This week’s Psychedelic Titan is Del Potter, Chief Scientific Officer of Alvarius Pharmaceuticals. Alvarius Pharmaceuticals is an Irish bio-pharmaceutical company researching and developing unique therapies to target addiction through the pioneering use of 5-MeO-DMT medicines.
What’s this article series about? Psychedelic Titans is a get-to-know-you-style blog series interviewing some of the psychedelic industry’s most influential and impactful individuals.
When did you first become involved in the psychedelic industry and why?
After I had my first experience with psychedelic compounds as an undergraduate, I resolved to integrate the study of psychedelics into my course of study. I was fulfilling pre-med requirements for psychiatry, focusing on psychology as a major, but after I discovered the differences in epistemology offered by anthropology, I constructed a special interdisciplinary major that fused psychology and anthropology: “Personality in Culture”. I was fortunate to find a graduate program that really fit this perspective: the joint medical anthropology program through UCSF and UCB where I could specialize in psychiatric anthropology. At the time I was most interested in developing new psychotherapeutic approaches, influenced by anthropological approaches to methodology and epistemology, in clinical psychology and psychiatry, saw myself as preparing for a clinical career, and began supervised clinical work at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. I believed that shamanic practice could influence and inform Western psychotherapy. To accomplish my vision I developed a plan to conduct fieldwork among several culturally distinct indigenous groups, do psychohistorical work on shamanic practitioners, and collect data on how indigenous groups treat mental health issues. Of course, at the time the work of Carlos Casteneda was popular, and there were cross-currents of the first research into psychedelics by Humphrey Osmond and psychotherapists who began to use LSD in their practice, particularly Stanislov Grof. I was most interested to include a study of “ethno psychopharmacology” as practiced by shamanic practitioners in my fieldwork. At this time I was also fortunate to be introduced to Alexander and Ann Shulgin and attended their Friday night salons where I met underground organic chemists, specialists in small molecule synthesis, contemporary philosophers, and clinicians working in psychiatry using MDMA in their practice. The Shulgins and others involved in underground chemistry (I’ll be discreet here) encouraged me to focus on neuropharmacology and medicinal chemistry and I began to specialize in those fields as well. Through a mentor, Napoleon Chagnon, I began my first fieldwork among the Yanomami people that would examine the cross cultural development of shamanic practitioners. As time went on, I found more interest in the phytochemistry of shamanic formulation which aligned with my studies in neuropharmacology. Of course, there was no psychedelic neuropharmacology then. I went on to do fieldwork in Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, and central Mexico. It was really doing fieldwork among the Mazatec in central Mexico that I really became focused on psilocybin-containing mushrooms, their taxonomy, and their use in healing rituals.
Do you, or have you taken, psychedelic substances?
Yes, first as an early undergraduate: LSD25. After I met the Shulgins, a number of synthetic compounds including MDMA, 2CB, DMT, and 5-MeO-DMT. Later Ayahuasca, Yopo, and Yage were among shamanic practitioners and psilocybin mushrooms among the Mazatec.
What’s your favourite psychedelic compound?
Without question: LSD25
Do your parents/family members know what you’re doing?
Unfortunately, my parents have passed on. They had escaped from Austria at the beginning of WW2, were traditional, and had considerable skepticism concerning my career.
Have you had an experience with mental health/chronic pain?
Yes. I went through significant difficulties in high school being the only kid on scholarship at an exclusive boarding school. My parents divorced and my mother had substance abuse issues which contrasted with the perfect lifestyle my friends from wealthy families had. It created difficult adolescence that made life difficult well into college.
What’s your vision of the industry in 20 years?
On the one hand, widespread global democratization of the use of psychedelic medicines through decriminalization and legalization.
On the other, the creation of new novel compounds that are more targeted, safer and with fewer adverse side effects. I firmly believe in the Western pharmaceutical project and how we can make far more advanced therapeutic compounds than we currently have. I also believe we will see how psychedelic compounds enlarge our understanding of neuroscience and the full breadth of health issues they can address.
What are your biggest worries for the industry?
That the consolidation that we will eventually see will limit the tremendous amount of innovation currently taking place. I’m also concerned about the lack of sophistication from a traditional Pharma perspective regarding some of the enterprise that we see and how that may impede the widespread acceptance of psychedelic treatment.
Who are your heroes?
There are so many that I’ll probably leave some out and in no particular order: Robin Carhartt-Harris, David Nutt, Bia Labate and the work at Chacruna, the Shulgins, Leonard Pickard and associated underground chemists, Ester Jean Langdon, Sutton King, Marcel Proust, Yukio Mishima, Nabokov, Garcia Gabriel Marquez, Margaret Mead, Claude Levi-Strauss, RD Laing, Freud, Rick Doblin, Roland Griffiths, John McCorvy, Adam Halberstadt, David Nichols, Charles Nichols, Gul Dolen, Albert Hoffman, Roger Heim, Gaston Guzman, Alan Rockefeller, Sartre, Camus, Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor, Laurie Anderson, Ornette Coleman, Lester Bowie, my uncle Saul Glazer, my uncle Karl Robinson, Pebbles Trippet, Dennis Peron, Dennis, and Terence McKenna, Napoleon Chagnon, Francoise Bourzat, Maria Sabina, a number of shamanic practitioners you’re unlikely to recognize. I’ll keep adding if I think of more.
If you could create a psychedelic to do anything you wanted, what would it do?
Cure substance abuse, other compulsive disorders and comorbid indications. I think these represent the most difficult to treat, psychologically and economically devastating issues as well as some of the most tragic. I would further like to see how we can understand the full scope of what psychedelics can offer outside of medical indications: relationship to nature, sorting out one’s life, and the value of the childlike perception that is core to the experience.
We’d like to thank Del for being a part of the Psychedelic Titans series. Stay tuned for more profiles on leaders in the psychedelic industry.
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