487 - Mainstreaming Psychedelics

Program Notes

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

http://maps.org[NOTE: All quotations are by Rick Doblin.]
“We need to move to a post-prohibition world.”
“The spiritual/mystical experience has profound implications of the kind that we need now.”
“Not in our studies only, but world wide there have now been over 1,100 people who have taken pure MDMA in research since the early ’90s. And there’s never been anybody who overheated and died… . We’ve never had anybody overheat. We’ve never had anybody have a heart attack. We’ve never had anybody have a mental breakdown. So we’ve shown in a clinical setting MDMA can be administered safely.”
“We are currently estimating that MDMA will be a prescription medicine in 2021.”

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)

Lorenzo’s Interview on the Natural Born Alchemist Podcast

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

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic

00:00:22 ►

Salon.

00:00:23 ►

Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:29 ►

And before I say anything else, I first would like to congratulate my friend KMO,

00:00:33 ►

who will soon be podcasting his 500th program.

00:00:37 ►

Now, if you’re an old-timer here in the salon, you’ll probably remember that for the first few years of this podcast, there was a running commentary between KMO, the Dope Fiend, and myself.

00:00:44 ►

there was a running commentary between KMO, the Dope Fiend, and myself.

00:00:51 ►

Sadly, the Dope Fiend has given up podcasting, but KMO’s program gets better and better every week.

00:00:55 ►

And I’m very proud of the fact that I was his guest on his 10th program.

00:00:58 ►

Now he’s coming up on 500.

00:01:01 ►

Well, KMO and I have been at this for a long time now,

00:01:04 ►

and although we were only able to meet in person one time,

00:01:07 ►

I continue to think of him as a good friend.

00:01:12 ►

So, congratulations, KMO, on your 500th program from the Sea Realm.

00:01:18 ►

And if you haven’t already heard some of his podcasts, just surf on over to searelm.com.

00:01:22 ►

That’s C-R-E-A-L-M, searelm.com.

00:01:24 ►

And check it out. In my opinion, KMO is the best interviewer that you’re going to find anywhere here in podcast land.

00:01:31 ►

Now, if you heard last week’s podcast, then you may remember me saying that today I would be podcasting an interview with Emanuel Seferis, the founder of DanceSafe.

00:01:47 ►

of DanceSafe. Well, although I’m somewhat of a geek, I’m also an old geek, and so I ran into a few technical challenges in recording an interview with Emmanuel. Hopefully I’ll get these problems

00:01:53 ►

solved here today or tonight, and next week you will finally get to hear directly from him.

00:01:59 ►

So as I was thinking about what I would podcast today in its place, I was also reading through our forums

00:02:05 ►

and wound up having an exchange of ideas with Rasky, one of our fellow salonners from Denmark.

00:02:11 ►

Among other things, Rasky suggested that I podcast another talk by Rick Doblin.

00:02:17 ►

And, as luck would have it, I still hadn’t played the Planque Norte lecture that Rick gave at last year’s Burning Man Festival.

00:02:25 ►

Then, as I was previewing this talk, the one that I’m about to play for you,

00:02:30 ►

about 12 minutes into it, as you will soon hear,

00:02:33 ►

Rick pointed out the fact that Emanuel Seferus was actually in the audience for this talk.

00:02:38 ►

So, while I haven’t actually held up my promise to bring Emanuel here today,

00:02:43 ►

well, in some small way, he’s here

00:02:45 ►

with us in the audience. Now, if you’re already up to speed on what is going on in the realm of

00:02:52 ►

MDMA research, then you know that the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic

00:02:58 ►

Studies, or MAPS, is the world’s leading organization in the struggle to legalize the use of this powerful substance for medical uses.

00:03:07 ►

In fact, this is the 40th podcast from the salon in which MDMA is being featured.

00:03:12 ►

So, I won’t repeat some of the things that I’ve already said about this amazing substance.

00:03:17 ►

However, as I was previewing today’s talk, I was struck by how amazing it is that we the people, us ordinary non-elected citizens of a

00:03:27 ►

so-called democracy, have had to spend inordinate amounts of time and our own money just to get our

00:03:33 ►

governments off the back of the medical establishment so that professional healers

00:03:38 ►

can use MDMA to do just that, heal people. Now, unless you’re living in a cave somewhere,

00:03:48 ►

you have most likely encountered friends, relatives, and co-workers who sometimes will sneer at you when you say that MDMA and cannabis can be used for healing.

00:03:55 ►

The response that I usually got was for them to tell me that I was just trying to use that as an excuse to get high.

00:04:02 ►

Well, I’m here to tell you that while, yes, I do enjoy getting high from

00:04:06 ►

time to time, for me, however, without my former use of MDMA and my current use of cannabis,

00:04:13 ►

you and I wouldn’t be together here in the salon right now. As you know, I’m a Vietnam vet, and

00:04:20 ►

while I’ve never been formally diagnosed as having PTSD, my ex-wife, I’m sure, will be happy to tell you that she had to live through many of the symptoms of PTSD with me.

00:04:30 ►

I won’t go into that now, but if you’re interested, there’s a 30-minute interview you can watch

00:04:35 ►

that I gave about my experiences with MDMA when it hit the streets in Dallas, Texas during the 1980s.

00:04:41 ►

And that video is titled, Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate, Thank you. Not that I don’t think that’s such a bad idea myself, but that’s not what MAPS is all about.

00:05:06 ►

They are actually struggling to get a medicine approved that none of the major pharmaceutical companies want to see introduced.

00:05:14 ►

And why is that, you ask?

00:05:16 ►

Well, first of all, the patent on it ran out many decades ago, so no big pharma company can get an exclusive on it.

00:05:24 ►

So, no big pharma company can get an exclusive on it.

00:05:32 ►

And the next reason is that to cure someone of PTSD, for example, it isn’t required to take an MDMA pill every day.

00:05:41 ►

In fact, with the proper professional assistance during an MDMA experience, seldom does a patient have to take it more than two or three times.

00:05:46 ►

In other words, there’s no way for big pharma to make a ton of money from this drug.

00:05:49 ►

Fortunately, we have MAPS and Hefter and other organizations that continue to press the idea

00:05:53 ►

that many, many, many lives and families

00:05:55 ►

can receive significant help from MDMA.

00:05:59 ►

And now, here is Chris Pezza,

00:06:02 ►

the organizer of the Planque Norte lectures,

00:06:04 ►

to introduce Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS,

00:06:08 ►

who will bring us up to date on the current state of their legalization battle with the U.S. government

00:06:12 ►

and the current state of their research efforts.

00:06:17 ►

Hi, everyone.

00:06:19 ►

Welcome back to Planque Norte.

00:06:21 ►

Thanks for joining us here on this dusty afternoon in Black Rock City.

00:06:26 ►

I’m very excited to introduce our final speaker for the day, Mr. Rick Doblin.

00:06:35 ►

A man who apparently needs no introduction.

00:06:40 ►

Rick graduated from Harvard with a Ph.D. in public policy

00:06:44 ►

and also studied under Stan Grof, learning holotropic breath work.

00:06:49 ►

In 1986, he founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies,

00:06:53 ►

who is still working to this day to turn MDMA into a legally used medicine in the United States.

00:07:01 ►

And we’re very happy to have him back here for the fifth consecutive year, I believe.

00:07:06 ►

And, yeah, with that, I’ll give it over to Rick.

00:07:09 ►

Welcome.

00:07:09 ►

I’d like to, first off, just welcome you all here

00:07:12 ►

and say I’m so pleased to be able to speak to you today.

00:07:17 ►

And I’m speaking also at 8 o’clock at something freaky this way foams tonight,

00:07:23 ►

and that’s going to be more of a PowerPoint presentation

00:07:26 ►

and more of the data from our studies.

00:07:29 ►

And so what I thought I’d talk about today

00:07:32 ►

was just to give you a more informal overview

00:07:35 ►

of where we’re at with the mainstreaming

00:07:38 ►

of psychedelics and medical marijuana.

00:07:41 ►

And then there’s sort of five sort of moral ethical questions that have come up

00:07:47 ►

for us over the history of maps and some more recently and i just wanted to share with you

00:07:54 ►

you know how i’m perceiving and navigating these kind of ethical moral issues and then just open it up for questions. So to give you a sense, one of the things that’s new for us is the Zendo project that’s three years old.

00:08:15 ►

And what’s so pleasing to me is if you can actually see from, it’s one block away.

00:08:24 ►

We have two Zendos this year, one on either side of the playa, and we actually have our own flag.

00:08:31 ►

So I felt it’s like Columbus landing in America and planting his flag.

00:08:35 ►

We now have Zendo flags.

00:08:36 ►

And so what we’re trying to do with that project is really develop a sense of community supporting each other

00:08:47 ►

through challenging psychedelic experiences.

00:08:50 ►

And that if we can create a community that takes care of its own like that,

00:08:56 ►

that then the kind of ripples that go back to the default world,

00:09:00 ►

that go back out, will be more supportive of this kind of experimentation.

00:09:07 ►

And so I’ve looked.

00:09:08 ►

We’re making so much progress now with medicalizing MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.

00:09:14 ►

And the Hefter and the USONA group is making so much progress now with psilocybin for end-of-life

00:09:21 ►

that I’ve looked around and tried to figure out where are the

00:09:25 ►

likely causes of backlash. Because I first learned about LSD, well, I learned about it in the 60s,

00:09:32 ►

but I learned about it as this is a terrible thing that’s going to cause terrible brain damage,

00:09:37 ►

hurt your chromosomes. And so I only realized how much misinformation I’d been given in 1971 and 72.

00:09:48 ►

And when I woke up to the incredible therapeutic and healing potential of psychedelics,

00:09:49 ►

it was right at the time of the backlash.

00:09:52 ►

And so it was a decision for me at an 18-year-old boy

00:09:57 ►

to decide to devote myself to bringing psychedelics back,

00:10:01 ►

mostly because I needed psychedelic therapy myself,

00:10:05 ►

and I also wanted to work for others.

00:10:10 ►

And so this sense that I woke up right after the backlash has persisted throughout this time,

00:10:18 ►

and I was really fortunate to learn about MDMA in 1982 when it was still legal.

00:10:27 ►

And so I was able to get involved with efforts to try to protect its therapeutic use because the crackdown then was also inevitable because when

00:10:33 ►

I learned about the drug called ADAM, which was the code name of MDMA used in the underground

00:10:39 ►

therapy circles, it was already being sold above ground as ecstasy. And this was the Nancy Reagan just say no escalation of the drug war.

00:10:47 ►

So it was clear that it was going to be another kind of backlash.

00:10:54 ►

And so now that we’re making progress, there’s more psychedelic research going on now than at any time in the last 40 years.

00:11:02 ►

And the kind of research, the range of research that’s taking place is

00:11:07 ►

utterly astonishing even to the point that there’s studies with lifelong meditators zen meditators

00:11:17 ►

who many of whom were motivated early on in their lives by their psychedelic experiences to do meditation and have largely given up psychedelics and zen has a somewhat um unsympathetic view in large

00:11:33 ►

part to psychedelics but now lifelong zen meditators are going to uh in switzerland are

00:11:39 ►

getting brain scans before and after a meditation retreat during which time they get either psilocybin or a placebo

00:11:46 ►

and are looking at the depth of the mystical experience,

00:11:49 ►

how that affects their meditation practice,

00:11:52 ►

how that affects their compassion, their altruism.

00:11:55 ►

So this idea of science and spirituality and religion coming together,

00:12:02 ►

something that we’ve needed ever since Copernicus and Galileo

00:12:06 ►

kind of ran into conflicts with the church, it’s really happening.

00:12:10 ►

There’s research into incredible neuroscience studies of what psychedelics do in the brain

00:12:17 ►

and how they work, and we’re learning a lot more about brain function through that.

00:12:22 ►

There’s studies that are looking at therapeutic applications

00:12:27 ►

for addiction, for end of life, for post-traumatic stress disorder, for autistic adults with social

00:12:32 ►

anxiety. There’s even a study that we’re about to start in January that’s going to be couples

00:12:40 ►

therapy with MDMA, but it’s not really focused on couples therapy because

00:12:46 ►

you can only make a drug into a medicine for a disease.

00:12:51 ►

And so difficult relationship is not a disease.

00:12:55 ►

And so it’s couples therapy where one of the member of the couple has PTSD, but it affects

00:13:00 ►

the relationship.

00:13:03 ►

And so our big challenge this next month or so

00:13:06 ►

is going to be our negotiations with FDA

00:13:08 ►

about whether we can get permission to give both members of the couple MDMA.

00:13:13 ►

And we think we’ve got a really good chance of doing that,

00:13:16 ►

not just the person with PTSD.

00:13:18 ►

So while there’s just this enormous progress with psychedelics,

00:13:24 ►

the concern is where might there be a backlash?

00:13:28 ►

And the initial backlash from the 60s was really about social change.

00:13:34 ►

It was about people who were identified with psychedelics

00:13:37 ►

who got inspired by this sense of connection,

00:13:41 ►

this sense of the spiritual mystical experience,

00:13:45 ►

broke down barriers between themselves

00:13:47 ►

and people that were different from them

00:13:49 ►

or the environment or classic enemies like the Russians.

00:13:55 ►

They just broke down these kind of barriers

00:13:57 ►

and people could identify as more part of the human family,

00:14:01 ►

part of the web of life.

00:14:02 ►

And then people lost a certain amount of fear of death

00:14:04 ►

and were able to invest themselves in this life, in social change,

00:14:10 ►

in a little bit more courageous of a manner.

00:14:12 ►

And so the backlash was really about, the initial backlash was about psychedelics when they go right.

00:14:20 ►

The story that’s sort of told is that there were so many people that were taking psychedelics,

00:14:24 ►

that weren’t prepared for it, that had psychotic breaks, that committed suicide,

00:14:28 ►

jumped out of windows, various things that we needed to protect people from drug abuse.

00:14:34 ►

And it’s certainly the case that there was a lot of drug abuse with psychedelics,

00:14:39 ►

and there were a lot of tragedies and negative outcomes.

00:14:43 ►

It’s not always inherently positive,

00:14:45 ►

but the fundamental cause of the backlash

00:14:47 ►

was this psychedelics affiliated with social change movements.

00:14:53 ►

And it’s hard to criminalize people

00:14:55 ►

for their exercising their constitutional rights,

00:14:58 ►

but if you can criminalize them for the drugs that they use,

00:15:00 ►

then that’s a lever.

00:15:02 ►

Now, 50 years later, that’s really pretty much faded because we have so many

00:15:08 ►

people who have either done psychedelics in their early lives or have done them throughout their

00:15:13 ►

lives since then that have made positive contributions we don’t and stay in society

00:15:18 ►

we don’t really have this idea that if you take psychedelics you’re going to reject the culture, and then you’re going to try to find some little utopia in some island somewhere

00:15:29 ►

or go off and grow soybeans on some isolated property,

00:15:35 ►

this tune-in, turn-on, drop-out.

00:15:37 ►

That hasn’t really happened.

00:15:40 ►

And even when we talk about Burning Man, I mean, we come here to Burning Man,

00:15:43 ►

but then there’s regional Burning Mans all over the world.

00:15:47 ►

It’s not just a retreat isolated here,

00:15:50 ►

so that even Burning Man is being integrated into the fabric of our culture

00:15:54 ►

and cultures around the world.

00:15:56 ►

So this concept, we’ve somehow outgrown this concept of psychedelics

00:16:01 ►

inherently causing people to challenge the status quo

00:16:06 ►

and then tear down the systems.

00:16:09 ►

So the causes of the backlash now that I see are mostly parents worried about their kids.

00:16:16 ►

And so one of the triumphs sort of for us is this month in September issue of the women’s magazine Marie Claire.

00:16:23 ►

They have a tremendous article about

00:16:25 ►

MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD in women. And so when you can start reaching out to women

00:16:32 ►

and to mothers, to families, and help them feel like there’s something wholesome and healing about

00:16:39 ►

these substances when used in a safe way, it changes people’s attitudes and it also makes it more likely that we’ll be able to move

00:16:47 ►

and to integrate these experiences because it’s not really about the drugs.

00:16:52 ►

It’s really about ourselves, and it’s about the experiences

00:16:54 ►

that are catalyzed by these different drugs.

00:16:57 ►

So the Zendo Project is an effort to try in certain high-profile festivals around the world to demonstrate that we can set up systems of self-care, in a sense,

00:17:12 ►

where people, because the idea of a difficult psychedelic experience,

00:17:16 ►

it’s inherent in taking psychedelics.

00:17:19 ►

It brings us in touch with things that we’ve been not looking at,

00:17:24 ►

brings the unconscious up, things that we’ve been not looking at, brings the unconscious up so that, you know, it’s very possible to take low doses of psychedelics and have a lot of fun and to play with them.

00:17:33 ►

But the more that you are involved with them, even people that have done psychedelics for decades, there’s inherent challenges and difficulties.

00:17:44 ►

As we age and go through different cycles of life, there’s always new challenges.

00:17:49 ►

So that the concept that people are going to experiment, they’re looking for celebratory, collaborative, spiritual, communal experiences,

00:18:00 ►

but that some of the times it will tap into something really difficult and that that’s inevitable.

00:18:05 ►

And not only that, but it can be good.

00:18:06 ►

It can be healing, that we need to welcome those kind of experiences.

00:18:10 ►

So having something like the Zendo Project,

00:18:13 ►

and we’ve been able to do it at Africa Burn, at Envision in Costa Rica,

00:18:19 ►

Boom Festival in Portugal.

00:18:22 ►

And so the idea is kind of getting out that festival organizers

00:18:25 ►

and electronic dance music festivals,

00:18:28 ►

things like that,

00:18:29 ►

that it’s part of their responsibility

00:18:30 ►

both to provide physical care

00:18:34 ►

in case you step on a rebar

00:18:36 ►

or hurt yourself in some way,

00:18:37 ►

but also provide psychological support services.

00:18:40 ►

And so this is an idea

00:18:41 ►

that’s been kind of pioneered by DanceSafe

00:18:44 ►

and Emmanuel Sferias, who founded DanceSafe, is here.

00:18:54 ►

And it’s been students for a sensible drug policy do a lot of this work, and they’re at colleges all over the country and the world and so the the conflict of course is between the police and the um the way

00:19:10 ►

our prohibition system has been structured and it’s put a chill on providing these kind of

00:19:16 ►

services so i’ve actually been coming to burning man every year since 2003 and the goal for me has been to try to integrate psychedelic harm reduction in an

00:19:27 ►

open way so that people can know that it’s there and it’s the same way with the medical staff if

00:19:32 ►

you uh you know we all are more relaxed knowing that they’re there it doesn’t help just the people

00:19:39 ►

that need stitches for this or that or need to go to the medical staff. So to have this kind of psychedelic harm reduction provided at an event,

00:19:49 ►

it sort of helps everybody feel more relaxed about what they might be doing.

00:19:56 ►

And so this year is the first year that we have two Zendos, one on each side of the playa.

00:20:03 ►

And it’s also the first year that the Burning Man organization has been willing to mention it in the survival guide.

00:20:11 ►

So we’re seeing that this culture is opening up in ways that have taken 50 years to develop.

00:20:21 ►

And one of the kind of clashes, one of the ways we see this is that in the 60s when there was

00:20:27 ►

this explosion of interest in psychedelics if anybody talked about yoga or talked about

00:20:34 ►

meditation that was something foreign it was a foreign import and it wasn’t really welcomed it

00:20:39 ►

was fearful it was cultish and so now we have meditation uh practice mindfulness is in business

00:20:46 ►

mindfulness is everywhere and meditation and yoga are at the ymca and you know as part of it’s been

00:20:52 ►

normalized what’s also been normalized is in the 60s there was really not much of a

00:20:58 ►

comfort level you could say with the raw aspects of birth and death. So women were tranquilized, men were not allowed in the delivery rooms,

00:21:08 ►

and now we have birthing centers, and our whole attitude towards birth has changed.

00:21:14 ►

Also, people didn’t talk about cancer.

00:21:16 ►

If somebody had cancer, nobody talked about it.

00:21:18 ►

People didn’t really have much to say about death, and now we have hospice centers. So the culture has incorporated psychedelics in so many ways.

00:21:30 ►

I read an interview with Miley Cyrus as a good example.

00:21:36 ►

So her foundation is called the Happy Hippie Foundation,

00:21:41 ►

and she hosted, I think it was the MTV or some video awards on Sunday,

00:21:46 ►

and the interviewer was, you know, what are you going to be doing to make it special?

00:21:50 ►

And her first word was, it’s going to be very psychedelic.

00:21:54 ►

So we’re really primed, and if we can move forward in the path that we’re on,

00:22:01 ►

I think in the next 20, 30 years we can be in a culture where psychedelics are legal,

00:22:08 ►

not just for medicine, but not just for religion

00:22:12 ►

in certain limited religious groups,

00:22:14 ►

but for personal growth and for celebratory experiences

00:22:18 ►

like at Burning Man, for all different kind of uses.

00:22:22 ►

And so… And that’s where we’re headed.

00:22:31 ►

And so what I’m going to now explain

00:22:33 ►

a little bit more is about

00:22:35 ►

where we’re at with the research.

00:22:37 ►

But I want to frame it by saying that

00:22:39 ►

while I think that the

00:22:41 ►

medicalization of psychedelics

00:22:44 ►

is the path of least resistance into our culture,

00:22:49 ►

and it’s not the end goal.

00:22:53 ►

There are a lot of people who are suffering, who are desperate for, who are anxious about dying,

00:22:57 ►

or post-traumatic stress disorder, or depression, or anxiety, or social anxiety, any number of things.

00:23:03 ►

And so it’s very important to develop psychedelics in terms of medicine.

00:23:09 ►

But that that’s still a limited set.

00:23:12 ►

And at the same time, when we talk about religious freedom,

00:23:14 ►

we have the Native American church has freedom to use peyote.

00:23:17 ►

There’s about half a million members of the Native American church that use peyote.

00:23:21 ►

The federal government has tried to limit it to people with 25% Indian blood,

00:23:25 ►

so it’s the only time a religion has had racial limitations.

00:23:30 ►

But the states are mostly open to people from any cultural background participating in NAC

00:23:37 ►

ceremonies. We have the Uniao de Vegetal and the UDV and santo daime these two ayahuasca churches from brazil who now

00:23:47 ►

have the udv won a supreme court case and they can practice their religion but the religious freedom

00:23:54 ►

is very very important but at the same time it’s limited to people who want to buy into a certain

00:24:00 ►

religious framework so many of us have a more an individual spirituality. And so how we get to

00:24:09 ►

that is not going to be through medicine and it’s not going to be through religious freedom.

00:24:22 ►

I’m pretty allergic to churches and religions.

00:24:29 ►

So I think that this idea that we need to move to a post-prohibition world

00:24:40 ►

and the Zendo project is envisioning what a post-prohibition world would look like

00:24:46 ►

in a setting like this and in festival settings so that’s the the bigger vision and and the reason

00:24:54 ►

that that for me is such a clear vision is i had this tremendous opportunity um in 1984 to reach

00:25:03 ►

out to the assistant secretary General of the United Nations.

00:25:06 ►

And he was named Robert Mueller.

00:25:09 ►

And he had written this book, New Genesis, Shaping a Global Spirituality.

00:25:14 ►

And what his thesis was is that we have conflicts between nations

00:25:19 ►

and people identify as I’m American or I’m German or I’m French.

00:25:24 ►

And a lot of these conflicts are nationalistic conflicts,

00:25:28 ►

but beneath them are religious conflicts.

00:25:31 ►

And so what we need is kind of a united spirituality,

00:25:35 ►

not a global religion, but a global spirituality

00:25:38 ►

where we can see that there’s different ways of expressing the same unity that we feel

00:25:43 ►

and that you can feel in a mystical state.

00:25:46 ►

And so he wrote this book about that, and I contacted him by letter

00:25:50 ►

and said, I really believe your book, but you didn’t say a word about psychedelics.

00:25:55 ►

And so do you think that psychedelics,

00:25:57 ►

here’s evidence from the Good Friday experiment that was done at Harvard in 62,

00:26:01 ►

that psychedelics really can teach us about mysticism, about spirituality.

00:26:05 ►

Whether you say it’s genuine or not, still we should learn about it.

00:26:08 ►

And I asked him if he would help to bring back psychedelic research and help me to do that.

00:26:14 ►

And to my utter astonishment, he wrote me a letter and said yes, he would help.

00:26:18 ►

So that’s where this theory really for me, this theory of social change, that psychedelics, or more broadly, the

00:26:28 ►

mystical experience, the spiritual mystical experience, has profound political implications

00:26:34 ►

of a kind that we need now. And we see a lot of people retreating into fundamentalism

00:26:40 ►

as a sort of response to the globalization and they’re they’re scared and

00:26:45 ►

holding on to these limited frameworks and so if we can help more people have this unit of

00:26:51 ►

experience then they’ll relax some of the fundamentalism and for myself at least it my

00:26:57 ►

spirituality came in some ways through my childhood but when i was 13 and I was bar mitzvahed, and I woke

00:27:06 ►

up the next day and I was no different.

00:27:10 ►

You know, my bar mitzvah did not make me into a man, and I felt really deprived and something

00:27:16 ►

went wrong and God was busy.

00:27:19 ►

But years later when I discovered psychedelics, I thought this can make me into a man.

00:27:26 ►

This is the kind of challenge, the kind of connection.

00:27:29 ►

So I think that this sort of global spirituality, for many people, one of the easiest, not that it’s easy,

00:27:37 ►

but one of the more direct easy accesses will be through psychedelics.

00:27:40 ►

So that’s, for me, the fundamental reason why to be working on this why i’ve sort of

00:27:46 ►

maps was started in 86 the same year bernie man was started

00:27:51 ►

why i’ve devoted my life since i was 18 to doing this so where we’re at with the research is that

00:27:59 ►

we are now at a place that is the end of phase two.

00:28:06 ►

We’re not there yet, but in order to make a drug into a medicine,

00:28:11 ►

normally what happens is you do initial studies in animals,

00:28:14 ►

you get some sense of the toxicity,

00:28:16 ►

you do phase one studies in humans who are not patients,

00:28:21 ►

but you just characterize the drug.

00:28:23 ►

Once you have a sense of what the side effects are, what the main effects are through a broad range of doses, then you can

00:28:30 ►

go into phase two, which is your patient population.

00:28:34 ►

And you need to do a lot of stuff in phase two, primarily to figure out how to design

00:28:39 ►

phase three.

00:28:40 ►

And phase three are the large-scale, multi-site, pivotal studies that are used by FDA to prove safety and efficacy. And so where we’re at now is we are nearing the end of a

00:28:53 ►

15-year process of doing an international series of phase two pilot studies with MDMA for post-traumatic

00:29:00 ►

stress disorder. So there’s a lot of reasons that I won’t go into why I felt that

00:29:06 ►

MDMA and PTSD are the combination that can make it through the system, because we could choose

00:29:11 ►

any psychedelic in any patient population. And the reason, briefly, is just that MDMA is not

00:29:17 ►

your classic psychedelic. It’s not like LSD or psilocybin or mescaline or ayahuasca or ibogaine,

00:29:28 ►

psilocybin or mescaline or ayahuasca or ibogaine, which tend to dissolve the control structures of our brains, dissolve the filters, and have this more material comes past through the filters.

00:29:35 ►

And then you can feel how much we’re all perceiving all the time. And you can have these

00:29:39 ►

senses of connection. There’s a certain kind of fear of dissolving and of letting go. And that’s

00:29:46 ►

why a lot of times people confuse this sort of loss of ego with physical death. And in difficult

00:29:51 ►

psychedelic experiences, a lot of times people feel they’re physically dying when really it’s

00:29:55 ►

just this ego death process. But MDMA is not working like that at all. MDMA kind of sinks

00:30:03 ►

you into yourself. It helps you do self-acceptance.

00:30:06 ►

You don’t have a lot of perceptual impact. And at the same time, you can have a verbal

00:30:12 ►

conversation. I like to say that MDMA is the kind of drug that when you take it, if your

00:30:17 ►

mother calls on the phone, which has happened to me, you can have a good conversation with her and not totally embarrass yourself.

00:30:29 ►

And actually weave her into your boot a little bit. I did MDMA one time. My grandmother was

00:30:35 ►

suffering from unipolar depression and my parents were law-abiding kind of people.

00:30:43 ►

And they said I could only work with her if we got legal permission.

00:30:46 ►

And we were never able to do that.

00:30:49 ►

So I took MDMA and spent the day with her.

00:30:52 ►

And was able, through her depression, which, you know,

00:30:56 ►

everything is a closed circle going nowhere,

00:30:58 ►

I was able to have more patience and bring out this deep family story

00:31:04 ►

that she shared with me about a regret that she

00:31:07 ►

had about a romance before my grandfather. My grandfather married 49 years and prior romance

00:31:13 ►

was broken up by her parents. And so my mother didn’t even know the story. This was a hidden

00:31:18 ►

story that came out under the influence of MDMA through sort of a contact high. So MDMA is like

00:31:24 ►

that kind of thing. You can sit there with

00:31:26 ►

your grandmother and she’s not going to go, you must be tripping. So there’s a gentleness to it.

00:31:36 ►

And actually, we’ve done a fair amount of work with people that had difficult

00:31:40 ►

psychedelic experiences earlier in their lives and were unable to integrate it.

00:31:46 ►

And there’s a fair number of people, actually, that are reluctant to smoke marijuana because

00:31:50 ►

marijuana brings back some of these anxieties from prior LSD experiences. And we’ve been able

00:31:56 ►

to work with people like that with MDMA and help them go back to the original, I wouldn’t say

00:32:03 ►

necessarily trauma, but the original challenge and the fearful experiences that they couldn’t integrate at the time,

00:32:10 ►

and then with MDMA help them integrate that.

00:32:13 ►

And that’s been the case for me as well.

00:32:15 ►

I’ve had some very difficult LSD trips early in my life,

00:32:19 ►

and once I started using MDMA, it was able to help me integrate a lot of that.

00:32:24 ►

So I feel like MDMA can help individuals integrate a bad trip.

00:32:29 ►

We can help society with MDMA integrate a difficult emergence of psychedelics in the 60s.

00:32:36 ►

The other part of MDMA is that the basic idea is that if you’re going to be a therapist working with psychedelics

00:32:45 ►

is that if you’re going to be a therapist working with psychedelics and working with patients,

00:32:50 ►

that you will be more effective if you’ve experienced the drug yourself.

00:32:52 ►

It’s kind of an obvious thing.

00:32:57 ►

You know, meditation teachers have meditated.

00:32:59 ►

You know, yoga teachers do yoga.

00:33:06 ►

So how is it that this idea that if you’re a therapist or a psychiatrist, if you want to work with these drugs,

00:33:08 ►

it’s pretty clear that you would be more effective if you’ve taken it.

00:33:12 ►

You don’t have to take it.

00:33:13 ►

People can be very effective therapists sitting with people with psychedelics

00:33:16 ►

without having done psychedelics themselves.

00:33:18 ►

But the resistance in psychiatry and psychology to taking LSD is pretty strong.

00:33:25 ►

I mean, there’s a lot of psychologists and psychiatrists that are open to do it. in psychiatry and psychology to taking LSD is pretty strong.

00:33:28 ►

I mean, there’s a lot of psychologists and psychiatrists that are open to do it.

00:33:35 ►

But it’s more likely that we can speak in a calmer way to the healing professions and suggest that they might consider taking MDMA.

00:33:41 ►

And we actually have permission from the FDA to give MDMA to therapists as part

00:33:46 ►

of their training. Yeah. And it’s, that for me was, that was about six years ago, and that was

00:33:58 ►

the sign of good faith that the FDA was really willing to try to let the science go forward

00:34:06 ►

because we explained to them that we needed to be able to train therapists,

00:34:12 ►

that there’s only a certain number of people that have underground credentials

00:34:15 ►

and above-ground credentials.

00:34:16 ►

And as we try to be mainstreaming,

00:34:18 ►

we’re going to be working with more and more people who don’t come from this culture,

00:34:22 ►

who have never done psychedelics before.

00:34:24 ►

And so we said to the

00:34:25 ►

fda we need to to do this kind of in a protocol context because it’s a scheduled drug and the

00:34:31 ►

fda said well you can’t really do that just for that but if you can design a study of some sort

00:34:38 ►

we don’t even care what it is but you study something um and then you can once you have this protocol then you can

00:34:45 ►

limit who’s in the study to people that you’re training to be therapists so they they sort of

00:34:52 ►

gave us the key to the the fda regulatory lock and we designed this study and they gave us

00:34:57 ►

permission and we’ve now we can bring people from all over the world therapists we brought from

00:35:02 ►

canada from israel throughout the United States, from England,

00:35:05 ►

to take MDMA in a therapeutic setting and train them.

00:35:10 ►

So MDMA, because it’s more gentle, will be more adopted easily by therapists and psychiatrists.

00:35:18 ►

And then PTSD.

00:35:19 ►

PTSD is something that is, right now, it’s kind of a national scandal that we have all these people coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan.

00:35:29 ►

We have all these people left from Vietnam with PTSD.

00:35:32 ►

And we don’t have treatments that work for everybody.

00:35:36 ►

We have some, the FDA has approved Zoloft and Paxil, two SSRIs for PTSD.

00:35:42 ►

They barely work.

00:35:43 ►

They do work a little bit. They cut the PTSD symptoms

00:35:47 ►

down a tiny bit, but some of the studies show they only worked in women. They didn’t even work in men

00:35:53 ►

for reasons that are not quite clear. But we also have non-drug psychotherapies like cognitive

00:35:59 ►

processing therapy or prolonged exposure, and they work for a lot of people too. But there’s a large subset of people for whom it’s too painful to talk about their trauma

00:36:10 ►

in an unaided way.

00:36:13 ►

And last year, as an example, the Veterans Administration spent around $6 bi ll i o n,$ 6

00:36:20 ►

billion just giving disability payments to veterans who are traumatized and are incapable of fully working.

00:36:29 ►

So when we talk about the cost of war, when we think about the people who die, the people who get wounded,

00:36:36 ►

the sort of emotional wounds of war and how a lot of times it’s young people that are in the war,

00:36:41 ►

and then this is $6 billion growing and growing for the next 40 years so there’s an enormous social problem there’s a sense that um we need to come

00:36:52 ►

up with new solutions and then it’s the case that there’s way more people that have ptsd from

00:36:57 ►

childhood sexual abuse or rape or car accidents or even um getting cancer in operations than there

00:37:03 ►

are from war so there’s millions millions millions and millions of people, and they could be anybody.

00:37:10 ►

So it’s a little bit different when we think about psychedelics for treating drug addiction,

00:37:15 ►

which is one of the best uses of psychedelics is treating people who are addicted.

00:37:20 ►

But, again, the addict is often the other.

00:37:23 ►

And so we wanted to sort of say that this is for the

00:37:27 ►

mainstream so that’s how we got ptsd and that’s how we chose mdma and just two weeks ago we did

00:37:36 ►

the last experimental session in a study of 24 subjects mdassisted psychotherapy for veterans. We decided that our first study was 20 subjects, mostly women, survivors of childhood sexual

00:37:50 ►

abuse, adult rape and assault, people who had PTSD an average of over 19 years.

00:37:57 ►

Really stuck.

00:37:58 ►

And over 80% of them no longer had PTSD at the end of the study.

00:38:03 ►

Thanks.

00:38:14 ►

had PTSD at the end of the study. So then the question is, is MDMA just for this group? What about men and women who’ve been involved in war? So for political reasons, and a lot of this is

00:38:20 ►

like science, but it’s political science. So we so we said okay we’re going to do this

00:38:26 ►

study we want to do veterans but just for the messaging we’re going to because we always are

00:38:32 ►

saying what the title of the study is the message is this is a study for veterans firefighters and

00:38:37 ►

police officers so i thought for for first offenders you know this is i mean first responders

00:38:43 ►

oops But for first offenders, you know, this is, I mean, first responders.

00:38:46 ►

Oops.

00:38:51 ►

Oops.

00:38:59 ►

So we actually didn’t think we’d get any firefighters or police officers,

00:39:01 ►

but I just wanted to say to the police, this is for you.

00:39:04 ►

And it’s really true that when you think about the police,

00:39:06 ►

they have a very difficult job.

00:39:10 ►

If they weren’t responsible for enforcing drug laws,

00:39:12 ►

we would have a whole different relationship with the police.

00:39:13 ►

We’d be grateful.

00:39:15 ►

It would be a whole different story.

00:39:18 ►

And so when you think about what it’s like to be a police officer, and I had this sort of compassionate moment one time,

00:39:24 ►

and this is how it came about. We have a study

00:39:27 ►

for Ibogaine for the treatment of addiction. It’s an observational study. It was in British

00:39:32 ►

Columbia. And I got a call from a psychologist in British Columbia, and he wanted to know about

00:39:40 ►

the Ibogaine project. And that morning, I had been on the phone with our office near Santa Cruz,

00:39:49 ►

and I was talking to Valerie, the woman who was working there,

00:39:52 ►

and she was telling me how there were police all over the place,

00:39:55 ►

and they were looking around because a few houses away,

00:39:59 ►

a woman had been murdered, and it was a pregnant woman.

00:40:03 ►

And I just somehow thought, God god how horrible to be a police

00:40:06 ►

officer and have to go there and see that and it was just so rare for me to feel compassion for the

00:40:13 ►

police so that’s how i was feeling and then i get this call in the afternoon from the psychologist

00:40:19 ►

and he started talking to me about the eyebanging project and then we talked for a few minutes

00:40:25 ►

and he said, Rick, I have to really stop and tell you,

00:40:27 ►

I’m a psychologist for the police,

00:40:29 ►

for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

00:40:32 ►

And I said, well, do you have people with PTSD?

00:40:35 ►

And he said, yeah, we have loads of people.

00:40:37 ►

So that’s what sensitized me to it,

00:40:39 ►

a rare moment of compassion for the police.

00:40:44 ►

And so then we put it, veterans, firefighters, and police officers.

00:40:48 ►

So we just had the last experimental session a couple weeks ago,

00:40:52 ►

and I’m really proud to report that we have 20 veterans, three firefighters,

00:40:58 ►

including one who is from New York at 9-11,

00:41:02 ►

and we have one police officer actually volunteered for the study.

00:41:08 ►

And, yeah, so it’s sort of this messaging is starting to come across.

00:41:17 ►

So the results of this study are in some ways mirroring the first study.

00:41:24 ►

We have excellent results.

00:41:26 ►

But what we have been surprised about is that one of the biggest issues of psychedelic research

00:41:32 ►

is how do you do a double-blind study?

00:41:36 ►

You know, how do you take a drug that if you’ve taken it, you’re pretty clear, you know, you’ve taken it.

00:41:43 ►

And if you have an inactive placebo, you know, you pretty much can tell.

00:41:48 ►

So it’s really difficult.

00:41:50 ►

So there are some ideas that you use an active control that’s something other than a psychedelic.

00:41:57 ►

And in the Good Friday experience, it was nicotinic acid, which gives you warm flush.

00:42:02 ►

It gives you something happening.

00:42:08 ►

And it comes on before the psilocybin would come on, too. So it turns out, though, that everybody was able to guess

00:42:13 ►

after a while. So it’s not really effective as a double-blind. So then I thought the best way to

00:42:19 ►

do double-blind is to do dose response, meaning that everybody gets the test drug,

00:42:28 ►

but the people who get the lower dose, and everybody knows they’re going to get it,

00:42:30 ►

but people will be blind to the dose.

00:42:34 ►

So then you’d show that the people that got the higher dose or the middle dose did better than the people that got the low dose.

00:42:36 ►

And this is, I spent, part of my Ph.D. dissertation was on this exact issue,

00:42:41 ►

the double blind, and this was the solution I came up with was the dose-response study.

00:42:47 ►

So the beautiful thing about research is that you get to test your theories.

00:42:52 ►

So it turned out my theory, which made so much sense,

00:42:55 ►

you know, written down there on paper, I got credit for it, I graduated,

00:43:00 ►

but in practice the theory failed.

00:43:02 ►

And it was surprising to us that it failed. But it failed in two ways.

00:43:06 ►

The first way that it failed is that the low dose, and we’ve, in our different studies in Switzerland, in Israel, in Canada, three now in the United States,

00:43:17 ►

we’ve tested 25 milligrams, 30 milligrams, 40 milligrams, 75 milligrams, 100 milligrams, 125.

00:43:24 ►

30 milligrams, 40 milligrams, 75 milligrams, 100 milligrams, 125.

00:43:33 ►

So the first way that this grand plan of mine failed was that there’s an antitherapeutic effect for the low dose.

00:43:40 ►

So that, I mean, we hear a lot about microdosing of LSD and psilocybin.

00:43:45 ►

And actually, there’s a lot of benefit to microdosing those drugs.

00:43:52 ►

You know, you get a little bit open, but you can still carry on through your day. It’s a little bit different when you start working with patients because then they’re slightly activated. So what

00:43:57 ►

we see with the, I wouldn’t call it microdosing, but in the 25, 30, 40 milligrams of MDMA,

00:44:03 ►

and again, keep in mind, these are people that

00:44:06 ►

have chronic treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress disorder. They’re with therapists for

00:44:12 ►

eight hours, a male-female co-therapist team. They’re listening to music, and they have

00:44:17 ►

the intention of working with difficult things that for many, many years before, they’ve been

00:44:22 ►

unable. Every time they come up, they can’t process them and they can’t stuff them away.

00:44:27 ►

So that’s constantly there.

00:44:28 ►

So that the low dose of MDMA actually has this antitherapeutic effect.

00:44:33 ►

And people have dropped out of our studies.

00:44:35 ►

They don’t want to be in those doses.

00:44:37 ►

So it doesn’t serve in a way as a good control.

00:44:43 ►

And when you start marching the dose up to see where is there this

00:44:47 ►

level, there is a fair amount of confusion between low dose and full dose for people that have never

00:44:52 ►

done it before. But what we discovered to our utter shock in this study is that the 75 milligram

00:44:58 ►

group is actually doing better than the 125, which is our full dose.

00:45:09 ►

And, you know, there’s more body rushes from the higher doses.

00:45:11 ►

There’s more mystical feelings from the higher doses.

00:45:14 ►

There’s more connection.

00:45:15 ►

There’s a lot going on.

00:45:19 ►

And there’s less going on in 75 milligrams. And so what we’ve started to look at is why might it be that the 75 milligram dose is doing so well

00:45:26 ►

and that’s got us in touch with people who are doing research into memory and there’s a field

00:45:32 ►

called memory reconsolidation and what that means is that when we recall something we sort of it’s

00:45:41 ►

stored in different parts of our brain and the memory is kind of consolidated

00:45:45 ►

and then it’s not like you put the book back on the shelf you kind of have to rewrite the memory

00:45:50 ►

and you reconsolidate the memory and when you do that that helps explain how memories change over

00:45:56 ►

time it’s really um common that there are memories of certain things will will change

00:46:06 ►

common that our memories of certain things will change. And with the memory reconsolidation, if you have a traumatic memory, then the memory of the incident is encoded by that fear from the

00:46:14 ►

trauma and the anxiety. But if you can recall a memory when you’re feeling safe and supported,

00:46:20 ►

then when you reconsolidate the memory, you can remember the incident, but it’s not linked so much to the fear and the anxiety.

00:46:28 ►

And so you can process it and move forward.

00:46:30 ►

So MDMA enhances activity in the frontal cortex,

00:46:34 ►

decreases activity in the amygdala where we store fear,

00:46:37 ►

the frontal cortex where we put things in association.

00:46:40 ►

So it’s now starting to seem like at the medium dose, people are more grounded, and they’re able to remember the trauma, and they’re not distracted by body rushes, by other kinds of feelings.

00:46:55 ►

So I’m not saying that the phase three studies we’re going to do just at 75 milligrams because some people seem to need higher.

00:47:04 ►

It’s variable.

00:47:05 ►

So what we’ve learned, though, is that there is something fundamentally different

00:47:11 ►

from the research with psilocybin and LSD.

00:47:13 ►

And I don’t know how many of you heard Steve Ross’s talk yesterday.

00:47:17 ►

It was a really great talk.

00:47:19 ►

But what he talked about was how in the work with psilocybin with alcoholism,

00:47:23 ►

the work with in the past, the current work that they’re work with psilocybin with alcoholism the work with in the past the

00:47:26 ►

current work that they’re doing with psilocybin with cancer patients with anxiety that there is

00:47:31 ►

a correlation between the depth of the mystical experience and the therapeutic outcome that’s a

00:47:37 ►

really important point that that this mystical experience not only has political implications

00:47:42 ►

it has therapeutic implications. And that

00:47:45 ►

particularly when you think of something existential like your death and this mystical

00:47:52 ►

sense of connection, the timelessness, the sweep of the billions of years of history,

00:47:57 ►

energy is being conserved, you can understand how there’s a direct correlation between the

00:48:03 ►

mystical experience and therapeutic outcomes.

00:48:05 ►

And a lot of their therapy with the classic psychedelics is directed at trying to help people have a mystical experience.

00:48:12 ►

What we found in the MDMA is that there still are a fair number of people that do have mystical experiences.

00:48:19 ►

The actual most mystical experience of my life ever was under the influence of MDMA.

00:48:27 ►

actual most mystical experience of my life ever was under the influence of MDMA. So there is no correlation, though, we found between the depth of the mystical experience and therapeutic outcome.

00:48:31 ►

So it seems like there’s something going on with this memory reconsolidation. And we have had

00:48:37 ►

the very good fortune and the very sad tragedy of having a tremendous relationship with Dr.

00:48:43 ►

Richard Rockefeller. He was, David Rockef relationship with Dr. Richard Rockefeller.

00:48:51 ►

He was, David Rockefeller is the oldest living Rockefeller. Richard was a doctor. He went into being chairman of the board of advisors of Doctors Without Borders. And he was someone who was really

00:48:58 ►

sensitized to whole populations being traumatized by being refugees or being in war zones. And so

00:49:03 ►

he tried to figure out how do you help all these people.

00:49:06 ►

We don’t have the resources for therapy for all these people.

00:49:10 ►

And so he started gravitating towards MDMA.

00:49:12 ►

And so he started working together with him.

00:49:16 ►

And about a year and a half ago, he died in a plane crash.

00:49:22 ►

And so his family, to honor him,

00:49:25 ►

have started research at Rockefeller University in New York City,

00:49:29 ►

which is filled with Nobel Prize winners.

00:49:31 ►

It’s a highly esteemed institution.

00:49:33 ►

And so they’re doing research with animal models

00:49:38 ►

looking at memory reconsolidation,

00:49:40 ►

which is also helping in the further mainstreaming this concept.

00:49:44 ►

Because if you have a mechanism of action, then it’s easier for people to understand how this might work.

00:49:54 ►

It’s not just stories.

00:49:56 ►

So what we are able to say now is that we have treated about 90 people in these Phase II studies at a cost of somewhere 15 years and roughly $5 or$ 6 million.

00:50:11 ►

And the data that we have is very compelling.

00:50:14 ►

And so what we’ve found is that it works in men and women.

00:50:18 ►

It works regardless of the cause of PTSD.

00:50:22 ►

So that’s the most important thing is once you have PTSD,

00:50:26 ►

whatever the cause was, your brain has changed in certain ways,

00:50:29 ►

you respond in certain ways.

00:50:30 ►

So we can enroll anybody we want into these studies as long as they have PTSD.

00:50:35 ►

We don’t have to say only certain kind of cause.

00:50:38 ►

We’ve also learned that in a therapeutic setting that it’s extremely safe,

00:50:44 ►

that we have had, there’s now been not in our

00:50:47 ►

studies only but there’s been over 1100 people that have taken pure mdma in research since the

00:50:53 ►

early 90s and there’s never been anybody overheated and died people can take pure mdma as as dance

00:51:00 ►

tries to let people know that that you can take pure MDMA, you can dance, you can overheat, you can dehydrate, and you can die.

00:51:07 ►

Or you can dance, overheat, and drink too much water and die.

00:51:11 ►

We’ve never had anybody overheat.

00:51:13 ►

We’ve never had anybody have a heart attack.

00:51:15 ►

We’ve never had anybody have a mental breakdown.

00:51:18 ►

So we’ve shown that in a clinical setting, MDMA can be administered safely.

00:51:22 ►

And we’ve shown that our treatment model,

00:51:25 ►

there’s something about this memory reconsolidation

00:51:29 ►

that produces changes that last.

00:51:32 ►

It’s not just this afterglow from having done the psychedelics,

00:51:36 ►

from having done MDMA.

00:51:38 ►

So we’ve done our first study.

00:51:39 ►

We did a three-and-a-half-year follow-up and tracked people down

00:51:43 ►

and found that the benefits had sustained over time which is really remarkable on average what that actually means though is that

00:51:50 ►

when you look at the raw data there were several people that relapsed which means that everybody

00:51:57 ►

else kept doing even better and the people that relapsed we’re not trying to say that you

00:52:02 ►

work with mdma you get over your ptsd and then you’re set for the rest of your life because life is just this continual flow of challenges.

00:52:11 ►

So we’re able to say now that there is this durable remission.

00:52:17 ►

When people relapsed, we got permission from FDA to give an additional session to people, to these three people that relapsed.

00:52:23 ►

And they all got better. Anded and two of them they all got better

00:52:26 ►

and then um only two of them sustained that one of them relapsed again so and that was a homeless

00:52:32 ►

person who didn’t have social supports but it does last it’s safe it’s highly efficacious we have

00:52:40 ►

effect sizes which is a new um so so normally you hear about statistical significance and you can

00:52:46 ►

have statistical significance for an insignificant effect meaning that if you have large numbers of

00:52:53 ►

people in your studies you can show that it’s not by chance that they differ even if they differ by

00:52:58 ►

just a little amount so the real question though is we don’t want to be helping people just a little

00:53:04 ►

what is the the effect so there’s a new statistical measure called effect size which takes the depth of the

00:53:11 ►

effect divided by the variance the variability and that’s the effect size so we have very large

00:53:17 ►

effect sizes and what we’ve done recently to give you a sense of how things are changing, we actually have a senior retired FDA official who’s acting as a consultant to MAPS.

00:53:32 ►

And he’s a phenomenal person.

00:53:35 ►

He was in charge of psychiatry products at FDA.

00:53:38 ►

And he said that, well, I’ll give you an example.

00:53:41 ►

He also approved a study that we are doing in marijuana.

00:53:46 ►

So I’m most focused on psychedelics.

00:53:49 ►

Psychedelics are about spirituality, about curing people from different illnesses.

00:53:53 ►

Marijuana as a medicine for PTSD is about reducing symptoms.

00:53:58 ►

It’s not a cure.

00:53:59 ►

And people who use marijuana every day for PTSD, it can help them.

00:54:04 ►

But if they stop using it, a lot of times their symptoms come back.

00:54:09 ►

So when we had this meeting at the FDA, at the end of the meeting,

00:54:13 ►

and they said they were going to approve the study,

00:54:15 ►

I said, I just want you all to know that our priority is really MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.

00:54:20 ►

People get it only a few times.

00:54:21 ►

They don’t get it on a daily basis.

00:54:23 ►

It’s one of the reasons Big Pharma is not interested.

00:54:26 ►

But that’s our priority.

00:54:28 ►

And he said, you know, Rick, you shouldn’t apologize for just treating symptoms.

00:54:34 ►

He said, in psychiatry, that’s about all we do.

00:54:37 ►

And so they have effect sizes that are usually between 0.3 and 0.4, not even 1.

00:54:43 ►

And our effect sizes are over 1.

00:54:45 ►

So we have tremendous data from the Phase II studies.

00:54:50 ►

We’re going to have the last primary outcome measure in December,

00:54:54 ►

and then we’re gathering this information and we’re going to be submitting it to the FDA.

00:54:59 ►

And it’s called an end-of-Phase II meeting to try to design Phase III.

00:55:03 ►

And then there’s going to follow that for us it’s called breakthrough therapy where you ask for a special condition for drugs

00:55:10 ►

for serious or life-threatening illnesses for which other treatments aren’t available and if

00:55:14 ►

they give it to you you get special assistance in doing your studies so we are currently estimating that MDMA will be a prescription medicine in 2021, that it will cost around

00:55:37 ►

$22 million to do these phase three studies.

00:55:42 ►

And there’s something about Burning Man that has been tremendously helpful in raising the money for this.

00:55:51 ►

So the first I’ll say is that we talked a lot about there’s a fellow,

00:55:57 ►

a Shauna Haley, who has been a longtime burner, who is on our board of directors, a brilliant software guy.

00:56:03 ►

And he was just a wonderful, wonderful man.

00:56:07 ►

Died at age 62 and left $5.5 million to MAPS.

00:56:14 ►

And we’ve restricted it.

00:56:15 ►

The board of directors has restricted it to our Phase III MDMA PTSD studies

00:56:20 ►

with a little bit of it going to studies of autistic adults with social anxiety.

00:56:26 ►

So we have that.

00:56:27 ►

Now, also, there’s the foam camp on the other side, Dr. Bronner’s camp.

00:56:34 ►

So David Bronner is on our board of directors.

00:56:38 ►

And I met David for the first time in person.

00:56:42 ►

We had bonded over our lawsuits against the DEA at a distance.

00:56:48 ►

We’d bonded at a distance.

00:56:49 ►

He was suing the DEA to try to get hemp permission to grow hemp.

00:56:54 ►

We were suing the DEA to try to get permission to grow marijuana.

00:56:58 ►

But we’d never met each other.

00:57:00 ►

And so I was working earlier years at sanctuary where we were

00:57:06 ►

working with the Rangers and David came in and that’s built a beautiful

00:57:10 ►

relationship and David has recently said that they will commit a million a year

00:57:15 ►

for five years yeah starting in 2017 and the reason it starts in 2017.

00:57:25 ►

And the reason it starts in 2017

00:57:28 ►

is he wants to invest money to legalize marijuana.

00:57:33 ►

And so now we’re more or less,

00:57:35 ►

you know, we’re close to possibly,

00:57:37 ►

we’re close to halfway there.

00:57:38 ►

And it’s been in large part because of Burning Man

00:57:41 ►

and the connections and the relationships

00:57:43 ►

that have been built here.

00:57:45 ►

So in addition to this work with MDMA, for post-traumatic stress disorder,

00:57:51 ►

we also have two additional patient populations.

00:57:54 ►

One is, as I said, social anxiety in autistic adults.

00:57:58 ►

MDMA stimulates oxytocin and prolactin, the hormones of nurturing and bonding,

00:58:03 ►

and it helps people to connect.

00:58:06 ►

And people who are often on the autistic spectrum have a hard time connecting. They have a hard time

00:58:10 ►

reading body language. And this is not something that we thought up ourselves. There’s a bunch of

00:58:15 ►

people who came to places like Burning Man, who came to raves, young people who were on the autistic

00:58:20 ►

spectrum, took ecstasy, and then they found that they were better able to understand their emotions

00:58:24 ►

or other people’s emotions. And then they put a story on the internet.

00:58:28 ►

And then somebody else says a story on the internet. And there was a woman who gave a

00:58:32 ►

talk here yesterday, Alicia Danforth. And she’s with Charlie Grobe is doing our study of 12 people

00:58:41 ►

with autistic adults with social anxiety. And so she did her PhD dissertation gathering all of these stories

00:58:47 ►

and talking to the families, talking to the people,

00:58:50 ►

as many who had their e-mails that she could identify,

00:58:53 ►

and it seemed like a real thing.

00:58:54 ►

And we used Alicia’s data from her PhD and submitted it to the FDA

00:58:57 ►

as justification for doing the study, and they gave us permission.

00:59:02 ►

And then the other area that we’re looking at right now

00:59:04 ►

is MDMA for people with life-threatening illnesses

00:59:07 ►

that are scared of dying, and that’s happening in San Anselmo.

00:59:11 ►

And just to give you a sense of how the FDA, the DEA, how much progress we’re making,

00:59:18 ►

you know, a lot of times you want to do studies in institutional settings for the credibility,

00:59:24 ►

but they’re also, they come with their own limitations.

00:59:27 ►

So I’m not really that, I’m allergic to religion.

00:59:29 ►

I’m pretty allergic to institutions as well.

00:59:32 ►

And so we have set up our studies mostly in private office settings.

00:59:36 ►

But this particular study, we decided to try to see if we could do it at the doctor’s home office.

00:59:42 ►

Now, the home office is at the top near Mount Tam,

00:59:46 ►

and it’s surrounded by redwoods and by nature and trees

00:59:50 ►

and a big hot tub on the deck out back.

00:59:53 ►

And we actually got permission from the DEA and FDA and IRB

00:59:57 ►

to do this in this gorgeous, gorgeous setting,

01:00:00 ►

as far away as institutional setting as you could get.

01:00:03 ►

So those are the three main patient populations.

01:00:05 ►

And then we have a fourth one that’s about to start in January.

01:00:09 ►

And this is something that Richard Rockefeller and his cousin, Senator Jay Rockefeller,

01:00:14 ►

who didn’t run for re-election but was on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee,

01:00:18 ►

they helped us in our relationship with the military.

01:00:21 ►

And we’ve been to the Pentagon.

01:00:23 ►

We’ve been to the VA.

01:00:25 ►

We’ve had all these discussions. So we’re funding a study with VA therapists. And it’s using some of their

01:00:33 ►

existing methods. And so when the VA first started thinking about which of their therapists to work

01:00:38 ►

with us, they thought, aha, MDMA, love drug, hug drug. So couples therapy.

01:00:45 ►

So that’s the study we’re about to start in January is couples where one of them has PTSD.

01:00:51 ►

So that’s the range with MDMA.

01:00:54 ►

We’re also, because politics are so arbitrary in some ways based on historical factors,

01:01:02 ►

it’s much easier to do research with psychedelics than it is with marijuana.

01:01:07 ►

And it’s because there’s a government monopoly on the supply of marijuana,

01:01:10 ►

and you can only use federally legal marijuana for research.

01:01:14 ►

And so I’ve always felt that if we can, because I’m sensitive to backlash,

01:01:20 ►

I felt like now if the science of medical marijuana is blocked by politics,

01:01:29 ►

that could just switch back to stopping the psychedelics.

01:01:36 ►

But if we can unblock the research with marijuana, then that protects the work with psychedelics and it protects this idea of scientific freedom.

01:01:43 ►

So since 1992, we’ve been – I worked with Dr. Donald Abrams, who’s one of the leading AIDS researchers.

01:01:46 ►

We had a study for marijuana for AIDS wasting.

01:01:48 ►

Marijuana helps with appetite, with nausea.

01:01:54 ►

We had FDA approval, IRB approval, and NIDA, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, refused to sell us the marijuana.

01:01:57 ►

And we couldn’t do the study.

01:02:04 ►

Eventually, we were permitted to do a modified version of the study looking at the risks of marijuana in AIDS patients. But we couldn’t look at the benefits. But we sort of snuck that in a little bit. But over that time,

01:02:09 ►

then we tried to do work with marijuana with migraines. We got FDA IRB approval. They wouldn’t

01:02:15 ►

give us the marijuana. Then we did a sneaky kind of a study with marijuana vaporizers and water

01:02:20 ►

pipes where we got, there’s a few people that get marijuana on a compassionate basis from the federal government. We got them to send the marijuana to a lab and we tested it and we

01:02:30 ►

showed that, you know, water pipes don’t really filter anything out. The bong water looks terrible,

01:02:37 ►

but it’s because it’s an equal part cannabinoids and tar. So the smoke that comes out of the water

01:02:43 ►

pipe is the same proportion of cannabinoids and tar as goes in. But a vaporizer doesn’t burn it, it heats it up.

01:02:50 ►

So we did that study. Then we published the results and Knight and DEA flipped out, like,

01:02:55 ►

how did you get this marijuana? You know, if you want to do more research. So then we applied

01:02:59 ►

to buy 10 grams of marijuana. And in seven years, we were unable to get permission to buy 10 grams.

01:03:09 ►

The only people in America who would spend seven years

01:03:13 ►

and be unable to buy 10 grams of marijuana.

01:03:18 ►

So then we started, okay, let’s sue the DEA and try to get our own farm,

01:03:24 ►

and that didn’t work.

01:03:27 ►

But meanwhile, what’s happening around in society is we have – our role in medical marijuana was –

01:03:32 ►

our role, MAPS’s role was to try to do marijuana research and fail.

01:03:36 ►

And then the Marijuana Policy Project, Americans for Safe Access, Drug Policy Alliance would then work on state-level initiatives

01:03:43 ►

and say,

01:03:46 ►

there’s no route through the FDA.

01:03:49 ►

We need to legalize medical marijuana in these different states, and that would pass.

01:03:50 ►

And then we have enough of those.

01:03:53 ►

Now we have a few marijuana legalization states.

01:03:58 ►

And then I started thinking, okay, maybe it’s time to try again with marijuana.

01:04:05 ►

So five years ago, almost six years ago, I thought, okay, we’re trying to develop an expertise with PTSD.

01:04:08 ►

Let’s look at marijuana for PTSD in veterans.

01:04:14 ►

And so we started this long process of going through the regulatory hoops.

01:04:19 ►

And the good news is, to not go over all how hard it was, the good news is that we have finally, yesterday, the FDA removed the study from clinical hold,

01:04:26 ►

and they put it there because it was only on hold until NIDA agreed to provide the marijuana.

01:04:33 ►

So now the National Institute on Drug Abuse has agreed to provide the marijuana.

01:04:37 ►

It’s going to be a study half at Johns Hopkins in the heart of the institutions.

01:04:43 ►

Johns Hopkins has got a lot of researchers who are

01:04:45 ►

funded by the government to look at drug abuse and we’re doing it independently in arizona

01:04:49 ►

we’re renting space from a marijuana growing operation and in phoenix arizona and we had to

01:04:56 ►

get the city council to mass to have a special uh meeting to decide that we could have zoning of a

01:05:02 ►

medical office in a marijuana growing operation

01:05:06 ►

because they don’t normally allow smoking in these marijuana operations or in the dispensaries.

01:05:11 ►

So this study was the amazing part of it was that Dr. Sue Sisley,

01:05:20 ►

who was the woman who we worked with for four years to get this,

01:05:25 ►

once we finally got NIDA approval two years ago to do it,

01:05:28 ►

then she got fired by the University of Arizona to block the study.

01:05:32 ►

And after she got fired, there was, you know, Sanjay Gupta, CNN, New York Times.

01:05:36 ►

It was the best thing that could have happened to us.

01:05:39 ►

And it wasn’t so good for her, but she was okay with it too.

01:05:45 ►

And so then we got contacted by researchers who are the top researchers for the VA

01:05:49 ►

looking at the use of marijuana by soldiers with PTSD

01:05:52 ►

and the top NIDA-funded researchers who were looking at marijuana also as treatment of,

01:05:59 ►

you know, in the context of people running away from their problems, basically.

01:06:03 ►

And they said they wanted to work with us.

01:06:05 ►

They could only do survey research.

01:06:06 ►

Maybe we could join forces with them, and then we could get permission.

01:06:10 ►

So I said, sure.

01:06:10 ►

We negotiated.

01:06:11 ►

We were able to come to agreement.

01:06:13 ►

And in part because we had the approvals,

01:06:16 ►

and in part because the state of Colorado has collected so much money from marijuana legalization

01:06:21 ►

and medical marijuana, they decided to give away $8 million for medical marijuana research,

01:06:27 ►

and we managed to get a $2.1 million grant from the state of Colorado.

01:06:32 ►

So, yeah, it was the only time in the history of MAPS

01:06:40 ►

where I realized that the more expensive I made the study,

01:06:43 ►

the more likely we were to get the grant.

01:06:46 ►

Because when you make it more expensive, you add people,

01:06:48 ►

they add their credentials to it, you’ve got to pay them for it,

01:06:51 ►

and we just got this loaded-up study.

01:06:54 ►

But we managed to get $2.1 million.

01:06:56 ►

So we are now, tomorrow, the DEA is inspecting the facility,

01:07:01 ►

and in a couple months, we are going to have the first marijuana drug development study

01:07:06 ►

that we’ve been able in over 23 years.

01:07:12 ►

And in a couple weeks,

01:07:14 ►

we’re going to be applying again to the DEA

01:07:18 ►

to get a license to set up our own marijuana farm.

01:07:21 ►

And we won a DEA administrative law judge lawsuit.

01:07:26 ►

The DEA rejected it.

01:07:27 ►

We lost in the appeals court in 2013.

01:07:30 ►

And things have shifted enough.

01:07:32 ►

We’re going to apply, and we think we might be able to get a farm.

01:07:35 ►

And if we can get a farm, then we can have our own supply,

01:07:38 ►

and we can take it through the FDA system.

01:07:40 ►

So that’s more or less where we’re at.

01:07:43 ►

We’re about to submit for publication two

01:07:47 ►

studies of ibogaine for the treatment of addiction with clinics in new zealand and in mexico

01:07:52 ►

so even though there’s like 35 ibogaine clinics it’s ibogaine’s been going on for 25 years

01:07:59 ►

or more there’s not a single study looking at people for a year out after they’ve been treated with ibogaine.

01:08:06 ►

So this is going to be the first observational study, long-term outcomes from ibogaine,

01:08:10 ►

and it’s going to be published in the Mainstream Drug Abuse Treatment Journal.

01:08:13 ►

And we also did work, a small observational study on ayahuasca for the treatment of addiction,

01:08:20 ►

and that was with Dr. Gabor Mate in British Columbia.

01:08:24 ►

And that study is interesting in the sense that Peruvian shaman came up.

01:08:30 ►

They gave ayahuasca to First Nations people.

01:08:33 ►

As we know here, Native Americans, First Nations people are heavily traumatized.

01:08:38 ►

In Canada, young people were taken away from their families

01:08:41 ►

and raised in these schools and sexually abused.

01:08:43 ►

So there’s enormous drug abuse and trauma among native populations.

01:08:48 ►

So the Peruvians, shamans came up.

01:08:50 ►

They gave the ayahuasca to the First Nations people,

01:08:53 ►

and Dr. Gabor Mate sort of mediated with Western psychiatry.

01:08:56 ►

And the results were great.

01:08:58 ►

And he started talking about it, and Health Canada said to him,

01:09:00 ►

if you do this work anymore, we’re going to take away your license

01:09:04 ►

because you’re talking about ayahuasca for medicine, not for religion, and it didn’t go through us.

01:09:09 ►

But if you want to work through Health Canada, we’ll be willing to work with you on some studies.

01:09:17 ►

And so I found a donor who was willing to pay for freeze-dried encapsulated ayahuasca.

01:09:25 ►

So it’s a way to get a standardized product.

01:09:29 ►

And it’s pretty much like the tea.

01:09:32 ►

But then the Peruvian shaman refused to work with it

01:09:36 ►

because it wasn’t in their traditional way.

01:09:39 ►

So now we’re thinking of doing an observational study of some U.S. veterans

01:09:43 ►

who go down to Peru or elsewhere for ayahuasca for PTSD.

01:09:48 ►

So that’s sort of where we’re at.

01:09:51 ►

And what I wanted to do briefly, and then we’ll have questions, is just tell you these five sort of moral issues.

01:09:56 ►

So the first one was about the military.

01:10:01 ►

About five years ago, I was contacted by someone

01:10:05 ►

who said that he was an army interrogator.

01:10:09 ►

And he had,

01:10:11 ►

actually it’s about seven years ago,

01:10:12 ►

and he had been in Iraq and Afghanistan

01:10:14 ►

and he had quit when they started using torture.

01:10:17 ►

And he had been now working for a non-profit

01:10:19 ►

and called me up.

01:10:21 ►

And this was super scary for me to hear from him

01:10:23 ►

because, as you know, in the 50s and 60s,

01:10:27 ►

there were sort of parallel efforts to do psychedelic research.

01:10:30 ►

One was sort of above ground psychedelic psychotherapy, psychedelic neuroscience,

01:10:36 ►

and then the other was military-funded psychedelics as mind control,

01:10:40 ►

weaponization of psychedelics in different ways.

01:10:45 ►

And so that was so scandalous that that stopped.

01:10:50 ►

And so once we were able to restart the above-ground work with psychedelics,

01:10:54 ►

then it seems like, as far as we know,

01:10:57 ►

the military has not resumed their own sort of nefarious kind of,

01:11:00 ►

you know, how they can use psychedelics in that way.

01:11:02 ►

So then here was somebody from the military calling me. And that was the first question is should i even respond to this person

01:11:08 ►

because he wanted to know would mdma be more humane than torture could you get secrets out

01:11:14 ►

of people by giving them mdma and i thought about for a while and i thought well um i’m willing to

01:11:23 ►

talk to him just to see. So we ended up having

01:11:26 ►

this conversation and basically I said, I don’t think it’s such a good idea. You know, you need

01:11:31 ►

informed consent. There isn’t that. And at the same time, I said, I believe that MDMA, if it’s

01:11:36 ►

somebody that’s coerced into being a suicide bomber, you know, they’ll probably tell you what

01:11:42 ►

happened. They might. But if it’s a true believer, the MDMA reduces your sense of pain,

01:11:46 ►

reduces your fears, reduces your anxieties.

01:11:49 ►

People who are true believers are likely to stand up for themselves

01:11:53 ►

even more under interrogation with MDMA.

01:11:56 ►

But that was the contact that started really me thinking more and more about the military.

01:12:03 ►

So I felt that was easy ethically.

01:12:06 ►

I could talk to them. So then the next question is about working with the military. Is it ethical

01:12:13 ►

to take people, many of whom have done things that are, you know, we think of victims and

01:12:20 ►

perpetrators. And so many of the people that are in the U.S. military have, under extraordinarily

01:12:26 ►

harsh circumstances, have killed the wrong people and feel really bad about it. And so

01:12:33 ►

we’re working both with people who are in the military who are, you might say, victims who have

01:12:40 ►

been, you know, shot or seen people killed or bombed.

01:12:48 ►

But then there’s others that you might call more perpetrators.

01:12:56 ►

So a friend of mine, Dr. Torsten Passy, is a German psychiatrist,

01:13:02 ►

and he’s been telling me that it’s very unethical to work with people in the military.

01:13:05 ►

What if they were the Nazi concentration camp guards?

01:13:07 ►

Would you help them with their PTSD?

01:13:10 ►

You know, is that an ethical thing to do?

01:13:15 ►

And so I think I’m raising that because I think it’s an important point to discuss.

01:13:17 ►

Eric Davis, who’s a friend and luminary

01:13:22 ►

in the psychedelic community,

01:13:23 ►

you know, talked about us and raised the question,

01:13:26 ►

are we just greasing the wheels of the military machine? And my view of that is that, of course,

01:13:33 ►

that’s the same thing you would say to a military doctor. It’s no different than if you patch

01:13:38 ►

somebody up physically. And we don’t think that military doctors are somehow or other inherently

01:13:44 ►

unethical. But if they’re engaged in a machine that’s doing unethical wars, and we don’t think that military doctors are somehow or other inherently unethical,

01:13:45 ►

but if they’re engaged in a machine that’s doing unethical wars, and we can talk about how Iraq

01:13:50 ►

was a war of convenience and choice, it wasn’t something we should have done.

01:13:56 ►

So I felt, though, that with the MDMA experience, where people are woken up to the emotional

01:14:03 ►

content of what they’ve done, woken

01:14:05 ►

up and nurtured and helped through it. And military trains people not to feel their emotions

01:14:10 ►

and to be just machines and to react instantaneously into certain things. So I think

01:14:16 ►

that healing trauma among the military soldiers is not only ethical, but I think it may reduce the chances that they repeat that

01:14:26 ►

kind of behavior rather than make them say, aha, that made me feel bad. MD made me feel good. Now

01:14:32 ►

I’ll do anything. But I think that’s the potential criticism. So I’ve resolved that morally for

01:14:40 ►

myself and have said, okay, I think that we can expand and deepen this connection with the military.

01:14:46 ►

I was a draft resistor in Vietnam, and it’s not that I am a –

01:14:51 ►

I wasn’t a conscientious objector because to be a conscientious objector,

01:14:54 ►

you have to be against all wars,

01:14:57 ►

and I do think wars of defense sometimes can be justified.

01:15:01 ►

So anyway, that’s that moral issue.

01:15:03 ►

Then the third one is something that’s pretty

01:15:06 ►

delicate um lately we’ve been having a lot of conversations and it’s about how um making

01:15:12 ►

psychedelics into medicines we’re working with regulators and there’s a pretty clear path but

01:15:18 ►

should the organizations that are doing the research to medicalize psychedelics speak out about

01:15:26 ►

prohibition, about the evils of prohibition? Does that sort of complicate our effort to make

01:15:32 ►

these things into medicines? And there’s no right answer. We’ve never done this before. We don’t

01:15:37 ►

really know for sure, but I sort of believe that the politics is what has been blocking the research for so long.

01:15:47 ►

And our main message is that we want the research to be evaluated on the basis of the science,

01:15:53 ►

that the politics should be out of the research.

01:15:56 ►

So when we say that I express my personal opinion that the prohibition is counterproductive,

01:16:03 ►

that drugs should be legal, psychedelics should be legal, adults should be able to have legal access to them without

01:16:08 ►

medicine, without religion, parents should be able to

01:16:11 ►

teach their children, so there should be a parental override to the drug laws.

01:16:17 ►

That’s a hard, controversial thing, but I’ll just say that in

01:16:19 ►

23 states of America, alcohol use is illegal

01:16:24 ►

for minors, but in 23 states, parents can give alcohol to their children written into the law that there is a parental override to the laws against use of alcohol by minors.

01:16:34 ►

So I think that’s the way that psychedelics and other drugs should be handled as well.

01:16:52 ►

Well, then the ethical question, though, or the moral question is, is this something that we should narrow our focus just on the research or talk about this larger aspect? And so the Zendo Project, the whole harm reduction work that we do, emerges out of this response to trying to build a post-prohibition world and response to the sort of harm maximization aspects of psychedelics.

01:17:04 ►

So I’ve addressed that question.

01:17:06 ►

So I feel like it is appropriate, even if it complicates things,

01:17:11 ►

and I think it will actually end up helping things.

01:17:13 ►

And to give you an example, I sort of posed this.

01:17:18 ►

A friend of mine works for a congressman,

01:17:20 ►

and this is a congressman who was friends with Martin Luther King.

01:17:27 ►

congressman and this is a congressman who um was friends with martin luther king and this um friend of mine um is is um interested in psychedelics psychedelic spirituality political

01:17:33 ►

implications of psychedelics and so i talked to him what do you think about this idea of

01:17:38 ►

people doing the research talking about legalization as well and he said you need a Malcolm X for a Martin Luther

01:17:45 ►

King and what he meant by that was that the same way that the right wing has

01:17:52 ►

sort of shifted the center on a lot of different issues if we have groups that

01:17:56 ►

are talking about legalization then it it brings that into the air and it makes

01:18:01 ►

it so that it’s not so weird and then medicalization is more of a

01:18:05 ►

conservative step than a radical step so so that’s how i’ve addressed that ethical issue

01:18:12 ►

other people have come to different conclusions and we’ll just see how that goes

01:18:16 ►

the the fourth ethical thing was about how ideally in a scientific way um there

01:18:23 ►

we’re testing as you heard me they’re we’re testing

01:18:26 ►

as you heard me talk earlier we’re testing

01:18:28 ►

like different amounts of different

01:18:30 ►

doses of MDMA

01:18:31 ►

but everybody gets psychotherapy

01:18:33 ►

and so

01:18:35 ►

for a ideal in a

01:18:38 ►

sense scientific study and also

01:18:40 ►

01:18:42 ►

want to get MDMA people are suffering

01:18:44 ►

now we want to find what’s the fastest path to get MDMA to patients.

01:18:48 ►

And so ideally you would do a study that would,

01:18:52 ►

somebody would get MDMA without therapy and just see what MDMA does by itself.

01:18:58 ►

And then we would say, okay, now here’s MDMA by itself.

01:19:00 ►

Here’s MDMA with therapy.

01:19:02 ►

Therapy costs, we estimate, it’s roughly 40 hours of

01:19:06 ►

therapy from a male-female co-therapist team is what our treatment model is. It’s 80 hours

01:19:12 ►

of therapy. Now, one of them can be a student, an intern, but it’s labor-intensive. So the question

01:19:17 ►

is, what could we learn from this study? And we know that many people take MDMA, work through

01:19:23 ►

stuff on their own. They don’t need therapists take MDMA, work through stuff on their own.

01:19:25 ►

They don’t need therapists.

01:19:29 ►

People get better all the time on their own in certain ways.

01:19:35 ►

Now, you can get deeper with support, but it’s not always necessary. So John Gilmore on our board of directors has been one of the main advocates for trying

01:19:40 ►

to study MDMA by itself.

01:19:42 ►

So we have felt that that’s unethical, though.

01:19:45 ►

We, meaning me and Dr. Michael Midhofer, are therapists.

01:19:48 ►

That that’s something that people are deeply traumatized.

01:19:52 ►

These are the worst cases.

01:19:53 ►

And to open them up without support is problematic.

01:20:00 ►

People could have negative reactions.

01:20:01 ►

They could end up suicidal.

01:20:03 ►

So our compromise, and this is how we solve that, is that we are doing a study in England.

01:20:09 ►

It will start early next year, probably April, actually.

01:20:13 ►

Now, to make a drug into a medicine, you have to show safety and efficacy,

01:20:17 ►

but you don’t have to have the vaguest idea how the drug works.

01:20:20 ►

You don’t have to know mechanism of action.

01:20:21 ►

So we haven’t really been interested in funding scarce resources into mechanism of action.

01:20:26 ►

But in England, we’re doing sort of two things.

01:20:29 ►

We’re taking veterans with PTSD, and we’re going to give them one dose of MDMA,

01:20:35 ►

and they’re going to go into an fMRI scanner.

01:20:37 ►

So it’s a neuroscience study of veterans with PTSD,

01:20:41 ►

and we’re going to look at how their brains operate when they recall a traumatic script.

01:20:47 ►

They sort of tell a traumatic story, and then they read that,

01:20:50 ►

and then there’s a neutral story.

01:20:52 ►

And so what we’ve been able to do is to say that this is people are going to be

01:20:59 ►

in the treatment facility for six hours.

01:21:01 ►

One hour they get the scan.

01:21:03 ►

The other time they are with someone

01:21:05 ►

who can assist them, a therapist who we’ve trained. But there are not these introductory

01:21:11 ►

therapy sessions to go over their trauma. There’s not the integrative sessions afterwards to help

01:21:17 ►

them do it. There’s not the three MDMA sessions three to five weeks apart that’s our treatment

01:21:22 ►

model. So this ethically is the minimum support that we felt we could do to try to see what MDMA does by itself. Now, it’s not the same

01:21:31 ►

as MDMA does it by itself because you’re in a scanner for an hour and these scanners are very

01:21:36 ►

loud and claustrophobic. You can’t move. But that’ll only be one hour. So that’s how we address

01:21:43 ►

that. And the final ethical thing, and then we’ll talk about questions is um starting to envision success so we’re starting to think

01:21:51 ►

what happens if we actually get to make mdma into a medicine um what then and it turns out that um

01:21:58 ►

there’s two choices if mdma becomes a medicine and then we decide to sell it for exactly what it costs, so we meaning MAPS.

01:22:08 ►

So MAPS is a nonprofit pharmaceutical company.

01:22:12 ►

We are negotiating to become the big, maybe one day big pharma.

01:22:17 ►

We’re negotiating, particularly if be the organization that markets the MDMA, trains the therapists, and sets up some of the psychedelic clinics.

01:22:32 ►

So it turns out that if we were to sell MDMA at the same price that it costs us, we could keep that inside the nonprofit because you’re not making profit but once you say well maybe um if we want to sell it

01:22:47 ►

for more than it cost us and then use the extra money to pay for research then that’s a different

01:22:55 ►

model and that can’t stay inside the non-profit so the first choice for me was i spent so much of

01:23:01 ►

my time um raising money and you, it’s actually I enjoy it,

01:23:06 ►

and it’s particularly when people say yes.

01:23:09 ►

But you’re trying to do social change with people who, you know,

01:23:14 ►

people who can have endless amounts of money,

01:23:16 ►

but they don’t have endless amounts of time,

01:23:18 ►

and they need other people to try to help advance their goals.

01:23:21 ►

We have loads of motivated people, but we don’t have endless money.

01:23:24 ►

So it’s kind of bringing people together, and I really enjoy it. But at the same time,

01:23:29 ►

what I’d like to do is build a sustainable nonprofit. And we’re one of the rare nonprofits

01:23:36 ►

that we’re talking about a product at the end of our work. So it’s a nonprofit charitable thing to

01:23:43 ►

try to make MDMA into a medicine. But then if we

01:23:45 ►

make it into a medicine and then we want to sell it for more money to become a sustainable non-profit,

01:23:51 ►

we can’t keep it inside MAPS. So then the question is how to do it. And one of the big criticisms of

01:23:58 ►

the legalization of marijuana movement is that we don’t want American capitalism unbridled,

01:24:08 ►

like alcohol and tobacco industry, marketing marijuana.

01:24:13 ►

They’ll market it to kids.

01:24:15 ►

They’ll make it into a play thing.

01:24:20 ►

You’ll have all sorts of kind of inducements to get people to smoke pot,

01:24:22 ►

and the more pot you smoke, the better for them.

01:24:33 ►

So what we’ve realized, and again through David Bronner, that there’s a new form of capitalism called the benefit corporation.

01:24:36 ►

And there’s several thousand of them now.

01:24:38 ►

And they started in California.

01:24:45 ►

They’re in also Delaware. So what the benefit corporation means is that, well, a regular corporation,

01:24:51 ►

the mission of the board of directors and the administration, the people who run the company,

01:24:53 ►

they must maximize profit.

01:24:56 ►

And if a corporation is not maximizing profit,

01:24:59 ►

you can have shareholder lawsuits to say you’ve got to maximize the dollar.

01:25:06 ►

With a benefit corporation, what you’re doing is you’re maximizing social benefits and if you’re not maximizing the dollar you can’t be held to account because your goals are different

01:25:11 ►

and a lot of companies have externalities that they don’t count you know social costs when they

01:25:17 ►

just try to maximize profits so maps has now addressed this sort of moral ethical issue of

01:25:23 ►

how we might move forward and we’ve

01:25:25 ►

created a benefit corporation that is a hundred percent owned by maps so no

01:25:30 ►

private enrichment no investors everybody still donates to maps but then

01:25:34 ►

maps invest the money in the benefit corporation and then the benefit

01:25:39 ►

corporation does the research for maps and then once we get permission to

01:25:44 ►

market it then the benefit corporation will market, and then once we get permission to market it,

01:25:45 ►

then the benefit corporation will market it and then we’ll pay taxes on it.

01:25:49 ►

But it won’t market it like let’s get it out there as fast as we can.

01:25:52 ►

It’s let’s get it out there in a way where there’s no backlash,

01:25:55 ►

where we get the most healing, where we train the therapists.

01:25:58 ►

So there’s a lot of kind of moral and ethical issues,

01:26:03 ►

and they get even more intense as we get closer and closer to actually succeeding.

01:26:07 ►

So I guess my main message here is that we are on the cusp of a major transition,

01:26:13 ►

both MAPS and HEFTA are into this phase three process,

01:26:16 ►

that the culture is on a major transition stage,

01:26:20 ►

that there’s a global disenchantment with prohibition with over incarceration with the

01:26:27 ►

racist nature of the drug war and so we we have this opportunity and i think for for young people

01:26:33 ►

who are thinking about like what to do with their lives if somebody wanted to have a career as a

01:26:38 ►

psychedelic therapist or psychedelic neuroscience you are now the first generation in 50 years

01:26:44 ►

that you can actually realistically say that’s what i want my career to be

01:26:49 ►

you’re listening to the psychedelic salon where people are changing their lives one thought at a time. Back in 1984, when I had my first dose of MDMA, I would have moved mountains if there

01:27:10 ►

had been a way for me to change careers and become a psychedelic psychotherapist.

01:27:15 ►

But about a year after I found that wonderful medicine, the government made it illegal to

01:27:20 ►

sell and use, which caused some problems for me because by then I had become deeply

01:27:25 ►

involved in selling it and promoting its use for ad hoc non-professional therapy.

01:27:31 ►

We didn’t necessarily think of it as such back then.

01:27:34 ►

All we knew back then was that on our own we’d figured out some ways that we could use

01:27:40 ►

it in a non-dance setting that greatly enhanced our lives.

01:27:43 ►

in a non-dance setting that greatly enhanced our lives.

01:27:48 ►

By 1985, after searching in many places,

01:27:52 ►

I was able to find only a half a dozen articles and papers about MDMA,

01:27:55 ►

or ecstasy as pure MDMA was called back then.

01:28:01 ►

One of those papers, dated March 2, 1985, was titled MDMA Enters the Global Brain, a report on a visit to the World Health Organization.

01:28:07 ►

And it was by this guy named Rick Doblin.

01:28:10 ►

Now, this was before the World Wide Web,

01:28:13 ►

and so it took me a month or so to get Rick’s mailing address.

01:28:16 ►

But once I found out where he lived, I wrote to him,

01:28:19 ►

and we began a brief correspondence, copies of which I still have.

01:28:23 ►

But then they made it illegal and things

01:28:26 ►

in Dallas got a little dicey for me, so I moved to Florida and actually wound up living about 50

01:28:32 ►

miles from Rick’s house, which became the first home of maps. And I know that some of our fellow

01:28:38 ►

slaunters also remember that wonderful and fascinating little place. Little did any of us

01:28:43 ►

know what would eventually grow out of those humble beginnings.

01:28:46 ►

Let me clarify that.

01:28:48 ►

Other than Rick Doblin, I doubt if any of us who were involved in the scene back then

01:28:52 ►

imagined what it could be today.

01:28:55 ►

But if you know Rick, you also know that he is a force that,

01:28:59 ►

well, he can at times be a bit difficult to work with.

01:29:02 ►

Well, he nonetheless is, without any doubt in my mind,

01:29:06 ►

the rock, the keystone of today’s global resurgence in studying psychedelic medicines.

01:29:12 ►

I expect that one day my great-grandchildren will be able to visit a psychedelic museum that

01:29:17 ►

features a big statue of Rick. He is truly one of our community’s founding fathers.

01:29:23 ►

But rather than go on with more talk about MDMA right now,

01:29:26 ►

I’m going to wait until next week’s podcast when I hope, once again,

01:29:31 ►

to be able to bring you a recording of a conversation that I plan on having with Emanuel Seferis.

01:29:36 ►

I hope to do it this week, so we will return to this important topic then.

01:29:42 ►

Before I go, however, I’ve got a couple of announcements.

01:29:46 ►

First of all,

01:29:51 ►

should you want to hear a little more from me, you can listen to an interview that I gave to the Natural Born Alchemist podcast recently, and you can find it at www.naturalbornalchemist.com,

01:29:59 ►

and it’s his podcast number 53. And by the way, you can also interact with Natural Born Alchemist

01:30:06 ►

over on our forums, which you can get to via the forums link on our main website, psychedelicsalon.com.

01:30:15 ►

Also on that site is a link to the upcoming conferences and festivals that I know about.

01:30:20 ►

As you will see, the month of August looks to be the busiest month on the calendar so

01:30:25 ►

far, and for one of those events, which is a sci-fi festival billed as the Holographic Universe,

01:30:33 ►

I will be appearing via Skype. And while that festival comes a week before Burning Man,

01:30:38 ►

it’s going to take place in the Netherlands, and from what I know about it, you will not want to

01:30:43 ►

miss it if you are anywhere close. So surf on over to our events calendar and see if there’s a conference or

01:30:50 ►

a festival that you can get to this year. No matter which one you attend, I’m sure that

01:30:55 ►

you will not only find it worthwhile, you will also be able to find a few of the others,

01:31:00 ►

as we like to say. Finally, I’d like to let you know about an interesting product that I’ve come across.

01:31:07 ►

It’s called CBD Living Water.

01:31:10 ►

Now, you already know that while the high associated with cannabis comes from THC,

01:31:17 ►

where the primary healing properties of cannabis come from CBD.

01:31:22 ►

And this product, CBD Living Water, combines CBD with some of the purest water that you’re going to be able to find.

01:31:30 ►

And their website may be found at CBDLivingWater.com.

01:31:36 ►

And there you’re going to be able to read more about it.

01:31:39 ►

But here are the headlines.

01:31:40 ►

Here are the headlines.

01:31:46 ►

The CBD, or cannabidiol, used in this product is pure and natural,

01:31:50 ►

and it’s free of THC, which means that it’s not psychoactive.

01:31:54 ►

And it’s been found to offer a wide variety of health benefits.

01:31:57 ►

Now, we all have an endocannabinoid system, and it gets weak from average daily stress, age, pollution,

01:32:03 ►

bad eating habits, and illness, among other things.

01:32:06 ►

But the endocannabinoid system is perhaps the most important physiologic system that we have

01:32:12 ►

that’s involved in establishing and maintaining human health.

01:32:16 ►

What this company has done, through advanced physics and chemistry,

01:32:20 ►

is to have taken ion-sized nutrients, you know, the size that can move through cells’ membranes,

01:32:26 ►

and has cleverly encased them with water molecules,

01:32:30 ►

which forms a small, flexible, ionic-sized water cluster

01:32:34 ►

and makes this CBD nearly instantly bioavailable by attaching it to your CBD-1 and CB-2 receptors

01:32:41 ►

in your endocannabinoid system, thus replenishing your system.

01:32:47 ►

In addition, the water used for this product is, in my opinion, about the best water that you’re going to be able to find.

01:32:55 ►

It’s obtained by taking a boat way off the coast of California and then lowering a suction hose to the ocean’s sandy floor,

01:33:02 ►

submerging a strainer under the sand and sucking up the

01:33:05 ►

water.

01:33:06 ►

This water is then transported to a small facility on the coast where its temperature

01:33:11 ►

is raised to somewhere around 160 degrees Fahrenheit, just high enough to create a big

01:33:17 ►

cloud.

01:33:18 ►

And this cloud is held in a multi-story high container, several of them in fact, where

01:33:23 ►

it can condense on these patented filters that remove salt from seawater

01:33:28 ►

but leave the other trace minerals there that are found in seawater.

01:33:32 ►

And then this process is repeated at least more than 50 times

01:33:36 ►

until all of the salt has been removed, leaving very pure drinking water.

01:33:41 ►

As you might expect, though, this process is very energy dependent.

01:33:46 ►

drinking water. As you might expect, though, this process is very energy dependent. However, they have solved that problem by using their own massive array of solar panels to power it, thus the name

01:33:52 ►

of their company, Solar Rain. I like that. Anyway, I’ve been to their plant, and it’s an engineering

01:33:59 ►

work of art to behold. Now, what about the purity of the CBD, you ask? Well, the source is European, and it’s as close to pure CBD as you’re going to find anywhere.

01:34:10 ►

As it happens, the angel investor who has funded both the CBD operation in Europe

01:34:15 ►

and the solar rain operation here in California happens to be a good friend of mine,

01:34:20 ►

and I can personally attest to this product’s meeting your highest standards.

01:34:25 ►

However, that’s the good news. The bad news is that as far as I know right now, there’s only

01:34:32 ►

one store in the world that’s selling this product and that’s a small store here in Carlsbad,

01:34:37 ►

California. So after that great sales pitch about a product that you probably aren’t going to be

01:34:42 ►

able to buy anytime soon, why am I telling you about it?

01:34:45 ►

Well, in the talk that we just listened to, we learned that there is now a path to becoming

01:34:50 ►

a psychedelic therapist that’s open to us.

01:34:53 ►

And for those of us, however, who are more geeky and are looking into getting involved

01:34:58 ►

in the newly blossoming cannabis business, I’m presenting this as a little picture of

01:35:03 ►

things to come, and hopefully

01:35:05 ►

some of these new products are going to be created and marketed by our fellow salonners

01:35:10 ►

who are just getting started in their life’s careers.

01:35:14 ►

The other day somebody asked me if I wasn’t jealous about all of the new opportunities

01:35:18 ►

that are opening up for people who are interested in psychedelics and cannabis, but which were

01:35:23 ►

opportunities that weren’t available to me when I was much younger.

01:35:27 ►

Well, after giving it some thought, I have to admit that, well, it was actually easier

01:35:31 ►

for me back then, in what my grandchildren now call the old days, because today the choices

01:35:38 ►

are almost endless.

01:35:39 ►

Your biggest obstacle may only be the fact that you have so many choices, and it’s going

01:35:44 ►

to be difficult for you to pick your initial direction.

01:35:47 ►

But don’t let that hold you back.

01:35:49 ►

Pick a direction, take a chance, and then march in the parade.

01:35:54 ►

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

01:35:59 ►

Be careful out there, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

487 - Mainstreaming Psychedelics

Program Notes §

Previous Episode §

Next Episode §

Similar Episodes §

Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

00:00:22 ► §

00:00:23 ► §

00:00:29 ► §

00:00:33 ► §

00:00:37 ► §

00:00:44 ► §

00:00:51 ► §

00:00:55 ► §

00:00:58 ► §

00:01:01 ► §

00:01:04 ► §

00:01:07 ► §

00:01:12 ► §

00:01:18 ► §

00:01:22 ► §

00:01:24 ► §

00:01:31 ► §

00:01:47 ► §

00:01:53 ► §

00:01:59 ► §

00:02:05 ► §

00:02:11 ► §

00:02:17 ► §

00:02:25 ► §

00:02:30 ► §

00:02:33 ► §

00:02:38 ► §

00:02:43 ► §

00:02:45 ► §

00:02:52 ► §

00:02:58 ► §

00:03:07 ► §

00:03:12 ► §

00:03:17 ► §

00:03:27 ► §

00:03:33 ► §

00:03:38 ► §

00:03:48 ► §

00:03:55 ► §

00:04:02 ► §

00:04:06 ► §

00:04:13 ► §

00:04:20 ► §

00:04:30 ► §

00:04:35 ► §

00:04:41 ► §

00:05:06 ► §

00:05:14 ► §

00:05:16 ► §

00:05:24 ► §

00:05:32 ► §

00:05:41 ► §

00:05:46 ► §

00:05:49 ► §

00:05:53 ► §

00:05:55 ► §

00:05:59 ► §

00:06:02 ► §

00:06:04 ► §

00:06:08 ► §

00:06:12 ► §

00:06:17 ► §

00:06:19 ► §

00:06:21 ► §

00:06:26 ► §

00:06:35 ► §

00:06:40 ► §

00:06:44 ► §

00:06:49 ► §

00:06:53 ► §

00:07:01 ► §

Program Notes

Previous Episode

Next Episode

Similar Episodes

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

00:00:22 ►

00:00:23 ►

00:00:29 ►

00:00:33 ►

00:00:37 ►

00:00:44 ►

00:00:51 ►

00:00:55 ►

00:00:58 ►

00:01:01 ►

00:01:04 ►

00:01:07 ►

00:01:12 ►

00:01:18 ►

00:01:22 ►

00:01:24 ►

00:01:31 ►

00:01:47 ►

00:01:53 ►

00:01:59 ►

00:02:05 ►

00:02:11 ►

00:02:17 ►

00:02:25 ►

00:02:30 ►

00:02:33 ►

00:02:38 ►

00:02:43 ►

00:02:45 ►

00:02:52 ►

00:02:58 ►

00:03:07 ►

00:03:12 ►

00:03:17 ►

00:03:27 ►

00:03:33 ►

00:03:38 ►

00:03:48 ►

00:03:55 ►

00:04:02 ►

00:04:06 ►

00:04:13 ►

00:04:20 ►

00:04:30 ►

00:04:35 ►

00:04:41 ►

00:05:06 ►

00:05:14 ►

00:05:16 ►

00:05:24 ►

00:05:32 ►

00:05:41 ►

00:05:46 ►

00:05:49 ►

00:05:53 ►

00:05:55 ►

00:05:59 ►

00:06:02 ►

00:06:04 ►

00:06:08 ►

00:06:12 ►

00:06:17 ►

00:06:19 ►

00:06:21 ►

00:06:26 ►

00:06:35 ►

00:06:40 ►

00:06:44 ►

00:06:49 ►

00:06:53 ►

00:07:01 ►

00:07:06 ►

00:07:09 ►

00:07:09 ►