The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #782 - Rick Doblin

00:00:00.000 Is that okay?

00:00:01.000 Is that comfortable?

00:00:02.000 Yeah.

00:00:02.000 Okay.

00:00:07.000 There's a constant debate as to whether or not the headphones are the way to go.

00:00:11.000 Because the headphones are the only way that you can hear exactly what other people are going to hear when they listen to the podcast.

00:00:18.000 So you can kind of like review it while it's happening.

00:00:21.000 And if only I wear headphones, then it feels weird.

00:00:24.000 Like I'm interviewing you.

00:00:25.000 Yeah, and it seems kind of to focus my attention just on what I hear.

00:00:31.000 Welcome back, man.

00:00:32.000 It's good to see you.

00:00:33.000 Rick Doblin from MAPS. That's, for whatever reason, that acronym I always stumble with.

00:00:38.000 Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

00:00:41.000 Yes.

00:00:42.000 Yeah.

00:00:43.000 And actually, I was just yesterday and today with Ralph Metzner, and I got the name from him in a way.

00:00:50.000 He wrote a book, Maps of Consciousness, and I needed a name for the organization that had a P in it for psychedelic.

00:00:58.000 Right.

00:00:58.000 And so I was looking around for words that had a P in it and maps.

00:01:01.000 And I really liked what Ralph did and with Tim and around us and the rest.

00:01:05.000 And so I thought maps, it helps, you know, explain a territory.

00:01:11.000 Yeah.

00:01:11.000 Well, you guys are so important when it comes to the dialogue of psychedelics, because from an outsider, this is how I always viewed MAPS. MAPS is always like, oh, those are the actual really smart dudes who are into psychedelics, because there's so many wacky fuckers out there in the world of psychedelics,

00:01:30.000 and they want to bring you crystals and talk to you about channeling, and I know a healer, and there's so much going on that's so crazy. 0.66

00:01:38.000 And then there was science.

00:01:40.000 And then there was people doing actual peer-reviewed studies.

00:01:43.000 There was actual scientists involved.

00:01:45.000 There was real data.

00:01:46.000 And you guys were pursuing it the right way.

00:01:49.000 And I was like, ooh, these guys are so important.

00:01:51.000 Because there's not a lot of people that...

00:01:53.000 That's one of the weird things about psychedelics. 0.99

00:01:55.000 You could tell people that you went out and drank whiskey until your feet went numb and you shit your pants and no one cares. 0.99

00:02:01.000 But if you tell people that you got together with some friends and you took a naturally occurring psychedelic drug and you explored your consciousness and you're so much happier now and you feel better about life and you're more optimistic, if you do that, you're some fucking wacky hippie druggie. 1.00

00:02:17.000 Some loser. 0.99

00:02:18.000 Well, that's the perception. 0.93

00:02:20.000 And so we've got this coming out, and we've looked at other social change movements like gay marriage and gay rights, and it comes from people coming out.

00:02:29.000 Because there are loads of smart people that do psychedelics or, you know, talented or emotionally wise.

00:02:34.000 And they just keep it quiet.

00:02:36.000 So people don't really know who in society has had these influences.

00:02:40.000 And they don't have to keep it quiet either.

00:02:43.000 Jobs think that their employees, for some reason, would be better off if they didn't do certain drugs, certain jobs.

00:02:51.000 I think that's crazy.

00:02:52.000 The idea that they get to control your body when you're not there is just crazy.

00:02:57.000 Yeah, but if you look at the companies like Facebook and Google and all these tech companies, they don't do drug tests.

00:03:04.000 They better not.

00:03:05.000 They don't.

00:03:05.000 They'll lose everybody.

00:03:06.000 Yeah, they know not to.

00:03:07.000 Imagine if Google did a pot test. 0.98

00:03:10.000 Oh, good Lord.

00:03:12.000 Oh, my God.

00:03:13.000 They would lose the entire company.

00:03:15.000 It would come back.

00:03:15.000 It would be like real straight-laced, Republican, Trump-supporting.

00:03:19.000 Yeah, so the innovation and psychedelics and marijuana and looking at things in different ways, people are getting to appreciate that, I think, more.

00:03:28.000 The culture is changing.

00:03:30.000 Well, we're in these camps, you know, we have these camps, the do's and the don'ts.

00:03:34.000 Do you take drugs?

00:03:34.000 Do you not take drugs?

00:03:35.000 And, you know, and there's a lot of people that pride themselves on one or the other, whether they're A perturber or non-perturbed.

00:03:42.000 You know, there's people that get weird about people that are doing things other than what they're doing.

00:03:48.000 They don't like it.

00:03:49.000 Yeah, and that's why we need this kind of coming out.

00:03:52.000 So we were having these global psychedelic dinners.

00:03:55.000 This is our 30th anniversary.

00:03:57.000 Actually, tomorrow is the 30th year that I started MAPS in 1986. And we're asking people to, in their own homes or with their friends, to invite people over and then have them tell stories of what psychedelics have meant to them or what their hopes are for psychedelic research.

00:04:17.000 So you're inviting everyone to do it, like, to make a night of it?

00:04:21.000 Yeah.

00:04:22.000 It's like a holiday?

00:04:23.000 Yes, yeah.

00:04:24.000 During April.

00:04:25.000 During the month of April, generally.

00:04:26.000 You're creating your own holiday.

00:04:28.000 Well, there's people that have done this before with conversations about death with dinner and drugs with dinner even.

00:04:36.000 So they try to promote conversations in safe places, but where people feel comfortable to really be more honest and they can open up.

00:04:46.000 And so it's kind of modeling on that.

00:04:49.000 And then it hopefully helps people to come out even more.

00:04:53.000 I mean, we even have like a Twitter, it's a hashtag psychedelics because.

00:04:59.000 And so people can write in and just say psychedelics matter to me because, you know, I'm more hopeful or I'm, you know, feeling that multi-generational trauma can be addressed.

00:05:12.000 Isn't that incredible that that is one of the best things for it is MDMA. One of the best things as far as getting over traumatic experiences is an illegal drug.

00:05:22.000 Yeah, and yet there's a carved out area that we've been able to make legal, which is the research area, and it's because science is the vehicle in our culture that we trust, more our religion than our religions, and so it felt like science and healing were the ways into the culture that was freaked out by psychedelics in the 60s,

00:05:43.000 and now because of these Crises we're in and also these tools that can be shown to be really helpful and that people have made lives out of them that it's not hurt them, it's helped them.

00:05:56.000 But people don't know it.

00:05:57.000 So that's where we think the research is helping people create a space where they can talk about it.

00:06:04.000 I think it's people are starting to understand the true nature of these things instead of the propaganda and they're doing it from people like yourself being really honest about their experiences and People like yourself even more importantly because there's not a lot of people like you that have actually gone out and pursued all the significant scientific data On psychedelics and the beneficial properties to it.

00:06:28.000 So that we can understand, like, we have this idea about a thing.

00:06:32.000 Forget it.

00:06:33.000 Put all your ideologies aside.

00:06:34.000 Whether you're right-wing or left-wing, we have an idea about a thing that's not correct. 0.93

00:06:39.000 And this idea about a thing is that there's a certain group of consciousness-adjusting substances that are for losers. 1.00

00:06:48.000 They're for dumb people. 1.00

00:06:49.000 They're for fools. 1.00

00:06:50.000 And don't you mess with those. 1.00

00:06:52.000 And everybody who does those is lazy and stinky. 0.77

00:06:58.000 There's a lot of people that automatically lock into that pattern of thinking. 0.97

00:07:02.000 That's their go-to for any drugs, anything that's not legal.

00:07:07.000 But yet those same people oftentimes will drink.

00:07:10.000 They have no problem doing that, and a lot of times they'll take pills, too, which is even more bananas.

00:07:16.000 Yeah, well, there was this idea that drugs or marijuana hurts your IQ. Says who?

00:07:22.000 Says who? 0.65

00:07:24.000 To prove it.

00:07:25.000 Is that true?

00:07:26.000 Well, there was a study, the National Institutes of Health just two weeks ago had a conference in Washington at the NIH headquarters.

00:07:34.000 The head of NIH was there, the head of NIDA, the head of NIMH, National Institute of Mental Health, about marijuana and cannabinoids.

00:07:41.000 And it was a neuroscience review.

00:07:43.000 And they presented results that suggested that there was heavy marijuana smokers that started early in their lives.

00:07:53.000 This was done in New Zealand over a 20-year period, had some differences, lower IQs than their control groups.

00:08:01.000 Well, if you're talking about people that are smoking marijuana heavily, one of the things that I would say is that if you're smoking marijuana heavily, you're not going to do a whole lot of thinking. 0.80

00:08:11.000 You're going to zone the fuck out. 0.61

00:08:13.000 You're going to do a lot of zoning out. 0.96

00:08:15.000 And while sober people might be absorbing more information, you're probably off on a world of your own all day long.

00:08:22.000 That's not necessarily healthy.

00:08:24.000 I think all psychedelic drugs should be an enhancer, but they shouldn't be in replace of.

00:08:29.000 You shouldn't say...

00:08:31.000 I'm just going to be high from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep every single day.

00:08:36.000 And this is how I exist.

00:08:37.000 I'm just high all the time.

00:08:38.000 High, high, high.

00:08:40.000 Take a break, man.

00:08:41.000 Yeah, I had that sense of, as in my early 20s, I was smoking all the time to be high, high, high.

00:08:49.000 And I enjoyed it, and I felt it got me into things.

00:08:51.000 It got me really into physical work and labor.

00:08:54.000 Really?

00:08:54.000 Yeah.

00:08:55.000 Pot and exercise is fantastic.

00:08:57.000 I mean, that's the opposite of the couch potato idea, you know, that people have.

00:09:01.000 But pot and exercise just meant I ran the New York Marathon while I was stoned.

00:09:06.000 That's amazing.

00:09:08.000 That's amazing.

00:09:09.000 I got tired in the middle, and I walked into Porta Potty and smoked up some more.

00:09:15.000 You get tired and you smoke some more weed and jump back in?

00:09:18.000 Yeah.

00:09:18.000 That's amazing.

00:09:20.000 Oh my god, that's a great story.

00:09:23.000 Isn't that hilarious?

00:09:24.000 A lot of jujitsu people smoke pot before jujitsu.

00:09:27.000 It's a big one.

00:09:31.000 Snowboarders.

00:09:31.000 Yeah, snowboarders love it.

00:09:33.000 Yeah, snowboarders love it.

00:09:34.000 They say basketball players.

00:09:35.000 Yeah.

00:09:36.000 They say that it's one of the things about the NBA. It's like, you better not be testing for weed, because these dudes love it.

00:09:42.000 Yeah.

00:09:42.000 It makes sense, too, because I don't play basketball, but I play pool, and one similarity they share is that it's about touch and feel, and that touch and feel is way enhanced.

00:09:53.000 A lot of the best pool players also smoke pot.

00:09:55.000 Yeah.

00:09:56.000 You know, this guy...

00:09:57.000 I don't know if I'm blowing up his spot.

00:09:59.000 I probably shouldn't blow up his spot.

00:10:01.000 There's a video of me doing an impression of him.

00:10:04.000 And he's like a genius. 1.00

00:10:05.000 Ah, fuck it, I'll say it. 1.00

00:10:06.000 His name's Earl Strickland. 1.00

00:10:07.000 He's a genius pool player.

00:10:09.000 And he might have occasionally enjoyed marijuana.

00:10:12.000 That's all I'm saying.

00:10:13.000 But these guys, like they say that when they're...

00:10:17.000 Smoking pot and playing you can like see things better you have a better sense of where the ball is going you have more sensitivity as far as how far it rolls yeah I used to play racquetball a lot and handball and a lot and sometimes I would play stoned and sometimes I when I was you you did have that deeper sense of being in the moment you were just one step instant more into the moment as and predicting and knowing and just But there was an unpredictability

00:10:47.000 about it.

00:10:49.000 So I could never really tell if I would play better or worse.

00:10:55.000 Well, that's probably why you play good, because you're never sure and you stayed on the edge.

00:11:01.000 You know, there's an ego-dissolving quality of any of these psychoactive substances, and I think that ego-dissolving quality gives you more space to move around with all your other focuses.

00:11:15.000 That's my theory about it, because I always felt like with jujitsu, you definitely feel better at jujitsu when you're high, and I was trying to figure out why.

00:11:24.000 Well, you also feel like Somehow or another, you feel more vulnerable, yet you do better.

00:11:32.000 Like you're more like kind of freaked out by any aggression or more trying to avoid any sort of conflict.

00:11:40.000 That's what the driving studies of marijuana and drivers show.

00:11:44.000 That people know that they're slightly impaired and they take defensive measures.

00:11:48.000 They drive slower.

00:11:50.000 We're just more aware of the possibilities of an error as well.

00:11:54.000 Yeah.

00:11:54.000 Yeah, and you're correcting for it, and you drive more carefully.

00:11:58.000 I think that's the part that we have to really be the experts on the risks as well as the benefits.

00:12:07.000 Yeah, definitely.

00:12:09.000 And that we can't ignore that there are both sides of it.

00:12:12.000 For sure with edibles.

00:12:14.000 Yeah.

00:12:15.000 You know, like edibles and driving.

00:12:16.000 Settle down.

00:12:18.000 Just please settle down.

00:12:20.000 Are you sure?

00:12:21.000 Are you sure that's a good idea?

00:12:23.000 Yeah, although I think the idea we need to do is more move to performance tests rather than drug tests, and then that's really directly what you're concerned about, and then you leave people's behaviors to themselves, but you check their real performance, not these indicators or predictors.

00:12:41.000 Yeah, from my personal experience, there's a big difference between how you understand and operate under it as a Like, someone who's been smoking pot for, like, 15 years versus someone who's been smoking pot for, like, a week or a month or even a year.

00:12:59.000 Like, there's a difference in sometimes your ability to handle being really high.

00:13:03.000 Like, your anxiety takes hold of you because you're like, oh my god, and you start freaking out.

00:13:08.000 Then you can't drive, you can't do anything.

00:13:11.000 And then there's people that are just OGs.

00:13:14.000 Like that Action Bronson character.

00:13:16.000 Action Bronson came in here. 1.00

00:13:17.000 This motherfucker smoked like nine joints in the entire time he was here. 1.00

00:13:21.000 He just kept smoking. 1.00

00:13:22.000 I had to tap out.

00:13:24.000 I had to sit back and watch.

00:13:25.000 And he just never slowed down.

00:13:27.000 He kept going in. 1.00

00:13:28.000 He kept lighting that fucker up. 1.00

00:13:29.000 I'm like, this guy's insane. 1.00

00:13:31.000 But like a dude like that, that guy can handle being high. 0.95

00:13:34.000 He understands how to be high.

00:13:36.000 But for someone who's not really that experienced at it, man, especially in a car, it's not a good idea.

00:13:42.000 Yeah.

00:13:42.000 Yeah, for sure.

00:13:44.000 Again, if you can just focus on performance, it takes a while to get used to it.

00:13:50.000 My point was the performance varies considerably depending upon the individual.

00:13:54.000 So I don't think you can even do an across-the-board performance test, like say, oh, we've shown that this guy under five joints can do BMX flips. 0.98

00:14:03.000 Because a lot of those BMX dudes, they can do that shit drunk, too. 0.99

00:14:07.000 You know what I mean? 0.99

00:14:07.000 Yeah, it has to be an individual examination. 0.99

00:14:10.000 Yeah, the part that I really liked about exercising and playing racquetball with marijuana is that sometimes it would be so easy to forget the score.

00:14:20.000 And then you realize you're not really playing for the score.

00:14:22.000 It doesn't really matter.

00:14:23.000 And you're just so into the moment and playing as hard as you can.

00:14:27.000 Yeah, just enjoying the movement.

00:14:29.000 And there is this competition, but it's like about helping each other do your best.

00:14:33.000 And then the score, yeah, that's the one downside of it.

00:14:37.000 You know, you're high in playing racquetball, trying to keep track of the score.

00:14:41.000 Yeah, you need someone there who's sober.

00:14:44.000 You need to hire someone.

00:14:45.000 Hire a dude with a clicker. 0.85

00:14:48.000 We can't be bothered, man.

00:14:51.000 Well, you just give each other participation trophies like they're doing with kids today, where everybody gets a trophy.

00:14:55.000 Don't worry about the score.

00:14:56.000 Just play.

00:14:57.000 Just keep playing.

00:14:58.000 Who won?

00:14:59.000 I don't know.

00:15:00.000 I think this idea, though, of science and being rigorous about things.

00:15:04.000 Yes.

00:15:05.000 Yeah, I mean, I saw something that you did about aliens, and I thought you did like a TV documentary.

00:15:11.000 Yeah.

00:15:11.000 I thought you did great about it.

00:15:13.000 Thank you.

00:15:14.000 I was very, yeah, I was impressed.

00:15:15.000 Well, the alien, listen, man, nobody wants to believe more than me.

00:15:19.000 Nobody wants to believe more than me.

00:15:20.000 Believe me. 0.98

00:15:21.000 I fucking want to believe. 0.96

00:15:23.000 But when I'm honest and I look at all the evidence, it's not there, folks. 0.98

00:15:27.000 There's nothing there.

00:15:28.000 There's nothing there.

00:15:30.000 There's like a few people that have seen some stuff.

00:15:32.000 There's some people that wrote affidavits.

00:15:34.000 Other than that, you got nothing. 0.99

00:15:36.000 You got some shaky-ass pictures that could be fucking anything. 0.99

00:15:39.000 It could be a bird that got shot out of a cannon. 0.99

00:15:42.000 There's some of these photos that they're convinced they're from another planet. 0.99

00:15:46.000 Like, are you fucking serious, man? 0.85

00:15:48.000 I think it'd be anything. 0.98

00:15:49.000 Who knows what that is?

00:15:50.000 I think the bigger question is, if it's true, then what?

00:15:54.000 And that's what I've tried to look at.

00:15:56.000 And so for me, if it's true that there's aliens from here somewhere else that are here, what would I do differently in my life?

00:16:03.000 Do I really need to solve that mystery, which doesn't seem very compelling and doesn't seem likely, but I think it's a way to be connected to something broader.

00:16:14.000 It's like a spiritual urging.

00:16:15.000 I think it's like a secular Jesus.

00:16:18.000 Yeah.

00:16:19.000 I really think it is.

00:16:20.000 I don't think I'm the only one.

00:16:22.000 I don't even think this is my theory.

00:16:24.000 I think other people have definitely thought this up.

00:16:26.000 That there's some sort of a connection between people that don't want to believe in religion.

00:16:31.000 I don't want to believe in any sort of ancient ideologies, but they desperately want some superior.

00:16:39.000 And so they reach out to the skies and some of them get fixated on the idea of maybe even they have been personally visited because it makes them more significant.

00:16:50.000 It gives their life a bit more meaning.

00:16:52.000 You know, you were chosen.

00:16:54.000 We're testing you.

00:16:55.000 We're trying you out.

00:16:56.000 Conveniently always while you're dreaming.

00:16:58.000 But trust me, dude, it's really happening.

00:17:00.000 You're not just sleeping and dreaming something crazy.

00:17:02.000 No, you are actually on a spaceship.

00:17:04.000 And so you get these people that are kind of delusional.

00:17:06.000 And when you look at the sheer, raw numbers of people in this country, and then you look at the UFO stories and go, how many of these people could be delusional?

00:17:15.000 Could it be all of them?

00:17:16.000 Could it be some of them?

00:17:18.000 Could it be most of them?

00:17:19.000 What's the real number?

00:17:20.000 And that was the cold hard thing that we got to on that sci-fi show.

00:17:25.000 Because it doesn't discount the possibility of, definitely not of extraterrestrial life, and definitely not of people being visited.

00:17:32.000 It's entirely possible that extraterrestrial life has visited Earth, observed dust, and there was a unique Unique moment where someone was there and witnessed it and maybe even was in contact with them and then they took off and they were gone and they never returned again that is entirely possible because that's entirely what we would do If we could just go from planet to planet, 0.92

00:17:54.000 as dumb as we are now, if we could just go from planet to planet and do studies, fuck yeah we would do it! 0.98

00:18:00.000 And if we found an intelligent life form that was more primitive than us, like cave people, like some 2001 shit with the monolith, you know? 1.00

00:18:09.000 If we found something like that, you don't think we'd go say hi? 0.98

00:18:12.000 Of course we would say hi.

00:18:13.000 We would definitely say hi. 0.99

00:18:14.000 And then we'd jet back off at our fucking sleep machine off into the skies. 0.99

00:18:18.000 We would do exactly what we think they would do. 0.99

00:18:20.000 Well, you could make the case that we already know by looking at these tribes in the Amazon that are as if living cavemen without much contact.

00:18:29.000 And we try more and more now just to let them alone.

00:18:32.000 Yeah, but you go there, they're wearing Nikes. 0.99

00:18:34.000 You go there, you just have fucking Kobe Bryant t-shirts on. 0.99

00:18:38.000 They have like Mickey Mouse hats. 0.99

00:18:40.000 I mean, it's weird.

00:18:41.000 You see these people in the jungle and they have all this Western clothing.

00:18:44.000 You're like, wow, it's so weird.

00:18:46.000 But yet they're living like an indigenous tribe. 0.86

00:18:50.000 Yeah, there's very few that are still pretty uncontacted.

00:18:54.000 They live primitive.

00:18:55.000 And I actually did a peyote ceremony one time with some Native American church shaman.

00:19:00.000 Dude, how many people could say that?

00:19:03.000 But this was...

00:19:05.000 A bunch of people can say that, but they wanted to see...

00:19:09.000 What a friend of mine who was helping them with their sheep was using because it seemed to help him get stronger and it was MDMA. With sheep?

00:19:20.000 When they would go off and do peyote ceremonies somewhere else, he would tend to their animals.

00:19:27.000 Right.

00:19:28.000 And he would give the sheep ecstasy? 0.78

00:19:29.000 No, no, no, no, no, I'm sorry.

00:19:32.000 Did you understand what you're saying?

00:19:34.000 No, okay, I skipped there.

00:19:35.000 I was just trying to follow.

00:19:36.000 I think we might have gone too deep before this episode.

00:19:42.000 A friend of mine was living out with the Navajos to kind of get his head straight. 1.00

00:19:46.000 Okay.

00:19:47.000 And he would help take care of their animals when they, this male, female shamans, both would go off to do peyote ceremonies.

00:19:56.000 Oh, wow.

00:19:56.000 And he stayed out there for about a year.

00:19:57.000 And he kind of put himself together.

00:19:59.000 And they said, what helped you?

00:20:02.000 And we're interested in what your medicine is.

00:20:04.000 And he said it was MDMA. And they said, well, we'd be interested in trying to experience MDMA. Whoa.

00:20:12.000 So I was invited out there, and we ended up doing this ceremony in a Navajo.

00:20:20.000 And they only spoke Navajo.

00:20:21.000 They didn't speak English at all.

00:20:23.000 And there was this, like in the Western movies, there was a trail of dust coming in.

00:20:30.000 Somebody came on horseback.

00:20:32.000 To be our translator.

00:20:33.000 Whoa.

00:20:35.000 Dude.

00:20:37.000 It was their 17-year-old niece. 1.00

00:20:39.000 Holy shit. 0.99

00:20:40.000 And she came to mediate during this MDMA experience, and it became clear that this was really for her. 0.99

00:20:52.000 Not so much for them, for them to show their 17-year-old, who was torn between the different cultures, that something about our culture we wanted what they had, or we saw and respected it.

00:21:04.000 Wow.

00:21:05.000 And a lot happened, and it was wonderful in all different ways, and there were some important healings, but in the morning when we were going, this young woman uh was going to get back on her horse and she had 17 magazine whoa and was reading it and that's where i started figuring out that you know even out in the reservation in these protected cultures that

00:21:35.000 this globalization of ideas and internet and podcasts and people are being exposed to ideas that they wouldn't have normally been exposed to even in china i mean they're having to do so much to kind of censor stuff Yeah, there's an explosion of thinking and ideas going on right now.

00:21:54.000 It's a very strange, strange time when it comes to that.

00:21:58.000 And I think people are getting unsettled because things they had thought were true and rigid and part of their frameworks are different in other places.

00:22:06.000 How many people speak Navajo exclusively?

00:22:09.000 There's a bunch.

00:22:10.000 That's insane.

00:22:11.000 I didn't even know that that existed.

00:22:13.000 I didn't know that inside of this country there were entire cultures of people that speak in the original native language.

00:22:20.000 Wow.

00:22:21.000 I didn't know that existed.

00:22:23.000 Well, it's probably very, you know, thin at these upper generations because the younger ones are...

00:22:29.000 Arguably the best sounding...

00:22:32.000 Their language is like the coolest sounding language ever.

00:22:36.000 It's got that...

00:22:37.000 You know, there's like a sound to it.

00:22:39.000 Like, there's something to their accent that just...

00:22:42.000 I guess it's like we're programmed to think of Native Americans as like spiritual and authentic. 0.92

00:22:49.000 You know, there's like this sound to it.

00:22:51.000 Like, do you remember that scene with Clint Eastwood?

00:22:54.000 Was it the outlaw Josie Wales where he met that Indian chief and they got together and these are my words of life and also my words of death. 0.90

00:23:02.000 Do you remember that speech, Jamie?

00:23:04.000 Do you know what I'm talking about?

00:23:06.000 Dude, you gotta find that.

00:23:07.000 It's so powerful.

00:23:09.000 It's like one of my favorite moments in a movie. 0.95

00:23:11.000 I mean, those Clint Eastwood movies were all ridiculous, right? 0.99

00:23:14.000 Like, when you stop and look at it, they're all ridiculous.

00:23:17.000 But there was something to that genre, that spaghetti western genre, because It wasn't just that there were cool action movies, but it was cool action movies that were in some ways reminding you of how people lived just a hundred years ago. 0.95

00:23:36.000 Because these were all in the 1960s and 70s and shit, right? 0.99

00:23:41.000 That's when they did these fucking movies. 1.00

00:23:43.000 Mm-hmm. 1.00

00:23:43.000 Well, this is the 1970s. 1.00

00:23:45.000 In 1870, they were riding fucking horses everywhere. 0.99

00:23:49.000 I mean, this literally is a hundred years old. 0.99

00:23:53.000 You know, 1865, they abolished slavery. 0.99

00:23:55.000 We're only talking about a hundred years, and this cowboy western shit was going on. 0.99

00:24:00.000 And for us, it almost like harkens to a time right before we fucked up the country. 0.99

00:24:07.000 Right when the first marauders on wooden wheels rolled their platforms covered in tarp across the entire continent to find a spot to have babies. 0.85

00:24:19.000 Not that it was like this perfect paradise before we got here.

00:24:23.000 Definitely wasn't.

00:24:24.000 Yeah, that's an interesting perspective that some people grab onto.

00:24:29.000 That the Native American people were completely at peace with each other.

00:24:32.000 They definitely weren't.

00:24:34.000 They're amazing.

00:24:36.000 It's nothing to take away from their cultures.

00:24:38.000 I'm fascinated by Native American culture.

00:24:41.000 It's just an amazing place that they existed on and for so long without any European influence while all this stuff was going on in the world.

00:24:51.000 They were living here in a very, very different way.

00:24:53.000 In a lot of ways, an intensely harmonious way with their environment, with nature itself.

00:24:58.000 And I think we look at that and we have all these deep spiritual attachments to that.

00:25:03.000 It means it's very significant.

00:25:05.000 But they fought amongst each other so much.

00:25:08.000 That was their sport in a way.

00:25:10.000 And they had that as killing.

00:25:12.000 It was a way of becoming trained as a predator.

00:25:16.000 And somehow that's so deep in us.

00:25:20.000 And that's...

00:25:21.000 Part of the question, I think for me, with psychedelics and, you know, therapy is, is there a way to get that out of the human heart in a way?

00:25:30.000 I think the way to get it out is the way that it's getting out right now.

00:25:33.000 And it's through information.

00:25:35.000 I think that when even you look at these Native American tribes that were harmonious with each other, right?

00:25:41.000 They have these very close knit bonds and close tribes and they're very communal.

00:25:44.000 But they didn't know these other people that were exactly like them that were 100 miles away.

00:25:49.000 And they assumed the worst.

00:25:51.000 And they assumed the worst, too.

00:25:52.000 And they looked at each other and there was not enough communication.

00:25:54.000 They couldn't interact with each other instantaneously.

00:25:57.000 They couldn't get to understand each other.

00:25:59.000 Like, we've talked about this on this podcast before, but it wasn't until, like, about 100 years ago where a boat showing up didn't mean...

00:26:09.000 I mean...

00:26:10.000 If you were in like the 1800s and a strange boat pulled up on shore, you're fucksville, right?

00:26:16.000 This is a terrible problem. 0.98

00:26:18.000 These are monsters with swords and they're gonna jump off and they're gonna shoot arrows at us.

00:26:22.000 That was really common. 1.00

00:26:24.000 If you had a boat that showed up, a giant boat, and a bunch of people got off, you're fucked, man. 1.00

00:26:28.000 You just got invaded. 0.99

00:26:30.000 Now, that means tourists.

00:26:32.000 And you want tourist dollars.

00:26:34.000 And people have translators on their phones so they can speak to each other, people that speak different languages.

00:26:40.000 I mean, this is an amazing time.

00:26:43.000 It's amazingly strange.

00:26:45.000 But we're experiencing each other on a much more even playing field than ever in the past.

00:26:51.000 And I think that's how we can exist with so many of us.

00:26:54.000 Yeah, and I think if we can see that really we're all more in common than we have different and we can appreciate the differences rather than be fearful of them and that what we have in common is this fundamental sense of connection of being this web of life that really we're not virtually we're pretty similar to animals you know we're way close to people with different skin or different cultures to be able to see that that is

00:27:26.000 who we really are and that acting from that and trying to work on cooperative solutions and I think that if we can have lots of people having these direct experiences so that they can't be manipulated by politicians so it's about grounding this kind of globalization but comfort with the sense of connection that we're Able

00:27:57.000 to find these bonds that they do exist and that they can be built.

00:28:01.000 I think one of the things that we're seeing in this extreme oversensitivity that we're experiencing right now, this is like a really interesting time as far as like PC culture and what you can do and what you can't do and cultural appropriation.

00:28:17.000 I mean, people are going after people for cooking Mexican food that aren't Mexican.

00:28:21.000 Yeah, we're trying to call that guy cultural appropriation.

00:28:24.000 We're trying to take ayahuasca out of the ayahuasca rituals and out of the jungles and turn it into a therapy drug. 0.66

00:28:34.000 But that's out of respect.

00:28:35.000 It's not out of...

00:28:37.000 Well, that's an interesting analogy.

00:28:39.000 It's a different thing in a lot of ways, but yeah.

00:28:44.000 Yeah, I mean, cultures can evolve.

00:28:46.000 You just have to be acknowledging where it comes from and try to bring you back as much as you're taking.

00:28:51.000 Yeah, what I was going to say, though, is that this oversensitivity is just...

00:28:55.000 It's a side effect of this expanded understanding.

00:28:59.000 And in this expanded understanding now...

00:29:02.000 All of the different things that are injustices in the world are being highlighted in a way that never been highlighted before.

00:29:07.000 So then people start going after them and then pushing the line further back.

00:29:11.000 And then they start looking for other slights that might be around.

00:29:16.000 You know, other...

00:29:18.000 Microaggressions.

00:29:19.000 Microaggressions.

00:29:20.000 Anything...

00:29:21.000 What is this?

00:29:22.000 White people with dreadlocks. 0.87

00:29:23.000 Justin Bieber adds fuel to the culture appropriation debate.

00:29:26.000 First of all, ladies and gentlemen, all you have to do is Google dreadlocks.

00:29:31.000 That's what I did. 0.98

00:29:31.000 And I found out that the fucking ancient Greeks were like the oldest people that wore dreadlocks. 0.98

00:29:37.000 They believe it might have come from the ancient Greeks. 0.99

00:29:41.000 Also, a lot of other cultures wore dreadlocks.

00:29:44.000 Vikings wore dreadlocks. 0.71

00:29:47.000 It's across the board with hair, folks.

00:29:49.000 Okay, this is not a black thing.

00:29:51.000 Not only that, that's not what cultural appropriation is.

00:29:54.000 Okay, that's just style.

00:29:56.000 What cultural appropriation is, is like, say if these Native Americans had a specific style of clothing that you, if you wore it, you were a shaman.

00:30:06.000 And you were a sacred person or you had a headdress that you wore during very intense spiritual ceremonies.

00:30:12.000 And someone just started wearing that for fun.

00:30:15.000 Someone thought it was cool to wear that for fun.

00:30:17.000 Well, then it becomes offensive and that's cultural appropriation.

00:30:20.000 Because these people have this...

00:30:23.000 Ritual, this very important sacred ritual, and this one part of that ritual, you are defacing, you're mocking it openly, and it's offensive to them, it hurts them.

00:30:32.000 And even that's arguable. 0.91

00:30:34.000 That's culture appropriation, and I agree that I think if someone has something that's sacred, like a headdress or something that they specifically wear, and then you walk around and wear it, that's kind of a dick move, right? 0.61

00:30:45.000 If you have to earn that.

00:30:47.000 It's like someone...

00:30:49.000 Yeah, it's like being a fake black belt or having a fake PhD or pretending that you went to Vietnam and you didn't. 0.70

00:30:56.000 There's a lot of those people out there, right?

00:30:57.000 They're all equally offensive.

00:30:59.000 But that's...

00:31:01.000 Cultural appropriation is not a white guy wearing dreadlocks.

00:31:04.000 It's just not, okay?

00:31:05.000 That's a kid who likes to wear his hair like that. 0.99

00:31:07.000 Who gives a fuck? 1.00

00:31:09.000 And the only reason why you give a fuck is because you've run out of things that are really important to care about in your life. 1.00

00:31:15.000 Because if you cared about really important shit, you would concentrate on that. 0.99

00:31:18.000 That is a massive distraction. 1.00

00:31:20.000 If a white kid with dreadlocks is gonna, you're gonna go out of your way to find anger in a white kid with dreadlocks. 0.56

00:31:27.000 All that says to me is you need more interests.

00:31:29.000 That's for sure.

00:31:30.000 You need more things that are interesting to you.

00:31:32.000 Yeah, that's called work avoidance.

00:31:34.000 You know, you're just focusing on things that are...

00:31:36.000 Yeah, work avoidance, right.

00:31:38.000 You're right.

00:31:38.000 Yeah.

00:31:39.000 You're right.

00:31:39.000 That is a great way of approaching it.

00:31:41.000 It's exactly what it is.

00:31:43.000 People do do that.

00:31:44.000 Well, there was a class at leadership at the Kennedy School.

00:31:47.000 It was taught by the only psychiatrist on the faculty, Ron Heifetz.

00:31:53.000 And that was a big concept, was that, you know, as a leader, there's just so much work avoidance being done in different ways.

00:32:00.000 And how do you help people focus on the issues that are...

00:32:06.000 Tearing them apart or that they're avoiding but would be better if they try to work on it and you know that word work is weird because work avoidance Doesn't just mean like actual work like working on your job.

00:32:16.000 It could be working on yourself You know, it could mean, like, there's a lot of people that get involved in wacky behavior because they also are addicted to cigarettes and maybe they drink too much.

00:32:27.000 So they start getting addicted to wacky behavior as well, not just as a side effect of the drugs, but also to distract them from dealing with the work.

00:32:35.000 They create dramas. 1.00

00:32:36.000 They create bullshit. 1.00

00:32:37.000 And almost like to drown out the nagging poking of all the shit you actually need to get done. 1.00

00:32:45.000 So then you just fucking tank your life again in this way. 0.99

00:32:48.000 Tank your life again in that way. 0.98

00:32:50.000 Yeah, my favorite approach to work avoidance is doing lots and lots of other work other than what's the most important thing.

00:32:58.000 Oh, really?

00:32:58.000 Do you put off everything except what you really need to do?

00:33:02.000 I catch myself doing that now and then.

00:33:04.000 That's crazy.

00:33:06.000 Isn't it weird how your brain would just play little tricks on you?

00:33:09.000 What is that?

00:33:11.000 I think it's this anxiety a bit about this is a big challenge and you don't know until you start how it's going to turn out.

00:33:17.000 There's lots at stake.

00:33:21.000 It's a matter of what you tolerate from yourself, too.

00:33:24.000 That's a weird line in the sand that you've got to learn to draw if you want to actually get things done.

00:33:31.000 You've got to say, okay, now from 7 p.m.

00:33:35.000 to 9 p.m., I do this.

00:33:37.000 This is what I'm going to do.

00:33:38.000 I'm going to sit down.

00:33:39.000 We're going to work.

00:33:39.000 And you be the boss of yourself.

00:33:41.000 And then you sit down and you stare at that computer screen or you stare at the notebook and you do the writing that you were really trying to put off.

00:33:48.000 It's hard for people to do, though, because a lot of times your brain is very wishy-washy, and we savor our choices.

00:33:53.000 We savor our ability to open up our websites and just start going, oh, what's going on on dig.com today?

00:34:00.000 Oh, wow, that's crazy.

00:34:01.000 And the next thing you know, it's 45 minutes after you were supposed to start.

00:34:05.000 Yeah, I call it the tyranny of the empty page.

00:34:10.000 But it's so nothing.

00:34:13.000 It's such a weird thing to be terrified of.

00:34:15.000 What really put me at ease was one professor when I was working on my dissertation at the Kennedy School at Harvard, and I just had this idea that you had to have it so good, you know, to be worthy.

00:34:28.000 And what I was doing, it just...

00:34:31.000 You know, it doesn't start that way.

00:34:35.000 So I had three professors, but I needed a fourth on my committee, and he was the academic dean.

00:34:42.000 He's terrific.

00:34:42.000 But I said to him, you know, should I, because you're so busy, should I just work through with the other professors and then just give it to you in the final phase just for you to read over?

00:34:54.000 And he said, no, give it to me in the junk phase, because that's when your comments are the most important.

00:34:59.000 Hmm.

00:35:00.000 But what it was, God, he acknowledged that there was a junk phase. 0.79

00:35:04.000 And that helped me feel like, okay, I can start because I'm producing junk.

00:35:08.000 But, you know, you just keep trying to refine it.

00:35:11.000 Oh, that's so important.

00:35:12.000 I mean, Ari Shafir has this little piece of paper that he has glued or taped to his laptop. 0.99

00:35:18.000 And it says the first draft of everything is shit. 0.99

00:35:23.000 And it's Ernest Hemingway. 0.99

00:35:24.000 And it's like taped right underneath his screen.

00:35:28.000 That's such a good point.

00:35:29.000 You really have to go over things.

00:35:31.000 Writing is weird.

00:35:32.000 And whenever I read something that's ponderous and labored, I go, did you read this again?

00:35:38.000 You've got to read it after you write it.

00:35:40.000 You've got to write it, you've got to read it, and you've got to rewrite it.

00:35:42.000 And that's where, for me, getting stoned and editing stuff that I've written.

00:35:46.000 It's harder.

00:35:47.000 Sometimes I can write when I'm stoned, but it's early, and sometimes it'll be like a half hour for a paragraph or so.

00:35:56.000 Right.

00:35:57.000 Because I'm thinking about all the different words and ways.

00:36:00.000 What do you use to write with?

00:36:05.000 To write with?

00:36:06.000 Yeah.

00:36:06.000 Do you have particular software do you write with?

00:36:08.000 Do you have anything?

00:36:10.000 Just Microsoft Word.

00:36:11.000 Do you ever try Write Room?

00:36:13.000 Do you know what Write Room is?

00:36:15.000 No.

00:36:15.000 Write Room is this program where the entire screen goes black.

00:36:19.000 I'll show it to you.

00:36:20.000 The entire screen goes black and all you get is these green letters and you can't access your browser. 0.99

00:36:26.000 You can't do shit. 0.97

00:36:29.000 This is what it looks like when I write. 0.99

00:36:31.000 Oh, nice.

00:36:32.000 So it's green letters.

00:36:33.000 There, you can see it up on the big screen as well.

00:36:36.000 So it's green letters, black background.

00:36:40.000 And so when I write like that, man, I feel like it just zones me in.

00:36:46.000 I can't do anything else. 1.00

00:36:48.000 I can't fuck off. 0.99

00:36:50.000 I just shut the Wi-Fi off and ram. 1.00

00:36:53.000 That's, for me, the best way.

00:36:54.000 The best way to get into it.

00:36:57.000 Yeah, for me it usually takes being like midnight or something like that.

00:37:03.000 Have you ever seen Scrivener?

00:37:04.000 You know what Scrivener is?

00:37:06.000 Scrivener is pretty cool too.

00:37:07.000 It's something I've been using for years.

00:37:08.000 It's this program that you can set it up, I think you can set it up a bunch of different views, but the one I like, it looks like a cork board.

00:37:16.000 So you have like index cards and you can write on index cards.

00:37:20.000 See them up there like that?

00:37:21.000 And all those index cards are expandable.

00:37:23.000 So each one of those index cards can be an essay.

00:37:28.000 And you click on each one of them and then you get to notes and you can open them up and read the full extent of it.

00:37:35.000 You can highlight things and make notes on the highlights.

00:37:38.000 It's a really cool program.

00:37:40.000 I like it a lot.

00:37:41.000 It's really cool too because I like cork boards.

00:37:44.000 And I use them in real life.

00:37:47.000 And I learned that from watching sitcom writers.

00:37:51.000 Can you have it where you've got, like, the different columns are different kinds of tasks, and then you have them prioritized?

00:37:59.000 So you can kind of, in one glance, look at...

00:38:01.000 I don't know.

00:38:02.000 You'd have to explore that.

00:38:03.000 I only use it for notes, but I'm sure it's pretty flexible.

00:38:08.000 But I think it's mostly...

00:38:11.000 I don't know.

00:38:12.000 Who started using it?

00:38:13.000 I think it was a screenwriting tool initially.

00:38:16.000 I think it was.

00:38:16.000 But a lot of people use it because it's a really cool view.

00:38:21.000 What kind of stuff are you writing? 0.99

00:38:23.000 Mostly just bullshit. 0.99

00:38:24.000 Just my thoughts on things. 0.99

00:38:25.000 Then I extract stand-up out of it.

00:38:29.000 I'll write long-form things.

00:38:31.000 I keep saying that I'm going to get back to writing a blog, but I just never...

00:38:35.000 I never have the real itch.

00:38:38.000 I like these half-processed things that then become bits.

00:38:44.000 I almost use it as a farm.

00:38:47.000 I used to try to write a joke.

00:38:49.000 I used to try to write a beginning punchline setup. 0.99

00:38:52.000 But then I realized the best way for me, at least with my style, is to write a bunch of shit and then find out what's funny about it. 0.90

00:39:01.000 Is tweeting sort of for you like notes or blog? 0.99

00:39:04.000 Sometimes it is, yeah.

00:39:07.000 Sometimes it's cool.

00:39:08.000 I like tweeting because you only get 140 text characters.

00:39:13.000 Those 140 characters, I think that's good because it makes you economize, and it makes you edit, and it makes you a better joke writer in a lot of ways.

00:39:22.000 The actual...

00:39:26.000 Figuring out the slams and the punches in a joke. 0.99

00:39:29.000 I think you can get to them better when you learn how to say funny shit on Twitter. 0.98

00:39:34.000 Because you only have 140 characters. 0.95

00:39:37.000 That small amount of text in this little box and you've got to figure out a way to get your point across and hopefully be funny too. 1.00

00:39:45.000 Sometimes it's just stupid text to me. 1.00

00:39:47.000 Someone will say something really stupid, just so silly, and I just can't stop laughing. 1.00

00:39:51.000 I think it's interesting how tweets have a time where they work, too. 1.00

00:39:59.000 Something could have just happened in the news. 0.83

00:40:02.000 And then someone will have the perfectly timed, ridiculous tweet. 0.52

00:40:05.000 And, like, in that moment, like, that dude, like, cracked up the whole party of the world, you know? 0.93

00:40:11.000 Or that woman, or whoever the hell said it. 1.00

00:40:13.000 There's a lot of people that, like Jenny Johnson, who was in here.

00:40:17.000 She's become famous in a working comic from tweets, just from being funny on Twitter.

00:40:24.000 Wow.

00:40:24.000 You know?

00:40:25.000 It's amazing.

00:40:26.000 Yeah.

00:40:27.000 It's crazy.

00:40:28.000 I haven't really used that...

00:40:31.000 Well, you guys use, Maps uses it.

00:40:32.000 Oh, we have tremendous.

00:40:34.000 You guys are really on the ball, too, when it comes to social media and getting people engaged and retweeting your stuff.

00:40:42.000 Yeah, Bryce Montgomery is in charge of that, and he does great.

00:40:45.000 We have such a really good team.

00:40:47.000 Thumbs up, Bryce.

00:40:47.000 Yes, Bryce.

00:40:50.000 No, you guys are amazing.

00:40:52.000 Like I said, it's so important to balance out People like me.

00:40:56.000 You want to balance out people like me, you know?

00:40:59.000 Well, we're in this stage of what I'm considering our major reality check of our 30 years of existence, and that's submitting the data from MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, these Phase II studies that we've been working on for the last 15 years,

00:41:16.000 and submitting that to, first off, to our FDA consultants and then to FDA about going to the next step.

00:41:24.000 About going from exploratory studies to studies that if they work, then you get approval as a prescription medicine, as a prescription treatment.

00:41:34.000 So we're bringing all of these data points that we've gotten.

00:41:41.000 Roughly, just in this bunch of studies, around $7 million studies, over 105 people, and what we're able to tell is a story about risk and a story about benefit for post-traumatic stress disorder from any cause with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy as compared to A placebo and also from the literature and working with people who have failed on other medications.

00:42:09.000 It's a weird subjective subject, isn't it?

00:42:13.000 Like how people feel, how do you feel about, you know, your life?

00:42:17.000 Because it's assisted psychotherapy, like how much of an impact specifically can you attribute to the drug?

00:42:24.000 Right.

00:42:28.000 The test will actually determine that because one group of people will get the therapy with a placebo.

00:42:35.000 Right.

00:42:36.000 I mean this is how we're thinking of for phase three and this is how some of the studies we did with phase two.

00:42:41.000 So I think being rigorous and skeptical is really important.

00:42:49.000 Super important.

00:42:50.000 So the first point is if you can do this with the therapy without the drug then why do you need the drug?

00:42:57.000 But there's so many variables when it comes to therapy as well, right?

00:43:00.000 Like the relationship between the therapist and the patient.

00:43:03.000 Yeah, there's so many variables and ranges of individual responses.

00:43:06.000 So there's these massive tables, statistical tables for sample size calculations that help you figure out On the basis of all these assumptions, how many people you need in this study to get statistically significant results.

00:43:21.000 And how many do you need?

00:43:22.000 Well, we're still working through the different assumptions.

00:43:24.000 I would say a million. 1.00

00:43:25.000 Let's get a million people high as fuck. 1.00

00:43:27.000 Let's see what's up. 1.00

00:43:29.000 Well, just think of the cost, though.

00:43:31.000 I know.

00:43:32.000 That's the problem.

00:43:32.000 There's got to be some billionaire character out there, smart.

00:43:35.000 What's it like?

00:43:36.000 Richard Branson.

00:43:37.000 Richard Branson starts dishing out MDMA. Then we got a party.

00:43:40.000 There are support that we're getting that makes me very hopeful about our ability to raise the money for Phase 3. We think it's going to cost around $24 or $5 million.

00:43:52.000 Wow.

00:43:52.000 And we have about half of it already.

00:43:54.000 Wow.

00:43:55.000 Either in hand or committed. 1.00

00:43:57.000 This is serious shit. 0.99

00:43:59.000 Yeah, well, the consequences, if it works, is that then we can start setting up psychedelic psychotherapy clinics for MDMA for PTSD. We can start negotiating with the VA and the Department of Defense with their hundreds and Hundreds of thousands of dollars. 0.99

00:44:17.000 The enormous...

00:44:20.000 Last year was about $6 billion that the VA spent in disability payments for about 600,000 veterans that are disabled to some degree with PTSD. Just for PTSD? Just for PTSD,

00:44:36.000 around $6 billion every year.

00:44:39.000 What?!

00:44:39.000 Just in disability payments.

00:44:42.000 That's...

00:44:43.000 What?!

00:44:43.000 The human suffering too, the money.

00:44:46.000 Oh my God!

00:44:47.000 Because it's hard when people are traumatized.

00:44:52.000 I would have never guessed it was that high.

00:44:55.000 Six billion dollars just for PTSD. I would have thought...

00:44:57.000 Just for disability payments.

00:44:59.000 That's not cost counting other things.

00:45:02.000 Wow!

00:45:03.000 And that's a lot of people...

00:45:05.000 And what we're able...

00:45:06.000 What we've been able to show what we say in this...

00:45:09.000 A group of 105 people is that, and this is PTSD for many cause, not just war, but childhood sexual abuse or rape or workplace accident, trauma of any kind, that a substantial percentage of these people can have significant improvement.

00:45:28.000 And how that's evaluated is, fortunately for us, there is a Independent rater administered scale for symptoms of PTSD. And it's called the CAPS,

00:45:43.000 the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale.

00:45:45.000 It's the gold standard developed by the VA, used by the FDA to approve Zoloft and Paxil for PTSD. And it's just been revised from CAPS IV to CAPS V. So it's a work in progress over decades.

00:46:00.000 And so this is the objective scale.

00:46:03.000 And people do have to tell...

00:46:07.000 their story to an independent rater and the way that the independent rating system is going to be done is going to be a whole pool of them that are calibrated with each other inter-rater reliability and they know how to administer this and they're randomly assigned to what we think will be about two hundred and thirty people for one phase three study that's probably what we're going to be proposing And we need two of those studies,

00:46:34.000 two large-scale Phase III studies.

00:46:36.000 And what we're going to have is these raters will be randomly assigned to one of the subjects, and they won't necessarily know, is this the one-year follow-up, the two-month follow-up that really is the primary outcome measure or the baseline?

00:46:53.000 So the independent raters are really important because for skeptical people in science, the double blind is a key development.

00:47:02.000 How you do an experiment, you shouldn't know the two conditions.

00:47:07.000 You shouldn't know which is the experimental one and which isn't because your biases might make you subtly see what you want to see.

00:47:17.000 Right.

00:47:17.000 And it's very hard not to do that.

00:47:20.000 That's kind of a human tendency.

00:47:21.000 So the idea has been these placebo-controlled double-blind studies.

00:47:25.000 But it's good in theory, but with a psychedelic drug, people tell if they've got a placebo that does nothing or a psychedelic drug.

00:47:35.000 It's a fundamental problem.

00:47:38.000 of this research and that's why these independent raters are even more important for people to have confidence in the results.

00:47:46.000 And what we've tried is a series of studies giving low-dose MDMA and comparing it to medium and full dose.

00:47:54.000 And so the idea we thought was that if people are confused about which dose they're getting, But then we can show a dose-response relationship, then that's the double-blind.

00:48:05.000 That's the solution to the double-blind problem, is that everybody knows they're getting MDMA, but they don't know what dose they're getting.

00:48:13.000 And so you have to show the people that get the higher dose do better than the people that get the lower dose.

00:48:18.000 And the people, patients might not know, therapists could be confused.

00:48:24.000 That's the ideal.

00:48:25.000 So that's what we are heading for.

00:48:27.000 And that's what we've spent the last 10 years or so researching with different low doses of MDMA, 25 milligrams, 30 milligrams, 40 milligrams, 75 milligrams, 100, and 125. And we would always have this possibility of half the initial dose administered one and a half to two and a half hours later to prolong the experience and make it an eight-hour therapy session.

00:48:55.000 So when these people are getting this ecstasy, they're getting it, or MDMA, they're getting it in a clinical setting?

00:49:00.000 Yeah, they're getting it in a clinical setting.

00:49:02.000 How often?

00:49:05.000 Three times, three to five weeks apart.

00:49:10.000 It's a three and a half month therapy process of weekly psychotherapy.

00:49:14.000 So the emphasis is on the psychotherapy, the preparation, the therapeutic alliance, and then after three weeks there's the initial MDMA session.

00:49:27.000 And it takes place in a special treatment center Treatment room where there's a male-female co-therapist team with the person.

00:49:38.000 The person, the patient, is having their blood pressure monitored.

00:49:41.000 They're having their temperature monitored.

00:49:43.000 They're being videotaped, the whole thing.

00:49:45.000 And there's videotapes on the therapist as well.

00:49:47.000 We're trying to understand about the method.

00:49:49.000 And the experiment, this portion of it, this session, is about eight hours.

00:49:56.000 Jesus!

00:49:57.000 Who's auditing all this footage?

00:49:59.000 We're loading it up.

00:50:04.000 We're not having somebody audit all of it.

00:50:07.000 We have the therapists sort of note which are the decisive moments.

00:50:12.000 So like a best of on YouTube?

00:50:15.000 Yeah, actually.

00:50:17.000 So in order to train therapists, the best way to train therapists is to show here's videotapes of actual patients under MDMA, and this is how they're It's poetry.

00:50:28.000 It's symbolic poetry.

00:50:30.000 People talk in terms of imagery.

00:50:33.000 Because half the time their eyes are closed, listening to music, having just their own private experience.

00:50:39.000 The other half of the time, more or less, they're communicating with the therapists.

00:50:45.000 And it varies.

00:50:47.000 And there's no particular order of things.

00:50:49.000 So it's basically...

00:50:50.000 And this is what I felt with the Native Americans when we did MDMA with the... 1.00

00:50:55.000 in the peyote circle that they had these elaborate rituals that you know went through the whole night that were beautiful and filled with these rich symbols but then they went so they did some of their opening prayers and they want to know what we're gonna do and we didn't have anything it was like well we just sit around and somebody says it's kind of a more freeform it felt that we had like a poverty of ritual but also freedom To

00:51:25.000 explore like that.

00:51:26.000 And that's what we try to provide in this MDMA experience, that people have their unconscious as the guide.

00:51:35.000 And we're not the guide.

00:51:36.000 We're not steering them anywhere.

00:51:38.000 There's all these techniques we know.

00:51:39.000 We're not...

00:51:40.000 We're responding to this emergence of material that's been catalyzed by the relationship, the setting, and then the drug.

00:51:49.000 And we're supporting this emergence.

00:51:52.000 And different people will sometimes go to the trauma first, or not talk about it until the fifth hour, or they'll go to child experiences that were supportive to build strength, or they'll But often it's in the symbolic language and they're sort of telling themselves a story.

00:52:12.000 And that story can reorder the neural networks in the brain and de-emphasize activity in certain fear centers of the amygdala.

00:52:23.000 And can change how memories are stored.

00:52:26.000 We're just sending MDMA to Rockefeller University, where one of the leading scientists in anxiety is going to start some studies in animals, mice, rats, I'm not sure which, and trying to look at fear extinction and memory reconsolidation and how MDMA affects that.

00:52:44.000 Whoa.

00:52:45.000 Yeah, so we're starting to get...

00:52:46.000 Fear extinction?

00:52:48.000 Like through giving someone MDMA, it lessens anxiety?

00:52:53.000 Yeah, so it means that when you have memory, you react with fear all the time.

00:53:00.000 And this fear has never fully been processed.

00:53:04.000 It's always like it's about happening.

00:53:06.000 It's not been fully processed because it's been so scary.

00:53:10.000 Right.

00:53:12.000 More emotionally rigid.

00:53:14.000 So with the MDMA, you can help people through this way of reducing the fear response.

00:53:21.000 Their activity in the amygdala is reduced.

00:53:23.000 Wow.

00:53:24.000 And so people can have the content without the fearful emotion.

00:53:29.000 So as some sort of a bridge or a blocker Yes, yeah.

00:53:35.000 But it changes the structure of the memory to that person?

00:53:39.000 Or the reaction to the memory?

00:53:41.000 Yes.

00:53:41.000 It changes how the memory, every time you have a memory, you have to consolidate from different parts of your brain, then you re-consolidate the memory.

00:53:50.000 Yeah, that's why people have weird false memories, right?

00:53:52.000 Yes.

00:53:52.000 That they would swear were real.

00:53:55.000 Yeah.

00:53:55.000 Your memories change over time.

00:53:57.000 But it's a memory of a memory that you're retelling.

00:53:59.000 It's almost like if someone you know that had a story and they did something and they told it to you and then you tell your friends about that story, that how, hey, I know Bob's story.

00:54:08.000 Let me tell you Bob's story.

00:54:09.000 But you don't really know Bob's story because you only know it from him.

00:54:12.000 You know what I mean?

00:54:12.000 You weren't there when it happened.

00:54:14.000 And I think that's some of what happens with at least my memories.

00:54:17.000 As they get older and older, I'm like, this is a memory of a memory that I had.

00:54:23.000 Yeah, you have to double check a lot.

00:54:25.000 And what happens is that people's memory for the trauma actually gets better.

00:54:33.000 So you can, with MDMA, you can somehow or another change what that memory is.

00:54:39.000 No, that's the beauty part of it.

00:54:41.000 You change your reaction to the memory.

00:54:44.000 Right, but I mean, what that is to you.

00:54:45.000 The feeling tone, yeah.

00:54:47.000 So because these memories were so scary, they've been suppressed, but not successfully.

00:54:55.000 They're not fully integrated, still activating...

00:54:59.000 Fear reactions frequently.

00:55:01.000 And so when you can feel peaceful and then bring up the memories, and then because you're feeling peaceful, people remember even better.

00:55:11.000 You know what you guys should really do if you really want to prove the effectiveness of MDMA? You should go to worldstarhiphop.com and find all those people that got fucked up and give them ecstasy and see if it helps.

00:55:24.000 Because there's so many people that got Hunted in the head and thrown off a fucking building. 0.99

00:55:30.000 We have the Zendo Project. 0.99

00:55:32.000 Is that for worldstarhiphop.com exclusively?

00:55:35.000 It's for electronic dance music festivals and Burning Man.

00:55:40.000 That's definitely different.

00:55:42.000 Definitely different.

00:55:43.000 Yeah.

00:55:43.000 But, I mean...

00:55:45.000 The idea of being able to better process trauma is universally appealing.

00:55:49.000 I think all of us have had bad moments in our life that you probably overcome, and you probably have some character because of those moments, but it would be nice if you had a full handle on how it makes you feel.

00:56:02.000 Yeah, and that's where this memory enhancement comes in handy, because then you can really learn from what happened.

00:56:08.000 Can I ask you how you chose MDMA out of all the different psychoactive substances?

00:56:14.000 Yes.

00:56:16.000 I felt that MDMA had a chance of being Welcomed into the culture as the first of the different psychedelics because it has that fear-reducing.

00:56:32.000 It's not so psychedelic.

00:56:33.000 It's not a classic psychedelic.

00:56:35.000 It doesn't make you feel like you're losing control.

00:56:39.000 It makes it so that you feel a subtle shift of openness to Self-acceptance, self-love, and this just self-acceptance, I think, is like the core of it.

00:56:54.000 And your muscles relax.

00:56:56.000 People can stretch a couple inches more.

00:56:59.000 Really?

00:57:00.000 Or more limber on MDMA. No kidding?

00:57:03.000 Yeah.

00:57:04.000 Have they ever done that with athletes?

00:57:06.000 I don't know.

00:57:08.000 They should do it with athletes, like people that are already really flexible, like maybe gymnasts or something like that?

00:57:12.000 Yeah, and that's yoga people. 0.99

00:57:13.000 Yeah, martial arts people.

00:57:14.000 Yeah, you can do...

00:57:16.000 I think that's part of the muscles relaxing, that Part of your tension, or it's tense because of parts of your brain.

00:57:24.000 So that the way in which you can then have this full memory when you're feeling peaceful, and you're looking at it as if it's happened in the past, which it did.

00:57:37.000 So you finally have got this perspective on it.

00:57:40.000 This peace makes it so that you're not seeing it as happening right now.

00:57:44.000 Because you realize it's not happening right now.

00:57:48.000 And so you're creating this longer, different kind of memory storage of something that was clearly in the past, and it's connected now to this reflective, peaceful tone.

00:58:00.000 So when the memory is reconsolidated, The next time you call it, you get the incident, but you get the emotional tone of this peacefulness and that it's in the past.

00:58:13.000 And so you can do work within a period of minutes sometimes or hours of seeing a shift and looking at something differently and processing these traumatic memories.

00:58:27.000 It's rare, but one person was in our study and he dropped out after just one session.

00:58:33.000 It's like, I got this.

00:58:34.000 He's like, and part of what he got, Tony Macy is his name, was one of the vets.

00:58:42.000 Part of what he got was that he had been telling himself that he was on opiates for pain, for injuries, but that he was starting to realize it was really more of an escapism and that he didn't need them and he didn't need drugs and he didn't need MDMA either.

00:59:00.000 Yeah.

00:59:01.000 Wow.

00:59:02.000 He didn't need any more.

00:59:04.000 He had what he needed.

00:59:06.000 Well, kudos.

00:59:07.000 Yeah, and we asked him later if he would at least be part of our follow-up evaluations.

00:59:15.000 Right.

00:59:15.000 And he said yes to that.

00:59:17.000 Well, that's nice of him.

00:59:18.000 And so he wouldn't qualify for PTSD at the two-month.

00:59:22.000 And then when it got closer to the one year, which is our last follow-up, he started...

00:59:27.000 Saying, well, you know, I'm still feeling pretty okay, but I think I could learn more from MDMA. Maybe can I have now some more of these sessions?

00:59:35.000 And we said, well, it's a rigid protocol.

00:59:37.000 You've dropped out.

00:59:39.000 But let's just wait and see if you even would qualify to be in the study, if you even have PTSD. So he did the 12-month follow-up, and he didn't have PT. He wouldn't even qualify to be in a study.

00:59:48.000 But he still wanted to get some ecstasy off you.

00:59:50.000 Because there's other things to learn.

00:59:53.000 Yeah, like how good it feels.

00:59:54.000 Yeah, that's...

00:59:55.000 Come on.

00:59:56.000 This guy's trying to party.

00:59:57.000 He's trying to party under the auspices of scientific study.

01:00:00.000 And in order to be the most rigorous, too, there's a way to look at studies.

01:00:05.000 One is called per protocol.

01:00:07.000 Everybody that finishes the study and meets the criteria.

01:00:10.000 Right.

01:00:10.000 And the other is called intent to treat.

01:00:12.000 Right.

01:00:13.000 So that means everybody that comes, you've got to look at their data, even if they drop out or they lied to get in the study or they wouldn't have qualified or whatever it is.

01:00:22.000 Once you have enrolled somebody, that's the more conservative.

01:00:25.000 You just have to include everybody.

01:00:26.000 You can't just be picking the people that fulfill your treatment plan.

01:00:31.000 Right.

01:00:31.000 So this guy was part of that.

01:00:34.000 We couldn't normally count him, but now that we're doing the most conservative Intent to treat analysis, we can include the dropout.

01:00:41.000 So actually, Tony's scores of Massive reduction in PTSD symptoms after just one session counts in our data.

01:00:49.000 Wow.

01:00:50.000 Because he was screened and had the first session.

01:00:53.000 There's so many variabilities.

01:00:55.000 Happiness being such a crazy sort of unquantifiable thing, right?

01:01:00.000 That's what everybody wants.

01:01:01.000 Everybody wants some happiness.

01:01:03.000 And one of the things that MDMA does seem to provide a lot of people is relief from tension, which in a lot of ways Equals happiness.

01:01:12.000 I mean, universally, if you had to say, what is the one thing that people get from a drug called ecstasy?

01:01:18.000 It's you feel great, right?

01:01:20.000 You feel relief.

01:01:20.000 You feel comfortable.

01:01:23.000 Insecurities melt.

01:01:24.000 They just dissolve.

01:01:25.000 They don't exist anymore.

01:01:26.000 And you can approach people in this really weird, open way. 0.96

01:01:30.000 Where you're not constantly ready to judo whatever kind of bad shit they're sending your way. 0.59

01:01:35.000 So many people, when they communicate, they always have some sort of a wall up or some sort of a barrier between their real feelings and what they're projecting. 0.98

01:01:46.000 So that they can sort of figure out how to navigate this conversation with the least amount of social damage.

01:01:53.000 There's like a zen to some styles of communication, like this way of going through it.

01:02:02.000 With having the least amount of conflict in your life.

01:02:06.000 But if everybody was on ecstasy, that would be the vibe.

01:02:10.000 There's a vibe that you get, and I'm not saying everybody should do it, but what I'm saying is there's a vibe that you get when you're communicating on ecstasy.

01:02:17.000 It makes it almost impossible to have arguments with people.

01:02:21.000 It's weird.

01:02:22.000 You communicate with people in this open way that you would never even attempt if you weren't both on MDMA. Yeah, we actually have a study starting in the next month or so where we're going to give two people MDMA at the same time to a couple.

01:02:38.000 They're going to fall in love.

01:02:39.000 Well, these are already people that are related.

01:02:42.000 They're going to fall in love again.

01:02:43.000 But one of them has PTSD, and one of them, it affects the relationship, but doesn't have PTSD. Oh.

01:02:50.000 And so this was...

01:02:51.000 A major, major breakthrough because the first study with psychedelics was in the modern era was 1990 with Rick Strassman with a DMT study.

01:03:02.000 And ever since then, now for the past 26 years, it's only been one person getting MDMA or psilocybin or LSD or anything at a time.

01:03:12.000 So this is the first time that we've been able to work with two people at a time and give them MDMA. And it's also the study that's in informal collaboration with the Veterans Administration National Center for PTSD. It's a therapist that used to work within the National Center who's now at Ryerson University in Toronto who developed this approach.

01:03:34.000 And who was introduced to us through the work of Richard Rockefeller, who was opening the doors for us with the National Center for PTSD. And we met this woman, Candace Monson, who's the researcher.

01:03:47.000 And she's developed what's called cognitive behavioral conjoint therapy.

01:03:51.000 And conjoint means couples.

01:03:53.000 And so it's a cognitive behavioral sort of scripted how you kind of think about your trauma and exercises about it, but it's for couples.

01:04:03.000 And so when they were thinking how to blend MDMA with traditional non-drug psychotherapies that are used by the VA, The couples therapy they thought would be the most logical because it helps you to have those kind of communications.

01:04:16.000 You're the better listeners.

01:04:17.000 You're more empathic.

01:04:19.000 You can get over stuck arguments.

01:04:22.000 And the PTSD really does affect the relationship in a lot of ways.

01:04:27.000 And the researchers have all these measures of the relationship, of the style of communication between the people.

01:04:35.000 We really care about the CAPS, the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale.

01:04:41.000 But it's going to be tremendously exciting, and we've been able to get permission for the first time to give two people MDMA, and we'll be able to monitor that.

01:04:49.000 But couples therapy, even though it's a tremendous use of MDMA, will never make it through the FDA because you can only take diseases.

01:04:57.000 You have to treat a disease.

01:04:59.000 It's not for personal psychotherapy.

01:05:03.000 It could be anxiety disorder or PTSD or depression.

01:05:07.000 We have to treat diseases.

01:05:09.000 It's such a weird distinction.

01:05:12.000 If there's something wrong and you have a substance that makes that wrong better, why does something wrong have to be something you look at in a petri dish?

01:05:19.000 Well, only because of the drug war.

01:05:21.000 It's only because it's illegal otherwise.

01:05:23.000 It doesn't make any sense.

01:05:24.000 It's obvious there's a condition and a solution to that condition. 0.93

01:05:29.000 I mean, just the fact that you're not dying from feeling like shit about your marriage, it doesn't mean it's not a problem, you know? 1.00

01:05:36.000 I mean, that's so stupid. 1.00

01:05:38.000 Yeah, it will be one of the best uses of MDMA. I mean, that's like making toothpaste illegal. 1.00

01:05:44.000 It's like, you know, unless you have like a serious dental disorder and you really need to clean the holes, you know, like you have like some sort of a horrible root canal that's about to happen.

01:05:56.000 It's the idea that you can somehow or another keep people from doing what they want to do.

01:06:01.000 That's like at the heart of it all, right?

01:06:04.000 Right.

01:06:05.000 And I think that this idea of, again, psychedelics because, hashtag psychedelics because, of coming out of the closet, of people sort of saying that this has been helpful, and that this is something good,

01:06:21.000 and we should be able to do this.

01:06:22.000 And I think the eventual use, we're sort of backing into this use in couples, but it's really about making MDMA into a mess for PTSD better.

01:06:34.000 And it's also about trying to understand what's the drug and what's the context.

01:06:40.000 So while we had this context I was describing of this non-directive therapy of the unconscious being the guide, other people, like cognitive behavioral, they give you all these exercises.

01:06:50.000 To think about and how you think about your trauma and where and when your triggers are and all different kind of thought exercises.

01:06:59.000 And so we're seeing that MDMA is like a general tool.

01:07:03.000 And so because it's a non-profit drug development, we're trying to work with as many other therapists as many other combinations of treatments that they want to use to explore if they want to blend MDMA with it.

01:07:17.000 And so we have this 960 grams of some of the world's purest MDMA. Don't tell me where it is.

01:07:26.000 I don't want to know.

01:07:27.000 Made by Dave Nichols.

01:07:29.000 Don't even give up the dude's name!

01:07:31.000 They're going to hold him hostage and make him make more.

01:07:32.000 No, this was a legal permission.

01:07:36.000 This is all legal, what I'm saying.

01:07:37.000 1985, I had a kilogram made.

01:07:40.000 Oh my god.

01:07:41.000 What?

01:07:43.000 What is that, two pounds?

01:07:44.000 2.2 pounds, yeah.

01:07:46.000 2.2 pounds.

01:07:46.000 Jesus Christ.

01:07:48.000 Yeah.

01:07:49.000 Good googly moogly young Jamie.

01:07:51.000 And this was...

01:07:53.000 Two pounds of ecstasy!

01:07:56.000 Yeah, in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at Purdue.

01:08:00.000 Oh, my God!

01:08:00.000 And they got a better yield than they thought.

01:08:02.000 They got more than a kilogram.

01:08:03.000 Oh, yeah, I bet they did.

01:08:04.000 They snuck off with it in the middle of the night.

01:08:06.000 I only paid $4,000 for it.

01:08:08.000 Did you guys ever do a rave while you were making it?

01:08:11.000 Absolutely not.

01:08:12.000 Oh, I like how you said that.

01:08:14.000 I don't believe you at all, but way to go.

01:08:17.000 Way to stick to the script.

01:08:18.000 Yeah.

01:08:19.000 No, this was, you know, there's like the legal track.

01:08:22.000 Oh, I understand.

01:08:23.000 Yeah.

01:08:23.000 That's why the yield was totally off.

01:08:26.000 No, but it was...

01:08:27.000 Alright, so we have 960 grams left.

01:08:32.000 31 years later.

01:08:34.000 And it's still the exact same thing we're using in our studies.

01:08:37.000 31 years later.

01:08:40.000 It's kept in room temperature and...

01:08:43.000 Without light, without moisture.

01:08:45.000 It's just infuriating that it's taken this long for people to recognize what other people have said.

01:08:51.000 What other people have said for a long time.

01:08:53.000 And I understand the idea of having rigorous scientific testing, but at a certain point in time, there should be enough anecdotal evidence and lack of...

01:09:01.000 I mean, how many people have died from MDMA? Has anybody?

01:09:05.000 Yes, yeah.

01:09:06.000 What are the risks?

01:09:07.000 Like, what is the LD50? Well, LD50 is a measure where you give a bunch of animals increasing amounts and the amount where you kill half of them.

01:09:23.000 The LD50 of MDMA in humans, I don't actually even know that number.

01:09:33.000 But it has happened.

01:09:34.000 Have they died from it?

01:09:36.000 I know people have died from dehydration.

01:09:39.000 People have died from hyperthermia.

01:09:42.000 Right.

01:09:42.000 So MDMA affects your temperature controls, which is one reason we measure temperature, although in therapy, but in a clinical setting lying down, there's no problem with temperature.

01:09:51.000 Right.

01:09:51.000 Mm-hmm.

01:09:52.000 At all.

01:09:53.000 And normally there wouldn't be either if there was adequate harm reduction and people were drinking not just water but electrolytes.

01:10:02.000 So that's why ecstasy people are always so sweaty?

01:10:05.000 Is that what's going on?

01:10:05.000 They're sweaty, but...

01:10:07.000 But they dance a lot, too.

01:10:08.000 It's that combination.

01:10:10.000 So some people have died...

01:10:11.000 And maybe glow sticks?

01:10:13.000 Keeping warm?

01:10:13.000 Yeah.

01:10:14.000 Pacifiers.

01:10:15.000 Glitter.

01:10:16.000 Glitter.

01:10:17.000 I know my analogy about toothpaste is a bad one.

01:10:20.000 You know, toothpaste and teeth.

01:10:22.000 But there is some weirdness to this idea that we need a substance like it's classified.

01:10:29.000 Whether, you know, no matter...

01:10:31.000 Whether it's legal or illegal, it gets classified.

01:10:34.000 And when you make something a drug, and that drug can only be used when there's an ailment, then you lock out the whole possibility of performance-enhancing substances.

01:10:45.000 We don't disclude across the board performing-enhancing substances.

01:10:50.000 That's essentially what coffee is.

01:10:52.000 And it's mandatory.

01:10:53.000 I mean, coffee breaks are written into union bills.

01:10:56.000 I mean, when they make a contract, they write in coffee breaks.

01:11:00.000 We've always had coffee breaks, right?

01:11:01.000 That's a break-to-ticket drug, a productivity drug.

01:11:04.000 And it used to be illegal at one point.

01:11:05.000 Yes!

01:11:06.000 It was where people gathered together and talked and fomented revolution in England.

01:11:10.000 Incredible.

01:11:11.000 So it's like many other things.

01:11:12.000 So we have this one performance-enhancing drug. 0.98

01:11:14.000 Well, ecstasy is probably a performance-enhancing drug as well because it gets rid of some of the bullshit that you've got clogging up your thinking. 0.98

01:11:22.000 Right. 0.94

01:11:22.000 And it allows you to think more freely. 0.94

01:11:24.000 Right.

01:11:24.000 And you can...

01:11:25.000 It's...

01:11:27.000 It's the most inherently therapeutic of all the psychedelics.

01:11:30.000 So when you ask me why did I choose MDMA, I think one part is it is the most inherently therapeutic.

01:11:37.000 People tend not to have bad trips.

01:11:39.000 The kind of bad trips people have is when they take MDMA in a recreational setting and difficult emotions come up and they're with friends that just want to party and they try to stuff the emotions down.

01:11:49.000 And someone plays Slayer real loud.

01:11:51.000 That would be worse, too.

01:11:54.000 And then they end up worse off.

01:11:55.000 So MDMA can make people worse off, too.

01:11:59.000 Well, there's certain people that really shouldn't be allowed to chew gum, and we should take them into account, too.

01:12:04.000 There's certain people that are going to stub their toe every time they walk, and I don't think we should nerf the world.

01:12:10.000 And I think it's super important to recognize when you're looking at all these numbers and statistics that there is a certain percentage of these people in this world that are helpless.

01:12:19.000 You just can't do anything about them.

01:12:21.000 There is risk in everything.

01:12:23.000 If you look at skiing, look at the number of people that die running into trees.

01:12:27.000 I mean, every year there's about 35 or 40 people that die skiing every year.

01:12:31.000 Dude, we lost Sonny Bono.

01:12:32.000 You'd have to remind me.

01:12:34.000 Yeah.

01:12:34.000 You'd have to bring it up, throw salt in the wound.

01:12:36.000 And that's not even counting people with avalanches.

01:12:39.000 But that's because there's benefits.

01:12:40.000 I got you, baby.

01:12:42.000 And that's where, again, this is coming out.

01:12:43.000 Yeah, it's fun.

01:12:44.000 Skiing's fun.

01:12:45.000 But, you know, so is driving race cars.

01:12:47.000 That's fun, too.

01:12:48.000 There's a lot of stuff that's fun.

01:12:49.000 But...

01:12:50.000 Dangerous.

01:12:51.000 Look, there's a lot of dangerous activities, but the amount of people that actually die from ecstasy versus skiing, very low.

01:12:57.000 Very low.

01:12:58.000 In comparison to how many people take...

01:13:00.000 Who skis...

01:13:00.000 Do you think people ski more or take ecstasy more?

01:13:04.000 I think that a lot of what people think is ecstasy, meaning MDMA, is really something else.

01:13:10.000 So that's another problem.

01:13:11.000 That is a problem.

01:13:13.000 Like meth, right?

01:13:14.000 With Arrowhead.org, there's an ecstasy pill testing program that they have been conducting that we helped start years ago.

01:13:22.000 There's one licensed laboratory, licensed by the DEA in the United States, that can take anonymous samples of drugs.

01:13:28.000 You can get drugs tested.

01:13:30.000 And so there's been this program to get ecstasy pills tested.

01:13:35.000 Wow.

01:13:35.000 Over 800 or 900 have already been tested.

01:13:38.000 And around half of them don't even have MDMA in them.

01:13:40.000 Jesus Christ.

01:13:43.000 What are they mostly, amphetamines?

01:13:45.000 They're amphetamines, they're caffeine, a lot of them.

01:13:48.000 Caffeine pills?

01:13:48.000 Yeah.

01:13:49.000 And they're selling them as ecstasy.

01:13:50.000 Sometimes they would, there's test kits, the dance-safe cells, and sometimes to fool the test kits, which turn a certain color, if there's MDMA in it, there's been pills that are one part MDMA, nine parts caffeine.

01:14:02.000 Wow.

01:14:03.000 Because there is the stimulant aspect and people stay up.

01:14:08.000 But that's a terrible up.

01:14:09.000 But the risks of MDMA, even in a large recreational setting, if it were a post-prohibition world, those risks would be very manageable.

01:14:19.000 But there would be some people, probably, rare situations.

01:14:24.000 Somebody might die.

01:14:26.000 We have that all the time with cars, with alcohol, with drugs.

01:14:30.000 You know, I can't say that it would never happen.

01:14:32.000 It's like those freaks that are allergic to shrimp. 0.99

01:14:34.000 Right?

01:14:35.000 Or penicillin.

01:14:36.000 People die from it.

01:14:37.000 Yeah.

01:14:38.000 There's gonna be risk for everything.

01:14:40.000 There's nothing that's safe.

01:14:41.000 A hundred percent.

01:14:42.000 Even salt.

01:14:43.000 Salt kills people.

01:14:44.000 People die from salt overdoses every year.

01:14:46.000 Right.

01:14:47.000 Aspirin.

01:14:47.000 Aspirin kills people.

01:14:49.000 Yeah.

01:14:50.000 Thousands of people die every year from aspirin.

01:14:52.000 But the actual...

01:14:53.000 Yeah, it's...

01:14:55.000 Yeah, it's crazy.

01:14:57.000 The number of people that fall in their bathtub.

01:15:00.000 Let's get rid of bathtubs. 1.00

01:15:02.000 Let's make them all out of rubber. 0.99

01:15:04.000 One of the things that my wife said about me when some of the neighborhood teenagers, when we had our teenagers, were thinking of...

01:15:15.000 Coming to visit me at Boom Festival in Europe, which is one of these festivals where they have the most harm reduction.

01:15:22.000 And these were teenage boys.

01:15:23.000 And what my wife said about me was that I wasn't really good at prevention, but I was good at rescue.

01:15:28.000 And so that's, for me, prohibition versus public health.

01:15:33.000 You know, prevention, you know, prohibition.

01:15:36.000 But if we can be good at acknowledging the risks but being prepared for them, the same way that festivals have medical tents and people have all sorts of physical problems.

01:15:44.000 Yeah, but the problem is there's not a strict prohibition on dangerous things.

01:15:49.000 So the precedent's already been set of freedom.

01:15:52.000 That precedent of freedom we would like to extend across the board.

01:15:55.000 That's what we want. 0.97

01:15:57.000 You can't tell me that I can go to a bar and drink my fucking lungs out and smoke cigarettes all day long and I can take pain pills and I can do all these things, but I can't have a joint. 0.98

01:16:08.000 You can't tell me that. 0.99

01:16:10.000 It doesn't make any sense.

01:16:14.000 Yeah, that makes sense.

01:16:31.000 That they knew they couldn't make it illegal to be black or illegal to be a hippie, but they could look at the drugs that those groups were using and selectively criminalize and prosecute them and use them to break up those communities.

01:16:43.000 And that they knew they were exaggerating the science and that the drug war was a political war against certain kind of drug users who were considered to be a problem to Nixon and Ehrlichman.

01:16:54.000 It was something that Ehrlichman said 20 years ago, didn't get that much attention, and he's been dead, I think, 10 years now, but it just came out again in an article, and people are looking at what Ehrlichman said, and it seems intuitively true.

01:17:07.000 Intuitively true and just unbelievable how damaging and for how long.

01:17:12.000 I mean, it's been going on since 1970. So we're deep here.

01:17:17.000 Yeah, but it also triggered into a fear of the unconscious, a fear of the drugs, not just these political parts, but just the drugs themselves and the reasons why they were political.

01:17:28.000 Well, also the blanket label of drugs becomes really problematic because you have all these things lumped in together.

01:17:35.000 You've got heroin and marijuana in the same categories.

01:17:38.000 You've got cocaine and all these things that are so different and to call them all drugs.

01:17:44.000 It's not a good implication.

01:17:47.000 It doesn't make sense.

01:17:48.000 It's not a good distinction.

01:17:49.000 There should be obvious classifications, like we all know.

01:17:53.000 You were telling me about the ecstasy, and I immediately thought amphetamines.

01:17:58.000 Well, that's a category, and that's how we should describe them.

01:18:01.000 I don't think describing things is, oh, you do drugs. 0.99

01:18:04.000 That's a dumb... 0.99

01:18:05.000 Of course I do. 1.00

01:18:07.000 What am I, stupid? 1.00

01:18:07.000 They figured out how to do things that are way better than not having them. 1.00

01:18:11.000 There's plenty of drugs that are excellent. 1.00

01:18:14.000 The idea that you're going to be completely drug-free is dumb. 1.00

01:18:17.000 Our brains are a drug factory. 1.00

01:18:19.000 Yeah.

01:18:21.000 Don't do damaging drugs.

01:18:23.000 Don't do terrible drugs.

01:18:24.000 Don't do meth. 0.92

01:18:25.000 Don't do things that are going to fuck you up.

01:18:27.000 Yeah, there's probably some stuff you should avoid just because it's not healthy for you.

01:18:31.000 But the problem is labeling them all drugs.

01:18:34.000 It depends on the dose.

01:18:35.000 It depends on the context.

01:18:37.000 The FDA made their reputation in the early 60s on blocking thalidomide to be prescribed in America for morning sickness for pregnant women because it caused all these thalidomide babies.

01:18:51.000 And it was a skeptical woman who ended up winning the President's Medal of Honor, the only person from the FDA, for blocking this drug thalidomide.

01:19:01.000 It was the epitome of the bad drug.

01:19:04.000 But now it's used in the treatment of cancer.

01:19:07.000 Is it really?

01:19:07.000 It's an approved medication.

01:19:08.000 Thalidomide is an approved medication.

01:19:10.000 Is it just one of those medications that only affects babies in the womb?

01:19:14.000 It strips certain blood vessels and it can be useful in certain ways.

01:19:18.000 Wow.

01:19:20.000 It's not that there's good and bad drugs.

01:19:22.000 It's not that things are good or bad in themselves.

01:19:25.000 I don't think methamphetamine is a bad...

01:19:27.000 Do you do meth?

01:19:29.000 Do you ever do it?

01:19:30.000 I've tried it.

01:19:31.000 What's it like?

01:19:37.000 I only tried it one time.

01:19:39.000 Did you clean your house with a toothbrush?

01:19:41.000 It did have that kind of energetic...

01:19:45.000 It wasn't that similar to cocaine.

01:19:50.000 It was a stimulant that can be really useful.

01:19:57.000 This was a shocking thing.

01:19:59.000 My father was a doctor, a pediatrician.

01:20:03.000 Years ago, and he's retired now, but well after I was into doing psychedelics and had dropped out, this is what I was focusing on, he shared with me that he and his medical friends did meth because they were under these ridiculous residencies and they had to work for these really long hours.

01:20:18.000 Wow.

01:20:19.000 And that in the 50s, it was very common for residents, medical doctors, all sorts of people who do methamphetamine.

01:20:26.000 And it was a major tool used in the war and with the soldiers.

01:20:33.000 It doesn't have this evolutionary feel in a way.

01:20:41.000 It helps you do what you're doing, but there's a way where psychedelics help you refine what you're doing.

01:20:48.000 So it just gives you energy.

01:20:50.000 Does it give you confidence?

01:20:51.000 And a mood.

01:20:51.000 There's a mood, too, yeah.

01:20:52.000 A mood.

01:20:53.000 Elevated mood?

01:20:53.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:20:54.000 So MDMA is methylene-dioxy-methamphetamine.

01:20:58.000 So there is similar molecular change with other additions to it, which fundamentally change how it works.

01:21:06.000 Happens, what it does in the brain.

01:21:08.000 So that's a part of maybe what triggers the euphoria as well as the dopamine release?

01:21:14.000 Yeah, that is part.

01:21:16.000 So that chemically, the army in 1952, the chemical warfare people, they were looking for mind control drugs.

01:21:23.000 And so they did a study with animal toxicity studies looking for LD50s and others with eight different drugs in a range.

01:21:30.000 One of them was MDMA. And one was, it was like methamphetamine to mescaline.

01:21:36.000 Whoa.

01:21:38.000 So MDMA is kind of like mescaline in a sense that it has that, which is from peyote, which has this psychedelic ego dissolving and things emerging and nonverbal processing and emotional intensity,

01:21:58.000 that it has that from mescaline, but it's not that ego dissolving.

01:22:04.000 It's more You're calmer and that has the energy from methamphetamine but not in a jittery way because you can sit still, you can meditate.

01:22:12.000 Meditators are now, you know, some of them have learned from MDMA or psilocybin to deepen a meditative practice.

01:22:19.000 So you can use these in any number of different ways.

01:22:24.000 And so you kind of have this paradoxical culmination of methamphetamine and mescaline that produced, you know, the molecule that does something different but reminiscent.

01:22:34.000 And it It is something that I believe that will be used in initially highly controlled therapeutic settings for particular clinical indications and over time, and by over time I mean 10 or 20 years,

01:22:51.000 there would be a development of psychedelic clinics like hospice centers Hospice centers spread all over America in 30 years.

01:23:00.000 The first one was 1974. 2004, there was 3,500.

01:23:04.000 So a place to help people who are at the end of life.

01:23:09.000 So these are psychedelic treatment centers to help people do ego death or to die to their old selves or to see more or that these centers will be Developed all over America, I think, over a process of once the drugs are approved,

01:23:25.000 and probably MDMA and psilocybin will both be approved around the same time.

01:23:31.000 One of the other, you know, in 2021 is our current predictions, and then we'll start elaborating these clinics, and then people will get more and more comfortable to it, so that medicalization precedes legalization, and that's what we've seen with medical marijuana.

01:23:46.000 That the culture gets comfortable through this process of now research and use that they can trust, that they see directly, and they see distribution centers that aren't violent, and people see a system and they then...

01:24:03.000 The latest poll was 60% of Americans in favor of marijuana legalization.

01:24:10.000 Wow.

01:24:11.000 The highest it's ever been.

01:24:12.000 That's incredible.

01:24:14.000 Yeah.

01:24:15.000 I think that we need...

01:24:18.000 People are under so much stress.

01:24:20.000 And if you look around at the world, the world is under so much stress and the environment is under stress and the cultures are bumping up against each other that we need to have all the tools available to manage...

01:24:32.000 The stress, because it's a tremendously crucial time in human history where we have these capabilities through our technology that we never had before to impact planetary systems.

01:24:45.000 Well, in a way, these psychedelic drugs are kind of a technology as well.

01:24:48.000 They're a technology to get us to understand how our brain is functioning.

01:24:51.000 Yes, and there's this confluence of coincidence of timing that Albert Hoffman, who invented LSD, first off created in 1938 and then accidentally ingested it in 1943, felt that the development of nuclear splitting of the atom...

01:25:10.000 was occurring contemporaneously with this discovery of LSD and in his view there was this kind of outer technology and this inner technology and that Einstein said the splitting of the atom has changed everything except our mode of thinking and hence we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe what shall be required as a substantially new mode of thinking and Albert Hoffman was like well I do wonder about the The technology,

01:25:41.000 which, you know, many people think that if it comes from nature, it's really good.

01:25:45.000 You know, if it's plant medicine.

01:25:47.000 But if it comes from a lab, it's somehow suspect.

01:25:49.000 Right.

01:25:50.000 But I think that it comes from our mind.

01:25:52.000 We're from nature labs.

01:25:54.000 So LSD... These nature, these plants, they just extract the chemicals from these plants.

01:25:58.000 When you break it down to what the chemicals are, you can reproduce those in the lab.

01:26:02.000 It's not as simple as it's not natural.

01:26:04.000 It's exactly the same thing as natural.

01:26:06.000 Right.

01:26:06.000 And it's all natural, right?

01:26:08.000 Because it's all from something that's on Earth.

01:26:10.000 Well, actually, because we're trying to see how we're operating in a public benefit manner and fair trade and all this, I asked the company that's now making us our kilogram of...

01:26:22.000 We're having a new kilogram of MDMA made.

01:26:25.000 Oh, Jesus.

01:26:26.000 You need more?

01:26:27.000 I thought you said you had a gang of it.

01:26:28.000 We have 960 grams, but it's not GMP, medical.

01:26:32.000 It's not acceptable for phase 3 research.

01:26:35.000 Oh, yeah.

01:26:36.000 I would say that's something like that, too.

01:26:38.000 I would say it went bad.

01:26:40.000 We've got to give it away to kids.

01:26:43.000 Well, we want to give it away to researchers.

01:26:45.000 So if there are researchers that are listening, we have free...

01:26:48.000 I just became a researcher.

01:26:50.000 Dude, I'm researching.

01:26:52.000 I research for YouTube.

01:26:53.000 We would like to give it there, but the... 0.98

01:26:55.000 Mostly crocodile attacks, but I'll fuck around with some MDMA. Well, the current one is costing us... 0.88

01:27:03.000 To have the medical grade is now costing us $400,000.

01:27:07.000 Oh, of course.

01:27:07.000 We need that.

01:27:08.000 We need that medical grade.

01:27:09.000 And that's what our...

01:27:10.000 Wait a minute.

01:27:11.000 You've got like a bucket of this stuff laying around.

01:27:13.000 But it's not...

01:27:14.000 You know, that's...

01:27:15.000 We're making this transition, yes, into the higher regulated areas.

01:27:20.000 So it is just that the standards of procurement weren't as strict?

01:27:24.000 Is that...

01:27:25.000 Yes, that...

01:27:28.000 This MDMA, just as pure as what we're going to get...

01:27:31.000 By the way, I should never use the word procurement.

01:27:33.000 It's one of those words that I use, and as soon as I go, did I say the right word?

01:27:36.000 Is that okay?

01:27:36.000 Is that okay to use right there?

01:27:38.000 It's the pedigree of all the ingredients.

01:27:41.000 So there has to be a paper trail for all the ingredients.

01:27:44.000 So you don't have that right now. 1.00

01:27:45.000 You got your shit from a dealer. 1.00

01:27:47.000 Sort of. 1.00

01:27:48.000 One of the things that he didn't have all of the paperwork on...

01:27:51.000 Oh, it's like a car.

01:27:53.000 Apparently, there's a part of the process of making MDMA where you need aluminum...

01:27:58.000 What?

01:27:58.000 And he took some aluminum...

01:27:59.000 Oh, Jesus Christ! 1.00

01:28:01.000 We were throwing forks in there and shit. 0.99

01:28:03.000 He took some aluminum foil and used it in the process. 0.99

01:28:07.000 Oh, and that's bad?

01:28:08.000 Well, because it's not like which aluminum foil and which batch and where did it come from.

01:28:13.000 Oh, Jesus Christ. 1.00

01:28:14.000 This guy threw aluminum foil into your fucking mixture. 1.00

01:28:17.000 What? 1.00

01:28:18.000 Janky ass fucking way to make things. 1.00

01:28:21.000 You gotta throw metal in it. 1.00

01:28:23.000 That seems so stupid. 0.99

01:28:25.000 I'm sure it was a really... 1.00

01:28:27.000 Hey man, you wanna eat some cans? 1.00

01:28:28.000 Fuck yeah, dude, I'm in. 1.00

01:28:30.000 I wanna roll. 1.00

01:28:32.000 We're rolling.

01:28:33.000 Yeah, if I knew more chemistry, I could kind of explain what it did in the process.

01:28:37.000 Well, aluminum is super common, rather.

01:28:41.000 We think of aluminum as being frying pans, but that's not the form it takes in the wild.

01:28:47.000 We're car panels.

01:28:48.000 They make a lot of cars out of aluminum now because they figured out how to make super lightweight but very strong aluminum.

01:28:54.000 That's as strong as steel but lighter.

01:28:56.000 But aluminum's everywhere.

01:28:58.000 It's in dirt.

01:28:59.000 It's like one of the most common metals.

01:29:02.000 So they use this stuff.

01:29:03.000 How much do you need?

01:29:04.000 Like in, say, a tiny amount?

01:29:06.000 I don't think it was all that much.

01:29:08.000 What does it do?

01:29:11.000 I'm not an economist, so I can't really say.

01:29:13.000 You didn't get curious? 0.99

01:29:14.000 And you found they were throwing aluminum foil and shit you were taking? 0.99

01:29:17.000 Well, I was just like, wow, this is pure MDMA. Great. 0.99

01:29:21.000 Dude, I would have been like, hold the fuck up. 0.99

01:29:23.000 Did you just say you threw a fork in there? 0.99

01:29:25.000 Dude, sit down, and you've got to tell me, what are you doing?

01:29:28.000 What are you doing?

01:29:29.000 Why does it have to have aluminum foil?

01:29:31.000 We went to the FDA, and we said, is there some way we can take this MDMA, which is just as pure as what we're going to get, and turn it into medical grade?

01:29:38.000 Right.

01:29:39.000 And they said, there's no way you can really do that.

01:29:41.000 Because you have to...

01:29:43.000 This is now preparing for prescription MDMA. I understand.

01:29:47.000 So you have to take it from every initial ingredient, has to be verified at the source, weighed out, documented, and then you make it, and then it's medical grade.

01:29:56.000 Is that right?

01:29:58.000 More or less.

01:29:59.000 So of this 400,000, about 75,000 is just to validate all the methods that are being used.

01:30:06.000 Another 54,000 is...

01:30:09.000 Three-year stability studies to show that the MDMA can last three years, even though we have MDMA from 1985 that we're still using, that we have purity studies on throughout the years.

01:30:19.000 But it's about this particular batch.

01:30:22.000 And actually, our 30th anniversary celebration on April 17th in Oakland at the Scottish Rite Center...

01:30:29.000 Is this a plug for a party?

01:30:30.000 This is a plug for a party.

01:30:31.000 How dare you just snuck that in.

01:30:33.000 See how you just snuck that in?

01:30:34.000 Is for raising money to a legal drug deal to buy this MDMA. How do people find out about this and how to get there?

01:30:41.000 They go to the maps.org website and there's information right on the homepage.

01:30:46.000 Powerful.

01:30:47.000 Thank you.

01:30:48.000 And it's about helping people, though, also think about having dinners in their own homes with their friends.

01:30:54.000 What are you going to make a holiday, dude?

01:30:56.000 Why not, man? 1.00

01:30:57.000 Columbus has a fucking holiday, and he's widely believed to be a piece of shit, right? 1.00

01:31:03.000 Yes, yes, I think... 1.00

01:31:05.000 Yeah, well, let's say that... 1.00

01:31:06.000 Columbus is supposed to be a piece of shit. 1.00

01:31:08.000 Okay, well, I think that once we get MDMA as a medicine, and then it becomes legal, and then most people are doing it... 1.00

01:31:13.000 Then we're going to change our opinion on Columbus?

01:31:14.000 Then we can turn Columbus Day into MDMA Day.

01:31:17.000 It's a great idea.

01:31:18.000 I mean, look, Columbus did start something in motion, but Columbus as a person, if you Google him, boy, he was a terrible human being. 0.85

01:31:26.000 He was cruel.

01:31:27.000 There was an account of one of the missionaries, I believe, that was there on the island.

01:31:33.000 I think it was a Catholic missionary.

01:31:35.000 I forget what religion.

01:31:36.000 But anyway, this one religious person.

01:31:39.000 I wrote this account of what Columbus and his soldiers did to some native people.

01:31:46.000 And it was just horrific.

01:31:48.000 And you realize these were the people that everybody was worried about.

01:31:52.000 Like we were talking about, a boat shows up and some monsters get off that boat.

01:31:56.000 And these are the people.

01:31:57.000 And what they had done to these people for gold, they found out that some of them had gold. 1.00

01:32:03.000 And they just did horrific shit. 0.99

01:32:05.000 Very similar to what happened on this coast here with the Incas. 1.00

01:32:12.000 The Aztecs, rather.

01:32:13.000 Yeah, there's a story of Cabeza de Vaca.

01:32:16.000 Do you know that story?

01:32:17.000 Which story is that?

01:32:18.000 Alvar Nunez, Cabeza de Vaca.

01:32:19.000 This is a true story of people that found real gold.

01:32:24.000 Spanish conquistadors.

01:32:26.000 This has been made into a movie.

01:32:29.000 It should be made into a more major movie.

01:32:31.000 What's the movie called?

01:32:33.000 Children of the Sun.

01:32:35.000 Children of the Sun.

01:32:35.000 Have you seen that, Jamie?

01:32:37.000 I think that's what I think the movie should be called.

01:32:41.000 I'm not sure if it was that.

01:32:42.000 You just make up your own names for movies?

01:32:44.000 I don't like Star Wars, bro.

01:32:46.000 I like Bigfoot and his buddy.

01:32:48.000 In space.

01:32:49.000 Well, the story that I've written, actually, this is incredible.

01:32:54.000 This is the hidden history of America.

01:32:56.000 This is the first meeting.

01:32:57.000 Children of the Sun?

01:32:57.000 Children of the Sun is the script I've written, actually.

01:33:02.000 What the fuck are you doing, man? 1.00

01:33:03.000 You smoked too much pot before the show, be honest with us. 1.00

01:33:06.000 A little bit, right?

01:33:07.000 Not too much.

01:33:08.000 A little bit.

01:33:09.000 Both of us did a little bit, right?

01:33:10.000 Yes.

01:33:11.000 Yeah, it's good for creative brainstorming.

01:33:14.000 And the movie, the story...

01:33:17.000 What is this movie that you can watch, though?

01:33:19.000 I think it might be Cabeza de Vaca.

01:33:23.000 It's got a dwarf shaman that doesn't really exist in the real story, and it's...

01:33:29.000 I think this has to be told true because it's the hope of America.

01:33:32.000 It's the hope.

01:33:33.000 It's a story of several hundred conquistadors around 1528 trying to link up with Cortez, blown off course in a hurricane, land around Tampa, Florida.

01:33:45.000 And of this bunch of hundreds of these conquistadors, only four of them survive.

01:33:50.000 And eventually, one of them is black. 0.96

01:33:53.000 One of them is a slave. 0.99

01:33:54.000 The rest are conquistadors, white. 0.99

01:33:57.000 And they become slaves.

01:33:59.000 So they start out at the head of the empire, exploring and plundering.

01:34:02.000 And then they get destroyed and they become slaves.

01:34:05.000 So they get captured.

01:34:06.000 They get captured.

01:34:07.000 By Native Americans that lived in Florida?

01:34:09.000 Yeah.

01:34:10.000 So the Native Americans that lived in Florida, the Seminole tribe, right?

01:34:13.000 Is that them?

01:34:14.000 I'm not sure which.

01:34:15.000 They end up running away, and it takes eight years, this whole process.

01:34:20.000 This is the charting.

01:34:22.000 So this is the first meeting of the black, white, and red races in much of North America.

01:34:28.000 At one point, when they're slaves, to get some use from them, the Indians, the Native Americans, say they want them to do some healings.

01:34:35.000 They think they're special.

01:34:37.000 There's a black person, they came, and they say, we're not healers. 0.79

01:34:42.000 And they say, if you don't do it, we're going to not feed you.

01:34:45.000 And they try to do a healing, and it actually works.

01:34:50.000 The person says they're better.

01:34:54.000 So what exists is the document.

01:34:58.000 There's a lot of historical documents.

01:34:59.000 What was the ailment that they documented?

01:35:03.000 I don't know what it was.

01:35:05.000 They do talk about...

01:35:07.000 But you wrote a script on it.

01:35:08.000 Well, I don't remember the exact verse.

01:35:10.000 This was a long time ago.

01:35:11.000 I decided that at some point I couldn't try to make the movie happen and also try to make MDMA happen.

01:35:17.000 Yeah.

01:35:18.000 So you set it aside for a long time.

01:35:20.000 But it's the myth, the symbol.

01:35:22.000 I have set it aside, but I haven't even thought about it for a long time.

01:35:24.000 But I think that the story is important for people to hear.

01:35:27.000 Alvar Nunez, Cabeza de Vaca.

01:35:29.000 They became healers, and they went eventually.

01:35:33.000 People gave them all their stuff.

01:35:35.000 They didn't want it.

01:35:36.000 They just wanted to go to where the...

01:35:39.000 Where they thought Cortez was.

01:35:41.000 Yeah, but hold on.

01:35:41.000 How did they become healers?

01:35:42.000 Just because they healed this one guy? 1.00

01:35:44.000 They just said, fuck, this is our new job. 0.99

01:35:47.000 Obviously, I didn't know I was magic. 1.00

01:35:50.000 Yes, they were pressed into service as healers.

01:35:56.000 Okay.

01:35:56.000 Some of them they felt were particularly more talented than others at it, and they ended up with basically the whole groups of Indians, one tribe would take them to the next tribe.

01:36:08.000 They had the allegiance of all of these Indians, and they learned to live very humbly.

01:36:12.000 They didn't take stuff for themselves.

01:36:14.000 They were incredibly good survivors through amazing hardships, and they saw their humanity with the Indians, and they had sort of conquered through love, through these healings, and then they ended up Getting to where the West was, to where Cortes,

01:36:29.000 I mean, where the conquistadors were, they finally saw burned-out villages and people as slaves, and they were taken captured themselves.

01:36:36.000 And Alvarez Cabez de Vaca went and was taken as prisoner back, and he had to write this report to The king about what happened to the expedition.

01:36:46.000 And the black man, Estebanico, he stayed and he traveled up and explored a lot of California and ended up being killed by the natives.

01:36:56.000 But the story, Henry Miller wrote a tremendous introduction to this story about the salvation of this westward expansion, the opportunity, what it showed is that through this respect, through whatever circumstances they got,

01:37:12.000 they Through cooperation and nonviolence, they had the support.

01:37:18.000 Well, the four that they didn't kill.

01:37:21.000 The 96 that they killed, they didn't get that support.

01:37:25.000 This nonviolence thing only worked out when it got down to four people.

01:37:32.000 That's not a good strategy.

01:37:34.000 I would say that's 96% ineffective. 0.99

01:37:38.000 Fucking terrible idea. 0.99

01:37:40.000 Night violence worked. 1.00

01:37:41.000 These four guys lived to become fucking wacky carnival healers. 0.99

01:37:45.000 This is perfect. 0.99

01:37:48.000 If you have time to look at this story of this report.

01:37:53.000 Do you recommend a book on the subject?

01:37:55.000 Yeah, there's the actual original document that Cabeza de Vaca, Elvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, The Marvelous Adventures of Cabeza de Vaca, I think is the translation of it.

01:38:08.000 Yeah, that's the guy.

01:38:11.000 There's a Ken Burns documentary on him called The West, I believe is what I was looking up.

01:38:15.000 Ken Burns did something on him?

01:38:17.000 Didn't Ken Burns do something on the Wild West?

01:38:20.000 Wasn't that a different...

01:38:21.000 He did it on this guy?

01:38:24.000 Ken Burns did?

01:38:26.000 Oh, it's a part of it?

01:38:28.000 Oh, I see.

01:38:30.000 Story first appeared in the Ken Burns The West PBS documentary that first aired in 1996. Hmm.

01:38:36.000 Wow.

01:38:37.000 Yeah.

01:38:37.000 And there's been an opera about it.

01:38:39.000 There's also...

01:38:40.000 A lot of people have sort of looked at this story and taken a lot of hope from it that...

01:38:45.000 Even though it took a lot of death for these people to get to this attitude, and the Indians were, you know, keeping slaves and killing each other, you know, but they were able to have a different kind of... 0.97

01:39:00.000 they got off the boat as those, you know, rampaging people, but they transformed into humanists and humble.

01:39:11.000 And actually, Cabeza de Baca was able to go on a second expedition To South America.

01:39:16.000 He was able to talk his way into it, and he did it.

01:39:19.000 He explored more areas than other people did without killing any Indians, and he discovered the Iguazu Falls, where the movie The Mission was made.

01:39:27.000 Big waterfalls.

01:39:28.000 And so he sort of demonstrated that he was a good ambassador between cultures, and tried to still, you know, explore, exploit, but do it in a way of a little bit more collaboration.

01:39:44.000 That's really interesting, man.

01:39:46.000 It's really interesting to think of cultures colliding like that.

01:39:50.000 Like some crazy people from Spain getting in a boat, getting washed out of their course, and landing in Florida, climbing out, trying to figure out what the hell's going on, getting attacked, attacking people, being at war, and then four dudes make it through that. 0.80

01:40:05.000 And live.

01:40:05.000 Can you imagine how cool those guys must have been?

01:40:07.000 Like talking to them?

01:40:08.000 Yeah.

01:40:09.000 Like the Native Americans decided, you're so cool, we're not even going to kill you, man.

01:40:12.000 They became traders for a while before they kind of escaped.

01:40:15.000 Trade-D. Yeah, traders, right?

01:40:17.000 Yes, traders.

01:40:18.000 And they could, you know, they got very hardy.

01:40:22.000 Oh, I would imagine.

01:40:23.000 How long did they live?

01:40:26.000 Some of them, well, Estevenico ended up getting killed.

01:40:29.000 He stayed in Mexico.

01:40:30.000 He didn't want to go back to be a slave.

01:40:32.000 Oh.

01:40:33.000 And then he went with the Christian missionaries up into California and then got killed. 0.85

01:40:37.000 In California?

01:40:38.000 Yeah.

01:40:39.000 By Native Americans here?

01:40:40.000 By Native Americans here.

01:40:42.000 Native Americans need a better name.

01:40:45.000 They do.

01:40:46.000 That's clumsy. 0.98

01:40:47.000 Native American, saying Native American is clumsy, saying Indian is even more clumsy. 0.95

01:40:53.000 I like First Nation.

01:40:55.000 That's like what the Canadians use. 0.94

01:40:57.000 I like that.

01:40:58.000 First Nations, that's their real claim, right?

01:41:01.000 They're First Nation.

01:41:02.000 Because the bottom line is, as far as we know, they're First Nation.

01:41:05.000 But we don't, you know...

01:41:07.000 Well, we did a study in Canada with First Nations people who were suffering from addiction because their culture has been under such attack.

01:41:16.000 But it was Peruvian, Third World Peruvian shamans bringing ayahuasca to work with First Nations people who were addicted with Dr. Gabor Monte, a Western psychiatrist. 0.50

01:41:31.000 That guy's amazing.

01:41:32.000 He is, mediating this...

01:41:37.000 Accession run by, and then we were able to support the team that did some outcome measures and suggested that this Third World, First World, First Nations people, that these, it's cultural bumping into each other all over now, 0.97

01:41:53.000 more ever than before in the history of the world probably.

01:41:56.000 Is that cultural appropriation or no?

01:41:59.000 I think it's appropriation if you don't...

01:42:04.000 If you steal from them.

01:42:05.000 If you pretend to be a Native American and hold your own peyote ceremonies with the feathered headband on and red paint. 1.00

01:42:11.000 I think flattery, imitation is the...

01:42:14.000 Most sincere form of flattery.

01:42:15.000 Flattery.

01:42:16.000 So I think it's like you want people to adopt, if you think it's good, but they don't have to adopt your dogma or your rituals.

01:42:23.000 I mean, I see that with our MDMA. We have our method and we have it, everything is videotaped.

01:42:29.000 We even have it scored.

01:42:30.000 We have raters that look at the therapist and score them on how much they're complying, coherent with our method.

01:42:36.000 But we want other people with other methods to use it and See how it works in other contexts.

01:42:42.000 Native Americans have their own rules, right, in their territories. 0.96

01:42:47.000 That's why they can put casinos up in there. 1.00

01:42:49.000 Yes.

01:42:50.000 Do they have rules as far as psychedelic drugs?

01:42:54.000 Do they have their own rules?

01:42:56.000 Well, they have...

01:42:58.000 Because on tribal lands, right?

01:43:00.000 Well, first off, they have authority in tribal lands, but a lot of people work in the military or do stuff with the federal government.

01:43:06.000 So they have the religious freedom to practice the Native American church.

01:43:10.000 The U.S. Supreme Court upheld, and as Congress, that they can...

01:43:14.000 But the federal government actually tried to limit it so that if you...

01:43:18.000 You had to have 25% Indian blood to be part of the Native American church in order to participate in the peyote rituals. 0.99

01:43:25.000 The states don't have that kind of racial requirement, but to try to prevent the spread of this religion from the Native Americans to wider groups of hippies and others that like peyote, you know, they tried to make a racial... 0.62

01:43:39.000 The federal government does have this racial limit, but it's largely ignored, and it's ignored by the states.

01:43:44.000 That's why white dudes were trying to be Rastafarians. 0.81

01:43:47.000 Remember that? 1.00

01:43:48.000 That's where white, dirty, stinky people with dreadlocks came from. 1.00

01:43:52.000 That's how it was reignited. 0.99

01:43:55.000 They were all fans of Bob Marley, right?

01:44:00.000 That's why I knew a dude who was a pot dealer, and he claimed Rastafarian.

01:44:05.000 He said, this is part of my religion, man.

01:44:07.000 It was like real serious.

01:44:08.000 Right, right.

01:44:08.000 In those cases, they've lost in court.

01:44:11.000 But they didn't lose the, what is it, Santo Daime?

01:44:14.000 What is the church?

01:44:14.000 How do you say it?

01:44:16.000 The Santo Daime went up to the Ninth Circuit.

01:44:18.000 It didn't go to the Supreme Court, but the Uniao de Vegetal.

01:44:21.000 I just came from Santa Fe this morning, and that's where the lead church, the Uniao de Vegetal, was located in Santa Fe, and it was Jeffrey Bronfman.

01:44:29.000 From the Canadian Jewish Bronfman family from Seagram's fortune, from smuggling alcohol during Prohibition and then building this massive business as one of the grandkids, he ended up becoming appreciative of ayahuasca.

01:44:45.000 And so he hired the best lawyers and worked on this case.

01:44:51.000 That they won a unanimous Supreme Court case affirming the union of the plants.

01:44:58.000 It's two different plants, roots and, you know, vines and leaves.

01:45:03.000 And you put it together.

01:45:07.000 So it's the union union de vegetal.

01:45:11.000 And they have legal protection in the United States.

01:45:14.000 On the other hand, it's, you know, it's a church.

01:45:18.000 I went to it, and I was hearing, I went to it twice, and the second time I was like, here's the myth of our church, the origin myth.

01:45:31.000 And part of it was that King Solomon went to the Amazon and told them how to put these Plants together.

01:45:38.000 Right.

01:45:39.000 And I'm like, King Solomon?

01:45:42.000 Really?

01:45:43.000 And so it is a religion.

01:45:46.000 Right.

01:45:47.000 So I think that that's going to kind of limit it.

01:45:50.000 Well, that's why the Supreme Court agreed with it, because it's so wacky.

01:45:53.000 They're like, yeah, you guys sound like a religion.

01:45:56.000 Right?

01:45:57.000 I mean, that's how they know that they didn't make it up.

01:46:00.000 Ayahuasca is having an incredible effect in America.

01:46:04.000 It's really amazing, the number of different people that are using it, not necessarily in these exact religious contexts, but in kind of shamanistic or personal growth or more, or kind of little modified, or even in these services.

01:46:18.000 Why hasn't that religion expanded?

01:46:21.000 Well, it's being used quite a lot.

01:46:24.000 There's a lot of ceremonies in California, all over America, all over the world with ayahuasca.

01:46:28.000 It's growing.

01:46:30.000 But this Union de Vegetales...

01:46:31.000 How do you say it?

01:46:32.000 Union de Vegetales.

01:46:33.000 Yeah, UDV. But they have...

01:46:35.000 They're expanding somewhat, but they're...

01:46:38.000 I'm saying they have authority.

01:46:39.000 They have authority to do it.

01:46:40.000 They have legal authority from the U.S. Supreme Court.

01:46:42.000 They're the only ones.

01:46:43.000 Right.

01:46:43.000 The Santo Daime went up to the Ninth Circuit, so they essentially have the same argument.

01:46:48.000 It just didn't get appealed to the Supreme Court by the prosecutors.

01:46:51.000 Right, but the Uniao de Vegetal, how do you say it?

01:46:55.000 Uniao?

01:46:55.000 Uniao.

01:46:56.000 Uniao.

01:46:56.000 Uniao de Vegetal.

01:46:57.000 They do have that, so they're locked down.

01:47:00.000 Yes, and Santo Daime is too, but as I said, they won in the appeals court and We've got to get Richard Branson. 0.78

01:47:07.000 You've got to get Richard Branson involved and start opening these bitches up right next to Virgin Records. 1.00

01:47:12.000 They don't have Virgin Records anymore. 0.80

01:47:14.000 Why haven't they expanded more?

01:47:16.000 Part of it is how cultural integration – so cultural appropriation but cultural integration.

01:47:22.000 So they're bringing a tradition from a different culture.

01:47:25.000 Right.

01:47:27.000 And they're trying to integrate it at a rate where it doesn't, it grows, it's constitutionally protected, but it doesn't grow too fast.

01:47:36.000 Maybe there's a way where it could grow too fast, and there wouldn't be the care and the use of the tea, and they want to make sure that it's responsibly handled.

01:47:44.000 These are the people that are running your church, meaning they?

01:47:47.000 Right, yeah.

01:47:47.000 Yes, yes, yes.

01:47:48.000 Jeffrey Boffman and the team.

01:47:49.000 They're just too busy getting high.

01:47:50.000 They want to keep it on the DL. No, no, no.

01:47:53.000 They want to hide and trip out and lay on the floor?

01:47:56.000 No, no.

01:47:57.000 You know, you don't hide by going to the Supreme Court.

01:47:59.000 No, obviously not.

01:48:00.000 I'm joking.

01:48:01.000 But I think it's amazing that they did actually get the ruling.

01:48:05.000 I mean, that's amazing.

01:48:06.000 They're taking one of the most potent psychedelic drugs known to man.

01:48:10.000 It's true.

01:48:11.000 But they got the support of mainstream religions, because there's a lot of weird things that mainstream religions do for cultural practices.

01:48:18.000 Well, hasn't a precedent been set with wine?

01:48:20.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:48:22.000 Wine is most certainly a drug.

01:48:24.000 And it can be used by children in certain ritual ceremonies, and it can...

01:48:30.000 But it's a common part of Catholicism.

01:48:33.000 Wine is a very common part.

01:48:36.000 There's a lot of weird stuff in religion, and as soon as you start saying that one person can't do their weird stuff, they go, okay, what kind of weird stuff do you got exemptions for?

01:48:44.000 And you look at their exemptions, you're like, what? 0.99

01:48:46.000 You can cut baby dicks. 0.99

01:48:48.000 What are you doing? 1.00

01:48:49.000 You're rubbing dirt on your forehead on Wednesday? 1.00

01:48:52.000 What the fuck are you doing? 0.99

01:48:54.000 And the idea that one could make fun of the other is just, at a certain point in time, it's like, you guys have blinders on, okay? 1.00

01:49:00.000 This whole thing is pretty wacky.

01:49:02.000 They might have the right idea.

01:49:05.000 That might be the only way to do it.

01:49:07.000 Well, the part about it that's really good is that while they have their dogma and their traditions, it's about the experience.

01:49:15.000 Right.

01:49:15.000 It's about the individual experience for yourself.

01:49:17.000 Rick Strassman did it with them.

01:49:19.000 He told me it was very strange.

01:49:22.000 He said, it's really strong.

01:49:24.000 He's like, they do really strong ayahuasca, and they sing songs about Jesus.

01:49:28.000 I was like, whoa, daddy.

01:49:30.000 What is that like?

01:49:32.000 He's like, it's a trip.

01:49:34.000 Yeah.

01:49:35.000 I think you have to have a generous spirit, in a way.

01:49:39.000 Like, okay, it's Jesus, but it's about reverence.

01:49:44.000 And then you kind of generalize in your own...

01:49:46.000 We were talking about this the other day, and tell me if this makes any sense to you.

01:49:49.000 If you have this idea, when you take...

01:49:52.000 I've never done ayahuasca, but I've done DMT on multiple occasions, right?

01:49:59.000 So I've had this psychedelic effect, the most potent version of that, right?

01:50:04.000 I would wonder if you went in with the intention and had these experiences with the intention to communicate with some benevolent deity that you believe is responsible for all life and all love on the planet.

01:50:17.000 If you kept...

01:50:19.000 Thinking of that as you entered into this dimethyltryptamine state of consciousness Isn't it possible that a vast majority of what is happening when you are having a psychedelic trip is The word the word hallucination is very strange because what the hallucination implies is in this world where we're sitting right here with tables and chairs and rooms Something could you could see it,

01:50:44.000 but it could not be real The problem with that is like What are you seeing, and can other people see it too?

01:50:53.000 Well, if other people can see it, then it's not a hallucination, right?

01:50:55.000 So how do you know what other people are seeing?

01:50:57.000 We really don't, right?

01:50:58.000 Now, how do you know when you close your eyes and you're on a psychedelic drug, how much of what you're experiencing is your visual cortex interacting with your mind, interacting with these...

01:51:10.000 Drugs and your creativity and your consciousness, they're colliding and gliding and dancing together along with your imagination.

01:51:19.000 And in this moment, if you go into it with this intention, your imagination can conjure up This Jesus type character in the ayahuasca ceremony and he can be real and he can be what you want him to be and he could be a manifestation of your own experiences in this life that you've carried around as memories and carried around as emotions and that in this psychedelic state if you continually go to it with that intention it's entirely possible that they do experience something

01:51:49.000 like that.

01:51:51.000 Exactly.

01:51:51.000 I think that we see through our own filters, and we see a lot of times what we want to see, and that we can coalesce a lot of feelings and images that are pre-verbal into certain kinds of symbols.

01:52:06.000 Well, especially if you're on an insanely potent psychedelic drug.

01:52:11.000 Yeah, so the idea that we ever know the ultimate truth, that it's not somehow or other filtered through our preconceptions.

01:52:19.000 John Lilly wrote this great book.

01:52:22.000 One of the things he did I thought was great was called Simulations of God.

01:52:25.000 And it's like different conceptions that people have of God and how you get to these And then there's a way to transcend that and see something even deeper and deeper, and that we have these filters.

01:52:37.000 And so the culture and the context is more important than the drug.

01:52:41.000 So I think one of the issues of the 60s was people had so much faith.

01:52:45.000 They wanted so much cultural change.

01:52:47.000 They were so...

01:52:48.000 It was such a strife-filled time that they had this hope, this unreasonable hope, that the drugs were enough, that the psychedelics were enough, that they would somehow or other bring this connection to the truth, to this new understanding just by themselves.

01:53:03.000 It's really more about the context.

01:53:06.000 But the context, and with a proper open context, and in our case, a therapeutic context in the experimental sense, then when you add the pharmacology, It produces really unusual opportunities to go very deep.

01:53:23.000 And that's what I think we can show, that we can do that and contain it in a regulatory therapeutic healing context that can slowly be accepted by our culture.

01:53:38.000 And that that's really the The value proposition that we're presenting to the FDA. See, the way you described it is why maps is so important.

01:53:47.000 Because I'm talking about making Jesus exist when you're tripping balls. 0.97

01:53:50.000 I'm making your own Jesus, like, while you're tripping. 0.97

01:53:53.000 And you bring it back to studies and science and data and present a paper.

01:53:59.000 Look, I'm wearing a tie.

01:54:00.000 Okay, and so for us, yes, yes, we're actually discussing.

01:54:04.000 Should I wear a tie at our 30th anniversary or not?

01:54:07.000 What are you going to do?

01:54:08.000 I haven't decided yet.

01:54:09.000 You should dress like Jimi Hendrix.

01:54:11.000 But the data is really this...

01:54:17.000 Double checking of what we think is true.

01:54:20.000 Right.

01:54:21.000 And it's a way where we have to have that humility that we don't necessarily know this ultimate truth.

01:54:28.000 Well, there's no way to know.

01:54:29.000 And that's not just humility.

01:54:30.000 That's just a fact.

01:54:31.000 There's no way to know what you're experiencing, what anybody else is experiencing when they're tripping.

01:54:34.000 You really don't know.

01:54:35.000 We don't know what it is.

01:54:37.000 And it's entirely possible that it's something that we don't understand yet.

01:54:41.000 Yeah.

01:54:41.000 And so the reason I brought it back in a way to the science is that We're operationalizing its effect on symptoms.

01:54:48.000 So whether you have this memory that is actually true, so whether it's Jesus or whether you're remembering childhood sexual abuse, whether that actually...

01:54:58.000 I don't like how you tied the two of those together.

01:55:00.000 Right.

01:55:01.000 Stop it.

01:55:02.000 The Catholic Church.

01:55:03.000 I know what you're doing.

01:55:03.000 There was a little...

01:55:04.000 Stop it.

01:55:05.000 A few things I leaped over there, but whether that...

01:55:10.000 Occurred in actuality is an important question for the legal system or for other ways, but from a therapeutic, from a healing, from a compassionate point of view, if this expression, if it's symbolic or actual, if it has the consequence of helping people come to terms with themselves and to get more acceptance about what happened That's what we're looking at.

01:55:33.000 We're looking at the outcomes.

01:55:35.000 So I think that that's the practical part.

01:55:37.000 That's the science part.

01:55:38.000 It's like there are questions.

01:55:41.000 A lot of times in my early LSD trips, I wanted God to show up, and I wanted the truth.

01:55:48.000 He's not busy.

01:55:49.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:55:50.000 God doesn't have a lot of other shit going on. 0.99

01:55:51.000 Well, I remember from my bar mitzvah where I was like, the very next day... 0.99

01:55:55.000 Dude, it's my bar mitzvah. 1.00

01:55:56.000 What the fuck, God? 0.99

01:55:57.000 You know, I studied all this Hebrew. 1.00

01:56:00.000 So in my bed the next day after my bar mitzvah, I was like, I was the same.

01:56:05.000 I'm like, I'm not a man.

01:56:06.000 I'm not any different than I was.

01:56:08.000 And it took me a couple days where I thought God was maybe busy.

01:56:13.000 Maybe a lot of people got bar mitzvahed that day.

01:56:16.000 And after like a week, I recognized, you know, I'm not going to change, and it's going to take something else.

01:56:21.000 The ritual didn't quite do it.

01:56:23.000 And then even with my LSD trips, wanting to see God, wanting to have this clarity and not quite getting it, and then appreciating that, that that was a delusion in some ways, that keeping the uncertainty is keeping integrity.

01:56:40.000 But there's that strong longing for that, for certainty.

01:56:44.000 Yeah, you're sounding like a dude who's rationalizing that he didn't get to meet God and he's upset.

01:56:48.000 If God did show up, the whole thing would be different, right?

01:56:51.000 Maybe God's like aliens.

01:56:52.000 He just doesn't visit everybody.

01:56:54.000 But when he does visit, it's a very unique experience and it's real.

01:56:58.000 I don't know, man.

01:56:59.000 I think there's a real problem in saying you know what other people experience, whether it's under the influence of psychedelic drugs or whether it's completely sober or Well, it's in a meditative state. 0.93

01:57:08.000 The idea that anybody can tell you what you experienced or what you got out of something is foolish.

01:57:13.000 So then it becomes a matter of whether or not we're protecting people.

01:57:16.000 So if our laws are designed to protect people, we should do it scientifically.

01:57:20.000 We should look across the board at all the damaging things.

01:57:23.000 And we don't do that at all.

01:57:25.000 That's why the government never discusses cigarettes.

01:57:29.000 Because we all know how many people's cigarettes kill every year.

01:57:31.000 It's in the hundreds of thousands, and no one brings it up.

01:57:33.000 No one running for president.

01:57:34.000 No one running for Congress.

01:57:36.000 They just don't bring it up.

01:57:37.000 It's not something they want to fight against, because if they do, they'll get slaughtered with money.

01:57:41.000 So it's not about whether or not they're trying to protect us.

01:57:44.000 So then what is it about?

01:57:45.000 Although, at the same time, cigarette use has been going down.

01:57:48.000 A little...

01:57:49.000 Still half a million people die every year in this country.

01:57:52.000 It's still, yeah.

01:57:53.000 It's crazy.

01:57:54.000 If it was just 5,000 people from pot, how quick would they shut it down?

01:57:58.000 If 5,000 people died prematurely every year because of marijuana, how quick would it be the demon of television news?

01:58:05.000 Well, it depends on what we do about the benefit side of the equation.

01:58:08.000 It's not cultural revolution.

01:58:09.000 No, but it doesn't exist, though.

01:58:11.000 You see what I'm saying?

01:58:12.000 5,000 isn't dying from pot.

01:58:15.000 But the 500,000 are dying from cigarettes are extremely significant, right?

01:58:20.000 Well, what should be done?

01:58:22.000 What we should do is make everything legal and then let people figure out what you want to do and not want to do, which is what we do with most things today.

01:58:31.000 Most things like cigarettes and alcohol that can kill you, we let you try.

01:58:35.000 Exactly.

01:58:35.000 Because no one should be able to tell you what to do, man.

01:58:37.000 If you want to Charles Bukowski it and just drink and smoke yourself to an early grave and just scribble all the cool shit along the way, who gives a fuck? 0.98

01:58:46.000 It's all finite, right? 0.99

01:58:48.000 Who's one person to tell another person that they can't BMX jump or skydive, right?

01:58:52.000 Well, I think you can have that.

01:58:54.000 I want you to be free.

01:58:55.000 I want to be free to do what I feel I should do.

01:58:57.000 You should have the same freedom.

01:58:58.000 But if you are hurting yourself, I'm compassionate.

01:59:01.000 And let's try to see, are you struggling with your own trauma or what?

01:59:06.000 Right.

01:59:06.000 But not to try to...

01:59:08.000 Well, what do you do about rock climbers?

01:59:11.000 Yeah, you just try to get safe equipment.

01:59:13.000 What if they're rock climbers with bad childhoods?

01:59:15.000 You just cut them off?

01:59:17.000 You know?

01:59:20.000 People can make choices about risk in different ways.

01:59:24.000 Sure.

01:59:24.000 And I think you really...

01:59:26.000 At some point, you know, where does it shade into suicide?

01:59:29.000 Yeah.

01:59:32.000 Well, do you think suicide should be legal?

01:59:34.000 There's another one.

01:59:35.000 Well, I think there should be – I mean, I don't think you should be punished.

01:59:44.000 Well, you can't be. 1.00

01:59:44.000 If you tried to get – committed suicide and you survived, then I don't think you need – Right to jail, you fuck. 1.00

01:59:49.000 Right. 1.00

01:59:50.000 I don't think you need that.

01:59:51.000 This is America. 0.99

01:59:51.000 We don't like pussies. 0.99

01:59:53.000 Go to jail! 1.00

01:59:54.000 I don't think it should be against the law.

01:59:56.000 And I think this is that suicide, you know, when people are end of life in pain, makes sense to me.

02:00:02.000 It certainly does.

02:00:02.000 But there has to be a lot of protection.

02:00:04.000 But I think there is this general feeling like life is a gift that I have and that somehow we need to run its course rather than...

02:00:13.000 Well, I think this is another way where MDMA therapy will help.

02:00:17.000 And I think that there's a lot of people that are haunted by their memories.

02:00:20.000 Memories of their past, memories of their own failures, memories of things that they did wrong. 0.99

02:00:25.000 And those things can really fuck with you.

02:00:28.000 People define themselves in this weird way by their past failures. 0.58

02:00:32.000 That's all the experience they have.

02:00:34.000 That's all they know of themselves.

02:00:36.000 And people have a very difficult time...

02:00:39.000 Just saying, okay, well those things are things that I'll never do again.

02:00:43.000 I made these mistakes and now I am this person who's learned.

02:00:46.000 And that's a really hard jump for some people because they need some sort of a memory definition of their patterns of behavior.

02:00:53.000 And when the memory definition, when they look in their own memory and everything is just failures and coming up short and missed your rent and car got repossessed, those kind of failures over and over and over again stack up and you define yourself by those failures.

02:01:05.000 And it becomes really hard to move forward.

02:01:07.000 It becomes really hard for people.

02:01:09.000 And so each little positive step that people can do can be so significant because it alters the course.

02:01:16.000 There was this Tony Robbins thing once, and I hate to quote Tony Robbins.

02:01:20.000 He's got some really good quotes.

02:01:21.000 But one of the things he was talking about was how just incremental changes in your life.

02:01:25.000 So if you have two cars or two boats that are going in this direction, And one veers off course just five degrees.

02:01:32.000 Well, if they both go ten miles, this one goes further and further and further from the other one and it keeps going further.

02:01:38.000 It changes the course.

02:01:39.000 It changes the direction.

02:01:41.000 And MDMA therapy or any sort of a psychedelic experience that's boundary dissolving and ego dissolving and it just gets to the raw heart of the matter and allows you this really intense We're good to go.

02:02:10.000 Yeah, there's this beautiful part of accepting oneself and loving oneself even with all of these failures, even with everything that's happened.

02:02:19.000 It's not that you deny that it happened or you don't see it.

02:02:22.000 It's just this sense that you can relax and feel that self-love, and that is what's so rare.

02:02:29.000 And I think that's why MDMA is one of the most popular illegal drugs in the world, and why It needs and will become a medicine.

02:02:40.000 And the reason that I selected it is also because training therapists, reaching to the mainstream, so that when we talk about how do we incorporate this as a medicine, it's with healers, it's with doctors and therapists.

02:02:55.000 And I think what we've found is that we have FDA permission for a study Where we can administer it to therapists in part of our training program.

02:03:03.000 We're studying the psychological effects of MDMA taken by healthy volunteers in a therapeutic setting.

02:03:09.000 Wow.

02:03:10.000 And it's a double-blind, crossover, placebo-controlled study, but we can bring in therapists from all over the world and give them an MDMA session where they're the patient, and they're seeing our method of how to deliver it.

02:03:21.000 And so MDMA is something that I think will have a smoother, easier way into psychiatry and into psychotherapy because of it so gentle, because it...

02:03:33.000 Isn't so much ego dissolving as ego clarifying.

02:03:37.000 Your defenses are relaxed and you can kind of accept yourself for who you are so you can see more clearly.

02:03:44.000 And then how you integrate that and how you make it so that that affects your daily life afterwards.

02:03:53.000 I think it's really important you're saying about it being a manageable experience.

02:03:56.000 It's one of the most manageable experiences of all the psychedelics because it feels really good.

02:04:00.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:04:01.000 It's not like you're going to have a bad trip for the most part.

02:04:04.000 Although some of the veterans have said, you know, I don't know why they call this ecstasy.

02:04:08.000 Why do they say that?

02:04:09.000 Because they're going through this trauma from their war.

02:04:12.000 So even under the influence of MDMA, they didn't like the fact that it was bringing back those memories?

02:04:21.000 No, they liked it because that was part of this healing, but it was painful.

02:04:25.000 It makes the pain bearable.

02:04:26.000 It doesn't make the pain go away, or it doesn't change your memory like it didn't happen.

02:04:30.000 Especially someone in war.

02:04:32.000 You really can't imagine what their experiences are.

02:04:37.000 It could be even worse, you know, childhood sexual abuse, and you can't trust your parents, or you can't trust your circumstances.

02:04:44.000 Yeah, it's all terrible.

02:04:45.000 All terrible.

02:04:45.000 No need to quantify, right?

02:04:47.000 Yeah, and how people can get into these patterns.

02:04:52.000 It's awful.

02:04:53.000 And it seems like through the technology, MDMA is part of the technologies of healing.

02:05:01.000 Yeah.

02:05:01.000 Well, it's one of the things that we were talking about with Jamie before this podcast started, before you got here.

02:05:06.000 We were saying how ridiculous it is that it takes so long to get things passed and that the government, the DEA, is going to review marijuana in July.

02:05:16.000 They have this thing in July.

02:05:18.000 Yeah, well, they're going to say no.

02:05:20.000 And we've been working...

02:05:21.000 Well, explain what they're going to say no to.

02:05:23.000 I believe that the request is that marijuana be rescheduled from Schedule 1 to Schedule 2. And that this rescheduling, the framework...

02:05:35.000 If you don't mind, could you explain what the difference between Schedule 1 and Schedule 2 is?

02:05:38.000 From the point of view...

02:05:39.000 So Schedule 1 is the worst drugs, and they have...

02:05:42.000 No medicinal value.

02:05:43.000 No medicinal value.

02:05:45.000 They're not current accepted medical, and there's no currently accepted safety under medical supervision, and no currently accepted medical use, and high potential for abuse.

02:05:55.000 Schedule 2 drug, and these are the most heavily criminalized drugs.

02:05:59.000 Schedule 2, except for certain exceptions, in Schedule 2, which are also drugs with a high abuse potential, but have an accepted medical use, like methamphetamine.

02:06:08.000 And coke.

02:06:09.000 And cocaine.

02:06:10.000 And heroin.

02:06:11.000 And heroin is not in the U.S., but opiates.

02:06:14.000 All the opiates are.

02:06:15.000 Heroin is legal in England, but it's been blocked here.

02:06:19.000 So, but Oxycontins are in Schedule 2, right?

02:06:22.000 Oxycontin is in Schedule 2. Every medicine that you can get in Schedule 2. And that's essentially the same as heroin, right?

02:06:26.000 Isn't it?

02:06:26.000 It's very, sometimes more dangerous in certain ways.

02:06:29.000 But I mean, the psych...

02:06:31.000 It's a synthetic.

02:06:32.000 It has very similar, yes, effects.

02:06:34.000 Right.

02:06:35.000 Okay.

02:06:35.000 Yeah, but it has a medical use for pain.

02:06:37.000 Right.

02:06:38.000 So, moving from Schedule 1 for Schedule 2, there's been efforts to try to force the DEA to do this.

02:06:43.000 But the way the schedules are set up, there has to be...

02:06:46.000 A currently accepted medical use.

02:06:48.000 And the data is not there.

02:06:50.000 And you talked before about, you know, when do you have enough anecdotal data?

02:06:54.000 I believe that we are so capable of fooling ourselves into believing what we want to believe, into seeing Jesus when Jesus might not be there, that we need science.

02:07:02.000 We should take marijuana through the drug development system.

02:07:05.000 We should take the psychedelics.

02:07:08.000 We're about to start a study with marijuana.

02:07:11.000 I basically started trying to do drug development research with marijuana in 1992. This is the first time, 2016. So there's no established medical benefits of marijuana that have been proven in any scientific way?

02:07:24.000 Yes, there's been a lot of evidence in Phase 2 pilot studies.

02:07:29.000 But the definition of real proof is Phase 3 studies, these large-scale studies that you work and negotiate with FDA for the marijuana plant.

02:07:39.000 Now, GW Pharmaceuticals is a company in England that grows marijuana, takes extracts, Sativex, it's a THC and CBD combination in a pill.

02:07:48.000 And then they also have Epidiolex, which is CBD for childhood epilepsy.

02:07:54.000 So they are in Phase III studies.

02:07:56.000 So there are people working with marijuana extracts in different nonsmoking delivery systems going through the system.

02:08:03.000 But the plant itself It's highly effective.

02:08:08.000 It doesn't cause lung cancer if you smoke it.

02:08:11.000 If you vaporize it, it's even less irritating to lungs.

02:08:18.000 There's the possibility that a low-cost plant in Israel right now, they grow high-potency trim buds for 50 cents a gram, $14 an ounce.

02:08:29.000 So I think there's public benefit in making the marijuana plant in smoked or vaporized form into a medicine available It's paid for by insurance as an alternative to all these other medicines.

02:08:41.000 But there is no effort right now.

02:08:44.000 We're starting...

02:08:44.000 Six years ago, we started a study for marijuana for PTSD in veterans.

02:08:49.000 So we've talked about MDMA, and the idea is to help people with a few MDMA sessions not need MDMA, not need drugs, Sort of reorganize their brain.

02:08:57.000 But there's a lot of people with PTSD that find marijuana to be helpful.

02:09:01.000 They don't have the nightmares.

02:09:02.000 They're more present focused.

02:09:04.000 And they're thinking, well, maybe I don't want to do this MDMA or maybe it's a supplement.

02:09:10.000 So there's never been a study of marijuana for PTSD. There's been lots and lots of anecdotal reports, hundreds, thousands of people saying that it's helpful in different ways.

02:09:23.000 But marijuana is a palliative, meaning that it just treats the symptoms, and it's used usually every day.

02:09:30.000 So it's taken us six years.

02:09:31.000 We're about to start the study, and it will take us another several years to finish it.

02:09:38.000 Part of it will be at Johns Hopkins, part of it will be in Arizona, 76 veterans with chronic treatment resistant PTSD. And we're testing one sample that's high THC, one that's high CBD, one that's kind of THC-CBD combination, and then one placebo.

02:09:51.000 And we got a $2.1 million grant from the state of Colorado to do this study.

02:09:57.000 And it's going to be a definitive thing.

02:09:59.000 And because, again, we're non-profit, we're giving away the protocol.

02:10:02.000 There's no intellectual property like that.

02:10:04.000 And so there's a for-profit company, Privateer, that actually has bought the Marley brand, and they have their medical marijuana company, Venture Capital, and they have...

02:10:15.000 That's hilarious.

02:10:16.000 Tilray, which is a big marijuana production factory in British Columbia, supplies like 5,000 patients.

02:10:24.000 They're owned by privateer, and we've given them our marijuana protocol.

02:10:28.000 And so they're going to use the study with our study, with the same study design, but with their marijuana.

02:10:33.000 And they're going to vaporize, and we're going to smoke.

02:10:35.000 And then there's a new study starting in Australia.

02:10:38.000 There's this guy whose grandchild had...

02:10:41.000 Pediatric epilepsy and nothing helped and then they tried CBD and it stopped the epileptic seizures to a great extent and then the father donated 33 million to the University of Sydney for cannabis research.

02:10:53.000 It's the largest grant in the history of the University of Sydney so they're gonna take our protocol and they're going to get marijuana from Tilray but put into capsules as edibles.

02:11:03.000 So we're gonna have three different studies Similar in design, but smoked, vaporized, and edibles.

02:11:12.000 We're going to combine the data, and so this is the scientific process.

02:11:18.000 But it'll take us, it's taken us six years so far just to get the study even started.

02:11:22.000 The study will be three years.

02:11:24.000 Then we'll learn from it, and we'd probably need to do another three, four year study of phase three, because this is just phase two.

02:11:30.000 And in the meantime, we have to break the government monopoly on marijuana, because in the U.S. we're stuck with the government marijuana.

02:11:36.000 Explain that.

02:11:39.000 Please.

02:11:40.000 In 1968, Andy Weil actually at Harvard wanted to do a study with marijuana.

02:11:45.000 And so the federal government started a farm at the University of Mississippi to grow marijuana for research.

02:11:53.000 Ever since then, the National Institute of Drug Abuse has contracts now, and so the University of Mississippi, Professor El Soli, is now in charge.

02:12:02.000 They're the only federally licensed, DEA licensed marijuana in America.

02:12:07.000 And the FDA is a federal agency, so it can only work with drugs that are federally legal.

02:12:12.000 So the only source of marijuana in America that can be used in clinical research is this marijuana controlled by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which has been anti-marijuana, with this contract with the University of Mississippi.

02:12:26.000 And we have tried, MAPS has tried, starting in 2000, to break this monopoly.

02:12:31.000 And we submitted an application in 2001 with Professor Lyle Craker at UMass Amherst.

02:12:38.000 We won a DEA administrative law judge lawsuit.

02:12:40.000 The second time I've sued the DEA and won.

02:12:43.000 But in the end, they ignore the judges, they ignore the science, and the politics takes over.

02:12:48.000 And we lost in the appeals court in 2013. So the way I described it, we have this 960 grams of super pure MDMA, but it's not...

02:12:57.000 Why did they appeal?

02:12:58.000 The government...

02:12:59.000 What did they say when they were appealing?

02:13:01.000 They said that the government had an adequate supply.

02:13:06.000 What does that mean?

02:13:07.000 For everybody?

02:13:08.000 In all research?

02:13:09.000 For the research, yeah.

02:13:10.000 We show that they didn't have what we needed.

02:13:12.000 And also...

02:13:12.000 Meaning?

02:13:14.000 That there has to be an adequate and uninterrupted supply produced under adequately competitive conditions.

02:13:20.000 Well, also, did you factor in the fact of the different strains have different responses?

02:13:25.000 Yeah, that's why we're using these different...

02:13:31.000 Right, but the government, do they understand there's different strains that are associated with different feelings?

02:13:37.000 Only recently have they had any CBD available.

02:13:40.000 So GW Pharmaceuticals started in 1998, combining Sativex with THC and CBD. It was up until just last year that the US government could provide marijuana with CBD in it.

02:13:53.000 They've not been focused on making these things into medicines.

02:13:56.000 It's more low-potency, research into the risks of marijuana, and it's the final next step in the medical marijuana story, is to end the obstruction on privately funded drug development research trying to make the plant into a medicine.

02:14:13.000 And that's what, ironically, It's easier to do research with psychedelics than with marijuana to try to make it into a medicine because we control our drug.

02:14:25.000 So I'm getting a GMP, MDMA. It's the same stuff we're going to use in phase three that we want to market.

02:14:31.000 But the federal government marijuana can only be used in research.

02:14:36.000 It can't be marketed.

02:14:37.000 And because the strains are all so different, we can't show marijuana helps for PTSD with one strain and then just say, oh, give us approval for any other strain.

02:14:46.000 Right.

02:14:46.000 So we need to use this, and this is the true for FDA for other botanicals.

02:14:50.000 If you're going to do a study in botanical medicines, the phase three study needs to be with the same, a consistent batch that you want to market.

02:14:58.000 Well, I guess this is all important because we want the same sort of stringent It's a hard process to be taking place for a drug, say, for arthritis or something like that.

02:15:07.000 There's so many drugs that have gone through clinical trials and wound up still, even after all that, being dangerous.

02:15:13.000 But the problem with this is that we know it's not dangerous.

02:15:16.000 It's not like there's any question whatsoever about whether or not it's hurting anybody.

02:15:19.000 Yes, and what I'm basically saying is about insurance and science.

02:15:24.000 What I'm saying is marijuana should be legal right away.

02:15:26.000 Of course.

02:15:27.000 People should be able to get this.

02:15:29.000 The process that we're trying to go through with making the marijuana plant into a medicine is solving the fundamental issue that all of these medical marijuana states that have approved medical marijuana laws, the patients have to buy the medicine themselves.

02:15:42.000 They don't get it covered by insurance.

02:15:45.000 That'll only happen when you go through the FDA and you've made it federally legal.

02:15:50.000 So the intention is to make it so that people can get their medicine?

02:15:55.000 So that they can get it paid for by insurance?

02:15:57.000 Is that the intention?

02:15:58.000 Yeah.

02:15:59.000 It's like a medicine.

02:16:00.000 Right.

02:16:01.000 And so the way to do that is to make it federally legal.

02:16:05.000 That's the best pathway, you think, to federal legalization?

02:16:08.000 Well, I'm talking about federally legalized for medicine.

02:16:11.000 Right.

02:16:12.000 So to go through the FDA process, then insurance companies...

02:16:17.000 They can be doing studies now and look at the fact that people are using marijuana instead of a lot of more expensive pharmaceutical medications, and that from an insurance company point of view, it could be wise to subsidize marijuana right now.

02:16:32.000 It just hasn't happened yet, as far as I'm aware, that insurance companies...

02:16:36.000 In Canada, the Canadian government pays for medical marijuana for veterans.

02:16:41.000 That's awesome.

02:16:42.000 For PTSD. The Canadian government pays for that, even though there's been no science.

02:16:45.000 These three studies will be the first on marijuana for PTSD controlled studies.

02:16:52.000 And so there's the likelihood that once we make it into an FDA-approved medicine, insurance companies will then be willing, now it's federally legal, to cover it as a medicine for what it's been proved to be,

02:17:08.000 particularly if it saves them money on other medicines.

02:17:11.000 So that's the cultural...

02:17:13.000 But of course, then the pharmaceutical drug companies are going to, there's going to be a bounce back there.

02:17:17.000 It's all really the only thing that's holding us back is this nutty system that we have right now that's so complicated to make something as harmless as marijuana become legal.

02:17:25.000 Well, the system has been blocked.

02:17:28.000 The system itself, when it's unblocked, isn't really that long.

02:17:31.000 You just talked about how the Civil War wasn't that long.

02:17:35.000 With psychedelics, I mean, part of it is also resources.

02:17:41.000 Do we have the resources to fund the studies?

02:17:42.000 But in 1992, the FDA had an advisory committee meeting that was about what to do about medical marijuana and what to do about psychedelics and should they be permitted to be studied as medicines.

02:17:54.000 This was in 1992. So there had been roughly 20 years of suppression of research, crackdown after the 60s.

02:18:00.000 The FDA had this advisory committee meeting.

02:18:03.000 The National Institute of Drug Abuse convened a meeting of their animal researchers doing studies on psychedelics and other drugs and animal models trying to figure out what they do.

02:18:11.000 They recommended human use.

02:18:13.000 The advisory committee recommended that human research be resumed, and the FDA adopted that.

02:18:18.000 So that we've actually had this open door with research at the FDA if we had the resources, except for marijuana, because the marijuana was controlled by the National Center of Drug Abuse.

02:18:30.000 We had broken that.

02:18:32.000 We'd gotten our own supplies of psychedelics after as their own supplies of psilocybin.

02:18:36.000 So now the system takes Six to ten years.

02:18:44.000 Something like that, of doing the research once you have a drug that you think does something to prove it.

02:18:51.000 And that takes some time, and it costs a lot of money.

02:18:53.000 But it doesn't cost billions like the pharmaceutical company will tell you.

02:18:58.000 I mean, we're actually able to make MDMA into medicine, in part because it's a demonized drug, because it's ecstasy.

02:19:05.000 Governments over the world have spent over 300 million dollars, probably more by now, on research with MDMA. If you go into the scientific literature in Medline and you put in MDMA or ecstasy, there's over 5,000 papers.

02:19:17.000 A lot of science has been done that we haven't had to pay for about the risks.

02:19:21.000 But even then, when we sort of take that and then Do the kind of studies that we need to do with psychedelics.

02:19:29.000 It feels like the system takes time to prove it, but we are so good at tricking ourselves.

02:19:36.000 And there is something to be said for this process.

02:19:40.000 And so I think when we talk about how come marijuana isn't a medicine, part of it is that the process has been gummed up for 50 years and is still gummed up by this last step.

02:19:51.000 I mean, there was another step to get access to this federal marijuana.

02:19:55.000 You had to have a public health service review that was created in 1999 because before that they only gave the marijuana to government researchers.

02:20:04.000 You couldn't even do your own funded study with marijuana through the FDA because you couldn't get the marijuana.

02:20:09.000 It was only for their researchers.

02:20:11.000 In 1999 they created this policy that would open it up.

02:20:15.000 In their minds, but there was a special review in addition to FDA, DEA, and IRB that we just were able to succeed in getting them to eliminate.

02:20:23.000 The Obama administration eliminated it last summer, this Public Health Service review.

02:20:26.000 It's what blocked our marijuana PTSD study for years and years.

02:20:30.000 That's gone.

02:20:31.000 The last thing to get gone is this government monopoly on marijuana.

02:20:35.000 And we're working.

02:20:36.000 We're planning to resubmit an application from Professor Craker.

02:20:39.000 We're working with Covington Burling, a big DC law firm, taking the case pro bono to do a legal analysis.

02:20:48.000 And then we will try to persuade.

02:20:51.000 We're working with Senator Gillibrand and Senator Warren and others have been engaging the DEA and ONDCP, HHS, in discussions about this monopoly.

02:21:01.000 There's growing support in Congress.

02:21:03.000 And this is the last vestige of sort of politics blocking the science with psychedelics or marijuana.

02:21:11.000 Then the system will have to work with.

02:21:14.000 And in the meantime, people can go around and legalize.

02:21:16.000 And then that gets access.

02:21:18.000 And so we're not saying wait for the science to...

02:21:21.000 Well, do you have any fear with the upcoming elections?

02:21:25.000 Do you have any fear if we go right wing that there might be some blowback?

02:21:28.000 Yeah.

02:21:29.000 I mean, I'm fearful of that all the time.

02:21:32.000 I mean, my sort of core imprint was that in 1971, I first took LSD. In 1972, you know, I decided that this is what I wanted to devote my life to.

02:21:41.000 And I looked around and I saw all the research has been shut down.

02:21:45.000 Right.

02:21:46.000 You came in one year after the big sweeping prohibition.

02:21:50.000 I woke up to it, not when it was thriving, but right after the backlash.

02:21:55.000 Right.

02:21:56.000 That's why I think I was so motivated to get involved with MDMA because I learned about MDMA in 1982 when it was an underground psychedelic psychotherapy tool under the code name ADAM that the government had no knowledge of.

02:22:07.000 Were you in Dallas?

02:22:08.000 This was at Dallas?

02:22:10.000 No, Dallas is where ADAM, MDMA, turned into ecstasy.

02:22:13.000 So that's where they started selling it above ground.

02:22:16.000 There's an incredible movie that's going to come out, The Star Club, about the club in Dallas where it really got well known.

02:22:22.000 But because it had this dual life, one as this quiet underground therapy drug with about half a million doses having been used by around 1984, and then the other was this public ecstasy use.

02:22:35.000 I thought, okay, now I know about it ahead of time.

02:22:37.000 I can see the crackdown coming.

02:22:39.000 Everybody could see the crackdown coming, but now we can organize.

02:22:42.000 Now we can talk to people about it.

02:22:45.000 It's not a crime.

02:22:46.000 We can gather our forces and have people try it even.

02:22:49.000 And that's where I became really politically involved in the 80s.

02:22:56.000 Well, it's just amazing how long it's taken.

02:23:00.000 But it's amazing that you have the fortitude to push through for so long.

02:23:04.000 I mean, the world and the consciousness of the people owe you guys a massive debt.

02:23:12.000 I mean, a debt of gratitude for sure that you've been out there pushing this envelope and chipping away.

02:23:18.000 It's like one of many weapons chipping at this wall of ignorance.

02:23:22.000 But maps is a really powerful one.

02:23:25.000 And we've been able to do it in a way where Right now we have two senior retired FDA officials who are acting as our consultants to prepare our documents because they felt that there's a strong need for new treatments for PTSD. I mean,

02:23:42.000 they don't necessarily are saying anything about cultural change or spirituality or drug war.

02:23:47.000 Just for soldiers.

02:23:48.000 Just for other people, everybody with PTSD. They have watched over the last 15-20 years what we've done and Actually, there's a woman on our staff, Ilsa Jerome, that has been reviewing all these papers, all these 5,000 papers,

02:24:04.000 and developing what's called, in conjunction with other members of our team, an investigator's brochure, a summary of the literature with a risk-benefit kind of calculation.

02:24:16.000 How you take all of this information, and then what does it mean in terms of the risk that you present to the patients in the study?

02:24:22.000 And that you tell the doctors.

02:24:24.000 And the people at the FDA thought that we were doing it fairly in a time when it was being distorted in all these different ways.

02:24:33.000 And Ilsa is actually a little bit more conservative than I am, and I knew that it was kind of good to let her take the lead in writing this, and that it got the respect of the FDA. So that's where I'm pretty hopeful.

02:24:47.000 Isn't it kind of strange that MDMA being used to treat PTSD is a primary motivating factor for the federal government trying to make it legal?

02:24:58.000 Because if you think about it, PTSD is inexorably associated with war.

02:25:04.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:25:07.000 War was responsible for accelerating the legalization of MDMA, which is really fucking crazy. 0.93

02:25:15.000 I mean, that is like yin and yang in like a biomechanical form. 0.96

02:25:20.000 Yeah, that's Aikido.

02:25:22.000 Yeah, that's crazy, if you really look at what that is.

02:25:25.000 Yeah.

02:25:25.000 Now, we've also, though, what about the other, the next step?

02:25:29.000 What's the next step?

02:25:29.000 We've been accused of, or people have raised the cautionary tale, which I disagree with, but they've said, some people have said, are you making war more easy to wage now?

02:25:40.000 More palatable.

02:25:41.000 If you are reducing the costs of war...

02:25:44.000 Are you making war more likely of an option?

02:25:49.000 And I think it's a worthwhile question to ask.

02:25:52.000 It applies to all medical doctors that work for the military, surgeons.

02:25:59.000 Are you, by treating people, making it easier for there to be war?

02:26:06.000 I think it's a very narrow perspective.

02:26:08.000 It's a very narrow perspective, and it's also not taking into consideration the actual Psycho-active effects of that substance because that substance makes someone loving.

02:26:18.000 So if you think that giving out pills that make you more loving are more likely going to generate more war or make war more palatable, I think the opposite is probably true.

02:26:27.000 I think the people who become more loving who can relay the experiences of the horrors of war to other people who become more loving because they also get a hold of this stuff, then I think that's more likely to eliminate war or lessen war or at least mitigate it significantly.

02:26:42.000 Because I think that war is probably mitigated significantly now in comparison to like the sheer numbers of people.

02:26:48.000 Like in comparison to, you know, 500 years ago, 600 years ago.

02:26:52.000 It's probably way less war.

02:26:54.000 Yeah.

02:26:54.000 I just watched a lecture.

02:26:55.000 It's a fellow Steven Pinker.

02:26:56.000 Yes.

02:26:57.000 It was very interesting about the reduction of violence.

02:27:00.000 Mm-hmm.

02:27:01.000 Well, it's way easier.

02:27:02.000 It's way safer.

02:27:02.000 And I think that things like psychedelic drugs in particular, but also the meditative techniques, focusing on being in the moment, focusing on learning how to manage your mind.

02:27:17.000 And there's a lot of things that people are practicing and attempting to use in their everyday life today.

02:27:24.000 Mindfulness and it's a subject that's repeated very often and people are trying to find a better way of approaching different dilemmas in their life and this is a tool for those things.

02:27:36.000 It's a tool for those things that should be considered alongside of yoga.

02:27:39.000 Alongside of meditation, alongside of reading self-help books, alongside of having good friends you can open up with and you can discuss things together and get encouragement from each other and maybe even criticism from each other.

02:27:50.000 All those things exist in all sorts of different forms and they exist in psychedelics as well.

02:27:56.000 A lot of the times, I mean, especially, I find eating marijuana to be one of the most self-analyzing, objective, introspective experiences you can have.

02:28:07.000 It's like a real wake-up call to any holes you might have in your game.

02:28:10.000 It just smacks you into place and sends you back out there in the world. 0.99

02:28:13.000 You're like, shit, okay, I got it, I got it, I got it. 0.97

02:28:15.000 Those are tools, and they're all tools that can be used in a variety of different ways, but to deny the fact that they can be used beneficially At this point is really silly because we are finite beings. 0.99

02:28:28.000 We live a short amount of time. 0.99

02:28:29.000 Wouldn't it be nice if you got rid of most of your bullshit by the time you hit 80? 1.00

02:28:34.000 Wouldn't it be nice? 1.00

02:28:35.000 And I think this sense of, isn't it about time, that it is.

02:28:40.000 And I think there is a mainstream system that's ready to incorporate, that's reaching out on the other side in a way.

02:28:50.000 And that this...

02:28:52.000 Possibility of really integrating this does seem to be the case.

02:28:56.000 And I think with the military, I think their training is to make people to suppress their emotions and to not feel the emotional consequences, to act in the heat of battle without the emotions.

02:29:09.000 And I think with MDMA, if you help people feel the emotional consequences of their actions, even if you've healed them from trauma and they want to go back to their units, that they are going to be more careful, more sensitive.

02:29:23.000 They'll be...

02:29:27.000 There's a German psychiatrist, Torsten Pasi, and he sort of raised this issue for me.

02:29:33.000 What about the concentration camp guards?

02:29:36.000 What if they were tormented and they came to you for MDMA therapy?

02:29:40.000 You know, you're a German therapist and they come to you.

02:29:43.000 Would you treat the concentration camp people for their trauma?

02:29:47.000 And I think the question is, Are people who are worked with in this emotional way for their trauma more or less likely to go back into these situations that produced the trauma in the first place?

02:30:00.000 Well, that question only becomes valid if you think, should you punish a person who's done something like that in all ways forever?

02:30:07.000 Or should you try to make them better?

02:30:09.000 Right.

02:30:09.000 I mean, you're not exonerating them for the horrible things they've done, but should, if you're gonna keep them alive, shouldn't you try to make them a better person?

02:30:18.000 Do you have some sort of responsibility to do that?

02:30:20.000 I would say the argument, if you want to look at our civilization in, like, the most efficient manner, you want to look at it in the most, like, what is the best way to get our civilization together? 0.99

02:30:30.000 We'll have less assholes, less crazy people, less mean people, less, you know, less psychopathic fucking security guards at Auschwitz. 0.98

02:30:38.000 So if you do have one... 1.00

02:30:39.000 You could probably get a lot of data from studying that guy, and he's obviously going to be in jail for the rest of his life.

02:30:46.000 It's not going to hurt.

02:30:47.000 Yeah, I mean, what Torsten was trying to say is, would you do that for an active military where it's not historical, but they go back?

02:30:53.000 Well, that's like, would you do it for a hobbit? 0.96

02:30:56.000 Would you get on your fucking time machine and travel back to the Roman days and give it to them? 0.99

02:31:00.000 Well, you don't have to worry about that. 0.99

02:31:01.000 You have to worry about people today.

02:31:03.000 Right, and I feel that trying to bring that healing approach, those loving feelings, which MDMA can really generate through oxytocin and prolactin, the hormones released that are in nursing and bonding, MDMA releases those hormones.

02:31:18.000 Same drugs that women get when they orgasm. 1.00

02:31:20.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:31:22.000 And actually, Torsten has written this terrific paper about how...

02:31:25.000 Orgasms?

02:31:26.000 The post-orgasmic state.

02:31:28.000 And he's compared the post-orgasmic state and the hormonal release to MDMA. And I think when we talk about MDMA, a good way to think about it is the post-orgasmic state.

02:31:39.000 You're satiated.

02:31:40.000 You're not striving.

02:31:41.000 Dude, if you could come and it felt as good as being on ecstasy.

02:31:45.000 Let's not kid ourselves.

02:31:47.000 Let's not kid ourselves.

02:31:49.000 I don't know what coming for that guy feels like.

02:31:52.000 But if he feels like he's coming on MDMA, alright dude, settle down.

02:31:57.000 Settle down.

02:31:58.000 I don't know if I'm buying it.

02:31:59.000 I don't know.

02:32:02.000 What an endorsement of MDMA. Someone might be exaggerating a little bit.

02:32:08.000 I mean, it feels real good.

02:32:10.000 MDMA feels like you're not even here.

02:32:12.000 You're in some planet love.

02:32:14.000 I only did it once.

02:32:16.000 I did it once, two pills, super powerful stuff.

02:32:19.000 The next day I was wrecked.

02:32:21.000 That was not worth it for me.

02:32:23.000 I definitely learned a lot from the experience, but the next day was absolutely horrendous.

02:32:27.000 Well, it's probably horrendous because you wanted to do things.

02:32:31.000 When we talk about people who are thinking about MDMA, what we say is...

02:32:35.000 Don't do anything afterwards.

02:32:36.000 It's a two-day experience.

02:32:37.000 Right.

02:32:37.000 You need the second day to rest and reflect.

02:32:39.000 And again, what's the purpose of it?

02:32:41.000 If you're trying to have this experience, this loving experience, and then kind of bring, appropriate some of that into your daily life, learn and integrate it, then the very next day is one of the most important parts because you're still halfway in, halfway out.

02:32:55.000 You're able to think about it.

02:32:57.000 That's where a lot of the integration work gets done.

02:33:00.000 So in our therapy, we make it so that people spend the night in the treatment center, just so that they don't have to move, they don't have to get distracted, and then there's hours of psychotherapy the next day to help them integrate it.

02:33:12.000 And then when they go home, we call them every day for a week on the phone, just to check in and see how they're doing.

02:33:20.000 What's up?

02:33:21.000 It's Rick.

02:33:22.000 Rick Doblin, what's up, dude?

02:33:25.000 How you feeling?

02:33:25.000 Like I just came.

02:33:27.000 All the time.

02:33:29.000 All the time, bro.

02:33:31.000 Alright, man.

02:33:32.000 Peace out.

02:33:35.000 We've got to wrap this up, man, unfortunately.

02:33:36.000 We started a little late, and I've got to get out of here.

02:33:39.000 Okay.

02:33:39.000 Is there anything you can direct people towards?

02:33:43.000 Yes.

02:33:43.000 The website, which is maps.org?

02:33:46.000 Yes, and in fact, we're having our 30th anniversary celebration on Sunday, April 17th, and we're live streaming it for free. 0.97

02:33:54.000 Oh, shit. 0.82

02:33:54.000 So it's maps.org slash live 30. How are you going to know when people are DEA agents undercover there? 0.82

02:34:01.000 Well...

02:34:02.000 Tie clips?

02:34:03.000 Actually, we have our first senior retired DEA consultant.

02:34:08.000 Ah, smart man.

02:34:09.000 Smart, but again, it's compassion.

02:34:11.000 I mean, he had a son who listed in the Army and has PTSD and is 50% disabled from PTSD and has found marijuana to be helpful.

02:34:20.000 Again, isn't it fascinating?

02:34:21.000 That's what...

02:34:22.000 Yeah, it's those kind of stories that help me think that we can do this integration.

02:34:28.000 We can.

02:34:28.000 And I am worried about right-wing backlash, but there's a couple things that we've put into place.

02:34:34.000 First off, the work with the military.

02:34:35.000 I mean, right-wing loves the military.

02:34:37.000 If we're trying to help the military, there's also people are compassionate about childhood sexual abuse survivors.

02:34:44.000 And so I think that we have enough of a base of...

02:34:51.000 Evidence and a long pattern since 1992 of the precedence at the FDA that I think we could survive.

02:34:59.000 The FDA also recently did something very interesting with the abortion bill, RU46, that they made it easier on women.

02:35:07.000 They eliminated one required step that the science showed that they didn't need.

02:35:11.000 And so the FDA is very much trying to be science over politics.

02:35:17.000 I mean, they will have an FDA commissioner that's appointed by and confirmed by president, but at the same time, the people that are there are really focused on science over politics and compassion.

02:35:28.000 The other part is that we have international strategy.

02:35:30.000 That was the longest time anybody ever talked over the music, but it was awesome.

02:35:34.000 Awesome information, and I wish I didn't have to get out of here, but I really do.

02:35:37.000 So thank you very much.

02:35:38.000 Hashtag psychedelic because, too.

02:35:40.000 Psychedelic because, what does that mean?

02:35:42.000 Don't say it.

02:35:43.000 Don't stop.

02:35:43.000 I gotta go.

02:35:44.000 Thank you, too.

02:35:45.000 So maps.org and the party one more time is April 17th.

02:35:50.000 April 17th.

02:35:50.000 April 17th in Oakland.

02:35:52.000 In Oakland, where at exactly?

02:35:53.000 Scottish Rite Temple.

02:35:54.000 What time does it start?

02:35:55.000 It starts from 5 to 11. Can you get tickets to the door?

02:35:58.000 No, not for the evening part, but not for the banquet.

02:36:01.000 So you gotta go to maps.org and there's all that information.

02:36:05.000 Okay.

02:36:05.000 Thank you.

02:36:05.000 Okay, beautiful.

02:36:06.000 Thank you, sir.

02:36:06.000 Much appreciated.

02:36:07.000 Alright, ladies and gentlemen, that's it for the week.

02:36:09.000 See you soon.

02:36:10.000 Bye-bye.

The Joe Rogan Experience - April 07, 2016

Joe Rogan Experience #782 - Rick Doblin

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