(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, we'll take you to a place where you can learn about gems and minerals all year long.

(Elizabeth) The Alfie Norville Gem and Mineral Museum, it's a very unique museum, and it's just very beautiful from start to finish.

(Tom) Community leaders reflect on a troubling national trend.

(Peter) This virus came from China.

It could have came from Africa.

It could have came from England.

Would you discriminate against anybody from England?

(Tom) The potential mental health benefits of magic mushrooms.

(John) There's been the promise of psychedelics for changing people's symptoms for a very long time.

(Tom) And acclaimed local muralist, Allison Miller, shows us some of her favorite public artworks.

(Allison) If my favorite mural has been graffitied, I'll reach out to the wall, so owner and offer my services.

(upbeat music) (Tom) Hello, and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

You're no doubt familiar with the Gem Show.

It has made Tucson synonymous with gems and minerals.

And today we join you from a very cool place where you can explore them and enjoy them all year long.

This is the University of Arizona, Alfie Norville Gem and Mineral Museum.

[jaunty music] People can be treated to many different things when they come to this museum.

We have beautiful galleries that tell kind of a really interesting complete story from start to finish.

We go from the evolution of minerals into the evolution of minerals here in Arizona, how mining happens, and then really from the mine to the finished product of jewelry.

[music] Here we have our gorgeous tapestry of gemstones.

So this particular tapestry took over ten months to create.

It was done back in about the late eighties, and it contains over 26,000 gemstones.

And they are composed of diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds.

All of it's real and everything other than the gemstones is actually made of gold.

The tapestry will be here for four years.

And it is a one of a kind, very unique piece and we are very excited to have it on display.

We give people the opportunity to not only come when they're here at the Gem Mineral Show, but we're open year round and we're very proud to have a very extensive collection that locals and visitors can enjoy.

[ominous music] Here we have a very large, entelodant skull and an entelodant is a very distant relative of modern day pigs or wild boar.

Sometimes it's colloquially referred to as a “terror pig” or has some crazy other names.

But really this is just a very large extinct species.

Kind of almost think about it the size of a cow that was carnivorous, which is pretty scary.

As you can see, they had very large heads and very large teeth and they often preyed upon what were known as early horses that were probably about the size of German shepherds.

The skull was actually discovered in a river in Florida just a couple of years ago.

And it took a very long time to put all the pieces back together.

But it is considered a complete skull.

This particular fossil is actually an undescribed species.

It's potentially a new species of entelodant.

And we're just really excited to have this piece on display.

It's actually the first museum that it's ever visited.

This is a type of meteorite that's called an iron meteorite.

The galleries are kind of all encompassing.

We in mineral evolution are pieces are from all over the world.

[soft music] Then when you move into Arizona, of course, we emphasize Arizona minerals.

Arizona is actually one of the best places in pretty much the world to find diverse minerals.

And so we try to showcase that to our visitors.

I am originally from Knoxville, Tennessee.

I was born and raised there.

So my first big move once I got out of college was actually coming here to Arizona and moving 2000 miles away from home.

I have a background in geology, so this state was very attractive to what my hobbies are, which is some some of it's rock hounding.

I loved coming to the Gem and Mineral Show so I actually came here for five years before I moved here.

And I also have my license in gemology, so I am also in love with all things that sparkle.

So this museum really just encompassed a lot of my hobbies and a lot of my interests.

[soft music] If people want to explore the space and come to downtown Tucson, I definitely recommend that they come and visit the Alfie Norville Gem and Mineral Museum.

It's a very unique museum and it's just very beautiful from start to finish.

[soft music] (Tom) At the beginning of the pandemic, there was an alarming increase in violent attacks against Asian American Pacific Islander communities.

And this was linked to rhetoric blaming Asian Americans for the spread of COVID-19.

We spoke with a couple of leaders in the Asian American community here about how their friends and their loved ones are coping.

- We are here standing together because we are sad.

We are angry and we are exhausted by the roller coaster ride of emotions that we've all been dealing with today.

(somber music) (somber music) - [Interviewer] How are you.

- Sorry, many years ago, we chose to come here, not just to assume the education, but also to pursue freedom.

And this country used to be the country all people look up; the humanity value, all people are equal, doesn't matter the skin color, doesn't matter where you from, that's a value we believe too.

I never feel afraid feared of anything, I feel equal to everybody else, but all of sudden, I was like, why does the ratio thing become such a big concern for the whole country?

Why we're being targeted and we're being to be attacked, to be pointed finger to?

(soft guitar music) We heard so much the terrible attacks to the elderly and women, especially in San Francisco and New York.

People worry, they say, if something threat to your life and to your parents, your sister brought us, shall we call out for her?

(dramatic music) When I saw those discussions and concerns, and I said, maybe we should reach out, we'll sit down with Tucson PD and we invited some politician from different department to listen to our concern, to listen to the communities' questions.

(dramatic music) - What is a legal grounds to defend myself or my loved ones with a legally owned firearm?

- I am not interested in buying a weapon, but I do here for my life right now.

- The treatment towards Asian-American Pacific Islanders is uncalled for, it's unjustified, it should be denounced.

- I'm wondering if there's educational efforts out there to help make that happen and to bring greater awareness and visibility to the Asian-American community.

- A lot of the times people say, "Ah, those Asian groups they would not complain, "they would not, you know, they're the majority."

And I think those times have passed.

- We have to first start to understand what the term Asian-American means.

You know, when they say API, what does that mean?

That means everybody who have heritage from the Asian-Pacific region and that involves more than 40 plus countries if not more, some of them were natives, they were born here in the United States.

So I guess people have to understand the group itself, what it means.

And then talk about the contribution.

Chinese-Americans have been here since the 1800s, Korean-American have been here probably since the '50s and the '60s as well.

So they need to understand, yes, this virus came from China, but it could have came from Africa, it could have came from England.

Would you discriminate against anybody from England, if it started in England, first?

(soft music) - Chinese labor do the humongous contribution to the transcontinental railroad from the west to the east side, it used to take six months to seven months.

After the railroad bill, seven days, that make this country jump to a totally different stage.

(dramatic music) This history was not being put in the education part, so a lot of people don't know the thing Chinese come here to take things away, but we're now with generations here, we may all contributions, including Indian, Korean and Japanese people that involved in the technology, science, entertainment, and they're all made the contributions to this country.

So I think all the ethnic groups do something.

Do they share?

- Being an immigrant myself, I think every time I think about the opportunity that was given to me by my parents to go to school here, to make a living here, it's extraordinary.

Just like all the friends and families and everybody that I know, a lot of them were born and raised in the United States, a lot of them were very grateful, but I also have a lot of people that don't understand what they have and they don't understand why so many people want to come here legally or otherwise, it's because they don't have what we have here.

So if they would go out and see the lives through other people's eyes, then I think they will understand we are not so different after all.

- And my communities, I hope deal will stand up for whatever the problem that encounter, any buyers on a discrimination.

You know, when something like pandemic happened, what I understand is people as all the people live in this country, in this land, should work with each other, help each other to get over this.

Because from time to time, there's pandemic, but pointing to each other, doesn't help, doesn't resolve the problem, helping each other will.

United will make us more powerful and stronger.

(dramatic music) - I wish everybody health and stay well throughout this next, however many months and when we can get together safely again, I invite everybody to come back to the Chinese Cultural Center to visit so that we can share our stories and get back together and go back on the road to normalcy.

- As Dr. Martin Luther king stated so eloquently, "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; "only light can do that.

"Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

We must participate actively in the dialogues that create a light to overcome racism and support healing in our communities.

(Tom) With mental health disorders on the rise, major universities have begun researching psychedelic substances and their potential impact on mental health.

In fact, the University of Arizona is in the middle of a study involving psilocybin or magic mushrooms and obsessive compulsive disorder.

And their findings are raising eyebrows.

- I've been like, trying to figure out what was wrong with me for a long time.

I just honestly thought everybody's brain worked the same as mine.

I was just kind of a you know, a wimp, you know, was kind of a wuss.

I have obsessive thought and the compulsive stuff, the physical compulsions like for example taking my dog to the park and he goes number two and I'm like, oh I don't wanna touch that but I, I got to so I pick it up and like the rest of the way and throw it away then like the rest I'm like, oh I gotta get it, I gotta get it, I gotta get home, I gotta get home wash my hands, I gotta get home wash my hands and like, like I was just kind of getting worse and worse and I was getting more obsessive, more confused, more stressed out, more anxious, more depressed at different times and just like, a million of other people I listen to Joe Rogan's podcast and he always talks about psychedelics.

- High on 20 grams of mushrooms, hugging a tree.

- I stop stuttering in one day - Wow - And this speaks to now what was been medically proven is that we can reset the neurology of the human brain - And I was like wow okay, maybe there's some sense to this.

Maybe it makes some more sense, maybe I gotta be a little more open-minded to other thing because I've been taken for like anxiety and depression and taking a lot of other medications and non of them really did anything for OCD.

So I went to a clinicaltrial.gov and typed in psilocybin.

Misspelled it like seven times but I finally got it right, then one to one popped up in Tucson and it was like, potentially recruiting people in like a few months and then you know, I kept it on my computer for literally a year and I'd refreshed it every Monday and it, and then one Monday I went into work and I refreshed it and it's like now looking for recruits actively but I emailed them I said hey, I'm interested.

I had like a phone screening, ultimately went down there once for like a three hour pre-screening and I was in.

I was in, I was a scoring pretty high on the, the OCD scale so.

- So one of the problems that all of us face is knowing did we do something right or conversely did we do something wrong?

And if something we do doesn't match up with our expectation we get a signal that says you made an error.

One of the troubles in OCD is that this signals a little too strong.

So, we think about there being kind of a hyperactive error monitoring signal in obsessive-compulsive disorder.

So, this task is a very simple task that's designed to make people make errors and what we see in patients with OCD is this error signal is stronger.

- During the early 1990s I had a patient in our clinic who was having trouble with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

He was able to relate to us that during a period of time when this person was using drugs of different kinds he noticed that when using freeze-dry psilocybin mushrooms his obsessive compulsive disorder got dramatically better and so based on that we decided to go ahead and pursue a study of psilocybin.

At the time there hadn't been any other studies of psilocybin or LSD in a clinical setting in close to three decades.

- Dr. Marina was a pioneer in being able to do this kind of research when he ran the, the first study over a decade ago.

There's been the promise of psychedelics for changing people's symptoms for a very long time.

The drugs got stigmatized, they were seen as having no medical value.

- [Television Informer] There is a medical risk to the brain and body.

Perhaps the biggest risk is the placing of the psyche in peril.

- I'm like not exaggerating at all.

I never did drugs.

I like never drank, I grew up like real religious.

Like, really you know, in conservative type household.

I'd like watch them youtube videos and stuff like people explaining it and this is what might happen, you gotta be ready.

This is why you might see.

- What is this alien technology and how do I use these human hands again.

It was very complicated and it was like every five seconds I'd forget where I was.

- Psychedelic drugs are very powerful substances.

For millennia, indigenous cultures have used them in the context of traditional, spiritual practices.

Psilocybin is just one of them.

- The way it's setup is there's eight visits.

Four of them are placebos, two of them are low dose and two of them are high dose and so the first week I get a pill and I'm sitting there and I'm like, waiting I'm waiting for the good stuff and then like, 30-45 minutes, an hour goes by and I'm sitting there as if I had just taken a Tylenol.

So I have to sit there for literally like, 12 hours.

So the next week I go back week two.

Week two, nothing happens.

Same thing and then week three I go in there, nothing again, I'm like three weeks in a row and at some, I'm kind of getting pissed at this point and so weak four, nothing again and I'm getting more stress and getting more anxious.

I feel like my OCD is like spiraling out of control like, and then so week five he gives me a pill and I'm laying there like 15, 20 minutes go by and like, 30 min, also like my spine just starts tingling.

My brain starts tingling.

It's like on Star Wars when they hit lights beam, like all the lights just start flying by and I was like, oh my god.

- The rationale for introducing imaging is so we can actually see what's going on in the brain before the time starts, midway through the trial and the end of the trial.

This is a technique called diffusion tensor imaging.

It actually looks at the white matter tracks in the brain.

So it tells you how different parts of the brains are connected to each other.

- So, this is what normal state of consciousness looks like after someone was given a placebo or a sugar pill.

This is what the brain looks like under the acute influence of psilocybin or magic mushrooms.

The brain sort of is shaken up and sort of rewired right so a lot of these regions that before weren't talking to one another are now talking at access and so, you can kind of think about this as adding a lot of flexibility to your brain and resetting your brain.

- There's like a river and a rainbow of just like, a gazillion colors that you can't explain and it was like flowing over me and I just felt amazing and you're a different dimension I guess, more or less.

Whatever that means and so like one, like my dad is is 84.

He's got dementia real bad right now and so, he's at a point where he's, he's starting to shut down like he's, having a hard time talking.

A lot of things.

So I had this experience where my dad came to me like, totally like coherent and I'm like, it's like super corny.

I wanna be like, emotional like, but my dad came to me and he just like, gave me a hug and he's like, hey how's it going?

And I was like, hey Dad and we just like had a conversation like we did like, 20 years ago and he's like, like I'm proud of ya and I was like.

So then he kinda just like walked off and it was like I.

It's kind of like I got to say goodbye to him.

So yeah, I don't know, I know how it works like if that's something you know, I wanted or something that existed in some other realm.

That was the first experience.

- And put quite simply it helps people get unstuck.

You know, I think you know people don't get into these, these situations that are so distressing overnight, right, but once they're there these can kind of take on a life of their own and self-perpetuate and I think the drug offers a moment to step back and step out of that and see things differently.

- The obsessive thinking, which was the biggest problem I had.

It went from like 100 you know, a scale of one to 100 I was like 99.

It went down there probably like 20.

It felt like, you could like physically see whatever the compulsive portion and it kind of like, you like almost would see like this come, like this obsessive thing like dissipate.

- If you just think about the impact for the amount of time invested, what else could possibly be this strong?

- You don't often see something in psychiatry that will pretty immediately change an individual's symptoms that haven't been changed for years.

- I'm hopeful that it, that it gets mainstreamed because, you know, if somebody can get the same experience I had, the same help the same benefit, yeah, that would, that would be awesome I mean, who doesn't want people to be happier?

(Tom) Artist and community organizer, Allison Miller, runs Alley Cat murals, which is responsible for a lot of the public art around Tucson.

And most recently it was the poetry murals along Speedway.

Well, next she talks about three of her favorite murals around town and what makes them meaningful to her.

- When you asked what my favorite mural was like, I just couldn't not pick this one.

I don't think we use airbrush to its capacity anymore.

This really speaks to that era.

I think in the 90s, especially in Tucson where we were a little obsessed with California.

I don't know too much about it, but I do know who painted it.

David Miller, Harold Gabitzsch were our teachers at Tucson High.

They had a lot of murals around town, especially bars for some reason.

I think they maybe got paid to do the mural in drinks.

I am related to David Miller, he's my father.

But both of them are my art teachers in high school.

The way I learned how to paint, especially painting murals was from Harold Gabitzsch and his commercial art class.

(soft music) My name is Alison Miller.

I'm a muralist.

I'm from Tucson, Arizona.

And I run a organization called Alley Cat Murals where we facilitate community opportunities to paint.

Maybe our most notable work is a long Speedway.

I have a stingray mural, we did with the Desert Museum.

Bentley's, we did an E.T.

mural for them.

If my favorite mural has been graffitied, I'll reach out to the wall's owner and offer my services.

This is just been with all of us for so long, especially when you get off the highway and you're trying to come into town.

It's one of the first to see.

It has no real story that I'm aware of.

I just I'm all about black representation.

Growing up in this town, back in the 90s, there wasn't a lot of black kids in my class.

My mom was the only black person I knew for a really long time.

Seeing a mural, so prominent so large, was just a really exciting spark for me as a kid.

It's painted by someone named L. It features all of these historic, I'd say historic characters from Fourth Avenue Street Fair.

And I remember some of these characters from when I would go to the Street Fair when I was a kid.

I'm very nostalgic to zone in and this is definitely something I grew up with and really feel protective over.

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Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

You know, this wraps up the 10th year of the new Arizona Illustrated.

And we truly appreciate you being along all these years for all of our adventures.

There are plenty more to come.

We look forward to it.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We will see you again next week.