David Nutt: Psychedelics & Recreational Drugs

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guest this week is Professor David Nutt. David is a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist who studies medicine at Downing College, Cambridge.
He completed his clinical training at Guy's College in central London. David's had a lifelong interest in the brain and we discussed that in his path to where he is today. In particular, we focus on molecules, molecules that affect the brain and we break this into drugs of all sorts, but go through it in a framework that David has been an advocate of and proposed, which looks at the risk of harm to the individual by the use of drugs, the risk to society and the potential for addiction. And we get into quite a bit of nuance around this and we really cover a broad range of drugs. And I find this to be a very helpful discussion because it's rather than just being sort of a moral discussion of drugs, it actually gets into the neurobiology of them. And of course, the risks. But the real focus of this discussion is actually around a class of drugs that many of you are well aware of and have a growing interest in, which are these drugs referred to as psychedelics. And more broadly, really we get into not just psychedelics, but at least in the classical sense, such as psilocybin and LSD, but we talk more broadly about empathogens, dissociative agents and even atypical psychedelics. So the only thing I'll say about this episode that kind of bummed me out is because David had a hard stop, we were not able to go as long as either of us would have liked. So I can say without reservation that this will be part one of more. When that second part will be, I'm not sure, but please be patient with us as I accept the fact that we probably only covered about a third to a half of the content that we wanted to get into. And my hope is that this wets your appetite for what will be a part two and potentially a part three. So as you're listening to this, keep us posted of your thoughts and what you would like us to go deeper in the next time. Because as I said, there's pretty much no question in my mind, we will go into that. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with David Nutt.
Hey David, thank you so much for making time in your evening, my afternoon here today. Very, very much looking forward to speaking with you about a topic that I think is on a lot of people's minds lately.

**David Nutt** (2:58)
Well, thanks for the invite. I'm looking forward to it too.

**Peter Attia** (3:01)
Let's start a little bit with your background. It sounds like based on what I've read, going back to your early teen years, you've always had an interest in the brain, whether it be through the lens of neuroscience or psychiatry. What do you think sparked that interest?

**David Nutt** (3:13)
Well, thinking about things.
I guess it was understanding that when I was probably four or five, I suddenly kind of realized that actually thinking was what actually made things make sense. And then I realized that thinking came out of the brain and I've always been fascinated by the brain. And actually I went to university to Cambridge to do brain science. I wanted to be a physiologist like Hodgkin and Huxley to do physiology. And then I kind of realized actually that some single cells are interesting, but you've got to put the 200 billion together and make sense of those. And actually that's where then I would did neurology and that got a little bit boring because it's mostly people kind of dying slowly from diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
So then I moved to psychiatry and then it became really wonderful because you see every aspect of the brain in psychiatry.

**Peter Attia** (4:01)
Well, it's so funny to say that because I'm not making this up, but this morning my six-year-old son was in my office and we were sort of fumbling around and I have a whole bunch of racing helmets in my office and so he's putting them on and that got him talking about why we're wearing helmets to protect the brain and blah, blah, blah. And then I said, well, you want to see what, well, he said, what does a brain look like? So I pulled up, on Google, I pulled up some images of brains, but actual anatomic images.