Men’s Journal’s Everyday Warrior With Mike Sarraille is a new podcast that inspires individuals to live more fulfilling lives by having conversations with disrupters and high performers in all walks of life. In our seventh episode, we talked to Dr. Martin Polanco and Dr. Kirk Parsley, who are leading the way in psychedelic research and therapy, and are changing people’s lives for the better, breaking down preconceived ideas about psychedelic therapy and its use in modern medicine.
Listen to the full episode above (scroll down for the transcript) and see more from this series below.
This interview has not been edited for length or clarity.
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Mike Sarraille: Welcome back guys. I’m actually excited about this episode. I’ve got two guys that have been influential in my life. I know I look at Kirk right now and I’m smiling, not always in positive ways. But Dr. Martin Polanco, who we’ll get to how he came into my life. But this one is going to be focused on the rise of psychedelic therapy, which I’m going to be honest, I never thought in my life I would do. I was closed minded to that, just came from a traditional Roman Catholic family. Where drugs or the perception of drugs and I think LSD had a horrible, just… My parents grew up in the bay area in the sixties, seventies, and they had a horrible perception of LSD and that’s what we believed psychedelics to be. But opened my aperture, not only to Kirk recommended it, a good friend, Dan Luna recommended it. And then a Dr. Chris Free, who I know recommended.
And I said, “Okay. Hey, if three guys who I trust my life with are saying, ‘Hey, you need to go do this to improve your life.’ Then it was good enough for me.” And hence I went forward and did the psychedelic therapy. So Dr. Martin, I want to jump in. First, I want to hear your story and sort of take us from your upbringing to how you got involved with psychedelic therapy and why you’re so passionate and why you’re leading the way in many degrees, leading the therapy and trying to push it even within the United States for the benefit of a lot of people.
Martin Polanco: Yeah. Thanks for that. So I got into this trying to help a family member. I’m a Mexican and an Austrian national, so I was born in Austria, I grew up in Mexico. From my mom’s side of the family, they’re all physicians. So that was kind of the career path that I had for myself. But then I had a close family member go through treatment, and I saw the profound change in her. How she went from using cocaine and being in denial that it was a problem to actually confronting the issues that it was causing her, and then taking the necessary steps to move away from her addiction. And it was so dramatic…
