The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2319 - Rick Doblin

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day!

00:00:14.000 This is absolutely incredible, Joe.

00:00:16.000 Absolutely.

00:00:17.000 A series of unexpected things have led to this day.

00:00:20.000 So you were supposed to do Duncan's podcast, and then Duncan and I got on the phone, and he was saying, you know, trying to move tickets for the psychedelic event.

00:00:28.000 And then Duncan said, you know, hey man, you can have him on your show.

00:00:32.000 And I said, well, why don't you come on too?

00:00:34.000 It'll be really fun.

00:00:35.000 Then this morning, Duncan has a root canal, like an unexpected emergency root canal.

00:00:41.000 So it was just a crazy turn of events, and fortunately, you're here.

00:00:46.000 Yeah, I just came in from Ukraine, actually.

00:00:49.000 Oh, wow.

00:00:49.000 Yeah.

00:00:50.000 Ooh, what are we doing over there?

00:00:52.000 Training therapists and psychiatrists.

00:00:54.000 Wow.

00:00:55.000 So Ukraine has enormous amounts of trauma, and so what I'm trying to do is to go to high-trauma areas and try to talk about MDMA-assisted therapy and how that could be helpful.

00:01:08.000 What is the legality of it over there?

00:01:10.000 Well, right now it's illegal.

00:01:12.000 They have these terrible laws left over from when Russia was in control.

00:01:17.000 And you cannot even do research with Schedule I drugs.

00:01:20.000 Wow.

00:01:21.000 Not with psilocybin, not with MDMA.

00:01:23.000 You can't even do research.

00:01:24.000 But over the last couple of years, there's been a lot of efforts by their military, by other people to change that because they're aware that they have so much enormous trauma.

00:01:33.000 So a couple of months ago, the Ukrainian government put out draft legislation to change the law.

00:01:40.000 And so the training that we did was for 55 psychiatrists and therapists from throughout Ukraine.

00:01:47.000 We did it in the western part of Ukraine, Lviv, which is not really a dangerous area.

00:01:53.000 But even while we were there, there were multiple air raid sirens.

00:01:57.000 But then they look at their phone and they see the area that the air raid sirens are supposedly about and they could be like 100 miles.

00:02:04.000 Square, something like that.

00:02:06.000 So nobody seemed to care.

00:02:07.000 Nobody moved to shelters, and we just ignored these air raid sirens and heard nothing.

00:02:13.000 But it's just, it was so emotionally moving because we went to the cemetery in Lviv, and they have these in cities all over Ukraine.

00:02:22.000 And they have something that I've never seen before, is that they have just enormous numbers of graves.

00:02:28.000 Terrible.

00:02:29.000 They've lost about 250,000 people.

00:02:32.000 But the graves all have flags for Ukraine, but they have the pictures of the person that's dead, the person that's buried there.

00:02:39.000 And I've never seen that anywhere else.

00:02:42.000 It has even more of an emotional impact because you're actually not just thinking all these people are dead, but you're seeing their pictures.

00:02:51.000 And most of them are younger and, you know, tragically interrupted their lives, a fair number of women.

00:02:59.000 And they put them in the center of the cities.

00:03:03.000 They're having to build new grave sites all over.

00:03:05.000 And this was next to a really large old historic cemetery.

00:03:11.000 And so it feels to me like what I'm trying to do is to really go to where people, I think, have lots of trauma but don't understand some of these new technologies, meaning psychedelic therapies.

00:03:27.000 Hardly new.

00:03:29.000 Well, new to them.

00:03:30.000 So they've been very much a conservative society.

00:03:34.000 They don't have legal marijuana.

00:03:36.000 They don't have marijuana.

00:03:38.000 How dare you.

00:03:39.000 Sorry.

00:03:42.000 Sorry.

00:03:44.000 Yeah, so it was very moving to be there.

00:03:48.000 Just the fact that we were there, that people felt that we were willing to come to the country and be there with them.

00:03:55.000 Even though it's in this more safe part of the country.

00:03:59.000 And so the thought that the next steps would all be philanthropy.

00:04:03.000 So I should say that I'm here representing myself.

00:04:09.000 I'm not talking on behalf of MAPS and I'm not talking on behalf of Lycos, the pharmaceutical company that MAPS helped start a while ago.

00:04:18.000 So I'm just talking for myself personally.

00:04:20.000 But what we're trying to do is...

00:04:24.000 Really respond to where the trauma is.

00:04:26.000 And next week I'm going to Beirut, which is something I never thought I would be going to.

00:04:33.000 But I've been invited to speak at the American University of Beirut and also a YPO sort of business group.

00:04:40.000 And there's the possibility of potentially at least starting research with MDMA therapy in Lebanon as well.

00:04:48.000 Do you ever get frustrated at the lack of progress?

00:04:52.000 With legalization?

00:04:54.000 Because it seems like so much headway has been made on the therapeutic front.

00:04:59.000 Like so many people have anecdotal stories of like a lot of soldiers with Ibogaine in particular, MDMA in particular, that these people have had incredible experiences, turned their life around.

00:05:13.000 I'm so baffled by the snail's pace of acceptance.

00:05:20.000 Well, I first tried MDMA in 1982.

00:05:23.000 So we're talking about 43 years ago.

00:05:26.000 And as soon as I experienced it, I thought this has incredible therapeutic potential.

00:05:31.000 It was legal at the time.

00:05:35.000 When did it become illegal?

00:05:37.000 1985.

00:05:39.000 And so it had been, MDMA had been a It had been legal, but it was sort of quietly used in therapy circles from around 1976 to the early 80s.

00:05:52.000 And then it started leaking out of these therapy circles and started being used as a party drug ecstasy.

00:05:58.000 Wasn't a lot of that in Dallas?

00:05:59.000 Yes, a lot of it was at the Stark Club in Dallas.

00:06:03.000 Yeah, that is really where MDMA became ecstasy.

00:06:06.000 Lorenzo from the psychedelic salon.

00:06:08.000 I learned all about that from him.

00:06:11.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:06:12.000 There's a fellow named Michael Caine is working on a movie about the Star Club.

00:06:16.000 Oh, wow.

00:06:17.000 There's an incredible story because Larry Hagman, who was the star of Dallas, frequented this nightclub with a bunch of the people from the cast.

00:06:27.000 And the police had decided to bust it because they knew that there was all these experiences.

00:06:34.000 They busted J.R. Ewing?

00:06:34.000 No, no.

00:06:36.000 They were all prepared to bust the Star Club that night.

00:06:41.000 And unexpectedly, J.R. Ewing and Larry Huckman showed up, and they canceled the bus because they thought it'd be too embarrassing to bust him, and they busted it another time.

00:06:51.000 He was on CNN once, and he was talking about how he's not afraid of death because he had an incredible LSD experience.

00:06:57.000 Yeah.

00:06:58.000 Did you ever see that?

00:06:58.000 I did, yeah.

00:06:59.000 They were like, what?

00:07:01.000 Well, he did LSD therapy in the 60s.

00:07:04.000 The reason that I even knew that is my mother-in-law read his autobiography.

00:07:09.000 And he talks about doing LSD therapy in the 60s.

00:07:13.000 And so my mother-in-law said, you might want to try to contact this guy because maybe he's got overlapping interests and he'll house out.

00:07:22.000 And it took me a couple of years to get to him, but eventually I did.

00:07:27.000 One funny story is that I got to know him pretty well and I would stay over at his house a bunch of times in Santa Monica.

00:07:33.000 But he was also in I Dream of Jeannie.

00:07:37.000 Oh, yeah!

00:07:39.000 So I Dream of Genie is about this genie that comes out of this bottle.

00:07:43.000 He's an astronaut.

00:07:45.000 And a friend of his had made a bong out of the genie bottle.

00:07:52.000 And they wanted to market it, and Larry said, no way.

00:07:56.000 So there was only two versions of this genie bong, and one of my more humorous moments was smoking pot with Larry Hagman on the genie bong.

00:08:10.000 That's hilarious.

00:08:11.000 It's so funny when a guy plays this, like, straight-laced, greedy kind of psycho on a television show, a soap opera show, and then in real life, he's a stoner.

00:08:20.000 Oh, he's incredible.

00:08:22.000 Yeah.

00:08:22.000 Isn't that interesting, though?

00:08:23.000 It's like, because you would never guess that from the J.R. Ewing character.

00:08:27.000 Oh, right.

00:08:28.000 No, he was very much...

00:08:30.000 Pro-psychedelic and had multiple experiences during the 60s.

00:08:33.000 The CNN interview was wild, though, because I remember watching it going, oh, you guys weren't ready for this.

00:08:40.000 That's what he said that.

00:08:41.000 They were like, what?

00:08:42.000 You're saying acid's good?

00:08:44.000 It's like literally the opposite of the Bill Hicks joke.

00:08:47.000 You know, the Bill Hicks joke, like you never hear a good drug story.

00:08:51.000 It's always young man on acid, thinks he can fly, dies. 0.99

00:08:56.000 But that was the one time.

00:08:59.000 A positive drug story from, like, a beloved star of a beloved show.

00:09:06.000 Yeah, it was the most popular TV show in the world at some point.

00:09:09.000 Yeah.

00:09:09.000 But about your question about frustration, yes, the answer is yes, but it's important not to be overwhelmed, I guess, by frustration, is just to continue plodding along.

00:09:23.000 We've just passed MAPS's 39th anniversary, April 8th.

00:09:29.000 I had 1986 is when I started MAPS.

00:09:33.000 And when I started MAPS, I didn't really know that it would ever succeed, that we would ever make MDMA into medicine.

00:09:39.000 It was the height of Nancy Reagan and just saying no and the escalation of the drug war.

00:09:44.000 The worst times.

00:09:45.000 And I realized that it was worth doing.

00:09:48.000 Working towards bringing psychedelics forward, whether it worked or not.

00:09:52.000 And that's what really gave me the mindset to not be overwhelmed by the frustration by how many obstacles there's been.

00:10:01.000 Because I always had this feeling that we need this kind of healing.

00:10:05.000 We need this access to these experiences.

00:10:09.000 And it's been tragic when we think about the number of veteran suicides, for example, that are happening every year.

00:10:17.000 The Drug Enforcement Administration, when they made MDMA illegal in 1985, they did that on an emergency basis.

00:10:25.000 We were in the middle of a lawsuit against the DEA, what's called an administrative law judge lawsuit, and we were challenging these arguments for making it into a Schedule I drug.

00:10:38.000 And we actually won the case.

00:10:40.000 The judge said it should be Schedule III, which means it should be available as a medicine, but it should be Illegal otherwise for recreational use.

00:10:50.000 But administrative law judges only give advice to the agencies that they're working in.

00:10:56.000 They don't compel.

00:10:57.000 You have to get out of that into the civil courts.

00:11:00.000 So the judge said Schedule 3, and the Drug Enforcement Administration said, no way, we're not going to do that.

00:11:07.000 And their rationale was so wrong, so we sued them in the appeals court.

00:11:12.000 What they said initially was that only the FDA could make a drug into a medicine, not the DEA.

00:11:18.000 But the law was clear that it could be the Attorney General could do that.

00:11:21.000 So the appeals court, when they review agencies' decisions, they don't tell them what to do.

00:11:28.000 They say, "You did something wrong, now rethink it." So then the DEA said, okay, we're going to rethink it.

00:11:34.000 And then they came up with a new reason why they were against it.

00:11:37.000 And this was this eight-part standard that was essentially the same as the FDA.

00:11:41.000 So then we sued them again the second time.

00:11:44.000 And we won again in the appeals courts.

00:11:46.000 And so they went back to the DEA and said, you have to come up with another rationale.

00:11:50.000 This one doesn't work either.

00:11:52.000 And then they came up with a five-part standard that was sufficiently different but still had Phase III studies, so it's essentially the same as FDA approval.

00:12:02.000 And finally, the courts upheld that.

00:12:04.000 And during this process, it was clear to me that the DEA would not do anything to make this available as a medicine, that we would have to go through the FDA.

00:12:13.000 And that's where MAPS began as a non-profit psychedelic.

00:12:18.000 Pharmaceutical company focused entirely on donations, and the intention was to turn it into a generic drug.

00:12:25.000 Because MDMA had been invented by Merck in 1912, it was in the public domain, it was used as a therapy drug before I even knew about it.

00:12:33.000 And then it turned out that the emergency scheduling that DEA did in 1985 was itself illegal.

00:12:41.000 It turned out that the Congress had given...

00:12:44.000 The Attorney General the power to emergency scheduled drugs, but the Attorney General had never sub-delegated that power down to the DEA.

00:12:53.000 So they didn't have the authority to do that.

00:12:55.000 So the people that got busted in the first year were all let go once their lawyers figured this out.

00:13:01.000 So the first move to criminalize MDMA was a crime, you could say.

00:13:06.000 Wow.

00:13:07.000 But we're stuck.

00:13:08.000 And so when we think about if MDMA had not been criminalized, how many people's lives would have been saved?

00:13:13.000 How many people would have been able to benefit from psychedelics?

00:13:19.000 That's one of the things that we're going to be talking about at the Psychedelic Science 2025 conference, the 16th to 20th in June in Denver.

00:13:27.000 We have over 500 speakers.

00:13:30.000 We had over 1,500 applications.

00:13:32.000 There's an enormous amount of research taking place with psychedelics, with psilocybin, with Ibogaine, with MDMA, with 5-MeO-DMT, with a whole host.

00:13:41.000 And the healing potential of these are incredible.

00:13:44.000 And yet, they've been kept away from people by these prohibitionist laws.

00:13:50.000 And so it's enormously frustrating and tragic.

00:13:54.000 And yet...

00:13:56.000 If we let that overwhelm us, then we're not going to work as hard to make it happen.

00:14:00.000 So I've had to learn how to deal with that frustration.

00:14:03.000 It's just a gross distortion of the legal system.

00:14:05.000 There's no reason why this should be illegal.

00:14:08.000 As long as you have whiskey and you can get Adderall easily on a prescription, and oxycodone is readily prescribed, this is crazy.

00:14:20.000 Well, it's counterproductive.

00:14:21.000 It's not even like...

00:14:24.000 Stopping a lot of the benefits.

00:14:26.000 It's actually creating more harms.

00:14:29.000 Just as one example, my father was a pediatrician.

00:14:32.000 He's no longer alive.

00:14:33.000 But he worked on the first study with crack babies. 0.84

00:14:36.000 He and his partners did the pediatric evaluation.

00:14:39.000 And you remember this in the 80s.

00:14:41.000 This idea was that there's going to be this whole generation of super predators and these women that were pregnant with crack were having babies that were addicted and they were going to be mentally deficient and prone to violence and this whole...

00:14:53.000 Scenario that Reagan amplified. 0.87

00:14:57.000 And what my father and his partners found out was that really these kids could recover, that they could do better, that it was mostly malnutrition, poverty.

00:15:08.000 It's not like fetal alcohol syndrome, that it was really not this direct connection between the crack cocaine and the problems with these kids.

00:15:17.000 But what he found was that the women that were pregnant and were addicted... 1.00

00:15:23.000 The fucking phone is dinging again, man.

00:15:25.000 Just put it on Do Not Disturb.

00:15:27.000 Yeah, let me just turn it off.

00:15:32.000 All you boomers and your goddamn gadgets. 1.00

00:15:34.000 About boomers.

00:15:37.000 But he found that these women were dissuaded from seeking treatment.

00:15:42.000 Why?

00:15:42.000 Because they were worried that they would have their babies taken away from them because they were worried they were going to go to jail.

00:15:47.000 So the drug war...

00:15:49.000 Is counterproductive in that the people that need the help the most are driven away from seeking it because of the stigma and shame and criminality.

00:15:58.000 But then they screw up sometimes and do like what Portland did where they just go, everybody just do whatever you want.

00:16:03.000 And then, unfortunately, you've already set a culture where you've allowed people to do fentanyl in the street and meth and whatever else they want.

00:16:10.000 And then the laws.

00:16:13.000 Pass where you decriminalize everything.

00:16:16.000 It's legal free-for-all.

00:16:18.000 And then, unfortunately, you have chaos.

00:16:20.000 And then they pulled back the law because it was just too much.

00:16:23.000 People were going there just so they could get high.

00:16:25.000 Well, that's the important point, what you just said.

00:16:27.000 People were going there.

00:16:28.000 So what that means is that – and we saw this in Zurich.

00:16:30.000 So there was a place in Zurich multiple decades ago called Needle Park where they decided to provide – Access to healthcare, access to safe injection sites, things like this for heroin addicts and others in Zurich.

00:16:45.000 And it was working because when you treat people as humans like that, they will often seek other treatment.

00:16:52.000 And then if they're not necessarily criminals, but then people come from all over and overwhelm the capacity.

00:17:00.000 Because it's this one humane site, and then it became an open-air drug market.

00:17:04.000 Just people from all over Europe started coming, and then they had the backlash.

00:17:07.000 So I think it's something somewhat similar in Portland, where you try some of these things on a local basis, but then it attracts people from all over, and then it turns into the opposite of what they'd hoped.

00:17:18.000 Right.

00:17:19.000 Yeah, and I just think also they had gone through the whole defund the police thing.

00:17:24.000 They were just overwhelmed by cases.

00:17:28.000 Portland just had a fucking...

00:17:29.000 Out of control.

00:17:31.000 It was a lovely place a few years ago.

00:17:33.000 Just a lovely place.

00:17:35.000 Ten years ago, Portland was amazing.

00:17:37.000 Saw a bunch of sweethearts and hippies.

00:17:39.000 They were like so calm.

00:17:40.000 And something happened and people got radicalized.

00:17:43.000 And then the tents, the people, the camping on the street.

00:17:46.000 Once that happened and you tolerated people just putting tents up in the middle of the city, it's like...

00:17:51.000 Don't ignore these people.

00:17:53.000 Either help them out or tell them they have to move or do something.

00:17:56.000 You can't just clog up your city with mentally ill drug addicts who are in tents. 0.95

00:18:01.000 That's crazy.

00:18:02.000 It is.

00:18:03.000 And it's hard to have these local solutions.

00:18:05.000 Because it attracts those people.

00:18:08.000 Exactly.

00:18:08.000 People probably got on trains to go to Portland and get high.

00:18:11.000 They did.

00:18:12.000 So these kind of solutions, I think people take the wrong idea from them, that the solution itself was the wrong idea.

00:18:18.000 But I think it's when you do it on a local basis like that and not have it widely distributed.

00:18:24.000 So basically, the idea is that you have people that have problems with substance abuse of all kinds.

00:18:31.000 We should criminalize people who are alcoholics.

00:18:34.000 They can go to AA.

00:18:35.000 They can go to other things.

00:18:36.000 They're not stigmatized and they're not worried that they're going to be arrested.

00:18:40.000 And yet they can go for help.

00:18:42.000 And you have a lot of people that actually do that.

00:18:45.000 And I think that's the kind of humane approach.

00:18:48.000 That's where we should be leaning as a society.

00:18:51.000 That's a healthy, intelligent society.

00:18:52.000 And also we should be paying attention to the people that report great benefits.

00:18:57.000 Like, there's just too many.

00:18:58.000 Well, luckily, we have guys like Rick Perry.

00:19:01.000 And Rick Perry, who was the Republican governor of Texas, is now really in full support of this Ibogaine initiative.

00:19:09.000 It's wonderful.

00:19:10.000 Yes.

00:19:10.000 Well, Rick Perry will be speaking at the conference.

00:19:12.000 Fantastic.

00:19:13.000 Love that guy.

00:19:14.000 Brian Hubbard.

00:19:15.000 Love Brian Hubbard, too.

00:19:16.000 The work that you did to have Rick Perry and Brian Hubbard.

00:19:19.000 On your show and how much that brought attention to the Ibogaine possibilities was incredible.

00:19:24.000 Well, it's my feeling is if a guy like Rick Perry, who's this straight-nosed, conservative, right-wing kind of a guy, if he can open up his eyes to that and open up his heart to that, it's available for everybody.

00:19:40.000 And there's this very binary position that people take in regards to their...

00:19:47.000 There are thoughts on psychedelics.

00:19:49.000 It's either it's for losers and people that want to escape reality or, you know, if you're on the side of the people that have experienced it, you don't get any of that, which is so weird for me.

00:20:04.000 So the people that think that it's for losers and it's all just a bunch of people just trying to escape reality and they're lazy, none of those people saying that have ever done it.

00:20:13.000 So if you can get just a few of them to do it and tell their friends, if we had legitimate therapy centers, because everybody needs a little help.

00:20:23.000 I'm not saying you need to get off heroin.

00:20:26.000 I'm not saying you're coming back from Afghanistan.

00:20:28.000 I'm not saying anything crazy.

00:20:30.000 But everybody could use just a little therapeutic help to give you a fresh perspective.

00:20:36.000 And I think if that was available to a lot of people that are just generally depressed.

00:20:41.000 I think we could change the tone of the country.

00:20:45.000 I really do.

00:20:46.000 Because one of the things that bums me out the most about, especially the interactions that people have on social media, is like it's all negative.

00:20:54.000 It's all negative.

00:20:56.000 You're living in these rare moments.

00:20:59.000 You have a finite amount of time.

00:21:02.000 A hundred years is so quick.

00:21:04.000 It goes by so fast.

00:21:06.000 And you're wasting it, yelling at people on Twitter for what?

00:21:11.000 For what?

00:21:12.000 Like commenting on things all day long in anger and disgust and look where this country is.

00:21:18.000 Like, what are you talking about?

00:21:21.000 Everyone's perspective needs a little help, needs a little pick-me-up, just a little something to go, you know, I think we're okay.

00:21:28.000 I think we're going to be okay.

00:21:30.000 I think that there are so many possible benefits from having...

00:21:34.000 Psychedelic clinics all over.

00:21:36.000 All over.

00:21:37.000 Yeah.

00:21:38.000 I mean, we're talking about right now there's several thousand ketamine clinics.

00:21:42.000 But one of the issues with ketamine clinics is that many of them provide ketamine without therapy.

00:21:50.000 Whoops.

00:21:53.000 Yeah, I met a lot of those people.

00:21:55.000 Yeah, yes.

00:21:56.000 So I think the key point is that when we talk about psychedelics, when we talk about the clinics, it's not here, take this pill.

00:22:03.000 Right.

00:22:03.000 It's here, take this pill in a therapeutic context with therapists there to help you process the emotions.

00:22:09.000 With an expert, someone who's experienced it themselves who can help you.

00:22:12.000 Yeah, and then with the therapy afterwards, which we call the integration process.

00:22:17.000 So it's not just the experience itself.

00:22:20.000 It's the preparation to be open to whatever happens.

00:22:23.000 It's the experience.

00:22:25.000 I just was the other day with a woman, Gould Dolan, who is a neuroscientist.

00:22:30.000 And what she's talked about and what she's discovered is that psychedelics are these rare substances that open up what they call the critical periods.

00:22:40.000 So it's neuroplasticity.

00:22:42.000 It's this ability to rewire your brain that stays for sometimes weeks or longer.

00:22:47.000 With Ibogaine, it can be several months after you have the experience.

00:22:50.000 So that the therapy that happens afterwards, the work that you do to integrate it, has special potential to make long-term changes in your behavior, in your brain circuitry.

00:23:01.000 And so psychedelics are unique among substances.

00:23:05.000 People are trying to develop non-psychedelic psychedelics that do have this neuroplasticity property.

00:23:10.000 But they open up this potential for long-term change if you do the therapy afterwards, if you focus on what the insights that you had during the experience and then try to make them into permanent behavior patterns.

00:23:25.000 That's really fascinating.

00:23:26.000 It's also so typically human that we try to develop non-psychedelic versions of the same thing.

00:23:31.000 We can do better than nature.

00:23:34.000 God was on to something, but he had an early plan.

00:23:37.000 It wasn't really fleshed out yet.

00:23:39.000 Right.

00:23:39.000 Well, one of the things that was really impactful for Rick Perry was Morgan Luttrell, who is now a member of Congress.

00:23:49.000 And so Morgan had very terrible trauma from his military service and eventually was able to experience Ibogaine.

00:24:00.000 And from that, he was able to get a lot better.

00:24:05.000 And there's a researcher, Nolan Williams, who will also be at the conference, who's done work with Ibogaine and a lot of the Navy SEALs and others that have gone down to Mexico, and he's done studies of their brains with traumatic brain injury, and has shown before and after that some of them actually do have this recovery from traumatic brain injury.

00:24:25.000 Yeah, it's pretty phenomenal.

00:24:27.000 It also helps people with other neurological disorders.

00:24:31.000 It helps people with Parkinson's, right?

00:24:33.000 Yes, and that is where it could make sense in certain ways to have non-psychedelic psychedelics.

00:24:38.000 Right.

00:24:38.000 But also, why not?

00:24:40.000 If Ibogaine's working, get him on that.

00:24:43.000 You already have Parkinson's.

00:24:44.000 Were you scared?

00:24:44.000 Well, and then you get the insights, though, as well.

00:24:48.000 Yes.

00:24:49.000 But there's people that might not want that.

00:24:52.000 It's difficult.

00:24:53.000 But why do they not want it?

00:24:54.000 They don't want it because of propaganda.

00:24:56.000 You know, they don't want it because someone, you know, there's the stories of, like, Sid Barrett from...

00:25:03.000 Pink Floyd.

00:25:03.000 You know what I mean?

00:25:04.000 The stories of people losing their mind.

00:25:06.000 That's what people are terrified of.

00:25:08.000 I think with some people, honestly, that's a valid point now that you're saying that.

00:25:12.000 There's a bunch of people that are very psychologically vulnerable and maybe a profound psychedelic experience wouldn't be tenable.

00:25:21.000 They wouldn't be able to handle it.

00:25:23.000 You know, that's possible.

00:25:25.000 There's a bunch of people that are in a bad state.

00:25:28.000 Maybe they're on a ton of medication just keeping them stable.

00:25:31.000 They can't do psychedelics.

00:25:32.000 Maybe them, a non-psychedelic version of it that rewired their brain would be beneficial, now that I think about it.

00:25:38.000 Yeah, there is actually a situation with cluster headaches.

00:25:41.000 So cluster headaches are like suicide headaches.

00:25:44.000 They're worse than migraines.

00:25:47.000 This is now back around 2003.

00:25:50.000 A bunch of the people who had cluster headaches, one of them went to a party, did mushrooms, and found that it postponed the cycle and would interrupt the cycle of these cluster headaches, which are terrible.

00:26:02.000 And so they contacted me and they formed this group called Cluster Busters.

00:26:07.000 And they said, we don't want to be criminals anymore.

00:26:09.000 We would like to study this.

00:26:11.000 Can you help us study this?

00:26:13.000 I live in Boston right next to McLean Hospital, which is a part of Harvard Medical School.

00:26:17.000 And I approached them and I said, would you want to study these people with cluster headaches?

00:26:23.000 And they said, sure, this is really interesting.

00:26:24.000 So they brought in all these people and checked their medical records and determined that this was really the case, that psilocybin and LSD blocked.

00:26:36.000 Cluster headache cycle and postpone the next cycle.

00:26:39.000 And so we did all this research, and then the next step would have been to actually give LSD or psilocybin to people with cluster headaches.

00:26:49.000 And the people at Harvard, like, oh, Timothy Leary, he was here.

00:26:51.000 We don't want to do this.

00:26:54.000 Goddammit, MKUltra.

00:26:55.000 All of that.

00:26:56.000 They ruined it for everybody.

00:26:58.000 Well, we're trying to get over that, but they did.

00:27:00.000 But then the people at Harvard said, well, we will do this LSD or psilocybin, but only if it's the last resort.

00:27:07.000 Only if everything else fails.

00:27:09.000 So the scientists, Torsten Passi and John Halpern, decided that they would use a non-psychedelic version of LSD called...

00:27:19.000 Bromo LSD.

00:27:20.000 And the plan was that they would give this Bromo LSD to a bunch of people with cluster headaches.

00:27:24.000 It would not work.

00:27:25.000 And then they would come back and say, hey, we need to do this LSD and psilocybin research.

00:27:31.000 So I said, okay, that makes sense.

00:27:32.000 We have no idea why LSD or psilocybin works, but it's probably connected to the psychedelic properties of it.

00:27:39.000 And so they did this study at Hanover University in Germany, and I kept waiting for the results and waiting for the results, and they wouldn't.

00:27:46.000 I heard nothing.

00:27:47.000 And then after months, they finally said, we didn't want to tell you, but the bromo LSD works even better than the LSD and the psilocybin because with LSD, you know, it's effective in micrograms.

00:28:00.000 You know, for psilocybin, you take 25 milligrams for a major, major trip.

00:28:05.000 But with bromo LSD, you can give large amounts of it because you're not getting high.

00:28:09.000 And whatever it does, it's still a mystery what it does in the brain, but it works better.

00:28:14.000 You just flood the brain.

00:28:16.000 So that's actually a good example of a non-psychedelic psychedelic for a physiological problem that could make sense as a medicine.

00:28:26.000 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

00:28:28.000 It makes a lot of sense with the dose, especially.

00:28:30.000 Yeah.

00:28:31.000 But that's great, though.

00:28:31.000 At least that way, like, we found something out.

00:28:34.000 Yeah.

00:28:35.000 Yeah.

00:28:35.000 And actually, when they finally told me that it worked and that they didn't want to tell me, I said, you know, I'm interested in psychedelic therapy.

00:28:44.000 Also, what's best for patients?

00:28:46.000 So that if this bromo LSD is best for patients, that's great.

00:28:50.000 It's not upsetting me at all because we're talking about it anyway for a physiological thing, and I'm interested in the therapy part of it.

00:28:58.000 And so unfortunately, talk about being frustrating, Cary Turnbull is a philanthropist and he's trying to make bromolasty into a medicine, but he's been unable to raise all the funds that he needs to do that.

00:29:12.000 And so this was a treatment for a terrible disorder that was identified over...

00:29:18.000 About 20 years ago.

00:29:20.000 And it's still not been made into a medicine.

00:29:22.000 And so those are the things that are frustrating because it's not even psychedelic.

00:29:27.000 Right.

00:29:27.000 That's crazy.

00:29:28.000 You know, it's just too close to psychedelic.

00:29:30.000 Yeah.

00:29:31.000 It's too related by, you know, by association.

00:29:35.000 Yeah.

00:29:36.000 So Morgan Drell was a big example to educate Rick Perry.

00:29:40.000 Morgan will be at the conference.

00:29:41.000 Congressman Jack Bergman, who's leading an effort.

00:29:46.000 In Washington, they have a group that's trying to collect a lot of support, bipartisan support, to make psychedelics into medicines.

00:29:53.000 I think the military aspect of it is very important because they're generally very right-wing guys and women.

00:30:02.000 They serve their country.

00:30:04.000 They're hard-nosed, disciplined people.

00:30:07.000 If they can't experience it, they can realize.

00:30:11.000 I've always said that I try to act as a bridge between the meatheads and the potheads.

00:30:17.000 You are a good bridge for that.

00:30:19.000 I'm the bridge.

00:30:19.000 Here I am.

00:30:20.000 You know what Timothy Leary said, which is phenomenal?

00:30:23.000 And tell me if this is true for you.

00:30:25.000 He said, if you want to be a bridge, you have to get used to being stepped on.

00:30:29.000 Oh, that's for sure.

00:30:31.000 Yeah, I'm pretty used to being stepped on.

00:30:33.000 But I mean, not necessarily for those positions.

00:30:36.000 Because the idea of pot...

00:30:39.000 And a lot of these other things is that it makes you lazy.

00:30:42.000 And you have a really hard time convincing anybody that I'm lazy.

00:30:46.000 That's very hard.

00:30:47.000 I'm pretty disciplined.

00:30:49.000 I don't believe that's the case.

00:30:50.000 I don't think it's just...

00:30:52.000 I don't think they're mutually exclusive.

00:30:55.000 Like, you have to have either discipline or be able to enjoy...

00:30:59.000 Expanding your consciousness.

00:31:01.000 I think, in fact, it enhances your perspective, which enhances the understanding of the value of discipline and hard work.

00:31:09.000 And of honesty, and of doing things the right way.

00:31:13.000 You do things the right way, you genuinely feel better.

00:31:18.000 And if you ever have trips, even in the sensory deprivation tank, like sober getting in there, they're better when you live the right way.

00:31:28.000 You don't have any demons, or as many.

00:31:31.000 You don't have any regrets.

00:31:33.000 Do the right thing.

00:31:34.000 Be a good person.

00:31:36.000 It's not that hard to do.

00:31:37.000 And the fact that it's been conflated with laziness and ne 'er-do-wells and all that stuff, that's nonsense.

00:31:46.000 Some of the most ambitious people I know smoke weed.

00:31:48.000 Some of the most hard-working, interesting, creative people I know smoke weed.

00:31:52.000 They enjoy it.

00:31:53.000 Well, one of the best examples is Carl Sagan.

00:31:56.000 Yes!

00:31:57.000 One of the best examples.

00:31:58.000 And he had to hide that, though, for decades because he was worried he would lose his security clearances.

00:32:03.000 I was trying to tell that to someone who was a scientist once off air, and they didn't believe me.

00:32:07.000 I'm like, how do you not know?

00:32:09.000 How do you not know Carl Sagan was a huge pot smoker?

00:32:13.000 Right.

00:32:13.000 Well, Lester Grinspoon was the doctor at Harvard Medical School, who was one of my mentors.

00:32:18.000 And he was close personal friends with Carl Sagan.

00:32:20.000 And Lester was an expert on medical marijuana.

00:32:24.000 He had a book about experiences with marijuana.

00:32:27.000 Carl Sagan had to tell his story under a pseudonym.

00:32:30.000 Wow.

00:32:31.000 Because he didn't really want to be known for that.

00:32:33.000 Well, it's a different time period, and that's why guys like him are so brave.

00:32:37.000 You know, just to talk about it at all, you could risk everything.

00:32:40.000 He was the guy explaining science and astronomy to everybody and explaining the cosmos.

00:32:47.000 We found out that guy's a stoner?

00:32:48.000 Like, oh, it's all out the window now.

00:32:51.000 Oh, yeah, and his wife, Andrea, was on the board of directors of the Normal.

00:32:56.000 To legalize marijuana, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

00:33:00.000 It's very frustrating for me because when I was a young man, I remember thinking that eventually all this will be worked out.

00:33:11.000 And by the time I'm 35 or something like that, there won't be any more drug laws about things that are beneficial.

00:33:17.000 I really did believe that.

00:33:19.000 Now I'm 57. I'm like, oh my god, it's not changing.

00:33:22.000 Oh my god, this shit's taking forever.

00:33:26.000 Decades of everyone knowing.

00:33:28.000 Decades of the internet.

00:33:30.000 Before the internet, propaganda was very effective.

00:33:33.000 The reefer madness stuff and all that craziness that they pumped into people's heads.

00:33:37.000 That was the 1930s, man.

00:33:39.000 And that's still effective today.

00:33:42.000 There's still people today that believe all that stuff.

00:33:46.000 Well, you just shared with me before we started talking about the...

00:33:49.000 The Texas law that's trying to, if you could maybe share a bit about that.

00:33:53.000 Ken Paxton, who I've met, I like him.

00:33:55.000 Very nice guy.

00:33:56.000 I don't know why he did this, but Austin had decriminalized marijuana.

00:34:03.000 So apparently the Attorney General's office sued Austin.

00:34:07.000 And what is the ruling on that?

00:34:10.000 I don't know if they even have acted on this or if they're going to appeal or what it is.

00:34:19.000 Something that's not fully legal.

00:34:21.000 And I've talked about this before, so I apologize if anybody's heard this.

00:34:25.000 John Norris, who's a friend of mine who's been on the podcast, who was a game warden in California.

00:34:31.000 And he found a diverted stream and they were trying to figure out what's going on.

00:34:37.000 They figured some farmer fucked up and like, what's going on here?

00:34:40.000 And like, fish were dead.

00:34:41.000 And so he's a game warden.

00:34:42.000 So they have to track down what happened with this stream.

00:34:45.000 Finds this huge grow up in the middle of the national forest run by the cartel.

00:34:49.000 And then his entire operation in the decades future becomes a tactical force with bulletproof vests and dogs and guns fighting the cartel in the forest, in national forest, because they were growing it all in America. 0.61

00:35:07.000 And then just selling it, like 90%, I believe he said 90% of the marijuana that was sold in states where it's illegal was coming from California.

00:35:15.000 And they were using very dangerous pesticides and herbicides, stuff that's completely illegal if you were growing it naturally, if you were growing it normally.

00:35:26.000 And because it's illegal, you have...

00:35:30.000 Organized crime that's providing it to people like it if it was legal We could only buy it from like you buy your fucking groceries you buy organic fruit, right?

00:35:40.000 You buy organic vegetables you buy organic marijuana You would know the people who are growing it you could meet the farmers Just like you can meet people from white oak pastures you'd meet people from fucking happy green farm and You wouldn't know where you're getting your stuff.

00:35:55.000 You know, there's no fentanyl in it Which is apparently they're talking about that now.

00:35:58.000 Yeah, you're not help You're not helping anybody.

00:36:00.000 You're only hurting people.

00:36:01.000 Now, if your goal is just to hurt as many people as possible, yeah, make more laws.

00:36:05.000 Keep locking people up.

00:36:07.000 Lock people up for things that don't hurt anybody, even themselves.

00:36:10.000 Well, the other part of it is the tax money, too.

00:36:14.000 When you're letting all this money go to the underground, to the cartels, to the criminal gangs, alternatively, you could have it as taxes, and it could make it easier on the rest of us.

00:36:26.000 I could see, as an argument, if you were the Attorney General, and you said you are propping up organized crime by allowing it to be decriminalized, and the people that are growing it and selling it in Austin, or the people that have it in Austin, are all committing crime, so they're probably cartel people.

00:36:43.000 I could see that argument, kind of.

00:36:46.000 But you know what the fucking solution to that is?

00:36:48.000 Make it legal.

00:36:49.000 This is dumb.

00:36:51.000 We could just buy whiskey anywhere, which I love.

00:36:55.000 Nothing wrong with it.

00:36:56.000 But you can go.

00:36:56.000 But I have a bar.

00:36:57.000 You know, I'm a drug dealer.

00:36:59.000 Literally, I'm a drug dealer.

00:37:00.000 I have a bar.

00:37:01.000 I own a bar.

00:37:01.000 I sell drugs.

00:37:02.000 Alcohol is a fucking drug.

00:37:04.000 It's just a sanctioned legal drug that we pay taxes for.

00:37:08.000 You know, the alcohol commission has to check, make sure we're doing everything right.

00:37:10.000 But it's drugs.

00:37:13.000 And it's way more dangerous.

00:37:14.000 And prohibition of alcohol, actually.

00:37:17.000 In the 20s, led to organized crime in America.

00:37:21.000 Yes!

00:37:21.000 Al Capone!

00:37:23.000 All that stuff.

00:37:24.000 Propped up organized crime.

00:37:24.000 But it also led to NASCAR, too, though.

00:37:27.000 You know?

00:37:28.000 Pretty cool.

00:37:28.000 They figured out how to soup up some cars to get away from the cops.

00:37:32.000 Right.

00:37:32.000 That's what NASCAR came from.

00:37:34.000 Did you know that?

00:37:34.000 Yeah.

00:37:35.000 Yeah, it's amazing.

00:37:36.000 But it's so dumb.

00:37:37.000 And everyone who enjoys a little alcohol with a drink at a social gathering, there's nothing wrong with that.

00:37:44.000 There's nothing wrong with that.

00:37:46.000 Let people do what the fuck they want to do.

00:37:47.000 We're all going to die someday.

00:37:49.000 And if people are having good or bad experiences on any of these substances, it's up to them to manage their experiences.

00:37:57.000 I don't get along with alcohol.

00:37:58.000 I won't drink alcohol.

00:37:59.000 I don't get along with marijuana.

00:38:01.000 I don't want to try it.

00:38:02.000 Okay, good.

00:38:03.000 That's okay.

00:38:04.000 It's all fine.

00:38:05.000 But let people who enjoy it have it.

00:38:08.000 It's dumb.

00:38:09.000 Well, this idea that we're all going to die one day, one of the most important uses of psychedelics is to help people at the end of life who are scared of dying.

00:38:18.000 Right.

00:38:19.000 And also for palliative care.

00:38:21.000 So there's a lot of research that's been done with people with life-threatening illnesses who are anxious about dying and have received either MDMA or psilocybin or LSD in the 60s.

00:38:31.000 Yeah.

00:38:31.000 So that the kind of big fears that we have about illness and death, when...

00:38:37.000 People are not able to process those fears.

00:38:39.000 It just gets worse and worse.

00:38:41.000 I wonder how many people Larry Hagman turned on.

00:38:44.000 You know what I mean?

00:38:45.000 That day on CNN, there's probably millions of people watching Larry Hagman saying, I'm not afraid of death because I had an LSD experience and I realized that it's all just connected.

00:38:56.000 Yeah.

00:38:56.000 Well, if it wasn't for my mother-in-law reading his book, and he became a big supporter of MAPS.

00:39:04.000 And he spoke out in public.

00:39:05.000 Those are the kind of dialogues that change people's minds.

00:39:08.000 Yeah.

00:39:09.000 You know, there's been some...

00:39:10.000 We have a lot of...

00:39:12.000 I live in Massachusetts where marijuana is legal.

00:39:14.000 Marijuana is legal in California, in Colorado, in all these states.

00:39:17.000 They're doing really well economically.

00:39:20.000 Oh, it's a huge tax boom.

00:39:22.000 Especially, like, Colorado had the craziest taxes.

00:39:25.000 Wasn't it like 39% or something at one point?

00:39:27.000 And everybody's like, okay.

00:39:28.000 Because it's, first of all...

00:39:31.000 Economically, if you want to go out for a night drinking, that's going to cost you a couple hundred bucks.

00:39:35.000 Buying a round of drinks for your friends, a round of drinks here and there.

00:39:39.000 Like, a couple hundred dollars worth of marijuana, you're stoned for a month.

00:39:43.000 Like, you're just stoned forever.

00:39:45.000 And if you have to pay 39% tax, like, okay, like, I hope it fixes streets.

00:39:50.000 Like, I'll give you my tax money.

00:39:52.000 I'm not scared of paying taxes.

00:39:53.000 I want to pay taxes if you were doing good stuff with it.

00:39:55.000 Is it helping pay for the schools?

00:39:57.000 Great.

00:39:57.000 Let's get great schools and a lot of people smoking weed legally.

00:40:00.000 But not kids.

00:40:02.000 You know, that's the other thing.

00:40:03.000 Like, we need education for children to let them know.

00:40:05.000 Like, it's not good to alter your state of consciousness.

00:40:08.000 Especially on a regular basis when you're young.

00:40:10.000 There's some developmental issues that come along with abuse.

00:40:13.000 Well, this is with abuse, for sure.

00:40:15.000 Abuse.

00:40:15.000 Abuse, definitely for sure.

00:40:17.000 One of the things that's pretty interesting is look at the cultures that have successfully integrated psychedelics.

00:40:22.000 Like, for example, the ayahuasca churches that are in Brazil.

00:40:26.000 Or the Native American church that uses peyote. 0.73

00:40:29.000 Often for Native Americans that have problems with alcohol.

00:40:32.000 I was out on a Navajo reservation.

00:40:34.000 This is about 20 years ago.

00:40:36.000 And it was for a Native American church peyote ceremony. 0.76

00:40:40.000 And one of the Navajo men brought his nine-year-old son to take peyote and spend the night with us. 0.83

00:40:46.000 Whoa.

00:40:47.000 Peyote's mescaline, right?

00:40:49.000 Peyote's mescaline, yeah.

00:40:50.000 And wachuma is from San Pedro.

00:40:54.000 Cactus is also that has mescaline in it.

00:40:56.000 But this nine-year-old did not take the same amount of peyote as the rest of us, but he took more appropriate for his body weight.

00:41:02.000 And it's...

00:41:04.000 Within a cultural context, within a family context, within a religious supportive context, these cultures tend not to have age limits.

00:41:12.000 So I think when you talk about the developmental problems that come from abuse, that's totally the case.

00:41:19.000 But when you talk about occasional use for inspiration...

00:41:23.000 Particularly when...

00:41:24.000 In a ceremonial setting.

00:41:25.000 In a ceremonial setting, which has been for centuries and centuries.

00:41:29.000 They've refined it.

00:41:30.000 There's no neurological damage that comes to your brain from mescaline.

00:41:34.000 Right.

00:41:35.000 Ceremonial settings are very important.

00:41:37.000 And I used to think it was foolishness.

00:41:39.000 I think ceremonies.

00:41:40.000 Like, get the fuck out of here with your ceremony.

00:41:41.000 I was cynical, you know?

00:41:43.000 But I think that...

00:41:44.000 And even rites of passages, like, into adulthood.

00:41:47.000 I used to think that was foolish, too.

00:41:49.000 But then I realized, like, wow, a lot of people have a hard time determining if that they're an adult.

00:41:53.000 And they stay kind of infantile for their entire life.

00:41:57.000 And especially someone that's, like, really coddled by their parents and overprotected helicopter parents.

00:42:02.000 You never develop the ability to be solitary and just to be out there on your own and autonomous.

00:42:08.000 And things that are important.

00:42:13.000 Should be treated with respect.

00:42:15.000 And that's where I think ceremony comes in.

00:42:17.000 Yeah, one of the things that I think has led to my interest in lifetime use of psychedelics was been the failure of my bar mitzvah to actually turn me into a man.

00:42:28.000 Oh, that's hilarious.

00:42:29.000 You thought you were going to be a man.

00:42:31.000 That's it.

00:42:31.000 I'm going to be a man.

00:42:32.000 I wanted to avoid all the awkwardness of adolescence.

00:42:35.000 I'm the oldest of four kids.

00:42:37.000 So I had no older siblings to tell me.

00:42:39.000 And we did this rite of passage, and it's been used for thousands of years.

00:42:43.000 And I just had somehow this idea that there would be some visitation from God of some way, that I would be one thing the morning of my bar mitzvah, and I would be something different the next morning.

00:42:55.000 And I remember waking up in bed the next morning after my bar mitzvah, and I'm like, I'm the same.

00:43:02.000 This particular rite of passage.

00:43:04.000 Didn't work.

00:43:05.000 And, you know, you're 13. You're not so smart.

00:43:07.000 And I was like, well, you know, God must be busy.

00:43:09.000 A lot of people got bar mitzvahed.

00:43:12.000 You know, it's like Christmas.

00:43:14.000 Eventually, God's going to get to me.

00:43:16.000 Yeah.

00:43:16.000 And so every day for a week, I would wake up and think, is today the day?

00:43:20.000 Am I different?

00:43:21.000 Oh, wow.

00:43:22.000 Nothing happened.

00:43:23.000 And then finally, another week and another bar mitzvahed, Saturday came along, and I realized that if I was on a list, I have now been dropped off the list completely because there's all these new people bar mitzvahed.

00:43:34.000 And the rites of passage that we do have, I believe, probably worked in the past for a lot of people.

00:43:39.000 And they did have this demarcation between different ages.

00:43:43.000 People didn't used to live that long either.

00:43:45.000 So 13 was kind of a transition point.

00:43:48.000 But it was when I was 17, almost 18, that I first did LSD.

00:43:54.000 And one of my very first thoughts was, this is what my bar mitzvah should have been.

00:44:02.000 Because, you know, you're like, who am I?

00:44:05.000 Where do I fit in?

00:44:08.000 My ego sense is dissolving a bit from LSD.

00:44:11.000 I'm connected to something bigger and larger than myself.

00:44:14.000 I thought this is the courage, the test of courage.

00:44:17.000 This is the test of manhood.

00:44:20.000 This is something that...

00:44:21.000 Is a part of a rite of passage.

00:44:23.000 So for me, the psychedelics became the rite of passage when the religious rite of passage didn't have the same impact as I had hoped it would.

00:44:32.000 That's fascinating.

00:44:34.000 That's fascinating.

00:44:35.000 It's interesting, too, that you talk about not restricting it for young people.

00:44:38.000 And I thought about, like, wine in Europe.

00:44:41.000 Because kids in Europe, particularly kids in Italy, they don't have the drinking problem that kids have in America.

00:44:48.000 When high school kids in America get a hold of alcohol, they get drunk and ridiculous because they're doing something naughty.

00:44:56.000 But kids are normalized to the just regular consumption of a glass of wine with dinner.

00:45:02.000 It's normal.

00:45:04.000 Well, and then in the U.S., where when kids do experiment, because they're worried about being caught with things, they tend to not use wine, but they tend to use stronger drinks.

00:45:14.000 Right.

00:45:15.000 So they call that sort of the iron law of prohibition, that when you prohibit something, it moves more and more to more concentrated, more powerful forms of that drug.

00:45:23.000 Hence fentanyl.

00:45:24.000 Yeah.

00:45:25.000 Yeah.

00:45:26.000 Or even cocaine, if you could have coca tea.

00:45:29.000 I mean, Andy Weil has been promoting for decades and decades this idea.

00:45:32.000 Yeah, I had that once.

00:45:35.000 What did it feel like?

00:45:37.000 I couldn't shut the fuck up.

00:45:38.000 I couldn't shut up.

00:45:38.000 I was like, oh my god, thank god I've never done cocaine.

00:45:42.000 I was telling my friend Doug, I was like, I don't think I could shut up.

00:45:47.000 But it wasn't anything crazy.

00:45:50.000 I think that chewing the leaves is supposed to be super beneficial and actually even healthier than coffee.

00:45:57.000 Yeah, there's a lot of nutrition in the leaves.

00:46:00.000 Does it help fuck your teeth up, though?

00:46:02.000 Well, if you do anything too much, it can, but it's something...

00:46:07.000 You sound like an apologist.

00:46:08.000 You sound like...

00:46:09.000 Well, I think it's this idea that appropriate use...

00:46:15.000 Well, Paracelsus is one of the early physicians, and he said the difference between a medicine and a poison is dose.

00:46:22.000 Right.

00:46:23.000 Well, yeah, salt will kill you. 0.50

00:46:25.000 Eat a pound of salt, see what happens.

00:46:27.000 Water will kill you. 0.99

00:46:28.000 Yeah, drink too much water, yeah.

00:46:30.000 Yeah, hyponatremia.

00:46:32.000 I remember a lady died because she was trying to win a PlayStation for a kid in a morning radio show.

00:46:37.000 She was trying to drink the most water.

00:46:39.000 Crazy.

00:46:41.000 Yeah.

00:46:41.000 Like, who knew?

00:46:42.000 I guess no one knew then.

00:46:44.000 But people are pretty aware now because of frat parties.

00:46:48.000 Hazing.

00:46:49.000 They've had kids do that.

00:46:51.000 Yeah, that's one of the things that has been happening in terms of the raves and ecstasy use.

00:46:57.000 So that occasionally people will overheat and die from MDMA, where you dance all night, you don't drink adequate fluid, and you can get hyperthermia.

00:47:06.000 And there are some cases.

00:47:07.000 So that's one of the dangers of ecstasy use outside of therapeutic context.

00:47:12.000 And so people have heard...

00:47:13.000 Okay, now I need to drink fluids in order to not overheat.

00:47:17.000 And there have been cases of people that have died from drinking too much water.

00:47:20.000 Well, I can counter that because there's a bunch of people that have died from too much exercise.

00:47:24.000 There's something called rhabdomyelosis that people get when you over-exercise.

00:47:28.000 Your protein starts breaking down.

00:47:30.000 Your kidneys can't process it.

00:47:32.000 You start peeing brown.

00:47:33.000 It can be totally deadly.

00:47:34.000 You can push yourself too hard and die from exercise, too.

00:47:39.000 Yeah.

00:47:39.000 How many people every year die of rhabdo?

00:47:41.000 Google that.

00:47:42.000 Because I know it's very common in the CrossFit world because people are competitive with exercise, which is not necessarily the great...

00:47:52.000 Like, a lot of people I know that are trainers do not like the concept of CrossFit because it's...

00:47:56.000 Doing exercises that are just supposed to strengthen your body and condition your body but doing them in a competition setting where it's like unlimited amount of repetitions.

00:48:04.000 As many as you can get in X amount of time.

00:48:07.000 And then they have these games where people play where they might not be conditioned enough to sustain the workload that they're putting forth and then they get rhabdo.

00:48:15.000 And it's fairly common.

00:48:17.000 Like I know multiple people that have had rhabdo.

00:48:20.000 Wow.

00:48:20.000 Yeah.

00:48:21.000 How many people die?

00:48:22.000 So it doesn't say that, but it says there's 26,000 cases reported annually, and about 5% of those lead to mortality, 5 to 20%.

00:48:31.000 That's a lot.

00:48:32.000 That's a lot of people that die.

00:48:33.000 That's probably more than people drink water and die.

00:48:37.000 I guarantee it's more.

00:48:38.000 I bet drinking water, so much water you die, is probably fairly rare.

00:48:42.000 But I think that rhabdo stuff is super dangerous.

00:48:46.000 You're reminding me of something funny.

00:48:48.000 David Nutt was the drug policy advisor for the British government, and he did a ranking about the dangers of all these different drugs.

00:48:56.000 And what he found was that the psychedelics were at the very low end of the dangers.

00:49:02.000 And so he...

00:49:03.000 Talked about how horseback riding was more dangerous than ecstasy.

00:49:09.000 Oh, yeah.

00:49:10.000 It's super dangerous, man.

00:49:11.000 People fall and break things all the time.

00:49:14.000 Yeah, and so he got fired for that because he was telling the truth.

00:49:18.000 He was making people love horseback riding in England.

00:49:21.000 Oh, that's crazy.

00:49:22.000 So what MAPS did is that we...

00:49:24.000 He got fired for telling the truth.

00:49:26.000 Well, he was the drug policy advisor saying things that people did not want to hear.

00:49:30.000 Maybe he should have, like, got his drop distribution down before he started yapping.

00:49:34.000 Like, what am I trying to do here for real?

00:49:36.000 You really want to know my opinion?

00:49:38.000 Or do I have an angle that I'm supposed to be headed towards?

00:49:42.000 Can you guide me?

00:49:43.000 Yeah.

00:49:44.000 So we did something similar.

00:49:45.000 We looked at cheerleading.

00:49:47.000 Oh, yeah.

00:49:48.000 And we looked at the emergency room visits on a per...

00:49:53.000 Person visit for the percentage of people that do cheerleading that go to the emergency room versus the percentage of people that do ecstasy.

00:49:59.000 And cheerleading is more dangerous.

00:50:02.000 Oh, yeah.

00:50:02.000 They fly through the air, man.

00:50:04.000 Yeah.

00:50:04.000 They bang heads sometimes.

00:50:06.000 Yeah.

00:50:06.000 So we had a poster that we made.

00:50:08.000 It said, give me an E. Oh, God.

00:50:11.000 That's so silly.

00:50:13.000 But here's the thing.

00:50:13.000 It's like we allow multiple dangerous things.

00:50:18.000 Like horseback riding is one thing.

00:50:20.000 How about bull riding?

00:50:22.000 Totally legal.

00:50:23.000 Super dangerous.

00:50:25.000 Like, super duper dangerous.

00:50:27.000 I mean, we allow BMX riding.

00:50:29.000 You should, of course, allow that.

00:50:31.000 I'm a martial artist.

00:50:32.000 You know how many people have accidentally died doing martial arts?

00:50:36.000 A ton.

00:50:37.000 It's real.

00:50:38.000 You know, there's a ton of activities that people enjoy.

00:50:41.000 Skydiving.

00:50:42.000 They enjoy bungee jumping.

00:50:44.000 Legal.

00:50:44.000 All legal.

00:50:45.000 Amusement parks.

00:50:46.000 Legal.

00:50:47.000 Yeah.

00:50:48.000 Well, I think that in those circumstances, people believe that there's benefits that outweigh the risks.

00:50:55.000 Well, people enjoy them.

00:50:57.000 Oh, people enjoy psychedelics.

00:50:59.000 Yeah, but I think that's the critical issue is that people have got, as you started out by saying, you know, people think that if you take these drugs, there's no benefits, you're hallucinating, you're running away from reality, you're not paying attention to what's really going on, you're making yourself more vulnerable, you're going to fly out a window and think you can fly.

00:51:13.000 Well, it's just like we need a comprehensive addressing of the actual real landscape.

00:51:22.000 Of what these things are, what the benefits are, and just this addressing of the impact of propaganda, the sweeping Schedule I Act of 1970, the whole William Randolph Hearst connection to marijuana illegalization, which was right after alcohol prohibition.

00:51:42.000 So they were looking to put these agents back out into the field.

00:51:45.000 All that needs to be, like, comprehensively explained to the American public to reinform people.

00:51:51.000 Because I think people are – they have the general population that doesn't listen to podcasts like this and doesn't get online and search these things.

00:52:00.000 You have these conceptions that are entirely formed by propaganda and they're not based on real anecdotal experiences, real science, real data.

00:52:12.000 And also the problem with that, too, is there's real side effects of some of these things.

00:52:17.000 Those need to be understood.

00:52:18.000 How do you understand them?

00:52:19.000 Well, you have to make them legal and do tests and studies.

00:52:22.000 And maybe people have gene expressions that, you know, maybe they shouldn't be doing this thing, but they can do that thing, you know?

00:52:29.000 Yeah, I think this idea that, for me, how do we break through the wall of propaganda?

00:52:34.000 And for me, the idea has been we go to where the suffering is.

00:52:38.000 We go to where the science is and we try to make things first into medicines.

00:52:42.000 And I think that's where people are willing to listen.

00:52:44.000 When you have all this propaganda and all these fears, it has to be that there's some corresponding benefit that overwhelms your sense of fear that you're willing to take a look.

00:52:55.000 And that's where you go to where the suffering is.

00:52:57.000 And that's where with post-traumatic stress disorder.

00:53:00.000 I think one of the things that we've been able to do...

00:53:03.000 Remarkably, is with psychedelics, they're one of the few things that are out of the culture wars these days.

00:53:09.000 There's bipartisan support for psychedelic research.

00:53:13.000 And it's because we went to where a lot of the suffering was, sympathetic patients.

00:53:19.000 Most of the people in our studies are women survivors of sexual abuse.

00:53:23.000 Most of the people with PTSD are women.

00:53:25.000 But most of the media attention goes to the veterans.

00:53:28.000 And people put veterans on a pedestal.

00:53:30.000 And if so many of them...

00:53:32.000 You know, there's different estimates, but it's, you know, 18, 22 or more per day commit suicide.

00:53:39.000 And you can end up avoiding a lot of that by helping them process the traumas that they experience.

00:53:46.000 And again, it's like we're talking about before.

00:53:47.000 It's the bridge.

00:53:48.000 Yeah.

00:53:48.000 That's the real bridge.

00:53:49.000 The bridge is these, you know, hard-nosed right-wing guys who have these experiences, become better parents, become better friends, just like reintegrate into society.

00:53:59.000 Make peace with the past.

00:54:01.000 It's totally possible.

00:54:03.000 And that these tools are being so underutilized to so many vulnerable and needy people.

00:54:09.000 So many people just fucking need some help.

00:54:11.000 Yeah.

00:54:12.000 One of the speakers at the Psychedelic Science Conference is Sharif El-Nahal, who was the Under Secretary of the VA.

00:54:17.000 Wow.

00:54:18.000 And he's become very passionate about what he's seen.

00:54:23.000 From those people that have done, the veterans that have done MDMA-assisted therapy inside the Veterans Administration.

00:54:30.000 But it took, MAPS, 25 years.

00:54:32.000 Starting in 1995, we were offering money to the VA to do MDMA research.

00:54:38.000 Until 2021, when the first veteran received MDMA inside the VA from VA therapists.

00:54:46.000 Wow.

00:54:46.000 So talk about frustration.

00:54:48.000 Think about the number of people that have committed suicide from when we started offering.

00:54:52.000 To the VA to do it, but it was the propaganda.

00:54:54.000 It was the stigma that made it so that they were not willing to do it.

00:54:58.000 What's most amazing today is that Congress gave $10 million to the Department of Defense for MDMA-assisted therapy research in active duty soldiers.

00:55:09.000 Oh, wow.

00:55:10.000 So there's a $4.9 million grant that went to Dr. Aaron Wolfgang at Walter Reed.

00:55:15.000 And it's going to be giving MDMA-assisted therapy.

00:55:18.000 There's another $4.9 million grant that went to a group called Strongstar that's in San Antonio, here in Texas, elsewhere.

00:55:26.000 And they're connected with Emory University.

00:55:28.000 And so they're going to combine MDMA with a therapy called prolonged exposure, where you talk about the trauma over and over.

00:55:36.000 But that's very re-traumatizing.

00:55:38.000 There was a study that the Veterans Administration did.

00:55:41.000 That took them about six years.

00:55:43.000 It was 916 veterans, and it compared two therapies that they use, both non-drug therapies for treating PTSD.

00:55:50.000 One was called prolonged exposure.

00:55:52.000 The other was cognitive processing therapy.

00:55:55.000 And what they showed is that around half the people are in the study drop out because the therapy itself is re-traumatizing.

00:56:03.000 Because you're just forced to go over the trauma, over the trauma, over and over, and that's supposed to desensitize you.

00:56:10.000 And if you can stay in it, it can be helpful, but it re-traumatizes so many people.

00:56:14.000 So what we've shown is, working with the MDMA with veterans, is that they're able to process the trauma, the fear reduction from the MDMA, reducing activity in the amygdala, the fear processing part of our brain, that once you can approach these things that have felt like will tear you apart, that they'll be overwhelming, you can't...

00:56:38.000 Really go away from them, but they never really leave either, then you can process it.

00:56:43.000 So this study that will be done here in Texas with active duty soldiers, again, is going to be a combination of MDMA with prolonged exposure.

00:56:52.000 The Walter Reed study is combining MDMA with what they call acceptance and commitment therapy, different kind of approaches.

00:57:00.000 How do they decide which approach?

00:57:05.000 This is going to be research, trying to different kinds of...

00:57:08.000 Oh, so there's going to be multiple ones and just see what's the most effective.

00:57:11.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:57:12.000 And I think that MAPS has started funding studies combining MDMA with cognitive processing therapy as well.

00:57:21.000 But the one that I think is potentially the most valuable is called cognitive behavioral conjoint therapy.

00:57:29.000 Conjoint means couples or diets.

00:57:31.000 And so what happens is the designated patient, the veteran with PTSD, Is where the attention is focused.

00:57:38.000 But when they have PTSD, it affects their families.

00:57:41.000 It affects their partners.

00:57:42.000 And so cognitive behavioral conjoined therapy was developed by this woman, Candice Monson, at the Boston VA.

00:57:48.000 And that's where they bring in the partner as well as the veteran.

00:57:53.000 And they both get therapy.

00:57:54.000 And so back in 2014, when finally I was working with Richard Rockefeller and his cousin, Senator Jay Rockefeller, who was on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, and they finally convinced the VA to be willing to let MAPS support research with MDMA.

00:58:11.000 They said that they wouldn't refer veterans, they couldn't do it inside the VA, we had to pay for it, but that the first thing they wanted us to do was combine MDMA with cognitive behavioral conjoined therapy.

00:58:22.000 Where both people now get MDMA.

00:58:24.000 And the results were better than anything they've ever got before in studying this therapy, both in reduction of PTSD, but also in strength of the relationship.

00:58:33.000 Do they combine it with 5-HTP or anything like that to sort of bring back your levels?

00:58:41.000 The answer is no.

00:58:44.000 People do use 5-HTP, and it can be helpful.

00:58:47.000 Can you explain what that does?

00:58:48.000 Yeah.

00:58:48.000 So 5-HTP is your precursor for serotonin.

00:58:51.000 So when we started research with the FDA, this was now 1992.

00:58:56.000 The very first time that they permitted MDMA research was 1992.

00:59:01.000 And as I said, MDMA had been used as a therapy drug since the middle 70s through the 80s, criminalized in 85. And people have felt that sometimes, and I think it's very much the case, that you're tired after MDMA, that people talk about a serotonin depletion.

00:59:18.000 And so when you take 5-HTP, That can be helpful.

00:59:23.000 But when we started with the FDA, they said, all this information that you've got from before, from underground use, or from before when it was still legal, doesn't matter to us, really.

00:59:34.000 Everything has to be done under direct supervision of FDA proof studies.

00:59:37.000 And they said, don't assume that you're going to have problems and you're going to use MDMA plus 5-HTP or something.

00:59:43.000 Just start with the MDMA, see what problems you get, and then you can start.

00:59:48.000 So the way we think about MDMA therapy is that it's really not a one-day thing.

00:59:55.000 It's a two-day in the sense that the second day is for rest.

00:59:59.000 It's for having no obligations, no appointments, and the therapists come back and do more integrative therapy the next day.

01:00:06.000 And also, we do the therapy during the day.

01:00:09.000 It starts at 10 in the morning.

01:00:10.000 It's an eight-hour session, so often people can get sleep that night.

01:00:14.000 And we don't see more low mood.

01:00:18.000 Or more tiredness in the people that get MDMA than in the people that got therapy without MDMA.

01:00:23.000 So we never felt the need to introduce 5-HTP.

01:00:28.000 We didn't have evidence of symptoms that required this.

01:00:32.000 But I think it's because we talk about it as a two-day experience.

01:00:37.000 The other part is that when people take MDMA at raves or parties and things like that, often they're drinking, they do it at night, they don't get full sleep.

01:00:46.000 The next day they...

01:00:47.000 Don't just take the day off.

01:00:49.000 Often they go into activities.

01:00:51.000 Right.

01:00:51.000 And they're exhausted.

01:00:53.000 And they're exhausted.

01:00:54.000 Yeah.

01:00:54.000 Makes sense.

01:00:55.000 I think that this concept that we've developed is this really thinking about it as a two-day experience where there is this low energy, but it can be productive in terms of trying to work on the issues that came up during the MDMA experience or the PTSD or depression or whatever it is.

01:01:13.000 Now, there's a project at a place called Sunstone, which is a therapy center outside in Rockville, Maryland.

01:01:21.000 And they've worked with cancer patients who are anxious about dying, and they have brought in their partners to the therapy, and both of them get MDMA as well.

01:01:33.000 And they found that that was tremendously effective as well, because when your partner's got a life-threatening illness, it doesn't just affect them, it affects you as well.

01:01:43.000 And often the therapy is focused, again, on the designated patient.

01:01:47.000 So this kind of broadening the sense of who it is that is going to be treated and bringing in people's partners, I think, is going to be very important.

01:02:00.000 Marcus and Amber Capone, who've done work with vets, they've brought probably by now about a thousand veterans down to Mexico for Ibogaine.

01:02:09.000 And they have also started bringing their partners as well.

01:02:14.000 They realize that you need to think about this as a family setting and to try to treat the entire family context.

01:02:21.000 This raises another issue, which is to talk about group therapy.

01:02:26.000 So the scale of the trauma, in America, there's 13 million PTSD patients.

01:02:32.000 This is the estimate by the Veterans Administration.

01:02:34.000 You know, in Ukraine, we've got an entire country.

01:02:37.000 When I was there, practically every family knows someone or has someone that has been injured or killed.

01:02:44.000 And so you've got massive population-based trauma.

01:02:48.000 And to think about treating people as individuals is really important, but it's going to be hard to scale.

01:02:55.000 Because of the limited number of therapists and psychiatrists and the cost of doing that.

01:03:00.000 So the FDA has wanted all the research with LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, 5-MEODMT, to start on an individual basis.

01:03:08.000 But there's new studies now that are going to be working on group therapy.

01:03:13.000 So one of the first in America was at the Portland, Oregon VA.

01:03:17.000 And it was four therapists for six veterans.

01:03:21.000 And it started out where each one got an individual session first, and then they got a group session.

01:03:27.000 And there's two basic kinds of trauma in the military.

01:03:31.000 One is war-related or accident training-related, and the other is what they call military sexual trauma.

01:03:37.000 There's a lot of sexual abuse by military active duty people of other people in the military, and they call that military sexual trauma.

01:03:47.000 And so what they've learned is they have to separate those groups when they do the group therapy.

01:03:51.000 Because if you're a military person who's been abused by other people in the military, you might not feel safe if you're in a context of group therapy.

01:04:00.000 So they've done separate the groups, but they've found that the groups do terrific with supporting each other afterwards in this integration process.

01:04:10.000 And so what they've done is they've realized, though, that...

01:04:14.000 The design they had initially was an individual session and then a group session.

01:04:19.000 And after they did two cohorts of the six, they realized that the people felt they needed a third MDMA session, and they wanted that also as a group, not as an individual.

01:04:30.000 There's a project in Australia that's going to be climate-related PTSD from floods that they've had related to climate, and so they're going to be doing group therapy there.

01:04:42.000 And there's an incredible project that's developing in Israel that's for people traumatized on October 7th.

01:04:49.000 And there's going to be groups of seven with two therapists, two assistants.

01:04:55.000 But the Ministry of Health has taken a while to review this application.

01:05:00.000 It's funded by charitable donations.

01:05:04.000 The MDMA is coming from Canada.

01:05:07.000 But what the Ministry of Health in Israel has wanted is, and this is the first study ever, where it's going to be direct comparison of individual therapy versus group therapy.

01:05:16.000 So everybody is ready to have one or the other.

01:05:20.000 You get randomized to either individual or group, and it will be a direct comparison.

01:05:25.000 And so I think like when we think about AA and we think about peer support, I think you can go deeper when it's individual therapy because you have more.

01:05:36.000 Focus.

01:05:36.000 You're not thinking about other people.

01:05:38.000 You can go deeper.

01:05:39.000 But when you're in a group setting, you can kind of bond with the other people.

01:05:43.000 You can kind of hear their other stories, but then you can support each other in this integration process.

01:05:49.000 So I think at the end of it, it could be that the groups do just as well as the individuals.

01:05:56.000 And then that will dramatically reduce the cost of the treatment and help it scale.

01:06:01.000 So that's where we're at this.

01:06:04.000 And I think particularly for military people that are traumatized in similar circumstances, that are bonded in groups, that group therapy can maybe even be the treatment of choice.

01:06:14.000 But I think the way the FDA is going to be reviewing it is that there is going to be studies with individuals first that will have to be gone through the system and approved and then...

01:06:26.000 There will be this additional research with groups.

01:06:29.000 What kind of a timeline are we talking about?

01:06:30.000 How long are these studies?

01:06:32.000 Well, it's going to be about three years for the project in Israel.

01:06:36.000 I mean, it's going to be about 160 people.

01:06:38.000 What about the projects here?

01:06:40.000 The project at the Portland, Oregon VA is going to be done pretty soon, but it's really just been four or five cohorts.

01:06:46.000 It's very small numbers of people, and so there will need to be more.

01:06:52.000 I think that there's been some efforts to do What people call in some ways a modified version of individual versus group is that they've done some of this at Sunstone also where there'll be four people getting psilocybin at the same time, but each in a separate room, each with one therapist.

01:07:10.000 But then near the end of the session, they bring them together and then they talk about what happened and then they also have the group integration.

01:07:17.000 So it's kind of a modified.

01:07:19.000 So I think in terms of time frame, it's probably...

01:07:25.000 Four or five years before FDA will approve group therapy, maybe longer.

01:07:30.000 The other issue is that the last time that we spoke, it was before the FDA advisory committee and before the FDA meeting to decide whether to approve MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD.

01:07:43.000 And the advisory committee recommended against it, and the FDA voted against it.

01:07:47.000 This was August of last year.

01:07:50.000 And so that was heartbreaking.

01:07:53.000 Because I thought that the data really did justify approval and it did demonstrate safety and efficacy.

01:08:01.000 But there was enough doubts that were raised.

01:08:06.000 One of the big problems to do research with psychedelics is how do you do a double-blind study?

01:08:13.000 When you take a powerful drug, you know you've taken it.

01:08:17.000 And if you give an inactive placebo, people can tell the difference.

01:08:23.000 A lot of my dissertation, which I did in 2001, was how to do a double-blind study with psychedelics, particularly with MDMA.

01:08:32.000 And my solution, which made sense, was to do therapy with low-dose MDMA versus therapy with full-dose MDMA.

01:08:43.000 So everybody knows they're getting MDMA.

01:08:45.000 They all have the same expectations.

01:08:48.000 And they might not be aware, though, which dose.

01:08:52.000 You know, is it a full dose?

01:08:53.000 Is it a lower dose?

01:08:54.000 So the challenge was to pick the low dose so that it's high enough to cause a certain amount of confusion, but not so high that it has so much therapeutic potential that you can't tell the difference between the groups.

01:09:08.000 For 16 years, from 2000 to 2016, MAPS did a series of what are called Phase II studies to try to figure out how to do Phase III.

01:09:16.000 And we looked at therapy with no MDMA, therapy with 25 milligrams, 30 milligrams, 40, 50, 75, 100, 125, and 150.

01:09:25.000 So sort of like a dose response.

01:09:26.000 We did all these different doses.

01:09:28.000 And what we discovered, fortunately, after I got my PhD, was that my theory was partially right and partially wrong.

01:09:37.000 That a microdose of anything is not going to be very good as a placebo because you'll be able to tell.

01:09:45.000 So what was surprising to us was that the lower doses, 25, 30, 40, 50 milligrams, did indeed cause a certain amount of confusion.

01:09:56.000 But when you're working with PTSD patients and you get this activation from the drug but you don't have enough of the fear reduction, it made people uncomfortable.

01:10:07.000 So we showed that the people that got therapy with no MDMA did better than the people that got therapy with the low doses of MDMA.

01:10:15.000 They still got better, but they didn't get as much benefit.

01:10:18.000 So the analogy is you're taking off in an airplane and there's all this turbulence at the beginning and then you get above the clouds and it's smooth sailing.

01:10:25.000 So it's kind of like that with MDMA.

01:10:28.000 But the part that we discovered that was...

01:10:30.000 Very surprising was we did a study with veterans, firefighters, and police officers, and one group got 30 milligrams, one group got 75 milligrams, and one group got 125 milligrams.

01:10:42.000 And in that particular study, it was about 26 people.

01:10:48.000 When you randomize, it doesn't mean that everything's equal.

01:10:51.000 It just means it's random.

01:10:52.000 So the people that had 125 Milligrams with PTSD had more depression than the people that had 75 milligrams.

01:10:59.000 But the 75 milligram dose group did better than the 125.

01:11:03.000 Interesting.

01:11:03.000 Just slightly better.

01:11:04.000 So what it meant was that the dose that's therapeutically effective was lower than we thought.

01:11:10.000 Can I stop you for a second?

01:11:11.000 Yeah, please.

01:11:11.000 When you said the people that did 125 had more depression, do you mean before the study?

01:11:16.000 Yes, yes.

01:11:17.000 So it was chosen that they would get the higher dose because they were suffering more.

01:11:22.000 Well, no.

01:11:23.000 Again, this is randomization.

01:11:24.000 Right, but you said that they had more depression before the therapy.

01:11:29.000 So how did you determine that?

01:11:30.000 Well, we evaluate everybody's PTSD symptoms and their depression symptoms.

01:11:35.000 And so just by the randomization, it turned out that those people that were higher on depression ended up more of them in the 125.

01:11:43.000 Just randomly?

01:11:43.000 Randomly, yeah.

01:11:44.000 Oh, interesting.

01:11:45.000 Yeah, because when you randomize again, it doesn't mean that you're making things equal.

01:11:50.000 Right, right, right.

01:11:51.000 So it was just a chance.

01:11:53.000 Just turned out that way.

01:11:54.000 Turned out that way.

01:11:54.000 How many people were in this group?

01:11:56.000 26 people were in the entire study.

01:11:58.000 Okay.

01:11:58.000 So it was just dumb luck.

01:12:00.000 Yeah.

01:12:00.000 Okay.

01:12:01.000 Yeah.

01:12:01.000 But it meant to us that this dose of 75 was indeed more therapeutic than we anticipated.

01:12:07.000 So there was no real sweet spot where there was a dose of MDMA that didn't either make people uncomfortable and reduce the effectiveness compared to therapy with no MDMA or...

01:12:19.000 It tipped over into being very effective.

01:12:22.000 So in November 29, 2016, when the FDA had what we call the end of Phase 2 meeting, after we got approved to go to Phase 3, the final studies where you need to prove safety and efficacy, I knew that we shouldn't do that because of this.

01:12:40.000 We shouldn't go directly to phase three.

01:12:43.000 The FDA offers this opportunity that most pharma companies don't take called special protocol assessment.

01:12:50.000 And it can take, for us, it took eight months.

01:12:57.000 And so pharma companies are thinking, there's nothing unusual what I'm doing.

01:13:01.000 My patent life is expiring.

01:13:03.000 But I knew we needed to do that to discuss how to deal with the double blind. 1.00

01:13:07.000 And so we presented this information to the FDA.

01:13:09.000 We said, we will give you blinding if you want with these lower doses, but it's going to make our job easier to find a difference between the full dose and these lower doses because it's going to compromise the therapy as compared to therapy with no MDMA at all.

01:13:25.000 And so we said to the FDA, you tell us what you want.

01:13:28.000 And the FDA chose therapy with inactive placebo to make our job harder, which made sense to me.

01:13:34.000 And they said that there's two things that you can do to reduce experiment or bias, because the whole purpose of the double-blind is to sort of reduce bias, that you don't know what's going on and everybody just treats everybody the same.

01:13:47.000 They said the first is this random assignment.

01:13:49.000 What that means is everybody's similarly motivated, and they will work, and the therapists don't know necessarily that.

01:13:57.000 So you do this random assignment.

01:13:58.000 But then the second thing is that you can't have the therapists or the patients rate themselves on how well they've done compared to baseline.

01:14:07.000 You need independent raters that are blind to the condition that the person that they're evaluating is in.

01:14:14.000 So the raters don't know, did this person get the placebo?

01:14:17.000 Did this person get the MDMA?

01:14:20.000 Just don't look at their pupils.

01:14:22.000 Well, this is afterwards.

01:14:25.000 But that's right.

01:14:26.000 And it's done on telemedicine.

01:14:28.000 It's done on Zoom.

01:14:30.000 And it's an hour-long interview.

01:14:31.000 And it's with what's called the CAPS, the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale.

01:14:36.000 And do they have a series of questions?

01:14:38.000 Yeah.

01:14:39.000 It's like an hour-long interview about their symptoms related to what they call the index trauma, which is the worst thing that ever happened.

01:14:47.000 You pick this.

01:14:48.000 This is my index trauma.

01:14:49.000 And how do you respond?

01:14:51.000 So we had these independent raters.

01:14:53.000 And then we had this random assignment, and that's what the FDA said is how we should do the Phase III studies.

01:15:00.000 What was problematic for us was the people at the FDA that we negotiated this with in 2017 then left the FDA.

01:15:07.000 And then new, more conservative people came in at the Division of Psychiatry.

01:15:12.000 And they were more concerned about this, what they called functional unblinding.

01:15:17.000 And that became an issue at the FDA Advisory Committee meeting and at the FDA.

01:15:23.000 When they reviewed whether to approve MDMA-assisted therapy or not.

01:15:28.000 And so the pharma company, Lycos, did not really proactively explain to the advisory committee how this design was developed, why FDA chose this design.

01:15:43.000 And so the people in the advisory committee are often more academics and they're more focused on this double-blind.

01:15:50.000 But they're not practical, in a sense.

01:15:52.000 So that the FDA realizes that the double-blind fails in practice a lot.

01:15:57.000 It's a theory of how you want to do things.

01:15:59.000 It's something to strive for, but it doesn't work a lot of the times.

01:16:03.000 Even with SSRIs, you think that Prozac or various drugs that you take that are not psychedelic, that those are easy to double-blind.

01:16:12.000 But they're not, because when people have sexual side effects, they have other side effects, and they report to their therapist what's going on, Then they can tell from the side effect profile.

01:16:23.000 So the double-blind fails in practice a lot.

01:16:26.000 But the FDA is saying, we can't just only approve drugs where the double-blind is perfect.

01:16:32.000 We have to weigh these different things.

01:16:35.000 So that was one of the big issues that the FDA Advisory Committee objected to, was this functional unblinding.

01:16:42.000 So when you asked about the time frame, there was other issues.

01:16:45.000 But where we're at right now...

01:16:47.000 Is that there's going to be negotiations between Lycos and the FDA with the new FDA, with the new people at HHS, and there's the proverbial fork in the road.

01:17:03.000 Either the FDA will say, we believe your data enough that you're not going to need to do another Phase III study.

01:17:12.000 They might require what's called a Phase 4 study, which is after approval, you gather information about safety, about durability, different things.

01:17:22.000 And if that's the case, it's possible that within six months, the FDA could say yes to approving MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD.

01:17:30.000 If the FDA says we want another Phase 3 study, that could delay approval for another three and a half years or so.

01:17:39.000 And that's just on an individual basis.

01:17:41.000 Wow.

01:17:42.000 So talk about frustration.

01:17:44.000 I mean, we had incredible outcomes.

01:17:47.000 So the two Phase III studies that were done, the first one was severe PTSD.

01:17:53.000 And what we showed is that two-thirds of the people that had severe PTSD no longer had PTSD after the treatment, which was 42 hours of therapy, three MDMA sessions, one month apart.

01:18:08.000 12 90-minute non-drug psychotherapy sessions.

01:18:12.000 Two-thirds no longer had PTSD that got therapy plus MDMA.

01:18:16.000 And those people that got therapy without MDMA, with the inactive placebo, roughly one-third no longer had PTSD.

01:18:23.000 And then another, roughly 20% had what's called clinically significant reductions of PTSD symptoms.

01:18:33.000 It means that their life has changed.

01:18:35.000 Their symptoms are not as burdensome, but they still have PTSD.

01:18:38.000 So they're called responders.

01:18:40.000 So we had 88% responders, only 12% non-responders.

01:18:44.000 Wow.

01:18:45.000 It's the best treatment.

01:18:47.000 In the second Phase III study, we purposely moved it to moderate to severe PTSD because we didn't want the FDA to say it's only for severe PTSD.

01:18:57.000 Three-quarters of the people did have severe PTSD.

01:19:02.000 One quarter had moderate PTSD, and it was 72.6% no longer had PTSD.

01:19:09.000 Almost three quarters no longer had PTSD at this two-month follow-up.

01:19:13.000 And what was even more remarkable, and this relates, I think, to the concerns that was expressed about bias and functional unblinding, is that 46% of the people that had therapy with no MDMA also went below the threshold of having a PTSD diagnosis.

01:19:30.000 That's better than any of the other therapies for PTSD.

01:19:33.000 And so what that demonstrated is that the therapist, even though most of them could tell the difference between whether somebody had MDMA or not, that they tried just as hard as they could to help people whether they got the MDMA or not, and we got extraordinary results in the control group.

01:19:51.000 And I think one of the things that...

01:19:53.000 The explanation is that when you have an eight-hour therapy session with music, with headphones, with more or less half the time people are inside having these different feelings, and the other half they're talking to the therapist in no particular order, you're not forced to focus on the therapy the way with prolonged exposure or cognitive processing therapy.

01:20:16.000 That's what I said was re-traumatizing.

01:20:18.000 In the studies that the VA did, roughly half the people dropped out.

01:20:21.000 We had very low dropout rates because people are encouraged to just, we support whatever's emerging.

01:20:27.000 That's the essence of the therapeutic approach that has been developed to support people when they're going through MDMA therapy.

01:20:34.000 And it's very similar to what can be done with psilocybin or LSD or even ibogaine, that you just support whatever's emerging.

01:20:41.000 You have the sense that there's a wisdom of the unconscious.

01:20:43.000 We all know that our body has a certain wisdom.

01:20:46.000 In that it moves towards wholeness.

01:20:48.000 We get cuts, it heals.

01:20:50.000 It's below our level of awareness.

01:20:51.000 So there's some kind of wisdom to what's emerging.

01:20:55.000 You could think about it as this barrier, this permeable barrier, semi-permeable barrier between the conscious and the unconscious.

01:21:02.000 And it all happens, we all know, at dreams, that material rises to our awareness at dreams.

01:21:07.000 And it's like that with psychedelics.

01:21:09.000 And so we just support whatever's emerging and people can go to some happy memories or to layers of trauma, whatever.

01:21:17.000 They're not forced to just focus on the trauma.

01:21:20.000 So we have very low dropout rates.

01:21:22.000 But the people that got the therapy without MDMA were able to make incredible progress.

01:21:27.000 We also have what are called fidelity ratings, which is we videotape all the sessions.

01:21:34.000 And then we have raters who are called adherence raters, and they look at, are people adhering to the therapeutic method?

01:21:42.000 And then that's called fidelity.

01:21:43.000 We had over 90% fidelity, meaning that the therapists really were doing the same, whether it was placebo or not.

01:21:51.000 So the results were outstanding in that way, and the side effects were very low.

01:21:57.000 We had nobody commit suicide that received MDMA.

01:22:00.000 That was one of the concerns.

01:22:01.000 We had one woman.

01:22:03.000 Tried to kill herself twice, but she was in the placebo group.

01:22:07.000 And we had another woman, such severe suicidal ideation, she checked herself into a hospital not to kill herself.

01:22:12.000 She was also in the placebo group.

01:22:14.000 Because when you help people with terrible trauma, it's difficult for them.

01:22:20.000 And they're not able to really process.

01:22:23.000 That's why they had long-term PTSD.

01:22:25.000 So we demonstrated remarkable results.

01:22:30.000 And yet the FDA said we need more data.

01:22:33.000 We need more data.

01:22:36.000 I think it's tragic.

01:22:38.000 It is tragic.

01:22:39.000 But it's also very hopeful.

01:22:41.000 The results are very hopeful.

01:22:43.000 And, you know, I'm always hoping that people come around.

01:22:46.000 Do you ever really consider, though, the burden of responsibility that lays on your shoulders?

01:22:52.000 Like you have been at the forefront of this for decades.

01:22:57.000 I imagine a world where a guy like you doesn't exist because it's real easy for you to not exist.

01:23:03.000 I only know you.

01:23:04.000 You know what I'm saying?

01:23:05.000 You have been responsible for so much research and so much pushing for legislation to be passed and pushing for people to understand these things and so much education.

01:23:15.000 I mean, you're a real hero in this.

01:23:18.000 Thank you.

01:23:19.000 But it must have been an incredible amount of resolve that you have to have.

01:23:26.000 Keep this fight going on.

01:23:28.000 It has been.

01:23:28.000 And I think one of the things that has kept me going was a dream.

01:23:33.000 We've talked about dreams a little bit.

01:23:34.000 It was a dream that I had when I was in my early 20s.

01:23:37.000 So when I was 18, you know, I had decided to focus my life on psychedelics.

01:23:43.000 This was after I realized, oh, LSD is what my Bar Mitzvah should have been.

01:23:47.000 And I was able to see these tools as really hopeful.

01:23:52.000 And there was two parts.

01:23:53.000 One part is sort of this...

01:23:55.000 Working through trauma, depression.

01:23:57.000 The other part is our interconnectedness.

01:23:59.000 I think sort of the essence of what people talk about, the sort of spiritual aspects of psychedelics or of meditation or of other things, you feel that we're not just isolated individuals.

01:24:09.000 We're connected with all of life.

01:24:12.000 And so at 18, I said, it's a crazy world.

01:24:14.000 I was a Vietnam War draft resister.

01:24:17.000 I was planning to go to jail.

01:24:19.000 I'd studied Tolstoy and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance.

01:24:24.000 My contribution to my country was going to be to not register for the draft and go to jail as a protest for Vietnam. 0.95

01:24:31.000 And then I thought, you know, my dad was and my mom was saying, you're going to have a criminal record.

01:24:36.000 You're never going to have a real job.

01:24:37.000 You're not going to be able to be a doctor or lawyer.

01:24:39.000 You'll be a felon.

01:24:40.000 And I thought, OK, well, I'm not willing to go to war because of that, but I can be an underground psychedelic therapist and you don't need a license for that.

01:24:50.000 So that was my plan.

01:24:52.000 So then this dream happened in my early 20s.

01:24:55.000 I should mention that I was so...

01:24:58.000 I had the real wrong idea at 18. The idea I had was the more drugs you take, the faster you evolve.

01:25:08.000 I mean, again, I'm a stupid 18-year-old.

01:25:11.000 So I did a good job of it.

01:25:15.000 And I just got more disoriented.

01:25:17.000 And very much ungrounded.

01:25:20.000 Too much horsepower, not enough traction.

01:25:22.000 That's a great way to say it.

01:25:24.000 Yeah, I was very ungrounded.

01:25:26.000 And I went to the guidance counselor at college.

01:25:29.000 And this was a new college in Sarasota, Florida.

01:25:33.000 And it was a private school at the time.

01:25:35.000 And the guidance counselor said, I need help with my dripping.

01:25:38.000 And it's become more important to me than my studies.

01:25:41.000 And he said, well, you know, I understand what you're doing.

01:25:43.000 That's really...

01:25:44.000 It makes sense to me in some ways.

01:25:46.000 We're overdeveloped intellectually and underdeveloped emotionally and spiritually.

01:25:49.000 And he gave me this book to read.

01:25:51.000 And I loved it.

01:25:52.000 And it was by Stanislav Grof, the world's expert LSD researcher.

01:25:57.000 And he was MD-PhD at Johns Hopkins.

01:25:59.000 This is now 1972.

01:26:00.000 And the research was being shut down.

01:26:02.000 You talked about the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.

01:26:05.000 And my guidance counselor had got this book directly from Stan.

01:26:10.000 And I said, could I...

01:26:12.000 Write a letter to Stan.

01:26:13.000 I want to become an LSD therapist.

01:26:15.000 And he said, sure.

01:26:16.000 So I wrote this letter and Stan was just leaving Hopkins and I'm this confused 18-year-old.

01:26:21.000 And to my shock, Stan wrote me back.

01:26:23.000 Stan is now, by the way, almost 94 years old.

01:26:32.000 And he is still going around the world to educate people.

01:26:38.000 But this book was...

01:26:41.000 A pivot point in my life, reading this, I said, I really want to study psychedelics.

01:26:45.000 So the dream was, a few years later, if people have seen the movie 2001 Space Odyssey, near the end of it, there's this scene where the astronaut is in this all-white room and he's on his deathbed.

01:26:59.000 And so the dream was, I'm in this all-white room, and there's a person on his deathbed, and he's...

01:27:07.000 Looking at me, he said, earlier in my life, I was almost killed, but I was saved.

01:27:12.000 And I knew I was saved for a purpose, but I didn't know what the purpose was.

01:27:16.000 He said, let me show you what happened to me.

01:27:17.000 So this is all in the dream.

01:27:19.000 So we go, and it's in World War II.

01:27:22.000 And he was a Jewish guy, and it was outside of a village, and there was all these thousands of people lined up with open grave, machine gunned by the Nazis.

01:27:32.000 The crematoriums and the concentration camps, they called it the Holocaust of Bullets.

01:27:36.000 So this guy was wounded, buried, but wasn't dead.

01:27:42.000 And then it had a little bit of a Jesus kind of a theme where he was buried for three days.

01:27:47.000 Somehow I'm seeing all this through his eyes.

01:27:49.000 And then he wakes up and he's not dead.

01:27:51.000 He climbs his way through the bodies and nobody's there.

01:27:53.000 It's the edge of town.

01:27:53.000 He runs into the woods.

01:27:55.000 He survives the war with the partisans.

01:27:58.000 And then...

01:27:59.000 I see all this, and then we're back in the room, and he's on his deathbed, and he's looking at me, and he says, now I know why I was saved.

01:28:06.000 I'm like, oh, tell me, why were you saved?

01:28:09.000 He said, it's to tell you to study psychedelics, that I want you to bring back psychedelics, that if we can all feel our interconnectedness, it will be harder to dehumanize others, it'll be harder to do this mass murder, that we need to understand how we're all more similar than different.

01:28:29.000 I said, in my mind again, in the dream, I said, I've already decided to do this.

01:28:34.000 This is sort of reinforcing it.

01:28:36.000 I will say yes, and you can die in peace.

01:28:38.000 You will have carried this message.

01:28:40.000 And then he dies in front of my arms, in front of my eyes.

01:28:43.000 And then after he's dead, and then I'm thinking, what do I do next?

01:28:47.000 And I walk out the room.

01:28:50.000 And now I'm somehow or other on a stream.

01:28:53.000 I'm sitting down watching the water go by.

01:28:56.000 And then I notice that there's this young boy sitting next to me.

01:28:59.000 And I look at him, and I realize I know him.

01:29:02.000 In real life at the time, I had a big LSD stash, and I was worried about getting busted.

01:29:07.000 And so his father was a friend of mine, and he stored my LSD stash at his house.

01:29:13.000 And when I connected this guy with this little kid with LSD, then I woke up.

01:29:18.000 So that's what's been a big motivator for me.

01:29:23.000 My entire life and made it so that I don't feel that I've been able to just give up.

01:29:30.000 It's like this sort of message from what humanity can do to each other if we don't really evolve in our consciousness.

01:29:39.000 And so that's what's helped me to continue.

01:29:43.000 I feel this enormous good fortune in that...

01:29:49.000 I was born in this generational... 0.73

01:29:52.000 I won the generational lottery, is the way to say it.

01:29:55.000 My great-grandparents on my mother's side were refugees from Russia, came to America in 1880, fleeing anti-Semitism.

01:30:03.000 My father's father, my grandfather and grandmother, my grandfather fled from Poland in 1920, also from anti-Semitism.

01:30:13.000 They arrive at America, and it's the American dream.

01:30:17.000 And it actually, on my mother's side, it was the classic rags to riches because they had a rags business.

01:30:24.000 And they turned it into a paper company.

01:30:27.000 And so I was born in 1953 after the Holocaust, after World War II.

01:30:32.000 And my parents were just so supportive.

01:30:37.000 And my dad was a doctor.

01:30:39.000 And I was told, we want to help you do whatever you want to do.

01:30:44.000 And I felt like I was born at the height of American power, American exceptionalism.

01:30:51.000 I was white.

01:30:51.000 I was male.

01:30:54.000 My family was well off.

01:30:56.000 I was the chosen people, Jewish, American exceptionalism.

01:31:00.000 The only thing I wasn't was tall.

01:31:02.000 But I got every other sort of lottery thing.

01:31:05.000 And I just was raised that I could make a difference.

01:31:08.000 And so I had this sort of luxury There's actually a Holocaust writer named Primo Levi, who was one of my father's heroes in a way.

01:31:22.000 And he wrote something very interesting that I think has relevance to where we're at today in America.

01:31:30.000 And he talked about how we tend to think of that the revolutions start with the oppressed.

01:31:37.000 And that the oppressed throw off their chains and they end up amassing all these people and they try to work for a better world.

01:31:46.000 He said, but that's not actually what happens.

01:31:48.000 The revolutions don't begin with the oppressed because often that's the purpose of oppression, is to make it so they can't do that.

01:31:55.000 They're so focused on survival.

01:31:56.000 He said the revolutions usually begin with the privileged, who for one reason or another use their freedom, use their privilege.

01:32:05.000 To argue, to work towards a better life.

01:32:08.000 So what it means to me is that if you have this privilege, you have the obligation and the opportunity to do things that other people cannot do.

01:32:19.000 It reminds me also of the hierarchy of needs.

01:32:22.000 Many people have heard of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

01:32:25.000 And the bottom one is survival.

01:32:28.000 That you have to work on core survival.

01:32:31.000 We've had these surveys that say a vast proportion of America cannot afford a $500 or $1,000 unexpected expense.

01:32:41.000 So you're living at this edge of economic anxiety.

01:32:44.000 You can't really think about many other ways to protest because you're focused on survival.

01:32:52.000 So I felt that I was born into this privileged And it took multiple generations from refugees from the American dream. 1.00

01:33:00.000 And so I felt I've had this mission of this use the privilege for making it a better world.

01:33:09.000 So I've not been focused on making money.

01:33:12.000 I've not been focused on bringing these healing and spiritual potentials of psychedelics back to the world.

01:33:20.000 And one of the things that was so...

01:33:23.000 Reassuring to me, and I think that people who will come to the psychedelic conference will see this, is that once FDA said no to MDMA-assisted therapy, that they weren't ready to approve it, that they wanted to see more data.

01:33:37.000 I was incredibly, you know, depressed and frustrated and all that.

01:33:42.000 But it took me a couple months to realize that this psychedelic renaissance, that MAPS, Lycos could disappear.

01:33:50.000 But that there is so much going on with research into a whole range of different psychedelics that the field was moving forward regardless.

01:33:59.000 That something had been accomplished.

01:34:01.000 That this psychedelic renaissance was really moving forward.

01:34:04.000 And that that was this wave that I think is unstoppable.

01:34:08.000 That we're seeing the healing potentials in so many different ways with so many different drugs.

01:34:13.000 So that gave me this...

01:34:17.000 It was kind of reassuring, yeah, that even though we were the first out of the gate and the FDA wasn't ready, things are moving forward in a great way.

01:34:27.000 Well, you've got an amazing perspective considering how much work it's been.

01:34:32.000 One of the things that you said that I think from the dream is to give people this understanding of interconnectedness, that we are all connected.

01:34:42.000 And without that feeling, war...

01:34:45.000 Is a normal thing.

01:34:47.000 It's part of...

01:34:48.000 If you ask the average person, could you conceive of a time in your lifetime where there's no war?

01:34:53.000 Would you be willing to bet on that?

01:34:54.000 Most people are like, no.

01:34:56.000 Unfortunately, I wish it was, but unfortunately, I think we're always going to have war. 0.99

01:35:02.000 That's...

01:35:03.000 Let's imagine a world where there was no restrictions on psychedelics.

01:35:09.000 Because I'm of the belief that it's probably responsible for a lot of religious experiences that we've documented.

01:35:17.000 It's not an uncommon theme in many, many cultures that you have these psychedelic experiences and then through that these great revelations come and then through that great change in the culture.

01:35:34.000 I mean, this is Eleusinian Mysteries in Ancient Greece that Brian Mirorescu talks about so well.

01:35:42.000 Without restrictions, if we didn't have these fucking insane laws, we would have progressed past where we are now.

01:35:52.000 If we had gone from 1970 to 2025 without those restrictions in place, who knows what this culture looks like?

01:36:00.000 Who knows what the world looks like?

01:36:02.000 And it's amazing.

01:36:04.000 That one administration, one presidential administration with one sweeping act that was essentially put in place to stop the civil rights movement and to stop the anti-war movement and to stop the black rights movement.

01:36:17.000 Like, if they had done that, if they had not done that, if that had not gone through, we might be looking at a completely different world where we have culturally accelerated evolution that mirrors our electronically and technologically accelerated evolution.

01:36:34.000 I think that's exactly right.

01:36:35.000 Yeah, I think this...

01:36:37.000 I'm smiling because you probably know this quote from John Ehrlichman, who is Nixon's domestic policy advisor.

01:36:45.000 And this came out at the end of the 1970s.

01:36:47.000 He did an interview.

01:36:49.000 And he said that the two main enemies of the Nixon White House were the civil rights movement and the hippies, the anti-war movement.

01:36:55.000 And he said, we couldn't stop them from protesting.

01:37:00.000 But we could criminalize the drugs that they were using and use that to bust up their meetings, arrest their leaders.

01:37:06.000 And he said, did we know that we were exaggerating the risks of these drugs?

01:37:09.000 Of course we did.

01:37:11.000 Yeah.

01:37:12.000 It's such a crime.

01:37:14.000 It's really a crime of enlightenment.

01:37:18.000 It really is.

01:37:20.000 It is.

01:37:20.000 And when you talk about Brian Murescu and the Immortality Key, which, by the way, is being made into a documentary.

01:37:27.000 Phenomenal book.

01:37:29.000 But the Ellicinian Mysteries is the longest-running mystery ceremony that we know of in the history of the world, roughly 2,000 years.

01:37:35.000 It involved a psychedelic potion called Kikion.

01:37:38.000 It's not exactly clear what was in it, but it was wiped out in 396 by the Catholic Church because psychedelics offer a direct experience of spirituality.

01:37:50.000 And often religious systems want to be the intermediaries.

01:37:54.000 Gatekeepers, yeah.

01:37:55.000 Exactly.

01:37:55.000 They want to be the gatekeepers.

01:37:57.000 Of course.

01:37:57.000 Power.

01:37:58.000 When we think about the reintroduction of psychedelics, you know, we talk about what happened in the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, but it really goes all the way back to the destruction of the Ellicinian mysteries.

01:38:11.000 And then we have a lot of the work in the Middle Ages where the women were mostly the plant medicine people.

01:38:16.000 And then we have the burning of the witches.

01:38:18.000 When the conquistadors started coming into Western civilization here, which was indigenous civilizations, the first people that they tried to kill were the shamans that did the work with the mushrooms or the work with the peyote because they were the center of the communities.

01:38:33.000 Now, these communities were not all, you know, peace and love.

01:38:36.000 They were often warring and killing each other.

01:38:40.000 A lot more conscious evolution.

01:38:44.000 But there's a...

01:38:45.000 Well, they were living in a very different time.

01:38:47.000 Yeah.

01:38:47.000 You know, I mean, you had a bunch of different languages.

01:38:50.000 You had tribal raiders. 1.00

01:38:52.000 It was very common.

01:38:54.000 There's, you know, it's just a different world.

01:38:58.000 They were living in a much more barbaric state.

01:39:00.000 Yeah.

01:39:00.000 But it was essentially a window into prehistory.

01:39:05.000 Yeah.

01:39:05.000 There's a book that I recommend for people by Herman Hesse.

01:39:10.000 And it's called The Glass Bead Game, Magister Lutie, The Glass Bead Game.

01:39:14.000 And it helped Hermann Hess win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he wrote it during World War II.

01:39:19.000 And so there is these competitive energies that we have that often can lead to war.

01:39:24.000 But the book was a post-apocalyptic culture that had decided to harness these...

01:39:31.000 Competitive energies into what they called The Glass Bead Game, which was this...

01:39:36.000 It's a beautiful book, but The Glass Bead Game was about a competition using poetry, mathematics, music, and philosophy to try to describe the universe.

01:39:48.000 And they would have this different kind of...

01:39:51.000 Who would be the most eloquent and the most comprehensive?

01:39:55.000 And this was kind of the...

01:39:58.000 The antidote to the competitiveness that led to this apocalypse.

01:40:02.000 And he's writing this during World War II as well as this sort of idealistic hopeful thing.

01:40:09.000 But the other part of the book was that this game itself becomes a little bit too abstract and it no longer harnesses the passions of the common people.

01:40:19.000 It became more of this elite.

01:40:21.000 And the head of it, the Magister Lutie, decides that he has to leave.

01:40:27.000 There has to be some way that we do compete with each other, but we have to do it in a way to learn nonviolence.

01:40:35.000 And our tools of technology are getting ever more destructive.

01:40:38.000 The nuclear proliferation is taking more.

01:40:41.000 So I ended my TED Talk with this, which was 2019.

01:40:45.000 And interestingly enough, it took six years until Nolan Williams gave a talk on the main stage at TED about Ibogaine.

01:40:53.000 So it took six years from my first—that was the only ever TED Talk on psychedelics in 2019, and then Nolan Williams talked about Ibogaine just recently, and he'll also be at the psychedelic conference.

01:41:04.000 But this idea, I ended up saying it's a race between consciousness and catastrophe.

01:41:10.000 And catastrophe is very common.

01:41:14.000 I mean, as you just talked about coming back from Ukraine, today, I don't know what's happening right now, but today India and Pakistan started bombing each other. 0.54

01:41:23.000 Yeah.

01:41:24.000 Yeah.

01:41:25.000 Which is terrifying.

01:41:26.000 Two nuclear powers are sending missiles into each other's country.

01:41:31.000 Yeah.

01:41:32.000 You know, what's going on with Israel and Palestine?

01:41:34.000 I just want to mention something.

01:41:36.000 So there are small groups of Israelis and Palestinians that are doing ayahuasca and MDMA together.

01:41:44.000 In a way to emphasize their common humanity, but also to work through their traumas.

01:41:49.000 And one of the most, I think, inspiring and motivating groups in Israel and Palestine is a group called Combatants for Peace.

01:42:01.000 And so these are Israeli soldiers or what would be called Palestinian terrorists or those that had used violence on both sides.

01:42:10.000 And they've given up violence for nonviolence.

01:42:13.000 So it's a group called Combatants for Peace.

01:42:16.000 And the Palestinian has been invited to come speak at Psychedelic Science, and he was denied a visa.

01:42:24.000 Wow.

01:42:25.000 He cannot come to our conference.

01:42:27.000 We're trying to see if we can work behind the scenes.

01:42:28.000 I don't know if we can to get him a visa.

01:42:31.000 But this idea that we're...

01:42:34.000 Just because he's Palestinian?

01:42:36.000 I don't know the exact reasons why.

01:42:39.000 He did have a violent past because that is the whole point of combatants for peace.

01:42:43.000 They were combatants.

01:42:44.000 They're now leading this nonviolent approach to work together.

01:42:50.000 So there's an incredible neuroscientist, Israeli neuroscientist, Lior Roseman at Exeter University in England that's done work with Israelis and Palestinians.

01:43:00.000 And he's brought a bunch of them to Spain for an ayahuasca session.

01:43:04.000 And with different measures of how you see the other.

01:43:07.000 And once you do see this commonality, you don't see the other as so foreign from yourself and you can recognize their pain.

01:43:17.000 It's like a residual effect of tribal culture from the ancient times, that you had to other these people in order to commit horrific crimes, because they were going to commit horrific crimes on you. 0.92

01:43:29.000 You had to protect the people around you, and unfortunately, that's baked into our genes.

01:43:34.000 You reminded me of one of the more powerful for me statements, Adam Kinzinger, who was the Republican on the January 6th committee in the House to look at what happened on January 6th.

01:43:46.000 He said that he's learned from his investigations that there's something that people are more scared of than death, and that's being kicked out of your tribe.

01:43:57.000 That we're such social beings, that this idea that we would be isolated and alone, that's how you have a lot of these fundamentalist religions that keep people within them, because if you deviate, you get kicked out of the tribe, and they ostracize you.

01:44:16.000 Yeah.

01:44:16.000 There's cultural things that mimic religions in that way.

01:44:20.000 Yeah.

01:44:21.000 And then you have the fundamentalists of all the religions.

01:44:25.000 I think this is very true, that the fundamentalists of the different religions are closer to each other than they are to the mystics of their own religions.

01:44:32.000 And the mystics of the religions are closer to the people who are other religions because they see that it's all this common reality, but that we have different symbols, different stories that we tell.

01:44:43.000 But it's all about this...

01:44:45.000 Combination of us being both interconnected and also extremely individual.

01:44:51.000 I think this other part is that the more you realize how we're all essentially more similar...

01:44:57.000 I mean, look at our DNA as very similar to some animal DNA.

01:45:01.000 There's very slight differences.

01:45:04.000 And then when you talk about humans, so different skin color, different things, our commonalities are really more.

01:45:10.000 But once you can kind of understand that...

01:45:14.000 Hopefully, then you can be more willing to appreciate the differences.

01:45:19.000 So it's this paradoxical thing where the more you realize we're interconnected, the more you can appreciate the unique individuality of every person.

01:45:28.000 Yeah.

01:45:29.000 I think what you brought up about the suspension of the Illusinian mysteries, that's just so important.

01:45:37.000 That kind of tactic has always existed because the...

01:45:42.000 Psychotic people in power want to maintain their control over the population. 1.00

01:45:47.000 And it's very difficult to do.

01:45:49.000 It's very difficult to get people to fight each other when they're all tripping together.

01:45:52.000 And they're like, oh, there's something more to this.

01:45:54.000 Like, we're missing out on a giant piece of this puzzle.

01:45:57.000 And it's like, there's these tools that are available to humanity that can elevate us.

01:46:03.000 And yet these tools are, by tyrants, are being kept from people.

01:46:09.000 Not just kept from people, but...

01:46:11.000 As you're talking about with Nixon's advisor, openly discussed how they lied and used propaganda to pretend that the effects were far worse than they really were.

01:46:19.000 Yeah.

01:46:20.000 Yeah.

01:46:21.000 And I think that it's, again, really important to say that the tools are in some ways less important than the context within which they're used.

01:46:31.000 So the social context.

01:46:33.000 So, for example, religion is often cozy up to the people in power.

01:46:39.000 So there's an ayahuasca church, the União do Vegetal, and they came from Brazil.

01:46:45.000 They actually went to the U.S. Supreme Court and got approval for practicing ayahuasca in the United States.

01:46:50.000 But they're a syncretic religion, meaning that in order for them to survive, they had to merge with the church.

01:46:56.000 So they've become patriarchal, homophobic, hierarchical, and some of the leaders of the União do Vegetal aligned with Bolsonaro, who was about destroying the Amazon.

01:47:09.000 So that it doesn't, the tools themselves don't automatically make you a better person.

01:47:15.000 It's the context.

01:47:16.000 So it's the same way in therapy, that you can have these experiences, but it's the context in which you interpret them, and then it's the integration work that you do after that really makes the most sense.

01:47:29.000 So that you can have psychedelic experiences, but if it's not in this...

01:47:35.000 Sort of therapeutic context where you're really open to deal with the different issues and things, fears of death, things that come up.

01:47:44.000 So I think we need to make that clear that it's not just – it's a magic pill and it will produce better people.

01:47:50.000 A great example of that is the berserkers. 0.98

01:47:52.000 Yeah.

01:47:53.000 The Vikings took mushrooms before they killed everybody.

01:47:55.000 Yes, yes, yes, yes.

01:47:57.000 It doesn't always make you a better person.

01:48:00.000 Really, and again, context of the culture and the times, barbaric time.

01:48:06.000 Have we talked about McKenna's stoned ape theory before?

01:48:09.000 No, we haven't.

01:48:11.000 What is your perspective on that idea?

01:48:13.000 Well, what he's basically saying is that it's a real good chance that early monkeys and stuff would experiment with whatever they could around them to eat and that they would eat mushrooms and that mushrooms then elevated their consciousness, started helping develop language.

01:48:36.000 I think it's plausible.

01:48:38.000 I mean, I don't know that we'll know for sure.

01:48:40.000 Have you heard Dennis describe it?

01:48:42.000 Dennis, I think, does an even better job of describing it than Terence because Dennis is like a legitimate hardcore scientist.

01:48:48.000 Yes, yes.

01:48:49.000 And he explains how psilocybin would interact with the brain and glossolalia and all these different effects that could come out of it.

01:48:56.000 And then...

01:48:58.000 That psilocybin is known for helping regrow neural tissue.

01:49:02.000 Yes.

01:49:02.000 Right?

01:49:03.000 That's what I talked about, this neuroplasticity.

01:49:05.000 Right.

01:49:05.000 And this, yeah, that Gould Allen is talking about, these opening these critical periods.

01:49:09.000 Yes.

01:49:09.000 Because part of the theory is...

01:49:12.000 Taking into consideration the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years, that it's this very extraordinary development.

01:49:19.000 And, you know, many biologists called the biggest mystery in the entire fossil record, like, what happened?

01:49:25.000 And McKenna's perspective was, I think I know.

01:49:28.000 I mean, it makes sense because he applied what we know about the climate back then.

01:49:36.000 The climate was changing and that these rainforests were receding into grasslands, which would make a lot more undulates.

01:49:43.000 Undulates were pooping everywhere. 1.00

01:49:45.000 Mushrooms growing cow poop.

01:49:46.000 Bam! 0.98

01:49:46.000 Bam, bam. 0.98

01:49:47.000 And you've got all these pieces together.

01:49:49.000 And then the fact that it would increase visual acuity and low doses and make people more or, you know, pre-human hominids more amorous. 0.98

01:49:59.000 They make them more likely to mate.

01:50:01.000 Make them better hunters because it improves their vision.

01:50:04.000 Also make them more creative so they'll probably develop new ways to hunt and fish so they would survive more.

01:50:11.000 They'd have more resources, more food, more protein.

01:50:13.000 They'd grow bigger and stronger.

01:50:14.000 And then their brains are developing because they're eating these mushrooms.

01:50:18.000 And I think that's plausible.

01:50:21.000 But I think then, what does that mean for us today?

01:50:24.000 Is that I do think that the psychedelic experiences could be part of this next sort of evolution of humanity to make us more collaborative and peaceful to deal with the incredible technologies that we're developing.

01:50:39.000 Einstein had this great quote.

01:50:41.000 He said, Everything, except our mode of thinking, and hence we are drifting towards unparalleled catastrophe.

01:50:51.000 What shall be required if mankind is to survive is a whole new mode of thinking.

01:50:56.000 And what is that new mode of thinking?

01:50:58.000 It's sort of how we're interconnected.

01:51:00.000 It's what the astronauts have said.

01:51:02.000 So I think we should say that this doesn't depend on psychedelics.

01:51:05.000 The astronauts who've been up in space look back and see the Earth as a whole thing.

01:51:09.000 Well, that's got to be a psychedelic experience.

01:51:12.000 Just seeing Earth from the stars, not from the stars, but from space, looking down and seeing the nonsense of these imaginary lines that we put on the ground.

01:51:23.000 Yeah, you don't see the borders.

01:51:25.000 You don't see the religions.

01:51:26.000 You just see that this is one.

01:51:28.000 Really unique planet that we've all grown up from, and it's produced all this life, and we're all interconnected.

01:51:37.000 But then there's this thought process that the conflict and the evil is important to sort of strengthen and encourage the good, and that this is all part of this evolutionary process that the human race is going through, and that almost...

01:51:52.000 In the face of this catastrophe is where real change comes.

01:51:55.000 And then we kind of have to understand that evil and terrible behavior is a real thing.

01:52:01.000 And have some mad search for the tools to mitigate these problems.

01:52:08.000 And so it encourages people like yourself.

01:52:11.000 It encourages people to try to figure these things out using...

01:52:16.000 And again, these tools which are right under our nose that have been here for thousands of years.

01:52:20.000 Yeah, I mean, people say that the stars burn brighter because they're surrounded by darkness.

01:52:25.000 Yeah, but that's the weird thing about the human race.

01:52:30.000 It seems like that has to be there.

01:52:32.000 You have to get rained on to appreciate a sunny day.

01:52:35.000 Well, there's an incredible quote from Carl Jung, so this Jungian psychology, and what he said was that we need to study...

01:52:45.000 More about humanity.

01:52:47.000 We need to study how we operate.

01:52:48.000 He said, because the only real danger that exists is man himself.

01:52:53.000 That we are able to deal with all these things.

01:52:55.000 He said, we know virtually nothing about man.

01:52:59.000 We must do more study because we are the source of all coming evil.

01:53:04.000 Yikes.

01:53:05.000 This was in 1959, about three years before he died.

01:53:09.000 And it's chilling.

01:53:10.000 We are the source of all coming evil.

01:53:12.000 Well, also, that's in the shadow of the bomb, right?

01:53:15.000 Like, everybody was still freaking out.

01:53:17.000 Like, what did we do?

01:53:19.000 You know, we just annihilated two cities.

01:53:22.000 Yeah.

01:53:22.000 Now, let's talk about the shadow.

01:53:23.000 Something else.

01:53:24.000 So, in Jungian psychology, the shadow is the parts of ourselves that we disown.

01:53:30.000 You know, it's our dark sides that we don't see.

01:53:32.000 And so what Jung said is that the most political, therapeutic, and social thing that we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.

01:53:42.000 So when you cannot deal with a part of yourself, you project it out.

01:53:46.000 And so these people become the enemies.

01:53:48.000 These people become the evil.

01:53:49.000 And we're the all good.

01:53:52.000 It reminds me, actually, I was with Terrence.

01:53:55.000 This was my first DMT experience.

01:53:58.000 So this is about 40 years ago.

01:54:01.000 This was at Esalen at Big Sur.

01:54:02.000 It was with Ralph Metzner, Terrence McKenna, and a bunch of us were trying to...

01:54:09.000 We gathered together to think how to protect MDMA.

01:54:12.000 And one evening, we all were trying DMT.

01:54:16.000 So not 5-MeO-DMT, but DMT.

01:54:19.000 And you smoke it in a pipe.

01:54:20.000 It's like 10 or 15 minutes.

01:54:24.000 And then you just go out, and then you come back and share what happened, and then you pass the pipe to the next person.

01:54:30.000 So it's like a three, four-hour process with this group.

01:54:33.000 And so for me, my first experience with DMT was...

01:54:38.000 So the first thing I saw was this horizontal line.

01:54:41.000 And then I saw a vertical line.

01:54:43.000 And then it turned red.

01:54:44.000 And then it turned into cubes.

01:54:46.000 And then it turned into like an M.C. Escher painting where the space doesn't seem to make sense anymore.

01:54:50.000 And then I was blasted into this other universe.

01:54:54.000 But I was blasted out of myself into the universe.

01:54:57.000 And I felt like I was part of everything.

01:54:59.000 And everything was part of me.

01:55:00.000 And it was this glorious billions of years of evolution.

01:55:03.000 And I went through all of this.

01:55:04.000 But then after all of that, finally I had this idea.

01:55:08.000 That if I'm part of everything and everything is part of me, then Hitler is part of me too. 0.72

01:55:15.000 And it was shattering.

01:55:18.000 But it was true. 0.98

01:55:20.000 You can't claim to be part of everything and only take the good parts.

01:55:24.000 And it just was a shocker to me that this logic brought me to this.

01:55:30.000 And it was really, really shattering.

01:55:33.000 And it took me this whole...

01:55:36.000 Data, start working on that.

01:55:37.000 And then the very next day, and this gets back a little bit to legalization, the next day, and to MAPS's political strategy, the next day, we experimented with ketamine.

01:55:49.000 All right, so in my ketamine experience, somehow or other, I was above and behind Hitler because, you know, the Holocaust had been this animating idea for me my whole life. 0.69

01:56:01.000 So I'm above and behind Hitler. 0.89

01:56:03.000 Ketamine gives you a bit of remove, like you're not So I felt that I was safe, but I was watching him give a speech to these rallies where we have enormous numbers of Germans.

01:56:14.000 And I was thinking, how do I get into his head so he doesn't want to murder everybody, doesn't want to kill the Jews, doesn't want to have this roar?

01:56:20.000 How do I get into his head?

01:56:22.000 And I felt this panic rising.

01:56:25.000 And it was like bubbles, like I was underwater, and I felt the bubbles of my fear.

01:56:30.000 If they broke the surface, I wouldn't be able to...

01:56:33.000 I'd have to look away.

01:56:34.000 I couldn't deal with it.

01:56:35.000 And then I realized that one of the beauties of ketamine is that it doesn't interfere with your respiration.

01:56:40.000 You can breathe.

01:56:41.000 So I started breathing deeply, which is a really important way to kind of ground yourself in difficult experiences of all kinds, psychedelics or not.

01:56:49.000 So I started really breathing.

01:56:51.000 And then I was able to go back and watch.

01:56:55.000 And what I saw was this Heil Hitler salute. 0.52

01:56:58.000 And then I saw everybody doing it back to him.

01:57:01.000 And I got this sense because Hitler was able to help people feel that they were all together, the German nation, that they were all part of something bigger. 0.88

01:57:09.000 And so it felt like he's pushing this energy out with the Heil Hitler salute, and then everybody is pushing it back to him.

01:57:16.000 So it felt like the one to the many and the many to the one.

01:57:19.000 And then it was like vibrations going up and up and up, like this kind of unity between him and the people.

01:57:26.000 And it just was terrifying.

01:57:28.000 And then I realized that there's no way I can get into his head.

01:57:31.000 Like you're saying, the psychopaths that are often politicians, that they're getting so much out of it.

01:57:36.000 But it's the people giving away their power that I thought, that's where the solution has to be.

01:57:42.000 So MAPS is about mass mental health, about a spiritualized humanity.

01:57:48.000 And so that led to this understanding for me that safety for humanity is not just...

01:57:57.000 Giving drugs to the leaders and having them wake up.

01:57:59.000 You know, it's about anchoring mass mental health and that the people that are giving away their power are getting less from it than the people that are amassing all this power.

01:58:09.000 So that led to this idea we need to medicalize, we need to go, you know, to produce real scientific evidence about benefits and risks, but at the same time there needs to be drug policy reform where we need access to people.

01:58:24.000 In a way, preventative medicine or if they don't have a diagnosis.

01:58:28.000 So that it's this two parallel paths.

01:58:30.000 One is science and medicine.

01:58:32.000 The other is drug policy reform.

01:58:34.000 And then we talked about earlier about educating young people.

01:58:37.000 We need honest drug education.

01:58:40.000 People have died from taking ecstasy contaminated with fentanyl.

01:58:44.000 You know, we need pure drugs.

01:58:45.000 We need peer support, treatment on demand.

01:58:49.000 But I think the drug war is so counterproductive that if we could just turn a switch, it would be worth it.

01:58:55.000 But we need to really anchor and build kind of a healthier culture and healthier people.

01:59:02.000 But it has to be sort of masses rather than just individuals.

01:59:05.000 Have you read Blitzed by Norman Ohler?

01:59:08.000 I have not.

01:59:09.000 We have it right over there, right?

01:59:10.000 Don't we have it over there?

01:59:11.000 Is it in the other room?

01:59:13.000 Phenomenal book on the drug use by the Nazis.

01:59:17.000 It's all about meth.

01:59:19.000 Yeah, they were all methed out of their fucking minds, which is like the wrong drugs can ruin everything You know and that whole experience of being a part of something and everyone's on amphetamines.

01:59:32.000 Yeah I mean, what the fuck?

01:59:34.000 They were giving them out to the soldiers.

01:59:36.000 That's how they got them to go through Poland in three days. 0.88

01:59:38.000 It's a phenomenal book.

01:59:39.000 But just like crazy when you think about how history was changed and a large part of the way it was accepted was because everybody was messed up.

01:59:51.000 On the wrong I mean imagine if Hitler was dosing out everybody with mushrooms They would have been like hold on like what are why are we in Poland?

02:00:00.000 The fuck are we doing?

02:00:01.000 I'm not killing anybody.

02:00:02.000 What is this?

02:00:03.000 This is crazy.

02:00:04.000 I gotta get out of this country like people just abandoned ship it's just The worst drugs are the ones that are always pushed by the tyrants and I think blitzed is a perfect example that the the Nazi administration that what the the Nazi Government was doing giving their soldiers giving their the people in the tanks got the most meth Because they had to be at the front lines.

02:00:29.000 It's a crazy book, man It just makes you think like what does that look like if no meth is there?

02:00:34.000 Does this all get worked out way in advance?

02:00:36.000 Is this never happened?

02:00:38.000 Does the Holocaust never take place? 0.93

02:00:39.000 Like what was what would have been like with no meth?

02:00:44.000 Yeah, and it promotes aggression as well.

02:00:47.000 Oh, yeah Yeah, I mean they went through Poland in three days with no sleep Yeah. 0.87

02:00:51.000 Just killing everybody.

02:00:52.000 And then these French soldiers are all drinking.

02:00:56.000 They were given like a liter of wine every day.

02:00:59.000 Wow.

02:00:59.000 You know, so they're drunk and silly.

02:01:02.000 And then the messed up Nazis show up and like, what the fuck?

02:01:05.000 Well, and you talked about the berserkers. 0.67

02:01:07.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:01:09.000 But the crazy thing is the berserkers were taking mushrooms, right?

02:01:12.000 Well, Amanita.

02:01:13.000 Amanita.

02:01:14.000 And the difference, did they also take psilocybin sometimes?

02:01:18.000 Probably.

02:01:19.000 I'm not sure.

02:01:20.000 Yeah, I think that was a part of the Nazi lore—oh, excuse me, the Viking lore as well.

02:01:25.000 The Viking lore had—did Vikings find that out?

02:01:28.000 Would they just take—because Amanita's a weird one, right? 0.95

02:01:31.000 I remember McKenna saying something about that he believes that it differed not just seasonally, but he thinks the effects differed genetically and geographically, and they were different in different places.

02:01:44.000 Sort of like, you know, like— A bad example, but all I have, like, if you grow certain tobaccos in Cuba, they make the best cigars because the soil is, like, so rich.

02:01:55.000 And you get a cigar from, you know, it's grown somewhere in America, it's not going to taste like a cigar that's grown in Cuba because there's something going on with the difference.

02:02:03.000 And I would imagine it's probably something about the nutrients in certain soil that would lead to the Amanita developing these properties in some places and not in others.

02:02:15.000 Yeah, Amanita muscaria.

02:02:17.000 No definitive evidence of a specific mushroom is Vikings regularly consumed.

02:02:22.000 Some scholars propose they may have used mushrooms for hallucinogenic purposes.

02:02:26.000 Most cited examples fly agaric mushroom Amanita muscaria.

02:02:31.000 Some believe...

02:02:32.000 May have been the Vedic soma, a sacred drink described in ancient texts.

02:02:37.000 There's also speculation about other hallucinogenic compounds like psilocybin cubensis, so psilocybin mushrooms being used.

02:02:44.000 So they might have as well.

02:02:45.000 The Amanita mascara is the weird one though, right?

02:02:48.000 Yeah.

02:02:48.000 Actually, in Ukraine, some people have developed Amanita and taken out some of the more toxins, and in low doses they use it for sleep.

02:02:57.000 Oh, wow.

02:02:58.000 Amazing.

02:03:00.000 Also, I've been in touch with some very well politically connected scientists in India, and they don't think that Amanita is actually Soma.

02:03:09.000 What do they think Soma was?

02:03:10.000 They don't know.

02:03:12.000 Why do they not think it was Amanita then?

02:03:14.000 Because of the experiences that they've been able to sort of track the way they describe it and the way people have described it before.

02:03:23.000 Well, there's probably a bunch of undiscovered psychedelics, right?

02:03:27.000 Like, from the past, at least?

02:03:29.000 It very well could be.

02:03:30.000 Well, we don't even actually know what was in the Kikion from the Eleusis.

02:03:35.000 We think that it might have something to do with ergot and LSD-like things.

02:03:41.000 There's an article about it, actually from Netflix, about the show Vikings, talks about how the Amanita might have not actually made them berserkers and it was something else doing it.

02:03:49.000 Hmm.

02:03:51.000 It says, if anything, fly agaric would have made them particularly worthless warriors since the side effects included drowsiness, vomiting, muscle spasms, and numbness in arms and legs.

02:04:03.000 Rather, it's more like if berserkers were getting high off henbane.

02:04:07.000 What is henbane?

02:04:08.000 Henbane is, actually, it was used in the Middle Ages by a lot of the witches.

02:04:13.000 It's very, I think it's like...

02:04:16.000 An important herb for Viking and Druid rituals connected to witchcraft.

02:04:19.000 Whoa.

02:04:21.000 Black henbane.

02:04:22.000 Nightshade.

02:04:23.000 Interesting.

02:04:24.000 Nightshade.

02:04:25.000 I thought that was a poison.

02:04:27.000 It can be in doses, yeah.

02:04:29.000 Interesting.

02:04:30.000 So the Amanita Muscaria one, though, I always go back to the sacred mushroom in the cross because that was what John Marco Allegro believed was the early days of Christianity.

02:04:41.000 They were consuming that.

02:04:44.000 But isn't it a strange one that you don't hear about people having like these Breakthrough experiences on Amanita.

02:04:50.000 No, you don't.

02:04:51.000 And you saw one of those side effects was drowsiness.

02:04:54.000 So that sort of relates to what they've done with low doses of Amanita for sleep.

02:04:59.000 Yeah, makes sense.

02:05:00.000 I've always been puzzled by that one because it does appear in so many shamanic rituals.

02:05:06.000 It appears in the old depictions of Christmas and Santa Claus and all the Christmas used to have little elves and the Amanita.

02:05:14.000 I always wonder, was the Amanita different back then?

02:05:17.000 You know?

02:05:18.000 Like, what was going on?

02:05:20.000 Like, what happened?

02:05:23.000 I don't know how you find that out.

02:05:25.000 I mean, you can probably do some genetic studies to see how long these genes that are in Amanita have persisted.

02:05:35.000 Yeah, I'm not sure.

02:05:36.000 I mean, but it's pretty clear that, at least from a lot of these Indian scholars, that Amanita is not SOMA, but they don't know what it is.

02:05:43.000 Interesting.

02:05:44.000 Interesting.

02:05:45.000 Yeah, the ergot thing is very interesting, right?

02:05:47.000 Because ergot has similar effects to LSD.

02:05:50.000 Yeah.

02:05:50.000 And so the Eleusinian Mysteries, I think it's only, right now it's been confirmed from, I think it was just one or two vessels.

02:05:59.000 These pottery vessels that they found traces of ergot.

02:06:02.000 Yeah, I mean, that's unbelievable.

02:06:04.000 Again, this just illustrates how far advanced our science has become, way over our spiritual and emotional development.

02:06:10.000 You're able to look at thousands of year old vessels and get microscopic traces of what was in them.

02:06:17.000 Crazy.

02:06:18.000 Yeah.

02:06:19.000 Well, at least it lets you know, okay, now it makes sense that that's how they figured out democracy.

02:06:24.000 Well, the Greeks are the... 0.99

02:06:27.000 Yeah.

02:06:27.000 Yeah, the home of democracy.

02:06:29.000 I mean, and also, like, just this astounding culture that emerged.

02:06:35.000 And how much of it was connected to that.

02:06:37.000 And then the people in power were like, yeah, we're going to shut that down.

02:06:41.000 We don't like this aspect of your...

02:06:43.000 You guys are a little too hard to control.

02:06:46.000 A little too hard to propagandize.

02:06:48.000 You don't need the intermediaries.

02:06:51.000 Yes.

02:06:51.000 And we want the taxes.

02:06:52.000 We want to tell you what.

02:06:54.000 Exactly.

02:06:56.000 This gets back to one of the earlier points you made about it, do I get frustrated?

02:07:00.000 Which is to realize that this is actually thousands of years plus of the suppression of psychedelics.

02:07:09.000 Also, you said something earlier, how quick 100 years goes by.

02:07:12.000 So, what if something takes a couple generations?

02:07:15.000 That's okay.

02:07:16.000 I think one of the things I like to say is that if your goals are something that you can accomplish in your own lifetime, they're too small.

02:07:24.000 We need to have, like, multi-generational goals.

02:07:27.000 I grew up outside of Chicago, and there's this Baha 'i temple.

02:07:32.000 So the Baha 'i religion emerged out of Islam, but it's more of a universal religion.

02:07:39.000 and they're suppressed a lot in the Islamic countries.

02:07:44.000 But there was this temple that they built outside of Chicago, this beautiful temple, but it took three I think this process of elevating consciousness...

02:08:09.000 in humanity so we can learn how to live together and not destroy the planet is however long it happens to take.

02:08:16.000 So if things take longer than I thought That's a great attitude.

02:08:21.000 Yeah.

02:08:22.000 You have to have that attitude.

02:08:23.000 But you're always so happy.

02:08:25.000 Every time I meet you, you're always smiling.

02:08:28.000 You're always happy.

02:08:28.000 Well, you know, I'm not in jail.

02:08:30.000 There you go.

02:08:31.000 You're not dead.

02:08:32.000 You're not crippled.

02:08:33.000 You're not unhealthy.

02:08:36.000 A lot of positives.

02:08:39.000 You know, the hope that we had that FDA would approve.

02:08:41.000 Well, they didn't.

02:08:43.000 So, you know, do you just give up?

02:08:45.000 Right.

02:08:46.000 No, you know, you just...

02:08:48.000 Keep on trucking.

02:08:49.000 Keep on trucking.

02:08:50.000 Yeah.

02:08:51.000 Well, thank you for what you do, man.

02:08:53.000 I want to add one thing about the conference.

02:08:55.000 Please.

02:08:55.000 Just to say that it's going to be really, really fun.

02:08:59.000 It's going to be, if people come to it...

02:09:01.000 500 speakers.

02:09:02.000 500 speakers.

02:09:04.000 Thousands, thousands, thousands of people, all sorts of ways the psychedelic community is going to be coming together.

02:09:10.000 Do you have a website?

02:09:11.000 Yeah, psychedelicscience.org or maps.org.

02:09:15.000 There's actually going to be a...

02:09:17.000 Ooh, look at that.

02:09:18.000 That's cool.

02:09:19.000 What is that thing spinning around?

02:09:20.000 A molecule.

02:09:21.000 That's a molecule.

02:09:22.000 But if you put Rogan in when you want to register, there's a 15% discount to go to the conference.

02:09:29.000 We also have this...

02:09:31.000 We have 10 different stages.

02:09:34.000 All different tracks for different kinds of interests.

02:09:37.000 We also have this project called Music is the Bridge.

02:09:41.000 And so we have various people are coming up with the music that they would listen to during a psychedelic experience.

02:09:49.000 Oh, like Icaros.

02:09:49.000 Icaros, very much.

02:09:51.000 Yeah.

02:09:51.000 So there's going to be concerts, music, all sorts of things connected to this conference.

02:09:56.000 And it's also lots of opportunities for networking.

02:10:01.000 Because, again, For me, even though MAPS has been focused on MDMA, what it's really about is the psychedelic renaissance.

02:10:09.000 So I don't see the psilocybin or the ibogaine or anything as competition.

02:10:14.000 We want the psychedelic therapists of the future to be cross-trained in all the different drugs and then to be able to customize the treatment for each person.

02:10:25.000 And that's what we're hoping to develop.

02:10:28.000 And one more time, what are the dates and where is this?

02:10:30.000 It's June 16th to the 20th.

02:10:32.000 It's coming up next month.

02:10:33.000 And it's in Denver.

02:10:34.000 It's at the Colorado Convention Center.

02:10:37.000 We have...

02:10:38.000 That's a big place.

02:10:39.000 Oh, yeah.

02:10:40.000 Last time we did this is 2023.

02:10:43.000 We had 12,400 people.

02:10:45.000 It was astonishing.

02:10:48.000 Must have been the nicest people, too.

02:10:50.000 Oh, it was so hopeful, and it was magical.

02:10:54.000 So, I think that this would be, if anybody wants to learn about the psychedelic community, this is where we gather together.

02:11:01.000 How many feds do you think go to these things? 1.00

02:11:03.000 Well, we want them to come.

02:11:05.000 That's the point, is that we want them to come.

02:11:07.000 Well, here's the other point, is that we work with police officers.

02:11:12.000 When you think about what job is...

02:11:15.000 Among the most traumatizing, it's being a police.

02:11:18.000 Yes.

02:11:18.000 Or being a...

02:11:20.000 EMT.

02:11:21.000 Or being a prison guard.

02:11:23.000 Yep.

02:11:23.000 Sure.

02:11:24.000 And they're trained sort of to suppress their feelings, to not talk about it.

02:11:29.000 Right.

02:11:30.000 And so there's...

02:11:31.000 So, yeah, we want the feds to come.

02:11:32.000 The more that they come, the more that they learn.

02:11:34.000 We have trained police officers who are also therapists.

02:11:40.000 That have even got permission from their police chiefs to go through our protocol to get MDMA as part of their training.

02:11:46.000 Wow.

02:11:46.000 So really, it's healing for all.

02:11:49.000 That's why I'm going to Beirut.

02:11:50.000 That's why I just came from Ukraine.

02:11:53.000 We've got a project in Somaliland in Africa.

02:11:56.000 We want to do work in Rwanda.

02:11:58.000 So I think that Lycos is going to succeed, whether it takes six months or three and a half years or whatever.

02:12:05.000 We will eventually, FDA will eventually approve MDMA cystic therapy for PTSD, then they'll approve psilocybin and other things.

02:12:12.000 And so I'm sort of going around the world in sort of high-trauma, low-resource areas to try to globalize access.

02:12:20.000 And I think that we're in a perilous time in America right now, and we could use more people dealing with their fears, dealing with their anxiety, withdrawing the projection of the shadows.

02:12:30.000 You know, immigrants have actually made America stronger in a lot of ways.

02:12:35.000 Where did we all come from?

02:12:36.000 I mean, what is the story of your family?

02:12:39.000 Immigrants.

02:12:40.000 Immigrants in the 1920s.

02:12:42.000 From where?

02:12:43.000 Italy and Ireland.

02:12:44.000 Yeah.

02:12:45.000 Wow.

02:12:46.000 Yeah.

02:12:47.000 Yeah, well, this is the real melting pot of the world.

02:12:51.000 And I know that there's a lot of prejudice against immigrants when they first show up.

02:12:55.000 But now we don't think you're not an American.

02:12:58.000 Right.

02:12:58.000 Exactly.

02:12:59.000 Yeah.

02:13:02.000 Well...

02:13:02.000 I mean, I think the real fear that people have is cartel members and people coming across the border and terrorists coming across, and not having a secure border, which I think we should have a secure border, but I also think we should have path to citizenship, too.

02:13:13.000 Yeah.

02:13:13.000 Oh, totally.

02:13:14.000 Yeah.

02:13:14.000 I mean, this is a great place, and this is the reason why people are willing to walk across the river to try to get here with their children.

02:13:21.000 They know that you can make something out of your life here.

02:13:24.000 I just think we could do better with all the things that you said, all the things you said, and with a guy like you out there spreading the world.

02:13:31.000 Spreading the word, rather.

02:13:32.000 It helps the world.

02:13:33.000 So I appreciate you.

02:13:34.000 You're doing God's work.

02:13:36.000 And look how miraculous it was that I'm here today with you.

02:13:40.000 The universe works like that.

02:13:42.000 Incredible.

02:13:43.000 Thank you, Duncan.

02:13:43.000 I'm so sorry you had an emergency root canal.

02:13:47.000 Yeah, poor Duncan.

02:13:48.000 That sucks.

02:13:49.000 He'll be back.

02:13:50.000 Okay.

02:13:50.000 Well, thank you very much, Rick.

02:13:51.000 It was awesome.

02:13:52.000 Great.

02:13:53.000 Thank you.

02:13:53.000 Go to maps.org.

02:13:54.000 Yes.

02:13:55.000 That's it.

02:13:56.000 Thank you, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - May 09, 2025

Joe Rogan Experience #2319 - Rick Doblin

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Transcript