Dr. Rick Doblin is the founder of the psychedelic research organization, MAPS, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. In this episode, Dr. Doblin talks about the history of psychedelic research, the importance of psychedelics in the modern world, and the role psychedelics have played in shaping the way we think about psychedelics and their impact on our understanding of the world. He also talks about what it means to be a psychedelic researcher and how important it is to be involved in psychedelic research. This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg and Annie-Rose Strasser. It was edited by Rachel Ward. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. We'd like to learn a little more about you, the listeners. Please take a few minutes to fill out this brief survey. We'll see if we can figure out what questions you had about the show and what you'd like us to know more about it in the next episode. Thanks for listening and share it on your socials! Timestamps: 1:00 - What do you think of LSD? 2:30 - What are your thoughts on psychedelics? 3:40 - How do you feel about LSD and psychedelic research? 4:10 - What would you like to see more of it? 5:00 6:00 | What are you looking forward to in the future? 7:15 - What's your favorite kind of psychedelic experience? 8: What kind of drugs? 9:00 / 10: What are some of your thoughts? 11:00 // 11: what would you want to see me try? 12:30 13:30 / 13:40 15:30 // 16:40 / 15:40 // 15:00 +16:00/16:30 +17: Is it possible? 17:00 & 17:20 16: What is your favorite type of drug experiment? 19:20 / 16: Is there something you're looking for? 21: Do you think I should be legalized? 14: What do I think I would like to have in the most psychedelic? 18: Does it have a place in my life right away? 15 + 16:30 & 15:20 + 17:10 15,000 / 17:50
00:01:11.000Well, you guys are so important when it comes to the dialogue of psychedelics, because from an outsider, this is how I always viewed MAPS. MAPS is always like, oh, those are the actual really smart dudes who are into psychedelics, because there's so many wacky fuckers out there in the world of psychedelics,
00:01:30.000and they want to bring you crystals and talk to you about channeling, and I know a healer, and there's so much going on that's so crazy.
00:01:46.000And you guys were pursuing it the right way.
00:01:49.000And I was like, ooh, these guys are so important.
00:01:51.000Because there's not a lot of people that...
00:01:53.000That's one of the weird things about psychedelics.
00:01:55.000You could tell people that you went out and drank whiskey until your feet went numb and you shit your pants and no one cares.
00:02:01.000But if you tell people that you got together with some friends and you took a naturally occurring psychedelic drug and you explored your consciousness and you're so much happier now and you feel better about life and you're more optimistic, if you do that, you're some fucking wacky hippie druggie.
00:02:20.000And so we've got this coming out, and we've looked at other social change movements like gay marriage and gay rights, and it comes from people coming out.
00:02:29.000Because there are loads of smart people that do psychedelics or, you know, talented or emotionally wise.
00:03:15.000It would be like real straight-laced, Republican, Trump-supporting.
00:03:19.000Yeah, so the innovation and psychedelics and marijuana and looking at things in different ways, people are getting to appreciate that, I think, more.
00:03:57.000Actually, tomorrow is the 30th year that I started MAPS in 1986. And we're asking people to, in their own homes or with their friends, to invite people over and then have them tell stories of what psychedelics have meant to them or what their hopes are for psychedelic research.
00:04:17.000So you're inviting everyone to do it, like, to make a night of it?
00:04:49.000And then it hopefully helps people to come out even more.
00:04:53.000I mean, we even have like a Twitter, it's a hashtag psychedelics because.
00:04:59.000And so people can write in and just say psychedelics matter to me because, you know, I'm more hopeful or I'm, you know, feeling that multi-generational trauma can be addressed.
00:05:12.000Isn't that incredible that that is one of the best things for it is MDMA. One of the best things as far as getting over traumatic experiences is an illegal drug.
00:05:22.000Yeah, and yet there's a carved out area that we've been able to make legal, which is the research area, and it's because science is the vehicle in our culture that we trust, more our religion than our religions, and so it felt like science and healing were the ways into the culture that was freaked out by psychedelics in the 60s,
00:05:43.000and now because of these Crises we're in and also these tools that can be shown to be really helpful and that people have made lives out of them that it's not hurt them, it's helped them.
00:05:57.000So that's where we think the research is helping people create a space where they can talk about it.
00:06:04.000I think it's people are starting to understand the true nature of these things instead of the propaganda and they're doing it from people like yourself being really honest about their experiences and People like yourself even more importantly because there's not a lot of people like you that have actually gone out and pursued all the significant scientific data On psychedelics and the beneficial properties to it.
00:06:28.000So that we can understand, like, we have this idea about a thing.
00:07:43.000And they presented results that suggested that there was heavy marijuana smokers that started early in their lives.
00:07:53.000This was done in New Zealand over a 20-year period, had some differences, lower IQs than their control groups.
00:08:01.000Well, if you're talking about people that are smoking marijuana heavily, one of the things that I would say is that if you're smoking marijuana heavily, you're not going to do a whole lot of thinking.
00:09:42.000It makes sense, too, because I don't play basketball, but I play pool, and one similarity they share is that it's about touch and feel, and that touch and feel is way enhanced.
00:09:53.000A lot of the best pool players also smoke pot.
00:10:13.000But these guys, like they say that when they're...
00:10:17.000Smoking pot and playing you can like see things better you have a better sense of where the ball is going you have more sensitivity as far as how far it rolls yeah I used to play racquetball a lot and handball and a lot and sometimes I would play stoned and sometimes I when I was you you did have that deeper sense of being in the moment you were just one step instant more into the moment as and predicting and knowing and just But there was an unpredictability
00:10:49.000So I could never really tell if I would play better or worse.
00:10:55.000Well, that's probably why you play good, because you're never sure and you stayed on the edge.
00:11:01.000You know, there's an ego-dissolving quality of any of these psychoactive substances, and I think that ego-dissolving quality gives you more space to move around with all your other focuses.
00:11:15.000That's my theory about it, because I always felt like with jujitsu, you definitely feel better at jujitsu when you're high, and I was trying to figure out why.
00:11:24.000Well, you also feel like Somehow or another, you feel more vulnerable, yet you do better.
00:11:32.000Like you're more like kind of freaked out by any aggression or more trying to avoid any sort of conflict.
00:11:40.000That's what the driving studies of marijuana and drivers show.
00:11:44.000That people know that they're slightly impaired and they take defensive measures.
00:12:23.000Yeah, although I think the idea we need to do is more move to performance tests rather than drug tests, and then that's really directly what you're concerned about, and then you leave people's behaviors to themselves, but you check their real performance, not these indicators or predictors.
00:12:41.000Yeah, from my personal experience, there's a big difference between how you understand and operate under it as a Like, someone who's been smoking pot for, like, 15 years versus someone who's been smoking pot for, like, a week or a month or even a year.
00:12:59.000Like, there's a difference in sometimes your ability to handle being really high.
00:13:03.000Like, your anxiety takes hold of you because you're like, oh my god, and you start freaking out.
00:13:08.000Then you can't drive, you can't do anything.
00:13:11.000And then there's people that are just OGs.
00:13:44.000Again, if you can just focus on performance, it takes a while to get used to it.
00:13:50.000My point was the performance varies considerably depending upon the individual.
00:13:54.000So I don't think you can even do an across-the-board performance test, like say, oh, we've shown that this guy under five joints can do BMX flips.
00:14:03.000Because a lot of those BMX dudes, they can do that shit drunk, too.
00:14:07.000Yeah, it has to be an individual examination.
00:14:10.000Yeah, the part that I really liked about exercising and playing racquetball with marijuana is that sometimes it would be so easy to forget the score.
00:14:20.000And then you realize you're not really playing for the score.
00:15:50.000I think the bigger question is, if it's true, then what?
00:15:54.000And that's what I've tried to look at.
00:15:56.000And so for me, if it's true that there's aliens from here somewhere else that are here, what would I do differently in my life?
00:16:03.000Do I really need to solve that mystery, which doesn't seem very compelling and doesn't seem likely, but I think it's a way to be connected to something broader.
00:16:24.000I think other people have definitely thought this up.
00:16:26.000That there's some sort of a connection between people that don't want to believe in religion.
00:16:31.000I don't want to believe in any sort of ancient ideologies, but they desperately want some superior.
00:16:39.000And so they reach out to the skies and some of them get fixated on the idea of maybe even they have been personally visited because it makes them more significant.
00:16:50.000It gives their life a bit more meaning.
00:17:04.000And so you get these people that are kind of delusional.
00:17:06.000And when you look at the sheer, raw numbers of people in this country, and then you look at the UFO stories and go, how many of these people could be delusional?
00:17:20.000And that was the cold hard thing that we got to on that sci-fi show.
00:17:25.000Because it doesn't discount the possibility of, definitely not of extraterrestrial life, and definitely not of people being visited.
00:17:32.000It's entirely possible that extraterrestrial life has visited Earth, observed dust, and there was a unique Unique moment where someone was there and witnessed it and maybe even was in contact with them and then they took off and they were gone and they never returned again that is entirely possible because that's entirely what we would do If we could just go from planet to planet,
00:17:54.000as dumb as we are now, if we could just go from planet to planet and do studies, fuck yeah we would do it!
00:18:00.000And if we found an intelligent life form that was more primitive than us, like cave people, like some 2001 shit with the monolith, you know?
00:18:09.000If we found something like that, you don't think we'd go say hi?
00:18:14.000And then we'd jet back off at our fucking sleep machine off into the skies.
00:18:18.000We would do exactly what we think they would do.
00:18:20.000Well, you could make the case that we already know by looking at these tribes in the Amazon that are as if living cavemen without much contact.
00:18:29.000And we try more and more now just to let them alone.
00:18:32.000Yeah, but you go there, they're wearing Nikes.
00:18:34.000You go there, you just have fucking Kobe Bryant t-shirts on.
00:19:05.000A bunch of people can say that, but they wanted to see...
00:19:09.000What a friend of mine who was helping them with their sheep was using because it seemed to help him get stronger and it was MDMA. With sheep?
00:19:20.000When they would go off and do peyote ceremonies somewhere else, he would tend to their animals.
00:20:40.000And she came to mediate during this MDMA experience, and it became clear that this was really for her.
00:20:52.000Not so much for them, for them to show their 17-year-old, who was torn between the different cultures, that something about our culture we wanted what they had, or we saw and respected it.
00:21:05.000And a lot happened, and it was wonderful in all different ways, and there were some important healings, but in the morning when we were going, this young woman uh was going to get back on her horse and she had 17 magazine whoa and was reading it and that's where i started figuring out that you know even out in the reservation in these protected cultures that
00:21:35.000this globalization of ideas and internet and podcasts and people are being exposed to ideas that they wouldn't have normally been exposed to even in china i mean they're having to do so much to kind of censor stuff Yeah, there's an explosion of thinking and ideas going on right now.
00:21:54.000It's a very strange, strange time when it comes to that.
00:21:58.000And I think people are getting unsettled because things they had thought were true and rigid and part of their frameworks are different in other places.
00:22:06.000How many people speak Navajo exclusively?
00:22:39.000Like, there's something to their accent that just...
00:22:42.000I guess it's like we're programmed to think of Native Americans as like spiritual and authentic.
00:22:49.000You know, there's like this sound to it.
00:22:51.000Like, do you remember that scene with Clint Eastwood?
00:22:54.000Was it the outlaw Josie Wales where he met that Indian chief and they got together and these are my words of life and also my words of death.
00:23:09.000It's like one of my favorite moments in a movie.
00:23:11.000I mean, those Clint Eastwood movies were all ridiculous, right?
00:23:14.000Like, when you stop and look at it, they're all ridiculous.
00:23:17.000But there was something to that genre, that spaghetti western genre, because It wasn't just that there were cool action movies, but it was cool action movies that were in some ways reminding you of how people lived just a hundred years ago.
00:23:36.000Because these were all in the 1960s and 70s and shit, right?
00:23:41.000That's when they did these fucking movies.
00:23:45.000In 1870, they were riding fucking horses everywhere.
00:23:49.000I mean, this literally is a hundred years old.
00:23:53.000You know, 1865, they abolished slavery.
00:23:55.000We're only talking about a hundred years, and this cowboy western shit was going on.
00:24:00.000And for us, it almost like harkens to a time right before we fucked up the country.
00:24:07.000Right when the first marauders on wooden wheels rolled their platforms covered in tarp across the entire continent to find a spot to have babies.
00:24:19.000Not that it was like this perfect paradise before we got here.
00:24:36.000It's nothing to take away from their cultures.
00:24:38.000I'm fascinated by Native American culture.
00:24:41.000It's just an amazing place that they existed on and for so long without any European influence while all this stuff was going on in the world.
00:24:51.000They were living here in a very, very different way.
00:24:53.000In a lot of ways, an intensely harmonious way with their environment, with nature itself.
00:24:58.000And I think we look at that and we have all these deep spiritual attachments to that.
00:25:21.000Part of the question, I think for me, with psychedelics and, you know, therapy is, is there a way to get that out of the human heart in a way?
00:25:30.000I think the way to get it out is the way that it's getting out right now.
00:25:52.000And they looked at each other and there was not enough communication.
00:25:54.000They couldn't interact with each other instantaneously.
00:25:57.000They couldn't get to understand each other.
00:25:59.000Like, we've talked about this on this podcast before, but it wasn't until, like, about 100 years ago where a boat showing up didn't mean...
00:26:45.000But we're experiencing each other on a much more even playing field than ever in the past.
00:26:51.000And I think that's how we can exist with so many of us.
00:26:54.000Yeah, and I think if we can see that really we're all more in common than we have different and we can appreciate the differences rather than be fearful of them and that what we have in common is this fundamental sense of connection of being this web of life that really we're not virtually we're pretty similar to animals you know we're way close to people with different skin or different cultures to be able to see that that is
00:27:26.000who we really are and that acting from that and trying to work on cooperative solutions and I think that if we can have lots of people having these direct experiences so that they can't be manipulated by politicians so it's about grounding this kind of globalization but comfort with the sense of connection that we're Able
00:27:57.000to find these bonds that they do exist and that they can be built.
00:28:01.000I think one of the things that we're seeing in this extreme oversensitivity that we're experiencing right now, this is like a really interesting time as far as like PC culture and what you can do and what you can't do and cultural appropriation.
00:28:17.000I mean, people are going after people for cooking Mexican food that aren't Mexican.
00:28:21.000Yeah, we're trying to call that guy cultural appropriation.
00:28:24.000We're trying to take ayahuasca out of the ayahuasca rituals and out of the jungles and turn it into a therapy drug.
00:29:56.000What cultural appropriation is, is like, say if these Native Americans had a specific style of clothing that you, if you wore it, you were a shaman.
00:30:06.000And you were a sacred person or you had a headdress that you wore during very intense spiritual ceremonies.
00:30:12.000And someone just started wearing that for fun.
00:30:15.000Someone thought it was cool to wear that for fun.
00:30:17.000Well, then it becomes offensive and that's cultural appropriation.
00:30:23.000Ritual, this very important sacred ritual, and this one part of that ritual, you are defacing, you're mocking it openly, and it's offensive to them, it hurts them.
00:30:34.000That's culture appropriation, and I agree that I think if someone has something that's sacred, like a headdress or something that they specifically wear, and then you walk around and wear it, that's kind of a dick move, right?
00:31:44.000Well, there was a class at leadership at the Kennedy School.
00:31:47.000It was taught by the only psychiatrist on the faculty, Ron Heifetz.
00:31:53.000And that was a big concept, was that, you know, as a leader, there's just so much work avoidance being done in different ways.
00:32:00.000And how do you help people focus on the issues that are...
00:32:06.000Tearing them apart or that they're avoiding but would be better if they try to work on it and you know that word work is weird because work avoidance Doesn't just mean like actual work like working on your job.
00:32:16.000It could be working on yourself You know, it could mean, like, there's a lot of people that get involved in wacky behavior because they also are addicted to cigarettes and maybe they drink too much.
00:32:27.000So they start getting addicted to wacky behavior as well, not just as a side effect of the drugs, but also to distract them from dealing with the work.
00:33:41.000And then you sit down and you stare at that computer screen or you stare at the notebook and you do the writing that you were really trying to put off.
00:33:48.000It's hard for people to do, though, because a lot of times your brain is very wishy-washy, and we savor our choices.
00:33:53.000We savor our ability to open up our websites and just start going, oh, what's going on on dig.com today?
00:34:13.000It's such a weird thing to be terrified of.
00:34:15.000What really put me at ease was one professor when I was working on my dissertation at the Kennedy School at Harvard, and I just had this idea that you had to have it so good, you know, to be worthy.
00:34:42.000But I said to him, you know, should I, because you're so busy, should I just work through with the other professors and then just give it to you in the final phase just for you to read over?
00:34:54.000And he said, no, give it to me in the junk phase, because that's when your comments are the most important.
00:37:07.000It's something I've been using for years.
00:37:08.000It's this program that you can set it up, I think you can set it up a bunch of different views, but the one I like, it looks like a cork board.
00:37:16.000So you have like index cards and you can write on index cards.
00:39:08.000I like tweeting because you only get 140 text characters.
00:39:13.000Those 140 characters, I think that's good because it makes you economize, and it makes you edit, and it makes you a better joke writer in a lot of ways.
00:40:52.000Like I said, it's so important to balance out People like me.
00:40:56.000You want to balance out people like me, you know?
00:40:59.000Well, we're in this stage of what I'm considering our major reality check of our 30 years of existence, and that's submitting the data from MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, these Phase II studies that we've been working on for the last 15 years,
00:41:16.000and submitting that to, first off, to our FDA consultants and then to FDA about going to the next step.
00:41:24.000About going from exploratory studies to studies that if they work, then you get approval as a prescription medicine, as a prescription treatment.
00:41:34.000So we're bringing all of these data points that we've gotten.
00:41:41.000Roughly, just in this bunch of studies, around $7 million studies, over 105 people, and what we're able to tell is a story about risk and a story about benefit for post-traumatic stress disorder from any cause with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy as compared to A placebo and also from the literature and working with people who have failed on other medications.
00:42:09.000It's a weird subjective subject, isn't it?
00:42:13.000Like how people feel, how do you feel about, you know, your life?
00:42:17.000Because it's assisted psychotherapy, like how much of an impact specifically can you attribute to the drug?
00:42:50.000So the first point is if you can do this with the therapy without the drug then why do you need the drug?
00:42:57.000But there's so many variables when it comes to therapy as well, right?
00:43:00.000Like the relationship between the therapist and the patient.
00:43:03.000Yeah, there's so many variables and ranges of individual responses.
00:43:06.000So there's these massive tables, statistical tables for sample size calculations that help you figure out On the basis of all these assumptions, how many people you need in this study to get statistically significant results.
00:43:37.000Richard Branson starts dishing out MDMA. Then we got a party.
00:43:40.000There are support that we're getting that makes me very hopeful about our ability to raise the money for Phase 3. We think it's going to cost around $24 or $5 million.
00:43:59.000Yeah, well, the consequences, if it works, is that then we can start setting up psychedelic psychotherapy clinics for MDMA for PTSD. We can start negotiating with the VA and the Department of Defense with their hundreds and Hundreds of thousands of dollars.
00:44:20.000Last year was about $6 billion that the VA spent in disability payments for about 600,000 veterans that are disabled to some degree with PTSD. Just for PTSD? Just for PTSD,
00:45:06.000What we've been able to show what we say in this...
00:45:09.000A group of 105 people is that, and this is PTSD for many cause, not just war, but childhood sexual abuse or rape or workplace accident, trauma of any kind, that a substantial percentage of these people can have significant improvement.
00:45:28.000And how that's evaluated is, fortunately for us, there is a Independent rater administered scale for symptoms of PTSD. And it's called the CAPS,
00:45:45.000It's the gold standard developed by the VA, used by the FDA to approve Zoloft and Paxil for PTSD. And it's just been revised from CAPS IV to CAPS V. So it's a work in progress over decades.
00:46:07.000their story to an independent rater and the way that the independent rating system is going to be done is going to be a whole pool of them that are calibrated with each other inter-rater reliability and they know how to administer this and they're randomly assigned to what we think will be about two hundred and thirty people for one phase three study that's probably what we're going to be proposing And we need two of those studies,
00:46:36.000And what we're going to have is these raters will be randomly assigned to one of the subjects, and they won't necessarily know, is this the one-year follow-up, the two-month follow-up that really is the primary outcome measure or the baseline?
00:46:53.000So the independent raters are really important because for skeptical people in science, the double blind is a key development.
00:47:02.000How you do an experiment, you shouldn't know the two conditions.
00:47:07.000You shouldn't know which is the experimental one and which isn't because your biases might make you subtly see what you want to see.
00:47:38.000of this research and that's why these independent raters are even more important for people to have confidence in the results.
00:47:46.000And what we've tried is a series of studies giving low-dose MDMA and comparing it to medium and full dose.
00:47:54.000And so the idea we thought was that if people are confused about which dose they're getting, But then we can show a dose-response relationship, then that's the double-blind.
00:48:05.000That's the solution to the double-blind problem, is that everybody knows they're getting MDMA, but they don't know what dose they're getting.
00:48:13.000And so you have to show the people that get the higher dose do better than the people that get the lower dose.
00:48:18.000And the people, patients might not know, therapists could be confused.
00:48:27.000And that's what we've spent the last 10 years or so researching with different low doses of MDMA, 25 milligrams, 30 milligrams, 40 milligrams, 75 milligrams, 100, and 125. And we would always have this possibility of half the initial dose administered one and a half to two and a half hours later to prolong the experience and make it an eight-hour therapy session.
00:48:55.000So when these people are getting this ecstasy, they're getting it, or MDMA, they're getting it in a clinical setting?
00:49:00.000Yeah, they're getting it in a clinical setting.
00:49:05.000Three times, three to five weeks apart.
00:49:10.000It's a three and a half month therapy process of weekly psychotherapy.
00:49:14.000So the emphasis is on the psychotherapy, the preparation, the therapeutic alliance, and then after three weeks there's the initial MDMA session.
00:49:27.000And it takes place in a special treatment center Treatment room where there's a male-female co-therapist team with the person.
00:49:38.000The person, the patient, is having their blood pressure monitored.
00:49:41.000They're having their temperature monitored.
00:49:43.000They're being videotaped, the whole thing.
00:49:45.000And there's videotapes on the therapist as well.
00:49:47.000We're trying to understand about the method.
00:49:49.000And the experiment, this portion of it, this session, is about eight hours.
00:50:17.000So in order to train therapists, the best way to train therapists is to show here's videotapes of actual patients under MDMA, and this is how they're It's poetry.
00:50:50.000And this is what I felt with the Native Americans when we did MDMA with the...
00:50:55.000in the peyote circle that they had these elaborate rituals that you know went through the whole night that were beautiful and filled with these rich symbols but then they went so they did some of their opening prayers and they want to know what we're gonna do and we didn't have anything it was like well we just sit around and somebody says it's kind of a more freeform it felt that we had like a poverty of ritual but also freedom To
00:51:52.000And different people will sometimes go to the trauma first, or not talk about it until the fifth hour, or they'll go to child experiences that were supportive to build strength, or they'll But often it's in the symbolic language and they're sort of telling themselves a story.
00:52:12.000And that story can reorder the neural networks in the brain and de-emphasize activity in certain fear centers of the amygdala.
00:52:23.000And can change how memories are stored.
00:52:26.000We're just sending MDMA to Rockefeller University, where one of the leading scientists in anxiety is going to start some studies in animals, mice, rats, I'm not sure which, and trying to look at fear extinction and memory reconsolidation and how MDMA affects that.
00:53:41.000It changes how the memory, every time you have a memory, you have to consolidate from different parts of your brain, then you re-consolidate the memory.
00:53:50.000Yeah, that's why people have weird false memories, right?
00:53:57.000But it's a memory of a memory that you're retelling.
00:53:59.000It's almost like if someone you know that had a story and they did something and they told it to you and then you tell your friends about that story, that how, hey, I know Bob's story.
00:55:01.000And so when you can feel peaceful and then bring up the memories, and then because you're feeling peaceful, people remember even better.
00:55:11.000You know what you guys should really do if you really want to prove the effectiveness of MDMA? You should go to worldstarhiphop.com and find all those people that got fucked up and give them ecstasy and see if it helps.
00:55:24.000Because there's so many people that got Hunted in the head and thrown off a fucking building.
00:55:45.000The idea of being able to better process trauma is universally appealing.
00:55:49.000I think all of us have had bad moments in our life that you probably overcome, and you probably have some character because of those moments, but it would be nice if you had a full handle on how it makes you feel.
00:56:02.000Yeah, and that's where this memory enhancement comes in handy, because then you can really learn from what happened.
00:56:08.000Can I ask you how you chose MDMA out of all the different psychoactive substances?
00:56:16.000I felt that MDMA had a chance of being Welcomed into the culture as the first of the different psychedelics because it has that fear-reducing.
00:56:35.000It doesn't make you feel like you're losing control.
00:56:39.000It makes it so that you feel a subtle shift of openness to Self-acceptance, self-love, and this just self-acceptance, I think, is like the core of it.
00:57:16.000I think that's part of the muscles relaxing, that Part of your tension, or it's tense because of parts of your brain.
00:57:24.000So that the way in which you can then have this full memory when you're feeling peaceful, and you're looking at it as if it's happened in the past, which it did.
00:57:37.000So you finally have got this perspective on it.
00:57:40.000This peace makes it so that you're not seeing it as happening right now.
00:57:44.000Because you realize it's not happening right now.
00:57:48.000And so you're creating this longer, different kind of memory storage of something that was clearly in the past, and it's connected now to this reflective, peaceful tone.
00:58:00.000So when the memory is reconsolidated, The next time you call it, you get the incident, but you get the emotional tone of this peacefulness and that it's in the past.
00:58:13.000And so you can do work within a period of minutes sometimes or hours of seeing a shift and looking at something differently and processing these traumatic memories.
00:58:27.000It's rare, but one person was in our study and he dropped out after just one session.
00:58:34.000He's like, and part of what he got, Tony Macy is his name, was one of the vets.
00:58:42.000Part of what he got was that he had been telling himself that he was on opiates for pain, for injuries, but that he was starting to realize it was really more of an escapism and that he didn't need them and he didn't need drugs and he didn't need MDMA either.
00:59:18.000And so he wouldn't qualify for PTSD at the two-month.
00:59:22.000And then when it got closer to the one year, which is our last follow-up, he started...
00:59:27.000Saying, well, you know, I'm still feeling pretty okay, but I think I could learn more from MDMA. Maybe can I have now some more of these sessions?
00:59:35.000And we said, well, it's a rigid protocol.
00:59:39.000But let's just wait and see if you even would qualify to be in the study, if you even have PTSD. So he did the 12-month follow-up, and he didn't have PT. He wouldn't even qualify to be in a study.
00:59:48.000But he still wanted to get some ecstasy off you.
00:59:50.000Because there's other things to learn.
01:00:13.000So that means everybody that comes, you've got to look at their data, even if they drop out or they lied to get in the study or they wouldn't have qualified or whatever it is.
01:00:22.000Once you have enrolled somebody, that's the more conservative.
01:01:26.000And you can approach people in this really weird, open way.
01:01:30.000Where you're not constantly ready to judo whatever kind of bad shit they're sending your way.
01:01:35.000So many people, when they communicate, they always have some sort of a wall up or some sort of a barrier between their real feelings and what they're projecting.
01:01:46.000So that they can sort of figure out how to navigate this conversation with the least amount of social damage.
01:01:53.000There's like a zen to some styles of communication, like this way of going through it.
01:02:02.000With having the least amount of conflict in your life.
01:02:06.000But if everybody was on ecstasy, that would be the vibe.
01:02:10.000There's a vibe that you get, and I'm not saying everybody should do it, but what I'm saying is there's a vibe that you get when you're communicating on ecstasy.
01:02:17.000It makes it almost impossible to have arguments with people.
01:02:22.000You communicate with people in this open way that you would never even attempt if you weren't both on MDMA. Yeah, we actually have a study starting in the next month or so where we're going to give two people MDMA at the same time to a couple.
01:02:51.000A major, major breakthrough because the first study with psychedelics was in the modern era was 1990 with Rick Strassman with a DMT study.
01:03:02.000And ever since then, now for the past 26 years, it's only been one person getting MDMA or psilocybin or LSD or anything at a time.
01:03:12.000So this is the first time that we've been able to work with two people at a time and give them MDMA. And it's also the study that's in informal collaboration with the Veterans Administration National Center for PTSD. It's a therapist that used to work within the National Center who's now at Ryerson University in Toronto who developed this approach.
01:03:34.000And who was introduced to us through the work of Richard Rockefeller, who was opening the doors for us with the National Center for PTSD. And we met this woman, Candace Monson, who's the researcher.
01:03:47.000And she's developed what's called cognitive behavioral conjoint therapy.
01:03:53.000And so it's a cognitive behavioral sort of scripted how you kind of think about your trauma and exercises about it, but it's for couples.
01:04:03.000And so when they were thinking how to blend MDMA with traditional non-drug psychotherapies that are used by the VA, The couples therapy they thought would be the most logical because it helps you to have those kind of communications.
01:04:22.000And the PTSD really does affect the relationship in a lot of ways.
01:04:27.000And the researchers have all these measures of the relationship, of the style of communication between the people.
01:04:35.000We really care about the CAPS, the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale.
01:04:41.000But it's going to be tremendously exciting, and we've been able to get permission for the first time to give two people MDMA, and we'll be able to monitor that.
01:04:49.000But couples therapy, even though it's a tremendous use of MDMA, will never make it through the FDA because you can only take diseases.
01:05:12.000If there's something wrong and you have a substance that makes that wrong better, why does something wrong have to be something you look at in a petri dish?
01:05:38.000Yeah, it will be one of the best uses of MDMA. I mean, that's like making toothpaste illegal.
01:05:44.000It's like, you know, unless you have like a serious dental disorder and you really need to clean the holes, you know, like you have like some sort of a horrible root canal that's about to happen.
01:05:56.000It's the idea that you can somehow or another keep people from doing what they want to do.
01:06:01.000That's like at the heart of it all, right?
01:06:05.000And I think that this idea of, again, psychedelics because, hashtag psychedelics because, of coming out of the closet, of people sort of saying that this has been helpful, and that this is something good,
01:06:22.000And I think the eventual use, we're sort of backing into this use in couples, but it's really about making MDMA into a mess for PTSD better.
01:06:34.000And it's also about trying to understand what's the drug and what's the context.
01:06:40.000So while we had this context I was describing of this non-directive therapy of the unconscious being the guide, other people, like cognitive behavioral, they give you all these exercises.
01:06:50.000To think about and how you think about your trauma and where and when your triggers are and all different kind of thought exercises.
01:06:59.000And so we're seeing that MDMA is like a general tool.
01:07:03.000And so because it's a non-profit drug development, we're trying to work with as many other therapists as many other combinations of treatments that they want to use to explore if they want to blend MDMA with it.
01:07:17.000And so we have this 960 grams of some of the world's purest MDMA. Don't tell me where it is.
01:08:45.000It's just infuriating that it's taken this long for people to recognize what other people have said.
01:08:51.000What other people have said for a long time.
01:08:53.000And I understand the idea of having rigorous scientific testing, but at a certain point in time, there should be enough anecdotal evidence and lack of...
01:09:01.000I mean, how many people have died from MDMA? Has anybody?
01:09:07.000Like, what is the LD50? Well, LD50 is a measure where you give a bunch of animals increasing amounts and the amount where you kill half of them.
01:09:23.000The LD50 of MDMA in humans, I don't actually even know that number.
01:09:42.000So MDMA affects your temperature controls, which is one reason we measure temperature, although in therapy, but in a clinical setting lying down, there's no problem with temperature.
01:10:31.000Whether it's legal or illegal, it gets classified.
01:10:34.000And when you make something a drug, and that drug can only be used when there's an ailment, then you lock out the whole possibility of performance-enhancing substances.
01:10:45.000We don't disclude across the board performing-enhancing substances.
01:11:12.000So we have this one performance-enhancing drug.
01:11:14.000Well, ecstasy is probably a performance-enhancing drug as well because it gets rid of some of the bullshit that you've got clogging up your thinking.
01:11:39.000The kind of bad trips people have is when they take MDMA in a recreational setting and difficult emotions come up and they're with friends that just want to party and they try to stuff the emotions down.
01:11:55.000So MDMA can make people worse off, too.
01:11:59.000Well, there's certain people that really shouldn't be allowed to chew gum, and we should take them into account, too.
01:12:04.000There's certain people that are going to stub their toe every time they walk, and I don't think we should nerf the world.
01:12:10.000And I think it's super important to recognize when you're looking at all these numbers and statistics that there is a certain percentage of these people in this world that are helpless.
01:12:19.000You just can't do anything about them.
01:13:50.000Sometimes they would, there's test kits, the dance-safe cells, and sometimes to fool the test kits, which turn a certain color, if there's MDMA in it, there's been pills that are one part MDMA, nine parts caffeine.
01:15:23.000And what my wife said about me was that I wasn't really good at prevention, but I was good at rescue.
01:15:28.000And so that's, for me, prohibition versus public health.
01:15:33.000You know, prevention, you know, prohibition.
01:15:36.000But if we can be good at acknowledging the risks but being prepared for them, the same way that festivals have medical tents and people have all sorts of physical problems.
01:15:44.000Yeah, but the problem is there's not a strict prohibition on dangerous things.
01:15:49.000So the precedent's already been set of freedom.
01:15:52.000That precedent of freedom we would like to extend across the board.
01:15:57.000You can't tell me that I can go to a bar and drink my fucking lungs out and smoke cigarettes all day long and I can take pain pills and I can do all these things, but I can't have a joint.
01:16:31.000That they knew they couldn't make it illegal to be black or illegal to be a hippie, but they could look at the drugs that those groups were using and selectively criminalize and prosecute them and use them to break up those communities.
01:16:43.000And that they knew they were exaggerating the science and that the drug war was a political war against certain kind of drug users who were considered to be a problem to Nixon and Ehrlichman.
01:16:54.000It was something that Ehrlichman said 20 years ago, didn't get that much attention, and he's been dead, I think, 10 years now, but it just came out again in an article, and people are looking at what Ehrlichman said, and it seems intuitively true.
01:17:07.000Intuitively true and just unbelievable how damaging and for how long.
01:17:12.000I mean, it's been going on since 1970. So we're deep here.
01:17:17.000Yeah, but it also triggered into a fear of the unconscious, a fear of the drugs, not just these political parts, but just the drugs themselves and the reasons why they were political.
01:17:28.000Well, also the blanket label of drugs becomes really problematic because you have all these things lumped in together.
01:17:35.000You've got heroin and marijuana in the same categories.
01:17:38.000You've got cocaine and all these things that are so different and to call them all drugs.
01:18:37.000The FDA made their reputation in the early 60s on blocking thalidomide to be prescribed in America for morning sickness for pregnant women because it caused all these thalidomide babies.
01:18:51.000And it was a skeptical woman who ended up winning the President's Medal of Honor, the only person from the FDA, for blocking this drug thalidomide.
01:19:59.000My father was a doctor, a pediatrician.
01:20:03.000Years ago, and he's retired now, but well after I was into doing psychedelics and had dropped out, this is what I was focusing on, he shared with me that he and his medical friends did meth because they were under these ridiculous residencies and they had to work for these really long hours.
01:21:38.000So MDMA is kind of like mescaline in a sense that it has that, which is from peyote, which has this psychedelic ego dissolving and things emerging and nonverbal processing and emotional intensity,
01:21:58.000that it has that from mescaline, but it's not that ego dissolving.
01:22:04.000It's more You're calmer and that has the energy from methamphetamine but not in a jittery way because you can sit still, you can meditate.
01:22:12.000Meditators are now, you know, some of them have learned from MDMA or psilocybin to deepen a meditative practice.
01:22:19.000So you can use these in any number of different ways.
01:22:24.000And so you kind of have this paradoxical culmination of methamphetamine and mescaline that produced, you know, the molecule that does something different but reminiscent.
01:22:34.000And it It is something that I believe that will be used in initially highly controlled therapeutic settings for particular clinical indications and over time, and by over time I mean 10 or 20 years,
01:22:51.000there would be a development of psychedelic clinics like hospice centers Hospice centers spread all over America in 30 years.
01:23:00.000The first one was 1974. 2004, there was 3,500.
01:23:04.000So a place to help people who are at the end of life.
01:23:09.000So these are psychedelic treatment centers to help people do ego death or to die to their old selves or to see more or that these centers will be Developed all over America, I think, over a process of once the drugs are approved,
01:23:25.000and probably MDMA and psilocybin will both be approved around the same time.
01:23:31.000One of the other, you know, in 2021 is our current predictions, and then we'll start elaborating these clinics, and then people will get more and more comfortable to it, so that medicalization precedes legalization, and that's what we've seen with medical marijuana.
01:23:46.000That the culture gets comfortable through this process of now research and use that they can trust, that they see directly, and they see distribution centers that aren't violent, and people see a system and they then...
01:24:03.000The latest poll was 60% of Americans in favor of marijuana legalization.
01:24:20.000And if you look around at the world, the world is under so much stress and the environment is under stress and the cultures are bumping up against each other that we need to have all the tools available to manage...
01:24:32.000The stress, because it's a tremendously crucial time in human history where we have these capabilities through our technology that we never had before to impact planetary systems.
01:24:45.000Well, in a way, these psychedelic drugs are kind of a technology as well.
01:24:48.000They're a technology to get us to understand how our brain is functioning.
01:24:51.000Yes, and there's this confluence of coincidence of timing that Albert Hoffman, who invented LSD, first off created in 1938 and then accidentally ingested it in 1943, felt that the development of nuclear splitting of the atom...
01:25:10.000was occurring contemporaneously with this discovery of LSD and in his view there was this kind of outer technology and this inner technology and that Einstein said the splitting of the atom has changed everything except our mode of thinking and hence we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe what shall be required as a substantially new mode of thinking and Albert Hoffman was like well I do wonder about the The technology,
01:25:41.000which, you know, many people think that if it comes from nature, it's really good.
01:26:08.000Because it's all from something that's on Earth.
01:26:10.000Well, actually, because we're trying to see how we're operating in a public benefit manner and fair trade and all this, I asked the company that's now making us our kilogram of...
01:26:22.000We're having a new kilogram of MDMA made.
01:29:29.000Why does it have to have aluminum foil?
01:29:31.000We went to the FDA, and we said, is there some way we can take this MDMA, which is just as pure as what we're going to get, and turn it into medical grade?
01:29:43.000This is now preparing for prescription MDMA. I understand.
01:29:47.000So you have to take it from every initial ingredient, has to be verified at the source, weighed out, documented, and then you make it, and then it's medical grade.
01:30:09.000Three-year stability studies to show that the MDMA can last three years, even though we have MDMA from 1985 that we're still using, that we have purity studies on throughout the years.
01:33:33.000It's a story of several hundred conquistadors around 1528 trying to link up with Cortez, blown off course in a hurricane, land around Tampa, Florida.
01:33:45.000And of this bunch of hundreds of these conquistadors, only four of them survive.
01:35:56.000Some of them they felt were particularly more talented than others at it, and they ended up with basically the whole groups of Indians, one tribe would take them to the next tribe.
01:36:08.000They had the allegiance of all of these Indians, and they learned to live very humbly.
01:36:12.000They didn't take stuff for themselves.
01:36:14.000They were incredibly good survivors through amazing hardships, and they saw their humanity with the Indians, and they had sort of conquered through love, through these healings, and then they ended up Getting to where the West was, to where Cortes,
01:36:29.000I mean, where the conquistadors were, they finally saw burned-out villages and people as slaves, and they were taken captured themselves.
01:36:36.000And Alvarez Cabez de Vaca went and was taken as prisoner back, and he had to write this report to The king about what happened to the expedition.
01:36:46.000And the black man, Estebanico, he stayed and he traveled up and explored a lot of California and ended up being killed by the natives.
01:36:56.000But the story, Henry Miller wrote a tremendous introduction to this story about the salvation of this westward expansion, the opportunity, what it showed is that through this respect, through whatever circumstances they got,
01:37:12.000they Through cooperation and nonviolence, they had the support.
01:37:48.000If you have time to look at this story of this report.
01:37:53.000Do you recommend a book on the subject?
01:37:55.000Yeah, there's the actual original document that Cabeza de Vaca, Elvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, The Marvelous Adventures of Cabeza de Vaca, I think is the translation of it.
01:38:40.000A lot of people have sort of looked at this story and taken a lot of hope from it that...
01:38:45.000Even though it took a lot of death for these people to get to this attitude, and the Indians were, you know, keeping slaves and killing each other, you know, but they were able to have a different kind of...
01:39:00.000they got off the boat as those, you know, rampaging people, but they transformed into humanists and humble.
01:39:11.000And actually, Cabeza de Baca was able to go on a second expedition To South America.
01:39:16.000He was able to talk his way into it, and he did it.
01:39:19.000He explored more areas than other people did without killing any Indians, and he discovered the Iguazu Falls, where the movie The Mission was made.
01:39:28.000And so he sort of demonstrated that he was a good ambassador between cultures, and tried to still, you know, explore, exploit, but do it in a way of a little bit more collaboration.
01:39:46.000It's really interesting to think of cultures colliding like that.
01:39:50.000Like some crazy people from Spain getting in a boat, getting washed out of their course, and landing in Florida, climbing out, trying to figure out what the hell's going on, getting attacked, attacking people, being at war, and then four dudes make it through that.
01:41:07.000Well, we did a study in Canada with First Nations people who were suffering from addiction because their culture has been under such attack.
01:41:16.000But it was Peruvian, Third World Peruvian shamans bringing ayahuasca to work with First Nations people who were addicted with Dr. Gabor Monte, a Western psychiatrist.
01:41:37.000Accession run by, and then we were able to support the team that did some outcome measures and suggested that this Third World, First World, First Nations people, that these, it's cultural bumping into each other all over now,
01:41:53.000more ever than before in the history of the world probably.
01:43:00.000Well, first off, they have authority in tribal lands, but a lot of people work in the military or do stuff with the federal government.
01:43:06.000So they have the religious freedom to practice the Native American church.
01:43:10.000The U.S. Supreme Court upheld, and as Congress, that they can...
01:43:14.000But the federal government actually tried to limit it so that if you...
01:43:18.000You had to have 25% Indian blood to be part of the Native American church in order to participate in the peyote rituals.
01:43:25.000The states don't have that kind of racial requirement, but to try to prevent the spread of this religion from the Native Americans to wider groups of hippies and others that like peyote, you know, they tried to make a racial...
01:43:39.000The federal government does have this racial limit, but it's largely ignored, and it's ignored by the states.
01:43:44.000That's why white dudes were trying to be Rastafarians.
01:44:16.000The Santo Daime went up to the Ninth Circuit.
01:44:18.000It didn't go to the Supreme Court, but the Uniao de Vegetal.
01:44:21.000I just came from Santa Fe this morning, and that's where the lead church, the Uniao de Vegetal, was located in Santa Fe, and it was Jeffrey Bronfman.
01:44:29.000From the Canadian Jewish Bronfman family from Seagram's fortune, from smuggling alcohol during Prohibition and then building this massive business as one of the grandkids, he ended up becoming appreciative of ayahuasca.
01:44:45.000And so he hired the best lawyers and worked on this case.
01:44:51.000That they won a unanimous Supreme Court case affirming the union of the plants.
01:44:58.000It's two different plants, roots and, you know, vines and leaves.
01:45:57.000I mean, that's how they know that they didn't make it up.
01:46:00.000Ayahuasca is having an incredible effect in America.
01:46:04.000It's really amazing, the number of different people that are using it, not necessarily in these exact religious contexts, but in kind of shamanistic or personal growth or more, or kind of little modified, or even in these services.
01:47:27.000And they're trying to integrate it at a rate where it doesn't, it grows, it's constitutionally protected, but it doesn't grow too fast.
01:47:36.000Maybe there's a way where it could grow too fast, and there wouldn't be the care and the use of the tea, and they want to make sure that it's responsibly handled.
01:47:44.000These are the people that are running your church, meaning they?
01:48:11.000But they got the support of mainstream religions, because there's a lot of weird things that mainstream religions do for cultural practices.
01:48:18.000Well, hasn't a precedent been set with wine?
01:48:36.000There's a lot of weird stuff in religion, and as soon as you start saying that one person can't do their weird stuff, they go, okay, what kind of weird stuff do you got exemptions for?
01:48:44.000And you look at their exemptions, you're like, what?
01:49:35.000I think you have to have a generous spirit, in a way.
01:49:39.000Like, okay, it's Jesus, but it's about reverence.
01:49:44.000And then you kind of generalize in your own...
01:49:46.000We were talking about this the other day, and tell me if this makes any sense to you.
01:49:49.000If you have this idea, when you take...
01:49:52.000I've never done ayahuasca, but I've done DMT on multiple occasions, right?
01:49:59.000So I've had this psychedelic effect, the most potent version of that, right?
01:50:04.000I would wonder if you went in with the intention and had these experiences with the intention to communicate with some benevolent deity that you believe is responsible for all life and all love on the planet.
01:50:19.000Thinking of that as you entered into this dimethyltryptamine state of consciousness Isn't it possible that a vast majority of what is happening when you are having a psychedelic trip is The word the word hallucination is very strange because what the hallucination implies is in this world where we're sitting right here with tables and chairs and rooms Something could you could see it,
01:50:44.000but it could not be real The problem with that is like What are you seeing, and can other people see it too?
01:50:53.000Well, if other people can see it, then it's not a hallucination, right?
01:50:55.000So how do you know what other people are seeing?
01:50:58.000Now, how do you know when you close your eyes and you're on a psychedelic drug, how much of what you're experiencing is your visual cortex interacting with your mind, interacting with these...
01:51:10.000Drugs and your creativity and your consciousness, they're colliding and gliding and dancing together along with your imagination.
01:51:19.000And in this moment, if you go into it with this intention, your imagination can conjure up This Jesus type character in the ayahuasca ceremony and he can be real and he can be what you want him to be and he could be a manifestation of your own experiences in this life that you've carried around as memories and carried around as emotions and that in this psychedelic state if you continually go to it with that intention it's entirely possible that they do experience something
01:51:51.000I think that we see through our own filters, and we see a lot of times what we want to see, and that we can coalesce a lot of feelings and images that are pre-verbal into certain kinds of symbols.
01:52:06.000Well, especially if you're on an insanely potent psychedelic drug.
01:52:11.000Yeah, so the idea that we ever know the ultimate truth, that it's not somehow or other filtered through our preconceptions.
01:52:22.000One of the things he did I thought was great was called Simulations of God.
01:52:25.000And it's like different conceptions that people have of God and how you get to these And then there's a way to transcend that and see something even deeper and deeper, and that we have these filters.
01:52:37.000And so the culture and the context is more important than the drug.
01:52:41.000So I think one of the issues of the 60s was people had so much faith.
01:52:48.000It was such a strife-filled time that they had this hope, this unreasonable hope, that the drugs were enough, that the psychedelics were enough, that they would somehow or other bring this connection to the truth, to this new understanding just by themselves.
01:53:06.000But the context, and with a proper open context, and in our case, a therapeutic context in the experimental sense, then when you add the pharmacology, It produces really unusual opportunities to go very deep.
01:53:23.000And that's what I think we can show, that we can do that and contain it in a regulatory therapeutic healing context that can slowly be accepted by our culture.
01:53:38.000And that that's really the The value proposition that we're presenting to the FDA. See, the way you described it is why maps is so important.
01:53:47.000Because I'm talking about making Jesus exist when you're tripping balls.
01:53:50.000I'm making your own Jesus, like, while you're tripping.
01:53:53.000And you bring it back to studies and science and data and present a paper.
01:54:41.000And so the reason I brought it back in a way to the science is that We're operationalizing its effect on symptoms.
01:54:48.000So whether you have this memory that is actually true, so whether it's Jesus or whether you're remembering childhood sexual abuse, whether that actually...
01:54:58.000I don't like how you tied the two of those together.
01:55:05.000A few things I leaped over there, but whether that...
01:55:10.000Occurred in actuality is an important question for the legal system or for other ways, but from a therapeutic, from a healing, from a compassionate point of view, if this expression, if it's symbolic or actual, if it has the consequence of helping people come to terms with themselves and to get more acceptance about what happened That's what we're looking at.
01:56:23.000And then even with my LSD trips, wanting to see God, wanting to have this clarity and not quite getting it, and then appreciating that, that that was a delusion in some ways, that keeping the uncertainty is keeping integrity.
01:56:40.000But there's that strong longing for that, for certainty.
01:56:44.000Yeah, you're sounding like a dude who's rationalizing that he didn't get to meet God and he's upset.
01:56:48.000If God did show up, the whole thing would be different, right?
01:56:59.000I think there's a real problem in saying you know what other people experience, whether it's under the influence of psychedelic drugs or whether it's completely sober or Well, it's in a meditative state.
01:57:08.000The idea that anybody can tell you what you experienced or what you got out of something is foolish.
01:57:13.000So then it becomes a matter of whether or not we're protecting people.
01:57:16.000So if our laws are designed to protect people, we should do it scientifically.
01:57:20.000We should look across the board at all the damaging things.
01:58:22.000What we should do is make everything legal and then let people figure out what you want to do and not want to do, which is what we do with most things today.
01:58:31.000Most things like cigarettes and alcohol that can kill you, we let you try.
01:58:35.000Because no one should be able to tell you what to do, man.
01:58:37.000If you want to Charles Bukowski it and just drink and smoke yourself to an early grave and just scribble all the cool shit along the way, who gives a fuck?
02:00:36.000And people have a very difficult time...
02:00:39.000Just saying, okay, well those things are things that I'll never do again.
02:00:43.000I made these mistakes and now I am this person who's learned.
02:00:46.000And that's a really hard jump for some people because they need some sort of a memory definition of their patterns of behavior.
02:00:53.000And when the memory definition, when they look in their own memory and everything is just failures and coming up short and missed your rent and car got repossessed, those kind of failures over and over and over again stack up and you define yourself by those failures.
02:01:05.000And it becomes really hard to move forward.
02:01:41.000And MDMA therapy or any sort of a psychedelic experience that's boundary dissolving and ego dissolving and it just gets to the raw heart of the matter and allows you this really intense We're good to go.
02:02:10.000Yeah, there's this beautiful part of accepting oneself and loving oneself even with all of these failures, even with everything that's happened.
02:02:19.000It's not that you deny that it happened or you don't see it.
02:02:22.000It's just this sense that you can relax and feel that self-love, and that is what's so rare.
02:02:29.000And I think that's why MDMA is one of the most popular illegal drugs in the world, and why It needs and will become a medicine.
02:02:40.000And the reason that I selected it is also because training therapists, reaching to the mainstream, so that when we talk about how do we incorporate this as a medicine, it's with healers, it's with doctors and therapists.
02:02:55.000And I think what we've found is that we have FDA permission for a study Where we can administer it to therapists in part of our training program.
02:03:03.000We're studying the psychological effects of MDMA taken by healthy volunteers in a therapeutic setting.
02:03:10.000And it's a double-blind, crossover, placebo-controlled study, but we can bring in therapists from all over the world and give them an MDMA session where they're the patient, and they're seeing our method of how to deliver it.
02:03:21.000And so MDMA is something that I think will have a smoother, easier way into psychiatry and into psychotherapy because of it so gentle, because it...
02:03:33.000Isn't so much ego dissolving as ego clarifying.
02:03:37.000Your defenses are relaxed and you can kind of accept yourself for who you are so you can see more clearly.
02:03:44.000And then how you integrate that and how you make it so that that affects your daily life afterwards.
02:03:53.000I think it's really important you're saying about it being a manageable experience.
02:03:56.000It's one of the most manageable experiences of all the psychedelics because it feels really good.
02:05:01.000Well, it's one of the things that we were talking about with Jamie before this podcast started, before you got here.
02:05:06.000We were saying how ridiculous it is that it takes so long to get things passed and that the government, the DEA, is going to review marijuana in July.
02:05:45.000They're not current accepted medical, and there's no currently accepted safety under medical supervision, and no currently accepted medical use, and high potential for abuse.
02:05:55.000Schedule 2 drug, and these are the most heavily criminalized drugs.
02:05:59.000Schedule 2, except for certain exceptions, in Schedule 2, which are also drugs with a high abuse potential, but have an accepted medical use, like methamphetamine.
02:06:50.000And you talked before about, you know, when do you have enough anecdotal data?
02:06:54.000I believe that we are so capable of fooling ourselves into believing what we want to believe, into seeing Jesus when Jesus might not be there, that we need science.
02:07:02.000We should take marijuana through the drug development system.
02:07:08.000We're about to start a study with marijuana.
02:07:11.000I basically started trying to do drug development research with marijuana in 1992. This is the first time, 2016. So there's no established medical benefits of marijuana that have been proven in any scientific way?
02:07:24.000Yes, there's been a lot of evidence in Phase 2 pilot studies.
02:07:29.000But the definition of real proof is Phase 3 studies, these large-scale studies that you work and negotiate with FDA for the marijuana plant.
02:07:39.000Now, GW Pharmaceuticals is a company in England that grows marijuana, takes extracts, Sativex, it's a THC and CBD combination in a pill.
02:07:48.000And then they also have Epidiolex, which is CBD for childhood epilepsy.
02:07:56.000So there are people working with marijuana extracts in different nonsmoking delivery systems going through the system.
02:08:03.000But the plant itself It's highly effective.
02:08:08.000It doesn't cause lung cancer if you smoke it.
02:08:11.000If you vaporize it, it's even less irritating to lungs.
02:08:18.000There's the possibility that a low-cost plant in Israel right now, they grow high-potency trim buds for 50 cents a gram, $14 an ounce.
02:08:29.000So I think there's public benefit in making the marijuana plant in smoked or vaporized form into a medicine available It's paid for by insurance as an alternative to all these other medicines.
02:08:44.000Six years ago, we started a study for marijuana for PTSD in veterans.
02:08:49.000So we've talked about MDMA, and the idea is to help people with a few MDMA sessions not need MDMA, not need drugs, Sort of reorganize their brain.
02:08:57.000But there's a lot of people with PTSD that find marijuana to be helpful.
02:09:04.000And they're thinking, well, maybe I don't want to do this MDMA or maybe it's a supplement.
02:09:10.000So there's never been a study of marijuana for PTSD. There's been lots and lots of anecdotal reports, hundreds, thousands of people saying that it's helpful in different ways.
02:09:23.000But marijuana is a palliative, meaning that it just treats the symptoms, and it's used usually every day.
02:09:31.000We're about to start the study, and it will take us another several years to finish it.
02:09:38.000Part of it will be at Johns Hopkins, part of it will be in Arizona, 76 veterans with chronic treatment resistant PTSD. And we're testing one sample that's high THC, one that's high CBD, one that's kind of THC-CBD combination, and then one placebo.
02:09:51.000And we got a $2.1 million grant from the state of Colorado to do this study.
02:09:57.000And it's going to be a definitive thing.
02:09:59.000And because, again, we're non-profit, we're giving away the protocol.
02:10:02.000There's no intellectual property like that.
02:10:04.000And so there's a for-profit company, Privateer, that actually has bought the Marley brand, and they have their medical marijuana company, Venture Capital, and they have...
02:10:16.000Tilray, which is a big marijuana production factory in British Columbia, supplies like 5,000 patients.
02:10:24.000They're owned by privateer, and we've given them our marijuana protocol.
02:10:28.000And so they're going to use the study with our study, with the same study design, but with their marijuana.
02:10:33.000And they're going to vaporize, and we're going to smoke.
02:10:35.000And then there's a new study starting in Australia.
02:10:38.000There's this guy whose grandchild had...
02:10:41.000Pediatric epilepsy and nothing helped and then they tried CBD and it stopped the epileptic seizures to a great extent and then the father donated 33 million to the University of Sydney for cannabis research.
02:10:53.000It's the largest grant in the history of the University of Sydney so they're gonna take our protocol and they're going to get marijuana from Tilray but put into capsules as edibles.
02:11:03.000So we're gonna have three different studies Similar in design, but smoked, vaporized, and edibles.
02:11:12.000We're going to combine the data, and so this is the scientific process.
02:11:18.000But it'll take us, it's taken us six years so far just to get the study even started.
02:11:40.000In 1968, Andy Weil actually at Harvard wanted to do a study with marijuana.
02:11:45.000And so the federal government started a farm at the University of Mississippi to grow marijuana for research.
02:11:53.000Ever since then, the National Institute of Drug Abuse has contracts now, and so the University of Mississippi, Professor El Soli, is now in charge.
02:12:02.000They're the only federally licensed, DEA licensed marijuana in America.
02:12:07.000And the FDA is a federal agency, so it can only work with drugs that are federally legal.
02:12:12.000So the only source of marijuana in America that can be used in clinical research is this marijuana controlled by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which has been anti-marijuana, with this contract with the University of Mississippi.
02:12:26.000And we have tried, MAPS has tried, starting in 2000, to break this monopoly.
02:12:31.000And we submitted an application in 2001 with Professor Lyle Craker at UMass Amherst.
02:12:38.000We won a DEA administrative law judge lawsuit.
02:12:40.000The second time I've sued the DEA and won.
02:12:43.000But in the end, they ignore the judges, they ignore the science, and the politics takes over.
02:12:48.000And we lost in the appeals court in 2013. So the way I described it, we have this 960 grams of super pure MDMA, but it's not...
02:13:14.000That there has to be an adequate and uninterrupted supply produced under adequately competitive conditions.
02:13:20.000Well, also, did you factor in the fact of the different strains have different responses?
02:13:25.000Yeah, that's why we're using these different...
02:13:31.000Right, but the government, do they understand there's different strains that are associated with different feelings?
02:13:37.000Only recently have they had any CBD available.
02:13:40.000So GW Pharmaceuticals started in 1998, combining Sativex with THC and CBD. It was up until just last year that the US government could provide marijuana with CBD in it.
02:13:53.000They've not been focused on making these things into medicines.
02:13:56.000It's more low-potency, research into the risks of marijuana, and it's the final next step in the medical marijuana story, is to end the obstruction on privately funded drug development research trying to make the plant into a medicine.
02:14:13.000And that's what, ironically, It's easier to do research with psychedelics than with marijuana to try to make it into a medicine because we control our drug.
02:14:25.000So I'm getting a GMP, MDMA. It's the same stuff we're going to use in phase three that we want to market.
02:14:31.000But the federal government marijuana can only be used in research.
02:14:37.000And because the strains are all so different, we can't show marijuana helps for PTSD with one strain and then just say, oh, give us approval for any other strain.
02:14:46.000So we need to use this, and this is the true for FDA for other botanicals.
02:14:50.000If you're going to do a study in botanical medicines, the phase three study needs to be with the same, a consistent batch that you want to market.
02:14:58.000Well, I guess this is all important because we want the same sort of stringent It's a hard process to be taking place for a drug, say, for arthritis or something like that.
02:15:07.000There's so many drugs that have gone through clinical trials and wound up still, even after all that, being dangerous.
02:15:13.000But the problem with this is that we know it's not dangerous.
02:15:16.000It's not like there's any question whatsoever about whether or not it's hurting anybody.
02:15:19.000Yes, and what I'm basically saying is about insurance and science.
02:15:24.000What I'm saying is marijuana should be legal right away.
02:15:29.000The process that we're trying to go through with making the marijuana plant into a medicine is solving the fundamental issue that all of these medical marijuana states that have approved medical marijuana laws, the patients have to buy the medicine themselves.
02:15:42.000They don't get it covered by insurance.
02:15:45.000That'll only happen when you go through the FDA and you've made it federally legal.
02:15:50.000So the intention is to make it so that people can get their medicine?
02:15:55.000So that they can get it paid for by insurance?
02:16:12.000So to go through the FDA process, then insurance companies...
02:16:17.000They can be doing studies now and look at the fact that people are using marijuana instead of a lot of more expensive pharmaceutical medications, and that from an insurance company point of view, it could be wise to subsidize marijuana right now.
02:16:32.000It just hasn't happened yet, as far as I'm aware, that insurance companies...
02:16:36.000In Canada, the Canadian government pays for medical marijuana for veterans.
02:16:42.000For PTSD. The Canadian government pays for that, even though there's been no science.
02:16:45.000These three studies will be the first on marijuana for PTSD controlled studies.
02:16:52.000And so there's the likelihood that once we make it into an FDA-approved medicine, insurance companies will then be willing, now it's federally legal, to cover it as a medicine for what it's been proved to be,
02:17:08.000particularly if it saves them money on other medicines.
02:17:13.000But of course, then the pharmaceutical drug companies are going to, there's going to be a bounce back there.
02:17:17.000It's all really the only thing that's holding us back is this nutty system that we have right now that's so complicated to make something as harmless as marijuana become legal.
02:17:28.000The system itself, when it's unblocked, isn't really that long.
02:17:31.000You just talked about how the Civil War wasn't that long.
02:17:35.000With psychedelics, I mean, part of it is also resources.
02:17:41.000Do we have the resources to fund the studies?
02:17:42.000But in 1992, the FDA had an advisory committee meeting that was about what to do about medical marijuana and what to do about psychedelics and should they be permitted to be studied as medicines.
02:17:54.000This was in 1992. So there had been roughly 20 years of suppression of research, crackdown after the 60s.
02:18:00.000The FDA had this advisory committee meeting.
02:18:03.000The National Institute of Drug Abuse convened a meeting of their animal researchers doing studies on psychedelics and other drugs and animal models trying to figure out what they do.
02:18:13.000The advisory committee recommended that human research be resumed, and the FDA adopted that.
02:18:18.000So that we've actually had this open door with research at the FDA if we had the resources, except for marijuana, because the marijuana was controlled by the National Center of Drug Abuse.
02:18:32.000We'd gotten our own supplies of psychedelics after as their own supplies of psilocybin.
02:18:36.000So now the system takes Six to ten years.
02:18:44.000Something like that, of doing the research once you have a drug that you think does something to prove it.
02:18:51.000And that takes some time, and it costs a lot of money.
02:18:53.000But it doesn't cost billions like the pharmaceutical company will tell you.
02:18:58.000I mean, we're actually able to make MDMA into medicine, in part because it's a demonized drug, because it's ecstasy.
02:19:05.000Governments over the world have spent over 300 million dollars, probably more by now, on research with MDMA. If you go into the scientific literature in Medline and you put in MDMA or ecstasy, there's over 5,000 papers.
02:19:17.000A lot of science has been done that we haven't had to pay for about the risks.
02:19:21.000But even then, when we sort of take that and then Do the kind of studies that we need to do with psychedelics.
02:19:29.000It feels like the system takes time to prove it, but we are so good at tricking ourselves.
02:19:36.000And there is something to be said for this process.
02:19:40.000And so I think when we talk about how come marijuana isn't a medicine, part of it is that the process has been gummed up for 50 years and is still gummed up by this last step.
02:19:51.000I mean, there was another step to get access to this federal marijuana.
02:19:55.000You had to have a public health service review that was created in 1999 because before that they only gave the marijuana to government researchers.
02:20:04.000You couldn't even do your own funded study with marijuana through the FDA because you couldn't get the marijuana.
02:20:11.000In 1999 they created this policy that would open it up.
02:20:15.000In their minds, but there was a special review in addition to FDA, DEA, and IRB that we just were able to succeed in getting them to eliminate.
02:20:23.000The Obama administration eliminated it last summer, this Public Health Service review.
02:20:26.000It's what blocked our marijuana PTSD study for years and years.
02:20:51.000We're working with Senator Gillibrand and Senator Warren and others have been engaging the DEA and ONDCP, HHS, in discussions about this monopoly.
02:21:29.000I mean, I'm fearful of that all the time.
02:21:32.000I mean, my sort of core imprint was that in 1971, I first took LSD. In 1972, you know, I decided that this is what I wanted to devote my life to.
02:21:41.000And I looked around and I saw all the research has been shut down.
02:21:56.000That's why I think I was so motivated to get involved with MDMA because I learned about MDMA in 1982 when it was an underground psychedelic psychotherapy tool under the code name ADAM that the government had no knowledge of.
02:22:10.000No, Dallas is where ADAM, MDMA, turned into ecstasy.
02:22:13.000So that's where they started selling it above ground.
02:22:16.000There's an incredible movie that's going to come out, The Star Club, about the club in Dallas where it really got well known.
02:22:22.000But because it had this dual life, one as this quiet underground therapy drug with about half a million doses having been used by around 1984, and then the other was this public ecstasy use.
02:22:35.000I thought, okay, now I know about it ahead of time.
02:23:25.000And we've been able to do it in a way where Right now we have two senior retired FDA officials who are acting as our consultants to prepare our documents because they felt that there's a strong need for new treatments for PTSD. I mean,
02:23:42.000they don't necessarily are saying anything about cultural change or spirituality or drug war.
02:23:48.000Just for other people, everybody with PTSD. They have watched over the last 15-20 years what we've done and Actually, there's a woman on our staff, Ilsa Jerome, that has been reviewing all these papers, all these 5,000 papers,
02:24:04.000and developing what's called, in conjunction with other members of our team, an investigator's brochure, a summary of the literature with a risk-benefit kind of calculation.
02:24:16.000How you take all of this information, and then what does it mean in terms of the risk that you present to the patients in the study?
02:24:24.000And the people at the FDA thought that we were doing it fairly in a time when it was being distorted in all these different ways.
02:24:33.000And Ilsa is actually a little bit more conservative than I am, and I knew that it was kind of good to let her take the lead in writing this, and that it got the respect of the FDA. So that's where I'm pretty hopeful.
02:24:47.000Isn't it kind of strange that MDMA being used to treat PTSD is a primary motivating factor for the federal government trying to make it legal?
02:24:58.000Because if you think about it, PTSD is inexorably associated with war.
02:25:29.000We've been accused of, or people have raised the cautionary tale, which I disagree with, but they've said, some people have said, are you making war more easy to wage now?
02:25:41.000If you are reducing the costs of war...
02:25:44.000Are you making war more likely of an option?
02:25:49.000And I think it's a worthwhile question to ask.
02:25:52.000It applies to all medical doctors that work for the military, surgeons.
02:25:59.000Are you, by treating people, making it easier for there to be war?
02:26:06.000I think it's a very narrow perspective.
02:26:08.000It's a very narrow perspective, and it's also not taking into consideration the actual Psycho-active effects of that substance because that substance makes someone loving.
02:26:18.000So if you think that giving out pills that make you more loving are more likely going to generate more war or make war more palatable, I think the opposite is probably true.
02:26:27.000I think the people who become more loving who can relay the experiences of the horrors of war to other people who become more loving because they also get a hold of this stuff, then I think that's more likely to eliminate war or lessen war or at least mitigate it significantly.
02:26:42.000Because I think that war is probably mitigated significantly now in comparison to like the sheer numbers of people.
02:26:48.000Like in comparison to, you know, 500 years ago, 600 years ago.
02:27:02.000And I think that things like psychedelic drugs in particular, but also the meditative techniques, focusing on being in the moment, focusing on learning how to manage your mind.
02:27:17.000And there's a lot of things that people are practicing and attempting to use in their everyday life today.
02:27:24.000Mindfulness and it's a subject that's repeated very often and people are trying to find a better way of approaching different dilemmas in their life and this is a tool for those things.
02:27:36.000It's a tool for those things that should be considered alongside of yoga.
02:27:39.000Alongside of meditation, alongside of reading self-help books, alongside of having good friends you can open up with and you can discuss things together and get encouragement from each other and maybe even criticism from each other.
02:27:50.000All those things exist in all sorts of different forms and they exist in psychedelics as well.
02:27:56.000A lot of the times, I mean, especially, I find eating marijuana to be one of the most self-analyzing, objective, introspective experiences you can have.
02:28:07.000It's like a real wake-up call to any holes you might have in your game.
02:28:10.000It just smacks you into place and sends you back out there in the world.
02:28:13.000You're like, shit, okay, I got it, I got it, I got it.
02:28:15.000Those are tools, and they're all tools that can be used in a variety of different ways, but to deny the fact that they can be used beneficially At this point is really silly because we are finite beings.
02:28:52.000Possibility of really integrating this does seem to be the case.
02:28:56.000And I think with the military, I think their training is to make people to suppress their emotions and to not feel the emotional consequences, to act in the heat of battle without the emotions.
02:29:09.000And I think with MDMA, if you help people feel the emotional consequences of their actions, even if you've healed them from trauma and they want to go back to their units, that they are going to be more careful, more sensitive.
02:29:27.000There's a German psychiatrist, Torsten Pasi, and he sort of raised this issue for me.
02:29:33.000What about the concentration camp guards?
02:29:36.000What if they were tormented and they came to you for MDMA therapy?
02:29:40.000You know, you're a German therapist and they come to you.
02:29:43.000Would you treat the concentration camp people for their trauma?
02:29:47.000And I think the question is, Are people who are worked with in this emotional way for their trauma more or less likely to go back into these situations that produced the trauma in the first place?
02:30:00.000Well, that question only becomes valid if you think, should you punish a person who's done something like that in all ways forever?
02:30:07.000Or should you try to make them better?
02:30:09.000I mean, you're not exonerating them for the horrible things they've done, but should, if you're gonna keep them alive, shouldn't you try to make them a better person?
02:30:18.000Do you have some sort of responsibility to do that?
02:30:20.000I would say the argument, if you want to look at our civilization in, like, the most efficient manner, you want to look at it in the most, like, what is the best way to get our civilization together?
02:30:30.000We'll have less assholes, less crazy people, less mean people, less, you know, less psychopathic fucking security guards at Auschwitz.
02:31:03.000Right, and I feel that trying to bring that healing approach, those loving feelings, which MDMA can really generate through oxytocin and prolactin, the hormones released that are in nursing and bonding, MDMA releases those hormones.
02:31:18.000Same drugs that women get when they orgasm.
02:31:28.000And he's compared the post-orgasmic state and the hormonal release to MDMA. And I think when we talk about MDMA, a good way to think about it is the post-orgasmic state.
02:32:41.000If you're trying to have this experience, this loving experience, and then kind of bring, appropriate some of that into your daily life, learn and integrate it, then the very next day is one of the most important parts because you're still halfway in, halfway out.
02:32:57.000That's where a lot of the integration work gets done.
02:33:00.000So in our therapy, we make it so that people spend the night in the treatment center, just so that they don't have to move, they don't have to get distracted, and then there's hours of psychotherapy the next day to help them integrate it.
02:33:12.000And then when they go home, we call them every day for a week on the phone, just to check in and see how they're doing.
02:34:28.000And I am worried about right-wing backlash, but there's a couple things that we've put into place.
02:34:34.000First off, the work with the military.
02:34:35.000I mean, right-wing loves the military.
02:34:37.000If we're trying to help the military, there's also people are compassionate about childhood sexual abuse survivors.
02:34:44.000And so I think that we have enough of a base of...
02:34:51.000Evidence and a long pattern since 1992 of the precedence at the FDA that I think we could survive.
02:34:59.000The FDA also recently did something very interesting with the abortion bill, RU46, that they made it easier on women.
02:35:07.000They eliminated one required step that the science showed that they didn't need.
02:35:11.000And so the FDA is very much trying to be science over politics.
02:35:17.000I mean, they will have an FDA commissioner that's appointed by and confirmed by president, but at the same time, the people that are there are really focused on science over politics and compassion.
02:35:28.000The other part is that we have international strategy.
02:35:30.000That was the longest time anybody ever talked over the music, but it was awesome.
02:35:34.000Awesome information, and I wish I didn't have to get out of here, but I really do.