588 - Good News on the Psychedelic Front

Program Notes

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https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Rick Doblin

https://www.fromshocktoawe.com/Date this lecture was recorded: August 31, 2018.]
Today we continue with the second part of the 2018 Palenque Norte Lecture given by Rick Doblin, the president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. In addition to learning some new information about the current state of MDMA research, Rick ends the Q&A session with some information about mescaline that I’d never heard before. As he says, “Mescaline is the most important psychedelic that isn’t being researched.” Also, there is an announcement about a screening of the film “From Shock To Awe” that was discussed here in the salon three years ago when the producers were first raising the funding for the project. It has now been completed and will be screened in select theaters on November 12, 2018. Full details are at the beginning of today’s program.
[NOTE: The following quotations are by Rick Doblin.]

“We got an agreement letter on July 28th, and what it means is that the FDA is legally bound to approve MDMA if we get statistically significant evidence of efficacy from this design and no new safety problems come up.”

“Mescaline is the most important psychedelic that isn’t being researched.”

From Shock To Awe

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Transcript

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

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Salon.

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And a big thank you goes out to my eight

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new supporters via Patreon. As you know by now, next week I officially begin what I’m calling the

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Psychedelic Salon 3.0 track. Basically it’s a continuation of this 1.0 track that we’re listening

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to right now. However, through Patreon my supporters are going to get a private RSS feed, and that’s

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the new 3.0 feed. So from now on, after today’s podcast, all of my new Salon One podcasts,

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plus things like selected Terrence McInnes soundbites and readings from me by my books,

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well, all of that’s going to first appear on the Patreon RSS feed. Then, three months after a new 1.0 podcast appears on the Patreon feed,

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I’ll rebroadcast it here.

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So, over time, you’ll still be able to hear everything that I publish from the salon.

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It’s just that my supporters on Patreon are going to get to hear them

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a few months before everybody else.

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As they used to say in Texas,

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you ought to dance with the one who brung

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you. Now, as much as I’ve tried to avoid doing this, my personal financial situation has, well,

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it’s been leaning toward the dire side. And so I’m trying to see if this is a way I can get my

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head back above water. So for only $1 a month, you can not only get access to the first run of many of my

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podcasts, you’re also invited to join other salonners and me for a live one and a half hour

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version of the psychedelic salon every Monday night. And we’ve been doing this all year long

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now and it’s developed into a nice little Monday night salon. And this is a true salon, you know,

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where everybody who wants to gets a chance

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to chime in. And there are other reward tiers. However, I’m planning on eventually only having

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$1 an d$ 5 reward levels. So when one of my larger dollar supporters has to reduce their monthly

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donation, I keep reducing the number for that level. But the other day, one of my eight $25 a month patrons

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reduced their monthly donation, and I planned on reducing the number for that group to seven.

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But I wasn’t fast enough, and before I could reduce the number of slots available at that level,

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David A. snuck in and filled it up again. So thanks a lot, David. You’re a real gem.

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Now, before we begin today,

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I have an announcement that I think you’ll be interested in. It comes from Janine Saget,

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who we heard from in podcast 471, which is titled Healing for PTSD is available. And in that episode,

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we learned about the Indiegogo campaign that Janine and others had organized to raise funds for the

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production of a motion picture that’s titled From Shock to Awe. Well, I am very pleased to let you

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know that not only was their financial campaign successful, they have now completed production

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of their film and it will be screened in select theaters in just two weeks. As we’re all well

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aware here in the salon, psychedelic therapy, which we’ll be

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hearing more about from Rick Doblin in just a moment, has finally returned to mainstream medicine

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where it was back, well, way back. And when it comes to treating PTSD, well, there’s actually

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more than one path available. And while MAPS’s MDMA studies continue to move us closer to proven therapies to treat

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post-traumatic stress disorder, there’s also another way that many of us vets have taken,

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and that’s through the use of ayahuasca. In the film, From Shock to Awe, you’ll hear women like

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Brooke Cooley who says, and I quote, ayahuasca and MDMA saved me, my husband, and my family.

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Had psychedelic therapy not come into our lives,

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not only would Mike and I be divorced,

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but there is a solid chance that one or both of us wouldn’t be alive.

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End quote.

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From Shock to Awe actually strikes a balance with a taboo topic

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that could have tremendous impact on society.

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The documentary premieres on November 12, 2018, all across the U.S.,

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but with a special one-night event, Coming Home Beyond Veterans Day.

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The event includes theatrical screenings in over 25 U.S. cities,

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followed by a live Q&A with the cast and filmmakers.

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Additionally, the film’s release launches a

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social impact campaign aimed at empowering people with information that opens a dialogue about

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trauma and supporting scientific research and saving lives. Janine tells me that all 25 of

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these venues are theater on demand, which means that we need to reach a minimum number of tickets

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sold in each location.

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So we have a big job in getting the message out.

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I hope that you can help us spread the word, actually.

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And, you know, this is an important movie,

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one that can change the lives of some of the people who see it.

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So if there’s any way for you to make one of these showings, I think that you’ll also find there are many of the others there as well.

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And you can get all of the information you need on their website, which is an easy-to-remember URL.

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It’s simply fromshocktoaw.com, all in one word.

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And there you can watch a trailer as well as find the location of a screening nearest to you.

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And maybe in a month or so, we can get Shauna home to do another interview with the people behind this important project.

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so we can get Shauna home to do another interview with the people behind this important project.

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Now, for today’s program, which also deals with ways in which the suffering from PTSD can be reduced,

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and in some cases even eliminated altogether,

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well, I’m going to play the rest of the talk that we began last week.

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If you’ve listened to the previous podcasts, before that one, the ones number 585 and 586, and while you’re listening to them, you wondered how or if any of the what they were saying affected the MAPS organization,

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then I strongly recommend that you listen to this, the second half of Rick Goblin’s 2018

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Palenque Norte lecture. In particular, I hope that you pay close attention when Rick is addressing

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some of the ethical issues that have, well, they’ve arisen as MAPS pushes the envelope of MDMA therapy even further ahead.

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And while you may still have some questions after listening to Rick right now, I want you to know that I am firmly in support of his positions.

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He’s had to deal with some very tricky issues, and as a lawyer myself, I’m well aware of the fact that we don’t always get exactly everything we want.

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However, in the case of where we are today, with the research that MAPS and Rick are behind, well, I believe that Rick has navigated our psychedelic voyage of discovery exceedingly well.

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well. So now let’s return to the playa at Burning Man on a hot Friday night, the night before the burn in fact, and

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listen to the last of the 2018 Palenque Norte lectures.

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Now, here is Rick Doblin.

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What happened to change how I describe it is two different things that changed.

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One is that in December there was a

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two paragraph little announcement in Reddit that a new fund was being created called the Pineapple Fund.

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How many of you have heard of the Pineapple Fund?

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Okay, I’d say a small fraction of you.

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So it turns out that what this announcement was, this was an announcement that an early Bitcoin investor had all these

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Bitcoins, and he of course wanted to remain anonymous, and so he announced in December

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that he was going to give away 5,600 Bitcoins, which at the time were worth $88 million.

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And I didn’t know anything about this, but several people saw it.

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I emailed MAPS staff, and one of the MAPS staff wrote a one-page grant application,

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sent it to Pine at the Pineapple Fund,

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and the next day we get an email that says, I’m giving you a million dollars.

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And then two hours later, the Bitcoin showed up in our wallet.

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homes. And then two hours later, the Bitcoin showed up in our wall. And then four days later, we got another million dollars in Bitcoins from who we have no idea who it was from.

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And then we get this email from Pine saying, I’d be open to talking to you about a matching

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grant. And we’re like, great, okay, that sounds really, really good.

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And so we talked a lot about it, but in the process I got to get to know him a little

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bit better through emails and trying to find out what motivated him.

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And what he said was that he had borderline personality disorder and he had depression

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and he decided to go for therapy.

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And he wasn’t sure what therapy to go for and he decided to go for therapy. And he wasn’t sure what therapy to go for, and he decided to go for ketamine therapy.

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So ketamine is considered the most important discovery

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in neuroscience for depression in the last 30 years.

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And there’s now 1,000 ketamine clinics in America

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for refractory depression.

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It’s being seen mostly just as a pharmacological drug

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without therapy.

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They just give ketamine.

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It tends to help people for short periods of time.

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They need repeated doses. Occasionally

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it’ll help people permanently.

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But he went for ketamine therapy.

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And under the influence of ketamine, he had

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a vision. And this vision

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was that there was a simple

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way for him to get out of

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depression and get out of borderline

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personality. And the simple way for him to get out of depression and get out of borderline personality. And the simple

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way for him to get out of that was to help other people. And if you’ve ever tried this

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when you’re depressed, to help other people is really a tremendous way to get out of being

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wrapped up in your own mind. So he decided that the best way he could help other people

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was to give away more than half of his wealth in

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bitcoins. And so

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then he proposed that he would

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give us a $4 million matching

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grant. And we negotiated

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what would the match be, how do we work

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that out, and we had from January

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10th to March 10th to

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raise this

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$4 million. And we managed to

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do it with a week to spare. And so he sent us $4 million. And we managed to do it with a week to spare.

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And so he sent us $4 million more Bitcoins.

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This was also at the peak of the Bitcoin,

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so the price was going down,

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so he would be sending us more and more Bitcoins.

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And so in the end,

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he gave away $55 million

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within two and a half months. And the Pineapple Fund is now gone. the end, he gave away $55 million within

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two and a half months.

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And the Pineapple Fund is now gone.

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There’s a legacy of where

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he gave all the money to.

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That inspired other people, as I mentioned,

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from the cryptocurrency community. So now

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what I say, well, I’ll say

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one other thing. So one other person

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formed

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the support that we need for phase three.

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And that was someone from the right wing.

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And that was a woman named Rebecca Mercer.

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And so for those of you who have studied the election,

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there’s a lot of concern about a company called Cambridge Analytica

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that sort of scraped all this data off of Facebook

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and then used it to target ads, maybe even telling some of the Russians

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how to target certain places. They were the main funders

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of Trump and Steve Bannon. So the Mercers are

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responsible more than anybody else for Trump being elected. And Rebecca

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Mercer, it turned out, started feeling like

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she doesn’t actually agree with everything Trump does.

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Thank goodness.

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And we had a conversation.

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I was introduced to her by a human rights activist.

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And during this conversation, it was about her interest in helping veterans

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and her interest in showing that she wasn’t such a horrible person.

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And so we had this discussion, and then she said that she would be open to the talk of a million-dollar donation,

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a quarter million a year for four years, but that just talking to me wasn’t enough.

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She had to talk to some senior people in the military.

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And it turned out in 2010, after we published our first study with MDMA,

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mostly in women, but a few

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veterans, that I was

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contacted out of the blue,

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actually up in the blue, I was contacted by a

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brigadier general

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flying in a military plane,

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calling me from the plane, and saying

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I just read your paper

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about MDMA for PTSD,

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what’s going on here?

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And this was a woman, Lori Sutton,

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who was the highest-ranking psychiatrist in the military.

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She started the Defense Center for Excellence

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at the Department of Defense in Psychological Health

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and Traumatic Brain Injury,

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and she’s become an ally over the years.

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Now, I’m a draft resistor.

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I was planning to go to jail instead of going to Vietnam

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and so all these connections with the military

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are kind of astonishing for me

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and very healing

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I never was a conscient subjector because I didn’t feel

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passivism was the way to go

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but this connection with Lori Sutton

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who really cares compassionately about PTSD

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she’s now head of veterans affairs for the city of New York This connection with Lori Sutton, who really cares compassionately about PTSD,

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she’s now head of Veterans Affairs for the city of New York.

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And so Rebecca said, who could I talk to that would be sort of from the establishment world?

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And I said, Lori Sutton.

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And so we had this three-way conversation.

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It took about ten minutes, and afterwards, Rex said, okay, I’m in for a million.

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So now what I say is that we are bringing MDMA to the world as a gift from the psychedelic, burner, cryptocurrency, and right-wing communities.

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So we are now at this place where we are trying to globalize MDMA.

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We’ve been having a series of discussions with the European Medicines Agency. We just had a meeting in person in London June 10th.

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And about three weeks after that, we got the results.

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This process started actually in January.

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So we have a long process with the European Medicines Agency.

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And in the end, what they said is that they will accept the FDA data

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and that they just want one study done in Europe

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and that they’re very interested in having geographical distribution throughout Europe,

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but they especially want us to work with refugees and migrants with PTSD. Because

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they see that’s one of the things that’s tearing

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Europe apart. And so they’re

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saying to us, see if maybe MDMA

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can be part of a solution to that.

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Now, it’s difficult

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for us to work with people that are

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in a situation where they’re being constantly

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re-traumatized.

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Because that’s not going to, they’re just,

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it’s not going to work if people are not

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fundamentally safe.

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So we have to wait for refugees to have been

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assimilated

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a little bit, and we’re likely

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to get a bunch of refugees from Germany,

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from Portugal, from elsewhere.

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So it’s roughly $9 million

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we think to make MDMA

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a medicine in

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Europe, and we’ve raised $400,000.

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So we’re looking for $8.6 million,

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and that’s what we hope to raise

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within the next four to six months.

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I mean, it’s very ambitious.

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I don’t know where it’s going to come from,

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but there’s a bunch of people here at Burning Man

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that write a check for that.

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So we’re trying to ask them.

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But we’re trying to do this all in a non-profit context.

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And what we’ve done is, with the FDA,

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we have done a similar kind of a discussion

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to move to Phase 3 that we’ve just done with EMA,

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and it’s called Special Protocol Assessment.

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And what that means is you negotiate

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every aspect of your Phase 3 design

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and all the other information that they’re going to want

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and if you come to agreement, you get an agreement

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letter, which we got on July

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28th, and what that means is

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the FDA is legally bound

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to approve MDMA

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if we get statistically significant evidence

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of efficacy from this design

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and no new safety problems come up.

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And since MDMA has been

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taken by tens of millions of people

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in hundreds of millions of doses for decades,

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we have a very clear idea of the safety profile of MDMA.

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And in fact, people have mostly taken MDMA

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in riskier circumstances than in their therapeutic setting,

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mixed with other drugs, MDMA with alcohol, MDMA with cocaine,

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MDMA with who knows what else, and two days in a row

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or three days in a row. So we have a very clear idea of the

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safety protocol. And so we have this special protocol assessment. So no matter

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what Trump and Sessions want to do, if we get

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and they’re not going to want to go after veterans anyway.

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Most people that have PTSD are not veterans. Most of them are women from sexual abuse or people in abusive childhoods

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or accidents, different ways. We’re focusing on the veterans,

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but we’re going to enroll more people who are not veterans in Phase 3

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than veterans, but the veterans have sort of been away politically to kind of

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change people’s minds. And so recently, I mean in the last panel

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George Greer talked about one of the things he was most surprised about

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and it was the coverage that we’ve got on Fox News.

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So we’ve got incredibly good coverage on Fox News. And there’s one in particular

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on May 12th, May 2nd is when we published our paper about

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the results from

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the Veterans,

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Firefighters, and Police Officers study.

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And we gave an exclusive to the New York

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Times. And in the New York Times, they had

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one sentence about how we had a million dollars

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from Rebecca Mercer.

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Now, they also are major

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investors in Breitbart

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as well.

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So, Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica and all this. So, the Mercers and Breitbart as well. Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica

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and all this. So the Mercers and Breitbart

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they’re super connected. They’re not the

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majority stockholders they like

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to say, just a minority, but

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connected to Breitbart, super connected to Fox

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News. And so the fact that

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the New York Times had this one sentence

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about Rebecca Mercer

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donating sort of gave the Fox

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News people the sense

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that they could report on this

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in a positive way. So the very

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next day, there was

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this six minute segment by

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Greg Gutfeld. There’s a group called

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The Five. Jesse Waters are the

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two main hosts.

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The woman who’s now the

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girlfriend of Donald

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Trump Jr. was on that panel,

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and they’re all talking about how MDMA should be made into a medicine,

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and they’re talking about how the strategy of working with veterans is a terrific strategy,

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and they’re joking about how if we’d worked with IT workers, nobody would care,

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but veterans, they care, and they talked about, they sort of tried to remember who I was, and then it went to

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this discussion with the whole group. So it’s, if you do Greg Gutfeld, the five, MDMA,

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PTSD, you’ll get to this segment. It’s absolutely astonishing, because then they

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started endorsing psilocybin for depression, ketamine for depression, marijuana for anything medical.

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So we have this total support from Fox News about what we’re doing.

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And we also have all of the military websites, Stars and Stripes,

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all the military websites and newsletters are all sympathetic.

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So we have managed to build bipartisan support.

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and newsletters are all sympathetic.

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So we have managed to build bipartisan support.

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So now what I want to do is sort of talk a little bit about some ethical issues,

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and then we’ll open it up for discussion.

00:19:58 ►

So one of these ethical issues has to do with working with the military.

00:20:03 ►

So one of the psychiatrists that we work with in Europe is from Germany,

00:20:06 ►

and a lot of people in Europe see our military

00:20:07 ►

as a very aggressive force.

00:20:10 ►

And it has been

00:20:12 ►

that in a lot of different ways.

00:20:13 ►

So this fellow was saying,

00:20:15 ►

would you give

00:20:18 ►

MDMA to concentration camp guards?

00:20:21 ►

You know, are you

00:20:22 ►

taking people who are

00:20:23 ►

uncomfortable from traumatizing people

00:20:27 ►

from having killed innocent people or been part of this war

00:20:30 ►

and then patching them up and then they go back to war

00:20:33 ►

is that what you’re doing

00:20:35 ►

and is that ethical

00:20:37 ►

so first off I’ll say

00:20:40 ►

I’ll be also in the questions curious what you all think about this

00:20:43 ►

but first off I’ll say, and then I’ll be also in the questions curious what you all think about this, but first off I’ll say that

00:20:45 ►

this criticism or

00:20:47 ►

potential criticism is due for every

00:20:49 ►

single medical advance.

00:20:51 ►

Everything that you want to do to help people

00:20:53 ►

survive, to help them

00:20:55 ►

be able

00:20:57 ►

to be healthy, sometimes

00:20:59 ►

we can help people go back to the battlefield.

00:21:02 ►

Is that a bad thing?

00:21:04 ►

Or what I feel actually and what I see from these veterans,

00:21:08 ►

first off, it’s not active duty soldiers,

00:21:10 ►

so we don’t have that exact question.

00:21:13 ►

But secondly, we see that MDMA reverses

00:21:18 ►

some of the training they got in the military.

00:21:21 ►

And I just heard a story yesterday from one of the vets that was in our study.

00:21:24 ►

I didn’t hear it from him. I heard it from a therapist

00:21:26 ►

about how he felt that

00:21:27 ►

the military training actually

00:21:30 ►

changed his brain.

00:21:32 ►

And so here, this is the year I robot.

00:21:34 ►

And so he felt that the military

00:21:36 ►

training made them into robots

00:21:38 ►

and changed their brains

00:21:40 ►

and changed the way they operated to their

00:21:42 ►

emotions. And that the MDMA

00:21:44 ►

was deprogramming the military programming

00:21:47 ►

to making them sensitive to the emotional consequences of what they did.

00:21:53 ►

And so I don’t think that we’re making people heartless killers

00:21:58 ►

because then they go, it’s like getting,

00:22:02 ►

you go to confession and now it’s okay

00:22:03 ►

and now you can go back and do whatever you want.

00:22:05 ►

It’s not actually like that.

00:22:07 ►

And I also think that we have an obligation both to victims and to perpetrators

00:22:13 ►

to try to heal everybody.

00:22:15 ►

And I think that’s more of a delicate and a difficult situation,

00:22:19 ►

but I think that we need to look at those people that are perpetrators

00:22:25 ►

are in many cases victims themselves at an earlier stage of their lives.

00:22:30 ►

And that we need to recognize that.

00:22:38 ►

I was, you know,

00:22:40 ►

one of the Israeli psychiatrists that we worked with at one point said,

00:22:46 ►

I understand MDMA, he’d never done it himself,

00:22:49 ►

it only works for victims, not for perpetrators.

00:22:52 ►

And that’s where I realized that our training program wasn’t really working well,

00:22:55 ►

and that it really is for everybody.

00:22:57 ►

So I think this idea of working with the military,

00:23:02 ►

ethically I feel that it’s a good thing to do. And similarly, working with police, or working with other military. Ethically, I feel that it’s a good thing to do.

00:23:05 ►

And similarly, working with police

00:23:07 ►

or working with other kind of first responders

00:23:09 ►

or working with prison guards

00:23:11 ►

or working with people who have sexually abused others.

00:23:16 ►

To the extent they’re willing to enter into our studies,

00:23:19 ►

I think that we should work with both victims and perpetrators.

00:23:22 ►

So that’s one ethical issue.

00:23:25 ►

One of the other ones that we’ve gotten a lot of criticism for

00:23:29 ►

is accepting this donation from Rebecca Mercer.

00:23:32 ►

So for me, it was one of the most important things that we were able to do.

00:23:37 ►

And building bipartisan support is one of the crucial issues

00:23:41 ►

as we move forward to try to move beyond research to make these into medicines.

00:23:48 ►

And so people have said that you’re trying to make her look good, and she should look bad.

00:23:52 ►

And she does all these bad things.

00:23:54 ►

Why?

00:23:54 ►

And then everything is tainted.

00:23:57 ►

So there’s a whole thing in philanthropy that’s called toxic donors.

00:24:00 ►

And do you work with them or not?

00:24:03 ►

Some of the people that have ripped off people in the stock market,

00:24:09 ►

then do you take their money or different things like that?

00:24:12 ►

So I feel like it’s very important for us to build these bipartisan bridges.

00:24:18 ►

And so I think taking the money from Rebecca Mercer was not only helpful for us,

00:24:25 ►

but people don’t recognize that it’s a two-way conversation,

00:24:29 ►

that maybe she will learn something from our work,

00:24:31 ►

and maybe that will change some of her ideas.

00:24:34 ►

People are worried that now we’re going to be controlled by Rebecca Mercer,

00:24:39 ►

and we’re going to be having to do things.

00:24:41 ►

But the only condition that she put on the money was that it go to veterans.

00:24:47 ►

There’s been other donors that have…

00:24:50 ►

The more pressure that I’ve actually received from donors

00:24:54 ►

has been from left-wing donors,

00:24:55 ►

who say, we’re starting to make MDMA to a medicine,

00:24:59 ►

but you’re talking about the need to legalize drugs.

00:25:02 ►

You’re talking about…

00:25:03 ►

So the fundamental point I’ll make here is that

00:25:05 ►

why I’m doing this, why I think

00:25:08 ►

it’s so important that we mainstream psychedelics

00:25:10 ►

is beyond medicine.

00:25:12 ►

It’s that we need to

00:25:14 ►

have millions and

00:25:16 ►

millions of people have a spiritual

00:25:17 ►

connection so that they can

00:25:19 ►

break through these us-them

00:25:21 ►

barriers and then they can

00:25:23 ►

have compassion for the other

00:25:25 ►

and see that we’re all connected.

00:25:27 ►

That’s the fundamental theory of change.

00:25:29 ►

I think we saw that a lot in the 60s,

00:25:31 ►

that people were motivated by psychedelics

00:25:33 ►

and were able then to participate in opposing the Vietnam War

00:25:37 ►

and working on the environmental movement,

00:25:39 ►

the women’s rights movement, civil rights movement.

00:25:42 ►

There is this connection, I think,

00:25:43 ►

between this mystical experience,

00:25:46 ►

the sense of spirituality, and political outcomes.

00:25:49 ►

And there’s

00:25:50 ►

actually been a study recently

00:25:51 ►

at the London College

00:25:53 ►

with Robin Carr Harris, and he’s

00:25:55 ►

actually demonstrated that there’s a correlation

00:25:57 ►

between mystical experience,

00:26:00 ►

nature-relatedness,

00:26:02 ►

progressive views, and

00:26:03 ►

anti-authoritarian views.

00:26:06 ►

Now, all of this is mediated by the context.

00:26:08 ►

So it’s not that you take the drug and you automatically have these things.

00:26:12 ►

You can take the drug and be worse off.

00:26:14 ►

But if you take the drug in a supportive therapeutic setting,

00:26:16 ►

you touch into some of these experiences,

00:26:19 ►

it has very strong, I think, political implications,

00:26:23 ►

and that’s why I’m doing it.

00:26:24 ►

And this, for me, was confirmed in 1983

00:26:27 ►

by the Assistant Secretary General of the UN, Robert Mueller.

00:26:31 ►

I talk about him a lot.

00:26:32 ►

He wrote this book called

00:26:33 ►

New Genesis, Shaping a Global Spirituality,

00:26:36 ►

which I read in 83.

00:26:37 ►

And his theory is that we have the United Nations

00:26:40 ►

to mediate conflicts between countries,

00:26:43 ►

but a lot of those conflicts are actually religious-based.

00:26:47 ►

And that what we

00:26:48 ►

need to do is help all these fundamentalists

00:26:50 ►

and all these different religions

00:26:51 ►

relax a little bit.

00:26:53 ►

And we need a bit of this global

00:26:56 ►

spirituality for them to realize that

00:26:58 ►

religions are like languages.

00:27:00 ►

We have all these different languages.

00:27:02 ►

They’re all about essentially

00:27:03 ►

communicating with each other.

00:27:05 ►

Each language has a different flavor, different words for things.

00:27:09 ►

But a full understanding, a mystical understanding of religion

00:27:12 ►

is that they’re all basically coming from the same place.

00:27:15 ►

We have different symbols, different cultural contexts,

00:27:18 ►

but we don’t need to be so rigid and fundamentalist about it.

00:27:22 ►

And so that was the thesis of this book.

00:27:25 ►

And so I was an undergraduate at the time.

00:27:27 ►

I wrote him a letter.

00:27:29 ►

I felt like I was a shipwrecked sailor on a deserted island.

00:27:34 ►

And I put a little note in a bottle,

00:27:36 ►

and I sent it off into the universe,

00:27:38 ►

and I sent it to him.

00:27:39 ►

And he actually wrote me back.

00:27:41 ►

And then he said, you know, I said,

00:27:43 ►

you didn’t say anything about psychedelics in your book.

00:27:46 ►

And I said, psychedelics,

00:27:48 ►

whether you consider them real or

00:27:50 ►

similar to, they’re a way to

00:27:52 ►

understand spirituality, and would you help

00:27:54 ►

us bring back psychedelic research?

00:27:56 ►

And he actually said, yes,

00:27:58 ►

he would help. And he believed

00:28:00 ►

in that theory of change, and then he

00:28:01 ►

referred me to a bunch of mystics in different

00:28:03 ►

religions, and reading he referred me to a bunch of mystics in different religions,

00:28:14 ►

and reading between the lines, I heard him say, send them all MDMA, which I then did.

00:28:21 ►

Then they would report back to him. Roman Catholic monks who took MDMA to monasteries,

00:28:28 ►

Zen Buddhists who took it in Zen meditation retreats, Jewish rabbis who took it and compared MDMA to the Sabbath.

00:28:32 ►

So anyway, that’s the theory of change,

00:28:35 ►

is that we need widespread mass mental health,

00:28:36 ►

global spirituality,

00:28:40 ►

and that when we think about Trump and we think about what if we gave MDMA to Trump,

00:28:43 ►

for example,

00:28:44 ►

I don’t think it would work and we think about what if we gave MDMA to Trump, for example.

00:28:52 ►

I don’t think it would work because you have to want to change.

00:28:59 ►

And our whole approach is to empower people to change themselves, to heal themselves.

00:29:01 ►

That’s the essence of this inner directed method,

00:29:05 ►

that we are helping people to marshal their own inner resources to heal themselves.

00:29:08 ►

And of the eight hour session,

00:29:10 ►

roughly four hours

00:29:11 ►

on average,

00:29:13 ►

more or less, people’s eyes

00:29:16 ►

are closed, they’re listening to music,

00:29:18 ►

and they’re having incredible

00:29:20 ►

poetic metaphors and imagery

00:29:22 ►

about their own inner

00:29:23 ►

conflicts.

00:29:26 ►

It’s astonishing how metaphorical people are

00:29:27 ►

in the way they tell themselves stories

00:29:30 ►

about what’s going on with their life.

00:29:32 ►

One of the veterans had this story

00:29:34 ►

of he was there for

00:29:36 ►

rage. He never hit his wife,

00:29:38 ►

but he threw stuff at her. He would fly

00:29:39 ►

off the handle all the time. And he had this idea

00:29:42 ►

of the warrior part of himself was locked

00:29:44 ►

in a cage inside of him, and

00:29:46 ►

actually had reached out with

00:29:48 ►

one arm with a knife and had stabbed him in the side.

00:29:50 ►

That he was in battle with

00:29:52 ►

this warrior part of himself that was

00:29:54 ►

uncontrollable, and he had to keep it under control.

00:29:56 ►

And under the influence of MDMA,

00:29:58 ►

he realized that that warrior self

00:30:00 ►

had kept him alive, that that was

00:30:02 ►

an ally, that was part of his patriotism,

00:30:04 ►

that that was something he had to make friends with. And they had this whole imagery of letting

00:30:09 ►

this wild animal out of the cage and becoming friends. So people are having these incredible

00:30:16 ►

metaphors of while they’re going through healing, but roughly four hours is speaking to the

00:30:21 ►

therapist, roughly four hours is having points where people heal themselves.

00:30:25 ►

And so this is this concept

00:30:27 ►

that if we were to give it to Trump,

00:30:29 ►

if he didn’t really want to deal with

00:30:31 ►

what was going on,

00:30:33 ►

he wouldn’t be healed. And I

00:30:35 ►

saw that in a sad way, I’ll say,

00:30:37 ►

with John Lilly. And so

00:30:39 ►

who knows who John

00:30:41 ►

Lilly is?

00:30:44 ►

He invented the flotation tank.

00:30:46 ►

And in the 50s and 60s,

00:30:48 ►

and he was the one that started about dolphin intelligence,

00:30:51 ►

and he was an early LSD researcher,

00:30:54 ►

paid for by the Navy.

00:30:55 ►

He actually did work with flotation tanks,

00:30:58 ►

doing LSD inside the flotation tank.

00:31:00 ►

And his book was called

00:31:01 ►

Programming and Metaprogramming of the Human Biocomputer.

00:31:05 ►

And when psychedelics got criminalized, sadly, he was so ahead of his time and impatient

00:31:10 ►

that he just retreated into ketamine addiction.

00:31:13 ►

And I had an opportunity to work with him later in his life with MDMA for a therapeutic purpose.

00:31:19 ►

And he sort of came into his body and saw all the abscesses that he had

00:31:22 ►

where he was injecting himself with ketamine,

00:31:24 ►

and it was so difficult for him that he didn’t really want to deal with it.

00:31:29 ►

And so he sort of withdrew again. So I learned from that that it’s not about just creating

00:31:35 ►

a safe space and giving people MDMA. They have to have the courage to change. And if

00:31:39 ►

they don’t want to do that, they won’t. And so it’s not about changing Trump, but what about

00:31:45 ►

the millions and millions of people who have given away their power to Trump, who have

00:31:49 ►

been motivated by fears and anxieties and have given away their power. So I think the

00:31:54 ►

ultimate solution for a more peaceful planet is going to be anchoring this sort of global

00:32:00 ►

spirituality in millions and billions of people so that they don’t give away. Because there

00:32:04 ►

will always be people who want to be dictators,

00:32:07 ►

who won’t want to change.

00:32:08 ►

We can never really end all that,

00:32:10 ►

but we can end, hopefully,

00:32:12 ►

this idea of people giving away their power

00:32:16 ►

by helping them process their own fears and anxieties.

00:32:19 ►

And that means going beyond medicine,

00:32:21 ►

going beyond religion to drug legalization

00:32:23 ►

and to a post-prohibition world.

00:32:32 ►

The Zendo here

00:32:34 ►

is about building a model

00:32:36 ►

for a post-prohibition world.

00:32:38 ►

So that here we have

00:32:39 ►

one of the main reasons

00:32:42 ►

for the backlash

00:32:44 ►

of the 60s

00:32:45 ►

was people getting involved with political change movements

00:32:50 ►

and the identification of LSD with counterculture.

00:32:54 ►

Nixon said that Leary was the most dangerous man in America.

00:32:58 ►

And so I think that was people having this mystical, spiritual sense

00:33:01 ►

and then realizing, why do I want to kill these Vietnamese?

00:33:05 ►

Why do I want to trash the environment?

00:33:07 ►

So I think it was psychedelics going right

00:33:10 ►

that caused this conflict with the society so rigid.

00:33:15 ►

Now, 50 years later,

00:33:16 ►

we’re in a much different position.

00:33:18 ►

The society has integrated

00:33:20 ►

much of the psychedelic vision of the 60s.

00:33:23 ►

So people at that time,

00:33:26 ►

you remember the Maharishi

00:33:28 ►

who came with meditation with TM.

00:33:31 ►

He was a strange, weird foreign import.

00:33:33 ►

And now they teach meditation to children in schools

00:33:37 ►

as part of mindfulness.

00:33:39 ►

So we’ve integrated that.

00:33:41 ►

Foreign religions, yoga was considered to be, it was going to convert

00:33:45 ►

people to a different kind of religion.

00:33:48 ►

Now every YMCAT

00:33:49 ►

has yoga classes.

00:33:51 ►

We didn’t really talk about death

00:33:53 ►

in the 60s. The first hospice

00:33:56 ►

was until 1974.

00:33:58 ►

And so now we have over

00:33:59 ►

6,000 hospices.

00:34:01 ►

Birth, women were tranquilized and men were not allowed

00:34:04 ►

in the delivery room for a lot of

00:34:06 ►

births. Now we have birthing centers. So we’ve changed

00:34:08 ►

our attitude towards birth, towards death,

00:34:10 ►

towards spirituality, towards

00:34:12 ►

the environment, and now

00:34:13 ►

the last thing from that is to integrate is

00:34:15 ►

the psychedelics. And so the

00:34:17 ►

main reason for a backlash now would

00:34:20 ►

be parents worried about their kids.

00:34:22 ►

Worried about their family members.

00:34:24 ►

And a lot of that will come from going to festivals and then taking psychedelics and

00:34:29 ►

not being prepared for the depth of the experience, and then coming off, going back home worse

00:34:34 ►

off.

00:34:35 ►

So in 2003, we started the Zendo Project, or we started, we didn’t call it the Zendo

00:34:39 ►

Project, but we started coming here to Burning Man to offer therapy.

00:34:43 ►

We brought therapists who were trained in psychedelics to help people with difficult trips.

00:34:47 ►

And that has evolved from 2003 to now,

00:34:50 ►

where we have over 300 volunteers that staff the Zendo 24-7.

00:34:55 ►

It’s on the Esplanade at 545 and E.

00:34:58 ►

It’s right out in the open.

00:34:59 ►

It’s in the greeter package.

00:35:01 ►

And last year, we had over 660 people came for support,

00:35:07 ►

sometimes while they were tripping,

00:35:08 ►

sometimes afterwards trying to integrate it.

00:35:11 ►

And so the Zendo project is really part of a model

00:35:14 ►

to demonstrate how do we move for a post-progression world.

00:35:18 ►

Because when adults are free to do these drugs

00:35:20 ►

without worry about the police,

00:35:23 ►

people will still get into trouble.

00:35:25 ►

And so we can provide these support systems. So anyway, I’ve been getting a fair amount of criticism

00:35:30 ►

from people for doing that, for talking about prohibition, but I think it actually makes

00:35:34 ►

it more likely we’ll be able to make it into a medicine than last night, because it takes

00:35:38 ►

away some of the fear of where we might go. So the other last sort of ethical issue,

00:35:46 ►

there’s two more.

00:35:48 ►

One is we’ve been getting criticism recently

00:35:51 ►

for there’s a for-profit and a non-profit group

00:35:55 ►

that’s developing psilocybin into a medicine.

00:35:58 ►

And our view as a non-profit

00:36:00 ►

that we have the ability to give tax deductions

00:36:03 ►

to people who give us donations.

00:36:06 ►

We have an obligation to the public to be

00:36:08 ►

transparent, to give out all of our information

00:36:10 ►

and to help everybody

00:36:11 ►

whether that’s for-profit or non-profit.

00:36:14 ►

And so that’s our fundamental view.

00:36:16 ►

And so we’ve been getting

00:36:18 ►

a lot of criticism for

00:36:19 ►

sharing all of our FDA

00:36:21 ►

regulatory documents and all of the

00:36:24 ►

information we know about the drug development system

00:36:26 ►

with this for-profit company called Compass.

00:36:29 ►

And there’s a non-profit company called Usona.

00:36:32 ►

So my view of this is that we should celebrate the fact

00:36:37 ►

that for-profit companies are coming into this

00:36:39 ►

because that means we have succeeded.

00:36:42 ►

For the last 32 years on MAPS,

00:36:43 ►

it only makes sense for the last year or so

00:36:46 ►

for for-profit people to come

00:36:47 ►

because we’ve changed the political dynamics,

00:36:50 ►

we’ve changed the dynamics with the regulatory systems,

00:36:52 ►

and so now it can make sense for investors.

00:36:57 ►

And so I think that makes sense.

00:36:59 ►

And also, though, the for-profit

00:37:01 ►

is not going to be able to block the non-profit.

00:37:03 ►

We will have the non-profit, the head of the non-profit

00:37:06 ►

you saw in it, Bill Litton, is here camping with us.

00:37:09 ►

And so it’s their view that whatever the for-profit does

00:37:12 ►

it’s not going to block them from what they do.

00:37:15 ►

And so I think it’s really good for us. But there’s some people that are

00:37:17 ►

worried about what they might charge.

00:37:22 ►

For those of you who watch about medical marijuana

00:37:24 ►

the FDA just approved a drug called what they might charge. For those of you who watch about medical marijuana,

00:37:28 ►

the FDA just approved a drug called Epidiolex,

00:37:30 ►

which is CBD for childhood epilepsy.

00:37:32 ►

It just got approved.

00:37:41 ►

The pharmaceutical company is charging $32,500 a year for stuff you can get for a couple thousand dollars

00:37:44 ►

from your local neighborhood dispensary.

00:37:47 ►

But it’s going to be covered by insurance.

00:37:49 ►

They did all the research.

00:37:50 ►

So there are problems with for-profit drug development.

00:37:53 ►

But anyway, I think we should help everybody, and that’s what we’ve been doing.

00:37:57 ►

The final ethical issue has to do with where we bring MDMA.

00:38:03 ►

It has to do with where we bring MDMA.

00:38:10 ►

And so in September, I’m going to China with one of our therapists and the leader of our clinical team.

00:38:20 ►

And what has happened is that this young Chinese Internet entrepreneur made hundreds of millions of dollars, left China, lives in San Francisco, and wants to bring MDMA back to China.

00:38:26 ►

And he says that his parents and his parents’ generation

00:38:29 ►

all have PTSD from the Cultural Revolution,

00:38:33 ►

and that you can’t say that in China.

00:38:35 ►

You have to talk about PTSD from natural disasters or other things,

00:38:39 ►

but that he wants to try to bring the healing potential of MDMA to China.

00:38:43 ►

And he thinks, though, that the only way to do it

00:38:48 ►

is to start with the Chinese military psychiatrists

00:38:51 ►

and the Chinese civilian psychiatrists there as well.

00:38:55 ►

So when I think about whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing

00:39:01 ►

to try to bring MDMA to the Chinese military psychiatrists.

00:39:06 ►

It turns out that the Israeli principal investigator was the chief psychiatrist for the Israeli

00:39:14 ►

defense forces. He’s one of the therapists coming to Israel with us. The fellow who’s

00:39:20 ►

with us camping now is going to coordinate our research in Europe, he is the

00:39:25 ►

as I mentioned, he’s the chief psychiatrist

00:39:27 ►

for the Dutch Ministry of Defense.

00:39:30 ►

In England, we’re working with the chief

00:39:31 ►

psychiatrist for the British

00:39:33 ►

military. So that

00:39:35 ►

that’s where a lot of the PTSD is located

00:39:38 ►

and that’s where a lot of the PTSD researchers

00:39:40 ►

are located. And so

00:39:42 ►

there is this

00:39:43 ►

sense that I have that moving into an authoritarian country,

00:39:49 ►

we all know that the CIA and MKUltra, where they used psychedelics for mind control, they

00:39:54 ►

tried to use them for brainwashing, things like that, that developed into such scandal

00:40:00 ►

that as far as we can tell, that’s not happening anymore,

00:40:08 ►

and that these drugs can be misused.

00:40:13 ►

But I think fundamentally, MDMA helps you when you take it.

00:40:15 ►

It helps you feel solid in yourself.

00:40:17 ►

It reduces your pain threshold.

00:40:21 ►

I mean, it increases your pain threshold, so you don’t feel pain as much.

00:40:24 ►

And if you’re sort of a true believer,

00:40:25 ►

I think it will strengthen your ability to resist anything.

00:40:29 ►

So the question is, in this trade-off,

00:40:32 ►

so much of the governments are motivated by people

00:40:36 ►

who are motivated by their trauma.

00:40:39 ►

So it’s this multi-generational trauma

00:40:41 ►

that causes the fear of the other.

00:40:44 ►

So my view is that

00:40:45 ►

I think

00:40:48 ►

on balance it’s a good thing for us to

00:40:50 ►

go to China to try to

00:40:51 ►

influence the Chinese therapists to try

00:40:54 ►

to influence MDMA. And I think that if there’s

00:40:55 ►

any pressure from the Chinese government

00:40:58 ►

from what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to be

00:41:00 ►

to limit the spread of it rather than

00:41:01 ►

to take it over and do it

00:41:04 ►

in other ways. So I think there are ethical issues as we go forward,

00:41:08 ►

and we need to be careful about them

00:41:10 ►

because we have a chance that we have not had in 50 years,

00:41:13 ►

and it’s a tremendous opportunity.

00:41:16 ►

And for those of you that are interested in careers, for example,

00:41:20 ►

in psychedelic psychotherapy,

00:41:22 ►

now is the first time that that’s a realistic thing.

00:41:27 ►

And to give you a sense of how realistic

00:41:29 ►

it is, and then I’ll be done with this

00:41:31 ►

talk and questions, is that

00:41:32 ►

we anticipate that MDMA is going to be

00:41:34 ►

approved in 2021

00:41:36 ►

in the United States.

00:41:43 ►

Planning on the fundraising,

00:41:44 ►

it could be that time, or it could be six months or a year later or whatever,

00:41:48 ►

it’ll be approved 2021-2022 in Europe.

00:41:52 ►

But there’s a program that the FDA has called Expanded Access.

00:41:58 ►

And the Republicans, in their anti-deregulation efforts, anti-regulation, deregulation,

00:42:05 ►

they just passed a bill called Right to Try.

00:42:08 ►

And Right to Try means,

00:42:10 ►

and Trump just signed this bill about a month and a half ago.

00:42:12 ►

So Right to Try means that if you have,

00:42:15 ►

excuse me, if you have a condition

00:42:18 ►

for which the available medicines have not worked,

00:42:23 ►

and there’s a drug that’s being studied for that condition,

00:42:27 ►

you should have a right to try that drug before it’s approved,

00:42:31 ►

at your own risk, because you still don’t know about the full safety of it,

00:42:35 ►

and at your own cost.

00:42:36 ►

You should be able to pay for the drug, pay for the therapy, whatever,

00:42:39 ►

and you should get it outside, simultaneously, actually,

00:42:43 ►

before the drug is approved as a medicine.

00:42:46 ►

So the FDA doesn’t particularly like Right to Try

00:42:48 ►

because it cuts them out of the process.

00:42:51 ►

People negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies,

00:42:54 ►

and the agreement is that whatever happens in this compassionate use, Right to Try,

00:42:58 ►

the FDA won’t review that data for safety and efficacy.

00:43:02 ►

So the pharmaceutical companies aren’t that worried about making it available.

00:43:05 ►

The FDA has a program called Expanded Access,

00:43:08 ►

which is similar to Right

00:43:10 ►

to Try, but it’s a little bit more paperwork

00:43:12 ►

and a little bit more

00:43:14 ►

data. So we’re going to go the Expanded Access

00:43:16 ►

route. And so what that means

00:43:18 ►

is that next summer,

00:43:19 ►

and we’ve already had meetings with FDA and

00:43:21 ►

DEA about this, because everybody

00:43:23 ►

who works in an expanded access site,

00:43:26 ►

it’s still a Schedule I drug before it’s a medicine,

00:43:29 ►

and they’ll need DEA Schedule I licenses.

00:43:31 ►

But we anticipate next summer, at the end of next summer,

00:43:34 ►

we’re going to be starting expanded access clinics

00:43:38 ►

so that we’re going to be training therapists for expanded access.

00:43:42 ►

So actually psychedelic psychotherapy, legally,

00:43:46 ►

where patients are coming in to pay for treatment,

00:43:49 ►

is going to start in one year from now.

00:43:52 ►

Woo!

00:43:57 ►

And it’s only for PTSD.

00:44:01 ►

It’s only for treatment-resistant PTSD.

00:44:04 ►

But it can be expanded

00:44:06 ►

to, like, for example, we did this study

00:44:08 ►

with autistic adults with social anxiety.

00:44:10 ►

We could end up having

00:44:11 ►

expanded access for social anxiety.

00:44:14 ►

We did a study with end-of-life

00:44:16 ►

people with anxiety

00:44:17 ►

about end-of-life with MDMA. That was helpful.

00:44:19 ►

We could get expanded access for that.

00:44:21 ►

We have limited resources. We’re focusing

00:44:23 ►

on PTSD, but

00:44:24 ►

the good news is that everything seems to be pointing in the direction of success.

00:44:33 ►

And I think it’s incumbent upon us to think as carefully as we can about the ethical issues,

00:44:40 ►

to proceed very carefully.

00:44:42 ►

And if so, I think we will be able to embed psychedelics in our culture.

00:44:47 ►

And then what will happen is from 2021 or so to 2031,

00:44:53 ►

we’ll be able to lay out and spread thousands of psychedelic clinics throughout America and throughout the world.

00:45:00 ►

There’s 14,500 drug abuse treatment centers.

00:45:03 ►

Psychedelics would be very helpful for the treatment of addiction.

00:45:06 ►

There’s 6,000, as I

00:45:08 ►

said, hospice centers. But I think there’ll be

00:45:09 ►

specialized clinics where people will

00:45:11 ►

go to get psilocybin, ketamine, MDMA,

00:45:14 ►

whatever drugs get further

00:45:15 ►

approved. And people,

00:45:17 ►

there’ll be a new profession, a new

00:45:20 ►

professional organization to be

00:45:21 ►

certified to be a psychedelic therapist

00:45:23 ►

with therapists cross-trained

00:45:25 ►

and all these different drugs. And I think

00:45:27 ►

after we have about 10 or 15 years of that,

00:45:30 ►

the population of America

00:45:32 ►

will be ready to

00:45:33 ►

fully legalize psychedelics

00:45:36 ►

and all other drugs.

00:45:37 ►

So our target date for that is 2035.

00:45:40 ►

We’re in a post-prohibition

00:45:42 ►

world. I hope that we’ll all be around to see

00:45:44 ►

if my predictions are accurate.

00:45:46 ►

Hopefully I’m too pessimistic.

00:45:48 ►

But I think that that’s the track we’re on.

00:45:50 ►

And I think it’s not going to be any day too soon

00:45:55 ►

because we are facing such environmental crisis,

00:45:58 ►

such crisis of weaponry,

00:46:01 ►

and our emotions are trapping us.

00:46:03 ►

This trauma of multigeneration is trapping us, this trauma of multigenerate is trapping us,

00:46:05 ►

and so we’re hoping that mainstream psychedelics

00:46:10 ►

will make a contribution to helping the human species

00:46:13 ►

survive and thrive.

00:46:14 ►

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

00:46:25 ►

Thank you.

00:46:26 ►

Thank you.

00:46:27 ►

Thank you.

00:46:28 ►

Thank you.

00:46:29 ►

Thank you.

00:46:30 ►

Thank you.

00:46:31 ►

Thank you.

00:46:32 ►

Thank you.

00:46:33 ►

Thank you.

00:46:34 ►

Thank you.

00:46:35 ►

Thank you.

00:46:36 ►

Thank you.

00:46:37 ►

Thank you.

00:46:38 ►

Thank you.

00:46:39 ►

Thank you.

00:46:40 ►

Thank you.

00:46:41 ►

Thank you.

00:46:42 ►

Thank you.

00:46:43 ►

Thank you.

00:46:44 ►

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I know I talked a bunch,

00:46:49 ►

but hopefully I didn’t talk too long,

00:46:53 ►

and I look forward now to a dialogue.

00:46:58 ►

Besides dose, dissociation, and desire to change,

00:47:02 ►

what trends do you see in responders versus non-responders?

00:47:09 ►

Well, we don’t know much

00:47:12 ►

more than that. Yeah, so one of the

00:47:14 ►

things that the FDA has required us to do

00:47:16 ►

phase four, post-approval,

00:47:18 ►

is to look at the pediatric

00:47:20 ►

cases. But

00:47:22 ►

they also want to look at non-responders

00:47:24 ►

and relapsers.

00:47:26 ►

So we’re not actually sure.

00:47:29 ►

I think that’s a really crucial question. Because in psychotherapy,

00:47:33 ►

one of the main issues is how do you match the patient to the right

00:47:37 ►

kind of therapy? What is that crossover? And that’s what you want to figure

00:47:41 ►

out. Now, one way people have talked about doing that is with biomarkers.

00:47:47 ►

So maybe there are some genetic or physiological conditions

00:47:50 ►

that will lead some people to be able to, first off, be resilient to trauma,

00:47:57 ►

or if they have PTSD, be able to recover more likely.

00:48:00 ►

So, so far there’s been no real reliable biomarkers.

00:48:05 ►

We know a little bit about what changes before and after treatment

00:48:08 ►

with the reduction of activity in the amygdala.

00:48:12 ►

But part of it is whether people have a safe place while they’re doing this deep work.

00:48:20 ►

So I’d add that, that people need to be safe to process all the pain and the trauma.

00:48:26 ►

And if they’re continually re-traumatized, that’s going to be an issue.

00:48:31 ►

One of the things that the FDA has talked about is that once we give this three sessions,

00:48:39 ►

how long do we wait?

00:48:41 ►

How many times can people go through that?

00:48:43 ►

And so they’ve not yet said about setting an upper limit,

00:48:47 ►

but it’s going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 or 12, something like that.

00:48:50 ►

So if 10 or 12 MDMA sessions have not helped somebody overcome their PTSD,

00:48:55 ►

more is not going to be better.

00:48:58 ►

But I’d say that is one of the, you know, who are the responders,

00:49:01 ►

who are the non-responders?

00:49:04 ►

Mostly I think it is those vectors,

00:49:06 ►

dissociation and the courage.

00:49:09 ►

Oh, one other thing is that we ask people

00:49:11 ►

to taper off all of their SSRIs.

00:49:14 ►

And so when they go into the study,

00:49:16 ►

they have to give up all their psychiatric medicines.

00:49:18 ►

And so we tell people, initially what’s happening is

00:49:21 ►

it’s going to be made worse.

00:49:23 ►

I mean, your symptoms are coming to the surface

00:49:24 ►

rather than suppressing the symptoms.

00:49:27 ►

And so we want you to realize that while it may be getting harder,

00:49:31 ►

that’s actually a good thing because you’re bringing things up.

00:49:34 ►

And so we have found that there seems to be a relationship

00:49:38 ►

between the length of time people have withdrawn from SSRIs

00:49:43 ►

and how well they get.

00:49:45 ►

So that SSRIs also change your brain,

00:49:47 ►

change your processing,

00:49:49 ►

and they operate on the serotonin system.

00:49:51 ►

And so we want more and more time now.

00:49:55 ►

So it’s five half-lives of whatever drug

00:49:58 ►

that you’re on plus two weeks.

00:50:02 ►

And so the longer it is,

00:50:03 ►

that seems to be another factor.

00:50:10 ►

What is your experience with

00:50:13 ►

your experience in a clinical setting

00:50:17 ►

with regards to some of the

00:50:18 ►

known negative after effects

00:50:20 ►

like the serotonin depletion,

00:50:22 ►

loss of magic,

00:50:23 ►

especially if people are having

00:50:24 ►

12 lifetime doses, 12 sessions.

00:50:27 ►

Tuesday blues, how do you guys work with or mitigate or what’s your experience with that

00:50:30 ►

in a clinical setting?

00:50:32 ►

Yeah, well, this Tuesday blues idea, the irony there is that we track that very carefully

00:50:37 ►

because all the concerns that people have about the problems from recreational use,

00:50:41 ►

they’re applying to us for clinical use.

00:50:44 ►

But we find that these Tuesday blues,

00:50:46 ►

the low mood, the depression,

00:50:48 ►

that it’s more prevalent in the control group

00:50:51 ►

than in the MDMA group.

00:50:54 ►

And the reason we think that is

00:50:56 ►

is because in the control group,

00:50:59 ►

we’re asking them to confront their PTSD,

00:51:03 ►

but without the support of the MDMA to reduce their fear.

00:51:07 ►

And it just unsettles them.

00:51:09 ►

And so here they are trying to bring it to the surface.

00:51:13 ►

They’ve never been able to deal with it before.

00:51:15 ►

So one of the things the FDA has said, though,

00:51:17 ►

is they want us to study MDMA by itself

00:51:19 ►

and really understand what the risks are.

00:51:22 ►

So I think what makes us able to not have this problem with the Tuesday blues

00:51:26 ►

or this feeling of serotonin depletion, so we don’t give 5-HTP,

00:51:31 ►

we don’t give any treatments afterwards,

00:51:33 ►

is that we do the MDMA during the day, not during the night.

00:51:38 ►

And people then can sleep mostly that night.

00:51:40 ►

Occasionally we will give people medicines to sleep.

00:51:43 ►

Then we tell them the second day you’re

00:51:45 ►

going to be tired, but don’t do anything about that. Don’t do anything. Don’t have responsibilities.

00:51:51 ►

Don’t have appointments. Go into that tiredness and also use that to integrate what happened the

00:51:58 ►

day before. And that’s really the anchor where people are able to say, here’s the second day, I don’t have to go to work,

00:52:05 ►

I didn’t dance all night,

00:52:07 ►

I can process the feeling.

00:52:09 ►

Now there are cases where people

00:52:11 ►

are having a very difficult time

00:52:14 ►

for a

00:52:15 ►

week sometimes after the

00:52:17 ►

first MDMA experience.

00:52:19 ►

So we can add

00:52:22 ►

extra integrative therapy sessions.

00:52:24 ►

We have therapists sometimes go back at night to talk to people.

00:52:28 ►

We just say to people, do not tranquilize yourself.

00:52:31 ►

We don’t tranquilize, but we say work with us.

00:52:35 ►

And so there are cases where we provide extra therapy when needed,

00:52:40 ►

and that’s called a protocol deviation.

00:52:41 ►

So we keep track of all of that.

00:52:43 ►

We have what’s in the protocol and then what’s extra.

00:52:46 ►

And so I do believe that a lot of people have found that you take 5-HTP after you take MDMA.

00:52:53 ►

It seems today it’s a little bit easier.

00:52:55 ►

But in the therapy and the research, we don’t do any of that.

00:53:01 ►

Hi, Dr. Doppler.

00:53:03 ►

Thank you for what you do.

00:53:04 ►

I am a psychiatry resident at Hopkins,

00:53:06 ►

very interested in this area.

00:53:09 ►

And my question is,

00:53:10 ►

once it’s approved by the FDA,

00:53:13 ►

what is your idea in terms of regulation?

00:53:15 ►

For example, should there be off-label prescriptions?

00:53:18 ►

Who gets licensed to do this and how?

00:53:21 ►

Okay, great question.

00:53:22 ►

By the way, where are you studying?

00:53:23 ►

At Hopkins. Oh, okay, great. Are you the way, where are you studying? At Hopkins.

00:53:25 ►

Oh, okay, great.

00:53:27 ►

Are you part of any of that?

00:53:29 ►

Do you hope to be, or will you be able to be part of the psilocybin project?

00:53:33 ►

Hope to be.

00:53:34 ►

All right, well, so this is a policy question.

00:53:37 ►

That’s what I studied at the Kennedy School.

00:53:40 ►

And so the FDA, generally, when they approve a drug,

00:53:45 ►

anybody can prescribe it for anything.

00:53:48 ►

Any doctor can prescribe it for anything.

00:53:50 ►

And there’s very minimal additional policies.

00:53:53 ►

What happened to start to change that was thalidomide.

00:53:57 ►

So in the 60s, thalidomide was medicine in Europe for morning sickness,

00:54:04 ►

and it caused terrible birth defects.

00:54:06 ►

And the pharmaceutical company was trying to bring thalidomide to the U.S.

00:54:09 ►

And there was a woman, Frances Kelsey,

00:54:12 ►

who’s the only person at the FDA to ever win the Presidential Medal of Honor,

00:54:16 ►

and she won it for being suspicious about the safety profile of thalidomide,

00:54:20 ►

and she blocked thalidomide from becoming a medicine in the U.S.,

00:54:24 ►

and she probably saved tens of thousands of birth defects

00:54:27 ►

before they figured out the connection.

00:54:30 ►

So decades later, thalidomide became a medicine.

00:54:35 ►

It constricts blood vessels.

00:54:37 ►

It’s good for leprosy.

00:54:38 ►

It’s good for certain kinds of cancer.

00:54:40 ►

So what the FDA did is they created a whole set of regulatory policies

00:54:45 ►

to control thalidomide to make sure that there would be no more birth defects.

00:54:50 ►

So they have what’s called a patient registry.

00:54:52 ►

Everybody that gets thalidomide is listed on a patient registry,

00:54:56 ►

and they track whether there’s any birth defects.

00:54:58 ►

There is an education that goes to the pharmacist.

00:55:01 ►

The pharmacist has to be educated.

00:55:03 ►

The physicians who prescribe it have to read some stuff, and there’s a brochure that’s given to the pharmacist. The pharmacist has to be educated. The physicians who prescribe it have to read some stuff.

00:55:06 ►

And there’s a brochure that’s given to the patients.

00:55:09 ►

And under those conditions,

00:55:11 ►

they’ve let thalidomide become a mess.

00:55:13 ►

That process of figuring out

00:55:16 ►

how to adjust the policies for the drug

00:55:18 ►

is now ratified into what’s called the REMS,

00:55:21 ►

which is Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies.

00:55:25 ►

And so

00:55:26 ►

what we’re proposing and what it looks like

00:55:28 ►

both FDA and DEA are

00:55:29 ►

going to agree on is that

00:55:32 ►

once MDMA becomes a medicine

00:55:34 ►

and this will be true for psilocybin as well,

00:55:36 ►

the drug is not

00:55:37 ►

safe or effective by itself.

00:55:40 ►

It’s psilocybin

00:55:41 ►

assisted psychotherapy or

00:55:43 ►

MDMA assisted psychotherapy

00:55:46 ►

so we’re proposing that the only people that are able to prescribe it

00:55:50 ►

or to be actually with patients

00:55:53 ►

doing the therapy

00:55:54 ►

will have gone through our training program

00:55:57 ►

so that they know the therapy that has been

00:56:00 ►

used along with the MDMA

00:56:03 ►

and that these drugs will never be take-home medicines.

00:56:07 ►

They will only be administered in psychedelic clinics

00:56:10 ►

under direct supervision.

00:56:13 ►

So those are the two main aspects

00:56:16 ►

of how we think that they’ll be regulated.

00:56:19 ►

The question that you asked

00:56:20 ►

was also about off-label prescription.

00:56:24 ►

So in 1986, Marinol, the oral THC pill, became a medicine.

00:56:30 ►

It was the first medicine from cannabis.

00:56:33 ►

And there have been all these talks in the 70s and 80s about chemotherapy

00:56:38 ►

and how smoke marijuana helps people with the nausea from cancer chemotherapy

00:56:44 ►

and it can contribute to an appetite. Smoked marijuana helps people with the nausea from cancer chemotherapy,

00:56:46 ►

and it can contribute to an appetite.

00:56:50 ►

And the government didn’t want to approve marijuana.

00:56:53 ►

This was, again, during Nancy Reagan, just say no escalation of the drug war.

00:56:59 ►

But they were willing to approve the RLTHC pill, which does not work as well as marijuana.

00:57:10 ►

But the DEA put a notice in the Federal Register that said that there would be no off-label prescription for the RLTHC-PRO because it was a Schedule I drug.

00:57:17 ►

And luckily, the pharmaceutical, not luckily, but many drugs, around a third of the prescriptions are off-label.

00:57:26 ►

Which means they’re being prescribed for conditions that they weren’t approved for or circumstances they weren’t approved for.

00:57:31 ►

So often it’s drugs that were studied in adults but have never studied in children,

00:57:32 ►

but they’re being prescribed in children.

00:57:35 ►

That’s why we have to do pediatric studies with MDMA.

00:57:40 ►

The FDA is trying to crack down on that and require studies in pediatric populations. But the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, the AMA, all these different groups

00:57:45 ►

protested the DEA, and the DEA had to withdraw it. So there is off-label prescription even for

00:57:51 ►

drugs that have come from Schedule 1. Now, what we’re saying also is that the only people that

00:57:58 ►

can prescribe this are people that we have trained in our method. Eventually there will be other people training them as well.

00:58:06 ►

But what we’re saying is that once they know our method,

00:58:10 ►

they know how the drug was used,

00:58:12 ►

they can innovate and they don’t need to keep using our method.

00:58:16 ►

They can modify it in any number of different ways,

00:58:19 ►

blend it with any other therapies, whatever.

00:58:22 ►

And the problem of off-label prescription,

00:58:26 ►

so that counts as off-label

00:58:27 ►

if you use it in a different therapeutic method.

00:58:30 ►

But the real question is

00:58:31 ►

about all sorts of other conditions.

00:58:35 ►

And so

00:58:35 ►

what I wanted to do

00:58:38 ►

was to have a patient

00:58:40 ►

registry, and then

00:58:42 ►

they have every time a doctor

00:58:44 ►

would prescribe MDMA would be a little

00:58:46 ►

form to say what it was prescribed for. So we would keep track of all the off-label prescriptions,

00:58:52 ►

and eventually we’d say, oh, look at all this use, now let’s study that, and try to make,

00:58:56 ►

because the thing about off-label prescription is that insurance will not cover it. That’s a

00:59:01 ►

big issue for us, because most of the people who are traumatized

00:59:06 ►

come from populations that have

00:59:08 ►

the least resources to pay for treatment.

00:59:10 ►

So there’s a big equity

00:59:11 ►

issue. So it’s very important

00:59:13 ►

that we get this covered by insurance.

00:59:16 ►

So insurance will only cover what

00:59:18 ►

you’ve studied it for.

00:59:19 ►

They won’t cover

00:59:21 ►

off-label uses. The other

00:59:23 ►

thing is that

00:59:24 ►

in order to defend yourself

00:59:27 ►

against medical malpractice,

00:59:30 ►

you have to have what’s called a significant minority of your peers

00:59:34 ►

to support what you’re doing.

00:59:36 ►

So for every off-label use,

00:59:38 ►

if there’s a significant minority of your peers,

00:59:42 ►

which means maybe some prominent psychiatrists

00:59:45 ►

think it’s okay to give MDMA for OCD.

00:59:48 ►

So there will be off-label prescription.

00:59:50 ►

But the pharmaceutical companies are prohibited

00:59:54 ►

from actually encouraging

00:59:57 ►

or even tracking off-label prescription.

01:00:01 ►

So we were told, don’t do the patient registry.

01:00:04 ►

Don’t ask the doctors to tell you what they’re prescribing it for when it’s off-label prescription. So we were told, don’t do the patient registry, don’t ask the doctors to tell you what they’re prescribing it for

01:00:07 ►

when it’s off-label, but just be blind to that

01:00:11 ►

and try to think on your own what other uses that it could be used for.

01:00:17 ►

So our goal is make MDMA into a medicine for PTSD.

01:00:20 ►

Then we will sell it for a profit through the MAPS Benefit Corporation,

01:00:24 ►

because selling MDMA for a profit is taxable.

01:00:27 ►

So we’ve created this benefit corp where we maximize public benefit, not profit.

01:00:32 ►

And we’re working with ethicists at UPED to articulate a whole series of metrics

01:00:38 ►

to evaluate the public benefit.

01:00:41 ►

And then the public benefit corporation is for a profit,

01:00:43 ►

but it’s owned 100% by the

01:00:45 ►

non-profit. So whatever profits are made are going to go for other research. So that’s

01:00:50 ►

our goal, is to try to get money from selling MDMA for PTSD and study all these off-label

01:00:54 ►

prescriptions. But once MDMA is a medicine, as long as you’ve been through our training

01:01:00 ►

program, then you can use it in any way for any condition.

01:01:08 ►

But I do think that we want to roll this out.

01:01:12 ►

So medicalization is not the same as legalization.

01:01:19 ►

We see from medical marijuana that in 1996, Arizona and California passed the first medical marijuana laws, and now 22 years later’s 60% of the American public

01:01:26 ►

is in favor of marijuana legalization for all

01:01:28 ►

uses. So medicalization

01:01:30 ►

will lead to legalization

01:01:31 ►

but we don’t want to

01:01:33 ►

but for medicalization it isn’t legalization

01:01:36 ►

I feel fine

01:01:37 ►

having it highly controlled. So this is

01:01:40 ►

where we get pushback from libertarians

01:01:42 ►

who are a lot of our donors like all these bitcoin

01:01:44 ►

people tend to be libertarians.

01:01:46 ►

And they’re like, why are you suggesting

01:01:48 ►

that it’s only under direct supervision,

01:01:50 ►

only for certain things?

01:01:52 ►

So I think we need to work with the system,

01:01:55 ►

work on incremental change,

01:01:57 ►

and part of that is all these limitations

01:01:59 ►

for the risk evaluation mitigation strategies.

01:02:04 ►

Dr. Dolan, another follow-up question.

01:02:06 ►

Thank you again for all that you do on behalf of humanity.

01:02:11 ►

What would somebody do if they wanted to get involved

01:02:15 ►

and get trained by you and set up a clinic?

01:02:20 ►

Well, that’s a very good question.

01:02:21 ►

So right now we have 5,000 therapists on a list to be notified when we want to start our training program.

01:02:31 ►

So the first thing to do is to sign up on our website to be notified for when we open up training opportunities.

01:02:42 ►

So this is the key bottleneck for us.

01:02:45 ►

And it’s very challenging.

01:02:47 ►

I mean, it’s been so easy for a lot of MAPs for the 32 years.

01:02:51 ►

Most of MAPs was just asking for permission to do stuff and getting rejected.

01:02:56 ►

And so that wasn’t that hard.

01:02:58 ►

Now we’re sort of seeing success, and people are saying,

01:03:01 ►

how are you going to scale up?

01:03:03 ►

And the most important challenge for us now is

01:03:05 ►

scaling up therapists. But we only have

01:03:08 ►

four trainers

01:03:08 ►

so far. So we’re starting new

01:03:12 ►

programs to train more trainers.

01:03:14 ►

So the first thing is sign up on

01:03:16 ►

the website. We’re trying to put more

01:03:18 ►

and more of what we do on the

01:03:20 ►

website. There’s also the treatment

01:03:22 ►

manual that describes our

01:03:23 ►

treatment approach, which is for

01:03:26 ►

free on the website under the MDMA

01:03:28 ►

page at the bottom, so read that.

01:03:30 ►

And we’re starting

01:03:32 ►

to think that we can train

01:03:33 ►

our trainings can be the maximum of

01:03:35 ►

60 people at a time. So

01:03:37 ►

we’re going to have a training for 60 people in Europe

01:03:40 ►

at the end of September.

01:03:42 ►

Hopefully we’ll have a training in November

01:03:43 ►

for Colombia, Chile, and Argentina South American therapists. And at the end of September. Hopefully we’ll have a training in November for Colombia, Chile, and Argentina,

01:03:46 ►

South American therapists.

01:03:48 ►

At the end of January, February,

01:03:50 ►

we’re going to have a training in Israel.

01:03:52 ►

The Ministry of Health has given us

01:03:54 ►

50 people can now take MDMA

01:03:57 ►

on a compassionate basis

01:03:58 ►

and expanded access

01:03:59 ►

while we move through Phase 3.

01:04:01 ►

So we’re going to train a bunch more therapists for that.

01:04:04 ►

And then we’re going to come back to the U.S.

01:04:05 ►

and start training for expanded access.

01:04:07 ►

The first training is going to be in March.

01:04:09 ►

We’re going to have one every two months.

01:04:11 ►

And we’re going to try to pick people who are geographically distributed

01:04:15 ►

in areas where we don’t already have phase three studies

01:04:19 ►

so we can reach more people.

01:04:23 ►

And you’ll have to start building a team. So if you apply

01:04:26 ►

on the website and you can write to Shannon, S-H-A-N-N-O-N, Shannon at mapsbcorp.com, we

01:04:35 ►

have kind of a list of things to do to prepare to have an expanded access site. So you have

01:04:40 ►

to have a doctor. So if you’re a therapist, you have to have a doctor because the DEA

01:04:44 ►

only gives Schedule I licenses to doctors. You have to have a doctor. So if you’re a therapist, you have to have a doctor because the DEA only gives Schedule I licenses to doctors.

01:04:47 ►

You have to have a facility that’s capable of having overnight stays.

01:04:51 ►

Ideally, you would have a team.

01:04:53 ►

You would have two male-female teams at least

01:04:56 ►

so that you can learn from each other as you start treating it.

01:05:00 ►

You’ll have to start thinking about what the fees are going to be charged.

01:05:04 ►

Is there money that we can get from places to subsidize treatments

01:05:08 ►

where people can afford it?

01:05:10 ►

But the key thing is that we don’t want there to be a backlash

01:05:13 ►

because people were treated in ways that were not completely ethical

01:05:20 ►

or not completely effective.

01:05:22 ►

So our pressure is to…

01:05:24 ►

There’s 8 million people with PTSD in America, roughly.

01:05:27 ►

So how do we ever possibly do that?

01:05:30 ►

It’s going to take us a very long time

01:05:32 ►

to try to figure out how to expand our training program.

01:05:36 ►

But we anticipate thousands and thousands of therapists.

01:05:39 ►

And so for now, the best way,

01:05:41 ►

one of the best ways is to volunteer to work at Zendo.

01:05:44 ►

So we use Zendo to train therapists

01:05:46 ►

because you’ve got a flow of people coming in

01:05:48 ►

with all different drugs in different combinations.

01:05:52 ►

And working with them to try to help them

01:05:53 ►

turn that into something productive

01:05:55 ►

is one of the best trainings.

01:05:58 ►

And we have Zendo that works at other events

01:06:00 ►

all over the place.

01:06:02 ►

So volunteer for Zendo.

01:06:02 ►

events all over the place.

01:06:04 ►

So volunteer for Zendo.

01:06:06 ►

And I think really that

01:06:07 ►

it’s a tricky thing for me to say,

01:06:10 ►

but I think practice with your friends.

01:06:13 ►

And practice

01:06:14 ►

with other people.

01:06:17 ►

You know, the MDMA

01:06:18 ►

does a lot of the work.

01:06:20 ►

And so you can create a safe space

01:06:22 ►

and you can learn

01:06:24 ►

with people who are suffering different things.

01:06:26 ►

And we’re all suffering something.

01:06:28 ►

We might not have a clinical diagnosis.

01:06:30 ►

But I’d say practice with your friends and practice with people that are suffering and learn that way.

01:06:37 ►

And then, you know, come out of the closet to the extent that you can to educate people so that it becomes less stigmatized.

01:06:47 ►

And hopefully we will have eventually training programs that you can be part of

01:06:51 ►

without waiting mega, multi, multi years.

01:06:56 ►

So that’s the best way to do it.

01:06:59 ►

Hi.

01:07:00 ►

So you mentioned at some point that the treatment works better with women than men.

01:07:06 ►

Did I get that right?

01:07:07 ►

No, that was the SSRIs.

01:07:10 ►

So the prescription medications for PTSD work better in women than in men.

01:07:15 ►

But MDMA, fortunately, seems to work well in men as well as women,

01:07:21 ►

so there’s hope for us guys.

01:07:25 ►

I mean, the question is, are women closer to their emotions?

01:07:28 ►

And that’s why we think SSRIs work a little bit better for women than men.

01:07:33 ►

But they have kind of a milder effect.

01:07:37 ►

And people have also asked, do you change the doses

01:07:40 ►

so that women get a lower dose than men?

01:07:43 ►

They tend to weigh less so that would be

01:07:46 ►

do you dose 5 mg per kg?

01:07:48 ►

Well, we don’t do that.

01:07:50 ►

And it seems like

01:07:51 ►

the thing

01:07:54 ►

people have often said about the women is that

01:07:56 ►

often many of them have complex PTSD

01:07:58 ►

from childhood

01:08:00 ►

multiple incidents. And so

01:08:02 ►

it does work well with complex

01:08:04 ►

PTSD or war PTSD.

01:08:07 ►

I guess the other

01:08:07 ►

question is, are women better

01:08:09 ►

therapists than men?

01:08:12 ►

So I don’t think that’s necessarily

01:08:14 ►

true, but I do

01:08:16 ►

think that this idea of a male-female

01:08:18 ►

team is pretty

01:08:19 ►

incredible to see it in motion.

01:08:22 ►

And for some reason,

01:08:24 ►

many of our male-female teams

01:08:25 ►

are married or are romantically

01:08:28 ►

involved. I didn’t think it would

01:08:30 ►

develop that way, but I mentioned

01:08:31 ►

we have four trainers. They happen to be

01:08:33 ►

two married couples.

01:08:35 ►

So more and more, it turns out

01:08:37 ►

that these male-female teams are

01:08:39 ►

in a romantic relationship. Because it’s

01:08:41 ►

kind of a very loving situation to be there

01:08:44 ►

nurturing somebody

01:08:45 ►

who’s trying to go through painful stuff.

01:08:48 ►

So they have to have a really good relationship

01:08:50 ►

even if they’re not.

01:08:53 ►

Hi, Rick.

01:08:57 ►

I wanted to reiterate my gratitude

01:08:59 ►

and thanks again for everything.

01:09:02 ►

I was curious about the inclusion of holotropic

01:09:05 ►

breathwork in the training of the

01:09:07 ►

therapists.

01:09:10 ►

Well,

01:09:12 ►

01:09:13 ►

holotropic breathwork, again, is hyperventilation

01:09:16 ►

that

01:09:17 ►

reduces your defenses and stuff

01:09:19 ►

comes to the surface.

01:09:21 ►

Holotropic breathwork is more like LSD

01:09:23 ►

than it is like MDMA.

01:09:25 ►

But it’s legal.

01:09:28 ►

And so most of the therapists,

01:09:31 ►

or I’d say many of the therapists

01:09:32 ►

that we’ve worked with,

01:09:33 ►

have been trained by Stan and Christina Groff

01:09:36 ►

in the holotropic breathwork.

01:09:37 ►

So I was trained in that from 88 to 91.

01:09:41 ►

Michael Midover and Andy Midover,

01:09:43 ►

who are our lead therapists

01:09:45 ►

have been trained in the breath work

01:09:46 ►

and so

01:09:49 ►

we have used holotropic breath work

01:09:52 ►

in the middle of the training

01:09:53 ►

because more and more now

01:09:56 ►

we’re working with people who are

01:09:57 ►

traditional therapists and psychiatrists

01:09:59 ►

who don’t have a psychedelic background

01:10:01 ►

and so

01:10:02 ►

we do use holotropic breath work

01:10:05 ►

to try to help people learn about letting go.

01:10:09 ►

That was before we got,

01:10:12 ►

and even still more recently we do that.

01:10:14 ►

Many underground psychedelic therapists

01:10:16 ►

start with a conversation with people

01:10:19 ►

to get to know them.

01:10:20 ►

Then they do holotropic breath work

01:10:21 ►

to see how they respond.

01:10:23 ►

And then they move to the psychedelics.

01:10:25 ►

So I think holotropic breathwork is a really good

01:10:28 ►

way to help train

01:10:29 ►

therapists in their own process of

01:10:31 ►

letting go. The fact that it’s

01:10:33 ►

harder than MDMA is

01:10:35 ►

actually good in the training of therapists

01:10:37 ►

because you see how scared

01:10:39 ►

you are about letting go.

01:10:42 ►

You don’t know what’s coming up.

01:10:43 ►

You don’t have the safety reduction of fear from MDMA that You don’t know what’s coming up. And you don’t have the safety

01:10:45 ►

reduction of fear from MDMA

01:10:48 ►

that you don’t get that with the breathwork.

01:10:50 ►

So it requires a little

01:10:52 ►

bit more courage, you could say,

01:10:53 ►

in the breathwork. So it’s been a very

01:10:55 ►

effective tool for us

01:10:57 ►

in the training of therapists.

01:11:00 ►

And we’re likely to continue

01:11:01 ►

using it that way.

01:11:03 ►

We don’t use it in the treatment.

01:11:05 ►

And I’ll say that the reason that we don’t

01:11:07 ►

is that we only want to have one intervention at a time.

01:11:12 ►

And so the FDA would not look kindly on,

01:11:15 ►

oh, you’re doing this and that.

01:11:17 ►

Well, what is the contributor to people getting better?

01:11:20 ►

So we don’t use holotropic breathwork in the treatment,

01:11:22 ►

even though in underground settings,

01:11:28 ►

people often do go through a series of breathwork before they do the psychedelics

01:11:30 ►

and I would say back about this post-approval

01:11:34 ►

post-approval, once it’s a prescription medicine

01:11:37 ►

I think holotropic breathwork will be used a lot

01:11:40 ►

before people start with MDMA for PTSD

01:11:42 ►

Hi, thanks for everything that you’re doing to advance society as well.

01:11:49 ►

A few friends and I get together a few times a year.

01:11:52 ►

We call it communion.

01:11:55 ►

Getting to the basis of what we’re doing. Sometimes we enter in with

01:11:59 ►

intentions, what we want to resolve at the time. Sometimes we just enter

01:12:04 ►

in and deal with what comes up.

01:12:06 ►

Have you noticed any difference in those kinds of aspects,

01:12:09 ►

going in with intention, I want to resolve whatever my issue is with this,

01:12:14 ►

as opposed to just whatever bubbles can surface?

01:12:17 ►

The approach that we use is a little bit of a combination of that.

01:12:21 ►

So it’s important to have intentions,

01:12:24 ►

and I think these intentions are

01:12:26 ►

focusing and they help your psyche try to, you know, and they mobilize energy. But once the

01:12:35 ►

session starts, we say throw away those intentions and then just deal with whatever comes up. And

01:12:40 ►

that’s this idea of this inner healing intelligence and the inner healer that somehow or other, you may have an intention of one thing and

01:12:47 ►

before you know it, you’re dealing with something completely different. And maybe that’s actually

01:12:51 ►

what you needed to deal with. So I think that it’s very good as part of

01:12:56 ►

the preparation to use intentions. We have an agreement

01:12:59 ►

with the people and we say, if during the MDMA

01:13:03 ►

session you don’t start talking about the trauma

01:13:06 ►

at some point

01:13:07 ►

we will bring it up because it’s our

01:13:10 ►

view that you have to speak

01:13:12 ►

about the trauma, you have to reprocess

01:13:14 ►

it in order to heal from PTSD

01:13:16 ►

and so

01:13:18 ►

we sort of set that intention ahead of time

01:13:20 ►

at some point

01:13:21 ►

if you don’t talk about it

01:13:24 ►

we’ll ask you some questions about the trauma.

01:13:26 ►

But because we have this

01:13:27 ►

inner directive approach

01:13:29 ►

and an eight hour session and we’re quite patient,

01:13:32 ►

we’ve never actually had

01:13:34 ►

to do that. People will eventually

01:13:35 ►

gravitate toward that. But some

01:13:37 ►

people go to happy memories first

01:13:39 ►

or to a mystical, spiritual sense of

01:13:41 ►

connection or feeling love and then

01:13:43 ►

they’ll go to the trauma, so all different ways.

01:13:45 ►

So I think if you hold on to the intention while you’re having the experience,

01:13:50 ►

you’re limiting the experience to your conscious mind

01:13:53 ►

and to what you thought you needed to work on.

01:13:57 ►

So it’s sort of a combination.

01:13:58 ►

Have the intentions and then let it go, and then see what comes up.

01:14:02 ►

Thank you.

01:14:05 ►

Hi, Rick.

01:14:07 ►

So the news of the efficacy of psychedelics is moving a lot faster than the therapeutic

01:14:14 ►

capacity for studying.

01:14:16 ►

And I’ve had a lot of friends ask me recently about self-medicating.

01:14:21 ►

And I’m in an area of the country that doesn’t have these kind of studies happening. So I’m wondering what you would tell people about self-medicating. And I’m in an area of the country that doesn’t have these kind of studies happening,

01:14:25 ►

so I’m wondering what you would tell people

01:14:27 ►

about self-medicating with these substances.

01:14:30 ►

All right, well, let me tell you

01:14:32 ►

what happened to me last year at Burning Man.

01:14:36 ►

So this guy comes up to me, and he gives me a hug,

01:14:39 ►

and he says, you saved my life.

01:14:42 ►

And I was like, well, what did I do?

01:14:44 ►

And he said, well, I’m a veteran, and I had PTSD,

01:14:47 ►

and I was feeling suicidal and terrible,

01:14:50 ►

and I heard about your study,

01:14:51 ►

but I wasn’t able to get in your study,

01:14:54 ►

and I went to your website,

01:14:55 ►

and I saw that you posted your treatment manual,

01:14:58 ►

and I read it,

01:14:59 ►

and I found a friend,

01:15:02 ►

and I found MDMA,

01:15:04 ►

and I took it,

01:15:05 ►

and now I feel better.

01:15:15 ►

So I think that it’s always self-medication in a sense.

01:15:23 ►

So one of the concerns I have about shamanism is that you tend to have the shaman as the one that heals you.

01:15:25 ►

Sometimes the shaman is the only one that takes the drug.

01:15:26 ►

And they go into a different state

01:15:28 ►

and they try to do divination,

01:15:31 ►

different things to heal you.

01:15:32 ►

And they have feathers.

01:15:34 ►

All different kind of things.

01:15:36 ►

But there’s a power dynamic

01:15:38 ►

that’s a little bit concerning

01:15:40 ►

in some shamanistic settings

01:15:42 ►

where they’re the healer.

01:15:44 ►

I mean, this is true with all doctors

01:15:45 ►

and all therapists too.

01:15:46 ►

It’s like, who’s really doing the work?

01:15:49 ►

And so our understanding of it

01:15:50 ►

is that people are always

01:15:52 ►

the ones that heal themselves.

01:15:54 ►

And we’re trying to create

01:15:56 ►

a context for them to do that.

01:15:58 ►

But that we’re not responsible

01:16:00 ►

for healing them.

01:16:01 ►

We’re responsible for creating

01:16:02 ►

an environment where they can heal themselves.

01:16:04 ►

So it’s always

01:16:05 ►

self-medication in a sense.

01:16:08 ►

I think it’s very important

01:16:11 ►

though for people to do it in a safe

01:16:13 ►

way, to be willing to

01:16:16 ►

have

01:16:18 ►

the full range of experiences,

01:16:20 ►

not to do it alone. So I would say

01:16:21 ►

you can self-medicate, but do not

01:16:23 ►

do it by yourself.

01:16:26 ►

Have a buddy, have somebody there that’s the mediator

01:16:28 ►

between you and the outside world.

01:16:30 ►

And don’t really think about

01:16:32 ►

it as necessarily one-dose miracle

01:16:34 ►

cure. And

01:16:35 ►

be willing to

01:16:38 ►

give yourself a couple

01:16:42 ►

days, particularly,

01:16:44 ►

to integrate what happened.

01:16:46 ►

And often, you know,

01:16:48 ►

it’s good to start out with smaller doses

01:16:50 ►

just to see if it agrees with you.

01:16:52 ►

But, you know, we’re trying to make it available

01:16:57 ►

as many tools as possible.

01:16:59 ►

The hardest thing about self-medicating

01:17:02 ►

is knowing that you’ve got a pure drug.

01:17:05 ►

So there is one company in America that is called Drug Detection Lab

01:17:10 ►

that has a license from the DEA to accept anonymous samples of drugs.

01:17:15 ►

And then you put in a code name, and then you contact them,

01:17:18 ►

and then you find out what it was.

01:17:21 ►

So it’s called Drug Detection Lab in Sacramento.

01:17:24 ►

And DanceSafe

01:17:26 ►

and Arrowhead and MAPS started

01:17:28 ►

an ecstasy pill testing program, and we

01:17:30 ►

did it with them, with Drug Detection Lab.

01:17:32 ►

So I’d say that’s very

01:17:34 ►

important, because when you get into these difficult

01:17:35 ►

emotional states, they’re

01:17:38 ►

sometimes difficult. And if you’re worried,

01:17:40 ►

oh my god, did I

01:17:41 ►

poison myself? What did I really take?

01:17:44 ►

Am I going to get the support I thought I would get? Maybe it’s not really MDMA.

01:17:48 ►

That complicates things a lot. So I’d say

01:17:51 ►

really make sure that you have confidence that it’s a pure drug.

01:17:56 ►

And it’s a risk because the more severe

01:18:00 ►

the situation, the more support people need.

01:18:04 ►

So the tendency, like even with self-medication,

01:18:08 ►

the fact that in our therapy setting we have overnight stays.

01:18:11 ►

You might say, oh, I’ll spend the day with you,

01:18:13 ►

and then the experience is over, and then the friend goes away,

01:18:16 ►

and they’re left on their own all night, and things could go really bad.

01:18:21 ►

So I’d say you need an even stronger and longer context,

01:18:26 ►

safe context, when people are going to try

01:18:28 ►

to self-medicate.

01:18:30 ►

But that,

01:18:31 ►

I think, starting below doses,

01:18:34 ►

how are we going to reach all these 8 million people?

01:18:36 ►

It’s going to be a lot of this self-medication.

01:18:40 ►

You know, I wish there were more

01:18:41 ►

centers and all set up and we made…

01:18:44 ►

But

01:18:44 ►

the challenge for us is not to grow too fast either.

01:18:50 ►

Not to surrender quality to just have massive numbers of therapists because that would also lead to backlash.

01:18:57 ►

So here’s another story that’s really, really hard.

01:18:59 ►

This is now 10 years ago.

01:19:02 ►

This fellow contacted me and he said,

01:19:08 ►

I’m struggling, I need an underground therapist,

01:19:11 ►

I want to work with psychedelics, I’m very depressed.

01:19:15 ►

And I referred him to my therapist, actually,

01:19:17 ►

who I knew did not do underground work,

01:19:18 ►

but I thought was a great therapist.

01:19:20 ►

And I thought, at least we can try this.

01:19:24 ►

So he had months of therapy with my therapist therapist and then he called me up and he said

01:19:26 ►

it’s not enough I want underground therapy and we talked a little bit and then it turned out that

01:19:32 ►

he said that he had had epileptic seizures in the past. So we don’t let people with epilepsy in the

01:19:39 ►

studies only because this is just the initial phase. People with epilepsy have taken MDMA or LSD without triggering a seizure.

01:19:47 ►

Even if you get a seizure, you can do stuff that’s not fatal usually if you’re prepared.

01:19:53 ►

But I felt like I couldn’t refer this person to an underground therapy center.

01:19:57 ►

So I said I just couldn’t do it.

01:20:01 ►

And I didn’t hear anything for about a month and a half.

01:20:04 ►

And then I got a call from the police. And the police’t hear anything for about a month and a half. And then I got

01:20:05 ►

a call from the police. And the police said, do you know this guy? And I said, yeah, I

01:20:11 ►

had heard from him. He contacted me and he wanted to know about therapy, but I didn’t

01:20:16 ►

have anywhere to refer him to. And the police said, well, that’s, you know, we’re glad to

01:20:22 ►

hear that you knew of him.

01:20:28 ►

And the reason we’re calling you is because he’s committed suicide and he’s left you a suicide note.

01:20:32 ►

And they said they would send it to me.

01:20:35 ►

And so then I got the suicide note.

01:20:37 ►

And it turned out he committed suicide the very next day

01:20:40 ►

after I told him I couldn’t refer him underground.

01:20:44 ►

The note was the most gracious, beautiful note.

01:20:48 ►

He’s like, I’m not blaming you. I’m blaming the system.

01:20:53 ►

And I know you did as much as you could,

01:20:56 ►

but it’s just I can’t live like this. And he said, you can

01:20:59 ►

use this note to tell people that if

01:21:03 ►

these drugs were approved,

01:21:05 ►

I might have been one more person

01:21:08 ►

saved.

01:21:09 ►

So I’m aware that there are

01:21:12 ►

people committing suicide

01:21:13 ►

because they can’t get into

01:21:16 ►

our studies.

01:21:18 ►

And that’s the

01:21:19 ►

pressure to try to do it as

01:21:22 ►

fast as we can, but not too fast.

01:21:25 ►

And so that’s why I’m very sympathetic when people

01:21:28 ►

say, what about self-medication?

01:21:33 ►

One last question.

01:21:37 ►

Hi Rick, thanks again for your work on behalf of

01:21:40 ►

making the world more psychologically

01:21:44 ►

healthy.

01:21:50 ►

I think it’s amazing that there’s people with enough passion to do this and just butt up against just an elaborate bureaucratic regulations for decades.

01:21:57 ►

That said, my friends and I have been recently trying the different psychedelic mescaline,

01:22:07 ►

which there seems to be no studies done by MAPS on it or anywhere that I could find.

01:22:13 ►

And we found one very good therapeutic use case for it,

01:22:18 ►

one very specific one,

01:22:20 ►

because it’s a drug that promotes very authentic communication between people similar to MDMA.

01:22:26 ►

So I was wondering, like, what would it take, if that is at all feasible,

01:22:30 ►

to do a mescaline study, like, by MAPS or some other way?

01:22:33 ►

Can you say what that specific case that you think it’s good for?

01:22:38 ►

Well, yes.

01:22:38 ►

There are a lot of people who just, their main concern is in life.

01:22:43 ►

It’s, like, what other people think about them.

01:22:47 ►

And they just live their whole life worrying about it,

01:22:50 ►

and they have theories based on,

01:22:52 ►

oh, does this person like me or hate me?

01:22:54 ►

And sometimes they’re on either side of the economy,

01:22:58 ►

Wednesday and Thursday,

01:22:59 ►

they’re like, oh no, maybe this person loves me,

01:23:01 ►

oh, maybe they hate me.

01:23:02 ►

These could be people in a relationship together. And they could spend their whole lives like

01:23:10 ►

picking this and never find it out. So with mescaline, like that is like the first thing

01:23:15 ►

that comes out. It like, it limits like anything that’s kind of on your mind, you would like

01:23:22 ►

almost inevitably reveal. It’s like other drugs like almost inevitably reveal.

01:23:27 ►

It’s like other drugs like alcohol or something.

01:23:30 ►

They let you speak your mind,

01:23:33 ►

but at the same time they like incapacitate your mind.

01:23:37 ►

And like what you speak is not very lucid,

01:23:37 ►

not very eloquent.

01:23:39 ►

But in masculine you’re very lucid and you could just,

01:23:41 ►

in like a kind of autistic childish way,

01:23:43 ►

you very much reveal your, like

01:23:46 ►

how you feel about other people, how you feel about

01:23:48 ►

yourself towards other people, and that just

01:23:50 ►

eliminates it. And I’ve taken it

01:23:52 ►

with my girlfriend, who was

01:23:54 ►

not depressed

01:23:56 ►

at the time, but very depressive.

01:23:58 ►

And that very much helped our relationship.

01:24:01 ►

That’s great.

01:24:02 ►

This is a great question to end on.

01:24:04 ►

Masculine is the most important psychedelic

01:24:07 ►

that is not currently being researched.

01:24:10 ►

And so it’s really good that you brought that up.

01:24:12 ►

And I’ll say, when I was 18 years old

01:24:15 ►

and first starting to do psychedelics

01:24:16 ►

at New College in Sarasota, Florida,

01:24:19 ►

again, this is 1971, 72,

01:24:23 ►

somebody came by with a half a pound of mescaline.

01:24:27 ►

And so I bought all of it.

01:24:31 ►

And my friends and I proceeded to use it

01:24:34 ►

over the next couple months.

01:24:37 ►

I had a lot of friends.

01:24:41 ►

Because we didn’t all do it all the time.

01:24:43 ►

But mescaline is fantastic.

01:24:46 ►

And in 1953, the U.S. Army did the chemical warfare service to the Army.

01:24:53 ►

They tested eight drugs for toxicity.

01:24:57 ►

On the one hand was mescaline, on the other was methamphetamine,

01:25:01 ►

and in the middle was MDMA.

01:25:02 ►

So that’s actually the first test that

01:25:05 ►

we’re aware of in the U.S. of MDMA was in this context. So the way to think about MDMA

01:25:13 ►

is that it’s like methamphetamine in that it makes you alert and it can keep you up

01:25:20 ►

all night, but it doesn’t make you jittery the way that methamphetamine will,

01:25:25 ►

or you can sit still and be awake all night.

01:25:28 ►

And it’s like mescaline in that it brings things to the surface,

01:25:32 ►

but it doesn’t have the visuals, it doesn’t have the kind of ego dissolution,

01:25:38 ►

but it has the warmth and the heart of mescaline.

01:25:42 ►

So MDMA, a good way to think about it, is sort of somewhat of a cross between mescaline and methamphetamine.

01:25:48 ►

The reason that mescaline, first off, is very hard to find

01:25:54 ►

is that it’s not that potent.

01:25:57 ►

So you need roughly 400 milligrams or so for a full psychedelic experience.

01:26:03 ►

And so underground chemists are looking to make drugs

01:26:08 ►

that are more powerful.

01:26:11 ►

And so you can sell more and you get more money

01:26:16 ►

per dose. So mescaline

01:26:19 ►

has that disadvantage, you could say, of requiring 400

01:26:23 ►

milligrams or up to a half a gram for full psychedelic experience.

01:26:29 ►

You can have a lot of beneficial stuff at lower doses as well.

01:26:33 ►

That’s also a reason why it’s not been yet us to make these drugs in gmp good medical practices way that um you know

01:26:49 ►

psilocybin you can do in 20 or 30 milligrams and have a full psychedelic dose you know mdma is up

01:26:56 ►

to 125 but then you know you just need to be making way way more and the price goes up for

01:27:01 ►

masculine when you have to give 400 milligrams or half a gram. That’s no reason, no real excuse not to make it into a medicine.

01:27:08 ►

It’s just to say the economics are a little bit different.

01:27:11 ►

And there’s a drug that’s sort of similar to mescaline called MDA.

01:27:16 ►

So it’s methyldioxamphetamine.

01:27:18 ►

It’s like a cross between MDMA and LSD a little bit.

01:27:21 ►

between MDMA and LSD a little bit.

01:27:28 ►

Right now, there is no resources that we’re aware of to work on mescaline,

01:27:32 ►

but I think it has incredible healing potential,

01:27:35 ►

and I can only hope that one day

01:27:37 ►

research will start with mescaline.

01:27:39 ►

Thank you.

01:27:43 ►

Thank you. Rick said just now about having an intention before an experience. Now, while I realized that what he was talking about was their MDMA work,

01:28:09 ►

personally, I found that the same thing works quite well for ayahuasca experiences.

01:28:14 ►

Early on, I learned that even though I began the session with a clear intention of what I wanted to work on that night,

01:28:20 ►

once the session began, I, well, I simply let go of my thoughts about that intention

01:28:25 ►

and let the medicine guide me from then on. And in my case, it’s worked wonders for me. So,

01:28:31 ►

if you haven’t tried that with your medicine work yet, well, maybe you want to consider it.

01:28:36 ►

So, Rick thinks that there will be full legalization of psychedelic medicines by 2035.

01:28:42 ►

Well, how convenient is that, I ask? You see, for reasons that I don’t

01:28:48 ►

fully understand, I’ve always known that I was going to live to be at least 94 years old. Well,

01:28:55 ►

fully understand, I guess I should be honest here. One of the main reasons I believe that is because

01:29:00 ►

on one of my ayahuasca sessions, I had a vision of, well, I had a vision of who was celebrating my 94th birthday with me.

01:29:08 ►

So that’s probably the main reason I think I’ll live to be 94.

01:29:12 ►

But if you do the math, in 2035, I’ll only be 93.

01:29:16 ►

So if all goes well, I’m going to stick around at, well, at least until the drugs are legal once again.

01:29:22 ►

Well, at least that sounds good to me.

01:29:22 ►

Well, at least until the drugs are legal once again.

01:29:24 ►

Well, at least that sounds good to me.

01:29:27 ►

But can you believe it?

01:29:33 ►

After all of the work that the volunteers, the donors, the therapists, and the staff at MAPS have put in,

01:29:38 ►

well, we are now within just a year of legal psychedelic-assisted therapy to become available under the FDA’s Expanded Access Program.

01:29:42 ►

Yes, there still are some things that MAPS must do to fully qualify

01:29:46 ►

for that program, but I think we can all rest assured that Rick Doblin and his merry band are

01:29:52 ►

going to make it across the finish line, and as Terrence McKenna sometimes said,

01:29:57 ►

and not a moment too soon. I can think back, oh say 30 years ago, when I would mention that some of my friends were suffering from PTSD.

01:30:07 ►

Well, people would ask me what that was.

01:30:09 ►

Today, things are quite different.

01:30:11 ►

It doesn’t take degrees in sociology and medicine to look around the world and see that huge segments of our human family are suffering from this malady.

01:30:21 ►

I think that maybe one of the things we all can do is to be aware of the symptoms of

01:30:26 ►

PTSD in our friends, relatives, and neighbors, and then at the very least let them know about

01:30:31 ►

the various psychedelic treatments that are now becoming available and may be of help for them.

01:30:36 ►

I know that doesn’t sound like much, but if you remember back from one of Lex Pelger’s Salon 2.0

01:30:42 ►

podcasts of psychedelic stories from around the country,

01:30:45 ►

there was one woman, I think she was a military veteran,

01:30:48 ►

who was having a terrible time readjusting to civilian life.

01:30:53 ►

And it was just a passing mention of the MAPS Phase 2 study that caught her attention.

01:30:58 ►

She made it into the study, and today she has only a few minor symptoms of PTSD.

01:31:04 ►

Now, had you been the person who told her about that study,

01:31:07 ►

wouldn’t you be feeling pretty good about yourself right now?

01:31:11 ►

So, please do what you can to spread the word about treatments

01:31:14 ►

that are now becoming available for the scourge of PTSD.

01:31:19 ►

And go see From Shock to Awe and take some friends.

01:31:22 ►

It, well, it could be a life-changing evening for some people.

01:31:26 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

588 - Good News on the Psychedelic Front – Pt. 2

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