Program Notes
Guest speaker: Brad Burge
Psymposia at Psychedelic Science 2017
http://www.maps.org/Today’s podcast features Brad Burge, the director of communications for MAPS, who tells us more about the upcoming 6-day conference in Oakland, CA: Psychedelic Science 2017.
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In the “Free Marketplace” at Psychedelic Science 2017 Psymposia will be hosting our stage ten hours a day. You can see the schedule and watch the livestream here.
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Today’s podcast is hosted by Lex Pelger, engineered by Matt Payne, intro music by Joey Whipp, outro music by California Smile, produced by Brian Normand.
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If you like this show, want to see more, or want to help Lex get a new mic, consider supporting the Psymposia Team monthly on Patreon.
https://www.patreon.com/psymposia
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
Salon 2.0.
00:00:24 ►
Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:00:28 ►
And today we have a short program featuring Brad Burge,
00:00:31 ►
who is the Director of Communications for MAPS,
00:00:38 ►
which is the organization that is producing the upcoming Psychedelic Science 2017 conference that’s taking place this coming weekend.
00:00:41 ►
Now, in case you haven’t been keeping up with the press releases about this event,
00:00:45 ►
well, it’s on track to be the largest psychedelic conference yet held. I understand that there now
00:00:52 ►
have been over 2,300 tickets sold. I’m not going to be able to make it myself, but I have quite a
00:00:58 ►
few friends who are going to be there, including Wild Bill Ratazinski, who you’ve heard from here
00:01:04 ►
a few times in the salon.
00:01:06 ►
And I’ve asked Bill to round up a few of the old hands that he finds there and take them to the
00:01:11 ►
symposia stage where they can record one of their own psychedelic stories. And in the months ahead,
00:01:18 ►
we’re going to be hearing a whole lot more from Lex and the symposia team, not just from this
00:01:23 ►
conference, but at this very moment,
00:01:25 ►
they are heading across country on their Blue Dot Tour, recording more stories like the ones that
00:01:30 ►
we heard last week. And I’ll be here at the April 27th stop in San Diego, and if you’re in the area,
00:01:37 ►
well, I hope to see you there. Now let’s join Lex and Brad to hear a little bit more about all that’s
00:01:44 ►
in store for the attendees at this week’s Psychedelic Science Conference.
00:01:57 ►
Hello, I’m Lex Pelger and this is a Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:02:01 ►
Today we’re happy to have Brad Burge, the Director of Communications for MAPS, the
00:02:06 ►
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. He’s here to tell us about the massive
00:02:11 ►
conference they’re pulling together the third weekend of April in Oakland, California, Psychedelic
00:02:16 ►
Science 2017. In the free marketplace at that conference, thanks to MAPS, we’ll have the
00:02:23 ►
Symposia Stage, where we will be featuring a range of storytelling speakers like Hamilton Morris, Jim Fadiman,
00:02:30 ►
the Cosmic Sister panel, and Dennis McKenna.
00:02:35 ►
We’ll also have live podcasts from Duncan Trussell, Zach Leary, Shane Moss, and me,
00:02:40 ►
interviewing Emmanuel Sefirios, for you, on the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:02:46 ►
To see the full schedule and learn about watching the live stream,
00:02:49 ►
go to symposia.com slash psychedelicscience.
00:02:53 ►
Here’s Brad to tell us more.
00:02:56 ►
So it sounds like you have a lot going on on your end, huh?
00:03:00 ►
It’s so exciting.
00:03:02 ►
We have this phrase that we’re bouncing around at maps, um, called
00:03:06 ►
watch out for insurmountable opportunities, uh, which is just to say, what do you do when the
00:03:13 ►
whole world is watching and you’re putting together a giant event and people are coming
00:03:18 ►
out of the woodwork offering to help and, um, and, um, yeah, that, that, that’s kind of what
00:03:23 ►
it’s like. So how do we, how do we deal with the scaling? How do we deal with all of these people who are interested in what we’re doing these days?
00:03:30 ►
What a great spot to be at.
00:03:32 ►
It’s exciting.
00:03:33 ►
Yeah. Tell me about the science tracks to start.
00:03:46 ►
So Psychedelic Science 2017 is the third scientific conference that we’ve done. It’s the third psychedelic science conference that we’ve done.
00:03:50 ►
Our first one in 2010, our last one in 2013, and now 2017.
00:03:55 ►
It’s going to be our third, and it’s looking like it’s going to be the largest.
00:03:58 ►
We have three simultaneous tracks.
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simultaneous tracks. That is three different sort of topic areas, very, very broad topic areas of scientific research into the benefits and risks of psychedelics and marijuana. About 95%
00:04:13 ►
focused on psychedelics. So things like LSD, MDMA, ayahuasca, psilocybin mushrooms, ibogaine, ketamine, peyote, just a little bit about medical marijuana, 2CE.
00:04:29 ►
A lot of research has been coming out into the neuroscience or the therapeutic aspects or the creative uses, microdosing, for example, of psychedelics. A lot more research has been
00:04:47 ►
coming out, especially over the last four or five years since the 2013 conference. And so
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we have proportionally more content that we’re showing. So we have these three different tracks,
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clinical research, interdisciplinary research, which is a combination of clinical research and
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other kinds of research, and plant medicines. We have a whole track focused on plant medicines of various kinds as they’re
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understood and used in traditional cultures, as well as how they’re being looked at in medical
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contexts. So here we have these three different topic areas on four different stages. So just a
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lot of different content. And that’s the main conference.
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Of course, the conference itself has five simultaneous stages.
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It really feels like a scientific conference festival,
00:05:34 ►
a six-day science festival than an academic conference.
00:05:39 ►
You do know how to make it fun.
00:05:41 ►
You make learning fun.
00:05:43 ►
Well, psychedelics make learning fun. You make learning fun. Well, psychedelics make learning fun.
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Yeah.
00:05:48 ►
Oh, man.
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That’s a great swath of
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research and tracks.
00:05:54 ►
Yeah.
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I think if you want more numbers,
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our last count, we had over
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175 presenters,
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including poster presenters
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and not including those that are going to be on the stage that you’re curating, the symposia stage.
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So we’re talking well over 200 presenters here at this conference.
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Definitely the largest gathering of scientific researchers focused on psychedelics ever.
00:06:21 ►
Wow, that’s exciting.
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And you have stuff going on besides the science tracks as well.
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What else are you excited about? I’ve been looking forward to combining psychedelics and comedy for
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a really long time. We see news reports all the time that are very serious about psychedelic
00:06:41 ►
therapy and how psychedelic therapy can help with PTSD
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and anxiety associated with life-threatening illness and opiate addiction. So a lot of the
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topics that we’re addressing with psychedelic therapy research are very serious. We are hosting
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what we think is the world’s first psychedelic comedy banquet on Saturday, April 22nd, during the conference,
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which has been sold out for some months now. And we’re going to have nationally recognized
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stand-up comics there, many of whom have come through Symposia and have done the Symposia loop.
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We’re going to have Shane Moss, we’re going to have strauss julia rosie um who i um you know first encountered
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in in in new york um uh rachel khan who’s a a fantastic poet um adrian erhart um yeah so
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duncan trussell um family hour he’s um you know a big inspiration for pulling this together
00:07:42 ►
um and um yeah it’s going to be loads of fun.
00:07:45 ►
So we’re going to have a series of stand-ups talking about psychedelics from sort of various angles.
00:07:54 ►
And also talking about cannabis with the goal being to really destigmatize conversations surrounding psychedelics and, help people have open and honest conversations about
00:08:05 ►
them, you know, in a not necessarily so serious way. Now, that’s a way to change hearts and minds.
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Yeah, you know, if the success of podcasts these days is any indicator, especially comic podcasts,
00:08:20 ►
just light conversation is any indicator, I think we have a pretty fun idea here.
00:08:26 ►
So we’ll be broadcasting the banquet out to other conference attendees who weren’t able to get into the banquet.
00:08:32 ►
And, of course, we’ll be recording the entire thing and making it available online afterwards.
00:08:37 ►
Oh, that’s great.
00:08:39 ►
And you’ll have your boat adventure again on Friday night?
00:08:44 ►
Yeah, yeah, expanded and commercial free.
00:08:49 ►
Two boats, five boats, ten boats.
00:08:52 ►
We already used all the boats.
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There weren’t any more boats left on the San Francisco Bay.
00:08:57 ►
No, but seriously, the company ran out of boats, and that’s why we couldn’t expand it.
00:09:01 ►
Yeah, we have a sunset cruise that’s hosted by the Beckley Foundation,
00:09:06 ►
which is MAPS’s co-host for the Psychedelic Science 2017 conference. They’re a UK-based
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research organization that does LSD research and other kinds of consciousness research and supports
00:09:18 ►
international drug policy reform efforts too. So the Beckley Foundation is hosting the sunset cruise
00:09:24 ►
on the San Francisco
00:09:26 ►
Bay. That’s a three-hour cruise with music and sort of a light meal and refreshments and networking.
00:09:31 ►
And that also has been sold out for some months. In 2013, we had one boat, about 320 people on it.
00:09:38 ►
And this time we have two boats and we’ve sold out both of those boats. We’re looking at getting a major
00:09:45 ►
cruise liner for the 2018 or 2019 conference. We’ll see. We’ll see. That’s great.
00:09:55 ►
And the conference itself isn’t quite sold out yet? That’s right. Not quite sold out. Over 90%.
00:10:02 ►
We are still doing our capacity calculations. We weren’t expecting
00:10:06 ►
such an incredible rush. We’re just about 30 days before the conference and most of the workshops,
00:10:14 ►
the all-day workshops, which are before and after the main conference, they’re sold out.
00:10:20 ►
Obviously, the banquet and the cruise, which I already mentioned, are sold out. Those are gone too, but we still have a handful of tickets left,
00:10:28 ►
and they’re going faster and faster as we get closer to the date.
00:10:35 ►
That’s great.
00:10:36 ►
But there is free stuff to do if people want to come check out the marketplace, right?
00:10:40 ►
Absolutely.
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Yeah, we definitely realize that not everybody can afford a few hundred dollars to come out to a conference for three whole days.
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that is taking place in the Oakland Convention Center,
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which is adjacent to the Oakland Marriott,
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where the conference talks are taking place.
00:11:14 ►
So the marketplace is really fun.
00:11:17 ►
You know, most scientific conferences,
00:11:19 ►
they have the scientific conference,
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then they have some poster presenters,
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and then they have a bunch of exhibitors.
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And that’s about it. Then you’re
00:11:25 ►
kind of on your own. For this event, we have opportunities to connect with other people
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interested in this topic, including researchers and just sort of the public at large,
00:11:38 ►
people with an interest in psychedelic science and therapy and creativity and spirituality and
00:11:43 ►
personal growth.
00:11:50 ►
We have opportunities to connect with this community from morning to night and then tomorrow and then morning again and then night again and then morning again.
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And then it keeps doing that for five days.
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And it’s going to be an exercise in can you find time to sleep?
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Really, we do have spaces available for people to hang out all night
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long um to see the sunrise to hang out late and dance on friday and saturday nights in the
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marketplace to enjoy tea we have free tea service in the marketplace provided by the full circle tea
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house we’ll have a gallery a full visionary art gallery with prints and originals from visionary artists that you can explore until 1 a.m.
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edge services and products that are related to visionary states of consciousness or altered states of consciousness or psychedelics that are related in some legal way to all of those things.
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And then, of course, we have in that space the symposia stage.
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Symposia stage.
00:13:00 ►
You say it so much.
00:13:01 ►
Tell me more, doctor.
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Yeah, and that’s, well, you know, I’ll do the pitch because you’re probably used to it.
00:13:09 ►
But that’s our opportunity.
00:13:11 ►
The reason why we wanted to work with you, Lex, was because we wanted to have an opportunity for people to present and people to learn in a context that was less formal, that was less academic and less rigidly scientific.
00:13:26 ►
So we’ve got what? We’ve got author signings or book signings and author events.
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We’ve got some podcasts, some other podcasts that are doing some live tapings there, I think.
00:13:38 ►
Storytelling, that’s one of my favorite parts, is this kind of – that symposium has been so great.
00:13:44 ►
It’s encouraging people to share their stories,
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their personal stories about why psychedelics are meaningful to them.
00:13:50 ►
You know, I think that a lot of what’s happening in the psychedelic community now
00:13:53 ►
in this sort of quote-unquote psychedelic renaissance that we’re getting
00:13:57 ►
is people are trying to find ways to express why psychedelics have been meaningful for them. And we’re finding millions
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of people have used psychedelics either recreationally or spiritually or for therapeutic
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purposes. And they’re not as scary and dangerous as we’ve been taught in the war on drugs. And
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quite the contrary, we’re seeing all this clinical research and legitimate conversations and conversations in Silicon Valley about using microdoses not to
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tune in and turn on and drop out, but to tune in and turn on and get better at your job.
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So we’re seeing this transition to more ability to talk about psychedelics from a mainstream
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more ability to talk about psychedelics from a mainstream perspective.
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And the symposia stage is a place for people to experiment with that and for us to experiment with that as a community and see what kinds of interpretations and understandings we can
00:14:56 ►
get from all those experiences.
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Yeah, it is one of the great things that MAPS offers is at the conference in 2013 and other MAPS events,
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I just see people get there and see that there’s a community that they didn’t expect but were always hoping for.
00:15:13 ►
And it’s really beautiful to see them just open up.
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And then they want to tell a story and come out of the psychedelic closet and let people know because they’ve been hiding for so long.
00:15:22 ►
And it’s why it’s so much fun to come to these gatherings.
00:15:26 ►
And I think the marketplace is going to be especially fascinating this year.
00:15:31 ►
Yeah.
00:15:32 ►
I think one misconception that I think people might have about psychedelic science and these conferences is that it’s kind of an insider thing and that everybody there has kind of been there before and they’re the only new ones.
00:15:47 ►
And I can tell you this from the inside of seeing the registrations come in.
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Half the people that register for this conference have never been to a psychedelic science conference before.
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Great.
00:15:58 ►
So at least half the people who are there are exploring.
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They’re curious they’re like you know
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they’ve heard about it in the news or they know somebody who has ptsd and they’re looking for
00:16:11 ►
other options or or you know they’re just just just curious about it or maybe you know they
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tried lsd once when they were 15 and now they’re 65 and they just kind of want to start thinking about this again.
00:16:25 ►
You know, we’ll also have speakers there from the center of the mainstream.
00:16:32 ►
Paul Sommergrad, who is the immediate outgoing president of the American Psychiatric Association, will be speaking about the future of psychedelic psychiatry and the opportunities that psychedelic
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therapy presents for psychiatry.
00:16:48 ►
Yeah, it’s amazing.
00:16:50 ►
Yeah, because he’s been all over the place preaching the good word.
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Now that he’s retired, now you can say stuff.
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He can come and he can speak at the Psychedelic Science Conference.
00:16:59 ►
We also have Tom Insell, the retired former director of the National Institutes of Mental Health, who’s coming and speaking also about the future of psychedelic psychiatry and what that might look like.
00:17:13 ►
So we have people with a great deal of experience as professional clinicians, as doctors, and then also as regulators who are showing an interest in this.
00:17:22 ►
And so it’s their first time.
00:17:22 ►
who are showing an interest in this.
00:17:24 ►
And so it’s their first time.
00:17:29 ►
There’s just people from all over the spectrum who are coming. And I think that opening for community is the key thing.
00:17:35 ►
In addition to encouraging scientific conversations
00:17:39 ►
and getting people to start studies
00:17:41 ►
and looking for funding for the research that’s happening
00:17:45 ►
and making international connections.
00:17:47 ►
All of that is very important.
00:17:50 ►
But even just at the immediate face-to-face level,
00:17:53 ►
just meeting people who are also coming at this whole area for the first time
00:17:59 ►
is, I think, the most exciting part of it.
00:18:01 ►
Wow, that does sound great.
00:18:04 ►
And speaking of getting new projects
00:18:06 ►
started and things like that, what have been the new developments on the MAP side with your
00:18:11 ►
research projects? Yeah, we are simultaneously. This conference is excitingly timed because it’s
00:18:18 ►
happening at the same time as our movement into phase three clinical trials.
00:18:25 ►
Yeah.
00:18:35 ►
MAPS has grown very quickly over the last six or seven years, especially from six employees to over 25 employees and expanding to keep up with the pace of the progress of the research. So we’ve just completed six phase two
00:18:46 ►
clinical trials of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder,
00:18:52 ►
treated over 100 subjects in those trials, and found that two-thirds of them didn’t qualify for
00:18:59 ►
PTSD anymore after just two MDMA-assisted psychotherapy treatments. Wow. Wow.
00:19:05 ►
And those results lasted a year, at least a year, on average, following that second
00:19:12 ►
treatment.
00:19:13 ►
So those results are just, yeah, they’re an order of magnitude beyond what currently
00:19:22 ►
approved prescription pharmaceuticals had when approved.
00:19:25 ►
And they don’t have to be taken every day in order to work.
00:19:30 ►
And so I think that just the level of those results has really propelled support at the regulatory level that is at the FDA for the next phase of research.
00:19:43 ►
And so we’re moving into that phase three phase now.
00:19:46 ►
And that’s the last phase of research that is required before the FDA decides whether
00:19:51 ►
to approve the treatment, which could happen by 2021.
00:19:55 ►
So in order to do that, we need to complete this next phase of research, which is going
00:19:58 ►
to be at least 200 more participants, up to 400, and cost another about 30 million, of which we still
00:20:08 ►
need to raise 20 million over the next five years, which in pharmaceutical drug
00:20:14 ►
development terms is very, very small.
00:20:19 ►
For-profit pharmaceutical companies often, just for perspective uh they spend over a billion dollars to develop drugs
00:20:26 ►
that are only mildly different or just slightly tweaked from existing drugs
00:20:31 ►
so 10 to 20 million dollars over the next five years is is a totally a um a reachable goal
00:20:40 ►
especially if the level of our support keeps expanding the way it is.
00:20:47 ►
I believe you guys can keep bootstrapping up.
00:20:52 ►
And I would say to anybody out there, you know, any little bit you can give always helps.
00:20:57 ►
And my recommendation always is if you need a new drug book, MAPS has a great library and just go online, be a member and the free book that you get, the list that you have,
00:21:02 ►
they’re great.
00:21:03 ►
And it’s a way that you can buy MDMA for
00:21:05 ►
soldiers with PTSD. It’s a great way to give back and to stay connected to the community.
00:21:11 ►
It’s true. Couldn’t have said it better myself. And you know, those books that we do publish,
00:21:15 ►
our most recent one is the Ketamine Papers, which is the most recent collection. It’s the only in print recent collection of ketamine therapy research that there is.
00:21:30 ►
And it’s a compiled collection of all sorts of different researchers talking about various uses of ketamine,
00:21:35 ►
which, of course, is a legal psychedelic.
00:21:38 ►
It’s a dissociative anesthetic and it’s used, for those who don’t know, in surgery by anesthesiologists.
00:21:45 ►
And it’s also used legally in therapy, either intravenously or orally.
00:21:52 ►
There’s a whole field of debate over routes of administration of ketamine and whether it should be used as a psychedelic or it should be used differently, um, or both.
00:22:05 ►
And we’ll be having those conversations at the conference. We’ll have a panel,
00:22:08 ►
we’ll have an all day workshop focused on ketamine. And then we also have this new book.
00:22:12 ►
Um, so then our next book coming out, which is going to be coming out this summer is called
00:22:17 ►
the manual of psychedelic support, which, um, which is a comprehensive guide to providing
00:22:23 ►
psychedelic harm reduction services.
00:22:26 ►
And it’s geared towards not just festival attendees,
00:22:30 ►
but to people who actually want to set up those services at events.
00:22:34 ►
So it’s useful for anybody who really encounters people
00:22:38 ►
who are having difficult psychedelic experiences,
00:22:40 ►
either at home or at parties or at festivals or what have you.
00:22:46 ►
experiences either at home or at parties or at festivals or what have you. And that manual of psychedelic support is already available in an earlier version online as a downloadable PDF
00:22:52 ►
manual of psychedelic support. You can find it and download it now, but we’re also printing it now
00:22:57 ►
so that people can have a copy to actually take with them into the field.
00:23:03 ►
And that’s why I think how diversified maps does their work. They also
00:23:08 ►
have the Zendo project. They are keeping people safe at parties. Yeah, we are not an overly focused
00:23:17 ►
organization. We do try to have, you know, an impact everywhere because we believe that science is part of a cultural context and it can’t be isolated from the broader context in which it’s happening.
00:23:36 ►
And we don’t want to ignore the fact that people continue to use psychedelics recreationally or spiritually or for for personal growth or outside otherwise outside of
00:23:47 ►
medical or research settings we don’t want to ignore that that’s continuing to happen and
00:23:52 ►
we want to show that it’s possible to provide support for people who’ve taken too much of a
00:24:01 ►
drug or been miseducated about dosage or just had bad luck or took it
00:24:06 ►
in an unsafe setting or were otherwise unprepared rather than arresting them or tranquilizing them,
00:24:13 ►
which still all too often happens. So providing that kind of alternative
00:24:17 ►
is something that we do take seriously in addition to the clinical trials.
00:24:24 ►
Wow. Yeah, that’s a lot of great ways to reach out.
00:24:28 ►
Yeah, it’s a great way to volunteer, too. We have a lot of people who have
00:24:31 ►
volunteered. I mean, we’ve trained thousands of people in how to provide psychedelic harm
00:24:38 ►
reduction through our trainings and events through the Zendo Project. And many of them have become regular volunteers. Some of them have. Um, and many of them have become regular
00:24:45 ►
volunteers. Some of them have become staff and some of them have become therapists. Um, we even,
00:24:50 ►
um, bring in a lot of, uh, student therapists who are in training to be therapists into the
00:24:54 ►
Zendo project as volunteers, since the skills for therapy and the skills for, um, being present and
00:25:00 ►
compassionate with somebody, um, who’s under the influence of a psychedelic can be very similar.
00:25:08 ►
Oh, that’s great.
00:25:10 ►
And so is there anything else you want to add before I let you go?
00:25:15 ►
Back to the battlefield?
00:25:17 ►
Send emails, organizing CurlyQs?
00:25:21 ►
Gosh, you know, it’s just an exciting time to be a part of this research, Lex.
00:25:28 ►
And I think we want to be careful not to get overconfident, just to not leave it on like a, you know, just like totally ecstatic note necessarily, but rather on a realistic one. You know, we want to not overestimate the
00:25:46 ►
extent of people’s fear when it comes to new experiences and to new approaches to medicine
00:25:56 ►
and to new scientific objects and to just be really compassionate with people who might be
00:26:02 ►
coming from a different place. Those people who live, as you might say, outside the bubble that we live in.
00:26:11 ►
So what are their fears and how might we be able to be compassionate with people in a way that enables them to be open to what we might have to share?
00:26:23 ►
So I think that’s especially important in these times.
00:26:27 ►
And a major part of the goal of psychedelic science
00:26:29 ►
and the Zendo project and MAPS, I think,
00:26:33 ►
is to provide an opening for exactly those people.
00:26:38 ►
So let’s be welcoming and let’s be encouraging.
00:26:42 ►
Symposia has done an amazing job at that.
00:26:43 ►
So thank you for talking with me today.
00:26:47 ►
Yeah, well, thank you so much for coming on and letting us know.
00:26:49 ►
And I look forward to seeing you in Oakland.
00:26:51 ►
So until then, try to get a little bit of sleep.
00:26:53 ►
And thank you so much for pulling this all together.
00:26:56 ►
Sleep, what’s that?
00:26:58 ►
Don’t worry about it.
00:26:59 ►
You can do it when you’re dead.
00:27:01 ►
Excellent.
00:27:02 ►
Awesome.
00:27:03 ►
Talk to you later, Brad.
00:27:07 ►
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00:27:09 ►
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00:27:11 ►
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00:27:18 ►
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00:27:21 ►
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00:27:22 ►
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00:27:28 ►
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00:27:31 ►
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