Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 828: The Psychedelic Miracle

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

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Recording LIVE from Glorial Studios in Chicago and beyond, this is Cognitive Dissonance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome at today is well, you're listening to this on Thursday, March the I'm gonna go 13th. Yeah, sounds about good.

Sounds right to me. That's the sixth. I think a week from now would probably be seven days. That's go 13th. Yeah, sounds about good. Sounds right to me. That's the six. I think a week from now It'd probably be seven days. That's the 13th. Yeah, so, you know today we're recording it Is it is March 6 was our long form deep dive episode. We're talking about an article from Rolling Stone Called the psychedelic miracle miracle not here in quotes Strong disagree they need to have quotes here. Also, this is from 2017. So this is an older article.

This is an older article. You may hear some names in here that were just sort of on the fringes at the time. Brett Weinstein is one of the names that you'll hear in here. So he's one of the people who's pro psychedelic use. And he's also one of these intellectual dark web guys. He's on Rogan. He's, you know also one of these intellectual dark web guys. He's on Rogan. He's, you know, one of these free speech dudes. Right. So like, understand that there's like

some stuff that gets said in here already that I'm already leery of. Is he one of those like crazy COVID guys? Yeah, he's an anti COVID Vax guy. Thought that the media was pushing the vaccine and the pushing media was pushing the vaccine and the pushing the narrative on the vaccine. One of those people. So, yeah. So this article is really interesting because it's kind of split the way it's written.

It's split between personal experience and informative article, which I thought was an interesting way to tell this story, because it's a story about somebody who decides to do some of these psychedelics to try to help their own problems with their own mental health. And at the same time, do the research about what's happening in the world, talk to the major large figures that are doing the research. And when I say research here,

there's a lot of quotes around that. Heavy air quotes. Heavy air quotes around research, but gets an opportunity to talk to those people, but then also explores lots of other different ins and outs about the use of psychedelics for medical use to try to treat people for problems with their mental illness, with problems with mental health.

You know, I thought I, Cecil sends me just a little peek behind the curtain, every week Cecil sends me a handful of long form ideas, and it's like, hey, pick one. And so I look at them and I saw this and I, I mean, I always read them all, but like I jumped on this one pretty readily. And I jumped on this one because this does dovetail with a personal interest of mine, which is, you know, the way that our medical care system intersects with.

And I think very often fails people that have challenges with their mental health. Yeah. It's something I'm interested in. It's something that I've, I've done a little bit of reading about independently. It's something that like I've experienced within my family. And so it's something that like I just, I just have a native interest in. I think this article does a really good job of kind of showing you both sides of the picture to some degree at least, right?

So even though it says the psychedelic miracle, I think it's this article to give it a little bit of credit does point out like like hey, this is a little problematic Like there's a lot of people walking around right now and you see this I'll tell you what this was written in 2017 it's been fucking eight years and This has only accelerated. Yeah, there's across those eight years Yeah, there are like you could buy magic mushrooms online you know there is a heavy communities Reddit boards everything else that you can imagine that you know talk about

You know ayahuasca I talk about DMT. I talk about MDMA I talk about you know a lot of these second mushrooms very often To a lesser degree as far as psychedelics are concerned, cause I know it's not one, but, um, uh, special K, um, ketamine, um, some of which are approved for medical use. Ketamine is one of those approves. You can get a literal prescription for it. Um, but a lot of things that are, that are being sold and touted otherwise for mental health treatment. I think it's worth really spending some time

and talking about, but I wanna identify like one key problem that I think is important to recognize. And that is that we don't have a medical care system in this country or I think out of this country, that does an adequate job of addressing mental health concerns for the general population. And when I say that, I wanna say like,

nobody gets better, it's not what I'm saying. But what I'm saying is that we are in the historical infancy of treating mental health diseases. We're in the pharmaceutical infancy of developing good, effective, safe drugs for mental health. A lot of the stuff that we've developed and discovered has turned out to be problematic. There's a lot of like,

we're just the beginning stages of all this. And that means that a lot of people are hurting and suffering and we don't have good options for people. And I'm always very, very sympathetic at the individual user level of the need to have those, those medical issues addressed and the fear and the need and the lack of a good place to turn when the medical care system doesn't provide good answers. I think that's like a huge part of what's being sometimes exploited here and sometimes explored here with in terms of psychedelics. Yeah, yeah.

I think, I think there's some real serious issues with psychedelics that when I, when I listened to this, what, what popped into my head the first time when I listened to this was the issues I have with it are that I don't know that we ever will be able to do, to prescribe these things in the same way we prescribe other things, because what occurred to me was it doesn't feel like they do the same thing for every person. Whereas like if I were to prescribe to you codeine,

there's a good chance, very good chance in fact, that it would do the things I would want it to do. Now there are occasions that it wouldn't do, it might be allergic, it might not affect you, it might have a problem with it, whatever, however that works. But on the average, if I prescribe codeine and you didn't and there wasn't any of those problems,

it would do what I needed to do for you. Same thing with other drugs. We would just be like, okay, this drug does this thing. The problem is, is that all these drugs do wildly different things for different people. And they do them not just for like a small amount of time, they do them for days at a time. This isn't just like a, you know, like a two hour

or a three hour buzz or something like that. We're talking about something that can make you, put you in a weird psychotic state for 72 hours. I mean, you could be three full days on one of the way they're describing it in this, a couple of these people are saying they're on these, they're dealing with all of these emotions and all of these traumas and also having these recurring sort of visions, et cetera,

for many days at a time. That's an insane amount of time, but it also just like, if one person has it for three days and one person only has it for a short amount of time, how hard is that for the doctor to sort of just be able to decide whether or not that thing is good to give to somebody? I think like what people are expecting is that

these things just go and get tested and then we eventually are going to be able to just say, yeah, that's fine. But I think there's sometimes there's some drugs that are just so unpredictable that you just can't, they're there. They'll never be something that your doctor writes you a script for. Yeah, I think, I think there's an enormous problem. I think what you've hit on is something that is the problem of standardization, right?

Like standardizing our dosages in order to create a statistically standardized effect. And I think, broadly speaking, that's hard enough to do with mental health stuff in general, right? So like, it's a common thing with mental health for it to be like, well, we're gonna try this and we're gonna see how it works. Sure, yeah.

Some people respond and some people don't. And you might need to change your dose and you might need to add this thing to that thing in order for it to have an effect. It's already a deeply kind of like unscientific, let's give this a whirl and see what happens, kind of an approach with mental health to start with. Then with psychedelics,

they seem even less predictable than that, right? They seem even more unpredictable. And like, to your point, like some of the dosages and lengths of time that these drugs, I don't wanna call them medicines because they're not medicines yet, that these drugs are being used for. These are like heroic doses.

In this article, it's talking about giving somebody MDMA in such quantities that they're essentially immobilized. If you take MDMA as ecstasy, that is very often a party drug. You would take an amount and then go dance. You would not take so much that you would be immobilized by it, but they are giving these, and this is all experimental. It's human guinea pig, it's anic data.

That's a big one, yeah. It's people, one of the people they're talking about in the front of this article is a guy who is a doctor, but he's not a psychiatrist. He's a fucking GP and he's off the fucking ranch. He's just doing, he's buying these drugs illegally, right? Cause you cannot buy them legally. Then they're doing like home test kits to see if they even contain what they're supposed

to contain. And I'll tell a quick story about that. I, Haley and I did ecstasy a few years back. I'd never done it before. She had done it like as a teenager. She had a really positive experience with it. I had read a whole bunch of stuff and I was like, hey, sounds like a lot of fun.

Why don't we like take some ecstasy, turn on some music and like, you know, the kids are gone for the weekend. We'll just like turn on some music and like have a good time. I've always wanted to kind of try it So she's like, yeah, sure So I had somebody that I knew that I thought, you know, they had a reputable connection and you know, but I'm not an idiot So I bought the ecstasy. Oh, and I'll tell you a funny story about that in a second, too I bought the ecstasy and I bought these test kits and see so the test kits you get at home Can identify and make sure that you have either,

like it filters out and it turns colors, you do this whole thing. And then it's like, okay, you have either ecstasy or meth. Oh wow. You don't have fentanyl, it says like, it'll tell you like, you don't have fentanyl, you don't have opioids, you don't have all these other things.

But the closest it could winnow down for me on a test kit that I could use at home, you can actually mail your samples out to a company and they'll test it. But I didn't do that. But like the closest it could be is like, okay, you either have ecstasy or meth. And the only reason I was willing to trust it is because the people I bought it from had had a really good time and they described an experience which was descriptive of ecstasy and not descriptive of math. And I knew it wasn't all this other stuff.

So I felt, I felt comfortable and I felt safe. I'll also tell you a quick, Tom doesn't know anything about drug story. I didn't know anything about drugs. I didn't take any drugs as a teenager. I didn't take drugs as a 20 something. I don't know anything about drugs. So when I went to my friend who was connected and I was like, Hey, I want to buy some ecstasy, but I don't know anything about drugs. So when I went to my friend who was connected and I was like, hey, I want to buy some ecstasy

but I don't know anything about it. So like, I don't even know how much it costs. And she's like, well, how much do you want? And I was like, I don't even understand how to answer that question. I don't know like what a dose is. So I was like, I felt kind of dumb. And I'm like, I don't know, like here's like a couple

of hundred bucks, like if you could get me some ecst some access and she was like, sure. Yeah, whatever. And then she gives me this access. She gives me an enormous amount of ecstasy. I had no idea. You bought enough to go to jail. She was so sweet about it. Like she like gets the, she's like, oh, I parceled it all out into like these gel caps. So you have enough for like, for you and Haley for like you know six or seven trips or whatever together i'm like i just wanted one i just didn't know how much it cost so i was just like i'm like fucking dennis and d from it's always sunny being like i'd like 500 cracks please

you get that and then she gave you your change in ecstasy yeah right it was just really tom doesn't know anything about drugs moment i'm like i don't know how much this shit costs. Sure. I threw money at the problem and ended up with like way more drugs than I was comfortable with and ended up giving them away but like it was funny. But like that sort of stuff you don't know what like even these doctors experimenting they don't know what they're getting because they can't they don't have a hookup they don't have like yeah the best you can do test kit wise at home is you can mail it out or you can do these test kits

but like, it's all fucking experiments on the street, man. That's not how science be. None of that is sciencing. Yeah, and they also talk about these, they go to these conferences and then they talk and then they share anecdotes. And like, that's not science, man. That's not a thing.

There's a, we're gonna be covering it on the No Rogan Experience, but there's this lady who did this thing called the telepathy tapes. And the telepathy tapes is where they think, they used to do this stuff where they used to like hold people's arms that were non-verbal, very autistic people, right? Completely nonverbal, don't show any signs of being able to communicate. And they would hold their arms and do what

they called facilitated communication, where they move their hands around. Human Ouija boards. Basically, that's what it is. It's a human Ouija board. And people, they could write, you know, in a language they've never actually learned because nobody ever sat down to teach it to them. But the facilitator can do these things. And so, but they've jumped from just them being able to communicate to them being telepathic now.

So people think they're telepathic. And all of the, I mean, pretty much every bit of the evidence that they have is all anecdotes. It's all anecdotal. It's all, you know, and this person doesn't understand that did this telepathy tapes and that is, you know, doing all this stuff. They don't understand that that's not good evidence,

that that doesn't mean anything. That just because I did this thing with you, like let's say I gave you a certain amount of mushrooms or I gave you some ayahuasca, and you personally were able to conquer your PTSD through this trip, that doesn't mean that's for everybody. And that doesn't mean that that's gonna work again.

It might not ever work again for anybody. You don't know. Now granted, you could stack some of these anecdotes And that doesn't mean that that's gonna work again. It might not ever work again for anybody. You don't know. Now granted, you could stack some of these anecdotes and start to try to get some data after a long period of time, but you've got to be real careful about how you're getting that data, right? These aren't people who are giving, I'm not going up to you, Tom, and saying, okay, I'm gonna give you some ayahuasca.

And then I'm not going to, you know, over to Eli saying, okay, I'm gonna give you some ayahuasca, and then I'm not going over to Eli, and being like, I'm gonna give you some ayahuasca, and we're gonna put you in a room, and we're gonna have you guys try to figure your demons out for a while. But I really just gave you sugar pills. Right. Right? Nobody's doing that, right?

Yeah. I mean, they might be, because they probably don't have a good test kit, or whatever, but nobody's doing it on purpose, I don't think. Nobody's taking these people's money, because what this is is sort of an underground network of people who are doing these psychedelics, hoping that they can try to cure their trauma. And I am sympathetic.

Deeply. Deeply sympathetic to people who are hitting their face against the wall of our medical system and Can't find answers to help fix them. I'm deeply sympathetic to those people same Those people are going through a rough rough time and the fact that we don't have answers for them is is Every day eating at them They need to figure out what's wrong with themselves. And this might be the one moment where they can throw spaghetti against the wall

and hope that something sticks. Hope that something sticks here. But these are, should not be considered something that is repeatable. We shouldn't be thinking about this as science. This is, I mean, this is like, this is like your mom giving you honey tea because she thinks it might cure your cough. Right. This is all just, this like folktale stuff that this doesn't,

there's nothing here that says that any of this stuff is actually working the way we think it's working. Um, and by the way that they're doing it and the way they're calling the way that they're proceeding with these procedures, it may never ever be something that we can use as an actual, you know, a way in which to treat these types of illnesses. I think one of the things that we wanted to talk about too

is like both you and I are both legalization guys. Yeah, yeah. Like we both think that should be legal. Absolutely. It's not like we are users. No, but like I'm certainly a decriminalized guy. Yeah. Like, you know, but I wanna circle back

to something you said, because I think it's a really important point too, that makes the kind of real science around these drugs particularly difficult to do. And I wanna be super clear too, I think we should do the science, right? Because- I do too. I know to do. And I want to be super clear too. I think we should do the science, right? Because I do too. I know you do.

Like, but let me tell you why this is particularly difficult. You can't give, I can't give you MDMA and give me a sugar pill. And I don't know why I got the sugar pill. I know I'm not having a hallucinogenic experience. There are sometimes the double-blind process is very very difficult or impossible to perform because there's click you can't give me a sugar pill and be like well

let's see there's a psychedelic there's an experience that I am not having. So sometimes the problem with double blinding or blinding at all is that the medicine has an effect. It has a feeling that you have. So if you give me something that doesn't produce that feeling, I don't know, like I know immediately that I've been placebo'd. I know right away. You put me in that room like, oh fucking I feel nothing. Put you in that room and you're fucking tripping balls, you know, it's just it's different and that makes it harder to study, too But I do want to say like if these things work

We do need to find out sure we need to find out if they work We need to find out if they're effective. We got to do it the right way. You can't just like skip the hard work part of science because it's hard and just move on to the Throw it against the wall with human beings as guinea pigs That's the problem is this is the human beings are part of and like there is a non-zero number of people For whom drugs like this and we have a long history of this for whom drugs like this trigger psychotic events or

uncover other pathologies like schizophrenia and like psychosis, bipolar disorder and other problems. So we have to be careful when we're dealing with at risk communities, vulnerable communities, that we don't throw drugs into their systems that might upset the balance of their mental health even further. I think one of the things too, is that these are normally given by people

that are just avid amateurs. Yes. So the person who's giving it to you probably isn't a doctor. They're just somebody who is involved in this in some way, whether they're, you know, one of these people who, this changed their life, so they're helping others now do this stuff,

or maybe they're one of these people who has one of these clinics. It's not, you know, a clinic, again, I'm saying clinic, and it's not a real clinic. It's just like a place that you go that's not in the United States, that happens to have this stuff that you do. But like, one of the things that they were saying is,

and this is something I looked up because I kept on hearing Joe talk about this ibogaine and ayahuasca and stuff. Some of this stuff can really fuck with your heart. It can really fuck you up physically. Like, so it's gonna do these things for you maybe mentally, maybe it's gonna help treat your PTSD or whatever. But like it can really fuck you up. It can fuck up your heart, like irreparably fuck your heart up. So these, these, uh, these

drugs, if they're not administered by somebody who's like watching you and knows that these things can happen, you know, like a psychiatrist, they're an MD, right? So if they do go past all these human trials and they start getting prescribed, et cetera, a great person in the room to be have next to you would be a psychiatrist, right? That would be the perfect experience so that you can have somebody who knows,

they're not only an MD, but they're also somebody who knows about the brain, knows about mental illness, knows how to work with you to try to get through this psychedelic trip to try to fix you in the ways that you can be fixed, hopefully mentally, right? Right. Having somebody who's just like,

yeah man, I like doing this stuff, or I like helping people, and not knowing all the problems that can come up is probably not the best bet, but that's sort of where you're at with this. So we're in this weird spot because it's not a legal thing. Yeah.

And so, you know, I'd love to see it be something that you do try, but I think one of the problems is, is that so many people are so invested in this being right. That's it, yeah. That you're never ever ever gonna hear the end of it if it doesn't pan out. It's like ivermectin, right? Like when ivermectin didn't work,

people don't, they don't care. They literally think it cures cancer now. Like they've gone. Yeah, they just moved on. They've moved on from COVID to be like, it'll cure anything. It's literally a cure all now. We've seen that with medical marijuana. Yeah.

Like how much, like medical marijuana may have, and it's worth studying again, it's worth finding out. It may have some real benefits to people, but before we found those benefits, people were already claiming the benefits for like everything. It was a fucking panacea. We cannot be lured into the trap of believing that there is a panacea. There is not a panacea. That's just not a realistic thing that we should be looking for. I derailed us. You brought up the decriminalization thing. And I derailed us. I wanna come back to that.

I am 1000% pro decriminalization, but I'm not pro decriminalization because I think that this is harmless. I just think that the harms of criminalizing are worse. Exceed this harm. And I also wanna point this out because I think this is worth putting my cards

on the table as a human being. And I don't know that you feel this way, but I will tell you, Cecil, I would 100% try these things if I was in a state of extremis and didn't know where to turn. I would 100% try this. And I know that about myself because through the years I have found myself with family members, people that I love very, very much that have run up against the wall and you find yourself at two in the morning and it's fucking the 10th night in a row and you're desperate and you know you need help and there's nobody in the system that has an answer and

can help you. And I know exactly what that feels like. And I know what I would do, which is to say, I'll try something else. Do something else, yeah. And maybe it doesn't work, and maybe it's fucking dangerous. But like, at some point,

you need to exercise some control of the situation through action. So I wanna make sure that like, I don't come off as a judgy dick because I know myself and I know exactly what I would do. And I sympathize with everybody who does this. Like I'm not, I a hundred percent don't think that the people who try this are dupes.

No. I think these people are up against a thing that they're like, I care for those people. I want them to get the care that they need. And I want this to work for them. I want it to be a thing that works for them. I just don't think the way that they're doing this, at least in this article, the way they're describing it.

Now, granted, this article's old. So it's possible that they've changed some of this stuff. It's possible that more of these things have become, because even in this article, there are moments that they're quoting papers, right? They're saying, here's a journal study about this. Here's a journal study about this. I'm sure they didn't just stop doing journal studies on it.

There's been more since then. There has been, I'm sure, maybe there's been a push in some ways for people to regulate this a little better, regulate the experience a little better, regulate the experience a little better, take better notes on what happens to people, those types of things. The way they're describing it in here is, it's like a hippie commune.

Yeah, man, yeah. That you go to and everybody just gets really, drinks a bunch of stuff, pukes in a bucket, and has a fucking crazy, weird, psychedelic trip, and sometimes those people fix themselves. And I'll be honest, I'm listening to, like I said, I'm listening to Joe Rogan. And Joe Rogan has some of these people on

that talk about this, and I'm hearing anecdotes from some of these people that come on his show, and it doesn't sound like it's automatically working, it sounds like, from what they describe, it sounds like a shitty time, and sometimes it works, and sometimes they have to go for multiple treatments. So multiple treatments, to me, says, doesn't work first time every time, right?

It's gotta do more than that. No panacea. And so it's not like something that you can just snap your fingers, but I'm right there with you. I 100% am sympathetic to all these people. I think, you know, there are, there is big gaps in our knowledge about understanding mental health and trying to learn, you know, I mean, obviously we're learning more about

it every year, but there's still big gaps and people fall through those gaps and they feel trapped and they need to fix. They want to try to fix something. So I hundred% with you. And you know, like some of the, and from this article, you know, one of the things too that I recognize is that, you know, many of these drugs seem to have a mechanism of action where they put people into this incredibly open

and vulnerable space. And that could be a really, potentially, from what it's been described, it could be a really positive thing if they're surrounded by the right people. So if they're surrounded by people who can really help to empathetically and in a way that is competent, guide them through whatever it is

that they're trying to work through, I can see a mechanism where that might have some real therapeutic value and shorten the distance from A to Z, right? And I think that that makes a lot of sense. MDMA, I know, has a history in the psychiatric or psychological community for being something that like was taken for like couples counseling and other therapies so that people can talk about traumatic or difficult or painful or embarrassing or hurtful things without feeling the feelings so they can express their thoughts, express their history, but not relive a trauma.

So I understand that there can be a mechanism, but that vulnerability and that openness can also create a space that can damage and shatter you if you're not with somebody competent, if you're with somebody exploitive, if you're with somebody coercive, if you're with somebody who's got an ulterior motive, or even if just you're with somebody who's not good at this. That's a problem, right? Like that level of vulnerability in an already vulnerable person creating deeper vulnerability, like the amount of regulation of some kind of training, research that would have to be done to make this like reliably safe and reliably effective.

I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying I'm worried about it. You know, I'm worried about like reliably safe and reliably effective. I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying I'm worried about it. I'm worried about it. I'm worried about it not being done well. The woman or the gentleman that wrote this article describes like taking a whole bunch of something. I don't remember which drug he's taking, one of these psychedelics and feeling the word he used

is feeling shattered from the experience. And then, you know, feeling like, oh my God, I've gotta get divorced. And then wrestling with, is that a real feeling? Or is that something that they're feeling because they took all these drugs and they're so blown open, and they don't know what's real and what's not real? These are dangerous vulnerabilities. I'm not saying that they don't know what's real and what's not real. Yeah.

These are, these are dangerous vulnerabilities. I'm not saying that they don't have some therapeutic value. They may have tremendous therapeutic value, but they seem also uniquely rife for exploitation, uniquely rife for the dangers of incompetence in ways that like just make me fucking nervous. And I think that like while that's not bad, one of the things that we're doing, unfortunately, is we're talking about them as if they're not dangerous. We're talking about them as if they're as if they are miracles. I don't know if you've seen around you, but around me, there's been there's popped up all these ketamine clinics.

Have you noticed these things? I haven't seen them, no. Ketamine is now prescribable for depression, for treatment, for some resistant forms of depression. Ketamine, you can get it as a nasal spray from your pharmacy now, and you can also go to like an infusion center that specializes in ketamine. And it seems to have some real value for some subset of people, right? So it's been tested, it's been approved, but I'm also seeing this enormous profit motive.

So these ketamine clinics are popping up and you can go online and fill out a form and be like, now I totes qualify for some ketamine because there's an enormous profit motive now that gets injected into this space. So I worry too with the psychedelics that you've got a vulnerable group of people that these drugs make us possibly uniquely even more vulnerable and even more suggestible

and even more on this sort of like emotional knife's edge because that's how these drugs would be useful, right? Like just taking them recreationally may not put you there but taking them in these doses they're talking about in these therapeutic environments. And then you're instituting this like profit motive. That all worries the shit out of me, bro. Feels like there's gotta be somebody who really

understands everything that's happening all the time around you. Yeah. To make sure that, and it's not just, you know, a guy who did it one time. Yeah, man. That seems like something that you'd probably want. I think too, they talk and hear a little bit about

the black market and you know, like, the difficulty of getting these drugs. And I think maybe the benefit is that if we do do the research on these, and people realize that they're not as dangerous as they were, maybe they can be decriminalized but they don't ever really become medicine. That's exactly where my head's at. I was thinking about this quite a bit on my drive here because I was thinking like I'm

of such two minds about this. Like I am a hundred percent certain that if this, if I felt like this was the only way that I could get help for myself or someone that I loved, I would a million percent be knocking on these doors. Sure. I'd be taking, I'd be fucking shooting eye to my fucking eyeballs. I could go to Peru, whatever the fuck I got to do. I'm not not licking toads, right? I am not not licking toads.

If I think it's going to solve a problem, I need to solve. One of the things that they do is they smoke the, they're smoking toads. You're smoking toads. Yeah. So like I am a thousand percent sympathetic, but I'm also super, super leery of the way it's being done and the profit motive and the difficulty of standardization, the difficulty of blinding these things,

the difficulty of knowing what you're taking, all of that stuff. And I think that like maybe this stuff needs to live in a decriminalized space that is more personally experiential and less medicalized. And maybe that's not safer, I don't know. But I'm not certain how to close that gap or if that gap is closable. Yeah, I'm not sure either.

I don't know if that gap is closable. I know that our current HHS guy, I know his brain worm is excited about second facts. So it may be that soon there is more of these things that are being, I mean, part of me doesn't think he's gonna test it. I mean, like he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who really pays much attention to that stuff.

I don't think he values it. So probably there's a possibility it could be something that gets fast-tracked into something that becomes a treatment for some of these things because it's something he personally believes works. And so we might see something more than that. I would be interested to see this as something to be seen

because the way they describe it for these therapies, it's like you said, it's like that shortening of gaps in therapy, you can get through years of therapy and just small sessions with these large doses of this because it lays it all bare. And then if you have somebody hopefully that can help guide you and you personally can do this, like mentally put this stuff together,

you might be able to fix some of these issues that would take years of therapy to try to fix. And that could be amazing for people. I mean, think about how, when they talk about it, I do understand why they call it a miracle, right? Like I do understand why that title is this. I understand it, but I am fucking super leery of it because I think like, I think that there's so many

different things, profit motive and just avid amateurism that'll make it cause it to be, I think always just a little bit too dangerous to actually work as real medicine. One other thing that I think is worth noting too is that in the current, like as it stands now, my understanding of most of the research that I've looked at, is that the best results, so let's say you are trying to be treated for anxiety

or depression or something along those lines, the best results seem to be a combination of a pharmaceutical and therapy. So the pharmaceuticals without therapy are not as effective as, like if you just take the pharmaceuticals without therapy, they're not as effective. Pharmaceuticals plus therapy are much, much more effective.

Right, so one helps to bolster the effectiveness of the other. But we have a system where when you go to the doctor, they see you for seven minutes, they write you a prescription, and mental health may or may not be covered under your fucking insurance plan. These drugs, and so a lot of people, they get a medicine, they go to the pharmacy,

they take a pill, they don't have access to therapy, and they are not getting the full therapeutic benefit that many of these drugs have been studied to be the most effective combination, right? This feels so much the same, right? Where like, if I just go take a bunch of MDMA because this got approved as a drug, and we're gonna treat it the way we treat drugs, which is

It's independent of therapy. Yeah, you get it and then you leave the office, right? Like I got I wrote you a script for ecstasy, you know Go to cvs and I went to cvs and I got my fucking MDMA and I went home and I took my fucking MDMA And then I had whatever experience I have and maybe it's good and maybe it's tragic, could be one, you know, maybe it's in between, it's fucking ineffective because what they're really describing in the article when people are having positive experiences

is they're having some kind of a therapeutic guide person that's with them for like you were saying, 14 hours, 24 hours, 72 72 hours what the fuck would that cost yeah there's not there's not a lot of psychiatrists that'll sit with you for 72 yeah even in the article the person who wrote the article is like yeah at one point I'm still like all fucked up and I'm still like tripping balls on this like heroic dose of MDMA and the person I hired to sit with me is like I got you got to go yeah I got customer. And they like packed her ass into the car.

They packed her up and they sent her on her way. And like that person was like, yeah, I gotta go back to my husband and like my husband had to take care of me and I'm like in the middle of tripping balls for another like half a day. Yeah. And they said, they called them that night and said, I feel really weird. And they're like, yeah, normally it doesn't last that long. Anyway, I gotta go. Right. Well, we're not, it doesn't last that long. Anyway, I gotta go. Right. We're not gonna ask fucking like United healthcare to pay for a 72 hour trip concierge.

It's not gonna happen. That's not a thing either. It's not gonna happen. So like, what are we gonna do? Like we're gonna medicalize these things that really don't function in a medicalized system. And then you're gonna give somebody a pill and they're gonna take it apropos of nothing

with no therapeutic, like adjunctive therapy. It would have to be a clinic of some kind. It's like a clinic, like if you go to like, detox yourself from alcohol. You go to a place that's like an inpatient place that you go and you do these things. They have these for all different types of things. So you could go inpatient and do something like this,

but you're talking about an inpatient procedure. I guarantee you're fucking met. This is gonna be relegated to rich people can do this. This is who's gonna be able to do it is rich people. Because you're never gonna be able to be like a regular Joe and just have your old blue cross blue shield. They're going to be like, fuck you. I'm not putting you inpatient for three days.

Get on Ativan or whatever. Yep, exactly. And that's what they're going to do. And that's the extent of what they're going to do because of our medical system here. So it feels like it's doomed before it starts even. So it's a weird place to be. And I'm also like you, you and two of mine.

So it's, I know that like, I know how I feel personally, and I know how I feel when I think about it as a policy. Same. Because like, I think that there is a strong possibility that some of these things under the right conditions for the right people could have enormous Transformative value, but I don't know how to scale that

Regulate it and control it RFK does our together you go. I know I feel stupid So his his brain worm went to Harvard Well someone had to. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed our conversation about this and we'll be back on Monday, the brand new show, but we're going to leave you like we always do

with the Skeptics Creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter mommy issue, hypno Babylon bullshit. Couched in scientician double bubble toil and trouble, pseudo quasi alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized, stereogram pyramidal, free energy healing, water downward spiral, brain dead pan sales pitch,

late night info docutainment Leo Pisces cancer cures detox reflex foot massage death in towers tarot cards Psychic healing crystal balls bigfoot yeti aliens churches mosques and synagogues temples dragons giant worms Atlantis dolphins truthers birthers witches wizards. It's time for you to reach under the bull and just grab him by the nuts. Shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, doublespeak, stigmata, nonsense. Expose your sides. Thrust your hands.

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