Krystle Cole has tried more psychedelic drugs than all of the Beatles combined, personally knew the operators of the biggest LSD laboratory in history and lived through some of the most profound and darkest experiences a human being can have, such as run-ins with the law and bad trips. A native of Kansas and former Tucson dweller, Cole is a pursuing a master’s degree in psychology from Capella University. Through her experience, she became an expert in psychedelics and safe drug use, penned a book called “Lysergic” and founded Neurosoup.com, a website that focuses on trying to educate people on responsible drug use.

Daily Wildcat: Could you tell me a little about your education? You dropped out of high school at 15?

Cole: It just wasn’t working out for me, so I went for the first semester of high school, and that was it. So after that, I went to college and I got my associate’s degree by the time I was 18. And then I kind of started making some bad decisions … big decisions that greatly impacted my life.

I met some people (William Leonard Pickard and Gordon Todd Skinner) who were chemists. They had the largest LSD lab in the world, and they got busted about six months after I met them. During that six months I was with them — and a couple of years after — I did a lot of different psychedelics and entheogens which taught me a lot of things.

Where do you see the drug laws going these days? Is it getting better or worse?

I think it’s getting a lot worse. For instance, substances like LSD and MDMA, they might not be 100 percent safe, but compared to a lot of the research chemicals out there, they’re very safe. The research chemicals that are on the market, like MDPV … (the government) will find a drug out there, like the research chemicals, they’ll schedule it, and then the people out there — the drug dealers — will just find more research chemicals to sell. And these research chemicals, some of them can be highly damaging to people.

So I think that is one major problem with our drug laws, that our government shouldn’t be making people say, “OK, do I want to break the law and cause myself to go to jail, if I get a felony conviction, I won’t be able to get my student loans to go to college.” So people are thinking about that, and it’s like, “OK, well, illegal drugs could cause me major legal problems. I don’t want that.” And then they’re like, “OK, what can I get legally? I can buy this stuff that’s a research chemical on the Internet and it’s legal, so I’m gonna do that!” And that’s what the user’s thinking.

The government’s trying to act like they’re doing something good for people’s health by making all of these substances like LSD and psilocybin mushrooms illegal, but those things have some proven safety profiles. You can have bad trips on them, true, and you can get (hallucinogen persisting perceptual disorder) and flashbacks in a very small percentage of the population primarily with LSD. But comparatively, with research chemicals — there are numerous ones, I could list them off for you — we don’t know if they’re going to be addictive or if they’re going to cause brain damage or if they’re carcinogenic.

They have no idea, but that’s what the people are doing now to get around the drug laws. … I mean, of course I think we should have our personal freedom to do what we want. If we want to use entheogens for spiritual purposes, we should be allowed to. I think the worst thing right now is that (drug laws) are damaging people’s health because people are dodging around them by using research chemicals.

So when it comes to drug laws, what exactly is your ideal?

When you look at something like heroin, it’s really bad for you.

It’s addictive, it’ll ruin your life, it’ll ruin your family members’ lives, it’s going to make it so you can’t go to work, you’ll steal, try to do anything you can to get heroin. It’s highly addictive. There are substances out there that aren’t doing that kind of damage that are also in the schedule one category. I think that’s what needs to happen to drug (policy) reform: The government needs to look at and ask, “Are these drugs really that damaging?”

I believe that some drugs should be illegal, like cocaine, crack, heroin, meth. Those things should probably stay illegal. I don’t think they’re helping the public in any way. In fact, they’re probably damaging the public. Things like LSD and psilocybin, I think they are helping people, and they can help people when used in the right set and setting. Also, I guess with medical marijuana, a lot of places are doing medical marijuana now. Isn’t Arizona one of the new medical marijuana states?

Yeah, they voted it in last year, but Gov. Jan Brewer is against it.

Yeah, medical marijuana is one good thing that’s happened with drug law reform. Some people are seeing that cannabis is not a(s) damaging as what people have made it out to be. And I think entheogens — psilocybin and LSD — are in that same category. They’re just not as damaging as people think.

Some have said they can actually cure addictions, right?

Exactly. They’ve done lots of studies on LSD before it was made illegal. Using LSD to cure people with alcoholism, they had good results. As well as substances like ibogaine, which are being used all over the world to treat substance abuse and addictions. But not here in the U.S.

Our government just won’t accept that they’re so stuck in the social stigma of what entheogens are.

I think also, at some level, the powers that be might not want the social destabilization that happened in the 60s with the hippies, everyone taking LSD. I don’t think that they really want that to happen again because people may wake up and say, “Hey, I don’t want to wake up and go to work every day to buy what the TV tells me to buy and to take all the prescription medications to make me happy. I don’t want to buy into the system, I want to realize that happiness is created by something far deeper and far more fundamental to being human than having a good job and paying my taxes.”

I think it’ll be destabilizing, so I think that’s part of why they don’t want entheogens to be legal.

What advice would you have for us entheogen-hungry college students?

If it were me, and I could go back to being 18, before I made some poor decisions, I would be more careful in choosing who I decided to trip with and who I decided to trust at that level. Because, that’s been the biggest mistake for me: the people I chose to hang out with while I was using entheogens. And (I wish) I would’ve had the resources back then to look things up on the Internet and educate myself.