The Peter Attia Drive - #65 - Rick Doblin, Ph.D.： MDMA— the creation, scheduling, toxicity, therapeutic use, and changing public opinion of what is possibly the single most important synthetic molecule ever created by our species

00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, welcome to the Peter Atiyah Drive. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah.

00:00:10.140 The Drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking,

00:00:15.600 along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with

00:00:19.840 some of the most successful, top-performing individuals in the world, and this podcast

00:00:23.600 is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality,

00:00:28.360 more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode

00:00:33.000 and other topics at peteratiyahmd.com.

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00:04:03.160 listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us

00:04:09.080 directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. My guest this week is Dr. Rick Doblin. Rick is the

00:04:14.640 founder and the executive director of the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic

00:04:18.860 studies, better known as MAPS. Now, if you listen to the podcast that I did with Tim Ferriss,

00:04:24.000 that name may sound familiar. We spoke quite a bit about Rick, well, more so about MAPS and really the

00:04:29.300 work that they've been doing to legalize specifically MDMA, but other molecules as well for medical use.

00:04:37.460 Rick is, he's a force of nature and there's just no other way I can describe this interview,

00:04:42.140 how much I learned about a guy that I already sort of knew in terms of his background, his passion,

00:04:48.280 what motivated him. He's really a unique individual. And at the very end of the interview,

00:04:52.760 I even sort of comment to that effect that there's just not that many people that can really

00:04:57.400 bend the arc of history the way I believe Rick is doing that. We spent about the first hour and 20

00:05:03.200 minutes or so putting some background together, both Rick's background, where his drive for this

00:05:08.720 came from, and also the background of how these molecules, and we talked mostly about LSD as an

00:05:15.260 example, but how these molecules were synthesized, basically made broadly available and utilized

00:05:19.680 quite liberally. And then ultimately how they were scheduled with the drug act of the early seventies.

00:05:25.200 At that point in the podcast, we then turn our attention specifically to MDMA, because what I really

00:05:29.440 wanted to focus on here was MDMA for several reasons. One, as I think I stayed in the podcast,

00:05:34.580 whether right or wrong, my personal opinion is MDMA is the single most important synthetic molecule ever

00:05:39.980 created by our species. Also, it's the closest one to being descheduled, meaning taken from being an

00:05:47.120 illegal drug that is a schedule one to something that will have a medical application. And you'll see

00:05:52.360 through this discussion how long it has taken to do that and what the implications of that are. And of

00:05:57.740 course, more importantly, you'll probably appreciate why we would think that that's an important thing

00:06:01.680 to do. So when it comes to MDMA, we talk about a lot. We talk about how it was created back in 1912,

00:06:07.260 how it was rediscovered and resynthesized, where its use, where it found its use, and how the parallel

00:06:14.300 use of ecstasy as the party version of this drug in some ways kind of, well, not in some ways, I mean,

00:06:20.280 in many ways really hurt the clinical application of MDMA, which was really where it started, how it was,

00:06:26.160 of course, scheduled and made illegal in 1985, which is relatively late compared to all of the other

00:06:30.900 psychedelics. And you can see that through this discussion that MDMA is sort of not your typical

00:06:35.840 psychedelic. And then how a year later, Rick created maps and did everything from going off to the

00:06:42.280 Harvard Kennedy School to get a PhD to help him understand the regulatory morass he was going to

00:06:49.500 have to navigate his way through. And right to where we are today, which is truly being on the cusp of

00:06:55.720 legalizing this incredibly powerful molecule that is going to help, in my opinion, literally millions

00:07:02.400 of people. So I'll just give you one example of something that we dive into pretty deep that I

00:07:07.080 think people are going to find very interesting, which is the toxicity of MDMA. So there are lots

00:07:10.340 of rumors about the toxicity of this drug. And of course, every drug has toxicity. So the point here

00:07:15.980 isn't that it doesn't have it, but the point is, what is the toxicity? And is it really what we were

00:07:20.760 led to believe with everything from depression, Parkinsonian syndromes, neuronal destruction

00:07:25.420 versus what's actually happening? So a very nuanced discussion on that. And I think we end with a

00:07:31.040 message of hope, which is one, there are going to be many people, I think, who listen to this,

00:07:34.800 who are going to wonder what can they do to receive this therapy. And we're going to talk about what those

00:07:39.640 clinical trials look like, what the enrollment looks like, and perhaps more importantly, what a

00:07:44.500 compassionate use license would look like such that if there are patients who are in need of this

00:07:49.020 therapy prior to its approval, what are the legal paths to do that? I have to state something very

00:07:55.440 important that I feel strongly about. Of course, the Drug Enforcement Agency considers MDMA to be a

00:08:01.300 schedule one drug. That means it is illegal. That means according to the DEA, at least at the time of

00:08:06.400 that scheduling in 1985, they do not believe there to be a medical use and that they believe that it has

00:08:11.000 the high potential for abuse. Now, I think you'll see from this discussion, neither Rick nor I agree

00:08:15.980 with that at all, but we do have to respect the letter of the law. So there's nothing in this

00:08:19.660 podcast that I want to be construed as encouraging you and or endorsing the use of illicit MDMA.

00:08:26.280 I think there are more than sufficient legal channels by which people could pursue compassionate

00:08:32.140 exemption for the appropriate treatment of PTSD, which is at this point in time where we believe MDMA

00:08:38.600 is most valuable. So with that said, sit back and please enjoy my interview and discussion with Dr.

00:08:45.600 Rick Doblin. Before we begin this podcast, I want to point out something that we did here a little

00:08:51.500 different from what we've done in previous podcasts. Rick and I sat down for a very lengthy conversation.

00:08:57.200 And in the beginning, we spent a lot of time going really deep into his background. Now, while I think

00:09:02.840 this conversation is really interesting, I also realize that the entire conversation is

00:09:08.500 long and many of you may be tuning in for more of what we talk about at the end, specifically as it

00:09:15.020 pertains to MDMA. So what we did is we took roughly the first hour and 15 minutes of this interview and

00:09:21.220 put it at the end. So what you're about to hear is where we pick up the conversation again, roughly an

00:09:27.060 hour 15 into it, where we start to talk about maps and Rick's work on MDMA, which I think is what the

00:09:33.860 majority of you are probably wanting to hear about. Then at the end of that podcast, we will roll

00:09:39.820 directly into the initial conversation on Rick's background, which the diehards like me will find

00:09:45.320 just as interesting. As this is a different sort of format than we typically do, hopefully it makes

00:09:50.280 sense and you'll enjoy the interview, but it's our belief that this will create slightly better flow

00:09:55.040 for what you're about to hear. Rick, thanks so much for opening your home today.

00:10:01.320 Oh, it's a pleasure to have you here.

00:10:02.980 Every once in a while, I get ready to sort of interview somebody and I think to myself,

00:10:07.220 this is highly applicable. This is incredibly broad. This topic we're discussing

00:10:12.640 is so important. And I don't know, as I was coming over here, I was talking to my wife

00:10:18.120 and she said, I can't believe I'm not there to listen to you guys have this discussion to which

00:10:23.100 I said, you've never once listened to me record a single podcast. Why are you so interested in this?

00:10:29.120 And she's like, I don't know. I just, you've spoken about Rick so much and you've spoken about MDMA so

00:10:34.660 much that I just don't want to miss it. And I said, well, don't worry, it's going to be recorded.

00:10:38.840 You're going to be able to hear it with everybody else. But this is a discussion I've wanted to have

00:10:42.640 for such a long time. Now, in many ways, there's probably few people, if any, that have done more

00:10:48.900 to sort of right the wrongs of that era. And that we're now 33 years into an organization that you

00:10:57.880 started. That organization you started in 1986 called MAPS. Tell me what MAPS stands for and what

00:11:03.680 you set out to do. So MAPS is Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. I knew at the time

00:11:10.360 that I wanted to have the word psychedelic in the title of the nonprofit. So just to go back a little

00:11:15.980 bit further. So in 1972, when I was at New College and having difficulties with my psychedelic

00:11:22.160 experiences, I went to the guidance counselor at college and I asked for help. And I said,

00:11:27.780 I'm having powerful, important experiences, but I'm not able to fully integrate them.

00:11:32.160 And I was just so fortunate. The guidance counselor gave me a copy of a book,

00:11:36.740 Realms of the Human Unconscious by Stan Grof about his work with LSD before it was even

00:11:42.420 published, manuscript copy. And it was reading that book that really helped me see that here is

00:11:49.340 science, here is spirituality, but viewed through a scientific lens. And it had the reality check

00:11:56.420 of therapy. It's focused on how do you help these people suffering from different conditions

00:12:00.920 grow. And so I felt that this was now everything together for me, science, mysticism, spirituality,

00:12:07.860 the sense of unity, and therapy, reality check. So in 72 is when I decided to become a psychedelic

00:12:12.600 therapist. And I wrote a letter to Stan Grof, and he ended up writing me back. And I took a workshop

00:12:18.340 with him in the summer of 72. And I did everything that I could to try to elevate and expand my

00:12:24.640 consciousness, including I had the delusion that the more psychedelics I took, the faster I would

00:12:29.520 evolve, which I underestimated the whole integration process. So I basically then took 10 years to

00:12:34.740 integrate. I dropped out of college. I didn't see Stan anymore. I spent 10 years trying to get

00:12:40.260 prepared to make psychedelics the forefront. So I was in the construction business and build houses

00:12:45.780 and build various things and got grounded in this 10 year period. And every once in a while would take

00:12:50.400 LSD and work on my fear. And so I went back to college in 1982 at New College, the same college I

00:12:57.300 had dropped out of. I'd built houses for a couple of the professors. I figured out how I could sort of

00:13:02.520 frame what I was doing as studying transpersonal psychology and psychedelic psychotherapy. And so

00:13:07.380 the very first semester that I went back to school, Stan Grof was giving a workshop, a month long

00:13:13.300 workshop at Esalen called the Mystical Quest. And where's Esalen? Esalen is in Big Sur. It's about

00:13:19.460 three and a half hours south of San Francisco. It's perched on the cliffs overlooking the ocean. There's hot

00:13:24.560 springs that come up there. There's baths. It's sort of the cradle of the human potential movement.

00:13:29.860 You were just there.

00:13:30.720 I was just there for a week long program on psychedelics where the entire property, which

00:13:37.940 fits around 120 people, it's sort of a commune, you could say, where they grow their own food. Their

00:13:42.500 job is to provide housing and workshops for people. They've been involved since the 60s, started by Dick

00:13:49.260 Price and Michael Murphy. Fritz Perls from Gasol Therapy lived there. Ida Rolf from Rolfing. Stan

00:13:55.300 Grof was there for about almost 15 years as scholar in residence. All sorts of people have taught there

00:14:00.800 and still going. And so this particular workshop that I was just at had the largest waiting list

00:14:05.760 in the entire history of Esalen since the 60s. They had over a thousand people try to get into this

00:14:11.460 program for 120 people. But I went there in September of 82 as the beginning of my going back

00:14:18.720 to school. My first semester was going to be about creating a curriculum to become a psychedelic

00:14:23.540 therapist. And so during this month long at Esalen with Stan and Christina Grof, his wife,

00:14:29.200 this woman named Debbie Harlow came by. She wasn't in the workshop, but she came by to Esalen and she

00:14:34.800 started talking about this new drug called ADAM, which was MDMA, and that it was used in therapy.

00:14:40.860 It had been used in underground therapy circles since the middle 70s. It was itself legal at the time,

00:14:47.420 but it was kept quiet because this was, again, during the drug war period. And that if it were

00:14:53.300 made public, chances are it would be criminalized. And when we learned about it in 82, when Debbie

00:14:59.400 started talking about it, she also shared that it had escaped these therapeutic circles and was being

00:15:03.540 sold as the drug ecstasy. So it was clear that it was doomed. It just wasn't clear when. And my initial

00:15:10.380 impression of it was that I underestimated it.

00:15:13.420 You underestimated the drug or the backlash that would come against it?

00:15:16.960 The drug.

00:15:17.360 Okay.

00:15:17.860 Yeah. So she said, it helps you feel love. It helps you feel connected. It helps you be a better

00:15:21.720 listener. It helps you talk to people, speak from your heart. And I felt that I'm in love. I feel

00:15:27.080 love. I feel like I can talk. I saw a group of people doing it and they were just sitting around

00:15:31.760 in a circle talking to each other. And I thought, how profound can that be? When you take 250 micrograms

00:15:37.320 of LSD, you can't talk. You go into this nonverbal place. That's what's really profound. You go beyond

00:15:42.740 your ego.

00:15:43.540 At that time, Rick, was the language that we now use to describe that distinction known? Was it

00:15:50.480 understood that, for example, psilocybin was an entheogen while MDMA was an empathogen? Did we

00:15:57.480 even understand what that meant in 82?

00:15:59.560 In 82, not quite then. So entheogen, I don't actually use that word because that's the God

00:16:06.180 within to generate a spiritual experience. I think that that word was created by Jonathan

00:16:11.240 Ott and others to try to create a counter to the word hallucinogen. So hallucinogen is pejorative,

00:16:17.320 negative. It's a delusion. It's negatively loaded. Entheogen is sort of positively loaded. It's going

00:16:23.220 to be spiritual. Psychedelic is mind manifesting. It's neutral. And it describes what it actually

00:16:29.540 does. So I've chosen to try to reclaim the word psychedelic. The empathogen is a really good word 0.59

00:16:35.520 for MDMA, that it produces empathy. Others, Dave Nichols, that was Ralph Metzner's word,

00:16:40.960 empathogen. Dave Nichols proposed intactogen to mean to touch within. And what was going on there,

00:16:46.920 so that was really created, those empathogen, intactogen, those words were created once we

00:16:52.040 needed in our legal case to try to protect the use of MDMA. It was to try to say that it wasn't like

00:16:57.040 a traditional psychedelic. So I think in 82, when I was first learning about MDMA, when I was foolish 0.92

00:17:02.620 enough to underestimate it, but smart enough to buy some, that it was clear that MDMA was not like a

00:17:07.920 classic psychedelic. Right. There's no dissociation. There's no hallucination. You remember it as though

00:17:14.900 you're completely awake. It is really in a class of its own in that way, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. It's very

00:17:19.740 good. And so that was the attempt to try to, the entheogen word was just to try to balance out

00:17:25.500 hallucinogen, but empathogen and taxogen was part of our legal case to try to say this was a different

00:17:30.260 class of drugs and you couldn't criminalize it the way these others had criminalized it. That in the

00:17:34.600 end failed. And psychedelic is a broader word, mind manifesting. So I think that MDMA is a psychedelic,

00:17:40.160 but it's not a classic psychedelic. So once I learned about it and actually underestimated it,

00:17:46.000 but bought some and tried some and was then just profoundly impacted by how subtle it was and how

00:17:52.460 incredible of a drug it was. Do you remember the first time you took it? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I

00:17:56.640 remembered it really well. I was with a girlfriend and we took it together. And at one point we said,

00:18:02.840 this love we're expressing and experiencing is it's really us. It's not a drug delusion. It's

00:18:09.380 liberating us to express what we really feel. I felt like the profundity and the depth of connection

00:18:15.520 was genuine and also something that we could learn from. I think one of the things that makes this

00:18:21.580 so helpful therapeutically, this drug is that because you're not dissolving your ego,

00:18:26.260 it's easier to integrate what happened. It's not that far away from normal consciousness. It's a

00:18:30.860 subtle shift with a reduction in fear and the amygdala in different areas. It's just profound

00:18:35.960 therapeutic. And so once I tried it, I thought that this was an incredible opportunity because

00:18:42.640 there was going to be a backlash, but it was still legal. And I had learned about LSD really the value of

00:18:49.260 it in 71 and 72 after the backlash, which was 1970 and the Controlled Substances Act and criminalization

00:18:56.380 of all the psychedelics and the effort to squash psychedelic research all over the world. So I

00:19:01.500 felt I missed my moment. You knew you had a small window, but you didn't know how big it was going to

00:19:06.680 be. Yeah. So I started a different nonprofit in 1984 before MAPS. What had happened actually,

00:19:13.700 and again, it's great that you're wearing the Doors shirt because Laura Huxley was key to my whole

00:19:19.300 life. So in 1983, after I had learned about MDMA, I read this book by Robert Mueller, who was the

00:19:27.640 Assistant Secretary General of the UN. He was from France, a French resistance fighter. He was the

00:19:32.220 mystic of the UN. He'd been there for 40 years. The book was New Genesis, Shaping a Global Spirituality.

00:19:37.380 And so this book was about how the UN is for conflicts between nations, but actually a lot

00:19:43.700 of these conflicts are religious conflicts and how he felt we needed a global spirituality that

00:19:49.680 would enliven every particular religion. It's not like a one world religion, like one world language,

00:19:55.740 but it was the sense that religions are like languages. They're all different ways of expressing

00:20:01.100 something similar, a similar reality. And that if we move beyond my religion is the one right religion,

00:20:07.100 and if you don't follow it, you're an infidel or you're all these religious wars that we've had 0.73

00:20:11.200 over the centuries. This idea that there was this sort of, we're all from the same planet. We all

00:20:17.680 have more in common than separate. That's what Robert Mueller wrote about this global spirituality

00:20:22.140 and as the key to human survival. So I wrote him a letter as a college undergraduate. And I said,

00:20:27.660 I agree with what you say, but you don't say anything about psychedelics. I told him about the Good

00:20:30.900 Friday experiment. I mentioned MDMA as a tool that could be used. And he wrote me back

00:20:36.820 and introduced me to various people who are mystics to share MDMA with them and see what they had to

00:20:42.300 say. So this letter though, that I wrote to Robert Mueller was Debbie Harlow saw it, who had introduced

00:20:48.640 me to MDMA. She showed it to a friend of hers who showed it to Laura Huxley. And so Laura thought,

00:20:53.540 wow, I'm trying to do important political work, outreach work. So I got invited to meetings that were

00:20:58.320 taking place at Esalen, organized by Dick Price and others to try to figure out how to protect MDMA

00:21:04.440 and how to bring this. MDMA had sort of revitalized the psychedelic underground because now there was

00:21:09.840 a new tool that was tremendously effective and it was legal. But there was a parallel sort of social

00:21:15.540 drug that was coming out as well. So when was ecstasy becoming the sort of parallel path for MDMA to

00:21:22.720 become mainstream? Was that about the same time? Yeah, that was about the same time. So Michael

00:21:26.980 Klieg was one of the people that had gotten MDMA under the name Adam in these sort of therapeutic

00:21:32.180 contexts in private homes, not all done by therapists and patients, but personal growth,

00:21:37.700 private homes, out of public settings. Michael had been involved with being a cocaine dealer,

00:21:42.780 others, he knew other cocaine dealers, and he thought this was a tremendous drug and more people

00:21:47.420 should know about it. And so he created ecstasy. He created this ecstasy and started marketing it in

00:21:53.020 public ways. And that was going to attract the attention of the government, particularly at the

00:21:57.980 Stark Club in Dallas was where it became a real party drug. You could buy it over the counter,

00:22:03.860 800 numbers. Michael had quite a large operation. And was it at the time ecstasy pure MDMA or was it

00:22:11.280 typically included with other impurities or additional stimulants? It was pure MDMA. It was great quality

00:22:19.380 and people had incredible experiences and started sharing it more and more and more and more people

00:22:24.520 wanted to do it. And so it was used a lot. It was sort of the beginnings of the rave movement, the dance

00:22:29.960 movement. It was used in these more public settings. And so that was a concern to those of us that were

00:22:35.260 interested in trying to protect the therapeutic use, that this public use was going to doom it. And we

00:22:40.420 actually contacted Michael and others. He approached us at different conferences. And so we got to know who the

00:22:46.340 underground manufacturers were. And basically I said that they owed a debt of gratitude to the people that

00:22:52.340 created MDMA and they should help us protect it. And so they did make some donations for us to help

00:22:57.120 in our legal efforts. And just to give listeners the background, I mean, MDMA, again, like LSD,

00:23:02.100 completely synthesized, man-made, originally synthesized in 1912, I believe. Yeah. Somewhat

00:23:07.460 forgotten about, correct? Yeah. So MDMA was invented by Merck Pharmaceutical in 1912. They were actually

00:23:14.360 looking to evade a competitor's patent on getting to a different drug. And so they had a whole different

00:23:20.600 synthetic route and they patented every step along the way, MDMA being one of them. But they weren't

00:23:26.480 looking for MDMA. It was just a- An intermediary towards the other ultimate goal. Yeah. And then

00:23:31.780 they did nothing with it. World War I came along. It's a German pharmaceutical company. And they

00:23:36.340 actually didn't test it in animals until 1927. And at that point in time, they found nothing of interest

00:23:44.600 and abandon it. It's funny to me, by the way, to imagine animals on MDMA. That's such an interesting

00:23:50.760 concept. Like, would it do anything to an animal? Do they- Well, it does, actually. And so some

00:23:56.320 researchers at Johns Hopkins have done studies with octopuses with MDMA. So as it turns out, octopuses-

00:24:04.400 You can make them less ornery? Yes, you can. They're solitary creatures unless it's mating season. And so

00:24:09.580 they've got this experimental contraption. This is a digression, but it's worthwhile. They've got this

00:24:14.020 experiment. So they put an octopus in the center chamber, and then they have two chambers off of

00:24:18.000 each side. One has an inanimate object in it, in a kind of a birdcage, so that it doesn't move in a

00:24:23.060 larger area. And the other has an octopus in this sort of birdcage, so it doesn't move either. So

00:24:27.360 under normal circumstances, the octopus will spend way more time with the inanimate object than with

00:24:32.740 the other octopus. They don't really like being with other octopuses. We supplied the MDMA for this

00:24:37.360 experiment, we meaning maps. So we ended up, they figured out how to dose the proper amount of MDMA in the

00:24:43.340 water. So they soak the octopus in a bath of MDMA-infused water for 10 minutes, and then they

00:24:48.560 put the octopus back in this experimental contraption. And lo and behold, now they spend

00:24:52.840 way more time with the other octopus. And humans and octopuses diverged 250 million years ago. And so

00:24:58.640 the big question that the experimenters had is, first off, would octopuses react to MDMA at all?

00:25:04.360 And then secondly, even if they did, would it have any kind of similar effect as it does in humans?

00:25:09.100 And it turns out that it does. Suggesting that whatever MDMA is doing is in a primitive enough

00:25:14.760 part of our brain, meaning it was still there before the bifurcation of us. Yes, yeah, yeah. Suggesting

00:25:20.000 it's not in the cortex. Yes. And also that it's something that, or not only in the cortex. Exactly,

00:25:24.860 not exclusively in the cortex. Yeah. And also that the FDA has told us that if we manage to prove safety

00:25:31.100 and efficacy in adults, they want us to do work in adolescence with PTSD. And if that works, they want us

00:25:36.920 to go down to 7 to 11-year-olds. So it suggests to me that working with the octopus, that young

00:25:41.940 children who've been traumatized may still benefit from MDMA, even if they don't have a lot of verbal

00:25:46.600 facilities. And so MDMA has also been given, the same group at Hopkins just published a paper in

00:25:52.680 Nature, which we can reference to. We'll link to all these things, yeah. Yeah, they just published a

00:25:56.980 paper in Nature that was in mice. And what they showed is that MDMA releases oxytocin, which causes

00:26:03.120 neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons and new neural connections in pro-social areas of the

00:26:08.140 brain. And they speculated that that's what's underlying the increase in the therapeutic

00:26:11.980 alliance between patient and therapist that MDMA catalyzes. This oxytocin release, hormones of love

00:26:18.960 and bonding and nurturing, nursing mothers, and when you're in love. So-

00:26:22.080 But when Merck came back to it, there's like this period where it was sort of forgotten about until

00:26:26.480 Sasha came along and started synthesizing.

00:26:28.760 Sort of. So what happened then, so invented in 1912, 1927, Merck does studies in animals and

00:26:35.260 then gives it up. The next time that we know about it was in 1953, when the U.S. Army Chemical

00:26:40.980 Warfare Service tested eight different drugs for toxicity in animals. This was classified,

00:26:46.400 it didn't come out until the early 70s, so very few people knew about it. But MDMA was one of those

00:26:50.700 drugs. And so what they did is they tested a series of eight drugs with mescaline on one side and

00:26:56.200 methamphetamine on the other, and MDMA more in the middle. So I think that's a good way to understand

00:27:01.860 MDMA is that it has the energy properties of methamphetamine. That's why people can take it

00:27:07.520 and stay up all night and dance. It makes you alert, but it doesn't make you jittery like

00:27:12.220 methamphetamine. You can take it and be alert, but be perfectly still. You can use it in meditation,

00:27:18.540 and many people have actually.

00:27:20.060 Is it technically considered a stimulant? I mean, it is an amphetamine chemically.

00:27:23.980 It has stimulant properties for sure, but it's also similar to mescaline, but it doesn't have

00:27:30.040 the ego dissolving sort of visual classic psychedelic properties that mescaline has.

00:27:35.440 So MDMA is kind of between mescaline and methamphetamine, but different from each end

00:27:40.440 of the spectrum. So that research was done in animals. There's no evidence that they did anything

00:27:46.340 in humans, and that wasn't declassified until the early 70s. So then what happened though,

00:27:50.500 is that a drug called MDA, methylene-dioxyamphetamine, was developed independently,

00:27:56.620 and it became quite popular during the 60s. And it was called the Miracle Drug of America.

00:28:01.860 It's a little bit like an MDMA-LSD combination, and a lot of people really used it during the 60s.

00:28:07.580 It was a pretty incredible experience and also kind of a different contrast to LSD, a softer version

00:28:13.720 of LSD. And so once all the drugs were criminalized in 1970 in this backlash in the Controlled Substances

00:28:21.100 Act, then chemists like Sasha and others were looking to modify drugs that were illegal to

00:28:27.300 develop new versions that would be legal and might have therapeutic properties. So it was because of

00:28:33.580 the popularity of MDA that people started looking at that kind of molecule. And then MDMA was

00:28:40.960 actually rediscovered without people knowing that it had been invented by Merck or that the Army

00:28:46.360 Chemical Warfare Service had used it. And then it became used. So Sasha Shulgin actually was told by

00:28:52.420 a graduate student of his that he should check into that particular molecule. And then he took it. And

00:28:57.340 the way Sasha worked was incredible, that he and his wife Ann, he would invent these new drugs. He was

00:29:02.520 looking for drugs for consciousness change. He had been working for Dow and had invented a

00:29:07.260 biodegradable insecticide. And Dow had given him his own lab and said you could do whatever you wanted

00:29:13.400 to do. But what he wanted to do was investigate psychedelics. And he'd had his first experience

00:29:17.920 was with mescaline. And he had a very spiritual experience with mescaline. After a while, it was

00:29:22.900 clear that he wasn't going to be producing anything that Dow wanted to market. And so he left and started

00:29:28.500 on his own and taught chemistry, but really became the premier American psychedelic chemist.

00:29:33.360 And so he resynthesized MDMA. And his process was he would take things himself. He and Ann would take

00:29:41.060 them. They had a group of 12 people that they would, and these were the same 12 people, that they

00:29:45.760 would test all these new drugs. And he felt that individuals are so different from each other. If

00:29:50.100 you have 12 people and you all take the same drug, you'll get a range of experiences. And that gives you

00:29:55.300 a good sense of what this drug might be. And those drugs that this group of 12 thought might have

00:30:01.280 therapeutic potential. Then he worked with a fellow named Leo Zeff, who was a clinical psychologist,

00:30:06.240 PhD, who had, when the crackdown came, decided to continue using psychedelics. And so Leo was

00:30:12.700 the leader of the underground psychedelic psychotherapy movement. The first book that

00:30:17.180 MAPS ever published was called The Secret Chief. And then a few years after that, we were able to

00:30:21.980 publish The Secret Chief Revealed, once his family was comfortable with us talking about Leo. Leo was

00:30:26.460 going to retire. But once he did MDMA, he realized that this had incredible therapeutic potential. So

00:30:33.040 he didn't retire. And Leo was the one that trained lots and lots of therapists and psychiatrists. And

00:30:37.700 he really built up the therapeutic use of MDMA. And so from the middle 70s to the middle 80s,

00:30:43.620 half a million doses, much of it made at MIT secretly. Chemists at MIT were making MDMA for this

00:30:50.340 underground therapy community. And it was out of that then that it leaked. And Michael Klee turned

00:30:55.860 it into ecstasy. Is it your belief, Rick, that had ecstasy never made it to the public party scene

00:31:04.980 that MDMA could have potentially evaded censorship that came with its criminalization as a Schedule I?

00:31:13.340 Is it possible this could have just at that moment in history been integrated into medically accepted

00:31:20.660 psychotherapy? I don't think so. No. I think that there was the backlash against the classic

00:31:27.320 psychedelic. So the summer of 84, so I started going to these meetings at Esalen in 83, 84, and 85.

00:31:34.880 And we were planning how to protect MDMA. The summer of 84 is when I started Earth Metabolic Design Lab.

00:31:42.240 So that was the nonprofit that actually had been started by Buckminster Fuller. And a friend of mine

00:31:47.260 had a branch of it in Saratota, Florida for alternative energy. My friend hadn't used it. And so I was able

00:31:53.960 to take over the nonprofit and interpret the alternative energy to include mental energy as well.

00:32:00.000 And so that was the nonprofit that we used to try to organize to protect MDMA once the eventual backlash

00:32:06.320 happened. So when the DEA first moved to criminalize MDMA in the summer of 84, Sasha had had connections

00:32:14.440 with an attorney, Rick Cotton, with a big DC law firm. Andy Weil had gone to Harvard as an undergraduate

00:32:20.180 with Rick Cotton. And now, so Rick was monitoring the DEA. And so once the DEA moved to criminalize MDMA,

00:32:26.380 he let Sasha know so that we had 30 days to go to Washington. And so I went to Washington on like day 28

00:32:32.520 and filed for a lawsuit to try to DEA administrative law judge hearing. So if there hadn't been the

00:32:39.560 crackdown at that point, that was still an era when all psychedelic research was banned. That didn't

00:32:45.600 change till 1992 when the FDA had an advisory committee meeting and decided that they would

00:32:50.560 open the door to psychedelic research. That was where in 1990, a new group of people at the FDA took over

00:32:56.420 regulating Schedule I drugs. And they decided to put science before politics.

00:33:00.480 Let's pause for a moment and explain what are the criteria for Schedule drugs. So you have four

00:33:04.540 schedules within the DEA. I'll let you explain what Schedule I is and we'll work our way.

00:33:08.520 So Schedule I is for drugs that have a high potential for abuse, no accepted safety under

00:33:15.560 medical supervision, and no currently accepted medical use. That basically says this is incredibly

00:33:22.680 harmful, addictive, et cetera, and there's no benefit to using it medically. And so heroin is

00:33:30.420 a Schedule I drug. Conversely, cocaine is not. The listener might say, wait, how could cocaine,

00:33:37.380 which of those two does cocaine not satisfy? Well, it clearly satisfies the first one. It's highly

00:33:42.660 addictive and harmful, but it turns out it does have one very important medically valid use, which is

00:33:48.300 it's a remarkable local anesthetic in very vascular areas. And so cocaine is used quite carefully

00:33:53.980 in nasal surgery. If you're having a nose procedure done by an ENT surgeon, there's a reasonable chance

00:34:00.240 they use cocaine. So MDMA lands itself as a Schedule I drug, meaning it's on the same level as heroin

00:34:09.860 or methamphetamine. Well, methamphetamine also has a medical use. Oh, that's right. That's right.

00:34:14.540 Yeah. So marijuana is a Schedule I drug. So the way in which it's been interpreted,

00:34:20.360 high potential for abuse, they emphasize the word potential. So it doesn't have to have a lot

00:34:25.800 of people using it. It just has to have a high potential for abuse. And the way they defined

00:34:31.820 abuse is non-medical use. It's a very loose definition. Oh, it can encompass anything because

00:34:37.500 it doesn't have to actually have harm. It just has the high potential for abuse.

00:34:44.320 So a grape technically could be a Schedule I agent.

00:34:47.820 Well, what's the potential for abuse of a grape? Well, if you ate enough, you could get diabetes.

00:34:53.620 Yeah, that'd be a bit stressed. I don't think grapes are likely to be scheduled, but I see your

00:34:58.400 point. Yeah. I mean, it's so ridiculous is my point. Yeah. No accepted safety under medical

00:35:02.680 supervision just means that it's not a prescription drug. The definition becomes a bit

00:35:07.460 of a tautology. Yeah. And no currently accepted medical use. And I think where people misinterpret

00:35:12.640 what Schedule I means is that it doesn't mean that the government has determined that there is

00:35:17.700 no medical use. There's no currently accepted medical use. And currently accepted has been

00:35:26.340 interpreted as FDA approval. It's not that you have a whole bunch of doctors that say this looks like

00:35:31.220 it's got incredible potential. They've made it so to get out of Schedule I, you have to have

00:35:35.540 FDA approval. So Schedule II is high potential for abuse, but it has currently accepted safety under

00:35:41.860 medical supervision, and it's got a currently accepted medical use. So opiates fit into this

00:35:46.200 category, fentanyl, oxycodone, oxycontin, cocaine, as we discussed. Yeah, methamphetamine for attention

00:35:51.940 deficit disorder. Schedule III is for drugs that have less than high potential for abuse. Schedule II drugs,

00:36:00.040 whenever there's a prescription, one copy goes to the DEA. So there's a lot of special controls for

00:36:05.740 Schedule II drugs, even though they're medically available. You can't write a prescription that's

00:36:10.980 automatically renewed for a Schedule II drug. Every new prescription has to be written explicitly by

00:36:16.640 your doctor. You can't renew this every three months for the next couple of years. And it goes

00:36:21.700 down there from Schedule III to Schedule IV to Schedule V, where you get over-the-counter drugs. But

00:36:26.020 they're still controlled in certain ways, but minimally. So what we're anticipating and what

00:36:31.120 we're trying to do is move MDMA, and also psilocybin is Schedule I drug. LSD is Schedule I drug.

00:36:38.440 Mescaline is a Schedule I drug. All these psychedelics are Schedule I drugs. Ketamine has been used as a

00:36:43.640 dissociative anesthetic by anesthesiologists, and it's a prescription medicine. It was just approved

00:36:48.300 as ketamine. An isomer of ketamine was just approved for depression. And it's considered among the most

00:36:52.740 important, if not the most important, new development in the treatment of mental illness

00:36:56.540 in the last several decades, because it's being used for depression. And it's effective relatively

00:37:01.180 immediately, rather than the current antidepressives that sometimes take weeks and weeks of daily

00:37:06.000 dosing. So this Schedule system, what eventually I think should happen is that the psychedelics should

00:37:14.320 be descheduled completely. I think that there's a fundamental human right that people have to explore

00:37:21.340 their consciousness, particularly when you think about it as spiritual experiences, that we should

00:37:25.760 have this fundamental human right. I believe we should have a system of licensed legalization.

00:37:31.180 Is there a precedent for the DEA taking something that is on Schedule I and moving it to Schedule II?

00:37:37.720 Yeah. The oral THC pill, Marinol, which was used in 85-86 for nausea control for cancer chemotherapy,

00:37:44.900 was switched from Schedule I to Schedule II. GHB was in Schedule I, but it's now actually in Schedule III.

00:37:53.740 Yeah. And last year, there was like $1.4 billion in sales. So Xyrem, it's for narcolepsy. It's to help

00:37:58.280 people sleep at night so that they don't fall asleep during the day.

00:38:01.480 Isn't Xyrem actually a chemical cousin of GHB and not actual GHB?

00:38:06.400 I'm not sure about that. I thought it was actual GHB.

00:38:08.960 It's close enough that I can understand why. But GHB, of course, being, what was its street name again?

00:38:13.420 Well, that's what's called the date rape drug. 1.00

00:38:15.680 The date rape drug, yeah. Did it have another name?

00:38:17.340 I'm not sure. It's the date rape drug because you can put it in water, and then it makes people sleepy,

00:38:22.440 particularly when mixed with alcohol. So it does have a bit of a taste, but you put it in alcohol or something,

00:38:27.360 it's hard to taste it. So there is a precedent of moving drugs off of Schedule I into other schedules.

00:38:32.260 Usually, initially, it goes Schedule II, and then depending on how it goes, it could go down further.

00:38:36.400 So all of this is to get back around to this idea that the DEA moved to criminalize MDMA in 84,

00:38:43.780 this nonprofit that I'd started with Debbie Harlow and Elise Agar to protect it. We got a hearing,

00:38:49.500 and we eventually triumphed. So the DEA administrative law judge said that it should be Schedule III.

00:38:56.760 But while the hearing was going on, that was in 1986, so while the hearing was still going on in

00:39:01.380 1985, we were winning in the court. The DEA administrative law judge doesn't work for the DEA.

00:39:07.920 The administrative law judges are employed and paid separately, and then they're inserted into

00:39:12.860 the different agencies to administer disputes between people and the agencies, and they make

00:39:17.400 recommendations to the head of the agency about what they should do.

00:39:20.680 So they don't make binding decisions. They are there as a quasi-neutral arbitrator of dispute.

00:39:26.640 Yeah, exactly. If you don't like the decision that's been made by the head of the administrator

00:39:31.600 of the agency, then you can sue them in the appeals court. So that's what we did. So in 85,

00:39:36.660 though, we're winning in the court, which is dismaying to the DEA. The DEA didn't even anticipate

00:39:40.900 that we would file because they didn't know about therapeutic use of MDMA. So they just thought

00:39:44.760 they're criminalizing ecstasy. They're criminalizing a party drug, and in the final hour, you guys show up

00:39:50.440 and say, wait, please, this has really important therapeutic benefit, which by the way, Rick, we should

00:39:54.560 circle back and really talk through that. And now all of a sudden, quote unquote, their judge,

00:40:00.260 although it's not really their judge, agrees with you guys and says, this should be a Schedule 3

00:40:04.420 agent.

00:40:05.340 Yeah. Before the judge issued his ruling, it was clear that we showed up with doctors,

00:40:10.080 with psychiatrists from Harvard Medical School, from all over with testimony. We did a secret study,

00:40:15.700 actually, as the safety of MDMA. So we had data to present to them. We had all these things that

00:40:20.320 we kept it secret because we didn't want it to be criminalized before the DEA moved. So

00:40:23.840 also, we were winning in the court of public opinion. So Robert Mueller, who had mentioned

00:40:28.700 was the Assistant Secretary General of the UN, had referred me to various mystics to whom I had sent

00:40:33.900 MDMA. So in the very first article, it was early 1985 in Newsweek, the first large media article about

00:40:40.880 MDMA, Brother David Steindlrast spoke on behalf of MDMA and said that a monk spends his whole life

00:40:48.200 trying to cultivate the mental attitude that you can get from taking MDMA. There was this paper in

00:40:53.100 the Washington Post that Rabbi Zalman Schachter, who had also experimented with MDMA that I'd sent

00:40:57.760 him, he compared MDMA to the Sabbath. So the idea of this as a party drug used by hedonistic kids

00:41:04.680 just recklessly risking their brains, that narrative, which is what the DEA wanted to share,

00:41:11.040 was contradicted by this narrative of rabbis and monks and therapists and psychiatrists talking about

00:41:16.180 the value of MDMA. So we're winning in the court of public opinion, winning in the court,

00:41:19.880 and the DEA freaked out and declared MDMA illegal on an emergency basis in the middle of 85 while the

00:41:27.140 hearings were still going on. And that was actually heartbreaking because we had thought that the

00:41:32.120 hearing might actually save it. So DEA criminalizes it on an emergency basis. Later, it turned out that

00:41:36.760 the DEA committed a crime in the sense that they didn't have the authority to emergency schedule.

00:41:41.280 I was just going to ask you both, do they have the authority? And secondly, was there a precedent for

00:41:45.480 that? Well, no, there was not a precedent for that. What had happened is that Congress had given the

00:41:50.700 attorney general the power to emergency schedule drugs. The attorney general, not the DEA. Yeah.

00:41:55.760 All the attorney general would have needed to do was to subdelegate the power. They would have just

00:42:00.240 had to file a piece of paper in the Federal Register saying that the attorney general subdelegates down to

00:42:04.560 the administrator of the DEA. But that had not been done. Had not been done. Who was the AG at the time?

00:42:08.200 I don't actually remember. Presumably, the AG at the time was very sympathetic to the DEA.

00:42:12.840 Oh, completely. Because this was, as you pointed out, I mean, this was one of Reagan's

00:42:16.480 signature policy pieces. Very much. The escalation of the drug war.

00:42:21.020 So you could argue that the DEA, though technically in violation of the reg,

00:42:26.140 probably could have done it if they'd waited, gone through the proper channel. They probably could

00:42:29.560 have received authority from the AG to do this. The bigger question is why? Why were they so afraid at

00:42:35.360 that moment? Well, because here was a drug that was being used by a lot of people, but it wasn't

00:42:40.320 causing problems. Let's dig into this for a little bit. So I think there are going to be many people

00:42:44.320 listening to this who are up until this point in the podcast are thinking, what the hell are these

00:42:48.380 two guys talking about? You're sitting here glorifying drugs. And so let's talk very specifically

00:42:53.760 about ecstasy. I think back to when I was in college, I had never touched this drug. And certainly a

00:42:59.360 lot of kids were using it. And the conventional wisdom was this drug gives you hyperthermia. So

00:43:05.900 you run this risk of overheating. You run this risk of getting long-term really depressed because

00:43:12.600 you deplete serotonin levels. I mean, there was certainly a lot of seemingly legitimate fear around

00:43:19.980 this. What was actually happening? Well, MDMA can cause hyperthermia. There are cases of people that

00:43:27.020 have taken MDMA. Usually there are people that have danced in hot environments and got overheated,

00:43:32.120 didn't have enough fluid replacement. And so some people have died from hyperthermia.

00:43:37.040 And is it actually the MDMA that's precipitating the hyperthermia or is it just that anybody who

00:43:42.980 could dance that long in that heat could get hyperthermia and the MDMA just sort of blunted their

00:43:47.620 other ability to self-regulate? Well, people generally don't die from hyperthermia from dancing all night.

00:43:53.660 So the MDMA contributes. It's a contributing factor. So the MDMA in therapeutic settings

00:43:59.140 doesn't cause hyperthermia. So there's something about MDMA combining with lots of movement and

00:44:04.720 dehydration that creates this trifecta. Yeah. What also was happening is that in a lot of these

00:44:10.200 environments where people were doing MDMA, these bars, people weren't buying alcohol. Alcohol kind of

00:44:16.980 blunts the MDMA experience. People weren't buying alcohol. And so what the bars would be doing would be

00:44:21.260 shutting off the water in the bathrooms and making people buy water. And so that's why sometimes people

00:44:26.380 wouldn't drink. Now also occasionally people drink too much water. They dilute their blood. They get

00:44:32.480 hyponatremia. And so what we use in therapy is fruit juices or things with electrolytes. So for those

00:44:38.600 people that are looking for harm reduction tips, it's better to drink stuff with electrolytes than water

00:44:42.840 if you're doing MDMA. So you drink as much as you want. You're not going to dilute your blood and get

00:44:46.900 hyponatremia. It's very, very rare that people will have these side effects. MDMA doesn't cause the

00:44:53.840 same kind of dissolution of ego that the classic psychedelics do. So generally people don't have

00:44:59.960 difficult experiences. However, there are people that have had traumas in the past or issues that

00:45:07.160 are emotional issues, even without traumas. Because MDMA reduces activity in the amygdala, reduces your

00:45:12.840 fear response to difficult emotions. A lot of times when people do take MDMA, difficult things come to

00:45:17.880 their awareness. And I've witnessed this in therapeutic settings where the tears of past

00:45:23.660 events just come out in a way that you could never imagine this happening otherwise. Yeah. I mean,

00:45:28.940 profound in ways that therapy, sometimes people are too scared to let it out, but MDMA helps them to do

00:45:34.420 that. And so people can have difficult experiences. One of the stories I told during my TED talk,

00:45:41.780 which we'll link to when it's out, was about a woman who I worked with in 1984 who had PTSD. And

00:45:48.300 she had taken MDMA, not in a therapeutic setting. And this violent sexual assault that had happened to

00:45:54.500 her years before came to the surface and intensified her suicidal feelings. And she actually checked

00:45:59.720 herself into a mental institution to protect herself from committing suicide after having taken MDMA.

00:46:05.820 And when she got out with the same old drugs that had been given to her before,

00:46:10.080 she was even more suicidal. And so a friend of hers, I didn't know her at the time,

00:46:15.120 contacted me about her. And so I started talking to her and agreed to work with her.

00:46:20.140 And under the influence of MDMA, and then also an MDMA LSD combination, she was able to overcome

00:46:25.480 her PTSD. So in 84 is when I learned about directly working with someone and seeing that MDMA could be

00:46:32.080 helpful for PTSD.

00:46:33.100 Was that, to your knowledge, Rick, the first time? I mean, first of all, were you guys referring to

00:46:38.160 the term PTSD? Was that a term that was widely understood in 84?

00:46:42.440 No. There was a lot of people that had-

00:46:44.400 I mean, clearly we'd seen it. I mean, all these poor guys coming back from Vietnam when you were

00:46:48.320 in college, beyond traumatized, but that term was not commonly used?

00:46:52.500 I'm not sure the actual history of the term PTSD. I think it was used somewhat, but people weren't as

00:46:58.300 aware of how much trauma impacts so many, many different people.

00:47:03.160 So at that moment in 84, really what you knew was, this is a woman who'd been traumatized,

00:47:07.900 for lack of a better word. And you saw the potential in this agent to, while on its own,

00:47:14.280 do something potentially dangerous in a controlled setting, you actually felt what? That she could

00:47:19.800 relive this experience and do so safely and process it? Talk me through what you were really

00:47:25.240 doing in 84 to understand that. Okay. So this woman's name is Marcella. So other people before

00:47:31.480 this, so I had been working with various people with MDMA before, both taking it myself and also

00:47:36.760 sometimes with people that had different issues and sometimes people just looking at, to communicate

00:47:41.640 others. I had spoken to a soldier who had been shot in the back and he told me under the influence

00:47:47.600 of MDMA that he was able to relax in certain ways so that the pain in his back went away to a large

00:47:53.900 degree, that sort of combination of the impact of the bullets, but also the fear connected to all

00:47:58.780 of that. This was a key turning point of my life. So I had been back to Esalen for a month long

00:48:02.980 workshop in the spring of 1984. And this was again with Stan and Christina Groff and it was called the

00:48:08.560 Spiritual Emergence Network. So there's a bunch of people that break down for different reasons

00:48:12.960 and different ways where people break down their path in life is not working for them. And often it

00:48:19.720 gets pathologized and people get tranquilized or they get hospitalized or different things.

00:48:24.800 But what Stan Groff and others were saying is that this can be a spiritual emergence. It can be seen

00:48:28.880 as a spiritual crisis that we're resisting. So it comes in dramatic ways, but the process of what's

00:48:35.180 trying to emerge is healthy. The process is, is not. So I had studied how to help people who were

00:48:40.640 struggling to integrate different, either spiritual experiences or psychological experiences that were

00:48:44.920 coming back as part of my effort to become a psychedelic therapist. And I was only home for about less

00:48:51.180 than a week when I got a call from this friend of mine who I actually had sold the MDMA to when it was

00:48:56.700 still legal. And he said that he and Marcella had done this together in a kind of a romantic

00:49:00.660 situation and that her past trauma had emerged. He wasn't aware of that and that she was now suicidal and

00:49:06.860 that whatever had been tried by traditional psychiatry, including the psychiatrist, the mental

00:49:12.000 institution that had not worked for her. She was suicidal, even worse. So I felt like I'm not

00:49:16.780 qualified. This is a terrifying situation, somebody being suicidal, but I didn't think that she had

00:49:22.840 any other options. She tried her best in traditional psychiatry. And I felt this is what I'm trying to do,

00:49:29.460 learn how to be a therapist, to work with this. And I felt somewhat responsible for having sold them

00:49:33.640 the MDMA. And so I agreed to talk to her. Talk to her on MDA or? Just talk to her on the phone.

00:49:38.360 So during the discussion, she explained what had happened. And I was saying that you'd taken this

00:49:43.520 MDMA in a situation where you weren't really anticipating that this would emerge or that you

00:49:49.320 would process this and that it made you destabilized and now you're suicidal. However, if we were to do

00:49:56.740 this in a therapeutic setting where you're not trying to be with someone, where you're able to focus on

00:50:02.540 this, the properties of MDMA may help you integrate it, may help you fully experience it, look at it,

00:50:09.080 come to peace with it. And I said that if she were willing to promise not to commit suicide while we

00:50:14.720 were working together, I would be willing to try to work with her. Even though I said I'm not a fully

00:50:20.020 trained therapist, this is something that I have been training to become. I just went through this

00:50:24.920 month-long training. And so I'd be willing to work with you. And I would get a group of my friends,

00:50:28.980 particularly female friends, to come and create a safe space around you. And you could come to my 0.96

00:50:33.700 house and work and we would work with you to try to help you integrate it. And so she agreed to do

00:50:38.760 that. And so we created this context. The first MDMA experience that she had turned out to be

00:50:46.740 like a tour of the traumatic experiences of her life. This violent rape and assault where she was

00:50:53.680 almost left for dead was not the only trauma that she had. There was a series of those other traumas that

00:50:58.640 she had kidnapped when she was young, different things. And she'd grown up in Colombia, South

00:51:02.920 America. So we got a tour of all of the various traumas in her life. And it was progress. A lot

00:51:09.440 of tears, a lot of processing. She didn't feel as hopeless, but it didn't feel like it had sort of

00:51:14.860 solved her problem. So I thought, let's switch to LSD for the next experience. And she agreed to do that.

00:51:21.340 Just to say that the first use of a psychedelic for treating PTSD was done by a Dutch psychiatrist,

00:51:28.120 Dr. Jan Bastians. And he had done this in the 50s, 60s, 70s. And he did LSD for what he called

00:51:34.040 concentration camp syndrome. So it was for people that were in the concentration camps,

00:51:38.780 traumatized by that. And that he had found that LSD would bring a lot of the memories back to the

00:51:43.000 surface. And then they could try to process them. But LSD doesn't really reduce the fear.

00:51:47.440 There's an Israeli Holocaust writer, Katsetnik, which was his concentration camp number,

00:51:52.900 and then his number, who wrote a book called Shaviti, A Vision, which is tremendous because

00:51:57.780 he went to get LSD therapy with Dr. Bastians. And this is a book about his therapy. And it was very

00:52:04.060 difficult. And a bunch of my Israeli relatives knew him and said that it helped him, but he was still

00:52:08.380 tormented a lot. So in any case, with Marcelo, we decided to switch to LSD. And so during the LSD

00:52:15.020 experience, a lot of these memories, again, resurfaced.

00:52:18.480 What amount of time was separated between them?

00:52:20.500 Two weeks. So it's really important to integrate the experience before you're ready to do it again.

00:52:25.720 So during the LSD experience, what happened was that she started having this vision of a double

00:52:31.420 sun. She was on a foreign planet, and there was a double sun, and she was baking to death. And it was

00:52:37.020 just terrifying to her. And she was stuck. She couldn't process it. It was just overwhelming fear.

00:52:42.180 And so I suggested that she take half a dose of MDMA. A full dose is like 125 milligrams,

00:52:48.220 so about 62 and a half. And I thought the MDMA would soften the LSD and might help her process it. 0.59

00:52:54.080 And it turned out that's what happened. And so once she took the MDMA, it condensed from this

00:52:58.940 symbolic foreign thing to actually her life, where after she was raped and beaten and thrown out of 0.83

00:53:06.260 the car and left under the sun, sort of way out to die. So it condensed. The MDMA helped it turn

00:53:12.740 into this experience that had actually happened to her. And then she was starting to able to share

00:53:18.540 that this person had been a date rape situation. And there were times where she was seeing me as

00:53:25.200 the rapist. My feet were turning into his feet. Then they turned back to my feet, different kind of 0.91

00:53:29.940 things. And so...

00:53:30.920 And you still had females there as well? 0.99

00:53:33.240 Not at this one time, but around her and before and after. But at this point, it was just her and I.

00:53:37.960 So I felt like I could take these projections onto me because that wasn't really me. And so she was

00:53:43.560 able to sort of clarify that she was seeing the world through her own distrust through what had

00:53:47.840 happened in the past. She wasn't sure what she could trust through her own filters. And then when

00:53:51.980 she could sort of feel more safe that it was me and not the rapist, at one point I asked her when I

00:53:56.600 realized it was date rape, I said, what did you like about this guy? And she immediately

00:54:00.540 vomited. And then she started sharing that he had liked animals. And so what she was able to do,

00:54:07.200 and one of the things that was making her suicidal was that she felt that she could never find love

00:54:11.680 again because she could never trust herself.

00:54:13.440 Yeah, I was just about to say, there's probably a piece of self-hatred, which is

00:54:16.740 at some level she made a decision to at least be with this guy in some capacity socially, right?

00:54:23.500 Or maybe they had a meal together or something. And it's like her judgment failed her is probably part

00:54:29.120 of this pain. Yeah, very much so. Yeah. It meant she could never trust herself. So how could she

00:54:33.300 find love? Because it could always turn into something like another date rape. But the fact 0.88

00:54:38.440 that she could go back and say, he liked animals. Okay, so now I could know that somebody else who

00:54:43.480 likes animals doesn't mean that I should automatically trust them. She was recovering her ability to be

00:54:48.100 discerning. You know, that's a really interesting story, Rick, because it illustrates something I don't

00:54:52.100 think I've ever thought of until you said it, which is that a woman who's been raped in that situation

00:54:57.180 has maybe an additional level of trauma that the equally tragic woman who gets yanked into the 0.99

00:55:05.040 alleyway by some stranger doesn't have, which is this sense of this loss of self-trust and maybe even

00:55:11.340 this sort of self-loathing of how could I have possibly let myself get into this situation?

00:55:15.880 Yeah, I think that's what made Marcella so suicidal, is that knowing that she led herself into this

00:55:21.760 in a way, or she had made some fundamental misjudgment, causing her to question everything

00:55:26.480 that she would then do in the future. And so I think once she was able to sort of say, yes,

00:55:31.600 he liked animals, but that's not a reason to automatically trust people, she was starting

00:55:35.700 to regain her discernment and regain her ability to feel hope that maybe she could go out and find love.

00:55:42.300 Were you afraid during this situation? I mean, I can't imagine what it would be like to

00:55:45.840 be flying by the seat of my pants in a situation like that. You're dealing with an incredibly

00:55:51.460 fragile woman who is broken and on the verge of something awful. And by your own admission, 0.99

00:55:59.620 you're not qualified to be doing this yet. But at the same time, there's no alternative,

00:56:04.500 it would seem, which puts you in a tough situation. I mean, how frightened were you?

00:56:08.760 Once she agreed not to commit suicide, that reduced my fear a lot. And then I did see progress from the

00:56:15.340 first MDMA experience and she did too. So that made it less scary. And also I've had my own

00:56:22.140 terrifying blockages with LSD where I reached places where I wasn't able to really make any

00:56:27.240 further progress, wasn't able to integrate it. So it was scary. But once I could see that the MDMA

00:56:33.400 was taking an effect, once it moved from something that she was just overwhelmed and then that she was

00:56:39.240 able to process it, then my fear went down. And then when I saw her throw up and- 0.60

00:56:42.960 It's almost like she was purging.

00:56:44.160 Yeah, very much. It was like this, I think, what did you like about him? The fact that she

00:56:47.720 immediately threw up, that was a clue that that was kind of part of the thing that was keeping her.

00:56:52.180 So this happened in 84?

00:56:53.500 This happened in 84. And that was the breakthrough. I mean, she didn't have any more sessions. We just

00:56:58.040 did two sessions. And then she felt able to also, this person had told her that if she ever talked

00:57:03.580 about what happened, he'd kill her. And so even though this was years before, the fact that she hadn't

00:57:08.140 been able to talk about it was prisoner in her own mind. And so being able to talk about it and see

00:57:14.060 that even though he was a continent away, the fear was still implanted in her, but that she could

00:57:19.580 overcome that, she could start talking about it was also freeing for her.

00:57:22.760 So a year later, you watch this molecule that you believe has incredible potential. You watch it get

00:57:31.940 scheduled as one and you realize it's only going to be more difficult for patients like this woman to

00:57:37.300 experience what she experienced. And at that moment in time, because one of the things that's so

00:57:43.200 impressive about the work you've done at MAPS is the, well, one, it's just been relentless. It's hard to,

00:57:50.320 as someone myself who has dabbled in the sort of nonprofit slash policy world only to immediately

00:57:57.520 realize like, this is not for me. It's the fortitude with which you can do it, but also it's sort of the

00:58:03.480 clarity of purpose. Now I want to make sure we talk about certain concepts like the breakthrough

00:58:09.100 therapy designation, which is such an important piece of this story. But before we get to that,

00:58:14.460 I guess what I want to ask you is in 1985, 1986, how much of what would transpire over the next 30

00:58:21.980 years was clear to you? In other words, how much of this strategy of we find an indication for which

00:58:28.000 it is crystal clear that this is valuable, the best indication would be one for which there is no

00:58:33.860 other therapy, hence this notion of breakthrough therapy. Did you think that that was going to be

00:58:38.720 PTSD? I mean, what were you thinking about? You hadn't even started at grad school.

00:58:42.400 Yeah, I was still an undergraduate. Yeah, because your PhD is basically geared towards getting you

00:58:46.400 ready to fight this fight. Yeah, I think when I look back on my life, it was really at this period

00:58:51.300 when I was 18 in 1972, when I felt like I might be going to jail for being a draft physician. I just

00:58:57.040 felt like the contribution I could make to the world, that this support from my family, this

00:59:02.020 multi-generational process that permitted me to look at deeper threats, that I was terrified of the

00:59:07.140 world and terrified of what happens and terrified of our own human potential for murder and genocide.

00:59:11.960 And that I felt that I had this rare gift from my family, this freedom to choose what I thought

00:59:17.540 would be the most strategic thing I could imagine, which was helping people to realize that we have

00:59:23.640 more in common than separate and that we're all part of one big family and that you shouldn't

00:59:28.480 dehumanize and kill. That that decision at age 18, now that I've recently in November turned 65,

00:59:34.980 it's always made sense. So I feel incredibly lucky and fortunate that something that I stumbled on at

00:59:39.940 age 18 still at this other period of my life still makes sense. And it has made sense continually.

00:59:45.660 And I've also thought that if not, but for an accident of birth, I could have been born earlier,

00:59:50.500 I could have been in the concentration camps, or I could have been sent off to Vietnam or incinerated

00:59:56.040 in nuclear warfare, that I always felt that whatever the struggles were that I was having,

01:00:01.420 were nothing compared to what a lot of struggles that other people had to go through.

01:00:05.620 And that this dream that I had of a Holocaust survivor telling me to be a psychedelic therapist, 0.63

01:00:11.340 that that's where the motivation came from, that I had this rare opportunity to try to work on

01:00:18.020 long-term threats that didn't have to directly lead to a job that didn't exist. So when I was 18,

01:00:23.340 I thought I would be an underground psychedelic therapist. The first day in the office of President

01:00:28.260 Carter, he pardoned all the draft resistors. So that started me starting to think that I could have

01:00:33.460 an above-ground career. But it's a far way from being pardoned as a draft resistor to

01:00:39.180 the legalization of psychedelics. Are you saying that that was just your first clue that the ice

01:00:46.140 was melting a little bit? I identified myself as a counterculture drug-using criminal. So at age 18,

01:00:51.260 that was my self-identity. Counterculture drug-using criminal. A little bit of the criminal part was

01:00:55.780 taken away. And then I thought I could sort of rejoin society in a certain way, but I was still

01:01:00.200 criminal from using psychedelics. Going to college was now in 82. Starting was now, psychedelics were

01:01:07.020 forefront, but they were always what I had been planning to in this 10-year period that I was

01:01:11.500 building houses and preparing for doing this. And then the transition of being politically involved

01:01:17.280 with a nonprofit in 84, and then starting MAPS in 86, that also changed my attitude. The fact that

01:01:24.460 there was a nonprofit that this friend had started, John Lambie, connected with Buckminster Fuller,

01:01:30.440 the Earth Metabolic Design Lab, I started realizing that that was part of the system,

01:01:34.360 this nonprofit, and that the system permits you to fight the system. So I was sort of outgrowing this

01:01:39.020 idea of myself as counterculture and seeing that you could work within and that there are opportunities

01:01:45.100 for reform from inside. And then the work with Marcella in 1984 and seeing her continually get

01:01:51.100 better over time. As the demonization of MDMA increased and as all of this NIDA, National Institute

01:01:58.060 on Drug Abuse funded research, started talking about MDMA neurotoxicity and all the concerns about

01:02:04.160 hyperthermia and hyponatremia and just the demonization of MDMA, the blocking of all MDMA research,

01:02:10.060 the whole part of that. The big transition for me, once MDMA was criminalized by the DEA on an emergency

01:02:15.340 basis, the judge in 86 said it should be Schedule 3. The DEA rejected those recommendations and then

01:02:20.960 we sued in the appeals court and we won twice in the appeals court. Both of the time, the appeals

01:02:24.860 court tends to tell agencies what you did is wrong. They don't normally say you should do this. They

01:02:30.580 just say what you did is wrong, go back and rethink it. Do they have authority to do anything other than

01:02:35.520 just make a formal position on what was done? Yeah. So for example, in school integration,

01:02:40.840 sometimes courts will take over school systems. Courts can actually compel. The appeals courts can

01:02:46.240 compel. But this is unbelievable. I mean, you have the DEA judge says make it Schedule 3 and then you

01:02:51.520 have two subsequent appeals saying that basically what the judge said they agreed with or what the

01:02:56.920 DEA did was incorrect. Yes, that's what they said. So the rationale for the DEA to reject the

01:03:01.900 recommendation, the first rationale was that the DEA said they didn't have the authority to reschedule.

01:03:06.340 Only the FDA did. The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 clearly says either the attorney general

01:03:11.600 or the HHS secretary either could reschedule to make the drug into a medicine. And the FDA sits

01:03:17.300 under which branch? HHS. HHS? Yeah. Which is where, yeah, okay. And the DEA sits under what? The

01:03:23.100 attorney general. The AG. And you're saying the Controlled Substances Act made it clear either had the

01:03:28.020 power to reschedule. So the DEA basically said, it's sort of ironic, they had the power to schedule,

01:03:33.280 but not reschedule, is what they're basically claiming. Yeah. So the DEA lawyers, as I've learned

01:03:38.240 over the decades, they don't really care if their arguments are flawed because they delay. So delay

01:03:44.720 is the same as victory to them. So if they put out a ruling that's wrong, it can take you years to go

01:03:50.400 through the appeals court. And so justice delayed is justice denied. So they don't care about their

01:03:55.420 arguments. They just want to delay. So the first argument they made was that they didn't have the

01:03:59.800 authority. So the appeals court said, yes, you do. Then they came up with an eight-part standard

01:04:05.480 that they said, you have to meet these standards in order for us to reschedule. To whom? The DEA

01:04:11.560 lawyers would then put a new ruling in the Federal Register justifying why they rejected the

01:04:16.920 administrative law judge's recommendation. And so their new rationale was, okay, here's our eight-part

01:04:22.120 standard. So then we appealed on that because that was essentially the same as FDA. And if the Congress

01:04:27.340 had wanted the FDA to be the only agency to reschedule, that would have been one thing.

01:04:32.260 But the fact that they gave the DEA the authority to do it, the DEA couldn't say, hey, it's exactly

01:04:36.340 the same thing as the FDA. Why didn't you at this point go to the FDA? Because the problem with the

01:04:40.660 DEA at this point is the cognitive dissonance is overwhelming. You're asking someone who's

01:04:44.760 done something to openly acknowledge what they've done was incorrect. So why not go to a new body?

01:04:49.460 Well, we were also going to the FDA, but the FDA was rejecting all the protocols.

01:04:53.780 So this was a period of time when the backlash against psychedelic research was so strong that

01:04:58.860 the FDA was rejecting every single protocol. And so we were trying to go to the FDA, but they

01:05:03.500 weren't responsive either. And so then the courts rejected this eight-part standard as being too

01:05:09.540 equivalent to the FDA. And then the DEA came up with a five-part standard, which the court accepted,

01:05:15.720 which is still essentially the FDA. You still need phase three studies. And so basically the DEA gave

01:05:21.180 away their authority to reschedule to the FDA because they didn't want to reschedule. They

01:05:25.080 wanted to schedule, but not reschedule. Is that pretty much how it stands today?

01:05:28.480 Yeah, the DEA is. But what's happened a few years ago is that Congress passed a law. It was always the

01:05:34.080 case that if FDA says a drug is a medicine, the DEA must reschedule, but they didn't have a time limit.

01:05:40.740 So now they have 90 days that they have to reschedule. So we had MDMA criminalized in 85,

01:05:48.300 kept that way. In 86, I start MAPS. And then I thought that I would go and get a clinical psych PhD.

01:05:55.040 So I graduated college in 87 with my Good Friday follow-up as my senior thesis. And because new

01:06:02.700 college didn't have any grades, I knew that to get into graduate school, I had to really study well

01:06:08.080 on the GREs. So I did great on the GREs. I had incredible recommendations from this professor

01:06:13.680 that had been head of the PhD program in psychology and social change at Harvard, who had retired in

01:06:18.400 Sarasota and who was my special teacher every semester. I had one class with him on psychedelics.

01:06:22.920 So in any case, I tried to get into clinical psych PhD programs and nobody would let me in because I

01:06:29.540 told them I want to do MDMA research. And I was saying, we can't do it now, but I don't want to spend

01:06:34.320 five years getting a PhD. And then I'm about to do my dissertation. And then you tell me you won't

01:06:38.060 let me do it. So I want to tell you what I want to do now. And if we get there and the system won't

01:06:42.860 let me do it, I'll do something else. It's very hard to get into clinical psych PhD programs,

01:06:47.080 but I came very close a couple of times in programs that had psychotherapy outcome research as their

01:06:52.720 specialties. And so I wasn't in the end able to get in. And so I was confused because since 1972

01:06:59.060 till now it was 1988 that I had been on this track for clinical psych PhD, learn how to do

01:07:05.320 psychotherapy outcome research with psychedelics. So I went home after the last rejection, I said,

01:07:10.860 I'm going to figure out what I need to do with my life. And so I decided to smoke marijuana and think

01:07:14.420 about it. And marijuana gives me a way to think about things from a different perspective. I'll

01:07:19.020 be trapped in a box. And so I had this realization that I want too much too soon, that I want to do the

01:07:24.940 science, but the politics is in the way. And so I'm leaping over. The culture isn't ready. I want too much

01:07:31.580 too soon. And so I thought, okay, if I want to do the science, but the politics is in the way,

01:07:37.060 maybe I have to study the politics. And I remembered reading an interview in Harper's Magazine with

01:07:42.900 several people talking about drug policy. And one of them was a professor at Harvard at the Kennedy

01:07:47.140 School of Government, Mark Kleiman. And they talked about our lawsuit against the DEA. I wasn't even aware

01:07:52.180 of public policy schools or the Kennedy School of Government, but I remember that he had mentioned

01:07:56.980 our lawsuit. So I called him up and I said, I want to study the politics. I can't do the research I want

01:08:02.780 to do. I can't do the education I want. So would you be my mentor? And he said, if you can get into the

01:08:08.380 Kennedy School, I would be glad to be your mentor. And so I applied and I managed to get in. I was sort of the

01:08:14.460 token left-wing hippie of the year at Kennedy School. And so that also started changing who I thought I was.

01:08:20.780 And now I'm even more becoming part of the system rather than becoming part of the counterculture.

01:08:26.360 Now I'm at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and people are planning careers in the

01:08:30.240 federal government. And so what they had was there was a program called the Presidential Management

01:08:34.860 Internship. It's now the Presidential Management Fellowship. And so it's for people that want

01:08:38.680 careers in the federal government. It's a competitive situation. Federal employees watch you as you do

01:08:44.300 group exercises. There's all sorts of essays and things. And so I managed to, it was at the same time

01:08:49.320 that the Native American church was having a Supreme Court case about whether peyote would be

01:08:54.160 protected by religious freedom. So that was my essay. I was able to write an essay about a Supreme

01:08:58.440 Court case, but it happened to be about psychedelics. And so I managed to get a Presidential Management

01:09:02.240 Internship. And then I tried to get a job at the FDA. I figured I want to work at the FDA.

01:09:07.340 And coincidentally, in 1990 is when I got my master's and when I was applying for this job at the FDA.

01:09:15.000 The group that regulated psychedelics switched in 1990 to a new group. So the group that had blocked

01:09:21.000 research basically for two decades was now out of the picture and a new group took over. And my

01:09:25.940 application ended up with this new group. It was called the Pilot Drug Evaluation Staff.

01:09:30.940 They were there in response to the AIDS epidemic where the FDA had been criticized for being too slow

01:09:34.880 to approve drugs. This was a group that was going to review new ways to approve drugs and faster.

01:09:39.900 And so they were looking around to the FDA, to other parts of the FDA, which groups had drugs that

01:09:45.060 they didn't care about that they could take over. So they'd have real life examples. And the Schedule

01:09:48.920 I drugs had been blocked by Paul Lieber, who was this guy in charge of the division that took care

01:09:53.360 of Schedule I drugs. And so he gave them up to this Pilot Drug Evaluation Staff. My application ended up

01:09:58.560 with them. And we went through about a six-month process of review whether I would be able to get this

01:10:03.120 FDA job, including interviews with the number two guy, Carl Peck, who was in charge of all drug

01:10:07.900 research at FDA. And the FDA decided that they would hire me. It was great. I was really excited.

01:10:13.080 I was willing to give up doing drugs. I was willing to wear a suit and dye and do all this stuff to go

01:10:18.000 work into the FDA for a couple of years, learn how they work, and then come back and run maps and try

01:10:22.860 to make MDMA into medicine. But at the last minute, right before I got hired, the DEA told the FDA that

01:10:28.080 they would refuse to work with me because I'd sued them before. And this is the branch of the FDA that

01:10:32.380 works with Schedule Drugs that deals with the DEA. So the FDA said that I couldn't be hired.

01:10:36.660 But they would work with me informally.

01:10:40.000 It's hard to be listening to this story and have a lot of empathy for the DEA. I'm trying to sort of

01:10:45.120 put my DEA hat on and sort of say, look, these are good people. They're doing their job. They believe

01:10:50.380 that they're doing the right thing. But they really come across as a petty bunch of, I don't know what

01:10:54.660 the right word is, but just sort of intellectually not particularly curious, not especially thoughtful.

01:11:02.160 I mean, to say we're not going to work with this guy just strikes me as a bit petty.

01:11:05.480 Oh, extremely. Yeah.

01:11:07.300 And then shunning responsibility, deciding, well, we're going to schedule something,

01:11:10.980 but we don't want to deschedule it. But my guess is if anybody's able to

01:11:14.080 muster up some empathy for the DEA at the same time, it's also you. Nothing about you resonates

01:11:18.540 this disdain for them. It's more of a, gosh, I wish I could help them see what I see and what I've

01:11:25.480 seen and the potential benefit of this.

01:11:28.020 Yeah. And what has really changed is I have started having some sympathy for the police

01:11:32.320 and how difficult their job is. And so actually we have a senior retired DEA official who is now

01:11:38.400 acting as a consultant for us. The reason is because his son went into the military and has PTSD

01:11:43.580 and uses cannabis for his PTSD. So that changed the father's mind. And actually October of last year,

01:11:51.440 2018, this fellow, Tony Colson, former from the DEA, arranged for us to give a talk at the

01:11:56.500 International Association of Chiefs of Police. So it's a convention that was all over the world.

01:12:00.960 It was 10,000 police chiefs and police officers. And so we actually had a veteran, one of our therapists,

01:12:06.840 me and our DEA consultants speak. And what's so exciting for me, what happened there is that it was

01:12:12.040 such a politically ripe environment for President Trump that two days before we were supposed to speak,

01:12:17.180 he decided he would speak there. And they scheduled his talk at the same time as ours.

01:12:20.600 Almost everybody went to his talk. But 30 people came to our talk, including a psychologist who works

01:12:26.300 for the police, a police officer who helps other police with psychological issues. And he said that

01:12:31.540 at the end of our talk, he wanted to go through our training and he has. And so next week I'm meeting

01:12:36.700 with, he's actually from the Boston area. So I'm meeting with his police chiefs about having police

01:12:41.180 with trauma volunteer for our study. That was a big step for me is trying to have sympathy for the

01:12:46.460 police. And what's also ironic is that my sister, I'm the oldest of four, I have two brothers and a

01:12:51.540 sister. Both brothers have done MDMA, but my sister will never do a drug. She's very conservative in 0.97

01:12:57.020 that way. Her son, her oldest son, Nathaniel, my nephew is now a police officer in Washington, DC. So I

01:13:03.760 have a police officer in the family. So all these us and them kind of barriers are dissolving. And in

01:13:09.680 December of 2017, we had a meeting with the police, with the DEA headquarters. And it was to talk

01:13:15.580 about what's called expanded access, which is compassionate use of MDMA and all sorts of

01:13:19.800 people are going to want to do that. And they're also going to need these DEA schedule and licenses.

01:13:23.900 So we had a meeting with the DEA to talk about that with our consultant again, to prepare them

01:13:28.420 for all these licenses. And they said that they would do that. One thing happened that was so

01:13:32.380 personally meaningful is that you can't go to DEA without an escort. When they take you into the

01:13:37.960 building, they don't want you to see somebody's desk or whatever. So we had an escort. So we're in this

01:13:42.660 elevator with the escort. And we're going up to the fourth floor to where our meeting is. And for

01:13:48.500 whatever reason, it's only our team and this escort. And the door opens on the second floor,

01:13:54.260 the elevator door. Nobody got in, nobody got out. We didn't press number two. But for whatever reason,

01:13:58.760 the door opens on the second floor, closes, and then we go up to our meeting. And our DEA consultant

01:14:04.000 whispers to me that the second floor is where the courtroom is. So I was previously in that building

01:14:09.160 in 2005, suing the DEA, not on MDMA, but on another lawsuit for marijuana, trying to get a

01:14:15.140 license to grow marijuana. So it felt like the door opened on the past conflict that we had with the

01:14:20.640 DEA and then closed. We noticed it, but nobody else noticed it. And then we went up to have a

01:14:25.180 cooperative meeting about how we could work together with the DEA. And the one part of the meeting that

01:14:29.600 went flat, everything was really good. They're willing to give all these licenses. I just said to them,

01:14:34.260 if any of you have DEA officials or officers that you know that have trauma that are in cities where

01:14:39.840 we have studies, they can volunteer for our project. And nobody smiled, nobody offered, but I just wanted

01:14:44.960 them to know that this is for them too, that I did have that level of compassion for them. And I knew

01:14:50.360 it would be awkward for me to say it, but I felt like I had to say that, that this is for them too.

01:14:54.520 And now I understand more and more about how police are traumatized. So this notion of, I don't know how

01:15:00.120 to explain it. There's a really nice video you guys made. It's a maps video. It's like maybe 10

01:15:03.980 minutes long. It can't be that old because Sasha died how many years ago? Oh, quite a few. Like

01:15:09.380 2014 maybe? Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what year. It was that year because at the end of the video,

01:15:13.840 it notes that he died about four months after the filming. Like I said, it's maybe 10 minutes long,

01:15:19.040 but there were many survivors in it talking about their experiences with MDMA. And it's very moving.

01:15:26.420 Do you know the video I'm talking about? We'll find this one and we'll link to it, but it's worth

01:15:29.700 someone who either doesn't have experience with PTSD, trauma, MDMA to maybe pause for a moment

01:15:35.400 and watch that and get a sense of what it is that you saw in 1984 that kind of created an eternal

01:15:43.340 flame inside of you that said, look, until every person who has experienced trauma or is suffering

01:15:49.420 from PTSD, at least has the opportunity to experience this type of therapy. I'm not really

01:15:53.840 going to stop. That's sort of what I sense in how you talk about this.

01:15:57.300 Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I mean, even if I'd never discovered MDMA, I would have tried to

01:16:01.800 legitimize LSD and the classic psychedelics. But seeing that there was a softer, gentler way

01:16:07.040 of working with MDMA, I feel that it's very rare that people who work on social justice movements

01:16:14.460 live to see the change that they're working for. Because a lot of these things are multi-generational.

01:16:19.600 If you think about- Yeah, civil rights or end of slavery. Yes, of course.

01:16:23.520 Yeah. I think that through an accident of history, I was born just at the right time so that there was

01:16:28.840 this backlash that I was able to see for psychedelics, for classic psychedelics, then this backlash

01:16:33.180 against MDMA. But now I might actually live to see the medicalization of psychedelics. And that would

01:16:40.160 be an arc of a life contained. It'd be incredible.

01:16:44.140 When did you guys receive the breakthrough therapy designation?

01:16:47.480 Started maps in 86. So from 86 to 92, we had five different protocols all rejected by the FDA.

01:16:55.960 And again, just for the listener to understand what we're talking about, you are proposing to the FDA

01:17:00.600 clinical trials that would necessitate the FDA to create an exemption for the use of a Schedule I

01:17:07.440 drug. It's a big deal.

01:17:08.740 Yes. And DEA would also have to approve it as well. And institutional review boards or ethics committees.

01:17:13.840 And then in California, that's the only state that actually has an additional review body for

01:17:18.920 scheduled drugs. So it is a lot of regulatory affairs. And I did learn a lot about it in the

01:17:23.580 Kennedy School, how to work through it. But so in 92, the group at the FDA that regulated psychedelics

01:17:29.920 switched, and that group decided to put psychedelics on a track for science. So from 92, we got permission

01:17:36.640 for the phase one safety study, the first dose response phase one safety study. That took us till about 96.

01:17:42.460 Wow. I just want to pause for a second. That's 10 years of your life. And you spent six of them just getting

01:17:49.580 rejected, being told you're not even allowed to play the game, get off the field. Then you spend four years

01:17:57.140 demonstrating what you pretty much know is already true, which is at a given range of doses, there's no

01:18:04.420 toxicity to this drug. But of course, that is a hoop you must jump through, understandably.

01:18:09.020 Yeah, we had to do that. And then the doctor that I was working with, Charlie Grobe.

01:18:13.340 Sorry, one other technical question. At any point in here, did you have to file an IND?

01:18:18.080 All the protocols that were rejected were INDs. Yeah.

01:18:20.900 Maybe explain to folks what that is and why that matters.

01:18:23.220 IND stands for Investigational New Drug. It's the formal application to do research with a drug to try to make it

01:18:30.420 into a medicine. Before that, actually in 1985, even before MAPS, I funded through this first

01:18:36.480 nonprofit, animal studies, 28-day animal toxicity studies in the dog and the rat. So that was a

01:18:43.120 requirement to do phase one or phase two research. You have to have certain animal toxicity studies.

01:18:47.980 So I did that already. We had our MDMA manufactured by Dave Nichols at Purdue University in 1985.

01:18:54.560 We're still using some of that today, 34 years later. Incredible, stable molecule. We've had new

01:19:01.000 MDMA made for phase three and for commercial uses if we succeed. But it took till around 96 to get the

01:19:07.860 safety study done. And then Charlie Grobe, the psychiatrist that we were working with, we were

01:19:11.600 proposing a study on cancer patients with anxiety. I knew about PTSD, but there was such a concern about

01:19:17.680 neurotoxicity, which was vastly exaggerated.

01:19:21.260 Yeah, the other thing that people talked about a lot was Parkinsonian-like symptoms.

01:19:24.800 My recollection is a lot of that research, quote-unquote research, has been quite debunked.

01:19:28.780 Is that the case?

01:19:29.360 A hundred percent debunked. Because it turns out that the only claims of Parkinson's were, again,

01:19:33.660 from George Riccardi and Una McCann, these researchers that were at Johns Hopkins, funded by NIDA.

01:19:39.900 And they claimed, well, from the middle 80s to near the end of the 90s, they were focused on MDMA

01:19:47.020 supposedly hurting the serotonin system and causing functional consequences of a serious nature so

01:19:53.440 that nobody should even ever get MDMA even once. It was so serious. One dose, functional brain damage,

01:19:59.340 stay away from it completely, shouldn't even be researched.

01:20:01.820 I was taught that in medical school. In 97, taking pharmacology, it was, this is a drug that

01:20:06.840 can permanently alter your serotonin receptors.

01:20:09.600 Yeah, totally not true. But we started challenging that. So actually, George Riccardi was,

01:20:14.780 my first alliance was, so I recognized that in the 60s, there was an exaggeration of the risks by

01:20:20.200 the prohibitionists and a denial of research and a denial of the benefits. But the advocates like

01:20:26.420 Leary were exaggerating the benefits and-

01:20:29.180 Both sides were doing the same thing.

01:20:31.400 So I felt that MAPS had to be the expert on the benefits and on the risks, that we had to be

01:20:35.960 reliable. People had to rely on our risk estimates. And so once I started working with MAPS in 86,

01:20:43.240 my first alliance for six years basically was with George Riccardi, the expert funded by NIDA to look

01:20:49.980 at the risks of MDMA. And so I funded his first monkeys to move from rats to monkeys.

01:20:56.080 So this is a real team of rivals.

01:20:58.000 Oh, yeah.

01:20:58.540 You are funding the person who is being sponsored by your opponent and basically suggesting things

01:21:07.540 that you believe are untrue. Now, presumably, you don't believe that there's any fraud in this.

01:21:11.540 It comes to that. So with George Riccardi, so first off was, I thought, okay, we're scientists.

01:21:16.500 We want to find out what's really going on. I'm very interested in what's really going on. What

01:21:21.080 are the risks? I'm taking the drugs. I should know myself. Everybody should know. And we got as far as

01:21:25.720 we could with the animals. And in the primates, we found out what was called the no effect level

01:21:31.520 for neurotoxicity. No as in N-O.

01:21:35.260 Yeah. So it's N-O-E-L, no L. So no effect level. So it turns out that five milligrams per kilogram

01:21:42.140 in a primate given every two weeks for four months. So eight exposures every two weeks. And

01:21:49.140 at five milligrams per kilogram, there was some nerve terminal degeneration in the primate. At two and a

01:21:55.560 half milligrams per kilogram, there was no nerve terminal degeneration. So again, I should say that

01:22:01.340 there may be changes, but changes are not necessarily bad. I mean, our brains are constantly

01:22:05.620 changing. And in fact, when you have therapy with MDMA, you have a reduction overall before and after

01:22:10.640 in activity in the amygdala. So certain things are definitely changing, which can be good.

01:22:15.760 What were the changes that occurred phenotypically at the five milligram per kilogram?

01:22:20.060 Well, there's never a cell death. It's just nerve terminals degenerate.

01:22:24.260 Did that manifest itself in any cognitive deficit or behavioral deficit?

01:22:28.360 No. The claim was that the only functional consequences that could be identified in ecstasy

01:22:33.920 users were neurocognitive consequences, supposedly memory. However, we've since done studies. A member

01:22:40.240 of MAPS contacted me to say that methodologically, all these studies that were done in ecstasy users

01:22:46.140 were methodologically confounded because these users had done all sorts of other

01:22:50.040 drugs. So how do you say what's from MDMA? And also there's no pre and post. It's only

01:22:55.200 retrospective compared to supposedly controlled groups. So this guy said, I have the solution

01:23:00.360 that there's a group of people that have done only MDMA and you need to study them. And so we're

01:23:05.340 right here right now, just about a mile from McLean Hospital, which is more psychiatric research.

01:23:10.120 It's part of Harvard Medical School, more psychiatric research done there than any other private

01:23:13.480 institution in America. And there's some people there that are experts in neurocognitive studies.

01:23:18.080 And so I told them, MAPS will give you a grant. There's this group of people. So we gave them a

01:23:22.660 $15,000 grant. It turns out they're fallen Mormons. The study took place in Salt Lake City. A bunch of 0.98

01:23:28.700 Mormons who had never done coffee, never done tobacco, never done marijuana, never done alcohol, 0.72

01:23:33.300 but had done ecstasy because it wasn't formally prohibited. And so this population did exist. So

01:23:39.260 they went and did a pilot study. Then they prepared the data and they submitted it to NIDA. And they got a

01:23:44.980 $1.8 million grant to a major study of people who'd only used ecstasy and they found virtually

01:23:50.280 nothing. There really is no strong evidence, no weak evidence even really about neurocognitive

01:23:55.600 consequences in heavy ecstasy users. And we've done neurocognitive studies in our people in our

01:24:00.380 therapy studies who only get MDMA a few times. There's no evidence whatsoever. So with George

01:24:05.460 Riccardi though, after we found the, he didn't publish the 2.5 milligram, he published the five

01:24:10.740 milligram per kilogram where there was some evidence of nerve terminal degeneration, but he didn't

01:24:16.360 publish the 2.5 milligram per kilogram. So I started thinking, this is not so much about science

01:24:20.500 anymore. There is a political agenda, but then I went to him and I said, I don't feel hurt. How can

01:24:25.420 you go even further? And he said, well, the only thing we can do now is spinal taps. So I said, all

01:24:29.880 right, I will volunteer for a spinal tap. And so it didn't hurt that much. It was terrible.

01:24:34.340 At that point in time, how often had you been at or above the five mg per kg dose?

01:24:39.200 I had never really been above it, but most people had not been above it. So I basically said, I'll be

01:24:45.200 your guinea pig. So I got a spinal tap and I thought about it as if women could give birth, I could give 0.94

01:24:49.740 birth to my spinal fluid for my purpose. And once it wasn't so bad, then I got over 30 people to

01:24:55.340 volunteer for spinal taps, which were done initially at Stanford and then at Hopkins. So all of this is

01:24:59.980 to say that it didn't seem like there was any harm to dopamine. It was still all focused on serotonin.

01:25:04.440 It didn't seem like there was much evidence that there was any problems with our serotonin

01:25:07.520 either. You only get serotonin metabolites in the spinal fluid. But what then happened was that

01:25:13.380 the escalating fears of the rave movement. And so the serotonin hypothesis of MDMA causing

01:25:19.620 serious problems, it started being challenged more and more by other scientists, by people at the CDC

01:25:25.480 Center for Disease Control. So their neuroscientists started challenging this exaggerated risk estimates

01:25:30.960 of serotonin. And so then what happened with George Riccardi and Una McCann is they realized,

01:25:36.880 this is in the end of the 90s, that the serotonin damage theories that they were using to try to block

01:25:41.760 research was getting increasingly dubious and challenged. Plus, more and more people had been

01:25:46.780 doing MDMA for decades and still seem fine. They published an article in Science that claimed that

01:25:52.760 MDMA hurt dopamine and would potentially cause Parkinson's. And that was outrageous because the

01:25:58.860 spinal tap studies didn't show any evidence of harm on dopamine. Other studies had not shown any harm

01:26:03.560 on dopamine. They were just searching and they killed a bunch of the animals, died during their

01:26:07.660 experiments. But this was published in Science. Yeah, I was just about to say, how did Science publish

01:26:11.960 that? There must have been something they saw. Alan Leshner, who was the head of NIDA, later left NIDA.

01:26:18.500 He built it up. He pandered to Congress. He scared them about MDMA and other drugs. He increased the

01:26:23.460 budget of NIDA up to over a billion dollars a year. And then he left to become the president of the

01:26:28.340 AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes Science. Yeah. So that

01:26:33.040 former head of NIDA, who was the main patron of George Riccardi. Which is a real shame. I mean,

01:26:37.400 people listening to this might not appreciate the significance of what you just said, but

01:26:40.180 science and nature are the two most high impact journals in the entire field of science. So in

01:26:47.200 other words, most scientists will go their entire career and not even have the ability to submit an

01:26:53.080 article to one of those journals, let alone have an article be accepted in one of those journals.

01:26:58.340 I don't believe there is an equivalent outside of science in terms of what the prestige it would

01:27:03.400 mean to have your work published in that journal. So it is certainly troubling to hear that, not

01:27:07.520 surprising of course, but it's not the first time I've heard these stories, but I think for the

01:27:11.120 listener to understand what the implication is, this isn't the National Enquirer.

01:27:15.040 Right. And then there was an editorial in Science that talked about MDMA as being Russian roulette

01:27:20.020 for your brain by Alan Leshner. And this study though, that was published in Science, actually just why

01:27:26.080 a couple of weeks ago, this paper in Nature about MDMA positively causing neurogenesis and

01:27:31.080 oxytocin release. And well, that's why that's so significant.

01:27:33.920 Yeah, exactly. Now you have Nature and Science being on book ends of this interesting story,

01:27:38.160 this arc.

01:27:38.800 Michael Mithover and I and others of our lead psychiatrists and I, we wrote a letter to

01:27:41.960 science and we said that the letter to the other, this doesn't make sense, this paper to us,

01:27:45.340 you've killed a bunch of animals. Other animals have not died in experiments. You didn't give the

01:27:50.160 animals the MDMA orally in the way that people normally take it. There's all this evidence that MDMA

01:27:54.860 doesn't hurt, don't mean. Nobody we know has Parkinson's. And so we challenged them. And so

01:27:58.960 what we didn't know then is that they spent a year trying to replicate their results. So our letter did

01:28:04.000 get published in Science, our critical letter. But this whole year, they kept defending their studies

01:28:09.260 in the media. But we later found out that they were having increasing problems in replicating their

01:28:15.200 results. And they later, out of frustration, after they couldn't replicate their results, took some of

01:28:20.820 the animals that had died, did a tissue analysis and had discovered that they had given the animals

01:28:25.700 methamphetamine instead of MDMA. It's a slight mistake. It's just a slight,

01:28:31.080 subtle, subtle difference. Yeah. And so they should never have published that paper because they

01:28:37.160 should have known that- Did they print a retraction?

01:28:39.040 They did. They had to retract it. That was 2004, end of 2003, 2004. So that was sort of the high

01:28:44.980 watermark of the fear and paranoia about MDMA neurotoxicity. Okay. So that relates to that's

01:28:50.700 when we got the first approval for our first PTSD study. So Charlie Grove, after we finished the safety

01:28:57.220 study, he started getting worried about MDMA being so identified with ecstasy and the wave movement and

01:29:03.820 neurotoxicity. So from a procedural standpoint, you have your IND filed. You've now documented through

01:29:09.760 phase one that this is not toxic. More importantly, you're not just winning that battle there. More

01:29:16.500 broadly, the scientific community is now realizing, actually, this is not a toxic compound whatsoever.

01:29:23.000 But in some ways, that's just the end of chapter one. Chapter two is, great, you have a safe compound.

01:29:29.140 Now, what is the indication? What will be the medically valid use for this compound?

01:29:34.140 Yeah. We had thought initially MDMA for cancer patients with anxiety because cancer patients would die

01:29:39.460 and they wouldn't live long enough to supposedly show the effects of neurotoxicity. But Charlie,

01:29:44.780 who I was going to work with on this, he decided that MDMA was too controversial and he wanted to

01:29:49.460 switch to psilocybin. So that started the whole work with psilocybin with cancer patients. I knew from

01:29:54.440 84, working with Marcella, and just by the way, Marcella is now one of our lead therapists training other

01:29:59.360 therapists. She later became a therapist. So it was a tremendous success in her life. So I returned to

01:30:05.180 PTSD. And Michael Mithofer, who's our lead psychiatrist, came to me in 2000 at a conference,

01:30:11.540 the first conference ever on ayahuasca in America, organized by Ralph Metzner in San Francisco.

01:30:16.460 And he was a member of MAPS, but I didn't know him. And he'd also been trained in the holotropic

01:30:20.960 breathwork by Stan Groff, which I'm also trained in. So it's hyperventilation to bring out experiences

01:30:26.360 that are sort of like LSD or psilocybin. So Michael came to me in 2000, and he said,

01:30:31.360 I want to work with you on creating an offshore clinic somewhere in the world.

01:30:36.260 Was there any developed country in the world, or any country for that matter,

01:30:39.140 for which MDMA wasn't scheduled? Because usually what happens is once the US schedules,

01:30:42.880 other countries follow suit.

01:30:44.260 Yeah. So very briefly, in 85, when we were suing the DEA, we became aware the DEA was trying to

01:30:51.460 criminalize MDMA internationally through the World Health Organization, the international

01:30:55.320 treaties. That's where I went back to Robert Mueller and said, can you help set up meetings?

01:31:00.340 And just for the listener, because I know you've brought Robert Mueller up again,

01:31:02.800 this has no bearing. It's a different name, Mueller. Yeah, yeah. This is spelled M-U-L-L-E-R.

01:31:07.060 Yeah. And he was the assistant secretary general. And so he helped me set up meetings at the World

01:31:11.400 Health Organization in Geneva. So I went to Geneva in 85 and brought information there to slow down the

01:31:16.700 DEA criminalizing internationally. And in some incredible coincidence, the head of that committee,

01:31:21.960 the expert outside committee was Paul Groff, Stan Groff's brother. And the committee endorsed the

01:31:26.980 criminalization of MDMA, except for one person, Paul. And he got a little footnote in there saying

01:31:32.240 that this was an important compound. He was worried that the criminalization internationally would

01:31:36.100 reduce research and they encouraged the nations of the world to facilitate research, which led to the

01:31:41.320 Swiss government from 88 to 91 permitting people to do compassionate use of MDMA and LSD. But when

01:31:47.680 Michael came to me and said, so there's no place in the world because it did get criminalized

01:31:51.400 internationally. But Michael had been in St. Kitts where there was a clinic that was set up for

01:31:56.560 Ibogaine. Ibogaine is something that I very much want to research. It's for opiate addiction. We're in

01:32:01.480 the massive crisis for opiate addiction. Ibogaine helps people through the withdrawals and it can give

01:32:07.220 them spiritual experiences and brings up what they've repressed. So it can be very, very helpful in both

01:32:12.280 going through withdrawal and also in reducing relapse. And it's illegal in the United States,

01:32:17.120 but legal in Canada, Mexico, multiple places. So Michael had a patient of his gone to St. Kitts

01:32:23.000 and he went with, and so he came to me and said, let's set up a clinic. Maybe we can find some place

01:32:27.460 where there's MDMA or LSD where you could set up a clinic. And I said, I'm totally a hundred percent

01:32:31.740 not interested in doing that. Because it sort of undercuts what you're doing at MAPS. It's sort of

01:32:36.200 like saying, again, there's so many moments in your story, Rick, where I'm sort of struck by the

01:32:40.420 maturity of the hippie. It's like, you're way smarter than anybody else. I wouldn't have had

01:32:47.080 the foresight to have, you just played the long game at every moment. And I just, I want to applaud

01:32:52.080 you for that as someone who I just know personally, I just wouldn't have had the discipline or the

01:32:57.220 foresight to have played that long game over and over and over again, which was, this is about the

01:33:02.620 highest integrity at the policy level. This is about the highest integrity at the scientific level.

01:33:07.140 And it's a hard decision because along the way, fewer people had access to something that you

01:33:13.900 felt very strongly could help them. But it was one of those examples of if it means that a few

01:33:20.120 hundred people or a few thousand people are denied this opportunity today, as much as that's

01:33:24.800 heartbreaking, this could mean millions of people can one day have access to this. And we won't sort

01:33:29.780 of taint or undermine the rigor with which we get them there. Yeah. Yeah. And I've always had people

01:33:35.020 in the back of my mind from the Holocaust saying, if we don't bring this forward and mainstream it,

01:33:41.660 we could have another situation. We have the rise of authoritarianism, the rise of hatred for the

01:33:47.260 immigrants. And we have a lot of that going on right now, we can see. And so that just is further

01:33:51.960 motivation for me to try to mainstream it. Even that's where the compassion for the police comes

01:33:56.720 in. It's for them as well. And so I said, Michael, I'm totally not interested in setting up

01:34:01.900 offshore clinic, but I think first off, there's no place. But secondly, it's about going to the

01:34:06.380 heart of the system and making change happen from the inside out. Yeah. And your fight is here. Your

01:34:10.660 fight is in DC. Yeah, exactly. And then the U S is one of our most successful exports has been the

01:34:16.060 drug war. And so other countries look around at us. If the U S is changing, then the drug war will

01:34:22.040 erode all over them. So I said, Michael, I think that now is the time we can work with the FDA. Would

01:34:27.060 you work with me? And he was an expert in PTSD. And I'm like, fantastic. Cause PTSD is the next

01:34:31.420 thing. And now that we don't have to worry about people saying, Oh, neurotoxicity, PTSD became the

01:34:36.300 number one thing, the top priority. And Michael said, yes. Yeah. Before we leave the toxicity and

01:34:41.320 start talking about the efficacy, I just want to ask based on everything you know today, which patients

01:34:45.480 would not be good candidates for MDMA from a safety perspective? Are there some patients that we would

01:34:50.060 still say today? Cause you know, look, any drug we can say ibuprofen shouldn't be taken with by

01:34:55.000 certain patients. Tylenol shouldn't be taken by certain patients either over the counter who in your mind is

01:34:59.240 not a good candidate for MDMA therapy. The most important thing is people with compromised hearts 0.99

01:35:03.700 so that MDMA increases blood pressure, not overwhelmingly, not substantially, but significantly

01:35:09.880 I could show you, but we work with people that have controlled hypertension, people that have had

01:35:14.380 uncontrolled hypertension and only recently got it controlled. We'll say you need to do a stress test,

01:35:19.340 but of all the tens of millions of doses of MDMA that are being used every year in the world,

01:35:23.600 there's almost nobody ever has a heart attack. Almost nobody really. I mean,

01:35:27.260 there's hardly any cases like that. So, but still that's the concern. When people are on a lot of

01:35:32.400 other psychiatric medications, we ask them all to taper off of them. The SSRIs blunt the effects of

01:35:37.940 MDMA. There's a remote chance that MDMA could trigger a seizure. Also that seems to almost never

01:35:44.900 happen, but so we will not at least initially work with people who are epileptic. I notice in the

01:35:50.500 documentaries, the patients in the study have blood pressure cuffs on. Yeah. We have to monitor blood

01:35:55.560 pressure and temperature. We exclude people that are psychotic. We exclude people with schizophrenia,

01:36:01.480 although I think MDMA could be very helpful with schizophrenia, but it needs a different container

01:36:05.880 because we basically do outpatient. I mean, they come in for the MDMA session, which is done under

01:36:11.340 supervision. They spend the night after the MDMA session and then they get more integrative

01:36:15.820 psychotherapy the next day, but then they go home. So if somebody was schizophrenic, we would want

01:36:20.880 more of a, they need a longer containment window. Yeah. Bipolar. I don't think MDMA is likely to be

01:36:26.460 helpful for people with bipolar. My brother is bipolar and he's tried MDMA and it's, he had a good

01:36:31.660 day, but it made him slightly manic and it didn't change things on a long-term basis. Let's talk about

01:36:37.240 that actually, which is I've experienced MDMA in both settings. I've experienced MDMA in the setting of

01:36:43.640 you're listening to music, you're having fun, you're, you're out and about around other people.

01:36:47.120 I've also experienced it in a very therapeutic setting and they're very different. It's so

01:36:51.000 interesting that the same molecule could have such a different effect based on the term that gets

01:36:57.580 used so often, the set and the setting, the intention and the way it's done. And I'm trying

01:37:02.620 to think of the best way to explain to people the difference, because I suspect there are people

01:37:06.520 listening to this who have experienced MDMA vis-a-vis ecstasy, Molly at a party or something

01:37:10.720 like that, and can certainly speak to how you feel wonderful on it. But what we've been talking

01:37:15.300 about is very different. What we've been talking about is, is very emotional. Anytime I've used it

01:37:19.720 in this sort of therapeutic setting, it's, I mean, it's endless rivers of tears and it requires a lot

01:37:26.820 of processing afterwards. It requires further discussion, journaling, these sorts of things.

01:37:33.180 What is it about creating that setting with that intention, ideally with a therapist and with this

01:37:39.820 sort of follow through that transforms something that is arguably one of the most feel-good drugs

01:37:45.880 at a party into a drug that is healing the deepest emotional wounds that people have?

01:37:52.180 I think it's the intent and it's whether your focus is external or internal. So the best way to

01:37:58.840 understand these things, they're just tools and they're not inherently therapeutic or inherently

01:38:04.180 recreational or inherently dangerous or inherently safe. These are tools and how they're used makes

01:38:10.880 all the difference. So when you take it at a party and you're externally focused and you're dancing and

01:38:16.540 you're talking to other people, people still process a lot of important stuff and people have insights and

01:38:22.900 can make therapeutic process. Even in recreational settings, they feel connected to this whole group.

01:38:28.280 They feel less isolated. A lot of good can come from recreational settings, but in general,

01:38:33.380 people who use it in a recreational setting say they want to have the good slice of experiences and

01:38:38.600 if something is difficult or painful, that's not what they're looking for. The thing about MDMA

01:38:43.380 that's different from the classic psychedelics is you can negotiate with the content a little bit.

01:38:48.020 By the way, I feel that is completely true, Rick. I mean, psilocybin and ayahuasca are beautiful

01:38:52.920 and powerful tools, but I have never for a second in using them felt like I had even a modicum of

01:39:00.240 direction. I mean, I've never done bullfighting, but when you watch it on TV where these guys are

01:39:04.120 on the bull and they got the little taser on the bull's nuts and that that's what it feels like to

01:39:08.680 be on those agents at high enough doses, which is there's probably something important to be

01:39:13.200 gleaned here, but I have no idea where it's going. I have no idea what's going to come up and I have at

01:39:19.780 least personally had no ability to steer it even if it starts going in a bad direction.

01:39:24.420 Yeah, the essence of doing the classic psychedelics is the art of surrender.

01:39:28.540 It's the ego dissolution and that's exactly the difference that gives them their power, but also

01:39:34.360 to me there's just a finer therapeutic line.

01:39:37.400 Yeah, very much so. And that's where, like where we talked about with Marcella, she got stuck with

01:39:41.600 LSD. She couldn't control it. She couldn't turn elsewhere. It just was so powerful emergence and she

01:39:46.700 couldn't handle it. So there's a way in which what differentiates sort of a good rep from a bad rep

01:39:52.620 is this resistance. So what we like to say is difficult is not the same as bad. If you have

01:39:58.180 difficult material, but you're not resisting it, you can learn from it, you can grow from it,

01:40:01.800 but it's the resistance that freezes it in place and causes friction and is painful. But it's very

01:40:07.220 difficult, if not impossible, to negotiate with the classic psychedelics. But with MDMA you can so that

01:40:13.620 people can say to some extent, this is material that I don't want to deal with now and then you're

01:40:18.400 out or focused and you're not processing that. And I think unless there's a real safe setting,

01:40:23.800 people are going to say that, that they don't want to deal with it because it is frightening.

01:40:27.000 So the therapeutic context where you're focused inward and you're open to whatever emerges,

01:40:32.940 even difficult things, that's where the MDMA can be very, very uniquely and remarkably helpful

01:40:39.540 coming to a different relationship with these painful experiences that have happened in the past.

01:40:44.120 So I think if many of the people that are in our study, not, I'd say most of them have never done

01:40:48.340 MDMA before, but some of them have. And those that have say that it was so different in a recreational

01:40:52.960 setting as in a therapeutic setting. And so this idea of welcoming the conflict instead of trying to

01:40:59.120 just have the slice, the happy slice is what makes it a difference. And so from 1999, 2000 to 2016 is when

01:41:07.520 we did what's called the phase two pilot studies. How many such studies were done?

01:41:11.580 We did six different studies in Israel, Canada, Switzerland, and the United States. And the

01:41:17.080 purpose of pilot studies is to prepare for phase three. The whole purpose of phase two is to prepare

01:41:23.200 for phase three.

01:41:23.880 Which is to show efficacy.

01:41:25.380 Phase three is to show large scale studies to show safety and efficacy. Phase two is to figure out

01:41:30.920 who is your patient population? What are your doses? What is your-

01:41:34.360 What's your indication?

01:41:35.380 Yeah. What are the people that you exclude and include? And so that's where we did a whole series of

01:41:40.740 studies with different patient populations. So basically from 1986 when I started MAPS to November

01:41:45.820 29, 2016, it was 30 years of getting ready. We had what's called an end of phase two meeting. And that's

01:41:53.840 where the FDA said, yes, we could go to phase three.

01:41:56.000 And is that when the designation of breakthrough therapy was given or was that later?

01:41:59.500 No. So what happens is once you end up getting permission to go to phase three, most pharmaceutical

01:42:04.780 companies go to phase three. But there's a program called special protocol assessment where you can

01:42:10.540 voluntarily engage with FDA where you negotiate every aspect of the phase three design plus all

01:42:16.040 the other information that they want to see. And if you come to agreement, you get an agreement letter

01:42:21.120 that means that the FDA is legally bound to approve the drug if you get statistically significant

01:42:26.860 evidence of efficacy using this design and if no new safety problems come up.

01:42:30.880 Since MDMA is unlike any other drug that the FDA has ever studied because tens of millions of people

01:42:36.240 have taken it for multiple decades, we have all this information about the safety risk.

01:42:40.560 We're pretty comfortable. There's still going to be no new safety things. So we went through this

01:42:45.140 whole process of special protocol assessment and then we applied for breakthrough therapy. So we got

01:42:50.500 special protocol assessment and then a couple of weeks later we got breakthrough therapy.

01:42:54.220 And tell people what that means in a sentence or two.

01:42:56.400 Breakthrough therapy designation is for the most promising drugs. And if you get this

01:43:00.540 breakthrough therapy designation, the FDA partners with you to try to make it into a medicine.

01:43:04.960 So you have shorter review timelines, more meetings with FDA.

01:43:08.480 And this is pegged to an indication. In this case, because the indication of PTSD has no other option

01:43:13.860 that is appearing to have any medical efficacy.

01:43:16.000 Well, there are two drugs that are approved by the FDA for PTSD, Zoloft and Paxil. And both of those

01:43:20.740 are SSRIs that diminish symptoms, don't solve the problem, and don't work in many, many people.

01:43:26.500 So it's the absence of other treatments, a large group of treatment-resistant people,

01:43:32.060 and breakthrough therapy we were able to get. So it's the most important program that the FDA has.

01:43:36.560 And that was the sign that now we had reached this place of legitimacy 30 years after we had

01:43:42.940 started MAPS.

01:43:43.640 Has the FDA ever encountered another situation that you're bringing, which is you're not presumably

01:43:48.140 just trying to seek legalization for a molecule that's going to be dispensed at a pharmacy,

01:43:52.020 but it's tied to a therapy. So how does the FDA think about what you're actually doing,

01:43:57.980 which is administering a therapeutic protocol, not just a medication?

01:44:01.460 It's new for the FDA. Yeah, they've never approved a drug therapy combination.

01:44:05.380 And that is what they're being asked to do now?

01:44:07.080 Yeah. However, there have been some drugs that have special risks that they approve certain kind of

01:44:12.620 educational programs that are required. So the best example there is thalidomide.

01:44:17.000 So the only person from the FDA that ever won the Presidential Medal of Honor

01:44:21.840 was Frances Kelsey. And she was the one in the early 60s that blocked thalidomide from becoming

01:44:27.380 a medicine in the U.S. It was used for morning sickness, it caused all these birth defects.

01:44:31.780 Years later, decades later, thalidomide became a medicine. It's useful for leprosy and some other

01:44:37.320 kinds of cancers. And so the FDA developed a whole set of policy tools that they require

01:44:42.820 a patient registry. Everybody who gets thalidomide is on a registry to see if there's any birth defects.

01:44:47.780 There's requirements of education for the pharmacist, for the patient, for the prescriber.

01:44:52.940 And so this has evolved into what's called the REMS, the Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies,

01:44:57.740 that the FDA can now regulate different drugs according to their unique risks.

01:45:02.880 So there's never been a drug therapy combination approved by FDA, but there have been drugs where

01:45:08.880 they've had different kinds of REMS to control the risks and have required certain kind of

01:45:13.680 policies. So the FDA is actually learning from and with us about how to regulate psychotherapy,

01:45:19.040 which they don't actually have the authority to regulate psychotherapy. But we've came to them and

01:45:23.160 said, the only people that we think should be directly treating patients if this drug is approved is

01:45:30.160 people that have learned the therapy as well as the drug. And so that's what the FDA has agreed so

01:45:34.900 that everybody who will be prescribing it and will be treating patients has to go through our training

01:45:40.340 program. So there's one phase three study that has multi-sites, I'm assuming? There'll be two.

01:45:45.380 There'll be two phase three studies, each 100 persons. Depending on the effect size, we think that

01:45:50.940 probably hopefully it'll be each only 100 persons each. And we've enrolled 19 of the first 100.

01:45:56.100 I've read that you think that this could be approved as soon as 2021.

01:46:01.520 Yeah, the end of 2021, we think. But what people should also know is that because there's so many

01:46:06.740 people with PTSD in America, and because we're only going to enroll hopefully 200 people,

01:46:11.420 the FDA has a program called Expanded Access, which is compassionate use.

01:46:15.700 Yeah, tell me about how that works.

01:46:17.380 If you have a disease that nothing has helped for you, and there's a drug being studied for that

01:46:22.760 disease, and if the pharmaceutical company agrees, they will set up this compassionate use program

01:46:27.980 where you can have access to the drug before it's approved while phase three is still going on.

01:46:33.560 So your therapist gets a special designation from the FDA and the DEA to possess and use this

01:46:40.120 not yet approved agent with you?

01:46:41.880 Sort of. Because it's a controlled substance, only physicians will be able to get schedule one licenses

01:46:46.980 to work. So there'll be therapists working with physicians or the physicians will be.

01:46:50.740 But there's an overarching protocol that we negotiate with FDA. It's different than phase

01:46:55.740 three, because first off, people have to accept the risk, and they have to pay for it themselves,

01:47:00.380 because the FDA doesn't use the data to approve it. So the pharmaceutical company isn't going to

01:47:04.900 pay to have all these people treated. So the protocol can also be riskier patients. So we can let people

01:47:11.900 in who, let's say, we're talking now about certain kind of diabetes. For excessive caution,

01:47:17.460 we exclude people with diabetes, even though loads of people with diabetes have done MDMA,

01:47:21.100 but we can let people with diabetes in expanded access.

01:47:23.680 What's the concern with patients with diabetes?

01:47:25.380 Some sort of vascular problems, and maybe they...

01:47:28.200 Oh, but it doesn't alter blood sugar?

01:47:29.840 No, it's not directly about that. It's more about a stroke or something like that. We are training now

01:47:34.420 people for expanded access already, and that was the meetings we had with DEA and FDA.

01:47:38.960 How long is that if I, for example, wanted to... I mean, I'm not a psychiatrist, nor am I a therapist

01:47:43.920 in any way, shape, or form. Is it even possible for just a regular Joe Blow to become certified?

01:47:50.720 Yes, it is. We have training programs. We're the only ones now with the training programs,

01:47:55.320 but our model is a male-female co-therapy team, and one of them needs to be licensed as a therapist 0.99

01:48:00.700 or a psychiatrist, but the other one doesn't. It can be a student getting a license,

01:48:05.360 can be a nurse, can be a social worker, can be somebody without a license. So what we're saying

01:48:10.940 is that the two-person team works better than one person. It's not twice as good, but most people

01:48:17.180 that are traumatized don't develop PTSD. Those that do tend to have a history of trauma before them,

01:48:23.080 often going to childhood and attachment disorders. And so having a well-functioning male-female team

01:48:28.520 as people go through their traumas can recreate sort of a loving kind of a situation that they didn't

01:48:34.720 have when they were young. But we don't want to make it so that it's twice as expensive.

01:48:38.700 So the idea will eventually be one person licensed therapist, the other is a student

01:48:42.580 working for free to get their hours or working for lower cost or something like that.

01:48:48.080 And so we are now opening up the training to people that will set up expanded access sites.

01:48:52.980 And the ideal cities where we don't have phase three sites or cities where we do have phase three

01:48:59.600 sites, but where there's a lot of people that have PTSD. So to get into expanded

01:49:04.640 access, you have to have treatment resistant PTSD. It means nothing else worked for you,

01:49:08.920 but people can have less severe PTSD. So psychedelic clinics are going to be opening up

01:49:13.560 throughout America at the end of this year. Someone listening to this who has PTSD does

01:49:16.920 not have to wait until 2021 necessarily. Their best option is one, identify a place where there's

01:49:24.400 an ongoing phase three trial. You may be a candidate for it. And I assume there's no placebo. Does

01:49:28.860 that mean that everybody in it will be treated?

01:49:30.880 Well, in phase three, there has to be a placebo. It's a controlled study.

01:49:35.440 So when you randomize, there's a chance you'll get the therapy without the...

01:49:38.160 Yeah. You either get therapy without MDMA or therapy with active MDMA. However,

01:49:41.940 everybody that gets randomized to the control group, once the study is over...

01:49:46.600 They can cross over.

01:49:47.400 ...for free. So everybody is offered. In the expanded access,

01:49:50.500 because you're paying for it, there is no control group.

01:49:52.860 Yeah. Because I get asked this question all the time, Rick, even by patients and by people who

01:49:56.980 know of my interest in this, which is how long do I have to wait? And it sounds like the answer is

01:50:00.820 not as long as you thought, really. In theory, this year, you can find compassionate use exemption.

01:50:06.440 Yeah, I think so. I think the other part, though, to say is that in our phase two pilot studies,

01:50:11.260 23% of the people that got the therapy without active MDMA no longer had PTSD two months after the

01:50:17.860 last experimental session. So that's actually pretty good in people that are severe treatment

01:50:22.400 resistant chronic. So I'd like to encourage people, if they are thinking about it, to volunteer for

01:50:28.180 phase three. You will get therapy, which can be very effective. And then in the end, you'll get MDMA.

01:50:33.260 But there is a bit of a sacrifice in a sense that you...

01:50:36.740 You have to wait, potentially.

01:50:37.760 You have to wait. But we need that. So if phase three starts slowing down,

01:50:42.340 FDA is going to shut down expanded access. I just want to add that the psychedelic clinics that 1.00

01:50:46.480 we're going to open for expanded access, people are also being cross-trained for ketamine.

01:50:50.880 And eventually, these clinics will work with psilocybin. So the long-term vision is that

01:50:55.780 these psychedelic clinics that we're opening initially become places where people can go

01:51:00.420 for therapy for MDMA or ketamine or psilocybin. But eventually, we hope that they become sites

01:51:05.520 of initiation where people who don't have a clinical diagnosis can go for psychedelic therapy

01:51:10.360 for personal growth or for couples therapy or for a mystical experience. And then if it goes well

01:51:16.780 in your first experience with LSD or MDMA or psilocybin, then you get a license

01:51:20.800 to go buy it and do it on your own. So the future is a system of licensed legalization

01:51:26.780 where people have access outside of religion and outside of medicine, but that there's also these

01:51:31.860 opportunities for medical use that insurance would pay for if you have certain diagnoses.

01:51:37.680 Psilocybin is sort of on the heels of MDMA.

01:51:39.860 Yeah.

01:51:40.040 Where do you see LSD in this? How far down the line?

01:51:42.840 It all depends on resources. I mean, LSD, so we're anticipating that it's somewhere in the

01:51:47.900 neighborhood of $40 million to make a psychedelic drug into a medicine.

01:51:51.520 That's about what you will have spent to go from your phase one to three on MDMA?

01:51:56.060 In the history of MAPS, we spent another $10 million on the phase two studies. We've spent loads

01:52:01.040 of money on a lot of the political work trying to get permission. So that isn't going to be necessary

01:52:05.200 anymore. So if some of these billionaires out there that have the resources, if they wanted

01:52:10.920 to make LSD into a medicine.

01:52:12.700 What you've done is created a playbook. I mean, in many ways, MDMA is far and away the biggest lift

01:52:18.000 because you had to do everything from soup to nuts, including the advocacy. Assuming MDMA is approved

01:52:24.660 in 2021, there is now a playbook for how to do this with other agents. And psilocybin, of course,

01:52:30.120 is right on the heels. The last thing I would say is I would encourage anybody who's listening to

01:52:34.040 this, whose curiosity has been piqued to watch a documentary called A Trip of Compassion, which

01:52:39.340 is, I hadn't heard of it actually until Tim Ferriss told me about it. I think he had just come back

01:52:43.780 from Israel, but I can't remember if he had seen it before.

01:52:45.460 He saw it in Israel.

01:52:46.360 He saw it in Israel.

01:52:47.500 It's hard to watch. There's just no doubt about it. It's very moving, but I think it's important.

01:52:51.340 I think if you're listening to this and you're still a bit unclear about what Peter and Rick have

01:52:55.160 been talking about, you invest an hour and a half in watching this documentary, just search

01:53:00.660 Trip of Compassion and you'll find it and you can stream it for five bucks or something. I can't

01:53:05.160 think of many better uses of an hour and a half of your time. And I still maintain to this day,

01:53:10.800 though this I acknowledge is a slightly hyperbolic statement. I'm not convinced that there is a

01:53:15.640 man-made molecule that is more important than MDMA. Again, it's hard to imagine a world with conflict

01:53:22.360 if everybody had the opportunity to experience this drug.

01:53:25.520 In a supportive setting?

01:53:26.560 Through the lens of, we didn't talk that much about it, but I think it becomes clear when people

01:53:31.020 will watch this stuff. This ability to feel another person's pain is also very powerful.

01:53:36.060 And I think that's a big part of what helps the trauma victim is that someone else can feel that

01:53:41.340 pain with them. They know that the person with them feels what they're going through. And that

01:53:46.480 in and of itself begins the process of alleviation. That sounds hoity-toity. And if you haven't

01:53:51.120 experienced it, I apologize. You will not know what I'm talking about and that's okay.

01:53:55.620 Yeah. The Trip of Compassion is about three of our Israeli PTSD patients in our Israeli studies. So

01:54:00.720 much of it is in Hebrew. Some of it is in English, but it has English subtitles. And it's three

01:54:06.180 different kinds of stories too. So you really get to see about how MDMA works.

01:54:11.080 Sexual abuse. It's an explosion, like sort of terrorist violence. And what was the third? 0.88

01:54:16.320 The third was kidnapping.

01:54:17.560 That's right. The kidnapping. Yes, yes.

01:54:19.100 It's very powerful. And some of it too is where people are explaining what happened to them in a

01:54:23.700 peaceful way. But others, you can see how trauma is trapped in the body too. So a lot of it is people

01:54:28.720 shaking and just letting out the fears that they had sort of suppressed in their body. So there's a

01:54:33.480 book by Bessel van der Kolk, who's a psychiatrist, PTSD expert called The Body Keeps the Score.

01:54:38.740 Yes.

01:54:39.320 And so Bessel is actually the principal investigator of our Boston site. And so we're working with the

01:54:43.900 leading PTSD researchers and all over the world. And I think that MDMA will make a major,

01:54:49.040 major contribution towards healing PTSD. And also why I think it's so important and why I think you

01:54:54.900 may have mentioned that as well is that it also heals multi-generational trauma, that we have

01:55:00.000 conflicts that are passed on through epigenetics from generation to generation, and they can keep

01:55:05.820 conflicts going for thousands of years. We can break those cycles within one generation, within one

01:55:10.600 session sometimes. I think that's the real hope is how can we move from this weight of trauma that has

01:55:17.300 been plaguing humanity for thousands of years and our murderous nature. And how do we evolve from that

01:55:23.040 to appreciate the other rather than being scared by the other and to not have to define ourselves by

01:55:27.940 who we're not, but how we're all more connected and celebrate differences rather than be scared of

01:55:33.040 them.

01:55:34.160 Hey, just as a reminder, this was technically the end of my interview with Rick. However, as I mentioned in

01:55:39.720 the intro, we moved the first 75 minutes or so, and we bumped it to what you are about to hear

01:55:46.700 now. This section dives really deep into Rick's background, his motivation for doing what he's

01:55:52.500 doing, and basically what shaped Rick into becoming the complete and utter force of nature that he is.

01:55:58.120 Hope you enjoy.

01:56:00.180 You dropped out of college and there was a bit of a hiatus there. What year was that?

01:56:04.440 Well, I started college in 71 and dropped out in 72. And when I dropped out, I had this really

01:56:11.220 important exchange with my parents where I said basically that I wanted to drop out of college.

01:56:17.020 I wanted to study LSD and become an LSD therapist and bring back psychedelic research. And I wanted

01:56:23.000 them to pay for it. They were initially shocked. I would say I'm the oldest of four kids. So I was

01:56:28.640 the first one out of the nest. And then here I am at college. And within a few months, I'm taking LSD

01:56:35.100 and deciding to drop out. So, but what I ended up explaining to them was that they were very open

01:56:42.140 minded in different ways. And I felt that what I learned from LSD, that I was unbalanced intellectually

01:56:49.260 and emotionally. I was overdeveloped intellectually and underdeveloped emotionally and spiritually.

01:56:54.520 And the world I felt was the same. Albert Einstein said that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

01:57:00.540 And so I felt that this was at a time of the height of the Cold War and not that long after the Cuban 0.66

01:57:06.420 missile crisis and this whole concern that we had this nuclear technology that we might not be able

01:57:11.480 to handle as humans, mutual assured destruction, and that the world felt at risk. And so I felt that

01:57:19.720 this imbalance that was in me that was also in the world and this ability of LSD to help me emotionally

01:57:27.280 and spiritually. To explain a little bit more, I was a draft resister to Vietnam. So this was during a

01:57:33.100 period of time when I anticipated going to jail. I did a lot of study of nonviolent resistance. So I

01:57:38.460 read Tolstoy and Thoreau and Emerson and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and a lot about that. And so I felt

01:57:45.340 that I was not a pacifist. And so to be a conscientious objector to Vietnam, you had to be a pacifist.

01:57:53.200 I was planning to go to college and there's college deferments, but I felt like that wasn't really

01:57:58.620 the proper kind of way to protest. And I felt like running to Canada was the wrong idea.

01:58:05.140 I felt that it was important to directly confront the draft and to suffer the consequences. So what I

01:58:11.740 felt was the best strategic approach was to not register for the draft at all, to drain the system

01:58:17.720 of the most energy, to make them come after me. What I didn't realize is that the system itself

01:58:24.520 wasn't as omnipotent as I thought it was. And roughly, I learned later, 60,000 people or so

01:58:30.280 never registered for the draft. And so absolutely nothing happened to me. That later became a moral

01:58:36.260 dilemma. Like, do I need to tell the draft board that I didn't register so they would come and put me

01:58:41.460 in jail? But at this point, I had discovered LSD and was seeing that this move beyond ego, this sense

01:58:48.960 of spiritual connection, the sense of oneness, the sense of unity, struck me as having incredible

01:58:55.100 political implications. And that's a lot of what I think was going on during the 60s, is that the

01:59:00.900 common narrative looking back is that psychedelics gone wrong is what caused the backlash. People took

01:59:06.340 it unprepared. They had psychotic episodes. They committed suicide. They jumped out of windows.

01:59:10.760 They did all these things. And therefore, the drug war was to help prevent drug abuse. When

01:59:16.460 actually, what I think happened more was that psychedelics went right. People had these experiences

01:59:22.860 of going beyond their ego, going beyond their different ways that they identified themselves

01:59:28.300 by their country, their religion, their gender, their race, their socioeconomic status, all these other

01:59:33.680 ways that we define ourselves and divide ourselves. And that by having that fundamental connection to the

01:59:39.880 earth, to the planet, to everybody, that that would be an antidote towards genocide, towards tribalism,

01:59:47.620 fundamentalism, towards fear of the other. And so I thought that at a time where the world could go up in

01:59:56.260 nuclear explosions, and earlier, I had been traumatized by learning about the Holocaust. So I was born in 0.84

02:00:03.640 1953. And I have loads of Israeli relatives who fought in the 48 war, been there for a long time,

02:00:08.940 I had distant relatives killed in the Holocaust. My grandfather came from Poland in 1920. And so his

02:00:15.600 family was left behind. My other relatives came a generation before. And I grew up in a town called

02:00:21.120 Skokie, Illinois. And I thought everybody was Jewish, everybody in my family knew was Jewish. But I was six

02:00:26.940 years old. And it's kind of a family story about when I learned that the whole world wasn't Jewish. And then it 0.88

02:00:31.540 was just a tiny, tiny fraction. And I was like, what if they're right? What if we're going to hell, and Jesus

02:00:35.980 is the only way? But it made me feel like this tiny, tiny minority. And then the more that I learned about

02:00:41.140 the Holocaust, I just had to wrestle with that level of magnitude of human cruelty. But I was protected by 1.00

02:00:49.240 this incredible loving family. And at the same time, I realized I've had almost all the possible ways to

02:00:55.020 feel safe. So I was born in America at the peak of American power. And I sort of bought into this

02:01:00.640 American exceptionalism. I was also a male, I was also the first born male child. And I was also

02:01:07.720 my family, my dad was a doctor, my mother was a teacher, but my mother's father was an industrialist

02:01:14.180 and had made a big success in business. And so we were economically secure. And I was Jewish part of

02:01:19.980 the chosen people. So I had every kind of thing to think about that I was safe and protected. Plus,

02:01:25.200 when we were 12, we moved to a town called Winnetka, which was further north, wealthier town,

02:01:32.140 and people were leading different businesses and government. Donald Rumsfeld lived across the street.

02:01:38.480 And so I was, I guess, just thinking that I had the ability to make an influence on the world.

02:01:44.540 And that safety gave me, I think, the sense of capacity in a way to look at bigger threats without

02:01:51.680 being terrified. I also knew as I was growing up that my grandfather had created this trust for all

02:01:58.380 of his grandchildren. By today's standards, it wasn't that much, but it was enough that I would

02:02:04.040 be able to pay for food and shelter. And so that meant that I didn't need to compromise with what I

02:02:09.540 would do with my life. I didn't have to find a job for survival. I could find a job for whatever I

02:02:15.680 thought was most important. And so there was also a period of time where I was just wrestling with

02:02:21.720 this, the cruelty of the Holocaust. And then as a young boy, being in school during the Cuban

02:02:28.940 missile crisis and being told that you can hide under your desk and you might survive. And so it

02:02:34.000 was the Germans were the ones doing it to the Jews. Now it's the Russians doing it to the Americans. 0.84

02:02:38.100 Then it was the Vietnam War, my own country doing things. And I got to know Daniel Ellsberg. And at one

02:02:44.380 point, he talked about how he realized that initially that he thought we were on the wrong

02:02:49.460 side of the war in Vietnam. And then he realized we were the wrong side. That sort of sense of the

02:02:55.980 world being crazy in peril. And now my own country is wanting to send me to kill people or be killed 0.99

02:03:01.140 for dubious reasons. And then I became this draft resistor and struggling with what do I do with my

02:03:07.760 life? And so I felt that I was the product of three or four generations where the third and fourth

02:03:15.340 generation, my great grandparents and my grandparents, their job was survival. They left poor

02:03:19.640 from pogroms, from Russia and Poland. They landed in America. Then they made financial successes.

02:03:26.280 And then I had the ability to look at deeper threats. So I interpreted this freedom that I had

02:03:31.840 to survive, to buy food and shelter as a charge, as a gift from generations before for me to look at

02:03:39.800 deeper threats. And that became the threat of nuclear annihilation or, again, threats of future

02:03:46.980 prejudice. And so I was just very much of a reader in high school and started reading Jung and thinking

02:03:53.420 a lot about Herman Hesse and kind of spirituality. And I looked at what was going on in the 60s. I

02:03:59.480 initially believed all the propaganda, that LSD was terrible, that it would cause chromosome damage,

02:04:05.100 that it would make you crazy if you did it a certain numbers of times. But the more I

02:04:10.200 wised up, the more I realized that I had been fed a lot of propaganda. I actually was studying Russian

02:04:16.880 to learn about the other. My parents sent me to Russia after my junior year of high school. So I

02:04:21.880 spent the summer in Russia learning the language. That would have been unusual, right, in the late 60s

02:04:25.980 for an American to go to Russia. It was incredible. It was 1970. It was with 60 high 0.98

02:04:31.440 school students. And we went to Samarkand in Tashkent. People there had never seen Americans

02:04:35.540 and ones that spoke Russian. It was just an incredible eye-opener for me to see the other.

02:04:41.960 At one point where we were outside of Leningrad for most of the time, for six weeks, they were

02:04:46.860 learning the language. I went for a walk with a Russian girl down the beach. And I just thought,

02:04:51.340 wow, you're not this devil. You're not a monster. You're just a person. And then I started realizing

02:04:55.800 that these are conflicts between countries, but the people aren't really necessarily hating each

02:04:59.980 other. Political systems, political leaders in conflict. But I did want to study the other.

02:05:05.780 And so I was in my Russian class in my senior year of high school. And a friend of mine knew I

02:05:11.540 loved books. And he gave me a book to read. I love this book. And I turned it back to him. And I said,

02:05:16.900 this is one of the best books I've ever read. And he said, do you know that this author wrote some of

02:05:20.500 this book while he was under the influence of LSD? And I'm like, that's not possible. LSD, you can't

02:05:25.900 produce. It makes you crazy. And he assured me that that was true. And so I looked into it more.

02:05:32.060 It was one for Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey. And it turned out he had written some of it while

02:05:37.060 it was under LSD. So that's what really was the key turning point as far as me opening my eyes to LSD.

02:05:43.760 And then when I ended up at college, it was a new college in Sarasota, Florida. It was an experimental

02:05:49.260 college that had started in the 60s. And it was designed as kind of an antidote to traditional

02:05:55.160 education. So the fundamental principle was that the student's curiosity is the most important thing.

02:06:00.260 I.M. Pei, the architect, had designed the buildings. It was on the Ringling Brothers grounds,

02:06:05.980 the Ringling Circus grounds, because that's where they wintered in Sarasota. And it had no grades.

02:06:12.180 It had written evaluations. It was very small classes, independent study, a lot. Everybody had to do a

02:06:18.460 senior thesis. But when I got to this college, this is before I had done LSD, there was two things that

02:06:24.280 they didn't put in the brochure that I didn't expect, but that both I was incredibly grateful

02:06:29.000 for. One was that they had this tradition of all-night dances under the stars with psychedelics.

02:06:36.120 And they had a tradition of people doing psychedelics individually for personal growth.

02:06:40.560 At the time, the average dose of LSD was 250 micrograms, so that you would go for an existential

02:06:46.600 experience beyond verbal communication abilities. And that was the standard dose. Now it's around

02:06:53.120 one-fourth or one-third of that dose is the standard dose. Because a lot of people got into

02:06:57.740 trouble, and it was too much for them. But they had this tradition of welcoming psychedelic use,

02:07:02.780 and it was brilliant people from all over the place. The other tradition that they had was surprising.

02:07:08.160 There was a woman professor, Marian Hoppen, who had studied directly with Jung. And she had married

02:07:14.220 someone who was quite wealthy. And the school didn't have a lot of facilities. And so they donated

02:07:19.560 an Olympic-sized swimming pool outdoors to the school. And for whatever reason, it turned into

02:07:24.680 a nudist colony. So I was a super shy guy in high school. For two years, I couldn't even speak to a girl

02:07:31.240 other than my mother and my sister. I was just too shy. I just couldn't even do it. Now here I'm sitting

02:07:36.200 at this pool with all these beautiful naked girls. And it felt somehow like this was an oasis of sanity, 0.89

02:07:43.120 that this college had created this place where we could be bringing things up from the underground,

02:07:49.220 from suppressed things. So sexuality, physicality, psychedelics, they were welcome. The campus police

02:07:55.820 job was to protect us from the real police. They had two sets of room notes where people were living.

02:08:01.640 There was one where the rooms that you were assigned, the other where the rooms where you really were

02:08:05.140 living. And so they would permit guys and girls to live together on campus. And it was just this

02:08:09.480 oasis of sanity in a crazy world. And then I started deciding to do psychedelics. And so my first

02:08:15.160 experience really, it was difficult because I wasn't very fluid emotionally, but it touched certain

02:08:20.380 parts of my psyche that I felt that my bar mitzvah had failed to touch. I thought the traditional

02:08:27.000 rites of passage didn't work for me. I was left hungry and wanting more and didn't feel a spiritual

02:08:33.640 connection. And so I felt that the psychedelics really had a big potential there. And then I was

02:08:39.720 reading the Whole Earth Catalog by Stephen Brand. And in it, they had this advertisement or this review

02:08:46.240 actually up for a book. And the book was by John Lilly. And it was called Programming and Metaprogramming

02:08:51.900 in the Human Biocomputer. And it was about the research that he did in the 50s, funded by the Navy,

02:08:57.980 where he developed the flotation tank. And then he started doing LSD in the tank and trying to

02:09:03.420 understand his mind as if it was a biocomputer, trying to really understand. I mean, we know

02:09:08.140 enormous amounts now about how specialized different brain regions are, but they didn't really know that

02:09:12.340 much back then. So this was an incredible book about LSD to go into the unconscious. And at the same

02:09:17.840 time that this was happening, this was 71 and 72, this was after the backlash against the 60s. So the

02:09:24.960 idealism of the 60s, the spiritually motivated move towards the start of a lot of movements had

02:09:32.020 backlashed and had failed. And a lot of it was because of the flaws of the advocates, not just

02:09:39.020 the evil system trying to squash everything, which was going on too. But there was also this sense that

02:09:44.000 counterculture had failed. People talk about the 70s as the me decade, but I think a lot of it was about

02:09:48.120 this, where did we go wrong? That our own instrument was flawed. So I felt like this deep work

02:09:54.900 was necessary to kind of purify and to refine so that when we try to bring this back again,

02:10:01.740 that it's mainstreamed and not rejected. I started doing flotation tank, sort of. We tried to create

02:10:08.560 our own sensory isolation experiments with gloves and eye shades and different things. We didn't

02:10:13.940 actually have tanks at the time, but some friends and I would do large doses of LSD in isolation

02:10:19.280 environments. And I started having a lot of problems with my LSD trips. Also mescaline.

02:10:25.500 Somebody came by a campus with half a pound of mescaline. So I bought all of it and capped it

02:10:31.100 hundreds of capsules. And friends and I just did it for months. And just to give you a sense of how

02:10:35.140 new college was at the time, I just had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of mescaline capsules in

02:10:39.340 my drawer in my room. And people would come to me and they'd say, I'd like to buy some mescaline.

02:10:43.980 I'd say, yeah, go ahead. Here it is. Take as many as you want. Here's the money. Leave the money.

02:10:47.700 And nobody ever wrote me off. Nobody ever got in trouble. It was just this sense that this was a

02:10:52.200 crazy world. The Vietnam War was raging. And here we were trying to find a new way.

02:10:56.520 Now at the time, Rick, was mescaline and or LSD scheduled?

02:11:01.040 Yeah. Yeah. They were both illegal.

02:11:02.580 Two things I just want to interject for historical context. The first is just give folks a bit of a

02:11:06.460 background on LSD. When it was synthesized, it's a completely synthesized molecule. So it doesn't

02:11:09.960 exist in nature. And a number of the psychedelics do exist in nature. So we can contrast that.

02:11:14.740 Give me like a little bit of a background on LSD.

02:11:17.180 Okay. Yeah. Also, I'll say that Albert Hoffman, who was the Sandoz chemist that first synthesized

02:11:23.480 LSD in 38. And they were looking for drugs that might be helpful for...

02:11:29.300 Sandoz, by the way, is to this day still a pharma giant.

02:11:32.540 Well, Sandoz has been purchased by Novartis.

02:11:34.700 Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. Sandoz makes... Like there are certain hormones, like thyroid hormones,

02:11:39.540 where I actually always prefer patients get the generic Sandoz, like the one made by Sandoz. Yeah.

02:11:44.680 I'm very particular about it. If they get levothyroxine, I want it to be Sandoz.

02:11:48.940 Wow. That's neat. What's really important for me symbolically is that the MAPS Public Benefit

02:11:54.180 Corporation, which is what conducts our research, our drug development research with psychedelics,

02:11:58.900 it's led by a whole group of women who came from Novartis. So we have the Sandoz... 0.99

02:12:03.700 This relationship, yeah.

02:12:05.120 Yeah. Training. So we've got big pharma. So...

02:12:07.660 What was Albert's motivation or the motivation of the corporation?

02:12:10.700 Yeah. They were looking for drugs for stopping postpartum bleeding. Ergot has been used for that

02:12:16.420 purpose. And so Albert was doing various derivatives from ergot and then chemically modifying them.

02:12:23.140 So LSD-25 is in the 25th of the series. And they gave it to a bunch of animals and found nothing

02:12:29.820 interesting. And in the height of World War II, in 43, after Albert had finished some other bit of

02:12:36.040 work, he had what he called a peculiar presentiment that this drug that had been studied and abandoned

02:12:42.740 might have some potential. He almost never did that. He's gone back to drugs that he'd invented that had

02:12:49.040 been tested in animals and found to be of no interest to Sandoz. He almost never went back. So

02:12:54.240 he writes a lot about this peculiar presentiment that he had and whether this was some kind of

02:13:01.300 calling or... So he re-synthesized it in April 16th of 1943. So this was...

02:13:09.460 Five years after he had originally basically come to the conclusion this was not going to have any

02:13:14.100 efficacy for postpartum bleeding.

02:13:15.960 Yeah. Yeah. Or other things too. I mean, they were looking for other things

02:13:19.180 as well. Maybe it had other potential purposes, but five years later, he re-synthesized it. And

02:13:26.540 during this re-synthesis process, and he's an incredibly meticulous Swiss chemist, he didn't

02:13:33.060 know how he might have contaminated himself, but he started closing his eyes and seeing colors and

02:13:38.020 visions. It lasted for a couple hours and kind of went away, but it was a weird kind of an experience

02:13:44.380 for him. And he thought maybe, maybe somehow he had contaminated himself with this LSD-25 that he

02:13:51.300 was manufacturing. And so that was on a Friday, April 16th, 1943. And so he decided over the weekend

02:13:58.420 that he would do a planned experiment on Monday the 19th. And it would take a tiny fraction of this drug

02:14:06.900 that he thought would have no effect, but he would try to see if there was something to it. If his

02:14:12.240 visions that he had on Friday were related to this drug. And so he took 250 micrograms,

02:14:17.660 250 millionths of a gram. And during that experience, he went through this similar kind

02:14:23.960 of vision. So he became convinced that this was the cause of what had happened on Friday,

02:14:28.280 but it got stronger and stronger and stronger. And he was starting to lose his normal frame of

02:14:35.240 reference and worrying that he had poisoned himself and that he was going to die. And he started feeling

02:14:42.400 like he was going to die. And so he ended up deciding that he would leave the laboratory and

02:14:47.600 he would go home. And so he rode his bicycle. So now Tom Roberts, who's a psychologist who helps

02:14:53.320 transpersonal psychology, has called it bicycle day. And so now it's celebrated around the world that he

02:14:58.100 took his bicycle home while he was tripping. And there's been videos made about this, but Albert gets

02:15:03.160 home and they call his wife and tell his wife that he might be dying. They get milk from a neighbor

02:15:08.140 because they thought milk would be an antidote. And he drinks a gallon of milk and stuff. And none of

02:15:12.940 this helps. And he goes through this whole existential crisis, but then in the end, he actually doesn't

02:15:18.520 die. And then he has spiritual experiences. He's written about it. It's beautiful. LSD, My Problem,

02:15:25.520 Child by Albert Hoffman. We've actually, MAPS has published that book. We just got 3,500 copies of it

02:15:31.100 delivered on Monday. And so it's a beautiful book about the origins of LSD. And this was just

02:15:37.380 something that Albert was shocked about. And then in the morning he felt great. And so he thought that

02:15:42.180 this drug was like a temporary voyage into insanity. So they called it psychotomimetic, meaning it mimics

02:15:49.120 psychosis. And they started sharing it. Sandoz did. They started, well, first off, Albert's bosses didn't

02:15:54.680 believe that this could be possible, that a drug in that small amount could actually have such an effect.

02:16:00.160 It's worth noting for a listener, what you said was micrograms. So you said 250 micrograms. But if any

02:16:07.560 person thinking about a drug that they take, if you take a drug for your blood pressure or your

02:16:12.280 cholesterol or an antibiotic, these are virtually always in milligrams, which is 1,000 times greater.

02:16:21.340 So 250 milligrams is 1,000 times more than 250 micrograms. Turns out Synthroid or drugs for thyroid

02:16:29.980 are some of the few drugs that are actually dosed in micrograms. But you're right. This is a very

02:16:35.140 potent agent to be at the level of millionths of grams to reach significant clinical feeling. I mean,

02:16:41.440 they obviously at the time didn't know what it was doing, but they knew that they were dealing with

02:16:44.340 something potent.

02:16:44.920 So several of Albert's bosses didn't believe him and they tried LSD as well. And then they were

02:16:50.980 persuaded that it really was from this LSD. And then they started trying to figure out what they

02:16:55.860 do with this incredible drug. And so they started shipping it around to different researchers to see

02:17:00.120 if they would look into it. They said this could be used for psychiatry to help you have a temporary

02:17:05.820 voyage into insanity. The first research in the United States was in 1949 at Harvard, and they ended up

02:17:12.980 circulating it to different places in the 50s. In the middle 50s, they sent it to Czech Republic.

02:17:17.800 That's where Stan Grof ended up using it in the middle 50s. But it also came to the attention

02:17:22.200 of the military and began this whole effort to study mind control drugs and what they called

02:17:29.480 non-lethal incapacitance. And it became tangled up in the CIA. They had a project called MKUltra.

02:17:35.620 They thought it would be good for stereotypically dosing world leaders and making them embarrassed when

02:17:40.140 they're giving speeches or different things, incapacitating a whole group of army people.

02:17:44.860 They tried to see if they could do it in aerosol sprays. So it had this dual track of military

02:17:50.020 applications, which were mostly kept secret, and then also therapeutic or temporary voyage to insanity.

02:17:56.120 But more people who took it realized that it wasn't temporary insanity. It was something different

02:18:00.600 and that there was this spiritual aspect to it. It started being used in different ways for

02:18:05.560 psychotherapy. In particular, it was being used for alcoholism and heroin addiction in the 50s and in

02:18:12.040 the 60s. And in the 50s, W. Bill Wilson, who started AA, actually tried LSD. His first experience

02:18:17.840 of a psychedelic was with belladonna, which was kind of something used by the witches. It was more

02:18:22.960 disorienting. But during his belladonna experience, he decided to get sober. And then years later,

02:18:29.300 when this work with LSD was being developed, he explored it. And so Bill W. did LSD and thought

02:18:35.520 it had tremendous potential for treatment of alcoholism. And it helps the spiritual sense.

02:18:40.940 And it also brings to the surface things that people have suppressed. And so it's good for

02:18:45.800 psychotherapy. And then it's also good for building sources of strength from these kinds of spiritual

02:18:50.240 experiences. What also happened is the CIA funded some expeditions, sent people to Mexico with Gordon

02:18:58.480 Lawson in 57, 58 to search for mushrooms, for other drugs that might be psychedelic.

02:19:05.700 Now, why did they realize that? Was it based on the similarity in chemical structure between

02:19:10.280 a completely synthesized molecule like LSD and what they knew were similar molecules that would exist in

02:19:17.440 nature? Well, mescaline had been extracted, synthesized from peyote in like 1895 or so. And it had

02:19:25.500 been used in research a lot in the 20s and 30s, mostly in Europe. Also, William James, the father of

02:19:32.560 American psychology, had experimented also in like 1896 or so with nitrous oxide and wrote about it in

02:19:38.800 the varieties of religious experience. So there was already knowledge about how other substances had

02:19:44.580 these properties. I mean, the word psychedelic didn't get developed until 1958 by Humphrey Osmond,

02:19:51.240 who wrote this poem to Aldous Huxley. I'll just say that you're wearing the Doors T-shirt.

02:19:55.980 I've got a Doors shirt on here. I wore this knowing that you would appreciate it.

02:20:01.220 Yeah. And the Doors got their name from the Doors of Perception.

02:20:04.160 Perception, which I read in high school and became obsessed with the band.

02:20:07.900 Yeah. And so that was from Aldous Huxley's discussion about his mescaline experience,

02:20:12.300 his writing about that. And so there was this whole awareness of these kind of substances.

02:20:18.440 And so there was this expedition. Gordon Wasson was going to track down this idea that mushrooms

02:20:23.820 might be used as spiritual tools by the Mazatec Indians. And the CIA had somebody go along secretly

02:20:30.120 as part of that expedition. And once they got these mushrooms, they did have these psychedelic

02:20:35.400 experiences, but they gave it to a bunch of different chemists and they weren't able to figure

02:20:40.120 out what was in it, what was the active ingredient. So they decided they would send it to Albert Hoffman.

02:20:44.600 And Albert was able to figure out that the active ingredient was psilocybin. And the reason he said

02:20:51.760 that he was able to figure it out and nobody else was, is that he was willing to drink the different

02:20:56.520 fractions.

02:20:57.560 And see which produced the similar effect to what he had already known.

02:21:02.500 Yeah. And then he would continue trying to separate it out to find out what was the active

02:21:05.860 ingredient.

02:21:06.140 Oh my God. You want to talk about the citizen scientist, right?

02:21:08.980 Oh yeah. But he's again, working for Sandoz at the time. And so Albert figured it out. So 15 years

02:21:14.320 after he discovered LSD in 43, discovered really the psychedelic properties, he was the one that

02:21:19.920 isolated psilocybin. And then shortly after that, there was this whole effort to understand other

02:21:25.800 sources in nature of psychedelics. And it turns out that morning glory seeds have also been used for

02:21:32.100 psychedelic properties. And then Albert looked at that and morning glory seeds have LSA, which is

02:21:38.120 lysergic acid amide and LSD is lysergic acid diethylamide. So there is, even though LSD came

02:21:45.320 from ergot, was modified so that it doesn't appear in nature. Decades later, Albert was able to figure

02:21:51.580 out that there is something in nature that's quite similar to LSD. It's not the same. And that LSD,

02:21:57.780 I think is more powerful, more effective. People have had a tradition of morning glory seeds for

02:22:02.600 getting high in different ways.

02:22:04.560 So because I know Michael Pollan has done a great job writing about this, and I would encourage anyone

02:22:09.960 who's interested in this topic to sort of go back and read his book, How to Change Your Mind,

02:22:15.200 where he details the history, there is an important point I want you to bring up because his legacy,

02:22:22.640 in many ways, provides a little bit of an undercurrent of the work you've done. And that is

02:22:26.520 the work of Timothy Leary. Where does Leary fit into this story specifically?

02:22:30.580 So Leary was an incredible psychologist who had written a book called The Interpersonal

02:22:37.120 Diagnosis of Personality that was heralded as brilliant. It was the most important psychology

02:22:42.740 book of the year. This is like 58, 59. He was working for Kaiser out in California as a Kaiser

02:22:49.160 psychologist. He was very rebellious kind of guy. He had been in West Point and got kicked out of

02:22:55.240 West Point for, I think, sharing alcohol and doing different things. And he had actually had a

02:23:01.940 friend who was involved in the CIA, who was a psychologist, did a lot of work on creativity,

02:23:08.480 Frank Barron. And Frank Barron had had knowledge about the mushrooms and had tried them. And he

02:23:14.400 recommended to Timothy Leary that he try these mushrooms. And then Tim had now also then been

02:23:19.900 offered this appointment at Harvard. So he got this appointment at Harvard before he'd even done any

02:23:24.420 kind of psychedelics. Then he does these mushrooms. And he thinks that he learned more from these

02:23:30.040 mushroom experience than in his entire time in school about the mind. And so he started trying to

02:23:35.540 study psychedelics and got interested mostly, again, in psilocybin. And so there was a series of

02:23:43.360 projects that Tim was here at Harvard only for three years, from 60 to 63. I've done long-term follow-ups

02:23:50.220 to two of his main studies that he did at Harvard. One was the Good Friday experiment that actually

02:23:56.220 Walter Pankey, who was a doctor and a minister, did this for a PhD. And Tim was his PhD thesis advisor.

02:24:03.580 Can you explain that experiment to people?

02:24:05.740 Yeah. I'd say the other is the Concrete Prison Experiment. I'll also explain. So because of Aldous Huxley

02:24:11.600 and writing about doors of perception and writing about the sort of spiritual aspects of masculine

02:24:17.020 and even Bill W feeling that LSD had spiritual capacities. So what Walter Pankey wanted to do

02:24:25.380 was originally he was interested in doing something about the sex lives of Radcliffe students, which his

02:24:31.900 wife wasn't too happy about. And he met Tim and Tim suggested that they do something with psychedelics.

02:24:37.500 And since Walter Pankey was both doctor and minister, they decided to look scientifically at whether

02:24:44.140 psychedelics really could produce spiritual mystical experiences, whether they were similar, identical,

02:24:49.960 pseudo, whatever. And so the first thing that Walter Pankey did was he spent a year trying to devise a

02:24:56.800 questionnaire to evaluate what the mystical experience was. Aldous Huxley had talked about the perennial

02:25:02.740 philosophy that keeps coming up. And so what Walter did was he looked at W.T. Stace, who had done work on

02:25:10.200 the theory of philosophy of religion and how you describe mystical experiences. There's actually a

02:25:15.880 scale that Stace had made and others. And so what Walter did is he spent this year developing a series

02:25:23.000 of questionnaires that were independent of any particular religious symbols or any particular

02:25:30.120 religious system. So even though this was an experiment that took place on Good Friday, it didn't

02:25:37.420 have any references to Jesus, this questionnaire. And so basically the fundamental core element of this

02:25:43.840 perennial philosophy of the mystical experience is the sense of unity. And you get this from all

02:25:48.640 different religions about everything's one, everything's united, everything's somehow one big 1.00

02:25:52.840 system. So there's external reality where you can see that nature is all connected or internal reality,

02:25:58.440 sort of everything, you know, without form is still connected. But that sense that it's all

02:26:02.760 one thing, transcendence of time and space, deeply felt positive mood, a sense of something

02:26:09.700 sacred or holy, a sense that it's ineffable, that there's something beyond language about the

02:26:16.040 experience. So Walter had developed this questionnaire, which is in very minimally modified way is still

02:26:22.200 used today in all of the psychedelic research to evaluate the mystical experience. So what they decided

02:26:27.840 to do was to take a group of 20 Christian divinity students from Andover Newton Theological Seminary

02:26:33.980 and bring them into church on Good Friday at Boston University. And the minister was Reverend Howard

02:26:41.220 Thurman, and he was Martin Luther King's mentor. He was an incredible dynamic black preacher.

02:26:47.680 And actually I was able, during my follow-up study, to obtain copies from Walter Pankey's widow. Walter died in

02:26:53.840 71 in a scuba diving accident. But his widow had the actual copy of the service that they listened

02:27:00.280 to during Good Friday, which is just profoundly moving. And it shows that in 1962, on Good Friday,

02:27:07.400 when they did this experiment, that psychedelics were just beginning to be controversial. They really

02:27:12.720 were not. And so this was an experiment to see if these 20 divinity students in church on Good Friday,

02:27:20.480 and this was like a three and a half hour service, three and a four hour service. They all got a pill,

02:27:25.500 half got placebo, half got psilocybin. And they were divided, these 20 people, into groups of four,

02:27:31.440 five groups of four, and two experimenters were assigned to each group of four. And the experimenters

02:27:37.940 also took these pills. And one of the experimenter would get the placebo, one would get the psilocybin.

02:27:42.920 These were people like Tim Leary, Ralph Metzner, Richard Alpert, who later became Ram Dass,

02:27:47.680 Houston Smith, incredible people who are experts in the philosophy of religion and psychology.

02:27:53.880 And they were trying to break down the us-them experimenter subject dichotomies. And that's why

02:27:59.960 they had the experimenters also took the pills. And what they then did was after the experiment,

02:28:06.760 after the service, they had a chapel in the basement. So while the main service was taking

02:28:11.960 place in the upstairs chapel, downstairs was the chapel where the experiment was taking place.

02:28:16.820 I've since visited this Marsh Chapel. It's on Commonwealth Ave for Boston University.

02:28:21.580 There's a statue out in front of it for Martin Luther King that actually talked about my approach

02:28:26.640 towards draft resistance. It's like, and the quote there is, who believes the law is unjust and breaks

02:28:31.640 it and is willingly suffering the consequences to be an example of others actually has the highest

02:28:36.260 regard for the law. So it's sort of showing that civil disobedience is people that believe in the

02:28:40.580 law but want to modify it. So that's out in front of Marsh Chapel. But then over the doorway to the

02:28:45.860 main chapel, before this experiment even took place, is a quote about experimental religion.

02:28:51.860 It's just amazingly historically resonant that that place was sympathetic with this idea of

02:28:56.780 experimental religion. But the idea was then that they would go through this experiment,

02:29:01.300 they would then give questionnaires about what their experience was, how they described it,

02:29:06.260 and then they would do a six-month follow-up about the long-term effects.

02:29:09.440 As I mentioned, Walter died in a scuba diving accident in 1971. So I was convinced in the

02:29:15.980 middle 80s when I was wanting to do a thesis at New College, I had to do a senior thesis,

02:29:20.860 I wanted to do something with psychedelics, but it was at a time when psychedelic research was all

02:29:24.920 blocked. And so I thought, wow, I could do a follow-up study and ask people what they thought

02:29:30.720 about it. It wouldn't involve drugs, so I could get permission to do it. So I ended up doing this 25-year

02:29:36.260 follow-up to the Good Friday experiment. What was the finding of the original experiment?

02:29:40.540 That nine out of the 20 people had a mystical experience, and eight out of those nine had the

02:29:46.800 psilocybin. So they concluded that under the influence of psilocybin, people who were religiously

02:29:52.840 inclined in a religious setting could have what looked like a mystical experience. And so either it

02:30:00.160 was genuine or it was similar, but they concluded that according to this questionnaire that

02:30:05.220 that psilocybin did indeed have the potential to catalyze mystical experiences.

02:30:10.800 What was the approximate dose of psilocybin they took?

02:30:13.520 It was 30 milligrams. So it was a major dose of psilocybin. And the placebo, it turned out,

02:30:20.140 was niacin.

02:30:21.380 To give them a flush without knowing that, yeah, we'll come back to this in psychedelic research.

02:30:27.360 One of the challenges is that placebos have to give you some feeling. 1.00

02:30:30.820 Yeah. My dissertation at the Kennedy School, a big part of it was on how to do double-blind studies

02:30:36.860 with psychedelics. And the conclusion I came to, and we'll get back to the Good Friday experiment,

02:30:42.320 but the conclusion I came to was that the best way to do a double-blind experiment with psychedelics

02:30:46.360 was to use low doses of the psychedelic versus full doses. And that way everybody has the same

02:30:51.980 demand characteristics. They all think they're going to be getting the test drug. They just don't know

02:30:56.120 what dose. And all the experimenters know everybody's getting the drug. And I thought

02:31:01.320 that the real challenge was going to be to find the level of the low dose.

02:31:05.980 Yeah. So that it's below the step. It's below the real activation.

02:31:09.800 Well, it has to be high enough so that you would have enough confusion between the full dose,

02:31:14.700 but not so high that you get all the therapeutic potential. So I thought you'd get a little bit of

02:31:19.620 the therapeutic potential, but you didn't want to get too much because the more therapeutic potential

02:31:24.780 you got, the more difference it would be to find differences between the two groups,

02:31:28.060 the more difficult it would be. And so in our work with MDMA, we'd looked at zero milligrams,

02:31:34.120 25 milligrams, 30 milligrams, 40 milligrams, 50 milligrams, 75, 100, 125, and 150. What we discovered

02:31:40.880 was that the low doses did produce blinding. That's what I had anticipated. But what I didn't

02:31:47.580 anticipate is that the low doses actually made people uncomfortable. It activated them without reducing

02:31:54.160 the fear. And so the therapeutic effect of just the therapy was compromised. And so people who had

02:32:01.600 therapy without any MDMA did better than people that had therapy with low dose MDMA.

02:32:07.260 And low in that situation was how low?

02:32:09.040 25 to 40, 25, 30, and 40 milligrams. And then the 75 milligrams actually was very therapeutic.

02:32:15.380 So when we opened our meeting with the FDA to talk about our phase three designs, I started by saying

02:32:21.120 there's a quote from, I thought it was William James, but it turned out it was Lowell, I think one

02:32:24.960 of the early presidents of Harvard. And he said, never forget, there's always a Harvard man on the

02:32:29.520 wrong side of every issue. And so I opened the meeting by saying, there's this quote, and unfortunately,

02:32:34.320 I'm the wrong side. This person that's wrong is me because my dissertation was wrong. And there is no

02:32:39.660 solution to the double blind problem, at least for MDMA. And so the FDA accepted that. And I said,

02:32:45.180 you could have us use low dose, but you're going to make it easier for us to find a difference

02:32:49.220 between the full dose and the therapy with low dose, because it blunts the effect of the therapy.

02:32:55.000 And so the real question is, if you can do it without a drug, why add a drug? If the therapy

02:32:58.560 is effective, why add a drug? So I said, the best way to do this is therapy with inactive placebo

02:33:04.640 versus therapy with full dose MDMA. And FDA accepted that. And so has EMA, the European Medicines Agency,

02:33:11.100 but back to the Good Friday experiment. So what they discovered is that the double blind did not work.

02:33:16.060 Niacin did not work as double blind. People were initially confused, but after a while,

02:33:21.700 this niacin flush wears off. And then you've got these other people seeing colors and seeing

02:33:26.160 sparkles in the candle flames and having all these unusual experiences. So everybody was clear by the

02:33:32.480 end of the experiment who had the niacin, who had the psilocybin. And at the six month follow-up,

02:33:38.000 they showed that people had reported long-term positive benefits. And so this was considered to be the

02:33:43.200 most sophisticated experiment in the history of religion, looking at the mystical experience.

02:33:48.120 And it demonstrated positive long-term benefits.

02:33:52.180 Although compromised, because of course, it effectively wasn't blinded.

02:33:55.780 To the extent that you would say that's compromised, yeah. Yeah. What makes me think that

02:34:00.780 it wasn't so compromised is that I did my long-term follow-up 25 years later, 87, 86,

02:34:08.700 88 is when I kept... So I went to Andover Newton Theological Seminary. I went to the alumni office

02:34:16.580 and to the president, and I said, could we send a letter to everybody on your alumni newsletter

02:34:20.980 asking who was in this experiment?

02:34:24.220 Oh, because you didn't know their names.

02:34:25.780 There's no record. Leary had no record. The records were gone of who the people were.

02:34:30.480 Andover Newton, this was at a time of Nancy Reagan, escalation of the drug war.

02:34:34.600 And this was probably the nadir of views towards psychedelics in society. Andover Newton refused

02:34:41.240 to cooperate with the study. They wouldn't put even a notice in their alumni newsletter or help

02:34:46.340 me in any way find out who the subjects were. And so I was super frustrated. And I said, while I was

02:34:51.640 there, I thought, okay, I'll just go into their library and see if they've got thesis and if they've

02:34:56.300 got the commentaries, any discussions about the most important study that was done with their students.

02:35:02.120 And so it turned out that they didn't even have Walter Pankey's thesis in their library.

02:35:06.020 It was so controversial, actually, that after the study was done, you had to get a permission

02:35:10.640 directly from Walter in order to look at the thesis in the Harvard library. They didn't even put it out

02:35:16.480 there. They didn't want any people to know about it. So I didn't even see the thesis. I thought,

02:35:20.860 this is like massive cultural amnesia. And here, how embarrassing. This is a school of religion,

02:35:26.180 and this is the most important study done. And they don't even have a copy of it. They don't even want

02:35:30.000 to talk about it. And I just wandered through their library a little bit. And then I saw,

02:35:34.040 coincidentally, a booklet of all of their alumni and their addresses and which years they were in

02:35:39.080 the school. And this was from like a 1972 book, but it had people who were at school in 62 when the

02:35:45.360 study was done. So I ended up writing letters to like 300 people. And I got about three responses

02:35:51.000 back that they were actually in the study. And it took me multiple years, but eventually I was able

02:35:55.520 to identify 19 out of the 20 of the people who were in the study. And my parents were sympathetic

02:36:00.860 at this point. And so I would fly to wherever they were in the country and then interview them in

02:36:05.200 person. And what I discovered was, first off, shocking to me. So at a point where every cultural

02:36:12.500 indication would be that these persons should deny the value of the psychedelic experience,

02:36:17.400 massive escalation of the drug war, Republicans in charge, people going to jail for all this kind of

02:36:22.540 stuff. Everybody who had the psilocybin experience, except for one person, said that they had a

02:36:28.060 mystical experience back then, and they still considered it to be a mystical experience. And

02:36:32.100 they had had many non-drug mystical experiences since then as well, to compare and contrast. And

02:36:37.360 they said that they preferred the non-drug mystical experiences because they tended to be more positive,

02:36:42.100 more in nature, more just coming over them, gratuitous grace, sometimes they would call it.

02:36:46.780 But the psychedelic mystical experiences were more oscillating between fear and unit of experiences

02:36:53.820 that they were deeper in some ways, but were more difficult to manage. But they validated the

02:36:59.340 importance of the experience. And then I felt like I discovered the clue to the 60s by doing these

02:37:04.840 interviews. Because what they told me is that, first off, everybody who had the psilocybin could

02:37:10.040 remember with crystal clarity some moments of their psychedelic experience. Something about

02:37:15.260 psychedelics imprint on memory. You don't remember everything, but some portions of it are just

02:37:20.880 indelible. And they validated that they were genuine. But the key to the 60s for me was that

02:37:26.800 they talked about how that unit of experience motivated them in different ways to get involved

02:37:32.620 with social justice struggles. Now, of course, these were all ministers anyway. They were thinking in

02:37:37.220 that way. It's not that everybody who takes this will be motivated in that way. But one of them

02:37:42.700 worked against the MX missile basing. Others of them participated in the civil rights movement,

02:37:47.860 the women's rights movement, the environmental movement. They felt that there was this connection

02:37:53.100 between this spiritual experience. They lost a certain fear of death. So they were more willing to take

02:38:00.500 risks in their lives. They learned the appreciation of the moment. It's not that they didn't care about

02:38:07.180 death, but death made life more precious. They didn't go for this idea that heaven is later after

02:38:14.540 you die. It's like more that they wanted to create it on earth. And so they used that psychedelic

02:38:19.620 experience to be involved in challenging the status quo, to try to make it a more spiritual,

02:38:25.760 loving world. And I felt that that's where I really learned that the crackdown against the 60s was not

02:38:32.300 because of psychedelics gone wrong, but because of psychedelics gone right. But I also learned

02:38:36.780 something else, which is that the placebo people had a hard time remembering what was going on. I

02:38:41.760 mean, they knew they were in the experiment, but they didn't have as clear memories about what

02:38:45.820 happened. Some of them were so upset by what they saw.

02:38:50.320 Saw in the others?

02:38:51.020 In the others, that they were disoriented, that one person went up and tried to be the preacher.

02:38:55.780 It scared them. And they decided never to do psychedelics. Others decided that they were so

02:39:00.940 inspired by what they saw that they wanted to do psychedelics. So some of them did go back and do

02:39:05.960 psychedelics from the placebo group. But then what I discovered, I started hearing these stories about

02:39:10.160 how one person who had received the psilocybin had been listening to Reverend Howard Thurman at one

02:39:18.260 point where he's telling people that you need to tell people there's a man on the cross. This is your

02:39:22.880 obligation. This Jesus story that you must tell others about it. And so this one person started to

02:39:29.760 realize that he should do that. And he thought, well, I should tell the president. If I'm going

02:39:34.580 to tell anybody, I should tell the president. And he then said, oh, you know, the president's in

02:39:38.720 Washington. Okay, I'll tell the president of the university. And so he left the basement chapel.

02:39:45.140 He went outside and he was wandering down the road going towards the president. And this very much

02:39:52.120 scared Timothy Leary and Houston Smith. And they went after him and they finally got him. They

02:39:56.820 protected him. He didn't get hit by a car, but he didn't want to go back in. And so they ended up

02:40:01.900 giving him a shot of Thorazine, a tranquilizer, which was used at this time. And when people had

02:40:09.420 difficult trips, sometimes they would tranquilize him. We would not do that today. It's it freezes

02:40:13.280 the struggles in place. It's not helpful at all. Better to just wait it out, even if it's terrible,

02:40:18.500 because then at least you don't get the message. You can't handle it. If you wait it out,

02:40:22.740 at least you survived. So it turned out though, that this whole administration of Thorazine to

02:40:27.660 this one person was completely missing from any of the reports about the study, which I consider to

02:40:32.560 be another key to the sixties in that Leary and the advocates underestimated the risks and over and

02:40:38.920 exaggerated the benefits. So the way this story, the Good Friday experiment was reported in Time

02:40:44.640 Magazine and elsewhere was that everybody who got the psilocybin had the mystical experience,

02:40:48.880 which is not the case. Eventually I did manage to figure out who was the one that was tranquilized.

02:40:55.520 And when I called him, he was still a minister. He was married. He had kids. But when I identified

02:41:01.520 myself as wanting to talk to him about this experiment, he was very upset. And he said,

02:41:07.500 if I ever called him again, he would sue me. He didn't want to talk to me at all. So I think that

02:41:12.240 this idea that he had been traumatized by that experience, he was very traumatized by it and it was

02:41:17.780 embarrassing. And so he didn't want to talk about it, but I heard about it from others and was able

02:41:22.620 to figure out who it was. And so I felt that this was the height of scientific irresponsibility.

02:41:28.980 And many people who have been through what you've been through, meaning they have watched this

02:41:32.680 journey, are not especially sympathetic to Leary. In fact, many people just single-handedly identify

02:41:40.980 Leary's irresponsibility as the sole reason for the backlash, which of course strikes me as hyperbolic.

02:41:47.780 And unlikely to be the case. But I've certainly read accounts that you've written that come across

02:41:53.200 as being slightly more sympathetic to Leary. Yeah, much more sympathetic in the sense that

02:41:58.220 it's psychedelics gone right that really caused the backlash. And while he was irresponsible in a lot

02:42:04.520 of different ways and was delighted to be a rebel and to be against the system. And I think this

02:42:10.740 identification as the counterculture was in itself a self-fulfilling doomed prophecy that you

02:42:16.680 identify yourself as the counterculture, you're going to be crushed eventually. But I think he saw

02:42:22.440 that the propaganda for the other side, the negative exaggerations of the risks were so strong

02:42:28.840 that he justified in his own mind that he could exaggerate on the other side and minimize the risk.

02:42:35.980 So I do think he deserves a lot of criticism for what he said, but he was very much about thinking

02:42:41.600 for yourself, questioning authority, challenging the system, all of which we need more of.

02:42:47.900 And what I fault him for the most was misrepresenting science. It's okay to be a cultural

02:42:54.320 advocate, but when science is holy in itself, holy meaning H-O-L-Y, meaning that it's sacred,

02:43:02.020 there's something sacred about our quest for knowledge through our bias. I mean, how we just discussed the

02:43:07.820 double-blind, the whole purpose of the double-blind is to eliminate or reduce experimental bias. We see

02:43:13.760 what we want to see. So how do we actually see what's really there? And I think that's the beauty,

02:43:19.160 the holiness of science. And so when Tim misrepresented the scientific findings he had,

02:43:24.880 that I thought was a tremendous violation. Being a cheerleader against the drug war and for

02:43:30.580 consciousness, I think he deserves a lot of credit for that. I think where he's also wrapped up in

02:43:35.720 deserving criticism is that he underestimated the risks and overestimated the benefits. So you take

02:43:42.640 this drug, you get enlightened, you're smarter than everybody else, and now you're part of this new

02:43:46.860 counterculture and all you have to do is drop the pill. That's wrong. People don't always have these

02:43:52.640 good experiences. People do get messed up and end up worse off. So what I discovered during the Good

02:43:59.220 Friday experiment follow-up was that there had been this overhyping of the results and also this hiding

02:44:06.440 of a problem. And as it turned out, Houston Smith then validated it, that it was true, that this had

02:44:13.480 really happened, and that somebody did get Thorstein, and it was really the case, even though that one

02:44:18.700 person wouldn't talk to me. But overall, my conclusion was that the experiment was essentially

02:44:23.680 validated, that people did have mystical experiences. They had subsequent experiences in their lives that

02:44:29.600 were without drugs, mystical experiences, that they then said that made them think that the psilocybin

02:44:34.180 mystical experience was legitimate. It had positive benefits in their lives. It had long-term impacts.

02:44:39.460 What I find most interesting, having experienced this myself, what resonates is this notion that

02:44:45.440 after the fact, years after the fact, in the case of your subjects, 25 years after the fact,

02:44:51.680 with crystal clarity, you could remember something from that experience. And I don't think I've ever

02:44:59.620 been under the influence of psilocybin that I can't look back and recall with just the most vivid

02:45:06.740 detail, some aspects of it, positive and negative. Some incredibly positive, deeply emotional,

02:45:14.120 moving beyond words, and also at times very in different settings or different times within the same

02:45:19.980 experience, incredibly frightening, an incredible feeling of despair, but with a degree of vividness

02:45:24.420 that I can't remember many things. So what do you attribute that? I don't know. I mean, I suspect

02:45:29.620 that I don't know enough about neuroscience. I'm probably the wrong person to ask, but I suspect

02:45:34.220 that if you look at parts of the brain, the hippocampus, where we imprint memory, there must be something

02:45:40.760 about these molecules that enable during periods of the time, because that's the thing, it's such a

02:45:46.780 nonlinear experience. It's sort of vacillating that there must be moments in there where there's an

02:45:51.500 overlap. And I'm sort of putting my hands like a, you sort of have to get an alignment of a couple

02:45:56.640 of things. One, the experience itself is profound enough. And two, so that's like the seed. And then

02:46:01.340 the soil itself at that moment, neurologically is fertile enough to take that seed. And that produces

02:46:07.140 this plant, which is the metaphor is this memory that is never going away. And what's also

02:46:13.580 interesting is I can still describe in some cases, the feeling that accompanied that vision or that

02:46:20.400 hallucination and what it connected me to someone that I cared about or something like that. So

02:46:25.420 that to me is a very powerful part of your followup. Whereas I can completely imagine that if you were

02:46:31.800 getting the placebo, I mean, I've taken niacin. I know what it feels like. It's miserable. Actually,

02:46:36.880 if you take a high enough dose, the flush is real. I mean, there's no denying it. But if you asked me to

02:46:42.380 recall a niacin flush I had two years ago, let alone 20 years ago, I'd be hard pressed to remember

02:46:49.340 anything about it. So the sensory experience alone is not enough. What I really want to get to now

02:46:54.140 is, and it will require backing up slightly from historical context is, let's talk about what's

02:47:00.080 happening right now with MDMA. Before we do that, let me just explain briefly about the Concord

02:47:04.640 Prison experiment. Oh, yes, yes, yes. That's right. That's right. This is the second major experiment.

02:47:08.640 Yeah. So what Leary recognized was that the Good Friday experiment, you're basically relying on

02:47:15.100 people to tell you what happened to them. So that's sort of subjective reports. He wanted to try to

02:47:20.840 find an objective way to talk about the benefits of psychedelics. And so what he started thinking

02:47:27.100 about was prisoners at the Concord Prison, which is not 20 minutes away from here. We're not that far

02:47:33.860 from Harvard Square. We're doing this four miles from Harvard Square. Concord Prison was nearby. And

02:47:39.000 so he thought that if you could work with prisoners while they're in prison and help them have a pro-social

02:47:45.720 experience, this kind of mystical experience, that that might, once they were released, it might reduce

02:47:51.900 their recidivism. And he thought that that is an objective measure of benefit. If we can show that

02:47:58.500 people don't go back to prison once they've released and that it's somehow correlated with this

02:48:03.320 mystical experience with psilocybin, that that would be a really good way of communicating to people.

02:48:08.220 So from 61 to 63, he started working with Ralph Metzner, who was his PhD student as well. And they

02:48:16.740 started doing a project at Concord Prison. And they ended up getting permission to do psilocybin inside the

02:48:23.460 prison with prisoners. And the same situation is that the experimenters, some of them would take

02:48:28.620 the psilocybin as well. And then prisoners were released. And how many prisoners over the period

02:48:34.260 of that time were treated? About 36 or so. And what was the average number of treatments per prisoner?

02:48:39.960 Two. And so what they ended up saying, though, is that this was one of the most successful experiments

02:48:46.220 in the history of psychedelics showing benefit. Was there a control group that were interacted with,

02:48:52.160 but without an agent? No, the control group was they did a base rate study of everybody that had

02:48:58.400 been released from prison in the year before they did this, and then they tracked them. And so they

02:49:04.120 had this base rate study, and then they compared against the base rate. So one obvious flaw in this

02:49:09.080 is that the people who are motivated to volunteer for this experiment might be more likely to want to

02:49:15.700 stay out of prison. Maybe they're more motivated to get better. That would be huge. And then the other

02:49:19.500 one, of course, being this performance bias, which is just the fact that they're getting

02:49:24.240 some positive attention while they're there. It's funny, if you were to redo that experiment,

02:49:28.940 you would randomize people. You take everybody, you randomize them. You're either randomized to

02:49:34.180 the intervention with the psilocybin, or the best example you can come up with of an intervention that

02:49:40.340 is without psilocybin, counseling, positive therapy, et cetera, et cetera, where you... So you're not

02:49:44.840 trying to be blinded, to your point. You're not going to be able to blind people, but at least you

02:49:49.260 can try to identify that if there is a benefit in the psilocybin group, it's much more likely to be

02:49:55.000 from the psilocybin than it is from selection bias or performance bias. Exactly. And so from the FDA's

02:50:00.920 point of view, once we discussed how there is no solution to the double-blind problem for MDMA,

02:50:05.880 they said that there are two other main ways that we had to incorporate into our protocol design

02:50:11.880 to reduce experimenter bias, and one was random assignment, that everybody's similarly motivated,

02:50:17.380 and then they just happen to get either your control group or your test group. The other is

02:50:20.960 the independent raters and how you evaluate the outcomes. So it can't be done by the experimenters,

02:50:26.460 you have to have a whole different pool of raters, and then how they are structured so that they

02:50:32.360 don't track the people through the study. They don't know if it's the beginning measurement,

02:50:36.380 the baseline, or the follow-up.

02:50:37.780 So what was the difference in recidivism between those two groups?

02:50:42.260 Well, it was substantial. And so it was a terrific positive experiment. And so after I had done the,

02:50:48.300 or so it seemed, so after I had done the Good Friday experiment follow-up and published it in 91

02:50:53.820 in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, then there was an op-ed about my study in the Boston Globe.

02:50:59.620 And I got a call shortly after that from a fellow Michael Forcier who worked for the Department of

02:51:05.100 Corrections. And he said, do you want to do a follow-up to the Concord Prison Experiment? I said,

02:51:09.700 I have been interested, but there's no record of who the people were in that study either.

02:51:14.200 And he said that they actually had those records, that the Department of Corrections had a storehouse

02:51:19.280 of information about all their interesting prisoners. Malcolm X had been a prisoner,

02:51:23.660 they had all this stuff. And he said that they had a record of who these prisoners were,

02:51:28.240 and that I could work with him if we wanted to do a follow-up to the Concord Prison Experiment.

02:51:31.840 And I thought, God, this is fantastic. Now I can help call attention to one of the most

02:51:36.460 important and successful experiments in the history of psychedelic research. And so it took

02:51:41.180 us a whole year to get permission to do this. We had to go all the way up to the governor's office.

02:51:46.540 It was William Weld at the time, who's now going to be running for president, trying to

02:51:50.420 knock off Trump in the primaries, which won't work, but it'll be good. So William Weld. So we got this

02:51:55.520 piece of paper finally saying that we could go into the criminal justice system records and track

02:52:00.800 people's criminal records after they had been released from Concord. But somebody had written

02:52:05.380 on it, no psilocybin. So we weren't asking for permission to give psilocybin, but they just wanted

02:52:10.760 to underscore that we could not give psilocybin. So I ended up going into the criminal justice system

02:52:17.140 records. It took quite a while to do this. And the more that I looked into it one by one and track

02:52:22.820 people, the more I started realizing that there had been something amiss, that it didn't look like it was

02:52:30.080 really working. The data that I was getting about their arrests were that they were arrested. It

02:52:36.260 didn't seem like there was this benefit that had been reported.

02:52:40.140 Meaning during the period when they were initially reported to have had a benefit, you felt that those

02:52:45.780 data were incorrect or over a longer follow-up period of time, both groups converged.

02:52:51.400 It was more that there was some tricks in the way that Leary and Ralph Metzner reported the data.

02:52:57.280 And it was also the case, Ralph Metzner, once I published my findings, basically it was scientific

02:53:03.240 fraud, not by Ralph, but more by Tim.

02:53:06.660 Who was still alive at the time, wasn't he?

02:53:08.260 He was. And I eventually visited him shortly before he died. I mean, I got to know him in a

02:53:13.200 bunch of different ways, but I also visited him with two of the prisoners, one who had never gone

02:53:17.760 back to prison and one who had gone back to prison. And we had kind of a reunion that was really

02:53:22.760 nice, but I didn't have the courage, I guess, to ask why he fudged the data. So what it turned out

02:53:29.680 to be is that the longer time had elapsed from when the experiment took place, the more that Tim

02:53:37.520 would tell the story of how more successful it was. So the results kept getting presented in a better

02:53:42.880 and better ways, the longer it was from the study. But even at the early stage, what they had claimed

02:53:49.440 was that their very initial thing was that while some people did go back to prison from the psilocybin

02:53:55.760 group, that they were monitored more carefully than others, the normal prisoners, and they went

02:54:00.460 there for parole violations, minor things, not new crimes. But then over time, the results just kept

02:54:07.460 being presented better and better and better. And so I had not actually looked at the very early

02:54:11.720 things, but I'd looked at all their other reports. So once I started doing the follow-up, I looked at

02:54:16.140 everything, and I could track it. And I got back to the base rate study, which I'd never looked at.

02:54:21.320 And what was surprising to me is here I am, an advocate for psychedelics, and this is one of the

02:54:26.440 premier studies in psychedelics showing benefits. But none of the critics had ever actually gone back

02:54:32.060 to the very original documents. The base rate study was published in a journal of criminology,

02:54:37.920 an obscure British journal of criminology, which I managed to find. And so what it turned out,

02:54:44.100 first off, is that the base rate study was done an average of people out for two years.

02:54:51.140 The actual research with the prisoners was done when people were out an average of 10 months.

02:54:57.580 And so what had happened was that obviously the longer you're out of prison, the more likely you

02:55:01.820 are to go back to prison.

02:55:02.540 Right, right. It's an apples to oranges comparison.

02:55:04.780 Yeah. And so it turned out that the original study actually tracked people over time. So there was

02:55:10.720 the data for 10 months. In the control group, the base rate, when they were out 10 months,

02:55:15.880 their results were the same as what was reported in the psilocybin group. So there was no difference

02:55:20.720 whatsoever. But what I also discovered is that the way in which Tim was saying about how, oh yeah,

02:55:26.140 people did go back to prison, but for parole violations, that they were actually parole violations

02:55:30.800 because they had committed new crimes for which they were later convicted.

02:55:34.460 So I figured out how his counting rules permitted him to say things that weren't true, but that might

02:55:42.100 look on the surface to be true. And I found the original base rate study. So what I concluded and

02:55:48.960 what actually happened was that Leary got kicked out of Harvard in 63. He thought of it as the scientific

02:55:54.820 prison. And they had started to recognize that just having a spiritual experience, which many of

02:56:01.780 these people did have in prison is not enough that you need support afterwards.

02:56:06.340 You need to integrate the experience and have support.

02:56:08.980 Yeah. And the same with treatment for addiction, that you need support groups afterwards. And so

02:56:12.820 they had actually created this support group for the prisoners. But then when they got kicked out of

02:56:18.380 Harvard, that fell apart. So my conclusion was that this experiment, scientific fraud, it didn't work,

02:56:25.320 but that some of the people who did have the psilocybin, who I was able to contact, that was delicate

02:56:32.400 because you're contacting former prisoners. So I had to make sure that I only spoke to them. I didn't speak to

02:56:37.100 their family members, so they might not have spoken about their experiment. But some of them said that the

02:56:41.900 psilocybin was really helpful. So what I concluded is that this was an experiment that should be repeated with

02:56:48.320 the combination of the experience and the support afterwards. And that it showed promise. But what I

02:56:55.620 really felt also was that this was Leary violating something that was sacred, which was the scientific

02:57:01.820 data and presenting it in a wrong way. And so I think in some ways, people appreciated the fact that

02:57:08.880 even though I was an advocate for psychedelics, I was willing to report the data as I found it rather

02:57:14.400 than as I wanted it to be. So I think it was good for personally for my credibility, but it was

02:57:20.120 me ending up delegitimizing this crucial experiment that everybody had thought was really successful.

02:57:27.100 That was my problem. So those are the things that I fault Leary for. And I also do fault him for

02:57:32.880 just encouraging people to take psychedelics without sufficient cautions about the need for people who

02:57:40.260 are not tripping to watch over you about the need to integrate it, about how it's not automatically

02:57:45.040 you learn something new. It can be very frightening or terrifying. But overall, I do think that Leary was

02:57:51.740 a positive. And I think that I might not have ever taken LSD if it weren't for him. And this idea that

02:57:57.660 he was trying to democratize the mystical experience. And I also think, I'll just say that I had a ketamine

02:58:03.500 experience where I was transported above and behind Hitler as he was giving one of the rallies. This is 0.70

02:58:11.540 one of the more profound psychedelic experiences of my life. And I was, I think, primarily traumatized

02:58:17.660 by the Holocaust. I've had dreams of Holocaust survivors telling me that I needed to be a psychedelic 0.81

02:58:22.880 therapist and that that was, they'd survived the Holocaust miraculously and that that was their

02:58:27.280 mission and they didn't know what it was. And it was to tell me to be a psychedelic therapist. So I think

02:58:31.280 fundamentally what I've been motivated by is how do we help people feel the connection so they don't

02:58:36.100 dehumanize and murder others. But there was this way in which that I felt that the problem of Leary

02:58:43.700 trying to exaggerate the benefits left people unprepared. But that the effort to have people

02:58:52.740 to think for themselves and to question authority was inherently a good thing. But that the justification

02:58:59.240 that he gave himself for twisting the science because others were twisting it in the negative way

02:59:04.240 was ultimately very harmful. Rick, on behalf of many people who are never going to necessarily know

02:59:10.840 your name, even after you're long gone from this planet, people who have already benefited from your

02:59:15.580 work, I want to thank you in the most sincere way that I can. What you've done is beautiful.

02:59:19.060 Thank you, Peter. Yeah, I think the ultimate success is being taken for granted.

02:59:22.940 It is.

02:59:27.940 You can find all of this information and more at peteratiamd.com forward slash podcast.

02:59:34.220 There you'll find the show notes, readings and links related to this episode. You can also find

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The Peter Attia Drive - August 05, 2019

#65 - Rick Doblin, Ph.D.： MDMA— the creation, scheduling, toxicity, therapeutic use, and changing public opinion of what is possibly the single most important synthetic molecule ever created by our species

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