Program Notes
Guest speaker: Rick Doblin
[NOTE: All quotations are by Rick Doblin.]
“Once you’ve produced the scientific data that’s necessary to make a drug into a medicine, you’ve gone a long way towards mainstreaming the acceptance of these drugs as having beneficial properties. And then the step to legalization is not that far behind that.”
“The government has a monopoly on the supply of marijuana that you can use in FDA-approved research. So even though there are 20 states and the District of Columbia [that have legalized medical marijuana], and there’s marijuana everywhere, we’ve spent seven years trying to get 10 grams of marijuana for vaporizer research. We’re the only people in America that can’t get 10 grams of marijuana.”
“We are all dying and we all have some anxiety about it. And so people are more scared of dying than they are of drugs. If we can show that people who are facing death can be assisted with psychedelics that’s a powerful message.”
MAPS Sponsored: MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy Research
“The New Drug They Call ‘Ecstasy’ ”
(New York Magazine, May 20, 1985)
“Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate” (video)
“Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate” (podcast)
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
Salon.
00:00:23 ►
And today we’ll be traveling back in time to the 2013 Burning Man Festival
00:00:28 ►
and join the good people at Camp Soft Landing for yet another of the Palenque Norte lectures.
00:00:34 ►
And our guest speaker today is Rick Doblin,
00:00:37 ►
the founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS.
00:00:45 ►
In some of my previous podcasts of Rick’s talks,
00:00:48 ►
I’ve mentioned the fact that Rick and I began corresponding even before he founded MAPS.
00:00:53 ►
And now that MAPS is so successful, it’s easy to forget about the fact that
00:00:57 ►
Rick has been at this for a long, long time.
00:01:00 ►
If you’ve heard my own story about how I first became involved with MDMA,
00:01:11 ►
If you’ve heard my own story about how I first became involved with MDMA, you may remember me mentioning that there was only a very limited amount of printed information about it.
00:01:23 ►
And one of the less than 10 documents that we could find at the time was titled, MDMA Enters the Global Brain, a Report on a Visit to the World Health Organization. And the author of that report, which was dated March 2, 1985,
00:01:29 ►
was none other than Rick Doblin.
00:01:31 ►
I’ve still got a copy of this report in my files,
00:01:35 ►
and to this day it still astounds me that some young guy would have the courage
00:01:39 ►
to approach the World Health Organization in an attempt to promote a new drug.
00:01:45 ►
He was definitely somebody that I wanted to meet.
00:01:48 ►
Just now, as I pulled that report out so that I could read the title correctly,
00:01:53 ►
I discovered that just under it, a copy of an article in the New York Magazine was there,
00:01:58 ►
and it’s dated May 20th, 1985.
00:02:00 ►
The article is titled, The New Drug They Call Ecstasy.
00:02:07 ►
- The article is titled, The New Drug They Call Ecstasy. And on page 41 of that magazine,
00:02:13 ►
in the article, there’s a photo of a very young Rick Doblin with a caption calling him a psychedelic cheerleader. Which I should point out is something that Rick definitely does not like to be called.
00:02:20 ►
Anyway, it was that photo of Rick that actually inspired me to get into contact with him way back in 1985.
00:02:27 ►
He’s been pulling this train for a long time and he deserves a lot of credit,
00:02:32 ►
even though he and I may disagree about little things from time to time.
00:02:36 ►
But looking at that magazine article, the first thing that stands out for me is one of those bold quotes
00:02:42 ►
that are pulled out of the story and highlighted. It reads,
00:02:46 ►
Let’s say it really does have therapeutic potential, says Dr. Robert Siegel.
00:02:51 ►
That’s all the more reason for it to be thoroughly tested.
00:02:53 ►
Why not take the time and do it right?
00:02:56 ►
Well, who would have thought that when that article came out in 1985,
00:03:01 ►
that taking the time to get it right meant that it would take almost 30 years for Rick to get
00:03:06 ►
the approvals necessary to conduct these studies. Dr. Siegel may have sounded rational at the time,
00:03:12 ►
but look at what has actually taken place, and you can see that Siegel, in his kind, really meant to
00:03:17 ►
keep the lid on this new medicine, one that wouldn’t be anywhere close to as profitable as
00:03:22 ►
the medicines in his inventory already.
00:03:29 ►
But getting back to that old photo of Rick, it’s a real classic.
00:03:33 ►
And so I thought about trying to scan it and post it with the program notes.
00:03:37 ►
However, I got lucky and found the entire article online,
00:03:39 ►
and with a color copy of that picture of Rick.
00:03:50 ►
So I’ll use that photo in the program notes and link to the article as well. And as you know, you can get to the program notes for these podcasts via psychedelicsalon.us.
00:04:02 ►
Now let’s join the master of ceremonies for the Planque Norte lectures, Christopher Pezza, or Pez as he is affectionately known, as he introduces my longtime friend, Rick Doblin. I’m very excited to introduce Rick Doblin.
00:04:08 ►
I’m very excited to introduce Rick Doblin.
00:04:18 ►
Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, otherwise known as MAPS.
00:04:23 ►
He received his doctorate in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government,
00:04:30 ►
where he wrote his dissertation on the regulation of the medical use of psychedelics and marijuana, and his master’s thesis on a survey of oncologists about smoke marijuana versus the oral THC pill and nausea control for cancer patients.
00:04:36 ►
MAPS is currently working around the world to turn psychedelics into prescription medicines,
00:04:42 ►
and I’m sure he’s going to tell you a bit about that. And they also sponsored and created the Zendo project
00:04:48 ►
that is here in Fractal Nation on the Playa,
00:04:51 ►
acting as a harm reduction facility for festival environments.
00:04:56 ►
So with that, here’s Rick.
00:04:58 ►
Just to orient me, how many,
00:05:00 ►
was any of you at the talk that I gave yesterday?
00:05:04 ►
Okay, in a, that’s good.
00:05:06 ►
So it’s a different audience.
00:05:08 ►
What I was talking about yesterday was the development of MDMA into a prescription medicine.
00:05:19 ►
And what I’m going to talk to you about tonight is a little bit about that and the challenges that we face
00:05:25 ►
and then i’m going to talk a bit about how the medical use can actually expand over time into
00:05:33 ►
legalization of psychedelics both for celebratory use like here at burning man and for religious use
00:05:41 ►
outside of religious freedom because that requires religion.
00:05:46 ►
And a lot of us have our own personal spiritual practices
00:05:50 ►
that don’t necessarily take place in the context of a religious setting.
00:05:54 ►
And so to help you understand how that’s possible,
00:05:58 ►
I want to draw a little bit on some lessons from what we’ve seen with the medical use of marijuana.
00:06:04 ►
draw a little bit on some lessons from what we’ve seen with the medical use of marijuana and so the groups that are now funding the 20 states plus the district of columbia that have
00:06:11 ►
legalized medical marijuana are getting extremely sophisticated in their work and working with
00:06:18 ►
major pollsters major advertising agencies are getting extremely well funded
00:06:25 ►
and are planning a series of marijuana legalization initiatives in Oregon, California, Massachusetts in 2016,
00:06:36 ►
and other states possibly as well.
00:06:38 ►
So the polling has shown something that I found really surprising. And they try to understand what motivates somebody to be in favor of voting for marijuana legalization.
00:06:51 ►
And you might think that the single thing that’s most important is whether you yourself are a pot smoker.
00:06:58 ►
You’d think that most pot smokers would want it to be legal.
00:07:02 ►
drugspokers would want it to be legal.
00:07:06 ►
But they found that there’s something else that is even more of a determinant of whether somebody votes in favor of legalization of marijuana.
00:07:10 ►
And that’s whether people know a medical marijuana patient.
00:07:16 ►
And when you think about that, it’s sort of surprising initially,
00:07:20 ►
but I think there’s so much information and misinformation that we get in our society
00:07:25 ►
that people don’t know what to trust.
00:07:28 ►
And when they know directly a friend or a friend of a friend or a relative that’s a medical marijuana patient,
00:07:35 ►
that not only changes their attitudes about the risk-benefit of medical marijuana,
00:07:40 ►
but it changes their attitudes about legalization as well.
00:07:43 ►
medical marijuana, but it changes their attitudes about legalization as well.
00:07:52 ►
So I think that as we are looking at social change, and as Burning Man, in a way, is trying to build certain models for how our society will grow, that we need to understand that the
00:08:00 ►
medicalization of psychedelics is not an effort to try to say that these are drugs that are so powerful and dangerous
00:08:08 ►
that they should only be used in a medical context.
00:08:11 ►
So we’re not trying to create a medical priesthood.
00:08:14 ►
We’re not trying to say that it’s only for people that have a diagnosable illness.
00:08:19 ►
But what we are trying to say is that in our society, we’re set up for making drugs into medicine.
00:08:26 ►
So it’s the path of least resistance into creating legal context for psychedelics to be administered for beneficial purposes.
00:08:35 ►
But that it has a larger role in social change because it will change people’s attitudes.
00:08:40 ►
And in our society, what we could say the closest that we have to a common
00:08:46 ►
religion is science. And the medicalization is based on a scientific process. And you get
00:08:53 ►
society’s opinion leaders, you get the media. Once you produce the scientific data that’s necessary
00:09:00 ►
to make a drug into a medicine, you’ve gone a long way towards mainstreaming the acceptance
00:09:06 ►
of these drugs as having beneficial properties. And then the step to legalization is not that far
00:09:14 ►
behind that. And I think it’s easy to understand the progress that’s been made in medical marijuana as working on people’s sense of compassion.
00:09:27 ►
And what’s unusual about the medical marijuana process is that it’s been done without the science, in a sense,
00:09:36 ►
without the science that’s been required by FDA to make marijuana into a medicine.
00:09:41 ►
So MAPS is focusing on trying to develop psychedelics and also marijuana
00:09:47 ►
into medicines. And the reason that we’ve not made progress with making marijuana into a
00:09:52 ►
prescription medicine is because the government has a monopoly on the supply of marijuana
00:09:57 ►
that you can use in FDA-approved research. So even though there’s 20 states and the District
00:10:02 ►
of Columbia and there’s marijuana everywhere,
00:10:11 ►
we spent seven years trying to get 10 grams of marijuana for vaporizer research.
00:10:16 ►
We’re the only people in America that can’t get 10 grams of marijuana.
00:10:23 ►
And it’s because vaporization is a threat to the system of prohibition because the concern has been about
00:10:25 ►
smoked marijuana being too dangerous and even though now we know that smoked marijuana does
00:10:30 ►
not cause lung cancer does not cause chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder that there’s
00:10:35 ►
anti-tumor properties in the cannabinoids vaporization is the way that we can imagine
00:10:41 ►
it making through the fda because it’s not burning the material.
00:10:46 ►
There’s no combustion.
00:10:47 ►
It heats.
00:10:47 ►
You’ve got a vapor.
00:10:49 ►
And so even though the products of combustion are not really that dangerous,
00:10:53 ►
a rational risk-benefit analysis by the FDA would approve smoked marijuana as a medicine
00:11:00 ►
that vaporization will more likely make it through.
00:11:03 ►
So vaporization has been resisted, and it’s been resistant through this monopoly on the
00:11:08 ►
supply of marijuana.
00:11:09 ►
We’ve just recently had a very frustrating experience, a 13-year project of trying to
00:11:15 ►
break the government monopoly on marijuana has just ended in the First Circuit Court
00:11:20 ►
of Appeals with a defeat.
00:11:23 ►
And so the law that says that the production of Schedule I drugs
00:11:27 ►
has to be done under adequately competitive circumstances and there has to be an adequate
00:11:33 ►
supply, the courts decided that the monopoly is adequately competitive because they presumably
00:11:39 ►
sell at cost. Of course, if they don’t want to sell it to you, the cost is infinite, and they’re the only
00:11:45 ►
source. So we are working in Israel and other places to try to facilitate medical marijuana,
00:11:51 ►
and the Israeli government is one of the world’s now examples where they’ve legitimized medical
00:11:56 ►
marijuana. They’ve licensed multiple producers. If you heard a little bit about the art car,
00:12:03 ►
Rainbow Bridge, that’s been donated by David Bronner and Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps.
00:12:08 ►
And he also donated about $85,000 to MAPS
00:12:13 ►
to support the development of medical marijuana in Israel
00:12:16 ►
because they initially had to operate in a nonprofit context
00:12:21 ►
and they had to initially give the marijuana away.
00:12:23 ►
So we supplemented with money from all the people that bought Browners soaps and products
00:12:29 ►
and helped the growers to sustain themselves until they could transform into selling for profit.
00:12:37 ►
So the medical marijuana movement is likely to continue at the state level expanding.
00:12:44 ►
It’s moving more and more towards legalization.
00:12:46 ►
And we have a protocol for marijuana for 50 veterans
00:12:49 ►
with post-traumatic stress disorder from Iraq and Afghanistan
00:12:53 ►
that is approved by the FDA.
00:12:57 ►
It’s been approved by the University of Arizona
00:13:00 ►
Institutional Review Board,
00:13:01 ►
and we’re going to try one more time to get marijuana from NIDA,
00:13:06 ►
the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
00:13:07 ►
So we anticipate that there’s going to be a lot of resistance for sure.
00:13:13 ►
Maybe we’ll be able to get it through.
00:13:16 ►
And if we don’t, our purpose is to show that the system is blocked.
00:13:22 ►
But we are hoping to get it through.
00:13:26 ►
that the system is blocked, but we are hoping to get it through. And I think if we can do that,
00:13:32 ►
then, and actually do the study, we’ll show that marijuana is effective for veterans and others with PTSD, and it will further help foster this change in social attitudes. Now, our main project
00:13:39 ►
is MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder. And we also have other projects with ayahuasca for the treatment of addiction,
00:13:48 ►
with ibogaine for the treatment of addiction,
00:13:51 ►
and with LSD and MDMA for end-of-life related anxiety.
00:13:56 ►
And we’re starting a new study.
00:13:58 ►
The very next talk is going to be from Alicia Danforth about MDMA for adults on the autism spectrum with social anxiety.
00:14:08 ►
So we’re like, well, first off, we have our own independent sources of all these drugs.
00:14:15 ►
So we’re not bound by the National Institute on Drug Abuse,
00:14:20 ►
who is not sympathetic with this sort of research.
00:14:23 ►
So one of the first things that we learned at the Kennedy School
00:14:27 ►
was that there’s no the government,
00:14:29 ►
that the government is like our own selves,
00:14:31 ►
that there’s all these different parts of ourselves,
00:14:34 ►
they’re not always aligned,
00:14:36 ►
and it has to do with the institutional mission of the different parts.
00:14:41 ►
So the most important change that’s happened so that now there is more
00:14:47 ►
psychedelic research than at any time in the last 45 years is that people at the FDA, starting in
00:14:54 ►
1990 and then reaffirmed in a special advisory committee in 1992, decided that they would open
00:15:00 ►
the door again to psychedelic research and that they would put science before the politics.
00:15:06 ►
So all of our strategy is based on the fundamental decision of FDA
00:15:14 ►
to reverse decades of suppression of research, which started in the middle 60s.
00:15:21 ►
By the early 70s, psychedelic research was blocked all over the world, and it’s taken until 1990 for Rick Strassman’s DMT project to start up psychedelic research again.
00:15:34 ►
So in 1992, they reaffirmed the policy and expanded it and gave us permission for the first study with MDMA.
00:15:49 ►
with MDMA. So we are working to build our alliance with FDA, which now is very highly developed. And to give you a sense of how deep the relationship goes, we went a couple years ago,
00:15:57 ►
and we said that as we talk about mainstreaming the research and expanding the research,
00:16:03 ►
there’s a limited number of people
00:16:05 ►
that have underground experience and above ground credentials. And so we’re going to need to train
00:16:12 ►
new therapists. And we’re going to need to train a lot of new therapists. And just like if you want
00:16:18 ►
to study yoga, you go to somebody that practices yoga. You want to study meditation, you go to somebody that practices yoga, you want to study meditation, you go to somebody that has meditated. What we approached the FDA with and said that if in our training process for therapists,
00:16:34 ►
we’d feel that therapists would be more effective if they’d had their own experience with the drugs
00:16:39 ►
that they’re giving to the patients. Now, that’s not true about electroshock therapy, or it’s not true about a lot
00:16:46 ►
of the things that the psychiatrists do. It doesn’t necessarily make them better psychiatrists to take
00:16:51 ►
antipsychotic drugs or antidepressant drugs, but it could be helpful. But it’s more important with
00:16:57 ►
psychedelics that people understand what the drugs do, particularly since in our model with MDMA, around half the time is spent
00:17:08 ►
in conversation, and the other half is where people’s eyes are closed and they’re having
00:17:12 ►
an inner experience.
00:17:14 ►
And with our study with LSD in Switzerland, it’s even more time in people’s eyes closed
00:17:21 ►
listening to music and maybe 20% or so dialogue, Because people are less verbal, it’s more difficult.
00:17:26 ►
So we went to the FDA and we said we would like to get permission to give MDMA to therapists.
00:17:33 ►
And because it’s a controlled substance, the only way we could do it is in the context of FDA-approved study.
00:17:40 ►
And so what they said to us was that they couldn’t give us permission just to give MDMA to therapists,
00:17:46 ►
but if we could come up with a design of a study that would look like science,
00:17:52 ►
meaning double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study,
00:17:56 ►
it didn’t particularly matter to them or to us what we were actually learning,
00:18:00 ►
but if we could do that, it fit in their right boxes,
00:18:04 ►
then we could limit who could be in the study to therapists in our training program.
00:18:09 ►
And so we did that.
00:18:11 ►
We ended up designing this project.
00:18:13 ►
We got it approved by the FDA.
00:18:15 ►
We got it approved by the Institutional Review Board.
00:18:17 ►
We even got it approved by the DEA.
00:18:20 ►
And so now we have the ability to give MDMA to therapists in a therapeutic setting.
00:18:25 ►
And the study is looking at the psychological effects of MDMA when taken in a therapeutic setting by healthy volunteers.
00:18:34 ►
And we’ve done it so that we ask questions and measures.
00:18:38 ►
If you heard Roland talk before, he talked about personality change and the neo-personality measure.
00:18:44 ►
So we use that and other measures.
00:18:46 ►
But during the eight hours of the MDMA session, we’re not bothering people.
00:18:49 ►
So we’re able to really help them have a deep and profound experience.
00:18:53 ►
And we’ve already brought three people.
00:18:55 ►
Not only can we do this for people in the United States,
00:18:57 ►
but we can bring therapists from all over the world to participate in the United States
00:19:02 ►
and legally get MDMA.
00:19:03 ►
to participate in the United States and legally get MDMA.
00:19:12 ►
So the FDA is our main ally when we think about trying to transform our society’s attitudes towards psychedelics.
00:19:19 ►
The National Institute on Drug Abuse, which is not very sympathetic, has no role at all because we have our own independent sources of supply.
00:19:22 ►
And the way in which institutional review boards are
00:19:25 ►
constituted, they’re created
00:19:28 ►
after World War II,
00:19:29 ►
after the Nazi experiments on concentration
00:19:32 ►
camp
00:19:32 ►
people, and
00:19:35 ►
they’re there to protect the human
00:19:37 ►
rights of the subjects. And so we need
00:19:40 ►
to present to them risk-benefit
00:19:42 ►
analysis, and they look at the safety of the
00:19:43 ►
subjects, but are not so
00:19:45 ►
politicized. So we are able to get approval from institutional review boards, and the DEA, once you
00:19:52 ►
have IRB and FDA approval, the DEA can only look at what’s called drug diversion. Their issue is,
00:19:59 ►
are the drugs that are coming for the study going to go to the patients, or the doctor is going to
00:20:03 ►
take it themselves, or the therapist, or is it going to go to the patients? Are the doctors going to take it themselves or the therapists?
00:20:05 ►
Or is it going to disappear somewhere else?
00:20:07 ►
But they can’t say no because they don’t want the study to take place.
00:20:12 ►
So the main thing that the DEA has done in the past is delay.
00:20:16 ►
They’re masters of delay because delay is the same as a no.
00:20:20 ►
But eventually they have to come around.
00:20:23 ►
And we’ve been able to get support from various
00:20:25 ►
U.S. senators and members of Congress who are sympathetic with our research aims. So we now have
00:20:32 ►
an open regulatory system where we can move forward with psychedelic research. And because
00:20:38 ►
we’ve been able to do that in the United States, and because people all over the world look to the
00:20:42 ►
FDA as the premier regulatory agency for medicines, we’re now able to get permission pretty much all over the world.
00:20:50 ►
It takes varying amounts of time in different countries. We’re about, you know, I can’t say
00:20:56 ►
for sure, but it looks like we’re a month or two away from starting a study in Canada with MDMA for
00:21:02 ►
post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s been five years just trying to get permission to do it.
00:21:07 ►
We actually got permission for the protocol, and then it took us two years just to get
00:21:12 ►
the permits to import the MDMA into Canada.
00:21:16 ►
But it looks like it’s within a couple weeks or so of getting the final approvals.
00:21:22 ►
We’ve modified the protocol a little bit, which I’ll talk about a bit more later.
00:21:27 ►
So we have studies in Switzerland, in Israel, in the United States,
00:21:33 ►
soon in Canada.
00:21:34 ►
We have Ibogaine projects in New Zealand,
00:21:38 ►
Ayahuasca projects in Canada.
00:21:41 ►
And so there’s this growing international consensus among regulatory bodies that this work
00:21:46 ►
is legitimate and that it should move forward. And the main reason that we’re able to make progress,
00:21:55 ►
because none of these drugs are patented, the patents have all expired, they’re all in the
00:21:59 ►
public domain. So what we’re doing is non-profit drug development. And that’s something, when I started MAPS in 1986, there had never been nonprofit drug development.
00:22:11 ►
I somehow just thought we would be able to do it eventually.
00:22:14 ►
And fortunately, starting in 1999, was the first example of a nonprofit organization developing a drug into a medicine.
00:22:23 ►
And that drug was the abortion pill, RU-46.
00:22:27 ►
And it was a drug that was controversial.
00:22:30 ►
It was a drug that no pharmaceutical company wanted to take on because they were worried
00:22:34 ►
that all of their other products would be boycotted.
00:22:36 ►
It was already approved in Europe.
00:22:40 ►
And what came together was a group called the Population Council,
00:22:45 ►
started by John D. Rockefeller III and funded by Warren Buffett,
00:22:50 ►
who donated over $5 million, and the Pritzker family and others.
00:22:54 ►
So we had sort of a top-down, small group of wealthy people
00:22:59 ►
decided that this was something important for public health,
00:23:02 ►
and they were able to make it into a medicine.
00:23:05 ►
So the FDA is sympathetic to nonprofit drug development,
00:23:10 ►
and what has happened since is that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
00:23:15 ►
has now stepped up and donated large sums of money for drugs for Africa,
00:23:20 ►
for malaria drugs and other drugs developed in a nonprofit context.
00:23:25 ►
And at the same time, there’s certain kind of patient groups that are trying to fund research themselves.
00:23:31 ►
So what we’re doing is really a partnership between the community.
00:23:35 ►
So far, our funding, and over the course of MAPS’s history since 1986,
00:23:44 ►
we’ve had over $20 million worth of funding.
00:23:49 ►
And what we’re anticipating going forward is that we’re going to need another 3 million
00:23:55 ►
over the next several years to complete the Phase II studies with MDMA for PTSD.
00:24:01 ►
And then we’re going to need another $15 million over the next five years
00:24:06 ►
after that. So our current trajectory is to have MDMA developed as a prescription medicine in
00:24:12 ►
- And I’ve been notoriously wrong about my timetables over the course of this process, but
00:24:22 ►
as we get closer and closer,
00:24:27 ►
we’re eliminating more of the uncertainties,
00:24:30 ►
we’re overcoming more of the regulatory problems.
00:24:33 ►
And so it’s a reasonable possibility that by 2021, MDMA would become a prescription medicine.
00:24:39 ►
And as you may have heard before
00:24:41 ►
about the work with psilocybin with end-of-life,
00:24:45 ►
they’re also trying to work through the FDA to make that into a medicine,
00:24:48 ►
and I’m not sure exactly of their timetable.
00:24:52 ►
But the general idea is that we get support from the people that are sympathetic with psychedelics,
00:24:58 ►
that are from the psychedelic culture.
00:25:01 ►
We hope to broaden and get support from patient groups from the government eventually we’re
00:25:06 ►
working with the national institute of mental health i’ve actually i was a vietnam war draft
00:25:13 ►
resistor and was planning to go to jail and was sort of shocked that they didn’t notice me
00:25:18 ►
and decided then that i would become an underground psychedelic therapist instead of going to jail.
00:25:26 ►
And that was 1972.
00:25:29 ►
So that was my career goal.
00:25:31 ►
And just recently we had a meeting in the Pentagon where we got to meet some pretty high-level people to talk about our work with veterans,
00:25:38 ►
to try to get active support from the Department of Defense. So we’ve not been able to do that yet, but we’re working with veterans who come to us from outside the VA
00:25:48 ►
and outside the Department of Defense
00:25:50 ►
who have chronic treatment-resistant PTSD
00:25:53 ►
and who have heard about our project.
00:25:56 ►
And so we’re hoping to eventually institutionalize it
00:25:59 ►
and get support from the military.
00:26:01 ►
It turns out that the head of the National Institute of Mental Health,
00:26:05 ►
I met him in the late 1980s.
00:26:08 ►
He was doing animal research into MDMA neurotoxicity.
00:26:12 ►
And I went to visit him in a lab that was surrounded by barbed wire with guards.
00:26:17 ►
They didn’t want animal rights protesters.
00:26:20 ►
And he showed me his studies.
00:26:22 ►
And he seemed like somebody who was more of a scientist than a politician.
00:26:26 ►
And his risk estimates were not exaggerated to try to support the drug war.
00:26:32 ►
And we developed a respect for each other but didn’t really communicate that much further.
00:26:38 ►
And all these years later, he’s now the head of the National Institute of Mental Health.
00:26:42 ►
And so I contacted him about a year and a half ago.
00:26:42 ►
He’s now the head of the National Institute of Mental Health.
00:26:44 ►
And so I contacted him about a year and a half ago.
00:26:50 ►
And the very day after I sent him an email, he replied.
00:26:55 ►
And he said that he felt that now was an appropriate time for us to submit a grant application to NIMH. And he assigned one of his top deputies to assist us in developing the grant application.
00:27:02 ►
And so we’re in that process still.
00:27:01 ►
in developing the grant application.
00:27:04 ►
And so we’re in that process still. But there are indications in the military,
00:27:09 ►
in the National Institute of Mental Health,
00:27:11 ►
of a sense of crisis,
00:27:13 ►
that there are 22 people a day, veterans, committing suicide.
00:27:17 ►
There is one active-duty soldier every day committing suicide.
00:27:21 ►
There’s a sense of crisis,
00:27:22 ►
and that the current treatment options work for some
00:27:27 ►
people, but there’s a significant percentage of people that it don’t work for.
00:27:31 ►
So what we’re trying to do, and again, what I learned more at the Kennedy School is that
00:27:37 ►
we’re combining politics and science.
00:27:40 ►
So the choice of MDMA as the psychedelic is in part more so than I think LSD or psilocybin or ibogaine or mescaline,
00:27:50 ►
is that MDMA is more gentle, and the psychiatric community and the psychotherapeutic community
00:27:55 ►
are more open to trying MDMA themselves to learn how to be a therapist than these other drugs.
00:28:06 ►
a therapist than these other drugs. I think if you talk to most psychiatrists who are trained to be agents of the pharmaceutical company, trained in psychopharmacology, have 15-minute
00:28:12 ►
meetings with people, the idea that they would take LSD is kind of frightening to a lot of people.
00:28:19 ►
So I think the movement into the treatment communities is likely to be more successful and more rapid with MDMA
00:28:29 ►
than with any of the other psychedelics.
00:28:32 ►
And then we need to sort of pick patient populations that the general public is sympathetic with.
00:28:39 ►
And there’s a whole history of work in the 50s and 60s with LSD for alcoholism and heroin addiction.
00:28:48 ►
And you might not know that Bill W., one of the founders of AA in the late 1950s, took LSD
00:28:55 ►
and thought that it had a major role that it could play in the AA movement
00:29:01 ►
because their spiritual principles that they have and they also talk about people
00:29:06 ►
hitting bottom and then they can start dealing with the things that they’ve suppressed and what
00:29:12 ►
he thought was that with LSD you can kind of precipitate hitting bottom when people still have
00:29:18 ►
intact relationships they might still have a job and that then they can also have a spiritual
00:29:23 ►
experience that they can draw strength from.
00:29:25 ►
But it was too controversial to really move into the AA movement.
00:29:31 ►
But there has been this whole series of studies in the 50s and 60s.
00:29:35 ►
But generally, addicts we think of, people with addiction problems, are the other.
00:29:41 ►
They’re kind of demonized in our society. They’re really not the kind of
00:29:45 ►
patient, even though the drugs work well, that we can get mainstream support from very easily.
00:29:52 ►
And the two main areas that we can do that are with post-traumatic stress disorder, which is
00:29:58 ►
something that could affect all of us through a natural disaster or an assault or an accident and then the other area is people
00:30:08 ►
who are dying so we are all dying and we’re all have some anxiety about it and so people are more
00:30:16 ►
scared of dying than they are of drugs and if we can show that people who are facing death can be
00:30:23 ►
assisted with psychedelics, that’s a powerful
00:30:26 ►
message. And many people will then be open to the idea of letting this move forward. And so I think
00:30:34 ►
we need these three different areas. The treatment of addiction to help communicate to people that
00:30:39 ►
drugs that are considered to be drugs of abuse have a role to play in the treatment of addiction,
00:30:46 ►
that it’s not the drug, it’s how the drug is used.
00:30:49 ►
And that’s the fundamental problem with our whole system of prohibition,
00:30:53 ►
is it sort of says there’s good drugs, there’s bad drugs, good drugs are illegal,
00:30:57 ►
the bad drugs are somehow inherently bad.
00:31:00 ►
And we put these properties into these drugs that are actually how they use the relationship
00:31:08 ►
that we have with the drug is the key factor so doing work with addiction is really important to
00:31:12 ►
communicate that also to show that we’re aware that there is addiction issues and at the same
00:31:19 ►
time i don’t think it’s going to be the way that’ll most make it through the system to
00:31:23 ►
medicalize psychedelics first but you could say it’s like going to school and you have major and minor.
00:31:28 ►
So we have a minor in psychedelics for the treatment of addiction.
00:31:32 ►
And Hefter Research has a major in using psychedelics for end-of-life.
00:31:37 ►
And we’re working with LSD and end-of-life.
00:31:41 ►
They’re focusing more on psilocybin.
00:31:42 ►
I think that has a terrific opportunity to move
00:31:45 ►
forward. And then I think right now, MDMA for PTSD is the drug condition combination that I think has
00:31:54 ►
the most opportunity to make it through the system. MDMA is a drug that reduces fear and
00:32:01 ►
anxiety. What we know from certain studies in terms of mechanisms of action,
00:32:08 ►
that there is the left amygdala, which is a fear processing part of the brain. MDMA reduces
00:32:13 ►
activity in that part of the brain, and it enhances activity in the frontal cortex.
00:32:18 ►
So what is basically happening is the fear response that that people have to difficult emotions is muted
00:32:26 ►
and people can then have an experience of their trauma when they’re not so frightened of it and
00:32:34 ►
then the frontal cortex where we put things in context and re-understand them we’re understanding
00:32:41 ►
more about memory is that memory is not something that is like a hard drive on your computer.
00:32:46 ►
You pull it up, you look at it,
00:32:48 ►
and then you put the memory back.
00:32:50 ►
What actually seems to be happening
00:32:51 ►
is that you have a memory,
00:32:53 ►
you pull it up for review,
00:32:55 ►
and then it’s reconsolidated.
00:32:57 ►
The memory is recreated and stored.
00:33:00 ►
And that’s how a lot of times memories change over time.
00:33:04 ►
And it’s a malleable thing, what our memories really are and what really happened.
00:33:08 ►
But what that means is, in terms of therapy,
00:33:11 ►
is that if you can remember a traumatic incident when you’re not feeling scared,
00:33:18 ►
then when you reconsolidate the memory, it doesn’t have all those same tags of fear.
00:33:24 ►
And so people are able to integrate difficult traumatic experiences the memory, it doesn’t have all those same tags of fear.
00:33:29 ►
And so people are able to integrate difficult traumatic experiences
00:33:32 ►
and then move forward with their lives.
00:33:41 ►
What I want to briefly say is that since we’re talking about in two,
00:33:48 ►
three years having to spend $15 million on making MDMA into a medicine in phase three studies,
00:33:56 ►
Shawna Haley, who was on our board of directors, who loved Burning Man, and we really deepened our relationship here,
00:34:04 ►
died at age 62, left us with 5.5 million towards developing MDMA into a medicine.
00:34:05 ►
So we’ve already got a head start there. But the principle of drug research is that you don’t want to do anything
00:34:10 ►
in phase three that you haven’t already done in small pilot studies in phase two. So we have
00:34:17 ►
eight different small pilot studies that are underway or completed trying to learn various
00:34:24 ►
aspects of how we do this research.
00:34:26 ►
So I’ll just briefly say what each of the studies is
00:34:29 ►
and what we’ve learned from it.
00:34:30 ►
The first study was in Charleston, South Carolina,
00:34:34 ►
and it was 20 subjects,
00:34:36 ►
and it was almost entirely women survivors of childhood sexual abuse
00:34:40 ►
and adult rape and assault.
00:34:42 ►
And these people had PTSD for an
00:34:45 ►
average of more than 19 years.
00:34:48 ►
So these are long-standing
00:34:50 ►
people who have
00:34:51 ►
also called treatment resistant,
00:34:54 ►
meaning that they’ve gone and get
00:34:56 ►
both psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy
00:34:58 ►
and it has not sufficiently
00:35:00 ►
helped them cope with their
00:35:01 ►
PTSD. So
00:35:03 ►
we were able to show that in this group of people
00:35:07 ►
that over 80% of them,
00:35:10 ►
after our three-and-a-half-month treatment process,
00:35:13 ►
no longer had PTSD.
00:35:15 ►
It was absolutely astonishing that people who are…
00:35:18 ►
We had three people who were on disability
00:35:20 ►
that went back to work.
00:35:23 ►
All the people who were on disability went back to work.
00:35:25 ►
Now, there are a group of people who are treatment non-responders, so I don’t want to say that
00:35:30 ►
it works for everybody. Nothing works for everybody. But what we learned is that in this
00:35:35 ►
population of people who’d been stuck for a very long time, that the MDMA in combination with
00:35:42 ►
therapy, it’s not the MDMA by itself. Although
00:35:46 ►
of all the psychedelics, MDMA is the
00:35:48 ►
most inherently therapeutic.
00:35:50 ►
I’ve talked to people who have taken MDMA
00:35:52 ►
at Burning Man, remembered
00:35:54 ►
prior sexual abuse, and
00:35:56 ►
been supported
00:35:58 ►
by their friends and able to work through it.
00:36:00 ►
So people, as we all know,
00:36:02 ►
we can heal ourselves
00:36:03 ►
to some degree. It does help to have
00:36:07 ►
support services, but that people can get better. But what we learned is that people who are stuck
00:36:13 ►
can move beyond it. And we then did a long-term follow-up study evaluating these people after an
00:36:22 ►
average of three and a half years and we found that the
00:36:26 ►
results were durable and sustained over time so in a way this is like a non-drug approach because
00:36:33 ►
we treat them over three and a half months they only get mdma three times with a male female
00:36:38 ►
co-therapist team the session started eight in the morning they go till, I mean they start at 10 in the morning they go till 6 at night, 8 hours
00:36:45 ►
and it’s a
00:36:48 ►
non-directive approach where
00:36:50 ►
we’re asking people to
00:36:52 ►
just open up in
00:36:54 ►
whatever different ways and patterns that they
00:36:56 ►
want to, the therapist will
00:36:57 ►
speak back to them, will try to
00:37:00 ►
develop
00:37:02 ►
in a way the most empowering
00:37:03 ►
kind of situation where it recognition it’s very much
00:37:06 ►
like midwives where you know you have to give birth yourself the midwife can’t actually help
00:37:11 ►
somebody give birth and it’s very empowering that way and so the same as people have to heal
00:37:17 ►
themselves that we’re not trying to be in this power dynamic situation we want to assist their
00:37:22 ►
inner healer so what we’ve been
00:37:25 ►
able to show is that it works and it is durable over time. Now, some people relapsed. So we went
00:37:31 ►
to the FDA and we asked them if we could have a new study where we would give people one session,
00:37:39 ►
open label, means that it’s not a double blind and everybody knows it’s MDMA and see if we can sort of help people get back to where they were after the treatment.
00:37:49 ►
And, you know, life goes on.
00:37:51 ►
People have more traumas.
00:37:52 ►
You know, nothing works forever.
00:37:53 ►
So we’ve been able to show that for three of the people that went into this relapse study
00:37:59 ►
that this single MDMA session helped them to get back to reducing their PTSD symptoms.
00:38:05 ►
But some of those people, again, after a year or so, the symptoms would return.
00:38:09 ►
So there are some people for whom occasional retreatments every several years might be necessary.
00:38:17 ►
But even that is pretty remarkable and pretty efficient,
00:38:21 ►
rather than having people get a daily drug that they have to take
00:38:25 ►
that has all these different side effects.
00:38:26 ►
So then we did a study in Switzerland, and what we found there was in 12 subjects
00:38:32 ►
that we were able to get really good outcomes, better than all of the available medications,
00:38:39 ►
but the Swiss study was more, the results were more like reducing symptoms.
00:38:45 ►
They weren’t, in most cases, producing the kind of cures that we saw from the U.S. study.
00:38:50 ►
And this was before we standardized the therapy.
00:38:53 ►
And we found that they used a slightly more directive approach.
00:38:56 ►
And also there’s cultural differences.
00:38:59 ►
So it’s very complicated to do research around the world in different cultures.
00:39:03 ►
But we found that even in the Swiss study, the results are good enough to get it around the world in different cultures, but we found that even in
00:39:05 ►
the Swiss study, the results are good enough to get it through the FDA. Then we started to study
00:39:10 ►
in Israel, and that was with the Ministry of Health with the traditional psychiatrist in the
00:39:18 ►
largest mental hospital in Israel. And this was an effort to try to see could we train traditional psychiatrists to be supportive therapists with MDMA
00:39:28 ►
and unfortunately the answer was no.
00:39:31 ►
So we found that you have to be able to sit through people’s pain and not try to block it,
00:39:39 ►
not try to be reactive with your own pain and try to give people confidence that they can go through it and come out the other end.
00:39:47 ►
And so we stopped the study in Israel and trained different therapists.
00:39:52 ►
So now we have experienced therapists that are working with the psychiatrists
00:39:58 ►
as part of these male-female teams, and now we’re getting good outcomes in Israel.
00:40:03 ►
What we found in our new study, then we
00:40:07 ►
started our new study in the United States with veterans and the issue there was are the veterans
00:40:12 ►
with war-related trauma going to be responding the same way that the women who had childhood
00:40:18 ►
sexual abuse and adult rape and assault? Is it a treatment that we have that only works for certain causes of PTSD, or does it work
00:40:26 ►
for all causes? And so we’re now enrolling the 15th out of 24 people in that study. For political
00:40:34 ►
reasons, we expanded it beyond veterans to firefighters and police officers. So again,
00:40:40 ►
we’re trying to show to the police and to the firefighters, first responders,
00:40:45 ►
that this is something that can be useful for them.
00:40:48 ►
So we’ve had 11 veterans and three firefighters,
00:40:52 ►
and we’re showing that it works really well in that population.
00:40:55 ►
So we’ve answered this question for ourselves that the cause of the PTSD doesn’t really matter.
00:41:01 ►
Once you have PTSD, the treatment works regardless of the cause.
00:41:07 ►
But we’ve also had problems with the double blind, meaning how do we do a study with a
00:41:12 ►
psychedelic drug that’s really very easy to tell from nothing? I’m sure all of you know that.
00:41:21 ►
So the standard model that the FDA has is that you compare a drug against a placebo.
00:41:27 ►
And if people can tell 100% that they’ve got nothing, it doesn’t work.
00:41:32 ►
So what we’re doing now is exploring what’s called dose response,
00:41:38 ►
meaning that everybody gets MDMA.
00:41:41 ►
They all know they’re going to get MDMA, but they get low, medium, or full doses.
00:41:46 ►
And if they’re confused about which dose they get,
00:41:49 ►
and we show that the higher doses do better than the medium or the low,
00:41:53 ►
then that counts for double-blind.
00:41:55 ►
And so in our current study in veterans,
00:41:57 ►
our grand plans have been upset by a discovery that we didn’t really anticipate,
00:42:03 ►
which is that, to our surprise, we’re using 30 milligrams,
00:42:07 ►
followed two hours later by a supplemental dose of half the initial dose to extend the plateau.
00:42:14 ►
So 30 milligrams followed by 15, 75 milligrams followed by 37.5,
00:42:18 ►
or 125 milligrams followed by 62.5.
00:42:22 ►
And that’s what makes it an eight-hour session.
00:42:24 ►
So, so so far to
00:42:25 ►
our surprise the people who are getting the medium dose are actually doing better marginally better
00:42:31 ►
than the people who got the full dose so it’s not clear most of the underground therapeutic use
00:42:39 ►
and most of the recreational use uses around 125 milligrams as kind of a standard dose. And so maybe there’s certain kind of ecstatic states that are really desirable,
00:42:53 ►
but maybe not necessarily linked to the therapeutic outcomes.
00:42:59 ►
Maybe lower doses are helpful.
00:43:03 ►
People are not distracted by other feelings. They stay more connected to
00:43:08 ►
therapy. We’re not sure if this is going to stay, but that’s one of the big things. And so we’ve
00:43:13 ►
revamped our studies, and now we’re adding a 100 milligram dose group as well, so that we’re
00:43:20 ►
looking at that. And our Canadian study, which we’re about to start, we haven’t learned anything from it,
00:43:28 ►
but we’re, again, using two experienced therapists and trying to see if we can replicate the results
00:43:34 ►
from the cures from the United States or sort of the reduction of symptoms from Switzerland.
00:43:39 ►
So these are all of the kind of projects that we’re doing to get ready for the Phase III studies.
00:43:46 ►
And once we’ve done that and we’ve got MDMA approved as a medicine,
00:43:51 ►
I’ll just be very brief about this part,
00:43:53 ►
which is that we think that the way you roll something out into a culture,
00:43:58 ►
we basically have a culture that has been traumatized by the 60s.
00:44:03 ►
And I think if you look outside in Burning Man
00:44:05 ►
and you see the presence of the police
00:44:07 ►
and how obsessive it is and how overboard it is,
00:44:13 ►
that that’s still this reaction of the society.
00:44:18 ►
So we have a society traumatized by drugs,
00:44:21 ►
and so we’re trying to both treat individuals and treat a society. So in order
00:44:26 ►
to do that, what we want to do is roll out psychedelic therapy in a gradual way that
00:44:32 ►
doesn’t cause a backlash. And what that means is that we don’t try to train the maximum number
00:44:38 ►
of therapists. We want to make sure that everybody can be responsible and do a really good job. So it’s likely that the FDA will say that the only people that can prescribe MDMA once it’s approved,
00:44:51 ►
because it’s MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, the prescribers will have to be trained in our therapeutic method.
00:44:58 ►
And only those people that have been trained can prescribe it.
00:45:01 ►
And it’s likely to be only in certain clinics. And that’s how methadone
00:45:07 ►
started. That methadone was able to be used, but only in methadone clinics. So what we’re
00:45:11 ►
anticipating is a network of psychedelic clinics. And it could take 20, 30 years. So if we look at
00:45:19 ►
hospice movement, which is very similar, in 1974 was the first hospice. In 2004, there was 3,500 of them all throughout America.
00:45:29 ►
So we’ll have these psychedelic clinics.
00:45:31 ►
They’ll be for these designated patients.
00:45:33 ►
They’ll include people who are dying.
00:45:35 ►
Eventually, people who are family members who are affected by people who have trauma
00:45:40 ►
or family members that are dying, everybody is grieving.
00:45:42 ►
So we think it will open up to people who are not the designated patient but or family members that are dying, everybody is grieving. So we think it’ll open up to people
00:45:46 ►
who are not the designated patient,
00:45:48 ►
but different family members.
00:45:49 ►
And then as that spreads,
00:45:51 ►
eventually they’ll become sort of rights of places
00:45:54 ►
for initiation.
00:45:56 ►
I think people will come to have a psychedelic experience
00:46:00 ►
in these clinics,
00:46:01 ►
and then they will get a license to buy these drugs
00:46:04 ►
and doing them on their own in whatever context they want.
00:46:07 ►
So I think if we imagine the next 30 years,
00:46:12 ►
that it’s very possible that through the medicalization of psychedelics
00:46:16 ►
and then the expansion of these clinics
00:46:18 ►
and eventually the adoption of basically a driver’s license model
00:46:22 ►
where you have to demonstrate that you can drive
00:46:26 ►
with a driver instructor and then you get your license to drive that drugs may be very much like
00:46:31 ►
that and you then you get your license and you can do drugs in a recreational context or whatever
00:46:37 ►
you want so that’s the long-term vision of how this will happen and it happens with the support
00:46:43 ►
of our community.
00:46:47 ►
So far we haven’t crossed that bridge,
00:46:50 ►
the rainbow bridge to the mainstream sources of support,
00:46:51 ►
but that’s coming.
00:46:54 ►
So I think that these are realistic, practical strategies.
00:46:57 ►
And at the end of it, hopefully,
00:47:01 ►
we’ll have a society that has both accepted psychedelics and accepted the spiritual potential of psychedelics
00:47:05 ►
so that we will be able to have a society where people are directly experiencing the sense of unity,
00:47:13 ►
and from that we’ll be able to overcome all the differences between countries and races and religions and genders and all the tribes.
00:47:22 ►
I think if we can all have a community that has at its core
00:47:25 ►
a deep experience of our unity,
00:47:28 ►
that that will help us overcome the divisions
00:47:30 ►
that could threaten our survival.
00:47:32 ►
So that’s the long-term vision.
00:47:35 ►
And now I’d like to open it up for questions.
00:47:41 ►
Thank you.
00:47:43 ►
Okay, guys.
00:47:42 ►
Thank you.
00:47:43 ►
Okay, guys.
00:47:50 ►
Unfortunately, we’ll only have time for a couple questions here.
00:47:59 ►
So you mentioned that there might be some senators that support the work.
00:48:03 ►
Do you have any names in particular that you can speak about?
00:48:05 ►
Yeah, I do. Actually, I have a letter here from a senator.
00:48:12 ►
I mentioned RU46 as being funded by the Population Council,
00:48:18 ►
started by John D. Rockefeller III.
00:48:21 ►
And so to my deep satisfaction,
00:48:25 ►
I’ve been developing a relationship with Dr. Richard Rockefeller,
00:48:30 ►
who is in his 60s.
00:48:32 ►
He was the chairman of the Board of Advisors of Doctors Without Borders.
00:48:38 ►
And what he’s come to feel is that the work that we’re doing with the military,
00:48:42 ►
with the veterans with PTSD,
00:48:45 ►
that that’s the doorway into the culture.
00:48:47 ►
And so he’s decided to help us as much as he can with his political connections.
00:48:52 ►
His cousin is Senator Jay Rockefeller, who’s on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.
00:48:57 ►
So the same time that we went to the Pentagon, we also went to the Senate
00:49:02 ►
and had meetings with Senator Rockefeller and staff
00:49:05 ►
of Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, who is the chair of the Senate Veterans Affairs
00:49:09 ►
Committee.
00:49:10 ►
So Senator Rockefeller has met personally with Secretary Shinseki, the head of the VA,
00:49:15 ►
to say it’s important to try to get involved with MDMA PTSD research, and he’s written
00:49:20 ►
a letter on our behalf to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs.
00:49:24 ►
So these have been helpful, but they haven’t been enough yet.
00:49:28 ►
And so what I’m anticipating is once two years from now we finish our current study with veterans,
00:49:33 ►
that will be the political cover that will be necessary for the Department of Defense and the VA to get involved.
00:49:39 ►
Plus we’re going to have to mobilize veterans to ask for these treatments.
00:49:45 ►
So it will be pressure from above, pressure from outside,
00:49:47 ►
and then the scientific credibility, I think,
00:49:50 ►
will all combine to move us across that line.
00:49:54 ►
Okay, we have time for one more question.
00:49:59 ►
Thank you.
00:50:00 ►
My question is, I’m actually a combat veteran of Iraq,
00:50:03 ►
and I have other friends who are combat veterans of Iraq,
00:50:06 ►
and we’re very interested in these therapies.
00:50:09 ►
And first of all, thank you so much for the work that you’ve done over the years.
00:50:12 ►
We’re very grateful for that.
00:50:14 ►
What can we do to further this cause?
00:50:21 ►
Well, I think that that would be my answer.
00:50:24 ►
I think that what we need is enough. Well, I think that that would be my answer. I think that what we need is
00:50:25 ►
enough, well, I’ll say two things.
00:50:28 ►
When we were at the Pentagon and had
00:50:30 ►
the meetings with some pretty
00:50:32 ►
high-level people, what they said that
00:50:34 ►
they were most worried about
00:50:35 ►
was that the word would get out
00:50:38 ►
about the work that we’re doing among
00:50:40 ►
the veteran community, and that then
00:50:42 ►
people would try to get
00:50:44 ►
MDMA ecstasy on their own
00:50:46 ►
and take it in unsupervised circumstances and then have symptoms get worse.
00:50:53 ►
And I had a letter in my hand at that time from a Vietnam veteran who had heard about
00:50:59 ►
our research, had found an underground therapist who worked with him with MDMA and was cured of
00:51:05 ►
his PTSD and I had to decide whether I should mention this or not and I felt like in that
00:51:12 ►
context it would have been too much promoting illegal use so I didn’t mention it but I think
00:51:18 ►
that the two things that could be done would be for people who are aware of this to actually, you know, our studies
00:51:27 ►
are very limited and I mentioned before
00:51:30 ►
about the number of suicides. I think
00:51:32 ►
people
00:51:33 ►
who can say this worked for
00:51:35 ►
me and then become really
00:51:37 ►
effective advocates
00:51:39 ►
and then contact
00:51:41 ►
members of Congress and members
00:51:43 ►
of the Senate to ask them.
00:51:45 ►
So I think we need to really mobilize both the veterans to move towards Congress,
00:51:49 ►
but there’s also a lot of groups like the Wounded Warriors Project and others that have not yet stepped up
00:51:56 ►
and said MDMA PTSD research is something that we want to see happen.
00:52:01 ►
So I think if you can work inside the groups that have been established for veterans and
00:52:07 ►
try to help them to become active advocates to the military and to the Department of Defense
00:52:14 ►
and the VA, that could help a lot.
00:52:16 ►
Because I think in this area, the veterans’ voices speak louder than anything else.
00:52:21 ►
And so to the extent that you could both work within those agencies and then
00:52:26 ►
also try to do
00:52:27 ►
I mean this is the hardest thing to say
00:52:29 ►
but this idea of self-care. We’ve put on
00:52:32 ►
the web our treatment manual
00:52:34 ►
that describes what our therapeutic approach
00:52:36 ►
is. And so
00:52:37 ►
we are aware that
00:52:39 ►
what we’re doing with proper
00:52:41 ►
screening, with pure drugs,
00:52:44 ►
with male-female trained therapists for eight hours,
00:52:47 ►
that that’s the optimum and that other contexts are riskier,
00:52:51 ►
but that there are ways for people to decide whether or not they want to wait
00:52:58 ►
until 2021 if our estimates are correct.
00:53:02 ►
So I think that probably of all the groups in society,
00:53:07 ►
the veterans and mobilizing them
00:53:08 ►
is the single most important thing we could do
00:53:10 ►
to facilitate the development of MDMA.
00:53:13 ►
Thank you so much.
00:53:14 ►
Yeah.
00:53:15 ►
Thank you.
00:53:18 ►
Wow.
00:53:22 ►
Thank you, Rick.
00:53:25 ►
Thank all of you for coming out here tonight to join us.
00:53:30 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:53:33 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:53:38 ►
So if you’re a veteran, have one in your family,
00:53:41 ►
or simply know a veteran of the military or someone who is a first responder.
00:53:46 ►
And oftentimes our first responders are also military veterans.
00:53:49 ►
We should remember that.
00:53:51 ►
So if you know somebody like that who’s having a hard time of it right now,
00:53:55 ►
maybe you should suggest that they at least ask about the potential MDMA treatments for veterans that are suffering from PTSD.
00:54:03 ►
And give them the link to the MAPS study
00:54:05 ►
that they can pass along to whomever they are in contact with at the VA. It may not seem like
00:54:11 ►
much if you only get one person to do that, but if everyone who’s listening to this podcast does
00:54:16 ►
that, it would, well, it’d create quite a wave that the Pentagon would have trouble dismissing.
00:54:21 ►
And I also think that Rick is right. Both the driving force for the legalization
00:54:27 ►
of MDMA as a medicine, well, it’s going to have to come from below. And that we simply cannot
00:54:34 ►
ignore the fact that in service of the citizens of this nation, whether you agree with the U.S.’s
00:54:39 ►
wars or not, our women and men in uniform, well, they certainly deserve to have the nation’s full resources focused on helping them get back to life in the default world.
00:54:48 ►
I know from first-hand experience how, well, even without any professional assistance,
00:54:53 ►
that in just talking about my problems with friends while we were all under the influence of MDMA,
00:54:59 ►
it actually worked wonders in relieving much of the psychic pain that I’ve been carrying around for a long time.
00:55:06 ►
And if you want to hear my story, it’s in podcast number 380 and is titled Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate.
00:55:12 ►
And by the way, Rick also mentioned that funding for the MAPS medical marijuana research being conducted in Israel
00:55:19 ►
was donated in part by David Brawner of Dr. Brawner’s Magic Soaps.
00:55:24 ►
And while I don’t know David personally, I’ve heard him speak at several rallies,
00:55:28 ►
but mainly I know his products.
00:55:30 ►
And if you’re a burner, well, you already know that Dr. Brawner’s soap is the only thing
00:55:35 ►
that can get playa dust off of you and your equipment,
00:55:38 ►
and yet it’s still safe enough to use in your skin and your hair.
00:55:41 ►
It’s truly an amazing and eco-friendly product that’s
00:55:45 ►
well it’s very safe and non-toxic and I recommend all of their products and the company particularly.
00:55:52 ►
If every company acted like the Dr. Bronner people operate their company well this would be close to
00:55:57 ►
a perfect world. Also I just checked the maps.org website to see what has changed since Rick gave this talk at the 2013 Burning Man Festival,
00:56:07 ►
which was held in August of last year.
00:56:10 ►
And here’s the update about the PTSD study with vaporized cannabis.
00:56:15 ►
Our efforts to initiate medical marijuana research have been hindered by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, NIDA,
00:56:23 ►
and the Drug Enforcement Administration, DEA,
00:56:26 ►
since our founding in 1986.
00:56:29 ►
NIDA’s monopoly on the supply of marijuana for research
00:56:32 ►
and the DEA’s refusal to allow researchers to grow their own
00:56:36 ►
has restricted medical marijuana research for decades.
00:56:39 ►
For over 12 years, MAPS was involved in legal struggles against the DEA to end this situation.
00:56:46 ►
On March 14, 2014, the U.S. Public Health Service approved our study of smoked or vaporized marijuana for symptoms of PTSD in U.S. veterans.
00:56:58 ►
MAPS worked for over 22 years to obtain marijuana for medical marijuana drug development research, and the approval
00:57:05 ►
is a historic shift in federal policy.
00:57:08 ►
The study is seeking final DEA approval, which we anticipate will not be a problem, and is
00:57:13 ►
now seeking funding.
00:57:15 ►
So, there is some good news in the never-ending struggle to have an intelligent discussion
00:57:21 ►
about our sacred medicines with some government bureaucrats.
00:57:24 ►
an intelligent discussion about our sacred medicines with some government bureaucrats.
00:57:31 ►
Now, in closing, I was going to play a cut from the latest East Forest CD, Prana.
00:57:36 ►
However, in an effort to keep the file sizes of these podcasts as small as possible for our fellow slaughters who have slow connections,
00:57:40 ►
well, music played here never comes out close to as good as it sounds in the original format.
00:57:44 ►
Well, music played here never comes out close to as good as it sounds in the original format.
00:57:51 ►
So I’m not going to play anything now, but I still want to mention the current tour that East Forest is on.
00:57:54 ►
That’s eastforest.org, by the way.
00:58:00 ►
And East Forest is actually Trevor Oswalt, who has been here with us in the salon for as long as I can remember.
00:58:05 ►
Way back in the early days, he sent in some of his music for me to play,
00:58:10 ►
and it was on an album that’s still free to download from his website. Anyway, Trevor stopped by here the other day, and we spent a delightful afternoon visiting before he
00:58:15 ►
had to go do a sound check for that night’s gig. And it’s Trevor’s tour that I want to
00:58:19 ►
mention, because as we were comparing notes, it appears that Trevor and I know just an awful lot of the same people.
00:58:26 ►
He really gets around. So go to eastforest.org and take a look at his current road schedule.
00:58:32 ►
He’ll be in California, New York, Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington, and Missouri, all between now
00:58:38 ►
and the middle of August. And my guess is that if you go to one of his gigs, you’ll most likely be
00:58:44 ►
able to find a few of the others, maybe even a fellow salonner, perhaps.
00:58:48 ►
But for sure, you aren’t going to find the others sitting at home.
00:58:51 ►
So go to a concert, go to a festival, or just do a little intimate live music gig this summer.
00:58:57 ►
But get out there and find at least one more like-minded friend, one more than you now have.
00:59:03 ►
My guess is that your new next best friend is
00:59:06 ►
not very far from where you are right now. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from
00:59:13 ►
Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.