On this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, I sit down with the founder of MAPS, a psychedelic research center that focuses on psychedelics and counterculture, Dr. Robert Kiyosaki. We talk about his early life growing up in the 60s and 70s, his experience with psychedelics, and how he went on to become one of the most influential people in the counterculture movement of the time. We also talk about what it was like being drafted into the military as a young man in the early 60s, and why he decided to turn his life around and become a counterculture activist. And, of course, we talk about psychedelics. This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg. It was edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme music was made by Micah Vellian and our ad music was written and performed by Mark Phillips. Additional music was mixed by Matthew Boll and Matthew Boll. Additional production by Patrick Muldowney. Additional mixing and mastering was done by Haley Shaw. The show was mixed and produced by Rachel Ward and Rachel Ward. Thanks to Rachel Ward for her contributions to this episode and for the use of her music stylings. Music by Haley Ward and Sarah Abdurrahman. Thank you to Sarah Ward for producing and mastering the music, and for her sound design and editing, and thanks to Matthew Boll for his editing and mixing, and Jeff Perla for his mixing, mastering and mastering, and additional engineering, and our mixing, for the production assistance, and mastering of the sound design, and editing by Matthew Perla, and his mixing and mixing. of the music and mastering at the music in this episode, and the mixing at The Joe Rogans podcast, and all of his mixing at the show, and also the production and mastering and editing at the sound in the music at the Afterbreeze, and Bobby Lord for his excellent mixing at Columbia Records, and at the New York City radio station, and other locations in Los Angeles, and on location in London, California, and New York, PA, and Los Angeles and Chicago, and San Francisco, PA. Thank you for your support, and thank you for all of your support throughout the podcast, for making it all of this podcast, we really appreciate it! - Thank you so much for all the support and thanks for all your support and support, all of the support we can do.
00:01:03.000Yeah, I'm pretty extremely lucky that 51 years ago when I was 18 in 1972 and I decided to focus my life on psychedelics, that now I'm 69 all these years later and it still makes sense.
00:01:17.000Well, back then it must have been a big risk because in the 1970s, when you focused your life on psychedelics, that was like right after that whole sweeping Schedule I psychedelics act was passed, right?
00:01:28.000Yeah, that was in 1970. Yeah, things look grim.
00:01:51.000I think there are some times you need to fight and defend yourselves.
00:01:55.000So the only options for me as I studied how to respond to Vietnam I didn't want to pretend I had bone spurs or run away to Canada or anything like that.
00:02:10.000And I studied Tolstoy and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance and decided that the thing that I would do would be to not register for the draft.
00:02:28.000I figured the government knows who I am and knows where I am and knows my age.
00:02:32.000And so I assumed that I would go to jail and that that would be a way to drain the system of energy and to register my protest that way.
00:02:42.000Martin Luther King actually said a great thing.
00:02:44.000He said, the person that thinks the law is unjust and violates it and is willing to suffer the consequences as an example to others About the unjust nature of the law actually has the highest respect for the law.
00:02:56.000He was trying to reframe civil disobedience as patriotism.
00:03:43.000I mean, I turned 18. Later was the lottery.
00:03:47.000I did have a higher lottery number, but nothing ever happened, and I just was shocked by that.
00:03:53.000And later, what happened was that Jimmy Carter, on his first day in office, he pardoned all the draft resistors.
00:04:00.000And that made me sort of move from my identification as a counterculture drug-using criminal to somebody who wasn't quite a criminal in that same way.
00:04:41.000I mean, nobody today defends the Vietnam War.
00:04:43.000There's still some people that think it was a good idea that we got Saddam Hussein out of power despite all the horrible collateral damage and the million people that are innocent that wound up dying in Iraq because of that invasion, but nobody thinks Vietnam was good.
00:05:15.000Well, one of the people also quite interested and supportive of psychedelic therapy is Daniel Ellsberg, who was the person that released the Pentagon Papers.
00:05:23.000But the false flag began with the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
00:05:26.000And so we're told that our ships were being attacked.
00:05:31.000And he was, I've gotten to spend some time talking to him, and he said that he had just started the National Security Administration at that time, was looking at some of these cables and realized it didn't make sense, but he thought somebody above him knew more than he did.
00:05:48.000And he didn't feel like he should say anything about it.
00:05:52.000And then all these years later when he released the Pentagon Papers, And people think of him as a hero because he was willing to go to jail for decades and decades, potentially the rest of his life, which is what the government was trying to do for him.
00:06:05.000Went all the way up to the Supreme Court and he won the case, or the New York Times also won the case.
00:06:10.000But he thinks of himself not just as a hero, but that he should have had more courage early on.
00:06:17.000And if he would have done something early on, maybe more people would have realized that this wasn't the way the government was saying it was.
00:06:25.000But I do think that there is patriotism in civil disobedience.
00:06:33.000Especially when you feel it's morally wrong to participate in whatever this thing that you're being obligated to do.
00:06:40.000Yeah, and I think it's really remarkable for me now that because I was not a pacifist and I was not a conscientious objector, I always felt that the freedom that I had was defended by our military in World War II. If we had lost and I'm Jewish,
00:06:57.000I probably would have been killed along with others.
00:06:59.000So I always felt that the military was essential and it was protecting my freedom.
00:07:05.000And so now, all these years later, to have so much work to be done with veterans and in the Veterans Administrations and with, you know, special operators and all sorts of people with PTSD, it feels right in a way that a draft resistor should form an alliance with suffering veterans.
00:07:28.000Yeah, I think that's one of the best aspects, at least publicly, of what you guys are doing, is that you are working with all these soldiers.
00:07:37.000And so you've got a lot of support from people that traditionally wouldn't be invested in psychedelics.
00:07:46.000It used to be that a lot of people on the right thought of psychedelics as a way to waste your life and you're going to be a hippie and a loser.
00:07:53.000But because of the benefits that it's been showing to people with PTSD and people coming back from all these various foreign conflicts, now you're getting support from veterans.
00:08:06.000You're getting support from the people on the right and people that know veterans that have had incredible experiences with psychedelics.
00:08:12.000Where it's completely changed their life and sort of reset their mind.
00:08:15.000Yeah, just several days ago I was in Nashville with Sean Ryan doing his podcast and he is a former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor and he was just talking about how much he had benefited from his experience with Ibogaine in Mexico.
00:08:33.000And how it's changed his views about things.
00:08:37.000But he still said that if he were to be attacked, if America was to be attacked, he would defend it.
00:08:42.000It doesn't turn people, again, into pacifists, necessarily, in that same way.
00:08:47.000And there's something noble and honorable about willing to serve your country and be willing to give your life to protect others.
00:08:54.000I think it's a problem in some cases when the political leadership makes terrible choices.
00:09:00.000And, you know, you've enlisted to do that.
00:09:02.000I think the other part, last week I was in Dallas, and we had an event that Governor Rick Perry attended, and Marcus Capone, and Jeff George, who's the chair of the board of directors of our MAPS Public Benefit Corp.,
00:09:19.000and then also Amy Emerson, who's the CEO of that.
00:09:23.000We have Governor Perry's support because he's heard from so many veterans.
00:09:29.000He's also talked about Marcus Luttrell, who lived with him at the State House when he was very emotionally damaged from his time in the military.
00:09:39.000And then he saw Marcus get a lot better when he went down to Mexico and got Ibogaine.
00:09:47.000There's people that I have never thought that I would find common ground with.
00:09:52.000And one of the ones that I thought was the most far that I couldn't imagine building a bridge, I mean, one of our themes is Be the Bridge, but it was with Ted Nugent.
00:10:05.000And I thought, you know, how would I build a bridge with Ted Nugent?
00:10:09.000Well, Rocco Moon, his son, connected us, and Rocco is interested in being a psychedelic therapist.
00:10:18.000And he's been doing a lot of work educating his dad.
00:10:22.000And we had a really remarkable conversation.
00:10:26.000And Ted actually said that he could be extremely effective for helping us because he's known as being so anti-drug.
00:10:35.000And yet, even he can see that in a therapeutic setting for veterans, that's what he cares about the most, but others, that these things can be helpful.
00:11:03.000And I had accepted a donation from Rebecca Mercer.
00:11:08.000Now, Rebecca Mercer, her father and she, they own Cambridge Analytica, they own Breitbart, you know, she's very much a supporter of Republican causes.
00:11:18.000And she gave us a million dollars and said that it was restricted to use in veterans.
00:11:24.000And I thought this is really a good thing to do to take this.
00:11:29.000But I've gotten more criticism from taking that donation from Rebecca Mercer than most anything I've done in the entire 37 years of MAPS. And so at this Passover Seder, my wife and I got there late.
00:11:57.000And then his wife started talking about how she had written a book about grieving parents who have illnesses, that their kids have fatal illnesses, and how to handle grief.
00:12:08.000And so we had this incredible conversation about MDMA therapy and about how it can be helpful for grief and all.
00:12:15.000And then after hours, Passover Seder steak, hours and hours, I finally realized that there was something more going on.
00:12:23.000And I thought, this guy is not just a judge.
00:12:26.000I think he's Stephen Breyer, the Supreme Court judge.
00:13:25.000Dave, he very much is in tune with that and speaks about that all the time.
00:13:28.000It's very important to him because it's just too easy to just dig in your heels and embrace the conflict and push away any ideas that are connected to the other side.
00:13:40.000If you can get someone who's a Republican, who's a Trump supporter to engage in psychedelics, understand the benefits of psychedelics for whether it's for soldiers or whether it's for grieving parents or anyone, if that can make it into their life and perhaps they can have an experience...
00:13:58.000I think a psychedelic experience is one of the greatest ways that someone can relax any ideological, dogmatic ideas that they might have that restrict them from taking in some of the opinions of the left.
00:14:36.000You know, I lived in San Francisco during the Vietnam War when I was a little kid.
00:14:40.000I mean, we were, you know, my stepdad had long hair when I was a kid.
00:14:47.000So I was, you know, but then I also grew up and I was a fighter.
00:14:51.000So I was always around these like hard-nosed, like very tough, you know, no-nonsense people.
00:14:58.000And a lot of them were very right-wing.
00:15:00.000And, you know, I knew a lot of cops from martial arts and You know, people have these ideas about what, you know, what drugs are and that blanket term, which I really don't like the term drugs and drug users, what drug users are.
00:15:14.000And one of, you know, one of the things that I'm kind of proud of is that if anybody wants to say that people who enjoy psychedelics People that enjoy marijuana are lazy and they don't contribute or they don't you know like what about me?
00:15:30.000Like I work hard and I work a lot and I work out a lot and I have a lot of friends that are very much like me and they're very open-minded people that are They embrace all cultures and ideas and all kinds of different things,
00:15:46.000but they're also You know, these hard-nosed, determined, very disciplined people that you would sort of automatically, maybe callously, lump in with people who are cruel or unkind or not embracing other ideas.
00:16:07.000And I just think that these ideas that we have of people It's so convenient to push people into one category or another and it's also very convenient to embrace one category and adopt their sort of predetermined pattern of ideas.
00:16:25.000Yeah, but would you be comfortable sharing some of your own psychedelic experiences?
00:16:31.000I mean the DMT experiences are by far the most profound and those are the ones that have really Every time I've done it, it's just completely made me rethink how I interface with people,
00:16:47.000what life is, and what that experience...
00:16:57.000Is it some sort of parallel dimension of Disembodied consciousness that you seem to be engaging with life forms, with things that know you, that can see your thoughts and see resistance and see bullshit in you.
00:17:16.000I mean, every time I've done it, it's sort of just like, in one way or another, just removed one layer of the onion.
00:17:24.000You know, one layer of bullshit that keeps you from just embracing the great mystery of this existence, whatever it is.
00:17:34.000Yeah, I think we're built on these layers and layers of billions of dollars, billions of dollars, billions of years.
00:17:45.000And that our prefrontal cortex, our brain, has kind of helped us focus on what we need as humans in our transition from birth to death.
00:17:54.000But that when you sort of, well, we talk about the default mode network, which is sort of the part of the brain that's identified as the sense of self.
00:18:01.000And the classic psychedelics weaken that part.
00:18:06.000So I think we can get back through all of the intercellular knowledge that is stored in our bodies and connect with this deeper, unitive sense.
00:18:17.000Yeah, it's also—they help so much to abandon preconceived notions and just sort of—we don't realize how much of the way we sort of see ourselves and see the world is kind of a convenient set of armor that we put on to try to protect us from uncomfortable thoughts and protect us from— You know,
00:18:47.000And I think psychedelics are the greatest mystery.
00:18:51.000And there's something about them that's just The idea that it exists that you can smoke a thing and then 15 seconds later be transported into an impossible realm and that that exists and no one's discussing it.
00:19:06.000Every day on the news they're talking about a million different things that seem so trivial once you've had a DMT experience.
00:19:14.000Yeah, you're reminding me of my 5-MeO DMT experience that I had.
00:19:18.000And it felt like I went sort of back to the moment of creation.
00:19:23.000But I realized that so much of our life is patterns, like you're saying, that we have these habits and we have these patterns and we take them as fixed.
00:19:35.000And this 5-MeO, by bringing me back to this moment of creation...
00:19:40.000It helped me realize that the new can enter at any moment.
00:19:44.000And so I've actually felt that that experience, which I had one time back in 1985, has been a big part of our success to get to the place that we're at now with psychedelic research, with MDMA therapy,
00:20:01.000because it helped me to realize that whenever I felt blocked or stuck, that I could We're good to go.
00:20:29.000It's just so easy to fall into patterns.
00:20:31.000You know, you fall into the patterns of the group that you hang out with.
00:20:33.000You fall into patterns of accents and, you know, dress and the way people behave and think about things and the concepts that they adopt.
00:20:42.000And when you have like a real breakthrough psychedelic experience, it just makes all that seem so trivial.
00:20:48.000My DMT experience, my first 5-MeO experience, I've done both multiple times, but the first 5-MeO experience, I thought I fucked up.
00:21:13.000Like it feels like there's no way I'm coming back from this like like I've gone so far and then that fear That fear subsided once the experience just fully kicked in.
00:21:27.000Like, the fear was at the doorway to the experience.
00:21:45.000This thing where you don't have any memory, you're barely a conscious entity, and you're experiencing what seems to be like the source code of the universe.
00:22:38.000Yeah, I've heard really great things from people that have addiction problems, like people that are addicted to pills in particular, have gone to Mexico.
00:22:47.000One of them was my friend, Ed Clay, who went down to Mexico because of a pill problem he had.
00:22:53.000And then he wound up opening up an Ibogaine Center down there once he had been cured of it.
00:22:57.000There is that phenomena where people, once they get healed, they want to help others.
00:23:01.000And in particular, in the military, you're trained to leave nobody behind.
00:23:05.000And many people have said that, that once they've gotten help, now they want to bring all their brothers to...
00:23:31.000For both PTSD, depression, traumatic brain injury, addiction, and he's heard just remarkable stories.
00:23:38.000But now that you mention, or that we're talking about Ibogaine, I just would like to say a bit of, we have a mutual friend, Aubrey Marcus, and I've been texting him this morning and it's a bit sad his father died.
00:23:52.000And so he's sitting Shiva, which is this Jewish tradition where for a week after someone dies, people come over to the house and you just mourn for a week.
00:24:03.000But his father, Michael Marcus, actually helped start Ibogaine research.
00:24:07.000And so I'd like to explain that just a tiny bit.
00:24:11.000Michael had studied a bit of holotropic breathwork with Stan Grof.
00:24:16.000So Stanislav Grof is the world's leading LSD researcher.
00:24:19.000He's almost 92 years old, but he worked at Johns Hopkins.
00:24:23.000He did LSD research in the Czech Republic, and when the Russians came in in 68 to crush their rebellion, he escaped and came to the U.S. But Michael got to know Stan and did work with him where once psychedelics were criminalized,
00:24:39.000Stan realized that you can catalyze similar experiences through hyperventilation without a drug.
00:26:15.000I said, great, now we're going to have this first Ibogaine study.
00:26:18.000And then he said, what else do you have?
00:26:21.000And I was like, well, okay, if you want to know more, I'd say the most difficult thing for us to fund, the most idealistic thing we're doing, this was at the time, was we're trying to start research in Jordan.
00:26:32.000You know, we have research in Israel, we have research in Canada, we have research, but we've no research in the Arab countries.
00:26:38.000And I thought, if we could do something in Jordan, and I had incredible connections in Jordan with the mayor of Amman, whose son-in-law actually had found LSD helpful for cluster headaches.
00:26:51.000And anyway, I went to Michael and I said, the most idealistic thing, the most far-reaching at this point would be to do this study in Amman.
00:26:59.000And he said, well, how much does that cost?
00:27:01.000And I said, well, it's about $85,000, something like that, $90,000.
00:27:06.000And he said, all right, I'll do that too.
00:27:09.000And so that started the first project with Ibogaine.
00:27:13.000And then we eventually did another long-term follow-up in New Zealand.
00:27:17.000And now there are people now, there's a project in Spain with a group called ICERs.
00:27:23.000And it's to take increasing amounts of Ibogaine to help people withdraw from methadone.
00:27:29.000There's projects in Brazil with Ibogaine.
00:27:32.000There's a company, Atai, that's one of the for-profit psychedelic companies that's working with Deborah Mass from Demaracks.
00:27:40.000They've merged and they're interested in Ibogaine.
00:27:43.000So Ibogaine is one of the classic examples of disastrous drug policy.
00:27:49.000It turns out that there were LSD dealers in the 60s who got busted, and they happened to have Ibogaine.
00:27:58.000And so the government made Ibogaine illegal.
00:28:01.000But these LSD dealers, Howard Lotsoff, was also experimenting with opiates.
00:28:06.000And when they tried Ibogaine, they felt no desire for opiates, and they went through the withdrawal without any pain.
00:28:12.000It's just remarkable what opiates do for you when you go through the withdrawal.
00:28:18.000But if you have Ibogaine, you can go through it in a couple days and you have a lot of psychological experiences about why you might want to run away from your problems into opiates.
00:28:26.000Isn't there something that happens with Ibogaine where it like literally rewires?
00:28:37.000And so what that means is that there is this ability for our neurons to have new synaptic connections.
00:28:47.000And that's what we mean is neuroplasticity.
00:28:50.000Our brain is constantly being rewired.
00:28:52.000Every time we do anything, we have memories, and the memories are encoded.
00:28:57.000And sometimes they get encoded in harmful ways, like with trauma, with PTSD. The memories are so painful that they never really get fully processed, they never really get put into long-term storage.
00:29:10.000There's a lot of changes in your brain when you have PTSD. But this idea that you can then rewire your brain once you experience them.
00:29:22.000And so there's researchers at, Goul Dolan is at Johns Hopkins.
00:29:26.000She's done studies in mice with MDMA and showed that it releases oxytocin, which is the hormone that we have for love and connection, nursing mothers, but it also promotes this new neural growth.
00:29:39.000So Ibogaine does that, LSD does that, psilocybin does that, and what Goul has found, which is really interesting, Is that the longer you're in the psychedelic state, the longer afterwards this period of neuroplasticity lasts,
00:29:55.000where you can do more integration work, where you have this enhanced ability to reroute patterns in your brain.
00:30:03.000And so Ibogaine opens up this period of neuroplasticity for several weeks after, because the experience can last for more than a day or two.
00:30:14.000Is there any headway that's being made on bringing Ibogaine to the United States?
00:30:20.000Because if you think about the opiate crisis that we have here, that seems like one of the very best sort of remedies for that.
00:31:45.000And they would then, Sasha would take it himself, and then if he thought it was okay, he would give it to his wife, Anne.
00:31:53.000And they would do these together, and then they had a group of 12 people that would meet like once a month, and they would try these new drugs.
00:31:59.000Sasha, by the way, did go to the Bohemian Grove, where he was a musician there, and so he was able to go, but he would test new drugs with people at Bohemian Grove.
00:32:29.000And they gave this to Leo Zeff and Leo said, wow, he was about to retire.
00:32:36.000He was a clinical psych PhD and he was getting up there in years and he was about to retire.
00:32:41.000He trained a lot of people with LSD and other things.
00:32:44.000And so he did not retire in order to bring forth MDMA. And so he really pioneered the use of therapeutic use of MDMA. And this is now MDMA being a therapy drug before it became ecstasy as a party drug.
00:32:58.000And that a lot happened in Dallas at the Star Club, which is, you know, a public place where, you know, incredible stories of the Star Club.
00:33:07.000There's going to be a documentary by Michael Caine is working on a documentary about the Star Club.
00:33:14.000But that attracted Lloyd Benson, the senator from Texas.
00:33:16.000He heard about this and then he complained to the DEA. And then the DEA moved to criminalize.
00:33:21.000We knew that this public use of MDMA was going to eventually result in DEA crackdown.
00:33:27.000This is Nancy Reagan and Ronald Reagan and all of that.
00:33:31.000And so we had a jumpstart in a sense that the DEA didn't know we were there.
00:33:38.000But we knew that the DEA was there and they were coming after us.
00:33:41.000So I started a non-profit before MAPS in 84 and that was to prepare and gather this community together in order to defend MDMA once the DEA moved.
00:33:52.000And so Leo Zeff came to me and he said, you're starting to be an advocate and I'd like to offer you an IBM experience.
00:33:59.000Because we need to own our own shadow, own our own weaknesses, own our own things that we're not comfortable with and also, you know, have spiritual connections and things like that.
00:34:13.000And he said, if I can help you, this might help in your political work because then you'll see that we're mixtures of good and bad.
00:34:21.000Everybody is and that you won't demonize the DEA and that you may be able to find a way To, you know, build a bridge.
00:34:28.000And so he offered me this Ibogaine experience.
00:34:30.000And I said, great, I would love to do this.
00:34:33.000And so we had this whole long day to set aside to do this.
00:34:38.000And Ibogaine in plant form takes a while to take an effect.
00:34:42.000So Leo said, I'd like to give you a bunch of LSD at the same time.
00:34:48.000It was 350 micrograms of LSD, which is a pretty hefty dose.
00:34:52.000The first LSD experience that we know of, Albert Hoffman, April 19, 1943, was an amount that he thought would have no real effect because it would be so small, 250 micrograms, which is a major existential challenge.
00:35:14.000And so I actually got administered Ibogaine, a bunch of it in plant form, and then also the LSD at the same time.
00:35:21.000And I could tell the differences between the drugs.
00:35:24.000I could tell coming up on the LSD and moving towards this kind of ego dissolution and opening up and different my emotions and how am I going to do this political work and who am I and, you know, am I qualified and all of this.
00:35:40.000And I sort of had a lot of experience with LSD, had never done Ibogaine before, and I was able to open up pretty well for the LSD. But then this sort of low guttural rumble started from the Ibogaine.
00:35:53.000The LSD peaks around three hours or so.
00:35:55.000And I could feel this Ibogaine building and building and building.
00:35:59.000LSD is also very much in your head, very ethereal, more so than psilocybin mushrooms, which are more embodied.
00:36:06.000And so this Ibogaine started coming up, this experience, and I started feeling like if I could just let go, if I could just fully have this experience, and if I didn't have these fears and anxieties, then I would be a better advocate, and I needed to,
00:37:34.000I mean, you know, I was like dry heaving.
00:37:36.000I had nothing left to throw up anymore.
00:37:38.000And I just so saw this connection between wanting to be perfect, not wanting to be human, being super self-critical, leading to self-hatred and shutting myself down.
00:37:49.000And so at the end of that day, I was so exhausted.
00:37:54.000I called it transcendence through exhaustion.
00:39:41.000I think the stories we tell ourselves, I mean, that's sort of PTSD or depression.
00:39:46.000And that's what we're saying about you get in these grooves.
00:39:49.000And that's where the psychedelics can shake things up.
00:39:52.000And the neuroplasticity is what really permits you to see it in a different way.
00:39:57.000So I spent the whole next day just curled in a puddle, basically.
00:40:01.000Occasionally they'd bring me a banana to eat or something like that.
00:40:04.000And then by the third day, finally, I was able to stand up without being nauseous, and a friend came and picked me up and ended up driving me away.
00:40:16.000And as we were driving, I'd only been there once.
00:40:19.000This was at a house I'd never been to before, and we were going back to familiar ground in the same way.
00:40:25.000And I had this sense in my mind that I knew what was around the corner.
00:40:30.000And I would say, oh, I think we're going to see this.
00:40:44.000Telepathic in a way or anything like that.
00:40:45.000It was just that all these experiences had sort of been there but hadn't registered.
00:40:50.000And I think I cleared out a lot of space in my mind from this constant self-criticism.
00:40:56.000So I had more openness in space and I could remember things.
00:41:00.000It was the fourth day that I could finally drive.
00:41:04.000But I felt that ever since then, I've had this Increasing ability to be self-critical without it being so connected to self-hatred and so painful.
00:41:16.000And I really feel that that I begin to experience, although I've not done it since.
00:41:22.000Because it was pretty heavy and exhausting and painful.
00:41:29.000And I've had other psychedelic experiences since.
00:41:32.000But that, I think, was one of the pivotal ones in my mind.
00:41:35.000And so here we have an opioid epidemic.
00:41:38.000Over 100,000 people died last year with overdoses, connected sometimes with fentanyl and others.
00:41:43.000And a tool that can be tremendously helpful is something that is not being studied at all in the United States, and we're forcing people to go to other countries.
00:41:53.000So MAPS is developing what's called an investigator brochure.
00:41:59.000And what that means is that any time a pharmaceutical company wants to develop a drug through the FDA, you have to summarize the world's literature in the peer-reviewed journals, and you look at it from a safety and efficacy perspective.
00:42:13.000And so we prepare this brochure for the FDA, and it will bring us to what is the latest science.
00:42:20.000It'll include the study that ICERS is doing in Spain with Ibogaine for Helping people withdraw from methadone or the studies in Mexico also for opiate addiction.
00:42:37.000Ibogaine is in some ways one of the most dangerous of the psychedelics in that there are a small group of people that can have problems with the heart.
00:42:45.000And so some people have died from taking ibogaine.
00:42:49.000But if you do it under medical supervision, particularly for people who are in weaker physical states because of drug addiction, that nobody needs to die and you can reverse it if something does happen.
00:43:00.000So we are probably going to propose And we're working with Joe Barsuglia and Martin Polanco, who have developed a company to try to make Ibogaine into a medicine.
00:43:16.000And they ran a lot of the clinics also in Mexico.
00:43:20.000So a medicine like a pharmaceutical medicine that will be available for prescription?
00:43:25.000Well, there's two tracks, again, and that's one track.
00:43:29.000But the other track is from a policy point of view.
00:43:32.000So MAPS, our nonprofit, we have a policy and advocacy team.
00:43:36.000So if ever there was a drug that we could make a strong case that should be removed from Schedule I. Schedule I is a drug, high potential for abuse, no accepted medical use.
00:43:46.000It's the worst drugs, according to our scheduling system.
00:43:50.000You know, if we make MDMA into a medicine, what's going to happen is that we'll have what's called bifurcated scheduling.
00:43:58.000And that means is that our particular product in this particular capsule for PTSD would move out of Schedule I, potentially Schedule III or Schedule IV, but MDMA itself would still stay in Schedule I. So getting MDMA out of Schedule 1 so that it's hopefully more accessible,
00:44:19.000not just for medicine, is part of our goal as well.
00:44:27.000There's no reason for it to be in Schedule 1 or Schedule 2. Schedule 2 is drugs that have a high potential for abuse but also have a medical use.
00:44:36.000So I think we need to have a two-pronged strategy with Ibogaine.
00:44:40.000One is to try to work through the FDA to make it into medicine, but other is to try to make the case that it never should have been criminalized in the first place, and it's not a drug of abuse.
00:44:50.000And at a time where we have so many people dying from opiate overdoses, and so many other people suffering even if they're not dying from this that this is something that a logical rational country would make this available and we should have clinics right here in Austin and all over the country because we have a massive problem and and yet it's this remnant of the drug war which and again I would say Nixon well John Ehrlichman who was Nixon's domestic policy advisor It came out in the
00:45:20.000late 70s, and he said that the Nixon White House had two main enemies.
00:45:25.000Those were the blacks for civil rights and the hippies, the anti-war.
00:45:29.000And what Ehrlichman said is, we realized that if we could criminalize the drugs that they did, we could bust them up, we could arrest their leaders, we could bust up their meetings.
00:45:39.000And then Ehrlichman said, did we know we are exaggerating the risks of those drugs?
00:45:44.000So I think we could make a good scientific and rational case Now that Ibogaine never should have been criminalized and it should be legally available, but by trained therapists in proper circumstances so that the safety is fine.
00:46:00.000But I think what has happened and what we've seen with medical marijuana leading to marijuana legalization, changing people's attitudes, We see that a lot of the psychedelic research with MDMA and psilocybin has led to Oregon decriminalizing drugs and making the Oregon psilocybin initiative with a sort of state legal program that they're trying to implement with local guides.
00:46:22.000Colorado in November, the last election, legalized natural plant medicines.
00:46:29.000So I think with Ibogaine we will see a similar kind of a thing, that there will be a lot of, hopefully, research over the next couple years and that will change people's attitudes and then maybe we can remove Ibogaine from Schedule I. And then the bigger question is,
00:46:46.000you're saying like, you know, nobody really looks back and thinks Vietnam was a good idea.
00:46:52.000I'm going to pause you right here because I have to pee so bad.
00:47:08.000And so I think we will think of it as a massive tragic experiment that has been exported all over the world, caused enormous violence, and I think the The idea of Ibogaine removing, getting it removed from Schedule 1 could be really important.
00:47:23.000But I have a little pee joke, if I could tell you.
00:47:59.000We do psychedelic harm reduction there.
00:48:00.000So a group of us were in this Sort of cuddle-puddle in this, you know, I was not doing MDMA at the time, but other people were.
00:48:09.000And it was like 3 in the morning, and we'd been there for hours, and we're just, like, 14 of us or something just talking, and this one woman goes out to pee and comes back, and, you know, other people do that.
00:48:19.000And then this woman turned to me and said, I don't understand.
00:49:10.000So, back to this idea that in the future we're going to look at the drug war as being an overall negative thing and a mistake.
00:49:18.000For sure, I think the biggest thing is going to be this blanket definition of drugs.
00:49:25.000You know, that there's, especially things, when you have things like psilocybin in Schedule I, Where it can help people in so many ways, and we're denying that help.
00:49:36.000And I think one of the keys, just like Rocco was the key to get the TED, I think that someone's son having a bad experience with opiates, someone in a great position of power, someone who's a politician or a governor or someone like that,
00:49:53.000who sees a big turnaround from someone using Ibogaine or using psilocybin.
00:50:00.000It's when people see members of their family or somebody that they care about that's suffering, that gets better, that's when change really happens.
00:50:09.000And I think it's sad that it takes that, that you can't sort of look at the world and think, you know, those might not be me or my friends, but something new should change.
00:50:20.000Well, it's just not having an understanding of what it actually is.
00:52:02.000And he is, you know, in New York City, and he's a drug policy reformer.
00:52:07.000And one time we were talking about drugs, and I said, you know, I think that the more dangerous the drug, the more important it is that it be legal.
00:52:18.000And he said he liked to say that and that he believed that also.
00:52:22.000And what I mean by that is that the dangerous drugs are ones which, when people get into problems with them, we need to offer them help as soon as possible.
00:52:34.000And then we stigmatize them and drive them away.
00:52:37.000The more dangerous drugs also get mixed with other things.
00:52:40.000So like fentanyl mixed with opiates and that's where you have the overdoses.
00:53:04.000So I think this idea of the more dangerous the drug, the more important it is that it be legal, I think makes a lot of sense.
00:53:12.000And we need to really offer treatment on demand and peer support.
00:53:16.000And when we think about drug policy too, you know, people don't understand as much lost opportunities.
00:53:24.000You can see things that have gone wrong, but lost opportunities are like invisible.
00:53:29.000But when I think about MDMA having been criminalized in 1985 by the DEA on an emergency basis for bogus reasons about neurotoxicity, but they used that as a rationale, then the hearings that we had going on with the DEA administrative law judge,
00:53:47.000they said that it should stay as a medicine.
00:53:49.000And the DEA overruled them, and we sued them twice in the appeals courts and won, and on the third time, DEA lawyers figured out how to Satisfy the courts to keep it illegal.
00:54:00.000And that's why, again, in 86, I started maps to go through the FDA. But that when I think of the number of suicides that have happened in both veteran communities and everywhere since 1985, Hundreds and hundreds of thousands, I think, of lives.
00:54:15.000We should talk about this while we're being brought up.
00:54:18.000Because there's a common misconception about MDMA that has been proven to be false.
00:54:23.000And it is that it makes holes in your brain.
00:54:40.000This was around 2001. So what had happened was that there was a young woman, her mother worked at a drug abuse treatment center, and she had problems with cocaine, she had problems with marijuana, she had problems with ecstasy, other things.
00:54:55.000And so they arranged, and this was for this MTV show, that this woman would go and do a brain scan, a spec scan, which is blood flow in the brain, and then they would reveal the results to her live on TV. And this was at this drug abuse treatment center that her mother worked at,
00:55:16.000and they revealed the results, and the results showed these holes in the brain.
00:55:20.000And it was a graphically manipulated image.
00:55:25.000So spec scans show blood flow through the brain, and there's certain areas that light up when you have more blood flow than others.
00:56:36.000And they had one woman who was a 24-year-old woman that was a raver, but she had positive experiences about MDMA. So they said, okay, she would be the one that would sort of say something positive about MDMA. And then Oprah said to her,
00:56:53.000do you know what you might be doing to your brain with all these holes in the brain?
00:57:00.000And if your brain scan looked like hers, would you, I think it was Lynn Smith was her name that had the holes in the brain, would you stop using if your brain looked like that?
00:57:11.000And she said, well, I'd be willing to do a brain scan.
00:57:14.000But the very next day she contacted MAPS. She contacted us and said that, should she do this brain scan?
00:57:21.000And I said, you definitely should do it, but do it with different people.
00:57:52.000But then years later, over a decade later, when Oprah was just a short time from closing her show, but she had O Magazine.
00:58:02.000So she decided she would assign a senior editor to do a story on MDMA and the therapeutic use.
00:58:11.000And it was like Oprah doing Atonement.
00:58:13.000I said, would you be willing, though, to do another show on your TV show and bring this woman back who had all these holes in the brain and let's see what she's doing now?
00:58:21.000And she actually did show some signs of brain damage in that she was working for the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.
00:58:33.000As the exhibit of, oh, you know, MDMA is terrible.
00:58:35.000So do you think they scared her with the holes in the brain to the point where she thought that drugs were ruining her life and she wanted to save other people?
00:58:43.000And I think that she wanted to get back in the good graces with her mother, that then she gets supportive and then she gets a job and this whole thing.
00:58:50.000And so Oprah said, no, she's not willing to do another show, but this article would go forward in O Magazine.
00:59:13.000But it's great because it didn't make a big deal of, oh, this is illegal underground.
00:59:17.000It was just like, here's what happened to her.
00:59:18.000The MDMA. But it was, in some ways, propaganda in the positive way.
00:59:25.000It was like, can a single pill save your life?
00:59:28.000You know, before it's like, this is going to cause holes in your brain.
00:59:32.000Now, one pill is all you need, a magic pill, and then you're going to be better for everything.
00:59:36.000Ignores the whole point that it's about the therapy and the context and the relationship.
00:59:41.000It seems like, unfortunately, because of those kind of television shows and because of up until podcasts and the internet, you had a limited sort of ability to fully express the pros and the cons and explain...
01:00:00.000The nuance of what these experiences are about.
01:00:03.000You're instead dealing with this sensationalist perspective where they're just trying to highlight whatever the most wildest aspects of the experience, pro or con, would be so they can get a lot of people to pay attention to it.
01:00:23.000And I think that like long form podcasts where you can have the whole story, you can get the whole story out unedited by people that are wanting to do it.
01:00:31.000But I will say in terms of educating people about psychedelics, what we're doing is a lot of maps is about public education.
01:00:38.000And so we're hosting the world's largest conference on psychedelics ever.
01:00:43.000And it's going to take place June 19th to the 23rd.
01:00:47.000How many DEA agents do you think will be in the audience?
01:00:52.000We also have some police officers who are – we have one.
01:00:57.000Sarko Gregarian is a full-time police officer in Winthrop near Boston, but he's also a psychotherapist.
01:01:03.000And he's been through our training program in order to give MDMA therapy to other police officers.
01:01:11.000We just had an incredible – the first psychedelic conference in Iceland.
01:01:15.000And Sarko came and also did his – police chief came.
01:01:20.000And we met with the Minister of Justice in Iceland.
01:01:23.000The conference was phenomenal, the second old conference in Iceland.
01:01:26.000And now the Minister of Justice is interested in having Iceland fund a study to give MDMA to prisoners to work with them to see about dealing with their traumas to reduce recidivism, also with victims of crime.
01:01:42.000To help them deal with their PTSD and also with prison guards and police.
01:01:46.000So we have this opportunity in Iceland to potentially make it an example of a countrywide approach.
01:01:57.000Our new big vision, and I'll get back to the Psychedelic Science Conference in just a second, but our new big vision is a world of net trauma by 2070. So this idea of every year we're adding to the burden of trauma that people are experiencing.
01:02:15.000There are some people that get better, but there's many people that get stuck in PTSD. And then there's multi-generational PTSD. There's what's called epigenetics, which is, you know, biological evolution takes place over long periods of time.
01:02:28.000But what turns the genes on and off is epigenetics above the genes.
01:02:33.000That can change from your own experience.
01:02:35.000And there's a woman, Rachel Yehuda, at the Bronx VA that has done studies with Holocaust survivors and their children and has identified an epigenetic mechanism by which this is passed on.
01:02:46.000From parent to child and it could be either from the father or the mother line.
01:02:52.000So this idea that we are increasing the burden of trauma by, there's some estimates that by 2050 that if climate change continues as it does that there will be about a billion climate refugees from droughts and poor crops and you know lack of water and all this so that it feels like The humanity is going to be burdened more by trauma.
01:03:17.000We have incredible problems with mental health because of both the COVID and other things.
01:03:24.000So that what we want to do is reduce the burden of trauma every year and get to net zero trauma.
01:05:36.000Yeah, but Denver and Colorado is very progressive.
01:05:39.000The mayor's going to help us open the conference.
01:05:41.000We've got the support of the governor.
01:05:43.000We're actually doing a project with the Denver police.
01:05:47.000Because mushrooms are the lowest enforcement priority, and we want to educate police on what happens when you encounter somebody with a difficult trip.
01:05:55.000You know, you could make it worse for them, or you could try to treat them in a certain way so that you calm them down and, you know, they don't need to be tased or, you know, however.
01:06:05.000So we're trying to educate police on how to de-escalate people with difficult psychedelic experiences.
01:06:48.000And now this one we think is going to be way more.
01:06:51.000And the theme of it, why we've waited so many years between 2017 now, is that we are now at the doorway to a new world.
01:06:59.000And what I mean by that is that we are at an incredible moment in time where there have been Probably two and a half or more billion dollars have gone into for-profit psychedelic companies.
01:07:14.000They haven't done so great in the stock market.
01:07:37.000In November 29, 2016, we had what's called an End of Phase 2 meeting with the FDA about our research with MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. So it took us 30 years, from the start of MAPS, 1986 to 2016, where we presented our data to the FDA and they said,
01:07:55.000yes, you can go into Phase 3. Phase 3 is the final stage of research where you need to do safety and efficacy.
01:08:03.000And if you prove that to the satisfaction of the FDA, you get permission to So some of the new for-profit companies, Compass Pathways is one, and USONA is a non-profit, are trying to develop psilocybin into a method, a treatment with therapy,
01:08:19.000Compass for treatment-resistant depression, USONA for major depressive disorder.
01:08:27.000And so a bunch of these companies are trying to develop new drugs.
01:08:30.000And I think some of them are thinking, well, the classic psychedelics like LSD, MDMA, psilocybin, MDMA, we wouldn't say classic, but the classic psychedelics like, you know, Ibogaine, Mescaline, psilocybin,
01:08:45.000LSD, DMT, all these are in the public domain.
01:09:30.000I understand that we're trying to undo 53 years of criminalization, but I just think that that's a bad strategy and you're getting in bed with some demons.
01:09:59.000And so if somebody develops some new molecule and, you know, for us, it's going to cost us hundreds of millions of dollars to make MDMA into a medicine.
01:10:07.000And so we've done that in an incredible set of ways.
01:10:14.000And I think this is why what I explained to you just a couple weeks ago and why you were so gracious to invite me back now is because I talked about this crossroads that we're at.
01:10:25.000And so MAPS has raised about $145 million in grants and most of it donations in our history.
01:10:36.000And we have gotten enormous value in people's donated time, expertise of all sorts.
01:10:42.000And it's hard to even put a dollar number on that, but it's been tremendous.
01:10:46.000And so we have used that to do this MDMA research.
01:10:52.000With the rise of all these for-profit psychedelic companies, it became more difficult for us to raise donations because people were like, why should I donate now?
01:11:01.000I can just invest over here and you've got a story now.
01:11:04.000Your story is that it looks like you're moving into phase three.
01:11:30.000Ryan Zuer organized it as the lead one called Vine Ventures.
01:11:34.000And they have about 3.8% of North American revenues from MDMA once we make it into a medicine for about 8 to 10 years afterwards.
01:11:43.000And if we don't give them a certain amount of money back, then it continues.
01:11:46.000But they don't have ownership, and they don't control what we do, and we can end up prioritizing public benefit over profits.
01:11:56.000So we also have around $20 million in a loan that's potentially convertible into equity if we don't repay the loan.
01:12:07.000And we've got a couple of years there.
01:12:08.000But we have reached this spot where we have the nonprofit MAPS, which has about 35 people, Is the 100% owner of the MAPS Public Benefit Corp., which is about 135 people, something like that.
01:12:26.000We also tried to do something new with pharma so that And something new with capitalism.
01:12:35.000So that capitalism, when you have for-profit companies, you're supposed to maximize profits.
01:12:40.000And if minority shareholders don't like the fact that the management isn't maximizing profits, they can try to throw them out.
01:12:47.000And so that produces a prioritization of profits over people, profits over social benefit.
01:12:54.000And so capitalism has been modified in a way with the public benefit corporation.
01:13:01.000So that's a new corporate structure, maybe 20 years old, but relatively new.
01:13:06.000And there's thousands, you know, not hundreds of thousands, not tens of thousands, I don't think, but there's thousands of these public benefit corporations.
01:13:13.000And what you do is you can maximize public benefit over profit so that you cannot be sued by minority shareholders to try to force out the executives because you're not maximizing profits because your goal is public benefit over profit.
01:13:30.000So we want to create a new model for how pharma drugs can be distributed.
01:13:35.000So we have this It's a remarkable moment where we have the nonprofit is 100% owner of a for-profit but public benefit pharmaceutical company.
01:13:47.000But we need to raise additional capital.
01:13:50.000We are now at a place where we recently announced that our second Phase III study was successful.
01:14:41.000And so if you have 1 in 20 and then you multiply them another 1 in 20, it's 1 in 400 chance that these two independent studies have produced results that are random, and then the FDA will approve it.
01:14:54.000Our first study was 1 in 10,000 chance that it was random.
01:15:05.000How do you get such great statistical significance?
01:15:07.000You get it because you have a big difference between the two groups and you also have not that much variability.
01:15:16.000So what it means is the people that got MDMA Pretty much of them got major benefits, and the people that got the therapy without MDMA, so I should say, the people got therapy with MDMA, did great, pretty, not very much variability,
01:15:32.000it doesn't work for everybody, but we had 88% responders.
01:15:36.000We had 67% no longer had a diagnosis of PTSD. These are severe PTSD patients that had PTSD an average of 14 years, one-third over 20 years, and then we had Just another 21% had what's called clinically significant response.
01:15:58.000And they still have PTSD, but over time they might get better.
01:16:03.000If they could have had a forced session, they might get better.
01:16:07.000We had actually nobody in the MDMA therapy group tried to kill themselves, tried to hurt themselves.
01:16:14.000We enroll people that have previously attempted suicide.
01:16:16.000We did have one woman try to kill herself twice during the study, but she was in the placebo group.
01:16:21.000She got therapy without MDMA. We had another woman, it was so difficult for her to confront her trauma that she checked herself into a hospital to not self harm.
01:16:35.000And science, the journal Science, one of the most important journals in the world in science, at the end of every year, they publish a list of what they think are the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of the year.
01:16:50.000And they chose our study in Nature Medicine as one of the world's top 10 breakthroughs of the year.
01:18:46.000Because we don't think it's necessary.
01:18:47.000So what we first proposed in 1992 is when we got permission for the first study with MDMA. And people had been using 5-HTP after MDMA. But there is a benefit to using 5-HTP. It boosts your serotonin levels quicker,
01:20:40.000It wasn't persuading the FDA. So NIDA funded this study, Una McCann and George Riccardi, and it was in primates.
01:20:49.000And as it turned out, a bunch of the primates died of overdoses, and they published a paper in Science that said that MDMA could cause Parkinson's, it could hurt dopamine.
01:21:04.000Science is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
01:21:08.000The president of that was Alan Leshner.
01:21:10.000He used to be the head of NIDA. And he fanned the fears of MDMA and he did that in Congress and it was great because then he got more money for NIDA. He got over a billion dollars a year.
01:21:20.000So he published a press release about this article and it said that taking MDMA was like playing Russian roulette with your brain.
01:21:29.000So it didn't seem right, this article.
01:21:32.000We knew that we'd given MDMA two primates for research and nobody died of overdoses.
01:22:35.000And finally, a year later, they said that – and this was super embarrassing – they had to retract the study because they were puzzled why they couldn't replicate the results.
01:22:44.000And so they took some of the tissue from one of the animals that had overdosed and died.
01:22:50.000And they discovered that they had mistakenly given methamphetamine instead of MDMA. And that the bottles, they said, that were labeled MDMA actually had methamphetamine in them.
01:23:03.000And so they got these bottles from a group called Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina.
01:23:09.000They provide all the Schedule I drugs for all the NIDA-funded researchers.
01:23:13.000So the Hopkins people blamed the people at Research Triangle Institute and said they switched the labels on the bottles.
01:23:20.000The people from Research Triangle Institute said they never do that.
01:23:26.000They think that it got switched something or other at the site at Johns Hopkins.
01:23:30.000The National Institute of Drug Abuse didn't want to find out what was going on, or if they did want to find out, they never made it public.
01:23:36.000So it's never clear how did this happen.
01:23:39.000But they had to retract this data and retract their papers.
01:23:45.000And it was the high watermark of neurotoxicity fears.
01:23:51.000And at the same time, Peter Jennings was doing a documentary called Ecstasy Rising.
01:23:56.000And this was the first documentary that really had a bunch of people talking about the benefits.
01:24:04.000The other thing about methamphetamine versus MDMA is that, you know, for people that know about Adderall and other things, 10-15 milligrams is a hefty dose.
01:24:13.000But MDMA, it's 125 milligrams, is a full dose.
01:24:16.000And so they were giving the wrong drug in MDMA quantities.
01:24:22.000And that's why they knocked off a bunch of these primates.
01:24:24.000And that's why they claimed that they saw this dopaminergic problems.
01:24:28.000And so ever since then, and that's been 20 years ago now— Do you have speculation that was sabotage?
01:24:37.000I don't think it was from research trying to listen to it.
01:24:39.000Do you think it's accidental sabotage, or do you think it— I think that the researchers wouldn't have done that intentionally, but maybe somebody in the lab did it or something.
01:24:51.000But I do think that the researchers were fundamentally irresponsible to put the paper out because they should have known that there was prior primate studies where dopamine hadn't been damaged.
01:25:04.000The other thing is in the late 1980s, early 1990s, we were trying to Talk about, yeah, MDMA, serotonergic neurotoxicity.
01:25:15.000And so I went to George Riccardi, the same researcher that did the primate study with the methamphetamine instead.
01:25:20.000And I said, I want to buy you some monkeys.
01:25:29.000And again, there was no evidence of overdoses or dopamine.
01:25:34.000Also, this was before brain scans came in.
01:25:37.000And so the most sophisticated way that was available at the time to look at what's going on in the brain was to do spinal taps and to take spinal fluid and look for metabolites of neurotransmitters in the brain.
01:26:05.000But the imagery that I did, and again, this is kind of this idea about storytelling.
01:26:09.000So the story I was telling myself as this big needle is going into my spine to try to draw out the spinal fluid was that if a woman could give birth to a child, I could at least give birth to my spinal fluid.
01:26:21.000It was like way less painful, much shorter, but I could do it.
01:26:25.000And so the imagery was I'm giving my birth to my spinal fluid to these researchers so that we can understand what's really going on with MDMA and hopefully make it into a medicine.
01:27:28.000To try to show that he's anti-woke and that he is wanting to – what's going on in public education in Florida is really frightening.
01:27:39.000George Soros is actually interested in trying to help out at New College because George Soros actually, even though he's the boogeyman for a lot of the right wing, he funded the Central European University in Florida.
01:28:51.000Yeah, that seems to be the case with a lot of scientific studies, isn't it?
01:28:56.000It's a real problem when you're not just trying to find out what the truth is.
01:29:02.000You're trying to find data that would reinforce whatever idea that you went into it looking to find in the first place and throw out information that is contrary to that.
01:29:12.000Yeah, I'll say the best example of that for me was that I've done long-term follow-up studies to the work that Timothy Leary did at Harvard.
01:29:22.000So the Good Friday experiment was in 1962. The Good Friday Experiment?
01:29:26.000Yeah, the Good Friday Experiment is incredible.
01:29:29.000So this was, Aldous Huxley had written The Doors of Perception and was talking about mescaline and spiritual experiences.
01:29:36.000And a lot of people who are doing work with LSD, with alcoholics and others in the 50s would have these spiritual experiences.
01:29:43.000And Bill W., who started Alcoholics Anonymous, Actually had an LSD experience in the 50s and actually his first place getting sober was Belladonna.
01:29:55.000So Bill W., the founder of AA, had a psychedelic experience that got him sober in the first place.
01:30:01.000And then later, about a decade or more later, he experimented with LSD and he felt that this LSD could be tremendous for...
01:30:10.000What was his initial psychedelic experience that led him to get sober?
01:30:49.000Scopolamine is also the stuff they use to stop people from getting motion sickness on boats, which is really crazy, like Dramamine patches.
01:30:57.000Well, that illustrates the exact point, though, that it's not the thing itself.
01:32:14.000Working with Cruder tools, but there was a lot of work with LSD in the 60s for alcohol use disorder, and it proved to be quite effective when supported, so that these substances can be extremely helpful, again,
01:32:29.000used in a careful way, So the Good Friday experiment was an attempt to understand, can psychedelics produce a mystical experience?
01:32:43.000And Walter Pankey was a doctor and a minister, and he was getting a PhD at Harvard.
01:32:51.000And he was interested in looking at the spiritual potential of psilocybin and he worked with Timothy Leary and they did this experiment and they did it with a Reverend Howard Thurman.
01:33:05.000So Howard Thurman was an African-American minister at Boston University's Marsh Chapel.
01:33:13.000And Howard Thurman is someone who deserves a lot more attention because he studied with Gandhi.
01:33:30.000So Howard Thurman really helped the...
01:33:33.000American Civil Rights Movement adopt the strategy of nonviolence that he got from Gandhi.
01:33:41.000And that's what we see in all of the stories about people being beaten by police, trying to protest different things, and they try to react.
01:33:51.000So nonviolent resistance was a key to the American Civil Rights Movement.
01:33:55.000And Howard Thurman was very interested in this connection between the mystical experience and political action.
01:34:03.000So the mystical experience, you move beyond your sense of, I'm, you know, this biographical person.
01:34:35.000So you can say this, and I can say this, and people can hear it, but if you have an experience that you feel it, then you know it.
01:34:41.000And so Howard Thurman was very interested in this idea of...
01:34:46.000What are the political implications of this mystical experience?
01:34:50.000And so Walter Pankey was willing to work with him.
01:34:56.000And Howard Thurman said, I will let you come to my church, Marsh Chapel, on Good Friday, and you can do an experiment with 20 divinity students from Andover Newton Theological Seminary, and you can Give them all a pill and half will be psilocybin,
01:35:14.000half will be placebo, which was nicotinic acid, which gives you a flush.
01:35:19.000And so this was done and it was considered to be the most eloquently designed experiment ever done on whether psychedelics could produce a mystical experience.
01:35:33.000And it showed that nine out of the 20 people had a mystical experience, eight out of the nine had the psilocybin, and then they did some long-term, like six-month follow-ups, and they said it impacted their lives in certain ways.
01:35:47.000And then Walter Pankey died in a terrible scuba diving accident in 1971. And so a lot was ended with him.
01:35:59.000And then the 1970 and the backlash against psychedelics.
01:36:02.000So now it's in the 80s and I'm an undergraduate.
01:36:07.000I dropped out of college for 10 years from 1972 to 1982. And you have to do a thesis, a senior thesis at New College.
01:36:16.000And I wanted to do psychedelic research, but psychedelic research was wiped out at the time, nothing to do.
01:36:21.000You couldn't get permission to give psychedelics.
01:36:23.000But I thought, if I go back to the Good Friday experiment, that I could do a long-term follow-up that is just asking people what happened to them when they took the psilocybin and how do they think about it now.
01:36:36.000And I wouldn't have to get permission from the FDA or the DEA. I would just have to get permission from what's called an Institutional Review Board, which our college had, just about the safety of the subject.
01:36:47.000So that was the only way that I could do psychedelic research.
01:36:51.000And it was incredible because in the mystical literature, the real test of the validity of a mystical spiritual experience is called the fruits test.
01:37:01.000Means, what are the consequences in your life?
01:37:04.000What are the fruits of the experience?
01:37:05.000Does it make you more peaceful, more loving?
01:37:07.000Does it make you more, reduce your fear of death?
01:37:10.000Does it give you a more spiritual sense of how we're connected?
01:38:26.000But I'm wandering through the library, and I notice that they've got some books of the alumni, and one of them had the list of all the students that were in school in 1962, and their names and their addresses.
01:38:40.000So I photocopied it all, and then there was like 350 of them, and I wrote a postcard to every single one of them, and that led me to three of them wrote back, saying that they were in the study.
01:38:50.000And over years and years, it took me, but I identified 19 out of the 20. I was able to go see them in person and interview them.
01:39:00.000And this really validated my theory of change.
01:39:03.000So my theory of change also, which you've shared a bit, is that if you have these spiritual connections, these spiritual experiences, that will make you Think about the world in a different way.
01:39:14.000Think about others in a different way.
01:39:15.000And so what people said is that their mystical experiences really did reduce their fear of death, made them feel more connected to other people from different faiths, made them more ecumenical in a way, deepened their faith in their own religion.
01:39:28.000It didn't turn them away, but they saw it in a more symbolic rather than literal way.
01:39:34.000But what I discovered, so it validated the results, but what I discovered is a big mistake, that one of the persons in the study had heard the...
01:39:46.000Howard Thurman, by the way, the audio of that service is up on our website.
01:39:51.000If you go Good Friday Experiment, you can listen to Howard Thurman's Good Friday Experiment speech, you know, his sermons and stuff from 1962. One of them Was you have to tell people there's a man on the cross.
01:40:03.000You must tell people there's a man on the cross.
01:40:05.000And one of the students under the influence of psilocybin said, yeah, I got to tell people there's a man on the cross.
01:41:21.000You know, I think I had, I don't know if you ever saw the podcast, I had Alex Berenson on, who wrote a book called Tell Your Children, and it's all about the dangers of marijuana.
01:41:32.000And I had him on with Dr. Mike Hart, who is a cannabis doctor in Canada.
01:41:38.000And, you know, one of the things that he was talking about was people, for whatever reason, When they have a high dose of marijuana, there's something that happens to some of them where they have like a schizophrenic break.
01:42:21.000And if someone is particularly vulnerable, whether it's towards schizophrenia or whatever mental illness it might be, there's something about these experiences that seem to send them over the edge.
01:42:33.000And that's something that we should be concerned with.
01:42:47.000It's like we become the polar opposite.
01:42:49.000We just justify things that we find morally reprehensible, we find ethically terrible, and we justify it because we're doing it for the right side.
01:43:49.000Okay, it could be that they're so resisting the experience.
01:43:52.000So Stan Grof actually talked about work with obsessive compulsives that he did with LSD, and he had some that he could give over a thousand micrograms of LSD, enormous amounts of LSD, and they could still play chess.
01:44:03.000So there's a way where you can control your mind so much that even psychedelics won't happen.
01:46:22.000I think if there is a backlash where I... You know, the backlash in the 60s was political, you know, against psychedelics and hippies and stuff.
01:46:29.000The backlash that happened in the late 70s, early 80s, when it looked like marijuana might be legalized, was parents against the...
01:46:56.000The kids of today, you kids with your internet and your Google and being able to watch whatever you want to watch on television at any given time.
01:47:03.000When I was a kid, when you saw something on television, everybody talked about it.
01:47:30.000Like, the influence that they had by being able to do those kind of things and put them on television back then, It sets things back.
01:47:39.000Everything takes a whole generation for people to get over.
01:47:42.000If we go back to the early days of cannabis prohibition, when you watch the Reefer Madness films, and you find out about this whole Harry Anslinger, William Randolph Hearst connection, and that it actually had a lot to do with commodities,
01:48:04.000There's so many aspects to it that you would have never guessed.
01:48:07.000But the point is that that propaganda from the 1930s turned something that had thousands of years of human use, demonized it, created a new name for it, used a Mexican slang name for tobacco.
01:48:47.000And then you've got to get into the 60s before marijuana is popular again.
01:48:52.000Literally, it has to burn through a generation of propaganda.
01:48:55.000Their children have to learn from their parents' mistakes and realize that their parents are dumbasses, and then they experiment with things, and they have to learn from other people that are doing it.
01:49:06.000And then it goes to a point where it's at now.
01:49:08.000We're now, because of the internet, these conversations are just everywhere.
01:49:15.000The work that you guys have done is so extraordinary and so important.
01:49:18.000Guys like Dr. Karl Hart, all these different people, Michael Pollan and his amazing book, all these people that are talking about these experiences, now there's just this flood of information.
01:49:29.000So you can't demonize it the same way, but it's very important that the people that are on this side Don't bullshit anybody.
01:49:38.000And all these people will be at Psychedelic Science, too.
01:49:41.000And I think that the trap that we have to avoid falling into is, and where the backlash will come from now if there is, is if we exaggerate the results and minimize the risks.
01:49:52.000And we have to be very careful that we don't do that.
01:49:55.000It should be honest across the board, and I think if it is, there'll be an understanding by most people that you should be able to make educated, informed decisions as to what to do with your consciousness because there might be a significant benefit available if you do that.
01:51:32.000So I talked to them about it and I explained that we have stuck our heels in the sand.
01:51:40.000We've dug our heels in on something that is objectively not just ineffective, but very detrimental to society as a whole, and that's having drugs be illegal.
01:51:51.000Because if you have drugs illegal, you're not going to stop people from taking drugs.
01:51:55.000What you're going to do is funnel all the cash to criminals.
01:51:59.000It's what happened in Prohibition, the 1900s in America, and it's what's happening right now in Mexico.
01:52:06.000Well, and after Prohibition ended of alcohol, shortly after that, marijuana became...
01:52:28.000But back then, if you had the newspaper, if you were William Randolph Hearst and you had the newspaper, you could write whatever the fuck you wanted.
01:53:28.000Yeah, people talk about their mystical experiences and then maybe they can say how that's changed their lives, but that's sort of subjective.
01:53:35.000But if we can give psilocybin to prisoners and then help them have these pro-social experiences, work through their traumas, and then when they're released, then we can reduce their recidivism.
01:53:46.000They will now be ready to make a new re-entry into society and that that's an objective thing.
01:53:52.000So the next thing that Timothy Leary decided to do was the Concord Prison Experiment.
01:53:56.000And this was a tremendous experiment, and they gave about 35 people psilocybin experiences inside prison.
01:54:06.000Timothy Leary and others, the researchers would go into the prison, and half the researchers would also take psilocybin.
01:54:15.000And this was a way to try to help them to reduce the experimenter-experimentee kind of idea.
01:54:21.000And the Concord Prison Experiment was considered to be one of the most successful psychedelic experiences and studies of the 60s that ever there was.
01:54:31.000And unfortunately, all the records were lost of who was in the experiment.
01:54:37.000So after I did the Good Friday Experiment follow-up, after 25 years and found 19 out of the 20, I went to Tim and others and like, do you have any idea who was in the Concord Prison Experiment?
01:54:50.000So I didn't think I could do anything.
01:54:52.0001991, I published a paper in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology about the Good Friday Experiment.
01:54:58.000And there was an editorial in the Boston Globe about it, op-ed.
01:55:02.000And I got a call afterwards from a fellow, Michael Forcier, and he said that he worked for the Department of Corrections, and they had a special room where they collect the records of their famous and interesting prisoners.
01:55:13.000Like they had Malcolm X and his records and others.
01:55:17.000And they had the records of all the people from the Concord Prison Experiment.
01:55:21.000And he said, would you like to do a follow-up study?
01:55:56.000Well, I have had a lot of good conversations with DEA people and police because what they're taught about drugs, if they believe it, nobody would ever do these drugs.
01:56:10.000So I've tried to explain to them, and I could, oh, I did it when I was legal.
01:56:12.000But you try to do it in a way where you don't encourage them to react in a negative way.
01:56:16.000So I did this follow-up to the Concord Prison Experiment.
01:56:20.000All right, so while I'm doing this experiment and tracking people's criminal justice system records in the decades—this was like a 34-year follow-up—it started becoming clear to me that the experiment wasn't a success.
01:56:36.000And I was the one that was wanting to do the follow-up to bring attention to it because I thought it was a success.
01:57:04.000When you're in jail, the first day that you get off jail, nobody goes back to jail.
01:57:12.000But if you look two years out, more people will have had a chance to commit crimes and go back to jail.
01:57:17.000So the longer you're out of jail, the more likely you are to go back.
01:57:20.000So the group of people that had been in this experiment had been – on average, they'd been out of jail 10 months when they looked at their recidivism.
01:57:36.000And the researchers, Ralph Metzner and Tim Leary, they had done a base rate study of all the people that got released from the Concord Prison Experiment in the years before they did it, and they published their results.
01:57:48.000It was a little bit historical, so things don't always say the same exactly in history, but that was the best that they could do to compare it.
01:57:54.000But what I discovered is that they had published the results of this base rate study in a really obscure journal, a British criminology journal, And, you know, I had to go down in the dusty libraries of Harvard Law Library, the Widener Library to even find this journal.
01:58:10.000And when I read it, what I learned is that they had taken data from people that were out of prison for 30 months and compared it to people that were out of prison for 10 months.
01:58:56.000And they were just monkeying with the numbers.
01:58:58.000Well, the farther away it was in time from the original experiment, the better the results were reported over and over in time.
01:59:06.000So what they'd also said is that some of the people that had gone back to prison who'd gotten psilocybin didn't go back to prison for new crimes.
01:59:15.000They'd gone back because they had violated their probation for something.
01:59:28.000For someone to not go back to a life of crime after they've been incarcerated is a tremendous ask.
01:59:35.000And I think that if you're measuring the success of a psychedelic experience for the normal person, if a normal person doesn't have a pattern in their life of committing crime and being incarcerated, The problem with becoming sort of institutionalized and you become accustomed to certain patterns of behavior,
01:59:56.000to ask someone to just stop doing that forever, it's a huge life shift.
02:00:03.000Like even if they had a positive net benefit of their psychedelic experience, asking them to not commit crime.
02:00:10.000If you know a guy who's been in jail a couple of times, And, you know, he grows up in a terrible neighborhood and there's crime all around him.
02:00:34.000And Leary and Ralph Metzner, they realized that what they needed to do was to provide support and aftercare after people got out of prison.
02:00:44.000And just as they realized that, they started creating support groups.
02:00:48.000That's where they got kicked out of Harvard.
02:00:50.000And so those support groups fell apart.
02:00:52.000And so what kind of an experiment we would need to do today would be to both...
02:00:59.000See, this was an overvaluation of the psychedelic experience by itself.
02:01:03.000And it didn't really understand the social support that you need and all the cultural determinants of people that go back to prison.
02:01:09.000And so the experiment that needs to be done is...
02:01:14.000Helping people have these psychedelic experiences, move through their traumas, kind of have these powerful, positive experiences of connection, but then the support that you need afterwards.
02:01:24.000Just the same way in our research, you do the therapy with MDMA. And then you do integrative work without the MDMA afterwards.
02:01:35.000And so what we're going to try to do in Iceland will be, with the Minister of Justice, it will be the proper kind of experiment.
02:01:43.000And so it would be both work inside prison and then support afterwards.
02:01:47.000And so I think there is this tendency, yeah, to overvalue the psychedelic experience and separate it out from the therapy and from the aftercare and from the integration.
02:01:57.000So I felt like I had to report and debunk this experiment that was considered to be one of the best examples of the power of psychedelic therapy.
02:02:10.000And that's absolutely the correct thing to do.
02:02:12.000I feel like having one psychedelic experience for someone who's gone through a lifetime of crime, is currently incarcerated, or just got out of jail.
02:02:21.000Is like someone having a terrible staph infection and giving them a small amount of antibiotics and going, oh, it didn't work.
02:02:30.000Like, you don't have the right dose, you don't have the right duration, and you don't have the right care.
02:02:35.000I think someone who's in that bad, like, there's people that have pulled themselves out of being incarcerated.
02:02:42.000And become exemplary human beings, right?
02:02:44.000Bernard Hopkins, one of my favorite boxers of all time, is a great example of that.
02:02:48.000Learned how to box in jail, got out, and became like a just all-time great.
02:02:53.000And was super disciplined, never drank, never smoked, just ate clean.
02:02:57.000But to get someone out of that life and have them reincorporate into society, it's a task.
02:03:45.000Well, that raises another issue, which is that we're now in about...
02:03:49.000Starting research in about eight different VAs with different studies with MDMA. Actually, one thing I did last night, which was tremendous, and what I really like to do, because I got here early so I could be here on time today, is that I love to smoke pot and go wandering around cities after midnight.
02:05:00.000Not quite the middle of the night, but well after midnight.
02:05:05.000In a place where so much conservative policies are coming out of it.
02:05:10.000The Texas legislature is currently considering a rider to allocate $2.1 million to a study of MDMA at the Houston VA with veterans with PTSD. And two years before,
02:05:26.000they have allocated a similar amount of money for a psilocybin study in veterans with PTSD. At the Houston VA. And Lynette Avril, who's going to be the principal investigator, she hasn't started the psilocybin study quite yet because she got pregnant and had a child and now she's getting back to it,
02:05:43.000but it's going to Baylor College of Medicine and the Houston VA. So I just had this feeling of the legislature is under repair with all of the scaffolding, but in this place out of which so much conservative policies are coming, so is support for psychedelics.
02:06:00.000And it just gave me such a warm feeling.
02:06:02.000And again, it's like not demonizing everything's all bad.
02:06:05.000But it was really a nice way to feel the grandeur of the building and to think that, yeah, we need to do a lot of renovation of our policies.
02:06:17.000And this work that's being done, yeah, Governor Perry is helping with it.
02:06:49.000There's so much work that's been done that people kind of understand there's real great benefits.
02:06:54.000I think the Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind, and then the Netflix series, the four series about that, has changed lots of people's minds.
02:07:01.000Well, he's such a respected journalist.
02:07:03.000Doing The Omnivore's Dilemma was amazing.
02:07:06.000So to get him invested in something like this is...
02:07:29.000Because it's always a benefit-risk balance.
02:07:31.000We don't have to pretend there's no risks.
02:07:33.000So the moment that we're at is just this incredible moment.
02:07:37.000So now we have two successful Phase III studies.
02:07:39.000We have a non-profit that is 100% owner of a public benefit corp.
02:07:43.000We do have Some money from investors, but our challenge now over the next couple months is where do we get the money to get us to two different points.
02:07:55.000The first point is from here to FDA approval.
02:07:58.000We think that's going to be potentially, if all goes well, something like June 2024. But then there's going to be about another year and a half or a bit more, potentially, until we reach what's called sustainability.
02:08:11.000And so sustainability is when income from the sale of MDMA equals what all of our costs are, and then we start amassing resources for more research, for more studies, for work that MAPS is doing.
02:08:28.000So what we have this chance to either keep MAPS as the sole owner of the Public Benefit Corp or we may have to turn it into a publicly traded company if we don't find the philanthropy that we need and we need to take investors and these investors want us to turn this into...
02:08:49.000Yeah, that was a wild conversation that we had the other night at the bar.
02:08:52.000Yes, and one of the things that you said struck me, and I thought about it a lot, is you said these are sacred substances.
02:08:58.000And when you get them mixed with commerce, you have to be really careful.
02:09:41.000It would still have to be some genius benefactor or some Elon Musk type character who comes along and decides to fund it, which could happen and would save you from that.
02:09:51.000But if you just went public, my worry is that you're getting involved in You're getting involved in commerce with psychedelics and that just doesn't feel like the way to do it.
02:10:05.000It feels like all that stuff should be completely legal and we should kind of wait until you guys and the way your work kicks in and all the influence and the people that vote get an understanding of what the real landscape is.
02:10:23.000Now, there's a fellow that, Jeff George, he's the chair of the board of the MAPS Public Benefit Corp.
02:10:30.000And he used to be the CEO of Sandoz, which is one of the world's largest generics, but also Sandoz was where Albert Hoffman invented LSD and where Albert also first synthesized psilocybin.
02:10:42.000So Jeff has got incredible pharmaceutical experience and he's been trying to help educate me about that we have a tremendous opportunity in a way, if we do need to take investors and do need to become a publicly traded company,
02:10:59.000that we could be an example for the entire pharmaceutical industry.
02:11:03.000That we could be an example of a public benefit psychedelic pharmaceutical company with majority control.
02:11:09.000Hopefully we could remain a majority control owner of a nonprofit.
02:11:14.000And so I appreciate your reaction to this because he said there may be several different ways in which there could be benefits from going public.
02:12:20.000Well, we are currently developing a budget in the range of $75 million to FDA approval.
02:12:28.000And then after FDA approval, there is going to be another raise that we're going to need to make to get to this sustainability point.
02:12:38.000But once we have FDA approval, there's many options that we will have that were not so much open to us now.
02:12:44.000So, for example, we've been approached by people, a big company in Korea that was interested in buying the rights for Asia for MDMA. So we're trying to narrow them down to Korea.
02:12:57.000But we could, with FDA approval, it'll be pretty clear that other countries will give reciprocity, that we can make it.
02:13:04.000So we might be able to sell rights to different countries so that we can keep the nonprofit, the 100% owner of the Public Benefit Corp.
02:13:12.000We would have more options to do royalty shares because then there are people that, the mission-related people that have, through Ryan Zura, that have given us this $43 million They're gambling that we may get it approved.
02:13:27.000And then the royalties come only if we get it approved.
02:13:29.000Post-approval, we'll be able to get a much better deal.
02:13:43.000Okay, so, well, the downside for me is right now, the potential downside is right now, With MAPS as the 100% owner of the Benefit Corp, net zero trauma by 2070 is the new vision.
02:13:58.000And what that means is we've talked about working with prisoners.
02:14:04.000I want to work with people in Rwanda that have been traumatized by genocide.
02:14:07.000I want to go all over the world and try to globalize MDMA-assisted therapy in a way where we go where the trauma is, not necessarily where the money is.
02:14:17.000And that we put this global perspective of net zero trauma by 2070, mass mental health, spiritualized humanity, you know, we're destroying the environment, we've got incredible proliferation of nuclear weapons, you know, whether humans survive is not a sure thing.
02:14:35.000And so I think if we're more stable, if we're not seeing the world through all these filters of pain and past traumas, so I think one of the upsides, you could say, of having the public benefit corp be wholly owned by the nonprofit is that we can focus on public benefit and that that's the thing.
02:14:52.000I think that when you start having publicly traded companies, you could say there's no one, it's not pure public benefit or pure returns to investors.
02:15:26.000The risk, depending on where the capital comes from and what kind of conditions they put on it, is that we start now maybe need to think about more returns to investors and where do we go for the money rather than where do we go to reduce the trauma.
02:15:44.000So, but I think we can have a good example of a public benefit corp, hopefully at least majority owned by the nonprofit, that can do an enormous amount of good in the world.
02:15:58.000But I just think that we could do an enormous amount of good plus if it's funded by philanthropy.
02:16:03.000So I think the worst loss of public benefit for us would be to run out of money and to never make it into a medicine at all.
02:16:11.000So if we have to take money from investors, I think we should do that.
02:16:16.000And so we're exploring different options.
02:16:27.000And I hope that some of those wealthy hippies decide to donate to make it into a philanthropy.
02:16:34.000But I do think that it's our obligation to make it into a medicine one way or another.
02:16:40.000And if we do take it from investors to do it in structured in such a way where It's still within a public benefit structure, and so we will try to develop metrics to evaluate public benefit.
02:16:54.000We will try to ensure governance controls so that it does stay more focused on public benefit.
02:17:00.000But, you know, it would be a lot easier if we could do this, in a way, through philanthropy.
02:17:06.000And also, we are the leading—there's hundreds of psychedelic for-profit companies and a few non-profits, but we're the only one that has completed Phase 3. So we have two successful Phase III studies.
02:17:17.000I'd like us to be a model for the entire field.
02:17:20.000And again, what you're saying about telling the truth or underestimating risks or overresting benefits, I would like us to be a model.
02:17:31.000When I first started MAPS in 1986, because I assumed, erroneously, that MDMA would immediately become generic if it was made into a medicine.
02:17:42.000Because I knew it was invented by Merck in 1912, and so the molecules in the public domain.
02:17:47.000And I also knew that the use of MDMA for PTSD was going on before I even knew about MDMA. You know, I worked with the first person with PTSD. I talked about it in my TED Talk.
02:17:58.000In 1984 is the first person that I actually saw suicidal with MDMA, no other options, and she was able to get better.
02:18:08.000And Marcella is her name, and now she's one of our lead therapists and trains other therapists.
02:18:14.000But I thought it would be coming generic.
02:18:16.000I did my PhD, I got it in 2001, focused on how to FDA regulation of psychedelics and marijuana.
02:18:24.000I took a class at Harvard Law School around 96 from the leading pharmaceutical expert, Peter Burton-Hutt.
02:18:31.000He wrote the textbook, Food and Drug Law.
02:18:34.000And he later became on my dissertation committee.
02:18:40.000But throughout my entire education, I still thought that MDMA would immediately become generic.
02:18:47.000It wasn't until 2014 that I went to a party, in a way, and ran into a patent lawyer.
02:18:55.000So my wife was head of what's called Foundation for Belmont Education, which is a local group that raises money to supplement the money that goes into public education.
02:19:20.000My wife can do the speech, and I'm done working.
02:19:24.000So this moment where I was done working and just going to munch on all this food is where I ran into a patent attorney who I had known.
02:19:33.000He was from locally, and he had previously gotten patents for Bromo LSD, which is a non-psychedelic version of LSD. And bromo LSD... What's the benefit of it?
02:20:04.000And I started doing work with them at Harvard.
02:20:07.000And they did medical records of all these people.
02:20:12.000They had terrible cholesterol headaches, then they didn't, and intervening was LSD or psilocybin.
02:20:17.000So it's just one trip to break a cycle?
02:20:20.000Well, they do it three times every three days.
02:20:23.000So over nine days, you'll do the psilocybin or the LSD. I mentioned about this project in Jordan that Michael Marcus helped fund.
02:20:37.000It was because a young Jordanian came by to McLean Hospital at Harvard to learn about the cluster headache study, and it turned out that his cycle began, and they weren't giving Psilocybin or LSD at the time, they were just studying it.
02:20:53.000And so his cluster headaches started and they referred him to me.
02:20:58.000And so I thought, okay, I'll give him LSD. But I thought, he's never done LSD before.
02:21:07.000And I said, we have no idea why LSD works.
02:21:22.000At the same time, the MDMA will calm him down and maybe whatever LSD does, it won't be blocked by the MDMA. I didn't know, but I thought let's give it a try.
02:21:54.000We can finally get into an Arab country to do Arab-Israeli stuff.
02:21:57.000So that's what I talked to Michael Marcus about, and that's why he supported that project.
02:22:02.000But in any case, the Harvard people said, oh, Timothy Leary was here, and this is like, we're not going to let you do psychedelic research unless it's the last resort.
02:22:12.000So Torsten Pasi, John Halpern were the two that were doing this.
02:22:16.000Torsten was at Hanover University in Germany, and they said, all right, let's do Bromo LSD. We don't know why it works, but Bromo-LSD is a non-psychological version of LSD, and we'll give it to a bunch of people, and it won't work, and then we'll come back to Harvard and say, we've got to start giving LSD or psilocyme to people.
02:22:35.000So, I keep waiting for the results, and waiting for the results, and waiting for the results, and they're not telling me, they're not telling me, they're telling me, I'm like, what is going on here?
02:22:43.000Finally, they told me that they thought I would be terribly disappointed, but Bromo-LSD worked.
02:22:51.000And not only did it work, but it worked better than LSD or psilocybin.
02:23:19.000Anyway, so Harvard then gets a patent on Bromo LSD. For cluster headaches with the University of Hanover.
02:23:27.000And a fellow, Kerry Turnbull, is now trying to move this through the FDA. So the patent attorney for Harvard was also part of this, you know, local.
02:23:39.000And so I go to him, again, keep in mind, I'm super stoned, just munching on all this food.
02:23:43.000And I'm like, oh, it's very interesting.
02:23:46.000How's this going with the patent for bromo LSD? And I said, too bad there's nothing like that for MDMA. And he said, well, there is something.
02:23:59.000He said, well, it turns out in 1984, Ronald Reagan signed a bill to provide incentives to develop drugs that are off patent.
02:24:07.000And what it means is that if you are the first to produce the evidence to make a drug into a medicine, even if there's no patents, you have exclusive use of your data for five years.
02:24:18.000Now, it's different from a patent in that another person, another company, can develop their own data.
02:24:24.000So it doesn't block anybody like a patent would block anybody.
02:24:28.000Then, if you do studies in pediatric populations, so the FDA has right now forbidden us to do studies in people that are younger than 18. We can only work with 18 or older.
02:24:40.000We've had a mother with a daughter who'd been terribly raped and was mute and wanted to be in the study, and the FDA said no.
02:24:48.000But what they did say is that if you succeed in adults, if we do give you permission to work in adults, you must do studies in adolescence, and you get an extra six months date exclusivity.
02:25:01.000Then it blocks the FDA from reviewing a generic applicant's file until the five and a half years is over, and it takes FDA an average of two years to review a file.
02:25:12.000So there's this period of data exclusivity that we would have a monopoly potentially on the sale of MDMA for PTSD. And Europe, the European Medicines Agency, after Ronald Reagan signed this in 1984,
02:25:35.000I thought, how is it that I took the class from the expert, I read the textbook, my whole dissertation is on it, and I never even heard about this.
02:25:44.000And the reason is pharma doesn't use it.
02:25:45.000They only want drugs that they have patented.
02:25:48.000And we've had a bunch of potential biotech investors tell us that they don't really want to invest because they don't like the fact that data exclusivity isn't as long as a patent.
02:26:22.000Now, I'll say that the DEA then has to reschedule, and that will take a maximum of 90 days.
02:26:29.000DEA, by law, must reschedule within 90 days after FDA has said yes.
02:26:34.000So there will be this five and a half years, and then it could be a year and a half, two years, or six months, or who knows how long it'll take the FDA to actually review this file.
02:26:45.000But I think that we have this period of time where we have this opportunity for income.
02:26:50.000So that's the story to the donors has been, and the story to the investors and donors is, if you help us make MDMA into medicine, we're not going to be coming to you for money all the time because we will be able to make money to use to more research.
02:27:05.000MDMA is not just good for PTSD. It's tremendous for couples therapy.
02:27:10.000We think it would be tremendous for eating disorders, for postpartum depression.
02:27:13.000Of course, we have to do all the research to see if this is really the case.
02:27:16.000It has to be data-driven, but We have this opportunity to become self-sustaining.
02:27:22.000And so that's the situation that we were able to tell both donors and then also investors, that we can return money during this period of data exclusivity.
02:28:07.000You need randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind studies.
02:28:10.000That's the gold standard for Phase III studies.
02:28:14.000So, well, Jamie, you may get these edibles and nothing happens, you know, but most people that get MDMA or LSD know they've got it, or psilocybin.
02:28:24.000So the double-blind doesn't work too well in these kind of studies.
02:28:28.000So the FDA offers what they call special protocol assessment.
02:28:33.000And that's a process where you can opt in once you've been approved to go to phase three and you negotiate every aspect of the design with the FDA and all the other material and other scientific studies, all the other data that they want to see in the review package.
02:28:50.000And the goal is to have these special protocol assessment negotiations to end up with what's called an approval letter.
02:28:58.000An agreement, yeah, a formal agreement that they agree with this special protocol assessment.
02:29:05.000Often you don't get that and Big Pharma doesn't use this a lot of times anyway because it delays things by quite a long time.
02:29:11.000But they often don't need to do it because they're not doing something novel, they're not doing something controversial, they're not doing something that's a challenge with the double blind.
02:29:22.000So we went through this special protocol assessment, and it took us eight months.
02:29:27.000And in the end, we did get an agreement letter.
02:29:29.000And the FDA brought in the old wise man of the FDA, a fellow named Bob Temple.
02:29:35.000Who was at the FDA since 1972, their Office of Science Policy.
02:29:40.000And what we said to them is, it was kind of funny, we said to them that there's a quote from an early president of Harvard, which says, never forget, there's always a Harvard man on the wrong side of every issue.
02:29:58.000So I opened the meeting and I said, this is the quote and the person on the wrong side is me because my dissertation was, I thought I solved the double blind problem.
02:30:07.000And it would be therapy with low dose MDMA versus therapy with full dose MDMA. And people would be confused about what they got.
02:30:15.000And our challenge would be to find the dose of MDMA. The low dose that was high enough to cause confusion, but not so high that it caused so much benefits that we'd never be able to see the difference between the two groups.
02:30:27.000So over the course of from 2000 to 2016, when we did all these phase 2 studies, we tested inactive placebo, 25 milligrams, 30 milligrams, 40 milligrams, 50 milligrams, 75, 100, 125, and 150. And what we discovered,
02:30:44.000which was again a little bit difficult for me to discover, is my dissertation was wrong.
02:30:51.000I was partially right, is a better way to say it.
02:30:53.000That it did cause confusion between the low dose and the high dose, but it made people uncomfortable.
02:31:00.000So the low doses, it's like turbulence when you take off of an airplane.
02:31:04.000At the very beginning there's more turbulence, and then when you get above clouds or so, your cruise control is smooth.
02:31:10.000So early small doses of MDMA, they have an activating effect without as much of the fear reduction.
02:31:17.000So what we showed is that people who got these low doses, they all still got better, but they didn't get as much benefit as if we gave them an inactive placebo.
02:31:30.000If they got therapy with nothing, they did better than if they got therapy with low dose.
02:31:34.000And we discovered that the 75 milligram dose group was actually surprisingly helpful and beneficial.
02:31:40.000So it's a narrow range between when you're in the turbulent zone to when you're getting benefits, when you're cruising.
02:31:48.000So there's no practical way to do that.
02:31:50.000So we went to the FDA at this final meeting for this special protocol assessment, and we said, I'm wrong.
02:32:01.000But we can give you blinding, but you're going to make it easier for us to tell a difference between the two groups.
02:32:07.000Because the people with the low dose don't do as well as the people that got nothing.
02:32:12.000And the real challenge is to show if we can do this with therapy, why bother add a drug?
02:32:17.000So we said to the FDA, we suggest you make it harder for us to find a difference by letting us use inactive placebo.
02:32:25.000And what they said is that oftentimes, what Bob Temple helped them come to this conclusion, is that oftentimes the double-blind doesn't actually work anyway.
02:32:34.000Like there's sexual side effects from SSRIs.
02:32:37.000So you can learn from side effect profiles that people talk to you.
02:32:41.000If you're doing an experiment and you're collecting adverse events, they'll tell you what the problems are and you'll say, oh, this is probably this or that.
02:32:48.000So they said there's two main ways to reduce experimental bias.
02:32:56.000That means everybody is similarly motivated, they come from the same kind of background, they all fit the inclusion criteria, and then they're all willing to do whatever and then half get your treatment, half get the control.
02:33:07.000The other is a robust system of independent raters to evaluate the outcomes.
02:33:12.000We don't want the therapist to say how well people did, because they will most likely, over 90% of the time, they can tell who got MDMA, who didn't.
02:33:33.000But most of the time, people are able to tell the difference.
02:33:40.000But the question is also that the side effect profile will be better if it's no MDMA as well.
02:33:47.000So when I said that we had one woman try to kill herself twice and she had the placebo, it's from the therapy.
02:33:54.000If she had gotten low-dose MDMA, Maybe it's this low-dose MDMA that made her uncomfortable.
02:33:59.000But now we know if you have severe PTSD and you go into therapy and you're starting to uncover things, that's a risk because you've got some balance.
02:34:11.000But when stuff comes to the surface, it can make you really disturbed.
02:34:14.000So Bob Temple came and said, we will approve this idea of therapy with inactive placebo.
02:34:23.000So we got an agreement letter from the Special Protocol Assessment.
02:34:26.000So we have a situation now, to address your question, how likely is it that it's going to be approved, is that the FDA is legally bound to approve our drug if we get statistical significance, which we've got in spades, tremendous, If we have an excellent safety record,
02:34:43.000which we do, and if we've gathered the data in a proper way so that the FDA considers it valid.
02:34:49.000And we've recently had a big inspection by FDA and Health Canada.
02:34:54.000We've had loads of people from the Public Benefit Corp who did a phenomenal job to try to respond to all the questions from the FDA, and we got some findings but nothing serious, so we know that they're going to consider the data to be valid.
02:35:07.000So I do think that the chances are they cannot say we don't like your design because the double line didn't work because we have prior agreement to use that design.
02:35:18.000There's no safety issues that they can point to of significance.
02:35:23.000I mean there's acute effects from MDMA. Most of it was like sweating or muscle tension or these are transitory side effects from the MDMA. All more from the MDMA than placebo.
02:35:34.000I think the other big factor that makes me somewhat confident is that we have bipartisan support.
02:35:45.000So much in America is politicized, is part of the culture wars.
02:35:49.000But we have managed somehow, well, consciously, intentionally, and a lot of it is working with veterans and others, is to take the psychedelics out of the culture wars.
02:36:00.000So I don't think there's going to be political efforts to...
02:36:05.000There's actually, I won't mention names or anything, but there is a member of Congress that has PTSD, that's a Republican, That wants to go through, if possible, a study in the open, a legal study, then to publicize the effects of MDMA therapy for PTSD. It's amazing.
02:36:37.000If it does get approved and if MDMA does get rescheduled, how quickly do you think that would open up the door for other similar substances?
02:36:47.000Well, the other similar substances, the next one in the line is psilocybin, and they're going to have to generate their own data.
02:36:52.000So we got breakthrough therapy designation in 2017. Right after we completed the special protocol assessment, we got breakthrough therapy, and we were the first one for any kind of psychedelics.
02:37:09.000A year or two later, the psilocybin, Compass got breakthrough therapy for psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, and then USONA got breakthrough therapy for psilocybin for major depressive disorder.
02:37:21.000So I think that the psilocybin people are going to be the next through the FDA system.
02:37:26.000They're just starting their Phase III studies.
02:37:28.000So I think by 2026 maybe psilocybin will be there.
02:37:32.000So we're opening the door politically, but they have to come through with their own data.
02:37:36.000And then there will be other people trying to work with 5-MeO to make that into a medicine, potentially for depression or something.
02:37:43.000So I think that we are the leading example.
02:37:46.000That's why I would like to ideally do it through philanthropy.
02:37:50.000But I think that we've got a real hope that this will be approved.
02:37:56.000Well, listen, you just shot out the bat signal.
02:37:59.000So we'll see who responds in terms of philanthropy or what hardcore capitalists think that you could save the world with this idea and make a shitload of money.
02:38:08.000Yeah, and all those that want to go to the Psychedelic Science Conference, Rogan 20, to get a discount.
02:38:13.000But I'd like to read you these potential benefits, just to see what you think about that.
02:39:25.000You know when your kids say they want to do something and you don't think it's a good idea?
02:39:30.000We'll say, well, why don't you give me three examples of why I should let you spend the night at Cindy's house?
02:39:40.000And then they go, because I think it'll teach me responsibility, and even though sometimes I stay up late with her, this time I definitely won't.
02:39:50.000Well, before I get to the rest of this, just about kids.
02:39:53.000So I've got Eden is 28, Lila is 26, and Ellie is 24. But when they were their bar mitzvah age, and this is where I'm curious more how you're going to teach your kids, is that I remember my bar mitzvah as being a massive disappointment.
02:40:42.000So when each of our kids turned 13, my wife and I, we went to them and we said, if you want marijuana or MDMA, we think you're old enough for it and we'll do it together and you can have it.
02:40:56.000And all of them were like freaked out, like, no, no, we're not ready!
02:42:10.000Well, the other is that there'll be more support for MAPS. I mean, if the Benefit Corp does well and MAPS is the owner, then we'll have more reason.
02:42:29.000The third one, I think, is somewhat different.
02:42:35.000It supports the organizational maturation and development.
02:42:39.000So we may have investors that have lots of pharma experience or something, and then they may help us to improve our operations in some ways.
02:44:20.000But we could become a model for the The industry.
02:44:26.000So I think there's a lot of merit in that idea.
02:44:29.000Well, I hope you figure out the right path.
02:44:32.000I do not know what it will be, but I appreciate everything you guys do.
02:44:37.000Yeah, and I think that once we talked about it a couple weeks ago, why you invited me back is because you wanted to help us highlight this crossroads that we're at.
02:45:19.000So Dan Grossman is also on the board of the MAPS Public Benefit Corp.
02:45:25.000And he is from the Boston Consulting Group.
02:45:28.000So he's a managing director, senior partner, and he does a lot of biofarm stuff.
02:45:34.000So I'll just say that there's various theories of pricing.
02:45:38.000So once we make it into medicine, whether we do it even in a public benefit with only philanthropy or if it's investors, we still are going to be looking at how do we price the drug.
02:45:50.000And there's interesting ways to do this.
02:45:53.000So the first is called price to value.
02:45:56.000And when you consider the value, and this is how insurance companies will often look at it, it's both to the individual, the family, and the society.
02:46:04.000So there are substantial values in taking people who have moderate to severe PTSD. They can't work, things like that.
02:46:13.000But you also want it to be available for everyone.
02:46:18.000And so the key challenge that we have is that when you look at pharmaceutical ads on TV, They'll say, oh, if you can't afford the drug, you know, we'll give it to you.
02:46:28.000You know, we have a patient assistance program, you know, and apply to us.
02:46:32.000So our situation is fundamentally different because the treatment is therapy augmented by the drug.
02:46:38.000So if we give people MDMA, it's not going to do them any good whatsoever if they can't afford the therapy.