Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
rick doblin founder
and executive director of the
multidisciplinary association for
psychedelic studies
maps he is one of the seminal figures in
both the cultural history
and the cutting edge science of
psychedelics he was there
along with the biggest characters
throughout this fascinating history of
psychedelics
and he is here to tell the story quick
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as a side note let me say that exploring
the places the human mind can go
can help us understand where it comes
from how it works
and how to engineer mental journeys
whether that's through
life experiences chemical substances
brain computer interfaces or
interactions with artificial
intelligence systems on a personal level
i think the dissolution of the ego for
stretches of time
is a powerful tool for understanding
yourself a lot of things can do this
including jiu jitsu literature
meditation but psychedelics is
definitely
at least arguably one of the most
powerful from psilocybin to dmt
i'm excited that people like rick are
leading the scientific research
that reveals the efficacy and the safety
of these substances
so that their proper dosage and usage
protocols can be understood
and people like me can safely and
effectively use them
not just for recreation but for rigorous
exploration
of my own mind this is the lex friedman
podcast
and here is my conversation with rick
goblin could you give
an introduction to psychedelics like a
big bold whirlwind overview
what are psychedelics what are the kinds
of psychedelics out there
in whatever way you you think uh is
meaningful
all right well when i started maps the
multi-disciplinary association for
psychedelic studies it was very
important for me that psychedelic being
the name
and the way in which the original
meaning of psychedelic
it's mind manifesting it was created by
humphrey osmond
in dialogue with aldous huxley
and so psychedelic means mind
manifesting
and so we interpret that very broadly
to mean dreams or psychedelic anything
that kind of brings things to the
surface
holotropic breath work you know
hyperventilation is psychedelic
so most people think psychedelic is only
about certain kind of chemical
substances either natural
or synthetic but we've got a much
broader view of that
meditation can be psychedelic in some
ways but
our primary focus is on the drugs it's
on the
medicines or the you might call them
some people might call them
spiritual tools or sacraments
um there's sort of two general
categories of those
one are what are called the classic
psychedelics and those are the ego
dissolving
sort of merged into unitive states
those are like lsd psilocybin mescaline
ayahuasca ibogaine dmt
things like that and then there's mdma
which some people even argue is not a
psychedelic
they'll say it's an pathogen or an
intactogen it's about touching within or
empathy
it doesn't do the same kind of ego
dissolution
that the classic psychedelics do but it
brings material to the surface
and and it changes the way we process
information
and so i think you can quibble about
whether it's a
it's certainly not a classic psychedelic
but i think mdma is also a psychedelic
marijuana i would say it's a psychedelic
marijuana is closer to the classic
psychedelics than it is to mdma
one point i like to make is dreams
because
then everybody can relate to that dreams
are psychedelic dreams
bring emotions feelings um
ideas concepts in symbolic form a lot of
times or just in raw motions to the
surface so
when people hear the word psychedelic
often they
are frightened by it it's about loss of
control
and it is to an extent loss of conscious
control
particularly with the classic
psychedelics but you know and we know
with dreams that
we can have frightening dreams
nightmares but i think that
um anchoring the the concept of
psychedelic and dreams
is really helpful for people to know
that it's kind of a natural state
and that there are other ways that you
can catalyze it than by going to sleep
and that for thousands of years
substances have been used in that way
so you mentioned this idea of bringing
something to the surface which is really
interesting
so can you maybe elaborate the surface
and what is
there in the depths of things and how
does
ego dissolution fits into that
all right well aldous huxley talked
about uh
the brain as a reducing valve that we
have an enormous amount of information
so right now there's an air conditioning
sound in the background
but that's not crucial to what you and i
are doing talking to each other so we
kind of tune that out
you know there's all sorts of sights and
sounds there's incoming information
in all the different sense modalities
and we have to figure out um
what's important to us and so the
mind in a way focuses a lot on
what are our core needs and and
we filter all the incoming information
that we get towards focusing on what our
court needs and we can even get to um
abraham maslow in the hierarchy of needs
about
survival needs belonging needs esteem
needs
go on so i think what
what i mean by bringing things to the
surface is
that we tend to
not focus on a lot of things that are
coming but we also push away things that
are difficult emotionally
difficult cognitively you know we all
know that we're on this very short
trajectory from birth to death but we're
not
constantly thinking about dying
[Music]
although that can actually be helpful to
focus us
on what's really important traumas
are often suppressed
conflicts we see in america and around
the world the kind of rise of
irrationality
where people push away their logic in
order for their emotional
tribal needs to be met a lot of people
are
suffering from early childhood traumas
of a different kinds or abandonment
issues or
anything so we we tend to focus on just
you know what we need to survive
and what we need for work and esteem and
so psychedelics
by dissolving this ego control or by
with mdma
kind of strengthening our sense of self
and our sense of self acceptance we can
bring in um
other information that have previously
been too complicated or too painful
you don't think of psychedelics as
conjuring up something new
it is more revealing something that is
already there
i think that's a very crucial thing so
um
yes um um sasha shulgin
who um sort of the um godfather of
mdma you know he sort of rediscovered it
and
brought it um back into use he talked
about
his first experience was with mescaline
his first psychedelic experience was
with mescaline
and he had a tremendous experience but
what he said about it was
he was having a human experience that
the mescaline was helping him access
rather than he was having a mescaline
experience
so that it's not like you pop a pill and
you always have the same kind of
experience as everybody else
the the experience is not contained in
the pill the pill
opens you up and you have an experience
of yourself
sometimes these are experiences that
we've never consciously had
but we can say right now that we know
that
our body below the level of our
conscious awareness has all these
self-healing mechanisms
and we we don't modulate them
to a large extent by conscious control i
mean eventually we we are learning more
about the mind body and we learn about
the placebo effect how what we think is
the case but
but i think that there's experiences
that are below our level
of conscious awareness particularly once
we're adults that
are more these unit of mystical
experiences sense of connection
you know i think kids are like this a
lot we kind of come from the void you
could say and you're born and you you
have
um a different way of processing
information what one
interesting point about that has to do
with ketamine which is
uh you know been approved s ketamine for
depression
but it's used for anesthesia and
roughly one-tenth the anesthetic dose
is a psychedelic dose and when it's used
in anesthesia
there's what's called the emergent
phenomena so this is you get
enough ketamine for um you can be
operated on you're not in pain you're
not really there your ego's knocked out
but you can still breathe but as the
operations
uh get over and then people metabolize
the ketamine
there's a process that they call the
emergent phenomena it's like as you're
emerging from this
tranquilized state and that's where you
pass through the psychedelic phase and
they don't prepare people
for that and
what we see is that a lot of adults have
difficult times with that
but children don't seem to have that
with those problems children are a
little bit more already in this kind of
state
and so ketamine is is used quite
frequently in children
now for anesthesia so
all of that is to say to your question
that um i think it
these psychedelics reveal things that
are within us
some things that are how we process
information back when we are children
um other things that we've never thought
of before that are sort of
baked into our consciousness um
you know there's one um drug 5-meo dmt
it's this toxin from a sonoran toad
that many people consider it to be the
most powerful of all the psychedelics
and it kind of knocks the ego structures
completely out of it
and we experience something different
but it's something i think that's always
within us it's at a deeper layer so we
knock out some of the higher cognitive
functions and then we experience things
in a different way
so my sense is that these are human
experiences that the psychedelics
bring us to yeah it's really profound
but and that's a dmt is a really
interesting example so
uh terence mckenna has talked about
these machine elves
right and there's this um i think
from the people i've heard speak about
the experience
there's a sense that you are traveling
elsewhere
to meet entities whether they're elves
or not
so in your sense you're not traveling
elsewhere
you're just revealing something that's
within and maybe it's a
a particular mechanism of revealing
what's already within
yeah and i knew terence i spent a lot of
time talking with terence
and i do not um ascribe to a lot of
things that he was saying he was
tremendous entertainer
and i think he did a lot of really good
things and focused us on
you know the power of psychedelics but i
think um i've never seen these quote
machine elves
i think culture is more determinative
of what people experience under
psychedelics
your preconceptions than um than we give
it credit for
and so i think there's a lot of um
priming that you could say that people
receive by
stories from their culture um
you know with ayahuasca it's about
jaguars and amazonian animals and so i i
think these machine elves are this uh
construct of terrans that other people
do see there's actually some people that
are very interested in doing a study and
they're they're
well-funded and moving toward it to
keep people on an iv infusion of dmt
for them specifically to see do they
contact
machine elves or aliens and what kind of
information do they bring back from
these other
cells other places or other entities
one question is you know who are we are
are we
connected to everything in the universe
we certainly know
in many cases you talk about waves or
particles you know
the quantum approach so i don't
interpret
um experiences that we have of some
entity that's you know somehow or other
deep in our consciousness that's
not us it's a part of who we are so i
tend to interpret it in that way
the the question is how big are we
yeah i mean that that's uh and how many
ideas are within us that can be revealed
by changing the perspective you
mentioned physics one of the
what physicists mathematical physicists
or mathematicians do
is the they reveal truths by looking at
a
by taking a slightly different
perspective on a problem that reveals
the simplicity
of how it actually works in totally new
ways
that's what einstein did that's what
like every progress in physics
and certainly every progress of
mathematics requires you to
take a different perspective and then
perhaps that's exactly what
um psychedelics are doing it's not that
they're contacting
aliens that are elsewhere it may be
revealing the connection between us and
other
living life forms or actually might be
revealing
a totally new perspective on what life
is or what consciousness is
and giving us a glimpse at that even
though our cognitive capabilities are
limited
in to fully grasp and understand it so
it's just giving us an inkling of that
somehow
and it seems perhaps a little ridiculous
not
from a scientific perspective in the
sense that
we don't have a good physics of life or
physics of intelligence or
physics of consciousness but getting a
glimpse of that it's giving us a little
bit of um
maybe an intuition of uh which way to
head
to uh to build such a physics
yeah yeah i think so i think that
there's this um
other concept i guess i would like to
talk about briefly this
jungian collective unconscious this idea
that
somehow or other everything that has
ever happened
is still accessible maybe not with as
much
data or as much resolution
but that there's you know wave
resonances
so that i do believe that we can have
experiences as part of this human
collective unconscious
that we're not from our own life yeah
and that that we can it's like the
holographic realities
and that that that there is a way to
gather
information that can be accurate about
other times and places
um through depth
investigations of our own consciousness
but i think what
what i tend to believe is that it's
because there's emotional resonances
between where we're at now in this life
and
you know other kind of um
experiences that people have had before
and you know
we always hear about uh everybody who
talks about past lives they're always
kings and queens
you know yeah so i think that's you know
that's again you filter things what you
want to be true
but but i do think that there is a way
to access information
beyond what we've taken in in our own
temporal existence through our own five
senses in some ways i really find that
compelling the notion that that
information is already there
and you're simply just moving the
attention of your mind
to different parts of that yeah i mean
we we have that with the radio
i mean you know you've got a frequency
you turn all this information
you could actually say right now between
the space between us we have the whole
world's knowledge that's up on the
internet
yeah it's right here yeah but we just
have to tune in
yeah what are the
interesting differences would you say
between
the various psychedelics that you
mentioned ayahuasca dmt
acid lsd marijuana mescaline pcp cell
cybin mdma all
you mentioned a few of them they're
really interesting we'll we'll talk
about scientifically some of the
the different studies that have been
conducted on each but sort of at the
high level
what are some interesting differences
well one of the big ones that people
make a big deal of that i think is
completely misplaced
is some are from nature some are from
the lab right so there's this kind of
like romantic thought that if it's from
nature it's good if it's from the lab
it's somehow tainted by humanity
and you know therefore some people are
like all for
plants psychedelics we see the policy
changes that have been happening in a
couple cities uh cambridge
somerville right not far from where
we're at now where they decriminalize
plant medicines so they call it
decriminalizing nature
so i i think that there is
from my perspective certain
certain things from nature or poison
certain things from the lab are
spiritual even if they don't show up in
nature like lsd
now there is something lsd is lysergic
acid diethylamide
there is lysergic acid amide lsa
which comes from morning glory seeds so
it's very similar
but at the same time i'd say i don't buy
into that distinction that there's some
fundamental preference
one of the things that terence mckenna
since we talked about him
he talked about how if it's from nature
it's good
and if it's not you know we should be
suspect
um of course he had a lot of great lsd
experiences but
actually terrance in 1984 we were at
eslin with a bunch of other people
this was before the crackdown on mdma
and this was some of the underground
therapists and the above-ground
researchers were trying to
talk about how to protect mdma from this
eventual crackdown and
terence was like forget about it you
know it's from the lab
you know it's dangerous we have
thousands of years of history all these
other things and you know what do we
know about mdma and
blah blah blah i was like terence you're
so um
um unscientific bullshit another
way to say it is and and i just said you
know we need a study
of uh the safety of mdma and so then
dick price who started
um aslan i said i'll put a thousand dick
prices he'd put a thousand so terence
was actually the catalyst for the first
study with mdma
wow um just because he was so
frustrating about how plants are okay
and you know if it's from the lab it's
bad yeah um so that's one distinction um
the the other distinction is this um
sense of uh classic psychedelics versus
things like mdma so to what extent do
they
uh dissolve the ego and you could say to
what extent do they
cause visions the 5-ht-2a serotonin
receptor subtype
which is responsible for a lot of that
where these drugs are activating
now masculine of all the psychedelics
chemically it's the most similar to mdma
it's a phenethylamine which is mdma so
in the 50s there was the 53 i think it
was the army chemical warfare service
wanted to look at drugs for
interrogations mind control
non-lethal incapacitance they did
a study in eight substances these were
now toxicity studies in animals
and on the one side was methamphetamine
and the other was mescaline and mdma was
in the middle
chemically so
mescaline of the psychedelics tends to
have the
warmth that mdma has it's not as
ego-dissolving quite as some of the
others
i mean it's the main active ingredient
in peyote it is very psychedelic very
visual
another distinction with these different
drugs is how long they last
and a lot of that has to do with the
route of administration
so for example if you smoke dmt
it takes 10-15 minutes and you're
within seconds you're off in another
world um similarly 5-meo dmt very rapid
when you take dmt in the form of
ayahuasca
where it's mixed with another substance
that
makes it so that it's orally active then
it's a couple hours
so lsd is uh 8 10
12 hours sometimes psilocybin is more
like five or six
hours or four to six hours mdma is
similar
it's one reason why in our research we
give an initial dose of mdma and then
two hours later we give half the initial
amount
to extend the plateau because we want it
to last longer
for people to be in this therapeutic
state
so that's another distinction is um you
know how long these drugs last
another distinction is which of them
come from
a religious context they have a religion
built around them
we have this um sense that some people
are saying that 5-mo dmt
and the sonoran toad that they have this
long history of indigenous use but they
don't that's all modern it's made up
and it's kind of a new approach however
there was thousands of years of use of
psilocybin mushrooms in religious
contexts um
from um 1600
bc to 396 a.d the world's
longest mystery ceremonies the
elusionian mysteries
you know sort of the heart of greek
culture the heart of western culture
that was a psychedelic potion called
kikion
that seems like it's very much like an
lsd-like substance
um air got on grain and
you know lsd comes from aragon
so i think that there are a lot of ways
to look at these different substances
another
distinction is um you know which one of
them
are being researched right now in
scientific context and which are not
and because of the rise of all these
for-profit companies and everybody's
looking for what they can patent what
they can claim the land grab
you know more and more there are
companies looking at every different
kind of psychedelics
the ones that are most important that
are not being researched
mescaline but now there's a company to
do masculine a journey collab
ibogaine which is crucial for opiate
addiction
there's a new company a
branch of this company a thai that's
going to be looking at ibogaine
so i'd say the rise of the for-profit
companies is making it so that
there's just going to be an enormous
amount of investigations
into all these different psychedelics
but what we're going to see is the
development of new psychedelics that we
don't know anything about that have not
existed yet because
a lot of these for-profit companies are
going to want to
invent and patent and have composition
of matter patents on new molecules
so i think we'll see a lot of that
happening too that's really fast i mean
there's a lot of doors you've opened and
we're going to walk through all of them
including the research and so on but
on this one little tangent of um the
future of psychedelics so engineering
new psychedelics
can you comment on maybe the the
chemistry and the biology of how
psychedelics work and where is the space
of possible
engineering of psychedelics and what
kind of things might they unlock
in terms of the possible places our mind
would be able to go and the
the effects of that of improving health
but maybe at the basic level of
chemistry
and the space of what could be
engineered
well you you reminded me it's not i'll
get to exactly what you said but you
reminded me of
a talk i heard by buck mr fuller
shortly before he died and what he
talked about
is how technology was making things
ever smaller you know that we are able
to pack more and more information into
smaller and smaller spaces
and that we're developing technologies
of communications with people you know
we now
know the internet and things like that
but what he said is that he thought the
eventual uh evolution of this sort of
research would move from this
miniaturization to telepathy
yeah and so it's like a shocking thing
for somebody like scientific like that
to say that yeah
um so will we unlock those parts
where i talked about the collective
unconscious will we be able to
more consciously explore those areas
so i think that that's a possibility
there was
stan groff who's you know the world's
leading lsd researcher
and has been my mentor his wife brigitta
they were talking about stories that
they had heard about um
mdma that um people take and then on top
of that they do 5-meo dmt
and so you get this ego dissolution but
underneath
that you have this sense of um ego
sort of um sense of self safety
of self acceptance kind of grounds it so
stan was like that's the future of
psychiatry that you can
watch without the terror of the ego
dissolution the sense that you're losing
your mind or you're going crazy or
you're dying or
you know that you have this grounded
sense of safety
while you're dissolving your normal
sense of how you see things
and being able to engineer in in a
fine-tuned way that
that exact experience may be fine-tuned
to the person yeah as opposed to sort of
this
manual potion that's uh through through
uh
well i don't experiment although i don't
know about fine-tuning things to the
person in the sense that
um we believe there's this inner healer
this kind of you know inner healing
intelligence
we talked about it the body repairs
itself you know so
um i think we more need to create
safety for people and then then what
emerges will be customized to what they
need to be looking at from this inner
healing intelligence
at the same time we will move to uh
you know we we hear so much about um
the new approaches to oncology
where you know you you do um genetic
analysis of different kind of tumors and
then you have certain kind of
chemotherapy agents and you do like
personalized chemotherapy i think we
will have
more like personalized psychedelic
therapy but it'll be more like a
sequence of different drugs that people
go through over an extended period of
time and then you kind of customize
what's next and sometimes you'll combine
different drugs together like this
5mu dmt and mdma or a lot of times
people do
lsd mdma combinations or psilocybin mdma
combinations
um chemistry and um
it's not my strength i'm i'm more into
clinical applications and policy but but
i can say that
um from what i've learned from reading
from others and research done by others
that you know different psychedelics
have an
impact on different neurotransmitters
different other
parts of energies in the brain
the default mode network is
what's considered to be like our sense
of self
you know and it's this it's part of the
brain that's sort of is what i described
before scanning
the world and filtering information for
what's really
important to us and both
um focusing us on things and also
helping us to ignore a lot of things
and the classic psychedelics all weaken
the energy in this default mode system
and therefore you get this flood of
information that you're not normally
paying attention to
and then you start seeing in more
creative ways or more connected
you actually move to beyond the verbal
kind of thinking into sort of
symbolic thinking a lot of times um
and that's where you sometimes get these
uh mystical sense of connection how it's
all one and
you get the sense also of
how big the universe is and how small
each one of us is
so there's a lot of work that sasha
shulkin and albert hoffman
who invented lsd and first synthesize
psilocybin and what they call structure
activity relationships
what is the structural molecule and then
how do you predict
what that new molecule that never
existed before is going to do
once you actually take it and
you can get close but you never really
know
until you actually take the drug and the
way that
sasha ran his experiments is that he
would take the drugs himself first
in low doses and he would sort of you
know step up the doses to have more
experiences if he thought it was
valuable he'd share it with his wife
anne
but then what they would do is if they
both thought it was valuable they had a
group of 12 people that they were with
for many many years
and they would distribute these new drug
to these 12 people
and they would get the different
perspectives and he felt that 12 was
like a minimum number you know because
we're so unique how each of us see
things but then you kind of get a little
bit of a consensus on how a lot of
people are going to see it and then if
that
12 people were positive about it then
they would turn it over to leo zeff
who he called the secret chief the
leader of the underground psychedelic
therapy movement and then he would start
exploring it in therapy so
there's um still a lot of mysteries as
far as structure activity relationships
and
it's not going to be the case that
people go into the lab and
they tinker with molecules and they know
exactly what they're going to get
and a lot of it has to do with the not
so much
chemistry as morphology you could say
the shape of the molecule and how does
that
interact with receptor sites and so
we're getting better at
modeling all of that and how does that
interaction relate to the
the the morphing of the human experience
and deeply understanding that
perhaps there's no equations yet for
that kind of thing you really have to
build up intuition by experiencing it
and over time and
sort of subjective self-report like
trying to build
an understanding of the effects of the
different chemistries yeah yeah you can
you can have approximate ideas but to
know exactly so
you know when i first tried mdma which
was 1982
and this was after i had done lots of
lsd and masculine
and mushrooms um i was shocked at how
different it was than these other
substances
and yet how profound it was so are there
whole new kind of categories of classes
of drugs that we're not aware of that
would be
not so much this like eco-dissolution or
emotional well what mdma does is uh
reduces activity in the amygdala
the fear processing part of the brain so
it's not just chemistry but it
it routes energy throughout the brain in
a different way it increases activity in
the prefrontal cortex
so you think more logically though that
i think has an enormous
impact on the effect of mdma the other
thing it does
is it increases connectivity between the
amygdala and the hippocampus so it helps
facilitate
um processing of things into long-term
memory
um and with ptsd trauma is like never in
the past it's always about to happen so
will we one time develop drugs that
would even be specific to
certain kind of memories we're working
with a woman rachel yehuda
who is at the bronx va
and she's done some studies that are
with the epigenetics of trauma so she's
worked with holocaust survivors and
their children
and she has identified um
epigenetic mechanisms by which trauma is
passed from generation to the
generations
sort of like set points for anxiety fear
certain
things like that but the question is can
you actually transmit memories
from one generation to the next now
this is not um dna
changes which happen over a very long
period of time in the
evolutionary scale but within one
lifetime within
some experiences your epigenetics what
turns on the genes or turns off certain
genes that can
be impacted and that's what we know now
can be transmitted from generation to
generation
either by the father or the mother
through the sperm or the egg
so it's it's pretty um remarkable so
what what rachel's going to
try to do is mdma research for ptsd
and look at these epigenetic markers
before and after and see if they change
as a consequence of therapy so
will we develop one day certain kind of
chemicals that will be able to bring
certain kind of memories to the surface
um that's not inconceivable the
epigenetic
angle is fascinating that there will be
these epigenetic perturbations that lead
to
memories living from one generation to
the other
and then bringing those memories to the
surface and using
using that as signal to understand what
exactly the psychedelics bring
to the surface and not yeah yeah now the
other
portion of that though is culture i mean
culture is where we store all these
memories
and in the stories that we get passed
down
especially with a lot of shared you talk
about the holocaust or world war two
where it is um
it's deeply ingrained in the culture the
impact of those events
and sort of in aggregate the different
perspectives on that
particular event create a set of stories
that you can plug into
and then they kind of resonate with some
aspect of you that creates a memory
that's
connected to like when i think about
world war ii and the holocaust
i think about my own family but in some
sense
it's also resonating with stories of
many others
so it's like somehow the two echo each
other
and i'm just providing my own little
flavor on top
the the meat of the stories are probably
those that are shared with others
it's plugging into the collective
unconscious that that's
um that's really fascinating really
plugging into
like precisely plugging into particular
memories
as a way to uh to to uh
deal with trauma and ptsd that kind of
thing
yeah i'll just have that the most
important dream of my life
ever was of a holocaust survivor telling
me
that he was miraculously
saved from death
and he knew that he was saved for a
particular purpose but he never knew
what that purpose was so in the dream
i'm seeing him on his deathbed and
and then he shows me whatever happened
to him during the holocaust
you know and then um we're back in the
room on his deathbed and he says well i
know what my
purpose was now and i'm like oh great
what was it he said let's
tell you to be a psychedelic therapist
and to study psychedelics and
bring back psychedelic research and
i thought to myself i've already decided
to do this you can lay this on me
i can say yes and then you can die in
peace and then he died in front of my
eyes
in the dream so i think that that kind
of
cultural um transmission that i got from
when i was really young
you know then manifested in this dream
and that was this
story about how people can be
um incredibly vicious and can be
very motivated by irrational factors and
so
i i just feel that this this kind of
multi-generational transmission of the
story of the irrational
you know being a murderous factor
and something i needed to respond to
was deeply ingrained and i i would say
my guess is you know more culturally
than this epigenetic
mechanism yes yeah but your sense is
that
whatever stimulated a certain
part of human nature in uh world war ii
especially not to germany but also in
stalinist soviet union
still is within us within all of us just
like we were saying uh you know
um we embody quite a lot of things
yeah and one of those is whatever the
the capacity of for evil
i seems to be one of those things
yeah there's a quote um from carl jung
from just a few years that
before he died what he says
and i'll just paraphrase it is that we
need to
understand psychology we need to
understand
who man is that the greatest danger
to us is man there are no other dangers
really
that impact our species and then he goes
on to say that
we are the source of all coming evil
now this was 15 years or so after world
war ii
but yeah and and i'd say one of the most
important psychedelic experiences of my
life was a dmt
experience also terence was there ralph
metzner
andy weil a few others and we are um
sitting around ed eslin smoking dmt
and under the influence of dmt which now
this was the first time i've ever smoked
emt
um i had this super rapid fraction of a
second like
dissolving of everything that i well
first off i saw
a horizontal line then i saw a vertical
line then it turned into a color
red than it was red then it turned into
cubes then it turned into like an
mc-escher kind of like
i don't know you know didn't make
logical sense and then i was gone
and then it was just this period of
five ten minutes of just feeling part of
this um enormous
wave of um billions of years of
evolution how
i had this sense that in my innermost
sense of who i
am uniquely individually this inner
voice that's talking to me that i didn't
develop english that that it's like a
gift to me from
millions of people that so that even in
my most
innermost uh sense it's not just me
it's it's the product of everything that
came before me i'm part of this bigger
system and then i just thought wow just
how many billions of years does it take
to reach this point
self-awareness and all this and it was
glorious beautiful and then i had this
thought
um and this is where this kind of um
intellectual honesty i guess you could
say i just thought well if i'm part of
everything and everything's part of me
then it's not just the good parts that
hitler's part of me too
yeah and that was just this shock like a
stone
sunk you know and i just was very moody
for the whole
next day but it was that acknowledgement
that each of us carries these potentials
and what we activate is what matters but
what what our potential
are is the whole full range of things
i don't know if you can comment about
the dmt trip itself and what it's like
starting from the very basic geometric
shapes and then launching
yourself into the context of the
enormity of space and time in the human
history
is there anything else to be said about
that kind of um
visually or physically
or emotionally about that journey what
is
what it's like that brief journey that
reveals so much
well i was with a group of people the
way we were doing it
was um you know each of us would smoke
dmt
have 10 15 minutes experience while we
closed our eyes and you know everybody
else was just chatting and then the
person who did the dmt would come back
and tell their story what happened and
and then
we'd think about it for a bit and then
pass the pipe to the next person and so
this was like a whole
evening you know and so even the
starting to interrupt even the
conversations themselves then
is part of the experience exactly yes
yes because it's also what you bring
back
right i mean i think that's particularly
for therapy you know it's not so much
about what the experience is
but it's what you bring back and what do
you integrate and then also
um how do you learn how to do these
things on your own without the drugs
there is this way because we're saying
it's it's sort of a core human
experience
the drug is the mediator but can we do
this on our own and once you've seen it
and felt it then you have a little bit
better sense to
recreate it on your own although you
know i've had dreams where i've been
doing lsd
and tripping and it was just incredible
it was
i was tripping in my dreams but i had
not taken lsd
so there's this way in which we do that
so i
i would say that from the dmt experience
the sense of safety that's what i was
trying to get at with this
group of us and this group of friends
trying to do this common exploration
that
if you have this sense of safety you're
incredibly
vulnerable because you are
giving up your um awareness really of
what's happening around you
i think there's what we're finding
is that in our psychedelic research
for ptsd um
and what we see with the vaccines that
that even african americans are
reluctant to
volunteer for vaccines because they
haven't had that sense of safety
from the medical establishment
they don't volunteer for psychedelic
therapy even as much
so the overlay has to be this sense of
safety as you become vulnerable and
looking inside you're
you're not um i i was just actually
told about how there's a lot of work
being done inside prisons to teach
mindfulness and you know so
one of the um charlene who's my
assistant is trying to do work on
um helping people in prison with
trauma potentially one day with mdma or
meditation or mindfulness but
one of the exercises was you know
teaching people to okay
here's how you deal with stress you know
just close your eyes and deep breath and
what charlene was saying is people don't
close their eyes in prison
you know you don't feel safe to do that
so um all that is just to say is that
um the context is the most important
factor so while i'll talk about
the dmt experience the context was this
supportive sense of safety that i could
be completely vulnerable and
out of any kind of um control women i
think you know
often or less safe in this way than men
because of all the sexual assaults
um but what it can do
by taking the ego orientation
um offline to some extent it opens you
up to much more
and and to make a bigger point of that
um we could say that um it's very
similar to the copernican revolution
and you know people thought that the
earth was the center of the universe
and you know the the inquisition
murdered people that
questioned that father bruno burned at
the stake actually one of the things he
said
i think that's worth all these years
later
saying is that when the inquisition
sentenced him to burn at the stake for
espousing this idea that the earth was
not really the center of the universe he
said to the inquisition
he said your fear in sentencing me is
greater than my fear in being sentenced
that their world view was so rigid yeah
that they had to wipe out anybody that
would question
it and and so
this idea of psychedelics displacing our
ego as the center of the universe
and to realize that we are just rotating
about on something much bigger
than our individual life you know our
ego is
is designed almost to protect this body
while we're alive
and you can understand all the good
reasons why that is
but it also disconnects us from this
bigger reality
and so the psychedelics dmt by knocking
this sort of
ego orientation or the default mode
network offline
you open up to the the bigger sweeps of
history
so in that place of safety and
vulnerability
in that fascinating group of people when
their ego was dissolved in this way did
they have
similar experiences is there different
places that their minds went
yeah so you know once i had this kind of
shattering experience that hitler's part
of me
yes you know no one else in the group
had that probably
a lot of them have maybe had that before
or they they realize that they're not
just
you know the good the white hat good
people and that they're all good and
they're you know we've got to fight
against the bad people
you know so no people will go in
different places and not only that
if you do it again you'll go into a
different place than you went to the
first time
unless you have not resolved the issue
so i had a sequence of lsd trips
that were very difficult but it was like
coming to the same
sort of conundrum the same challenge
that i was unable to overcome this idea
of letting go and really fully
dissolving
letting the ego fully go and and i would
have this sequence of trips over a
couple months where i would reach this
point where i was too scared to move
forward and i would just be holding on
so there are there are repeated themes
sometimes
what stan groff has said which i find
very beautiful is that the
full expression of an emotion is the
funeral pyre of that emotion
and what that means is if you can fully
let in
something then the essence of of life
has changed
is that it moves on that everything's in
motion
and if you can fully experience it even
if it's a sense that you're going to be
trapped in eternity
in this hellish state if you surrender
to that that's the way out
you know this full experience of
something is this
um funeral part of that emotion and so
that
runs against a lot of what modern
psychiatry is doing too which is to
suppress symptoms
and to and to instead of supporting
people to kind of explore these
insecurities so that then they can
contain them
and then they can move on so yeah
resistance is not a way to make progress
right um although in
one of the reasons why we do the
supplemental dose during the mdma or why
there's advantages in a 10 hour lsd
experience is that
you have a lot of opportunities to come
up against this resistance
it may be too difficult to deal with and
then you kind of push it aside and then
a couple hours later you come back to it
or you come back to it press news every
once in a while
if you're not ready it's hard to do that
i think the with mdma
you can negotiate that's i think a part
of
its safety in a sense you can have this
like oh i should be talking about this
but i
we're feeling this but it's too much for
me now you can push it away but with the
classic psychedelics
this kind of membrane between the
conscious and the unconscious
that um once you take the drug and it
weakens this membrane and things are
coming up
um it's very difficult to negotiate
with it the the cl the key to successful
uh classic psychedelic trips is
surrender
you've talked about that you first began
to reconsider the negative
health myths around psychedelics when
you learned that the book
one flew over the cuckoo's nest was
written by ken gizzy when
he was in part under the influence of
lsd
so how do you think lsd helped him ken
keys in
writing uh that incredible book
yeah um there's a a process that's
called semantic priming
and so what what that means is that i i
say um
night you say day you know there's kind
of normal patterns
of kind of you say one word what kind of
words come to you
next and so they've done some research
they meaning scientists have done some
research
where you give people a psychedelic
and then you do this semantic priming
and what you
find is they have a wider range of
associations
than they normally would when they're
not under psychedelics
so i think for ken kesey um
he was able with psychedelics to get
like um a deeper kind of emotional
connection to some of these
states of mind that people were in the
instant this mental institution
and that he could explore them more
in-depth and more eloquently and and
and also one of the things he talked
about was the fog machine
was you know how um people's minds were
sort of clouded by the people that ran
the institution and this
the fog machine would be coming in so i
think
the um imagery and the metaphors
that he used a lot in the book could
come to him during lsd experiences
and and then now he wasn't doing um
you know very when you're writing you
have to be
literate uh you have to be able to write
you know so it would be more like
beginning and ends of lsd trips instead
of at the peak
but i think you would get a lot of these
um
the feeling tones or the images the
metaphors i think he would get
these extent also lsd lasts so long you
can get these extended focus
and you can really elaborate on um
images and um so much of psychedelic
experiences are
poetic and metaphorical i mean you can
take um
you know veterans who've never um
read a book of poetry in their lives
you know and under the influence of mdma
just
what they describe the imagery and the
way they describe their experience is
metaphorical poetic it's incredible
and so i think that ken kesey was
able to channel these what lsd did to
his mind
in a way that
most people couldn't do that he did
because he was trying to write this
novel and because he was so brilliant
yeah the i mean we'll talk about
psychedelics and treating
in uh bringing some of trauma to the
surface and dealing with all those kinds
of things but
there's something also to the opening up
of creativity
for whether it's for writing purposes or
for
for in my world for engineering for
invention innovation and invention
itself is a very it's a deeply creative
process
and it's fascinating to think
with the aid of psychedelics what kind
of ideas can be brought to life
yeah well we have the whole phenomena of
a lot of the people in silicon valley
and else microdosing psychedelics in
order to
have a little touch more of this
creative approach to things
i would love it to see if it was that's
more like terence mckenna territory
correct me if i'm wrong but i would love
to serve more scientific to where
there will be the rigor of saying how to
do it effectively
you know how to sort of understand sort
of um
not just almost um
you know to take the full
journey of creative exploration and to
do it for
prolonged periods of time you know um
for years you know lifelong kind of part
of your life
of hot it empowers creativity i
i think of course you start with
um helping people
uh deal with trauma and then the next
step is
people who have moved past their trauma
and are trying to do something create
something special in their life
how can then psychedelics empower that
yeah
now that also just to not shy away from
anything controversial yes
um that has to that gets us to this um
idea of psychedelics for vision quest
particularly for younger people you know
when you're
sort of moving into this adulting kind
of phase and you have to figure out what
are you going to do with your life
there's so many options a lot of people
of course feel constrained that they
have very few options but
i think this idea of psychedelics as a
way to help you
find your calling or find your vision or
find your unique leverage point
i think we'll see that more and more as
our culture evolves and gets healthier
around the use of psychedelics it says
both the science
uh having the rigor of understanding how
to do it safely and the culture catching
up
to the fact that this is uh both safe
and uh like very useful
yeah although i would question this idea
of safety
um so so we can understand physiological
risks
and we can minimize them and i think
there's very minimal
physiological risks from the classic
psychedelics virtually none
or for even mdma under safe conditions
psychological risks are
harder to address but we can do that
through the sense of safety and support
but i think there's um a level of risk
there that we shouldn't overlook
and so you know to make a drug into a
medicine what we have to do is prove
to the satisfaction of the fda and other
regulatory agencies
that things are safe and efficacious but
even though they use those words proving
safety and safe and efficacious
it's in relationship to the disease that
you're trying to treat and you accept a
certain amount of risk
so it's the risk benefit ratio rather
than
pure safety yeah absolutely
let me ask you about kankeezy a little
bit longer because the fascinating human
being
he was also part of project mk ultra
yeah
yes what was project mk ultra and what
uh lessons we should take away from it
well mk ultra was a program
by the caa you know what they were
looking at was
can you take these drugs these
psychedelic drugs
and weaponize them in different ways
um for interrogation for true serums for
um
you know exposing somebody before they
give a big talk to something like lsd
and then they
you know can't talk or make a fool of
themselves or
can you spray lsd over the battlefield
and have everybody tripping and drop
their weapons and then you just walk up
and
you know nobody dies and you've won you
know the battle
so so it's a fascinating concept yeah
they call it non-lethal incapacitance
and i think that's how uh one way to win
a war is
uh to enforce peace
to get everybody not caring about the
war but yes well i
think gandhi said something even better
which is that the true way to win a war
is to turn your enemy into your friend
yes
that's a beautiful way to put it yeah um
but
mk ultra was really nefarious and it was
part of our military and it was done in
secret and um
they would dose people against their
will
i mean one of the most infamous things
uh
was that they had a house of
prostitution in san francisco and they
would um
have one-way mirrors all this stuff and
then they would just dose people with
lsd
they would have the prostitutes dose
these guys with lsd and and observe what
they would do and how they would
act and um the ca actually for a while
was dosing each other
secretly and that there's a famous case
of this phil olsen that
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either jumped out of a window or was
pushed he might have been killed
um he was a cia guy and they gave him
lsd and then they're trying to see can
they break him down and get him to tell
secrets and
i think he felt uncomfortable with what
happened to him while he's under the
influence of lsd and
um whether he was pushed or or not i
don't know if we'll ever know
but uh mk ultra was
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violating people's human rights it was
done in secret and
the irony of it is that ken kesey
is one of the people one of the main
early people that got lsd in this
context and then
he was one of the main people that
helped inspire the hippies to use
psychedelics to
oppose the vietnam war so
i think the cia kind of in many cases
things get out of their control what
they think they can do and it turned
into be
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a disaster for them i think there was
some thought that some of the people at
the cia had this that if you can turn
people inside
you know take drugs and they just focus
on their internal experience they're not
going to be involved politically
it's a way to sort of take people
offline
and what i don't think they counted on
is that when you're offline and you have
these
unit of spiritual experiences and you
realize how we're all connected then why
do you want to
go out and kill these vietnamese and put
a
one dictator over another dictator
dictators on both sides in north vietnam
and southeast
why are we doing that so mk ultra has
um just very disreputable
uh we're learning more and more about
what they did and one of the unintended
consequences was ken kesey
and not only that but then the grateful
dead who
began at the acid test that gizi was
helping to organize
um and out of that emerged you could say
just this incredible um psychedelic
culture and you look at the bands that
began
in the 60s yes and which ones have
really survived to the
this day and um you know the grateful
dead
has survived longer than most any other
band i mean some of them have died and
all but but it was like the tightness
the the sort of
telepathy we talked about before that
they could just
get so tuned in to each other and each
other's energies and they could do
improvisations and they could do this
incredible
work that i think the the the
sustainability of the grateful dead as a
group was a testimony testament to the
power of the lsd
experiences and that might have never
happened if not for mk ultra
but uh can we talk about uh
darkness a little bit so yeah yeah ted
kaczynski the unabomber was allegedly
part of the mk ultra studies
while at harvard uh do you think this is
true
do you think it had an impact on him
psychologically intellectually
and so on i do think it's true and i do
think i it had an impact so
um we talked before about are these
drugs somehow rather
producing a certain kind of drug
experience or do they bring out what's
within
so we have this experience yeah on the
one hand ken kesey and he
sort of took positive things out of this
um on the other hand
um you know we can um
get this uh opposition to the modern
world to technology and to the point of
uh
creating bombs to try to go after it so
that
the experience is not in the drug it's
this interaction between
the drug the person the context and so
we can heal people with psychedelics or
people can be driven crazy with
psychedelics
it depends again on the context and so
i think it's both these things can be
true and i think it was really good that
you kind of
highlighted this that there is this um
polarities
and that it's not in the drug it's in
the the
other factors and it's who they were
beforehand and then how you use that
experience so
all that's to say is if we put lsd in
the water and everybody we're going to
get it it doesn't mean that all of a
sudden everybody's going to have a
mystical experience and then that's
you know all we need to do and humanity
is spiritualized or
end war and all of this it's it's not
about
the drug and that that actually is why
for me
um we've also talked about um
engineering new psychedelics and all the
people that are going to be trying
for-profit companies to develop and
patent new psychedelics
for me the most important challenge is
new cultural contexts
that can create legality safety support
for the existing psychedelics that we
already have
i mean we have so much incredible
tools in these existing psychedelics
that
it's more about creating context for
them to be used in
safe medical or personal growth or
recreational even with harm reduction
all these different ways that's more
important to me than
finding some new molecule that's
somewhat similar somewhat different
but you know it can be patented so it's
the social context
so i i do believe that ted kaczynski was
part of nk ultra and i think it affected
him in a negative way
and that's a cautionary tale that it's
not in the drug it's in the context
the context the person still it feels
like um
if viewed from a therapy perspective
perhaps there was a way to use
psychedelics to help
ted kaczynski find a path out of the
darkness
i i think so and i think that um
this is where i think mdma comes in in a
way that
mdma is um you know he felt very
isolated
and very much out of society in some
ways
mdma stimulates oxytocin which we
haven't mentioned which is the hormone
of nursing mothers of love and
connection
it provides a lot of this sense of
self-acceptance and safety and and
wanting to be in relationship there's
google dolan is a neuroscientist at
hopkins she's given
octopuses mdma they're solitary
creatures
except mating season which is not very
often and but you give them mdma and
they become
more interested in hanging out with
other octopuses so
i think this um for people that have had
difficult psychedelic experiences
um mdma helps them integrate them we've
worked with people that had
a difficult lsd experience 40 years
before
and are still able to get back to that
under the influence of mdma
and work out some of the conflicts that
they weren't able to resolve
all those decades before so i think that
psychedelics could have been helpful in
a different context for ted kazinski
but the other big part of it is that
people have to be willing to cooperate
with the experience we talked about
resistance
so people can resist these things it's
uh you know the saying is you can drink
bring bring a horse to water but you
can't make them drink yeah this is about
how
people have to be willing to go to these
spaces so
one of the essence of our therapeutic
approach is that we
help people to heal themselves that we
are not
giving them the healing it's it's a flip
on the power dynamics
that existed um you would say in the 50s
and 60s my dad was a doctor and the
doctors were gods
and you know whatever they said was
right and you know we no longer of
course believe that but
um for a while psychoanalysis with freud
you know
that they gave the interpretation to the
patient the patient couldn't help
themselves but they would do the free
associations and then
psychoanalysts would see these conflicts
and would would be the one that does the
healing
would give this interpretation and that
would open things up so
i i think it's this idea of empowering
people to heal themselves
and so if ted kazinsky had been in a
therapeutic setting with psychedelics
and if they'd had something like mdma
available or mda which was popular
during the 60s which is a more like mdma
lsd combination
the outcomes might have been different
let's take a step into the world of
studies
timothy leary who was he
and what were the most important ideas
you've learned from him
well i did have the um
opportunity to get to know him
personally and to spend some time with
him
timothy leary
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well let's start with nixon saying he's
the most dangerous man in america
that's a good place to start yeah yeah
and and why did nixon say that it's
because of this uh
tune in you know tur turn on tune in
drop out
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timothy leary was just an incredible
advocate for
um think for yourself question authority
those were things he said all the time
think for yourself question authority he
was a rebel
he was kicked out of west point um he
was a psychologist
who um was at harvard for three years
from 60 to 63.
before he got to harvard he had an
experience
with mushrooms
in mexico and that he said he learned
more in that experience than he had in
his entire academic career before then
about how the human mind works
and so he came to harvard wanting to do
research into psychedelics
and he did some very important studies
both of which well one was called the
good friday experiment
which was whether psychedelics in
religiously inclined people taking
psilocybin in a religious setting
whether it could produce a mystical
experience
that took place at mars chapel at the
boston university
because it's a little bit subjective or
you could say entirely subjective what
people
describe happens to them he wanted to do
another study
which would be a more objective measure
and that was called the concord prison
experiment and that was the thought if
you can give people
psilocybin mystical sense of connection
type experiences while they're in prison
when they get out
they'll be more pro-social and they'll
have reduced recidivism
um so tim did that he also did the
naturalistic studies of giving loads of
people psilocybin and
sort of writing down what their
experiences were the range of
experiences
later on in his time at harvard he just
they started doing lsd
and lsd is more cerebral longer lasting
not as reassuring in a way as psilocybin
sometimes he's to say that if they never
got into lsd they'd still be at harvard
with the psilocybin so he was a great
american psychologist but then
he got tired of the psychology game
you could say or he would say that he
got
more and more interested in cultural
change
and various musicians and artists and
all sorts of people started coming to
him for
the psychedelic experience that they are
in a way for creativity for other things
so he started hanging out with
all sorts of famous people or you know
creative people and
um he stopped going to classes all
a lot and um rom das richard alpert
you know had um given lsd to a student
that um romness was
courageous enough to admit that he had
the sexual interest in
uh they weren't supposed to give it
undergraduates that was about the only
time that they ever did it and
psychedelics just getting more and more
controversial even in the early 60s
eventually got kicked out of harvard and
then he became
kind of a cultural icon for the
counter-culture and
was hounded by the police and nixon and
spent a lot of time in jail i mean he's
an incredible
person one thing that ramdas said
is that richard albert ramdas said
i'm a rascal but leary's a scoundrel
what's the distinction um rascal's like
in good fun a scoundrel is like
you can't quite trust them i think um
um idea yeah it's a spectrum of sorts
yeah i think that leary was someone who
a little bit got addicted
to media attention yeah
but i i think that um overall he gets
blamed a lot for the
backlash against the 60s the shutdown of
psychedelic research i think that
he is unfairly plain for a lot of that
um i think when you look back at the 60s
my son that the common narrative is that
it was because psychedelic's going wrong
people took psychedelics they weren't
prepared they had emotional breakdowns
they went psychotic they
killed themselves they did this or that
different problems of
people taking psychedelics in um context
that
they didn't feel preferably safe in or
or just they weren't prepared or they
didn't know how much they were taking or
all this that so
the the backlash was because
psychedelics gone wrong
but i think the real reason well that
did happen
i think the real reason is psychedelic's
going right and
people having this sense of connection
and then
the opposite of what the cia was hoping
that it would kind of
turn people inward and take them away
from political struggles
it actually motivated people once you
actually
um have these psychedelic experiences
your attitude towards death changes also
this idea of death becoming an intrinsic
part of life it's a natural cycle
it's not so much so i think people
realize that you know while there's this
billions of years of evolution
you know infinity whatever that means in
terms of time that we're here for a very
limited time and they end up wanting to
use their time well they have a
lessened fear of death and they want to
build this paradise on earth here now
instead of later
so a lot of people really did get
motivated
to challenge the vietnam war to work on
the environmental movement civil rights
movement women's rights movement
anti-militarism
and it was that challenge to the status
quo that caused the backlash
so leary is someone who um in 1990
we had a now maps i started in 86 so in
1990 we had this
conference to raise money out in
california and leary was there and ram
dust was there and ralph metzner was
there and andy wilde was there and
terence mckenna was there and dennis
mckenna was there and all these
but there was one point where um
tim was speaking and afterwards i was
asking him some questions and i said do
you have any advice
for us on how to work with the
government and
and how to bring these psychedelics
forward that's what we're trying to do
i've got this non-profit for it you know
we're trying to do this research what is
your advice on
how to bring this forward and how to
work with the government
and he said fuck the government
he said i am so far past asking for
permission for
anything but i'm glad that you're doing
it
and then he held up my hand like you
know like passing the torch
wow so it was and that's one of my
favorite photographs of me and tim where
he's sort of like but it was
after this fuck the government i'm so
far past asking for permission for
anything but
yeah i'm glad that you are now i did
follow-ups to the good friday experiment
and i did follow-ups 25-year follow-up
to the good friday experiment about a
34-year follow-up to the concord prison
experiment
what i discovered in some ways i would
say is the key to the 60s what i just
told you but in the the follow-up to the
good friday experiment that i did in the
80s
for my undergraduate uh thesis at new
college
in sarasota florida i eventually found
19 out of the 20 people
it was just that was an enormous
challenge because their names were all
lost and
it just took forever years and years and
years to find them all
um but i discovered that those people
that had the psilocybin experience in
the midst of
uh 25 years later with nancy reagan and
ronald reagan and if there ever were
there
a social pressure to disavow the
validity of the psychedelic experience
that was then
and instead they um affirmed it
that they thought with all of this years
of hindsight now looking back they
thought it was a valid mystical
experience
but i discovered that one of the persons
who had the psilocybin
had this experience during the good
friday service
that um reverend howard thurman was the
minister he was martin luther king's
mentor
and reverend howard thurman was the
minister at boston merc at mars chapel
uh martin luther king got his phd at
boston university
and howard thurman had spent time with
gandhi
and so he was really kind of this hidden
person behind the civil rights movement
about
non-violence as their strategy but he
was interested in the the political
implications of the mystical experience
so he permitted this
experiment to take place and there were
20 divinity students from andover newton
in the basement and
10 experimenters all the people on
religion and psychology
like houston smith and walters and clark
and leary and rhonda
mr others were there as a support part
of it and
the sermon was like three hours later we
actually have
three hours long we actually have the
original sermon from the good friday
experiment from howard thurman up on our
website
it's incredible but part of it was tell
people there's a man on the cross
and this one person sort of heard that
and he thought
okay i got to do that i got to the
howard thurman was such a dynamic
speaker he said i gotta tell people
there's a man on the cross
and so he said what am i doing here in
this basement chapel
listening to the service i got to go
tell people to manage correct so he went
they thought he was just going to
bathroom but he ran out the door he's
running down commonwealth avenue
and houston smith and tim leary go after
him
and um he had thought that since he
should tell somebody he should tell the
president
like why not but then he realized well
the president's in washington i'm
you know here in boston i'll just tell
the president of the university
so anyway he's running down the street
and and leary and
houston smith go after him and he
doesn't want to go back inside they
finally get him he's not hit by a car
um but they end up giving him a shot of
thorzine
what's dorizine thorazine is like a
major antipsychotic
uh drug it's a tren it's it's a horrible
drug
uh but it knocks people out tranquilizes
them
we would never do that today um you know
we don't abort a difficult experience
like that
yeah but in any case they hid that that
was not part of the
um write-up of this experiment so
what they did is in a sense a little bit
exaggerated the benefits it later became
out
three years later after the experiment
or four years in time magazine it said
everybody that got psilocybin had a
mystical experience like
saying it wasn't true not everybody
eight out of the ten did but not all ten
not this guy and they uh
minimized the risks so there was a bit
of that i think tim was reckless in that
way
it was underplayed the risks and over
promised
the benefits and then the concord prison
experiment
it turned out that um tim had fudged the
data
completely and it wasn't really
successful so
i i fought him for that the outside
world was doing the opposite
it was exaggerating the risks and
blocking resources he felt justified
to fudge the data yeah because the
outside world was
fudging in a sense the the response to
the yeah
yeah exactly yeah so so that
that presents a very nice context um
fucked the government but i'm i'm glad
that somebody
is fighting the good fight from within
and doing it the right way which is
where you are so the 80s
let me ask what is uh maps the
multidisciplinary association for
psychedelic studies and what
what is its mission throughout the years
throughout the decades
yeah so uh maps is a non-profit
organization i created it as a
non-profit pharmaceutical company
i created an 86 after a dea the drug
enforcement administration
criminalized mdma in 1985 and that was
after they started trying to do that in
and as i mentioned this uh terence
mckenna is sponsoring you know
motivating us to do this safety study
so so we did that in preparation for
this eventual crackdown
because mdma was called adam used as a
therapy drug
but it was also beginning to be sold as
ecstasy as a party drug and that was
taking place in public settings and bars
and so it was inevitable that the
crackdown would happen
and so i had a non-profit connected to
buckminster
fuller earth metabolic design lab
that we use to support this lawsuit
against the dea to block them from
criminalizing mdma
we were winning in the court of public
opinion and winning in the court
the dea freaked out and the emergency
scheduled mdma in 85
the handwriting was on the wall that
they were not going to permit the
therapeutic use to continue because it
gets in the way of the narrative of the
drug war and these are terrible drugs
so in 86 is when i started maps as a
non-profit pharma because the the
strategy that i realized is that
americans are open to medicines
you know that tools to ease suffering
that was the opening wedge the opening
door to changing attitudes
and it would be through science i would
say that my religion is more science
than anything else
yes and you know culture and
religion are metaphorical but often too
much they become
literal but but i felt that through
science through medicine
um there would be way to bring these
drugs back to the surface
and the mission was always this mass
mental health
this idea that what we need is to
spiritualize humanity
einstein said the splitting of the atom
has changed everything except our motive
thinking
and hence we drift towards unparalleled
catastrophe
which shall be required if mankind is to
survive is a whole new mode of thinking
so what is that new mode of thinking
i my presumption is that it's more of
this mystical sense of thinking that
that we're all connected
and then if we realize that we're all
connected we're not going to blow up the
world so
a lot of people say that you know if we
could just give lsd all to world leaders
that would be
you know then they'd have these
spiritual experiences the world would be
better but i actually had a ketamine
experience the day after that dmt
experience i described with the inner
hitler
this ketamine experience was um i was
above and behind hitler as he was giving
a speech
like the nuremberg rallies kind of thing
and i was trying to think how do i get
into
his head how do i undo what he wants to
do
how can we deal with him and and i
realized this whole new thing about the
heil hitler salute and
you know he would like push energy out
and then everybody would do the salute
back to him and so it's like the one to
the many and the many to the one giving
all these people giving away their power
and then how it would just sort of
ratchet up in intensity like these
vibrations
and and i realized there's no way to get
into his head this idea we've talked
about before about you have to be
willing
yes right so what that sort of helped me
understand
is that the strategy has to be mass
mental health it's not about changing a
few liters we need to change the mass of
humanity
to this new mode of thinking this new
spiritual way
so maps was a non-profit pharmaceutical
company
focused on psychedelics big pharma
wasn't doing this work government wasn't
funding it so the only source of funds i
thought would be through nonprofit
donations and that's been true up until
just a couple years ago now that we have
the rise of these
for-profits but that's because we've
cleared out the regulatory
obstacles we've got more scientific data
about the benefits
funded through philanthropy we've
changed public opinion
and there's a lot less zeal for the drug
war so all of those
things have changed but at the time it
was mass mental health was the goal
two tracks one was drug development the
other was drug policy reform
so that it's not just available to
people who have a clinical diagnosis but
people who
are personal growth or you know
they should have access to it as well i
did not know
at the time that no drug had ever been
made into a medicine by a non-profit
that was really good i didn't know that
i might have been a little bit more
daunted
and actually that didn't happen for 13
more years it happened in 1999
and that was the abortion pill ru-46
that was approved in europe but
controversial nobody no pharmaceutical
company would take it
and it was john d rockefeller iii
through the population council with the
major donor being
warren buffett oh wow and the
rockefellers uh
and the buffetts and some of the
pritzkers were involved in funding this
so that was the first non-profit but but
the the maps was
designed as
from the very beginning not academic
research into psychedelics but drug
development and that's a fundamental
distinction and that's why i think
we're years ahead now with everybody
else in terms of making
a psychedelic assisted therapy into a
medicine because our goal
from the very beginning was not
knowledge not academic research it was
practical it was drug development how do
we create new
social structures how do we create legal
access to these things
now in december of 2014
we created the maps public benefit
corporation
so maps is a non-profit but you know
in our 35 years we've raised about 110
million dollars in donations
what i didn't know when i started maps
and it took me
um quite a few years i didn't even know
this until about
eight nine years ago was that in 1984
ronald reagan had signed a bill to
create incentives for developing drugs
that were off patent
so mdma was invented by merck in 1912.
it's in the public domain these
incentives are called data exclusivity
which means that if you make a drug into
a medicine that does no patent
protection
nobody can use your data for a period of
time
to market a generic and that will
effectively be
well it's five years you do pediatric
studies you get six months extension
and and we are being required if we
succeed in adults to work with
adolescents with ptsd
it blocks a generic competitor from
applying for for until that five and a
half years is over takes fda at least
six months
to review so more or less six years of
data exclusivity 10 years in europe
is data exclusivity so the story then
became to the donors
that you're not going to have to give us
money forever because we can make money
selling mdma but we want to do
two revolutionary things you could say
one is psychedelic assisted
psychotherapy but the other is
marketing drugs when you market it with
the profit maximization motive
we end up in the extreme getting the
distortions that we have in america
where we have the most
expensive health care system in the
world per capita but our outcomes are
down like 40 or 50
among the countries our average outcomes
we don't have a third of the people or
so don't
have insurance and it's just very
inequitable
so what we're trying to do is show a
different way to market
drugs and it's a modification of
capitalism it's called the benefit
corporation
where you maximize public benefit not
profit you still make a profit
so selling mdma for a profit is not
something we could keep inside
the nonprofit because it's taxable it's
it's a business
so we've created the maps public benefit
corporation
which is a hundred percent owned by the
nonprofit so we have a non-profit that
owns a pharma company and and the
mission of that former company
is to maximize not profit but maximize
benefit
for society yeah yeah although there
still will be profits and
the profits that we're going to make are
going to be used towards
the mission of maps which is again is
this mass mental health and
ending the drug war and and in fact
we've hired the boston consulting group
to help us plot our commercialization
strategy and so there is some
suggestions
based there's so many different
assumptions in this the number of
therapists that we train
the price that we set for the mdma
whether insurance companies will cover
it
but there's the possibility of somewhere
in the range of three-quarters of a
billion dollars in profits
during this period of data exclusivity
just from the u.s you know and we're
talking about the
trying to do this research around the
world as well so that's what the benefit
corporation is the benefit corporation
is our pharmaceutical arm
we're about 130 people now somewhere in
that
fluctuates but one-third of them are in
the nonprofit we do
harm reduction psychedelic harm
reduction we help
you know create programs for
people with difficult psychedelic
experiences at burning man at festivals
all over the world even in cities we're
now
negotiating with the um police the city
of denver
because denver has made the mushrooms
the lowest enforcement priority
you know we oregon has passed the oregon
psilocybin initiative so in those areas
where
maybe more people are going to gravitate
to do psychedelics we want there to be
harm reduction so that we don't have bad
stories coming out that would change
that so maps does the psychedelic harm
reduction we do
public education we do a lot of it
that's what you and i are doing right
now we're doing that now
so but and but also research towards
well the research now is done in the
benefit corp in the benefit
yeah so so what happens is people donate
to maps get a tax deduction
maps transfers the money or you could
say invests in the benefit corp
yes the benefit corp will do the
research and then
maps is the sponsor but then we will
license the sale of mdma to the benefit
corp so
got it but but the research had done
with an eye towards creating something
that has a big impact versus just
research for knowledge sake
yeah yeah because um
i'm interested in political change um
you can
the other part of it and which is that
the brain is the most
uh complex thing we know in the in the
universe
it's gonna it's endless i mean when are
we gonna really like this idea of will
we figure out telepathy will we figure
out
tapping into the collective unconscious
what is the extents of our brain
you know how does the brain actually
work do you ask chemistry questions you
know so
if it's just the pursuit of knowledge
that is an endless thing and how does
that end the drug war how does that help
people directly so
that's why we're focused on drug
development more than mechanism of
action
before i ask you about a one but
several really exciting studies let me
ask sort of a personal question for me
so if i wanted to get
psychedelics from the maps
public benefit corporation and uh
explore my own mind um how do i get to
do that
uh and when you won't be able to you'll
never be able this is very unfortunate
because the the reason is because the
benefit corp is designed as a
pharmaceutical company
so we can only work on clinical
indication so let's say you
you come to me and you just say oh i'm
really depressed can i get mdma to
overcome my depression or overcome my
ptsd
you know we'll have to do research in
those indications um
and by when you say me you mean like a
doctor so this would be prescribed in
theory by doctors so this would go
through a doctor
yes and a prescription okay let me uh
let me ask another question
to further answer the so so that's where
the drug policy arm comes in
the drug policy reform so you should be
able to get
access to psychedelics for your own
personal growth yes but that's not
medicine so that's why we need
to medicalize to have things covered by
insurance
to change people's attitudes the public
attitudes and then
we get this subsequent drug policy
reform
and and we're talking about it in terms
of licensed legalization so my view is
you should get a license to
do psychedelics you get a little
education stuff and then then you should
be able to buy it and do it on your own
so let me rephrase the question
more specifically so when can i if i
happen to have
um ailments of some kind where the
doctor decides that psychedelics could
help
when would you be a loose estimate for
you
of when a doctor would be able to
prescribe to me something from
uh maps public benefit co and then
when for my personal growth and
creativity would i be able to get
something so like
just looking up this isn't like
guaranteed but like your vision your
hope
yeah um for yeah for for academics in
society
well the end of 2023 so two and a half
years from now
we anticipate fda approval for the
prescription use of mdma for ptsd
because the fda does not
regulate the practice of medicine there
is what's called off-label prescription
what that means the label is what it's
approved for so the label said this is
approved for ptsd
and but let's say you come in anything
else social anxiety or whatever
you can go to the doctor they can give
it to you it might not be covered by
insurance they have to be a little bit
careful about malpractice if they're
but i think the end of 2023 is when
you will be able to do that now there's
actually another program
very limited called expanded access
which is compassionate use
which means that and we have approval
for 50 people
for compassionate use right now we think
that'll grow
so that's going to open up in about two
months and so those are
people with ptsd they have to be
treatment resistant nothing has worked
for them and they can
access mdma while we're doing the phase
three studies
wow and but they have to pay for it
themselves we're not
the sponsor has to pay for all the
research but expanded access
because there's no control group
everybody gets the mdma
people can pay for it themselves and we
think that'll start in a couple months
but it's very limited it's limited to
certain cities there's also a program
called right to try
which is um passed through congress it's
it's
it's similar this idea of compassionate
use but it cuts the
fda out of it and patients can negotiate
directly with
pharma companies to get access to their
drugs
that's starting to happen i think in
canada now they're letting
people have compassionate access to
psilocybin
for life-threatening illness because
there has been studies with psilocybin
for cancer patients and others with
life-threatening illness
as far as your question about when will
you be able to access this
for personal growth outside of medicine
i'll take that to mean you know fully
legally where you can just go buy pure
drugs somewhere when will that happen
you know we already are starting to see
the decriminalization in certain areas
of plants psychedelics
and we see overall drug drug crim like
that passed in oregon
so that any drug is now it's not legal
you can't
really fully set up clinics to
offer it to people or there's no legal
supply like that but
it's decriminalized so my sense of
things is based a lot on watching what
happened with medical marijuana and
marijuana legalization so we're sitting
here in massachusetts where marijuana is
legal
but what happened first was medical
marijuana so
what we see is that medicalization
by demonstrating that under certain
contexts the risks are
much less than the benefits and then
there are benefits
and then people hear stories about
people that gotten better
and then that changes their minds then
eventually that builds up to
why are we throwing people in jail
shifts to culture yeah
yeah so i think that what we're going to
have 2023
is mdma approved by the fda chances are
psilocybin will be a year two after that
then what we're going to need is a
decade of psychedelic clinics
that are going to roll out across
america
also other countries as well thousands
of these psychedelic clinics
we already have hundreds of ketamine
clinics
that are ketamine for depression um more
and more people are realizing that
ketamine when it's used with therapy
it's better than when it's not
um but the therapists want to be
psychedelic therapists they don't want
to be a ketamine therapist or an mdma
therapist so those the cross-trained
so we'll have a decade of these
thousands of psychedelic clinics and all
these stories of people getting better
in 2035
is when i think that we will move to
licensed legalization
which is when you will have the option
of just going somewhere
once you've done this educational stuff
potentially
i also think it would be better to have
the opportunity for people to go
for free paid for by tax money to these
clinics and you have your first
experience with psychedelics under
supervision
and you know what you're getting into
you've you know
to ask the questionnaire what the risks
are with the drugs then you get your
license
so 2035 is when i think that'll happen
and the clinics will be sites of these
initiations
yes and so be a safe environment just
like you said all the things that are
actually
uh maximize the likelihood of a pleasant
experience and all those kinds of things
it is a frustratingly slow process and
the
fda being part of that process is very
frustrating that
of course there's there's benefits but
uh boy well i wish you could move a lot
faster
yeah well one thing that i've learned
from being a parent
is that when you have little kids it
seems like they'll be with you forever
but then when they grow up and they go
to college and they leave you look back
and like where did that
20 years ago you know so
we're still dealing with the legacy of
the civil war and slavery in america
yeah so actually a 20-year plan is not
that long
so while we say um
it's frustratingly slow and it is you
know i mean it's 50 years
since uh the psychedelic 60s and you
know
when right now it's um you know it's 36
years since mdma was criminalized
and you think about all those people
that committed suicide from ptsd
or from anything else and all those
people that could have been helped
if the dea had accepted the
administrative law judge recommendation
that mdma
stay in schedule three it's it's
tremendously sad
at the same time culture evolves slowly
you know you read the bible or you read
all the stuff we're not that different
from people thousands of years ago
so how are we going to really evolve
enough over the next couple decades so
we don't destroy the planet and don't
kill each other
that's why i think psychedelics have an
important role to play
that's why i've devoted my life to
psychedelics and it is frustratingly
slow
and what i said to myself is our whole
effort has not been fast enough can we
talk a little bit about ptsd and mdma
there's this fascinating uh paper
came out on a fascinating study that
you're a part of
that's a phase three study can you
describe what the study is can you
describe what phase three means
can you describe um what the findings
are and why it's
in fact so important and impactful yeah
this study came out may 10th in nature
medicine
so one of the highest impact factors in
medicine journals it was tremendous
so to make a drug into a medicine the
first thing you need to do
is what are called non-clinical or
pre-clinical studies meaning
safety established in animals what does
the drug do
what are the side effects in animals
where do you see the risks and
then you negotiate with fda to do phase
one studies
and phase one studies where you move
from animals to humans
and those are more safety studies and
trying to describe what the drug does so
that you can
determine if there is potential medical
value there
certain drugs like cancer drugs
are so toxic
that um you don't have phase one studies
in healthy volunteers
it's like phase one slash two where it's
you you bring in the patients
but you still are doing sort of dose
response safety studies
but you use patients but most phase 1
studies are healthy volunteers
phase 2 are where you start bringing in
the patients
and you start experimenting with various
different things the
purpose of phase two is really just to
design phase three
now again i'm sort of putting out of the
picture in another area's mechanism of
action how do these drugs work
phase two you're trying to figure out
what they do
who your patient population is what are
the risks who do you
include who do you exclude what are the
doses what is your treatment
what are your measures
in our case it was um you know how do
you do a double blind study
that was a big part of phase two that's
a big challenge for
psychedelic drugs any kind of drugs that
have a real strong effect
you know how do you do a double blind
study a double blind side to interrupt
would mean that the patient should know
should not be aware whether it's a
placebo or not
and the research and the researcher does
not is not aware
and so for that lack of awareness when
the effect is really strong is very
difficult to do on both the researcher
and the patient
side yes and sometimes fascinating they
talk about triple blind
so the other part is the raters that
evaluate the symptoms and
before and after so you ideally want
triple blind do you want the patients
the researchers and the evaluators of
the outcomes
all of them not to know what the drug
whether it was drug or placebo and
that's to reduce
experiment or bias so
and then then you move to phase three
once you've figured out how to design
the phase three studies and phase three
are the large-scale
multi-site placebo-controlled
double-blind
studies where you must prove safety and
efficacy
in order to get permission to market the
drug
now for us when we started maps in 86
as i said it was one year after the
criminalization of mdma in 85
we had five different protocols that
were rejected by the fda
for studying with mdma and these were
all various phase one studies
they came from harvard from uc san
francisco from the university of in
arizona and albuquerque new mexico
all over and they were all rejected 1992
um six years after we started we got the
first permission
for phase one and that took us through
much of the 90s
again things are slow because we have to
raise the money through donations and
and then in 1999 is when we started the
work with
ptsd and that then took us till
november 29 2016.
which is when we had the end of phase 2
meeting with fda
so it took 30 years from the start of
maps to the end of phase 2 meeting with
fda
and what we had discovered during phase
was several different key points
the drugs that are available right now
for ptsd
the ssris zoloft and paxil
that have been approved by fda and
regulators in europe as well the
european medicines agency
for ptsd they work better in women than
in men
and they failed in combat related ptsd
all right so what we learned is that
mdma-assisted therapy
works just as well in men or women and
it works in combat related ptsd
it works in regardless of the cause of
ptsd we also discovered that
even though there are stories that you
know people take mdm at raves and they
dance all night and they overheat and
they get hypothermia and they die from
overheating which is true and can happen
from pure mdma
or that sometimes people have heard
about needing to cool down
and so they drink water and then while
they're
dancing all night and then they drink
too much water and then they dilute
their blood and they die from
hyponatremia
so there are risks of mdma but we
discovered that in a therapeutic setting
we can control all those risks those
things don't happen at all
so we discovered safety we could we
could demonstrate safety
we also figured out that our measure
the caps the clinician-administered ptsd
scale that it's the
gold standard all over the world for
measuring ptsd symptoms it's what the
fda and the e may
require we discovered that it was a good
measure for us and that we could show
changes in that the other
big thing that we learned is that um and
we haven't mentioned this
yet but the work in the 50s and 60s with
lsd and psilocybin and the modern
research over the last 20 years with
psilocybin and classic psychedelics has
demonstrated
that there's a link between this
mystical experience this unit of
mystical experience and therapeutic
outcomes
for the treatment of addiction for
working with people's life-threatening
illnesses
you know that for ocd for
obsessive-compulsive disorder that
there's
with the classic psychedelics both in
the 50 years ago and then the research
now has been
that there's a link between the depth of
the mystical experience and therapeutic
outcome
what we discovered is that that's not
the case for mdma
that people do score fairly high on the
scales of mystical experience not as
high
as they do with the classic psychedelics
but they do score pretty high
on average and a significant number of
them have
over the cutoff for what would be
considered a full mystical experience
so enough to say that we could look at a
correlation and we didn't find any
the other thing that we discovered and
this was
more humbling i would say for me
personally
is that my dissertation at the kennedy
school a big part of it was on the
it's about the regulation of the medical
use of psychedelics and marijuana
big part of my dissertation was how to
do the double-blind
study and i thought i'd solve the
problem and i persuaded my
dissertation committee that i'd solved
the problem
and the solution was therapy with
low-dose mdma
versus therapy with full-dose mdma and
everybody knows that they're going to
get mdma most of these people have never
done it before
they'll be confused about is at full
dose or low dose
and then the challenge is uh to pick a
dose that's
high enough so that there is this
confusion but not so high that it's so
therapeutic that we can't tell the
difference between the groups
so we we studied zero meaning inactive
placebo
25 milligrams 30 milligrams 40
milligrams 50 milligrams 75 milligrams
100 milligrams 125 and 150.
what we discovered is that my
dissertation was wrong and that
there is no good solution to the
double-blind problem
um what we found is that to our surprise
actually was that 75 milligrams was an
effective dose
oh wow we didn't think that i mean the
normal doses like
full dose is like 125 milligrams
something like that
but 75 milligrams was an effective dose
and we discovered that the lower doses
so i was i was half right you could say
the the doses
of 25 30 40 50 they they could
produce enough confusion that you could
say that they were successful at
blinding not perfectly but
enough confusion so that people
therapists couldn't
know for sure so that so that there was
this reduction of bias you could say
but what we discovered again to
to our surprise was that the low doses
made people uncomfortable
they they stimulated them
but they didn't reduce the fear and so
people still got better with the therapy
with low-dose mdma but if we gave them
therapy with inactive placebo they did
even better
than if we gave them therapy with
low-dose mdma
so we we call it an anti-therapeutic
effect
well i don't mean to imply that they got
worse but it made people uncomfortable
people didn't like it you know but we
would still help them make some progress
so we had the blinding but what what it
meant by reducing the effect of
therapy with inactive placebo is that it
would make it easier for us to find a
difference between the two groups
and so the real question is if you can
do it with therapy
why bother at a drug so we went to the
fda
and and so this was what we discovered
during phase two we went to the fda at
this end of phase two
meeting and we said we can give you
blinding
but it will make it easier for us to
find a difference between the two groups
and so we suggest
that we do therapy with inactive placebo
versus therapy with full dose mdma
that will cause a problem because most
people will be able to tell what they've
got
yeah what um tom lawforn a doctor who
used to be head of psychiatry products
at fda is our
main advisor so the first thing he said
is that the double blind fails in
practice a lot even with ssris
because there are certain side effects
that you have with these drugs and the
doctors who are doing these research
when you're
reporting your side effects they can say
oh that's probably you got the active
drug instead of the placebo so
the double blind is in theory is
terrific but in practice
it doesn't always work quite as well yes
and so what tom said is that there are
two
main approaches that they think are
important to reduce bias
the first one is easy to do it's called
random assignment
so you know sometimes there are studies
where you know you'll you'll treat a
bunch of people
with something and some fraction of them
will get better and some won't and then
you say
okay all those who didn't get better who
volunteers to get this new treatment
and then you give them the new treatment
but the people that volunteer are more
likely to want to get better they're not
representative sample of everybody that
has these so when you have random
assignment
everybody is similarly motivated and has
meets the same inclusion exclusion
criteria
so that's what we talked of course we
need random assignment
the other part was when the bias double
blind doesn't work as well
then the system of independent raiders
is especially important of how you do
that so we
have over a pool of raiders
over 20 of them and we do this monthly
in inter-rater reliability tests
to make sure that they um you know
evaluate the so that they're given a
videotape of a ptsd patient and then
they're supposed to rate them
according to their symptoms and then
then we sort of make sure that we've got
this
calibrated raider pool and it's all done
by zoom by
telemedicine and they're randomly
assigned to the next person that needs a
rating
so they said 20 raiders yeah so we've
got like 20 raiders
and um we want what we want to do is is
make it so that each raider sees each
patient
only once maybe twice but but not
tracking them through the study
so that guys to reduce the bias in the
raiders that they they don't know where
this person is in the study
yes um and then and so
there's a fellow um bob temple who's
like the old wise man at the fda
he's been there since 1972 he was in
charge of the office of science policy
and they brought him into the final
meeting of this
um process where we are trying to design
phase three so once fda said yes you can
go to phase three
that was november 29 2016.
we then negotiated for eight months on
the design of phase three and all of the
other information this is fascinating
it's gonna need this process of design
ah it was
you know to the extent that i have any
uh artistic creativity
it's in protocol design i really love
that so you enjoy this process i love it
i love it because it's always trade-offs
and it's
um yeah it's you know and i acknowledge
you know
that we are all biased and so how do you
there's something beautiful
about the scientific process designed to
get you to the truth
um especially when that scientific
process is trying to get to the truth of
the human
organism which is so complicated so it's
very difficult to uh
to dissect to do to get the the the
strong effects
and when you're analyzing when you have
like raiders they're
they're watching a video
there's removing subjectivity from that
is very very challenging
yeah very very much so um
and so we came to this agreement with
fda though
that we would um use this uh independent
raider pool and
and so we learned in in phase two again
that the double blind there was no
solution to the double blind problem and
and both the fda
and the european medicines agency in the
end agreed
that the best design was therapy with
inactive placebo
versus therapy with full dose mdma
accepting the fact that most people will
be able to tell
what whether they got nothing or they
got full dose mdma
most therapists will be able to tell the
difference but
that makes a harder test for us to show
a difference between the two groups
because we're giving them inactive
placebo and not the anti-therapeutic
effect of low-dose mdma
so once we started phase three so then
we were able to start
in 2018 phase three and the paper
in nature medicine that just came out
was the
results of our first phase three study
we
came to agreement with fda that we would
do two
phase three studies each would have 100
persons in them
and what the fda said to us is that they
thought that we could prove
efficacy with smaller numbers than they
wanted to see for safety
the reason they said that is that in
phase two we had a large effect size
so from a statistical point of view the
bigger of an
effect that you're looking for the fewer
number of people you need to get
statistical significance
when you're trying to find small
differences you need large numbers of
people to
sort of work out the noise um
so we were we came to agreement on two
100 person phase three studies
uh and the idea is that it's very
possible that the
the first part the first study would
show the efficacy
because the effect is so strong yeah
yeah and the second but but also
safety as well so so you know one of the
things we also realized when you work
with a highly stigmatized drug
in the midst of still you know the drug
war and prohibition that we need
highly sympathetic subjects
and we need to make the best case we can
which means we need to work with the
hardest cases
so that this is really needed and so we
end up enrolling people
the first study was chronic severe ptsd
and unlike many studies of ptsd we
enroll people that have previously
attempted suicide
wow so we have multiple people that have
tried to kill themselves
that we felt like um if we were to
exclude them what are we doing
those are the people that need it the
most so
we we came to this agreement with fda
we're going to work with
chronic severe ptsd patients
including those that had attempted
suicide and
we would do these two 100 person studies
and
we also negotiated what's called an
interim analysis
so what that means is that when the
study
is um underway
um and often big big studies they have
this kind of interim analysis
where what you do is and for us we
negotiated when we had 60
or 60 people had reached the primary
outcome measure
and all hundred had been enrolled then
we would take a look at the data
and if the statistical analysis that we
did
was showing you know based on a certain
effect size that we chose based on what
we saw in phase two
the interim analysis is for what's
called sample size re-estimation
so what it means is if the results
aren't as good as you thought they would
you can add more people
and then you'll get statistical
significance
it means that your effect isn't as
strong as you thought it'll be harder to
get insurance to coverage but fda will
still approve it
because fdl also believes that these are
group
averages there may be some people that
will later figure out respond better
than others
so they'll approve it if it's
statistically significant even if it has
a low effect size
the ssris have low effect size so
we did the interim analysis in march of
and what we discovered to our delight
was that
um we did not need to add any subjects
that's all we were told we weren't told
like what is the results we were just
told all we were going to get is a
number
zero or you need to add x numbers of
people to the study to get the
statistical significance that's right
around the time that covet hit
and lockdowns happened and we ended up
negotiating with fda that we would end
the study with 90 people instead of 100.
it took a while for us to end up doing
that so the paper that we just published
is on the results of 90 people i think
it was 46 in the mdma group 44 in the
placebo group and what we
discovered was that the study worked
better than we had even hoped
so the first thing is that you look at
statistical significance you have to get
0.05
which basically means a nickel out of a
dollar a 1 in 20 chance
that the difference between the two
groups is due to some random factor
rather than to your intervention
and in this case the the placebo group
gets therapy
and then with inactive placebo and then
the
group gets mdma with active placebo so
you have to get .05 there's another
measure
that the fda uses sometimes called
robust which means
one in a thousand instead of one in
twenty one in a thousand and if you get
a robust
results .001
and you meet some other criteria they
might agree to approve the drug on the
basis of just
one phase three study instead of two
because when you think about
it a one in 20 chance for your first
seconds to
a phase three study a one in 20 chance
for your second phase three study you
multiply that together it's one in four
hundred
point zero um two five um
that's pretty good so robust .001 is
even better than
two independent phase three studies each
at .05
what we ended up getting was one in ten
thousand point zero
zero zero one outrageous
yeah you know incredibly so that's a
measure of both the difference between
the two groups and the variability
and so what it meant is that we had
minimal variability
that most people who got to mba got
quite a large
amount of benefit from it and most
people who got the placebo
were more or less in the same range as
well that's really exciting by the way i
mean
[Laughter]
mean i i i suppose it's exciting from a
perspective of
approval by the fda maybe perhaps that's
the way you're seeing it but it's also
exciting because it's it has a chance to
help people that are truly suffering
yeah well if we can get one in uh 10
000 in the first phase three study
chances are we can get one in 20 in the
second
so it's really going to be about safety
for us in the second phase three study
yeah now you can have
a large p value a large significance
but you could have an effect that's not
very significant
it's not clinically significant you can
have statistical significance without
clinical significance and as i said the
the more people you get in the study you
can find smaller and smaller differences
between two groups
now we showed that we had um
a very large effect size so effect size
is based on
um that scale you mentioned well well
the scale of the effect size
is based on standard deviations
so an effect size of one means that your
results are one standard deviation away
from the norm that's considered very
large
the the ssris because they have they
were like .3.4
effect size that's considered small
effect size medium is starting to be
around 0.6
and 0.8 and above are large effect sizes
we had what's called placebo subtracted
effect size there's two different ways
to look at it placebo subtracted means
you kind of look at the difference
between your two
groups and and what that is for us since
one group had therapy and one had
therapy plus mdma the placebo subtracted
effect size
is basically the effect of just the mdma
because you've kind of washed out the
therapy that was 0.91
so we had a large effect size which was
different
wow over so 0.91 over the just the
therapy so over the placebo
yeah wow now when we do the
within group meaning the group that just
got the
mdma plus therapy look at their baseline
and their outcomes
that's another way to look at it and
that's what's going to actually happen
in practice because people are going to
get mdma plus
therapy that's 2.1 effect size two
standard deviations away from the norm
is enormous effect size yeah
the other part is that we had
no effect by sight which is very
important so we had 15 sites two in
israel two in canada 11 throughout the
united states
the fda looks at is there a side effect
because what that might mean is maybe
you've got all your patients
or most of your patients going to this
one site which is these highly
experienced therapists and they're like
you know hippies from way back
and they're super experienced with
psychedelics and you know and they're
they're getting great results but nobody
else gets good results
so we had no effect by sight which means
that's incredible
that we've been able to train all these
new therapists we had about um
about 80 therapists working at all these
15 sites
we also discovered that there's a group
that's considered to be
very difficult to treat which is called
the dissociative subtype
so when people are traumatized
one of the ways to psychologically
survive that
is you dissociate it's like you're not
there
when you do that though it's hard to
come back because when you come
back then you get all these painful
memories and fearful and so
um the extreme of that is called
dissociative identity disorder
kind of like schizophrenia almost
dissociative identity you're
so we let people in who are on the
dissociative
subtype and those are considered to be
the hardest to treat because
the the theory is that you need to be
ego intact as i said the mystical
experience is not correlated
with therapeutic outcomes and you need
to be talking about what traumatized you
and working through that and expressing
it letting it out not keeping it in
so the dissociative subtype
seems like it's harder for them to get
back into the event because they're so
dissociated
what we showed is that those people did
even better on average than everybody
else
so that mdma is integrative it helps
people
who are so separate that they make even
more rapid progress
so it's almost like them dma made it
more difficult for them to dissociate
yes yeah or you could say it made it
easier for them to remember
yes exactly to reverse the dissociation
yeah and we find that mdma
enhances memory for the trauma so that
you can have these
unconscious uh memories or memories that
you cannot remember
that you've suppressed so much but they
distort your view
your filter of the world is distorted by
these fearful memories that the world
can't be trusted people can't be trusted
it's always about to happen
so we find that mdma increases memory
for the trauma but by reducing the fear
then the memories can come to the
surface then you can process them let
out the emotions cry scream shake
whatever and then through this mdma
effect on the amygdala and the
hippocampus it helps you
store these memories into long-term
storage so that they're not always about
to happen they're in the past
they're part of your story but they're
not the whole story so we discovered
that the dissociative subtype
works better now none of this would be
enough
unless safety so from a safety
perspective
what we discovered is that there was one
woman in the study that attempted to
kill herself
twice during the study there was another
woman
that was so um
worried that she might kill herself that
the therapy brought these things to the
surface that she's been pushing away
that she
checked herself into a hospital in order
to avoid self-harm
at the end of the study you know what we
learned is both of them were in the
placebo group
we didn't have anybody in the mdma group
attempt to kill themselves
so the mdma is really
helpful for giving people a sense of
hope
and and that they can somehow process
this
now it's not to say that nobody will
ever commit suicide
and that's our big concern in the second
phase iii study
as i said it's more going to be about
safety than about efficacy we think
we'll get the efficacy but
we're very concerned about you know
safety
because we had um problems in the first
phase three study of somebody trying to
kill herself twice in the placebo group
you know it's it's the background for
having ptsd
so there'd have to be a disproportionate
number of people in the mdma group
try to kill themselves or succeed in
killing themselves then in the placebo
group
for the fd to say oh this mdma it's too
dangerous it brings
we don't think that's going to happen so
those are
the other findings are that this from
safety is that the side effects are
transitory they're minor
they're they're um you know sweating or
jaw clenching or
you know slight temperature increase and
you know ev everybody that's been to a
rave knows about
you know taking ecstasy you know there
are some side effects
but they're minor they're transitory and
there has been this
massive problem of um during the 80s the
90s
nida the nationalists on drug abuse was
trying to say that mdma was neurotoxic
and that you take it and it's going to
cause nerve terminal degeneration it's
going to be major
brain damage it's going to be
significant functional consequences and
back then they were saying that mdm is
too dangerous it should never even be
researched nobody should even get it
once
because it's poison and brain damage
well
we no longer believe that that was
exaggerated that was um
you know in service of the drug war but
we've done in phase two
neurocognitive tests before and after in
two of our different sites and showed no
decline in cognitive functioning so we
we don't think that there's any
um neurotoxicity happening and the doses
that we use
there's no obvious functional
consequences people are getting better
and the other thing that we've learned
in um
phase two and that we still have to
learn from this study so what we showed
is that
um is the durability of the effect we
showed that um
32 percent of the people that got the
therapy without mdma at two months after
the last experimental session no longer
had ptsd
just with the therapy which is
phenomenal because these are
on average 14 years ptsd one-third had
ptsd over 20 years
and just with the therapy
32 no longer had ptsd at the two months
um however those people that got mdma it
was 67 percent
no longer had ptsd you know more than
twice as good
in phase two and in phase three we're
also going to do the 12-month follow-up
that's not for the fda that's not for
approvability that's more for insurance
companies
because this is expensive a lot of
therapy time if it fades
you know if it's great results initially
but then it fades after six months
what's the point and what we showed
in phase two is that um
people keep getting better at the
two-month follow-up
they're doing pretty well but at the 12
month follow-up they're even better
so it's durable people have learned how
to process trauma
they keep getting better so we've not
reached that point in this phase three
study where everybody's got their one
year follow-up but
we have also done three and a half year
follow-ups to some of the groups that
were in phase two
and showed that it was durable and we're
doing a long
long-term follow-up now to everybody to
many of the people in phase two some of
them treated 15 years ago
so that's all more for the insurance
companies so
basically what we found in the paper
that we just published is that it was
highly efficacious highly significant
no effect by sight works in the hardest
cases
and the safety record was great that's
an incredible success
and that's really exciting especially
given that uh the people who've
committed
who attempted to commit suicide were let
into the study and
so these are is the people who are truly
suffering
um i mean
that um that's incredibly exciting
and i mean just to speak to the
frustration why things can't move faster
but um
but for what it is it's incredibly
exciting
is there other studies of this nature
that you foresee
enabling that same kind of positive
impact whether it's mdma
for other things like treating addiction
or maybe it's psilocybin
for uh for other conditions is there
something else that's promising
yeah i i think that um
what we've discovered i don't think is
unique to mdma
so it's mdma assisted psychotherapy
mdma is ideal for ptsd you know
maybe it won't work as well for ocd or
other things you know it's very
strategic why we chose mdma and why we
chose ptsd
but i i don't think that the results
that we've got are so
unique to mdma assisted therapy i think
that psilocybin assisted therapy is
going to be great for
people with life-threatening illnesses
cancer
you know we're anxious about dying it's
looks like it's really good in the
treatment of addiction
um again these are in combination with
sort of the psilocybin tobacco was
cognitive behavioral therapy with
psilocybin
um i think that it's going to be a
little bit more difficult psilocybin for
depression
i don't know if it'll be quite as good
you know there are some biological
aspects sometimes to depression
but i think there'll be really good
results for psilocybin for depression i
think it'll be approved it's considered
a breakthrough therapy by the fda
ibogaine is phenomenal for opiate
addiction helping people go through the
withdrawal and then
giving them this chance to deal with the
material that they've
that drives them for addiction um there
was ben sessa dr ben sessa in england
did mdma for alcohol use disorder
and that was really great the results he
got and it's it's the case that
he ended up basically treating people
for trauma it's the trauma that people
run
the emotional challenges that people run
from into
quieting that pain through drug
addiction or alcoholism
so trauma is behind a lot of addiction i
i think that we are going to see
a revolution in psychiatry and that
there will be a lot of
conditions that have
left a lot of people still suffering
that psychedelic assisted therapy
different psychedelics different
approaches but i think that we will see
a lot of hope for psychiatry and
psychotherapy and that psychedelics
would be a big part of
changing the practice of of psychiatry
and psychotherapy yeah this is really
to me fascinating so i i actually um
when i was younger for the longest time
wanted to be a psychiatrist
so i was excited by psychotherapy but
then i
uh perhaps incorrectly maybe you can
correct me but
became more and more cynical because it
felt like it was more about prescribing
drugs than psychotherapy
i'm not going to correct you that's i
mean right now it's like there is a
crisis
in psychiatry that there are so many
psychiatrists that are so fed up because
they have been pharmaceuticalized yes
they meet people for 15 minutes they
adjust their medications
this is the way they make the most money
yeah but they've lost the art of talking
to people
yes it's it's true and that's why we see
that
so many young psychiatric residents are
so thrilled by
psychedelics that they really want to
get back to
treating people as individuals not just
a bunch of chemicals
yeah that's truly fascinating because
the reason it was appealing to me it was
a way to
to study the human mind and to see ways
through talking that you can
make people feel better make people
better
you know make people suffer less and
that that was really exciting at the
time i ended up then going to ai
because then i can understand the mind
from that angle but um
it's exciting that that that could be
also
revolutionized the field of
psychotherapy take it from its
uh back to its origins to where um a
psychiatrist
would be a scholar of the mind yeah well
you know freud talked about
dreams as the royal road to the
unconscious
and there was a lot of we you you really
spent a lot of time with people
now um right before he died um
in in his last book freud wrote
something and again this will be a
rough paraphrase but he said that in the
future
we may learn about the energies of the
brain
and there'll be ways with chemicals to
influence that that will
help the therapeutic process yeah
[Laughter]
so you could say he was uh he was ahead
of his time
yeah this study paints a fascinating
picture
of a future where first for medical
applications but then also in general
psychedelics of various forms could be
used by the broader society
forgive the perhaps ridiculous question
but
if much of society including our
politicians are
um taking psychedelics
and dissolving their ego and going
through this whole process
how how do you think the world may look
different
in 20 30 50 years ah
okay so um i i said that i think
licensed legalization happens in 2035
yes
right so um and i think by 2050
um we will have enough people
hopefully spiritualized
we're also talking about um we hear so
much in terms of
climate change about you know net zero
carbon
so our goal is net zero trauma
when do we have a world with net zero
trauma i mean right now
you know we have two sites in israel so
we help a few people but the recent war
with gaza
has traumatized millions of people on
both sides
so we are a long way away from net zero
trauma
um but that's the hope and that's
i think possible i think humanity as a
whole
um is
like lemmings heading over a cliff with
climate change and with
the nuclear proliferation and just the
the religious hatreds and the more the
retreat to authoritarianism and
fundamentalism
and tribalism so i i think that there's
a very good chance though that
psychedelics used wisely so it's not
just makes psychedelics
legal and everybody takes them and you
know as you talked about ted kaczynski
you know
it's the context that people take it in
but i think that there's
um a reasonable chance that enough
people can sort of you could say
um clean their filters uh
to see people as um
more similar to them than different not
to label them as the enemy
stan groff again had this beautiful
phrase about um
transparent to the transcendent
the death that's what yeah so for our
ego can can we be transparent to the
transcendent because
can the filter that we look through the
world at be cleaned
to um you could say cleansing the doors
of perception you know
can it be clean to the point where we
can see the humanity in everybody
and see that um
one way to say this is that can we get
to the point where religions are seen as
like languages
where we all have this need to
communicate there's
thousands of different languages you
know we don't say that this language is
fundamentally better than this language
this language is the only right language
everybody must speak english and
russian is bad or german is better you
know maybe we'll get to that point that
that religions are like that that their
different cultural backgrounds different
symbol systems different um
saints and heroes and messiahs and all
this but that
you know yeah jesus is the son of god
but so are we so is everybody you know
or yes you know the jews are the chosen
people but so is everybody
so can we get there i think that we can
and i think that we need to to survive
the challenges that we're facing
and the hope is that by bringing
psychedelics as tools forward and trying
to bring
the context around them to be one of
responsibility rather than just profit
maximization
and just you know get as many people to
do them from all these for-profit
companies
you know can we and then also drug
policy reform and embed
knowledge in the society can we get to
honest drug education
you know dare the drug awareness
resistance
education you know is fundamentally
twisted i mean
but it's the program that's used in a
lot of schools now
so can we get honest drug education pure
drugs harm reduction
and knowledge about therapeutic uses and
um
on the one hand and and more of these
thousands of psychedelic clinics
um i'm hopeful um and that that's our
goal
but in this landscape of um
pharma companies they make a lot of
money
some people are worried about the impact
of those com you know
uh a big pharma on the landscape of
human trauma
yeah yeah and so there's of course some
companies could do good
but that's not inherent like um
many of these companies are not
optimizing for good they're optimizing
from profit exactly
exactly does this uh rise of for-profit
pharma companies were eu
how do you navigate it do we still have
for-profit companies that
basically uh do what uh maps does which
is like
fight the good fight for the benefit of
humanity like what like how do we
proceed in this in landscape or work
where drugs can make a lot of money
well i am concerned overall i think the
rise of the for-profit
companies we have to realize is a sign
of success
that we have overcome
the regulatory prohibitions we've
overcome
a lot of the public attitudes that are
against it we've demonstrated some
success so the rise of the for-profit
companies
are a sign of the progress that we've
made on the other hand turning things
over to profit maximizing companies
the big concern is that they're going to
try to
minimize the amount of therapy and make
it so the cost
is less so insurance companies are more
likely to cover it and then that they
just sell the most drugs
the other thing we've seen as an example
of this is s
ketamine by johnson johnson for
depression and it's done by a profit
maximizing company
they don't know anything about
psychedelic psychotherapy or
psychotherapy at all
and so they've gotten approval for
s-ketamine on the basis of it's just a
pharmacological treatment
and it's not delivered with therapy the
results fade pretty quickly
so you need to get more ketamine and so
it's
designed in a way to maximize the
profits for the
pharmaceutical company but it doesn't
maximize patient outcomes
what we're seeing though in these
various clinics that are being set up is
that a lot of people are realizing
that it works better with therapy
and so the clinics are run by people
that are therapists so that when they
provide therapy they're making more
money and and then you need less
ketamine
also ketamine itself s ketamine is a
isomer of ketamine that's been patented
for depression
and they sell it for hundreds of dollars
but ketamine itself
is one of the world's essential
medicines it's off patent it's been
around for a long time it was the main
battlefield anaesthetic in vietnam
and it's only a few bucks because it's
generic so
a lot of the ketamine clinics are saying
great thank you
johnson johnson you've helped
demonstrate that ketamine is good for
depression but we're not going to buy it
from you
we're going to buy it for a few bucks
and we're going to add therapy to it
now there's a bunch of ketamine mills
you could say that are that are
just prescribing the ketamine and then
people are making a lot of money there
so i am worried about that i think the
best thing that we can do
is create an alternative narrative
a different kind of example we can lead
by example we can't make
for-profit companies into benefit
corporations
unless they want to do that we can't
make them to you know really
maximize patient outcomes but if we
create an example
of something that's different the hope
is that
um people will gravitate towards that
and some of the other
companies like even now we have exxon
and other these uh companies
oil companies saying oh we're big into
alternative energy and we're
you know and that starts with companies
that show an example that uh
then communicates to the public that
this is something exciting and then they
demand of
the same of exxon and so on the public
demands and
you could say the same thing for the
public demanding the
the big pharma to uh to
optimize for benefit versus optimize for
profit
and maybe giving power to the therapists
more power to the therapist more power
to the doctors that ultimately
uh want i think
incentives are interesting but i think
doctors ultimately
care more because they're in direct
contact with humans
they want to make people better it's not
you know sure they want to make money
but they ultimately want to make people
feel better because they get to look at
people and it's so joyful
to make people feel better at the end of
the day so giving more power to them
is also perhaps one of the ways that you
then incentivize
uh the the pharma companies that are
trying to do good because the doctors
will choose those companies
yeah now the other part of this is drug
policy reform
right so that if we make it so you can
buy mdma for 10 or 20 bucks
on your own and we've trained people on
here's our therapeutic method
here is our ways for peer support
then people have an alternative from
buying it from the pharma companies
so most of the for-profit companies
have come to this conclusion that um
drug policy reform is bad for their
business model
i think they're making a fundamental
mistake and i think the reason is that
the more that we destigmatize this the
more that we sensitize people to this is
an approach
even when people can get it on their own
and do it with their friends or do it
with themselves
there's going to be even more people
that say oh my god i've got real
serious issues i would rather go to
trained professionals
covered by insurance and i think it'll
increase the business but most
of the for-profit companies don't see it
that way and so
as a non-profit that owns a benefit corp
we're not trying to maximize sales or
profits so that
but but i do believe that drug policy
reform creates this alternative
access point for people and that will
help keep the for-profits in check
to some extent as well
i love it uh is there um let's put on
your
wise visionary hat and ask
when you look to young folks is there
advice you can give
to young people today whether in high
school or college
about career about life
you've lived quite a non-linear and
fascinating life yourself
is there advice you can give either on
career or more generally in life
well i i would say what what people
often hear is that um
you know we're not actually here for
that long a period of time
um and so to the a and the world is on
fire
and whether humanity survives is not
clear
and whether how many species are we
going to kill before we figure out not
to do that anymore
so i would advise you to really
try to
develop a combination of what do you
need in terms of
income for your own survival but what
does the world need in terms of
um help to make the world better
and you know howard thurman who he
talked about who
who ran the good friday experiment the
minister there he said
he's got a famous quote attributed to
him he says um
and this is exactly it to young people
he said um
you know there's nothing particular that
you should do but find what makes you
come alive because what the world needs
is people that have come alive and are
passionate
so i i would say that
beware of this uh
trap that you need um vast resources
that you need all this stuff
you know uh you know i i keep thinking
of the
super wealthy people in first class on
the titanic
you know as the titanic is sinking you
know their money's not going to help
them
the the earth is like titanic you know
we're sinking we're destroying the
planets destroying the environment so
it's um you need a certain amount of
money to be comfortable
to not be at that edge of survival
because once you're at that edge of
survival it's hard to think about
anything else but but i'd say to young
people
to the extent that you're able to do
this and again student debt and all this
kind of stuff is a big problem there too
but really just try to
find this combination of what the world
needs and what you need the other thing
to say to young people is um life is a
lot shorter than you think
that and a 20-year plan is not really
that long
so if it takes you 20 years to get in a
position to do what you want to do
go for it you know have long-term plans
the the other part
that was so important for me to um
keep doing what i've been doing
basically now it's
um 49 years that i've sort of been
devoting my life on psychedelics since i
was 18.
when i started i didn't think it would
ever work i just thought this is the
only idea i have in this crazy world
you know this is what i want to work on
luckily i had support from my family
that took care of my survival needs
so i could do that but i realized that
if my
happiness was dependent upon
accomplishments
that i might never be happy that i was
able to
reframe happiness in terms of effort
yeah so if i'm trying hard to get stuff
um
to be better whether it's better or not
i can be happy at the end of each day
i tried and so i think you you try to
separate out
the goals that you have and your
happiness to whether you're trying hard
the other thing i would say is that
everybody has
this humanity within them so be very
careful about dividing the world into us
and them
um you know and try to
so so one of the things that i've done
um
that has um taken a long time because
you know i feel like um you know drugs
are illegal i always felt like you know
the police were the predator and i'm the
prey
yes you know but now we're working with
the police and the police have
tremendous trauma from the work that
they do
we have one police officer who is now
going he's a full-time police officer
he's also a psychotherapist and he's
going through our training program
to learn how to give mdma therapy to
other police officers
and i met his police chief a couple
times he got permission from his police
chief to go to the second part of our
training program which is where we give
mdma to therapists who volunteer as a
patient
so we have just a couple weeks ago dosed
the police with mdma
yeah and so i think this idea of those
people that are on the quote other side
try to see through that to their
humanity
to what their pains and suffering what
their struggles are to the extent that
you can
and that i think and and build long-term
relationships you
you never know what's gonna um come
around 20 years from now so you you help
some people try to keep these
relationships going 20 years from now
something could
could come and um and
also um be persistent
you know yeah i think that's
that's been the key to success i mean
once the fda or dea figured out
we're not going anywhere they're gonna
have to deal with us
then we started getting some progress
it's a mix of patience and stubbornness
that gets things done is there something
you've
figured out through your journey with
psychedelics
about some of the big why questions
about life
like oh like what the heck's the value
of love
um why does it suck so much that we die
and uh and for some of us maybe it's the
russian and me but it's
quite terrifying the notion of it or the
biggest why question of them all which
is what's the meaning
of it all well um yeah what i've
discovered is that um
we don't need answers to those questions
you know
that the fact that um
we can feel happy you know that we can
love that we can have
moments of happiness that's enough
you know figuring out these big
questions you can get lost in that
and um you we all can come up with our
answers what's what's the meaning of
life why
why is there life why is there
consciousness but um
i don't know that we need those answers
what we know is that we're um
social creatures that um
we people other people can make us happy
by certain things we can make other
people happy
that one life is enough so this other
part about uh
why is it so um tragic that we die yeah
um i i don't think it's tragic that we
die so first off if you believe in this
collective unconscious but but but
we have an impact that lasts but i i
think that
for me at least i've been of the view
that um
we should be grateful for death that
death makes life precious
that if we had an infinite amount of
time
you know i mean i'm i'm a bit of a
procrastinator about stuff
particularly things that are really you
know hard to do and you just you know
you just don't do it and then like
where'd the day go i was gonna do that
so
so if we had an infinite life we never
died um know would life be precious
would we do anything i don't think so so
my parents um gave um
you know every jewish new year they
would they would make their uh new
year's card
and and one of the quotes was fantastic
it was just uh
we have to make up for the brevity of
life with the intensity of life
oh man that is good
well the end makes things precious death
makes life precious
the end of this conversation makes it
precious
and uh which is a great way to end eric
it's i wanted to talk to you for a long
time
i share you were very excited about the
study i can now understand
exactly why this is really promising
this is really exciting gives me hope
about
the future even if it doesn't come
fast enough but like you said had to be
patient and stubborn
thank you so much for wasting all your
valuable time with me today it's truly
an honor to meet you and talk to you
not a waste at all i really appreciate
it this time together
thank you for listening to this
conversation with rick doblin and thank
you to
theragun expressvpn blinkist and
asleep check them out in the description
to support this podcast
and now let me leave you with some words
from terence mckenna
nature loves courage you make the
commitment and nature
will respond to that commitment by
removing impossible obstacles
dream the impossible dream and the world
will not grind you
under it will lift you up this is the
trick
this is what all the teachers and
philosophers who really counted
who really touched the alchemical gold
this is what they understood
this is the shamanic dance and the
waterfall this is how magic is done
by hurling yourself into the abyss and
discovering
that it's a feather bed thank you for
listening and hope to see you
next time