In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, we are joined by Dr. Mark Frieden. Dr. Frieden is the founder of MAPS, a non-profit organization that uses psychedelics to improve the lives of prisoners and their families. In this episode, we talk about the benefits of psychedelics and how they can be used to help reduce recidivism in prison. We also talk about how psychedelics could be used in prison to help prisoners and family recover from trauma and trauma-related trauma. And we discuss the potential for psychedelics in prison and post-release care. This is a must-listen episode for anyone who is interested in psychedelics, mental health, or trauma recovery. If you're interested in learning more about MDMA, MDMA use in prison, or PTSD, or other forms of trauma, this episode is for you! This episode is brought to you by Mass General, a leading psychedelic research organization that focuses on psychedelic use in the prison system and the treatment of mental health issues and trauma. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to josephcrane.org/OurAdvertisers and use the promo code: JOERoganPODCAST for $10 off your first purchase of a copy of his new book, "The Joe Rogans Experience book, or visit joeoganexperience.co/OurGoodbye to receive 10% off your purchase of $10 or more than $50 or $100, and receive a free copy of the book, and 10% discount when you enter the offer is available through Paypal or Amazon Prime membership, or use the discount code JOEJOEROGROGAN PODCAST, JOEPRODCAST and we'll be giving you $10% off the entire book is available in paperback or Kindle or Audible. and Audible is giving you a 5-day trial, and JOE ROGAN PROMO, and 7-day shipping starts starting from $99, and they'll get 10-AVOID $99 or $25, and $99 gets you a VIP discount, and you get $5,99 gets $10,99 a month get $50, and VIP access gets you 4-day VIP access to the book is a VIP gets 4-place get $4-choice gets $5-choice, and 5-choice is also VIP access?
00:00:17.000Your tireless work has not gone unnoticed.
00:00:20.000I mean I'm beyond thankful that you and MAPS are out there and that you've done this incredible job and we were just describing the genius of First, doing it with people that no one can deny need help,
00:00:37.000like with soldiers with PTSD, using psychedelics to help them get over their horrible issues.
00:00:46.000That it's one of the best ways to sort of ingratiate or let people know the powerful benefits of psychedelics and do it to people that you wouldn't expect to be connected with psychedelics ordinarily, right?
00:00:59.000Well, the most unusual people are police officers.
00:01:03.000And so we've actually had police officers in our studies.
00:01:06.000And we even have a police officer full-time who's also a psychotherapist.
00:01:10.000And he's going through our program to learn how to give MDMA therapy to other police officers.
00:01:17.000And I met his police chief several times and persuaded and told him about our full training program.
00:01:25.000And one of the steps is where we have a protocol from the FDA where therapists can volunteer to receive MDMA themselves as part of the training.
00:01:34.000And so the police chief gave his police officer permission to volunteer to take MDMA. So we're actually helping give MDMA to police officers to give it to other police officers with trauma.
00:02:41.000Well, for example, the longer you're out of prison, the more likely you are to go back.
00:02:46.000So his group, on average, had been out of prison 10 months, and he compared it with a group of people that had been out of prison 24 months.
00:03:18.000Showed how they were at different time points, including at the 10-month time point, and the results were the same at the 10-month point.
00:03:26.000So it's obvious if you compare people who've been out of prison longer with people who've been out of prison shorter, you know, it's just not a fair comparison.
00:03:35.000The other thing he did, not to rag on Timothy Leary, but I think he did a lot of great things.
00:03:40.000But the other thing he did was he said that a lot of these people were gone back to prison because they had minor parole violations and that they were supervised more carefully because they had done psilocybin in prison and that they were just recidivism because of minor things.
00:03:57.000And so when I got into the prison system records, it turns out that they...
00:04:58.000It's hard to get permission to do work inside prisons because of the question whether prisoners can give informed consent, whether there's pressure on them to do it or if they do it, they think they'll get out sooner or something.
00:05:10.000But it would be perfect when you're in prison to be doing this inner work to explore how you ended up in prison and the traumas that maybe made you commit certain kind of crimes.
00:05:22.000I think that same argument about prisoners and psilocybin and aftercare, you could apply that maybe to a lesser extent to just the general public.
00:05:33.000One of the arguments that I've had, not the arguments I've had, but the conversations I've had with people, the argument about psychedelics not being life-changing.
00:05:41.000People will say, well, I know a lot of people who've done psychedelics and they're basically the same person.
00:05:45.000They have one experience and they get back to it.
00:05:48.000The way I've described it is that I think that a real profound breakthrough of psychedelic experience is like pressing Control-Alt-Delete for your brain.
00:05:57.000And when you reboot, you have a fresh desktop.
00:06:01.000It's clean, but you have one folder on the desktop that says, My Old Bullshit.
00:06:06.000And most people open up that folder and just get comfortable with their old bullshit.
00:06:11.000So after the experience, this thing where you sort of have to You have to rethink how you view everything, and you have this renewed perspective.
00:06:23.000You have this completely different view of the world, but it's confusing.
00:06:28.000You don't have scaffolding to travel on.
00:06:31.000You don't have a clear pathway, but it's really easy to slip into your own thing and start...
00:06:39.000Doing all the same dumb shit that you were doing before.
00:06:42.000And I think for prisoners, it's probably profoundly more difficult because not only are you outside, not only have you been incarcerated, which has got to be incredibly traumatic, you've been locked into a cage, they take away all your freedom, they tell you what to do,
00:06:58.000but then you become accustomed to that way of life.
00:07:01.000And there's comfort in the fact that you are told what to do and you know what every day holds for you.
00:07:08.000Then you go out in the world, you're out in the free world, and you don't know how to get by.
00:07:14.000And it's really hard to get an apartment because you're a felon.
00:07:17.000It's really hard to get a job because you're a felon.
00:07:19.000And then someone who you know from the old life is doing something illegal, and they invite you to join in, and you say, well, this is my chance to score.
00:08:18.000Once you've gotten off of your old pathway, the psychedelics jolt you into this new realm.
00:08:25.000But if you don't have a new pathway, then you panic and people fall back into their comfort zone.
00:08:32.000And if your comfort zone is alcohol abuse and doing the same things you've done before and ruining your life and taking pills, you're going to go right back to that.
00:08:43.000Yeah, there's one example of one person where it was like a one-dose miracle cure.
00:08:48.000It's really rare, but I'll just explain a bit.
00:08:51.000He was a veteran and had PTSD. I talked about Tony Macy during my TED talk, but he had this sense that he had been disabled with PTSD for years because of friends of his that had been killed, all the violence that he saw when he was in Iraq.
00:09:07.000And under the influence of MDMA, he had this realization that there was something good about the PTSD. He was getting a benefit from it, which was it was the way that he showed loyalty to his friends who had died.
00:09:20.000That he was connected to their memory and that he was suffering and it was a way to be bonded still with them.
00:09:26.000But then he was able to kind of see himself from the eyes of his friends who had died.
00:09:31.000And to realize that they wouldn't want him to squander his life.
00:10:19.000And at the two-month follow-up, no PTSD. And then around 11 months, when we have the 12-month follow-up, he started thinking, well, maybe I'd like another MDMA experience.
00:10:46.000But it was this realization that he was able to make under the influence of one experience of MDMA that enabled him to reinterpret the way he could be loyal to his friends who had died.
00:11:01.000It completely makes sense that that would be one of the reasons why a soldier would have PTSD. If you talk to soldiers that experience combat duty, one of the things they say is that there's this insane, profound connection with their fellow soldiers.
00:11:15.000And when one of them is killed and they survive, they have this survivor syndrome, this survivor's guilt.
00:11:40.000And then they also have this sense that many of them feel like Now that they've found healing with psychedelics, that they have this sense of guilt in a sense that so many of their comrades have not had that opportunity for healing.
00:11:56.000So many of them have now become more advocates for helping others from the military who've traumatized in that way get access to psychedelics to kind of bring them all back home.
00:12:21.000It's not that I didn't realize that I had insecurities, like everybody has insecurities, but I didn't realize how they affect every single interaction.
00:12:30.000That I would have with people, and that kind of everybody does.
00:12:33.000You're always wary of how someone's gonna view you, and how you're communicating with them, and, you know, is this, like, are we safe talking to each other?
00:12:45.000Like, there's this weird tension that human beings have when you first meet people.
00:12:50.000But these people that I met when we were doing MDMA together, like, no one had any fear.
00:12:56.000We were all holding hands and talking, and it was this bizarrely free experience where it made me realize, wow, most of the time we talk to people, we have these guards up, we have these walls up,
00:13:12.000and you kind of have to, I guess, because some people have nefarious intentions, and sometimes life can be dangerous.
00:13:20.000But it made me think, boy, if you could get this to prisoners, Because how many of them are products of traumatic childhoods?
00:13:35.000That's the argument, like the determinism versus free will argument as well, that we want to look at someone who's a person who's a criminal and say, oh, this person's a piece of shit.
00:13:47.000One of the things that happened to me as a father is seeing my children go from being babies to being little people that I'm talking to and then even young adults.
00:14:24.000The worst environments, the worst parenting, the worst trauma, maybe sexual abuse, maybe assault, maybe drug abuse, maybe criminal justice abuse, maybe all sorts of chaos that can happen when you're living in these crime-infested,
00:14:44.000gang-ridden neighborhoods that a lot of these people come from, and all you see around you This is what you're modeling.
00:15:14.000We're babies, but we made it to this point in our lives in a pretty good state, you know, without some bumps and bruises along the way, but here we are.
00:15:23.000And the only way that I could think of to really reset who they are Is through psychedelics.
00:15:31.000I don't think there's anything else that's going to really push them into a new realm of understanding of their position in life and how they got to where they are.
00:15:40.000Well, I think there are other therapies that are effective.
00:16:08.000And we all have that capacity if we're traumatized to do things that we're not proud of, that we're ashamed of.
00:16:15.000We can all be twisted in certain ways.
00:16:17.000So I just feel so grateful for my parents, who I had very loving parents, who supported me to...
00:16:23.000Even when I broke their hopes for me when I was 17 years old in college and starting to do LSD, and I'm the oldest of four kids, and in the middle of my first year of college, I called up my parents and said, I'm going to drop out of college,
00:16:39.000I want to study LSD, and I want you to pay for it.
00:17:51.000So we made, me and two other guys gathered all the stuff from all these other high school students and we made thousands and thousands, thousands of rubles.
00:18:01.000And we knew that we couldn't take it home or anything.
00:18:04.000And so I went to go meet this guy at the synagogue to give him these books in Moscow.
00:18:27.000So I was kind of fearless in that way.
00:18:30.000And we made this transfer, and I gave him this bunch of rubles and the prayer books, but it was my parents kind of that sent me on this mission, and that was my first underground activity, was against the Russians, against the communists, and it was very enlightening.
00:18:46.000But one of the things that was most enlightening for me was I took a walk on the beach with a Russian girl who worked at the school that we were going to, and I just had this conversation with her, you know, primitive, because I wasn't that great in Russian, but I was just like, you don't want to kill me.
00:19:02.000You know, because this was the height of the Cold War and all of these, could we destroy the world not all that long after the Cuban Missile Crisis?
00:19:09.000And I just thought, you know, you're just a person.
00:19:12.000I'm just, you know, our governments might be in conflict.
00:19:15.000But I had this image that all the Russians are horrible and hateful and they all want to kill us.
00:19:21.000It was extremely eye-opening in terms of who's the other.
00:19:25.000And I found the other was me, was just like me.
00:19:29.000I had this other experience I just wanted to share about, this was a DMT experience, where I realized that, you know, we all have the capacity for evil if we aren't careful, in a sense.
00:19:42.000So the DMT experience, Kind of dissolved my ego vera quickly.
00:19:46.000It was the first time I ever did DMT. It was sitting in a circle with a group of people at Esalen.
00:20:02.000It takes about 15 minutes, 10-15 minutes.
00:20:05.000One person would do it, would then sort of close their eyes, lie down, and come back after 15 minutes or so, and then tell the story about what happened.
00:20:13.000And then we'd pass the pipe to the next person.
00:20:14.000And this was like a whole evening of DMT stories.
00:20:17.000So my DMT experience was this I saw this horizontal line.
00:20:26.000Then it turned into cubes, like squares.
00:20:28.000And then it turned into like an M.C. Escher painting that was just—and then I was gone.
00:20:32.000And then I just had this insight that in the deepest recesses of who I think I am, in this inner voice that's kind of always talking to you that's— That I was using English.
00:20:46.000It's all the product of all these people that came before me.
00:20:49.000So even in my most inner private self, I'm intermixed with everybody else and everything that came before me.
00:20:54.000And I had this beautiful experience of going back to the Big Bang and all of this kind of Sweep of evolutionary history, and I'm part of everything, and everything's part of me, and it was all this beautiful stuff.
00:21:05.000And then I realized this sort of logical part of my mind was like, well, if everything's part of you and you're part of everything, then Hitler is part of you, too.
00:21:41.000And so this is where I did more see Hitler.
00:21:44.000So this is actually an experience that has helped me with my political strategy, in a way, of what MAPS is doing.
00:21:51.000It's both drug development and drug policy reform.
00:21:55.000So under this experience, it was very depressing and shattering to realize that I couldn't just say all the evil's out there, that I have this capacity, that Hitler's inside me.
00:22:05.000So the next day, under ketamine, I was hovering above and behind Hitler as he's giving one of these speeches, like the Nuremberg rally kind of things.
00:22:15.000And the ketamine gave me a bit of remove so I didn't freak out.
00:22:36.000And then I saw the Heil Hitler salute near the end of his speech, and he would put up his hand like that, and then everybody in the crowd would do it back to him.
00:22:47.000And I felt like it was the one pushing out this energy and then the many pushing it back to him and giving him – and they would go back and forth and the intensity was kind of increasing.
00:22:58.000And at that point, I was just realizing there's no way to get into his head.
00:23:02.000It has to be voluntary and that he was getting so much from it.
00:23:09.000And I felt this panic rising above me.
00:23:11.000And I felt that if I were to panic, I would never be able to be effective in the world, that I would just turn away from that.
00:23:18.000And then with ketamine, you can still breathe.
00:23:20.000And so I realized that if I just breathe, that might help me deal with this fear.
00:24:36.000And as the panic kind of built up, I had this thought, I can breathe.
00:24:40.000So I did have that sense that I was on a drug and that if I were just to modulate my breathing, that would help relax me.
00:24:48.000So I had that thought, but I felt like I was really there.
00:24:53.000I've seen movies of World War II, and I've seen movies of Hitler giving speeches, but I was never as emotionally connected to it and in the moment as I was during this ketamine experience.
00:25:03.000So it was kind of a dual situation where I was there, but a part of me felt removed and safe.
00:25:12.000And this thought like, okay, just breathe.
00:25:15.000But I never had that insight before about the Heil Hitler salute and how this energy exchange and how the rallies were very dramatic.
00:25:23.000And that's where he cemented his power, through these rallies.
00:25:26.000Well, you know Hitler was on all kinds of drugs.
00:26:13.000And when they did that he was just bouncing off the walls and he cornered Mussolini and talked to him for five hours and convinced him not to leave the effort, not to leave the war effort.
00:26:28.000One of the things that this story was basically pointing to was that much of Hitler's mania and much of this rabid attack that he had put on the rest of the Western world was fueled by amphetamines and cocaine and testosterone and that they just kept injecting him.
00:26:51.000With all this shit that gave him this insane confidence and insane maniacal aggression.
00:26:57.000And it completely makes sense if you think about what he did.
00:27:00.000And then we also know that the kamikazes were on amphetamines and many of the Nazi soldiers were on amphetamines.
00:27:08.000Well, the Blitzkrieg, how they would do that, they were days and days on amphetamines.
00:27:13.000And then that promotes aggression as well.
00:27:18.000And he had this delusion of creating this master race which is and that's the most cocaine idea of all time, right?
00:27:26.000Like this idea like we're gonna engineer the greatest human race ever and you know and to be able to look at that idea from this cocaine-fueled or amphetamine-fueled perspective to the point where you're willing to commit genocide in order to accomplish your goal.
00:27:44.000Drugs were a big factor in the Third Reich.
00:28:32.000During the meeting with Mussolini, Hitler was so energized that he pretty much just shouted for three hours.
00:28:38.000There's several reports from that meeting, including An American intelligence report, to the embarrassment of everyone in attendance, Hitler didn't stop talking throughout the entire duration of the meeting.
00:28:48.000Mussolini couldn't get a word in edgeways, meaning he wasn't able to voice his concerns about the war effort and perhaps raise the prospect of Italy leaving.
00:30:09.000Yeah, so maybe we can do the other with MDMA and certain kind of psychedelics to help people feel that there's other ways than violence to try to achieve their goals.
00:30:38.000So, a human being is essentially the product of all the chemicals that are running through your veins.
00:30:46.000It's your neurochemistry, your biochemistry, all of the nutrients you've eaten, food, water, and an imbalance of any of those things can severely change the way you think or behave.
00:31:28.000He's a perfect example of someone who had a certain perspective before he became a research scientist and thought of drugs as being all negative connotations, thought of them as being addictive, terrible for you, but then through actual rigorous study,
00:31:46.000like actually understanding and studying the effects of drugs, then became to change his perspective based on data.
00:32:34.000Because he's got the courage to do this in the face of all of the propaganda and the current cultural narrative, which is that drugs ruin lives.
00:32:42.000And he's saying, no, no, they don't ruin lives.
00:32:56.000Yeah, one of the things I talked before is this dual strategy of MAPS, the drug development, you know, the pharmaceutical drug development and drug policy reform.
00:33:04.000And so Carl is one of the leading advocates for drug policy reform.
00:33:08.000And that's why we're trying to see if he'll come join the board.
00:33:12.000And one of the things that he asked us to do is to look at our employee manual, our handbook.
00:33:20.000In the MAPS, and then we also have the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation, which is our for-profit, but benefit maximizing, not profit maximizing.
00:33:28.000And he said, because we don't do drug testing, it might not be surprising to anybody, but we don't do drug testing for employees.
00:33:56.000So we permit people to smoke pot or do things during work.
00:34:01.000You know, some people like to microdose, some people like to do different things, and we just say if it enhances your performance, fine.
00:34:09.000If it makes you unable to do your work, that's not good, but it's not about what you do.
00:34:14.000And then one of my favorite things, actually, and we put this in the employee manual, is that One of the smokable tasks for me is strategizing, is getting high and meeting with MAP staff.
00:34:25.000And some of us will get high, some of us won't, but then we'll just strategize.
00:34:29.000So we put that in the employee handbook, that it's okay to smoke pot at work if you're doing strategizing or other kind of things.
00:35:58.000And he had to hide that because he was worried he wouldn't be part of the space program if it was clear that he was smoking pot all the time.
00:36:53.000But it's so well written, like the way he described it and that these experiences are available through cannabis that wouldn't be available to him.
00:37:03.000Yeah, there's a line of research called semantic priming.
00:37:06.000And what that means is that if I say night, you're normally going to say day.
00:37:11.000There's a certain number of kind of associations that we normally have to a word.
00:37:15.000So semantic is like a word and you prime somebody and then you see how they respond.
00:37:20.000And so there's been research done with psilocybin when people are under the influence of psilocybin and then you give them a certain word and what they found is that people have a wider range of associations to that word when they're under the influence of psilocybin and the same would be true for marijuana.
00:37:36.000So that you have access to a broader sense of connections.
00:38:08.000You know, how do our brains process information?
00:38:11.000And normally, you know, we have certain kind of go-to associations with things.
00:38:17.000And then under the influence of these psychedelics or cannabis, you have just a wider range of associations And also, you're not seeing from the normal perspective.
00:38:33.000And not all new ideas are great, but if we're stuck in the same old ideas, you're not going to be able to filter new ideas to see which ones are really gems.
00:38:42.000Yeah, it really brings to light this idea that you can't be as balanced a person as you can be or to sort of try to optimize your perspective on things.
00:38:54.000You need to have a lot of things in line.
00:38:57.000Like you need to have your personal relationships in line.
00:39:01.000You need to have your career goals or at least your path in line.
00:39:06.000You need to have your physical health in line.
00:39:20.000Now when you add psychedelics to those things, that's when I, at least in my opinion, like from my personal perspective, when I've had the best results, is when I've had other things in a good place.
00:39:34.000And so my trips aren't about dealing with the anxiety of my mistakes or the angst with my current state of my career or life or relationships.
00:39:47.000Instead of looking at it that way, I've already sort of done work to keep myself in a good place with all those things and then the psychedelics will sort of reveal more perspective that's available.
00:40:02.000Now, on the other side of that coin is we do psychedelic therapy with people whose lives are in shambles and who are traumatized, who are disabled from trauma, or who are alcoholics or substance abusers who've lost relationships.
00:40:19.000And so in those circumstances, they have difficult experiences, but they can process a lot of the pain and the suffering that they're running away from.
00:40:29.000So I would say that when you say your best experiences, those are like the most enjoyable or the most insightful.
00:40:35.000But for those people whose lives are in tatters, psychedelics in a safe, supportive context with preparation and with the integration that is often overlooked, then they can make major steps to get healthier.
00:40:50.000So it can help them put all those pieces in line in terms of their personal relationships, their career goals, their health goals.
00:40:59.000Get yourself in a good place that way from these uncomfortable situations that the psychedelics put you in where you recognize all the things you're doing incorrectly, all the things you're doing that are flawed.
00:41:11.000Now, the way you just described that the MDMA helped you see your insecurities.
00:41:15.000So, on the one hand, they bring up the insecurities, they bring up things that would make you normally uncomfortable, but with MDMA in particular, it reduces activity in the amygdala, the fear-processing part of the brain.
00:41:27.000So you have this sense of self-acceptance so that you can see more critical information without it being so painful.
00:41:35.000Your sense of self, your self-compassion is increased.
00:41:39.000And so things where you've not done as well as you would have liked, which normally people run away from, you can see that.
00:41:47.000And also traumatic memories that have been overwhelming for people.
00:41:52.000That's where people have PTSD. These memories are so traumatic and they feel overwhelming that they can never really fully move past them.
00:41:59.000It's like the trauma is always about to happen.
00:42:02.000They see the whole world through this filter of trauma.
00:42:04.000They hear noises that remind them of the trauma they're triggered.
00:42:09.000And so this sense of safety in yourself that MDMA can give helps you to deal with these problems.
00:42:17.000And there was a study that was recently done in England with MDMA for alcohol use disorder.
00:42:23.000And what it turned out to be a study of helping people deal with their traumas.
00:42:27.000And that's what led them to run away from these traumas into alcohol.
00:42:32.000These emotions were so overwhelming that they couldn't process them, so they thought, I'll drown them out with alcohol.
00:42:38.000But with the MDMA, they're able, through this reduction of activity in the amygdala, through this promotion of release of oxytocin, which is the hormone of nursing mothers of love and connection, that you have this sense of safety, self-compassion,
00:42:55.000as I said, and then you can move into these troubled areas.
00:42:58.000So while psychedelics will produce a certain kind of experience for people that have their lives in order, and you can sort of expand, I think?
00:43:17.000I've talked to so many people that have gotten their lives in order through step by step like one psychedelic experience sort of illuminated all the problems that they have in their life and then they sort of took steps to eventually have more psychedelic experiences and do have better choices in their life and but For the most part,
00:43:39.000there's not a clear-cut, disciplined pathway that exists for people.
00:43:45.000If you're going to college, you take courses, you have to do your thesis, there's all these different things that are kind of laid out to let you know that this is how you get an education.
00:43:55.000When you're trying to get a psychedelic education, it's Rough shot.
00:44:09.000You might listen to some great Alan Watts recording or listen to Timothy Leary or McKenna and you've got to kind of get an idea of maybe how I should...
00:44:22.000But it would be so beneficial if there were places where...
00:44:29.000Legitimate professionals who have an expertise in psychedelics and perhaps psychology had these psychedelic centers where you could go and have these curated experiences where you're safe.
00:44:47.000You don't have to worry about overdosing.
00:44:48.000They do the right dose per your body weight and your experience.
00:44:52.000And if there was a structure in terms of allowing people the space to maybe talk to counselors afterwards and process what that psychedelic experience is like, and then maybe have someone who could help you devise a strategy to optimize your life based on this newfound information that you've gotten from that experience.
00:45:17.000Now, if we were to do a podcast 10 years from now, my prediction is, we could see if it comes true, is that there's going to be about 5,000 or 6,000 of these centers throughout the United States, and that there's already hundreds and hundreds of ketamine centers, and that's legal for depression.
00:45:33.000The ketamine therapists are interested in being cross-trained in MDMA, psilocybin.
00:45:38.000We think by the end of 2023 that we'll have FDA approval for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. By 2024, 2025, there should be FDA approval for psilocybin, for depression, potentially for alcohol use disorder, other indications.
00:45:54.000And they'll be administered in these exact kind of centers.
00:45:58.000And that's our long-term goal, is to have these thousands and thousands of psychedelic centers.
00:46:03.000And they'll be not just an MDMA center or psilocybin center or ketamine center, but psychedelic centers.
00:46:09.000The therapists will be cross-trained in all these modalities.
00:46:12.000And that's the vision that we're trying to establish.
00:46:15.000But I would say about schools, and you talked about your kids, that we overemphasize cognitive education and underemphasize emotional education.
00:46:23.000And schools don't really prepare people for that.
00:46:26.000So when kids are hyperactive and stuff, we just give them Adderall or something.
00:46:30.000We're not really looking at the whole human.
00:46:34.000And there's been a lot of discussion about different kinds of intelligences.
00:46:37.000Emotional intelligence, EQ, is super important.
00:46:41.000But in schools, we just emphasize cognitive, and we leave so much untouched, and that causes so many problems.
00:46:49.000So we really need to reform how we think of education.
00:46:55.000One of the quotes that I thought was from Albert Einstein, but then I checked it out and it wasn't really, but I thought for a long time it was.
00:47:16.000There's another quote from Einstein that is from Einstein that is, The splitting of the atom has changed everything except our mode of thinking, and hence we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe.
00:47:30.000What shall be required if mankind is to survive is a whole new mode of thinking.
00:47:36.000And what is that new mode of thinking that Einstein was talking about?
00:47:41.000And I think it's a more universal, spiritual, we're all in this together.
00:47:45.000We're not primarily defined by how we're different from people, but we're primarily defined by how we're the same from other people, and also the same as animals, and the same as the environment, that we're all part of this planet Earth, life on Earth, and that if we can have that sense of connection like that,
00:48:02.000we're not likely to bomb people into oblivion, or To commit genocide or to be racist or, you know, throw masses of people in prison for mass incarceration.
00:48:12.000So I think that that kind of spiritual and emotional education along with cognitive is what we need.
00:48:29.000Well, also, let's look at it this way.
00:48:31.000We're talking about an education outside of traditional education when you're talking about these psychedelic centers that you plan on having open in 10 years.
00:48:44.000Look at the physical education you get from high school and look at how many people leave school and take yoga and start going to CrossFit gyms and take martial arts and there is a mass movement of incredibly physically healthy super aware people that are taking care of their body through There was no education about this in high school.
00:49:16.000So many people who have degrees and careers in completely non-related fields are very physically active and very tuned into their bodies because they've recognized the benefits of that through external sources outside of the traditional education system.
00:49:33.000We could have that same type of movement With mental health and psychedelics and with learning outside of these traditional radically underfunded places.
00:49:47.000Like when you look at how much a high school teacher makes, it's embarrassing and it's no wonder why they're under motivated.
00:49:54.000No wonder why they're depressed and Not enthusiastic about this job and also how the fuck do you connect one-on-one with 50 people when you have them for 45 minutes or whatever it is a class is an hour or whatever it's not possible so you can't do it and That that is one of the reasons why so much emphasis is paid to forcing these children to sit still and pay attention I don't know if I have ADHD,
00:50:23.000but I know that if I was in school today, and if I think about how I was when I was a child, and if I had parents that were so inclined, I would 100% be medicated.
00:50:44.000I was not interested at all in what they were teaching.
00:50:47.000I was interested in comic books, and I was interested in, you know, martial arts, and I was interested in space travel, and I was interested in...
00:50:56.000If you talk to me about something that was interesting to me, then I was locked in and tuned in.
00:51:02.000But if you're talking to me about some boring shit, I was just staring at the sky and looking at my fingernails, and I just couldn't pay attention.
00:51:10.000But it wasn't because my mind was incapable or my mind needed medication.
00:51:15.000It's because I wasn't interested in what they were talking about.
00:51:19.000And that turns out to be very valuable in life if you're a person Who finds what you're interested in and ignores the things you're not interested in.
00:51:30.000Because you can really get far just paying attention to what you're interested in and focusing on that obsessively.
00:51:35.000Some of the most successful people in this world are that type of person.
00:51:40.000And as a child, they're taking those people and stifling them and forcing them to be a square peg.
00:51:49.000They're taking their roundness Of whoever they are, and they're compressing it and shoving them into this square hole with medication.
00:52:30.000If you wanted to major, you had to do a certain number of classes, but you didn't have to major.
00:52:34.000A lot of schools say you've got to do a language, you've got to do this, you've got to do that.
00:52:37.000This was the student's curiosity is the most important thing, and we will do everything to foster that.
00:52:43.000There's no grades, all written evaluations.
00:52:46.000Everybody had to do a senior thesis, a big project.
00:52:50.000And so this school, when I started, now this was sort of, people say the 60s really continued into the early 70s, and so it was very much like that.
00:52:59.000But the school had this tradition of all-night dance parties with psychedelics till the sunrise.
00:53:08.000But they also had this unusual situation where there was a woman who had actually a professor who had studied with Carl Jung, and her husband was wealthy.
00:53:18.000They donated this big Olympic-sized swimming pool to the college, and it had turned into a nudist colony.
00:53:27.000I come to this school with this tradition of psychedelics, with this tradition of sort of bringing sex and drugs into the open from being suppressed, this nudist colony at the pool.
00:53:36.000And I started doing a lot of psychedelics, but I wasn't prepared.
00:53:39.000My education up to that point had been so cognitive.
00:53:45.000My bar mitzvah didn't turn me into a man.
00:53:49.000You know, the traditional rituals didn't work.
00:53:51.000And when I first started doing psychedelics, I thought, it's helping me answer existential questions, or at least ask them, not answer them, but ask them.
00:54:00.000I said, this is what my bar mitzvah should have been.
00:54:02.000But I was jumbled up, and I went to the guidance counselor at school.
00:54:06.000And today, if this happens, you know, you'd be in big trouble.
00:54:09.000But I went to the guidance counselor, and I said, I need help with my LSD trips, and my mescaline trips, and my mushroom trips.
00:54:33.000Did the guidance counselor have psychedelic experiences to draw upon?
00:54:37.000Well, he didn't share that, but I was just so lucky.
00:54:40.000But he said to me, there's a book that I would like you to read.
00:54:43.000And he gave me this book, and it was by Stanislav Grof, who's the world's leading LSD researcher, one of the co-founders of transpersonal psychology.
00:54:53.000And the book was his first book that he ever wrote.
00:54:55.000It was Realms of the Human Unconscious, Observations from LSD Research.
00:55:01.000And the book was not actually published until 1975, but my guidance counselor had a copy of it in 1972, a manuscript copy of it.
00:55:09.000And it was reading that book that made me devote my life to psychedelics when I was 18, because it was this...
00:55:37.000One group that he called was biographical, Freudian, you know, just what happens in our life and how that affects us.
00:55:43.000The other is birth trauma, how the process of being birthed, where we're being born, where we feel that we might die, it's imprints on us, certain emotional patterns according to how our birth process actually is.
00:55:58.000And then beyond that is the spiritual realm and this sense of connection that we talked about.
00:56:02.000And so it was science that also had this political implications, because I was thinking, yeah, if you can feel connected to everything, that's the antidote to war and genocide.
00:56:11.000But it had a reality check, which was therapy.
00:56:15.000Can we use these states of mind and these experiences to help people have richer lives, to get out of being drug addicts or out of being alcoholics or out of being scared of dying if you've got cancer or things like that?
00:56:30.000And the guidance counselor, after he gave me the book, he said that he was in touch with Stan.
00:56:34.000And I said, great, I would like to write him a letter.
00:56:36.000So I'm this confused 18-year-old writing to this MD-PhD at Johns Hopkins, leading psychedelic research, which was being squashed.
00:56:44.000Because 1970 is when Nixon and the Controlled Substance Act came in, and all these drugs are criminalized, and psychedelic research is being squashed.
00:59:56.000So I thought this new college, I'll go back to be with my friends, and I'll build this handball court.
01:00:01.000I'll get into the physical world, and that's how I'll get integrated.
01:00:04.000I was super confused, and my parents were willing to buy 3,000 concrete blocks.
01:00:10.000And support me while I built this building.
01:00:12.000And the school needed facilities, and they let me have some land to build on it.
01:00:16.000And it was right next to John Ringling's house, which is now a state museum.
01:00:23.000And Charles Ringling gave the building for the library.
01:00:26.000And this other people, the Caples, who built the New York Railroad and sold the land to the Ringlings, they gave this mansion to New College when Mrs. Caples died.
01:00:35.000And I was asked to be the security guard at this mansion on the beach on the Sarasota Bay while I was building this handball court.
01:00:44.000And that led to a career of 10 years in construction.
01:00:48.000And it was during that time that as I got more fluid with the outer world, I would trip every now and again and And I would get a little bit better at letting out the emotions and seeing what was happening.
01:01:00.000So I had this 10-year period of not doing psychedelics directly, but occasionally and being in the construction business.
01:01:09.000It took a whole decade of dropping out of college to get balanced.
01:01:13.000And then in 1982, I went back to school.
01:01:17.000And the very first semester, I went to the same school, to New College, and the very first semester, I went to Esalen in Big Sur and did a month-long workshop with Stan Grof again.
01:01:29.000And that's when I learned about MDMA. And that's what changed things, because I learned about LSD after the backlash.
01:01:37.000But now I learned about MDMA before the backlash, but it was called ADAM as an underground, it was legal, but it was kept quiet as an underground therapy drug.
01:01:49.000And it was gentler than the classic psychedelics.
01:01:51.000It had incredible therapeutic potential, but it had escaped from those circles and it was being used as ecstasy as well.
01:01:59.000So it was very clear that it was doomed.
01:02:02.000This was during Nancy Reagan and Ronald Reagan and escalation of the drug war.
01:02:06.000And so that's where I said, I've got to get political and I can start introducing MDMA to various people who would take it, like Lester Grinspoon.
01:02:15.000He and his wife had had a tragedy of a son die of cancer when I think he was about 13 years old.
01:02:21.000And they took MDMA together and Lester said that they were able to talk about Yeah.
01:02:46.000Because Terence had this mistaken idea that if it's a plant, it's good.
01:02:59.000We need a safety study with MDMA. And it was because Terrence going on and on about how plants were good and stuff from the land is bad that we did the first safety study with MDMA to prepare for this DEA crackdown, which happened later that summer in 84,
01:03:16.000and that sort of led to where I'm at now.
01:03:18.000Why do you think Terence had that rigid perspective?
01:03:21.000It's a really good question, because you think about psychedelics as supposedly to break down rigidity.
01:03:27.000I mean, I think there's some good things to say, which is plants have been used for thousands of years.
01:03:31.000We have all this historical evidence about it.
01:03:34.000We know that in the Western culture, when we think about the origins of the Western culture, we think about the Greeks, and that's the origins of democracy.
01:03:44.000And the longest-running mystery ceremony in the history of the world was the Eleusinian Mysteries, and it ran from like 1600 B.C. to 396 A.D., and it involved the plants that were psychedelic.
01:03:58.000Yeah, we had Brian Murrow-Rescue on the podcast.
01:04:01.000His book, The Immortality Key, is amazing.
01:04:04.000And now they're doing studies because of that book in Harvard about the Eleusinian mysteries.
01:04:14.000And, you know, he proved in that book, in the research for that book, that there were like ergot-like compounds that were in these wine vessels.
01:04:24.000So, for sure, these people were taking some kind of psychedelic mixed in with the wine.
01:04:30.000And what do we know about ergot and about the use of ergot in terms of psychedelic properties?
01:04:41.000Well, LSD is not exactly an ergot, but ergot is the starter material that Albert Hoffman used, ergotamine, in order to modify it to develop LSD. Oh, okay.
01:04:54.000And so we talk about different times in the Middle Ages when whole villages would sort of go crazy, and it's from a mold on wheat and barley.
01:05:38.000So maybe they had beer and maybe that was tainted with it as well.
01:05:42.000So they were involuntarily having these LSD-like experiences.
01:05:47.000Of course you would think that there's witches.
01:05:49.000Of course you would think you were bewitched and that there's magic going on.
01:05:53.000Yeah, well, and Brian had reached out to me when he was sort of a normal career, when he wanted to get more involved with marijuana and psychedelics.
01:06:00.000So the first thing that he did was a group trying to collect doctors who were going to be supporting medical marijuana.
01:06:06.000And then he moved into writing The Immortality Key.
01:06:09.000So I've known him for quite a while, and he's very respectable and sober.
01:06:17.000Yeah, he's decided not to take psychedelic.
01:06:21.000I think eventually he may do that, but he didn't want people to say, you're biased, that somehow or other you take these drugs, they would question his research.
01:06:29.000Imagine what it's gonna be like when he finally has a real breakthrough psychedelic experience and he realizes like think about all the scholarly work this guy's done to sort of expose how all of these ancient enlightened people had created these ceremonies to get together and they worked out democracy they worked out so many different principles of modern religions and and schools of thought and it all came out of these Rituals where
01:07:26.000And when you experience it, it's so beyond your imagination or what you could have possibly anticipated, that when you do break through, you'll never look at regular reality the same way again.
01:07:38.000That's one thing I can guarantee, just knowing, particularly the DMT experience.
01:07:43.000Knowing that you can get to that place in 40 seconds, that you can take three giant hits, and then 30-40 seconds in, you're gone.
01:07:53.000You're gone, and then you're experiencing entities in some brightly illuminated world that's far more real-feeling than the world we live in right now.
01:08:26.000His work has been amazingly helpful because of the fact that he is sober.
01:08:32.000Because of the fact that he is a legitimate scholar.
01:08:34.000I mean, everything about the way he's done this is perfect.
01:08:38.000Yeah, there is a way, a little bit, one historical parallel to what Brian is going to be looking forward to, and that's Walter Pankey.
01:08:46.000So I described at the very beginning this Concord prison experiment that Leary did when he was at Harvard.
01:08:51.000But the experiment that he did before was called the Good Friday Experiment.
01:08:57.000And that was in 1962. And it was designed to see if religiously inclined people in a religious setting taking psilocybin would have a mystical experience.
01:09:07.000And so Walter Pankey was a doctor and a minister and working on a PhD.
01:09:14.000And Timothy Leary became his faculty sponsor.
01:09:18.000There was also a fellow named Reverend Howard Thurman, who was the Reverend at the Boston Marsh Chapel at Boston University, but he was Martin Luther King's mentor.
01:09:28.000So Martin Luther King had got a PhD at Boston University in the 50s.
01:09:54.000So Reverend Howard Thurman was really interested in this relationship between the mystical experience and political action.
01:10:01.000And so he agreed to be the minister for this Good Friday service.
01:10:06.000And if people are interested, we have the actual sermon from Reverend Howard Thurman several hours on our website under the Good Friday experiment.
01:10:16.000And it took 20 divinity students from Andover Newton Theological Seminary into church on Good Friday in the basement chapel and half got psilocybin, half got a placebo.
01:10:29.000Ten experimenters, Houston Smith, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Ralph Metzner, Walter Houston Clark, others that were very involved in sort of the science of religion were the helpers.
01:10:40.000They were divided into groups of four, five groups of four students, Half would get psilocybin, half would get the placebo, and then two of the experimenters were with them, and one of the experimenters would also get psilocybin, and one would get the placebo.
01:10:55.000And as it turned out, nine out of the 20 people had a mystical experience, and eight out of those nine had the psilocybin.
01:11:03.000And this experiment was considered to be, and still is, one of the best experiments ever in the history of the study of psychedelics and spirituality.
01:11:13.000And the questionnaire of what is a mystical experience that Walter Pankey developed for this is still being used in the research today.
01:11:19.000It's called the mystical experience questionnaire.
01:11:22.000Walter Pankey decided that he didn't want to take psilocybin until after the study was over for fear that people would say that he was biased.
01:11:32.000And then he went with Bill Richards, who's the longest living psychedelic therapist right now.
01:11:38.000He's sort of the center of the Johns Hopkins psychedelic research, and he's trained a lot of other groups, they're researchers with psilocybin.
01:11:47.000He's actually going to go through our training now to learn about MDMA. Bill Richards is, but he was in Germany studying and Walter Panke went to visit with him and that's where Walter Panke had his first psilocybin experience after the experiment was over and published and had this illuminating psychedelics mystical experience.
01:12:10.000First of his life after he'd done the experiment.
01:12:12.000Now when I did at New College I said you have to do this senior thesis and so this was during the 80s and I wanted to do something with psychedelics I think we're good to go.
01:13:21.000You want to have the stuff that works the best.
01:13:24.000So when I wanted to do a thesis, a project, I realized that Walter Pankey, if he would have been alive, he would have done this long-term follow-up study.
01:14:16.000And I just wandered more through the library and what I saw was they had a section of alumni handbooks.
01:14:21.000And one of them had the list of who was in school during that year and their names and addresses.
01:14:28.000And so I photocopied all of that and I sent out 350 or so letters to people and said, if you were in this experiment or know anybody, you know, I'm trying to do a follow-up.
01:14:40.000And over the time, I ended up getting 19 out of the 20 identified.
01:14:44.000And I administered the same questionnaire, the mystical experience questionnaire, and they held up that the results were almost the same as they were before, and people said that this mystical experience that they'd had, they'd had other non-drug mystical experiences,
01:15:00.000many of them afterwards, that they said, Help them consider that the one that they had with the psilocybin was legitimate.
01:15:09.000They generally preferred the non-drug mystical experience.
01:15:11.000How do you define a non-drug mystical experience?
01:15:14.000Oh, you're walking in nature, or you're making love, or you just have this, they call it gratuitous grace.
01:15:19.000This feeling just comes over you, like something is...
01:15:23.000It's the same as basically as this drug experience and they described how this was not only considered valid but also it had motivated them to work on the environmental movement, the women's rights movement, the anti-war movement.
01:15:38.000So for me I found in some ways the keys to the 60s in this follow-up study because the sad part is I discovered that Reverend Howard Thurman was this incredible orator, and part of his Good Friday service was, you have to tell people there's a man on the cross.
01:15:53.000You have to tell people of this story.
01:15:56.000And one of the students said, oh, okay, I should do that right now, under the influence of psilocybin.
01:16:02.000And so they thought he was going to go to the bathroom, and he burst out the door, and he started running down...
01:16:08.000And in his mind, he had thought, I'll tell the president.
01:16:12.000If I'm going to tell anybody, I should tell the president.
01:16:14.000And then he's like, oh, the president is somewhere else, but I'll tell the president of the university.
01:16:18.000And so Timothy Leary and Houston Smith went after him to help him not get killed by a car or something.
01:16:24.000And they finally caught up to him to bring him back and he didn't want to come back inside.
01:16:29.000And so they gave him a shot of Thorazine to calm him down.
01:16:33.000That's what they thought at the time is somebody's having a difficult LSD experience, you know, bring him down with Thorazine, which is a major tranquilizer for psychotics.
01:16:45.000So I discovered during this follow-up study that there was a really important part of the experiment that they had hidden, which was this sort of difficult reaction this person had and his refusal to come in.
01:16:57.000So what I saw from Leary is that they had...
01:17:03.000Underestimated the risks, that they hadn't reported this.
01:17:06.000You know, if we do research now under FDA regulations, you have to report adverse events.
01:17:11.000You can't just brush them under the rug like they didn't really happen.
01:17:15.000So the core thesis that psychedelic psilocybin, in this case, could produce a mystical experience, that was confirmed.
01:17:22.000The fact that it had long-term benefits, that was confirmed.
01:17:26.000But Leary and others had over time said everybody that had the psilocybin had the mystical experience.
01:17:46.000And one of them was Some of them, you know, again, it's not like it's automatic that you take this drug and this kind of experience is what you had.
01:17:57.000Were there any similarities in their experiences and were they on any kind of medication?
01:18:26.000It's crazy that they didn't have an experience.
01:18:28.000Well, they had experiences, but they didn't score on this questionnaire to be above the threshold.
01:18:35.000And the beautiful thing about what Walter Pankey did was that this questionnaire about a mystical experience, even though it was with Christian ministry students in Good Friday service, it didn't have a word about Jesus.
01:18:49.000He surveyed the literature of mysticism throughout the world and all these different religions, and he kind of made what is the sort of common themes, you know, a deeply felt positive mood, a sense of sacredness, a transcendence of time and space.
01:19:25.000And that's why it's being used today at Johns Hopkins and all the research that's being done, a lot of it with LSD, with psilocybin, even with MDMA, we use this same questionnaire that's only a tiny bit modified.
01:19:38.000And so it was a sense that this experiment really validated for me my theory of change, you know, that if we can help people, more people have these psychedelic experiences and support them and help them integrate it,
01:19:58.000It may help people want to protect the environment.
01:20:02.000And so that's what really motivated me when I was 18 to devote my life to psychedelics, that this potential, this political potential.
01:20:11.000It was only when I, 10 years later, learned about MDMA and I learned about its effect on trauma that I thought, wow, this can also be used to help people move through the pain of their lives and to really see the world more clearly,
01:20:26.000to see people that they might have been scared of, to see more of their humanity.
01:20:31.000And so I think this kind of mystical experience and the therapeutic going together is where I think there's a lot of hope for the future.
01:20:41.000And what I was able to sort of recognize is that there's value in these things, and that we talked about the Ellicinian mysteries.
01:20:50.000What we're talking about now is mainstreaming psychedelics, and a lot of people have this idea that it's never been done before, but it's actually been done thousands of years ago in the heart of Western culture, and it was wiped out by the Catholic Church.
01:21:05.000Because they wanted to be the intermediary between people and spirituality.
01:21:11.000It was a power play by the church to be this intermediary.
01:21:16.000And so then throughout the Middle Ages, all of this was suppressed, you know, with the witches, with all of this.
01:21:22.000And then when the conquistadors and others come to the Western world and they see these traditions of mushrooms that are used in Mexico and peyote that's used by the Native American church and We're good to go.
01:22:42.000Or you could slip it to people when they were about to give a talk, and they would make a fool of themselves, something like that.
01:22:48.000But yeah, so where we're at now with the military, just to say with veterans and others, is that it seems like we're trying to reintroduce psychedelics for trauma, but in a more humane way.
01:23:24.000There's a drug called Ibogaine, which is very psychedelic, but then you modify the molecule, and there's one called 18-MC. And you take it and it's not psychedelic.
01:23:34.000So you take the core molecule, you figure out what atoms you can add to it, and it has a lot of the basic properties, but you try to take out the psychedelic properties.
01:24:36.000It's always been the goal of the shaman and the role of the shaman and that these people who have experience in these realms and understand how to have a psychedelic ceremony and do it correctly, that there's a way to do this.
01:24:53.000And this is a very valuable piece of information and that to just ignore that and say, we just need, you know, maybe we could just do it in a pill and you don't need a therapist.
01:25:03.000Well, one of the things that's so frustrating that DARPA would give $25 million to study non-psychedelic psychedelics is there's more than a million veterans disabled with PTSD. And the VA spends around $17 billion a year on disability payments.
01:25:19.000But we've not gotten any funds from the VA for research.
01:25:25.000So actually, we're working with Congressman Dan Crenshaw.
01:25:28.000And he's working with Congressman Tim Ryan from Ohio.
01:25:31.000So we've got a very strong Democrat, a very strong Republican working together on two different bills.
01:25:38.000One would give money to the Department of Defense to do psychedelic research for PTSD. And one would give—well, we're not sure the amounts.
01:25:47.000We're thinking one would give some amount of money also to the VA. And by psychedelic research, we're saying it should be limited to Ibogaine, 5-MeO-DMT, psilocybin, and MDMA. And so we don't know that this will pass through Congress,
01:26:10.000And it's because a lot of the Navy SEALs, Dan Crenshaw is a former Navy SEAL, have spoken to him about their work going down to Mexico for Ibogaine and 5-MeO, or their work with MDMA for PTSD. I actually had an hour conversation with them a few months ago.
01:26:47.000When he heard about the healing potential, and he's heard stories, Well, one of the things about SEALs and about many of the people in the military is their number one goal is to help the people that are their brothers and sisters that are also in the military and that are suffering.
01:27:02.000And they will abandon dogma if they find an effective treatment.
01:27:08.000Whereas if you're just politically motivated or if you just have these very rigid ideas about what's good and what's bad in terms of psychedelics, bad.
01:27:23.000These sort of rigid dogmas, they get in the way of finding the truth because we really don't have a long-standing history of treating people with psychedelics who have post-traumatic stress disorder.
01:27:36.000It's fairly recently, but it's very promising.
01:27:39.000And the people that have gone through the anecdotal evidence and the anecdotal experiences that they can relay to fellow soldiers are incredibly valuable because these people, guys like Dan Crenshaw, who are, you know, he's a congressman, he's in a real position of power and influence,
01:27:55.000he can shape and change the way the rest of...
01:28:08.000Yeah, and the fact that he's willing to partner with someone that's very on the other political spectrum, Tim Ryan.
01:29:14.000S-H-I-V-I-T-T-I. It's by an Israeli Holocaust survivor who was a writer who went to the Netherlands for LSD therapy, and he's describing what he went through during his LSD therapy.
01:29:32.000My Israeli relatives knew him before and after and said that it helped him a lot, although he still was somewhat tormented just from what he had gone through.
01:29:40.000But with the LSD, there's not the reduction of fear, the reduction of activity in the amygdala, the way that you get with MDMA. And so we're trying to globalize the MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. And we're working in the Netherlands with Dr. Erik Vermetten,
01:29:58.000who's the chief psychiatrist for the Dutch military, And he has the Bastian's chair at the University of Leiden, and he's leading our effort for MDMA. So it's only been very short time, really, that people have understood the role that psychedelics can play in the treatment of trauma and PTSD. And LSD can be helpful,
01:30:18.000ayahuasca can be helpful, Ibogaine can be helpful, mushrooms can be helpful, and MDMA all in different ways.
01:30:25.000I think that MDMA has the chance to be the most helpful because of the reduction of fear, the sense that you can bring traumas to the surface easier.
01:30:35.000I've actually worked with people with trauma, both with MDMA and with LSD. And in one case, I also talked about this in my TED Talk, this woman who, the LSD brought, you know, horrible rape and almost murder, you know,
01:31:15.000And I just think of all the people that have, soldiers and others that have committed suicide from PTSD since then, more died that way than in the war, and in the different wars.
01:31:24.000And if the DEA hadn't criminalized MDMA in 85, so many lives would have been saved, so much.
01:31:32.000I mean, for somebody like Congressman Crenshaw to be...
01:31:48.000Supporting research in this area and for so many Navy SEALs to have spoken to him, this is where Marcus and Amber Capone from vets, they've led lots and lots of vets to Mexico for Ibogaine and they have a group that supports the expenses for people to get this treatment.
01:32:05.000Actually, the Navy SEAL Foundation gave us a donation to MAPS of $50,000.
01:32:11.000Because they heard from so many Navy SEALs that what they were getting from the VA wasn't enough, and that they needed more, and that they were seeking out psychedelics.
01:32:21.000And so the board of directors of the Navy SEAL Foundation had a meeting, and they changed their mission.
01:32:27.000Their mission was only to support treatments, but not research.
01:32:31.000And so they changed it so they could also support research.
01:32:34.000They limited it to 150,000 per year, and the most any one project would get 50,000.
01:32:40.000And so the very first project was our Phase III study with MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. So even the Navy SEAL Foundation is coming.
01:32:48.000We're working with a psychiatrist, Bob Kaufman, at Walter Reed, who is an expert in PTSD. He's a military psychiatrist, retired now 32 years, but he still does work at Walter Reed.
01:32:59.000And we've had about 40 or more veterans have been through our studies.
01:33:05.000And most of them, not all, but most have gotten a lot of relief.
01:33:09.000But we've not once had an active duty soldier.
01:33:12.000So that's going to be the next big breakthrough.
01:33:14.000Because the idea here is that we want to treat people closer to the trauma.
01:33:19.000And then maybe the treatment is less expensive, not as long, because you haven't let it fester.
01:33:26.000You haven't let these patterns go on for longer.
01:33:30.000But there is some concerns about will the DOD permit active duty soldiers to get this?
01:33:36.000But the amount of money that they spend to train a Navy SEAL is enormous.
01:33:41.000And when you think about if they're disabled from PTSD, what if you can help them not get over it?
01:33:54.000We're doing research for Phase 3 for MDMA for PTSD in Israel, Canada, and the United States.
01:34:00.000So the Ministry of Defense in Israel has just invited us to set up a clinic for soldiers, for active-duty Israeli soldiers who are traumatized.
01:34:08.000And now because of the recent war with Gaza and the missiles, you know, it's just so clear that the whole populations are traumatized on both sides.
01:34:16.000We have a project also with—we've been starting it with— It's in the very early stages, but it's with the survivors of torture.
01:34:30.000It's for the treatment of survivors with torture, and it's in Ramallah.
01:34:49.000But we want to treat people on both sides of all the different conflicts.
01:34:53.000And we see that Sir General Nick Carter, who's the Secretary of Defense equivalent in England, We're working with a group in England, which is supporting wounded veterans.
01:35:12.000And Nick Carter is on their board of directors.
01:35:15.000And so he's come out in favor of MDMA research.
01:35:19.000Essentially, the Secretary of Defense in charge of all the British military has endorsed MDMA research.
01:35:24.000So we're hoping that we'll have that in the United States, that the Department of Defense will get involved as well.
01:35:30.000The bills that we're trying to get with Representative Crenshaw and Ryan would kind of encourage that, to try to start that.
01:35:37.000And as we talked before about prisoners and prison guards and police officers, we even have a police officer that we're training.
01:35:49.000And when we think about it, as we talked about the Ellicinian mysteries, it's kind of reintroducing into Western culture But it's this thousands of years of history and trying to bring psychedelics back to where we can sort of spiritualize the population in a way and reduce trauma as we face incredible challenges that humanity has never faced before in terms of what we're doing to the environment and the power of the weapons that we have.
01:36:17.000So that's the kind of vision that animates the motivation for why what we're doing.
01:36:24.000I think we have to re-engineer the cultural narrative, right?
01:36:26.000Because for so long it's been drugs are bad.
01:36:43.000And they have these negative associations or non-beneficial associations with drugs.
01:36:49.000And I think one of the things that, obviously I have a very limited experience with MDMA because I only had one experience, but that one experience was so positive.
01:38:02.000And so I said, Pennsylvania is where she went to school, Dickinson College, and it wasn't legal there, so I just said, I'll give it to you, and you can do it with your friends.
01:38:13.000So in the very first week of school, When she's just a freshman in college, she and a couple of the new people that she was meeting, girlfriends, they went off and tried to smoke a joint.
01:38:23.000But they got busted by the campus police.
01:39:02.000I mean, but counseling is like everything else.
01:39:05.000There's people that suck at it, right?
01:39:07.000There's people that I'm sure they're fully invested and really tuned in to what the person needs and they're dedicated and they're very well educated.
01:39:21.000And then there's people that are just not good at it because they're, for whatever reason, they carry their own biases, weird perspectives, and they don't know what they're talking about.
01:39:48.000What I was going to get to is that even though I have a limited experience with MDMA, it was very positive in terms of the actual trip itself.
01:40:14.000And so what bad is, is more resisting it.
01:40:18.000And so, to give a good example of this, there is actually, this is about 15 years ago, but two women contacted us within the same week with similar but different stories.
01:40:29.000Both of them had taken MDMA at a rave with their friends, had taken ecstasy for party setting.
01:40:34.000And one of them said that prior sexual abuse came to her mind, again, because this reduction of fear in the amygdala, difficult things can come to the surface, you can look at it more.
01:40:45.000But she was with a bunch of friends who just wanted to party.
01:40:49.000And she felt that she couldn't talk to them about it.
01:40:54.000And she contacted us months afterwards and said she was feeling worse, that the MDMA had actually made her feel worse, because it brought it to the surface, but she didn't deal with it.
01:41:03.000This other woman said a similar story, that she took MDMA at a rave, memories of prior sexual abuse came to the surface, and she went off to a corner with a girlfriend and talked about it, and after an hour worked a lot through it, and then went back and had a party and danced and And now she felt better and thought maybe MDMA could be great for PTSD. So there are bad trips,
01:41:24.000but bad I think is primarily about resistance, of not being open to it.
01:41:30.000And difficult can be productive, very productive, if you're supported through it.
01:41:37.000You know, there's an incredible movie called Trip of Compassion that's about three of our Israeli PTSD patients.
01:41:43.000It's the most patient-centered documentary ever made about MDMA-assisted therapy.
01:41:50.000And you can see people having very difficult experiences.
01:41:54.000You know, there was one woman that was kidnapped when she was traveling in Peru.
01:41:59.000You know, a lot of Israelis after the army to de-stress.
01:42:27.000Some people, when they take it, particularly if they're taking it in unsupported settings, they don't know exactly that it's pure drugs, they don't know that if you open up to the difficult emotions, that that's the pathway through.
01:42:41.000And so they resist it, and people can end up worse off from that.
01:42:45.000This was a very small study group about the people that didn't get mystical experiences.
01:42:50.000You're talking about two out of how many?
01:42:54.000It would be really interesting if you did it large scale and you find out what are the similarities between the people that don't have those experiences.
01:43:12.000But also I've heard it doesn't work in terms of it doesn't give them the visual experience.
01:43:18.000There are some people that are more visual than others, and some people that are more emotional than others, and some people, yeah, that it may not work.
01:43:28.000But I would think that that has to do with resistance rather than it just doesn't have...
01:44:20.000Instantly, I can tell, you know, not high, high.
01:44:23.000Edibles, I have gotten high off of them, but in general, if I would try anything, I'm with people all the time that take like a little 10 milligram and they're like, I'm gonna go crazy tonight.
01:44:34.000Let's like, everybody calm down, have a cool night.
01:44:36.000And I'm like, why are you wasting your time eating that gummy?
01:46:21.000This lady, she didn't realize that the CBD she was taking had THC as well, and she took multiple droppers full of it, and she thought she was dying.
01:47:06.000So she's taking this THC-laced CBD. Apparently, for some people, I've talked to some athletes, and they tell me that CBD with THC is the most effective for them in terms of alleviating inflammation and pain,
01:48:48.000So since 2000, we've been trying to end this monopoly on marijuana that the federal government has in order to promote marijuana research to make it into a medicine.
01:49:02.000And so in 2001, I spent a year trying to find the Rosa Parks of medical marijuana production.
01:49:11.000Who would be the most good plaintiff, in a way, for this effort?
01:49:17.000And so Lyle Craker was a professor at UMass Amherst, expert in plants.
01:49:21.000He'd worked in secure facilities to try to develop herbicides for coca plants.
01:49:26.000He was an expert in plant medicines, and he agreed that he would work with us to try to get a license from the DEA to grow marijuana.
01:49:33.000So we submitted his application in 2001. I call back a couple months later to the DEA and say, hey, what's going on?
01:49:42.000And they say we don't have any record, or Lyle called, and he said they don't have any record of his application.
01:50:52.000And the judge said that marijuana, it's in the public interest for Lyle to get this license.
01:50:58.000And then the DEA rejects the recommendation They wait two years, actually, and they waited until six days before Obama got inaugurated in order to reject the recommendation.
01:51:10.000And then Obama does nothing for eight years.
01:51:13.000And then near the end of his term, the DEA under Obama says, finally, we're going to give this recommendation.
01:51:19.000We're going to issue these licenses, and they put something in, I think it was August 2016, in the Federal Reserve, around 30 people apply.
01:51:27.000Then Trump gets elected, and Sessions is against marijuana, and they squashed it all.
01:51:32.000Then we're working with Dr. Sue Sisley in Arizona, in Phoenix, and she had submitted one of the licenses.
01:51:40.000She sued the DEA to try to reveal, you know, who applied.
01:51:44.000They didn't even, and they finally gave the list of who applied.
01:51:50.000But they didn't want to give any of the licenses still.
01:51:53.000And so what just happened about two weeks ago was that finally the DEA has given licenses for domestic production of marijuana federally so that people can grow to make it into a medicine.
01:52:05.000Since 1968 has been this federal monopoly.
01:52:09.000There's been a company, GW Pharmaceuticals, in England that got a license from the Home Office in 1998 to grow marijuana, and they grew CBD marijuana.
01:52:21.000And they just were sold for $7 billion to Jazz Pharmaceuticals.
01:52:26.000They made Epidiolex, which is for childhood epilepsy, CBD for childhood epilepsy.
01:52:33.000So now we've ended this monopoly on the production of marijuana.
01:52:38.000And also, the state of Michigan, when they legalized marijuana for recreational purposes, it was friends of ours at the Marijuana Policy Project that put it in there, and they wrote the initiative language.
01:52:52.000And they had a paragraph that says, of the money that they're going to make from the taxes, they have to put $20 million a year for two years into studying cannabis for veterans' health and to reduce veterans' suicides.
01:53:05.000And the money can only go to nonprofit organizations or academic researchers.
01:53:12.000And they just put out the request for proposals June 1, just a few days ago.
01:53:19.000So we have a protocol that we've already submitted to FDA, and we've already got some comments back to study in around 300 veterans with PTSD. We're going to go for a $10 million grant from the state of Michigan.
01:53:33.000And we've previously gotten a $2.2 million grant from the state of Colorado to do a marijuana study that we did with Sue Sisley.
01:53:44.000And we had one group got THC, one group got THC-CBD combination, one group got CBD, and one group got placebo, where they take marijuana and they wash it with alcohol and you wash out the terpenes and the cannabinoids.
01:54:13.000And we demonstrated safety, but the problem was, and I'll illustrate it by one person, was that there was one person who did great, and his PTSD symptoms were reduced, and he was really excited about that.
01:54:27.000But more importantly, he was on opiates for pain, and he was able to get off the opiates and to use the product that he had been given.
01:54:35.000And so he wanted to become a public spokesperson for the study.
01:54:39.000He spoke to the media a bunch of times.
01:54:41.000When the study was over, we uncovered the blind, and it turned out he'd gotten the placebo.
01:54:50.000So what we found in this study, unfortunately, was that the group that did the best had the THC. The group that did the next best was the placebo, which completely befuddled us.
01:55:02.000And then the group that got lesser benefits was the THC-CBD combination, and the group that got the least benefits had CBD only.
01:56:32.000But I think my current prediction is 2025 is when we will have federally – a law will be passed like the end of alcohol prohibition that says there's no federal penalties for marijuana.
01:56:47.000And so I think that that will happen in 2025. We need, in presidential years, are when these initiatives tend to pass.
01:56:55.000More young people come out, more people come out to vote in the presidential elections.
01:56:59.000And so we need a few more medical marijuana and marijuana legalization states.
01:57:03.000We'll get maybe potentially more in 2022. More in 2024. And so I think in 2025, there's a good chance that we will have the federal government will move to end prohibition on marijuana.
01:57:17.000You know, society has not collapsed in Colorado or Seattle or On the contrary, the economy is booming in those places where they have legal marijuana because it's enhanced the economy.
01:57:30.000Especially in Colorado, the real estate has gone through the roof.
01:57:34.000Particularly for warehouses, for production facilities.
01:57:37.000I don't know how long you think it'll be before Texas comes along.
02:00:05.000I'd only run about 18 miles before, and I wasn't sure if I was going to make it.
02:00:09.000And so I was realizing that if I define success as succeeding to run the entire marathon, then the whole time that I'm running, I'm going to be carrying this anxiety.
02:00:22.000And this marijuana helped me think differently, and I realized that I should define success as trying.
02:00:28.000And that if I could be happy for every step that I took, that was a success, however far I got, that I was trying something I'd never done before.
02:01:10.000But I also think in terms of work, I talked about smokable tasks for strategizing.
02:01:16.000But now we have a pattern, and I'm not scared to say this, but before we submit documents to the government, to the FDA, I get high, and I edit the documents with some of our other staff, and you get very attuned to every word you're using,
02:01:31.000what the implications are, where your arguments are strong, where they're weak, what you're missing.
02:01:46.000I think it's very wise, and that's using marijuana as a tool.
02:01:50.000And again, you're talking to someone who's a regular marijuana user, so I'm aware of the benefits of it, the pros.
02:01:56.000So someone listening to this, they might be, you know, if they don't smoke marijuana or they don't have any experience with it, they might listen to these idiots talk about how good it is to smoke weed before you review something important.
02:02:09.000But to someone like me, you saying that, I'm like, absolutely.
02:02:14.000Well, you know, your invitation for me to come here for this podcast in Austin has now led for some meetings yesterday.
02:02:20.000We're going to try to make Austin one of the sites for giving marijuana to veterans with PTSD for our application to the state of Michigan.
02:02:28.000So we're going to try to have multiple sites in Michigan to make sure that we get the local people involved.
02:02:34.000But we'd like to have some in non-medical marijuana states, which would be Florida and also Texas.
02:04:00.000And a lot of them smoke marijuana before they train.
02:04:03.000And I always found that I had my best training sessions when I was high.
02:04:08.000And that I could literally get like one step better at Jiu Jitsu when I was high.
02:04:14.000It wasn't necessarily good for learning technique though.
02:04:17.000I would only like it when I was rolling.
02:04:20.000So like say if someone was trying to teach me a particular move...
02:04:25.000I would want to be sober when learning the move because jujitsu moves are super complicated like a leg lock or a heel hook or something like that.
02:04:35.000You have to have this foot here and you're pinching your legs here and this foot is here and then when the guy turns this way you're framing off with your shin to block his movement and you want to have the toes Clamped in your armpits.
02:04:47.000There's a lot of things you have to think about, right?
02:04:49.000And I don't think marijuana is necessarily conducive to learning all those, because you just get too drifty.
02:04:55.000But for what you already know, applying that in sparring, marijuana is insanely helpful.
02:05:03.000I'm much better when I'm high, when I roll.
02:05:43.000Jake Shields, who is a multiple champion and multiple different mixed martial arts organizations and an elite Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, and they get high, and then, here, play one of these.
02:05:58.000And you can see, as these guys go out there to compete, see if it shows them smoke the weed first, because usually it does.
02:07:11.000Like, if you're lazy because of marijuana, you're just lazy.
02:07:14.000It's just marijuana just happened to get there while you were being lazy.
02:07:18.000But if you're a super motivated person, I don't believe that marijuana is going to make you lazy.
02:07:24.000But I do believe that many young kids with the wrong influences and the wrong activities in their life that they do together as a group could lose their way by just getting high all the time and escaping reality.
02:07:48.000Goals in terms of the things you're trying to do and good friends that push you and that all work together towards things you're trying to accomplish in your life and then talk to each other about the benefits of accomplishing things.
02:08:01.000And, oh man, I didn't think I was going to make it.
02:08:07.000And then you start thinking, wow, I want to do something like that too, where I push myself and I expand my own personal boundaries and enhance my own personal potential for all future endeavors.
02:08:18.000Because if you can do that in one thing, you can do it in other things.
02:08:20.000Or you can just be that person that sits around and plays video games and gets nothing done.
02:08:57.000I give you a hammer, you could build a house with it, or you could hit yourself in the dick if you're fucking crazy.
02:09:03.000Yeah, that's how we should understand it, and it's what you bring to it.
02:09:06.000The fundamental problem with the drug war is that we've made certain things good drugs and bad drugs, and we've lost the point about the relationship that you have with it.
02:09:15.000It's about the relationship and what you do with it.
02:09:18.000The best example from the FDA point of view is thalidomide.
02:09:21.000Thalidomide, we know, was given to women for morning sickness and caused horrible birth defects with deformed limbs.
02:09:28.000But that was the quintessential bad drug.
02:09:31.000The only person at FDA that ever won the Presidential Medal of Honor was this woman, Frances Kelsey, who blocked thalidomide from coming into the US because she was worried about safety.
02:09:55.000And we've tried to personify these are good or evil things.
02:10:00.000And I think that that's a complete misunderstanding.
02:10:02.000The same way, ecstasy can be a party drug, or it can be a therapy drug.
02:10:06.000And some of the vets in our studies and others have said, I don't know why they call this ecstasy, because it helps them go through painful emotions, and they don't associate it with a party drug.
02:10:17.000Even when we train therapists and even patients, we let people into our studies If they've done MDMA up to, I think, five times.
02:10:56.000Needs of the moment, which we will be able to do post-approval.
02:10:59.000But five we just chose as an arbitrary number.
02:11:03.000People have talked about how there's diminishing returns sometimes over time for MDMA. For me, it happened after about 40 or 50 times I was really made for MDMA. And it's still...
02:11:16.00040 or 50 times you had diminishing returns?
02:11:58.000I mean, you can use marijuana thousands of times, and you do get a tolerance for it, but if you stop for a day or so, or a couple days, you smoke it again, it's like you're getting high, the same way you did before.
02:12:09.000But there is something about MDMA. That's different than psilocybin or LSD, where a lot of people do report that it's not quite as deep and profound as it was the first initial bunch of times.
02:12:21.000And where that number is varies with different people.
02:13:40.000In the 80s, when I started MAPS in 86, another group started a for-profit company to develop Ibogaine for opiate addiction.
02:13:51.000And they called it NDA for New Drug Application International.
02:13:55.000But then I saw a lot of the researchers starting to sue each other for intellectual property about Ibogaine.
02:14:03.000And it just was so destructive that it sort of killed the field for a long time.
02:14:07.000Those patents, original patents, have now expired.
02:14:10.000But I hired a patent attorney that did the Ibogaine use patents to develop an anti-patent strategy.
02:14:17.000So nobody could patent, not us, not anybody could patent a lot of the uses of MDMA. So I thought when we made MDMA into a medicine, it would just become generic.
02:14:30.000But there's so many different uses of MDMA that it's hard to do all of this with philanthropy.
02:14:37.000And then I realized, accidentally in a way, I discovered from another patent attorney that in 2013 I learned that there was actually incentives that the FDA had developed for promoting research into drugs that were off patent.
02:14:54.000And Ronald Reagan in 1984 signed this law that provided these incentives.
02:14:59.000And what they're called is data exclusivity.
02:15:02.000And what that means is that if you make a drug that's never been made into a medicine before, and there's no patent protection, no one can use your data to market a generic for five years in the U.S., and it's ten years in Europe.
02:15:18.000Not only that, but if we succeed in adults, the FDA is requiring us to do studies in adolescents that are traumatized, 12 to 17-year-olds.
02:15:27.000And we've actually already had to submit a pediatric plan.
02:15:31.000And you get six months additional data exclusivity for working in pediatric populations.
02:15:37.000And it blocks a generic competitor from applying to be a generic competitor until the five and a half years is over, and it takes FDA around six months or so to evaluate their application.
02:15:46.000So we'll have six years of data exclusivity.
02:15:49.000It's different from a patent in that another company, if they wanted to, could generate their own data.
02:15:56.000So we don't block anybody, but it'll take them five or six years.
02:15:59.000So then I realized that we could tell a different story to our donors.
02:16:03.000That if you can help us reach this point of sustainability, that we can sell MDMA for a profit and we can use the profits for more research.
02:16:12.000But I didn't want it to be like a traditional for-profit pharma company, where you maximize profits.
02:16:19.000There's a modification of capitalism called the Benefit Corporation, and there's thousands of these Benefit Corporations now.
02:16:27.000They are for profit, but you maximize public benefit, not profit.
02:16:31.000So if there are minority shareholders, they can't sue the management because they're not maximizing profits.
02:16:38.000Now we have all these hostile takeovers, things that if shareholders think that the management is not maximizing profits, they can try to change the management.
02:16:47.000So in a benefit corp, You maximize public benefit.
02:16:50.000And I think when we talk about healthcare, the profit motive has really warped things in America in a terrible way, so that we have the highest per capita expenditures on healthcare than any country in the world, but our outcomes are down like 40 or 50 in the countries,
02:17:06.000when you look at your average outcomes.
02:17:08.000So we wanted to model not just something new, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, but we also wanted to model a new way to market medicines.
02:17:17.000So we created in December 2014 the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation.
02:17:24.000That's our pharmaceutical arm, and that will end up, we hope, by the end of 2023, getting permission to sell.
02:17:31.000And we will sell not to maximize profits, but to maximize benefits.
02:17:36.000And so we think that we will reach sustainability in the middle of 2024. Now, our ambitions have been expanding.
02:17:47.000We have this one successful Phase III study that we just published in Nature Medicine, and we had New York Times articles, front page even, about psychedelics.
02:17:56.000And we're in the middle of the second Phase III study, but we also want to globalize.
02:18:01.000And so we're now starting research in Europe.
02:18:05.000It'll cost us like another $30 million or so to bring research and obtain approval from the European Medicines Agency.
02:18:12.000It's so much less expensive than in the U.S. because the Europeans will accept all our U.S. data.
02:18:18.000And so we only have to do one Phase III study in Europe.
02:18:22.000To try to start MDMA research in South Africa, in Rwanda, where they had the horrible genocides, in Somaliland, Armenia, and Bosnia, people all over the world, Palestine, people have contacted us where there's lots and lots of trauma, not necessarily lots and lots of money,
02:18:52.000And we've hired them to help us plot our commercialization strategy.
02:18:57.000So, you know, my PhD at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard was on the regulation of the medical use of psychedelics and marijuana.
02:19:05.000So I have expertise in that, and we've hired a lot of people from pharma who know drug development, and that's how we've built the Benefit Corps, but we don't have expertise in commercialization.
02:19:16.000So this BCG report was to help us understand what is the path to commercialize.
02:19:23.000And so when you have a pharmaceutical company, you need all sorts of new functions to do commercialization.
02:19:29.000Government affairs, you need to have...
02:19:57.000So in California, you actually need a whole new law to pass the legislature and signed into law by the governor to make a Schedule I drug into a medicine.
02:20:05.000And there's a bill now going through the legislature just past the State Senate in California that would decriminalize psychedelics, and it's got a provision to automatically reschedule once the FDA and DEA say a drug is a medicine.
02:20:20.000And Amber and Marcus Capone from VETS We're very helpful in talking to various senators, state senators in California, to get them to change their minds and support this law because they told stories of how psychedelics have been helpful to them.
02:20:33.000In Texas here, it's an automatic rescheduling.
02:20:38.000Unless the Commissioner of Public Health objects.
02:20:41.000And so with Rick Perry and the efforts that have been here in Texas, there was just a law passed that would support psilocybin research, and it also directs the Commissioner of Public Health To do a study of the literature on MDMA,
02:20:58.000to acquaint them what's going on, so that if we make MDMA into a medicine, we think Texas will reschedule automatically, and we think that the Commissioner of Public Health will not object to that, although we don't know, but we're already trying to educate them.
02:21:11.000So, in any case, we need to do this in all 50 states.
02:21:15.000There needs to be a lot of government affairs relations, and so BCG report has estimated that it could be somewhere in the neighborhood of $80 million to do the commercialization, and they say we need to prepare starting for that now.
02:21:29.000And because we have one successful phase three study, there's a good chance we're actually going to succeed.
02:21:35.000So where we're at is a very challenging situation.
02:21:38.000There's now hundreds and hundreds of psychedelic, for-profit psychedelic companies.
02:21:44.000When I started MAPS in 86, now again, 35 years ago, I'd say for the first 31, 32 years, I could never even imagine that there would be for-profit psychedelic companies, that there would only be, you know, non-profit donations.
02:22:00.000But we've cleared out the regulatory obstacles, we've helped change public opinion, we've demonstrated through the FDA that it works, and now there's several for-profit companies with psychedelics that have market caps over a billion dollars.
02:22:16.000So basically, MAPS is further along than any of them.
02:22:21.000We're the only group in Phase 3. We have one successful Phase 3 study.
02:22:26.000So in a sense, we've taken around $110 million and 35 years of work.
02:22:32.000And if MAPS were a public company, we'd be worth well over a billion dollars because we have this...
02:22:40.000Potential to market MDMA. And what I told to the New York Times is that this BCG report suggests that during this period of data exclusivity, depending on where we set the price, depending on how many therapists we've trained, Shannon Carlin is leading our therapy training program.
02:22:59.000We're right now, at this very moment, we have 300 therapists in our training program.
02:23:03.000We've got another one starting in September.
02:23:06.000We hope to have more 500. We've already trained about a thousand therapists.
02:23:11.000We want to get tens and tens, tens of thousands of therapists for all these thousands of psychedelic clinics.
02:23:15.000But the estimate is somewhere in the neighborhood of $750 million or more in profits during this period of data exclusivity just from the U.S. And we're also working in Canada and Israel.
02:23:29.000But the challenge that we face Is that now we think we're going to, to fully globalize, to commercialize, complete everything that we're doing, we're going to need to raise about $150 million more.
02:23:41.000About $50 million a year for three years.
02:23:44.000But that will make MDMA available in much of the world.
02:23:50.000We'll get this income from the sale of MDMA. We'll be able to complete globalization, complete commercialization.
02:23:56.000And you will be the only ones that are able to sell this MDMA? During this period of data exclusivity, unless another company decides to do their own research.
02:24:05.000So the answer is probably yes, because it will take people at least five or six years to do that.
02:24:26.000And so we will not be able to meet the demand.
02:24:29.000There's about 8 or 9 million PTSD patients just in the United States, 350 million throughout the world or more, and just so many other people traumatized.
02:24:40.000And the way we want our negotiating with FDA... And DEA is that the only way that this becomes a medicine is that the only people that can prescribe it have been through a training program, so they understand the safety of MDMA, and the only therapists that can actually work with the patients have been through our training program.
02:24:59.000So there's two ways that we need to work on to meet the demand.
02:25:04.000The first is to train as many therapists as we can.
02:25:07.000The second is to start exploring group therapy.
02:25:10.000And when you train these therapists, do they have to have experiences themselves with MDMA? We don't want to ever require that people try MDMA, but we think that they would be better therapists if they do.
02:25:26.000About 10 years ago, we negotiated with FDA and we got approval for a protocol where its personality changes various things with MDMA and it's limited to therapists in our training program.
02:25:39.000So the only way we can give legally therapists MDMA is in the context of a protocol because it's a Schedule I drug.
02:25:54.000Now, two years ago, we wanted to get another protocol approved that would make it less expensive to give MDMA to therapists.
02:26:02.000So the first protocol is four days long, and people either get MDMA or placebo, and then a day of integration, and then the crossover, whatever they didn't get the first day, and then a fourth day of integration.
02:26:17.000And that was good when we're training people to work for research where half of their people will get placebo.
02:26:22.000We get therapy without MDMA compared to therapy with MDMA. But now we wanted to do two days where everybody gets MDMA and just a day of integration afterwards.
02:26:34.000And so about two years ago we applied to the FDA And they put the protocol on clinical hold, which means that we couldn't do it.
02:26:43.000They said the risks were too great to have healthy people get MDMA. What risks?
02:26:59.000Yes, she had attempted self-harm before.
02:27:03.000And it was resolved successfully during the MDMA session, and she told it it was beneficial to her.
02:27:10.000But what's happened now is this bureaucratic self-protectionism.
02:27:15.000The FDA realizes that now it might work, and it might become a medicine, and if something goes wrong, they're going to be blamed for it.
02:27:25.000And it's the same group at the FDA, not the same structure, but the same organization that 25 years ago under a different group name, but the group that regulated psychedelics back then also regulated OxyContin.
02:27:39.000And so they're the ones that approved OxyContin for long-term use.
02:27:43.000It's helped produce the opiate epidemic.
02:27:45.000And so all of their documents have been released to the public.
02:27:48.000And so the FDA, even though it's different people now, they're a little bit worried about what happens if they let psychedelics out and something goes wrong.
02:27:56.000So they've become more conservative in certain ways.
02:28:00.000And so they said, no, we're not going to give you permission to give MDMA to therapists.
02:28:04.000And of our two-person therapy team, which is male, female, usually, two-person team, the lead person needs to be licensed to do therapy, and the second person doesn't need to be licensed.
02:28:17.000It can be a student to get a license or someone with a thousand hours of behavioral health experience.
02:28:22.000But in this new protocol, the FDA said the lead person needs to be an MD or a PhD.
02:28:28.000And they said every clinic needs to have a doctor on site.
02:28:32.000I mean, this protocol, you need a doctor on site.
02:28:35.000Right now, we have approval in phase three.
02:28:38.000The lead person is just a licensed therapist, not MD, PhD.
02:28:42.000And the doctor does the screening and is on call but is not on site.
02:28:46.000So these are like poison pills for rolling it out to meet the demand because it would increase the costs of the therapy tremendously to have a doctor on site.
02:28:55.000Many therapists have private practice offices.
02:28:58.000If they had to pay for a doctor on site the whole time, It would be way too expensive.
02:29:02.000So we've been through a two-year process, and we decided that we needed to fight this.
02:29:08.000And so we actually hired attorneys with expertise in challenging FDA in what's called the formal dispute resolution process.
02:29:19.000And that's where you appeal to higher levels of the FDA. So the division of psychiatry products is regulated by the Office of Neuroscience.
02:29:28.000And so we've spent over a quarter million dollars on lawyer's fees.
02:29:34.000It's kind of a mixture of law and science.
02:29:36.000And we went to challenge the FDA. And we said that, first off, it's not too risky to have therapists volunteer for this.
02:29:45.000So we did a survey of the 90 therapists that have been through it.
02:29:48.000And they Uniformly, almost, said very high average scores.
02:29:52.000It was very helpful to them professionally to learn how to understand what MDMA does.
02:29:57.000It helped them to be better therapists, and personally, they got a lot out of it, and the harms were very, very minimal or virtually nonexistent.
02:30:06.000We got letters from expert therapists and academics and said over 20 letters saying MD or PhD doesn't make sense, that licensed therapists can do just as well or better.
02:30:22.000Even psychiatrists a lot of times are trained to sort of be arm of the pharmaceutical industry.
02:30:27.000And psychopharmacology, they don't even have to do therapy themselves to be a psychiatrist.
02:30:32.000PhDs in psychology are often trained to do measures.
02:30:36.000They're not necessarily therapists either.
02:30:38.000It's just from the FDA, they don't regulate psychotherapy.
02:30:41.000That's what's so challenging for them.
02:30:43.000This is the first time that the FDA is not looking just at drugs.
02:30:47.000So the way ketamine was approved, and there's ketamine clinic here in Texas, the way in Austin, I mean, and hundreds of ketamine clinics, it was approved just as a pharmacological treatment without any kind of therapy with it.
02:33:09.000And there are multiple companies in the US, Canada, Netherlands, England, Switzerland that we got bids from to manufacture our medical grade MDMA. Wow, that is interesting.
02:33:24.000A lot of drug companies contract out to research labs to make their drugs.
02:33:29.000Well, they must also be very aware that with MAPS, it's such a legitimate organization with such a long history of success that you guys are basically opening up the door for this industry.
02:33:50.000And eventually, I think 2035, after a decade of clinics, I think we'll have licensed legalization, and people will be legally able to buy psilocybin, MDMA, LSD, all these drugs.
02:34:02.000Well, I love the fact that you're planning this far ahead.
02:34:05.000It's a bummer that here we are in 2021, and we have to think in terms of 14 years from now being legal, something that should be legal right now.
02:34:13.000But I do love the fact that your strategy is so...
02:34:16.000you guys are patient and calculated and you're doing it right.
02:34:21.000Well, to say the first medical marijuana states were California and Arizona in 1996. That's 25 years ago and we still don't have federal legalization of marijuana.
02:34:54.000But once they make it into a medicine, and then we roll out these thousands of clinics, we and others, I mean, and there'll be psilocybin, ketamine, MDMA clinics, and maybe 5-MeO-DMT and Ibogaine and other clinics.
02:35:07.000But there'll be trained—therapists will be cross-trained.
02:35:12.000But then there'll be stories and stories and stories of people that have gotten benefits from psychedelics, and that's what'll change public opinion to move to licensed legalization in 2035. But to just backtrack for a second— MDMA that's manufactured now for us in England,
02:35:29.000it's a company that also makes LSD and psilocybin, and they make MDMA for us.
02:35:56.000So then there's another company that we have to send it to in order to put it into capsules.
02:36:03.000And you would think that that should be pretty damn easy to just stick this stuff into capsules.
02:36:08.000But they have to do it at large scale, automated.
02:36:11.000They mix it with mannitol, you know, other different things to make it all weigh the same, all the capsules.
02:36:19.000Because for research, too, we have to have all the capsules weigh the same, even though they have different amounts of MDMA in them, supposedly for double-blind purposes.
02:36:28.000But we have a second company now that is making it into capsules.
02:36:32.000And it's cost us so far almost $6 million just to get our new supply.
02:36:39.000Whereas I got one kilogram and a half actually from Dave Nichols in 85 for $4,000.
02:37:07.000So now what we're doing is scaling up to make it, and we hope that we'll have enough MDMA. The question is, will we have enough therapists?
02:37:19.000Well, we did a study in veterans, firefighters, and police officers, and we tested 30 milligrams, 75 milligrams, and 125 milligrams.
02:37:32.000And we thought that the effective dose was 125 milligrams, and we thought that 30 and the 75 would not do quite as well.
02:37:42.000Now, just to say what we do, we do believe that longer is better in the therapeutic session.
02:37:49.000So two hours after this initial administration of whatever it is, we give half the initial amount.
02:37:56.000So 125 with 62.5 milligrams, 75 with 37.5 or 30 and 15 milligrams.
02:38:03.000And that extends this plateau that's called the optimal arousal zone.
02:38:09.000So when people have PTSD, one of the common responses is they become emotionally numb.
02:38:15.000You know, it's too painful, or people are hyperactive, hypervigilant, and they're constantly on edge.
02:38:21.000But in neither of those conditions are people really able to do therapeutic work to process the trauma.
02:38:28.000They're either too numb or too reactive.
02:38:30.000So the MDMA brings people into this optimal arousal zone where they can feel safe and process the trauma.
02:38:37.000So what we discovered in this study, to our surprise, was that the 75 milligram group actually did great, even a slightly better than the 125 in this one particular study.
02:38:48.000Although there were other differences.
02:38:50.000When you randomize, it doesn't mean that everything is equal.
02:38:56.000And so what we showed is that the PTSD symptoms were pretty much equal in these different groups, but depression was a lot higher in the 125 mg group than in the 75 mg group.
02:39:06.000But in any case, the 75 mg group did great.
02:39:09.000And we've tested zero milligrams, 25 milligrams, 30 milligrams, 40 milligrams, 50 milligrams, 75, 100, 125, and 150, all with half the initial amounts.
02:39:21.000So our phase three studies now are designed, there's three MDMA sessions one month apart.
02:39:28.000And there's 12 90-minute non-drug psychotherapy sessions, three before the first MDMA session for preparation, and then three after each MDMA session for integration.
02:39:41.000So the first one in phase three is now going to be 80 milligrams.
02:40:07.000Millions to make a new dosage form that we felt that we needed to save money, so we make only 40 milligram capsules or 60 milligram capsules.
02:40:18.000And so 60, you take two of them, you get 120, and then you've got the 60 for the half.
02:40:22.00040 milligrams will give you 80 and half of that.
02:40:26.000It's 40, or the 340s can give you the 120. So we only have two different sizes, 40 milligrams and 60 milligrams.
02:40:34.000But we found that the 80 milligrams can be quite effective, and it's a good way to start for a lot of people.
02:40:45.000And then the next day is not overwhelming as well, right?
02:40:48.000Does it have an equal impact in terms of how much time you need to recover?
02:40:52.000Does like 30, do you have to recover less than you would with 120?
02:40:56.000Yeah, it doesn't take near as much out of you.
02:40:59.000But still, we have the second day with no obligations and people are resting and then we have the integrative psychotherapy the very next day.
02:41:09.000So what we have modified our program based on what we found to be a lower effective dose than we thought, but what made it complicated is that it's important to, the goal is to try to do double-blind studies.
02:41:25.000Randomized placebo-controlled double-blind studies so people don't know what dose they're getting so that then you can say it's due not to their expectations.
02:41:34.000If there are differences between the two groups, it's just due to the dose.
02:41:37.000And so what we are trying to do is find out what dose of MDMA is high enough to cause confusion.
02:41:45.000People aren't quite sure, but not so high that it's so therapeutic that you can't tell a difference between the two groups.
02:41:52.000And to our surprise, as I said, the 75 milligram group in that study was effective, so it was a lower effective dose than we thought, but the 25, 30, 40, and 50 milligrams made people uncomfortable.
02:42:05.000It was like turbulence when you take off from an airplane.
02:42:08.000You know, you have to get up above the clouds and then it's smooth sailing, but if you're in this kind of turbulent phase, It can make you uncomfortable.
02:42:16.000You're supposed to talk about your trauma.
02:42:18.000You've been burdened by your trauma for a very long time, but you don't have enough fear reduction.
02:42:22.000So what we showed is that people all got better, but if you gave people therapy without any MDMA at all, they did better than the people that got therapy that got 25, 30, or 40 milligrams.
02:42:37.000And so that meant that my dissertation was wrong.
02:42:42.000I had thought I'd solved the problem of how do you do a successful double-blind study, and it was going to be therapy plus low-dose of whatever it is, low-dose psilocybin, low-dose MDMA, you know, therapy plus low-dose versus therapy plus full-dose.
02:42:59.000Now, with MDMA, what we discovered is that if we use low doses, 25, 30, 40 milligrams, that we can produce enough confusion that the FDA would consider it successful blinding,
02:43:15.000but that it will make it easier for us to find a difference between MDMA with low-dose MDMA than Than therapy with low-dose MDMA, I mean, or therapy with no MDMA at all.
02:43:29.000So the real question is, if you can do the work with therapy, why bother at a drug?
02:43:34.000So when we went to the FDA, we said, we can give you blinding with low-dose MDMA with therapy, but it's going to make it easier for us to find a difference between the two groups and that we suggest that we do therapy with inactive Placebo versus therapy with full-dose MDMA. And most people,
02:43:53.000almost everybody, will be able to tell whether they've got MDMA or not.
02:43:57.000And the therapist will be able to tell.
02:44:04.000And so that's what the FDA... There's a fellow named Bob Temple, like the old wise man of the FDA. He's been there since 1972. He was in charge of the Office of Science Policy.
02:44:13.000They brought him into the final meeting where we discussed our design of phase three.
02:44:18.000And he was part of the group that said, yes, we can do therapy with inactive placebo.
02:44:24.000And he said there's two main ways then to, or he didn't say, but the FDA was, there's two main ways to reduce experimenter bias when the double blind doesn't work.
02:45:12.000It's called the CAPS, the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale.
02:45:15.000It was developed by the Boston VA. And so they're randomly assigned on telemedicine to evaluate the patient, the next patient that comes in.
02:45:25.000And so one rater doesn't follow the patient through the study.
02:45:29.000And so that's how the FDA said that we can do the studies.
02:45:32.000And we have a signed agreement in what's called the special protocol assessment process.
02:45:37.000And so once we present the data to the FDA, they can't say, we don't like your methodology.
02:45:42.000If we get statistically significant evidence of efficacy and no new safety problems arise, then they must approve the drug.
02:45:50.000And then when we went to the European Medicines Agency and we said to them, we would like to bring this to Europe.
02:46:03.000The EMA, the European Medicines Agency, agreed with the FDA and they said we have to do one phase three study of 70 people in Europe.
02:46:11.000Again, therapy with inactive placebo versus therapy with full-dose MDMA. And the European Medicines Agency also said I think that we're good to go.
02:46:50.000We'll also be, in Europe, starting with 80 milligrams, followed by 40, and then the second and third is almost always 120, followed by 60. And you'll be interviewing these people.
02:47:02.000And what's the protocol for establishing success in terms of, like, how the study went, how the experience went for these people?
02:47:27.000So CAPS V. And so that's administered to people at baseline and then we administer it throughout the study and then two months after the last experimental session.
02:47:39.000So to give you a sense of how our phase three study went, the one that we just got published in Nature Medicine and why we think we have a real good chance of succeeding, is that now we work with severe chronic PTSD patients and we felt that we have to work with the hardest patients.
02:47:57.000And what that means is that if they have attempted suicide in the past, we will still include them.
02:48:03.000They can't be actively suicidal, but they can have tried to kill themselves in the past.
02:48:08.000And many PTSD studies think that that group is too dangerous to use, that they exclude people who have tried to kill themselves before.
02:48:18.000So what we showed at the two-month follow-up was that those people that got therapy without MDMA, 32% no longer had PTSD. Which is pretty amazing.
02:48:31.000People had PTSD on average of 14 years.
02:48:33.000We had one third of people had PTSD over 20 years.
02:48:38.000So 32% of people that just had therapy with no MDMA. Now, obviously there's a different therapist with different skill levels and different levels of intuition and the ability to navigate emotional problems.
02:49:06.000And what about the people that were initially suffering from PTSD? What did they have in common?
02:49:11.000Well, you're asking one of the most important questions, and we don't know the answer.
02:49:16.000You know, we are not sure how to predict ahead of time who's going to respond and who's not going to respond.
02:49:22.000Well, also, because you're dealing with different therapists, you're also dealing with different personalities and different bedside manners, different people that have a different skill level in terms of emotional skill or rather emotional intelligence.
02:49:38.000Being able to navigate conversations with people.
02:49:40.000That's true, although we train all the therapists.
02:49:43.000Right, but they're individual human beings.
02:51:10.000So what we found, though, when we analyzed the data was that there were no site-to-site differences that were statistically significant.
02:51:19.000So what that means is that there are these individual variations in the different skills of the therapists, but that we think that the effectiveness of the MDMA is, in a way, equalizes, like a great equalizer.
02:54:08.000A lot of times people will talk about traumas that they've not talked about to anybody before, even that they've not really fully acknowledged themselves that didn't come up in the prior discussions because they're feeling safe.
02:54:23.000That same kind of reduction of anxiety, reduction of fear, self-acceptance, more complex things come up.
02:54:30.000So we do think that the MDMA is very therapeutic, potentially in the right supportive setting.
02:54:37.000The therapists make a big difference, but that we do feel that through the data analysis that there were no site-to-site variations, meaning that the results were more or less equivalent across all these, about almost 80 therapists in these 15 different sites.
02:54:56.000So that gives us confidence that we can scale it, that we can find tens of thousands of therapists.
02:55:03.000Now, some therapists could be really bad and they could make it worse.
02:55:06.000You know, we'll try to identify them during the training.
02:55:09.000So what we do is we have right now this 100 hours of training virtual.
02:55:15.000Then we have an opportunity for some of the people to volunteer to receive MDMA as a patient themselves, to understand from the inside out what it does.
02:55:23.000And then we supervise the therapists as they work with their first patient.
02:55:29.000And we have our treatment manual, which is also up on the MAPS website if anybody wants to know our therapeutic approach.
02:55:36.000And then we have operationalized it in what's called adherence criteria.
02:55:40.000Like, are the therapists supporting people's inner experience?
02:56:23.000But generally, we have this method called this interdirected therapy in our treatment manual.
02:56:29.000And it seems like we will be able to scale this and that the MDMA really helps people to process and we give them the time in this safe space for them to work through their own issues.
02:56:43.000Like the MDMA experience that you described, you know, you came to a lot of things on your own.
02:56:48.000You know, you were able to do that, but it wasn't that the people with you produced those insights.
02:57:33.000Yeah, and of the one-third that more or less that still had PTSD... Most of them had what are called clinically significant reductions of PTSD symptoms.
02:57:43.000Their lives were better, they had fewer symptoms, although they still had PTSD. But if we could have given them a fourth session...
02:57:50.000You think you could have nipped it in the bud?
02:57:54.000Now, because this is labor-intensive and it's very expensive, the big issue for scaling for us is going to be not only the number of therapists that we train, but is it covered by insurance?
02:58:12.000So in our phase two studies, and in also this phase three study, we're going to check again at 12 months.
02:58:20.000We're not at that point yet for this first phase three study.
02:58:23.000But in our phase two studies, what we showed is that In phase two, at the two-month follow-up, we had 56% no longer had PTSD with the MDMA plus therapy at the two months.
02:58:37.000So the phase three results are even slightly better than phase two.
02:58:40.000But at the 12-month follow-up for phase two, people kept getting better.
02:58:46.000Now two-thirds no longer had PTSD at the one-year follow-up.
02:58:50.000So it took long for the lessons to sort of sink in.
02:58:53.000Yes, and people, once you learn how to sort of, you don't need to suppress, you can process it.
02:59:00.000People can keep getting better on their own without more drugs.
02:59:03.000So this is fundamentally different than here, take a drug to correct a biochemical problem, like an SSRI, you're going to need this every day and you can need it for years or months.
02:59:14.000What we're saying is we do in-depth work to try to make it so we get to the core of the problem so that then we free people of the need for drugs.
02:59:23.000Now, the thing about marijuana, we talked about marijuana for PTSD, that's more palliative than curative, meaning that it reduces symptoms, it'll help people sleep at night, but it doesn't help them process the core trauma.
02:59:35.000It just suppresses the symptoms, and there are many people that may not want to do this difficult work.
02:59:42.000It's painful and it's emotional and you have to really look at this trauma and it's difficult.
02:59:48.000So we think that there's quite a number of group of people that would rather just use the marijuana for PTSD if we can show if it's effective.
02:59:57.000Go back to the prison thing because I think that's a place where I think there's a lot of room for beneficial therapy.
03:00:05.000I mean, if you think about how many of these people that are in prison have never really gotten any kind of real helpful counseling or real moments like something that could be provided from an MDMA experience where they really get a chance to let go of a lot.
03:00:27.000Well, it's a little bit difficult to get permission to do—or it's very difficult to get permission to do research inside prisons because the question is informed consent.
03:00:37.000Are people in some way pressured to do this?
03:00:41.000But we've got therapists that have worked at San Quentin.
03:02:36.000I think that that will be in the future, but we have to go step by step.
03:02:40.000Chances are we'll start with parolees, provide support, see if we can reduce recidivism, and then eventually hopefully get permission to do work inside prison.
03:03:15.000Just imagine how much better the world would be if MDMA was readily available.
03:03:20.000That's what kept us going this whole time.
03:03:23.000People could just sort of make decisions based on the same decisions they make based on whether or not they want to have alcohol or whether, you know, there's so many different things that you do that you're allowed to make these decisions with that are more harmful than MDMA. Yeah.
03:03:39.000Now, we have another project which is for political reconciliation.
03:03:43.000So it turns out that there are some Israelis and Palestinians that have been doing ayahuasca and MDMA together.
03:03:59.000And ayahuasca is used throughout Israel.
03:04:01.000So with Lior Roseman and Robin Card Harris, who are at Imperial College, Lior is a neuroscientist but an Israeli, and Natalie Ginsberg on our staff, who is head of our policy and advocacy team.
03:04:17.000We are trying to study how you can use psychedelics in this Israeli-Palestinian context.
03:04:25.000Now, again, they're not the hardcore haters.
03:04:27.000They are the people that are more open to being in these mixed spaces.
03:04:31.000We have understanding that the Palestinians, they have MDMA first on their own to try to work through some of their traumas.
03:04:37.000Then they go into these mixed spaces where they use ayahuasca.
03:04:41.000So the first year of this study, and this was funded by Christian Engermeyer, who started to tie the lead investor in Compass.
03:04:51.000But he said he's not all about money, he's also about peace.
03:04:55.000And so the first year was interviews of these Israelis and Palestinians, why they did it, and what were their experiences.
03:05:03.000And so we were just recently publishing a paper that Lior wrote about that.
03:05:07.000One of the beautiful moments was this person said, an Israeli, that whenever he heard Arabic music, that it made him tense up.
03:05:30.000And he said, in this state of mind, in this ayahuasca state of mind, that there's no Israelis, there's no Palestinians, there's just human, and I could see the beauty of this Arabic music.
03:05:43.000And so what we like to joke, but it's not so much of a joke, is that we're going to work on the easy case of Israelis and Palestinians, and then if it works, we're going to come to America to work with Republicans and Democrats.
03:05:57.000So the psychedelics have so many different potential uses.
03:06:03.000And so when you have these traumatized – that's why in Rwanda, you know, we've been approached by people who want to bring MDMA to Rwanda where the Hutus and the Tutsis did massive genocide against – oh, sorry.
03:06:36.000Yeah, so we do have this idealistic hope, in a way, that psychedelics can help people to see through their traumas, to see people that they're scared of as humans, the same way you were talking about with criminals.
03:06:52.000You know, if there's some way that we can see them as humans as have been wounded, if we can have compassion for them, if we can have compassion for people that have different political views.
03:07:02.000Well, it's remarkable that there actually are compounds that promote empathy and that these are illegal.
03:07:08.000Well, did you hear about the octopus study?
03:07:58.000And so Gould was interested to know, what does MDMA do to an octopus?
03:08:05.000So there's, you know, neuroscientists do a lot of animal studies.
03:08:08.000So they have an experimental procedure where there's an octopus in a container and there's two doors.
03:08:17.000One goes to an inanimate object that's kind of put in a birdcage kind of thing so it can't move.
03:08:25.000The other door leads to another octopus that's also in this birdcage that it can't move.
03:08:30.000And so the octopus that's put in this timber can go either way.
03:08:34.000And no matter how you switch the genders, the octopus will spend way more time with the inanimate object.
03:08:42.000It will stay away from the other octopus.
03:08:44.000But when it's with the other octopus, it's around the perimeter.
03:08:48.000It doesn't really engage with the other octopus.
03:08:52.000So it took a while for her to figure this out, but how much MDMA? We sent them the MDMA. But she puts the MDMA in the water, soaks the octopus in this water, and the octopus absorbs the MDMA. And then you put the octopus back in this chamber,
03:09:12.000and now they spend way more time with the other octopus, and when they're there, they're touching the tentacles and they're engaging with this other octopus.
03:09:22.000So what she felt it does is, we know that kids, when you're young, you can learn languages easier.
03:09:34.000So what Gold thinks is happening is that MDMA opens up a critical reward period for social reward learning, that you now can become more social.
03:09:44.000And that, I think, is what we see also in humans.
03:09:47.000So MDMA has this ability to promote connection and to promote empathy and to promote interest and understanding.
03:09:57.000Some people said ecstasy is not the right word for MDMA. It should be called empathy.
03:10:04.000Now, Ghul also did work with mice, and she gives mice a bunch of MDMA. And what she showed then, and mice shall then chop them up afterwards and look at their brains, but MDMA releases oxytocin, which is this hormone of love connection,
03:10:20.000and then it produces new neural connections.
03:10:26.000So there's the new connections with other neurons in prosocial areas of the brain.
03:10:34.000So you are actually rewiring your brain.
03:10:38.000And there is this way where you process memories differently, and this neuroplasticity can account for the long-term benefits from MDMA. That's been done with psilocybin about neuroplasticity.
03:10:57.000That psilocybin also can promote neural connections.
03:11:17.000Big rewards, you know, and the Stanley Cup a couple times.
03:11:22.000But he's working also affiliated in a way with Mike Tyson.
03:11:27.000He's got a company called WeSana, which is going to try to develop psilocybin with cannabinoids and potentially adding MDMA for traumatic brain injury.
03:11:37.000So fighters and people that have been You know, in wars, people have been blast exposures.
03:11:42.000So it looks like there's a good chance that there can be...
03:11:49.000Recovery from TBI. So there was this documentary, HBO Sports, and they had one segment of it that was just on psychedelics.
03:12:00.000And so, you know, we were featured about MDMA, but Daniel was also about this concoction of psilocybin microdosing and cannabinoid CBD and other things.
03:12:11.000And so it does seem like other psychedelics also have this way to rewire the brain, and it may be helpful for TBI, for traumatic brain injury, as well as PTSD. And a lot of the vets and others have both.
03:12:25.000You have TBI and PTSD. So as we are thinking about how do we raise this roughly $150 million, $50 million a year for three years, We've got several basic ways.
03:12:37.000We want to do it through philanthropy.
03:12:38.000We want to be able to still prioritize public benefit.
03:12:43.000We're concerned if we take loans or investments, then we'd have to give returns.
03:12:58.000But we may partner with other companies that want to develop other indications for MDMA. So this one company, Wisana, is interested in partnering with us, and we're just in the early stages of exploring.
03:13:09.000Well, what if people just want to donate?