471 - Healing For PTSD Is Available

Program Notes

Guest speakers: Janine Sagert, Saj Razvi, Ryan LeCompte, & Shonagh Home
FROM SHOCK TO AWE (Indiegogo Campaign)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvMGWogM3kw&width=640&height=480
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Click image to see video

From Shock to Awe is a feature-length documentary that will chronicle the journeys of military veterans as they seek relief from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder with the help of ayahuasca, MDMA (“Ecstasy”), and cannabis. It will be an intimate look at how these substances can be used to heal our wounded warriors—and, by extension, their loved ones.

Our intention with this film is to raise awareness of the healing properties of, and help change the laws regulating, ayahuasca, MDMA, and cannabis so that these substances can be legally available for responsible use in therapeutic, and spiritual, settings—especially for veterans with PTSD. Because we believe that all vets have the right to choose their own path to healing.

“What we’re finding is that after three full dose MDMA sessions, with each session lasting about a day and spread three to four months apart, we’re finding that 83% of chronic, treatment-resistant PTSD sufferers no longer qualify for the diagnosis.” -Saj Razvi

If you are (or know) a military veteran (or anyone else) who has PTSD, then you owe it to yourself to listen to the conversation featured in today’s podcast. In this program Shonagh Home interviews Janine Sagert, the content producer of “From Shock to Awe”, Saj Razvi, who is an MDMA clinical therapist, and Ryan LeCompte, an ex marine who now runs an organization called Veterans for Entheogenic Therapy. Their discussion focuses on ways in which veterans and others suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorders can get relief, and in some cases even be cured, through the use of MDMA, ayahuasca, and cannabis.

Veterans for Entheogenic Therapy

From Shock to Awe:
Healing PTSD with Ayahuasca, MDMA, and Cannabis
brand, web, and crowdfunding by awakemedia.com

http://awakemedia.com/

Shonagh Home is a teacher, shamanic practitioner, and the author of
‘Ix Chel Wisdom: 7 Teachings from the Mayan Sacred Feminine,’
‘Love and Spirit Medicine’and the upcoming, ‘Honeybee Wisdom: A Modern Melissae Speaks.’
Website: www.shonaghhome.com

Contact: shonagh.home (at) comcast (dot) net

https://vimeo.com/67246327?width=800&height=600
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Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate (video)

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

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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is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And today we are going to get to listen to a conversation about PTSD and some stories about successfully treating it with ayahuasca,

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MDMA and cannabis. Now, if you’ve been listening to these podcasts from the salon for a while,

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you already know how those substances have had a positive effect on my own life. But

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in case you’re somewhat new here,

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I’ll just give you the headlines. I first became involved with MDMA when it hit the streets in

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Dallas, Texas in the 1980s. However, at the time, it was almost impossible to learn anything about

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how to properly use this medicine, so we experimented. In my case, I kind of went over

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the top and off the deep end,

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and, well, I used it so often that eventually it no longer worked for me.

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However, after a 10-year hiatus,

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I used it again with some of my Vietnam veteran friends in Florida.

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And what happened in our little group just, well, it almost seemed miraculous.

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So if you’re interested, you can hear all about this in an interview that I gave that is titled Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate.

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And for what it’s worth, I’m still very much an advocate of this powerful medicine.

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But today, much more has been learned about how to use MDMA in a therapeutic setting.

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And that is what we are going to learn a little more about today.

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And that is what we are going to learn a little more about today.

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After we listen to this interview, which was recorded for us here in the salon,

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I’ll expand my own story of this just a bit in order to better fit it into the picture that our guests are going to paint for us.

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Also, I’ll tell you about a new feature of our psychedelicsalon.com website that, well, it may help you find the others.

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But first, let me add a sense of urgency to today’s program.

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You see, the people that we are about to hear from are raising funds for a documentary that is titled Shocked and Odd, which actually is the title I wanted to use for today’s podcast,

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but instead I chose something that, well, I hope it’s going to encourage more people to listen to it,

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because the scourge of PTSD among our military and veterans is quite alarming.

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And it is an issue that, well, it actually touches on almost every family here in the States,

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either directly or indirectly.

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You may not be aware of it, but there is a high probability that someone you know

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is either suffering from PTSD or has a family member in that situation.

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As far as the Department of Veterans Affairs is concerned, though,

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the only thing that they think can be done to help the women and men who have sacrificed so much for us

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is to keep them in a zombie-like state with powerful pharmaceuticals.

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But that no longer has to be the case.

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There now actually is a cure for post-traumatic stress.

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So now let’s join our resident medicine woman, Shana Holm, in her conversation with Janie Saggart,

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the producer of Shock and Awe, Saj Razvi, who is an MDMA clinical therapist,

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and Ryan LeCompte, an ex-Marine who now runs an organization called

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Veterans for Entheogenic Therapy.

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Well, hey everybody, welcome.

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This is Shauna Holm, and I have the great pleasure today and privilege of interviewing three very powerful and potent people who are carrying extraordinary medicine.

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They are carrying what I think is life-changing and world-changing medicine. And these folks have come together to produce a documentary,

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and this documentary focuses on veterans with PTSD

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and delves into their healing journeys with ayahuasca, MDMA, and cannabis.

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And it’s called From Shock to Awe.

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And you can see a clip on a website called Indiegogo.com.

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They are currently raising funds to finish this very important documentary.

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And so whatever you are moved to give will be greatly appreciated.

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So let’s just get into the bios of who I’m going to be speaking with today.

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So first is Saj Razvi, and he is the Executive Director at Trauma Dynamics. He leads trauma

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dynamics trainings nationally for therapists, graduate students, and medical professionals.

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He is a sub-investigator for the FDA clinical study of MDMA-assisted

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psychotherapy for treatment-resistant PTSD.

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Saj is also a national topic expert and speaker for PESI education, focusing on complex PTSD,

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and he runs a trauma education program at the University of Colorado’s Hospital’s

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CDAR Addiction Treatment Center.

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Saj is co-author of a soon-to-be-released text for therapists that is based on the trauma

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dynamics treatment protocol.

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Then we have Janine Segert, Ph.D., and Janine is the content producer.

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She has spent a lifetime exploring the inner reaches of the human psyche, including her

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own, and how it interacts with other people and the culture surrounding it

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to produce happiness and high function, or its opposite, suffering and breakdown.

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She earned her doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley,

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in culture and mental health with a specialty in altered states of consciousness

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and psychological resilience.

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Specific to From Shock to Awe,

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it should also be mentioned that she is an army brat,

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having grown up on military bases around the world,

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and that her first experience with LSD at age 21 was profoundly transformative,

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leading her to a lifelong dedication to consciousness-raising

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through spiritual practices such as self-inquiry and meditation.

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And finally, we have Ryan LeCompte.

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And Ryan is a United States Marine Corps infantry veteran

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and founder of Veterans for Enceogenic Therapies, VETS,

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an organization whose mission is to spread awareness about alternative medicines

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for the treatment of PTSD.

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As part of his graduate work at Naropa University,

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where he is studying to become a transpersonal therapist,

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he will act as principal investigator for MAPS-sponsored study into ayahuasca-assisted therapy for PTSD and combat veterans.

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So, everybody, welcome.

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So good to have you here.

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Thank you, Shona.

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It’s lovely to be here.

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Yeah, this is so great.

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As I was saying to you guys earlier, this is a subject that is near and dear in my heart,

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and I’ve worked with a couple of veterans,

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both of whom have been quite addicted to really horrifying cocktail pharmaceuticals,

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and one of them has a drinking problem as well.

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And so maybe we’ll get into some of that as well in terms of mixing alcohol with those dangerous substances.

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And so here you are presenting a subject whose time has really come.

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So let’s get right into this.

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And whoever wants to take the floor first,

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let’s talk about trauma and how it works, how it affects the mind.

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I think, Saj, you should take that.

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Sure, sure.

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I’m happy to jump in with this.

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I think the thing here, Shauna, is that we think about trauma as a mental health disorder, and certainly it affects our cognitive ability.

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It affects how we see the world, but I think it’s so much deeper than that which is

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to say that you know it affects all of us it affects our emotional world

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affects our thought process it affects our bodies there are really significant

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large-scale research studies out there that show that even trauma that happened way back in childhood has a great deal to do with the physical disease processes and the mental health processes that we have as adults.

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So I would say it’s fairly pervasive, and I would say it’s also one of the big reasons that people do end up in

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psychotherapy. Sure and so all right so we know it’s far-reaching it goes very deep within our

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society and so then what happens when you go to battle when you go to fight a war I mean these

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guys are committing suicide to the tune of I think think it’s on average, 22 soldiers a day. And so what is the depth of that level of trauma,

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what we call PTSD for our soldiers?

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You know, again, Ryan, jump in here at any time, but I would say my sense of it is that trauma shakes us to the core of who we are.

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And if when you’re traumatized as an adult, what you find at the core is a childhood full of contactful parenting, support, a nurturing world, then you have something to build

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back from, right? You can find your feet again. If, on the other hand, you, as an adult,

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you’re traumatized, and then where you’re taken is this experience of childhood where, you know,

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there’s more of that, more chaos, more abandonment, things like that, then I think it’s very difficult to build from that place.

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Sure, sure. And then, so the soldiers are, actually, can you go into a little bit about what these guys are exposed to and the effects of that?

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Certainly, yeah. Sure, yeah. As far as combat related or stateside, what was your –

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Either one or both.

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Okay.

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Well, a lot of our mission, I served in the infantry,

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and, you know, part of the experience of being in the infantry is this idea of picking up your gear and continuing to move forward,

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regardless of firefights and everything else that we’ve been exposed to, IEDs.

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It’s a very, I call it a chronic state of anxiety.

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And when you’re exposed to those heightened states of anxiety, hypervigilance for over a period of eight months to 15 months for the Army, you tend to sort of cauterize your psyche in a sense.

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You taper off that experience of fight or flight so that you can function and be able to survive.

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that experience of fight or flight so that you can function and be able to survive and so a lot what you see in trauma a lot of times is like in

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childhood we go through the same type of experience where you you you sort of cut

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off your your emotional processing to continue survival mode and that’s been

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the struggle for vets as they come back, like Saj just said. A lot of the treatment-resistant patients we’re seeing have a high rate of childhood neglect or abuse in some way or another, as well as trauma.

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And so these are the subjects that we’re really looking at for treatment of ayahuasca and cannabis and MDMA.

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treatment of ayahuasca and cannabis and MDMA.

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And also, like Saj was saying, you know, if you have a good support network,

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when you get back, you know, most likely if you had that same good support network when you were a kid, you’ll have it as an adult.

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So your resilience seems to be in a good place to bounce back from those

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experiences and learn to integrate those with a good support system.

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And you’re most likely to be able to use these medications that the VA is prescribing in an instrumental

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and functional way.

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But for the ones that, and I think that they’re higher now more than ever at the VA,

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22 I think is a lot deeper than just that number with regards to PTSD, but I think a lot

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of it has to do with the childhood trauma. And it’s just important to look at how that manifests

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itself when you return and the stigma. I mean, there’s so many factors that contribute to what veterans are going through, and a lot of it all is a very complex issue of PTSD.

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In addition, I was going to say in addition, in interviewing and talking to quite a few vets,

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one of the themes that’s arising, well, actually there’s two, about the trauma is I’m hearing more and more vets say it really starts in boot camp.

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When you go through that training, whether you see combat or not, it is so traumatic,

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and it is retraining the brain to be immune to feelings, to not feel, to not be compassionate,

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to not be empathetic to

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just function and much like a robot well that itself oh yeah that’s that’s kind

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of a vague statement because a lot of us are altruistic a lot of us do have

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compassion a lot of us are not we’re trained to have compassion for each

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other but I think the real the the real issue is pushing through those moments of being able to process emotions as you’re doing the mission.

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Right.

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Which is unnatural in a way, yeah.

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Yeah.

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Well, I mean, we know what we signed up to do.

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You know, the big struggle that we’re having is we’re very aware of the fact that

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we signed up to go to war. We definitely didn’t sign up to bake cakes. But on return, the issue

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we’re having is upon our return, accepting the condition, the conditioning that we signed up for

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and everything else, the struggle is trying to get the help that we need when we get back. And these medications and the VA are definitely something that we need to look at

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as looking at alternatives now as opposed to that.

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And isn’t it true that they are medicating you guys out on the field as well?

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I mean, isn’t there a lot of use of these medications out in combat as well?

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I can see, yeah, there’s definitely,

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I don’t think there’s a lot of actual pharmaceutical medication in field,

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in country, but I know that there’s a lot of illicit use.

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Marijuana, spice was a big thing.

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What’s spice?

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Spice is a synthetic form of marijuana.

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It’s basically household chemicals.

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Oh, dear.

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Yeah, it’s the war on drugs, but even more so in the military.

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You know, you make one drug illegal and another one that’s twice as harmful is bound to pop up.

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But I think that a lot of these guys are self-medicating and we’re not getting the help we need either on active duty,

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which more so than the VA, but the VA as well.

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So there’s two different fronts there.

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Okay.

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All right. Does that make sense? Absolutely. There’s two different fronts there. Okay.

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All right.

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Does that make sense?

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Absolutely.

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And I have a personal question for you is what brought you to your interest in ayahuasca for PTSD?

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Oh, boy. If I could tell you the answer to that question, that would be – I can tell you the conditions that led up to it.

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Definitely, you know, my own seeking of healing.

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I haven’t been officially diagnosed with PTSD, but I’m sure that I have it in some form or another.

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But my personal journey has been losing brothers to suicide as well as combat.

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And one in particular really took hold of me.

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His name was Sergeant Leon Alcivar.

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He had just gotten back from Iraq.

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I was stationed in northern Virginia at the time, and he’d taken his own life.

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I found him in his barracks room, and he’d taken his own life.

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I found him in his barracks room and he had hanged himself and that really took a hold of me.

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I didn’t realize consciously what was happening at the time.

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I knew that he drank as most Marines in the barracks do when we’re stateside.

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It’s part of the self-medicating thing.

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So I knew that he was drinking pretty heavily

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but it was just the nature of how he took his own life that really shook things up for me

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so I kind of I won’t get into the details on how or you know what the specifics were but that those

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specifics are what shook me about the nature of PTSD in general. And so Sergeant Leon, after we buried him and I decided to get out of the military,

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finish up my enlistment and get my honorable and then get out and start school.

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And shortly after school, I was also on VA’s medications for PTSD.

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I was taking, I was on barbiturate I was

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on zolpidine which is the off-brand of of Ambien I was taking Klonopin for

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anxiety and trigger management or trigger suppression and I was also on a

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heavy antidepressant it was Prozac I was on the heaviest dose at the time and I was also on a heavy antidepressant it was Prozac I was on the heaviest dose

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at the time and I just started hanging out at the VA and I started noticing you

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know I was like man these medications really shouldn’t be taken there’s a lot

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of contraindication here there’s heavy dosages that are being prescribed and

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we’re not spending much time with the psychiatrist or psychotherapy at all so

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I started hanging out in at all so I started

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hanging out in the lobbies I started talking to other veterans and asking

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them just as a kind of a qualitative interview or just putting down you know

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numbers on paper how much were you being prescribed what were you being

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prescribed and what was your diagnosis how long have you been on treatment I

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just started writing all this stuff down while I was going to school. These veterans were pretty open because of how desperate they

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were. A lot of them were being over-medicated. I could tell that the sense in the waiting room at

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the VA was just depressing. After I collected all that, I started noticing that we were all being

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prescribed the same amount, the same type, you know, everything was there. We really felt like

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cattle. And shortly after that, I didn’t really know what to do at the time. I was really looking

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at the problem. The solution came when I did some underground psychedelic psychotherapy with a friend that I had met at community college.

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And that was the first psychedelic I had ever done, which was DMT.

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And DMT, once I touched that realm and I was able to understand what was going on and all the archaic knowledge that came forth,

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it really shook things up for me and I got off

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all my medication shortly thereafter and my relationship with my wife and my kids started

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to improve I started reading books about psychedelics I started following Terrence

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McKenna he really helped a lot of this manifest itself started listening to Lorenzo, a psychedelic salon.

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And then one day I just decided, you know,

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I’m going to start a group called Veterans for Entheogenic Therapy so that I can get others, you know,

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find the others and get these guys supporting the program and helping people

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come out of the closet,

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especially veterans coming out of the closet about their psychedelic

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experiences and maybe for some that are tired of the medications, especially veterans coming out of the closet about their psychedelic experiences

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and maybe for some that are tired of the medications that are being prescribed.

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So it kind of grew from there.

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You know, we’re up to a couple thousand members.

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We did a retreat last year in July.

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Lisa Ling came with us and CNN broadcast an episode from our experiences in Peru where we took veterans with treatment-resistant PTSD.

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We drank ayahuasca, and it was just more of an informal study at the time.

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I didn’t have an IRB approval or anything like that, but that sort of created the momentum for me to move forward and continue finishing up my bachelor’s, which I did last year.

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And,

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you know,

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really started getting serious about looking at a real study that would at

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least,

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you know,

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shed some light on whether or not ayahuasca could help with PTSD.

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So that’s kind of where I’m at now.

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I hope I didn’t,

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I didn’t,

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maybe I rambled.

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I’m sorry.

00:21:44 ►

Are you kidding?

00:21:45 ►

No, no, no.

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Wow.

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Actually, when I was listening to you speak, I was curious,

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what was your experience between the type of feelings or the processing that you had with psychiatric medications versus ayahuasca?

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Oh, my God.

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Just complete polar opposite.

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It was the most foreign thing I’d ever experienced.

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These medications that I had really just focused on putting the symptoms down,

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pushing them down, pushing the emotions down,

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keeping me functional for a limited amount of time but sedated.

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That was the big piece for me was feeling like I was sedated to whatever it was I was feeling.

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And ayahuasca really opened all of that up in a very compassionate way.

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It wasn’t a way that was like, you need to see this, you need to experience this, this is what it is.

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And sort of how the military approaches reality, pretty grounded.

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I saw a lot of truth, but I me integrate a lot of my experiences in the

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military.

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I sort of picked out the strengths that I learned from the military, honor, courage,

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and commitment, and a lot of values that Marines hold very sacred. And at the same time, I dropped a lot of the bad, which was, you know, an ambiguous war

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effort, dealing with putting and suppressing emotions that were not useful at the time.

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It’s helped me decompress my reaction to a stimulus in my environment, which

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at the same time time these other medications were

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doing that right like the benzodiazepines that i was on helped me do that but it it did it in a way

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that i was sedated to everything and that caused a lot of turmoil in my relationships um it really

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killed my spirit it killed my my willingness to continue moving forward with my dreams and my

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passions and everything else. And I know that there’s other veterans out there that still want

00:24:11 ►

to serve and they still want to be useful to society. And we still take our commitments

00:24:16 ►

seriously. And these drugs just seem to be a way to put off commitment, which is something that goes against what we’re dedicating ourselves

00:24:25 ►

to. Yeah, it sounds like that. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. I was just gonna say it sounds like

00:24:32 ►

the difference between being non reactive because things are numb versus being non reactive because,

00:24:39 ►

well, they’ve really been moved through and there’s sort of a much more organic neutrality in the system oh i love that

00:24:46 ►

organic neutrality yeah it’s a crisis of consciousness you know we don’t want to be

00:24:52 ►

sedated anymore we don’t want to be asleep to what’s going on and we also don’t want to be

00:24:57 ►

too hyper vigilant about it either but this pharmacology this ayahuasca just balances it for you,

00:25:06 ►

and then you just sort of ride the wave of grace, really.

00:25:11 ►

Well, Ryan, I want to bring up an important point here,

00:25:13 ►

and that is that it’s my understanding that there are certain medications

00:25:17 ►

that do not go hand-in-hand with ayahuasca.

00:25:21 ►

And so I’m just thinking in terms of people who are listening to this conversation, you know, what would you advise them in terms of, you know,

00:25:30 ►

should they get off their medications first?

00:25:33 ►

Because it doesn’t sound like you did.

00:25:34 ►

It sounds like you were on them and you took the ayahuasca and then you went

00:25:37 ►

off them.

00:25:38 ►

Could you just elaborate on that?

00:25:40 ►

Oh, I definitely did my research before I drank ayahuasca.

00:25:44 ►

I was off medication for a month before I went to Peru, and that’s what I advised all my veterans that came with me.

00:25:54 ►

There was a military sexual trauma woman who’s been struggling since the 1980s who’s been on every drug in the book,

00:26:01 ►

three Iraq veterans and one Vietnam veteran, and all of them have tried the same medications I have and I always

00:26:08 ►

advise them if you’re on antidepressants that seems to be the most dangerous mix

00:26:13 ►

with with ayahuasca because of how serotonin works in the brain when you

00:26:18 ►

drink ayahuasca so definitely be off all medications at least a month prior to drinking ayahuasca.

00:26:27 ►

Okay, another question for you, Ryan, because the clients that I have who are on antidepressants

00:26:34 ►

are endeavoring to get off them, and you can’t just kind of get off them because everyone I’ve

00:26:40 ►

spoken to feels psychotic, suicidal, out of control, chaotic.

00:26:47 ►

So what was that like with you?

00:26:49 ►

Because that sounds pretty intense, you know, to go off all of them just a month before.

00:26:56 ►

Anyway, because I’ve heard that you have to sort of ease off of these.

00:26:59 ►

So I’m just curious.

00:27:00 ►

I want to hear more of this experience.

00:27:03 ►

Which it just depends I mean

00:27:06 ►

I wouldn’t advise someone who’s on antipsychotic medications to drink

00:27:10 ►

ayahuasca because of the nature of psychedelics in general you doubt if you

00:27:15 ►

have something part of the pre-screening process that I’m doing with my

00:27:19 ►

observation study with maps is I’m asking people what pre-existing conditions they had if

00:27:26 ►

any in relation to or not related to PTSD and if they do I have to exclude

00:27:32 ►

them from the study because that can definitely be a really bad spiritual

00:27:37 ►

crisis experience it’s something I’m not equipped to to deal with and I don’t

00:27:43 ►

think a lot of shamans are either, to be honest.

00:27:50 ►

So I think the best way to go is just if you have to,

00:27:51 ►

wean yourself off.

00:27:54 ►

And cannabis seems to be okay.

00:27:59 ►

If that’s something that will help with your symptoms until you can get to Peru or to an approved center in the United States,

00:28:03 ►

making sure that you’re doing it legally,

00:28:05 ►

and I’m not advising anyone to do it at all.

00:28:08 ►

I would definitely, like Libby, last year when we brought her to Peru,

00:28:13 ►

I had to advise what medication she was on, find out, and then she would sort of bounce back to me,

00:28:21 ►

and I would go back to the research and talk with psychiatrists

00:28:26 ►

and make sure, you know, what medications people are on that seem to be contraindicated to ayahuasca use.

00:28:34 ►

But as far as what you’re on now, that is a really tough decision to make.

00:28:41 ►

And Libby definitely felt like putting herself through a month of being off all medications

00:28:50 ►

was worth that effort because she’s now in a position where she has relationship with

00:28:56 ►

her granddaughters which is something she didn’t have before.

00:28:59 ►

So it’s definitely a risk.

00:29:03 ►

None of this is foolproof.

00:29:06 ►

But at the rate that we’re at now with the suicide rate that we’re at

00:29:09 ►

and with everything else, you know, vets are – I just had an email.

00:29:15 ►

Can I read this to you real quick, guys?

00:29:18 ►

Please.

00:29:19 ►

Yeah.

00:29:20 ►

This is an email I just got today from a guy.

00:29:23 ►

I’ll just call him Bob.

00:29:26 ►

Sir, ma’am, I was wondering if you might be able to point me in the right direction for any PTSD therapy that might work.

00:29:32 ►

I did four combat tours, once in Afghanistan and three times in Iraq.

00:29:37 ►

Since my medical discharge, I have been an inpatient for a cumulative total of 14 weeks to manage my PTSD symptoms,

00:29:44 ►

with only minor success. The VA has me

00:29:46 ►

medicated into a stupor. I have lost my entire life to my issues. My marriage ended in flames.

00:29:52 ►

My little girls were taken away. I have a criminal record now. I have no one. I don’t know if I can

00:29:58 ►

be fixed anymore. I’m sorry I did not intend for this to be event session. If you happen to know where I could turn to, I’d appreciate it.

00:30:05 ►

CBD, DBT, CPT has only been temporarily effective,

00:30:11 ►

and my medications from the VA have only masked some symptoms. Thank you, sir, ma’am.

00:30:16 ►

I get these emails at least two to three times a day from my group and from the website.

00:30:23 ►

This was directly submitted from the website, and these are veterans that are seeking out this therapy. So a lot of

00:30:29 ►

these guys just are at the end of their road.

00:30:34 ►

Wow.

00:30:35 ►

Yeah.

00:30:36 ►

Wow. It’s just heartbreaking. It’s heartbreaking. All right. I want to ask Saj if you could talk to the use of MDMA for the PTSD.

00:30:52 ►

Yeah, absolutely.

00:30:53 ►

And efficacy, yeah. very exciting time to be in the field of mental health because the nonprofit pharmaceutical MAPS,

00:31:08 ►

which is sponsoring the research on MDMA, we are currently nearing the end of phase two trials,

00:31:15 ►

phase two FDA trials, which is to say that, you know, we’re nearing the end of demonstrating

00:31:21 ►

efficacy and safety, and MAPS is going to then apply for

00:31:25 ►

phase three trials, which are, you know, a much larger rollout throughout the United States.

00:31:32 ►

And, you know, it’s a very powerful medication. Again, people have to taper off of all

00:31:39 ►

pre-existing medication to do this process. And, you know, the results are pretty extraordinary.

00:31:49 ►

What we’re finding is that after three full-dose MDMA sessions, which, you know, last each full

00:31:57 ►

dose session lasts about a day, and so these are spread three to four months apart, we’re finding that 83% of, you know, chronic treatment

00:32:07 ►

resistant PTSD sufferers no longer qualify for the diagnosis.

00:32:12 ►

Okay.

00:32:12 ►

That’s incredible.

00:32:14 ►

It’s very, it’s, I can tell you that, you know, I approached this study not from having

00:32:19 ►

experiences with psychedelics.

00:32:21 ►

I approached it from, with a background in mental health and in particular,

00:32:26 ►

you know, focusing on trauma. And and so when I sort of joined the study and saw what was

00:32:33 ►

happening in it, I couldn’t believe it. This is the results that we’re seeing are not what we’re

00:32:38 ►

supposed to see in the in the world of mental health. And the, you know, the long-term results are there as well.

00:32:46 ►

So basically in the study, we, you know, we track people two months after all medication has ceased.

00:32:52 ►

That’s where we got that 83% number from.

00:32:56 ►

And then at this point, we’re tracking people 3.8 years out.

00:33:01 ►

And for the most part, the, you know, the numbers are staying the same. People aren’t regressing.

00:33:09 ►

They’re not relapsing back into, into, into PTSD.

00:33:12 ►

Now, are those people,

00:33:14 ►

have they formed a network then of support for themselves as a result of the

00:33:18 ►

work with MDMA?

00:33:20 ►

You know, some, they, they,

00:33:24 ►

lately there has been some people talking about getting together and having sort of a group process around it.

00:33:30 ►

But no, I mean, mostly these are people that, you know, they leave the study.

00:33:34 ►

They’re probably in their own therapy session, in their own therapy as time goes on,

00:33:40 ►

because there’s a lot of integration that has to happen as part of this process.

00:33:45 ►

So let me be clear here.

00:33:47 ►

We’re testing MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, not just MDMA, right?

00:33:52 ►

Right, right.

00:33:52 ►

The set and setting is everything for people to sort of, you know, process and heal from

00:33:57 ►

trauma on this.

00:33:58 ►

Right, right.

00:33:59 ►

So actually, could you describe one of those, like, what is a session like?

00:34:03 ►

What happens in that kind of setting?

00:34:05 ►

Okay.

00:34:06 ►

Yeah, I’ll describe some of the logistics of it and also I think some of the qualitative experience that people have with it,

00:34:13 ►

which is to say that the very first thing I want to say is we do not give people MDMA to take home.

00:34:20 ►

So when we do presentations on this, some reason that that has to be clarified um but uh

00:34:28 ►

basically people come in you know they have to qualify medically to be in the study and they

00:34:32 ►

take a lot of psychometric tests and we test their memory and things like that before during and

00:34:38 ►

after um and uh um so when they’re admitted into the study, they have three preparatory sessions, right,

00:34:46 ►

which is to say three therapy sessions to meet their therapist and build some level of rapport in a relationship.

00:34:54 ►

And then we dive into a full day experimental session.

00:35:00 ►

And because it’s double blind, neither the participant nor the therapist know what they receive.

00:35:08 ►

And so the setup is that there’s two therapists in the room and a client, and it looks like anybody’s living room.

00:35:17 ►

It’s a therapy office that’s made to be fairly comfortable.

00:35:20 ►

They take the medication at 10 a.m. in the morning, and then we’re there until 6 p.m. at night.

00:35:29 ►

And so there’s typically, you know, if they get a full dose session, there’s a lot of processing,

00:35:34 ►

and it can look a lot of different ways,

00:35:37 ►

but typically people have a vivid re-experiencing of memories, of sensations, of emotions from their past, from the past trauma,

00:35:49 ►

which sort of, you know, it’s kind of like the ultimate version of re-exposure therapy.

00:35:54 ►

And then they can reintegrate this material.

00:35:57 ►

So how do you help them reintegrate that material?

00:36:01 ►

Because that’s really intense, right?

00:36:04 ►

It is. It is a very intense process.

00:36:09 ►

It seems that the human

00:36:13 ►

psyche, in the conditions of

00:36:17 ►

support, when it’s really feeling the conditions

00:36:22 ►

that MDMA create, which is a tenfold increase in oxytocin, prolactin.

00:36:29 ►

Basically, there’s a real sense of bonding and connecting and opening to the world and to one’s

00:36:36 ►

own experience and to other people. And so in that state, when the trauma arises, which, by the way, it arises by itself.

00:36:47 ►

You know, part of the protocol that we have is that if the participant doesn’t sort of

00:36:52 ►

focus on the trauma in some period of time, we’re instructed to have them take a look

00:36:58 ►

at it.

00:36:58 ►

But we’ve never had to do that simply because their system is wanting to heal.

00:37:04 ►

Their system is wanting to integrate the aspects of their experience

00:37:08 ►

that have not been integratable up until now.

00:37:12 ►

So when that does happen and they contact these memories and emotions

00:37:17 ►

and things like that, there’s a lot of clarity that happens.

00:37:21 ►

There’s a lot of autonomic nervous system reactivity that takes place.

00:37:28 ►

So, you know, you can kind of say that their system is naturally taking elements from sort

00:37:33 ►

of all different therapeutic modalities and spontaneously it kicks in. Like they’ll do

00:37:42 ►

cognitive reframing, restructuring just by themselves, you know,

00:37:47 ►

their bodies will begin to process the trauma just sort of spontaneously. Is that getting at

00:37:52 ►

sort of? Yeah. Yeah. You could talk about the follow-up too, Saj. Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. So

00:37:58 ►

the follow-up is pretty significant because, you know, what we find is, look, you know, people have,

00:38:07 ►

at least in the Boulder, Colorado study, most of the participants are people with

00:38:10 ►

early childhood trauma, repeated and chronic, right? And so their systems have found a way to

00:38:20 ►

compartmentalize the trauma, to dissociate from it, to cope with it.

00:38:27 ►

And one of the things that MDMA does is really screw up the coping mechanisms.

00:38:32 ►

Like if addiction is a great coping mechanism for trauma, right,

00:38:35 ►

and even though it has its massive downsides, we find that the MDMA process,

00:38:41 ►

because it is so contactful, It screws up their coping mechanisms.

00:38:47 ►

And because of that, these people are very raw afterwards.

00:38:52 ►

They’re, you know, we, and, and, and so we provide a lot of support.

00:38:57 ►

Like we’ll call them for seven days after the, after the session.

00:39:03 ►

And, you know, we’ll,

00:39:04 ►

there’s three integration sessions in person after the sessions. And, you know, there’s three integration sessions in person

00:39:07 ►

after the sessions as well for the next three weeks.

00:39:11 ►

Okay, excellent, excellent.

00:39:13 ►

Is there a spiritual component to this as well?

00:39:16 ►

Ah, you know, great question,

00:39:18 ►

because Ryan and I were talking about sort of the difference

00:39:21 ►

between sort of entheogenic psychedelics like

00:39:26 ►

ayahuasca psilocybin things like that and MDMA and I think one of the key

00:39:33 ►

reasons why maps is choosing to go with MDMA is because it is a very human

00:39:39 ►

experience meaning that well you know on MDMA is not a transpersonal process.

00:39:46 ►

We’re not transcending the human realm

00:39:48 ►

in which case my sense of that

00:39:51 ►

given I have limited experience with that kind of thing

00:39:54 ►

is that people are less interested in processing their trauma

00:39:58 ►

in that transcendent state.

00:40:00 ►

And so the entire window of MDMA

00:40:04 ►

is a very human experience that’s focused on one’s personal history.

00:40:12 ►

So there is a spiritual component, but it’s not nearly as powerful as what happens with, say, psilocybin or ayahuasca or DMT, things like that.

00:40:21 ►

Okay. All right. Wow. This is really amazing. Now, what about the role of

00:40:27 ►

cannabis with all of this? I’m in a state, in Washington State, where cannabis is now made

00:40:32 ►

legal. And so Ryan mentioned it briefly. Or no, it wasn’t you. I’m sorry, Ryan. Someone in the

00:40:40 ►

documentary was, I think, talking about they were smoking cannabis and they were able to get off a lot of their meds.

00:40:47 ►

So what is going on with the use of cannabis for these veterans?

00:40:54 ►

Cannabis seems to be an allopathic form of treatment, meaning that it treats the symptoms.

00:41:01 ►

And I’ve seen a few veterans actually go through some conscious cannabis circles here at Boulder

00:41:07 ►

that help lean more toward a cure or at least a better management system.

00:41:13 ►

But overall, cannabis seems to be a temporary relief for all of the medications that are being prescribed.

00:41:23 ►

Right.

00:41:22 ►

of the medications that are being prescribed.

00:41:23 ►

Right.

00:41:31 ►

So one of the beauties of it is that it does manage symptoms. It doesn’t seem to be the breakthrough in consciousness that both MDMA,

00:41:36 ►

ayahuasca, and some of the other entheogens are.

00:41:40 ►

But it does manage symptoms and replaces One of the standard lines that we hear over and over,

00:41:48 ►

standard in the sense that we hear it oftentimes,

00:41:51 ►

not that it’s just blindly repeated,

00:41:54 ►

is that one plant seems to replace 10 to 15 pharmaceutical drugs for many of these veterans.

00:42:06 ►

I have heard stories of veterans who couldn’t sleep for three years,

00:42:11 ►

I mean, literally would wake up in the middle of the night,

00:42:14 ►

couldn’t get a good night’s sleep,

00:42:15 ►

and their first time trying whole plant marijuana,

00:42:21 ►

they would get a good night’s sleep.

00:42:22 ►

Now that in itself is healing for the body

00:42:27 ►

it seems to help a lot with anxiety control it has a lot to do with aggression management

00:42:35 ►

so we see these symptoms that are greatly helped and yet there’s also the controversial side that they’re also not well researched at this point.

00:42:48 ►

So Dr. Sue Sisley, you may have heard of her.

00:42:52 ►

She was at the University of Arizona Medical School,

00:42:57 ►

got FDA approval for studying veterans with PTSD,

00:43:03 ►

five different strains of marijuana,

00:43:06 ►

to see what works, what doesn’t work, is it verifiable?

00:43:11 ►

Can I interrupt one sec?

00:43:13 ►

Where do they get the strains of marijuana?

00:43:17 ►

Because I know there can be quite a big difference between strains.

00:43:24 ►

Well, this is exactly the problem.

00:43:26 ►

Oh, this is the story.

00:43:27 ►

This is the story.

00:43:30 ►

So she had identified the strain she wanted to study in a triple-blind study.

00:43:38 ►

She has her FDA approval.

00:43:40 ►

She’s gone through all the, taking years, of course. And then shortly before she was ready to really start,

00:43:48 ►

she got fired from her job at the university,

00:43:52 ►

even though the year before she had very good reviews,

00:43:57 ►

and since then has been looking for where, number one, where to place her study.

00:44:02 ►

So update is that Johns Hopkins is going to do half of them,

00:44:06 ►

and half of them will be done in Phoenix in this protocol.

00:44:09 ►

But they have yet to receive their strains

00:44:13 ►

because if you have an FDA-approved and supervised research project,

00:44:21 ►

there’s only one place you can receive your marijuana from,

00:44:25 ►

and that is the University of Mississippi.

00:44:29 ►

That’s what I heard.

00:44:30 ►

I heard it’s kind of inferior.

00:44:32 ►

Neither.

00:44:33 ►

What I just heard from Sue was the best they can do for her is 12% THC in these strains. And most strains that are out there are probably up around 23% that are grown by normal growers.

00:44:53 ►

So it doesn’t, I’ll call it inferior, perhaps the better word is weaker, but that’s all

00:45:01 ►

they said they’ll be able to provide her, and that still isn’t for months.

00:45:06 ►

So it becomes a tremendous roadblock in doing this research because many people are interested in what really does work, what doesn’t,

00:45:16 ►

how conscious and responsible people start prescribing and helping for various maladies.

00:45:31 ►

And strangely enough, it seems that there are some roadblocks,

00:45:33 ►

quite a few roadblocks being put up.

00:45:35 ►

You think that’s strange, Janine?

00:45:39 ►

I’m trying to be diplomatic here.

00:45:40 ►

I’m trying to be diplomatic.

00:45:44 ►

No, you know, NIDA has our best interests. What are you guys talking about?

00:45:47 ►

Yeah, I mean, I have seen that something like 90% of the NIDA studies

00:45:55 ►

are about all the bad things with marijuana, not the positive aspects.

00:46:01 ►

So, again, perhaps there are vested interests.

00:46:11 ►

Let’s talk a bit about

00:46:13 ►

this documentary you guys are doing. You are

00:46:17 ►

the content producer.

00:46:20 ►

What inspired you to begin this?

00:46:26 ►

This is a big project and it’s a big deal.

00:46:30 ►

So what brought you to this?

00:46:32 ►

I’m glad you recognize that because I was pretty naive at the beginning.

00:46:38 ►

I mean, I knew it was important, believe me.

00:46:40 ►

It was like as deep in my consciousness as I could go,

00:46:44 ►

this was something I could commit to.

00:46:47 ►

But I didn’t realize how much work it would be.

00:46:50 ►

The story is that Luke Cote, who’s the director and the actual filmmaker,

00:46:55 ►

I mean, he’s a bona fide filmmaker.

00:46:57 ►

I happen to have had a different past, but am committed to helping this get done.

00:47:05 ►

He and I have been friends for many years.

00:47:07 ►

We lived in an ashram together, so we have a root of similar consciousness.

00:47:14 ►

And he himself had made a movie on PTSD amongst Canadian veterans years ago

00:47:22 ►

called Crash Landing.

00:47:23 ►

It came out in 2005 and was heartbreaking. You’re left

00:47:29 ►

after this movie loving these human beings and saying, but there’s no help for them. What can

00:47:35 ►

be offered to them to help them out of this pain and misery in the prisons, internal prisons they live in. So when we started, we’re both experienced in psychedelics

00:47:49 ►

and find great benefit in them, both in spiritual and emotional

00:47:53 ►

and every other realm of our lives.

00:47:56 ►

So when we started seeing the new research coming out with MDMA,

00:48:03 ►

observational studies with ayahuasca, and of course all

00:48:08 ►

the other studies happening at NYU with end-of-life anxiety, et cetera, it just seemed the natural

00:48:16 ►

direction to go was to focus on veterans, which he and I both care a lot about. Not that everybody doesn’t care about them, but that it grabbed us.

00:48:28 ►

And PTSD and these three substances. People sometimes ask us, well, why not study psilocybin

00:48:37 ►

and why not do meditation studies? And all of those things are very valid. It just so happens

00:48:42 ►

that these are the ones where we feel we can get bona fide data as well as anecdotal.

00:48:51 ►

So that’s our motivation is to really follow these stories

00:48:57 ►

and do it with actual stories of veterans before receiving any of these medications,

00:49:06 ►

these plant medicines and MDMA, during their therapeutic sessions

00:49:13 ►

and afterwards. Excellent.

00:49:17 ►

So that people can see, every human can see for their own self

00:49:21 ►

and make their own judgment as to whether they think they have

00:49:25 ►

validity and veracity. Fantastic. So where are you at in the process of this documentary? So you have

00:49:35 ►

an Indiegogo campaign, need more money. These things are very expensive. Yes, they are. Yeah, yeah. And so you have a campaign going right now until October 14th

00:49:49 ►

to raise as much money as you possibly can.

00:49:53 ►

So how far along are you in the production of this documentary?

00:49:58 ►

How much more do you have to go here?

00:50:01 ►

Well, a long way.

00:50:03 ►

We’ve been at it a year and a half,

00:50:02 ►

Well, a long way.

00:50:04 ►

We’ve been at it a year and a half,

00:50:10 ►

and most of that time was setting up relationships,

00:50:17 ►

building trust with veterans such as Ryan and others that we have met.

00:50:23 ►

Because you can’t just step in and go, hey, guys, we’re here to make a movie.

00:50:28 ►

And also with therapists such as Saj and Marcella,

00:50:32 ►

who also works at the Boulder Study, to establish relationships with MAPS,

00:50:36 ►

the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies,

00:50:38 ►

and building all of those relationships. So where we are actually today, which is in two days,

00:50:44 ►

we’re actually beginning filming.

00:50:47 ►

We have several veterans who are very involved and active with the cannabis aspect of this movie,

00:50:58 ►

some of whom are going to be traveling across country from L.A. to Washington, D.C.

00:51:04 ►

to land on the steps of the VA on Veterans Day,

00:51:10 ►

November 11th. And all along the way, they’re holding events, gathering other veterans,

00:51:17 ►

educating them about the possibilities. And their main message is that not all your pharmaceuticals, but a good deal of them can be replaced with

00:51:29 ►

this plant medicine.

00:51:31 ►

And that every veteran should have the right to choose their own path to healing.

00:51:39 ►

And so they’ll throw all of their medicine bottles on the steps of the VA.

00:51:45 ►

Oh, that’s awesome.

00:51:47 ►

Make a statement.

00:51:48 ►

Yeah.

00:51:49 ►

Yeah.

00:51:50 ►

So we’re beginning the first aspects of that.

00:51:55 ►

And then shortly thereafter, we’re also going to be in Boulder talking to Ryan

00:51:59 ►

and some of the people that might be in his study, which we don’t know exact dates, but that’s

00:52:08 ►

starting to set that up to finding veterans who are willing to tell their story and be

00:52:14 ►

involved before they actually go through the ceremonies.

00:52:18 ►

So again, we can catch them in their daily life, see what it’s like.

00:52:23 ►

So anybody watching can hear it, see it, feel it, taste it, and get an experience of what

00:52:30 ►

PTSD is like and then see what the healing sessions are, whether it’s MDMA or ayahuasca

00:52:38 ►

or watching veterans use cannabis, marijuana to manage their symptoms and then following

00:52:44 ►

them in their lives for the next six or eight months.

00:52:49 ►

So it’s a long process.

00:52:51 ►

It’s at least two more years, we anticipate.

00:52:56 ►

It’s complex.

00:52:58 ►

It is, and I didn’t see a website for your documentary.

00:53:02 ►

There’s the Indiegogo website, Raising Fun.

00:53:04 ►

Do you have an actual website yet, Janine?

00:53:06 ►

Yes, we do. And there’s a lot of good information on there. It’s fromshocktoawe.com. So the name of the film,

00:53:15 ►

fromshocktoawe.com. And on there, you will see it’s very rich in information. It has clips of many veterans, therapists, and experts. People like Stan Groff

00:53:28 ►

are there. Chris Killam on ayahuasca.

00:53:33 ►

Oliver Williams talking about breath work and other things.

00:53:36 ►

So it’s really rich in all of those arenas

00:53:40 ►

as well as we have a whole section where we keep updated articles that are coming out,

00:53:46 ►

new research, updated news reports, et cetera.

00:53:52 ►

So it really is information rich for anybody interested in this topic of PTSD,

00:53:59 ►

ayahuasca, MDMA, and cannabis.

00:54:04 ►

Fantastic.

00:54:05 ►

And now, Ryan, what is your website for your group?

00:54:10 ►

My group is vetentheogenic.org, V-E-T-E-N-T-H-E-O-G-E-N-I-C.org.

00:54:18 ►

We also have a Facebook page, facebook.com slash vet and theogenic.

00:54:27 ►

Excellent.

00:54:28 ►

Excellent.

00:54:28 ►

And then, Saj, do you have a website here that you can give to the listeners?

00:54:33 ►

We do.

00:54:34 ►

I guess I would like to really have people look at the MAPS website.

00:54:40 ►

It’s maps.org, which is so much more important than any website I have

00:54:48 ►

only because you know guys I just want to say I never knew there was such a

00:54:53 ►

thing as a nonprofit pharmaceutical company because the idea just didn’t

00:54:59 ►

make sense you know when we do fundraisers for maps it’s like holding a

00:55:03 ►

I mean I I’ve never heard of somebody holding a bake sale for Zoloft.

00:55:08 ►

It doesn’t happen simply because Zoloft is a financial blockbuster, right?

00:55:13 ►

You have to take it for a very long period of time, if not the rest of your life.

00:55:17 ►

Otherwise, your symptoms will come back.

00:55:19 ►

And MDMA is not a financial blockbuster. And even though it looks to be one of the most promising things that we’ve seen in the world of mental health in terms of treating trauma, it would not be where it is today.

00:55:34 ►

It would not be near, you know, phase three trials if it were not for a nonprofit organization like MAPS.

00:55:41 ►

Amen.

00:55:42 ►

Yeah.

00:55:43 ►

It’s not going to move MDMA through the system, you know.

00:55:50 ►

So just I would encourage people to take a look at that and if there’s any impulse to

00:55:55 ►

donate, that in my world is, you know, perhaps one of the most worthy causes.

00:56:01 ►

Excellent.

00:56:02 ►

Thank you.

00:56:03 ►

Thank you.

00:56:04 ►

So I actually have a question. And maybe, Ryan, you could answer this.

00:56:09 ►

So the cynic in me is thinking in terms of what if the military, I don’t know, okay,

00:56:17 ►

so if PTSD and then it is cleared through the use of, say, MDMA or ayahuasca,

00:56:24 ►

and then would these guys return ever to combat?

00:56:30 ►

Or would you say it changes your life so dramatically

00:56:34 ►

that there is no desire to go back to that kind of life?

00:56:40 ►

Well, what do you think?

00:56:42 ►

And then I’ll answer.

00:56:43 ►

Okay.

00:56:44 ►

Well, okay. You’re talking And then I’ll answer. Okay. Well, okay.

00:56:46 ►

You’re talking to a mushroom medicine woman here.

00:56:48 ►

And so I would say,

00:56:49 ►

a quote from a veteran saying,

00:56:52 ►

hell no.

00:56:54 ►

Hell no.

00:56:54 ►

No combat.

00:56:55 ►

No, of course it would change your life

00:56:57 ►

and probably take you,

00:57:00 ►

deepen you,

00:57:01 ►

and take you into probably service,

00:57:03 ►

which is what I find so many people who work with these medicines are called to serve.

00:57:11 ►

Not in the military, quite in that regard, but, yeah, to help others heal.

00:57:18 ►

And so what’s your answer?

00:57:21 ►

Yeah, I think my life is my message.

00:57:24 ►

Yeah, I think my life is my message.

00:57:28 ►

Ayahuasca opened me up to service, continuing service.

00:57:37 ►

And a lot of veterans, when we get know, the basic idea of psychedelics is,

00:57:46 ►

you know, creating a symbiosis between us and them and no longer being able to define

00:57:53 ►

where the lines are drawn any longer. I know a lot of us, when we come back, we find that

00:58:00 ►

a lot of the locals there, about 95% of the locals live just like you and me and want to live like you and me.

00:58:09 ►

And it’s always, you know, there’s always going to be 5% that we have a saying in the Marine Corps.

00:58:15 ►

There’s always one or two that screws it up for everybody.

00:58:17 ►

And we have to face reality that there are real factions in the Middle East that want to do nothing but impose terrorism on

00:58:27 ►

regular people.

00:58:29 ►

And I’m not saying that the war was just or, you know, there’s a lot of ambiguity there.

00:58:35 ►

And I don’t think I want to get into that, the politics of it.

00:58:38 ►

But I think in general, you know, veterans feel when we get back that the integrative care to become, you know, normal members of society, the support isn’t there.

00:58:51 ►

So I don’t think, you know, I think what you’re speaking to more is Akatamai and Blackwater and sort of some hush-hush real groups of men that are bent on just destroying the lives of other people.

00:59:08 ►

And I don’t see psychedelics playing a part in getting people better to be ready to go do that again.

00:59:13 ►

That hasn’t been my experience, especially the spiritual path that ayahuasca has put me on.

00:59:19 ►

I would agree.

00:59:20 ►

I was actually thinking more of the MDMA, actually.

00:59:26 ►

So, yeah.

00:59:27 ►

All right.

00:59:27 ►

Well, this is just a question that came up.

00:59:30 ►

This is just absolutely fascinating, rich, rich topic.

00:59:35 ►

And to this point, I just wanted to say that just like Ryan, many of the vets,

00:59:42 ►

well, I’ll say one specifically, Tony Macy,

00:59:51 ►

who the arc of his healing was such that he did MDMA therapy,

00:59:56 ►

felt that it took him a year to really face and heal and get himself back in physical and mental emotional shape.

01:00:00 ►

He said, I knew what I had to do.

01:00:02 ►

I did it, and now I want to serve.

01:00:05 ►

And he takes groups of veterans to Cambodia to do service,

01:00:10 ►

to help rebuild villages and help repair.

01:00:15 ►

So I think it’s, again, there’s no evidence.

01:00:20 ►

Go ahead.

01:00:21 ►

No, no, go ahead.

01:00:22 ►

I apologize.

01:00:23 ►

I was just going to say it’s not like any formal study

01:00:25 ►

but like Ryan

01:00:28 ►

who is so service oriented

01:00:30 ►

he gives so much of his time

01:00:32 ►

his energy, his heart

01:00:33 ►

to helping other vets

01:00:35 ►

wanting to help them heal

01:00:37 ►

as you said

01:00:38 ►

as many psychonauts do

01:00:40 ►

because you see

01:00:41 ►

that is me.

01:00:44 ►

And there’s Tony and others. and others mission you know warriors are they

01:00:49 ►

like to be on a mission and to do good and to serve so this replace it’s a different kind of

01:00:55 ►

warrior a different kind of service you know guys i think we’re finding something similar we’re not

01:01:01 ►

tracking for this in the mdma study but, you know, more anecdotally speaking, we are finding that people that come out of this, because they, you know, the

01:01:09 ►

world of trauma is so, so contracted and so intense that when people find a way out, we find that,

01:01:18 ►

you know, a lot of them have that impulse to serve. They have an impulse to sort of communicate their experience, which,

01:01:26 ►

again, I feel a little sad for Zoloft right now because I keep bashing it, but, you know,

01:01:31 ►

I don’t ever hear people talk about their Zoloft experience.

01:01:35 ►

Right. That’s, Naz, you make a great point, man, because I think in the last interview,

01:01:40 ►

another point I brought up about this issue was that veterans that would be still willing to,

01:01:47 ►

I always think of medications as archetypes and drugs in general.

01:01:54 ►

Alcohol and these pharmaceuticals seem to be medications that are geared toward the mindset of someone that doesn’t want to process emotion

01:02:05 ►

and process what it is that they’re doing and embrace consciousness.

01:02:10 ►

And so those types of people, although they’re still out there that are bent on that,

01:02:16 ►

those would be the demographic, I would think,

01:02:19 ►

that would be more on the Klonopin side of taking this so I can go back out

01:02:26 ►

and continue in this path of destruction.

01:02:30 ►

And so veterans that are seeking this kind of healing,

01:02:34 ►

for whatever reason has drawn them to it,

01:02:36 ►

whether it’s wanting to get off the medications they’re on

01:02:39 ►

or whether it’s that they’ve never tried those

01:02:44 ►

and they’ve just decided that the spiritual path is one that they want to honor.

01:02:48 ►

And I don’t think any of that, it sort of bars you from wanting to be of service for destruction,

01:02:54 ►

whereas the warriors of light and the ones that have turned toward service,

01:03:00 ►

the ones that have joined for altruistic reasons and service to others,

01:03:05 ►

can now do it in a more constructive way in saving lives.

01:03:09 ►

Yeah, beautiful.

01:03:10 ►

Well, it’s like it really gives them a whole new lease on life.

01:03:16 ►

Annie Oak, who runs the Women’s Visionary Congress, once said,

01:03:19 ►

alcohol is an inferior drug.

01:03:23 ►

And I would add the pharmaceuticals to that statement as well because it is really astonishing.

01:03:32 ►

I mean, what you have been sharing is, I mean, to we who work with these plants, fungi, with the MDMA,

01:03:42 ►

plants, fungi with the MDMA.

01:03:46 ►

I mean, it’s, you know, this is not new to us, but, you know,

01:03:51 ►

this is astonishing to the people who this is going to reach for the first time.

01:03:53 ►

Really, it’s remarkable.

01:03:59 ►

And, you know, Shauna, I think one of the most powerful aspects of what’s happening right now is that it is leaving the realm of, you know, personal experience,

01:04:04 ►

meaning that you and we and probably most people that are listening here,

01:04:09 ►

they probably have very compelling experiences of their own,

01:04:13 ►

which give them insight into this world.

01:04:16 ►

However, most of America doesn’t.

01:04:19 ►

And one of the powerful things that’s happening with the research

01:04:24 ►

is that we are really entering the realm of science and science is backing up everything we’re talking about here.

01:04:31 ►

So, for example, one of my favorite little stories from comparisons here is that, you know, when when Zoloft, there’s only two medications in this country that are approved for working with trauma, with PTSD.

01:04:44 ►

only two medications in this country that are approved for working with trauma with ptsd it’s uh zoloft and paxil right not to say other ones psychiatrists don’t use other things but um

01:04:51 ►

and in the trials that zoloft had when when the fda approved it it on a 136 point scale of uh

01:05:00 ►

where anything above 50 was clinically significant for trauma um zoloft had a six point reduction over placebo right so okay you know six points but we don’t

01:05:13 ►

have anything else so you know it got approved uh what we’re seeing in the mdma trials is a 54.7 point seven an average of fifty four point seven point drop on that same scale all right so it’s roughly not nine times as effective at least for it for

01:05:32 ►

that one particular study and and that’s measuring after all all medication is

01:05:38 ►

ceased people don’t have to keep taking MDMA to see these results that’s a huge

01:05:43 ►

point in the world of ayahuasca I’d make the same point that ayahuasca is definitely not a drug of abuse.

01:05:49 ►

It’s not something you can take lightly.

01:05:52 ►

No.

01:05:52 ►

No.

01:05:54 ►

Same with the mushrooms.

01:05:56 ►

I mean, good grief.

01:05:57 ►

Who wants to take them?

01:05:58 ►

Yeah.

01:05:59 ►

Right.

01:06:01 ►

My casual ayahuasca.

01:06:04 ►

I’ve noticed the more I take these drugs, the less I need them.

01:06:07 ►

And I think that’s important.

01:06:10 ►

Yeah.

01:06:10 ►

Yeah.

01:06:11 ►

Absolutely.

01:06:11 ►

Yeah, it’s the exact reverse of what happens with psychiatric medications, right?

01:06:17 ►

And pharmaceuticals, yeah.

01:06:18 ►

By the way, I want to draw attention.

01:06:32 ►

I want to draw attention, when you were talking, Shawna, about the remarkable nature of your implying that these drugs are being used for military people,

01:06:37 ►

that’s out of the normal realm of the shock and awe offensive, this military

01:06:48 ►

offensive, which was meant to devastate people so fully that they were immobilized and could

01:06:53 ►

not do anything in retaliation, that it should turn itself, talk about karma, and bring it

01:07:02 ►

back to us.

01:07:03 ►

Turn itself, talk about karma, and bring it back to us.

01:07:11 ►

Think of the implications of more and more of these beautiful warriors coming to the awe and to the bigger perspective and the consciousness shifting medications

01:07:17 ►

because of that awful experience and that war, those wars.

01:07:24 ►

I love the implication of it.

01:07:27 ►

Turning it on its head, it’s like, okay, you guys, whoever it was that created

01:07:32 ►

all of this, it’s coming back in a higher form.

01:07:35 ►

So watch out.

01:07:37 ►

Think about what better group would be

01:07:42 ►

more beneficial to the world than to have the people that were wielding the weapons of suffering to now wielding the weapons of recovery.

01:07:56 ►

Exactly.

01:07:57 ►

Carrying the banner.

01:07:59 ►

Yeah, I’ve got a dear friend who was an airborne ranger, and he has been saying all all along if we can get the vets to wake up

01:08:07 ►

it’s a game changer that’s a major

01:08:10 ►

exactly and this is the spearhead yeah yeah i changed the i changed the name of semper fidelis

01:08:22 ►

which means always faithful to semper fidelis to the plants. Always faithful to the plants.

01:08:30 ►

Now I’ve got a specific way

01:08:32 ►

to, I have something that I can be faithful to now versus

01:08:35 ►

just sort of throwing it out there and being faithful to whatever comes my way.

01:08:41 ►

Yeah, yeah. Well, I always say I really

01:08:44 ►

see this wave, this growing wave of consciousness with regard to the visionary plants and fungi as Mother Earth calling her children back. and helping us to wake up. And I sometimes wonder if that really is, from a higher intelligence,

01:09:07 ►

the purpose of these plants and fungi.

01:09:10 ►

Is that really what they’re doing here to kind of give us the opportunity of a course correction

01:09:16 ►

when we have lost our way, as we have, desperately, desperately.

01:09:22 ►

I absolutely believe that.

01:09:23 ►

Oh, that’s huge.

01:09:24 ►

Yeah, it’s like feeling grateful.

01:09:26 ►

I feel grateful to the fact that the plants are still reaching out to this carnivore inside me

01:09:32 ►

that’s just, you know, raging destruction.

01:09:36 ►

And that’s a huge piece for vets, man, the sons and daughters of mother that’s reaching out

01:09:42 ►

and saying, hey, we’re still here reaching out to you.

01:09:44 ►

of mother that’s reaching out and saying, hey, we’re still here reaching out to you.

01:09:50 ►

Yeah, and we’re going to heal you and we’re going to love you up and we’re going to help you go back out there and live your life.

01:09:55 ►

That’s right.

01:09:56 ►

And take you into the light.

01:09:58 ►

Yeah, I mean, this is the least I can do after my experience

01:10:02 ►

is to try and give it to as many of my brothers and sisters as I can.

01:10:08 ►

It’s just going to be a web of service.

01:10:11 ►

Well, isn’t that like one of the cries of most military men is no one left behind?

01:10:17 ►

That’s right.

01:10:18 ►

That’s one of the honor of I will not leave my buddies and my cohorts behind on the battlefield.

01:10:28 ►

And so when the enlightened warriors come

01:10:31 ►

and return to bring their brothers and sisters along with them,

01:10:36 ►

we have a potential revolution of consciousness.

01:10:41 ►

Oh, well, it makes me think of that question.

01:10:43 ►

What if we held a war and no one came?

01:10:50 ►

What if it just didn’t make sense?

01:10:53 ►

That’s great.

01:10:54 ►

I like that.

01:10:54 ►

Yeah.

01:10:55 ►

Yeah.

01:10:56 ►

Yeah.

01:10:57 ►

And this is so deeply rooted.

01:10:59 ►

You know, this goes back to Vietnam even before that with the warriors and the treatment of

01:11:03 ►

vets in general.

01:11:05 ►

They were the tip of the tip of the spear in the movement for human rights in the 60s.

01:11:11 ►

It benefits more than just vets in the end.

01:11:14 ►

We will be the tip, but I would like to see these medicines available to everyone.

01:11:20 ►

I agree.

01:11:21 ►

I agree.

01:11:22 ►

I know.

01:11:23 ►

In the same way that we signed up to serve the country, you know,

01:11:25 ►

we’re also serving the country

01:11:26 ►

in this way.

01:11:30 ►

Absolutely.

01:11:32 ►

Oh, yeah. Well, it’s like your

01:11:33 ►

role, the role of the

01:11:35 ►

warrior, it’s shifting, isn’t it?

01:11:38 ►

And so,

01:11:39 ►

yeah, this is very

01:11:41 ►

exciting. Absolutely. And, yeah,

01:11:43 ►

like, hang on to your your hats because we’re in.

01:11:46 ►

What a time to be alive on this planet.

01:11:48 ►

Because this is unprecedented what is going on.

01:11:52 ►

I mean, we’re up against a big, dark wall of folks who sort of held the reins of power for quite some time.

01:12:01 ►

It’s like it’s not sustainable.

01:12:04 ►

It can’t be sustainable because it’s immoral

01:12:07 ►

and it doesn’t work and it harms people. And so here are our warriors. Oh, my goodness.

01:12:12 ►

Wait till you guys all heal. Oh, my goodness. It’s quite something.

01:12:20 ►

I know that the powers that be would have a lot on their hands if we had enlightened warriors around us.

01:12:28 ►

Military has more guns than the DEA, as Rick Doblin says.

01:12:33 ►

Yeah.

01:12:35 ►

Yeah.

01:12:37 ►

The VA is huge in the world of mental health.

01:12:40 ►

As the VA goes, so does the rest of the world of mental health.

01:12:44 ►

Absolutely.

01:12:46 ►

Yeah, I was just at a talk in Walter Reed with Dr. Sue Sisley,

01:12:50 ►

me and her, presenting a talk on ayahuasca and marijuana

01:12:54 ►

to a crowd of Brigadier, Four Stars, congressmen.

01:13:00 ►

I think Obama came through at one point.

01:13:02 ►

And it was just amazing to see, even in that environment,

01:13:07 ►

where you have the top military medicine in the country gathering for this workshop for PTSD treatment,

01:13:16 ►

and all of them were receptive, you know, which is amazing.

01:13:19 ►

Because we’re talking about enlisted substances on federal ground at Walter Reed National Naval Medical Center.

01:13:27 ►

And the doctors and physicians and psychiatrists are all just wanting to know, hey, where do we turn?

01:13:33 ►

You could see the desperateness in their eyes that they didn’t know.

01:13:37 ►

And a lot of the ethics are coming up around this as well.

01:13:42 ►

Ethics?

01:13:42 ►

Could you speak to that?

01:13:44 ►

Say again? Could you speak to that?

01:13:45 ►

Say again?

01:13:47 ►

Could you speak to the ethics?

01:13:54 ►

Yeah, ethically, I think, you know, I’m going into the field of psychotherapy like Saj is.

01:13:56 ►

We’re both from the same institution. And one of the things I bring up a lot in class in the graduate program is we’re here to help.

01:14:04 ►

a lot in class in the graduate program is we’re here to help. I mean, aside from pharmaceuticals and psychotherapy, whatever is being developed here, we need

01:14:12 ►

to make sure that our clients, it’s client-centered, it’s client-based.

01:14:16 ►

We’re here to serve them and obviously the worst case should get the most potent pharmacological intervention.

01:14:27 ►

And ethically, you know, I couldn’t do my job if I was wanting the patient to return to me over and over and over again.

01:14:34 ►

I would want that person to get well and be able to find ways to self-regulate and have active medicine.

01:14:42 ►

We’re establishing evidence-based practices here, right,

01:14:45 ►

with this much gold standard research that’s going on.

01:14:48 ►

And so the question becomes, if something is truly evidence-based and shown to work,

01:14:53 ►

well, you know, what are the ethics of not using it?

01:14:57 ►

There you go.

01:15:00 ►

And anecdotally, the evidence is there for ayahuasca,

01:15:04 ►

and I’m hoping with this observational

01:15:06 ►

study that it will open the doors and I’ll be able to present this data to the VA.

01:15:11 ►

My 20-year goal is to have the VA work with an approved center here in the United States

01:15:18 ►

under religious freedoms to be able to outsource treatment-resistant patients to approved centers. I hope, I hope that we can do this through science, Saj,

01:15:28 ►

and especially what you’re doing in the clinical trials is so important.

01:15:31 ►

We’re so close to getting that underway, and I’m really hopeful.

01:15:35 ►

I mean, this is a huge breakthrough in medicine and therapy.

01:15:41 ►

Yeah, we are so close.

01:15:43 ►

We are so close.

01:15:44 ►

therapy. Yeah, we are so close. We are so close.

01:15:48 ►

We’re looking at five years for approval for MDMA as a psychiatric medication. That’s amazing.

01:15:54 ►

Of course, the first step is rescheduling.

01:15:57 ►

That’s a whole other bag of worms. Getting these

01:16:00 ►

medicines rescheduled from Schedule 1

01:16:04 ►

with no known medical value to Schedule 3,

01:16:08 ►

where they can be prescribed, they can be used in responsible settings, et cetera.

01:16:13 ►

I think the good thing about putting it through – I’m sorry, go ahead.

01:16:18 ►

I was just going to do a tip of the hat to Rick Doblin again, who’s been on this, doing this.

01:16:23 ►

Oh, for year after year after year

01:16:25 ►

after year you know responsibly

01:16:27 ►

what were you going to say

01:16:29 ►

oh well Ron I had a question

01:16:32 ►

because you mentioned how you’d love

01:16:34 ►

to see ayahuasca in centers

01:16:35 ►

well that could be a whole other hour

01:16:37 ►

discussion but I’m curious

01:16:40 ►

to know your vision of that

01:16:41 ►

because of course ayahuasca comes from

01:16:44 ►

the jungles of the Amazon,

01:16:46 ►

and there are well, highly trained shamans,

01:16:51 ►

and there’s a tradition there.

01:16:53 ►

And so I’m just thinking, okay, VA approved ayahuasca.

01:16:59 ►

What the hell is that going to look like?

01:17:02 ►

What’s the definition, Robin?

01:17:04 ►

I want to hear.

01:17:06 ►

Yeah, like I said, it’s a 20-year plan.

01:17:11 ►

It’s sort of the same path that I think Rick set out back in the 80s when MDMA was first made illegal.

01:17:18 ►

This is something that I think is viable.

01:17:21 ►

It’s possible, and I think that we can in the West create a

01:17:25 ►

context for ayahuasca through the religious freedoms and be able to use

01:17:30 ►

that facility for science which is what I’m doing right now I I’m connected with

01:17:35 ►

this church in Florida called soul quest and we’re collaborating for the study

01:17:41 ►

that I’m doing with veterans and PTSD.

01:17:48 ►

They are under the religious freedoms of the Native American church,

01:17:53 ►

and so they’re protected to use ayahuasca as sacrament in their ceremony.

01:18:00 ►

And so the veterans that I recruit here, once the study gets IRB approval,

01:18:05 ►

I’ll be sending down to Florida, and MAPS will be sponsoring the study as well.

01:18:11 ►

And once they come back, we’ll be following up with them for a year using the same psychometrics that the MDMA study is using, which is CAP severity scale, PTGI, which is a post-traumatic

01:18:18 ►

growth inventory, which measures integration of traumatic experiences.

01:18:28 ►

We’ll be doing a sleep scale, the Pittsburgh Sleep Study. And I also added in the MEQ, the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, because I’m

01:18:34 ►

curious to see how that correlates with PTSD recovery in general. So I think overall the key is if we don’t have to send them to the dangerous jungle of the Amazon,

01:18:48 ►

we could definitely do it here in the States,

01:18:52 ►

and I think we can create a context and a container around it so that we don’t have to keep sending Westerners

01:18:58 ►

into an indigenous culture where I got the sense that the shamans there, although they were friendly,

01:19:05 ►

were basically saying, you guys need to police your own shit.

01:19:08 ►

And I got that message very clearly, and I think that we can.

01:19:13 ►

And that’s why I’m at Naropa is because of the transpersonal element.

01:19:18 ►

There’s a ton of integration that the veterans are going to be doing

01:19:21 ►

when they get back from SoulQuest and their ayahuasca experience.

01:19:28 ►

They’re going to be working with equestrianrian therapy they’re going to be working with horses uh all of them will get isolation tank vouchers all of them will be doing some

01:19:36 ►

some gateway model work uh young’s archetypal gateway model work that will be going on retreat

01:19:42 ►

wilderness therapy somatic therapy, individual

01:19:46 ►

and group psychotherapy.

01:19:48 ►

And so they’re getting the whole package in the integration process.

01:19:54 ►

My hunch is that by the end of the year, at the 12-month follow-up, we’ll see a reduction

01:19:59 ►

in CAP score.

01:20:01 ►

And once that happens, that opens the doors to getting more to a clinical-based program where we can start presenting this data to the VA.

01:20:10 ►

And I’ve been since building connections at the VA and Walter Reed, and people are waiting to see the results of this study.

01:20:18 ►

I’m really excited about it.

01:20:21 ►

Brilliant.

01:20:22 ►

Hey, I have one suggestion, Ryan.

01:20:24 ►

Ryan, didn’t you once refer to it as spiritual boot camp?

01:20:28 ►

Yes, spiritual boot camp.

01:20:30 ►

That’s the model.

01:20:33 ►

It’s a reintegration program.

01:20:36 ►

I would add nutrition to that as well.

01:20:39 ►

Like really good nutrient-dense foods that a lot of these guys are missing because they’re eating, you know,

01:20:46 ►

processed, genetically modified, you know, tons of sugar, that kind of thing,

01:20:52 ►

that I know would also assist greatly.

01:20:55 ►

Absolutely.

01:20:56 ►

And the beautiful thing about Naropa is I have every type of alternative therapist at the tips of my fingers.

01:21:04 ►

There’s nutritionists that I work with as well.

01:21:07 ►

And all of these people, since I’ve been networking at the school,

01:21:10 ►

have offered to do some type of integration program pro bono, which is great.

01:21:16 ►

Wow.

01:21:17 ►

Wow.

01:21:18 ►

That’s huge, you guys.

01:21:20 ►

You know, all of this information just calls to mind this quote I love.

01:21:25 ►

It’s Arthur Schopenhauer.

01:21:26 ►

Have you heard of that?

01:21:27 ►

It says, all truth passes through three stages.

01:21:30 ►

First, it’s ridiculed.

01:21:32 ►

Second, it’s violently opposed.

01:21:34 ►

Third, it’s accepted as being self-evident.

01:21:38 ►

Right.

01:21:39 ►

Oh, I love that.

01:21:41 ►

Yeah, that’s exactly what’s going to happen with all of this.

01:21:44 ►

Truly. Yeah. It’s like what’s going to happen with all of this, truly.

01:21:46 ►

Yeah.

01:21:47 ►

It’s like hidden in plain sight, you know?

01:21:49 ►

We’re moving toward more of a holistic model.

01:21:53 ►

Right, right, right.

01:21:55 ►

Back, well, we’re coming back to nature, sounds like.

01:21:57 ►

Right.

01:21:58 ►

Boom.

01:21:59 ►

And no time to lose on that one, really.

01:22:04 ►

No, no.

01:22:05 ►

You know, guys, something that I think, a phrase that we haven’t been talking about here,

01:22:13 ►

but just in terms of how this is going to affect the world of mental health,

01:22:17 ►

because, you know, the cognitive behavioral therapy model is vastly the dominant in in the world of psychotherapy and you know it’s all

01:22:27 ►

about sort of learning new coping mechanisms workarounds reframing what’s happening you know

01:22:36 ►

cognitive restructuring things like that which is great it’s one of the tool sets that we have here

01:22:41 ►

but what we’re finding with these approaches is that,

01:22:45 ►

you know, people don’t, you know, talk therapy is not what people are typically doing on MDMA.

01:22:52 ►

And, you know, these are much more experiential therapies that we’re talking about here. They’re

01:22:58 ►

much more sort of the ground up, the bottom up. And what made me think about this was talking

01:23:04 ►

about how nature is kind of

01:23:06 ►

reasserting itself because I mean I think that what we’re seeing in the world of mental health

01:23:10 ►

is that you know we cannot have this top-down approach where the um you know the prefrontal

01:23:15 ►

cortex is telling all the other parts of the brain to behave and get in line and you know just

01:23:22 ►

you know stop feeling that way or something like that

01:23:25 ►

it simply doesn’t work and and so we’re experiencing these these emergencies

01:23:33 ►

emergence of this bottom-up processing models in the world of psychotherapy and

01:23:38 ►

I think sort of what’s happening there is going to dovetail beautifully with

01:23:42 ►

what’s happened what we’re you, what we’re discovering in these sessions, which is, you know, it is a, it is fundamentally

01:23:49 ►

an experience that heals people, not, you know, a thought or not, you know, a cognitive

01:23:57 ►

reframe.

01:23:59 ►

Right.

01:23:59 ►

It’s not an intellectual exercise.

01:24:02 ►

That’s right.

01:24:03 ►

Right.

01:24:03 ►

It has to be constantly managed. Let’s get an intellectual exercise. That’s right. Right. It has to be constantly managed, lest they get out of control.

01:24:09 ►

And a lot of mindfulness-based therapy offers that kind of insight of not thinking of the brain as the big boss,

01:24:16 ►

but integrating the entire experience somatically.

01:24:20 ►

And through neuroscience, too, we’re starting to see that there’s neural pathways that are being formed

01:24:27 ►

as a result of mindfulness-based exercises.

01:24:29 ►

These are all, you know, hard research that looks at parts of the brain that are responsible for integrating these experiences

01:24:37 ►

and looking at it from a limbic point of view.

01:24:40 ►

I think a lot of the science is really going to come through for the for this

01:24:45 ►

side of the point that we need yeah yeah very much so there is a study that I

01:24:51 ►

don’t know if it’s been published yet but you know we’re seeing some of the

01:24:55 ►

some information leak through where I believe is a UK study that they put

01:25:00 ►

people in an FMRI a functional MRI machine which is to say we’re not

01:25:05 ►

looking at just the structures of the brain we’re looking at the crosstalk

01:25:08 ►

between areas of the brain and what we’re seeing at least with you know MDMA

01:25:13 ►

I suspect this may be true of other psychedelics is that you know a there’s

01:25:19 ►

decrease in the activity in the of the amygdala there’s a decrease in the

01:25:23 ►

activity of the prefrontal cortex.

01:25:26 ►

But what we do see an increase in is a conversation between the amygdala and the hippocampus,

01:25:33 ►

which is to say, which is that statement right there, that one particular piece right there

01:25:39 ►

pretty much turns the entire world of psychotherapy on its head by saying that, look, it’s not this, you know,

01:25:47 ►

the consciousness centers, the rational mind that’s going to help here.

01:25:50 ►

It’s a conversation between two much more primitive parts of the brain that seems to, you know, resolve things.

01:25:58 ►

Got it.

01:25:59 ►

And that’s the center for memory and emotional processes.

01:26:03 ►

Right.

01:26:04 ►

That’s where we have to get,

01:26:06 ►

it reminds me of like what Terence was talking about

01:26:08 ►

when he said this archaic recursion,

01:26:10 ►

like we have to go back to the mammalian brain.

01:26:13 ►

Yeah.

01:26:14 ►

And reassess.

01:26:16 ►

That’s it. Rewired.

01:26:18 ►

Yeah, it is the mammalian brain,

01:26:20 ►

that’s where my experience in the field,

01:26:23 ►

that’s where trauma is hanging out. It’s a

01:26:25 ►

autonomic process. It’s a bottom-up animal process. I mean, we can see the same sort of

01:26:36 ►

trauma responses in other mammals that we see in human beings, which is to say that, you know,

01:26:41 ►

you don’t have to have higher cognitive capacities. You know’t have to have this sophisticated meaning-making structure around the world to be traumatized.

01:26:50 ►

A mouse can be traumatized just like a human being can.

01:26:54 ►

That says the opposite to what we think in the psychonautic world of evolving and transcending,

01:27:01 ►

whereas this path is transcendence through recursion, which is interesting.

01:27:06 ►

Uh-huh.

01:27:07 ►

Through the deep dive.

01:27:09 ►

Mm-hmm.

01:27:10 ►

Right.

01:27:11 ►

Yeah.

01:27:12 ►

You got to go back to the roots, man.

01:27:14 ►

Yeah.

01:27:15 ►

That’s what we’re finding.

01:27:17 ►

Wow.

01:27:18 ►

I’m pretty complete.

01:27:19 ►

The only piece that I want to throw into the pie is how we’re talking about the veterans, getting back to that, and healing them.

01:27:27 ►

But think of the many people they affect, their children, their parents, their wives, their husbands, their communities.

01:27:36 ►

It really is the tip of the spear also for that.

01:27:41 ►

So many are affected.

01:27:43 ►

You should talk about the – I think what you’re doing and definitely what I’m doing as part

01:27:48 ►

of the qualitative side of the research is I’m following up with family members

01:27:52 ►

to find out. Yeah, I think that’s super important.

01:27:56 ►

Well, we want to film people in their families, in their homes. What does it look like,

01:28:00 ►

feel like before and after?

01:28:04 ►

Yeah.

01:28:11 ►

You know, the other thoughts that I had, Shana, was just in terms of your question.

01:28:17 ►

I’m wondering about if people need to have a better sort of understanding, a more sort of visceral understanding of what PTSD actually is.

01:28:21 ►

Because we’re all, you know, it’s this acronym that we all know what it is.

01:28:24 ►

truly is because we’re all, you know, it’s this acronym that we all know what it is.

01:28:30 ►

But I’m wondering if most people, I mean, because here’s a quick little story that I found extraordinary, right, that one of my colleagues who teaches with me, Dr. Mike Barnes,

01:28:36 ►

who’s one of the program managers at CEDAR, he got to CEDAR in 2012, right?

01:28:41 ►

And CEDAR is arguably one of the top four addiction treatment clinics in the

01:28:45 ►

country. It’s fantastic. But he went through their records to see in 2011, how many people

01:28:53 ►

that came through the door of an inpatient addiction treatment center had post-traumatic

01:28:57 ►

stress disorder and the number that he, how many people had that diagnosis? And he found, he, you know, he found 0%,

01:29:06 ►

which is to say that it’s not accurate. It’s not, we know from like really good research that,

01:29:13 ►

you know, that there’s a very large overlap between, you know, early childhood trauma and

01:29:18 ►

people who develop addiction later in life. And so the reason why he found 0% is because the field does not know how to recognize trauma.

01:29:26 ►

Oh, my God.

01:29:28 ►

Yeah.

01:29:29 ►

I mean, these are clinicians.

01:29:30 ►

These are psychiatrists.

01:29:32 ►

And what they’re doing is they see people with trauma and they say, oh, well, you have generalized anxiety disorder.

01:29:37 ►

You have depression.

01:29:39 ►

You have bipolar disorder you have basically there’s all these other things that can be people with trauma

01:29:45 ►

can be diagnosed at because you know the the dsm doesn’t look at causes it just looks at

01:29:50 ►

symptom sets um and then oh yeah go ahead right yeah wow no no man i’m just i’m blown away because

01:29:58 ►

this this really gets into the the stigma of addicts in our society. Looking at this population who we cast, I worked in substance abuse as a counselor,

01:30:13 ►

and I was noticing the level of trauma that a lot of these patients, adult males that

01:30:17 ►

I worked with, had very, very heavy symptoms of PTSD, but we were treating the addiction

01:30:24 ►

part of it.

01:30:25 ►

The addiction, right.

01:30:26 ►

It doesn’t account for the dual diagnosis.

01:30:28 ►

There’s so much stigma around, you know, a lot of these people have childhood experiences

01:30:33 ►

and they grow up and they self-medicate and there’s societal stigma still attached to it.

01:30:40 ►

And I see a lot of that in the veterans community of high resistance to treatment.

01:30:45 ►

Yeah.

01:30:45 ►

Yep.

01:30:47 ►

It’s huge, man.

01:30:48 ►

We don’t know how to – we don’t see trauma very well.

01:30:52 ►

Man.

01:30:54 ►

And later – and just to complete that story, Mike Barnes then gave everybody a measure called the Trauma Sentiment Inventory, which is fantastic, in 2012.

01:31:04 ►

And the number was 70 percent

01:31:06 ►

that he found wow from zero to 70 percent come on wow come on man and as we always say it’s going

01:31:16 ►

to take an army of supporters to get this thing done to get get movement. Guys, I just want to say, I have no idea how MDMA

01:31:28 ►

has come this far in terms of the research.

01:31:31 ►

I’m like, how has it been permitted to…

01:31:36 ►

Because you can’t shut it down at this point, right?

01:31:41 ►

We’ve got way too much data at this

01:31:44 ►

point for it to be shut down.

01:31:47 ►

Yeah.

01:31:48 ►

Well, there’s grace.

01:31:50 ►

There’s always grace.

01:31:51 ►

There’s always grace, yeah.

01:31:52 ►

This is definitely, yeah, there’s no way.

01:31:54 ►

The cat’s out of the bag on this one.

01:31:57 ►

Yeah, it’s called science.

01:31:58 ►

Yeah, I love that.

01:31:59 ►

It’s called science.

01:32:01 ►

Okay, Shauna, let us know if there’s anything else you need from us.

01:32:05 ►

Okay, no, I think we’re good.

01:32:07 ►

Let’s conclude.

01:32:09 ►

And this has been just so illuminating and so inspiring.

01:32:14 ►

And I want to emphasize again for the listeners that the website to go to is Indiegogo.com,

01:32:21 ►

site to go to is Indiegogo.com where you

01:32:24 ►

can contribute

01:32:25 ►

to this very, very

01:32:27 ►

worthwhile and much needed

01:32:29 ►

project. They’ve got to raise money

01:32:32 ►

and they have until the 14th

01:32:34 ►

of October and so whatever

01:32:36 ►

can be given, I know

01:32:38 ►

would be greatly, greatly appreciated

01:32:40 ►

and so… Greatly appreciated

01:32:42 ►

and it is specifically from shock to

01:32:44 ►

awe because there are many campaigns on Indiegogo,

01:32:47 ►

so they have to go to From Shock to Awe.

01:32:51 ►

Oh, thank you, Janine.

01:32:52 ►

Okay, so just type in From Shock to Awe on whatever the subject is.

01:32:55 ►

And Indiegogo, yes.

01:32:57 ►

Indiegogo, right.

01:32:59 ►

Just that we need everybody’s support for all of our endeavors, for the studies, for maps,

01:33:10 ►

for the movie, for everything that anybody can do in their own realms to communicate the message that healing is available.

01:33:16 ►

Wonderful.

01:33:17 ►

Thank you.

01:33:17 ►

And Saj, what would you like to say in parting words?

01:33:20 ►

Wow.

01:33:23 ►

It is a privilege to be a part of this movement. It is amazing to be in

01:33:28 ►

the world of mental health and see what we can do with trauma all by ourselves

01:33:33 ►

but and then see what kind of what happens when we get a lot of support to

01:33:38 ►

work with trauma. It’s a beautiful thing to behold and you know we really are

01:33:44 ►

looking at the establishment of psychedelic centers around the country in the not too distant future.

01:33:52 ►

And then lastly, you know, this is something that I see being much more than the U.S.

01:33:58 ►

I see it, you know, the way that the world works is that it takes the lead of the FDA. And if the FDA approves MDMA, then it’s something that can be used in, you know,

01:34:09 ►

a lot of different contexts around the world.

01:34:11 ►

So, you know, if people want to see that happen,

01:34:16 ►

then I would also suggest going to maps.org and supporting that cause.

01:34:22 ►

Excellent.

01:34:23 ►

Thank you.

01:34:24 ►

And Ryan, what would you like to say in parting?

01:34:29 ►

Thank you, guys, for everyone that’s considering donating to this campaign.

01:34:33 ►

You’re supporting not only psychedelic research,

01:34:36 ►

but you’re supporting veterans that very much need this form of therapy,

01:34:41 ►

myself included, who I was given the privilege to find it underground, which

01:34:46 ►

isn’t always the ideal case.

01:34:48 ►

So now we have an opportunity to deliver these medicines to veterans and start coming above

01:34:55 ►

the ground and speaking our truth.

01:34:58 ►

And so I think it’s important.

01:35:00 ►

Thank you guys for listening.

01:35:02 ►

And yeah, this is an important film that’s going to get the word out.

01:35:08 ►

And the more we do that, the less we have to be scared about talking about these forms of therapy and medicine.

01:35:16 ►

Excellent.

01:35:17 ►

Well said.

01:35:17 ►

Thank you all so much.

01:35:19 ►

And bless you all.

01:35:21 ►

Take care.

01:35:22 ►

Thank you, Shana.

01:35:23 ►

Blessings to you as well.

01:35:24 ►

Bye. Thank you. Bye you, Shana. Blessings to you as well. Bye.

01:35:25 ►

Thank you.

01:35:26 ►

Bye-bye.

01:35:26 ►

Bye, guys.

01:35:28 ►

Bye-bye.

01:35:29 ►

Bye.

01:35:32 ►

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

01:35:39 ►

And as you just heard, filming on this important documentary just began this morning.

01:35:44 ►

And as you just heard, filming on this important documentary just began this morning.

01:35:50 ►

I realize that every day somebody is asking you for money, and in fact, well, there’s hardly a week that goes by in which somebody hasn’t asked me to give a plug to one of their

01:35:55 ►

crowdsourced projects.

01:35:57 ►

And I always feel bad about not doing so, because, well, they all have positive points

01:36:02 ►

that deserve a shout-out.

01:36:03 ►

However, being a Vietnam veteran myself, and having dealt with PTSD on various levels,

01:36:09 ►

I am far too aware of what a difficult time many of our military members and veterans are having

01:36:15 ►

when it comes to dealing with events that traumatized them in the past.

01:36:20 ►

Just think about it.

01:36:22 ►

From the time you got up this morning until you get up tomorrow morning there will be at least another 22 women and

01:36:29 ►

men who have taken their own lives because

01:36:32 ►

they can no longer deal with the suffering

01:36:34 ►

that post-traumatic stress brings into one’s life

01:36:37 ►

and if you have ever had the misfortune of having a friend take his or her own

01:36:41 ►

life then you know that the number 22 is only the tip of the iceberg,

01:36:46 ►

because there are also many friends and family members

01:36:49 ►

who will never be the same

01:36:50 ►

after one of their loved ones has committed suicide.

01:36:54 ►

We are talking about a nationwide epidemic here,

01:36:57 ►

one that is essentially being swept under the rug

01:37:00 ►

by the political elite who seem to be more concerned

01:37:04 ►

with raising bribe money for their campaigns than they are in governing. Forget the politicians. Thank you. caused by PTSD, but we have to get the word out. For that reason, I feel that we should all do whatever we can to help.

01:37:28 ►

In today’s program notes, you’ll find links to the Indiegogo campaign,

01:37:32 ►

along with links to other projects our guests are involved in.

01:37:35 ►

And even if you can only make a token donation of a few dollars,

01:37:39 ►

well, I urge you to go to the Shocked and Awed Indiegogo page

01:37:43 ►

and make a donation to let them know that you do care about our vets

01:37:47 ►

and that you’re willing to do what you can to help them.

01:37:50 ►

And I’ll put a link to this campaign in today’s program notes

01:37:54 ►

on our psychedelicsalon.com website.

01:37:57 ►

Also, if you are a veteran yourself and are near to one of the demonstrations

01:38:02 ►

where on this coming Veterans Day, November 11th,

01:38:06 ►

veterans will be throwing their prescription medicine bottles on the steps of the VA and other government sites.

01:38:11 ►

Well, if you can get there and do that, you will have a positive memory that will stay with you for the rest of your life.

01:38:18 ►

In the past, I talked about the time back in the 1970s when I participated with vets all over the country

01:38:25 ►

about the time back in the 1970s when I participated with vets all over the country in throwing our service medals on the steps of federal buildings to protest the ongoing war in Vietnam.

01:38:32 ►

The memory of that day is still one of my clearest memories of the past, and I still

01:38:37 ►

feel good every time I think about it. So give it a try if you get a chance. I don’t

01:38:42 ►

think you’ll be sorry. Now, a few weeks ago, when Dr. Groves stopped by for a visit,

01:38:48 ►

he told me that he and Dennis McKenna had begun to work out plans for a study

01:38:52 ►

that could shed some more light on ways in which ayahuasca may be used to treat PTSD.

01:38:58 ►

Their most serious roadblock right now is the fact that this research has to be conducted

01:39:03 ►

at a place that’s outside of the United States.

01:39:06 ►

Not the jungle, but at an ayahuasca center with the proper facilities that they’ve worked with in the past.

01:39:12 ►

However, that’s going to make it somewhat expensive for the veterans to travel there.

01:39:17 ►

As you know, Dr. Grobe is one of the few researchers in the field of psychedelics

01:39:22 ►

who has actually conducted human studies using psilocybin

01:39:25 ►

and other studies with MDMA and another study with ayahuasca. And Dennis McKenna is the scientist who

01:39:32 ►

first isolated the processes by which ayahuasca works. In my opinion, you can’t find two better

01:39:38 ►

qualified people to lead a project like this. So if you know of anyone who could help fund this

01:39:45 ►

research well please get in direct contact with either one of them or let

01:39:49 ►

me know through the contact form on our website and I’ll help you get in touch

01:39:52 ►

and speaking of getting in touch with people this now brings me to the last

01:39:58 ►

thing that I want to talk with you about today which is a social media feature

01:40:02 ►

that I’ve added to our website on On the new site, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.com, you’ll see a link to forums, and clicking

01:40:12 ►

that link will take you to the login page for our Find the Others social media section.

01:40:18 ►

And in November, this part of the website, which is only the social media section of

01:40:23 ►

the site, well, it’s going to be available after November only to subscribe members. Thank you. For the rest of this month, however, free charter membership for life is open to anyone who wants to register.

01:40:47 ►

And already there have been well over 50 people who have registered.

01:40:51 ►

But for the most part so far, most of these fellow salonners have just been lurking, waiting for something to happen.

01:40:57 ►

Of course, if something’s going to happen there, it’s going to be up to the members to participate.

01:41:03 ►

However, my guess is that things

01:41:05 ►

will begin to pick up soon. And while the forums will be the most visible sign of activity there,

01:41:11 ►

some other features may actually be of more interest to you. First of all, you can remain

01:41:15 ►

anonymous and use only a screen name. Secondly, there is no advertising on the site and I’m even

01:41:21 ►

trying to keep search engines from indexing it. However, even if they do,

01:41:25 ►

all forum pages require a membership in order to view them. Now the biggest feature of this section

01:41:31 ►

may turn out to be the fact that anyone who wants to can form their own group and these groups can

01:41:36 ►

also be set to be private, invitation only groups. Private messaging is also available and over time

01:41:44 ►

I’m hoping that when someone out in the boondocks is looking to find the others

01:41:48 ►

That this will be a place for them to do exactly that

01:41:51 ►

So if you’re interested even slightly right now

01:41:54 ►

My suggestion is for you to register as a charter member this month while it’s free

01:41:59 ►

And if you are listening to this after the free month

01:42:01 ►

Well, you can still try it out for free as a student

01:42:04 ►

Because anyone who wants to may register as a student and that comes with the first year’s

01:42:09 ►

membership for free. Beginning in November, however, membership will cost one dollar per month

01:42:15 ►

paid a year in advance. And why, you ask, after over 10 years of podcasting, am I setting up a

01:42:21 ►

membership section for our site? Well, each year we’ve been having

01:42:25 ►

a pledge drive to raise funds to support the salon, but each year it also seems that the

01:42:31 ►

same 200 or so people are the ones who are carrying the load. My hope is that we will

01:42:37 ►

now be able to do away with the fundraisers each year and let members who are interacting with one

01:42:42 ►

another pay a small amount to keep things rolling without me having to beg for money every spring.

01:42:48 ►

We’ll see how it works out, but I’m hopeful that this is going to replace our annual fund drive.

01:42:54 ►

And for our wonderful salonners who have made donations to the salon in past years,

01:42:59 ►

well, if you are hearing about this after the free charter membership program ends, never fear.

01:43:04 ►

If you are hearing about this after the free charter membership program ends, never fear.

01:43:12 ►

Everyone, everyone who has ever made a past donation to the salon will be grandfathered into the new site as a free lifetime member.

01:43:19 ►

So when November rolls around and if you are a previous donor who hasn’t gotten around to getting your ID and password yet,

01:43:26 ►

just let me know through the contact link on the site and I’ll see to it that you become a lifetime member at no cost.

01:43:33 ►

After all, without the support that has come in these past ten and a half years from our wonderful donors,

01:43:35 ►

well, this podcast wouldn’t still be here.

01:43:39 ►

Well, that’s probably enough for today.

01:43:42 ►

Next week I’ll talk a little bit more about our new way to find the others,

01:43:47 ►

but for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.

01:44:15 ►

Be careful out there, my friends. Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

471 - Healing For PTSD Is Available

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Program Notes

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