Ep102 - Hamilton Morris, Star of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia
Xenon, Iboga, MDMA, psychedelic toad venom...Hamilton Morris talks about the pleasures and challenges of unearthing the secret history of psychedelics, one substance at a time.
If you’re interested in exploring the burgeoning world of psychedelics, you’ll find no better guide than Hamilton Morris. The 34-year old, 6’1, scientist, documentary filmmaker, cultural anthropologist and son of Errol (The Thin Blue Line) Morris has spent the last decade traveling to over 30 countries to shed light into darker corners of the psychedelic world. Hamilton is a scary smart, affable and big hearted companion -- so much so that many men, women and other-gender identified people I know have somewhat of a crush on him.
In our conversation, Hamilton, a resident of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, speaks openly about some recent episodes of the third, and sadly, final season of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia. He tells me that Xenon, a rare noble gas available in Russia and the Czech Republic, qualifies as “a near perfect high.” He reveals that his 5-day immersion in an iboga ceremony in West Africa allowed him “to stand outside of myself and see my behavior, my relationships, my life history... with an objective, dispassionate perspective that was unbelievably beneficial.”
And he does something rarely seen in journalism, he admits he made a mistake. In an episode in Series 1, he was fooled by an imposter who claimed to be Albert Most, the author of The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert, the 1984 pamphlet that first revealed that the venom of the Bufo alvarius toad was a powerful psychedelic (otherwise known as 5 MEO DMT) when smoked. In this podcast, Hamilton recounts how being hoodwinked actually led him to meet the real Albert Most (real name Ken Nelson) just six weeks before he died from Parkinson’s Disease. The journey of that episode is one of the highlights of Series 3.
In fact, meeting Ken led Hamilton to republish a new edition of The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert, which also includes Morris’s formula for synthesizing the 5 MEO DMT compound. If you wish to order a copy, not only will you own of a classic piece of psychedelic literature, but your money will go to fund research into Parkinson’s Disease. Learn more by tuning into the last ⅓ of this great conversation.