Program Notes
Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com
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Guest speaker: George Greer
https://heffter.org/Date this lecture was recorded: August 31, 2017
Today’s podcast features Dr. George Greer, one of the co-founders of the Hefter Research Institute. In this Palenque Norte Lecture that he delivered at the 2017 Burning Man Festival, Dr. Greer not only covers the current state of psychedelic research, he also provides several interesting anecdotes about ways in which research participants have had their lives significantly improved through the use of psychedelic medicines.
Hefter Research Institute
Abstracts of papers by Greer and Tolbert
“Subjective reports of the effects of MDMA in a clinical setting”
“The Therapeutic Use of MDMA”
“A method of conducting therapeutic sessions with MDMA”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
Salon.
00:00:23 ►
And I’d like to begin today’s podcast by thanking Carl L. for his recent donation to the salon
00:00:29 ►
to help cover some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.
00:00:34 ►
Your donation, along with past donations by other fellow salonners, is what keeps us going.
00:00:39 ►
So, thank you very much, Carl.
00:00:42 ►
Now, let me ask you what you think that it takes to be called a
00:00:46 ►
psychedelic elder these days. Well, today’s guest speaker, Dr. George Greer, has a credential that
00:00:52 ►
I think is hard to beat. While he is the medical director and a co-founder of the Hefter Research
00:00:58 ►
Institute, in my opinion, his credentials for being an elder go back much farther than that.
00:01:05 ►
opinion, his credentials for being an elder go back much farther than that. You see, back in the 1980s, when MDMA was still legal, George not only treated some of his patients with MDMA,
00:01:12 ►
he actually synthesized it himself in Sasha Shulgin’s laboratory. And in all of the years
00:01:19 ►
since then, he’s remained directly involved in psychedelic research. Now to me, that is an elder.
00:01:28 ►
Additionally, George has been attending the Burning Man Festival for a really long time.
00:01:34 ►
Although I knew about George and his work before my first trip to a burn, it was at Burning Man
00:01:39 ►
in 2002 that I first met him. It was my first time on the playa, and I was like a little boy
00:01:44 ►
in a candy shop
00:01:45 ►
as I took in all of the new sights and sounds that you encounter there. And I was still getting used
00:01:51 ►
to seeing people in all kinds of costumes. So when my wife walked up to me with this tall,
00:01:57 ►
distinguished-looking man who was wearing a Roman toga and had a crown of laurel leaves on his head,
00:02:03 ►
well, I just assumed that was some person that she’d just met.
00:02:06 ►
Not so.
00:02:07 ►
It was George Greer, who will forever remain etched in my mind as a Roman senator.
00:02:14 ►
So, now let’s join George for his fourth Palenque Norte lecture,
00:02:18 ►
which he delivered at this year’s Burning Man Festival.
00:02:22 ►
And this is also his fourth appearance here in the salon.
00:02:27 ►
So, my name is George Greer. I’m a psychiatrist. I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
00:02:32 ►
I’m the medical director of the Hefter Research Institute, formed 24 years ago.
00:02:40 ►
Just a little about myself, I had some paradigm-shifting personal experiences in my college years,
00:02:48 ►
studied Eastern religion and mysticism,
00:02:51 ►
was inspired in an enhanced moment to become a psychiatrist,
00:02:56 ►
went to medical school, became a psychiatrist,
00:02:59 ►
went to a six-week Stan Grof workshop at Esalen in 1975
00:03:04 ►
when I was in medical school
00:03:06 ►
which
00:03:06 ►
was a
00:03:10 ►
changer also.
00:03:12 ►
You know, there was a professional
00:03:14 ►
way to work with
00:03:15 ►
psychedelic medicine
00:03:16 ►
and studied transpersonal psychology
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and
00:03:20 ►
when I finished my
00:03:23 ►
residency in San Mateo, California,
00:03:28 ►
starting off with ketamine sessions because it was a legal drug,
00:03:31 ►
and then heard about this drug MDMA, which was just hardly known.
00:03:37 ►
And a person I know, Leo Zeff, was using it in therapy,
00:03:40 ►
so I studied with him and was trained by him
00:03:43 ►
and found a legal way to give
00:03:46 ►
it to my patients if I made it myself so I made it in Sasha Shulgin’s lab and started giving to
00:03:51 ►
people for five years about 80 people over five years published a paper about just their experiences
00:04:00 ►
so that was the first MDMA therapy related paper. Those were the worried well,
00:04:07 ►
you know, people without any serious problems. And that stopped in 85. And then in 93, Dave
00:04:19 ►
Nichols founded the Heftra Research Institute, and I was part of the founding group. And
00:04:23 ►
we started out, we had no money, but trying to do research and support research.
00:04:28 ►
And we did that for, been doing that ever since.
00:04:31 ►
And a lot of basic science, neuroscience in Switzerland,
00:04:36 ►
University Hospital Zurich with Franz Wollinweider.
00:04:41 ►
And then the first psilocybe, the first psychedelic treatment study in this country
00:04:48 ►
was for obsessive-compulsive disorder in Arizona.
00:04:51 ►
It started around 2000.
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And then soon after that, around that decade, the 2000s,
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Charlie Grobe did the first psilocybin study for cancer patients with depression and anxiety.
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Just 12 people.
00:05:09 ►
And about 10 years ago, the NYU Johns Hopkins team started their larger clinical trials, cancer and depression and anxiety.
00:05:19 ►
And those were published last December.
00:05:21 ►
It got amazing publicity, front page of the New York Times.
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And those were published last December, got amazing publicity, front page of the New York Times.
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And then concurrently the last few years, a board member of ours, Bill Linton, a philanthropist, founded the USONA Institute.
00:05:38 ►
And so now Hefter has done like sort of research, and USONA is doing drug development. So they’re going to take psilocybin through FDA approval, and they’re in the middle of all that.
00:05:44 ►
So that’s a brief nutshell history.
00:05:49 ►
And I’ll just right now describe very current, recent research studies that are going on.
00:05:54 ►
They’ve been published recently.
00:05:55 ►
It’s sort of the current state of what’s going on with Hefter and the other things I know about.
00:06:01 ►
So Hefter’s role has shifted because we’re like just pure research.
00:06:09 ►
We’re not drug development, et cetera.
00:06:11 ►
So our focus now is mostly addiction, psilocybin for addiction treatment.
00:06:17 ►
And there were two pilot studies with smokers and alcoholics, 15 people,
00:06:23 ►
and they did amazingly well, much better than we thought,
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like 80% reduction in smoking
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and two-thirds reduction in drinking.
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And so now there’s large clinical trials
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where you have like a placebo group and a psilocybin group,
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so it’s the whole standard scientific model
00:06:39 ►
to demonstrate to how the scientific community thinks that this can help treat psychiatric illness.
00:06:51 ►
And so they’re both about a third or so way through alcohol at NYU and smoking at Johns Hopkins.
00:06:59 ►
And it’s looking good.
00:07:01 ►
You know, we don’t know who’s in which group technically,
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but we can tell the difference between someone getting Benadryl as opposed to psilocybin.
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You can kind of guess, you know.
00:07:11 ►
And the smoking study is just a nicotine patch versus a lot of therapy for smokers in a psilocybin session.
00:07:21 ►
And then we’re helping fund a study in University of Alabama, Birmingham, on cocaine
00:07:26 ►
addiction. And that’s, the university provided most of the funds for that. We just helped a
00:07:32 ►
little. But that’s really interesting because this is a very different demographic from the Hopkins
00:07:37 ►
NYU studies, which are mostly Anglo-Saxon, European descent people, middle class.
00:07:47 ►
In Alabama, there’s a lot of poor African-American living in crack houses,
00:07:51 ►
elementary school education,
00:07:54 ►
very, very different kind of population.
00:07:57 ►
And that’s interesting because they’re using the music playlist
00:08:00 ►
of all this romantic classical music
00:08:02 ►
that they use at Johns Hopkins been used for decades
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and they’re having mystical experiences and turning their lives around you know moving out
00:08:10 ►
of the crack house getting some benefits to start going to school or working you know and it’s just
00:08:17 ►
and they have these spiritual experiences and uh just a little anecdote uh and a follow-up one of the it was a man and
00:08:27 ►
he’s like well what did you learn it’s like well you know i used to like you know drive around the
00:08:31 ►
street and look at women you know and like hey you know check her out and stuff and now it’s like
00:08:34 ►
you know just just be cool man don’t do that just be cool so so they’ve appropriated that experience into their own culture.
00:08:53 ►
Then there was an alcoholic woman in New Mexico where they did the alcohol pilot.
00:08:58 ►
I had the privilege of interviewing her, which was mostly just letting her talk on camera.
00:09:02 ►
This video is up on the hefter.org website.
00:09:06 ►
She’s a middle-aged Hispanic woman,
00:09:08 ►
very normal kind of person.
00:09:10 ►
She was raised in a,
00:09:12 ►
she called it a Christian cult,
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like her mother made all her clothes and highly rigid,
00:09:16 ►
fundamentalist Christian cult.
00:09:18 ►
And then she left that and got away from it
00:09:21 ►
and she studied other things,
00:09:23 ►
other spirituality, religions, and found a lot of value in those things and she just insidiously started drinking more and
00:09:31 ►
it just in just like every day and kind of she was going to try to get her husband in the study
00:09:37 ►
but she talked about it and turns out she qualified in terms of having alcohol
00:09:41 ►
use disorder and she didn’t really think of herself that way.
00:09:46 ►
But she realized she’d really gotten kind of distant from her children
00:09:50 ►
and just not connected.
00:09:52 ►
So her first psilocybin session, she basically cried for four hours or so.
00:09:58 ►
She could not, in her experience, contact her children.
00:10:03 ►
She couldn’t reach them, and it felt like months.
00:10:06 ►
She’s just, I’ve lost my children.
00:10:08 ►
It was just devastating in how she screwed up her life,
00:10:12 ►
and she felt guilty and ashamed,
00:10:13 ►
and it was not a happy experience.
00:10:18 ►
And then a couple weeks later, she had her second session,
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and there were, like, colors and joy,
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and she felt like she was in the presence of what
00:10:25 ►
she called god and that this god is is the one true god of all spiritual traditions it’s not
00:10:34 ►
any locked any particular religion and she said that’s where i’m going, and I’m taking my kids with me. And she stopped drinking.
00:10:46 ►
I interviewed her about 14 months after this.
00:10:49 ►
No more alcohol.
00:10:51 ►
And instead of going to AA, she actually got more involved in her evangelical church in Albuquerque,
00:10:57 ►
which was not the rigid, fundamentalist kind of church she’d grown up in like cultists.
00:11:02 ►
Just, you know, we’re saved, and that’s her community,
00:11:07 ►
and it helped her maintain her sobriety.
00:11:08 ►
And my sense was that she’s really more American and apple pie
00:11:16 ►
than she was before psilocybin.
00:11:19 ►
And I’ve had this paranoia, this worry that, okay, people will take,
00:11:24 ►
well, like in the 60s,
00:11:25 ►
a lot of young people took LSD and left their parents’ religious traditions,
00:11:30 ►
mostly Protestant or whatever, and that disrupted families, created a generation gap.
00:11:36 ►
It was very traumatic to families.
00:11:37 ►
And the fact that she had the experience, was cured, at least as far as you know,
00:11:44 ►
from being an alcohol addiction and not being a good
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parent um to reconnecting with her own religion in other words the psilocybin mystical mystical
00:11:55 ►
experience did not make her change her religion she didn’t become a hindu or a buddhist or whatever
00:12:00 ►
so that was very reassuring to me that it’s that, and one of the things important about
00:12:05 ►
psychedelic experience is they are in essence, ideologically neutral. You know, there’s no
00:12:11 ►
ideology in the drug. It’s just a drug and it’s the mindset and the mindset of the therapist.
00:12:18 ►
That’s really important. And we take a lot of care to, promote or use conceptual frameworks from a certain religion or tradition that could sort of brainwash someone into that religion.
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It’s delicate.
00:12:35 ►
It’s very important to keep it neutral in that way so that they can believe whatever they want.
00:12:40 ►
You know, we just want to help them get well.
00:12:44 ►
And there was another really interesting thing that happened to this woman.
00:12:47 ►
She, after the second session, her sister picked her up.
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She went to her house.
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And the son, he sounds kind of autistic.
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He just never was affectionate.
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He’s like four or five and wouldn’t really be affectionate.
00:13:02 ►
And so at the end of the day, she goes up, and he goes over,
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and he kind of sits down next to her.
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And she goes like, oh, wow, well, that’s different.
00:13:10 ►
Then he kind of like puts her hand in her lap,
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and then he like lets her embrace him and hug him.
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And she and her sister are going like, we’ve never seen him like this before.
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And I have no explanation for that.
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But it was just a really cool effect that she was just in the connecting mode,
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which she hadn’t been with her children.
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And then her children said, like, she was playing with them.
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She said, like, wow, Mom, you’re like playing with us, you know, playing football.
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She said, oh, I play with you. He played with you like yeah but you never ran before and so her whole connection with her
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playing with her children just was renewed and that’s it was just so uh to me personally it was
00:13:56 ►
very inspiring because alcohol is just such a horrible you know horrible condition that affects parent-child relationships, DWIs, et cetera.
00:14:06 ►
So from my perspective, this alcohol study is probably the most important study that we will ever do
00:14:14 ►
because that’s such a horrible scourge on our society.
00:14:20 ►
Huh?
00:14:22 ►
Sure, yeah.
00:14:23 ►
So it’s pretty much the same as all of them.
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So basically for the treatment studies, there’s first screening, you know,
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to make sure you don’t have a psychiatric or medical problem that could get worse with psilocybin,
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like a family member with psychosis or bipolar disorder.
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And then several hours of therapeutic preparation, connecting with the therapist, the guides, and a trusting relationship.
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You know, what’s your intention, your purpose.
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And then the session is all day with the usually male-female guides.
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And then follow up what we call integration phase, which is another several hours over some weeks.
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several hours and over some weeks.
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And then there’s, you know, psychometric testing, you know, outcome results, levels of depression, drinking, all this stuff, different measurements that can go on,
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usually for several months up to a year afterwards to measure the outcome.
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You know, how long do people stay sober?
00:15:19 ►
And this is true for the studies for addiction, depression, anxiety, OCD, anything.
00:15:26 ►
That’s pretty much the standard protocol,
00:15:29 ►
and that’s written up in a paper called something about hallucinogens,
00:15:34 ►
safety for administration, something like that, by Matt Johnson and Roland Griffiths.
00:15:37 ►
So that’s kind of the current published sort of Bible about how to run therapeutic psilocybin sessions safely and effectively.
00:15:48 ►
Yeah?
00:15:50 ►
The question is, are there safety recommendations for using psychedelics regarding, yeah, so there’s two levels. Definitely first-degree relatives, parent, child, brother, sister,
00:16:09 ►
if they have those disorders, then that person would not be allowed to participate in the study.
00:16:14 ►
Some studies require even second-degree relatives like, you know, grandparents, aunt’s uncle, also excluded.
00:16:21 ►
It depends on the study.
00:16:23 ►
also excluded. It depends on the study.
00:16:28 ►
And let me digress for a moment on the safety because just to tell a story where it was in a recreational setting.
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An acquaintance of mine, he was
00:16:35 ►
totally functional, intelligent person, worked for Microsoft
00:16:40 ►
for years doing sales, you know, fun, comes to Burning
00:16:44 ►
Man, highly functional.
00:16:46 ►
His sister has schizophrenia, and he was in California.
00:16:52 ►
He went to, and his gay partner was going to meet him at the airport, and he took LSD,
00:16:59 ►
and he got the idea that he needed to communicate to his partner that his plans had changed
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in terms of meeting at
00:17:05 ►
the airport and he thought he could just give that message psychically but to really make it work he
00:17:11 ►
had to take more lsd to become more psychic so he took more lsd and got into this whole sort of
00:17:19 ►
psychic communication belief system ended up he was at his uncle’s house
00:17:25 ►
he took all of his clothes
00:17:27 ►
went on the neighbor’s property
00:17:29 ►
called the police
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was arrested by the sheriff naked
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handcuffed
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charged with a crime
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went to jail
00:17:38 ►
was convicted of the crime of
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trespassing
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and decent exposure
00:17:44 ►
something like that.
00:17:48 ►
Had to not be in California for a couple of years
00:17:52 ►
until his probation or his parole was up.
00:17:57 ►
And other than that, he’s a completely normal person.
00:18:00 ►
And then like out of the blue,
00:18:01 ►
he just had this psychotic experience on lsd that affected his
00:18:07 ►
judgment and he got in trouble so you know it’s rare but it happens and we just for research we
00:18:14 ►
can’t take any risks of something going south like that with a person that would just really help
00:18:19 ►
harm the whole research movement so i’m glad you brought up the question of safety because we get a lot of questions, you know,
00:18:26 ►
is it’s how do you, people, you know,
00:18:28 ►
how can I take mushrooms safely or LSD safely?
00:18:31 ►
And, you know, we’re a scientific research institute.
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We just have to be medical and say we can’t really,
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we advise you not to do it
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without psychiatric screening and preparation.
00:18:41 ►
You know, we just have to toe that line for safety,
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safety first, basically.
00:18:47 ►
So let me just sort of continue about describing the other studies.
00:18:52 ►
So three addiction studies.
00:18:55 ►
There’s a study starting soon at Yale University for obsessive-compulsive disorder,
00:19:01 ►
bigger, with using scanning more evolved.
00:19:05 ►
And that researcher is camped in our camp, Ben Kelmendy,
00:19:08 ►
in camp now over here in the corner.
00:19:12 ►
And there’s a study just started now at Yale,
00:19:16 ►
a completely different kind of diagnosis, psilocybin for cluster headache.
00:19:20 ►
And probably a lot of you read about cluster busters and LSD
00:19:22 ►
and psilocybin for cluster headache.
00:19:24 ►
So they actually have treated their first subject at Yale to see if psilocybin can help prevent cluster headaches.
00:19:32 ►
And then Yale is also going to do a study for depression, a small study.
00:19:37 ►
And this study is actually, our motivation is more to help a young investigator get started in a research career.
00:19:43 ►
He’s a psychiatry resident.
00:19:43 ►
more to help a young investigator get started in a research career.
00:19:44 ►
He’s a psychiatry resident.
00:19:48 ►
And so it’s a small study with depression,
00:19:53 ►
but they’re using highly sophisticated EEG biomarkers to say, okay, this biomarker correlates with people not getting depressed.
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Does psilocybin change the biomarker and improve depression or not or whatever?
00:20:03 ►
So it’s more like learning about the basic science of depression, neurochemistry, and
00:20:08 ►
psilocybin’s effects on it.
00:20:09 ►
So it’s a very sort of esoteric neuroscience.
00:20:12 ►
But we want to help young investors start a career.
00:20:14 ►
And these are very passionate, two young, very passionate residents.
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And a senior researcher is working with them.
00:20:24 ►
So that’s Yale.
00:20:25 ►
At Johns Hopkins, in addition to the smoking study,
00:20:30 ►
they’re doing two other studies
00:20:32 ►
that are not with patients with disorders.
00:20:36 ►
One is about a million-dollar study
00:20:38 ►
on the effects of psilocybin
00:20:41 ►
in long-term meditation practitioners
00:20:43 ►
from different traditions,
00:20:47 ►
but they’re mostly Buddhist mantra-type meditators,
00:20:51 ►
but, you know, practiced for 20, 30 years.
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And it includes fMRI scanning before and after,
00:21:02 ►
but a lot of it is like,
00:21:03 ►
how did the psilocybin experience affect your meditation
00:21:07 ►
practice itself did it change help hinder harm some sort of qualitative change in your experience
00:21:15 ►
in meditating and then they do one low dose psilocybin session uh probably equivalent to
00:21:22 ►
say a couple of grams of mushrooms roughly and they actually are scanned during the psilocybin experience
00:21:29 ►
doing various kinds of
00:21:31 ►
so just open mind meditation
00:21:34 ►
loving kindness meditation
00:21:36 ►
some sort of focused attention meditation
00:21:40 ►
and what is the brain doing in those different meditative states
00:21:43 ►
under the influence of a low dosedose psilocybin.
00:21:45 ►
So it’s a very neuroscience-oriented meditation study.
00:21:51 ►
In Switzerland at University Hospital, Franz Wollinweider,
00:21:55 ►
who’s one of our connected researchers on our board,
00:21:58 ►
he’s done studies with Zen monks actually up in a mountain retreat in Switzerland,
00:22:05 ►
in their retreat hooked up to all these EEG wires
00:22:07 ►
to do very similar kinds of studies of long-term Zen meditators.
00:22:16 ►
I’m pretty sure it’s Zen.
00:22:16 ►
There’s Tibetan Buddhists who are Zen meditators.
00:22:18 ►
So he’s working on that.
00:22:23 ►
And then there’s a study that’s happening both at Johns Hopkins University
00:22:27 ►
and New York University for religious professionals. And these are ministers with congregations.
00:22:36 ►
And they would love, they want to get ministers from different traditions. So they have, you
00:22:40 ►
know, plenty of rabbis. Not a problem to recruit rabbis. Some Christian ministers,
00:22:45 ►
they, of course, love to get a Muslim imam to come.
00:22:49 ►
They haven’t found one,
00:22:50 ►
but if anybody knows a Muslim minister or imam or whatever
00:22:54 ►
who would be interested, let us know
00:22:57 ►
because that would just be awesome
00:22:59 ►
to have someone from that tradition.
00:23:01 ►
How does psilocybin affect your personal experience,
00:23:05 ►
what you do in your job as a minister, your sermons, your beliefs,
00:23:10 ►
your effectiveness of being a minister to your congregation.
00:23:17 ►
So that’s at both.
00:23:18 ►
Hefter’s not doing that.
00:23:19 ►
Other people are funding that, but it’s part of the same research group.
00:23:24 ►
Other people are funding that, but it’s part of the same research group.
00:23:33 ►
So I think those are the main ones in the United States that are happening with psilocybin.
00:23:38 ►
After we did some MDMA basic science research back in the 90s in Switzerland,
00:23:41 ►
you know, the mechanism of action and the receptors and all that, and in the Voldenweider Clinic and learned about the neuroscience.
00:23:45 ►
And our main researcher, Steve Ross, who’s also camped over here with us, he’s at NYU.
00:23:53 ►
He’s really interesting.
00:23:54 ►
He’s kind of the center of everything now because he’s doing the phase three,
00:24:00 ►
one of the phase three studies for MDMA, for PTSD,
00:24:09 ►
one of the phase three studies for MDMA, for PTSD, phase three study for psilocybin for depression with and without cancer patients, religious professionals, and alcoholism. So he’s,
00:24:16 ►
he’s like everywhere. And he’s over here if you want to catch him and talk to him about that.
00:24:21 ►
him and talk to him about that.
00:24:25 ►
So those are the U.S. studies and I’ll just
00:24:28 ►
I’ll tell, I want to talk a little bit about
00:24:30 ►
the studies and some of the studies in Switzerland
00:24:31 ►
that are just sort of interesting models for
00:24:34 ►
research but I’ll stop now
00:24:36 ►
for any comments or
00:24:37 ►
questions about the things I’ve talked about so far.
00:24:40 ►
Yeah. Hi, my name
00:24:42 ►
is Loic. I, you’re
00:24:43 ►
it’s fascinating, I’m a meditator so i’m really
00:24:46 ►
interested in your meditation and uh i mean those experiments can you can you tell about the first
00:24:53 ►
results because you well there’s no results because they’re in the middle of doing the study
00:24:57 ►
there is no nothing like that until the study is over i mean they’re collecting data it’s just
00:25:02 ►
collected and stored on a computer but there’s there no data analysis, so we have no results.
00:25:08 ►
I mean, anecdotally, I mean, there’s nothing bad has happened.
00:25:13 ►
I mean, none of the Sillen-Steinbren studies have had any what we call significant adverse effects
00:25:19 ►
where someone is injured or harmed more than like I had a headache or I threw up or I couldn’t sleep, you know, minor stuff.
00:25:26 ►
My blood pressure went up a little bit.
00:25:27 ►
No serious event studies, adverse events in either MDMA or psilocybin research, which is great.
00:25:34 ►
But no data yet.
00:25:36 ►
We don’t know.
00:25:36 ►
But they’ve done fine, and some said it was a good experience, et cetera.
00:25:40 ►
So thank you.
00:25:42 ►
I’ve got two questions.
00:25:49 ►
cetera. So thank you. I’ve got two questions. One is, has there been research or anecdotal work, or maybe even from your clinical practice back in the 80s on using psychedelic substances
00:25:56 ►
for treatment of personality disorder? No, there is not. But I can’t make one comment on that.
00:26:01 ►
No, there is not.
00:26:03 ►
But I can’t make one comment on that.
00:26:10 ►
Johns Hopkins, before they started doing the treatment research,
00:26:15 ►
they did some studies with just, quote, normal people without a disorder.
00:26:25 ►
And to me, the landmark study of the past 50 years was about spirituality,
00:26:28 ►
just psilocybin occasioning mystical experience.
00:26:31 ►
And then they did another one,
00:26:33 ►
just sort of dose finding,
00:26:34 ►
like low, medium, high doses.
00:26:41 ►
So these are all non-disordered people, you know.
00:26:44 ►
And so they took, I don’t know how many people it was,
00:26:46 ►
total maybe 50 or so,
00:26:48 ►
and they did personality testing on all these people.
00:26:52 ►
So they found that just, you know,
00:26:54 ►
just looking at all the personality profiles before and after their experience,
00:26:57 ►
one dimension of personality changed.
00:27:00 ►
And personality dimensions just, they just don’t change.
00:27:03 ►
They’re just fixed.
00:27:04 ►
It’s very, I’m not an expert in personality dimensions, they just don’t change. They’re just fixed.
00:27:08 ►
I’m not an expert in personality science,
00:27:13 ►
but it’s very unusual that your MMPI test will change,
00:27:15 ►
that one of these factors will change.
00:27:18 ►
So the one that changed significantly was the factor of openness,
00:27:30 ►
which involves the opposite of rigidity, sort of open to new ideas, creativity, not closed mind to new ideas, which is sort of like, I mean, duh, you know, to people, but it was
00:27:36 ►
actually scientifically documented, you know, statistically. And so that was an impressive
00:27:43 ►
finding. You know, these people don’t have
00:27:46 ►
disorders but that’s like their personalities were more open and i think at least we here
00:27:52 ►
think that’s good yeah and then my other my other question is uh you know being
00:28:01 ►
prone to meditation or prone to religious leaderships, not in the DSM-5.
00:28:08 ►
And so I’m kind of curious how, you know, these things have to go through the FDA.
00:28:16 ►
And what I’m interested in is how then that allows the use of these substances in kind of non,
00:28:25 ►
substances in kind of non, in a setting that’s not pathological or it’s for enhancing people that are already, you know, not,
00:28:30 ►
they don’t have a DSM diagnosis.
00:28:32 ►
And how does that come about and what’s the kind of, you know?
00:28:36 ►
Under the structure of current laws and regulations,
00:28:38 ►
it will have no effect on that directly.
00:28:42 ►
Yeah, so let me address that a little bit.
00:28:48 ►
So the FDA will allow the research,
00:28:52 ►
you know, it’s just let’s study the brain, study just basic science, what’s going on. You know,
00:28:56 ►
they’ll allow the research. Obviously, it’s happened and they’re happy. The FDA has been, I say, extremely friendly to this field since about 1990. Before, they were like, no, no, no,
00:29:02 ►
no, no. And I was mdma when it was controlled i
00:29:06 ►
had a cancer patient who relieved his pain from multiple myeloma for weeks and i wanted to get
00:29:13 ►
permission to continue with him this is like 85 and the answer was you need more animal studies
00:29:20 ►
and he was like terminally ill so it’s like around 1990 it totally changed
00:29:25 ►
the doors open it’s like any other drug you’re open the door so you can do the research but the
00:29:30 ►
whole the fda regulations for approving a drug to be sold to be sold legally in the marketplace
00:29:37 ►
it can only be sold for an indication which means a an illness of some sort. Now, an illness, an indication may or may not be a DSM-5 diagnosis.
00:29:50 ►
I mean, they really encouraged this.
00:29:52 ►
We wanted to do some sort of, you know, cancer distress condition.
00:29:56 ►
It’s like, sure, do tests, validate it.
00:30:00 ►
That’ll take you five years.
00:30:01 ►
Then you’ll have a condition, and then you can start your research.
00:30:03 ►
Like, never mind.
00:30:04 ►
We’ll go with the DSM-5.
00:30:08 ►
So another thing I want to say about the DSM-5,
00:30:13 ►
which is the authoritative manual of official psychiatric diagnosis
00:30:19 ►
published by the American Psychiatric Association.
00:30:21 ►
It totally dovetails with the international classification.
00:30:26 ►
And you say they’re not in there.
00:30:27 ►
Basically, every psychiatric diagnosis requires impairment in functioning somehow.
00:30:38 ►
So you can be, you know, you can believe that you’re from the Pleiades,
00:30:54 ►
You know, you can believe that you’re from the Pleiades, and if you can provide for your food, shelter, and clothing, you don’t have a diagnosis because you’re functioning.
00:31:02 ►
You know, if you have social relationships and you can earn your living and function, you can believe whatever the hell you want to.
00:31:07 ►
You’re not psychiatrically ill. So some people think, well, hey, you know, this is, you know,
00:31:11 ►
I’m not crazy, and, you know, why is this diagnosis, you know, it’s all about functioning.
00:31:15 ►
And so I’m being a little, I guess, defensive about psychiatry, but that’s something that people lose sight of in terms of diagnoses. So it’s not
00:31:19 ►
diagnosing everything that’s not conformist, in other words.
00:31:24 ►
I have a question about an observation that the mycologist Paul Stamets has been making
00:31:31 ►
in some of his recent talks, including at the most recent MAPS conference in Oakland this year.
00:31:37 ►
He has been talking about the use of a combination of psilocybin, niacin,
00:31:43 ►
and lion’s mane mushroom for neuroregenesis
00:31:47 ►
and using the three in combination.
00:31:52 ►
And I’m curious about what your thoughts about that might be.
00:31:57 ►
Well, this is the first time I’ve heard of that.
00:31:58 ►
I wasn’t at that talk.
00:32:01 ►
I do know that I’m a little vague about this,
00:32:05 ►
but it has, I’m pretty sure it’s been measured that psilocybin,
00:32:10 ►
and this is just the pure molecule,
00:32:11 ►
not in a mushroom with all the other stuff in the mushroom,
00:32:14 ►
increases the production of brain, BDNF,
00:32:21 ►
brain-derived neurotropic factor.
00:32:25 ►
And when that increases, that’s a marker.
00:32:29 ►
It correlates with recovery from depression.
00:32:33 ►
And so you can say, well, that means that factor goes up
00:32:38 ►
and neurogenesis is happening just from psilocybin by itself.
00:32:43 ►
But I don’t know of any study.
00:32:47 ►
I mean, I don’t know how you would do it, you know,
00:32:49 ►
that there’s new nerve growth because you’d have to, you know,
00:32:53 ►
cut the brain up and look at it.
00:32:56 ►
It probably could be done in animals.
00:32:57 ►
Maybe it’s been done in animals.
00:32:58 ►
I don’t know that psilocybin improved neurogenesis.
00:33:03 ►
But my question would be as a psychiatrist,
00:33:05 ►
well, I mean, more neurons are not necessarily better.
00:33:10 ►
You know, it’s like more neurons where?
00:33:12 ►
And connecting what to what?
00:33:15 ►
I mean, with MDMA, you know, in high doses,
00:33:18 ►
there’s this, you know, nerve terminal destruction
00:33:20 ►
that can happen with super high doses.
00:33:23 ►
But if it’s cutting connections that are not helpful, well, great.
00:33:29 ►
If you have a connection that’s got you in an obsessive loop or an addictive loop,
00:33:35 ►
it’s good to not have that connection.
00:33:39 ►
So it’s just more is not better, but it’s a fascinating thing. And, you know, was this just sort of anecdotally reported evidence from people who were using the combination,
00:33:52 ►
or was there some sort of research project in a journal?
00:33:55 ►
I mean, do you know the details of that?
00:33:58 ►
It was a proposed combination that he put up as a recipe in a slide during a number of talks that he gave
00:34:07 ►
this year and i think where he was going with that was a proposal for more research
00:34:15 ►
and a suggestion that this combination might be useful for age-related cognitive decline
00:34:22 ►
and alzheimer’s patients. Oh, okay, okay.
00:34:25 ►
So basically based on what Paul knows about mushrooms,
00:34:29 ►
which is way more than all of us together many times.
00:34:33 ►
So this is his theory, his knowledge of neurochemistry and the mushrooms,
00:34:37 ►
how that might help.
00:34:40 ►
That’s really interesting.
00:34:41 ►
You know, some of the elders before my generation had Alzheimer’s.
00:34:52 ►
My teacher, Leo Zeff, had Alzheimer’s.
00:34:54 ►
Sasha Shulgin had Alzheimer’s.
00:34:58 ►
Myron Stoleroff had Alzheimer’s.
00:35:00 ►
And I’m not an expert on Alzheimer’s at all, but it’s like, okay, well, you know, oh, my God, oh, my God,
00:35:05 ►
you know, is that, or psychedelics,
00:35:07 ►
will they cause Alzheimer’s or MDMA or whatever?
00:35:10 ►
So I asked a neurologist who is very familiar with this field
00:35:14 ►
about that concept.
00:35:15 ►
This was at the four years ago Psychedelic Science,
00:35:18 ►
and his name will come to me
00:35:19 ►
because I’m starting to have H-related name forgetfulness.
00:35:24 ►
It started in my 20s.
00:35:26 ►
But he said the whole neurochemistry of Alzheimer’s
00:35:30 ►
is more the cholinergic system, acetylcholine,
00:35:35 ►
choline enhancement, et cetera.
00:35:38 ►
And MDMA and none of the psychedelics
00:35:40 ►
do anything to that system at all,
00:35:43 ►
you know, directly that we know of.
00:35:45 ►
They’re all the serotonin system, dopamine, norepinephrine.
00:35:50 ►
So he was very comfortable in saying, I mean, like, you know,
00:35:56 ►
Alzheimer’s cognitive decline is such a pervasive thing,
00:35:59 ►
it’s not unusual at all that three people that I knew got Alzheimer’s.
00:36:04 ►
You know, my mother got cognitive decline.
00:36:05 ►
So it made me assured that psychedelics or MDMA are not a cause for cognitive decline.
00:36:15 ►
There is research that heavy users of MDMA, most of whom are using other things recreationally,
00:36:22 ►
do have some reduction in verbal memory or fluency that are, it’s subtle.
00:36:28 ►
They’re still within the normal range, but you can measure a decrease.
00:36:32 ►
But there was a study done with, this is really interesting,
00:36:37 ►
with Mormons in Salt Lake City who were ravers.
00:36:43 ►
They never touched alcohol.
00:36:45 ►
They never touched any other drug except ecstasy.
00:36:49 ►
And they did neuropsych testing on them.
00:36:52 ►
And some would do it a lot, you know.
00:36:54 ►
Completely normal.
00:36:56 ►
Completely normal.
00:36:57 ►
And then in Switzerland, Franz Willenweider, you know,
00:37:00 ►
has this super sensitive scanning of, you know,
00:37:04 ►
radio labeling.
00:37:08 ►
The serotonin nerve terminals are supposedly destroyed when rats get tons of MDMA.
00:37:11 ►
And this is just one session with 100 milligrams,
00:37:13 ►
you know, a therapeutic dose.
00:37:15 ►
No hint of any destruction of anything on that.
00:37:19 ►
And so, I mean, you can overdo anything.
00:37:22 ►
And you can definitely overdo MDMA,
00:37:24 ►
but it’s still very reassuring that at the therapeutic dose levels that are being used in the research that heal people,
00:37:31 ►
it, so far as we know, is safe, you know, basically.
00:37:36 ►
Yeah.
00:37:37 ►
There are some people who have taken a lot of psychedelic, particularly MDMA,
00:37:44 ►
and who say, it doesn’t work for me anymore.
00:37:48 ►
I think Ann Shulgin is one of those. And has anybody tried to study what changes cause
00:37:55 ►
it to not work after X amount of use?
00:38:00 ►
No, in terms of recreational use over years or something.
00:38:07 ►
Right. no there’s in terms of like recreational use over years or something right yeah no that i’ve never seen a paper or studying recreational users or why it doesn’t work or like okay i’ve used ecstasy for
00:38:12 ►
five or ten years and bring them into the lab give them mdma and major there that has not been done
00:38:17 ►
that i know of but but it’s a common story yeah and it’s it’s very common that like oh my first
00:38:23 ►
mdma experience was like and and nothing ever quite was like the first one, you know, which is, I mean, novelty is impressive.
00:38:31 ►
You know, your first Burning Man is like, oh, my God.
00:38:33 ►
So clearly more research is needed, you know, of course.
00:38:38 ►
So, but I don’t know.
00:38:49 ►
Well, so screening is probably more human hours are spent in screening patients than preparing them and treating them in the study.
00:38:53 ►
I mean, it’s common to screen 20 people for every one subject who actually gets in the study.
00:38:59 ►
So you start with usually a phone interview, just basic questions,
00:39:04 ►
and then if they pass that, an in-person interview.
00:39:07 ►
And what they do is for these treatment studies,
00:39:10 ►
the standard is the clinical interview for DSM-5,
00:39:17 ►
structured clinical interview for DSM-5, SCID.
00:39:20 ►
And so basically it’s a structured interview covering every psychiatric diagnostic category
00:39:25 ►
and sort of a you know if you have this you know it’s like a menu thing then check out this
00:39:29 ►
if you say you’re depressed and check all the symptoms for depression so and you and you check
00:39:34 ►
in in the in the the dsm-5 it’s like it’s cookbook if you have you know five of these
00:39:40 ►
10 symptoms or whatever then you are officially have major depression.
00:39:46 ►
So it’s totally structured, yes, no, screening.
00:39:49 ►
And it’s done by psychiatrists, almost always psychiatrists, maybe psychologists sometimes.
00:39:56 ►
So it’s a very rigid categorizing of people.
00:40:00 ►
But anybody can apply and say, hey, I want to be in the study.
00:40:04 ►
You know, they can be referred by therapists.
00:40:07 ►
And so definitely, and recruiting is by far the rate-limiting factor in getting the research done.
00:40:14 ►
And it was very hard to find cancer patients willing to take psilocybin
00:40:20 ►
until a lot of the videos and the media got out that it was really helping cancer patients,
00:40:25 ►
and then the recruiting sped up.
00:40:27 ►
But it took 10 years to do these two studies to get 80 patients, you know, from conception to publication.
00:40:32 ►
So we’re hoping it will go much faster now that all the media is out there, et cetera.
00:40:38 ►
So does that answer your question about?
00:40:42 ►
Hi.
00:40:43 ►
Hi.
00:40:44 ►
You’ve already addressed this a little bit but I wondered if you
00:40:48 ►
had anything more to say on MDMA and potential toxicity of MDMA so you had
00:40:55 ►
that Mormon study which the what the Mormon the Mormon study the Mormon rave
00:40:59 ►
oh I didn’t I didn’t have more to say about it, but I can answer questions. Yeah, so my question was just, is it more of a settled question now?
00:41:10 ►
Because I know at one point it was pretty, it was controversial,
00:41:13 ►
and there was kind of conflicting evidence.
00:41:15 ►
I would say there are definitely lots of people for whom they think MDMA,
00:41:20 ►
recreational use or therapeutic use, could cause neurotoxicity.
00:41:25 ►
I guess there’s a British researcher, Andrew Parrott,
00:41:28 ►
who’s sort of the lead person on that mission
00:41:33 ►
that MDMA is bad for you or could be bad for you,
00:41:37 ►
shouldn’t use it therapeutically.
00:41:38 ►
So no, it’s not universally accepted
00:41:40 ►
that MDMA is safe for your brain
00:41:42 ►
at therapeutic levels or frequency.
00:41:46 ►
But I would say, well, most people just don’t care.
00:41:51 ►
You know, it’s just a minor issue.
00:41:53 ►
They’re not involved in that kind of research, and it’s just a small, narrow field involved in that.
00:41:58 ►
But the people who think it’s dangerous, in other words,
00:42:04 ►
I haven’t heard of any of those people
00:42:05 ►
who are sort of championing that
00:42:06 ►
who were convinced by the Mormon study
00:42:08 ►
or the Swiss pet study
00:42:11 ►
because that’s the culture of science.
00:42:17 ►
Thank you.
00:42:18 ►
Of scientists.
00:42:20 ►
Well, let me just touch on,
00:42:22 ►
in Switzerland,
00:42:23 ►
they just do all kind of amazing conceptual studies with psilocybin.
00:42:31 ►
You know, one was binocular rivalry, where if you see an image where you get,
00:42:38 ►
your right eye gets stripe lines this way, your left eye this way,
00:42:42 ►
your brain, they can measure, you know which which one you’re attending
00:42:46 ►
to and it goes back and forth and and it changes at some frequency it can vary and it’s usually
00:42:54 ►
sort of random changing back and forth with lsd it became more of a a rhythmic changing back and
00:43:00 ►
forth of this binocular rival but it’s like, what does it mean? Who knows?
00:43:07 ►
Some people, I’m not sure this was proven, but some people were able to see both at the same
00:43:11 ►
time, you know, which is like you can hold conflicting concepts in your mind at the same
00:43:15 ►
time. So that was cool. But about a year ago, there was a study in Switzerland on social exclusion,
00:43:23 ►
in Switzerland on social exclusion,
00:43:28 ►
how psilocybin affected the experience of being socially excluded.
00:43:32 ►
And so what they set up, they set up a video.
00:43:37 ►
It was like an interactive video presentation.
00:43:41 ►
And there’s two people playing in your own, have some visors on.
00:43:43 ►
There’s two people throwing a ball and playing catch.
00:43:50 ►
And sometimes they throw it to you, and you throw it back to them and so in one condition they keep throwing it back to you in another condition after a while they just stop throwing you the ball
00:43:54 ►
so you’re excluded from their interaction and so they did that with people on psilocybin and off
00:44:02 ►
psilocybin and then measured their subjective experience
00:44:06 ►
and what their brains are doing, etc.
00:44:08 ►
So the people on psilocybin
00:44:10 ►
had less of an experience
00:44:13 ►
of being socially excluded
00:44:14 ►
than the people who were not on psilocybin.
00:44:17 ►
They didn’t feel so abandoned.
00:44:21 ►
And being socially connected,
00:44:23 ►
I think, we all think is a good thing,
00:44:26 ►
and not to, you know, get angry at people who aren’t throwing you the ball.
00:44:32 ►
So the kind of research models that psilocybin can be applied to are, you know, it’s just all over the place.
00:44:38 ►
I was just, and for the future, addiction specialist at University of Wisconsin is working on opioid addiction.
00:44:49 ►
And that’s a tricky addiction to treat because if people stop using opiates entirely,
00:44:55 ►
and I’m sure you know about this, Annie,
00:44:58 ►
and if they suddenly relapse, they’re no longer tolerant,
00:45:01 ►
and they use as much or even half the dose they used before they can die
00:45:06 ►
because they’re so sensitive to the opiates again.
00:45:09 ►
And we don’t want someone who is healed from opiate addiction with psilocybin to go relapse and die.
00:45:16 ►
That would not be good.
00:45:17 ►
So what they’re going to do, they’re going to do a little pilot study
00:45:19 ►
and have people taking suboxone or buprenorphine maintenance with the goal of seeing if we can get heroin or opiate addicts.
00:45:30 ►
The goal would be to maintain on Suboxone and not use them illicitly or in an abusive way.
00:45:37 ►
So their first trial is going to maybe get a dozen people or so who are taking Suboxone
00:45:41 ►
to see if they still can have the mystical experience with psilocybin, to see if they still have, can have the mystical experience
00:45:45 ►
with psilocybin, to see if Suboxone, which is an opiate agonist, part agonist, to see
00:45:50 ►
if that inhibits the, what seems to be the heating experiential part of psilocybin.
00:45:55 ►
So if they do have that or find the dose at which it is effective, then they can go forward
00:46:02 ►
treating opiate addicts in a pilot to see, you know, could it help opiate addiction.
00:46:06 ►
Of course, we all think it will.
00:46:08 ►
I mean, LSD, we think, has helped addicts, you know, in the 60s and 70s and alcoholics.
00:46:16 ►
So that’s something on the horizon.
00:46:18 ►
And, you know, I mean, opiate addiction, there’s epidemic opiate addiction.
00:46:21 ►
Well, it’s like, you know, less than half the people die from opiod addiction is alcohol addiction.
00:46:28 ►
So alcohol addiction is like, it’s so big,
00:46:31 ►
people don’t even think about it as an emergency
00:46:33 ►
because it’s been an emergency for decades.
00:46:37 ►
And just last night, this is just getting in the world of total speculation,
00:46:40 ►
I happened to see a neurosurgeon.
00:46:44 ►
We had sort of an event over at the Transformation, a neurosurgeon,
00:46:50 ►
and he works with a lot of comatose patients from trauma or metabolic or all sorts of coma.
00:46:57 ►
And some of them are, you know, they look like they’re asleep, but there’s brain activity.
00:47:02 ►
Like they are maybe awake or maybe they’re not awake.
00:47:05 ►
But he has the idea, well, would psilocybin help people wake up from a coma?
00:47:10 ►
And if they did, wouldn’t that be cool?
00:47:12 ►
So it’s like, you know, I never thought of that before.
00:47:17 ►
But it’s just so, and he was a young, he just finished his residency,
00:47:20 ►
a young neurosurgeon, University of Texas in Austin.
00:47:23 ►
He’s a young neurosurgeon at the University of Texas in Austin. And so there’s, you know, because these medicines have been banned for so long,
00:47:31 ►
a whole generation of researchers, it just stopped.
00:47:34 ►
And so it’s having to reboot a whole new generation to start that movement on again
00:47:40 ►
where the senior researchers and the young researchers.
00:47:43 ►
And so people are having ideas.
00:47:45 ►
And since these medicines were banned,
00:47:46 ►
and they’re so different from every other kind of drug and medicine,
00:47:50 ►
I mean, the sky’s the limit of what you can imagine, you know,
00:47:53 ►
they might be useful for.
00:47:54 ►
And you never know until you do the study under the standard traditions
00:47:59 ►
of accepted scientific method and see.
00:48:03 ►
And so it’s just unlimited like you know
00:48:06 ►
Alzheimer’s or whatever so it’s just an exciting time to be part of that we’ve
00:48:12 ►
got five more minutes if there’s any other questions yeah the National Institute
00:48:21 ►
of drug abuse spent I don’t know, $10 million on Ibogaine research.
00:48:27 ►
In the 90s, I’m thinking.
00:48:30 ►
And a lot of it was because of protests from the addicts, you know,
00:48:34 ►
who found it useful.
00:48:35 ►
What they ran into was toxic problems in the cerebellum,
00:48:40 ►
the neurotoxicity in the cerebellum and slowing down the heart rate so they decided
00:48:47 ►
it’s just not a safe treatment ibogaine and there are obviously clinics in mexico and other places
00:48:54 ►
where people go and they are healed and they don’t get addicted you know it cures them of their opiate
00:48:58 ►
addiction so it obviously works and it obviously blocks withdrawal. But what’s happening now, an analog of Ibogaine that is not
00:49:05 ►
psychedelic at all,
00:49:08 ►
nor Ibogaine,
00:49:10 ►
is being studied to
00:49:11 ►
block opiate withdrawal and craving.
00:49:13 ►
So that’s in like a for-profit drug
00:49:15 ►
development field. So Ibogaine
00:49:17 ►
did lead to that
00:49:19 ►
discovery. And likewise, there’s a drug
00:49:21 ►
under development. It’s a LSD
00:49:23 ►
analog for cholesterol headache that’s also not psychedelic that’s in for-profit drug development.
00:49:32 ►
Bromo something LSD.
00:49:36 ►
Like here’s electricity.
00:49:37 ►
What can we do with it?
00:49:38 ►
Let’s try it for everything.
00:49:39 ►
You know, I mean, there’s so much that could be done.
00:49:42 ►
Okay.
00:49:43 ►
Well, thank you very much.
00:49:43 ►
Thank you.
00:49:48 ►
Thank you, George.
00:49:51 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:49:53 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:49:58 ►
It is really quite comforting for me to learn about how much psychedelic research
00:50:03 ►
is now underway in so many different parts of the world.
00:50:06 ►
At the beginning of this millennium, there was almost no government-approved research programs in which human subjects participated.
00:50:15 ►
Then, in 2004, after many years of going back and forth with the FDA to get their approval,
00:50:21 ►
Dr. Charlie Grove got his psilocybin end-of-life study approved.
00:50:26 ►
And by the way, that study was funded by the Hefter Research Institute, of which Dr. Grobe
00:50:31 ►
is also a co-founder.
00:50:33 ►
Since then, psychedelic research studies have become much more common at universities and
00:50:38 ►
clinics in many parts of the world, as we just heard.
00:50:42 ►
And based on the wide variety of studies that are now being conducted,
00:50:46 ►
it appears to me that this field is going to continue to grow by leaps and bounds in the
00:50:51 ►
years ahead. Now on the topic of psychedelics in conjunction with meditation, I want to once again
00:50:58 ►
point you to Myron Stolaroff’s excellent essay on the topic, which is titled, Are Psychedelics Useful in the Practice
00:51:05 ►
of Buddhism? I’ve talked about that essay in previous podcasts, and so I won’t repeat what
00:51:11 ►
I said here, but I will provide a link to it in today’s program notes, which you can find at
00:51:16 ►
psychedelicsalon.com. And talking about the Stolaroffs, Although Myron died almost five years ago, his wife Jean is still going
00:51:26 ►
strong at 90. And when I called her earlier today, she told me that a couple of days ago,
00:51:32 ►
two women who are working on a creative project involving psychedelics came to her home in Lone
00:51:37 ►
Pine to learn more about the early days of psychedelic research in which she had participated.
00:51:43 ►
So far, Lou B. from Colorado is the only fellow salonner
00:51:47 ►
to write Jean a short note of appreciation for her pioneering work,
00:51:51 ►
but the recent visit by those two young women certainly has made up for it.
00:51:56 ►
Of course, you still should send Jean Stoller off a holiday card if you can.
00:52:00 ►
Her mailing address is Post Office Box 742, Lone Pine, California, 93545.
00:52:08 ►
And it would really be a wonderful thing for you to send Jean a short note or a card,
00:52:13 ►
particularly at this time of year when we old people sometimes get a little blue.
00:52:18 ►
So tell her a little about yourself, because she is always looking for news about what is going on in the wonderful
00:52:25 ►
world of psychedelics, and whether you know it or not, you are on the front lines in one
00:52:31 ►
way or another.
00:52:32 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:52:37 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.