Dhru Purohit Show - Using Psychedelics To Heal The Brain & Expand Consciousness with Rick Doblin, Ph.D.

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough and Calm.  Many people are unaware of the benefits of psychedelics when taken in a controlled, clinical setting under the care of a professional. Emerging research has shown promise for healing from trauma, connecting to your partner, and gaining insight into the bigger picture of consciousness and life itself. This week on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Rick Doblin, Ph.D., the founder and President of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelics (MAPS), to discuss the use of psychedelics, specifically MDMA, as a therapeutic intervention for qualifying candidates with complex mental illness, schizophrenia, PTSD, anxiety, eating disorders, and more.  Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the Founder and President of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He received his doctorate in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he wrote his dissertation on regulating the medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana and his Master’s thesis on smoked marijuana vs. the oral THC pill in nausea control for cancer patients.  Rick studied with Dr. Stanislav Grof and was among the first to be certified as a Holotropic Breathwork practitioner. His goal is to help develop legal contexts for the beneficial uses of psychedelics and marijuana as prescription medicines, for the personal growth of otherwise healthy people, and eventually to become a legally licensed psychedelic therapist.  In this episode, Dhru and Rick dive into (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): -Why it’s so hard to see beyond existence (1:28 / 1:28) -How Rick’s beliefs and personal views were shaped by his psychedelic experiences (8:19 / 6:58) -Potential sources of inner wisdom/guidance when taking psilocybin (16:07 / 14:30) -Idiosyncrasies that caused Rick to pursue psychedelic research (28:50 / 26:42) -A deep dive into the history of MDMA (35:03 / 32:06) -Therapeutic uses of MDMA (54:20 / 57:51) -The effects of psilocybin on the brain (1:10:45 / 1:07:46) -The war on drugs and how it impacted the public’s perception of psychedelics (1:20:33 /  1:17:32) -The recent advancements in psilocybin and MDMA for therapeutic use (1:27:20 / 1:24:25) -Early evidence on the ill effects of marijuana: should we be concerned? (1:30:55 / 1:28:05) -Current status of MDMA in psychological interventions (1:42 / 1:39:24) -Future hopes for FDA to allow psychedelic drugs to come to market (1:45:22 / 1:42:04) Also mentioned in this episode: -Maui Wild Fires Support/Resources -Make a donation to MAPS here  -Maps.org For more on Rick Doblin, follow him on Instagram @rickdoblinphd. BiOptimizers is offering 10% off + special gift with purchase, just head over to magbreakthrough.com/dhru with code DHRU10. Calm is offering an exclusive offer of 40% off a Calm Premium Subscription. Head over to calm.com/dhru today. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

MDMA has incredible therapeutic potential when combined with therapy. I'd say one of the best uses of MDMA is for PTSD. One of the other best uses is in couples therapy. It's really remarkable about how much of a better listener you can be, about how you can hear things that are complicated, you can express yourself in a more eloquent way, in a less defensive way. Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body

with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Rick Doblin. Rick Doblin is the founder and president of MAPS, multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies, and on today's podcast, he's diving deep into the topic of the power and the therapeutic effects of MDMA. Now, a little bit more about Rick Doblin. He received his doctorate in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Rick studied with Dr. Stanislav Groff and was among one of the the first to be certified as a holotropic breathwork practitioner. Rick's professional goal is to help develop legal context for the beneficial uses of psychedelics primarily as prescription medications, but also eventually for the personal growth of otherwise healthy individuals. Stay tuned for a fantastic episode on all things MDMA and psychedelics with Rick Doblin. Rick, welcome to the podcast. I'm a big fan. I'd love to jump right in. Why is it so hard for most of us to take a peek behind the curtain of existence? And what is the role in psychedelics broadly in their ability to assist on that journey?

Well, you certainly have a terrific question. I'll say one of the reasons why I think it's so hard for us to take a peek behind the curtain of existence is that we don't exist in the sense, that, you know, our individual life, our individual trajectory from birth to death, our individual ego, when you try to connect up with the sort of universal patterns of everything's in motion, of everything's growing and being born and dying, that there's nothing that's stable, the sun is going to die, all of this, that when we get the sense of this repeating pattern, this life, death, repeating death rebirth cycle, you could even say. It's, for many of us, it's a realization, at least for me it was, that our individual self is temporary

in the sense that there may be some echoes through some kind of holographic record or whatever of everything that we've done. There may be this cosmic consciousness, collective unconscious, all of this. everything that's ever happened recorded in such a thing like that, so that in that way we might, you know, continue to exist in that sense. I think that for many of us, this sense of our own incredible irrelevance in some ways, the smallness of our individual lives compared to the enormity of the universe, and at the same time, the critical value of each of our individual lives

and what we can do to make the world a better place. I think there's another part, this idea that's, so scary is that the dissolution of our ego, of our sense of self, as we merge into this, you could say, peeking behind the curtain, that it's quite well known that in psychedelic states, when people are approaching this ego dissolution, ego death experience, that it's interpreted as physical death, that we're so attached to our ego and to our sense of who we are in this body from this birth to death process, that when that is being dissolved, which certain psychedelics do in different ways than others, but they all tend to do that, that dissolving of our

normal orientation is often interpreted as physical death. And Stan Groff, who's, you know, now 92 years old and is sort of the world's leading LSD researcher and theoretician, he talked about this in the 50s, when he was starting in the Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia at the time in Prague to learn about becoming a psychiatrist and to learn about psychedelics. The way that they did the work is that they had to sit for a bunch of patients doing LSD before they had their own LSD experience. And they considered their own LSD experience to be critical to their training as a psychiatrist. So Stan had seen multiple people come up to this point of this ego dissolution and feeling that they were physically dying. And he would encourage them to go through.

You're not really physically dying. You know, this is just let go and be open and trust, be open, let go. And then they would have some, you know, important experiences. So when it came time for him to take LSD, what he described was that he reached the same point and he convinced himself for a period of time that unlike everybody else, he actually was dying because he had this illness when he was young and he said it changed his body chemistry and that it was kind of like an allergy or some kind of situation and that now, unlike everybody else, he actually was dying. So I think that's part of the reason why it's difficult for people to sort of peek behind the veil of existence. On the other hand, in a way, it can be profoundly simplifying of one's life,

and that you can see that this enormous historical sweep, billions of years, that this enormous universe, that we're intrinsically inherently part of it. We're not isolated from it. A lot of times the ego also makes us isolated from the rest of the world. And so while it can be really terrifying and frightening and people think they're dying to see beyond this avail, that it also can be incredibly inspiring and give people this sense of connection so that people can reduce their fear of death and become less depressed, all sorts of things. So it's an important endeavor to try to explore those areas of consciousness, but it's not without its risks. This episode is brought to you by bioptimizers.

You know, I've had a bunch of experts on my podcast talk about the insane benefits of magnesium. This super mineral powers 600 plus enzymatic reactions in the body. That means if you're not getting enough of it, and most people aren't, 600 plus enzymatic reactions cannot function properly. To quote my dear friend, Sean Stevenson, a magnesium deficiency can spell disaster if you're not careful. But most magnesium supplements on the market are low quality, in my opinion, which is why I was super pumped when I found bioptimizers.

Bioptimers, magnesium breakthrough stands out from the rest of the magnesium supplements because, number one, it's formulated for optimal absorption. And number two, it contains seven different forms of magnesium, each serving a unique function in the body. Want to boost performance? Bioptimizers has magnesium orate for that. Want to support your heart health? Magnesium toriate. Want to protect your brain? magnesium malate.

whichever magnesium your body needs, bioptimizers has you covered. Right now, bioptimizers is offering my community 10% off and a special bonus gift with your purchase. Just head over to mag breakthrough.com slash drew and use the code Drew 10 at checkout. That's mag, M-A-G,

breakthrough, B-R-E-A-K-T-R-O-U-G-H dot com slash D-A-A-A-A-S-D-A-A-A-S-D-A-A-A-S-D-A-A-A. H-R-U with the code Drew 10. D-H-R-U-10. Now, back to today's episode. I want to pull on this thread of death for a moment, just for you personally. You know, we're here to talk about psychedelics, but also just curious because you mentioned it.

And we'll also be chatting about your story as well, too, because you are the man behind this movement, one of the men that's behind this movement. How much of your view of death and your own personal beliefs was or wasn't shaped by your experiences with psychedelics? I had a pretty early encounter with death, you know, well before I knew anything about psychedelics. So I kind of was aware of the reality of death that can take people who are close to me that I love

and can take them pretty quickly also. I was very much, you know, fundamentally changed in my political attitudes and my approach to life in terms of my wanting to do about the Vietnam War. So, you know, I was in one of the last years of the lottery. I became a draft resistor, planning to serve my country by going to jail to demonstrate my opposition to it. But that got me thinking a lot about death as well. But I would say that the experience of psychedelics is what really did deepen my understanding of death to the point where I've come to this view that we need to be grateful for death.

There is a really interesting prayer in Yom Kippur. So I'm Jewish and the Day of Atonement, the Most Holy Day in the Jewish calendar is Yom Kippur, and you fast. and go to temple. I prefer to smoke pot and go to temple. One time I took MDMA and spent the day in temple on Yom Kippur with Zalman Schachter, the rabbi, but it was incredible. Very good for atonement and forgiveness. But there's a prayer that is repeated every year. And part of the prayer is, if you could banish death, would you?

You know, would you make it so that there's no new babies born? that there's no new ideas, that the people that are alive today are the only people that are ever going to be alive. And it goes on and on in that vein. And it reminds me of a statement that Max Planck, one of the brilliant scientists, the Plank constant, and one of the things that he said was that science proceeds funeral by funeral. you know, that even though you think scientists are always about contradicting or challenging their own hypotheses and trying to, you know, see if they're true and they're constantly evolving their views based on evidence, what Max Planck said was that, you know, even scientists get stuck

in their ways and science proceeds funeral by funeral. So that idea, other experiences, this prayer on Yom Kippur, it's made me come to this point that, we need to be grateful for death. And that death is what makes life precious. And if we would live forever, then the moment is no different this moment than next moment, because we'll live forever. Why do something now and we can do it later?

It doesn't really matter. So I've come to embrace death as a ally, as part of something that really is what confers meaning on the preciousness of the small amount of time in the history of the universe that each of us individual is alive. And I'd say that has come to me a lot through my psychedelic experiences. And I think also what's come to me through my psychedelic experiences

is just the magnitude of the enormity of the universe and of all this happening and how energy is not created or destroyed, it just changes forms in different ways, that this welcoming of death has made it so that, yeah, I don't really fear death, even though, as I said, I don't believe that there's going to be a soul of me that's going to persist and pop up in somebody else or something. But I think the way that psychedelics have done this is to really help me comprehend kind of the, the enormity of the universe and the sense that everything's in motion, everything is dying.

The sun is dying right now. You know, we think of the sun as such a constant. But it's going to take forever, you know, enormous amounts of time before the sun burns out. But it is in the process of dying. It's well past being born and it's giving away energy of which it has a limited amount. And yet, with that. the transitory nature of things, there's still meaning and purpose and love and connection. So it's not that I think that's where psychedelics have also been really helpful to me,

is that there can be the reality of death, but it doesn't negate the value of the moment, or in some ways the eternal nature of a kind act or anything that we do in this kind of sense that we're contributing to this collective unconscious to the extent there is such a thing. And so I think this idea of being open to change, being open to have one's conception challenged and broadened, you know, that's in a way psychedelic therapy or any kind of therapy. You're always dying to your old self and you're becoming kind of a new understanding, a new self. And if you've stopped that dying process, you solidify, you ossify, you increasingly become irrelevant. him. So I feel grateful for psychedelics that have made me grateful for death. You know, many people who have had psychedelic experiences, and we've had Dr. Roland Griffiths

on the podcast, you know, a couple years ago. He's talked about this through his national surveys as well, too. They have similar experiences. You know, this, earlier this year, I had a guided psilocybin experience in Maui, and my heart goes out to everybody right now who's suffering from No, that terrible fires that are terrible fires that happened, the 100 or so probably more people who passed away, so my heart goes out to that community right now. We'll put some links in the show notes for different organizations that are doing some great work that are there.

But it was in Hawaii. It was very lucky enough that my mom, my dad wanted to come, and it was a group experience. My wife was there, my brother-in-law. In addition to the gratitude that you mentioned earlier in this respect that was there for the normity of existence and also the respect that was there for death, many of us had the experience that we felt that some entity,

maybe our ancestors, it was different for everybody. I'll talk about in my instance. I felt that I was hearing directly from my ancestors. I felt that I was directly hearing the voices of some being that wasn't me. I'm sure you've heard about this before. You've been in this field for such a long time. in the early days, and you know so much of the history of the psychedelic movement, so much of these things were being written off as hallucinogens or this thing or that thing that's going on inside of the brain, inside of the mind. What is your opinion of these voices and this guidance and this wisdom?

Where is it coming from that people hear that they often attribute to other entities and beings? Yeah, well, you got some great questions. So let me start, though, by talking about hallucinogen. So that's a word that's a negative word. It's a hallucination. It's not real. And so whenever you read a paper, a scientific paper these days about psychedelics, any kind of psychedelics, if it uses the word hallucinogen in the title, you know that it's been funded by the National Instant Drug Abuse.

So that it's a negative word. Psychedelic is a neutral word, you know, mind manifest. Anthiogen is a loaded word in the positive. It's also a propaganda, you know, the God within. So I just want to start by saying that, you know, hallucinogen is a word that I tend to avoid. Which is why I brought it up, because I knew that context of it was written off

as these experiences were hallucinogenic and people were using it in that negative context to criticize the work that was being done out there. In the space between me and the computer, you know, it looks to me like it's empty space. But you can pull down the entire internet is actually flowing through this space, you know, in the air, somehow or other. So there's an incredible density of information in any moment passing through in certain waves. How that happens is miraculous. I think that there is some kind of record of, and Stan Groff talked about it again,

as a whole graphic sort of memory system, and as farther you get away from the original event, you know, you have a little bit less detail, but that. So my sense is these voices are coming from inside us. I don't, I'm very cautious about people that say they're channeling, you know, dead people or that they're somehow or other. But I think that you can have a very convincing encounter with people that are no longer alive that can be, you know, your ancestors, as you say, that can be sending you messages. And there may be something is coded. in our genetics. Maybe there's even certain memories that are, you know, we know epigenetic transmission of trauma and other things through what turns genes on and off. My, my, my, my, my, my, thing is that's very dangerous is for people to hear a quote voice and to say, oh,

this voice is, uh, true. This voice is 100% accurate. This voice is the voice of God. This is, this is, quote, the truth. So I think we always see these things through a filter, through our own psychic filters. And so we're never really in direct contact with unvarnished truth. But I think that sometimes people want to give authority to that. They don't want to live in the uncertainty. And so they'll say, I heard this voice and this voice is 100% right. And that's what I need to do. I think that when people talk about reincarnation experiences, I think that you can have information that you bring back about a life that happened before yours that doesn't necessarily mean that it was your life.

I think through this kind of holographic recording of information, that if there's some emotional residence between this prior life and yours, that you can tune into this prior life. You can get accurate information. Again, you can't assume that it's always accurate or that it's not 100% accurate, but you can get information, I think. And so I think that's where I would say

some of the voices come from. We know that people are schizophrenic who hear voices. Are those voices really there? So hearing voices we tend to associate with being mentally ill in different ways. yet in psychedelics, it's like a badge of honor. Oh, I heard this prophet said this thing or that thing. And I heard that voice.

And the voice told me, there's somebody that I know that said that he heard this voice, that he has to support the presidential candidacy of Robert Kennedy. I said, I don't know that you got that voice quite right. Maybe you need to ask that voice some questions. I think this idea of our higher wisdom, a lot of times, okay, so we definitely know that our body knows how to heal itself below our level of conscious awareness. We have a fundamental theory about the inner healer that psychologically, what emerges in a psychedelic experience has some sort of inner logic. I think that there is this inner wisdom that can come to us in the form of, of a voice from somebody answers telling us something so that I think you can have information

that may be valuable and it may even be accurate information but it doesn't mean that the voice is really you know the source of this information is really this discrete voice like that I have had one experience I'm kind of curious what you've had that cause causes me to tend to believe in telepathy. I'll just share that. I'll look to hear about it, please. Story, and then you can tell me.

But before I tell the story, I'll just say, that makes me think that there's other ways that we get information than our five senses. And so some of that could be turned into, oh, this is a voice. So this particular story is now about to turn 70 in a couple months. So this is the one and only time in my entire life where I really felt like there might be something like telepathy.

And so you could say that this is a massive coincidence and that, you know, doesn't happen very often. But the story was that this is now early 1985 and I'm at a party with a bunch of friends and we're doing MDMA. And MDMA is legal at the time. and I was in a place where I was lonely. I had no relationships at the time. You know, I'd had a bunch of relationships in the past, but at this moment, I was about almost 32, and I was not in a relationship at all.

And actually, I was staying with friends that were a married couple. So, you know, this sense of a relationship there. So at this party, I went off to myself for a while. while about 3 a.m., something like that. I just sat there, and I started thinking about all the different relationships that I'd been in in the past. I'd bring up this one woman or this other woman, and it felt like I was updating the relationship.

Like it wasn't, I was just calling a memory, but I was sort of calling a memory, but then everything I knew since that relationship had ended was now in process as I was evaluating that relationship and thinking about how it ended and where we were. So it felt like these. relationships were really alive. And I did that through several, three or four of the most important relationships that I'd had in my life. And then I had this funny feeling of a woman's body inside my body. It felt not like I was remembering something. You know, I know from Jungian psychology, you talk about the anima and the animas, you know, our female side or our male side. But it didn't

feel like this is like the female side of me. It actually felt like there was this foreign woman, you know, somehow this outside person inside me, that I had this sense of this woman inside me. As I was thinking of these various women that I'd been relationships, but it didn't come with a name or anything. It just was like this funny kind of feeling. And then it went away after a bit. I thought about one or two more women and then went to go to the hotel. And when I get to the hotel, there's this message from a person named Chris with a phone number. And I'm like, well, who is this Chris? I don't know. Is this a man? Is this a woman? who was his number? I have no idea. But it was like at this point around five or six in the

morning, so I thought, I'm just going to go to sleep. When I wake up, I'll call. So I call, and turns out that I reached this person, Chris, and it was a woman, and she said that we had been lovers over a year before, and she had left town. We sort of had a brief romance, and she'd left town, and we hadn't had any contact in over a year. And she said that pretty much we figured it out at the exact same time that I was having this woman's body sense in my own body. She had a dream. And the dream was of me. And it was so strong that the dream woke her up in the middle of the night.

And she realized she had to call me. And she called my house in Florida. And they were surprised, of course, to be woken up in the middle of the night. And they told her that I was in New York and they gave her the phone number of the hotel. So we're like, mystified. And she's like an hour away from where I am. And so we decided to get together, naturally decided to do MDMA together. And so we did MDMA together.

And during this, she explained that she was going through a crisis in her life and that she was starting to get dependent on opiates. And that she was very, very worried about that. But more importantly, she was falling in love with her boyfriend's best friend and falling out of love with her boyfriend. Wow. And that was a problem. So, yeah, so I think what was happening is that I was in an MDMA state in a deep state of loneliness, but that somehow they're open to these relationships. She was in a crisis point in her life.

And maybe there was some kind of signal sent, or maybe it was just an incredible coincidence. Right. But that gets to your question of where do the voices come from? So I think that there is this way that we can pick up information and beyond the five senses. And I think that may be connected to the voices. But I do think, and I would caution everybody to say that, you know, you really need to be careful about giving over your own analytical power to the voices. Like, okay, this voice is true. I don't need to analyze it.

I just need to do it. I think that's really, really dangerous. Now, what about Terence McKenna talks a lot about machine elves, you know, under the influence of Iwaska. I've never seen them. A lot of people have never seen them. So I think that was his first. I'm not familiar with that. Could you explain what that is machine elves?

Oh, yeah. These self-replicating machine elves that are kind of these little curious figures that you encounter under ayahuasca and they tell you things. you know, so Terrence used to talk about that a lot. But I think that was kind of an idiosyncratic interpretation of the information coming in. So, but I do think that my entire sort of motivation in my life has been messages in a sense from my relatives, from my ancestors. not so much in like, well, basically Jews that died in the Holocaust and, you know, who were dehumanized and who were considered to be other. And then the critical dream of my whole life was in my 20s, a few years after I decided to

focus my life on psychedelics, and it was of a Holocaust survivor. He was in his deathbed. And just he and I were in this all-white room, and he was telling me that he was miraculously saved for some reason, but he didn't know what that reason was. And he said, let me show you what happened. And then we go back, and it's the World War II, and it's the outside of town. And thousands of Jews are lined up in front of this big mash grave to be machine gunned and killed by the Nazis. And that's what happens, and they all get pushed into this grave. But it turned out he was wounded but not killed.

And so I'm watching in this dream now. I'm with him for three days buried. So it's got a little bit of a Jesus story too. He gets resurrected on the third day, climbs up through the bodies, nobody's there, runs to the woods and lives with the partisans and survives through World War II. All right.

So then he said, that's how I was miraculously saved. And I knew I was saved for a purpose, but I didn't know what the purpose was. So then we're back in the room. And he says, but now I do know what the purpose is. I'm like, terrific. What's the purpose? He said, well, it's to tell you to study psychedelics.

and that, you know, we need, what's the antidote to genocide is having us all realize we're all part of the same family and we're all fundamentally similar and we have more in common than we have a part. And so in my mind I said, yes, I've agreed to do that already. I've already decided to that so I can say yes to this and you can die in peace. And then he died in front of my eyes in the dream. All right. So that was kind of like a voice, I would say, a collective voice of my ancestors, but I heard it more as like a historical. It's my understanding what happened in the world. So I don't think this guy was necessarily a relative of mine. You could interpret that as some sort of a voice, but I interpret it as just somehow I've been working on how do you respond to the Holocaust?

And this is, you know, where that came from. There are people that talk about channeling different voices, you know, different spirits and things like that. And, you know, no matter where they come from, we hear them through our own filter. And therefore, we have to be critical in how we interpret the advice or whatever the meaning or the suggestions are from these voices. But also, I think we need to acknowledge the incredible mystery of this universe. So I'm not saying, oh, it couldn't be. I'm just saying, you know, I don't really know, but I do think that it's a super big danger to give your power over to inner voices and not do your own critical analysis. This episode is brought to you by Com.

You know, do you ever wonder what our fast-paced on-the-go world is really doing to us? I think, personally, for one, it's programmed us to completely dismiss the importance of our mental health. And that's pretty crazy when you think about it, since taking care of our mind is such a key part. of our overall wellness. But you don't just have to let feelings of being stressed and having a ton of anxiety overwhelm you. Instead, do what I do. Use calm, the meditation, sleep, and relaxation app that has everything you need to prioritize your mental health. They've got meditations, sleep stories, relaxing musing tracks, and even daily movement sessions, all designed to give you the tools you need to improve the way you feel. I personally love their sleep stories and I use

them at night to help me wind down from a hectic and busy day and get ready for the best night's sleep ever. And I have some good news for my audience. Com is offering an exclusive 40% off of their Com premium subscription at com.com slash drew. That's com C-A-L-M dot com slash D-H-R-U for 40% off unlimited access to Com's entire library. To get that offer of 40% off, Just go to comc-a-l-m.com slash d-H-R-U. Yeah, in their highest regard, these can be reflections or an archetype to your own intuition that might be easier for you to internalize that comes through a story like this gentleman who is there for you.

I think that's really right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I want to come to MDMA now that we've had a chance to ask some of my burning questions to you on these topics. around voices, entities, and peeling the veil and the curtain behind to kind of get a little bit of a glimpse, even if that glimpse is through your own filter. Sorry, we're going to say something? Well, I'm just going to say that Stan Groff, I've talked about a bunch of times,

but he's talked about the future of psychiatry as being people taking MDMA, but then like an hour later using the five MEO DMT vape pins. And the reason that I'm saying that is this idea of the 5MEO is like the fastest to the behind the veil. You know, it's the most powerful psychedelic we're aware of. It just completely dismantles your sense of self. But when you smoke it, it's instantaneous and you just like into this other kind of spiritual place. But when you use the vape pens of different potencies and you start with MDMA, which reduces the fear of death or the fear of anything, you know, that you can have this base of acceptance with this ego dissolution from the 5MEO

that he thinks is going to be incredibly instructive. I've tried the 5MEO with 8 pens. I haven't tried it with MDMA first, but I have talked to people that have done it. I've seen people that have done it. I've been there when people have done it in that way. And it's just astonishing. So it's that, it's another way for people to really ask some of those questions about what's behind the veil and who are these voices and how do we deal with them.

So I just wanted to add that. No, thank you for that. Thank you for that. Let's set the groundwork a little bit with MDMA. Before we get to modern history and a lot of your work on it, tell us a little bit about some of the history that's there. And I mean, entire documentaries could be made and some are made about this, but give us a little bit of the brief history of this in the context of the range of psychedelics that

are out there. MDMA is one of the man-made psychedelics that are there, and often people have a lot of misconceptions and myths around. And I think the history can be helpful. Yes, yes. Well, Drew, also, you know, these initiatives like the Portland, the Oregon psilocybin initiative, the Colorado Natural Plant Initiative, what may be on the Massachusetts ballot in 2024, again, about natural plants, plant psychedelics. People have this romantic idea if it's from a plant, it's good. And if it's synthetic, it's bad. So unfortunately, MDMA, not unfortunately, but actually, MDMA is synthetic or semi-synthetic.

It's not there in nature by itself. At least we've not found it by itself. And so it's not being included in these different drug policy reforming issues around psychedelics because people might not vote for it. So MDMA was invented in 1912 by Merck. and Merck Pharmaceutical in Germany. They were looking blood thinners. They were not looking for MDMA.

They were looking for another drug, and they had a new synthetic pathway, and they patented everything along the way, MDMA being one of them. And since that wasn't what they were really looking for, they didn't do anything with it. Then along comes World War I, and that threw them off track.

But it wasn't until 15 years later, until 1927 that Merck studied MDMA and some animals. They thought maybe we should check and see if there's anything interesting. They weren't really good at speaking to these animals, and they concluded that MDMA had no value, that there was nothing there, and they abandoned it. The next we know about MDMA is in the 50s. The U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service was testing eight drugs.

Again, it seems like they're only testing. them in animals, but these are a series of drugs called phenethylamines in the class of phenethylamines. And on one end was mescaline from peyote or from San Pedro. On the other end was methamphetamine. And in the middle, MDMA, and these are all phenethylamines. And so this, as far as we can tell, as I said, didn't turn into human experimentation. They didn't really come up with great value here. So MDMA was sort of abandoned again.

But MDMA to understand it, it has the alerting properties of methamphetamine. MDMA is methyline-dioxy methamphetamine. So methamphetamine is a stimulant. It keeps you awake. It focuses you, gets you active on things, doing things. But it doesn't promote stillness. It doesn't promote the same kind of open-hearted fear reduction, the way that MDMA does.

On the other hand, is mescaline. Mescaline is a classic psychedelic. It has more of this peering behind the veil, the ego dissolution, the visuals more, the float into the conscious from the unconscious. And so MDMA has the alerting properties of methamphetamine. You can stay up all night and dance.

You don't need to eat and drink if you want to. But it has that. ability for helping people sit still, that methamphetamine doesn't. And it's like mescaline, but it doesn't have the visuals, but it does have this flow into awareness and have the warmth. Mesculin is pretty warm, body oriented, a little bit more open-heartedness, and MDMA's got more of that. All right. The next we know is 1959. MIRC looks at animals again with MDMA. And again, they decide there's no value and they completely abandon it. In the next, In the 70s, there was a drug called MDA, Methylene-Dioxy amphetamine that was a lot of people liked it.

In the 60s and 70s, I had a chance to take it in the 70s and say I really, really liked it. It's kind of like an LSD-MDMA combination, a little bit more psychedelic than MDMA. All right. And some people, MDA, called it the miracle drug of America. And yet, what happened was 1970 is the controlled substance, the backlash against the psychedelics. And so chemists were motivated to tinker with molecules because at the time, specific molecules were made illegal. But if you varied the molecule, then all of a sudden it wasn't illegal. So there was all this tinkering with the MDA molecule and other things.

and sort of MDMA kind of got rediscovered by, in particular, Sasha Shulgin and Anne Shulgin are credited as sort of the godfather, godparents of the MDMA. You know, Sasha was very interested in finding psychedelics that would teach him about structure activity relationships, but also that would be useful for psychotherapy. So Sasha took it, Ann took it. They had a small group of people that they experimented with. new drugs and they decided that MDMA had incredible potential. So around 76, 77, they gave it to a fellow named Leo Zeff. He's a clinical psychologist, PhD. He is who he called the secret chief.

He was the leader of the underground psychedelic therapy movement. And he was getting ready to retire. And Sasha said, no, try this MDMA. Don't retire yet. He tried the MDMA. He thought, hey, man, this has got incredible potential. And he started teaching psychiatrists and psychotherapists how to work with MDMA. That in the late 70s, early 80s, started leaking out of these therapy circles, and some people decided that they had a great opportunity to make a lot of money and to share this drug that they thought was better than cocaine and other things that they had been dealing. And MDMA then, which was under the code name Adam as a therapy drug, then became marketed as ecstasy. And it was ecstasy that was being used in public settings that attracted the attention of

the DEA, Senator Lloyd Benson from Texas. This was used a lot in Dallas at the Star Club and other places. And so what happened was that MDMA was going to be criminalized. This was during the 80s, Nancy Reagan, just say no, escalation of the drug war. So I learned about MDMA in 82 at Esclan. from a woman named Debbie Harlow, and I was told it's code named Adam, and it's got incredible therapeutic potential, but also it's starting to be sold as ecstasy, and its fate is doomed. But the government knows about ecstasy, but they don't know about Adam as far as we knew, and we knew that the government was going against it. So I started a nonprofit before Maps in 84 to organize effort to protect the medical use of MDMA

once the DEA was going to move to criminalize it. And we introduced MDMA to monks, to rabbis. I talked about the rabbi that I, Salman Schachter, that I took MDMA and Yoke-Kippur in his temple, brother David Steindler-Rost, Vanya Palmer, all sorts of people from Zen meditation, Roman Catholicism, Judaism, different religious leaders and psychiatrists at Harvard Medical School,

all of this. And so in the summer of 84, D.E.A. moved to criminalize MDMA. Within 30 days, comment period, I went to DEA headquarters and handed in some documents and said we're going to ask for a hearing. We had great legal representation. We managed to get a hearing. And we actually won the hearing. The judge said MDMA should be scheduled three. But in 85, before the hearing is even over, DEA freaked out. We were winning in the courts, winning in the court of public opinion. They emergency scheduled MDMA, while the hearings were still going on.

Year later, we win the hearing, and the DEA ignores the recommendation of the judge, and kept it in schedule one. So we sued a couple times in the appeals courts and won twice, but the appeals courts just tell the agencies to rethink stuff. They said, what you do is wrong, but come up with something new. They don't tell them what to do unless it gets really extreme. So by the third time of this happening, the DEA lawyers figured out how to keep MDMA and cannabis illegal, that there was no currently accepted medical use. I can see that coming.

And so what I realized is that I needed to start a new nonprofit maps in 86, April 8, 86, that would be a psychedelic pharmaceutical company. The only way to bring it back now was not through suing the DEA, not through public education. It had to be through science. The resistance was so great. So the history of MDMA since then, has been 37 years of clinical research. The first six years, everything was rejected. We finally got permission for a safety study in 92. And all along there's going on,

MDMA is neurotoxic. One dose is going to hurt your brain and have major functional consequences. We had to deal with that. Completely bogus, of course, but funded by the same people that use the word hallucinage. And through the 90s, we did this phase one safety study.

Then from 2000 to 2016, we did a series of phase two exploratory pilot studies, trying to figure out how to design what's called phase three, which is the final stage of research. And phase three, we got approval in November 29th, 2016. We negotiated the FDA about phase three throughout 2017. 2018, we started our first phase three study. 2021, we published it, May 10th in Nature Medicine. The results were phenomenal. Nature Medicine said it was one of the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of the world for 2021.

Our second phase three study has been accepted for publication, and we don't know exactly when it's going to be published, but it's going to be open access. We hope a month and a half from now, something like that. and we anticipate submitting a whole package to the FDA before the end of this year and by the middle of next year we hope to have FDA approval. Meanwhile, I'll just say that ecstasy or MDMA has become one of the world's most popular illegal recreational drugs. So part of the history of MDMA has to acknowledge and address the fact that it is really,

we have enormous experience with the risks of MDMA and the riskiest circumstances, people taking it just for parties and impure drugs, mixing it with alcohol, all such of other things. So there's over 5,000 papers in, if you go to Medline, the list of published scientific papers, peer-reviewed from journals, going back a long time. There's over 5,000 papers on MDMA or ecstasy. So there's an enormous amount known about this, which is why I believe that we've been able to do phase three studies, the first one with 90 people, the second one with 104. And that that will be sufficient for us to demonstrate to the FDA, the data that we have about safety and efficacy. So I think the way to understand MDMA is it began as a pharmaceutical drug, was completely overlooked.

looked, even though they tried. Then it became a secret therapy drug. Then it escaped from that became a party drug. And now all these years later, we're trying to make it back into a therapy drug. And we're also trying to legalize it for what I prefer to call celebratory experiences, not just recreational, for personal growth, for spirituality. Maybe I should mention this also, but the most mystical experience in my whole life, I've done LSD over 100 times. I've done ayahuasca. I've done a lot of drugs.

But surprisingly, and I'm grateful for all of them, but surprisingly, the most mystical experience of my whole life was on MDMA. Tell us a little about that. What did you go through that you would list it as one of the most mystical? And then also, based on the literature, after you talk about your story

and why it was so mystical, what's the potential of MDMA in a therapeutic contest. How does it help and support the body to heal? What are we healing from? Well, what we're healing from is, well, particularly in our work with trauma, you know, undigested trauma, trauma that is never properly processed that always seems like it's about to happen or is happening. It's never really located in the past. It colors the present. And so you're healing. could say from a disorder of memory that this experience that was so vivid and maybe when it was happening, you couldn't pay attention to the emotions. You had to pay attention to survival. But over

time, it becomes something in your nightmares. It becomes something that you're easily triggered to see that it's intrusive. You're hypervigilance. You're depressed. All these things that this kind of trauma has not been fully processed and fully placed in long-term memory in the hippocampus, that it's really sort of stuck, you could say, in the amygdala, which is where we process fear. And so what's happening in this, what we're healing from is unprocessed trauma. For people that are struggling with addiction, a lot of times they're healing from they're struggling with unprocessed trauma, but they're also struggling with a sense of disconnection of isolation, of not connected to this behind the veil. There's nothing behind the veil.

You know, there's nihilism, there's meaninglessness. People feel disconnected. So a lot of times what happens with people with psychedelics is that they heal from the sense of being an isolated individual and they can see that they're part of something bigger. You know, MDMA enhances activity in the prefrontal cortex. PTSD decreases activity in the prefrontal cortex. That's where we think logically. So you hear a sound, you immediately leap to it. It's a gun or whatever scared you before.

There's not a lot of enough time to sort it out. No, that was just somebody dropped a pot or something. MDMA reduces activity in the amygd. PTSD increases the activity in the miga. So you're always fear about all these different memories. and then MDMA increases activity, connectivity between the amygdala hippocampus. So you can sort of take these memories once you've processed them and put them into long-term storage. And then the next time you remember it, it's not like it's about to happen.

It's something that you've made your peace with it. And it's in the past and you've survived. So we could go on more of that. MDMA releases oxytocin, hormones of love and connection to nursing mothers, that this builds a self-love, self-connection, connection to others. It's remarkable. So the MDMA experience that I had that was my most mystical experience in my life was, again, this was in 1985. And I was starting to figure out about becoming more public and challenging the DEA?

And was this going to be a problem for me? And would I become more vulnerable, more surveilled by the police, all of this, instead of hiding in the underground, you know, coming after him, would that be dangerous for me? And I had spent a lot of time with brother David Steindlerost, who was this Roman Catholic monk, who is just tremendous. He was written this book, Gratitude is the Heart of Prayer, which is really beautiful. And he was at a monastery near Esselin. And Stan brought him into our first month-long workshop as one of the speakers. And over time, I got to know him, and I gave him his first MDMA.

And he used it in the monastery to help him meditate. and he was like half a dose. He could get a quieter mind. He could go deeper. He could have the emotional involvement. And then he would reach these new states, but then he could practice without the drug later to get back to these states that he had been able to access through MDMA.

So he described MDMA. He said the monks spend their whole of life trying to reach the enlightened attitude that you can get from MDMA. Rabbi Zalman Chalkner said that MDMA is like the Sabbath. You know, he compared it in that way. So I decided, okay, I'm starting to get ready to be suing the DEA, being more visible. And I decided that I would take MDMA by myself at night, right by the Pacific Ocean, right at Essela. And I would try to think about the DEA, about, you know, how I might maneuver.

and then I would try to think about Brother David. And I would like, why would somebody want a celibate life? It just doesn't. You know, why would he want to do that? And so I just just those were my main topic sort of that I prepared to think about. All right. So I did this at the edge of the continent. So the mountains come down right down to the ocean.

And there was a little bit of a space where the high tide, wouldn't come up. So I has a little, little tiny protected space, but the mountains behind me, the ocean is in front of me, the roaring ocean, the skies are magnificent. There's not a lot of light pollution there, massive beautiful Milky Way and all of that. So I'm initially part of this experience, I'm looking at a tree and I'm kind of imagining the tree being the DEA and the DEA looking at me. So I'm trying to, you know, negotiate how do I become more visible but try to stay safe. And I had this important insight that was really helpful to me, which was that the DEA is trained to look under the rock. They're trained to look at what people are hiding from them. So I felt that if I

become more visible, they may also think I'm hiding things from them, which of course I was. But they'll be mostly engaged by my lawsuit and all the things that I'm doing that way. And that will give me a certain amount of safety, because if they go after somebody for political reasons, that's going to look bad for them. All right. So that was pretty good. And then I'm thinking, okay, I've got my way forward. And then I was just lying there and just listening to the ocean. And I just had this sense of myself dissolving into space, that this, you know, just the roar of the ocean, the enormity of the stars. And I was just this tiny little person. And the universe was so fast. And I was. I felt like I was just dissolving into space.

And so you could say that's sort of like a mystical experience. But what happened then is after a while I realized that I was still there. I was like, how is it that I'm even still here? The earth is revolving thousands of miles, you know, every minute or whatever it is, as the earth revolves. you know how fast is that I don't actually thousands of miles but very fast everything's in motion and I felt like I haven't flung off to the universe something is keeping me here and I was like well what is it I felt it's it's gravity and then I felt that

I was gravity was this force of love and then I felt this image that I was in the arms of a lover but it was gravity it was And I felt like I was cradled in the arms of gravity. And that gravity was love and that gravity was what kept things together. And it was intrinsically woven into the universe. And this whole sense that I was both an individual. So this is where I think the MDMA does. I was both an individual in this spot,

but I was also encased in this universe of love. And that gravity was this key force and that I was part of this, both individual and part of this bigger thing. And I felt that that was really the most mystical experience. And then I realized, aha, this is why somebody might want to celebrate life. Because if you can connect to universal love like this, you know, that then that's tremendous and that you don't necessarily connect with an individual, but you see it's woven into the universe. So I felt that was great.

I said, this is phenomenal. Not only have I figured out why somebody might want to be a monk, but now I don't have to be a monk, because I figured it out. I don't need to be, Sullivan. And that has been, I've never been as lonely since then. All right.

So 30 years after that, 30 years after that in 2015, I was at a conference run by USona in Madison, Wisconsin. Usona is a big nonprofit supporting psychedelic research. And Brother David was there. And I sat next to him. I've been, you know, loosely kept in touch over the years. And so I sat with him at dinner.

And I said, Brother David, I just have some questions to ask you. I said, you know, 30 years before I had the most mystical experience in my whole life, and it involved you. And I was thinking about you. And I'd like to tell you what it is and just get your impression, your feedback. And what he did was, he heard my story. And then he was quiet for a while. And he looked at me and he said, I think of gravity every day.

Yeah, so that's one of the reasons I love MDMA so much is that you can have these kind of really remarkable experiences. Who should be thinking about potentially having an experience with MDMA? Well, first off, I think therapists who are going to be administering MDMA to their patients should have the option of legally obtaining access to it. I mean, that's a big thing. Therapists who are a psychedelic therapist will be more effective if they've done the drug themselves. And we can get into all discussion about why psychiatrists don't give themselves electroconvulsive therapy or don't take antipsychotics. But that's because those are the things that are the treatment in and of itself. In this case, psychedelic assisted therapy, it's a lot depending on the relationship between the person

and the therapist. And it makes it a lot more sense for the therapist to have their own experiences. who should. There's nobody that I would say should. Everybody has to make up their own mind. So I'm not going to say, you all should do this. What I'm going to say is that MDMA has incredible therapeutic potential when combined with therapy. People at Raves and others that do it illegally, a lot of times they talk about therapeutic benefits that they've got. So I'd say one of the best uses of MDMA is for PTSD.

One of the other best uses is in couples therapy. It's really remarkable about how much of a better listener you can be, about how you can hear things that are complicated, you can express yourself in a more eloquent way, in a less defensive way. People that are suicidal often, I think, have lost hope. We've got a lot of stories about people who have gained hope from their very first MDMA experience.

And just when they're feeling MDMA, they're saying, okay, I'm not going to have to kill myself. I think monks and rabbis and all these people that want to meditate, I think would be really good to try MDMA as a tool for meditation. There's eating disorders. There's all sorts of things that people, but I would also say that we've got a project, Israelis and Palestinians are doing ayahuasca and MDMA together,

small groups of them. So this is about conflict resolution, the same way similar to couples therapy. So I think MDMA can have a major role to play in the political healing of political partisanship and divides. I also think traumatized children. You know, we're going to have to study traumatized children. If the FDA gives us permission for prescription use in adults, we have to study traumatized children. I think that there's a lot of people that are, there was a study by Ben Sessa that was done in England with people with alcohol use disorder.

and the MDMA was the treatment, and it turned out a lot of people with alcohol use disorder were running away from trauma that they hadn't really processed. You help process the trauma, then they don't need to escape with alcohol. So I think for a lot of people with dependence on different substances or dependence on anything, that MDMA can be really helpful,

there's been some amazing stories recently about MDMA with people who are paralyzed. And we know about neuroplasticity. that people have regained certain functions under the influence of MDMA. It's something that we need to study a lot more. So I think that people that want to learn about love would do great to take MDMA. People in rites of palette passage. I look at my bar mitzvah as one of the most important disappointments of my whole life.

You know, I really thought it was going to turn me into a man. That was the story I was told. And nothing happened. So I think we have a lot of these rites of passage that don't really connect with people where they're really at. And I think MDMA, psilocybe, and other psychedelics, ayahuasca, can be great for rights of passage. I think there was a recent story that I don't know if you've seen, but it was about a white nationalist who vicarious. volunteered for a project at the University of Chicago looking at the effect of MDMA on the perception of touch. So this guy, a white nationalist, volunteers for this study, and it's not a

therapy study, but under the influence of MDMA, he starts rethinking, why is he so prejudiced, all of this, and that that's not really a healthy way to be. And then he's written this article that's gotten pretty widespread distribution about how. MDMA helped them overcome being a white supremacist. So to the extent that I would get to should, I would think all bigots and everybody that's prejudiced and stuff should probably do MDMA to get more in touch with themselves and see about the way they project on others. Carl Jung had a beautiful statement.

He said the most important political, therapeutic and spiritual thing we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others. The shadow is our disowned parts that we don't accept that are flawed, and we present them on others. So if you want a good example of this sort of shadow projection work, look at everything or anything that President Trump says, it's always, you know, the best way you can understand what he's doing is looking at what he's accusing other people doing. So how do you withdraw that projection of your shadow onto others?

And you have to deal with it. You have to accept it. One of my DMT trips with Terrence, actually, no little green men or machine elves. But I realized that I had to enter Hitler, that if I'm part of everything, everything's part of me, then Hitler's part of me.

I can't just say he's out there. And that was really a shattering thing. But that's part of them withdrawing your projection onto others or your shadow. I would think that for a lot of people in their late teens, early 20s when they're trying to figure out what to do with their lives and how to direct their energies, that's a great time for psychedelics. And then MDMA in particular, it's a really due vision questing. So I also think that psychedelics are great at the end of life. I've worked

with several people several days before they die when they died of cancer and under incredible pain on opiates for pain and barely there. But MDMA synergizes with the opiates. You get better pain control and it opened heart and so and it wakes people up because they're sort of numb and tranquilized by all the opiates but the methamphetamine aspect of the MDMA is a stimulant overcomes the depressive properties of the opiates so i think MDMA in a hospice setting is going to be one of the best uses coming up so all this is is just to say that um you know that I wouldn't say that anybody should, but I would say that a lot of people would benefit a lot

from their own MDMA experiences. And just to emphasize this point, we strongly recommend that therapists who are going to give MDMA patients have their own MDMA experience, but we will never require it. We should not force somebody to do a drug. We shouldn't make it so that it's only people that have done it.

We should be welcoming skeptics and stuff. We want to learn the method, but don't want to use the drug. But we should strong, recommend it. And several people have said, oh, let's give MDMA to Trump or let's give MDMA to DeSantis or some of these political leaders. I don't think it will work. I think that the reason it won't work and work meaning turn them into better people is that it's not just about the drug. You have to be willing to look at what comes up. And if you're so

into projections and narcissism, you're not going to look. You'll have these different feelings, but I don't, so particularly if it was slip to try, you know, I don't think it would do them any good. So it should only be people voluntarily choosing to take it, but I would imagine that over time, once MDMA becomes a medicine, which we think, as I said, will happen in 2024, the middle of it. I think by 2035, we should have legal access for all purposes. you know, the thing about the MDMA through the FDA is that insurance covers.

Insurance companies will cover the treatments because you're treating a disease. But if it's made legal, nobody's going to cover it. It's your own choice. And so I would guess, though, by 2035, that MDMA will be both a generic medicine and also a legally accessed substance. and I think it will be even more one of the most popular drugs in the world. Well, one note of commentary, just with my own experience with psychedelics, although I haven't done MDMA.

And I look forward to doing that one day in a therapeutic setting, myself, my wife. I would love us to both have that experience, even though there's so much love. Does she want to do it? She does. She does. Yeah, we're working on getting pregnant, so we're leaving space for that right now. Well, actually, let me say that if it doesn't work right away, there are people that have had a hard time conceiving and they do MDMA together and then they can conceive. Well, thank you for that.

I know, I'm not making a claim here, but I have heard multiple stories. I've heard anecdotes. I've heard anecdotes. We know that, you know, a lot of times people have a hard time conceiving and then they adopt a child. and then they can conceive. It's like the stress is down. So actually, my wife and I, she said it was more for me than for her, but we took MDMA together to get ready to have a child. And I felt like having a child for me was like standing on the edge of a swimming pool.

And you know it's a little bit cold, and it'll probably be cold for like the first 10 seconds after you start swimming. But you can spend like minutes and minutes and minutes before you dive in just to avoid. So that was what parenthood was like. I was like years and years like not ready to dive into the pool. And under the influence of MDMA, I was able to say, okay, I'm ready. Let's give it a try. That's beautiful.

That's beautiful. I love that. And we did that a little bit with our psilocybin experience earlier in the year. Yeah. As sort of entering into this place, we've only been married for a couple years. We just went down the path of saying, okay, we want to sit the intention of, you know, starting a family this year. But even in that psilocybin. experience so much of what I walked away from is that, you know, I got listeners from all sides of the

aisle that are here, one thing that I genuinely do feel is that there's bigotry on every spectrum. Anywhere you go in the world, you're going to find bigotry. You're going to find people that are not open to new ideas and want to demonize the other in any sort of religious group, any background, political spectrum, etc. And the people that are making me the most excited about this movement are individuals that sometimes you would seem they would be the least likely people to have interest in wanting to go down the pathway of having an experience with psychedelics. And largely, they've been convinced to have at least some openness and put aside their

judgments and learn more. Listen to a podcast. Listen to you on Joe Rogan. Listen to you on Dr. Hyman's podcast. These other places and some of your con, colleagues and for a second see maybe the way that I've been told and the and the narrative that I've been told about a particular thing is not exactly the full truth or is completely misguided by individuals and I think that it's human nature just like you said you have that experience of seeing that the same energy inside of a dictator or somebody that is mass killing individuals like a Hitler, we have to be aware that that same bigotry is inside of all of us in that same way. Whoever it is, whoever that individual is, regardless of politics or whatever, we have that

ability inside of all of us to become that if we are not present to or don't question those stories. So what are psychedelics doing inside of the brain that they open up that ability to see that we ourselves can be part of the problem. And there's narratives that maybe we've held on to for our entire lives about other people, groups, things, places, whoever, that can be peeled back. And now that there's an openness or love. So what's happening inside of the brain? Well, okay, first off, let me make a point, which is that to make a drug into a medicine, you have to prove to the satisfaction of the FDA. You have to demonstrate safety and efficacy. And you have to do it in usually two large-scale double-blind placebo-controlled,

randomized controlled phase three studies. You don't have to have any information about mechanism of action. So you're asking how does it work in the brain? So because MAPS has been mostly funded by philanthropists, we've had to have a very narrow path and to work on what do we need to do to persuade the FDA. And so because they don't require mechanism of action, I figured if we show that it works, other people will figure out how it works. And we also know that the brain is, you know, one of the most complex things in the universe.

And how is it that is going to take a long time to figure out what actually goes out inside the brain? Also, we know that people have used psychedelics for thousands of years without any understanding whatsoever of brain scans or neurochemistry or, you know, so people have learned how to refine the use of psychedelics in healing and spiritual and creative contexts. over thousands of years without any information of physically, how does it work in the brain? We may not be sure exactly how kids are conceived, but we know you have sex, you make a baby. Yeah, yeah. So I think what we do know, there's kind of controversy around this more and more, but there is this general sense that the classic psychedelics, which are like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, you know, ayahuasca, Ibegaine, that they operate in a slightly different way in the brain than MDMA does.

And that they tend to dissolve this sense of self. There's people who have called it the default mode network so that you're flooded with information that's not sort of centered around your ego. There's also something called neuroplasticity, which is really important, which is about the ability to resculpe neural pathways in the brain. And what seems to be happening, with psychedelics is they open up what are called critical periods. We all know that when you're little, you can learn languages easier than when you're an adult. There's certain periods where you

have to bond with people if you don't, you're often left unable to bond. Certain things, you know, problems with your eyes. If you don't see by a certain point, sometimes you stay blind. So there's these things that are called critical periods. And what Gouldolland, who is a neuroscientist at Hopkins has talked about about psychedelics opening up these new critical periods and then promoting a period of neuroplasticity where you can rewire with different kind of thoughts get wired in a different way. So, for example, with MDMA and there's what's called fear extinction and memory reconsolidation. So I think this neuroplasticity, this memory reconsolidation is a big clue to what's happening. So that you, we used to think memory is like you take a book down from the shelf

from your brain, a memory, and you read it and you put the book back. Turns out that's not the way. The memory is distributed throughout your brain so that you've got episodic memory. You've got memories related to smell to different sites, different things. And then they're collected, they're consolidated, and then you have a memory for this episode, for this event. Right. So what it turns out is that when you, let's say take MDMA and you have a fearful event that you're remembering, but you're not catalyzed into this fear. You're able to process it, think about it. You're sort of swapping out a memory of fear and panic for a memory of, I can accept it, I've survived it, and it happened in the past. So then when you reconsolidate this memory, you are, you're putting it

into storage in different places, but you've changed it. So there's neuroplasticity. You've now changed this, the connection. So when you call back this memory again, now you've overwritten, oh, this is terrifying. I could die. You've overwritten it with, oh, that happened in the past. I've processed it.

So this rerouting of neural circuits is a big part of what psychedelics do in the brain to help there to be long-term benefits from even a single experience. And if it wasn't rewiring the brain, then we'd have to really wonder, how is it that you can have one psychedelic experience? And I can talk about this experience I had in 1985, and it still makes me feel less lonely and, you know, this whole mystical experience with MDMA. So I think that there's lots and lots more to learn.

I'm just giving you a very superficial understanding from somebody that's not a neuroscientist, but that there are ever more subtle probes into how do psychedelics work. Actually, what a lot of people should realize is that the whole idea of neurotransmitters and the whole idea of discovery of serotonin had a lot to do with LSD because it was in the 50s that this happened, this idea of neurotransmitters, but people were like, how is it that you can take millions of a gram, a hundred millionths of a gram of something and have this profound LSD psychedelic experience.

It must be that it's acting on other compounds that are of similar tiny scale in your brain that is somehow rather impacting how your brain processes information. And so it was the early work with LSD that led to people being curious to discovering serotonin. So there, and then the whole thing is cultural amnesia after psychedelics promote inspirational experiences for people who reduce their fear of death and then feel more connected and then are going after the Vietnam War or after, you know, working in the civil rights

movement, the environmental movement, things like that. So how they work is kind of miraculous because you can tinker with one molecule. So there's Bromo LSD. So LSD is, you know, what we just talked about. It's, and it's been discovered to be really helpful for cluster headaches. You know, you take LSD when you're in the cycle. It can help you break the cycle. Delays the return of the cycle.

But you add one atom, bromine. And I think it's one atom. I don't know if there's several, but it's, you add some minor stuff to this LSD. Bromo LSD, and now all of a sudden it's not psychedelic. It doesn't fit in the same receptor. And you can take a gram of it. It turns out it's better than LSD for cluster headaches because you can take so much of it. And so we still don't know how it works for cluster headaches.

So it's it's one of those questions that you can have, you know, one of the world's leading neuroscientists on your podcast two years from now. And they would still say, we're just scratching the surface of figuring out what these drugs do in the brain. Yeah. And I think most importantly, as you were mentioning, we don't have to wait to understand everything to know the tremendous benefits and the potential of what's possible. Going back to that potential and your quote that you had shared, one of my

favorite quotes from Max Planck. Oh, you already knew that quote? You like that one? Yes, yes. I think in the world of functional medicine, they use that quote quite often because they feel that they're on a similar similar battle to help people understand that the body is a group of interconnected organs and that everything does impact everything. And so we have to be aware in health. If we're really going to help people get to the root of chronic disease, we have to understand how all these things interplay. Well, going back to it and kind of putting a bow tie around this understanding and the difference, the whole idea of science advances one funeral at a time, you had mentioned that, you know, it was this December 16th, the Journal of Science designated MAPs,

assisted therapy, PTSD is one of its top 10 scientific benefits out of all the different things they had listed. Yeah, breakthroughs of the world. Breakthroughs, scientific breakthroughs, including breakthroughs in physics and everything else. That was the year 2021. And the subheading underneath that press release that came from the Maps organization said that this award comes 19 years after. Science published a later detracted article falsely claiming that MDMA cause the dopogenic neurotoxicity

leading to Parkinson's disease along with an editorial comparing, taking MDMA to playing Russian roulette. I just thought that was fantastic. That made it, you know, those of us with the long-term view that science designation was so sweet. but what I should explain is that the Alan Leshner was the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and he's the one that funded a lot of the MDMA neurotoxicity research that was done by Georgia Cardi and Una McCann and others

and Alan Leshner was very successful in building the budget of NIDA. the Nationalist on Drug Abuse to over a billion dollars. And he did that by pandering to Congress, by scaring Congress. And he's made some disastrously mistaken presentations to Congress. But he was rewarded. You know, this was during early 2000s, and there was all this fear of MDMA. And so he managed to build the budget through the 90s into the early 2000s.

And then he left NIDA, and he became the president of the American Association. for the advancement of science. And they published the journal science. So he was in charge of the journal science. And then it was through the 90s, it became increasingly difficult for them to make the case that MDMA was damaging to serotonin neurons. They had all these theories,

they're all this stuff, but it just, it didn't, it got increasingly challenged. And as time goes by, all these people that had done loads of MDMA still seem normal. I don't know if I seem normal, but I would say that, you know, hopefully I don't seem to brain damage. But it was becoming pretty difficult for them to block research by claiming serotonergic neurotoxicity. We had previously funded research with primates, with MDMA, with George Ricardy, trying to look for the no-effect level on serotonin.

And from that, we learned that they didn't hurt dopamine. All right, so years later, what happens is Georgia Cardi and Una McCann at Hopkins do this study with primates. Now, we'd also done studies, by the way, before it was spinal taps. Before there was brain cans, I got two spinal taps to look at metabolites of neurotransmitters in my spinal fluid. I got 30 other people to do that. What we learned is no problems with dopamine. Some questions about serotonin, but serotonin is linked to risky behavior, taking MDMA is risky behavior. It didn't seem like there was anything special for that.

So in any case, Georgia Cardi and then again give a bunch of primates MDMA, and they're looking for what's going to happen, and they think, oh, my God, don't mean it's being hurt. And they ended up publishing this paper that claimed that a single oral dose of MDMA could cause a significant dopaminergic neurotoxicity that could lead to Parkinson's. Now, first off, they gave multiple sessions of MDMA. they gave, it wasn't a single oral dose. But they never, a bunch of the animals died of overdoses.

And they never should have published it because all of the prior information suggested that MDMA didn't herd dopamine in primates. And but they published it. And it was like a dying last gasp. You know, okay, we can't block MDMA research for reasons of serotonergic neurotoxicity, but now we've got this new thing, dopamineurgic neurotoxicity. So it just, they didn't give it. MDMA to the animals orally in the same way that people take it.

We criticized a lot of it. We said it didn't make sense. A year goes by and they defend and defend and defend the study and scientific articles and journals. And then finally they release a statement saying that they're going to sadly have to retract the paper because they mistakenly administered methamphetamine instead of MDMA to these primates. Yeah.

And not only that, but MDMA, you know, the therapeutic dose that we use in our studies, the sort of main one is 120 milligrams, followed by 60 milligrams two hours later. You know, methamphetamine is a whole lot stronger than MDMA. You don't give it 120 milligrams of methamphetamine to somebody. All right. So what they were doing, though, is they were giving the wrong drug methamphetamine to these primates, but giving it in MDMA amounts and causing all this, damage. And they assumed that was from MDMA, but it was really from methamphetamine.

And so they spent this year and they couldn't replicate their results and they couldn't replicate their results. And finally, they looked at some of the tissue samples from one of the animals that they had overdosed and killed and discovered that it was methamphetamine, not MDMA in the brain. So that was the high watermark, 20 years ago, high watermark of the fear of MDMA neurotoxicity. And ever since then, we've been able to start moving into patients, and now the FDA is satisfied that the doses that we give in the amounts and the frequencies that we give are not an issue for neurotoxicity. What a journey.

And, you know, part of that also relates to there has been, and people want to lump all drugs together in sort of one category and talk about them as a whole. We need to separate them all out and talk about the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics, et cetera, other things. There's been so many narratives over the last 50, 60, 70 years around these topics that there's still so many people that I meet, even in the context of psychedelics going through this revolution, so much of this studies and being published out there, their organizations like yours, that there's a lot of old ideas that it takes time for them to sort of die out

because they have to be replaced and they've been ingrained and ingrained. The media has perpetuated them and people don't even know where they initially got this idea from, but these ideas are still there, even just the idea of now that you mentioned in the beginning of the interview, that I was talking to somebody who was very well-known individual who said, you know, I'd be open to psilocybin. I'd be open to, you know, maybe some of these other components. But MDMA, it's man-made. So I feel like I don't even want to touch it because it feels like something that how could it have any sense of being able to support us?

And then there was a bunch of other things of being associated with a party drug. You talked about. So bottom line, it just takes time. And I love that you included that in sort of the press release because this is a movement that's being built and that you've been working on for quite a long time and that others have been working on. And just takes time for that ground swell to build. And then all of a sudden it'll tip and we won't be able to remember how things. used to be. I think that's what we're hoping. And where is that tipping point? So, yes, are we there? Have we passed it? It felt like the psychedelic science conference,

psychedelics, 2023 that we had in Denver, was just incredible 19th to the 23rd of June, 12,400 people, Governor Jared Polis from Colorado, former Governor Rick Perry, Republican from Texas, followed by the Director of the National Mental Health, Josh Gordon. That felt like a tipping point, that conference. Like, I think we really may now be moved. But I think FDA approval of MDMA-assisted therapy will be sort of the final step in that tipping point. But what I want to say is that I think what we really need to get to, and the drawer of drugs has distorted our concepts.

And the thought is that there are good drugs, there are bad drugs. You talked about loving them all together. but the idea is that it's not about the thing, it's about the relationship you have with it. And so we need to start understanding there are different relationships with drugs. Some can be healthy, some can be unhealthy, but that there's no such thing as a good drug or a bad drug.

There's just drugs as tools and how do we use them, is the real question. And so the best example for that from the FDA, of you is the drug thalidomide. So there's only one person at the FDA that ever won the Presidential Medal of Honor, this woman Francis Kelsey, and she won it because she blocked thalidomide from being marketed in the U.S. There were some concerns that there were problems in Europe, but she blocked it from coming into the U.S. And as it turned out, it was being prescribed for morning sickness, and it caused terrible, terrible birth defects. People would be bored

without limbs and flippers, just horrible. And so out of that became a lot of FDA reform and all of this. As it turns out, over the time, people have discovered that the effect of thalidomide on blood vessels can be helpful in treating certain kind of cancers. You restrict the blood. So thalidomide is also helpful in certain kind of leprosy. So thalidomide is now a medicine. Approved by FDA with a whole set of safety procedures to make sure. So the quintessential terrible bad drug is now a life-saving drug for certain people with a different kind of a relationship to it. So that's, I think, the big thing for people to be thinking about as we think about, quote,

drugs as a category. It's really about the relationship that we set up with them that determines whether it's beneficial, harmful, neutral, fun, or not. No, that's great. You know, one of the things I've been seeing over the last few years is interviewing a lot of psychiatrists and individuals who have been evolving their viewpoint on marijuana and have gone through different sorts of circles around it. Again, all on the idea that you don't want to say something is good or bad, but we want to look at how something is being used, the relationship, the availability. I'd love to get your commentary on this just because it's topical.

So there's a few people that have had on the podcast that have talked about. the increasing sort of concern in the context as marijuana has been legalized in certain states, the amount of THC has gotten so high. Sorry, go ahead. And I'll explain why. Yeah, yeah. And I want your honest thoughts on this. I'm just bringing up, you know, because we're talking about drugs and we're talking about that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That that there seems to be some emerging data about the connection between very high THC, and its relationship to individuals that might be prone in the classic sort of age category, especially leaning towards males, of psychotic episodes or schizophrenia, right? What are your thoughts on this? And these aren't people that are saying that weed is completely bad and that people shouldn't use them, but they're saying that we are looking at the context, how it's being used, what's available to people. Have you been following this topic at all?

Well, I'm a long-term pot smoker, so I definitely have been following it. The reason why I was laughing is because right before this podcast, I came back from the dispensary. And the way I buy my cannabis from the dispensary, I'll just advertise this for a second. It's super lemon haze. So I go to the dispensary. and I say, give me setiva with the highest THE you've got.

That's what I want. I only want the highest THC pot. So for me, it works great. It gives me a lot of new thoughts. Also, the higher potency of the pot, the more smoke you need to inhale for the same amount of cannabinides so that you could say it's even healthier for your lungs. It's clear that cannabis does not cause lung cancer.

So I think that when we talk about hash, right, hash ish, hash has always been around. It was around in the 60s. It's been around for thousands of years. Hash is more potent than even this. You know, the percentage of THC and hash is higher than the percentage of THC and the highest THC cigarette that I can get from the dispensary. So I, now let's start. talk about schizophrenia. I think it's possible to have problems. High T.HC. Pot can cause people to be

disoriented. It can cause problems. And it's about the relationship you have with it. So does it cause schizophrenia? So what has happened? Lester Grinspoon was a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, one of the very early and most prominent advocates for medical marijuana. And what he showed was that when you look at schizophrenia, there's a general sense that it's 1% of the population. And that seems to be across different cultures, across different times, but it's more or less 1% of the population.

Now, what happened in the 60s when there was, an enormous increase in the use of cannabis through the 70s. Did the percentage of people with schizophrenia changed? No, it stayed the same. So whether people who are vulnerable can be catalyzed into some sort of schizophrenic episode because of cannabis, I think it's possible. Yeah. but I think that overall, we've always had potencies through hash that are greater than the

system is available. And also I do think that there's, there should be choices, you know, so people should know what they're getting. And those people that like high potency like me should get it. Those people that don't want it can get something else or not at all. but I don't think that the number of cases of sort of psychotic breaks has increased, you know, because of cannabis. Generally, the thought is that these are people that are vulnerable. It would have happened anyway, one way or another.

And at least that's what we think from looking at the base rates. A lot of people, in fact, a friend of mine was over last night and he smoked this and he said, man, that was really strong. It made me hard to talk for a while. So I think it takes a certain amount of, you know, different people have their preferences for different things. But the dangers of prohibition are so great that the dangers of high potency pot are best addressed through public education, through information, through testing, through labeling,

then through any kind of potency limits or anything like that. Everything has risks. Everything has risks. And for certain people under certain circumstances, really high potency marijuana could be problematic. But I would say the biggest thing that people need to worry about is edibles when you talk about cannabis. When you talk about people that have scary stories that they felt terrible, it took hours for them to get over it. They thought they were dying. it's almost always from edibles.

You know, it's slower to come on. It's last longer. It's a different drug metabolized in the liver. It's more disorienting. So I'd say the real cautions need to be about edibles. But also some people, you know, don't like high potency THC. Other people do. And I think the.

I think the part that's for me is so good about it is it fosters creativity and thinking. Just to give you one example, it's kind of a funny example. You know, we've got a $12.9 million grant from the state of Michigan to do cannabis research and 320 veterans with PTSD. Now, we mainly focus on MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD. That gets to the root causes. You can work through it. You can reprocess the trauma.

You can do this memory reconsolidation. fear extinction, neuroplasticity, all of that. And then the goal is to make it so people don't need Mdemea therapy anymore. They've dealt with the trauma. They've reprocessed it. They're fine. So cannabis for PTSD is palliative, not curative. You need to take it every day.

It helps you with nightmares, focus you on the present, but it never gets to the root of the problem, and you keep needing it every day for most people that use cannabis for PTSD. So we've had a, a problem with the FDA. The study has been on clinical hold for a very long time. And we just got something back the other day, actually on Friday. And it was from the FDA. And it was rejecting our use of smoked marijuana. They would not permit smoked marijuana. And not only that, but they're not going to permit vaporizer marijuana. And in their smoked marijuana, they insinuated.

They made a paragraph that was super flimsy, but they tried to imply that marijuana caused lung cancer. And they quoted this fellow, Dr. Donald Tashkin, who was funded by NIDA for decades and decades to study cannabis and lung function. He is the world's expert on cannabis and lung function. So I'm like, the FDA is such an obstacle. How is it that we're going to do this? They're just so wrong, and they're so dead set against smoking and vaping. we were talking about vaping as the plant in a vaporizer, but they were criticized, they didn't even talk about that. They talked about vaping as vaping isolated cannabinoids in oil and vape pans,

and that's what they're against. So they didn't even read our, respond to our protocol. So anyway, I'm thinking, how do we respond to FDA? And so I decided, okay, I'm going to smoke some pot, think about it. How do we get our marijuana study up and running when the FDA is blocking it? Well, I'm going to smoke some pot and think about it. All right. So what I realized, while I was high that I needed to create new facts on the ground and that what I should do is call Donald Tashkin, who's now a professor of Meredithus retired, and ask him if he would comment on the way the FDA used his citation because I knew that he has published saying there's no evidence that marijuana caused lung cancer. So I wrote him an email. The very next day, this is on Saturday,

I wrote him, I smoked, we got the letter on Friday. I smoked the pot on Saturday. I wrote him a letter on Sunday. He wrote right back and he said, and we had a conversation with him on Monday yesterday. And he said, he will help us. And he'll write this letter. So the struggle with FDA to get them to approve marijuana has been helped by my smoking marijuana and becoming more creative and coming up with a different idea. And at MAPS, we call that smokeable tasks. So we permit people to do drugs at work. If they and their manager say that they're as good or more effective at whatever task, then they can use drugs at work. We're not against that. It's not about your state. It's about your productivity. It's about performance. It's not about what state of consciousness you're in.

So one of the best uses of a smoke-able task is cannabis for creative problem solving. So that's enshrined in the MAP's employee manual. Wow. Wow. What a story. Yeah. There's some interesting theories of Chris Palmer out of Harvard, who wrote a book called Brain Energy about just mitochondria insults. Are there certain things that people are doing at certain times that there's a total overload of mitochondria that could put somebody in a place that's there? And that, by the way, that could be diet for certain people. You know, so could some people be more susceptible from a mitochondrial overload level that there is some sort of breakage that's there? I'm only addressing it because I, I've mentioned it before inside of the podcast, but I'm so open to the idea. I personally don't have a draw towards, you know, marijuana. I never smoked. I never even drink alcohol growing up.

I have no draw really now to alcohol and I have no draw to marijuana. But I'm so fascinated about this space of psychedelics because I think another part of it that's there is that when close friends come to you and say that what they got out of two or three sessions of assisted MDMA couples counseling, they feel like it was 50 years of therapy and probably even better than that. Yes, yes, yes, yes. They might not have gotten there if they were just doing therapy alone, right? Maybe therapy on its own might even make it worse if they was just using therapy. Those are the stories where you start to feel like, wow, I need to learn more about this. This sounds so profound.

Wow. Well, you do need to learn more about it. And your wife and I have, you know, your wife and you have some, whenever your pregnancy situation is, you know, resolved. And whenever you want to, I think you'll learn an awful lot for it. My wife and I try to do it once a year with each other. Super helpful. But I will also say that there's a scientist, Dr. Steve Martyr at UCLA, that's starting a study with MDMA for schizophrenia. Yes.

And it's not to necessarily cure schizophrenia, but it's this idea that they feel. a lot of anxiety, depression, fear, confusion, isolation. And so saying maybe MDMA can be helpful to people who are schizophrenic. I think a lot of times when you have an emotional break, it's easy for psychiatrists and others to diagnose you as schizophrenic, you know, like, and then start medicating you. And then it just solidifies there. Whereas I think that if people have these early, I don't know what the story is,

your friend but that there's a lot of situations I think where people get diagnosed and medicated whereas if they would have been given time to work through stuff and potentially been given MDMA or some other psychedelic in a supportive context they might work through it and then you add on top of that the emerging data around ketogenic diet and how that seems to be influencing and being a role for people who are going through severe mental health disorders There's a few trials that are going on right now at Harvard's McLean School of medicine that Chris Palmer is involved in. And I mean, it's just a completely different future that we can paint in this crisis of mental

health that we have if these tools are available. Yeah. Now, by the way, I'm one mile away from McLean Hospital. Oh, amazing. Yeah, and that's where we started MDMA research at Harvard. This is around 2006. So as part of the psychedelic renaissance, there's symbolic politics. It was necessary.

I thought there was two key things that were. were necessary to really say that we have reached this renaissance in psychedelic research. One was start research at Harvard again, and that's where Timothy Leary and Ram Dass and Ralph Messer and others were. So we had to do that. And we were able to do that at McLean with cancer patients with anxiety to give them MDMA. Then the other one was that we had to start LSD research, because that is the quintessential bad psychedelic that's everybody scared of. And we managed to do that in 2008 in Switzerland. Again, cancer patients with anxiety with LSD therapy.

Yeah, it all comes full circle, doesn't it? Rick, this has been fantastic. Thank you for spending so much time with me to share all these beautiful stories and to also give our audience the history of it all. Last question here who comes from a good friend of mine, who's part of the MAPS program, a therapist that's in Los Angeles, who I'll give a shout out to. I won't mention her name, but I'll give a shout out to.

What do you hope for as the regulating body or how government sort of gets involved in allowing to bring this to market? You know, you decided that MDMA through FDA approval was the method that you guys wanted to pursue in Maps. Once that's there, do you imagine a governing body or do you imagine some sort of special branch that's set up specifically for psychedelics or is it all part of the FDA? Well, I think that every medical specialty, like when you talk about the board certified, you know, you're a board certified psychiatrist or you're a board certified surgeon, whatever it happens to be, those boards are organizations of people who practice that specialty. And then they, but they're non-governmental organizations. So we hope that there will eventually be board certified or something like that,

psychedelic therapists. that there will be a regulating board, self-regulating by the community of psychedelic therapists that sort of decides on minimum standards and training and where you can complain if you have got complaints, things like that. So I think that what's going to happen is that there will be eventually schools of psychiatry and psychotherapy will have as part of their core curriculum psychedelic psychotherapy. And it won't be MDMA therapy or psilocybin. it will be MDMA and psilocybin and ketamine and 5MEODMT and Methelan and Iowwaska and Ibegain so that they will train psychedelic therapists and cross-trained them in all the different modalities and then there will be these regular boys.

Now, what I want to make clear is that for MDMA assisted therapy, we have a manualized therapy that we call interdirected therapy. People could go to the maps.org website and they could download the treatment manual and that describes our therapeutic approach. We're in the midst of all these negotiations with FDA, but we are of the view that therapists, before they can administer MDMA to patients, once it's approved, they need to go through training, and they need to learn the method that we used in phase three, because that's the method that generated the data that got it approved. However, once they've learned the method, then they're free to practice on their own. so that they could add it with,

they could combine it with EMDR or cognitive behavior or whatever they want to combine it to. So that there's going to be minimum standards of what you have to know about the method that was used to make this drug into phase three, different kind of trainings. And then you're free to practice on your own. But I think that there will be these regulatory boards for psychedelic therapy. And eventually, I think there,

Well, right off the bat, actually, we hope that there will be, you know, insurance coverage for it. And then we've got a lot of discussions about the apprenticeship model. How do we bring in more therapists? And I think it should be where, you know, one person is the licensed therapist and the second person is like an apprentice in the room and as they're learning under supervision of the first person. So I think that the, you know, we're kind of ahead of the creation of these organizations because there's really been no need for that. It's all underground right now. There's thousands of underground psychedelic therapists who are doing actually most of them very good work.

But they've never formalized anything. Now that it's becoming above ground and approved, then we will see these regulatory bodies. Beautiful. Well, shout out to all those individuals and the people that are part of the MAPS program because they're, literally building a new future for us, all with the goal that you've shared many times of net zero trauma by 2070. That's there. So Rick, you're giving me so much time. Thank you so much for being on the program. And lastly, individuals can contribute to Maps directly. Thank you. Yes, again. Well, Maps is a nonprofit. And so we're looking to build our membership. We also just had

12,400 people at the psychedelic science. We had about 500 speakers or so. We're going to ready to post all those videotapes up on the Maps website for free for people to learn the latest in psychedelic science. But we do encourage people to help us by becoming members, ideally monthly members, and just go to Maps.org and you can donate. And we'd like to keep it that way so that the more donations we get the, we just stay focused on public benefit. I'm going to do it right after this. I don't know how it's possible. I've donated to other things in this group, but I have not donated maps. I'm going to do it right after this. Rick,

no, Drew, thank you so much. Thank you so much for being here. Super appreciate you. My pleasure. Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend.

share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter, and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much. more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This or just go to Drew Perot.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-O-H-I-T.com and click on the tab

that says, try this.