentary.
Noah Raess:
You kind of mentioned earlier about some of the past legal issues, you know, with the War on Drugs, I guess. What is the kind of legal landscape for this look like today?
Christopher Cramer:
It's rapidly evolving. The legal landscape today has been a complicated topic, especially as we're looking at states that are legalizing because each state is still federally illegal, kind of like the early days of cannabis. While it's still federally illegal, there are states that are legalizing the therapy process, but each state is coming up with their own terms. So Oregon opens the door first, and anyone could go in and try this under supervision. Colorado followed and had similar rules and that anyone could try it no matter what your diagnosis. And you could do homegrown and trade. So in Colorado, if you wanted to grow your own and you wanted to give it away for free, as long as you didn't charge for it, and as long as you're not doing it within, like however many feet of a school, you were able to do that in Colorado. Now, New Mexico's about to come online in a few months. What makes New Mexico interesting is they are not legalizing it for everyone the way other states are. You need a diagnosis. You can't just go in and make an appointment to do it. And under New Mexico law, the diagnosis right now that they're running with is PTSD, complex PTSD, and treatment resistant depression. There's one more. But again, these laws are changing so rapidly that I'm not familiar with it at this moment. And then if you look globally, we have a lot of first world countries that are opening up. Australia became the very first one in which Australia is opened up for like national legal psychedelic therapy. And then we have other countries that'll be coming online in the next 3 to 4 years.
Noah Raess:
My final question is what you kind of hope people take away from this film after watching it?
Christopher Cramer:
My goals for making this film, and my hopes for making this film, is not to convince anyone to do psychedelic therapy. I'm a filmmaker. I entered this conversation to build understanding, but my goal and my hope is to reduce stigma. And the opening message that comes on the screen when you watch this documentary is that this movie was not made to convince anyone to try psychedelics. That is your choice. It was made so that you would think of the people that do it kindly. Because these people are after healing. They're trying to better themselves. They're not going into this to do drugs in the way that we think of them. These are individuals who are looking to better themselves. And that is my hope for the movie is if you know somebody who's doing this treatment to understand that they are trying to better themselves, they're not doing this to experience drugs in the way that many of us think that they are. And I really hope that this film reduces the stigma of people who are trying to better their themselves.
