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"I ask somebody, what is your intent for doing this, and what are the things you're looking to heal? What are your traumas? And based on that, I'm going to make a recommendation based on what psychedelic, or combination of psychedelics, you should do," he says. "If it's feminine-related energy you need, that might be ayahuasca; if you're lacking joy it might be micro-dosing psilocybin; if it's addiction, maybe ibogaine; if you're out of touch with nature, maybe that's San Pedro cactus." A one-time Wall Street investor who made his fortune in domain names—he bought and sold such URLs as Beer.com and Music.com in the internet's infancy—Zapolin today is something of a celebrity spokesman for psychedelics, having inspired public figures from Lamar Odom to Michelle Rodriguez to, as Timothy Leary once put it, "tune in." Odom, a two-time champion while playing in the NBA for the Los Angeles Lakers, sought treatment for the unprocessed trauma of his mother's passing when he was 12 and of the more recent death of his infant son. "He had been covering up these traumas with whatever he could get his hands on," says Zapolin, who captures the basketballer's healing journey in his latest documentary, Lamar Odom Reborn. Zapolin's language is less clinical than his colleagues in psychedelic advocacy; he calls himself a "psychonaut" and a member of the "mind army" lobbying for change. He's also less keen on incrementalism than others in the movement. "I'm acting as if these things are legal and available, because the crisis level is so high," he says. "Here we are in 2022; I'm not going to sit here and have somebody tell me that alcohol is good, tobacco is good, but psilocybin mushrooms are not good. [They are] a human right. "The mind army wants to be the most radical voice in the psychedelic movement, because sometimes people couch their language and say, 'Well, it's not for everybody, and we need to test it.' No. Millions of people have done this. We're in a real mental health crisis. We can't do what cannabis did, where they cower to the state and the local and the county and the DEA. The mind army is demanding that the president of the United States write an executive order to the DEA and ask them to look at the current research, and to consider rescheduling some of these compounds based on the need." hroughout my conversations with South Florida's "psychonauts," two opinions recurred. One of them is that, despite its benefits, labeling ketamine a "miracle drug," as some have done, is hyperbolic and unhelpful. "There's no panacea," Weiner says. "Every person is completely different." Charles Patti calls ketamine a "catalyst. As cliché as it sounds, if nothing changes, nothing changes. If I'm sitting at home and eating really unhealthy, I'm isolating and I'm not practicing any other healing modalities in my life, and I do my ketamine treatments and go right back to the same way I was living, I'm not going to have the results. That's why we teach people about meditation, breathwork, healthy lifestyle changes, exercise, all of the things that are the real recipe for long-term success with the medicine." The second common opinion, even stressed by longtime journeyer Zapolin, is that these drugs are not "recreational" as we typically define the term. Which doesn't mean that "healthy normals"—to borrow a term from Michael Pollan's 2018 best-seller on psychedelics How to Change Your Mind—can't use them to expand their consciousness or explore other realms. Besides, as Zapolin says, "with the media and wars and pandemics, we all have PTSD right now on some level." Robinson, too, concedes that "even in a party situation, there can be tremendous therapeutic value if done properly with integration, awareness and intention." "Most of my healing didn't happen in a facility," Patti adds. "I came out of a DMT trip and quit a six-year heroin addiction. I wouldn't call it recreational, but people should have access to these medicines. If I can go to the store and buy a gallon of vodka, I should be able to, in a responsible way, use psychedelics." "I came out of a DMT trip and quit a six-year heroin addiction. I wouldn't call it recreational, but people should have access to these medicines. If I can go to the store and buy a gallon of vodka, I should be able to, in a responsible way, use psychedelics." —Charles Pai Summer 2022 venicemagftl.com 99

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