Dr. Albert Y. Leung

My Research and Expertise.   For decades, I have been writing as a scientist and user of traditional Chinese herbs.  My first paper was on growing an Oregon magic mushroom (Psilocybe baeocystis) in liquid culture, succeeding in inducing it to produce psilocybin and its analogs (sister compounds).  It was published in 1965 in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences with two co-authors – Professors Ara Paul and Alexander Smith.  Both were my mentors, the former was my thesis advisor and later Dean of the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy, and the latter was my mycology mentor and the director of the UM Herbarium.  That was my first scientific paper ever published, 3 years after my arrival in Ann Arbor as a graduate student on a teaching assistantship.  That paper, followed by 2 others in 1967 and 1968, published in the same journal, co-authored with Ara Paul, was our first identification and isolation of 2 of the new closest analogs of psilocybin, which we named baeocystin and norbaeocystin.  They are not just the closest analogs to psilocybin, but simultaneously the closest to serotonin, an important hormone and neurotransmitter present throughout our body, especially in our GI tract and our brain, responsible for various functions.   

Typically, in our scientific research and discoveries concerning our complex body relating to our health, we just keep digging deeper and more holes and seldom, if ever, see how these holes and their countless functions mean to our whole body and total health.  We have countless specialties with even more new jargon to describe each of them.   Yet, when you combine these with more money making (monetized vicious cycle with perpetual income for a few clueless and not-so-bright narcissists in our current government owned and run by idiots and yes-men), you can see why Americans have such poor health.   It is a national shame that for years we are not even considered one of 30, or even 40 of the world’s healthiest countries, despite being the richest 1, 2, or 3 in the world along with our claiming to be the most advanced in health sciences. 

However, it is obvious that few, if any, of my fellow scientists are even aware of the vicious cycle (VC) of synthetic drug therapy, the cause of poor health for most Americans but big money for a few.  Hence, our money-making system is strictly a private enterprise among a few selfish narcissistic gazillionaires.  And we are no longer a democratic society.

I am no economist or businessman, but despite my handicaps, I have a history of selecting the right and appropriate scientific endeavors that would benefit us all.  My history of accomplishments is scattered online and throughout my books and newsletters.  As examples of my key areas of expertise and involvement, the following offer a general view of my accomplishments:

1. An interview of me by Dan Van Atta titled “Merging Modern and Ancient Medicines” was published on December 30, 2004, in New York Academy of Sciences’ blog (NYAS).  Of which I had no recollection and only rediscovered it in recent months while searching the Web for my earlier work. 
2. I was presented with the Alumni Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011 by the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy for my contributions to traditional herbal medicines.
3. In 2018, I was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by Marquis Who’s Who.  Its 6-page press release gives the most detailed information on my career and achievements in a single publication.

My Major Publications.                          

1. (Leung’s) Encyclopedia of Common Natural Ingredients Used in Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics – published by Wiley (1^st Ed. in 1980, 2^nd Ed. 1996 & 3^rd Ed. 2010);
2. Leung’s (Chinese) Herbs News (1996-2004) – now republished with my Memoir in a single volume, see below…  
3. My Life & Rollercoaster Career (MLRC, 2018; Memoir + Newsletter).
4. My Psilocybin Trip with PBN (Psilocybin, Baeocystin, Norbaeocystin);(Some chapters have already been published online in recent years).

My born Handicaps – Inattention (Undiagnosed ADHD).    I was born with inattention and ADHD.   I cannot concentrate  on things I don’t like, but with things that interest me I can zero in on them and make them useful.  My life experiences have shown that my handicaps have two sides, bad and good or dumb and smart. 

With things of no interest to me, I can easily ignore them, such as in boring conversations, I simply tune out.   Hence, with people like businessmen who don’t know me, discussing money or business matters that don’t concern me, I quickly stop listening.  To them, I am dumb, not worth their attention.  This feeling is mutual.  Hence, quite a few of the second- or lower-level business managers of my clients/partners who have met me once or twice have done things that affect the quality of their companies’  products without their top executives’ knowledge, resulting in most of my clients selling adulterated imitation herbal supplement products so common in this industry.   Of all the products I have designed and overseen their manufacture over the past decades, no matter how small or big these companies’ annual sales (multimillion or billion dollars), only one company (in the Czech Republic) sells the original PhytoChi (a tonic drink consists of mostly Chinese tonic herbs) that I have designed and continue to support.  All the others are fake no matter who carries it.   This is all because of my  ADHD handicaps (the bad and dumb side), one of which is my trusting nature that I often wonder whether other fellow ‘sufferers’ also have.

               On the other hand, given a different problem, I often notice elements in it which my scientific/technical peers don’t see.  They include a simple process of extracting levodopa from velvet beans that we developed within a few weeks which can be used by any lab with minimal equipment without having to deal with a bean soup using expensive equipment or complicated purification processes as in some patented processes (see MLRC, pp. 94-97).  

Other applications include cosmetics, supplements, and modern endeavors such as databases of natural drugs.   

The last was in the mid-1980s.  In partnership with a new computer company, my one-man information company, AYSL Corporation, specializing in Chinese herbs, responded to an RFP (request for proposal) from National Cancer Institute for a contract to build a database of natural anticancer drugs.  The RFP specifically concentrated on jungle medicines because they were disappearing.  It was obviously geared at Dr. Norman Farnsworth and his group who had built NAPRALERT (a database of natural products known worldwide) with government funds for over 10 years.  Someone in  the group must have thought about using their knowledge and facilities to get NCI funding to build a commercial database of antitumor jungle medicines.  They figured that they would have no competition.  For Phase I of the proposal, out of thirteen SBIR (small) companies, Farnsworth’s group and our group won.  The contract was $50,000 each, basically for proof of concept.  Then both of us were invited to submit the 2^nd Phase proposal, this time for $1million to commercialize the database.  My company AYSL Corp. and Ketron (our subcontractor) won again.  But NCI said they had no available funds.  Sure!   I was so disgusted at our government and academic cronyism that for 15 years after that episode, I didn’t want anything to do with our government. 

The following is from my MLRC (pp. 121-125) describing that project:

C H A P T E R  8

David versus Goliath:

National Cancer Institute (NCI) Small Business

Innovation Research (SBIR) Database Phase II Contract

— What if…? …

My Second and Final Involvement with Government Contracts and/or Grants.    It was in late 1990, a friend and colleague (Greg Pennyroyal) brought me several RFAs (request for applications) issued by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) for SBIR grants in different herbs 3 weeks before the proposals were due.  His employer at the time was Leiner that had over 100 (or 200?) employees and was thus not qualified as a small business.  My business at the time had maybe 20 employees, so it qualified as a small business.   I brought in my friend Dr. Dennis Awang, an expert in feverfew chemistry, as my co-principal investigator.  We won the grant for feverfew, both first and  second phases, for a total of about $1.5M, which we completed in about 5 years.    This is described in Issue #33 (July/August 2001) of my Newsletter republished in my MLRC (pp. 436-442) along with my Memoir.  In that issue, I also described drugs vs. supplements and their identity and quality issues.  Which I am still describing, 25 years later!     I believe it is human greed and narcissism blinded by wrong-hero- and money-worship by some not-so-bright high-level American officials currently running healthcare in our government.   These have been so ingrained in our current drug-therapy system that it continues to ruin our health unless we make changes to our current healthcare system by at least recognizing the weakness of its faux-science nature and start complementing it with tried-and-true ancient medicines.

Our Gold-Rush Mentality Involving Science.   Are people born with inattention and ADHD dumb or smart?  From my own experience, they are both!    With things I don’t like or have no interest in, I often tune them out and don’t care what people think about me.  Because of my daydreaming when confronting things I don’t like, I often have no clue of what people are talking about.  I appeared like an idiot when others asked me a question, especially during my preteen years.  My father used to call me “idiot boy” – sor jai in Cantonese or shazi in Mandarin.  But he knew I was no idiot and used to be proud of me and to brag about my paintings and  my making simple movies, and electric gadgets like trains and fans, as well as my teaching myself Spanish, French, and German before graduating from high school.  The foreign languages (French & German) not only helped pull my grade-point average up after takinga couple of semesters of them and got over 90 (A+) in both languages which helped pull my GPA up to a barely B to meet the minimum requirements for graduate school at Michigan.  Furthermore, I passed the reading requirements for my PhD program at Michigan without having to spend time taking those language classes.  Incidentally, the grading system at the time in Taiwan was  passing grade 60 (a C), 70 (B), above 80 (A).  

           In college, my classmates and friends used to talk a lot about making  big money after graduation.  But none has built a business and started to make it rich, except for one or two engaging in real estate.  But they were not that rich.  I seem to be the only one who has done it, not because I was trying to make big money.   I just started working for some company as all others.  Due to the negative features of my ADHD nature, I worked for 2 companies, did very well, but then I was fired because of my ethics being incompatible with those of my employers and I was on my own.  Then, I started my independent  entrepreneur career around the mid-1970s in different fields, ending up in natural products (herbs, drugs & cosmetics).  They are all described in Chapters 5, 8, and others in my MLRC (pp. 99-104 & 121-125 describe my protein from petroleum project and the database project that was not meant for us even though we won but was not funded – cronyism between government and academia!).

            The therapeutic process using synthetic drugs is at best faux scientific, because the preliminary steps  from cellular testing to approval via clinical trial have never been truly precisely scientific.  There are always impurities present that have never been tested in humans for long enough time to ensure their safety.    Remember the notorious Thalidomide in the 1950s/1960s?  Many thousands of pregnant women taking it gave birth to deformed babies without some organs, such as limbs!  All these could have happened  because  some of us are greedy and narcissistic, or otherwise not too bright, and blindly worshipping money and fame, irrespective of how these were obtained.   All the ‘scientific’ steps prior to clinical trial may be able to eliminate some obvious deleterious effects of their impurities short term, but they cannot predict long-term toxic effects except via the trial-and-error process that our ancestors used long term, like multi-decades, centuries, or millennia.  

            To me, it is obvious that our modern drug-therapy process using synthetic chemicals made from toxic petroleum have inherently toxic impurities that, like the drug itself, are brand-new to our planet, and have never been tested in humans.  In contrast, all chemicals present in our herbal remedies have been in our healing or toxic herbs and foods since our human and plant species appeared on this planet.  Whatever healing and toxic herbs and foods have been with us since the dawn of  human history.  As an intelligent species, we don’t just take toxic aconite or drink petroleum indiscriminately, if ever.    We know which herbs to take for our problems from long-term use experience.

            The vicious cycle (VC) of drug therapy using synthetic drugs is how I have defined it.  It only happens when we use brand-new synthetic chemicals made from toxic petroleum, which has never been tested long-term by us humans, tops maybe a few decades, but not centuries or millennia as our ancestors had done to our traditional medicines.   The vicious cycle described by other healthcare professionals only applies to narcotics and other addictive drugs, synthetic or natural.  They blame humans for our addiction to them because of our weak willpower.  The addictive drugs (narcotics, synthetic & natural) are always there, not the fault of the legal drug makers or their pushers.  Hence, drug addiction is a big business.   So is the huge business of the VC of synthetic drugs.  The latter is legal and perpetual.  It is a goldmine for Big Pharma and its interdependent associates (insurance agents, promoters, advertisers, and crooked politicians of both parties).  

Modern scientific synthetic drugs developed via the so-called scientific process is at best faux scientific, because despite our continuing to claim them precisely scientific, they are NOT, for different reasons.  Because we can’t control all the steps (in vitro, in vivo, small animals & humans), nor their purity along with countless living chemicals and cells in our extremely complex body with which they must interact.  We are simply continuing to build new smaller entities with more complicated new jargon but nothing yet to tie them together to better our total health.  There may be some inkling of using universal elements like what the Chinese refer to as chi (qi) and what a tiny handful  of modern scientists refer to as cosmic elements.  Consequently, so far, we have modern scientific drugs built with faux science which still must await final trial-and-error experience that may take a few generations or more to secure.  Meanwhile, we already have tried-and-true traditional medicines from different cultures being negatively impacted by Western modern medicine,                                                       

            Thus, Indian / Ayurvedic traditional medicines have for centuries been influenced by modern British new drug therapy that treats complex traditional medicines only as their ‘active principles’.   The negative impact of American modern medicine on traditional Chinese medicine have only started decades ago.  Hence, more recently, the Chinese Pharmacopoeia (2000) started to change the nature of Chinese herbs to conform with Western chemical standards.  For example, the well-known tonic herb cured fo-ti or zhiheshouwu, is judged by the content of its antioxidant, 2,3,5,4’-tetrahydroxystilbene-2-O-beta-D-glucoside (TSG).   Traditionally, raw fo-ti  is used as a cathartic and detoxicant; and is considered toxic, while cured fo-ti is an antiaging tonic after hours of cooking with black beans when TSG and other required chemicals would disappear.  The new TSG requirement of 0.7% in cured fo-ti and 1% in raw fo-ti is not TCM.  It’s simply the work of scientists applying faux science to Chinese herbs.  Hence, we are bound to see more toxic incidences  of cured fo-ti products appearing, if not already, in future Chinese  herbs not meeting the traditional Chinese standards but passing current and future ChP standards (2020 & beyond). 

            Regardless, both modern synthetic drugs and traditional medicines have good features (the former based on faux science while the latter based on experience and wisdom).   For 50 years now, I have been an independent consultant for numerous companies in various fields.  Most of the time I have advocated using both modern and traditional medicines side by side for maximal safety and benefits.  The interview for NYAS’s blog was over twenty years ago.  Now, especially considering our Americans’ continuing poor health because of our misapplication of science and our greed, it is more urgent than ever to start trying to recover our nation’s health or at least improve it.  Being the richest, or one of the 2 or 3 richest, and the most scientifically advanced country in the world, it is a national disgrace that for decades we have not even ranked among one of the world’s healthiest 30 or even 40 nations.

Mea Culpa.     Considering my born handicaps, I should be satisfied with what I have accomplished in my lifetime.  But I am not!   I have lost most of my  business because of the ‘idiot’ side of my ADHD.  Except for writing, I cannot start or run a business without partners or assistants.  When I rejoined the psychedelics movement 6 years ago, I knew exactly what I wanted to do in its ‘gold-rush’ environment. The 2 psilocybin analogs that I isolated and named in graduate school from the liquid culture of Psilocybe baeocystis – baeocystin (B) and norbaeocystin (N)are the closest analogs to both psilocybin and serotonin.  When N is dephosphorylated (with phosphate group removed) it becomes 4-hydroxytryptamine, a nonidentical twin of 5-hydroxytryptamine (serotonin). 

            Serotonin is a hormone and neurotransmitter present throughout our  body. The functions of B and N have not been studied.  At this point, especially when synthetic psychedelics are used, no one is sure how accurate or dependable the research results have been. I have already given the example of psilocybin containing 1% LSD as  an impurity (the level allowed by most pharmacopoeias) whether on purpose or by chance.  Since LSD can be up to 200X more active than psilocybin, one dose of such psilocybin (or starch or gum with no psilocybin) could have at least one or two times the expected psychedelic effects.   How useful then, have the study results been all these years? And what effects might natural B and  N and their synthetic impure counterparts have on our mental and physical health (like thought process, happiness, neuroplasticity, or recovery from trauma)? 

           We have been actively synthesizing chemicals for maybe a century.  By now, we may have already made a million or two of such chemicals; maybe more.   Anybody keeping track?   Despite all the above, the synthetic ingestible chemicals (esp. drugs & additives) have been entering our body causing the VC that now supports a huge drug and supplement industry.  That is  the major cause of Americans’ poor health!

Americans’ Poor Health Started with the Vicious Cycle (VC) Caused by Using Inherently Toxic Synthetic Drugs in Therapy.  Their side effects become new diseases that require more new drugs to treat, and the VC persists and perpetuates.  It is a ‘fountain of gold’ for drug makers and their interdependent associates.  The more side effects the more income, if no one is killed, or no offsprings born with deformities as caused by the drug Thalidomide in the 1950s/1960s.    I have observed this for decades and have tried to alert my colleagues and fellow scientists to the inherent problems with synthetic drugs and additives (because they are brand-new and made from toxic petroleum or other toxic chemicals).  More recently, this Thalidomide  has been redirected to treat something else.   So, be careful, my colleagues, especially ones with TCM upbringing like mine plus Big Pharma’s drug training.   Most of us accept anything using drugs as scientific because we confuse anything new as scientific and anything  traditional as old and nonscientific; some of the scientists of my generation (most are gone now) used to describe the latter as voodoo.   Specifically, if you are working with the Chinse Pharmacopoeia, or have some influence on it, please bring up raw heshouwu vs. cured heshouwu to the attention of its real experts, ones who appreciate both but not awed by either.   Traditional Chinese medicines are not based on one or two specific chemicals, like a stilbene, TSG, in heshouwu.  The way it has been during the past 3 decades, zhiheshouwu or cured fo-ti produced at its sources, which may meet current ChP 2020 standards, will no longer work, because it is no longer traditional medicine, tested by our forebears for centuries or millennia.  Instead, we are going to see more toxic side effects of this new cured fo-ti.

            Our modern synthetic drug system is very different from our Chinese or Western traditional medicines.  For years, I have been trying to bring traditional Chinese medicines (esp. tonics) to work side-by-side with chemical-based ‘modern’ medicines.   After rejoining the new psychedelic movement 6 years ago, it took me 3 years to abandon the ‘gold-rush’ companies run by my partners or potential partners and started my PBN Naturals Worldwide Consortium, a cooperative to replace the usual ‘for-big-profit’ companies.  I didn’t go nonprofit because it is too complicated without business partners to handle such a legal entity.  Hence, my Consortium has not officially started yet.   Regardless, I am still optimistic about finding a business- and/or computer-savvy partner, or a compassionate, non-narcissistic financial partner whose morals and ethics are compatible with mine. 

My Obligations, Responsibilities, and Goals Before I die.   Born into a loving, well-off family, I was well taken care of from childhood to adulthood.   I have also been lucky all my life.   With the two together, I didn’t have to work throughout my education, from high school, college,  through graduate school.   I barely got a grade-point average of B to qualify for admission to the University of Michigan graduate school.  Not only that.  Because of my high score in the English proficiency test for foreign students, I was offered a teaching assistantship.  Without that, I would not have been able to come here.  Also, two years into my graduate research in psychedelic mushrooms, I succeeded in  growing an Oregon species (Psilocybe baeocystis) in liquid culture, inducing it to produce psilocybin analogs (sister compounds), isolated 2 of them and named them baeocystin and norbaeocystin.   It happened that these 2 are the closest analogs to both psilocybin and another tryptamine, 5-hydroxytryptamine (serotonin), because norbaeocystin when dephosphorylated in our body becomes 4-hydroxytryptamine.   The 2 tryptamines are twins, though nonidentical.  

            It has been almost 60 years since I first isolated these 2 analogs of psilocybin/serotonin from the fungal mycelium grown in liquid culture.   So far, no research has been done on them in their natural form, because our pursuit of scientific endeavors has been motivated or blinded mostly by money and fame.  The few truly health-oriented scientists can’t help digging deeper and more holes, ending up with countless ‘advanced’ specializations masked in complicated jargon, some patented by their business partners or masters  to prevent others from cashing in.   This applies to health-related industries now controlled by a few selfish and narcissistic gazillionaires. 

            I only realized after I had rejoined the psychedelic space several years ago that the mycelium containing PBN was in pellet form.  For human consumption or experimentation, the pellets can simply be placed on a filter or screen, rinsed with distilled water and freeze-dried.   Their PBN content can then be analyzed.  This product is now totally natural and can be labeled as such.  Unless it is further processed or treated with synthetic chemicals, reagents, or solvents. 

            As described in my memoir (in MLRC), I owe my life and achievements to my family and friends/colleagues as well as to luck.  With inattention/ADHD, if I were born even a generation later, or in the USA and not in Hong Kong, into a family with no TCM tradition, drugs used  here for treating ADHD would probably mess up my brain.  My family seemed to understand my condition and left me alone a lot, to draw, paint, or make electric gadgets like trains and movies, and above all, daydream.   Quite often, my grandma and mother would send me to a grocery store 3 or 4 houses downslope from our garden to get some stuff.  Even at that short distance, I often got distracted and forgot what I was supposed to get and went home to ask.  My family never made a big deal of it.

           Then, when I got a little older, in my early teens, I met my best friend and big brother, Yeung Buddy, who was a few years older than me.  He is described in “Chapter 2 – People Who Helped Shape My Character While Growing Up”, in MLRC, pp. 55-58.   Yeung Buddy had the most influence on me in my high school and college years.  Unfortunately, he passed away due to some sort of cancer while furthering his studies at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec after switching from National Taiwan University.  The last time I saw him was when saying goodbye to him at Taipei Airport while I was  still in my junior or sophomore year.

            In college in Taiwan, I could never take notes because my ‘brain-to-finger’ reflex is too slow, especially in Chinese.   So, some of my classmates would lend me their notes to copy.    Without that, I would probably not be able to graduate because of 2 or 3 minor subjects.  A similar situation happened to me in my sophomore year in St. Louis High School in Hong Kong.  I flunked 3 or 4 minor subjects and was expelled despite I was tops in English, science and math.   Because of my family’s financial problems at the time, I thought I could skip a grade and graduate sooner to get a civil service job to help my mother.   So, I attended the senior year of a newly accredited high school and took the “unified high school certificate examinations” and graduated a year sooner.  Though I passed only the required minimum of 5 subjects, I had 4 honors (credits).  That qualified me to get a civil service job or start college in Taiwan.  I did the latter because my Uncle Siu and Aunt Pauline volunteered to pay for my college expenses.  They sent me US$10 (not a misprint) monthly that covered tuition, living expenses and books, with still money left for a couple of movies and for me to hang out at a music house doing my homework or reading while listening to classical music.  Without Uncle and Aunt, I would never have my higher education, career, and accomplishments.

            For graduate school, I applied to  2 universities.  University of Michigan College of Pharmacy offered me a teaching assistantship sight unseen, because I scored high in the English proficiency test for foreign students.  Otherwise, I could not have afforded to come to America.

             Right after I got my Bachelor of Science degree from Taiwan (National Taiwan University), I was hired to teach Chemistry for seniors at the Salesian School, on the east side of Hong Kong.  The school I flunked out of, St. Louis School, is on the west side.   Both are run by Salesian priests.  Father Ma (Alexander Machuy) from Mexico was stationed at St. Louis where I first met him.  After I had taught myself to read and write Spanish, he was the first one with whom I  tried to practice my spoken Spanish whenever I bumped into him, though not that often.   Regardless, I think he liked me. 

           All the above events (in high school, my admission to UM graduate school and my early achievements) were due to my family, fellow students, friends, and my mentors at UM, plus luck from the good side of my ADHD, without which I would not have achieved what I have described so far in my story. 

My Plans Now and for the Future.   With my born ADHD-related handicaps, I cannot start any endeavor without business and/or computer partners.   This is based on my over 55 years of practical experience in these fields.  Throughout my long career, I have only responded to US government Request for Proposal (RFP) and Request for Application (RFA) twice – one a contract and the other  a grant.  I won both, with the contract, our proposal was not even in scope.  I altered its requirements because its stated jungle medicines did not cover the field of traditional medicines like Chinese medicines.  Ordinarily, proposals out of scope would be tossed out.  But ours won the contest.  NCI said they had no funds.  Hence, we won but without funding.  Most of what I am writing here has been treated in my book. My Life & Rollercoaster Career (MLRC, Chapter 8.  David vs. Goliath:  NCI SBIR Phase II Database Contract.  What if…?).   Cronyism and corruption in our government are rampant.  Which is why our economy is so bad, with a tiny few gazillionaires controlling the health and wealth of our once democratic country.  I can’t do anything about politics, but at least I will try to do something right away with our poor health by doing TLC/HPTLC fingerprinting of herbal supplements on the market which are so obviously fake.    

In contrast, natural medicines (e.g., herbs) with chemicals therein, have been with us since we appeared on this planet eons ago.  Hence, we are no strangers to one another.  When we compare our experience with modern synthetic drugs (a measly 2 centuries) versus that of traditional medicines (millennia or countless years), it is like a grain of sand on a sandy beach. 

Being unaware of this difference when dealing with synthetic drugs based on our drug principle, ‘synthetic and natural chemicals are the same if they have the same chemical structure and both are pure’.  But how pure?  Nobody seems to  raise this question for 200 years since the synthetic era began. 

World pharmacopoeias (like our USP/NF), the ‘bibles’ of identity and quality of drugs and additives, only give a range of their impurities up to around 3%.  Which is for manufacturers of herbal or chemical supplements and drugs to follow.  However, once these products are on the market, there are no rules from USP/NF or government agencies like the FDA to test for them in the finished commercial products on the market.  With drugs, you can still analyze the drug chemicals in them, but not those in herbal supplements or traditional medicines because there are still no meaningful rules for guaranteeing the ID and quality of herbs based on any assumed active chemical.  Which is why our herbal supplement industry is such a mess.  The way it is now, 2 herbal supplements made by 2 different companies with labels containing the same herbal ingredients can be different as night and day.

Modern drugs (or drug therapy using synthetics) are very different from herbs or traditional herbal medicines.  The former is based on faux science unless its advocates (most of my colleagues) include the trial-and-error step after our modern drugs have been approved via the clinical-trial process.  Otherwise, we would forever be scratching our heads wondering why its VC continues to produce endless side effects, enriching the drug makers & associates, while continuing to exploit most Americans’ health and finances. 

In short, the two types of therapeutics, synthetics and traditional medicines or herbs, both have merits and faults. The former is based on science without the experience and wisdom of the trial-and-error process which require time to acquire, without which many more generations of Americans and fellow humans will continue to suffer more from its VC – being sick more often and croak earlier.   The latter, herbs and traditional medicines, are experience and wisdom already accumulated over millennia or countless years.  We just need to take the better features of each and combine the two to work in a complementary manner to benefit every fellow human who needs such therapeutics at affordable cost.

Can you imagine if I were born in a country like ours now with all these synthetic drugs but clueless and incompetent yes-men in charge?   They would drug me to try to make me do better in school; but the final aim would be to please and enrich their boss by selling more drugs?

Regardless, when I got older, my older sister protected me from school bullies; and later my younger sister helped me in other ways.  Then in college in Taiwan, because of my slowness in transferring what I hear onto paper, I could not take notes.   A couple of women classmates noticed my struggle. They lent me their notes to copy, otherwise I wouldn’t be here today, because I would flunk too many subjects I didn’t like.

So, I always have a lot of respect for women.   Without them, I would not have done what needed to be done to get my BS, MS, and PhD degrees and later build a reputation in my diversified fields.  When I was building my career and companies, I hired competent female  assistants as well.   Realizing my handicaps, they took over the tedious menial work, at their insistence, so that I could concentrate on writing, planning, and traveling. 

I believe women are the ones who will eventually resolve our country’s poor health.  We have arrived at this condition because of two things:

1. We have ignored the inherently toxic nature of synthetic drugs, hence their toxic impurities as well.  This property creates side effects and new diseases that require more new drugs to treat, leading to the perpetual vicious cycle (VC).  
2. This VC is used by greedy businessmen who (unlike women with mother instinct) have no compassion for others and turn this VC into a perpetuating high-income business. 

This VC does not benefit anyone else other than the makers of toxic drugs and their interdependent associates (insurance agents, investors, pushers, crooked politicians, etc.).  Most people, including those involved in the money-raking aspect of the VC don’t realize its ugly side.  If they do, I still think many of the greedy men will continue to get involved in it. 

In my next post, I’ll repeat how the VC was created decades ago which has caused fellow Americans such poor health.  Yet most of my technical (scientific) colleagues seem to ignore it or are unaware of it.  By now, this vicious cycle as I have described should be searchable online, or in my last book published in 2018, My Life & Rollercoaster Career (CreateSpace/Amazon, 548 pages).

Regardless, after I was forced to retire in 2010 because I lost a client that was responsible for 75% of our business,  I started to write my memoir around 2017.   Then I was obligated to reveal things about myself, otherwise I would feel insincere.  Since I had already written my Newsletter, Leung’s (Chinese) Herb News from 1996 to 2004, I included all 42 issues of it with my Memoir and published all in a combined volume, My Life & Rollercoaster Career (CreateSpace/Amazon, 2018).   Together, they cover my personal and professional life and work over nearly nine decades. But I am not done yet. I believe we are about to enter another industry built on faux science.   Which is driven by greedy, clueless gazillionaires and their followers towards new specialties based on vague healthcare ideas and confused products shaped by AI and other questionable sciences that even most leading scientists in the fields don’t understand.   And we just plunge blindly in, propelled by greed, because everyone is doing it?

Most of my colleagues and friends (except a few who were close to me) did not know my problems.  And I had/have quite a few.   I have inattention (part of ADHD?), and get easily bored when in group conversations, especially in business and money matters that don’t concern or interest me.  I often tune out and have no idea what others are saying.  

I am very slow in reading, especially numbers.  It takes me 3 or 4 times longer than most people to get a number with 5 or 6 digits right.  Also, I’m very slow in going from my thinking to writing/speaking.  Hence, I can never dictate to anyone (e.g., my assistants).   And it takes me literally hours to write a couple of pages that would  only take 20 or 30 minutes for others.  That handicap prevents me from casually answering any texts. Which is why I don’t do social media other than LinkedIn.  I might read ones that are forced on me because I don’t know how to block them from entering my phone.  Now, I can’t even get back to LinkedIn on my laptop to post things, I have to post my documents on my blog from my phone access. Another consequence of my problem of being forgetful is that I can selectively/subconsciously blog certain things less important to me than others at a particular moment.  For example, I was interviewed by Dan Van Atta which was published on September 30, 2004 in New York Academy of Sciences blog.  That was when I was in the middle of my grant research, among other important activities worldwide, I only discovered my interview a few weeks earlier when I searched for something online.  This article popped up, and I had totally no recollection of having given that interview.  But it was all true, except no pharmacologist automatically specializes in pharmacognosy.  On the other hand, a pharmacognosist can also be a pharmacologist if he/she wants to see how a particular natural medicine works.                                   

I mean a system different from the one I have been describing for decades: one based on toxic synthetic chemicals that cause side effects and new diseases, trapping patients in a vicious cycle (VC) that only enriches the drug makers and their interdependent associates (insurance agents, promotors/pushers & crooked politicians).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

This is the issue I have been addressing, not addiction, which other health professionals describe as a problem of our weak willpower, applying  only to mostly synthetic narcotics.   Our VC is for all drugs that are now countless in number.  But we don’t seem to even realize this.  Maybe we ignore it, because we are hoping someday, we may have our chance to drink from that fountain of gold. 

For some reason, men seem to be more narcissistic and less compassionate for others than women – I guess men have no innate mothering instinct/nature?  I have now lived to at least 10 years beyond the male life expectancy in the USA.  I am still physically fit and mentally lucid.  Though I am tired of not finding support in my final endeavor to move our physical and mental health towards a better, normal path.   During my long independent career, I have  had no problem working with technical colleagues, founders, and CEOs of the companies I was advising.  My problem was with businessmen of second, third, or lower levels in the big companies.  Invariably, they  were all men and seemed to consider themselves more knowledgeable than I in the subject their top bosses hired me for.  This fouled up their products that are now typical of those on the herbal supplements market.   In one or two cases they were startups that happened in recent years, I simply resigned and have had nothing more to deal with them since.  They  have then gone under or disappeared.    In other instances, happened a decade or two earlier, their products linked to my name are no longer genuine and the two are  different as night and day on TLC/HPTLC analysis.

I believe this unfortunate situation happened because of my unique personality combined with the  greedy and heartless nature of many businessmen.  In the next post, I’ll describe how my born nature (undiagnosed ADHD?) can be misunderstood by some businessmen and why I think the future of Americans’ poor health and deficient healthcare can only be resolved by women executives, not by greedy and selfish men, the likes of Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, Gates, and others.

The only way to remove the greed element from this VC is to make a few key changes to our no-longer democratic system.  Limit Congressional members’ terms to maximal 6 years for congressmen and 12 years for senators, with  no special perks or free healthcare for themselves unless fellow citizens are included.  Members of Congress (of both parties) have been too cozy with moneyed groups that breed corruption when they stay in Congress for too long.  Some, like the head of the executive branch and his family, have been openly doing personal business with our money resources, hugely benefiting themselves and ignoring the welfare of most Americans.   The way it is now, too many congressmen and senators are themselves too corrupt to speak out, hence letting the other branch(es) continue to do their dirty work to enrich themselves.

I believe if we have limited terms for congressmen and senators, there will no longer be tax-free income for billionaires, nor further money-making openly by government officials and their families using our government resources to enrich themselves. That may start us on the correct path to a real democratic society more like that of the Scandinavians and Canadians.   We have arrived at our current nondemocratic status (like a banana republic in bygone days) only within the recent decade or two.  In my opinion, when our Congress has no term limits, it is  prone to be corrupted by money and power.    If not for this main reason, I don’t understand why we let narcissistic or selfish people control our nation’s finances, unless most of our Congress members are corrupt and have inch-thick skin, as they are now?  I feel sorry for our grandchildren’s generation and theirs.

I had published all my work in four papers by 1969.  And I am never interested in making money by exploiting or restricting others.  This is unusual, especially after I rejoined the psychedelic movement only about six years ago when the field was filled with ‘goldrush’ entrepreneurs, especially one group was first a non-probit organization getting free advice and services from well-known experts but then went for-profit and got most of the typical moneyed investors.  They are all sticking to synthetic psychedelics and seem not to be aware of the vicious cycle (VC) of synthetic drug therapy that I have been talking about for years. 

During most of my long independent career I have not dealt with psychedelics.   And I was only employed fulltime for less than six years by two companies.  I came back to magic mushrooms after retirement because I reactivated my membership in LinkedIn to try to promote my book, My Life & Rollercoaster Career, self-published in 2018 (CreateSpace/Amazon), which is my memoir and my Newsletter (1996-2004) combined.  It did not have anything on psychedelics, except a short description of my PhD research when isolating norbaeocystin and I spilled the concentrated extract ready for crystallization.  When back on LinkedIn, I quickly noticed the chatter online about psilocybin and magic mushrooms.  I promptly forgot my book.  But I found out one key thing that prompted me to eventually form my PBN Naturals Worldwide Consortium.  Incidentally, norbaeocystin is the closest analog to serotonin and psilocybin.  After it is dephosphorylated, it becomes 4-hydroxytryptamine, a nonidentical twin of 5-hydroxytryptamine (=serotonin).  Since serotonin is a hormone and neurotransmitter present throughout our body, its function as a serotonin substitute has never been studied.

I grew my fungal mycelium in different vessels, flasks of different sizes on shakers and eventually in a home-make 5-gallon Carboy fermenter with aeration.  The mycelia all grew into little pellets up to maybe 0.5 cm in diameter.  I collected the little pellets by screening or filtering them through a sieve or coarse filter, rinsing them with distilled water and freeze-drying them.  Then, I’d do my isolation of their psychedelic compounds.  All the time I was working with growing and extracting the fungal mycelia, I never realized my process would produce a truly clean and natural mycelia containing PBN with NO synthetic contaminants from toxic fossil fuels, or new unknown chemicals from biotech conversions that would require isolation and extraction from synthetic brand-new chemicals with which we have no history of interactions.

Consequently, the typical drug model, active principle(s) in multicomponent herbal medicines, cannot be applied to anything but synthetic drugs.  The notion that coffee is caffeine held by some drug scientists a generation or two ago is no longer possible.  But many of my drug-trained colleagues still hold onto the concept of an active principle in multiple-component herbs, unaware of, or ignoring other more important, also active, chemicals present.  Some still practice it, leading to repeated false or irrelevant results.  Seriously, how much of our published psychedelics research in the past century  was due to uncertain identity or impurities containing highly active compounds (like LSD in psilocybin for whatever reason)? 

For above reasons, I don’t consider our modern synthetic drug therapy scientific.  Nor is it based on human experience and accumulated wisdom, as with traditional medicines   Regardless, both therapies have merits despite their deficiencies.   Which is why I have been advocating the use of both, but with prudence.   

In my last post, I mentioned using both synthetic drug therapy and tried-and-true traditional medicines in treating our illnesses.  That is only when we have no other alternatives like it is now, when we have available only synthetic drugs along with the vicious cycle (VC) they cause that in turn leads to unavoidable side effects and new diseases.   They can be ameliorated by traditional medicines if available.  However, the best alternative is to avoid or bypass using synthetics altogether.   Now is as good time as any other to start for the following reason. 

Since the synthetic drug era began about 150 years ago, we have been making both ingestible chemicals (as drugs & additives) and non-ingestible chemicals (for our  convenience & pleasure) nonstop and ongoing.  They must be hundreds of thousands, or millions, in number by now.  Who knows what their tonnage is, and will be, a few decades from now.   Since over 50 years ago, I already had succeeded in growing  a totally natural magic mushroom mycelium (Psilocybe baeocystis) containing PBN (psilocybin baeocystin norbaeocystin), the closest analogs to serotonin (a hormone and neurotransmitter throughout our body which we might have studied closely and have invented specializations of which we are so proud.  What exactly do or can these closest analogs do to our mental and physical health other than making them rest at serotonin ‘receptors’ (whatever and wherever they are).   It has been over half a century since my discovery of 2 of these closest analogs to serotonin, no scientists have even succeeded in repeating my work despite it has been published in 4 detailed papers.  When I rejoined the psychedelics movement about 5 years ago, on reviewing my work, I discovered we can actually rinse/wash my fungal mycelium with distilled water, dry it, and we would have a totally natural psychedelic product.  No extraction with solvents or reagents is necessary.  Hence, no contaminants from synthetic chemicals such as from biotech, enzymatic, or other technologies eventually will require extraction of the chemicals from mixtures of culture fluids.           

More on the VC  in my  next post.  So, until then!

Since the VC is the origin of the major health problems in our country, I will spend the next few posts rehashing this issue and its closely interrelated problems that I have been describing for years in my posts and books.

Synthetic drugs and additives have one thing in common.  They are all made from toxic petroleum or other fossil fuels.  Hence, they are inherently toxic.  Our recent forebears were smart and correct in designing scientific tests (in vitro, in vivo, small creatures, etc.) to be sure they are effective, or at least safe, before subjecting them to clinical trials in humans, then after approval, release them for patient use.  This last step is the same trial-and-error process our ancient ancestors used when they were developing our traditional medicines eons ago.  This process of our traditional medicines has lasted not just decades but millennia or countless years when we inherited traditional medicines from our ancestors.  In contrast, our modern synthetic drugs have gone through scientific treatment, tops a few years, and we consider them safe and effective (but in ‘animal’ lifetimes) and try them in humans.  Even though our human lifetime is only 60 to 80 years, some of the toxic effects of synthetic chemicals may only start to appear, hardly proving that they are safe and effective. 

For above reasons, I don’t consider our modern drug therapy scientific.  Nor are they based on human experience and accumulated wisdom.   Regardless, both therapies have merits despite their deficiencies.  Which is why I have been advocating the use of both but with prudence.  More on the VC  in my next post.  So, until then!

Wrong identity or impure test materials can mean unreliable or misleading results.  Remember what the basis was for the so-called ‘ginseng-abase syndrome’?  Something labeled ‘ginseng’ from a  store!?   Or the MD declaring he could do acupuncture because he was used to  sticking needles in patients.

Now closer to home (our psychedelics) – just consider 1% LSD present in a dose of psilocybin for whatever reason; that would double the psychedelic effects because LSD is up to 200X stronger than psilocybin.  So, my colleagues, be careful!   Has any of our colleagues published research that shows this purity/identity issue of any commonly used or researched synthetic psychedelic, one way or another?

In the next post, I want to continue to connect the vicious cycle (VC) of drug therapy using synthetic chemicals with the persistent poor health of Americans, exploited or caused by the drug industry.   The only way to eliminate this VC is by government-owned healthcare as most truly democratic, educated, or civilized nations like Canada and the Scandinavian countries, whose multibillionaires pay taxes unlike ours who don’t pay any.