these kinds of guests always bring the best out of joe (or at least bring out his most genuine curiosity)
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Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit established in 1986 to advance evidence-based psychedelic therapy and end prohibition. MAPS incubated Lykos Therapeutics (formerly MAPS Public Benefit Corporation) which is leading drug development of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. Learn more about Psychedelic Science 2025, June 16–20 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, at www.psychedelicscience.org, and visit www.maps.org for information on MAPS
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these kinds of guests always bring the best out of joe (or at least bring out his most genuine curiosity)
Brian Muraresku, The Immortality Key
Gil Karni, Trip of Compassion
Ka-Tzetnik, Shivitti: A Vision
Lester Grinspoon, Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine
Pippa Ehrlich, My Octopus Teacher
Stanislav Grof, LSD: Doorway to the Numinous
Tom Shroder, Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal
If life wasn't real it'd be the craziest psychedelic trip ever - Joe Rogan
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The Joe Rogan experience train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day
Very good to see my friend so it's so great to be here again your tireless work
has not gone unnoticed
I mean, I'm beyond thankful that you and maps are out there and that you've
done this incredible job
and we were just describing the genius of
first
Doing it with people that no one can deny
Need help and like with with soldiers with PTSD using psychedelics to help them
get over their their their
horrible you know issues that it's one of the best ways to sort of ingratiate
or
Let people know the the powerful benefits of psychedelics and do it to people
that you wouldn't expect to be connected with
Psychedelics ordinarily, right?
Right well the the most unusual people are police officers and so we've
actually had police officers in our studies
And we even have a police officer full-time who's also a psychotherapist
And he's going through our program to learn how to give mdma therapy to other
police officers wow and I met
His police chief several times and
Persuaded and told him about our full training program and one of the steps is
where we have a protocol from the FDA where
Therapists can volunteer to receive mdma themselves as part of the training and
so the police chief gave his police officer permission
To volunteer to take mdma Wow, so we're actually helping give mdma to police
officers to give it to other police officers with trauma
That would be amazing. You know we really need to do get it to prisoners
Exactly and prison guards. Yeah, they're also very traumatized and so oh, yeah,
I can imagine
Yeah, there was a 35 year follow-up study. I did to
Timothy Leary when he was at Harvard
He did the conquered prison experiment and that was to give psilocybin to
prisoners
Who are getting ready to be released and the goal was to see if they could
produce pro-social
Experiences that would then help reduce recidivism
And the study was unfortunately
It was promoted as very very successful. I thought I was going to do a follow-up
to
Bring light to one of the most important
Psychedelic studies ever but as I got more into it, it turned out that
Timothy Leary had fudged the data. Oh, no. Yeah, it was really disappointing.
What did he do? Well, for example
The longer you're out of prison the more likely you are to go back. So his
group
On average had been out of prison 10 months and he compared it with a group of
people that had been out of prison 24 months
And that was published in this obscure british criminology journal
And nobody had bothered to check to see if he was doing a fair comparison
And so when I started doing this follow-up, I was just like how could he have
done that and the
The data that was from the prior prisoners from conquered prison
up to two years it also
Showed how they were at different time points including at the 10-month time
point and the results were the same at the 10-month point
So it's obvious if you compare people who've been out of prison longer with
people who've been out of prison shorter
You know, it's just not a fair comparison. The other thing he did
Not to rag on Timothy Leary, but I think he did a lot of great things
But the other thing he did was he said that a lot of these people were
Gone back to prison because they had minor
Parole violations and that they were supervised more carefully because they had
done psilocybin in prison and that they were just
Recidivism because of minor things and so when I got into the prison
system records, it turns out that they
Did have their parole violated, but that's because they had committed new
crimes for which they were later convicted
So Timothy but the what what he realized is that you can't just
Help people have these experiences
And then let them out of prison and assume that they'll just be fine. You need
aftercare. Yeah, you need support groups
And so he had started to create that and that's when he got kicked out of harvard
and then they fell apart
So my conclusion of the follow-up study was that
He had basically committed scientific fraud and it wasn't really
True what he had said, but it didn't mean that it doesn't work
It means that you can't rely over much on just the psychedelic experience. You
have to have
supportive aftercare
And group support and if you do that, I think it could potentially work
So we have been talking to various people who want to do work with prisoners
And I think or recently released it's hard to get permission to do work inside
prisons
because of the question whether prisoners can give
informed consent whether there's
Pressure on them to do it or if they do it they think they'll get out sooner or
something
But but it would be perfect when you're in prison to be
doing this inner work to
Explore how you ended up in prison and and the traumas that maybe made you
Commit certain kind of crimes. Yeah, I think that same argument about
Prisoners and psilocybin and aftercare
You could apply that maybe to a lesser extent to just the general public like
one of the arguments that i've had
Not not the arguments i've had but the conversations i've had with people the
argument about psychedelics not being life-changing
People will say well. I know a lot of people have done psychedelics and they're
basically the same person
You know, they have one experience and they get back to it and the way i've
described it is that
I think that a real profound breakthrough of psychedelic experience is like
pressing
Control alt delete for your brain and when you reboot you have a fresh desktop.
It's clean
But you have one folder on the desktop that says my old
And most people open up that folder and just get comfortable with their old
So after the experience this this thing where you sort of have to
You have to rethink how you view everything and you have this
Renewed perspective you have this completely different view of the world
But it's confusing you don't have scaffolding to travel on you don't have like
a
You don't have a clear pathway
But it's really easy to slip into your own thing and then start
Doing all the same dumb shit that you were doing before and I think for
prisoners
It's probably profoundly more difficult because
Not only are you outside
Not only uh have you been incarcerated which has got to be incredibly traumatic
you've been locked into a cage
They take away all your freedom. They tell you what to do
But then you become accustomed to that way of life
And there's comfort in the fact that you are told what to do and you know what
every day holds for you
Then you go out in the world
You're out in the free world and you don't know how to get by and it's really
hard to get an apartment because you're a felon
It's really hard to get a job because you're a felon
And then someone who you know from the old life is doing something illegal
And they invite you to join in and you say well this is my chance to score I
can get a little bit money
Maybe then I can get an apartment and maybe then I can get back on track
And the next thing you know you're living a life of crime again
Yeah, we make it so hard for people to reintegrate into society
Yeah, and I think one of the problems from the 60s was this idea of
You know one dose miracle cure that's all you need
Yeah, and I think what we've come to understand is that it's not that way
occasionally it can be
But mostly it's not and you need this support afterwards and you need to
integrate it and what we've also learned from neuroscience is that you're
actually
neuroplasticity that these psychedelics help you rewire your brain in new ways,
but you have to reinforce that
It's just not yeah automatic. It's not about the drug
It's about the therapy that the drug helps make more effective and people have
placed undue
Confidence you could say in the drug itself
Yeah, you need a new pathway once you've gotten off of your old pathway the
psychedelics jolt you into this new realm
But if you don't have a new pathway
Then you you panic and people fall back into their comfort zone and if your
comfort zone is
Alcohol abuse and doing the same things you've done before and ruining your
life and taking pills
And you're gonna go right back to that. Yeah, there's one example of one person
where it was like a one dose miracle cure
It's really rare, but i'll just
Explain a bit. He was a veteran and had ptsd. I talked about
tony macy during my
ted talk
But he had this sense that he had been disabled with ptsd for years
Because of friends of his that had been killed all the violence that he saw
when he was in iraq
And under the influence of mdma
He had this realization that there was something good about the ptsd
He was getting a benefit from it which was
It was the way that he showed loyalty to his friends who had died that he was
connected to their memory and that he was
Suffering and it was a way to be bonded still with them
But then he was able to kind of see himself from the eyes of his friends who
had died
And to realize that they wouldn't want him to squander his life. They didn't
have life anymore
They would want him to live as fully as possible
And he realized there's another way to honor his friends which is to
To live and he thought what am I going to do with the rest of my life and in
that moment?
He cured himself of ptsd
Then he said i'm taking opiates for pain
But I don't really think i'm taking it for pain. I'm thinking more about it as
an escape
I don't need the opiates anymore
And then he said I don't need this mdma anymore either i'm done. I want to drop
out of the study
This was his first of what was going to be three mdma sessions wow and he
dropped out and we said sure it's all voluntary
but if you
We'll just do the outcome measures that would help us and he agreed to do that
And at the two-month follow-up no ptsd and then around 11 months when we have
the 12-month follow-up
He started thinking well, maybe i'd like another mdma experience
I said well, we we can't quite do that if you're out of the protocol you've
dropped out
But at least it's only for ptsd this study. Let's see what your scores are at
The 12 months and no ptsd and that was about 9 10 years ago. I've been in touch
with him recently
He's doing great
But it was this realization
That he was able to make under the influence of one experience of mdma that
enabled him to reinterpret
The way he could be loyal to his friends who had died
That's amazing and it makes sense
It completely makes sense that that would be one of the reasons why a soldier
would have ptsd
You talk to soldiers that experience combat duty one of the things they say is
that there's this insane profound connection
With their fellow soldiers. Yes, and when one of them is killed and they
survive they have this
Survivor syndrome this survivor's guilt. Yeah, and it it haunts them, you know
And if they could honor the fallen soldiers by living their best life and not
being in constant trauma
It'd be better for everybody and that is what their brothers and sisters would
want. Exactly. Yeah, and then they also have this sense that
many of them feel like
Now that they've found healing with psychedelics that they have this sense of
guilt in a sense that they're so many of their
Comrades have not had that opportunity for healing. Yeah, so many of them now
become more advocates
For helping others from the military who've traumatized in that way get access
to psychedelics
To kind of bring them all back home. That's amazing. It makes sense
I I learned a lot from the one mdma trip that I had the one mdma trip
I had made me realize how insecure I am like I didn't realize it
Like I always thought that the way it's not that I didn't realize that I had
insecurities like everybody has insecurities
But I didn't realize how they affect
Every single interaction that I would have with people and that kind of
everybody does
You're always wary of how someone's gonna view you and how you're communicating
with them
And you know, is this like are we safe talking to each other? Are you gonna be
mean to me?
Am I gonna be mean to you like there's this weird tension that human beings
have when you first meet people?
But these people that I met when we were doing mdma together like no one had
any fear
no one had to end we were all holding hands and talking and it was
It was a this bizarrely free experience
Where it made me realize like wow like most of the time we talk to people we
have these guards up
we have these walls up
And you kind of have to I guess because some people have nefarious intentions
and you know sometimes life can be dangerous
But it made me think boy if you get this to prisoners
You know if you get because like how many of them are products of traumatic
childhoods almost all of them. Yes
Right not all of them, but many of them most of them. Yeah
That's the the the argument like the determinism versus free will argument as
well
That we want to look at someone who's a person who's a criminal and say
Oh, this person's a piece of shit. They're a criminal
One of the things that happened to me as a father is seeing
You know my children go from being babies to being you know little people that
i'm talking to and then you know even
young adults it makes you realize like
Oh, these are all babies
Like those people in prisons you you go by a prison you see those those people
that are all like trapped in that yard with barbed wire fence
Those are babies. They're babies that stayed alive
They were at one point time someone's beautiful innocent child and then
The worst shit happened to them the worst environments the worst parenting the
worst
Trauma maybe sexual abuse maybe assault maybe of drug abuse
Maybe criminal justice abuse
Maybe you know all sorts of chaos that can happen when you're living in these
crime infested
Gang ridden neighborhoods that a lot of these people come from and all you see
around you
Is this this is what you're modeling you're modeling crime and criminals?
And then also you're in jail and then people go well put them in jail and lock
them all up forever and you got this sort of
Hardline republican way of thinking this is like a completely non-empathetic
non-compassionate way of looking at
babies
Which is what they are they're just
Babies that got look you and I are lucky we're babies, but we made it to this
point in our lives in a pretty good state
You know without some bumps and bruises along the way, but here we are those
people did not
And the only way that I could think of to really reset who they are is through
psychedelics
I don't think there's anything else that's going to really
Push them into a new realm of understanding of their position in life and how
they got to where they are
Well, I think there are other therapies that are effective. There are other
ways good. I don't think so
I don't think so and I think that's profound when we combine them with
psychedelics
Yeah, then you get to go really deep, but social programs
Yes, programs where they're counseled programs where someone can say hey, man,
I've done this
I used to be a thief. I used to be whatever and now here. I'm not I can help
you. I got out of jail
I made better of my life. We can do that with you
And we all have that capacity if we're traumatized to do things that are we're
not proud of that we're ashamed of
We can all be twisted in certain ways
So I just feel so grateful for my parents who I had very loving parents
Who supported me to even when I broke their hopes for me when I was
17 years old in college and starting to do LSD and I'm the oldest of four kids
and in the middle of my
First year of college, I called up my parents and said i'm going to drop out of
college
I want to study LSD and I want you to pay for it
What were you in college for?
Well, this was 1971 that I started
In 1972 is when I had this conversation with my parents. I was studying
psychology and
Russian, you know, I was very interested in the other so I had studied
Russian in high school and actually I had gone to russia my parents sent me to
russia in 1970 for the summer to learn russian
And that's actually where I first started working in the underground you could
say
My parents gave me some prayer books because we're jewish and prayer books were
forbidden in russia
And they gave me these prayer books to give to these guys at the synagogue
And I when I got there I was with about 60 high school students and we could
speak passable russian
And and so a bunch of the young russian black market kids came up to us
Again 1970 we had the psychedelic revolution in america and they just had repression
And so they wanted to buy our shirts our clothes blue jeans anything that
looked like america
They would pay rubles and rubles were worthless outside of russia because they
wanted to block anybody from escaping
You'd have to escape with no money
So we made me and two other guys gathered all the stuff from all these other
high school students and we made thousands and thousands thousands of rubles
And we knew that we couldn't take it home or anything
And so I went to go meet this guy at the synagogue to give him these books in moscow
And he said we're being watched
Don't do it here
But let me meet you at a subway station at this amount of time at this station
And I said I also got all these rubles to give you and so we we had this
meeting
And I was just 16 and I was like hey if they catch me, you know, I'm a dumb kid
They'll just send me home
So I was kind of fearless in that way
And we made this transfer and I gave him this
A bunch of rubles and the prayer books and you know, but it was my parents kind
of that sent me on this mission
And that was my first underground activity was against the russians against the
communists
And it was very enlightening and but the one of the things that was most
enlightening for me
was I took a walk on the beach with a russian girl who worked at the
School that we were going to and I just had this conversation with her
You know primitive because I wasn't that great in russian
But I was just like you don't want to kill me. I don't want to kill you
What does you know? Because this was the height of the cold war and all of
these
Could we destroy the world not all that long after the cuban missile crisis?
And I just thought you know, you're just a person. I'm just you know
Our governments might be in conflict, but I had this
Image that all the russians are horrible and hateful and they all want to kill
us and
It was extremely eye-opening in terms of who's the other
And I found the other was was me
Was just like me
I had this other experience. I just wanted to share about this was a dmt
experience
Where I realized that you know, we all have the capacity for evil if we
Aren't careful in a sense. So the dmt
Kind of dissolved my ego very quickly. It was the first time I ever did dmt. It
was
Sitting in a circle with a group of people at esalen. This was terence mckenna
and
um, you did dmt with terence mckenna. Yeah, yeah, and ralph metzner from farward
and and we would um
There's about eight of us and we would each of us it takes about 15 minutes 10
15 minutes. So we'd
One person would do it
With that sort of close their eyes lie down and come back
After 15 minutes or so and then tell the story about what happened and then we
pass the pipe to the next person and this would like a whole evening of
Dmt stories so my dmt experience was this
Um, I saw this um horizontal line then I saw a vertical line then I saw color
it turned red then it turned into cubes
Like squares and then it turned into like an mc escher painting that was just
And then I was gone and it was just it didn't make sense
Then I was gone and then
I just had this insight that in the deepest recesses of who I think I am in
this inner voice
That's kind of always talking to you this that I was using english and I didn't
invent english
It's all the product of all these people that came before me
So even in my most inner private self, I'm intermixed with everybody else and
everything that came before me
And I had this beautiful experience of going back to the big bang and all of
this kind of
Sweep of evolutionary history and I'm part of everything and everything's part
of me
And it was all this beautiful stuff
And then I realized this sort of logical part of my mind was like well
If everything's part of you and you're part of everything then hitler is part
of you too
It's inner and and that was very shattering for me because that was in the dmt
experience. That was in the dmt
Did you see hitler in the experience? I did and I got a million
Golden hitlers floating around you well that that that we all have that
capacity that that if we want to claim that we're
Connected with everything that it's it's not just the evil out there that it's
Potentially in in me and it was very shattering and the next day
We did ketamine and so this is where I did more see hitler
so this is actually an experience that has
Helped me with my political strategy in a way of what maps is doing is both
drug development and drug policy reform
So under this experience the next it was very depressing and shattering to
realize that I couldn't just
Say all the evils out there that I have this capacity that hitler's inside me
So the next day under ketamine
I was hovering above and behind hitler as he's giving one of these speeches
like the nuremberg rally kind of things
And the ketamine gave me a bit of remove so I didn't freak out
I was I was there, but I was not there so I didn't feel vulnerable in that way
And I saw him doing this speech and i'm thinking how do I get into his head?
How do I help him not want to murder and kill and you know
What can we do to you know undo this evil?
And then I saw this
The heil hitler salute near the end of his speech and he would go
You know he put up his hand like that and then everybody in the crowd would do
it back to him
And I felt like it was the one pushing out this energy and then the many
pushing it back to him
And giving him there and they would go back and forth and the intensity was
kind of increasing
And at that point I was just realizing there's no way to get into his head that
that he's does it has to be voluntary
And that he was getting so much from it
that he wouldn't
And I felt this panic rising above me and I felt that if I were to panic
I would never be able to be effective in the world that I would just have turn
away from that
And then with ketamine you can still breathe
And so I realized that if I just breathe that might help me deal with this fear
And I started deep breathing and then came this idea that ironically rather
than
Trying to change the mind of the one we need to change the mind of the many
And that they don't get as much out of it as hitler did that they're giving
away their power to him
And so that's where we need mass mental health
So you hear a lot of people I had a chance to talk to steve jobs for an hour
A long time ago and um, but he was like
stuck in the 60s in a way he was like god if we could just give all these
politicians lsd
And I think yeah, that might be good, but they might resist it
But really we have to base this new compassion and spirituality in the masses
in
millions tens of millions of people this this hitler thing
Can I yeah ask you like when i've never done ketamine so when you're having
this experience what is
What is it like do you realize that you are in a psychedelic experience that
you're in some sort of a hallucination?
Or does it actually feel like?
You are there like what is it felt like I was there
But I had this sense that I was somehow or other also not there and removed
But you knew that you were tripping
Well at the time do you think I I lost that for a while and as the panic kind
of
Built up I had this thought I can breathe so I I did have that sense that I was
on a drug and that if I were just to
Modulate my breathing and and that would help relax me
So I had that thought but I felt like I was really there and it was way
You know
I've seen movies of world war ii and i've seen movies of hitler giving speeches
But I was never as emotionally connected to it and in the moment as I was
during this ketamine experience
So it was kind of a dual
situation where I was there
But a part of me felt
Removed and safe and this thought like okay just breathe
But but I never had that insight before about the heil hitler salute and how
this energy exchange between
And how the rallies were very dramatic and that's where he cemented his power
through these rallies
Well, you know hitler was on all kinds of drugs. Yes. Yeah, um, there was
God I keep forgetting who told us that story jimmy, but there's a story about
hitler
Convincing mussolini
Do you remember i've tried i've tried to look it up and find it? I can't I can't
find it
It might not have even had it happen on a podcast. That's the problem is I have
so many conversations and my memory is just so
Full it's just there's no room there. I got like folders stuffed all over the
place
I don't know where anything is, but the story was that hitler was in the middle
of campaigning
And he was completely exhausted and he was supposed to meet mussolini and he
was going to not meet mussolini because he was so exhausted
But then they shot him up with testosterone and liquid cocaine
And when they did that he was just bouncing off the walls and he cornered mussolini
and talked to him for five hours and convinced him
Not to leave the effort not to leave the war effort and he sort of
One of the the things that this story was basically pointing to was that much
of hitler's
mania and much of this rabid
Attack that he had put on the rest of the western world was fueled by amphetamines
yes and
Cocaine and testosterone and that they just kept injecting him
With all this shit that gave him this insane confidence and insane
Maniacal aggression and it completely makes sense if you think about what he
did and then we also know that
The kamikazes were on amphetamines and many of the nazi soldiers were on amphetamines
Well the blitzkrieg how they would do that this kind they were
Days and days on amphetamines and then that promotes aggression as well
And just psychotic delusions. Yeah, and he had this delusion of creating this
master race, which is
And that's the most cocaine idea of all time right like this idea like we're
gonna engineer the greatest human race ever
And you know and and and to be able to look at that idea from this
Cocaine fueled or amphetamine fueled perspective to the point where you're
willing to commit genocide in order to accomplish your goal
Yeah, drugs were a big factor in the third Reich. Yeah, very much so
Also, we know that john kennedy was given amphetamines. That's miss dr. Feelgood,
right? Yeah, dr.
Feelgood was a little legitimate doctor that would run around and give people
amphetamines
What'd you find everybody the story? Oh, who where is this from?
historyhit.com did hitler's drug problem change the course of history
He got a shot of this stuff called you could all okay hitler took you could all
for the first time before the dreaded meeting
His mood changed immediately everyone was very happy that the furor was back in
the game
His enthusiasm was such that on the way to the airport to fly to his meeting
with mussolini
He demanded a second shot the first shot had been administered subcutaneously
But the second was intravenous it was even better during the meeting with mussolini
hitler was so energized
That he pretty much just shouted for three hours
There's several reports from that meeting including an american intelligence
report to the embarrassment of everyone in attendance
hitler didn't stop talking throughout the entire duration of the meeting
Mussolini couldn't get a word in edgeways
Meaning he wasn't able to voice his concerns about the war effort and perhaps
raise the prospect of italy leaving
So italy stayed at the end of the day hitler told morale the success of today
is totally yours
Wow, so morale must have been the doctor
Yes
You could don't find out what that shit is
Okay, you could do is similar to heroin. In fact, it's stronger than heroin
It also has an effect that heroin doesn't have it makes you euphoric
But I think they shot him up with some other stuff too. The word was that it
was I'd read
heroin I'd read cocaine and
Oxycodone, so I just hit google and that's what comes up. Oh
Interesting, but I had heard and cocaine it says there five milligrams of
cocaine, too
Where's it say that under a di x wikipedia there? We yeah
Oh, is that what's in there math and coke mixed together? Oh, so that's what
you could deal is
Oh
Okay, that makes sense. So you could do is five milligrams of cocaine and three
milligrams of methamphetamine
Wow, so d d i x it's a
Methamphetamine based experimental performance enhancer developed by nazi germany
Wow, so that's the stuff
Yeah, so maybe we can do the other with mdma and
Certain kind of psychedelics to help people feel
That there's other ways than violence to try to achieve their goals. Well, I
just think he was
I don't you know, I think what what does it say here could march 90 kilometers
a day
Without rest what is that using how many miles is that?
So 100 miles is 66 to 66 to 100 kilometers is 60 miles
Wow, that's a lot so
Like a human being is essentially the product of all the chemicals that are
running through your veins
It's your neurochemistry your biochemistry
All of the nutrients you've eaten
Food water and an imbalance of any of those things can severely change the way
you think or behave
Our brain is a drug factory people talk about a world without drugs our brain
is a drug factory
Yeah, and the people that talk about no drugs, you know generally they
Enjoy some drugs. Oh tobacco alcohol. Yeah, yeah
Carl hart is one of my favorite people to talk to
Do you know that carl hart we've invited him to join the board of directors of
maps amazing?
He's going through this six-month process of getting to know us and we're
getting to know him
He's gonna come to our board of directors meeting in a couple weeks. Yeah, carl
hart is fantastic. He's amazing
He's a perfect example of someone who
had a
Certain perspective before he became a research scientist and thought of drugs
as being
All negative connotations thought of them as being addictive terrible for you
But then through actual rigorous study like actually understanding and studying
the effects of drugs
Then became to change his perspective based on data
And then realize like oh, no, no, no
This is this is most of what we think about drugs is
Incorrect or is propaganda and to have the courage to be a professor
Right and to be a legitimate scholar and have the courage to say that he enjoys
heroin
And then he likes to sniff heroin it helps relationships with his wife and it
helps his friendships and I was like that is
Because he's just being honest, you know, he's being courageous and he's
incredibly
Incredibly courageous and honest and also he's so fucking smart and when he
says it you realize like, okay, this is not some
Crackpot perspective. This is an actual scholar who's telling you how this
stuff works
And you should probably listen because he's got the courage to do this in the
face of all of the propaganda
And the current cultural narrative, which is that drugs ruin lives and he's
saying no
No, they don't ruin lives. They don't ruin my life
And you look at his life his life is great. He's not getting ruined by drugs.
He's using them
Like with responsibly he's using them like an adult
Yeah, one of the things I talked before is this dual strategy of maps the drug
development
You know the pharmaceutical drug development and and drug policy reform and so
carl is one of the leading advocates for drug policy reform
And that's why we're trying to see if he'll come join the board
And one of the things that he asked us to do is to look at our employee manual
our handbook
We've got about 120 people now in the maps and then we also have the maps
public benefit corporation
Which is our for-profit but benefit maximizing not profit maximizing
And he said that because we don't do drug testing it might not be surprising to
anybody
But we don't do drug testing for employees. It's all about performance. It's
not about what drugs you take
And so carl wanted us to take a look at how we described
That and we just emphasized that even more that even if for cause we'll never
drug test people
It's about their performance. Yeah
And then we put in there that some of the things that I really like to do I
just wanted it to be there that we call them smokable tasks
So we permit people to
Smoke pot or do things
During work, you know, some people like to microdose some people like to
Do different things and we just say if it does if it enhances your performance
fine if it makes you
Unable to do your work. That's not good, but it's not about what you do
And then one of my favorite things actually and we put this in the employee
manual is that
One of the smokable tasks for me is strategizing is getting high and meeting
with MAP staff and some of us will get high
Some of us won't but then we'll just
Strategize so we put that in the employee handbook that it's okay to
Smoke pot at work if you're doing strategizing or other kind of things and carl
was really
You know a big factor in sort of articulating that even more clearly that
It would be very disappointing if you guys did drug tests
It wouldn't be terrible
Can you imagine if maps is drugged piss in the cup wilson what I thought I
thought I was working at maps
And we will let people um work with us who don't do drugs so right but you don't
want people just showing up drunk either
Unless they think somehow or other that
Enhances their performance. I mean again, it's not about about responsibility.
It's about responsibility and it's about what particular tasks like
Some people can really do spreadsheets better when they're high because it
helps them focus some people
They would just lose track of all the numbers right that's me
But writing jokes I feel like about marijuana is a superpower
I feel like it gives you these new ideas that I don't know where ideas come
from you know they they come from
The ether right you're you're pulling them out of
Cultural references you're pulling them out of the life experiences creativity
It's there's so many different and then a jolt of marijuana
Puts you in a completely different realm of experiences and ideas it puts you
in this different place
And I always feel like other ideas are accessible when you're on marijuana that
aren't anywhere else
Carl sagan shared that yes
Yes, he was a daily pot smoker and he had to hide that because he was worried
He wouldn't be part of the space program if it was clear that he was smoking
pot all the time
Yes, yes, and yeah, wasn't there like something that he was there was something
where he was denied
something because of his
Use of marijuana because he's stated use of marijuana
I forget what it was about like weird i'm not sure there was a one of his best
friends was a dr lester grinspoon who was a
Psychiatrist at harvard medical school
And so lester was kind of a mentor of mine. He recently died
And lester had a book of
stories about people who had used
marijuana for different purposes, but for carl he had him but he
Hit his name it was an anonymous report because he was worried about what would
happen if he was so out about it
But yeah, that that statement that he made about the use of marijuana was
through a pseudonym, right?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes through pseudonym
But it's so well written like the way he described it and that these these
experiences are available through cannabis
That wouldn't be available to him. Yeah, there's there's a line of research
called semantic priming
and
What that means is that if I say night you're normally going to say day or you
there's certain number of kind of
Associations that we normally have to a word so semantic is like a word and you
prime somebody and then you see how they respond
And so there's been research done with psilocybin
When people are under the influence of psilocybin and then you give them a
certain word
And what they found is that people have a wider range of associations
To that word when they're under the influence of psilocybin and the same would
be true for marijuana
So that you have access to a broader sense of connections
It's not your normal pathways and that's where I think creativity can come from
Because you're able to look at things in a new way and the old patterns
That are so reinforced the psilocybin or the cannabis or other things make
broader
range of semantic priming
Interesting
Semantic priming
Yeah
And what is
What what what is this the discipline of semantic priming just like us clearly
Well, it's like cognitive neuroscience, right?
You know, you know how do our brains process information and when normally
You know, we have certain kind of go-to
Associations with things mm-hmm and then under the influence of these
Psychedelics or cannabis you have just a wider range of associations and
Also, you're you're not seeing from the normal
Perspective yeah, and that promotes new ideas and not all of new ideas are
great
But if we're stuck in the same old ideas
You're not going to be able to filter new ideas to see which ones are really
gems
Yeah, it really brings to light this idea that you can't to be
As balanced a person as you can be or to sort of try to optimize
Your perspective on things
You need to have a lot of things in line like you need to have your personal
relationships in line
You need to have your career
Goals or at least your path in line you need to have your physical health in
line your diet should be in line
All your the way you view the world like how you choose to interact with people
You should have sort of an ethic and a scaffolding for that all these different
things now
When you add psychedelics to those things
That's when I in at least in my opinion like from my personal perspective when
i've had the best results is when i've
Had other things in a good place
And so my trips aren't about dealing with the anxiety of my mistakes or the
The angst with my current state of my career or life or relationships
Instead of looking at it that way i've already sort of done work to keep myself
in
A good place with all those things and then the psychedelics will sort of
reveal
More more more perspective that's available
Yeah, now on the other side of that coin is we do psychedelic therapy with
people whose lives are in shambles
Yes, and who are
Traumatized who are disabled from trauma or who are
alcoholics or
Substance abusers who've you know lost relationships
And so in those circumstances they have difficult experiences
But they can process a lot of the pain and the suffering that they're running
away from
Yeah, so I would say that when you say your best experiences
Those are like the most enjoyable or the most insightful but for those people
whose lives are in tatters
Psychedelics in a safe supportive context with preparation and with the
integration that is often overlooked
Then they can make major steps to get healthier
So they can do they can help them put all those pieces in line
In terms of their personal relationships their career goals their health goals
Get yourself in a good place that way
From these uncomfortable situations that the psychedelics put you in where you
recognize all the things you're doing incorrectly all the things you're doing
They're flawed and yeah now the way you just described that the mdma helped you
see your insecurities
So on the one hand they bring up the insecurities they bring up
Things that would make you normally uncomfortable
But with mdma in particular it reduces activity in the amygdala the fear
processing part of the brain
So you have the sense of self-acceptance
So that you can see more critical information without it being so painful
Your your sense of self your self compassion is increased
And so things where you've not done as well as you would have liked
Which normally people run away from you can see that and also traumatic
memories that have been
Overwhelming for people that's where people have ptsd
These memories are so traumatic and they feel overwhelming that they can never
really fully
Move past them. It's like the trauma is always about to happen. They see the
whole world through this filter of trauma
They hear noises that remind them of
The trauma they triggered and so this sense of safety in yourself
That that mdma can give helps you to deal with these problems
And there was a study that was recently done in england with mdma for alcohol
use disorder
And what it turned out to be a study of helping people deal with their traumas
And that's what led them to run away from these traumas into alcohol that they
these emotions were so overwhelming that they couldn't process them
So they thought i'll drown them out
With alcohol but with the mdma they're able through this reduction of activity
in the amygdala through this
Promotion of release of oxytocin, which is the hormone of nursing mothers of
love and connection
That you you have this sense of safety
Self-compassion as I said and then you can move into these troubled areas
So while
Psychedelics will
Produce a certain kind of experience for people that have their lives in order
and you can sort of expand
There's others that have their lives in complete disorder and it's a way to
help them
to try to get their lives back in order
hmm that
I've
Talked to so many people that have gotten their lives in order through
Step by step like one psychedelic experience sort of illuminated all the
problems that they have in their life
And then they sort of took steps to
Eventually have more psychedelic experiences and do have better choices in
their life and but
For the most part, there's not like a clear-cut
Disciplined pathway that exists for people where they can like if you're going
to college you take courses
You know you have to do your thesis
There's all these different things that are kind of laid out to let you know
that this is how you get an education
When you're trying to get a psychedelic education, it's
Rough shot. It's all wild. It's you don't know what you're doing. You you're
taking advice from a bunch of stoners
Everybody's got their own
methods
You know, you might listen to some great alan watts recording or you know
listen to timothy leary or mckenna
And you got to kind of get an idea of maybe how I should oh set and setting
okay
I'm gonna do it this way and but
It would be so beneficial if there were places where
Legitimate professionals who have an expertise in psychedelics and perhaps
psychology
Had
These psychedelic centers where you could go and have these curated experiences
where you're safe
There's a medical staff on hand. You don't have to worry about overdosing
They do the right dose per your body weight and your experience
and
Just give and if there was a structure in terms of allowing people
The space to maybe talk to counselors afterwards and process what that
psychedelic experience is like and then maybe
Have someone who could help you devise a strategy
To optimize your life based on this newfound information that you've gotten
from that experience. Yeah
Now if we're to do a podcast 10 years from now
My prediction is we could see if it comes true is that there's going to be
about five or six thousand of these centers
Throughout the united states and that there's already hundreds and hundreds of
ketamine centers
And that's legal for depression
The ketamine therapists are interested in being cross-trained in mdma psilocybin
We think by the end of 2023 that we will have fda approval for mdma assisted
therapy for ptsd
by 2024 2025 there should be fda approval for psilocybin for
depression potentially for alcohol use disorder
Other indications and they'll be administered in these exact kind of centers
and that that's our long-term goal is to have these thousands and thousands of
psychedelic centers
And they'll be not just an mdma center or psilocybin center or ketamine center,
but psychedelic centers
The therapists will be cross-trained in all these modalities
And that that's the vision that we're trying to establish but but I would say
about schools and you talked about your kids
That we overemphasize cognitive education and underemphasize emotional
education and schools don't really prepare people for that
so when kids are
Hyperactive and stuff we just give them adderall or something. We're not really
Looking at the whole human
And there's been a lot of discussion about different kind of intelligences
emotional intelligence
eq is super important
But in schools, we just emphasize cognitive and we leave so much
Untouched and that causes so many problems. So we really need to
Reform how we think of education. What do we we need to educate citizens?
One of the
Quotes that I thought was from Albert Einstein, but then I checked it out and
it wasn't really but I thought for a long time
It was but still it's a great quote and it is that um our technology has
exceeded our humanity
Who is that quote? I thought it was Einstein too. I don't I never could
actually track it down to Einstein, but but you'll track it down
Okay, there's another quote from Einstein that is from Einstein that is
um the splitting of the atom has changed everything except our mode of thinking
And hence we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe
What shall be required if mankind is to survive is a whole new mode of thinking?
And what is that new mode of thinking?
That Einstein was talking about and I think it's a more universal spiritual we're
all in this together
We're not primarily defined by how we're different from people
But we're primarily defined by how we're the same from other people and also
the same as animals and the same as the environment that we're all
Part of this planet earth life on earth and that if we can have that sense of
connection like that
We're not likely to bomb people into oblivion or to commit genocide or to
Be racist or you know throw masses of people in prison for mass incarceration
So I think that that kind of spiritual and emotional education along with
cognitive
Is what we need we we have technology that's miraculous. I mean just think how
many people can be
Watching this podcast or how many people survived on zoom during the pandemic.
Yeah, it's miraculous. Well, also let's look at it this way
We're talking about an education outside of traditional education when you're
talking about these psychedelic centers that you plan on having open in 10
years
Look at physical education
Look at the physical education you get from high school and look at how many
people leave school and
Take yoga and start going to crossfit gyms and take martial arts and there is a
Mass movement of incredibly physically healthy
super
Aware people that are taking care of their body
through
No, there's there was no education about this in high school, right?
It's not they didn't get this from college. They got this from pursuing it so
many people who have
Degrees and careers and completely non-related fields are very physically
active and very tuned into their bodies
Because they've recognized the benefits of that through
External sources outside of the traditional education system. We could have
that same type of movement
with mental health and psychedelics and with learning
outside of these traditional
Radically underfunded places like when you look at how much a high school
teacher makes yes, it's embarrassing and it's it's no wonder why they're
Undermotivated no wonder why they're they're they're you know depressed and
Not enthusiastic about this job and also
How the fuck do you connect one-on-one with 50 people when you have them for 45
minutes or whatever it is a classes an hour?
Whatever, it's not possible so you can't do it and
That that is one of the reasons why so much emphasis is paid to forcing these
children to sit still
And pay attention. I don't know if I have adhd
But I know that if I was in school today, and if I think about how I was when I
was a child
And if I had parents that were so inclined, I would 100% be medicated 100%
But it wasn't because I always thought there was something wrong with me
But it wasn't that there's something wrong with me is that I was bored
I was not interested at all in what they were teaching
I was interested in comic books and I was interested in you know
Martial arts and I was interested in space travel and I was interested in
If you if you talk to me about something that was interesting to me, then I was
locked in and tuned in
But if you're talking to me about some boring shit, I was just staring at the
sky and looking at my fingernails
And I just couldn't pay attention
But it wasn't because my mind was incapable or my mind needed medication
It's because I wasn't interested in what they were talking about and that turns
out to be
Very valuable in life if you're a person
Who finds what you're interested in and ignores the things you're not
interested in because you can really get far
Just paying attention what you're interested in and focusing on that obsessively
Some of the most successful people in this world are that type of person and
As a child, they're taking those people and stifling them and forcing them to
be a square peg
They're taking their roundness of whoever they are and they're compressing it
and shoving them into this square hole with medication
And it's a tragedy. It really is. Yeah
I was so lucky I went to a college in
When I was 17 in 1971 and it was an experimental college
It should be kind of the way all colleges are but what it said was the
principles of this college called new college
It's in sarasota florida. It's the honors college of the state of florida
But when I went to it, it was private
But it said the students curiosity is the most important thing
And that they weren't going to put anything in the way of that curiosity. So
there was no
Distribution requirements you could just do general studies if you wanted to
major you had to do certain number of classes
But you could you didn't have to major a lot of schools say you got to do a
language
You got to do this you got to do that
This was the students curiosity is the most important thing and we will do
everything to foster that there was no grades
All written evaluations
Everybody had to do a senior thesis a big project
And so this school when I started now this was
Sort of people say the 60s really continued into the early 70s and so it was
very much like that
But the school had this tradition of all night dance parties with psychedelics
Till the sunrise they didn't put that in the brochure
But they also had this unusual situation where there was a woman who had
actually a professor who had studied with carl jung
And her husband was wealthy. They donated this big olympic-sized swimming pool
to the college
And it had turned into a nudist colony
For the students and the faculty and so here I was a shy guy
I come to this school with this tradition of psychedelics with this tradition
of
Sort of bringing sex and drugs into the open from being suppressed this nudist
colony at the pool
And I started doing a lot of psychedelics, but I wasn't prepared my education
up to that point had been so cognitive
I was really emotionally stunted my bar mitzvah didn't turn me into a man
You know the traditional rituals didn't work and when I first started doing
psychedelics, I thought this is the
It's helping me answer existential questions or at least ask them not answer
them, but ask them
I said this is what my bar mitzvah should have been
But I was jumbled up and I went to the guidance counselor at school and today
if this happens, you know
You'd be in big trouble, but I went to the guidance counselor
And I said I need help with my lsd trips and my mescaline trips and my mushroom
trips
I don't have the ability I get scared I get stuck I can't move forward
And this is now more important to me than my studies because i'm
Unbalanced i'm overdeveloped intellectually underdeveloped emotionally and
spiritually and the guidance counselor took me seriously
Really did the guidance counselor have psychedelic experiences to draw upon
well, he didn't share that but I was just so lucky
But he said to me there's a book that I would like you to read
And he gave me this book and it was by stanislav grof who's the world's leading
lsd researcher
Founder of trans one of the co-founders of transpersonal psychology and the
book was his first book that he ever wrote it was
Realms of the human unconscious observations from lsd research
And the book was not actually published till 1975 but my guidance counselor had
a copy of it in 1972 a manuscript copy of it
And it was reading that book that made me devote my life to psychedelics when I
was 18
Because it was this
Science I wasn't so comfortable with religion. I knew that there's a lot of dogma
and
Religion I kind of knew that you know jews are the chosen people, but that's
not really true
Yeah, I mean, we're all the chosen people and
But it felt to me that it was science looking at the range of experiences that
we can have
One group that he called was biographical freudian, you know
Just what happens in our life and how that affects us
The other is birth trauma how the process of being birthed where we're being
born where we feel that we might die
It's it's it's imprints on us certain emotional
Patterns according to how our birth process actually is and then beyond that is
the spiritual realm and this sense of connection that we talked about
And so it was science that also had this political implications because I was
thinking yeah
If you can feel connected to everything that's the antidote to war and genocide
But it had a reality check
Which was therapy can we use these states of mind and these experiences to help
people have richer lives to get out of being drug addicts
Or out of being alcoholics or out of being scared of dying if you're got cancer
or things like that
And so this book changed my life and the guidance counselor
After he gave me the book. He said that he was in touch with stan and I said
great
I would like to write him a letter
So i'm this confused 18 year old writing to this md phd at johns hopkins
leading psychedelic research which was being squashed
Because 1970 is when nixon and the controlled substance act came in and all
these drugs are criminalized and psychedelic research is being squashed and
Stan i'm just so lucky this
I wrote stan a letter and he actually wrote me back
Wow
And he said i'm giving a workshop later this summer out in california and you're
invited to come i'm really glad you like my book
You know we're we're our research is winding down
And you know but come to the research come to this workshop if you'd like to
So I hitchhiked across america back when people would hitchhike
I went to the first rainbow festival that was in colorado
I didn't know about it, but I just saw signs as I was hitchhiking
But I did this workshop with stan and
Joan halifax who he was married to at the time who's now very much into buddhism
and meditation and I did primal therapy
I did a three-week primal therapy intensive where you like scream your birth
trauma out
And uh, my therapist permitted me to do lsd one time during this primal therapy
and then I sat for him and
I did a month-long encounter group
Meanwhile, of course got my parents you sat for their therapist while they did
acid. Yeah, we switched that and actually that was kind of um
A little bit scary because he was so used to letting his feelings out. We were
in a soundproof padded room. We'd go in there. I was isolated for um
The day except for like one hour of therapy every day and trying to get it
The only thing I could do is have a dream journal
And so but I couldn't read books. I couldn't write anything
I was just there to get in touch with the sort of primal trauma of being born
and um, but this um therapist that I was sitting for he kind of lost the
Distinction between what's inside and what's outside
And he uh took off the classic story
He took off his clothes and he wants to like run outside and I had to like
wrestle him down to try to keep him in the room
It was really a bit scary, but
At the end of all of this work. I did a month-long encounter group. My parents
paid for all of this, which was really kind of them
But I wasn't where I wanted to be because I had this
mistaken idea
Which was the more drugs you take the faster you evolve
And it's about the quantity of drugs and I completely had missed the idea. It's
about the integration. It's about you don't need to do it
Many times sometimes only once you can learn an enormous amount and it can
enrich you for
You know months or years to try to integrate it
So I just was super confused
After all this I tried the strongest things and I'd seen the idealism of the 60s
crash and burn
And now we've got the vietnam war still and we've got nixon and psychedelic
researchers shut down
And so, um, I went home and I lived
Back home. I'm the oldest of four kids. So I was a terrible example for my
siblings sent off to college and do drugs and drop out
But that's where I got the sense that I needed to do integration work that I
was unbalanced and I
My parents actually had a house built by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright's
designed it. It was this exquisite
Structure and it influenced me a lot. And so and I was playing handball. I was
in the high school
It was one of the few high schools that had handball courts
And so I was really good at handball
So I thought this new college i'll go back to be with my friends
And i'll build this handball court i'll get into the physical world and that's
how i'll get integrated
I was super confused and my parents were willing to buy 3 000 concrete blocks
And support me while I built this building and the school needed facilities and
they let me have some land to build on it
And it was right next to john ringling's house and which is now
State museum and charles ringling
gave the building for the library and this other people the capels who built
the new york railroad and sold the land of the ringlings
They gave this mansion to a new college when mrs capels died and
I was asked to be the security guard at this mansion on the beach
On the on the sarasota bay while I was building this handball court and that
led to a career of 10 years
In construction and it was during that time that as I got more fluid with the
real with the outer world
I would trip every now and again and I would get a little bit better at letting
out the emotions
And seeing what was happening. So I had this 10 year period of
Not doing psychedelics directly but occasionally and and being in the
construction business and that was what it took
It took a whole decade of dropping out of college to get balanced
And then in 1982 I went back to school and the very first semester I went to
the same school to new college and the very first semester
I went to esalen in big sur and and did a month-long workshop with stan groff
again
And it was on the mystical quest and that's when I learned about mdma
And that's what changed things because I learned about lsd after the backlash
But now I learned about mdma before the backlash
But it was called adam as an underground
It was legal but it was kept quiet as an underground therapy drug and it was
gentler than the classic psychedelics
It had incredible therapeutic potential, but it had escaped from those circles
and it was being used as ecstasy as well
So it was very clear that it was doomed. This was during nancy reagan and ronald
reagan and escalation of the drug war
And so that's where I said I got to get political and I can start
introducing
mdma to various people
Who would take it like lester grinspoon?
He and his wife had had a tragedy of a son die of cancer when I think he was
about 13 years old
and they
They took mdma together
And said that they're lester said that they were able to talk about
The loss of their child in ways that they had never been able to talk about
with each other before
And then he later became one of the witnesses when the dea the drug enforcement
administration finally moved to criminalize mdma in 84
Actually, i'll just say terence mckenna was a big part of this effort
Because terence had this mistaken idea that if it's from the if it's a plant it's
good if it's from the lab. It's bad
We had this meeting at esalen and
He was going on and on about this and I said that's so ridiculous. You know, we
need a safety study with mdma
And it was because terence going on and on about how plants were good and stuff
from the lab is bad that we did the first safety study with mdma
To prepare for this dea crackdown
Which happened later that summer in 84 and and that sort of led to where i'm at
now
Why do you think terence had that rigid perspective?
It's a really good question because you think about psychedelics is supposedly
to break down rigidity
Yeah, I mean, I think there's some good things to say which is plants have been
used for thousands of years
We have all this historical evidence about it
we know that in
The western culture when we think about the origins of the western culture we
think about the greeks and that's for the origins of democracy
And the longest-running mystery ceremony in the history of the world was the
eleusinian mysteries
And it ran from like 1600 bc to 396 ad and it involved the
Plans that were psychedelic
Yeah, we had brian burrow rescue on the podcast yeah
His book the immortality key is amazing and now they're doing studies because
of that book yeah in harvard
Yeah, yeah about the eleusinian mysteries. Yeah at the harvard divinity school.
Yeah, really interesting incredible incredible
And you know, he proved in that book in the research for that book that there
were
Like ergot like compounds that were in these wine vessels
So for sure these people were taking some kind of psychedelic mixed in with the
wine
And um, what is what do we know about?
About ergot and about the use of ergot in terms of the psychedelic properties
well lsd is
It's not exactly in ergot but ergot is ergot is the starter material that albert
hoffman used
Ergotamine in order to modify it to develop lsd
Okay, and so we talk about different
times in the middle ages when whole villages would sort of go crazy and it's it's
from a mold on wheat and the salem witch trials
That's it came from that it came from ergot poisoning, right?
It could it could have been I believe that's what they think it happened
They think that that was because of an early frost
They've did they've nailed the time period of all these
Witch trials to an early frost which coincides with
Ergot poisoning of wheat and i'm sure they you know not just made bread with
the wheat but did other things with the wheat
And and probably it does ergot grow on other things other than wheat
Um, i'm not sure. I think barley it may grow on barley. Um, so maybe they had
beer and maybe that was
Tainted with it as well, but so they were involuntarily having these lsd like
experiences
Of course, you would think that there's witches of course you would think you
were bewitched and that there's like magic going on
Yeah, well and what what brian had reached out to me when he was
Sort of a normal career when he wanted to get more involved with marijuana and
psychedelics
So the first thing that he did was a group trying to
Collect doctors who were going to be supporting medical marijuana and then he
moved into writing the immortality key
So i've known him for for quite a while and he's very respectable and sober and
sober completely sober
That's what's interesting, right?
Yeah, he's he's he's decided not to take
Psychedelic, I think eventually he may do that but he wanted he didn't want
people to say you're biased that somehow or other you
You know take these drugs that they would question his research
Imagine what it's going to be like when he finally has a real breakthrough
psychedelic experience and he realizes like
Think about all the scholarly work this guy's done to sort of expose how all of
these
Ancient enlightened people had created these ceremonies to get together and
they worked out democracy they worked out
So many different principles of modern religions and and schools of thought and
it all came out of these
Rituals where they engaged in psychedelics
So this guy is just looking at this all from this like sober historical
perspective and just wait
Just wait the first time he just gets blown through the membrane into the other
dimension
And realizes like this is not
This is not
People that are delusional. This is not some cult perspective. This is the real
thing
Again, and when you experience it, it's so beyond your
Imagination or what you could have possibly anticipated
That when you do break through you'll never look at regular reality the same
way again. That's one thing I can guarantee just knowing
Particularly like the dmt experience
Knowing that you can get to that place in 40 seconds
That you can take three giant hits and then 30 40 seconds in you're gone
You're gone and then you're experiencing entities in some
Brightly illuminated world that's far more real feeling than the world we live
in right now far more vivid
Far more aware
They they seem to understand exactly how you're thinking
They're communicating with you with no words and they're infinite and they're
all around you all the time and they seem to know what fucks with you
You know brian has a lot to look forward to oh my god. He does
He's he's owed it you know like his work has been
Amazingly helpful because of the fact that he is sober because of the fact that
he is a legitimate scholar
I mean everything about the way he's done. This is perfect
Yeah, there there is a way a little bit one historical parallel to
So what brian is going to be looking forward to and that's walter pankey
So I described at the very beginning this concord prison experiment that that
leary did when he was at harvard
But the experiment that he did before
Was called the good friday experiment and that was in 1962
And it was designed to see if religiously inclined people in a religious
setting taking psilocybin would have a mystical experience
And so walter pankey was a doctor and a minister and working on a phd
And timothy leary became his faculty sponsor
There was also a fellow named reverend howard thurman who was um the
Reverend at the boston marsh chapel at boston university, but he was martin luther
king's mentor
So martin luther king had
Got a phd at boston university in the 50s and reverend howard thurman had
studied with gandhi and had studied
Non-violence and was kind of the main influence on having the civil rights
movement be focused on
Non-violence and like we know with john lewis and getting beaten up on the
bridge when they're trying to get voting rights
That they didn't respond that and that was very effective
this non-violent approach so reverend howard thurman was really interested in
this relationship between the mystical experience and
political action and so he agreed to be the minister for this good friday
service
And if if people are interested we have the actual sermon from reverend howard
thurman
Several hours on our website under the good friday experiment
And it took 20 divinity students from andover newton theological seminary into
church on good friday
in the basement chapel and half got psilocybin half got a placebo
10 experimenters houston smith timothy leary ramdas ralph metzner walter houston
clark others that were very involved in
The science of religion were the helpers they were divided into groups of four
five groups of four students
Half would get psilocybin half would get the placebo
And then two of the experimenters were with them and one of the experimenters
would also get psilocybin and one would get the placebo
And as it turned out
Nine out of the 20 people had a mystical experience and eight out of those nine
had the psilocybin
And this experiment was
Considered to be and still is one of the best experiments ever in the history
of the study of psychedelics and spirituality
And the questionnaire of what is a mystical experience that walter pankey
Developed for this is still being used in the research today. It's called the
mystical experience questionnaire, but
Walter pankey
Decided that he didn't want to take psilocybin until after the study was over
For fear that people would say that he was biased
Now brilliant and then he went with bill richards who's the
Longest living psychedelic therapist right now
He's sort of the center of the johns hopkins psychedelic research and he's
trained a lot of other groups there
researchers with psilocybin
He's actually going to go through our training now to learn about mdma
um
bill richards is but um he was in germany studying and walter pankey went to
Um visit with him and that's where walter pankey had his first psilocybin
experience after the experiment was over and published
and had this
Illuminating psychedelics mystical experience his first of his life first of
his life after he'd done the experiment now
When I did at new college, I said you have to do this senior thesis
And so this was during the 80s, and I wanted to do something with psychedelics
But there was no legal permission. It was all shut down and I realized that in
the mystical
research
The most important thing is called the fruits test so you can describe an
experience and that's what they do initially, but
What are the fruits of the experience?
How does it affect your life if it's a genuine mystical experience?
It will make you feel connected it will make you feel there's love woven into
the universe it will have certain kind of
Long-term benefits and that's the way that people evaluate the validity of the
experience. So walter pankey
Unfortunately, um died in 1971 in a scuba diving accident. Oh wow. It's his
body was never found what and it was like
he dissolved into the ocean of
Consciousness almost or fish atum more likely fishing something yes something
happened
Um, stan groff actually said that walter was a little bit cheap and he might
have bought and secondhand equipment or something that didn't work
Scuba equipment. Yeah, you got
You want to have the stuff that works the best
So when I wanted to do a thesis
A project I realized that walter pankey if he would have been alive he would
have done this long-term follow-up study. Yeah
But I could do that now
And it turned out that um
Timothy leary ramdass they'd lost the names no
They had no idea who was in the study. All I knew was that they were andover
newton theological seminary students
And so I went to the andover newton school
And I said
Could you put a notice in your alumni newsletter if anybody was in this
experiment?
This is 1986 all these years later 24 years later, and they refused to do it
They said they want to had nothing to do with this research again
This is during the time of nancy reagan and ronald ryan
Yeah, so I went to their library and I thought okay there must be some books
about it
They must have this thesis. They must have some books about it. They had
nothing
And I just wandered more through the library and and what I saw was they had a
section of alumni handbooks
And one of them had the list of who was in school during that year and their
names and addresses
And so I photocopied all of that and I sent out 350 or so
Letters to people and said if you were in this experiment or know anybody, you
know
I'm trying to do a follow-up and that led me to three people
And over the time I ended up getting 19 out of the 20 identified
And I administered the same questionnaire the mystical experience questionnaire
And they held up that the results were almost the same as they were before
And people said that this mystical experience that they'd had
They'd had other non-drug mystical experiences many of them afterwards that
they said
Help them consider that the one that they had with the psilocybin was
legitimate
It was similar to the non-drug they they generally preferred the non-drug
mystical experiences
How do you define a non-drug mystical experience?
You're walking in nature or you you're making love or you just have this they
call it gratuitous grace
This feeling just comes over you like something is
um
It's the same as basically as this drug experience and they described how this
was
Not only considered valid, but also it had motivated them to work on the
environmental movement the women's rights movement
The anti-war movement so for me I found in some ways the keys to the 60s in
this follow-up study because the sad part is I discovered that
Reverend howard thurman was this incredible order and part of his good friday
service was you have to tell people
There's a man on the cross you have to tell people of this story and one of the
students said oh, okay
I should do that right now under the influence of psilocybin
And so he he went they thought he was going to go to the bathroom and he burst
out the door and he started running down
The road and in his mind
He had thought i'll tell the president if i'm going to tell anybody I should
tell the president
Then he's like oh the president is somewhere else, but i'll tell the president
of the university
And so timothy leary and houston smith went after him
To help him not get killed by a car or something
And they they finally caught up to him to bring him back and he didn't want to
come back inside
And so they gave him a shot of thorazine
To calm him down. That's what they thought at the time is somebody's having a
difficult lsd experience, you know
Bring them down with thorazine, which is a major tranquilizer
for psychotics
But they never mentioned that so I discovered during this follow-up study that
there was a really important part of the experiment that they had hidden
Which was this sort of difficult reaction this person had and his refusal to
come in
So what I saw from leary is that they had
Underestimated the risks that they hadn't reported this
You know if we do research now under fda regulations you have to report adverse
events you can't just
brush them under the rug like they didn't really happen
so the core
Thesis that psychedelics psilocybin in this case could produce a mystical
experience that was confirmed
The fact that it had long-term benefits that was confirmed
But leary and others had over time said everybody that had the psilocybin had
the mystical experience that was not true
So they exaggerated the benefits and they had
Minimized the risks by hiding this story of this person that had the thorazine
Now how many people had the psilocybin experience and didn't have a mystical
experience two and one of them was
Some of them you know again you it's not like it's automatic that you take this
drug and this kind of experience is what you had
What what were there any similarities in their experiences and were they on any
kind of medication?
No, they weren't they just
They didn't let themselves open or it just it didn't have the same effect for
them. What was the dosage?
The doses was pretty big. It was like
Well, it was synthetic
psilocybin, so I think it was 25
milligrams, which is a major trip. I'd say it's equivalent to like
five or six grams of mushrooms. So it was a major experience
And it's crazy. It was didn't have an experience. Well, they had experiences,
but they didn't score
On this questionnaire to be above the threshold and the the beautiful thing
about what walter pankey did was that this questionnaire about a mystical
experience
Even though it was with christian ministry students in good friday service. It
didn't have a word about jesus
It he surveyed the literature of mysticism throughout the world and all these
different religions
And he kind of made what is the sort of
Common themes, you know a deeply felt positive mood a sense of sacredness a
transcendence of time and space
a sense of
Ineffability that you can't put it into words a sense of
Transcendence of time and space and a sense of unity
Those are the elements and so it's something from people from every different
kind of religion could respond to this
So it took out all the cultural symbols
every reference to jesus
And it was and that's why it's being used today at johns hopkins and all the
research that's being done a lot of it with lsd with psilocybin
even with mdma we use this same
questionnaire
That's only tiny bit modified and so
It was a sense that
This experiment really validated for me my theory of change
You know that that if we can have help people more people have these psychedelic
experiences and support them and help them integrate it
It may build compassion. It may reduce prejudice. It may help people
want to protect the environment
And and so that that's what really motivated me when I was 18 to devote my life
to psychedelics that this potential this political potential
It was only when I 10 years later learned about mdma and I learned about its
effect on trauma
That I thought wow this can also be used to help people
move through the pain of their lives
And to really see the world more clearly to see people that they might have
been scared of to
See that more their humanity and so I think this kind of mystical experience
and the therapeutic
Going together
Is where I think there's a lot of hope for the future
And what I was able to
Sort of recognize is that there's value in these things and that we talked
about the ellicinian mysteries
What we're talking about now is mainstreaming psychedelics
And a lot of people have this idea that it's never been done before
But it's actually been done thousands of years ago in the heart of western
culture
And it was wiped out by the catholic church
Because they wanted to be the intermediary between people and spirituality it
was a power play
It wasn't a religious spiritual it was a power play
by the church to
Be this intermediary and so then throughout the middle ages all of this was
suppressed
You know with the witches with all of this and then when the
Conquistadors and others come to the western world and they see these
traditions of mushrooms that are used in mexico and peyote
That's used by the native american church and by the indians in mexico
And they came to south america where we have ayahuasca
Their main thing was kill these people kill the leaders kill the shamans, you
know, because they're a source of power for their cultures
And so that was suppressed
And it was only around night in the late 1950s when
Western people discovered the mushrooms and that was gordon was word and wasson.
Yeah
Yeah
Ironically one of the people on the trip with gordon wasson was a cia agent as
well that that there they were looking for mind control drugs
And that's the whole mk ultra and this whole nefarious use of psychedelics to
They called them non-lethal incapacitance
Huh, that's an interesting way of looking at it. Yeah, they thought it was humane
right in a way if you can like
You know spray lsd in the air on a group of soldiers and they call all in
circles
Yeah, you know that you could come and just pick up their weapons and you kind
of could
In some way yeah, they they did try aerial spraying of lsd. It didn't actually
work. How much lsd was you?
You need a lot of it and it seems like you can wreck people
Well, that was partially their goal or that you could slip it to people when
they're about to give a talk and yeah, they would make fool of themselves
Something like that, but yeah, so
Where we're at now with the military just to say with veterans and others is
that it seems like we're trying to reintroduce psychedelics
For trauma
But in a more humane way, and so i'm not really sure darpa the defense advanced
research
group
They've just given 25 million to develop non-psychedelic psychedelics
They're not really interested as far as we can tell in the war implications of
psychedelics
We also have what does that mean non-psychedelic psychedelics well like ibogaine
There's a drug called ibogaine, which is very psychedelic, but then you modify
the molecule and there's one called 18 mc
And you take it and it's it's not psychedelic
So you take the the core molecule you you figure out what atoms you can add to
it
And it has a lot of the basic properties, but you try to take out the psychedelic
properties for what purpose
Well, they think somehow maybe that's like therapeutic you can a lot of them
They see the psychedelic part as a negative side effect
So if you can promote neuroplasticity or doesn't it seem that you just need to
get a hold of these people and give them psychedelics
Stop stop stop you're doing it all wrong
That's like saying you want to do martial arts, but you don't want to touch
anybody
Exactly. I want to do no touch martial arts. Yeah, that might be okay
Yeah, and now maybe they'll find a way that biologically something can happen,
but the meaning
Maybe they think well one of the costs of psychedelic therapy is of course the
therapists
And if you could just take a pill and you didn't need therapists
But but people get meaning from the experience
Yeah, and we're we're clearly establishing that it's probably a good idea to
have someone guide you through these things very much
It's always been the goal of the shaman and the role of the shaman and that
these people who have
experience in these realms and understand how to how to have a psychedelic
Ceremony and do it correctly that there's a way to do this
And this is a very valuable piece of information and that to just ignore that
and say we just need you know
Maybe we could just do it in a pill and you don't need the therapist like
Well, one of the things that's so frustrating that darpa would give 25 million
to study non-psychedelic psychedelics is there
There's a million more than a million veterans disabled with ptsd
and the va spends around 17 billion dollars a year
On disability payments, but we've not gotten any funds from the va for research
But things are changing so actually we're working with congressman dan crenshaw
And he's working with congressman tim ryan from ohio, so we've got
A very strong democrat a very strong republican working together on two
different bills
One would give money to the department of defense to do psychedelic research
for ptsd
And one would give well, we're not sure the amounts
We're thinking one would give some amount of money also to the va
And by psychedelic research, we're saying it should be limited to
Ibogaine 5-meo-dmt psilocybin and mdma
And so we don't know that this will pass through congress, but we have
bipartisan support
So it's trying to get the military to look at the healing potential of
psychedelic psychedelics
And it's because a lot of the navy seals dan crenshaw is a former navy seal
have spoken to him about
their work going down to mexico for ibogaine and 5-meo or their work with
mdma for ptsd
I actually had an hour conversation with them a few months ago
Dan's great
He was very open to it. I was just a young
Healthy guy you know, like he's in healthy in terms of his perspective on
things
He looks at things as objectively as he can
I mean, he's clearly a republican
But he's open to entertaining all sorts of ideas
I found him to be very compassionate
I mean when he heard about the healing potential and and he's heard stories
Well, one of the things about seals and about
many of the people in the military is their
Number one goal is to help the people that are their brothers and sisters that
are also in the military and that are suffering
and they rule
Abandon dogma if they find an effective treatment
Whereas if you're just politically motivated or if you just have these very
rigid ideas about what's good and what's bad in terms of psychedelics bad
You know pharmaceutical drugs good, you know counseling good
Acid bad like that these sort of rigid dogmas
They get in the way of finding the truth because there we really don't have a
long-standing history of treating people with psychedelics who have
Post-traumatic stress disorder. It's fairly recently, but it's very promising
And the people that have gone through the anecdotal evidence and the anecdotal
experiences that they can relay to fellow soldiers are incredibly valuable
Because these people guys like dan crenshaw who are you know, he's a congressman
He's in a real real position of power and influence
He could shape and change the way the rest of
Congress and the senate and and just government in total looks at these
These potential strategies and say listen
This is something we're ignoring and it might be the most effective thing we've
ever found for this
Yeah, and the fact that he's willing to partner with someone that's very on the
other political spectrum tim ryan
right is terrific
It's amazing and it comes from this place of compassion for people that are
suffering
Yeah
Now the the very first use of psychedelics for ptsd
began in the 1950s and 1960s and
It was a dr. Jan bastians in the netherlands
And he pioneered the use of lsd for what they called concentration camp
syndrome
And they worked with people that were in the camps that were tremendously
traumatized
And a lot of them were jews gypsies homosexuals others
But also some of them were dutch resistance fighters. He was a dutch
psychiatrist
And so they later the dutch resistance fighters later became you know part of
the government and
Dr. Bastians was the last person in the world that still had legal permission
to use lsd till the late 70s early 80s
And there's an incredible book called shaviti a vision
by an lsd
um by it by holocaust survivor how do you spell that s-h-i-v-i-t-t-i
it's it's it's by a an israeli holocaust survivor
who was a writer who went to the netherlands for lsd therapy
And he's describing what he went through during his lsd therapy
And it's it's horrific my israeli relatives knew him before and after and said
that it helped him a lot
Although he still was somewhat tormented just from what he had gone through
But with the lsd there's not the reduction of fear the reduction of activity in
the amygdala the way that you get with mdma
and so
We're trying to globalize the mdma assisted therapy for ptsd
And we're working in the netherlands with uh dr eric vermetten who's the chief
psychiatrist for the dutch military
And he has the bastians chair at the university of leiden and he's leading our
effort for mdma
So it's only been very short time really that people have understood the world
the role that psychedelics can play in the treatment of
trauma and ptsd
And lsd can be helpful ayahuasca can be helpful ibogaine can be helpful
mushrooms can be helpful
And mdma all in different ways
I think that mdma has the chance to be the most helpful because of its the
reduction of fear the sense that you can
Bring traumas to the surface easier
I've actually worked with people with
trauma
Both with mdma and with lsd and and in one case. I also talked about this in my
ted talk this woman who
The lsd brought you know horrible rape and almost murdered you know to the
surface
But it was too paralyzing she's kind of frozen and then gave half a dose of mdma
this is now in 1984
And um, that was the breakthrough the the mdma softened it made it so that the
emotions could be released
um, and it was
A really breakthrough and so I saw in 1984 the value of mdma for ptsd
And I just think of all the people that have soldiers and others that have
committed suicide from ptsd since then more died that way than in the war
And if if the dea hadn't criminalized mdma in 85
so many lives would have been saved so much but
Now we're trying to bring it back as quickly as we can
It's just taken a long time maps has been at it for 35 years since 1986 when I
started maps
But the world is changing now and I mean for for somebody like congressman crenshaw
to be
Supporting research in this area and for so many navy seals to have spoken to
him
This is where marcus and amber capone from vets. They've led lots and lots of
Vets to mexico for ibogaine and they have a group that supports
The expenses for people to get this treatment and hundreds of navy seals
actually the navy seal foundation
gave us a donation to maps of fifty thousand dollars
Because they heard from so many navy seals that this that what they were
getting with from the va wasn't enough
And that they needed more and that they were seeking out psychedelics
And so the board of directors of the navy seal foundation had a meeting and
they changed their mission their mission was only to
Support treatments but not research and so they changed it so they could also
support research
They limited it to 150 000 per year and the most any one project would get 50
000
And so the very first project was our phase three study with mdma assisted
therapy for ptsd
So even the navy seal foundation is coming we're working with a psychiatrist
bob kaufman
At walter reed who is an expert in ptsd. He's a military psychiatrist retired
now 32 years, but he still does work at walter reed
and
We've had about 40 or more veterans have been through our studies and of most
of them not all
But most have gotten a lot of relief, but we've not once had an active duty
soldier
So that's going to be the next big breakthrough because the idea here is that
we want to treat people the closer to the trauma
And then maybe the treatment is
Less expensive not as long because you haven't let it fester you haven't let
these patterns
Go on for for longer
But there is some concerns about will the dod permit you know active duty
soldiers to to get this but
The amount of money that they spend to train a navy seal is enormous and when
you think about if they're disabled from ptsd
What if you can help them not have get over it? Yeah
So we think eventually that'll be a big breakthrough just today. I got an email.
We're doing research
In for phase three for mdma for ptsd in israel canada the united states
So the ministry of defense in israel has just invited us to set up a clinic for
soldiers for active duty israeli soldiers
Who are traumatized and now because of the recent war with gaza and the
missiles
You know, it's just so clear that the whole populations are traumatized on both
sides
We have a project also
with um
We've been starting it with
it's in the very early stages of um, but it's with the
survivors of
Torture it's for the
Treatment of survivors with torture and it's in ramallah. It's in the west bank
And they're interested in mdma for therapy. So we're trying to train some of
their therapists
We're going to try to see if we can get approval from the palestinian authority
to bring mdma in there because it's a schedule one drug
It'll have to come through israel
But we want to treat people on both sides of all the different conflicts
And and we see that
Sir general nick carter who's the secretary of defense equivalent in england
We're working with a group
In england
Which is supporting wounded
veterans
And nick carter is on their board of directors
And so he's come out in favor of mdma research
the
Essentially the secretary of defense in charge of all the british military has
endorsed mdma research
So we're hoping that we'll have that in the united states that the department
of defense will get involved as well
and this
bills that we're trying to get with
Representative crenshaw and ryan would kind of encourage that to try to start
that
And as we talked before about prisoners and prison guards and police officers
We even have you know police officer
You know that we're training so we really need to
mainstream this and
When we think about it as as we talked about the illusinian mysteries, it's
kind of reintroducing into western culture
But it's this thousands of years of history and trying to
Bring psychedelics back to where we can
Sort of spiritualize the population in a way and reduce trauma
As we face incredible challenges that humanity has never faced before in terms
of what we're doing to the environment and
The power of the weapons that we have and so that that's the kind of vision
that animates
The motivation for why what we're doing
Well, I think we have to re-engineer the cultural narrative right because for
so long it's been drugs are bad
Just say no like the even if you do drugs you do drugs because you're being
silly
You want recreation you want some chaos in your life like I did all my work
I'm going to do some coke, you know
And they they do something and they feel but I got to stop doing that that was
bad
And they they have these negative associations or non-beneficial associations
with drugs
And I think one of the things that I obviously have a very limited experience
with mdma because I only had one experience
But that one experience was so positive
And and the the next day though terrible I couldn't read
Like yeah, we we tell people it's a two-day experience. You must rest the next
day
Yeah, and take five http right and take something that's going to rebuild your
that could be or just rest
I mean what we so when we worked with the fda
They said don't add supplements until we see what just the mdma does and we
find that when you give it to people during the day
And they rest the next day
Yeah, supplements can be helpful, but but we don't administer them and people
don't use them and or they can if they want to but
They can be helpful
But really you what you need is rest on top for sure and the integration. Yeah,
that's the idea
As you think about you don't rush into your daily activities
But just as a kind of funny story about the cultural narrative so as a parent
When my daughter my youngest daughter ellie uh went to college
Um, I thought I would give her she um you're gonna give her acid. I gave her
marijuana. Oh, so I gave her um
10 pre-rolled medical marijuana joints that she could do with her friends
because she was going to college
Had she experienced marijuana before this? Yeah, she had she had um
and
So I said, you know, this pennsylvania is where she went to school dickinson
college and you know
It wasn't legal there. So I just said i'll give it to you and you can do it
with your friends
So in the very first week of school
When she's just a freshman in college she and a couple of uh the new people
that she was meeting girlfriends
They went off and and tried to smoke a joint
But they got busted by the campus police
And it was a terrible thing they're like you're ruining your life and you know
your permanent record
You're never going to get into graduate school
And then she had to go through education and she had to meet with a counselor
And the counselor the first meeting they had the counselor said, why do you
hate yourself?
No, no, you know, why are you using marijuana? You must hate yourself to escape
That's a lot of the cultural attitudes that people have
Wow, it was it was terrible and and she really got uh convinced of how
Negative drug education is so warped. Why do you hate yourself? Wow
Yeah, I mean but counseling is like everything else. There's people that suck
at it, right?
there's there's people that
Yeah, they're i'm sure they're
Fully invested and really turn
Tuned in to what the person needs and they're you know
They're dedicated and they are very well educated and then there's people that
are just not good at it because they're
for whatever reason they carry their own biases
Weird perspectives and they don't know what they're talking about. Why would
you hate yourself?
Yeah later
Right before the lockdown and covet I got invited to give a talk at dickinson
at the college
And it was very well attended and it was all about psychedelics and and and it
was really
Well, the faculty were there full circle. It was full circle. It was just a
beautiful experience what I was going to get
To is that even though I have a limited experience with uh mdma
It was very positive in terms of the actual trip itself
But are there bad trips do people experience because it seems like what it is
is about
You know the reason why it's called ecstasy. It's the it's love and happiness
and and everyone's affectionate
Well, the first thing we want to say is that there's a distinction between
difficult and bad
Right. All right, and so what bad is is more resisting it
and so
To give a good example of this there is actually um this is about 15 years ago,
but two women contacted us within the same week with
similar but different stories both of them had taken mdma at a rave
with their friends had taken ecstasy for party setting and one of them said
that
That prior sexual abuse came to her mind again because this reduction of fear
in the amygdala difficult things can come to
The surface you can look at it more
But she was with a bunch of friends who just wanted to party
And she felt that she couldn't talk to them about it
And she stuffed the feelings down and she contacted us months afterwards and
said she was feeling worse
That the mdma had actually made her feel worse because it brought it to the
surface, but she didn't deal with it
This other woman said similar story that she took mdma at a rave
memories of prior sexual abuse came to the surface
And she went off to a corner and with a girlfriend and talked about it and
after an hour worked a lot through it
And then went back and had a party and danced and
And now she felt better and thought maybe mdma could be great for ptsd
So there are bad trips, but bad I think is primarily about resistance
Of not being open to it and difficult
Is can be productive very productive
If you're supported through it
You know, there's an incredible movie called trip of compassion that's about
three of our israeli ptsd patients
It's the most
Patient-centered documentary ever made about mdma assisted therapy
And you can see people having very difficult experiences
You know, there was one woman that was kidnapped
When she was traveling in peru, you know, a lot of israelis after the army to
de-stress
They travel around the world and this was a young woman with a girlfriend then
they got kidnapped
And she spends a lot of time just shaking letting it out
Letting out the stress so it's difficult but supported
She ended up having a lot of healing afterwards and it really changed her so i'd
say that
Not everybody gets better some people it just doesn't work for some people didn't
have a mystical experience with the psilocybin
Some people when they take it particularly if they're taking it in unsupported
settings
They don't know exactly that it's pure drugs. They don't know that if you open
up to the difficult
Emotions that that's the pathway through
And so they resist it and people can end up worse off from that
This is it was a very small study group about the people that didn't get
mystical experiences you're talking about
Two out of how many ten two out of ten? Yeah
Um, it would be really interesting if you did at large scale and you find out
what are the similarities between the people that don't have those experiences
because
is it a
Biodiversity thing like is it some people do they react? I know some people
apparently dmt doesn't work for is that correct?
Well people can resist it but also i've heard it doesn't work in terms of it
doesn't give them the visual experience
there are like my my
There there are some people that are more visual than others and some people
that are more emotional than others and
Some people yeah that that it may not work, but I would think that that has to
do with
Resistance rather than it just doesn't really have I think so but jamie doesn't
get high off edibles
Edibles don't work on him
Like no, I mean he can eat like a thousand milligrams. Wow. Wow. That's what i'm
saying. Yeah, well and i've seen it
People metabolize differently and he's like yeah, it just doesn't work like it
doesn't work on him. Hmm. Yeah
I mean, we are different biochemically I I stay away from medical
But that's why i'm asking because I don't know anybody like jamie
Right, so there's this guy that I know that i'm very close with that can take a
thousand milligrams of edible
So if you were telling me about your friend, I'd be like maybe that guy's full
of shit
Maybe needs get some good stuff. I know what he what about when you smoke
It does so yeah, I mean I get high when I smoke sure
Instantly I can tell you know not high high
Edibles
I have gotten high off of them, but in general if I would try anything people
I'm with people all the time that take like a little 10 milligram and they're
like i'm gonna
I'm gonna go crazy tonight looks like everybody calm down have a cool night and
i'm like what why are you wasting your time eating
that gummy that's like
it's nothing
And they can't take them out of like uh bong hits or joint hits or blunt hits
or anything that I can take
I don't know. It's just fair. It's very strange. I've tried to overdose on this
boy
I look at it and I can't I can't maybe you were high when you put those shoes
on the fuck are those things what's wrong with these
very comfortable, you know
Sorry about edibles my my my mother-in-law
Had pain and my wife was thinking maybe
THC or cbd would be good for her so they my wife said she'd try it first
So she she took this cbd didn't do much she gave it to her mom didn't do much
and so then she took a 10 milligram
chocolate edible
and was
Thinking she would try it out to see her mom liked it, but it was a horrible
experience and she got 10 milligrams
She got she totally
Got so deep into her body in a way her thinking that she thought that she might
forget to breathe
And she was just terrified and you yeah, and then it lasts edibles last a long
time
And so my own wife has ptsd from edibles
I had a conversation with this couple the other day me and my wife were out
with them and
I was asking them what beverly hills is like right now because I know people
that live in beverly hills have talked about the
Spike in home invasions and crimes and they were saying no the police there are
amazing
Because there's so much money in beverly hills the police react very quickly. I
said huh
I go that's interesting and they go yeah
Well, we had to call the police one time and i'm thinking i'm gonna hear this
story
About like maybe there was a guy trying to break into your house or steal your
car
No, this lady
She took she didn't realize that the cbd she was taking had thc as well
And she took uh multiple dropper droppers full of it
And she thought she was dying, you know, she thought her heart was gonna stop
she's freaking the fuck out
She couldn't whatever it was
She couldn't handle it and she called the police and the police were there
instantly
So this was their story of the police is that this lady had too many edibles
She just it's edible weed. It's the same thing, right?
No, it's not it's not it's metabolized differently in your liver
So it's actually a different yeah, but i'm saying edible weed, but yeah, it's
the same thing
It's 11 hydroxy metabolite. I know that yeah, but i'm saying yeah, this is no
different the droppers
Oh, yeah, it's no different than edible weed. Yes, like so she's taking this thc
Laced cbd can apparently for some people i've talked to some athletes and they
tell me that cbd
With thc is the most effective for them in terms of like alleviating
inflammation and pain and they like it the most
but some people don't recognize like like this
Kill cliff has 25 milligrams of cbd in it, but it's non-psychoactive. Yeah, but
some cbd that
You get is got psychoactive thc in it as well
That's what this lady did and so when she did it
She was just blast she has no idea how much she took she might took a couple
hundred milligrams
So this poor lady who weighs like, you know 130 pounds was fucking gone
You know and literally thought she was dying and the cops are like yeah, we're
just gonna have to ride this out
That's so they said they get calls like that all the time
Which is really hilarious. Yeah now as long as we're talking about marijuana, I
just want to say that we've made some big breakthroughs with marijuana
And one of them has been that there's been a federal government monopoly on the
supply of dea federally legal marijuana
And this has been in since 1968 it's grown at the university of mississippi it's
sold to the national insulin drug abuse
They provide it to researchers, but it's only for research not commercial use
It can't be used in phase three is it good. It's terrible weed. It's terrible
weed
We used to always think that that was the good weed
Like that was the thing like back in the day like in the 90s when weed was hard
to get by people called the government weed, bro
I got some of the 13. Yeah
Got some of that government weed. No, it's gonna really take us off. It's not
good. It's terrible. It's terrible. So
since
2000 we've been trying to end this monopoly on marijuana that the federal
government has in order to promote marijuana research to make it into a
medicine
Right
And so in 2001 I found I spent a year trying to find the rosa parks of medical
marijuana production
You know a political who would be the most
Good plaintiff in a way for this
Effort and so lyle kraker was a professor at umass amherst
Expert in plants he'd worked in secure facilities to try to develop herbicides
for coca plants
He was an expert in plant medicines and he agreed that he would work with us to
try to get a license
From the dea to grow marijuana
So we submitted his application in 2001
I call back a couple months later to the dea and say hey, what's going on?
And they say we don't have any record or lyle called and he said they don't
have any record of
His application and he says that's weird, you know, I know I sent it
And so he goes to the university. They have copies of everything. They photocopy
it
And they send in this new application and then
He waits a couple months and calls them and then the dea says sorry
We can't accept the application because it's not an original signature. You
sent us this photocopy
Which is a bogus thing. So then he says, okay, I'll send it again with my
written thing
Then he sends it in and they do nothing for three and a half years and then we
sue them
For unreasonable delay under the administrative procedures act
And we get the judge says it's not unreasonable delay
But dea at least you better explain why you're taking so long so they they
realized they should
Reject so they rejected the application then we could sue them on their
rationale which was
Bogus that they couldn't do this international treaties and all so then we had
a
dea administrative law judge hearing
That was eight days of testimony inside dea headquarters. You have to get
security clearance just to go to the courtroom
And we won the case and the judge said empty the marijuana
It's in the public interest for lyle to get this license and then the dea
rejects the recommendation
They wait two years actually and they waited until six days before obama got
inaugurated in order to reject the recommendation
So he couldn't come to it fresh
And then obama does nothing for eight years and then near the end of his term
they the dea under obama says finally
We're going to give this
We're going to issue these licenses
And they put something in I think it was august 2016 in the federal register
around 30 people apply
Then trump gets elected and sessions is against marijuana and they squashed it
all
There then we're working with the dr. Sue sicily
in arizona
In phoenix and she had submitted one of the license she sued the dea to try to
reveal
You know who applied they didn't even and they finally gave the list of who
applied
and
But they didn't want to give any of the licenses still and so what just
happened about two weeks ago
Was that finally the dea has given licenses for domestic production of
marijuana federally
So that people can grow to make it into a medicine it's it's um
Since 1968 has been this federal monopoly
There there's been a company gw pharmaceuticals in england
That got a license from the home office in 1998
To grow marijuana and they grew cbd marijuana
And they just were sold for seven billion dollars to jazz pharmaceuticals
They made epidiolex which is for childhood epilepsy cbd for childhood epilepsy
They had a drug sativax also so
Now we've ended this monopoly on the production of marijuana and also
The state of michigan when they legalized marijuana for recreational purposes
it was
friends of ours at the marijuana policy project that
Put it in there and they they they wrote the initiative language and they had a
paragraph that says
Of the money that they're going to make from the taxes
They have to put 20 million a year for two years into studying
Cannabis for veterans health and to reduce veteran suicides and the money can
only go
to
Non-profit organizations or academic researchers
And they just put out the request for proposals june 1 just a few days ago
And we have been preparing for this so we have a protocol that we've already
submitted to fda
And we've already got some comments back to study in around 300 veterans with ptsd
cannabis
We're going to go for a 10 million dollar grant
From the state of michigan and we've previously gotten the 2.2 million dollar
grant from the state of colorado
To do a marijuana study that we were did with sue cicely. It was 76 veterans
And we had
One group got thc one group got thc cbd combination one group got cbd
And one group got placebo where they take marijuana and they wash it with
alcohol and you wash out the terpenes and the cannabinoids
And the study took us seven years to get approval because the government didn't
want to supply us the marijuana
They did but we had fda approval seven years to get permission three years to
do the study
Several years to write up the research we just published it recently
And we demonstrated safety
But the problem was and i'll illustrate it by one person was that there was one
person who did great
And his ptsd symptoms were reduced and he was really excited about that but
more importantly he was on
Opiates for for pain and he was able to get off the opiates and to use the
product that he had been given
And so he wanted to become a public spokesperson for the study
He spoke to the media a bunch of times
When the study was over we uncovered the blind and it turned out he'd gotten
the placebo
Oh, wow
It was super embarrassing
Oh, wow interesting
So what we found in this study unfortunately was that the group that did the
best
Had the thc
The group that did the next best was the placebo which would completely befuddled
us and then the group that got
Lesser benefits was the thc cbd combination and the group that got the least
benefits had cbd only really yeah
And you think of cbd as anti-anxiety and all though. It's weird. That's less
than placebo less than placebo. That's bizarre
Yeah, so
Well, it was crummy marijuana from the government. That's one of our
explanations
Dry harsh. They only used half of on average or about what we gave them per day
So now we're going to refuse to use the night of marijuana. We're going to
import from either
israel canada or
Australia import marijuana in america that seems gross well, we have to use
federally legal marijuana, so
Michigan why can't they make an exemption use that california weed california
weed is so good
A lot of it is great. It's the one thing california does best
Well, it depends if you're from british columbia. They'll say they got better
We have better scientists here. Well, and then the colorado people are starting
to be pretty proud of their stuff
and goddamn good in colorado, too. It's not much difference in colorado and
California and also
Seattle the pacific northwest people they don't fuck around either. They know
what they're doing make some real shit
But we can't use any of it because fda is federally regulated
that's one of the questions that I had for you what progress if any has been
made on the uh push to get
the federal government to
Release marijuana from schedule one quite a lot, but I think my current
prediction is 2025 is when we will have federally
The a law will be passed like the end of alcohol prohibition that says there's
no federal
Penalties for marijuana. It's up to the states
And so I think that that will happen in 2025 we need
In presidential years are when these initiatives tend to pass more young people
come out more people come out to vote in the presidential elections
And so we need a few more medical marijuana and marijuana legalization states
will get
Maybe potentially more in 2022 more in 2024 and so I think in 2025
There's a good chance that we will have the federal government will move to
And prohibition on
Marijuana
You know
Society has not collapsed in colorado or seattle or
Oregon or
On the contrary or massachusetts
The economy is booming in those places where they have legal marijuana because
it it's enhanced the economy
It's been especially colorado the yeah real estate has gone through the roof
particularly for warehouses yeah for production facilities
Yeah, and I don't know how long you think it'll be before texas comes along
I don't know you know the thing about austin is they don't arrest you for it
It's like fairly
Low on the rung of their concerns. It's about as low as it can get they don't
arrest you for it
It's fairly it's decriminalized in the city. It's not like you can buy it
everywhere
But you can buy this weird stuff called delta eight. Hmm. Yeah, you know what
that is
Have you experienced it? No, I I haven't I've had friends who've experienced it
and they say it's like a cousin of being high
It's like being high's neighbor
It's like it's like weird. They're like it's not terrible, but it's strange
But you know jamie and I were used to los angeles marijuana like real shit
And you you know if you want to bring that here you're risking federal law
I mean, it's even if it's legal here or at least decriminalized here in the
city of austin
It's not in the state of texas
What is your prediction for how long it'll take for texas to come along and
either medical marijuana or legalization?
Well, texas is supposed to be all about freedom
So it should have happened a long time ago the the misconceptions are what the
part of the problem is the misconception is
That marijuana people are lazy losers and that drives me crazy as a person who
has
Three fucking jobs and works all day and works out constantly like you guys are
out of your mind
You don't even know what you're talking about
It's a bunch of people that don't understand the effects of marijuana and they're
the ones who making decisions
About marijuana and it's foolishness because I feel the exact opposite about
marijuana
I think marijuana it makes me work harder because it makes me aware of you know
Some people say paranoia
I don't necessarily get paranoid, but I do get hyper aware
And when I get hyper aware i'm hyper aware of
Flaws in my thinking and behavior and reasoning and the things that drive me
crazy
And one of the things that drive me crazy about myself is any perceived lack of
discipline
So I work harder because of marijuana. It makes me more tuned in me
Yeah, you know, I ran the new york marathon
I've only run the marathon once but um
Right before the marijuana the marathon started sorry
Marijuana marathon right before the marathon started I ducked into a porta potty
and smoked a joint
Yeah, and and then I I'd never run that far
I'd only run about 18 miles before and I wasn't sure if I was going to make it
and so I was realizing that
If I define success as succeeding to run the entire marathon
Then the whole time that i'm running i'm going to be carrying this anxiety. I
might be a failure. I might be a failure
And this marijuana helped me think differently and I realized that I should
define success as trying
And that if I could be happy for every step that I took that was a success
however far I got
That I was trying something I'd never done before
And that made a big big difference
But then in the middle of the marathon
I got tired I ducked into another porta potty
smoked another joint and um made it the whole way
And it was so for me I get revived from the second joint
I totally did and when I um, there was a bit of time where I had to walk
I got so tired a little bit and then um, but I made it the whole way and I kept
running even after the finish line
But I love my one of my favorite things is to I'm from Boston
One of my favorite things is to get high and shovel snow
It's very meditative
But I also think in terms of work that we now I talked about smokable tasks for
strategizing
But now we have a pattern and i'm not
Scared to say this but before we submit documents to the government to the fda
I get high and I edit the documents with some of our other staff
And you get very attuned to every word you're using what the implications are
where your arguments are strong
Where they're weak what you're missing makes you very sensitive, right?
Yeah, so we we do the final editing is me getting high before we submit stuff
to the fda
I like it. I like it. And it's been really helpful. I think it's very wise and
that's using marijuana as a tool
And again, yes, you're talking to someone who's a regular marijuana user
So I'm aware of the benefits of it that the pros so someone listening to this
They might be you know if they don't smoke marijuana or they don't have any
experience with it
Then I would listen to these idiots talk about how good it is to smoke weed
before you review something important
But yeah, but to someone like me you saying that I'm like absolutely. Yes, I
get it. I understand
Well, you know your invitation for me to come here for this podcast in austin
has now led for some meetings yesterday
We're going to try to make austin one of the sites for giving marijuana to
veterans with ptsd
For our application to the state of michigan
So we're going to try to have multiple sites in michigan to make sure that we
get the local people involved
But we'd like to have some in non-medical marijuana states, which would be
florida
and also
texas
That's great
That's
Florida is a bit of a mirror medical marijuana. It's not marijuana legalization
Well, they have medical marijuana here, but you have it's very rigid like you
have to have like some serious illness
You can't just have headaches like california's got some before it became legal
in 2016. We had some really bogus
Requirements you just have to my feet hurt
And they're like, oh here you go
You didn't really have to have a real problem
When you're talking about marijuana and marathons, I wanted to know are you
aware of the connection with marijuana and jiu-jitsu?
No, no
Okay, this is interesting because jiu-jitsu which
Jiu-jitsu is a very misunderstood
Martial art because when people think about they think of like
Just meatheads and and and people just squeezing each other's necks
Which there's a lot of that for sure, but there's also a lot of
Nerd assassins is what the way we describe them like really super intelligent
people
That if you looked at them on paper, you would never think that this guy is a jiu-jitsu
wizard
You would think that this guy is uh, he's like a computer programmer or
something like
But a lot of jiu-jitsu practitioners smoke marijuana a lot and a lot of them
smoke marijuana before they train
And I always found that I had my best training sessions when I was high
And that I could literally get like one step better at jiu-jitsu when I was
high
It wasn't necessarily good for learning technique though
I would only like it when I was rolling so
Like say if someone was trying to teach me a particular move
I would want to be sober when learning the move because jiu-jitsu moves are
super complicated like you know
Like a leg lock or a heel hook or something like that
You have to have this foot here and you're pinching your legs here and this
foot is here
And then when the guy turns this way, you're framing off with your shin to
block his movement
And you want to have the toes clamped in your armpits
There's a lot of things you have to think about right and I don't think
marijuana is necessarily conducive to
Learning all because you just get too drifty kind of but
For what you already know
Applying that in sparring marijuana is insanely helpful
I'm much better when i'm high when I roll i mean much better like like quite a
bit and to the point where there's actually
Competitions where people get high and then compete um high rollers brazilian jiu-jitsu
there's uh
Wow yeah, there's a company called high rollers bjj and high rollers brazilian
jiu-jitsu puts on
Competitions and they televise them wow and these elite athletes
Smoke marijuana look they all they get gifted giant buckets of marijuana when
they win
like guys like jake shields jake shields who is a
Multiple champion and multiple different um uh
Mixed martial arts organizations and like an elite brazilian jiu-jitsu black
belt and they get high
And then here play one of these and you can see as these guys go out there to
compete
You can see if it shows them smoke the weed first because usually it does yeah
See these guys smoke weed and then go out there and roll and so they have these
highlight reel
So these guys doing jiu-jitsu right here are all high as fuck and look the see
all the smoke in the room
I mean the room is completely filled with pot smoke look at there wow all stoners
And they're all nerd assassins and they're all doing jiu-jitsu
so what jiu-jitsu is
Is a really complicated game that you're playing with your body with leverage
and positions and and technique
And and also cardio and muscle strength and all and and knowledge
and
When you're high on marijuana, it it gives you a sort of
clarity of perspective in pursuing it that is uh very unique and so there's a
long history of some of the greatest jiu-jitsu artists
Who are all potheads?
Yeah, that's why it flies in the face to a person like me
When someone says marijuana makes you lazy i'm like you don't know what you're
talking about you think you're just lazy
Like if you're lazy because of marijuana, you're just lazy. It's just marijuana
just happened to get there while you were being lazy
But if you're a super motivated person, I don't believe that marijuana is going
to make you lazy
but I do believe that many many young kids
With the wrong influences and the wrong
Activities in their life that they do together as a group could lose their way
By just getting high all the time and escaping reality and I think but I think
that's a function of not having good structure in your life
Not having good
Goals in terms of the things you're trying to do and good friends that push you
and and that that all work together
Towards things that you're trying to accomplish in your life and then talk to
each other about the benefits of accomplishing things
And oh man, I didn't think I was going to make it like you talking about the
marathon
But when I made it I realized like wow I can do it
I did it and then you start thinking wow
I want to do something like that too where I push myself and I expand my own
personal boundaries and enhance my own personal potential
For all future endeavors because if you can do that in one thing you can do it
in other things
Or you can just be that person that sits around and plays video games and gets
nothing done
That's possible too, but I think it's a structure issue. I don't think it's an
issue in marijuana itself
So that's why I take I take umbrage with that when someone says marijuana makes
you lazy. I'm like no
You're just lazy
Yeah, well you talked about motivation. Yeah, I think the best way to
understand these drugs marijuana psychedelics is they're just tools
And how you use them you could give somebody a hammer and if you know
They could smash their finger and be screaming or they get my act or they could
build a house
That's it literally a bit my act. I go if I give you it's like a tool
I'll give you a hammer you can build a house with it or you can hit yourself in
the dick if you're fucking crazy
Yeah, that's that's how we should understand it and that's what you bring to it
It's the the fundamental problem with the drug war is that we've made certain
things good drugs and bad drugs and we've lost the point
About the relationship that you have with it. It's about the relationship and
what you do with it
The best example from the fda point of view is thalidomide thalidomide we know
Was given to women for morning sickness and caused horrible birth defects with
deformed limbs
But that was the quintessential bad drug the only person that ever won the at fda
that ever won the presidential medal of honor
Was this woman francis kelsey who blocked thalidomide from coming into the us
because she was worried about safety
But thalidomide is now medicine. It's a medicine for certain cancers and leprosies
And so it's not a good drug or a bad drug. It's how you use it what you use it
for how you're preparing how you're careful
They're just tools and you know, we've tried to personify these are good or
evil things
And I think that that's a complete misunderstanding the same way ecstasy can be
a party drug
Or it can be a therapy drug and some of the vets in our studies and others have
said I don't know why they call this ecstasy
Because it helps them go through painful emotions
And they don't associate it with party drug even when we train therapists and
even patients we let people into our studies
If they've done mdma up to I think five times
So they couldn't have done it that way, but we don't want if they've done a
whole lot
But if they've done it up to five times and those people that have done it that
way have done it in party settings
And when they do it in a therapy setting, they say it's a completely different
experience. Can I ask you why you choose five?
Well, it's just we um
What if somebody had six? Well, you get that's the thing about clinical
research is you have to be arbitrary about certain things
You have to be you know, that that's why some therapists are reluctant to work
on clinical research
you can't modify according to the
Needs of the moment which we will be able to do post-approval, but five we just
chose as an arbitrary number
People have talked about how there's diminishing returns sometimes over time
for mdma for me
It happened after about 40 or 50 times
I was really made for mdma and it's still um 40 or 50 times you had diminishing
returns
Well, no 40 or 50 times was no diminishing returns
But once you hit over 50 well, I still use it. My wife and I like to try to do
it once a year
It's really great for our relationship. It's still really powerful, but it's
not quite the same
As the first experiences, so that's why we we made a limit
We didn't want people to have done it a whole lot
Right and and we want to have them come at it fresh in a way
So we just picked five we could have picked six or seven, but but there's this
I think it maybe is even six I can't remember exactly but
you know, you have to have inclusion and exclusion criteria and you have to
Set it up that way. And so that's what we chose and yeah
It's not like that with marijuana. I mean you can use marijuana thousands of
times and if you you do get a tolerance for it
But if you stop for a day or so or a couple days you smoke it again
It's like you're getting high the same way you did before but there is
something about mdma
That's different than psilocybin or lsd where a lot of people do report that it's
not quite as
Deep and profound as it was the first initial bunch of times
And where that number is varies with with different people, right?
But I think you know and in the research with mdma
We're also saying it's a tool we're using it in this particular way
You know, we've now succeeded with our first phase three study. So in the
35 years of maps's history, we've raised over 110 million dollars in donations
And so we now have the maps
And now because we think we're about to succeed
We've started in 2014 the maps public benefit corporation
And that's that's our pharmaceutical arm. It's it's led by amy emerson and bera
yazar klusinski
and there's about
80 people in this public benefit corporation about 40 or so in the non-profit
People donate to the non-profit get tax deductions the non-profit transfers the
money to the benefit corp
the benefit corp does the research
And we'll eventually
Sell mdma by prescription if we get approval
And so we have now
Realized that there's when I first started maps. I thought that
It was invented by merck in 1912. So it's it's not patentable. It's in the
public domain in the 80s
When I started maps in 86 another group
started a
For-profit company to develop ibogaine for opiate addiction and they called it
NDA for new drug application international
But then I saw a lot of the researchers starting to sue each other
For intellectual property
About ibogaine and it just was so destructive that it sort of killed the field
for a long time
Those patents original patents have now expired but I hired an a patent
attorney
So that did the ibogaine use patents to develop an anti-patent strategy
So nobody could pat not us not anybody could patent a lot of the uses of mdma
So I thought when we made mdma into a medicine
It would just become generic and I thought that was fine
We're doing this as a public service people should have it
But there's so many different uses of mdma
That it's hard to
Do all of this with philanthropy and then I realized
Accidentally in a way I discovered from another patent attorney that in 2013
I learned that there was actually incentives that the fda had
Developed for
Promoting research into drugs that were off patent and ronald reagan in 1984
signed this law that provided these incentives
And what they're called is data exclusivity
And what that means is that if you make a drug that's never been made into a
medicine before
And it's there's no patent protection
No one can use your data to market a generic for five years in the us and it's
10 years in europe
not only that but if we succeed in adults the fda is requiring us to do studies
in adolescents that are traumatized
12 to 17 year olds and we've actually
Already had to submit a pediatric plan and you get six months additional data
exclusivity for working in pediatric populations
And it blocks a generic competitor from
Applying to be a generic competitor till the five and a half years is over and
it takes fda around six months or so
To evaluate their application so we'll have six years of data exclusivity
It's different from a patent in that another company if they wanted to could
generate their own data
So we don't block anybody but it'll take them five or six years
So then I realized that we could tell a different story to our donors
That if you can help us reach this point of sustainability
That we can sell mdma for a profit
And we can use the profits for more research
But I didn't want it to be like a traditional for-profit pharma company
Where you maximize profits
There's a modification of capitalism called the benefit corporation
And there's thousands of these benefit corporations now
They are for-profit but you maximize public benefit not profit
So if there are
Minority shareholders they can't sue the management because they're not maximizing
profits
Now we have all these hostile takeovers things that
If shareholders think that the management is not maximizing profits
They can try to change the management so in a benefit corp
You maximize public benefit and I think when we talk about healthcare
The profit motive has really warped things in America in a terrible way so that
we have the highest per capita
expenditures on healthcare than any country in the world
But our outcomes are down like 40 or 50 in the in the countries when you look
at your average outcomes
So we wanted to model not just something new psychedelic assisted psychotherapy
But we also wanted to model a new way to market medicines
So we created in December 2014 the maps public benefit corporation
And that will that's our pharmaceutical arm and that will end up
We hope by the end of 2023 getting permission to sell
And we will sell not to maximize profits but to maximize benefits and so
We we think that we will reach sustainability in the middle of 2024
Now our ambitions have
Been expanding we have this one successful phase three study that we just
published in nature medicine
And we had you know new york times articles from page even about psychedelics
And we're in the middle of the second phase three study, but we also want to
globalize
And so we're now starting research in europe
It'll cost us like another 30 or million or so to bring research and obtain
approval from the european medicines agency
It's it's so much less expensive than in the u.s
Because the europeans will accept all our u.s data
And so we only have to do one phase three study in europe and we're working
To try to start mdma research in south africa in rwanda where they had the
horrible genocides in somaliland
Armenia and bosnia people all over the world palestine people have contacted us
where there's lots and lots of trauma
Not necessarily lots and lots of money, but we want to globalize. So that'll be
Now we've also hired the boston consultant group
Which is um, you know helps businesses figure out their strategy bcg is what
they're called
And we've hired them to help us plot our commercialization strategy
So you know my phd at the kennedy school government at harvard was on the
regulation of the medical use of psychedelics and marijuana
So I have expertise in that and we've hired a lot of people from pharma who
know drug development
And that's how we've built the benefit court, but we don't have expertise in
commercialization
so this bcg report was to
Help us understand what is the path to commercialize and so when you have a
pharmaceutical company you need all sorts of new functions
to do commercialization
Government affairs you need to have
Pharmacovigilance you need to track how everything is going you need to
um
We'll need to reschedule in all the states
So for example when fda says a drug is a medicine the dea must reschedule out
of schedule one
And but where it goes is is up for discussion
But then the states have to reschedule and different states have different
Procedures for that so in california
You actually need a whole new law to pass the
The legislature and signed into law by the governor to make a schedule one drug
into a medicine
And there's a bill now going through the legislature just past the
State senate in california that would decriminalize psychedelics and it's got a
provision
To automatically reschedule once the fda and dea say a drug is a medicine and
amber and marcus capone from vets
were very helpful in talking to various senators
state senators in california to get them to change their minds and support this
law because they told stories of how
Psychedelics have been helpful to them in texas here. It's an automatic rescheduling
Unless the commissioner of public health objects and so with rick
Perry and the efforts that have been here in texas
There was just a law passed that would support psilocybin research
And it also directs the commissioner of public health
To do a study of the literature on mdma to acquaint them what's going on so
that if we make
mdma into a medicine we think texas will
Reschedule automatically and we think that the commissioner of public health
will not object to that although we don't know
But we're already trying to educate them so in any case we need to do this in
all 50 states
There needs to be a lot of government affairs relations
And so bcg report has estimated that it could be somewhere in the neighborhood
of 80 million dollars
To do the commercialization and they say we need to prepare starting for that
now
And because we have one successful phase three study
There's a good chance. We're actually going to succeed
So where we're at is it is a very challenging situation. There's now
hundreds and hundreds of psychedelic for-profit psychedelic companies
When I started maps in 86 now again
35 years ago i'd say for the first 31 32 years
I could never even imagine that there would be for-profit psychedelic companies
That there would only be you know non-profit donations
But we've cleared out the regulatory obstacles we've helped change public
opinion we've demonstrated through the fda that it works
And that's now there's several for-profit companies with psychedelics that have
market caps over a billion dollars
So basically maps is further along than any of them
We've done the only we're the only group in phase three we have one successful
phase three study
So in a sense we've taken around 110 million dollars and 35 years of work
And if maps were a public company we'd be worth well over a billion dollars
Because we have this
Potential to market mdma and what I told to the new york times is that this bcg
report suggests that during this period of data exclusivity
Depending on where we set the price depending on how many therapists we've
trained
Shannon carlin is leading our
Therapy training program we're right now at this very moment. We have 300
therapists in our training program. We've got
Another one starting in september. We hope to have more 500
Therapists we've already trained about a thousand therapists
We want to get tens and tens tens of thousands of therapists for all these
thousands of psychedelic clinics, but
the estimate is somewhere in the neighborhood of
750 million dollars or more
In profits during this period of data exclusivity just from the us
And we're also working in canada and israel, but the challenge that we face
Is that now we think we're going to to fully globalize to commercialize
complete everything that we're doing
We're going to need to raise about 150 million more about 50 million a year for
three years
But that will make mdma available in much of the world
We'll hit the sustainability point. We'll get this income from the sale of mdma
We'll be able to complete globalization complete commercialization
And you will be the only ones that are able to sell this mdma
During this period of data exclusivity
Unless another company decides to do their own research
So the answer is probably yes because
It will take people at least five or six years to do that. Can you meet demand
though?
Well, here's where it gets a little bit more complicated because
The demand the way we say this it's not the drug
It's the therapy that the drug
Makes more effective, right?
And so we will not be able to meet the demand
There's about eight or nine million ptsd patients just in the united states
350 million throughout the world or more and just so many other people traumatized
So it's going to and the way we want are negotiating with fda
And dea is that the only way that this becomes a medicine is that the only
people that can prescribe it
Have been through a training program
So they understand the safety of mdma and the only therapists that can actually
work with the patients
Have been through our training program
So there's two ways that we need to
Work on to meet the demand the first is to train as many therapists as we can
The second is to start exploring group therapy
And when you train these therapists, do they have to have experiences
themselves with mdma?
We don't want to ever require
That people try mdma, but we think that they would be better therapists if they
do so
We have
About 10 years ago we negotiated with fda and we got approval for a protocol
Where
It's a
Personality changes various things with mdma and it's limited to therapists in
our training program
So the only way we can give legally
Therapist mdma is in the context of a protocol
Because it's a schedule one drug so we've given around over 90 people I've
mentioned the police officer
We gave you know, we have mdma in this protocol
Now two years ago we wanted to get another protocol approved
That would make it less expensive to give mdma to therapists
So the first protocol is four days long
And people either get mdma or placebo and then a day of integration and then
the crossover whatever they didn't get the first day
And then a fourth day of integration
And that was good when we're training people to work for research where half of
their people will get placebo
We get therapy without mdma compared to therapy with mdma
But now we wanted to do
Two days where everybody gets mdma and just a day of integration afterwards
And so about two years ago, we applied to the fda and they put the protocol on
clinical hold
Which means that they we couldn't do it. They said the risks were too great to
have healthy people get mdma
What risks do they cite those risks?
They didn't really that there was one person that had um suicidal ideation
Meaning that she um
During existing yes, she had attempted uh
self-harm before
And it was resolved successfully during the mdma session and she told it it was
beneficial to her
But what's happened now is this um bureaucratic self-protectionism
The fda realizes that now it might work
And it might become a medicine and if something goes wrong they're going to be
um blamed for it
And it's the same group at the fda not not the same structure, but the same
organization that that um
25 years ago under a different group name
But the group that regulated psychedelics back then also regulated oxycontin
And so they're the ones that approved oxycontin for long-term use and that's
been a big scandal
It's helped produce the opiate epidemic and so
All of their documents have been released to the public and so the fda even
though it's different people now
They're a little bit worried about what happens if they let psychedelics out
and something goes wrong
So they've they've become more conservative in certain ways and so they said no
We're not going to give you permission to give mdma to therapists and
Of our two-person therapy team, which is male female
Usually two-person team the lead person needs to be licensed to do therapy
And the second person doesn't need to be a licensed person can be in a student
to get a license or someone with a thousand hours of behavioral health
experience
But in this new protocol the fda said the lead person needs to be an md or a phd
And they said every clinic needs to have a doctor on site
That this or I mean this protocol you need a doctor on site right now
We have
Approval in phase three the lead person is just a licensed therapist not md phd
And the doctor does the screening and is on call, but it's not on site
So these are like poison pills for rolling it out to meet the demand because it
would increase the costs of the therapy tremendously
To have a doctor on site many therapists have private practice offices
They don't need if they had to pay for a doctor on site the whole time
It would be way too expensive. So we've been through a two-year process and we
decided that
We needed to fight this and so we actually hired attorneys
with
Expertise in challenging fda in what's called the formal dispute resolution
process
And where that's where you appeal to higher levels of the fda so the division
of psychiatry products
Is regulated by the office of neuroscience and so we've spent over a quarter
million dollars
On lawyers fees
To it's kind of a mixture of law and science and we went to challenge the fda
and we said
That first off it's not too risky
To have therapists volunteer for this so we did a survey of the 90 therapists
that have been through it and they
Uniformly almost said very high average scores. It was very helpful to them
professionally to learn how to
Understand what mdma does it helped them to be better therapists and personally
they got a lot out of it and the harms were very very minimal
Or virtually non-existent
We got letters from expert therapists and academics and said
20 over 20 letters saying md or phd doesn't make sense that licensed therapists
can do just as well or better
Because they practice therapy mds don't even know what therapy is even psychiatrists
a lot of times
Are trained to sort of be arm of the pharmaceutical industry and psychopharmacology?
They don't even have to do therapy themselves to be a psychiatrist
PhDs
In psychology are often trained to do measures. They're not necessarily
therapists either. It's just from the fda. They don't regulate psychotherapy
That's what's so
Challenging for them. This is the first time that the fda is not looking just
at drugs
So the way ketamine was approved and there's ketamine clinic here in
Texas the way in austin. I mean in hundreds of ketamine clinics it was approved
just as a pharmacological treatment
without any kind of
therapy with it
But we think therapy is part of it
So this is the first time fda is trying to regulate therapy
And we also said that we don't need a doctor on site that they're the safety
issues are
You're making them up. We looked at all the phase three sites where some of
them
We have doctor on site some not some we have md phd is the lead therapist some
not and there were no differences really in
efficacy or safety
So the good news is that just two weeks ago
Or three weeks ago
We won this formal dispute resolution. All right. Yeah, it was great
So the fda now we have permission for this study to give mdma to therapists
again. It'll be less expensive
Md phd is out the window and doctor on site is out the window. Where is the mdma
coming from now?
Well in 1985
I had some made at purdue university by dr. Dave nichols
85 1985 and we're still some 36 year old mdma laying around it's
Incredibly stable molecule now
It's not used in phase three so i'll just say so at that point we um
I paid him four thousand dollars for a kilogram of mdma
Whoa, what's that worth on the street a lot a lot and and I I will say that I
have never done this mdma
It's the of course it's the purest uh in the world what it's it was incredible
It was done in the university lab. Why haven't you done it then because it's uh
The legal and the illegal are separate. Oh
So god, you know, yes, I can't no totally true wink
No, no totally true. I've never never done it. Oh for sure. Um, I wish I could
have
But um, but but they've actually got a good yield. It was a kilogram and a half
So the the reason I share this is just to say it's an extremely stable molecule
We are still using it in non phase three studies because it's not quote gmp
good manufacturing practices
It's just as pure, but there's not all the data about it. It's not made at
scale
But it's just great. So we've had to find new suppliers for mdma. So to answer
your question um dealers
uh
producers
Producers and um there are multiple companies in the us canada netherlands england
Switzerland that we got bids from to manufacture our medical grade mdma wow
that is interesting
Yeah, so we're like a drug company a lot of drug companies
Contract out to research labs to make their drugs. Well, they must also be very
aware that with maps
It's such a legitimate organization with such a long history of success that
you guys are basically opening up the door for this industry
Yes, and they'd like to get in on it as quickly as possible and have an
established foot through the door
Yeah, and they think that this could go very big so there's like
Absolutely, yeah, so so it very well could and and eventually I think 2035
after a decade of clinics
I think we'll have licensed legalization
And people will be legally able to buy psilocybin mdma lsd
Well, I'd love the fact that you're planning this far ahead
It's a bummer that here. We are in 2021
We have to think in terms of 14 years from now being legal something that
should be legal right now
But I do love the fact that your strategy is so
You guys are patient and calculated and you're doing it, right?
Yeah, yeah
Well to say the first medical marijuana states were california and arizona in
1996
That's 25 years ago and we still don't have federal legalization of marijuana
People are motivated by stories
They need to hear stories. That's what what um
Congressman crenshaw
What motivated him was hearing stories from other navy seals it wasn't so much
data
It was stories that the people that said so we think that the fda needs data
They don't want to hear stories they need data
But once they make it into a medicine and then we roll out these thousands of
clinics we and others
I mean and they'll be psilocybin ketamine mdma clinics and maybe 5-meodmt and
ibogaine and other clinics
But they'll be trained
Therapists will be cross-trained they'll be psychedelic therapists
But then there'll be stories and stories and stories of people that have gotten
benefits from psychedelics and that's what will change public opinion
To move to license legalization in 2035, but but to just backtrack for a second
the
mdma that's
Manufactured now for us in england
It's a company that also makes lsd and psilocybin and they make mdma for us
So they're a daring company. They're really really good. What are they called
onyx is the name of the company
But they make what's called the um active pharmaceutical ingredient that's
called api the active pharmaceutical ingredient
That's like the powder, you know, whatever, but that's not the dosage form
So then there's another company that we have to send it to
in order to
put it into capsules
And you would think that that should be pretty damn easy to just stick this
stuff into capsules
But they have to do it at large scale automated they mix it with
Manitol you know other different things to to make it all weigh the same all
the capsules because for research too
We have to have all the capsules weigh the same even though they have different
amounts of mdma in them
So supposedly for double blind purposes, but we have a second company now that
is making it into capsules and it's cost us
So far almost six million dollars
Just to get our new supply whereas I got
One kilogram and a half actually from dave nichols and 85 for four thousand
dollars now. We've got about
14 kilograms
But it's done in a way where it's done at scale. It can you you pressure test
everything what can go wrong?
What are the impurities you have to get really
Very clear understanding and then you have to get uniformity blend uniformity
to put it into the capsules. That's also really expensive
So now what we're doing is
Scaling up to make it and we hope that
We'll have enough mdma. The question is will we have enough therapists what's
an effective dose?
Well, we did a study in
Veterans firefighters and police officers and we tested 30 milligrams
75 milligrams and 125 milligrams and 125 milligrams
And we thought that the effective dose was 125 milligrams and we thought that
30 and the 75
would
Not do quite as well
Now just to say what we do we do believe that longer is better in the
therapeutic session
So two hours after this initial administration of whatever it is
We give half the initial amount
So 125 with 62 and a half milligrams 75 with 37 and a half or 30 and 15
milligrams
And that extends this plateau
That's called the optimal arousal zone
So when people have ptsd
One of the common responses is they become emotionally numb
You know just it's too painful or people are hyperactive hyper vigilant and
they're constantly on edge
But in neither of those
Conditions are people really able to do therapeutic work to process the trauma.
They're either too numb or too
reactive
So the mdma brings people into this optimal arousal zone where they can
Feel safe and process the trauma. So what we discovered in this study to our
surprise
Was that the 75 milligram group actually did great
Even a slightly better than the 125 in this one particular study, although
there were other differences the groups
When you randomize
It doesn't mean that everything is equal you just it's random
And so what we showed is that the ptsd symptoms were pretty much equal in these
different groups, but depression was
A lot higher in the 125 milligram group than in the 75 milligram group
But in any case the 75 milligram group did great
And we've tested
0 milligrams 25 milligrams 30 milligrams 40 milligrams 50 milligrams 75 100 125
and 150
All with half the initial amounts
So our phase three studies now are designed there's three mdma sessions one
month apart
And there's 12 90 minute non-drug psychotherapy sessions
Three before the first mdma session for preparation
And then three after each mdma session for integration
So the first one in phase three is now going to be 80 milligrams
Followed by 40 milligrams and then the second session
It could stay 80 or 40, but generally almost everybody will go up to 120
And then get 60 and then the third mdma session also is negotiable
But it's almost always again 120 over 60 the reason it's not 75 and 125 is it's
so expensive
Millions to make a new dosage form
That we felt that we we needed to save money
So we make only 40 milligram capsules or 60 milligram capsules
And so 60 you take two of them you get 120 and then you've got the 60 for the
half 40 milligrams
will give you 80 and half of that
Is 40 or the or the 340s can give you the 120 and so we only have two different
sizes 40 milligrams and 60 milligrams
But we found that the the 80 milligrams is is can be quite effective and it's a
good way to start for a lot of people
Where it's not overwhelming?
Yeah, it's not overwhelming
And then the the next day is not overwhelming as well, right?
Yeah
Does that does it have an equal impact in terms of how much time you need to
recover?
This is like 30
Do you have to recover less than you would with 120?
Yeah, yeah, it doesn't take near as much out of you
But but still we have the second day with no obligations and people are resting
and then we have the integrative psychotherapy the very next day
So what we have modified our program based on
What we found to be a lower effective dose than we thought
But what made it complicated is that it's important to
The goal is to try to do double blind studies
Randomized placebo controlled double blind studies so people don't know what
dose they're getting
So that then you can say it's it's due not to their expectations if there are
differences between the two groups
It's just due to the dose and so
What we are trying to do is find out what dose of mdma is high enough to cause
confusion
People aren't quite sure but not so high that it's so therapeutic you can't
tell a difference between the two groups
And to our surprise as I said the 75 milligram group in that study was
effective
So it was a lower effective dose than we thought but the
25 30 40 and 50 milligrams
made people uncomfortable
It was like turbulence when you take off from an airplane
You know, you have to get up above the clouds and then it's smooth sailing
But if you're in this kind of turbulent phase
It can make you uncomfortable stuff comes to the surface. You're supposed to
talk about your trauma
You've been burdened by your trauma for a very long time, but you don't have
enough fear reduction
So what we showed is that people all got better, but the people that got
If we if you gave people therapy without any mdma at all
They did better than the people that got therapy that got 25 30 or 40
milligrams interesting
and so that meant that
My dissertation was wrong. I had
Thought I'd solved the problem of how do you do a successful double blind study
and it was going to be
Therapy plus low dose of whatever it is low dose psilocybin low dose MDMA low
dose cells
You know therapy plus low dose versus therapy of full plus full dose
Now with mdma what we discovered is that
If we use low doses 25 30 40 milligrams that we can produce enough confusion
that the fda would consider it successful blinding
But that it will make it easier for us to find a difference between
mdma with low dose mdma than
Then therapy with low dose mdma. I mean or therapy with
No mdma at all. So the real question is if you can
Do the work with therapy why bother at a drug?
So when we went to the fda we said
We can give you blinding with low dose mdma with therapy, but it's going to
make it
Easier for us to find a difference between the two groups and that we suggest
that we do therapy with inactive
placebo versus therapy with full dose mdma and most people almost everybody
will be able to tell
Whether they've got mdma or not and the therapist will be able to tell but
That's the fair test, you know
Can we do this and so that's what the fda they there's a fellow named bob
temple like the old wise man of the fda
He's been there since 1972. He was in charge of the office of science policy
They brought him into the final meeting where we discussed our design of phase
three
And he was part of the group that said yes, we can do therapy with
inactive
Placebo and he said there's two main ways then to or he didn't say but but the
fda was there's there's two main ways to
Reduce experiment or bias when the double blind doesn't work
One is called random assignment. You have everybody
Pass the same screening the same inclusion criteria. They're all similarly
motivated
They're all willing to get the full dose mdma
But then some do and some don't then the other part of it
It is how do you evaluate whether the treatment was successful?
You can't have the therapist evaluate or give measures to the patients because
they're biased
They might think you know, they know who got the mdma who not
So we need a very robust system of independent raters
That are trained by the boston va we have over 20 of these
They're inter-rater reliability. They do an hour interview. It's called the
caps the clinician administered ptsd scale
It was developed by the boston va and so they're randomly assigned on telemedicine
to
Evaluate the patient the next patient that comes in and so one rater doesn't
follow the patient through the study
And so that's how the fda said that we can do the studies
And we have a signed agreement in what's called the special protocol assessment
process
And so once we present the data to the fda they can't say we don't like your
methodology
If we get statistically significant evidence of efficacy and no new safety
problems arise
Then they must approve the drug
And then when we went to the european medicines agency and we said to them
We would like to bring this to europe. We would like to globalize
Here's the same issue. How do we do a double blind study? Here's what the fda
said
The ema the european medicines agency agreed with the fda and they said we have
to do one phase three study of 70 people
In europe again therapy with inactive
Placebo versus therapy with full dose mdma and the european medicines agency
also said
That they want us to work with refugees and migrants they want us to enroll
some refugees and migrants in the phase three study
Because there's so many syrian refugees and north african refugees in europe
and there are a lot of them
Horribly traumatized from becoming a refugee and trying to
cross these borders and
traffickers and all that so
We're going to try to include some refugees and migrants, but that that's
basically
The design of the studies and so the the active dose
Will also be in in europe starting with 80 milligrams followed by 40 and then
the second and third there's almost always 120 followed by 60
And you'll be interviewing these people and what what's the protocol for
establishing success in terms of like the the
How the study went how the experience went for these people?
Yeah, they're there luckily for us
There is a gold standard measure of ptsd symptoms and it is this measure
developed by the boston va called the caps
Clinician administered ptsd scale and this is number five. This is the fifth
Version of it. So caps five and so that's administered to people at baseline
And then we administer it throughout the study and then two months after
The last experimental session so to give you a sense of how our phase three
study went the one that we just got published in nature
medicine and why we think we have a real good chance of
Succeeding is that
Now we work with severe chronic ptsd patients and we felt that we have to work
with the hardest patients
And what that means is that if they have attempted suicide in the past we will
still include them
they can't be actively suicidal
But they can have tried to kill themselves in the past
And many ptsd studies think that that group is too dangerous to use that they
exclude people have tried to kill themselves before
But we think we have to include them
So what we showed at the two-month follow-up
Was that those people that got therapy without mdma 32 percent no longer had ptsd
Which is pretty amazing people had ptsd on average of 14 years
We had one-third of people had ptsd over 20 years can I stop you for a second?
Yeah, so 32 percent of people that just had therapy with no mdma
Now obviously there's a different therapists with different skill levels and
different levels of intuition and the ability to navigate
emotional problems
Was that taken into consideration like we were looking at the 30% what was
The ones that were effective what traits did they have in common?
What what about the that those therapy sessions and what about the people that
were initially suffering from ptsd?
What did they have in common?
Well, you're asking one of the most important questions and we don't know the
answer
You know, we are not sure how to predict ahead of time who's going to respond
and who's not going to respond
Well, also because if you're dealing with different therapists, you're also
dealing with different personalities and different bedside manners
different people that have a different skill level in terms of
emotional skill
Or rather emotional intelligence being able to navigate conversations with
people
That's true
Although we train all the therapists
Right, but they're individual human beings you can train people all day long if
you train seven people
How to be a computer coder. Yeah, you know, there's going to be varying skill
levels
Well, one of the things that the fda required us to do was to look if there
were site-to-site
Variations in the results site decide in terms of geographic locations. Well,
yeah, so we have 15 sites for phase three
Right, but do you do what i'm saying by geographic like some places will have
good weather?
Some places have terrible weather. Well, this is more just about the therapists,
you know
So are the therapists at these different sites got it? Okay, so we had two
sites in israel two in canada and 11 throughout the united states
That's a big difference geographically. Yeah geographically, but you know in
different languages
But the caps 5 is translated into multiple languages, so it's the same measure
all over the world
That we use the same train
We train raiders in the different countries that but it's again. It's
subjective, right?
You're just subjectively trying to analyze how people feel
Well, you could say it's subjective
It's an hour-long interview of the patients reporting how they're feeling,
right? Yeah
So in that sense it has to be subjective, right?
Well, we don't know biological markers either. That's the other part
I mean we do we have done some fMRI tests before and after and showed reduction
of activity in the amygdala
Interesting so that people are having brain changes
This is through therapy through just just there or therapy with mdma. Okay.
Yeah, so
What we found though when we analyzed the data was that there were no site-to-site
Differences that were statistically significant
So what that means is that there are these individual variations in the
different skills of the therapists
But that we think that the effectiveness of the mdma is
In a way equalizes like a great equalizer
Right because it's so potent and our method is to empower people to heal
themselves
So it's not like we're
Thinking okay great therapist. You're doing this healing work. So of the eight-hour
session
Roughly half the time in no
Specific order people's eyes are closed. They have they're listening to music
through headphones. They're having this own internal experience
That's very poetic metaphorical mdma is not visual like
LSD or psilocybin, but it's promotes this imagination this it's like inner
storytelling
Very metaphorical. I mean one of the veterans was like
The warrior part of himself that he came back from a rock with that he couldn't
trust
He'd locked up in a cage inside him and this warrior would reach out of the
cage and try to this gorilla would reach out of the cage
Stab him in the side and and then he he realized that
There's a book acid test lsd ecstasy and the power to heal about this
particular veteran and it's about our work
So acid test lsd ecstasy and the power to heal it's about
Michael midhofer our lead
Psychiatrist my story and the vets and nick
Blackston and how we all interacted in our lives
But it's it's this sort of people tell themselves stories and it was how nick
realized that this
Gorilla part that he had locked up because he couldn't trust
Because of what he had done in a rock he would explode in rage and sometimes
with his wife
That he was only making it worse by keeping this gorilla in a cage
And so in his imagination while his eyes are closed, you know, and he's
He unlocks the cage. He pulls the knife out of his side
He unlocks the cage and these evil red eyes of this gorilla melt and they hug
each other and
And he never this was his first mdma session sounds like some weird anime
It sounds like that. Yeah, and it's and it was 75 milligrams and he never had
rage after that first session
Never not against his not in that same way
His emotions were more under control in that raging kind of way
This is an extraordinarily beneficial session for him extremely
Yeah, and um, so
Of the eight hours roughly half the time people are having
Their own experiences and then the other times they come out and they share
with the therapists what's been happening and there's some dialogue there
And then they um go back inner and outer and and we have no script. It's not a
It's it's we call it inner directed therapy
And there's this inner wisdom for what emerges
And so a lot of times people will talk about traumas that they've not talked
about to anybody before
Even that they've not really fully acknowledged themselves that that didn't
come up in the prior
discussions
Because they're feeling safe that the same kind of
reduction of anxiety and reduction of fear self-acceptance
more complex things come up
So we we do think that the mdma is is very therapeutic
Potentially in the right supportive setting the therapists make a big
difference
But that we do feel that through the data analysis that there were no site-to-site
variations meaning that
The results were more or less equivalent across all these
About almost 80 therapists in these 15 different sites
So that gives us confidence
That we can scale it that we can find tens of thousands of therapists now
Some therapists could be really bad and they can make it worse
You know, we'll try to identify them during the training
So what we do is we have right now this hundred hours of training virtual
Then we have an opportunity for some of the people to volunteer to receive mdma
as a patient themselves
to understand from the inside out what it does
And then we supervise the therapists
as they work with their first
patient and we have our treatment manual which is also up on the maps website
if anybody wants to know our therapeutic approach
And then we have operationalized it in what's called adherence criteria
like are the therapists supporting people's inner experience are they intervening
too much are they
you know talking too much are they letting the therapist the patients have
their own experience are they creating a safe supportive environment are they
answering their questions about
safety are they you know encouraging them to express rather than suppress
whatever's happening again this difference between a bad and a difficult trip
Yeah, so we have a team of adherence raters
that evaluate the videotapes and give feedback back to the therapists are they
adhering to our method
So we do try to kind of have a
standardized approach that leaves room for individual variability
Therapists can say different things they can do different kind of things
But generally we have this method called the treatment this inner directed
therapy in our treatment manual
And it seems like we will be able to scale this and that the mdma really
helps people to process and we give them the time
in this safe space for them to work through their own issues like the mdma
experience that you described you know that
You came to a lot of things on your own
Mm-hmm, you know you were able to do that, but it wasn't that the people with
you
Produced those insights you figured it out yourself, right?
And so that's what we're trying to we're trying to empower the patients to heal
themselves
and
Even though these are chronic severe
Some had attempted suicide
before
They tried other drugs. They tried therapies 32 percent were able to
At the two-month follow-up no longer have ptsd, which is really good for
therapy
But you said 32 percent with just therapy just therapy just therapy. Yes. Yes.
The group that got therapy plus mdma
Was 68 percent wow that's significant. Yeah, and of the one third that more or
less that still had ptsd
Most of them had what are called clinically significant reductions of ptsd
symptoms their lives were better
They had fewer symptoms although they still had ptsd
But if we could have given them a fourth session
You think you couldn't nipped it in the bud for for many
Now because this is labor intensive and it's very expensive
The big issue for scaling for us is going to be not only the number of
therapists that we train
But is it covered by insurance, right?
And so for the insurance companies what they want to see is is it durable is it
lasting
So in our phase 2 studies and in also this phase 3 study, we're going to check
again at 12 months
We're not at that point yet for this first phase 3 study, but in our phase 2
studies what we showed is that
um
At
We had in phase 2 at the two-month follow-up. We had 56 percent no longer had ptsd
with the mdma plus therapy at the tumor
So the phase 3 results are even slightly better than phase 2
But at the 12-month follow-up
For phase 2 people kept getting better now two-thirds no longer had ptsd
Oh, wow at the one-year follow-up. So so it took long for the lessons to sort
of sink in
Yes, and people once you learn how to sort of you don't need to suppress you
can process it
People can keep getting better on their own without more drugs
So this is fundamentally different than here take a drug to correct a biochemical
problem
Like an ssri you're going to need this every day and you could need it for
years or months
What we're saying is we do in-depth work
To try to make it so we get to the core of the problem so that then we free
people of the need for drugs
Now the thing about marijuana we talked about marijuana for ptsd. That's more
palliative than curative
Meaning that it reduces symptoms. It'll help people sleep at night, but it
doesn't help them process the core trauma
It just suppresses the symptoms and there are many people that may not want to
do this difficult work
It's it's painful and it's emotional and you you have to really look at this
trauma and it's it's difficult
So we think that there's a quite a number of group of people that would rather
just
Use the marijuana for ptsd if we can show it
Let's go back to the prison thing because I think that's a place where
I think there's a lot of room for
beneficial therapy
I mean you if you think about how many of these people that are in prison have
never really gotten any kind of
Real helpful counseling or real
Moments like something that could be
Provided from an mdma experience where they really get a chance to let go of a
lot
I think so I think that is there been a step like a thought about how to
implement. Oh, oh, yeah
Well, it's it's a little bit difficult to get permission to do research
Or it's very difficult to get permission to do research inside prisons because
the question is informed consent
Yeah, our people in some way pressured
To do this, but we've got therapists that have worked at San Quentin
That have worked at Folsom prison others that there are wardens that are now
interested in this
But what we think we're probably going to have to start with
is
Recently paroled people and then work with them
outside of prison and help them address their traumas
And then provide again group support and try to limit recidivism or limit recidivism
we wanted to get I mean prison in a way
is
Perfect opportunity for people to confront these issues now my son eden lives
in philadelphia and he lives
Right next to the eastern state penitentiary
And so this was the first major penitentiary
Where the word penitentiary came from it was it was all
Set up hundreds of years ago. It was for
People to be meditating on their crimes, you know, so it's individual cells
Sort of like they pioneered, you know
isolation
But they tried to make it so people would use the time in prison to
Reform themselves and make themselves they found that it actually was very
cruel punishment to be so isolated like this
And they didn't provide therapy support
But I think prisons would be an ideal environment to do this kind of deep work
And that's where we want to get to one day
And we do think that you need to have compassion a lot of these people have
been deeply wounded in their lives in their early lives
and
It would be you know
They've got time to do it. They want to
Find a way not to be in prison
Even if for people that are in prison for the rest of their lives that have
life sentences
This could be very helpful to
You know help them have a better
Internal environment a better quality of life
So I think that that will be in the future, but we have to go step by step
Chances are we'll start with parolees
Provide support see if we can reduce recidivism
And then eventually hopefully get permission to do work inside prison
The other thing is prison guards
I mean, it's a brutalizing environment for everybody that's there
Not just for the prisoners, but also for the guards
And because they're traumatized they act in more violent ways towards the
prisoners
And so we think that we want to be working with the same way with police
officers. They have
Exposure to the worst of humanity. They see all these crimes. They see murders.
They see horrible things
Just imagine how much better the world would be if mdma was readily available
That's what kept us going this people this whole time sort of make decisions
based on
The same decisions they make based on whether or not they want to have alcohol
or whether you know
There's so many different things that you do that you're allowed to make these
decisions with that are more harmful
Than mdma
Yeah, now now we have another project which is for political reconciliation
So it turns out that there are some israelis and palestinians that have been
doing ayahuasca and mdma together. Oh boy
Now where in in well, there are underground psychedelic therapists in palestine
And ayahuasca is used throughout israel so
With leor roseman and robin card harris who are at imperial college
Leor is a neuroscientist but an israeli and natalie ginsberg on our staff who
is head of our policy and advocacy team
We are trying to study how you can use psychedelics in this israeli palestinian
context now again
They're not the hardcore haters
They are the people that are more open to being in these mixed spaces
We've understanding that the palestinians they have mdma first on their own
To try to work through some of their traumas. Then they go into these mixed
spaces with where they use ayahuasca
So the first year of this study and this was funded by um christian engermeyer
who's the
Lead uh started to tie the lead investor in compass
But this was he said he's not all about money. It's also about peace
And so the first year was interviews of these israelis and palestinians why
they did it and what were their experiences
And so we were just recently publishing a paper that leor wrote about that
Well, I mean one of the beautiful moments was this person said that an israeli
that whenever he heard arabic music
That it made him tense up it reminded him of the quote the enemy
but during an ayahuasca experience they
played um
Islamic music
from uh prayer music oh and he could hear the beauty in it
And he said there's there in this state of mind in this ayahuasca state of mind
That there's no israelis. There's no palestinians. There's just human and I
could see the beauty of this arabic music
And so what we like to joke but it's not so much of a joke is that um we're
going to work on the easy case of
Israelis and palestinians and then if it works we're going to come to america
to work with republicans and democrats
But it's hilarious
But we need so so the psychedelics have so many different
Potential uses and so when you have these uh traumatized pop that's why in rwanda
you know
We've been approached by people who want to bring mdma to rwanda where the
Hutus and the tutsis did massive genocide again again
um
Oh, sorry
that's a hilarious
ringer
It's hilariously at the three-minute mark the three-hour mark to like right
about to wrap this up
It's like a timer went off. That's bloody
Yeah, so we do have this
idealistic hope in a way that psychedelics can
Help people to see through their traumas to see people that they're scared of
as humans the same way you're talking about with criminals
Yeah, people demonize the criminals
You know if there's some way that we can see them as humans as have been
wounded
If we can have compassion for them if we can have compassion for people that
have difficult different political views
Well, there it's remarkable that there actually are compounds that promote
empathy
And that these are illegal
Well, did did you hear about the octopus study?
No, okay, so there's a neuroscientist
Gould Dolan at Johns Hopkins
So the
The oscars gave this best documentary to the my octopus teacher
which is incredible movie
But it's about a guy who has a relationship with this octopus
But octopuses are solitary creatures
And they stay away from other octopuses unless it's a mating season, which is
very rare
And there they live alone
But around 560 million years or more ago humans and octopuses diverged
But octopuses still process serotonin their brains still process serotonin
And so Gould was interested to know what does MDMA do to an octopus?
So there's you know neuroscientists do a lot of animal studies
So they have a experimental
procedure where there's an octopus in a
container and there's two doors
One goes to
an inanimate object that's kind of put in a
birdcage kind of thing so it can't move
The other door leads to another octopus that's also in this birdcage that it
can't move
And so the octopus that's put in this timber can go either way
And no matter how you switch the genders
The octopus will spend way more time with the inanimate object
It will stay away from the other octopus
But when it's with the other octopus
It's around the perimeter it doesn't really engage with the other octopus
So it took a while for Gould to figure this out but how much MDMA we sold that
we sent them the MDMA
That's a Gould
But she puts the MDMA in the water
Soaks the octopus
In this water and the octopus absorbs the MDMA
And then you put the octopus back in this chamber
And now they spend way more time with the other octopus
And when they're there they're touching the tentacles and they're engaging with
this other octopus
Oh wow
So what she felt it does is
We know that kids when you're young you can learn languages easier
You also learn more social skills
So what she said what Gould thinks that is happening is that MDMA opens up a
critical reward period for social reward learning
That you now can become more social and that I think is what we see also in
humans
So MDMA has this ability to promote connection
And to promote empathy and to promote interest and understanding
Some people said ecstasy is not the right word for MDMA
It should be called empathy
Now Gould also did work with mice and she gives mice a bunch of MDMA
And what she showed then is and mice shall then chop them up afterwards and
look at their brains
But MDMA releases oxytocin which is this hormone of love connection
And then it produces new neural connections
So new accent so there's the new connections with other neurons in pro-social
areas of the brain
So you are actually rewiring your brain
And there is this way where
You process memories differently
And that can account for this neuroplasticity can account for
The long-term benefits from MDMA
Now there's also work that's been done with psilocybin about neuroplasticity
That psilocybin also can promote neural connections
And neural growth
Neural growth, yeah
So Mike Tyson you had on
He talked about how psychedelics have changed him
There's a fellow named Daniel Carcillo
Who was a
Carbomb was his name
He was in a hockey player with one the
Big rewards you know
And the Stanley Cup a couple times
But he's working also affiliated in a way with Mike Tyson
He's got a company called Wysana which is going to try to
develop psilocybin with cannabinoids
And potentially adding MDMA for traumatic brain injury
So fighters and people that have been
You know in the wars people have been blast exposures
So it looks like there's a good chance that there can be
Recovery from TBI
So there was this documentary HBO Sports
And they had one segment of it that was just on psychedelics
And so I you know we were featured about MDMA
But Daniel was also about this concoction of psilocybin microdosing and
Cannabinoids CBD and other things
And so
It does seem like other psychedelics also have this way to rewire the brain
And it may be helpful for TBI for traumatic brain injury
As well as PTSD and a lot of the vets and others have both
You have TBI and PTSD
So as we are thinking about how do we raise this roughly
150 million 50 million a year for three years
We've got several basic ways we want to do it through philanthropy
We want to be able to still prioritize public benefit
We're concerned if we take
Loans or investments that that would then we'd have to give returns
It would it would change our approach
You know, where would we work?
Would we work with people that have large amounts of trauma
But not large amounts of money like all around the world
But we may partner with other companies that want to develop other indications
for MDMA
So this one company we saw is interested in partnering with us
And we're just in the early stages of exploring
Well, what if people just want to donate?
What's the best way to do that?
Maps.org
Maps.org and it's very clearly laid out there
They can just go and donate
Yeah
And that's obviously very beneficial
Yeah
So we should encourage people to do that
I really appreciate that
Yeah
Yeah
And if they want to donate a fair amount
Don't do it through the website
Because
There it is
Yeah
Sports, psychedelic, science
Thank you
Don't do it through the website?
What do you mean?
Well, only because if you do it through a credit card
You know, the credit card people take a bunch of the money
So, you know, mail in a check
Or if you want to donate stocks
Or something like that
It's all on the website
How to do that
Okay
But we are trying to build our base, too
So we're trying to have more monthly members
The t-shirt that you've got is for
Maps staff
That's a very limited edition
But we have
So lucky
Special things for members
So we want to have
Well, I'm going to encourage people
To go there
And I've got to wrap this up
But we've already done three hours, believe it or not
Wow
Isn't that crazy?
Now, I do have one question
If you're open to this question
Is the last two times we did this
We smoked pot before
Yeah
And we didn't do that this morning
We didn't, no
So I'm wondering
Is that because we're in Texas?
No
No, we just started talking
No, there's pot right here
Oh, okay
We just decided to just talk
Okay, I was wondering if it's Texas
I think it's good to be sober occasionally
There's nothing wrong with it
Yeah
Yeah
That's it
That's the only reason why
Okay
No, we've been
The first few episodes we didn't, though
We got a little nervous
We're like, maybe we should be good neighbors
You know, since it's not totally legal here
We abandoned that pretty quickly
I'm glad to hear that
Yeah
Well, thank you very much, Rick
It's always a pleasure to see you
And I think what you're doing
And the work you've done
Is really amazing
And inspiring
And so beneficial
And so
I'm very thankful
Very thankful for you guys
Yeah
And whatever I can do to help
Let me know
Well, yes
Thank you very much
And maybe if we come back
In five or ten years
We can see how many psychedelic clinics there are
Yes, ten years from now
Let's think about a June of 2031
And then there'll be a shitload of them
And maybe the world will be a better place
I hope so
And that's our plan
I hope so, too
Yes, and you're doing an amazing job with it
Thank you
Thank you very much
Okay
Bye, everybody
Bye, everybody
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