Zane Qarni & Jan Uroda — The Original Medicine (Part 2)
What if the medicine we keep calling "alternative" is the original medicine — the one we've been using for thousands of years?
In this episode of In the Chair with Bear, Anthony Bear sits down with two returning guests, together for the first time. Zane Qarni is a psychedelic researcher who founded the psychedelic club at UC San Diego and works with Students for Sensible Drug Policy — 23 years old, fresh off his master's, and already years deep in advocacy, community organizing, and guide work. Jan Uroda, last in the chair for Episode 14, Talking Plants, joins from Europe, where his own slow relationship with the herbs began.
The three of them sit with a question that won't leave Bear alone: in a culture that keeps reaching for a stronger hit — high-THC dabs, nicotine salts, extracts of extracts — how do you invite people into a real relationship with plants? Not another product. A relationship.
The conversation wanders the way good ones do. The herbal origins of Coca-Cola and the pharmaceutical industry. A $3.8 billion pharma acquisition in the psychedelic space, and why synthetic psilocybin doesn't sit right with Bear. Blue lotus and the return of dreams. Valerian, damiana, bearberry, and the hundreds of thousands of plant species we've never even met. The urban legends that keep people afraid of the plants growing around them. And the story Bear has carried for decades — a prayer said over a cigarette on the Diné reservation that changed the way he smoked, and eventually helped him stop.
Zane makes the case for changing the system from within — research, numbers, the slow work of shifting stigma — while Jan asks what it takes to reach people who are in real pain. Together they land somewhere simple: intention turns a habit into a ritual, and attention is where the healing starts.
If you're curious about plant medicine, herbalism, psychedelic research, or just a more conscious relationship with the things you already reach for, this conversation is worth sitting with.