392 - MDMA and Autistic Adults_ A New Research Study

Program Notes

Guest speakers: Alicia Danforth & Charlie Grob

Today’s podcast features a 2013 Palenque Norte lecture given by Alicia Danforth in which she tells about her work with the autistic community and their use of MDMA. Following that is a recording of a conversation with Alicia and Dr. Charlie Grob, who have just begun a new study to investigate the potential of using MDMA to help ease the social anxiety that is sometimes experienced by our friends and fellow saloners in the autistic community.

LINKS mentioned in this podcast:
Study Information: MDMA-assisted Therapy for Social Anxiety in Autistic Adults
“What Is Autism?” by Nick Walker

Exploring therapeutic effects of MDMA on post-traumatic stress

Podcast 380 – “Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate”

Podcast Archive for Gary Fisher

MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

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And today we’re going to focus on a substance that has had a major impact on my own life

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and anecdotally has also made a positive difference in many other lives.

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The substance is MDMA, and at long last, the U.S. government is allowing it to be studied

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in a more rigorous and scientific manner.

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allowing it to be studied in a more rigorous and scientific manner.

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In the program notes for today, I’ll also include a link to a recent story in the Los Angeles Times about research in this area.

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And in addition to mentioning the study that we will be learning about in this podcast,

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the push to help veterans suffering from PTSD is also being considered.

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So for my personal story about MDMA, you can hear it in

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my podcast number 380, which is titled Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate. Now, today we are first

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going to get to hear the Palenque Norte talk that Alicia Danforth gave at the 2013 Burning Man

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Festival. In it, she brings us up to date about the research that she’s been involved

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in for the past several years. And following that, I’m going to play the recording of a

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conversation that I had with Alicia and Dr. Charles Grobe. It took place about a week ago,

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and in that conversation, Alicia and Charlie talked about their new FDA-approved study,

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one that began only this month. And after those two segments, I’ll be back to give you an update on our annual pledge drive.

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However, in case you’re wondering, during the first half of the drive,

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we have now raised over two-thirds of the funds that we need for a full year of operation.

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So it looks like you’re going to have to put up with me here in the salon for another year at least.

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And for me, that is a very good thing.

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Hopefully you feel the same way.

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But first, let’s return to the playa at last year’s Burning Man Festival

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as Pez introduces Alicia Danforth,

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who will begin our enlightenment about the concept of neurodiversity.

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Good evening, everybody.

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So I have the pleasure of introducing our next speaker.

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Alicia Danforth, Ph.D., is the co-investigator

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for a new FDA-approved clinical study

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looking at the effect of MDMA-assisted therapy

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on social anxiety in autistic adults

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at the Los Angeles Biomedical

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Research Institute, Harbor UCLA Medical Center. Her work as a co-facilitator on a clinical trial

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with psilocybin for existential anxiety related to advanced cancer inspired her to become a

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clinical psychologist, and she completed her pre-doc clinical internship this summer.

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At the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,

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Alicia co-developed and co-taught the first graduate-level course

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on psychedelic theory, research, and clinical considerations

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for therapists and researchers in training.

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Since 2004, she has volunteered as a Black Rock Ranger

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and care service peer counselor at Burning Man,

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Boom, and other festivals and

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events.

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Her areas of focus is supporting individuals who are experiencing challenging altered states

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of consciousness.

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And without further ado, Alicia.

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Tonight I’m going to take full advantage of being at Burning Man to give the talk I’ve

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been dying to talk since, I’ve been dying to give since I’ve started this research.

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I’m going to make it as fun as

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possible and my hope is that I’ll

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present some new perspectives

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that will maybe shift your

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thoughts about this concept of neurodiversity

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and I’ll go into a little more detail

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about that. I want

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to start where I left off.

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I want to start with the conclusion of a talk

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that I gave at Shift

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Camp earlier in the week, and we’re going to take it from there into the fun stuff.

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So what I want to start with is just an acknowledgement that individuals on the

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autism spectrum are not in their own little world. They’re very much with us in our world,

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own little world. They’re very much with us in our world, and they simply process information differently than we do. But I want to get away from this idea that they’re somehow separate

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and not a part of our community, because all week long as I’ve been speaking, I’ve been approached

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by autistic individuals who have come up to share their stories with me. So they’re here with us at Burning Man,

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and I want to raise awareness about that fact,

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that maybe the typically developing amongst us

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may encounter some opportunities to help enable them

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have the best Burning Man experience possible.

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So this talk is about all of us.

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Put very simply, neurodiversity is a movement away from the concept of autism as pathology, disease, disorder,

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and looking at the broad spectrum of cognitive difference and all the shades of gray in between.

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So that’s what I’m referring to when I refer to

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neurodiversity. We’re all on a broad spectrum. And at this point in history, if anyone tells you

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they know what autism is, don’t believe them. It’s unknown at this time. It’s an understudied area.

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And my interest is not in treating or curing autism with psychedelic-assisted

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therapy.

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I’m looking at ways in which MDMA-assisted therapy may improve quality of life, specifically

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by reducing social anxiety.

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So I want to be clear about that to begin with.

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I do not speak for autistic individuals.

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It’s not my aim to give them a voice. They have a voice. And so I asked them questions.

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I asked them very open-ended questions for the qualitative portion of my mixed methods dissertation, I asked in semi-structured interview

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essentially three basic questions

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intended to reduce my own bias

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as someone who has been involved

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in clinical research with psychedelics.

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I asked them to tell me about what they experienced

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when they tried MDMA ecstasy.

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What happened?

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And let them tell me in their own words about their experiences.

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I also asked them what led them to try MDMA ecstasy for the first time,

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and their answers weren’t really significantly different

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than probably what most people in this room would say if I asked them.

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So there weren’t a lot of significant findings there.

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But I also asked them what, if anything, they noticed changed after they did MDMA.

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So a lot of the responses that I got in the interview transcripts were about change.

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change. I used a process called applied thematic analysis to pour over every word of thousands of pages of transcript to look for emergent themes. How did the topics that people discussed cluster

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around common themes? And so, as I mentioned at the start of the talk, I’m going to do the fun presentation I’ve wanted to do for a long time.

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I’ve organized the themes around a fun analogy, and I’m going to use some visual images to help you remember the key themes.

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For listeners who will be listening in the future on podcasts, I’ll try to keep you in mind, too,

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and kind of describe what we’re looking at here as we go along.

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So a brief word about the study population.

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For my dissertation, I interviewed two female and 22 male individuals

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who identified as being on the autism spectrum.

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There’s a little bit of information there about diversity.

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The age range of participants was 21 to 49 years old,

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with the mean age of being 30.8 years.

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22 of the 26 individuals identified as white.

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So anyone inspired to do research in this field in the future,

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I encourage you to take measures to include more ethnic diversity.

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The AQ is an autism quotient assessment measure.

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It’s not diagnostic.

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It’s not intended to tell someone whether or not they have autism,

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but it will give you a good indication of whether or not

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you have a relatively high profile in terms of autistic traits. Sometimes it’s used as a screening

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to help someone know whether or not they should invest in getting more extensive assessment.

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The mean score for typically developing individuals is 16. In this study, the mean AQ score was 37.6,

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to give you some indication.

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And two third-party individuals

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who knew the interview participants well.

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In one case, it was a best friend,

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and in the other, it was a romantic partner.

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I interviewed them as well to say,

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I know they’ve talked about this change.

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Did you see a before and after change in them

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to get that sort of third-party validation?

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Just one more reminder before we dig in here

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and start hearing some of the quoted material from the interviews.

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I want to remind everyone that autism is a spectrum.

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One of the most helpful things someone told me before

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I dove into the dissertation was they said, don’t forget, if you’ve met one person on the autism

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spectrum, you’ve met one person on the autism spectrum. There was a lot of heterogeneity in

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this study group. Everyone was unique and very different and that contributed to the diversity

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of stories that we’re going to hear. Let’s dig into the big themes. So change came up time and

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time again and to help me organize all the different categories of change I recognized

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that they fell into roughly five categories which I refer to as the five C’s.

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And we’re going to go through each one briefly, their courage, communication, connection,

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communion, and clarity.

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And I’m going to use the Wizard of Oz as our structuring analogy as we walk through to

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see how the participants’ experiences were somewhat similar to what Dorothy and her companions experienced in Oz.

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So first off, we have the Cowardly Lion.

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And as I’m sure most of us in the room know, his adventures in Oz helped him attain his courage.

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And courage was a theme that emerged repeatedly in my participants telling me what happened when they took MDMA.

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overheatedly and my participants telling me what happened when they took MDMA. To give you an idea of what that sounded like, I’m going to be reading quotes. Everyone who’s identified by name, I just

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want to let everyone know it’s a pseudonym, so everyone’s identity is protected. So this is how

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Haas described his increase in courage that he acquired through using MDMA.

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He’s a 21-year-old male.

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He said, I guess it broke down barriers is how I would describe it.

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Yeah, I felt like up until that point,

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I just sort of always lived in a shell, like in a bubble,

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the way I isolated from people.

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And yeah, I just sort of tore that down and said,

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there’s no need for there to be a barrier.

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That gives you the flavor of some of the newfound courage people described.

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One of my favorite examples of someone who found courage was, he found the courage to dance.

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And he said he had never been able to dance.

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Often with an Asperger’s diagnosis, there’ll be some challenges with kind of awkward gait.

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With an Asperger’s diagnosis, there’ll be some challenges with kind of awkward gait.

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And with the teasing you get in school, a lot of times these individuals would grow up with a fear of dancing in public. But he said, after about an hour, I jumped out on the dance floor and I had moves like Michael Jackson.

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I don’t know what I looked like, but I felt like Michael Jackson.

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So time and time again, I heard stories of barriers coming down,

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inhibition being reduced, openness increasing,

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self-confidence increasing to new levels that they hadn’t experienced prior to MDMA,

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and developing a new social confidence.

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So to help you remember that, you can think of the cowardly lion.

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So communication. I’ll use the analogy of the cowardly lion. So communication.

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I’ll use the analogy of the tin man’s oil can.

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How he’s sort of frozen and stuck.

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Individuals on the autism spectrum told me quite a bit

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about how taking MDMA influenced their ability to communicate.

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The four primary categories were talking,

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they were better able to join in group discussions socially,

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listening, several people described being able to listen

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to what someone else was saying and sustain their attention

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and really sustain an interest in what the other person was telling them.

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There are several accounts of people being able to participate

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in enjoyable eye contact for the first time.

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Difficulty with eye contact is a common attribute

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for individuals on the autism spectrum.

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It actually can invoke a fear response

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that can, for some individuals, feel like dread.

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And body language.

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Several people told me that they had the sensation that when the effects of the MDMA came on,

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they would say things such as,

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all of a sudden I could read body language.

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And they were quick to acknowledge they didn’t know how accurate they were,

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but they felt very much as if they could interpret gestures, facial expressions, and subtleties of nonverbal communication, in some

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cases for the very first time. So here are a few examples from quoted material about what that

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sounded like. George was 24 when he tried MDMA for the first time. I interviewed him about four days after his first experience,

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and he said, I wanted to talk to people,

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but not in the way I usually do, i.e. lecture them.

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I listened to other people and cared deeply about what they were saying.

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He also added, I was actually enjoying making eye contact.

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On eye contact, in addition, he said, suddenly there was no discomfort

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at all. Not only no discomfort, but suddenly I felt it was like I could see the person behind

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the eyes, and I wanted to sort of know who it was, and it was sort of just looking in there to look

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for a slight reaction, slight sort of changes, just to see how he was reacting to me.

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And this was a very novel experience for George.

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He’d never experienced anything like this.

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I’ll tell you a little side anecdote.

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He was in Europe and went to a nightclub with a friend

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who was also on the spectrum.

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And by chance, they encountered a psychiatric nurse who was at the club that night.

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And the nurse said, you know, I have a client who identifies as Asperger’s. And she says her,

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you know, symptoms go away when she takes MDMA. And she actually likes making eye contact.

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So the two friends turned to each other and began deeply gazing into each other’s eyes,

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and he said it felt like hours.

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They just enjoyed looking at each other’s faces,

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looking in each other’s eyes deeply,

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and with a sense of humor.

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He said by the end of the night,

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we noticed we were starting to look down at the ground again.

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But he added that he’d noticed in the days following,

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he said, as I’m walking down the street now, my shoulders are up and back and my head is lifted and I’m less afraid to glance at people’s faces.

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So he had a change there.

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Begrimed was a 25-year-old male, and this was regarding social conversation.

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He said, MDMA didn’t make me unafraid of it, unafraid of conversation.

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It made me want to actually converse and make friends and all that.

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It was something else.

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So, and to help you remember the theme of communication,

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think of the tin man and his oil can sort of loosening up.

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The next theme also related to our Tin Man, that heart connection, that

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reduction of the boundaries between people, increased intimacy, making friends, relating

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to family members, romantic relationships, and sexuality and intimacy were also sub-themes of the theme of connection.

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And to give you the flavor of the shifts that MDMA helped catalyze,

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I’m going to read a somewhat longer quote by Sylvan.

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Sylvan was a 24-year-old male.

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So he said, There are actually certain friends I had made months previous to his first MDMA experience,

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or his second, actually, that I really wanted months previous to his first MDMA experience, or his second actually,

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that I really wanted to get to know better. But due to my social anxiety, I was really just,

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well, I was intimidated by them. I really looked up to them and thought they would never really want to be my friends. So I kind of stopped talking to them out of shyness but for a while I really wanted to make

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a connection with them it felt really important so the day after that experience I was still

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feeling so open and so changed that I made an effort to just get past my shyness and make a

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call to them and I actually ended up seeing them that day and it was really a great kind of reconnection

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and I told them about my experience with MDMA and since then we’ve been pretty much best friends

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and we do all these things together and it’s been one of the best places I’ve ever been in my life

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to reconnect and really feel that it was because I was so changed by that experience.

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So remember our friend the Tin Man.

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Now, there was another level of connection that was a bit deeper, a bit more substantial,

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maybe on a mental connection level, even a spiritual level.

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And I refer to that category as communion.

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If you think of the communion, how Dorothy and her three companions started moving through their journey together as one unit,

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that sort of cohesive bond between them, that might help you remember this communion theme.

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The best way to explain it is by providing some examples. Some of the main themes were sharing with others, which sometimes can be difficult for individuals on the

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spectrum who have difficulty navigating those social cues, unity, empathic feeling, and empathic

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understanding. It’s a very widespread and deeply ingrained myth that individuals on the autism spectrum do not experience empathy

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I encourage you to step away from that thinking

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and imagine that they experience empathy differently

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and I’ll give you some examples of what that sounded like

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to help you feel the difference between the empathy of caring

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and feeling for others in that sort of heart place

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and the empathy of understanding another’s condition based on what you observe.

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And I think sometimes typically developing individuals think they are much better in that capacity than they actually are.

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So, again, we’re not talking about empathic accuracy here, but perceptions of empathic experiences.

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So here’s some examples.

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Michelangelo, 25, felt as if, and this is his quote, the mystery of other people had been dissolved a bit.

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Fuzzy, 23, said, I felt more emotionally connected to my friend, and I could understand

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his situation a lot better. Jules said, I found people much more enticing to be around. I want

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to connect with people, and I want to be around people. I want to hang out and commune with, like,

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some aspect of community. Tony36 said, I’m a little bit skeptical about some people’s impressions of

00:21:08 ►

ecstasy because ecstasy is also an amphetamine and while it increases your sense of empathy,

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it also probably increases your delusions of empathy at the same time. So maybe some of you

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can relate to that statement. And our fifth C is clarity.

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And this was the category that was the most unexpected finding in my research.

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This is where I started to hear a real difference

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between what I’d heard from typically developing MDMA XTC users

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and individuals on the autism spectrum.

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They talked about this profound clarity, just like the scarecrow there,

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this sudden straightening out of cognitive processes.

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The word clarity was repeated time and time and time again.

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And if I were a neuroscientist, I would be all over this.

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What is going on in the brain that allows these individuals under the

00:22:06 ►

influence of MDMA ecstasy to experience this profound clarity that strikes them as very sudden

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and novel, like something they had never experienced prior? It’s a research question I hope someone

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will pick up. I’ll read some quotes briefly here. So Morton49 said,

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It gave me a complete clarity about things I didn’t have prior to that.

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And the reason that I didn’t have clarity prior to that

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was because I was always worried and anxious.

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So maybe the reduction of fear might have something to do with it.

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Fuzzy said,

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I have a tendency to just get stuck in thought loops about things,

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usually things that I don’t tendency to just get stuck in thought loops about things,

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usually things that I don’t want to be thinking about,

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and this kind of seemed to just not make that happen while I was on it.

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It didn’t seem to happen at all.

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Begrimd said, for the first time, it was very, like, I finally got it.

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Like, you know how, I guess, autistic people, they don’t really know those unwritten social rules and. Like, you know how, I guess autistic people,

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they don’t really know those unwritten social rules and all that, you know?

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The nuances and conversation and stuff like that, like, I got it.

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Like, it was just like, bing.

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And George said that his thoughts were flowing lucidly.

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So that’s, and I’ll add to that,

00:23:27 ►

that 58% of the individuals

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that I interviewed for my dissertation

00:23:31 ►

reported experiencing significant

00:23:34 ►

epiphanies, insight, or revelation.

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So they had these moments of awakening

00:23:40 ►

as a result of trying ecstasy.

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So remember our scarecrow.

00:23:47 ►

Before we leave the characters of Wizard of Oz,

00:23:51 ►

I’ll share with you that while I was, over months and months,

00:23:55 ►

laborious work pouring over all these transcripts,

00:23:58 ►

trying to extract the themes,

00:24:00 ►

at some point that lyric from the America song,

00:24:03 ►

Oz never did give nothing to the tin man that he didn’t already have,

00:24:07 ►

kept repeating in my mind.

00:24:09 ►

It’s important to remember that distinction,

00:24:12 ►

that it didn’t come in in the form of a pill or a powder,

00:24:18 ►

but there was something latent, there was something unexpressed

00:24:22 ►

or something that was difficult to come forward that MDMA somehow smoothed out and allowed these attributes to be expressed.

00:24:35 ►

So, as we know in The Wizard of Oz, there were also, let’s see, some undesirable attributes to being in Oz

00:24:45 ►

flying monkeys and wicked witches

00:24:48 ►

so yes, not every report was glowing

00:24:52 ►

I had to really dig to get the negative

00:24:55 ►

there wasn’t a lot of negative

00:24:57 ►

that could be because of self-selection bias

00:24:59 ►

meaning people who had great experiences were more likely to contact me

00:25:03 ►

to participate in interviews

00:25:04 ►

but here are a few of the ways people describe the undesirable effects people who had great experiences were more likely to contact me to participate in interviews.

00:25:08 ►

But here are a few of the ways people describe the undesirable effects.

00:25:11 ►

Tony said,

00:25:15 ►

I just kind of wanted the general happiness feeling of it because I don’t naturally feel much of that at all.

00:25:18 ►

My general sensation is neutral to cold, I would say.

00:25:21 ►

And so I was hoping it would have some effect there

00:25:24 ►

and I got pretty you know, I,

00:25:26 ►

I got pretty upset that it didn’t, that it, nothing. It’s like, am I ever going to have that?

00:25:34 ►

So he was a classic non-responder. You may know, you know, typically developing friends of yours

00:25:39 ►

who take MDM ecstasy and they just don’t have that effect. So Tony was an example of an autistic

00:25:47 ►

individual who reported that it just didn’t work for him. Sylvan said it was a bit hard to kind of

00:25:54 ►

find a ground in myself for a while because all these kinds of new thoughts and new kinds of

00:25:59 ►

feelings were flooding into me and it was disorienting for a while. I was just stuck in my bed, not knowing what to do.

00:26:07 ►

So there were other accounts of undesirable outcomes.

00:26:11 ►

The main categories, distress, disappointment, overwhelm,

00:26:15 ►

over-disclosure, and the come-down.

00:26:17 ►

But those accounts of the come-down

00:26:19 ►

weren’t significantly different than what I’ve heard and read

00:26:24 ►

from typically developing populations.

00:26:27 ►

So I’m going to speed up here.

00:26:30 ►

Before I leave the Wizard of Oz theme,

00:26:33 ►

I’ll stay there a little bit longer.

00:26:36 ►

I just want to remind everybody, as I dig deeper into this theme,

00:26:39 ►

I keep seeing more Wizard of Oz everywhere I look.

00:26:42 ►

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that before Dorothy and her traveling companions

00:26:46 ►

could enter the Emerald City, they were

00:26:48 ►

in the poppy field

00:26:49 ►

representing a unique

00:26:52 ►

altered state of

00:26:53 ►

consciousness before. So we

00:26:56 ►

might think of the poppy field as

00:26:57 ►

the MDMA experience that was sort of the

00:26:59 ►

gateway to the transformative

00:27:02 ►

experiences available in

00:27:04 ►

the Emerald City. And what did they find in the Emerald City.

00:27:06 ►

And what did they find in the Emerald City?

00:27:08 ►

A horse of a different color.

00:27:19 ►

So I’m going to skip ahead here because there’s a section that I did not cover at the Psychedelic Science Conference, at the MAPS Conference that I want to be sure we cover tonight.

00:27:25 ►

I have new material that’s never been presented before

00:27:27 ►

that I want to leave time to share with you.

00:27:30 ►

I want to just talk about Dorothy for a minute.

00:27:32 ►

If we imagine Dorothy as representing our MDMA journeyer in this analogy,

00:27:38 ►

Dorothy was undoubtedly transformed by her experience in Oz.

00:27:43 ►

It was temporary. It was sudden. like MDMA maybe comes in like a

00:27:48 ►

tornado and whirls your world around upside down and you have this

00:27:52 ►

adventure in a new and novel strange land.

00:27:56 ►

But at the end of the day, she was back in Kansas.

00:27:59 ►

And it wasn’t the big balloon

00:28:03 ►

that she was planning to leave with the wizard that got her back there.

00:28:09 ►

And I think sometimes people look to the substance in psychedelic journeying to be like that balloon,

00:28:14 ►

to just pull them up and whisk them out of their existence of everyday life into something new and fabulous.

00:28:21 ►

But at the end of the day, it was self-transformation that got Dorothy back home where she really needed to be. So just throw that little twist

00:28:32 ►

in there. Briefly, I’ll just mention, I’m asked frequently, but did these effects last

00:28:41 ►

after the drug effects wore off? And the answer was yes, with a lot of variety

00:28:47 ►

in terms of the duration. For the quantitative

00:28:51 ►

portion of the dissertation, I did surveys that asked, you know, which

00:28:55 ►

effects did you experience and how long did they last?

00:28:59 ►

And I’ll quote a couple of those when I summarize key

00:29:03 ►

findings in just a minute here. But I want to give you

00:29:07 ►

a sense of how people

00:29:11 ►

describe the retention of the changed

00:29:15 ►

perceptions that they had. So Mary said

00:29:20 ►

I can sort of recall that one moment, that memory

00:29:24 ►

and it’s fresh in my mind,

00:29:26 ►

and it’s a very necessary thing in my life now.

00:29:30 ►

It was a peak experience that he had on MDMA, connecting to close friends,

00:29:34 ►

and that stayed with him.

00:29:36 ►

And he said, with the MDMA moments, I remember them very vividly,

00:29:40 ►

and they fill me with a very great joy.

00:29:43 ►

George said, I was always sort of, you know, slightly critical of myself.

00:29:48 ►

You know, you can’t keep conversation with other people because you just can’t.

00:29:52 ►

Don’t even bother trying.

00:29:54 ►

Whereas now, I’ve got this memory of, quote, well, hang on a minute.

00:29:59 ►

One night there a week ago, I went out, and I talked to a bunch of strangers,

00:30:03 ►

and they enjoyed my company, and I enjoyed their company.

00:30:08 ►

You know, this is one step really, isn’t it?

00:30:11 ►

And at the moment, it’s really helping that.

00:30:14 ►

So he was just a few days out from his first MDMA experience,

00:30:19 ►

but he was aware that his retention of that memory was still helpful to him. I’m going to skip over George’s

00:30:27 ►

train ride. It’s an anecdote that is available if you do a Google search for my name, Alicia

00:30:37 ►

Downforth, MDMA, MAPS, 2013, you can hear George’s story. But I want to make sure that we spend some

00:30:43 ►

time getting to the part of the talk that was cut off for time at the Oakland conference. So let’s talk specifically

00:30:50 ►

about healing because, as I think Rick probably mentioned, where we are right now in the evolution

00:30:55 ►

of reintroducing our sacred plant and other entheogenic and pathogenic medicines, we’re kind

00:31:02 ►

of in the stage of really emphasizing clinical research,

00:31:07 ►

where you need to find a clinical indication and suggest a substance-assisted therapy for

00:31:14 ►

something specific. So what kind of healing did my participants mention when they described their

00:31:24 ►

experiences? Some were very much related to themes you would see with psychotherapy or couples my participants mentioned when they described their experiences.

00:31:29 ►

Some were very much related to themes you would see with psychotherapy or couples therapy.

00:31:35 ►

More specifically, there was more awareness of affect,

00:31:40 ►

statements such as, it’s like I’ve been put in touch with all sorts of feelings.

00:31:48 ►

Or the main takeaway is, for me at least, is inclusion of emotion became much more apparent.

00:31:56 ►

Or I really got the feeling of experiencing a lot more feelings than ever before. Or I’m able to see emotions more clearly. There may be implications for establishing therapeutic rapport. There’s

00:32:03 ►

scant literature on the effectiveness of

00:32:05 ►

conventional psychodynamic psychotherapy with autism. The general thinking now is that it

00:32:11 ►

doesn’t really tend to work, and one of the reasons might be the challenges because of autistic

00:32:17 ►

processing to establishing therapeutic rapport. An MDMA-assisted therapy may be helpful with something like that. Alexithymia, I have a couple quotes on that topic.

00:32:29 ►

Alexithymia is a word to describe difficulty in expressing and describing emotional responses.

00:32:36 ►

And a few quotes will give you an idea of how MDMA ecstasy helps some of the study participants with putting words to their feelings. So Calvin, 21,

00:32:48 ►

who had the highest AQ score, said,

00:32:51 ►

it made it a lot easier to sort of process my emotions

00:32:55 ►

and put them into words properly, which is the main difficulty that

00:32:59 ►

I have, processing emotions and just getting it into words.

00:33:05 ►

Sanders said, I wouldn’t be having this conversation with you

00:33:08 ►

if it wasn’t for MDMA.

00:33:09 ►

I wouldn’t have written an email to somebody else

00:33:12 ►

to have a conversation and speak about my feelings.

00:33:16 ►

He also said, I got the feeling that I slipped back a bit,

00:33:20 ►

but at the same time, I got the feeling that I can work on it.

00:33:24 ►

So the black hole might be a bit brighter today

00:33:26 ►

there’s some additional areas

00:33:30 ►

where MDMA assisted therapy might

00:33:32 ►

have implications for psychotherapy

00:33:36 ►

and couples counseling, problem solving, increasing optimism

00:33:39 ►

gaining insight into the self

00:33:42 ►

and my favorite phrase that Nick has taught me

00:33:46 ►

increased social adaptability

00:33:49 ►

a theme of interest I think to people at Burning Man

00:33:52 ►

might be touch

00:33:53 ►

I’ve noticed people here really like touch

00:33:56 ►

what did MDMA do for touch

00:33:59 ►

for individuals on the autism spectrum

00:34:01 ►

hypersensitivities to touch

00:34:04 ►

discomfort with

00:34:05 ►

uncomfortable clothing or physical contact is common in the autism community. A lot of people

00:34:11 ►

have problems with touch, not everyone by any means, but this is what Haas had to say

00:34:17 ►

when I asked about his comfort level around cuddling with other people prior to taking ecstasy. He said prior, his comfort level prior,

00:34:28 ►

like zero. And now I’m just like all about the hugs.

00:34:33 ►

Jules said that he was more sensuous

00:34:35 ►

with people. Biodrinks felt

00:34:39 ►

quote, complete comfort like anybody else when he

00:34:43 ►

gave and received massages during his first MDMA

00:34:47 ►

experience at a dance club. That was something entirely new and novel for him.

00:34:53 ►

So dance clubs, not surprisingly, came up quite often in my interviews. A lot of people tried MDMA

00:35:00 ►

the first time. Music and dance was a huge theme and it definitely has implication for music

00:35:07 ►

movement and dance therapies. I’ll read a couple quotes to just go right to the source here.

00:35:15 ►

Michelangelo said, I’ve had a pretty god-awful relationship with dance up until that stage.

00:35:20 ►

I remember at my debutante ball, I was sort of ostracized because I was one of the few people who just refused to dance.

00:35:27 ►

And my relationship with it would still be the same up until now, was it not for taking some MDMA, because there was some cool music playing.

00:35:37 ►

I’ve never been into it before, but suddenly it was not only very fun, but it was easy.

00:35:44 ►

And I had no problem at all with it all of a sudden

00:35:46 ►

and that’s changed me

00:35:48 ►

completely stayed with me

00:35:50 ►

until this day I don’t know why

00:35:53 ►

it’s just like the door was

00:35:54 ►

unlocked and Krius

00:35:56 ►

was probably the biggest

00:35:58 ►

dance fan being able to dance

00:36:01 ►

and participate in social dance

00:36:03 ►

really changed his

00:36:04 ►

life and this is what he had to say I’ve been listening to a lot of music that I would Being able to dance and participate in social dance really changed his life.

00:36:05 ►

And this is what he had to say.

00:36:06 ►

He said, I’ve been listening to a lot of music that I would never listen to before.

00:36:10 ►

How many of you here have said that about electronic dance music?

00:36:13 ►

Like, I’ve never listened to techno.

00:36:15 ►

And then suddenly you love it.

00:36:19 ►

I would never listen to it before.

00:36:20 ►

The act of dancing is just amazing where it never has been before ecstasy.

00:36:27 ►

And I can’t help but believe that this chemical

00:36:30 ►

has profoundly impacted my ability to be free in that way.

00:36:35 ►

What a gift.

00:36:37 ►

Whew.

00:36:37 ►

Okay.

00:36:39 ►

You may be familiar with the PTSD studies

00:36:42 ►

that MAPS has sponsored.

00:36:44 ►

They’ve published some of their

00:36:45 ►

findings. They’re promising and looks like lots more research in this area is going to get funded

00:36:50 ►

and continue in the coming years. Three participants of the individuals I interviewed

00:36:58 ►

on the autism spectrum spontaneously talked about PTSD and how MDMA helped them recover from PTSD. I’ll read quotes

00:37:07 ►

from two of them. Isabeau was a rape survivor, and this is what she had to say. And so MDMA

00:37:16 ►

was kind of a facilitator, and she’s referring to taking it with her romantic partner at the time.

00:37:23 ►

So he and I could be in this warm, safe,

00:37:26 ►

trusting environment in this little bubble we built together. And the MDMA lowered our barriers

00:37:31 ►

enough so we could say, hey, this is what happened to me. And this is what, you know, this is how it

00:37:38 ►

affects me still. And we could share our stories, I guess, in this, you know, very, very, very safe,

00:37:46 ►

very trusting, very private, but very intense environment that we kind of created ourselves.

00:37:52 ►

So she credited taking MDMA with a romantic partner with helping her move beyond her PTSD.

00:38:00 ►

Haas was a male, and he had quite a bit of significant trauma in his youth when he was

00:38:07 ►

a boy and he was very clear when he stated his belief

00:38:12 ►

that MDMA could be a potential cure for PTSD

00:38:15 ►

he said I think it is like a cure for it

00:38:20 ►

and it actually needs to be publicized and people need to know

00:38:24 ►

because to deny this to people

00:38:26 ►

who suffer from it is cruel and sick like genuinely those are strong words but seriously

00:38:32 ►

it’s like withholding the cure it’s not like it is a cure so he credited again taking ecstasy and social settings with helping him leave PTSD behind.

00:38:49 ►

At the time of his interview, he was a university student,

00:38:53 ►

and he reported that he limited his substance use for the sake of his studies.

00:38:59 ►

So sometimes people have approached me about their concern.

00:39:02 ►

Aren’t you afraid people are going to run wild once they have these great opening experiences

00:39:06 ►

and develop problematic use?

00:39:10 ►

That wasn’t the case with the population that I studied.

00:39:13 ►

Nobody reported it was so good I couldn’t stop doing it.

00:39:17 ►

I’m going to fall back on a stereotype right now.

00:39:21 ►

I realize it’s a stereotype,

00:39:22 ►

and it doesn’t apply to everyone on the spectrum.

00:39:25 ►

But there’s a general consensus that as a group, they tend to be logic-driven and they like getting

00:39:32 ►

literal fact-based information. So I was really impressed with the level of homework that they

00:39:37 ►

had done about the relative risks and benefits and, you know, best practices for using MDMA safely in recreational settings.

00:39:46 ►

So I just want to add that.

00:39:51 ►

And in our final healing category, I want to say a little bit about social anxiety

00:39:58 ►

because 58% of the participants that I interviewed reported that their experiences with MDMA ecstasy

00:40:05 ►

helped them significantly with social anxiety.

00:40:09 ►

The best way to give you a sense of this,

00:40:11 ►

I’m just going to go rapidly through

00:40:13 ►

a series of very brief quotes

00:40:15 ►

so you’ll get the flavor.

00:40:17 ►

So, Biodrinks said,

00:40:20 ►

socially, all the anxiety I had,

00:40:23 ►

completely gone.

00:40:25 ►

Sylvan, I’ve credited that one experience

00:40:28 ►

to nearly wiping out my social anxiety,

00:40:31 ►

which at that point had been strong.

00:40:34 ►

Morton, I used to experience terrible anxiety

00:40:37 ►

before I took ecstasy,

00:40:39 ►

and this disappeared completely

00:40:40 ►

while I was actually high on the drug,

00:40:43 ►

and I was able to communicate much more openly.

00:40:46 ►

I’ll add that maybe similar to experiences some of you have had, with later subsequent use,

00:40:54 ►

he found that ecstasy use brought his anxiety up. So it’s important to always keep in mind it’s not

00:41:01 ►

a panacea. While some people talk about this kind of vanishing of social anxiety

00:41:05 ►

symptoms, it doesn’t work

00:41:08 ►

for everyone that way.

00:41:09 ►

DocStar, I just

00:41:12 ►

felt comfortable talking about everything

00:41:13 ►

and so it was kind of a relief of the

00:41:16 ►

anxiety of holding things back.

00:41:19 ►

Mary

00:41:19 ►

said, I generally suffer from

00:41:22 ►

a manageable amount of anxiety

00:41:23 ►

but after

00:41:24 ►

use of MDMA, I’m generally lacking in anxiety for about a week, after which it comes back quite quickly.

00:41:33 ►

So there’s another variation.

00:41:35 ►

David, it reduces social anxiety for me, I guess.

00:41:38 ►

I feel like I can step onto a dance floor and have a lot of fun.

00:41:42 ►

Step onto a dance floor and have a lot of fun.

00:41:44 ►

Isabeau.

00:41:48 ►

It’s a little easier just being around the whole press of people without still feeling like, oh my God, there’s all these people

00:41:52 ►

and they’re all around me and I don’t know how any of them think.

00:41:57 ►

And finally, Michelangelo said,

00:41:59 ►

I feel like I understand people just a little bit better

00:42:03 ►

and that pushed me into the area of confidence that I needed to be in,

00:42:07 ►

and that stayed with me ever since.

00:42:11 ►

So I guess that’s a good segue.

00:42:14 ►

Oh, briefly, I’ll just share three key findings from the quantitative data

00:42:20 ►

that I think really speak to the significant potential

00:42:25 ►

and need for additional research in this area.

00:42:29 ►

For the survey, I collected survey data from 100 individuals

00:42:35 ►

who had used MDMA between 1 and 50, 5-0 times,

00:42:41 ►

and then as a comparison group,

00:42:44 ►

I interviewed 50 individuals on the spectrum who had never

00:42:46 ►

taken MDMA.

00:42:48 ►

But here’s what some of the individuals who had taken MDMA reported, and I’ll just give

00:42:52 ►

you three quick stats.

00:42:55 ►

I hope you kind of take this with you and remember some of these.

00:42:59 ►

Okay, so 72% of the survey participants who had used MDMA between one and 50 times, 72% of the survey participants who had used MDMA between 1 and 50 times,

00:43:07 ►

72% reported more comfort in social settings,

00:43:12 ►

and 12% reported that that effect lasted two or more years.

00:43:18 ►

And I should add that that number is probably going to go up

00:43:21 ►

because many of the people I interviewed, two years had not passed since they tried it.

00:43:27 ►

78% reported feeling at ease in my own body,

00:43:33 ►

with 15% reporting that that effect lasted two years or more.

00:43:38 ►

And finally, 77% reported that they found it easier than usual to talk to others,

00:43:44 ►

87% reported that they found it easier than usual to talk to others,

00:43:51 ►

and 18% of the survey respondents reported that that effect lasted up to one year or longer.

00:44:00 ►

Just a brief list of some potential areas of future research that were suggested by the dissertation findings.

00:44:04 ►

I’m not going to go into them in detail here but I always like to take advantage of opportunities like this

00:44:10 ►

to make my pitch for the value of qualitative research

00:44:14 ►

at the beginning of this presentation I have a slide

00:44:18 ►

where the ratio is reversed

00:44:21 ►

where there’s a big circle

00:44:23 ►

emphasizing qualitative, subjective research,

00:44:28 ►

getting to know the population you’re studying, and hearing from them

00:44:32 ►

from their own experiences, where their challenges lie,

00:44:36 ►

what their needs are, and

00:44:39 ►

using that inductive

00:44:44 ►

approach to cast a broad net

00:44:46 ►

and get lots of little data points

00:44:48 ►

to inform your hypothesis testing

00:44:51 ►

when you switch over and reverse that proportion

00:44:54 ►

and do your big quant little qual.

00:44:58 ►

So I’m hoping in scientific inquiry in this area

00:45:01 ►

there’ll be more resources invested in the qualitative research

00:45:06 ►

and more value placed on gathering subjective experiences first.

00:45:13 ►

And here’s why I feel so strongly about this point.

00:45:16 ►

I came to this research with no prior expertise whatsoever in autism.

00:45:22 ►

My mind was filled with stereotypes that you might have heard.

00:45:26 ►

You know, they’re like robots. They don’t feel empathy. They have no sense of humor. There are

00:45:31 ►

no emotions in there. I’d been told all sorts of grossly inaccurate and actually damaging

00:45:37 ►

stereotypes, things that harm the autism community. But as a result of getting to know autistic individuals who were verbal,

00:45:47 ►

who could communicate with me, and listening deeply to their experiences, letting them tell

00:45:53 ►

me in their own words what was troubling for them, what struck me was no one told me that

00:45:59 ►

they wanted to get rid of the autism. Being autistic was a pervasive and intrinsic part of who they were.

00:46:07 ►

For many of the individuals I spoke with.

00:46:11 ►

And I was really struck by the fact that many of them told me

00:46:14 ►

that if there was a cure for autism, they’d decline it.

00:46:18 ►

They like the gifts.

00:46:19 ►

They value some of the attributes of that cognitive diversity,

00:46:26 ►

those processing differences.

00:46:34 ►

But what they did tell me is they would love to get relief from the social anxiety that accompanies having a different operating system, being a neuro-minority.

00:46:39 ►

When you have to open the front door in the morning and go out in the world, if you’re

00:46:43 ►

able, and the analogy that’s used time and time out in the world if you’re able and the analogy

00:46:45 ►

that’s used time and time again is you know i was born on the wrong planet i just don’t get these

00:46:50 ►

people and it’s painful for me it interferes with my ability to have relationships i’d like to have

00:46:56 ►

a job and contribute and and you know like here we we value contributing our talents to the greater

00:47:03 ►

good of the community.

00:47:09 ►

Autistic individuals would love to have some of the barriers removed to increase social adaptability so they could do the same.

00:47:13 ►

So here’s the last point I’ll make.

00:47:16 ►

As I was doing this research, hearing these stories and these themes were coming out,

00:47:21 ►

and I was getting some clarity around what the needs of the community might be,

00:47:26 ►

I was thinking maybe in five or ten years we might be able to use some of this material as foundational

00:47:33 ►

for an actual pilot study of MDMA-assisted therapy.

00:47:37 ►

And things started falling together, and I’ll cut to the chase.

00:47:43 ►

and I’ll cut to the chase in May before I even had an opportunity

00:47:46 ►

to defend the dissertation

00:47:48 ►

we got FDA approval for a MAPS

00:47:52 ►

00:47:55 ►

that is due to launch as soon as

00:47:58 ►

all the final regulatory approvals are secured

00:48:01 ►

this isn’t 100% approved yet

00:48:04 ►

but we’re over the hurdle of FDA approval

00:48:06 ►

to provide MDMA-assisted therapy for social anxiety

00:48:11 ►

with a study group of 12 MDMA-naive adults,

00:48:17 ►

everyone over age 21, at the Harbor UCLA Medical Center.

00:48:22 ►

I’ll be a co-investigator with Dr. Charles Grobe at Harbor UCLA.

00:48:27 ►

So we will be able to test this model

00:48:29 ►

and see if these kind of benefits were reported from recreational use,

00:48:34 ►

what might be able to be achieved in terms of, you know,

00:48:39 ►

improving outcome measures for social anxiety

00:48:42 ►

in a controlled clinical setting with carefully facilitated treatment,

00:48:46 ►

MDMA-assisted therapy with careful pre-work, intention setting,

00:48:52 ►

and then extensive post-integration work to help them maximize the benefit of the treatment session.

00:48:58 ►

So look for some more announcements.

00:49:00 ►

MAPS has already announced that we got the FDA approval.

00:49:03 ►

We need IRB approval, DEA, California Research Advisory Panel,

00:49:08 ►

or now they’re the Research Advisory Panel of California,

00:49:11 ►

so they have a better acronym.

00:49:12 ►

You can figure that one out.

00:49:15 ►

And we hope to start enrolling around January.

00:49:21 ►

So I’ll leave it at that kind of optimistic forward-thinking point and open

00:49:27 ►

it up for any questions folks might have. Thank you. I’m going to wait just a second

00:49:37 ►

for someone to bring a microphone around.

00:49:38 ►

Sorry. You talk about neurodiversity as regards typical development versus autism spectrum.

00:49:48 ►

Are there other dimensions of non-typical neurology or other directions of neurodiversity

00:49:57 ►

that you are interested in, would like to mention?

00:50:01 ►

At present, my focus has been exclusively with autistic

00:50:06 ►

adults, but I know within the

00:50:07 ►

neurodiversity movement

00:50:09 ►

there’s

00:50:11 ►

a much more inclusive

00:50:13 ►

definition to include other

00:50:15 ►

cognitive differences such as bipolar

00:50:18 ►

and OCD

00:50:19 ►

and other cognitive

00:50:21 ►

configurations that

00:50:23 ►

traditionally have been pathologized

00:50:26 ►

and marginalized, stigmatized,

00:50:28 ►

there’s a movement to kind of embrace the broader spectrum of cognitive diversity.

00:50:37 ►

And so I have not had an opportunity to delve in,

00:50:41 ►

but who knows, we’ll see where the autism research goes

00:50:44 ►

and we may be able to

00:50:46 ►

start extending

00:50:47 ►

MDMA assisted therapy or work

00:50:50 ►

with other psychedelic assisted

00:50:52 ►

therapy for other

00:50:53 ►

neurocognitive minorities

00:50:55 ►

it’s wide open

00:50:57 ►

00:50:59 ►

I was diagnosed with Asperger’s

00:51:02 ►

at 11 and

00:51:03 ►

PDSD at 28.

00:51:09 ►

I’ve taken a massive amount of MDMA over the years.

00:51:13 ►

I found that it has had pretty much all the positive effects that you described.

00:51:18 ►

I also think there have been some long-term negative effects

00:51:21 ►

from just sort of the quantity that I’ve used.

00:51:24 ►

long-term negative effects from just sort of the quantity that I’ve used.

00:51:27 ►

And I wonder if you could comment on that,

00:51:34 ►

sort of the cons that could come from using that as a regular part of your sort of therapy.

00:51:36 ►

It is something that we think about.

00:51:37 ►

It is a concern.

00:51:42 ►

There are really two safety concerns that have occupied my thoughts.

00:51:45 ►

The first one that you mentioned,

00:51:47 ►

as researchers, what is our responsibility to mitigate the potential risk of overuse?

00:51:52 ►

I think we’re going to have to pay

00:51:55 ►

great attention to education

00:51:59 ►

and providing alternatives.

00:52:02 ►

I know martial arts was mentioned earlier.

00:52:04 ►

A lot of individuals that I talked to talked about

00:52:07 ►

how they had these profound opening experiences

00:52:11 ►

with entheogenic substances,

00:52:14 ►

but wanted to continue and find another path

00:52:17 ►

to continue that growth without relying on drugs.

00:52:20 ►

And martial arts, for example, was one example that came up.

00:52:24 ►

Social dance and sort of a moving away

00:52:26 ►

a substitute so yes

00:52:28 ►

we do think about it, it does keep me up

00:52:30 ►

at night sometimes thinking are we opening

00:52:32 ►

a door for people to think

00:52:34 ►

oh great MDMA I’ll take

00:52:36 ►

this often so

00:52:38 ►

extensive counseling and coaching

00:52:40 ►

and providing alternatives

00:52:41 ►

doing everything that we can to

00:52:44 ►

educate the public about the potential risks

00:52:48 ►

and how do we help people not become dependent on the substance.

00:52:53 ►

So that’s really kind of the difference between recreational use, people out using pills, and MDMA-assisted therapy.

00:53:00 ►

They’re very different modalities.

00:53:04 ►

The other concern that I want to be sure to

00:53:07 ►

mention, this is probably my biggest fear, and my God, I’m just about to put it on a podcast,

00:53:11 ►

so here we go. I can’t emphasize enough that at this point in history, I personally, and I think

00:53:20 ►

most of the other members of our research team, I can’t speak for them, but at this point in history, we are only looking at adults,

00:53:28 ►

adults who are 21 or older, at the age of consent.

00:53:31 ►

MDMA is not for children at this time.

00:53:35 ►

And my fear is that the parents of autistic children may take matters into their own hands,

00:53:42 ►

and unfortunately, because of the Controlled Substances Act

00:53:46 ►

and the status of MDMA presently,

00:53:48 ►

most of them have no other avenues available to them

00:53:52 ►

than scrounging around on the street for potentially dirty product

00:53:55 ►

that could harm the kids.

00:53:57 ►

So if you happen to talk about this research with anyone else,

00:54:01 ►

I encourage you to emphasize adults only.

00:54:06 ►

We do not know about the effect of MDMA on developing

00:54:08 ►

brains. We don’t know about

00:54:09 ►

the safety profile in kids.

00:54:12 ►

And it’s my, personally,

00:54:13 ►

my perspective is very clinical.

00:54:15 ►

I’m trained as a psychotherapist.

00:54:17 ►

And thinking developmentally,

00:54:19 ►

I really question,

00:54:21 ►

there’s no data, this is just speculation

00:54:23 ►

on my part, but I question if an individual has not reached a certain developmental stage,

00:54:29 ►

is MDMA really going to do that much for them?

00:54:33 ►

If the ego isn’t at a certain stage in development,

00:54:37 ►

if they haven’t experienced certain life experiences,

00:54:41 ►

is MDMA really going to do that much at all for kids?

00:54:45 ►

So not for kids.

00:54:46 ►

Please help spread that message out there.

00:54:51 ►

We’re going, in the pilot study, we’re going to do kind of a dose escalation study.

00:54:56 ►

Because it’s really a feasibility and safety pilot study, we’re going to have different

00:55:02 ►

individuals receiving different doses, starting at the smaller dose.

00:55:07 ►

We want to know if, because of known hypersensitivities with autism,

00:55:12 ►

is what we would call a standard clinical dose for a typically developing individual.

00:55:17 ►

Maybe some with autism needs a somewhat lower dose.

00:55:21 ►

Maybe they need a somewhat higher dose.

00:55:23 ►

somewhat lower dose, maybe they need a somewhat higher dose.

00:55:31 ►

So I think about 75, 100, 125, I’d have to look at the protocol.

00:55:33 ►

But in there, but in there.

00:55:35 ►

So we’re going to start a little bit on the lower end and see if that’s sufficient.

00:55:37 ►

We have time for one more question.

00:55:42 ►

Hello.

00:55:44 ►

Hey, I’m over here.

00:55:46 ►

I’m curious to know if any of the participants reported a change, increase or decrease in any challenging behaviors or self-stimulatory behaviors that they may have.

00:56:03 ►

Several people told me they were

00:56:06 ►

a little bit embarrassed. We were interviewing over

00:56:08 ►

Skype and they were a bit embarrassed as they started

00:56:10 ►

stimming and I just

00:56:11 ►

completely normalized stimming. Stimming is just

00:56:14 ►

a form of communication.

00:56:18 ►

I’m trying to think specifically.

00:56:20 ►

No one mentioned

00:56:21 ►

specifically that they had reduced

00:56:24 ►

stimming behaviors

00:56:25 ►

or reduction in tics or kind of the physiological changes.

00:56:33 ►

I’m trying to think of some specific examples that stand out

00:56:36 ►

that might be relevant to your question.

00:56:38 ►

It had more to do with changes in reduction of fear and initiating conversations or comfort

00:56:45 ►

with eye contact,

00:56:47 ►

enjoying touch

00:56:49 ►

more. Am I getting to the point

00:56:52 ►

that you were…

00:56:52 ►

Aggression.

00:56:55 ►

Because of the limits of my

00:56:57 ►

resources as a graduate student,

00:57:00 ►

I was only able

00:57:02 ►

to use technology

00:57:03 ►

to an extent to work with individuals who were verbal.

00:57:09 ►

And a lot of them talked about leaving some of those behaviors behind in their youth.

00:57:15 ►

And the ones who told me about MDMA use in their teen years definitely talked about a reduction in behaviors.

00:57:22 ►

One guy had been incarcerated several times, and he was able to avoid getting in trouble with the law.

00:57:28 ►

So some people reflected back on changes in behavior in their youth,

00:57:34 ►

things like aggression, acting out, meltdowns.

00:57:40 ►

But again, it’s all anecdotal.

00:57:43 ►

It’s just storytelling at this point.

00:57:45 ►

We need to gather the hard data so that we can answer that question more conclusively.

00:57:51 ►

So I didn’t have the ability to interact with people to gather data

00:57:57 ►

who have a designation of classic autism.

00:58:01 ►

For our study, we want to be as inclusive as possible, so we are leaving it open

00:58:06 ►

to individuals who use text

00:58:08 ►

to speech technologies.

00:58:10 ►

It’s not a requirement that

00:58:12 ►

one is verbal to participate

00:58:14 ►

in the clinical study, but I didn’t

00:58:16 ►

talk to people who are in the

00:58:18 ►

more classic

00:58:19 ►

autism category who may be more

00:58:22 ►

prone to behaviors like headbanging

00:58:24 ►

because

00:58:24 ►

for whatever reason they’re not able to verbalize what’s bothering them

00:58:29 ►

or they’re using self-simulating behaviors to reduce uncomfortable hypersensitivities.

00:58:37 ►

So that’s an unexplored area.

00:58:39 ►

Excellent question.

00:58:40 ►

New territory that we’re taking our baby steps right now.

00:58:44 ►

Okay.

00:58:46 ►

I think that wraps it up.

00:58:47 ►

Thank you.

00:58:53 ►

Thank you, Alicia.

00:59:02 ►

Although Alicia’s research until now has been largely anecdotal,

00:59:06 ►

just think of the possibilities that lie ahead as some rigorous scientific research is done in this area. And that’s what we’re going to hear about now.

00:59:12 ►

As you already know, the talk that we just heard Alicia give took place at the end of August of

00:59:17 ►

last year, which was 2013 for you time travelers of the future. And now I’m going to play a recording of a Skype interview

00:59:26 ►

that I did a week ago with Alicia and Dr. Charlie Grobe.

00:59:30 ►

And we talk about the new study that they have just begun

00:59:33 ►

at the Harbor UCLA Medical Center in Southern California.

00:59:38 ►

As you’ll hear, the quality of my recording of this conversation

00:59:42 ►

leaves much to be desired, but I think that nonetheless you will find the information quite interesting.

00:59:49 ►

Well, thank you, Alicia and Charlie, for joining us here in the salon.

00:59:54 ►

I know that a lot of our fellow salonners are going to have many questions about this new study

01:00:00 ►

because they always like to know what’s going on in the world of psychedelic research,

01:00:04 ►

although I’m not sure this is totally psychedelic.

01:00:06 ►

But let’s just start with the fact that you guys have now started a new clinical trial

01:00:12 ►

with MDMA-assisted therapy for social anxiety in autistic adults.

01:00:18 ►

And so let me just pass the baton to the two of you

01:00:21 ►

and let you tell the salonners here how long the study’s been going on and what the focus of you and let you tell me, tell the salonners here what, how long the

01:00:27 ►

study’s been going on and what the focus of it is.

01:00:30 ►

Well, that’s really a big question.

01:00:32 ►

Let me see if I can give you the short answer.

01:00:35 ►

From about 2009 on, I’ve been working on my dissertation about the MDMA ecstasy experiences

01:00:44 ►

of adults on the autism spectrum.

01:00:48 ►

And near the time I was starting to write the final dissertation,

01:00:56 ►

Dr. Grove and I started talking more seriously about the potential of doing clinical work in this area.

01:01:04 ►

And MAPS put out a request for proposal. about the potential of doing clinical work in this area.

01:01:08 ►

And MAPS put out a request for proposal.

01:01:13 ►

MAPS is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

01:01:31 ►

And they had some interest in exploring what might be possible in this area. So we went ahead and put together a proposal and collaborated with the team at MAPS to submit what we thought would be a good pilot study first to the FDA. And despite the perception that people have that government agencies can be very difficult to work with and reluctant to approve clinical studies with Schedule I substances like MDMA, that approval process was very smooth.

01:02:07 ►

very smooth. So from there, we had several other regulatory agencies that needed to review and approve the proposal. And it went very, very smoothly. And in December of last year, 2013,

01:02:22 ►

the DEA approved Dr. Grove’s schedule and license, and that was the last barrier

01:02:27 ►

we had to starting.

01:02:29 ►

So beginning in January of 2014, we got very busy preparing the treatment space and putting

01:02:37 ►

the team together and getting ready to start.

01:02:41 ►

And this week, we actually began the screening process for the first potential

01:02:47 ►

participants so we’ve launched the study is in progress and and so what you’re saying is is this

01:02:57 ►

isn’t anything to actually change or cure autism and as i understand it many autistic high

01:03:04 ►

functioning autistic people don’t

01:03:06 ►

want to lose some of their special abilities but it’s more to help them feel more comfortable in

01:03:11 ►

social situations um well it’s it’s understandable that when many people first hear about this study. They assume that we are somehow trying to treat or cure autism.

01:03:27 ►

But that’s not the case at all. Autism is genetic. It’s pervasive,

01:03:34 ►

meaning that it really is part of the whole person.

01:03:40 ►

Right. Well, these are individuals who have grown up with some degree of delay in their acquisition of language skills, a delay in their capacity to interact socially.

01:04:27 ►

Autistic kids often grow up very isolated and quite overwhelmed by tasks of day-to-day living that neurotypicals might take for granted, but often very challenging for a young autistic individual and many autistic kids will grow up to be autistic adults and there’s a spectrum of degree of impairment ranging from individuals with experiencing in social situations

01:04:39 ►

in part that might be because of early experiences of not being accepted by the group or being split off and picked on, teased, bullied by peers.

01:04:54 ►

Social interactions might early on have been highly unpleasant to the point where later in life individuals with this condition become somewhat avoidant.

01:05:08 ►

And it’s very important to emphasize that we’re not attempting to cure the autism in and of itself.

01:05:16 ►

It’s simply to help individuals improve their capacity to adapt and interact with uh the mainstream world many

01:05:28 ►

individuals who are high functioning on the autism spectrum uh feel very positive about their about

01:05:35 ►

themselves about their um what we might in the normative world consider unusual traits but they

01:05:42 ►

they would see many of them as uh as a strength and would not want to be

01:05:47 ►

changed in that regard. But that being the case, it’s often an emotionally painful process to

01:05:55 ►

attempt to interact with neurotypical individuals. So we’re trying to help our subjects or our future subjects to better understand, in a sense, the rules of social engagement and really help them achieve a better, a higher level of functioning out in the social world.

01:06:25 ►

So Alicia, you might want to expand on that.

01:06:27 ►

One potential long-term outcome, if we’re really focusing on quality of life,

01:06:37 ►

is there’s a potential for MDMA-assisted therapy to help adults on the spectrum

01:06:44 ►

potentially be maybe more successful in the workplace.

01:06:50 ►

Could you tell me, Charlie, just kind of give me a brief overview of the protocol of this?

01:06:56 ►

This is a phase one study, a pilot study, right?

01:06:59 ►

Well, it would be really phase two because it’s with an identified patient population.

01:07:04 ►

It would be really phase two because it’s with an identified patient population.

01:07:07 ►

It’s not a normal volunteer population.

01:07:18 ►

But it’s a pilot investigation where we have been approved to recruit 12 subjects who are high functioning on the autism spectrum.

01:07:22 ►

The ages of 21 and older.

01:07:28 ►

So we’re not recruiting child or adolescent subjects. One has to be at least 21. And also, subjects must have at least two years of college education or the equivalent.

01:07:36 ►

So a threshold on an instrument that measures social anxiety. So we’re screening for both autism. They’ll be administered a structured

01:07:48 ►

diagnostic instrument designed to ascertain whether an individual is on the autism spectrum.

01:07:56 ►

They’ll also be administered a social anxiety scale questionnaire, which will establish whether they have sufficient social anxiety

01:08:07 ►

to be entered into the study. We’re ruling out individuals with other serious mental disease

01:08:18 ►

and individuals with serious medical disorders, particularly cardiovascular disorders.

01:08:26 ►

So we’re approved to recruit 12 subjects who fit the inclusion criteria

01:08:34 ►

and who do not fit the exclusion criteria.

01:08:38 ►

It is a placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomized study.

01:08:47 ►

placebo control, double blind, randomized study. And for the first phase of the study,

01:08:56 ►

eight subjects will be randomized into receiving two MDMA sessions. And keep in mind, this is all after lengthy screening and preparation. Eight or two-thirds of the subject gets randomized into an active drug treatment, and four or one-third of the subjects are randomized into two separate treatment sessions spaced at least a month apart.

01:09:54 ►

Afterwards, we do extensive follow-up therapy treatment to help individuals integrate that experience and also to track their function over time. for the individuals who had been randomized into the placebo group, if they would, at that point, would like an MDMA session,

01:09:56 ►

or actually two sessions for them.

01:10:11 ►

So essentially a pilot investigation exploring safety parameters and efficacy in 12 adults who are high functioning on the autism spectrum, social anxiety. I really like the fact that you are going to take the people who had the

01:10:18 ►

placebo and give them the opportunity should they so desire to have the experience too, because

01:10:23 ►

that’s always one of my complaints

01:10:25 ►

about some of these double-blind studies is some people really get left out.

01:10:29 ►

Right, right, yes. We have to wait until the full data follow-up period passes, but then we

01:10:37 ►

felt it was only fair to offer these people an open-label treatment.

01:10:43 ►

And my guess is that one of the other requirements is that none of your subjects have used MDMA in the past?

01:10:51 ►

Good point.

01:10:52 ►

Thank you for raising that.

01:10:53 ►

Yes, all subjects to enter the study must be entirely naive to MDMA.

01:10:59 ►

Okay.

01:11:00 ►

And now the study is being conducted.

01:11:03 ►

Where is the actual study taking place?

01:11:06 ►

Well, the study will be at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor UCLA Medical Center,

01:11:14 ►

which is in Torrance in Los Angeles County.

01:11:19 ►

And because of the many occasions subjects will have to come in to meet with us at our offices at LA Biomed and Harbor UCLA,

01:11:33 ►

we’re looking for subjects who live within the greater Los Angeles region. would not make practical sense to recruit subjects from out of town who would have to then commit to

01:11:47 ►

making multiple trips down to LA. So we’re looking for people who live, you know, more or less

01:11:55 ►

locally within a 30-40 mile radius of the treatment site, which is in Torrance.

01:12:03 ►

of the treatment site, which is in Torrance.

01:12:09 ►

Charlie, you and I, in the past, we did some interviews with Gary Fisher because he worked with children in psychedelics years and years ago.

01:12:12 ►

Did he have any influence on your ideas here?

01:12:15 ►

Gary began his career studying psychedelics as a psychologist,

01:12:24 ►

really going back to the late 50s.

01:12:27 ►

His brother-in-law was one of the early researchers with Humphrey Osmond in Saskatchewan in Canada

01:12:35 ►

and introduced him to psychedelics at that time.

01:12:41 ►

Gary was involved with the treatment of a number of different kinds of patients,

01:12:49 ►

but the area I think he most remembered for is his work with profoundly disturbed children at

01:12:58 ►

the Fairview State Hospital in Southern California, where over a period of time he treated with psilocybin children who by today’s

01:13:09 ►

standards, many of them were likely severely autistic. Some childhood and adolescent,

01:13:16 ►

by today’s criteria, at least some of these kids were autistic. And speaking with Gary at great length and going through his collected

01:13:25 ►

papers from his old study, it was clear that his work with these young people had

01:13:36 ►

an enormous impact and he had very, very positive results. Unfortunately, by the early mid-60s, this issue of psychedelics

01:13:51 ►

had kind of escaped the confines of the research treatment studies and had emerged into the greater

01:14:00 ►

culture, had become very controversial.

01:14:10 ►

There were some very provocative public figures who spoke out on this issue.

01:14:14 ►

And the government, I think by around 64, 65,

01:14:20 ►

ordered Gary to shut down his research project.

01:14:30 ►

But be as it may, Alicia and I both got to know Gary very well and spoke with him at length about his early experience treating these young people and found it quite inspirational. And

01:14:36 ►

it was our belief that the area of autism really lent itself to this treatment model, although we’re very careful to emphasize that we’re not treating children.

01:14:49 ►

We’re not treating teenagers.

01:14:51 ►

We’re only treating adults, but adults on the autism spectrum, adults who are high functioning on the autism spectrum.

01:14:59 ►

And I’ll put some links to some of the recordings that you and I made with Gary Fisher,

01:15:06 ►

interviews that we did with him in the past, and a lot of that is talked about,

01:15:10 ►

and we’ve got it here in the salon.

01:15:11 ►

So is there anything else that you want to be sure that you get in?

01:15:15 ►

Well, just that we’re very excited about the prospects of this study.

01:15:22 ►

We’re treating a patient population for which mainstream treatments are

01:15:28 ►

often quite lacking. Conventional psychotropic medications often do not effectively alleviate

01:15:40 ►

the significant anxiety and mood problems and adjustment problems that people on the autism spectrum have.

01:15:49 ►

And we think we have a very new and novel treatment approach.

01:15:53 ►

And we’ll pursue this at a very careful, conservative manner.

01:16:07 ►

matter, but we feel at the end of the day, we may have some very interesting research data to share with our colleagues and the public at large. Alicia, I, you know, having some experience

01:16:14 ►

myself with MDMA and a lot of talk with others in the community, a lot of people think of it as an

01:16:20 ►

empathogen. So are you talking about something to do with empathy in the spectrum,

01:16:26 ►

or is that a myth about autism? I’m glad you asked about empathy. It’s a big issue,

01:16:34 ►

and it’s a source of a lot of misunderstanding. The first thing I was taught when I first was told about Asperger’s was the definition I was given was that Asperger’s

01:16:50 ►

means that someone cannot feel empathy.

01:16:53 ►

And I just accepted that at face value until I began working with adults on the autism

01:17:00 ►

spectrum and found out really nothing was further from the truth.

01:17:06 ►

The problem arises from how people use the term empathy.

01:17:12 ►

It’s very broad, and it means a lot of different things.

01:17:17 ►

The ability to observe someone and make an informed guess about what they might be thinking and feeling is very different than the type of empathy that involves having feelings for the condition of someone else.

01:17:37 ►

Feeling sad because someone you care about is feeling sad.

01:17:43 ►

So that distinction leads to a lot of confusion.

01:17:47 ►

Adults on the spectrum have challenges processing the cues,

01:17:53 ►

especially the nonverbal cues, things like facial expressions

01:17:57 ►

and body language, tone of voice that might indicate sarcasm.

01:18:06 ►

Those little social cues can be difficult, if not impossible, to interpret correctly,

01:18:15 ►

which can lead to the appearance that someone lacks empathy. So I want to just make sure that everyone is clear that we’re not trying to somehow inst new depths of empathy by participating in MDMA-assisted therapy.

01:18:55 ►

So there may be new awarenesses, new abilities to engage with others on a deep level, but I want to make sure that we don’t

01:19:07 ►

keep perpetuating the myth that people on the autism spectrum do not feel every level

01:19:15 ►

of this research.

01:19:17 ►

We are making our very best effort to employ what’s known as community-based participatory research, meaning that we just

01:19:30 ►

don’t have someone come in maybe once to look at the treatment room and say, yeah,

01:19:38 ►

it’s okay to me.

01:19:39 ►

We have had a consultant on our team. Nick Walker is an educator, scholar, and writer who’s also an autistic self-advocate.

01:19:53 ►

And we had Nick come in as a team member from the very beginning of protocol development

01:20:01 ►

to help us make the best choices about the instruments and assessments

01:20:08 ►

that we selected.

01:20:10 ►

He’s advised us and contributed in a really significant way to the protocol development.

01:20:17 ►

We have him review documents that are submitted to the regulatory agencies.

01:20:23 ►

that are submitted to the regulatory agencies.

01:20:32 ►

And he’s been invaluable in helping us raise our awareness about how we use language.

01:20:38 ►

He’s helped us prevent some of these myths and misconceptions that are often unintentionally harmful to the autism community.

01:20:45 ►

He’s also been really instrumental in helping us as a liaison with the media

01:20:51 ►

and supporting MAPS in getting really great messages about autism

01:20:59 ►

and the autism community out there.

01:21:01 ►

Does this mean that depending on the results of this initial study that you hope

01:21:07 ►

to maybe go beyond it and have a follow-on study that’s a larger study? I try never to get too far

01:21:15 ►

ahead of myself. We have our hands full right now, but of course, you know, the hope is always there that the data will be good and will support larger trials.

01:21:29 ►

What we’re doing right now is really a small pilot that will allow us to test safety parameters.

01:21:58 ►

One of the commitments we made early on was we didn’t want to assume that the doses that are considered kind of in the ideal range for typically developing research participants would be the best for people on the spectrum. Because they often have sensory hypersensitivities.

01:22:30 ►

have sensory hypersensitivities. The internal world of someone with autism can often get differing doses so we can help determine what’s really the ideal dose for someone on the spectrum.

01:22:46 ►

And as a result of taking these little baby steps now, we hope to refine how we provide MDMA-assisted therapy for our Pacific adults to inform future studies.

01:22:57 ►

That’s always the hope, but we have to get this study done and analyze the data and see what it tells us.

01:23:00 ►

So you’ve got to walk before you run, I guess.

01:23:06 ►

Absolutely. I often refer to myself as the queen of baby steps. I think you get a lot farther faster if you, you know, take small, carefully considered steps.

01:23:14 ►

Of course, always putting safety first and, you know, slowing down to really explicit input from the research participants about their experience

01:23:25 ►

and always identifying your best practices

01:23:31 ►

and building those into the protocols that follow.

01:23:34 ►

How’s your reception been to some of the talks that you’ve given?

01:23:39 ►

Lots of anecdotal accounts of what it was like

01:23:44 ►

when people on the spectrum took MDMA ecstasy on their own.

01:23:51 ►

So I did have a really rich body of some quantitative data,

01:23:57 ►

but mostly qualitative data about the subjective experiences.

01:24:02 ►

So that’s what I’ve been able to talk about publicly.

01:24:07 ►

I gave the talk at Burning Man.

01:24:10 ►

In fact, I was able to give several talks.

01:24:13 ►

And after every presentation, I was pretty blown away by the fact that

01:24:27 ►

Autistic people from the audience would emerge and approach me and really validate

01:24:34 ►

the

01:24:36 ►

The accounts that I was sharing saying that that was my experience

01:24:41 ►

I could really relate to what you were saying. I was really amazed to learn.

01:24:47 ►

I suppose I shouldn’t have been, but I was really amazed to learn how many autistic burners there are.

01:24:53 ►

They approached me after every talk that I gave. to listen to how they kind of compensated for hypersensitivities,

01:25:10 ►

how they managed the chaos at Burning Man.

01:25:13 ►

And some of them had some really interesting strategies.

01:25:17 ►

And, you know, I thought about it.

01:25:19 ►

What is it about this community that would really attract people on the spectrum.

01:25:27 ►

And I realized, you know, it’s a community that celebrates diversity.

01:25:34 ►

And one of the favorite terms that Nick Walker, our community consultant,

01:25:41 ►

taught me from the very beginning was this term neuro diversity.

01:25:47 ►

And I realized that Burning Man is a,

01:25:51 ►

is a place where that diversity is really respected and embraced.

01:26:00 ►

People who don’t fit the norm can find a fake place where they belong there people with

01:26:07 ►

special talents and creative gifts and uh you know unique abilities as musicians and visual

01:26:16 ►

artists and designers and engineers uh you know are all welcome. So I think that’s part of the draw for autistic community members.

01:26:28 ►

Well, you know, it’s interesting because in the past I’ve had a few challenging moments at Burning Man myself.

01:26:34 ►

And perhaps the autistic community could put some protocols together for people like me that have challenges at Burning Man.

01:26:42 ►

If they’re able to make it, they’ve got a lot to teach us I think oh yeah oh yeah definitely I have a fantasy that I won’t

01:26:52 ►

be able to really act on it this year but I have a fantasy of creating a camp

01:27:01 ►

I’ve even named it one of the biggest autism interest websites is called Wrong Planet because of this notion

01:27:12 ►

that a lot of people on the spectrum sometimes feel like they were just born on the wrong planet

01:27:17 ►

because it’s so difficult for them to figure out the social rules that they’re expected to follow.

01:27:25 ►

So I’d really like to create a camp called Camp Right Planet at Burning Man.

01:27:32 ►

Some place where people on the spectrum can just, you know, bring their unique gifts and,

01:27:38 ►

you know, get some support they need to, you know, help enable them to have the very

01:27:44 ►

best Burning Man experience that they can.

01:27:47 ►

I think that’s a wonderful idea, and I’ll be happy to support it however I can.

01:27:52 ►

You know, Charlie did mention also a moment ago that you’re looking to recruit participants mainly or only really from the LA area. So in closing here, maybe you could tell us

01:28:05 ►

if somebody knows someone autistic or someone is autistic or how do they get in touch with you?

01:28:12 ►

What’s the next step if they would like to find out more about participating in this?

01:28:16 ►

So it’s all one word, clinicaltrials.gov. If you do a search for MDMA and social anxiety, our study will come up,

01:28:28 ►

and it has a lot of information about the protocol, including the inclusion and exclusion criteria for the study.

01:28:37 ►

If you scroll down, there’s contact information for the research team down at the bottom.

01:28:43 ►

for the research team down at the bottom.

01:28:48 ►

Another way that you can reach us more directly is by sending an email to

01:28:52 ►

A. Danforth, that’s A-D-A-N-F-O-R-T-H

01:29:00 ►

01:29:01 ►

labiomed.org. And I’ll put both of those links and all that information on the website, the program notes for today’s podcast, too.

01:29:12 ►

So everybody should be able to find that.

01:29:14 ►

And hopefully some of our fellow salonners have friends or family members or perhaps they’re high-functioning autistic people themselves who would like to contribute to this research in one way or another. So I hope that they will get in touch with you. Oh, one thing I should mention is

01:29:30 ►

Max is also just about to launch a special website dedicated just to providing information

01:29:38 ►

about this study. And that should be online, I guess, in another week or so.

01:29:48 ►

It’s now March 2014.

01:29:54 ►

So I imagine by April we’ll have a website with all sorts of information.

01:30:01 ►

And I would just check with the maps.org website for a link.

01:30:06 ►

Well, Alicia, thank you so much for your time, and Charlie, for your time.

01:30:10 ►

I really appreciate both of you taking a Saturday morning here out of your schedule to talk to us here in the salon, and hopefully this information will reach a wider audience, and

01:30:15 ►

maybe we can all pull together and help some of our friends who are just a little uncomfortable

01:30:23 ►

in the social situations.

01:30:24 ►

friends who are just a little uncomfortable in the social situations.

01:30:30 ►

I don’t consider myself autistic, but I’m very uncomfortable socially, too.

01:30:32 ►

So I do appreciate the work that you’re all doing.

01:30:34 ►

Yeah, it was a pleasure speaking with you.

01:30:35 ►

Thank you.

01:30:42 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:30:43 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:30:51 ►

In the program notes for today’s podcast, which as you know you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us,

01:30:57 ►

I’ll post Alicia’s email address as well as the links to the various websites that she mentioned.

01:31:04 ►

And before I give you an update on our pledge drive, I just want to make a brief comment about social anxiety. As Alicia mentioned, there

01:31:06 ►

is a considerable degree of stress that people feel when they or someone close to them suffers

01:31:12 ►

from one or another form of cognitive diversity. While it is not exactly the same situation as

01:31:19 ►

being in an autistic family, my mother suffered from severe epilepsy, and for my brother and me, this caused a degree of stress

01:31:27 ►

whenever a friend would come to our house to play,

01:31:29 ►

because on occasion my mother would have a seizure.

01:31:32 ►

And it isn’t a pleasant thing to witness,

01:31:34 ►

particularly when it’s your mother who’s suffering.

01:31:37 ►

Of course, my brother and I were equally worried about ourselves,

01:31:41 ►

you know, about what the children at school would say about her and about us

01:31:44 ►

after witnessing such an event.

01:31:47 ►

In fact, our entire family was very protective of her, and yes, it did cause us all some anxiety when,

01:31:53 ►

well, whenever we’d attend school functions and other public events as a family.

01:31:57 ►

But back then, epilepsy was, well, it was something that was seldom discussed,

01:32:02 ►

at least when us children were around.

01:32:05 ►

And as a result, we probably didn’t handle it as well as we should have.

01:32:09 ►

In fact, as young boys, my brother and I would sometimes wonder if when we got older, the seizures would manifest themselves in us as well.

01:32:18 ►

Thankfully, they didn’t.

01:32:19 ►

But those memories of protecting someone we loved from the unknowing slights of others has never left me,

01:32:26 ►

and so I have a great deal of empathy for autistic individuals and for the people who love them.

01:32:32 ►

So I’m extremely grateful that Charlie and Alicia, with the financial support of MAPS, are doing this very important work.

01:32:41 ►

Now for some news about our annual pledge drive.

01:32:45 ►

First of all, since this is something new that we’re doing here,

01:32:48 ►

I’m going to be kind of finding my way as I go along.

01:32:52 ►

So the first thing that I figured out is that in posting the names of our fellow Saloners who have made donations,

01:32:58 ►

I’m also going to include the names of everyone who has donated in the calendar year of 2014,

01:33:04 ►

which only seems fair. Thank you. how you want to be listed. Most people may want only their name and last initial,

01:33:27 ►

but some people prefer that their full name be listed and others want to use a screen name or apply a name.

01:33:31 ►

So I want to be sure that I get that right.

01:33:33 ►

Also, in those emails, I’ll confirm the address

01:33:36 ►

to send the thumb drives to those who donated $45 or more.

01:33:40 ►

So don’t worry about whatever address PayPal has for you.

01:33:43 ►

I will definitely confirm

01:33:45 ►

the shipping address with you before they are shipped. And as to when the thumb drives will

01:33:50 ►

be shipped, well, I’ve got to gear up and get eight more podcasts out as quickly as I can so

01:33:55 ►

that we can reach that magic number of 400 podcasts for the thumb drive. And all of those will be on

01:34:01 ►

the drive that you receive. Also, I’ll be including about a hundred of my favorite Terrence McKenna soundbites.

01:34:08 ►

Originally, I began setting those little segments aside in the hopes that I would find the energy

01:34:13 ►

to string some of them together into a completely new talk of some kind.

01:34:17 ►

But, well, it’s become obvious that I’m not going to get to that project anytime soon.

01:34:23 ►

So my new idea is to send these along to our donors and let them put something together that, well, maybe we can play here in the salon one day.

01:34:32 ►

And just to give you a little idea of what I’m talking about in the way of a soundbite,

01:34:36 ►

I’m going to play a few of them at random in a moment here right after I sign off for today.

01:34:42 ►

As I said at the beginning of this podcast, with the month only half over,

01:34:46 ►

our pledge drive is more than two-thirds of the way completed.

01:34:49 ►

So it looks almost certain that these podcasts

01:34:52 ►

will be continuing through February of next year.

01:34:55 ►

And most likely, well beyond that.

01:34:59 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:35:03 ►

Be well, my friends.

01:35:03 ►

Now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:35:04 ►

Be well, my friends.

01:35:11 ►

It’s a wonderful thing to learn to be able to stand up and yell bullshit.

01:35:17 ►

The world is obviously made of mind and intention.

01:35:24 ►

When they come with the machine guns, the taste for politics turns bitter. and they always do come with machine guns.

01:35:28 ►

The politics of the situation here in this millennial crisis, I think the reasonable

01:35:36 ►

response is to push the art pedal right through the floor. The way to escape the present cul-de-sac is an enormous outbreak of creativity of all sorts.

01:35:50 ►

We just need to overwhelm ourselves with creative expression. So we’re on hold.

01:35:58 ►

Nobody knows what’s going on.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

392 - MDMA and Autistic Adults_ A New Research Study

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