Program Notes
Guest speaker: John Gilmore
John Gilmore talks about the politics involved in legitimate psychedelic research at a conference in the Netherlands. What The Hack is an outdoor hacker conference/event that took place on a large event campground in the south of The Netherlands from 28 until 31 July 2005. Events like What The Hack take place every four years, and originate from a group of people that was originally centered around a small hacker magazine called Hack-Tic. The magazine’s last issue was published in 1993, but for reasons unknown the events have so far refused to die.
In this talk, John describes the work of doctors who are giving MDMA, psilocybin, and soon LSD to patients in ongoing clinical trials. The new focus is on proving that these drugs can help to cure otherwise intractable conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress, fear of death in cancer patients, and cluster headaches.
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Transcript
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3D Transforming Musical Linguistic Objects
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Delta Shells This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. So, how is everybody today?
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I hope these summer months are being kind to you.
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It’s been kind of hot around here lately.
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Maybe it’s the same where you are right now.
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Unless, of course, you’re down under and have winter on your minds.
00:00:39 ►
Actually, it’s not as hot here in Southern California as I’m making it out to be, at least not along the coast.
00:00:46 ►
The truth is that I’ve entered into that pre-Burning Man phase where I begin to wonder what the hell I was thinking about when I decided to go back to the burn this year.
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You know, the truth is I’m not a big fan of camping.
00:00:58 ►
I can barely tolerate the heat, and I have to admit that I don’t enjoy the desert all that much.
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All in all, I’m not a very good candidate for the Burning Man experience.
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Yet, when I think about finally driving up to the gate where one of the greeters says,
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Welcome home, well, until you’ve been there, there’s just no way to describe the feeling you have at that moment.
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It’s a unique experience, that’s for sure.
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And right now, we’re all going to have the unique experience of going back in time to a
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conference held in the Netherlands at the end of July last year. And I guess I should mention that
00:01:37 ►
for those of you who may have lost your handle on time for the moment, That would make it July of 2005. And the conference was called
00:01:46 ►
What the Hack, as in H-A-C-K. And I’ll let you figure out for yourselves what the main
00:01:52 ►
focus of that conference was. Anyway, thanks to one of our own here in the Psychedelic
00:01:58 ►
Salon, we’re going to hear a talk that John Gilmore gave at that conference that he titled
00:02:03 ►
The Politics of Psychedelic Research.
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I hadn’t heard about this conference myself, but Yap,
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who is one of our regular visitors here in the Psychedelic Salon,
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told me about it and suggested that I feature it in one of these podcasts.
00:02:18 ►
Actually, Yap found an online video of this talk and offered to strip out the audio for me
00:02:24 ►
if John would agree to let us podcast it, which he very graciously did.
00:02:30 ►
In fact, thanks to Jop getting the ball rolling, John has also agreed to give a talk at this year’s Palenque Norte lectures in Theon Village at the Burning Man Festival.
00:02:40 ►
And I’ll tell you more about our Burning Man program at the end of this podcast.
00:03:16 ►
But first I want to play John’s talk at last year’s What the Hack convention. www.burningman.com And that link will take you to his personal web page where you’ll learn that, among other things, John was instrumental in getting started with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, better known as EFF, and the Alt News Groups, which is where a lot of us geeks hung out before the web came along.
00:03:25 ►
And now, let’s listen to John Gilmore’s overview of the current state of the politics of psychedelic research.
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I’m here to talk about the politics of psychedelic research.
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I hope that’s what you came to listen for.
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So I have a long history with psychedelics.
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But actually the history of psychedelics goes back before I was born. And a lot of what we understand about how the brain works, figured out in
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the 1950s and the early 1960s by people who were doing medical research with psychedelic
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drugs. Before we had these kind of tools that alter how the brain works, the
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brain was really kind of a black box. The way people studied it was by studying people
00:04:13 ►
who had really abnormal brains. And once they discovered psychedelics, and particularly
00:04:19 ►
in the purified forms, it became possible to take ordinary brains and alter them
00:04:26 ►
and see how the alterations changed how people thought,
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and that gave people clues into how the brain actually worked inside.
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Well, that went on throughout the 1950s, 1960s,
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and thousands and thousands of papers were published by people doing research
00:04:48 ►
with psilocybin. LSD was invented in this period, and it was given out by the Sandoz
00:04:54 ►
Corporation to any researcher who wanted to do research with it. And a lot got learned.
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And then came the 60s, and a huge cultural backlash as it escaped from the labs
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and escaped from the scientists and was used by ordinary people for their own purposes.
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So the Nixon administration in the United States clamped down on this research and passed a set of laws
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that made it illegal to possess these substances.
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And even though the laws were written
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such that you could do research if you got permission,
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somehow nobody could get permission.
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And all the research got closed down.
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It was kind of a casualty of the culture wars of
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the 60s. So for a period from about the mid-60s and early 70s up through the early 1990s,
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absolutely no research was done with psychedelics except for government research trying to prove how bad they were.
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Well, this isn’t actually true because, of course, these drugs had escaped out into the world.
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And so all of us were doing research with them.
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Or some of us were doing research with them.
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I’m curious.
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How many people in the room have taken a psychedelic drug?
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okay
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how many have taken
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do you count marijuana as a psychedelic?
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how many have taken marijuana?
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okay
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how many are on one of these drugs now?
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right now? Right now?
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Right now, yes.
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Okay.
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For me, I’ve taken psychedelics, and I’ve taken marijuana,
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and their influence on me has generally been quite positive.
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And their influence on me has generally been quite positive.
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Luckily, I don’t suffer from a large number of maladies for which these can be good,
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but they’ve given me insight.
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They’ve shown me that the narrow sort of reality-based worldview that I grew up with maybe didn’t correspond to everything in reality,
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but was more a construct of how my own mind was interacting with reality.
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And that led me to be able to accept other people’s views of reality
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and to be more effective in the world.
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But I’m not here so much to talk about how people use psychedelics
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for their own personal insight, for their artistic use and all of that.
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Because that’s still a battleground that has been largely lost in a legal sense, but of
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course, culturally, it’s still going on.
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What I’m here really to talk about is the untapped medical potential of these same drugs. So I’m on the board of
00:08:08 ►
an organization called MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. It’s
00:08:16 ►
maps.org. I encourage you guys to look at the website. It’s got all kinds of information,
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all the details about the stuff I’ll be telling you tonight.
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It was formed by a guy named Rick Doblin, who had some really formative experiences in his life with MDMA, as a lot of people from later generations also had.
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And he decided that it was crazy that people couldn’t take MDMA.
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They couldn’t use it for personal growth.
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They couldn’t use it to get beyond the problems they had.
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They couldn’t use it in therapy, which is what it was initially used for after Alexander Shulgin invented it.
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He gave it to therapists, and the therapists used it with their patients.
00:09:06 ►
used it with their patients. And there was a network of many hundreds of people doing psychoanalysis and different kinds of therapy who were taking this drug when it was legal,
00:09:15 ►
taking it with their patients or taking it and sitting with patients who were using it
00:09:19 ►
and talking through their problems. And it was a really powerful tool for working things out in your own mind.
00:09:29 ►
Well, again, when this drug escaped from the research community
00:09:33 ►
and made it out into the New Age community and into the bar scene in Dallas, Texas,
00:09:41 ►
the government clamped down,
00:09:44 ►
and the researchers at that time decided not to speak
00:09:47 ►
up.
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They had been doing this relatively quietly, and they decided they didn’t want the attention,
00:09:55 ►
and they just allowed it to become illegal.
00:09:59 ►
Since that time, though, a few people have been fighting to go back over that ground and say, well, look,
00:10:08 ►
we had hundreds of therapists using this. We gave it to thousands of people. Very few of them had
00:10:14 ►
real problems with it, and it helped a lot of them. Now, this sounds like the sort of drug you’d
00:10:20 ►
want doctors to be able to give to their patients, right? How do we move it through the process by which drugs for medical use are vetted? And what’s happened
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is over a period of 15 years, Rick and the people who have been working with him, a gradually growing collection of scientists and doctors and activists,
00:10:49 ►
have been getting government permission to go ahead and do scientific studies
00:10:56 ►
with an eye towards making these things into real medicines that you can get a prescription for,
00:11:02 ►
that you could go down to a pharmacy and fill your prescription,
00:11:05 ►
or you could take under the supervision of a doctor.
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So, the first of those that I want to talk about is MDMA.
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We currently have a clinical trial running.
00:11:19 ►
We have authorization to treat 20 patients.
00:11:24 ►
But this is a serious clinical trial.
00:11:26 ►
So I’ll tell you about clinical trials.
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I don’t know how it works in Europe,
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though I’ve heard that it’s a similar system.
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But in the United States,
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drugs that are given to people medically
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are controlled by an agency,
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the Food and Drug Administration.
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Since they don’t consider these foods,
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it goes down the drug path.
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And in order to prove that a drug is a reasonable thing,
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you have to prove two things.
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First, that it’s safe to give to people,
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that it won’t hurt them,
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or at least that it helps them more than it hurts them.
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And many, many drugs have terrible side effects.
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But the side effects are not as bad as the condition you started with
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that the drug is helping you with,
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and you and your doctor can make that decision.
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Second, they have to prove that it’s effective,
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that it actually does something good for you.
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And these strictures were put in in the 1920s
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because there were a lot of companies selling bogus medicines
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that didn’t actually do any good,
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just burned up people’s money and maybe even made them worse.
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So, safety and effectiveness.
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And the way that you prove this is you go through three clinical trials.
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The way that you prove this is you go through three clinical trials. A clinical trial is where a doctor will give a substance to a human being
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and look at what happens.
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And they may look with lab results, they may look with testing the people’s reactions,
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they may just make an evaluation of how the patient did over time.
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There’s three phases of clinical trials that you have to go through.
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Phase one trial tests for safety in a small population.
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You think MDMA is going to be good for something,
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but you don’t know, or maybe you’ve invented a brand new drug.
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You don’t know if it’s good for people or not. You’ve tried it out on animals and they didn’t die.
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So you try it on humans.
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And maybe 5, 10, 15 humans.
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They’re all volunteers.
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They usually volunteer because they’ve got some terrible condition
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and their drug might be good for it
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and they’re willing to take the chance.
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And so phase one trial just tests for safety, and it tests what a reasonable dosage is.
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Phase two trial tests for efficacy.
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Does it work?
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And for that, you have a population who you give the drug to
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and a population you don’t give the drug to, and you compare how well they do.
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You try to match these people up
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so that they come from a similar set of circumstances.
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And after you go through the statistical analysis,
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maybe you do this for 20, 50 people, something like this.
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After you go through that analysis,
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ultimately you find out,
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well, that drug actually didn’t make those people any better.
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It made them feel good, but their disease was still bad,
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or whatever it is.
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Okay, assuming you make it through that test,
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then you do a third phase, a phase three clinical trial.
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And in this case, you’re testing again for efficacy,
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but you’re also testing in a much broader population,
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hundreds and hundreds of people,
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because maybe people who come from a particular racial group
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or have a genetic, these particular genes, will have a funny reaction to it.
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Maybe people who are taking another medication at the same time
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will have a strange interaction.
00:15:01 ►
So you’re testing for safety in a broad population.
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have a strange interaction.
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So you’re testing for safety in a broad population.
00:15:08 ►
Okay, that’s the process that we would have to run one of these illegal drugs through
00:15:11 ►
in order for it to be declared safe and effective
00:15:13 ►
as a medicine for doctors to prescribe.
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Now, all of the drugs that you can get in the United States
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and presumably most of the ones you can also get in Europe
00:15:24 ►
have gone through a process like this, unless they were invented before the process was
00:15:30 ►
created.
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Drug companies usually do this work, and they pay for it in advance.
00:15:39 ►
It’s a lot of work, and they pay for it on the expectation that if the drug is actually useful
00:15:45 ►
and they can sell it, then they’ll make the money back by having a monopoly on that drug
00:15:49 ►
by getting a patent on it for 20 years.
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Well, we can’t do that with MDMA, with marijuana, with LSD, with psilocybin.
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All of these things were invented decades ago.
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Their patents are all expired.
00:16:07 ►
Marijuana just grows out of the ground.
00:16:09 ►
You can’t have a monopoly on it.
00:16:12 ►
So no drug company has been willing to fund this kind of research.
00:16:16 ►
It doesn’t matter how good it might be for patients.
00:16:20 ►
There was no economic incentive for a company to do it.
00:16:24 ►
So it’s taken a group of activists to do it instead of raising money and going through the work
00:16:29 ►
and finding the scientists and et cetera.
00:16:32 ►
So we found a scientist in South Carolina in USA, Dr. Michael Mithoffer,
00:16:40 ►
and he is running a test with 20 people for MDMA for people who have post-traumatic stress disorder.
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These are people who have gone through a traumatic experience and they can’t get over it.
00:16:55 ►
It’s affecting their life in a bad way.
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These are people who have been raped, who have been in a car accident,
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These are people who have been raped, who have been in a car accident,
00:17:11 ►
who have been assaulted or had a crime committed on them in some other way.
00:17:19 ►
We recently got the protocol expanded so it can also be used for people who are victims of war or terrorism,
00:17:22 ►
since we’re seeing too many of those.
00:17:28 ►
Ten patients have gone through this test so far, and we have another ten to go.
00:17:32 ►
And so far the results are looking positive.
00:17:39 ►
I mean, part of what’s happening here is we already understood that MDMA was good for this sort of thing.
00:17:44 ►
So, you know, of course, if you’re going to have to spend hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of dollars to go through this whole set of scientific tests,
00:17:48 ►
you want to test for something you’re going to win at, right?
00:17:51 ►
You don’t want to test for an unknown condition.
00:17:54 ►
And post-traumatic stress disorder is something that a fair number of people have,
00:17:59 ►
and many people have it in intractable ways that the current drugs don’t solve it.
00:18:07 ►
So that’s one test that’s running.
00:18:12 ►
Now, it turned out it took about five years to get permission to do that test.
00:18:18 ►
The government kept losing the paperwork, rejecting the paperwork. We had to go through three different institutional review boards
00:18:28 ►
which review any kind of research done on human subjects
00:18:32 ►
so that they protect the subjects.
00:18:37 ►
The government managed to scare off each of them by saying,
00:18:41 ►
well, you know, if somebody died during the process,
00:18:46 ►
you know, you could be sued for having authorized it.
00:18:48 ►
Well, of course, we all know, millions and millions
00:18:52 ►
of people have taken MDMA, right, without having a doctor
00:18:55 ►
at their side, and very few of them had any medical
00:18:58 ►
problems with it, but the government has a whole series
00:19:01 ►
of lies about how dangerous these things are,
00:19:03 ►
and so they scared, you know, it took five years of convincing and pushing papers
00:19:09 ►
and all of this to get the permission.
00:19:13 ►
But we got the permission and we’re doing the study.
00:19:15 ►
And probably sometime in 2006 or more likely 2007,
00:19:21 ►
we’ll have the whole thing written up as a scientific paper
00:19:24 ►
and can accurately say
00:19:26 ►
this was effective or it was not effective.
00:19:29 ►
There’s another trial happening at the University of Arizona, MDMA for cancer patients who have
00:19:38 ►
anxiety about their cancer.
00:19:40 ►
These are typically terminal cancer patients.
00:19:42 ►
These are people who have only weeks, months to live.
00:19:47 ►
And they’ve often been going through chemotherapy,
00:19:50 ►
which has terrible, terrible side effects.
00:19:54 ►
It makes you feel like you’re going to die.
00:19:56 ►
Actually, the chemotherapy, the theory is that you’re taking poison,
00:20:01 ►
and it’s poisoning your cancer faster than it’s poisoning you.
00:20:06 ►
But it doesn’t make you feel very good.
00:20:08 ►
And so Dr. Moreno realized we’re spending large amounts of effort trying to cure these people’s cancers
00:20:19 ►
and not spending very much effort on how they feel during the process.
00:20:26 ►
spending very much effort on how they feel during the process. What’s it like for the patient,
00:20:34 ►
whether or not they live or die ultimately from the cancer? And he said, okay, let’s work on ways to make people feel better, to talk them through the fear of death, their concerns about losing
00:20:42 ►
their hair, about all of the family issues that come up,
00:20:46 ►
let’s try and give them therapy.
00:20:49 ►
And we’re using MDMA in that therapy
00:20:53 ►
and trying to see, do the patients who got MDMA
00:20:57 ►
do better than the patients who didn’t?
00:21:00 ►
That study is still in process also.
00:21:04 ►
Right, there’s also, actually, the very first study with MDMA
00:21:08 ►
was the very first study that ever got government permission
00:21:12 ►
to study MDMA in a medical context.
00:21:15 ►
It was done in Spain.
00:21:18 ►
And it was Dr. Jose Carlos Puosa in Madrid.
00:21:23 ►
He actually treated about six patients after going through, yes?
00:21:31 ►
Okay, speak up. Oh, do we have any control groups? Absolutely. In each of these studies,
00:21:39 ►
not the safety studies, but in the efficacy studies, some of the patients, it’s called a randomized double-blind test.
00:21:50 ►
And in each of these groups,
00:21:53 ►
some of the patients are getting something that looks like the same medicine,
00:21:56 ►
but it isn’t actually the medicine.
00:21:58 ►
And some of them are getting the real thing.
00:22:01 ►
And it’s actually a tricky part of the study design
00:22:04 ►
as to how do you make that placebo medicine,
00:22:09 ►
the one that’s not supposed to have any effect,
00:22:11 ►
but make it invisible to the patient and the doctor.
00:22:15 ►
It’s called double blind because neither the patient
00:22:18 ►
nor the doctor knows when they give them that dose
00:22:22 ►
whether it’s the real thing or the fake thing.
00:22:24 ►
So, for example, in the study in South Carolina,
00:22:29 ►
I think they’ve gone through 10 patients.
00:22:32 ►
I know at least two of them had placebo,
00:22:35 ►
and probably it was more like five because it’s half and half.
00:22:40 ►
We got permission a few months ago.
00:22:44 ►
The results for the patients were sufficiently good
00:22:47 ►
that we went back to the Human Studies Review Board
00:22:52 ►
and said, will you give us permission
00:22:55 ►
so that the people who got the placebo,
00:22:58 ►
who have post-traumatic stress disorder,
00:23:00 ►
and we didn’t give them the drug that could help them
00:23:03 ►
because they were the control group, can we give them the drug that could help them because they were
00:23:05 ►
the control group.
00:23:06 ►
Can we give them the drug later?
00:23:10 ►
And then we can compare not only them, their initial therapy against people who did get
00:23:17 ►
MDMA, we can compare directly how they did in therapy without to how they did in therapy
00:23:22 ►
with.
00:23:24 ►
And we got permission to do that.
00:23:26 ►
So the first patient who had placebo
00:23:28 ►
has now also gotten MDMA
00:23:30 ►
and is going through the remainder of the therapy.
00:23:33 ►
The way the therapy works is
00:23:35 ►
you do some talking to the doctor
00:23:37 ►
for over a period of weeks.
00:23:39 ►
You do two sessions that have MDMA
00:23:41 ►
and then you do some more talking with the doctor
00:23:44 ►
to work out things
00:23:45 ►
that you learned in that process.
00:23:47 ►
And so that patient is still going through
00:23:50 ►
the final stages of that.
00:23:52 ►
But yes, we absolutely have control groups.
00:23:57 ►
Okay, so the very first study in Spain
00:24:02 ►
was called off in the middle because the Spanish anti-drug agency convinced the
00:24:13 ►
hospital where the drug study was happening to withdraw from it.
00:24:18 ►
And this happened after a lot of newspaper articles about the dangers of ecstasy and
00:24:23 ►
raves and all of this sort of thing.
00:24:24 ►
a lot of newspaper articles about the dangers of ecstasy and raves and all of this sort of thing.
00:24:32 ►
Actually, there’s a scientist who’s funded by the U.S. government, George Ricarte,
00:24:36 ►
who has been studying MDMA in animals.
00:24:46 ►
And, okay, so the United States government spends just about a billion dollars a year. I looked it up on the web today. I thought it was a few hundred million. It’s a billion dollars a year for the National
00:24:50 ►
Institute on Drug Abuse. And what this agency does is it does scientific studies designed
00:24:58 ►
to prove how bad drugs are for you. They spend a billion dollars a year
00:25:05 ►
trying to prove how bad they are.
00:25:08 ►
We at MAPS are spending less than a million dollars a year
00:25:12 ►
trying to prove how good they are for you.
00:25:16 ►
And so far, we’re doing better than they are.
00:25:19 ►
Woo-hoo!
00:25:31 ►
And I hope it’s because we have truth on our side, right,
00:25:34 ►
that these drugs are actually good for something.
00:25:39 ►
So part of that money went to Dr. Ricarte.
00:25:48 ►
And he has done a whole long series of studies where he will give MDMA to animals and then slice their brains up and see what shape they were in.
00:25:51 ►
And he did a study of trying to prove that MDMA caused Parkinson’s disease,
00:25:58 ►
which makes people tremor, gives them shakes.
00:26:01 ►
And you tend to get it in old age.
00:26:04 ►
He did this with a small group of monkeys,
00:26:08 ►
and it turned out that some of the monkeys got Parkinson’s.
00:26:13 ►
And actually, one of the monkeys died
00:26:17 ►
during the treatment.
00:26:19 ►
They gave them what they claimed was MDMA,
00:26:22 ►
and the monkey died.
00:26:24 ►
Right, and they called off the treatment on a second monkey
00:26:27 ►
because they were getting sick and they were afraid it would die.
00:26:31 ►
I mean, this should have raised a clue in their minds
00:26:33 ►
because they had done all kinds of studies of MDMA,
00:26:36 ►
and monkeys had never died from it before.
00:26:39 ►
It turned out, but instead they went ahead and published this and said,
00:26:41 ►
Look, look, monkeys are dying from doses that ordinary ravers are taking.
00:26:48 ►
I mean, my God, it’s terrible.
00:26:50 ►
You should all stop taking ecstasy now.
00:26:53 ►
Well, and what was actually wrong, as it turned out,
00:26:56 ►
was that they didn’t give them MDMA at all.
00:26:59 ►
They gave them methamphetamine.
00:27:02 ►
They gave them methamphetamine.
00:27:19 ►
And ultimately, they were forced to admit this and retract their paper, which was published in the journal Science,
00:27:23 ►
published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
00:27:29 ►
which I will point out is now the president of that association is Alan Leshner,
00:27:35 ►
who used to be high mucky muck in the U.S. government,
00:27:39 ►
in the anti-drug part of the U.S. government.
00:27:44 ►
He’s now running the people in charge of science.
00:27:52 ►
So anyway, the Spanish study was not canceled by the government,
00:27:55 ►
but they pressured the hospital into withdrawing from it.
00:27:59 ►
There is some hope that as we complete the U.S. study and show that it’s safe,
00:28:04 ►
that the Spanish study can continue and treat more patients and finish itself.
00:28:08 ►
That’s most of the studies now that are happening with MDMA. We actually have one study that is approved, but the doctor doesn’t yet.
00:28:16 ►
It was approved in December of last year, but the doctor doesn’t yet have permission to dispense the MDMA,
00:28:25 ►
or actually to keep it in his little office safe.
00:28:28 ►
The Drug Enforcement Administration has held up his permission from December to August
00:28:35 ►
in order to have like 10 doses of MDMA in his office safe.
00:28:42 ►
This is the sort of bullshit paperwork we have to go through
00:28:46 ►
to get this permission. A question?
00:28:48 ►
Where do they get the MDMA?
00:28:49 ►
Do they make it from the government or what?
00:28:52 ►
Ah, the MDMA
00:28:54 ►
can be produced by any lab
00:28:56 ►
in the United States that has a Schedule I
00:28:58 ►
drug manufacturing
00:29:00 ►
license, and there are
00:29:01 ►
10 or 15 of those. It turns out
00:29:04 ►
that a research lab run by Dr. David Nichols at Purdue University
00:29:08 ►
produced the MDMA that they’re using in this experiment,
00:29:13 ►
or they will be using when they get the permission.
00:29:15 ►
Do you have his phone number?
00:29:17 ►
I do have his phone number, yes.
00:29:20 ►
But if you just type Dr. David Nichols into Google, and you’ll find him.
00:29:27 ►
In fact, he’s an interesting guy.
00:29:30 ►
He developed a new synthesis for MDMA
00:29:33 ►
and produced MDMA of higher purity than anyone had ever seen before.
00:29:40 ►
In fact, when you go through these experiments,
00:29:44 ►
particularly if it was produced a few years earlier,
00:29:46 ►
you have to run it through a lab.
00:29:48 ►
You have to run your sample through a lab
00:29:49 ►
to verify that it hasn’t degraded,
00:29:52 ►
that it’s really the chemical you’re trying to test.
00:29:55 ►
And when they tested it against their known lab sample of MDMA,
00:29:59 ►
they discovered it was better than their known lab sample.
00:30:04 ►
So if you want some of this, you can get some,
00:30:09 ►
but you will need to have terminal cancer first.
00:30:21 ►
It’s actually easier to do these sort of studies in patients who are about to die.
00:30:29 ►
It’s easier to get permission because there are fewer concerns about it doing them long-term harm.
00:30:37 ►
Will there be long-term studies of MDMA?
00:30:43 ►
Eventually, if we prove that it’s efficacious for one of these conditions, then
00:30:50 ►
we will have to do phase three trials with hundreds of people over a period of years.
00:30:55 ►
I mean, it takes years to do even one of these studies anyway. And you usually have to do
00:31:00 ►
two separate studies. Maybe one can be done in the US, one can be done in Europe perhaps,
00:31:05 ►
with maybe 100 or 200 people in each one.
00:31:08 ►
And those people get tracked over a period of years.
00:31:12 ►
What’s the youngest age you could test MDMA on?
00:31:16 ►
For each of these studies,
00:31:18 ►
you have to write up a really detailed protocol
00:31:20 ►
that says all the conditions, for example,
00:31:24 ►
the studies are excluding people
00:31:25 ►
who have heart conditions because there is some, it’s clear from earlier research that
00:31:31 ►
taking MDMA tends to speed up your heart.
00:31:35 ►
And so we just, you know, didn’t want that kind of complications.
00:31:37 ►
Actually, the government required that we, originally, we were going to do these studies,
00:31:44 ►
the South Carolina studies, in a hospital
00:31:46 ►
where there would be a full emergency room there if anybody had any complications.
00:31:52 ►
Well, then it turned out that the hospital backed out,
00:31:55 ►
and so we were going to do it in a doctor’s office.
00:31:57 ►
Oh, but then we wouldn’t have the backup,
00:31:59 ►
so we have an emergency physician with what they call a crash cart
00:32:04 ►
with heart restarting equipment and things like that
00:32:07 ►
sitting in the next room in case we need him.
00:32:10 ►
So far, for those 10 patients, we haven’t.
00:32:12 ►
You know, he sat in there and read a book the whole time.
00:32:18 ►
So age limits.
00:32:22 ►
Generally, in these kind of studies,
00:32:23 ►
you want to exclude the far ranges of the age limits. Generally, in these kind of studies, you want to exclude the far ranges of the age limits.
00:32:27 ►
So I think the maximum age is about 70 or so, and the minimum age is probably 18, 21, something like that.
00:32:35 ►
When you get to the phase three studies, then you expand the age limits,
00:32:39 ►
and you start looking at those conditions.
00:32:41 ►
So would they test ecstasy on, like, how young of a person?
00:32:41 ►
those conditions.
00:32:44 ►
So would they test ecstasy on how young of a person?
00:32:50 ►
In these studies, I don’t actually know.
00:32:53 ►
You can look in the protocol on the MAPS website.
00:32:56 ►
I suspect they’re not trying to push the limits on,
00:33:00 ►
oh, we’re going to test this on 12-year-olds, right?
00:33:05 ►
Just because we’re trying to push this through a bureaucracy.
00:33:11 ►
It turns out Rick did a study of the FDA and the drug development process as his Ph.D. thesis at Harvard.
00:33:16 ►
And he went and interviewed people who worked at the FDA all through the 60s and 70s
00:33:23 ►
when the research was getting shut down
00:33:25 ►
and people who are in there now.
00:33:26 ►
And what he discovered really was
00:33:28 ►
that the research sort of fell in between the cracks at the FDA.
00:33:39 ►
What happened was in the 60s there was,
00:33:42 ►
well, to understand, the FDA,
00:33:44 ►
the Food and Drug Administration,
00:33:47 ►
doesn’t usually specialize in testing psychedelic drugs, right?
00:33:52 ►
They’re testing antidepressants, and they’re testing cancer drugs,
00:33:56 ►
and they’re testing anti-AIDS drugs,
00:33:58 ►
and they’re testing analgesics and painkillers,
00:34:01 ►
all kinds of new drugs that are coming out, epilepsy drugs, this and that.
00:34:07 ►
And so they’re a bureaucracy, and they have a whole big section that tests cancer drugs
00:34:11 ►
and a whole big section that tests antidepressants.
00:34:14 ►
And then they have a sort of a little section that tests all the other stuff.
00:34:18 ►
And the psychedelics fell into that section.
00:34:21 ►
Well, so through some internal politics and reorganizations, a really innovative set of
00:34:28 ►
people were in control of that all the other stuff section in the 1960s. And they were the ones
00:34:34 ►
allowing all this research to happen. And when things got shuffled around, I think actually
00:34:39 ►
those people got promoted into a more responsible job because that was kind of a backwater in the agency.
00:34:47 ►
And the people in charge of that became more stodgy,
00:34:50 ►
and they just stopped approving.
00:34:52 ►
But anyway, the end result of the thesis is,
00:34:57 ►
if we actually go through the full-blown three-phase,
00:35:01 ►
all-singing, all-dancing scientific process,
00:35:04 ►
and we really show that
00:35:06 ►
in patients this does work,
00:35:10 ►
we think that the FDA will actually make it a legal drug.
00:35:15 ►
Now, for an awful lot of things
00:35:18 ►
inside United States government
00:35:20 ►
where you thought you had rights against search
00:35:23 ►
and you thought you had procedures that protected you and all of this.
00:35:27 ►
Well, there’s the drug exception to all of that,
00:35:30 ►
where, oh, when it comes to drugs, you don’t have rights
00:35:33 ►
and they make arbitrary decisions that are unrelated to science, et cetera.
00:35:38 ►
Apparently, the Food and Drug Administration is not corrupted by that.
00:35:43 ►
And we’ve already pushed a case through the courts in the 1980s
00:35:47 ►
that proved that the FDA is in charge of whether or not
00:35:52 ►
that the Drug Enforcement Administration and the politicians in the White House
00:35:55 ►
have no say over whether something becomes a medicine.
00:35:58 ►
It’s the FDA that does it.
00:36:01 ►
So having gone through decades of work,
00:36:04 ►
we think probably that the government will follow its own rules
00:36:07 ►
and make it a medicine if we meet their standard of proof
00:36:11 ►
okay
00:36:12 ►
on to psilocybin
00:36:14 ►
a lot of the early research was done in psilocybin
00:36:20 ►
because it was one of the first compounds
00:36:22 ►
isolated and studied
00:36:24 ►
and there is a clinical trial happening right now because it was one of the first compounds isolated and studied.
00:36:27 ►
And there is a clinical trial happening right now at the UCLA Harbor Medical Center in Los Angeles.
00:36:33 ►
Let me see.
00:36:35 ►
It’s Dr. Charles Grobe,
00:36:38 ►
and I’m trying to remember what condition he’s studying.
00:36:42 ►
It’s another of these anxiety and terminal cancer patients.
00:36:46 ►
Who knows, by the time we get this finished, you may have your choice of MDMA or psilocybin,
00:36:52 ►
you know, if unfortunately you discover you have only weeks to live.
00:36:59 ►
It turns out that study is sponsored by a group called the Hefter Institute.
00:37:06 ►
It turns out that study is sponsored by a group called the Hefter Institute. It’s another group of researchers and activists who are interested in seeing the potential of these substances become medicines.
00:37:16 ►
And they got tied down to very tight conditions for who is allowed to be in that study.
00:37:23 ►
The result is they’ve only had a small number of patients,
00:37:26 ►
and they’re having trouble recruiting people to be in the study.
00:37:31 ►
They may not be able to finish the study
00:37:33 ►
because they just can’t get 20 patients or whatever who fit their criteria.
00:37:37 ►
So if you know anyone who has a terminal disease or who gets one,
00:37:46 ►
cancer in this case,
00:37:49 ►
and they’re anxious about dying
00:37:52 ►
and they might be willing to try psilocybin
00:37:54 ►
and therapy along with it.
00:37:59 ►
Hefter will fly them to Los Angeles
00:38:02 ►
to do the treatment and fly them back.
00:38:05 ►
I mean, they’ll have lots of other stuff to deal with in their life at that time,
00:38:08 ►
but if they want to do that, they’re welcome to come,
00:38:11 ►
and they would help all of us, I think, by doing that.
00:38:15 ►
There’s another psychological condition besides anxiety
00:38:19 ►
that there’s a study in process for.
00:38:22 ►
It’s for obsessive-compulsive disorder.
00:38:26 ►
This is people who get stuck in patterns
00:38:29 ►
and can’t break out of them
00:38:30 ►
and are washing their hands constantly
00:38:32 ►
because they’re afraid they’ve touched something or whatever.
00:38:36 ►
That’s happening at the University of Arizona.
00:38:39 ►
That one’s also in process.
00:38:43 ►
I think that’s the end of the psilocybin studies,
00:38:47 ►
though there are some studies also happening,
00:38:51 ►
not with an eye towards clinical trials,
00:38:53 ►
but Franz Wollenweider at Hefter Research in,
00:38:58 ►
I think it’s in Zurich, it’s in Switzerland somewhere,
00:39:01 ►
has been doing long-term research.
00:39:04 ►
One of the things they’re studying, for example, is memory
00:39:07 ►
and how psychedelic drugs affect your memory over the long term.
00:39:13 ►
Okay.
00:39:15 ►
LSD.
00:39:17 ►
An awful lot of research happened with LSD, too, in the 1960s.
00:39:22 ►
And it was a real shock to the scientific community
00:39:27 ►
because it is so much more powerful
00:39:29 ►
than the other substances they were working with.
00:39:34 ►
Where you’re giving a patient milligrams of other substances,
00:39:38 ►
you give them micrograms.
00:39:40 ►
You give them one thousandth as much of LSD,
00:39:43 ►
and it’s even a more profound trip in many cases.
00:39:47 ►
So, you know, there was a lot of what was learned about how the brain worked was like,
00:39:52 ►
how can this tiny amount of substance have such profound changes in perception and thought?
00:40:17 ►
And because LSD was the preferred substance of Timothy Leary, who spun out, and Richard Alpert, who spun, who actually kicked out of Harvard for releasing this stuff to the world,
00:40:29 ►
the LSD has had sort of a special stigma attached to it in medical research. And Albert Hoffman, who originally discovered the substance,
00:40:31 ►
is still alive. He’s 99 years old, living in Switzerland.
00:40:36 ►
Doesn’t look it, yeah, but he will be 100 years old
00:40:41 ►
next year.
00:40:41 ►
In February.
00:40:42 ►
In February.
00:40:44 ►
And we are attempting to start LSF 100 years old next year. In February. And
00:40:45 ►
we are
00:40:47 ►
attempting to start
00:40:49 ►
LSD research at Harvard
00:40:51 ►
again in time for his
00:40:53 ►
100th birthday.
00:41:04 ►
Yes. Yes, Dr. Hoffman is still, he’s not as active at flying around the world,
00:41:11 ►
but he’s still pretty active in Switzerland at this.
00:41:15 ►
So there’s an interesting piece of LSD research I want to talk about.
00:41:20 ►
Studies haven’t started yet in the scientific sense,
00:41:23 ►
to talk about it, studies haven’t started yet in the scientific sense, but what’s interesting is
00:41:26 ►
this is a condition where the patients came
00:41:29 ►
to the scientists and said,
00:41:31 ►
we think LSD is helping with this,
00:41:34 ►
can you help us do a study to prove it?
00:41:38 ►
There’s a condition called cluster headaches.
00:41:41 ►
It’s a very rare condition.
00:41:44 ►
It’s like migraines, but much worse. It’s like a series of
00:41:49 ►
migraines where you could go through several weeks if you have this condition and have no headaches
00:41:53 ►
at all. And then you’ll get a terrible headache and it will just drive you to your bed for hours
00:42:00 ►
or in some people’s cases, days. And then the headache will go away and then it’ll come back
00:42:05 ►
and it’ll go away and it’ll come back
00:42:07 ►
and it’ll go away and it’ll come back.
00:42:08 ►
And you’ll go through a cluster of headaches
00:42:10 ►
that could go on for a week or two weeks.
00:42:13 ►
And then you go out of that cycle
00:42:15 ►
and back to having a normal life.
00:42:19 ►
And none of the existing pain killing drugs
00:42:24 ►
seem to work for these, seem to stop this condition.
00:42:27 ►
And there’s an online discussion group of people who have cluster headaches called ClusterBusters.com.
00:42:39 ►
And these people were talking about, you know, how they structure their lives and how they deal with these headaches.
00:42:46 ►
And one of them said,
00:42:48 ►
well, I was in the middle of one of these clusters
00:42:51 ►
and just by the random chance of life,
00:42:56 ►
I ended up taking LSD with some friends
00:42:58 ►
and the cluster stopped.
00:43:02 ►
And the headaches didn’t come back.
00:43:03 ►
and the headaches didn’t come back.
00:43:10 ►
And some other people who were in the forum went off and tried it.
00:43:13 ►
And it worked for some of them too.
00:43:17 ►
And some of them even tried taking it
00:43:22 ►
when a cluster was about due to start,
00:43:25 ►
and actually succeeded in preventing a cluster from starting.
00:43:31 ►
Now, this is a really puzzling sort of thing.
00:43:33 ►
I mean, no one knew what caused these headaches,
00:43:36 ►
and no one has any idea how LSD is aborting them.
00:43:40 ►
And it turns out, apparently, psilocybin also, for for some people can have this kind of effect.
00:43:48 ►
But the patients are really happy to have found this out.
00:43:52 ►
And one of them, who I think is an ex-Microsoft person who had a large amount of money,
00:43:58 ►
came to MAPS and said, can I donate you guys some money to do a study of this, right? So that we can work with real doctors
00:44:08 ►
and try to get permission to use this
00:44:10 ►
and also do the research to understand
00:44:13 ►
ultimately how to cure it if we can’t do anything else.
00:44:21 ►
And so that study, we currently are doing what’s called an anecdotal, we’re
00:44:27 ►
collecting anecdotal studies. We’ve gone out and sent someone out to interview all of those
00:44:32 ►
people and write down, okay, talk to their doctors, talk to the people, and write up
00:44:37 ►
a whole document about what has been discovered by these patients. And we’ll send that in
00:44:42 ►
to the FDA to say, looks like something interesting here, can we do a study?
00:44:48 ►
So that’s in process and we’re hoping to do that at Harvard.
00:44:54 ►
Let’s talk a little bit about marijuana.
00:44:58 ►
Marijuana, some people think of it as a psychedelic,
00:45:01 ►
some people don’t.
00:45:02 ►
I don’t tend to lump it into that category,
00:45:04 ►
but marijuana, it turns out, is quite useful to a wide variety of people with medical conditions.
00:45:14 ►
And, in fact, it was part of the pharmacopoeia of the standard list of drugs at the turn of the century in 1900.
00:45:23 ►
at the turn of the century in 1900.
00:45:27 ►
And it was only taken out of the pharmacopoeia in about 1930,
00:45:33 ►
after there had been a whole scare campaign made against marijuana and it had been made illegal in various places.
00:45:37 ►
Marijuana for medical use really got restarted by the AIDS crisis.
00:45:44 ►
It turned out that, and this really happened in San Francisco, really got restarted by the AIDS crisis.
00:45:49 ►
It turned out that, and this really happened in San Francisco, a lot of people in San Francisco got AIDS because it was a hotbed of homosexuality.
00:45:58 ►
And in that time, people thought that all of the sexually transmitted disease were easy to cure.
00:46:08 ►
Well, we’ve discovered a few since then that aren’t easy to cure.
00:46:12 ►
But at the time, people weren’t taking precautions for transmission of disease.
00:46:17 ►
And so many people came down with this, and many young people.
00:46:21 ►
And one of the things that would happen to these patients is they would lose interest
00:46:27 ►
in eating. And when that happened, their weight would go down. They would become less resilient
00:46:35 ►
against any other thing that happened to them. And since their immune system was compromised,
00:46:40 ►
they would get all sorts of other infections and things, couldn’t fight them off, and they would die. They’d waste away. So, and at the time, you know, medical science couldn’t do
00:46:51 ►
anything for people who had AIDS. They were willing to try anything, and they tried everything. And
00:46:58 ►
one of the things they tried was marijuana. And it turned out that people who smoked marijuana tended to get the munchies.
00:47:09 ►
And they would eat, and it would keep their weight up, and then they could better fight off their other conditions.
00:47:15 ►
And this was the beginning of the medical marijuana movement.
00:47:31 ►
the politicians in San Francisco were very supportive of AIDS patients.
00:47:36 ►
They had an epidemic in their town that was untreatable by medical science, and anything that could provide relief to these people, they could have.
00:47:42 ►
And so the activists, Dennis Perrone among them,
00:47:46 ►
who set up a dispensary to provide marijuana to AIDS patients,
00:47:51 ►
where any patient could walk in,
00:47:54 ►
as it turned out, pretty much any person could walk in if they knew about it,
00:47:58 ►
and buy marijuana there,
00:48:01 ►
and smoke it on site and learn from other patients,
00:48:06 ►
and they had food and they had support groups and the politicians and the cops wouldn’t shut them down because
00:48:15 ►
they didn’t want to be seen busting AIDS patients. So that was the beginning. And it turned out that we couldn’t convince the legislature to do anything about it,
00:48:30 ►
but we did convince the people.
00:48:32 ►
And so we put that group of people put an initiative on the ballot in California
00:48:38 ►
that would pass a new law that said,
00:48:42 ►
if your doctor recommends that marijuana is good for your condition, then you have a right
00:48:48 ►
to grow it and keep it and smoke it.
00:48:52 ►
And you can also have a caregiver, another person who you can authorize
00:48:56 ►
to grow it for you or transport it for you or whatever.
00:49:01 ►
They can’t smoke it for you.
00:49:05 ►
Right.
00:49:06 ►
So that initiative passed in California,
00:49:11 ►
and similar ones passed in other states.
00:49:14 ►
And it turns out that, and that passed in 1996.
00:49:20 ►
So it’s been eight years that that’s been the law in California.
00:49:32 ►
Now, the federal government did everything it could to stop this.
00:49:37 ►
They first, immediately after the election,
00:49:41 ►
they stated that any doctor who recommended this would lose their medical license.
00:49:48 ►
And we went to court and ended up getting a ruling that said,
00:49:53 ►
no, doctors are free to recommend any goddamn thing they want to their patients.
00:49:56 ►
And the federal government cannot censor that speech and cannot punish them for that speech.
00:50:00 ►
They’re not allowed to prescribe the medicine,
00:50:04 ►
because prescribing is something that the feds regulate,
00:50:07 ►
but they’re allowed to recommend it.
00:50:08 ►
And they’re not allowed to give them the medicine,
00:50:10 ►
because that would be transferring, distributing an illegal substance.
00:50:16 ►
But they’re allowed to recommend it.
00:50:19 ►
And then how the patients get it is their own problem.
00:50:23 ►
Well, it turned out once that system was set up
00:50:26 ►
and people could get these recommendations
00:50:29 ►
that people tried marijuana for a whole variety
00:50:31 ►
of different conditions.
00:50:32 ►
About, there are more than 10,000 people in California,
00:50:36 ►
I don’t know the exact numbers,
00:50:38 ►
because there’s no central registry,
00:50:41 ►
who have recommendations for medical marijuana
00:50:43 ►
from their doctors.
00:50:50 ►
And from what I’ve heard, about half of them are for different kinds of pain.
00:50:55 ►
Some of them are for multiple sclerosis.
00:51:00 ►
Anecdotally, it seems to reduce the tremors and not the tremors, but the clenching of muscles in multiple sclerosis.
00:51:05 ►
Some of them are for AIDS.
00:51:08 ►
And a whole variety of other conditions.
00:51:12 ►
Yeah, a glaucoma, certainly, actually.
00:51:14 ►
The federal government even gives marijuana from their official research pot farm in Mississippi
00:51:22 ►
to six or seven patients.
00:51:26 ►
And one of them who I happen to know is a glaucoma patient
00:51:32 ►
who has been taking marijuana for this condition
00:51:35 ►
for 25 years and she and her doctor both say
00:51:37 ►
it has saved her sight.
00:51:39 ►
I mean she has very little sight left,
00:51:41 ►
but she would be totally stone blind if it wasn’t
00:51:43 ►
that she’s been taking marijuana. And she actually talked to me about, she had gone to another state and dealt with an
00:51:54 ►
eye doctor there. And he had measured her interocular pressure, which is what glaucoma
00:52:01 ►
is a disease of. It’s too much pressure in the eye.
00:52:10 ►
And he measured her eye, and it was high, but it was okay.
00:52:14 ►
And this doctor was very skeptical about the marijuana and said, yeah, blah, blah, blah, I don’t believe in that stuff.
00:52:17 ►
And she said, okay.
00:52:19 ►
I smoked marijuana within the last three or four hours.
00:52:24 ►
I won’t smoke it tonight.
00:52:25 ►
I’ll come back in the morning and you test me again.
00:52:29 ►
And she did that.
00:52:31 ►
And he tested her in the morning and her glaucoma had gone from like 300 to 800.
00:52:37 ►
It was like way out of range.
00:52:39 ►
And the guy said, he’s like, go out there and smoke some right now.
00:52:49 ►
Okay.
00:52:50 ►
So we have a few trials running on marijuana as well.
00:52:56 ►
The federal government, again, has taken years to provide the permissions to do this.
00:53:02 ►
years to provide the permissions to do this.
00:53:08 ►
But there was a study in AIDS patients at UC San Francisco
00:53:10 ►
that we wanted to do a study to say,
00:53:15 ►
does it help patients gain weight?
00:53:17 ►
Does it reduce AIDS wasting, as the condition is called?
00:53:21 ►
The feds wouldn’t let us do that study.
00:53:24 ►
Instead, we ended up substituting a study
00:53:28 ►
for, that says, okay, if these AIDS patients
00:53:31 ►
are taking other drugs for their AIDS,
00:53:33 ►
and they also smoke marijuana,
00:53:36 ►
does it make them worse or not?
00:53:39 ►
Right, it’s like, back to the way
00:53:41 ►
the government thinks about this.
00:53:42 ►
You want studies that will either show nothing
00:53:45 ►
or will show that drugs are worse for you.
00:53:49 ►
And so we ran that study,
00:53:51 ►
and it turned out it showed that people who smoked marijuana
00:53:55 ►
were no worse off than the people who didn’t.
00:53:58 ►
Oh, and by the way, on the side, they gained more weight.
00:54:01 ►
The ones who didn’t get marijuana gained one kilo
00:54:05 ►
because they were sitting around the hospital room
00:54:07 ►
full of snacks and things for them.
00:54:09 ►
And the ones who smoked marijuana
00:54:11 ►
or who took it orally gained three kilos.
00:54:15 ►
Okay.
00:54:16 ►
There’s also a study, it has finished,
00:54:19 ►
but they’re still analyzing the results and putting it up.
00:54:22 ►
This is marijuana for neuropathic pain.
00:54:25 ►
Neuropathic pain is pain that you get
00:54:27 ►
because your nervous system is broken.
00:54:31 ►
There’s probably nothing really wrong with you,
00:54:33 ►
but it hurts anyway.
00:54:35 ►
It’s like the pain people get of a phantom limb,
00:54:39 ►
for example, and AIDS tends to produce neuropathic pain
00:54:43 ►
in a lot of people.
00:54:45 ►
So this study has been done, I think, with 10 or 15 people
00:54:50 ►
and is being written up now.
00:54:56 ►
Yeah, Ibogaine, it turns out, is illegal
00:54:58 ►
in the United States, but it’s legal in many other countries.
00:55:03 ►
And Ibogaine, it’s a substance that comes in many other countries. And… What is it?
00:55:05 ►
Ibogaine.
00:55:06 ►
It’s a substance that comes from an African plant
00:55:09 ►
called iboga or iboga.
00:55:12 ►
And the unique thing that people claim about it
00:55:16 ►
is that it can break the cycle of addiction
00:55:19 ►
of opiates and cocaine.
00:55:22 ►
That it not only can it make people not crave the drug they’re addicted to,
00:55:27 ►
but it also resets their tolerance for the drug down to zero.
00:55:32 ►
So that even if they resume it,
00:55:35 ►
they resume it at a very low dose,
00:55:38 ►
rather than at the high doses they built themselves up to.
00:55:42 ►
There have been ibog, ibogaine clinics
00:55:45 ►
that have run in Mexico, in the Caribbean,
00:55:48 ►
and also one that ran for several years in Vancouver
00:55:52 ►
called the Iboga Therapy House.
00:55:55 ►
And none of these were done scientifically,
00:55:59 ►
none of these did the control groups
00:56:02 ►
and non-control and clinical trials
00:56:03 ►
and permissions and all of that.
00:56:05 ►
They were just done in countries where it was legal
00:56:08 ►
and where people who had an addiction problem
00:56:10 ►
could go and get treated.
00:56:12 ►
Now we are doing a follow-up study with the patients
00:56:16 ►
who went through the iboga treatment house in Vancouver
00:56:19 ►
and trying to collect those stories
00:56:22 ►
in an attempt to see whether it’s worth
00:56:23 ►
doing a clinical trial.
00:56:27 ►
Right, since you weren’t at the microphone,
00:56:30 ►
I have the pleasure of paraphrasing your question.
00:56:35 ►
Which is, when I claim that having taken drugs
00:56:39 ►
has expanded my consciousness or my ability
00:56:43 ►
to see the world.
00:56:45 ►
Is that actually an expansion
00:56:47 ►
or is that a malfunction of my brain?
00:56:53 ►
Is there reality or is that just illusion?
00:56:55 ►
It’s another way to ask that.
00:57:00 ►
It’s really not clear to me what the nature of reality is.
00:57:17 ►
So I don’t claim that either the mundane reality is the real thing
00:57:22 ►
or that what you experience when you take this substance and it’s in your bloodstream is the real thing or that what you experience when you take this substance
00:57:25 ►
and it’s in your bloodstream is the real thing.
00:57:28 ►
I don’t know whether to say one is an illusion
00:57:30 ►
and one is reality,
00:57:32 ►
but that’s not really the point of what you were asking.
00:57:36 ►
I mean, the way I look at it is
00:57:39 ►
not what happened during the experience,
00:57:42 ►
but how did it change me?
00:57:44 ►
How did it change me in my future interactions when I’m not on the drug?
00:57:48 ►
And what it did was it showed me that the narrow worldview that I had
00:57:54 ►
was not the only way to see the world.
00:57:57 ►
And I think that has been a benefit to me.
00:58:04 ►
I don’t know how anyone could better explain the value of a psychedelic experience than
00:58:10 ►
John did just then when he said, it’s not what happened during the experience, but how
00:58:16 ►
did it change me?
00:58:17 ►
How did it change me in my future interactions when I’m not on the medicine?
00:58:22 ►
And for me, that’s the bottom line of the experience.
00:58:26 ►
These mystical, magical substances can open many doors, but it’s still up to each and every one of
00:58:32 ►
us to walk through those doors and attempt to bring back some information that just might be
00:58:37 ►
of value to us personally, or to our family, or clan, or tribe, or to the planet in general.
00:58:44 ►
Everything you’ve been searching for all your life actually may be no more than a photon
00:58:49 ►
away, but you’ve still got to do the great work required to mine those nuggets of golden
00:58:55 ►
information.
00:58:56 ►
Speaking of gold, what did you think about that little factoid John mentioned about the
00:59:01 ►
U.S. government spending over a billion dollars a year
00:59:05 ►
trying to prove that these sacred medicines are bad for us.
00:59:10 ►
You know, it just boggles the mind.
00:59:12 ►
Just think of what the psychedelic community could do with a billion dollar research budget each year.
00:59:18 ►
Of course, since all of the substances we’re interested in can’t be fenced in with a patent,
00:59:23 ►
Since all of the substances we’re interested in can’t be fenced in with a patent,
00:59:31 ►
the drug cartels in Washington aren’t about to let the government show how beneficial these plants and chemicals really are.
00:59:34 ►
You know, it’s amazing when you think about it.
00:59:39 ►
The citizens of the U.S. are by far the most drugged out society on the planet.
00:59:43 ►
And I’m not just talking about caffeine, sugar, nicotine, and alcohol. I’m talking about all the mind-altering prescription drugs that the AMA’s pill pushers keep prescribing in record numbers every year.
00:59:52 ►
Seems like the pharmaceutical industry has a lock on what substances the government will allow you to put into your own body,
00:59:58 ►
and they aren’t about to let something get approved that they can’t make a lot of money on.
01:00:03 ►
And, of course, the drug cartels in Washington are also working hand-in-glove with the prison industry,
01:00:09 ►
where they see an abundant supply of slave labor in the form of nice people
01:00:13 ►
who are locked up for simply smoking a joint or two.
01:00:17 ►
You know, it’s a system that eventually is going to come crashing down, I’m sure of that,
01:00:21 ►
and not a moment too soon, in my humble opinion. But before I get too carried away here, I want sure of that, and not a moment too soon in my humble opinion.
01:00:26 ►
But before I get too carried away here, I want to be sure and mention that a while back
01:00:31 ►
we podcast another talk by John Gilmore, and it was in our Mind States 2003 sampler, which
01:00:38 ►
was volume 23 of the Psychedelic Salon.
01:00:41 ►
And the talk that John gave at that conference was titled, Our Constitutional Rights
01:00:46 ►
of Anonymous Travel. And in it, he details some of the adventures he’s been having while suing the
01:00:53 ►
U.S. federal government to force them to allow air travel in the U.S. without having to show an
01:00:58 ►
identification. You’ve got to hand it to John. He’s not afraid of taking on the big boys in their own backyard.
01:01:06 ►
My hat is off to him, that’s for sure.
01:01:13 ►
So it’s with great anticipation that I look forward to hearing John at Burning Man this year when his topic will be Strategies for Ending the Drug War.
01:01:18 ►
I guess I should also mention that the Blanque Norte lectures this year
01:01:22 ►
are on track to be even more spectacular
01:01:25 ►
than they’ve been in the previous three years.
01:01:28 ►
In another couple of weeks, we’ll have the final lecture schedule posted on the web.
01:01:33 ►
As in past years, this year you can expect to see and hear people like
01:01:38 ►
Eric Davis, John Hanna, Daniel Pinchbeck, Alex and Allison Gray,
01:01:43 ►
Raphael Eisner, Earth and Fire Arrowood,
01:01:46 ►
and a lot of other speakers that you won’t want to miss.
01:01:50 ►
And, of course, if all goes well this year,
01:01:52 ►
you won’t even have to put up with the rigors of the playa to hear them.
01:01:56 ►
This year we’re not going to rely on my little cassette tape recorder
01:02:00 ►
to capture the talks because J.T. has offered his help in making the recordings.
01:02:26 ►
Thank you. It never really does in the playa. Well, we should be able to enjoy this year’s Palenque Norte lectures in the comfort of the psychedelic salon this winter.
01:02:30 ►
I guess I’ve kept you long enough for today.
01:02:33 ►
Thanks again for joining us.
01:02:34 ►
And a special thank you to John Gilmore for sharing his thoughts with us.
01:02:39 ►
Thank you again, Yap, for locating this talk and helping me get it into podcast format.
01:02:44 ►
I hope I haven’t mangled the pronunciation of your name too much,
01:02:48 ►
but as a typical American, I’m sort of linguistically challenged.
01:02:54 ►
Jacques Cordell and Wells, otherwise known as Chateau Hayuk,
01:02:58 ►
well, thanks again for the use of your music here in the salon.
01:03:01 ►
I really do appreciate it, you guys.
01:03:04 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from
01:03:07 ►
Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.