[Playback Audio Clip of MARK POLLAN]: So, psychedelics, how safe are they? Is a question that I explored at some length. I was in my late 50s when I decided to use them, so I wasn't at that risk taking 20-year-old like, yeah, let's try it. So I did my due diligence, and I was really surprised by what I found out. Compared to most drugs, the classical psychedelics, and I'm talking here of psilocybin, LSD, DMT, which is the chemical that's in ayahuasca, are remarkably non-toxic. There is no known lethal dose, believe it or not, of either LSD or psilocybin. You can't say that about many drugs. [ROCK MUSIC] CHARLIE BENNETT: You are listening to WREK Atlanta, and this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the studio with Fred Rascoe and Cody Turner. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme, and it's a doozy this week, and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you tune in for, we hope you dig it. FRED RASCOE: A doozy indeed. Our show today is called Evidence Based and Far Out. Wait, I'll say that again. Evidence Based and Far Out, Man. CHARLIE BENNETT: Can you explain yourself, Fred? FRED RASCOE: That is short for practices that are informed by research and scientific investigation, but also seem a little strange, weird, or mind expanding. CODY TURNER: OK, the longer the title, just the more questions that I'm going to have. CHARLIE BENNETT: Turn on, tune in, drop out, and do careful research on the end result. CODY TURNER: Oh, OK. Yeah, I'm on board with this now. FRED RASCOE: On board both mentally and literally here in the studio. Consider, for example-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Fred, I am going to murder you. I just want you to know that. FRED RASCOE: You love puns, Charlie. Consider, for example, LSD. It's a psychedelic drug which can dramatically affect perception, thinking, and mood. It was created in the late '30s, became a subject of research in the '50s, and turned into a counterculture force in the '60s, which is where we get far out, man. CHARLIE BENNETT: By 1970, however, LSD was criminalized, along with peyote, mescaline, psilocybin, and many other recreational and medicinal drugs. FRED RASCOE: But everything old is new again. Drug legalization is ongoing in America. Research into the effects and benefits of psychedelic substances is happening again. Evidence based and far out. CHARLIE BENNETT: Today we're speaking with Dr. Mark Burton, a clinical psychologist who does research on mental health treatments, including psychedelic interventions. FRED RASCOE: And this was an easy music theme to program today. We're going to get into-- we are going to get psychedelic, man. CHARLIE BENNETT: You're so excited, you can hardly talk. FRED RASCOE: Our songs today are about how psychedelics affect our brains, the people who use and distribute them, and awareness of other planes of existence. Psychedelics in popular perception are not always viewed positively when it comes to clinical treatments, but there are researchers like our guest who are changing those perceptions in more ways than one. So let's start with a song about expanding our psychedelic horizons. This is "Garden of My Mind" by the Mickey Finn right here on Lost in the Stacks. [MUSIC PLAYING] "Garden of My Mind" by the Mickey Finn. Our show today is called Evidence Based and Far Out. CHARLIE BENNETT: You didn't say it right. FRED RASCOE: Sorry. Evidence Based and Far Out, Man. Our guest is Dr. Mark Burton, a clinical psychologist who has supported dozens of participants receiving psychedelic treatment across different FDA regulated clinical trials. Mark, welcome to the show. MARK BURTON: Thank you guys so much for having me. FRED RASCOE: So talk about what a clinical psychologist who does this kind of research actually does. Tell us a little bit about your day to day. MARK BURTON: Yeah, absolutely, I'd love to. Clinical psychologists, we wear a lot of hats. We can do clinical work, and we're oftentimes engaged in some sort of clinical research. For myself, I've always looked into and been curious about different psychotherapies, different treatments for different mental health diagnoses, and really trying to study what works, what treatments are out there that are going to be helpful for people suffering from conditions like depression or PTSD. So a lot of my research has been on that, looking at what treatments are effective and how they work. And so I think I sort of fell into psychedelics when-- CHARLIE BENNETT: We're going to clip that out and use that as a advertisement for the show. FRED RASCOE: A lot of people say that. MARK BURTON: Yeah, yeah. I was at Emory working in their clinic, in their psychiatry department. And a study came along looking at psilocybin for depression. CHARLIE BENNETT: About how long ago was that? MARK BURTON: That was 2018. And so around then is when folks were really starting to get excited about psychedelic research again. It was a little bit before classic psychedelics really hit the research scene. At that time, there was some excitement around some models surrounding, for example, MDMA treatment for PTSD, some folks who were looking at ketamine as a potential way to lead to fast acting antidepressant effects. And classic psychedelics were starting to come back into the research sphere. It was around that time, too, that Michael Pollan's book came out. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, who we heard at the top of the show. MARK BURTON: Mm-hmm. And that really-- we talk about the Michael Pollan effect sometimes in this work. CHARLIE BENNETT: For real? MARK BURTON: Yeah, for different reasons. One thing that was great about it is it got people interested in this and talking about it and thinking about it as a potential helpful intervention. But one of the downsides is kind of an overhype, potentially, of a psychedelic intervention where we want to make sure we're not getting ahead of ourselves. And at that point, especially, there's a lot of years left for clinical research. CHARLIE BENNETT: So, wait, what does ahead of yourselves mean in this context? MARK BURTON: Well, it means overhyping an intervention that once we find out through robust clinical study may or may not be helpful for a condition that's being studied. If we haven't done the research yet to know that, we want to be really thoughtful about how we talk about it, how we talk about it amongst ourselves as researchers, how we talk about it with participants who are going through different studies. One thing that happens is, of course, participants are going to get informed about psychedelics. CHARLIE BENNETT: And more so than something that's not quite as culturally interesting. MARK BURTON: Exactly, exactly. And folks, of course, are going to have ideas about what a psychedelic experience is or can be or what it might do for my depression, for example. Or folks are coming into these studies really with a lot of hope that something can help change their suffering, help them through this difficult stage in their lives. So we want to be really measured in how we talk about it and make sure that we're not setting people up with false expectations, which is a big part of what we do when we work with folks going through these studies, is to really talk about the broad range of effects and possibilities, to hopefully have them have appropriate expectations moving through programs like that. CHARLIE BENNETT: So when you saw or when you really noticed that this was an opportunity for research, had you felt like you were running out of other things to do? Was there a certain sense of I don't know, or was this just a new thing that was exciting? MARK BURTON: It was a new thing that was exciting. I mean, there's so much exciting. I love clinical research. I love the idea of really getting into mechanisms of treatment, trying to figure out why they work so that we can have, as the name of the show suggests, evidence based treatments for people out there. So that's really my passion. That's what drives me in my work. So when this came along, I think I saw it as an interesting thing to do. I was basically invited to be a therapist on one of these studies. And I was like, sure, that sounds fun. And I like that it's-- CHARLIE BENNETT: It could be a story. MARK BURTON: Yeah, 14-year-old me would have been super pumped that this was my opportunity. But I also loved that it was within a very rigorous clinical trial framework. These are FDA regulated studies, which means that this is going to be a study with the most oversight in terms of design and safety for participants. And so I was kind of thrilled to be able to be involved with that. And so now have been involved with studies like that in different ways, both as a provider or therapist working with participants in the studies, but also thinking in terms of how do we train people in these models? How do we design studies that are going to really answer the question about providing a psychedelic in this way will add some benefit for patients? And that's the end goal. Is this going to help people in general? And can we make sure we're putting the best treatments forward? FRED RASCOE: There's just a little bit of time left in this segment, but I want to ask how participants find studies and treatments like this. You talked a little bit about how you found it as a researcher. But how do participants, do they come and say, hey, I've been reading in the scholarly journals about psychedelic treatments. Or do you introduce it to them as a possibility? MARK BURTON: Well, sometimes they come well informed. Usually somebody might find us online or they'll go to clinicaltrials.gov. These studies can be found there, and they'll be interested in that way. There are some advocacy groups out there letting people know the clinical research. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, MAPS, will have on its website different options for clinical studies. But yeah, usually people find us. We just open up the phone lines and let people call us, and then we can let them know about the studies. FRED RASCOE: This is Lost in the Stacks. And we're going to hear more about research into psychedelics after another great music set that I'm really excited about. CHARLIE BENNETT: Dude. File this set under BF207.A2 and Fred's enjoyment of it. [MUSIC PLAYING] That was "The Book of Spectral Projections" by Outrageous Cherry. And before that, "Are We Experimental?" by Acid Mothers Temple. The answer is yes. Songs about experimentation and awareness of other planes of existence. [MUSIC PLAYING] This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called Evidence Based and Far Out. We're speaking with Dr. Mark Burton, a clinical psychologist whose work as a researcher focuses on mental health treatments, including psychedelic interventions. We keep using that phrase, psychedelic interventions. It means therapy with a psychedelic to support and encourage it? Is that kind of what it is? MARK BURTON: Yeah, you're sort of stepping into a big debate in the field. CHARLIE BENNETT: Nice. MARK BURTON: Yeah. So what are we doing? Are we providing psychotherapy with a psychedelic on board? Or are we providing support for a psychedelic experience? CHARLIE BENNETT: Just to make sure we've got the terms of art correct, psychotherapy is not anything outrageous. That's just what therapy is that people think of as therapy. MARK BURTON: Yeah, talk therapy. You can have evidence based psychotherapeutic approaches. But it's talk therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy. These are types of psychotherapies. And it's an interesting and important research question. Do we need to add some sort of structured talk therapy or psychotherapy around the psychedelic experience, or is the psychedelic experience alone enough? And so there's different tracks of research looking at this. And broadly, you can think about this research on two broad tracks, which are the sponsored studies, companies who have developed a synthetic form of psychedelic working to bring their psychedelic to market. And then you have the investigator initiated trials, where just folks in academia are interested in this topic, asking questions around what's the best approach here? CHARLIE BENNETT: And you'd be the investigator in this sense? MARK BURTON: I'd be working on those studies. And I work on both. I work in sponsored trials, and I work in investigator initiated trials. But anyway, that's where you can ask these questions. And there's some really interesting work from some of my colleagues at Emory looking at that. Is it that the experience, the psychedelic experience alone itself, is making for change in people's lives? Or is it that there's a kind of therapeutic process happening that the psychedelic interacts with? And it's an open question. So for example, a study looking at a psychedelic provided to participants with some sort of support around it. We want to always make sure foundationally that people feel safe and that we're kind of keeping them feeling safe through their psychedelic experience. Is that going to lead to the same outcomes as a psychedelic maybe with some therapy sort of brought on in the days and weeks after the psychedelic experience? CHARLIE BENNETT: Can I say back to you what I think you just told me? MARK BURTON: Yes. CHARLIE BENNETT: So sometimes, you're just letting people trip and then talking to them after, and sometimes they're tripping and you're talking to them while it's happening. MARK BURTON: It depends. It depends on the psychedelic that's on board. It depends on the study design that you're working in. So there's been some fascinating research from some of my colleagues at Emory looking at providing evidence based treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder with a psychedelic adjacent compound, MDMA, on board. MDMA is not a classic psychedelic, but it's studied in the same kind of framework as psychedelics are where you have a dosing session and you have some sort of supportive environment around that dosing session in the days after. They're looking at if we add in this specific type of evidence based treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder on their dosing day and after, will that lead to better benefits than the therapy alone? And so that's an interesting topic. And I think MDMA experience is going to be different than a classic psychedelic like LSD or psilocybin in terms of a participant's ability to engage in a conversation or ability to engage in a therapeutic process while under the influence of the psychedelic. CHARLIE BENNETT: So we've mentioned a couple different psychedelics. We've made a few jokes, even LSD. So what are the actual compounds that you in particular are doing research with? MARK BURTON: Yeah, so there's a number of ongoing studies, and they're all utilizing synthetic formulations of classic psychedelics. Now, LSD was always a synthetic formulation. But there's new companies and groups developing these molecules and then testing them in clinical trial research. So we have synthetic psilocybin, synthetic psilocin, which is what psilocybin breaks down into in your body, which is actually what sort of relates to the psychedelic effects. We have new formulations of synthetic LSD. So there's these studies looking at can we create a medicine out of this and then study whether it's effective for different populations of folks? CHARLIE BENNETT: So you're not growing mushrooms. MARK BURTON: No. CHARLIE BENNETT: You're not pulling peyote out of the ground or anything. Actually, not out of the ground. I guess you're not cutting chunks of peyote off the cactus. MARK BURTON: Right, exactly. Yeah, these are synthetic formulations. Now, that's not to say that there can't be some sort of time where clinical researchers are looking at different formulations or molecules or ways to think about what is going to be the most effective type of psychedelic to study. But currently, that's how we should be and are doing it, especially for legal reasons. With psychedelics being a Class I substance, there's a lot of restrictions on that in terms of how you study it. So with all that kind of study the molecules that are out there that can't be studied. CHARLIE BENNETT: OK, I have two paths. I have to choose one. So actually, what might one participant actually do if they join the study? MARK BURTON: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So all of these models of support around psychedelics, they're based on really the classic research in psychedelics from the early days, from the '50s and '60s. CHARLIE BENNETT: Back before the law came. MARK BURTON: Back before the law came. And I will say that what I've enjoyed about working on it in these times is that we have the structures in place to say this is how we're going to do it. We don't know if it's the best way to do it, but this is how these studies are going to run, and we're going to test out whether it's effective. So we might be pulling some of the classic ways of engaging with psychedelics from the past, but doing it in a new sort of regulatory environment that I think provides a lot of safety for patients and therapists and investigators looking at these drugs. So with that said, some of the common ways that somebody might engage with one of these studies is to go through a pretty rigorous screening process. Every study looks at different populations of folks. So folks, for example, suffering with depression, suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder, and then after sort of screening into a study will then engage with what is sometimes referred to as monitoring or support or facilitation of their experience. At the core component of that is the dosing session. So usually you have a 6 to 10 hour dosing session where someone ingests the study drug. And within that, you're providing safety and support, really just being calm and relaxed and letting people that they're safe. CHARLIE BENNETT: I have a side question. Fred's got a real question. I have a side question. Do you ever just find it hilarious that you're using this language for something that is also known as a completely wild recreational experience? MARK BURTON: I've found that it actually-- I appreciate being able to use this language, especially with participants coming in who may be nervous about what they're getting into. So a lot of times, these are not folks who have all this experience with psychedelics and might really feel like, oh, I've got an image of psychedelics in my mind from recreational use or some sort of historical example of psychedelics. And we want to say, we're going to do this in this really specific way that's designed to help you through your experience, to help you feel safe in your experience, and to help you come out of that experience in the best way possible. So we use a lot of that language to let people that they're safe to engage in this, which is a big part of having a "helpful," quote unquote experience with psychedelic. FRED RASCOE: It reminds me of a comedy sketch that I saw on the show Portlandia, where the two characters, middle aged parents, decide to use drugs for the first time. And they have whistles and t-shirts that say, "I am on drugs" because they're so afraid of the experience that's going to happen. You are listening to Lost in the Stacks, and we're going to hear more about research into psychedelic interventions with Dr. Mark Burton on the left side of the hour. [MUSIC PLAYING] (SINGING) I know for sure there ain't no cure JOHN LINEDMANN: Hi, I'm John Lindemann from the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Obsolete Library Science. And you're listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta. More wattage in the cottage. Tune it in and tear the knob off. (SINGING) I want rock n' roll You betcha Long live rock n' roll CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's show is called Evidence Based and Far Out. Evidence based for research, far out for psychedelics. That mixture has been present in modern psychedelics ever since the effects of LSD were discovered back in 1943. LSD had been synthesized in 1938, but nobody tripped on it until a very minor lab accident in 1943. After that first brush with LSD, Albert Hofmann, a chemist at Sandoz Laboratories, decided to try it on purpose. He took what he assumed would be a small dose, 250 micrograms, which turned out to be about 10 times the amount necessary. Here are some of the effects, as he described in his book, LSD, My Problem Child. "Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted, as if seen in a curved mirror. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux." Hofmann awoke the next morning refreshed, with a clear head and with a sensation of well-being and renewed life. "Breakfast tasted delicious and gave me extraordinary pleasure. The world was as if newly created. All my senses vibrated in a condition of highest sensitivity, which persisted for the entire day." File this set under ML3534.H89. [MUSIC PLAYING] (SINGING) You're doing it right Just put your head back CODY TURNER: That was "The Trip" by Kim Fowley. Before that was "Down in the Desert" by Thin White Rope. And we started with "Scene Through the Eyes of a Lens" by Family. Those are songs about the effect of chemicals on the brain. FRED RASCOE: This is Lost in the Stacks, and our show today is called Evidence Based and Far Out. Our guest is Mark Burton, a clinical psychologist and researcher based in Atlanta. CHARLIE BENNETT: He has supported dozens of participants receiving psychedelic treatment across different FDA regulated clinical trials and consults with biotechnology companies working on various therapies. FRED RASCOE: So we've talked a little bit about how there was the classic era of psychedelic research, and there's been kind of a resurgence. When you're doing research to inform treatments using psychedelics, is there a pretty robust literature, like in the peer reviewed medical literature, that you can refer to and plan your treatments? MARK BURTON: Especially now, yes. Like I said, since like 2015, this field has really been growing and growing. And so there are now when you have a question or you want to look into something, there's a clinical literature to look into. And so, again, depending on, I mean, there's so many different things to look at in terms of psychedelics. What's effective is the big question. What psychedelic compound is going to be effective for what diagnosis? CHARLIE BENNETT: Is the actual definition of effective also up in the air? MARK BURTON: That's a good question. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, so what does it mean for something to be effective? We're looking at changes on maybe a diagnostic interview or scale. But what point difference is meaningful? If someone shows a reduction in symptoms, what's meaningful about that to them? And that's true outside of psychedelics. And that's kind of an interesting thing about this. Psychedelics are so different, but we're fitting it into a clinical research structure that it doesn't fit perfectly into. So we have a sort of way of looking at treatments. We have a way of doing clinical trials for drug research or bringing things to approval through FDA. And then we're sort of taking a psychedelic experience and trying to fit that in there. So, for example, a big question in clinical research is can you appropriately blind the study? If you have a placebo controlled study, you want to have it be double blinded for really understanding whether it's effective. FRED RASCOE: Meaning that you who has experienced what in a clinical trial. MARK BURTON: Right. We don't that. Ideally, though, when the participants don't or can't guess. CHARLIE BENNETT: That seems kind of impossible though, right? Because a psychedelic experience, I mean, all joking aside, a psychedelic experience is remarkable. Like literally remarkable. Extraordinary in the extraordinary sense. It's very hard for you to say to someone, you don't know if you had an altered perception or anything like that. MARK BURTON: And they know. I mean, they've studied this. I mean, usually it's like 85% of people are going to appropriately guess whether they got a psychedelic or not. CHARLIE BENNETT: Did you just say 85? Meaning 15% of people don't if they-- MARK BURTON: I don't know if there's-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Refuse to answer. MARK BURTON: Yeah, who knows? But there's a vast majority of people who are going to be able to guess if they got a psychedelic or not. And so it's forced us as a field to try to make sense of that and try to control for it in different ways and try to control for it in the experimental design as well as the analyses that we do. One way to look at different ways to study this, you can have differential dosings. So it's not a true placebo versus a full psychedelic dose. You have some sort of middle dosing. So it is harder for people to guess yes or no whether I got something. You can track, just like they do in these studies, whether people are guessing that. And then you can do head to head comparisons. If you do a head to head comparison between two active interventions. CHARLIE BENNETT: That is such a pun. That is such a pun, I'm dying from it. And I know you didn't mean it as a pun, but it's killing me. MARK BURTON: Well, that's where we're kind of at. How do we study this and make sense of whether it is effective, given that it's hard to do these studies. CHARLIE BENNETT: So are you adding to the literature yourself? MARK BURTON: So I do work with a couple of different collaborators at Emory who are investigators on these studies. So I've been fortunate to be able to work on, I think I mentioned the study of MDMA with prolonged exposure therapy for PTSD, not as the investigator, but just as a member of the team. And that's been really fascinating to be able to work on and then publish. Throughout my career, I've kind of worked on these studies and published them in different ways. And I don't know, a big part of me just enjoys being a therapist or a provider on these studies and seeing the on the ground participant experience. And then you look at these aggregated outcomes and you think, OK, this was a reduction on this scale for this group of people. But then you have these anecdotal experiences. You get to actually see whether or how it's helpful for people and hear from them. So yeah, it's been interesting just to be at that level. FRED RASCOE: Here's another pun for you, Charlie, in my question here. CHARLIE BENNETT: I'm going to shut your mic off. FRED RASCOE: How fringe is this perception? How fringe is the perception of psychedelic research, like in the medical field generally? I imagine you go to conferences, talk to researchers, and maybe not necessarily studying the same things. Are you getting side eyes or is it more generally accepted? MARK BURTON: Yeah, it's becoming much more accepted. And I think it's because of the rigor of the studies. And the folks I talked to that are doing these studies, it's really important to make sure that the studies are just as rigorous, that we're not kind of doing this in a way that's not going to demonstrate that it's really being taken seriously. FRED RASCOE: You're not a bunch of hippies wearing tie dye. CHARLIE BENNETT: You have to avoid joke titles or leaning into, hey, it's so weird we're doing this. MARK BURTON: Yeah. But I mean, I think it's important, though, to also acknowledge the interesting aspect of studying psychedelics within these different frameworks. So I think even when we talk about the psychedelic experience, that's such a vast thing. And oftentimes, you can't describe it. It's impossible to describe. So I think getting qualitative data from participants and from researchers is really important. What was your experience like? There's some really cool studies that just interview participants after their experience and just hear from them and then try to quantify that and make sense out of the psychedelic experience a little bit more. A lot of researchers are just studying it for what does it say about consciousness. CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh my gosh. MARK BURTON: What does it say about the psychological experience in general, not just is this intervention effective for this diagnosis? But really, can we get deeper into this experience? CHARLIE BENNETT: So we're out of time on this segment, but I do have to ask a question. So I'm going to just push you to answer as simply as possible. Have you practiced talk therapy with someone who is using a psychedelic at that moment? And what is that like for you as the practitioner? MARK BURTON: With the psychedelic in the moment? I'm not practicing psychotherapy or talk therapy. I'm talking with people, but it's really about setting a comfortable, safe environment. CHARLIE BENNETT: Guiding. MARK BURTON: Yeah. Guiding, supporting. If they need something, a big goal of ours is to provide support. It might be verbal reassurance. It might be accommodating a need. Maybe they need a blanket or a fan. Maybe they're having a physiological response that they just need to talk through. Maybe they're starting to feel anxious so we can do a little bit of breathing. We're really just right there alongside them. But it's really important because psychedelics can lead to such suggestibility that we're not intervening too much, because then all of a sudden we're a bigger part of the experience than maybe their pure experience would have been without us. CHARLIE BENNETT: Got it. So there's not like an emergency pack of Oreos hidden in the room. MARK BURTON: There are Oreos. [LAUGHTER] Sometimes that's what you need. CHARLIE BENNETT: This is Lost in the Stacks, and today we've talked about research into psychedelic interventions for mental health treatments with the clinical psychologist Dr. Mark S. Burton. FRED RASCOE: And you can file this set under RM324.8.S54. [MUSIC PLAYING] (SINGING) Mr. Pharmacist Mr. Pharmacist Mr. Pharmacist FRED RASCOE: "Mr. Pharmacist" by The Other Half. Before that, "My Friend Jack" by The Smoke. Songs about people who regulate chemical intake, more or less. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's Lost in the Stacks is called Evidence based and Far Out, about research into psychedelic interventions. Since a thematically appropriate pre-credit question would be something like, what's your personal trauma? What's your history of drug use? Which Grateful Dead bootleg is best after a heroic dose? Those answers to any of those questions would be awkward, embarrassing, maybe even scandalous. So I'm just going to quote Michael Pollan, the author we heard speaking at the beginning of the show and mentioned in the middle. "The conversation begins with the recognition that humans like to change consciousness, and that cultures have been using psychoactive plants and fungi to do so for as long as there have been cultures. Something about us is just not satisfied with ordinary consciousness and seeks to transcend it in various ways, some of them disruptive, as psychedelics were in the West in the 1960s, and others generally accepted as productive, like caffeine. Hence, the ritual of the coffee break, in which employers give employees both the drug and paid time off in which to enjoy it." [MUSIC PLAYING] FRED RASCOE: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library. Written and produced by Alex McGee, Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens. CHARLIE BENNETT: Cody Turner is our disruptive and productive engineer. FRED RASCOE: Legal counsel and absolutely nothing else related to the theme of this episode were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. CHARLIE BENNETT: Special thanks to Mark for being on the show, to Anna Lee and Juniper for being the vector of this particular episode, and thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening. FRED RASCOE: Our web page is library.gatech.edu/lostinthestacks, where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to our podcast feed, and a web form if you want to get in touch with us. CHARLIE BENNETT: Next week, it's going to be gratitude, not attitude for our pre-Thanksgiving episode. FRED RASCOE: I don't know, I might have some attitude inside my beat-up brain. CHARLIE BENNETT: There will be no attitude. It will be all gratitude. FRED RASCOE: Time for our last song today. Maybe your perception of psychedelics has been altered by today's discussion. CHARLIE BENNETT: Dude, that's enough. FRED RASCOE: And maybe you need some appropriate music to help you along in your mind's journey from one side of the issue to the other. To guide the way, here is Spacemen 3 from their album The Perfect Prescription. This is "Take Me To The Other Side," right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everybody. Man. [MUSIC PLAYING]