Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Rick Doblin

Episode Date: April 13, 2016

Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, joins Duncan on the Squarespace You Are God bus and they talk about the beautiful path Rick is blazing into a future where MDMA and other psychedelics can be prescribed by clinicians.

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crystal palaces over at Squarespace.com. No longer does humanity have to worry about the satanic quivering probiscous of some pseudo web designer injecting itself into our bank accounts, go to Squarespace.com and use offer code Duncan and you will get 10% off your first order. If you sign up for a year, you will get a free domain name, Squarespace.com. Build it beautiful. Hello friends, it's me, Duncan, and I'm reporting in from Pittsburgh, somewhere in the midst of the Squarespace Presents You Are God comedy tour, and I'm having one of the greatest aprils

of my life. Not only have I been given the opportunity to travel around on a bus doing stand up every single night, which is already one of the greatest things ever, but to add to that insanely beautiful yet unfortunately temporary existence, I have also gotten to do podcasts with three of the top psychedelic luminaries living today, Alex Gray, Allison Gray, and Rick Doblin. And all of these podcasts are coinciding with what may be one of the most psychedelic months in human history outside of the month that LSD was synthesized and outside of the month that the first proto hominid stumbled upon a mushroom covered bit of bovine dung

growing on the primordial grasslands and shove those mushrooms into its cracked, jagged, slavering proto hominid mouth hole, thus experiencing the very first psychedelic trip, which according to many people led to the expansion of the neocortex, the evolution of language, the beginnings of religion, and ultimately led to this incredible time in human history where we are about to bring artificial intelligence to life. It's pretty cool, and this month is particularly psychedelic for three different reasons that I can think of. The first being that for the first time they have done brain imaging of a human brain on

LSD, and this is an incredible thing, it's always been a mystery what happens to us when that magical substance makes its way into our memory jam, but now we can see that when you take LSD, it creates all kinds of brand new connections in the human brain that according to the sound bites I've found on the articles I've skimmed is very similar to the way that an infant's brain works. So when you're on LSD, it's as though you are transforming into a kind of enlightened baby, and it's incredible to think, and this is something that anyone has thought if you've been around a baby, if you've spent any time at all with an infant, one of the first things

you think is my god, this guy seems like he's on a lot of acid, they are tripping, right? They seem like they are tripping, no, they are not tripping, they are just existing in a pure primordial state of connectivity and innocence, and that is the exact same state that if you've had a great trip you've experienced, and what an incredible relief to slip back into that garden of Eden style state of consciousness when for the majority of your life you've been encased in the terrible neurological thought prison that you call your identity, that awful series of habituations and concepts of what's right and what's wrong that just surrounds you like barbed wire around an angel, LSD has freed so many of us from that prison

and it's incredible to see that that state of consciousness is not some kind of abnormal state of schizophrenia or some kind of state of lunacy or some kind of state of going insane but is actually a return to the primary consciousness that we all get to experience for a few years in the beginning of our lives, and that's a really beautiful thing, it's an incredible thing but it also shows us that one thing that we may need to implement in all the hospitals of the United States of America is a kind of vaginal prison that we can put on the vaginas of women who are giving birth, I picture it as sort of like a solitary confinement cage for babies so that the moment those little darlings get shot out of the vagina they're

immediately locked in one of these cages and shipped to penal colonies for infants because every single baby that you are seeing when you're out there to Starbucks or maybe your own baby or whoever it may be are experiencing an illegal state of consciousness that the federal government has for many years deemed so dangerous that they have mandated a five-year mandatory minimum for people who dare to allow their minds to slip back into the state of infantile consciousness that according to the federal government is just as dangerous as this experience of injecting the poison of heroin into your veins or snorting crystal meth so let's lock up the babies that's one thing that I've learned from this new study

on LSD is that every single baby walking on the earth today is a drug offender who should be at least handcuffed so maybe somebody out there who has an entrepreneurial spirit could invent baby handcuffs or vaginal prisons so we can solve this awful problem it kind of explains what's wrong with society right we're all born criminals that's what happens we're born criminals and thanks to the state we are reeducated and transformed into highly functioning adults who know right from wrong this is one reason that it's one of the most psychedelic months in human history and obviously I'm joking about the baby prisons I don't think babies should be locked up in prisons I think babies should be immediately launched

into outer space to some other planet let's get rid of the babies all together I don't think we should allow them to contaminate our planet with their awful innocence and complete disregard for all human laws the other reason it's a incredibly psychedelic month is because at this very moment the multi-disciplinary association for psychedelic studies which is the organization that Rick Doblin founded is raising money to create to synthesize a kilogram of MDMA because they are doing FDA approved studies which are having great results in which are probably going to lead to MDMA being a prescribable medicine so there are ways that you can now chip in in this historic moment in human history all you have to do

is go to the maps website links will be in the comments section of this episode and donate a little money or chip in in some way right now at this crucial time so that we can get this MDMA legally synthesized and continue these very important tests that Rick Doblin has gotten has made legal it's incredible this guy is a real saint he's awesome now that's the second reason that it's a psychedelic month the third reason it's a psychedelic month and you'll find more about this on next week's podcast which gets released April 19th is because Alex and Alice and Gray are in I suppose what you could say the final phase or the next phase of building their beautiful temple in Theon and upstate New York which is a kind

of nexus point for the incredible art church that they have created and for the awesome community of people who have gathered around them and who have in varying ways been using art as a means to connect to the universe and it's a beautiful it's a beautiful religion and I know religion has a lot of negative connotations but it's a beautiful philosophy that is being propagated by Alex and Gray over at Cosm and so I got to visit with them I got to see Entheon I got to witness this embryonic temple and I had my mind blown as I always do by hanging out with those two and especially by being on their beautiful property which I think anyone can visit they have a bed and breakfast over there with some of their art is on all the walls and they're just a variety of

super cool people who are always hanging out there including Alex and Alice and Gray so that podcast comes out next week regardless this has been one of the most mind-melting months of my life and I'm really grateful that I get a chance to experience it all and that's all because of you guys for listening to this podcast so much thanks to you we're going to dive right into this episode but first some quick business this episode of the DTFH is brought to you by the glory angels over at Squarespace.com I was just watching one of these weird shows that is on TV and somehow there's like a whole genre of these shows now like Shark Tank where essentially these billionaire entrepreneurs go around finding folks who make special napkin covers and jams and weird

products and buy millions of dollars worth of these products for for their businesses so if you've got a nice if you're a glass blower and you want to get your glass blown vases and a billion Bubba Gump shrimp companies then if you're lucky this amazing godlike billionaire who runs the golden saddle or whatever that hotel is in Vegas will come to your glass blowing place chastise you for how slow you are when you create your art and if you're lucky he'll he'll get you to water down your art to the point where you can sell it to him wholesale and obese drunks shoving shoving shrimp into their face that Bubba Gumps can completely ignore your flower holder on their table it's a weird I don't know what to think of it but anyway the whole

point is last night as I was watching one of these things falling asleep and I had nightmares for the entire night I woke up my beautiful beloved Cora screaming in the middle of the night and I think it was because of watching these shows it also may have been because I ate a bunch of chocolate right before I fell asleep but anyway one of these shows this leather worker was taken to some Manhattan web design building where these charlatan sons of guns told this guy that for a seven page website they normally charge a hundred thousand dollars think about that a hundred thousand dollars for a seven page website if you make me pay a hundred thousand dollars for a seven page website there better be a page on there where I can press a button and it brings my mom and my grandmother back

to life because otherwise it's a ripoff don't get hoodwinked by these charlatan bastards who will drag you like a cowboy whose boot is stuck in a stirrup through a cactus garden and at the end of this awful dragging you'll be dead broke and you'll have a website that is a little worse than a website you could easily have made by going to squarespace.com squarespace.com go there use offer code Duncan you'll get 10% off a brand new beautiful website all the websites come with shopping carts which mean you can immediately start selling whatever the thing is you want to sell if you're a glass blower you don't have to wait for some billionaire reptilian to come farting into your workshop and tell you that you're too slow you can immediately build a website and start selling your beautiful

glass blown trinkets right now you don't need a brick and mortar website you don't a brick and mortar store you don't have to build a store on some dangerous corner where somebody high on bath salts is going to come and chew your face off you don't have to die that horrible death laying in a pool of your own blood staring at one of your eyeballs that is being sucked back into the cracked lips of some bath salt maniac who's eating it like a little bit of pasta at a bubble gum shrimp company no you don't have to risk your life you can just go to squarespace.com use offer code Duncan and you'll get 10% off a brand new website and if you sign up for a year you will get a free domain name what could be better than that squarespace i owe you my life

thank you my sweet darling patrons i've already been shipping babies to you every time i have a baby and i've been having a lot of babies uh over the last few months i ship i ship them to the offices over at squarespace so if you guys have been getting a lot of babies they've all been coming from me we've got a little bit more advertising to do and then we're going to jump right into this podcast and i apologize that every single time i do an episode over this month i will be listing the upcoming shows um so here's what's going on we have got right now i'm at Pittsburgh and if you listen to this episode right now and happen to be in Pittsburgh then please come see me i'm going to be at the recs theater then i'm going to be in columbus on the 13th that's tomorrow cleveland on

the 14th fern dale on the 15th toronto on the 16th two shows in toronto both of these shows have almost sold out go check on the website there may be some tickets left i'm not sure but i think they're both sold out but it's worth checking chicago on the 17th madison on the 19th i believe that we are sold out madison too i think there's a few tickets left for that you can go to all these by the way all these ticket links are at dunkatrustle.com we're in minneapolis kansas city st louis nashville vancouver seattle portland san francisco los angeles and then i'm going to be in mawai at the rom dos spring retreat so i hope you guys will come to one of these shows as i mentioned before i'm having an incredibly amazing time meeting all of you and i hope to see some of you at these upcoming

shows we're also brought to you by amazon.com if you go through our portal located at dunkatrustle.com the next time you're going to buy something on amazon for example a brand new oculus rift then they will give us a very small percentage of anything that you buy and it's a great way to support this podcast and it costs you nothing we also have t-shirts posters and stickers located at dunkatrustle.com for those of you asking who are the first few shows of the tour who weren't able to get a t-shirt those will be on sale at the end of the tour a limited number of the ur god t-shirts will be on sale so keep your eye out for that okay everybody thanks for hanging in there now please welcome to the dunkatrustle family hour podcast a pioneer in the world of psychedelics

somebody who while i was uh when i was young and having mind opening experiences on lsd and thinking how absolutely insane it was that these blissful states had somehow been criminalized by the state when i was impotently bitching about this to my friends rick doblin was actively doing everything in his power to transform the draconian drug laws that have scheduled some of these life improving psychedelics in the same category as they schedule heroin and meth to a place where they could be prescribed by doctors so this is a hardworking as far as i'm concerned this is a saint and already his hard work is paying off and we're finding out that mdma is a treatment for ptsd which is a disorder that is really destroyed zillions of lives all over the planet

and he's just getting started so as i mentioned before if you want to find out more about rick go to his website the multi-disciplinary association of psychedelic studies links will be at dunkintrustle.com if you want to hear more of a conversation with rick he just did a podcast with the great joe rogan on the joe rogan experience that you can download so okay enough of that now everybody please welcome to the dunkintrustle family hour podcast the amazing rick doblin so rick doblin this is such a surreal moment for me suddenly i'm on a right now i'm on a bus in boston and i'm sitting across from one of the pioneers

of psychedelics who is doing so you're doing so much work for us right now and it's just a real and for me too yeah um i want to start off by asking if you could just update me on where maps currently is right now when it comes to getting mdma prescribable i know you guys have been raising money to manufacture a batch of mdma but what's going on well things have dramatically changed for the better because of a meeting this afternoon that took place and what we're doing is summarizing 15 years of research with mdma in ptsd patients that we've done at a cost of somewhere near seven million dollars with support and other aspects of it and we're gathering it for presentation to the fda for phase three studies and this transition what it means is phase two is pilot

studies where you're trying to just explore and understand who do you want to treat how does your method work what doses do you want to use what patients does it really work in who doesn't it work in how do you understand the the risks and benefits of these drugs and then also how strong is the effect and how variable it is and all of that gives you the idea of how to design these big studies that are going to be used to approve the drug proving safety and efficacy so it it moves into a whole different realm it's and all of the academic researchers all sorts of scientific research that's non drug development so this is a certain kind of science right that it's not just trying to figure out how it's about alleviating suffering it's not about knowledge and that's

something really important for people to understand the difference that and there's an aspect of commercial marketing of approval of legal approval for medicine so it's about getting mdma approved by the fda right so what we're doing is summarizing all of our data from the last 15 years about safety and efficacy and reaching out to the other researchers all over the world who've treated about another um thousand people so there's been 1100 people have been mdma not patients but in scientific studies okay so we're trying to gather up all of that data and then gather data per like how much data is there per person like what's the volume of data per person that you have well everybody is treated with this course of psychotherapy that is about three and a half months

and it's all videotaped so and we have weekly non drug psychotherapy sessions and then three different times we'll have eight hour mdma sessions that start at 10 in the morning go till six at night what's the dosage how many milligrams well we're changing we're doing all different so these what i mean this is these exploratory studies so we've done some where it's an inactive placebo we've done some with 25 milligrams uh 30 milligrams 40 milligrams and those doses we're trying to figure out um double blind can we um like can we confuse people as to whether they actually got that or they got 75 milligrams which we also use 100 and 125 and even in one study we did 150 so we're doing all these different and then we also have this very smart idea i think of

administering supplemental doses of half the initial dose after between one and a half and two and a half hours yeah as a decision between the therapist and the patient so we're trying to give a certain fixed range but variability and fine tuning not just uh according to the psychological or physiological different ways so then there's this eight hour session there they spend the night in the treatment center then the next day they come back and there's um two or three hours sometimes of integrative psychotherapy about what happened before somebody else comes picks them up they can't drive home then we call them every day on the phone for a week checking in with them and that could be 15 minutes and all this is um being recorded and notes are taking

notes are taking and we're documenting everything and then there's um three or four more weeks of non-drug psychotherapy and then a second mdma session and then that happens again a third mdma session and that's it and then two months later is when we evaluate them and that's what's called the primary outcome measure that's what is really used to show safety and efficacy but then we also do can you talk a little bit about the primary outcome measure what is made up of yes and and here's our advantage the primary outcome measure for ptsd so is called the clinician administered ptsd scale okay and this was developed by the va and it's been updated constantly over the years and it's been um this is the the caps four is what we've been

using the caps five is just coming out as they refine their understanding of this and it has to do with certain kind of avoidance behaviors certain kind of intrusion behaviors avoidance behaviors like not going out triggers yeah something triggers your reminder of your trauma and so you avoid this whole okay got you yeah there's emotional hyper reactivity got you aspects of it nightmares and then then there's also emotional numbing there's different kind of symptoms and for us the key issue is we use all these lower doses to try to find a place where there was a confusion between the doses and then we would show a dose response relationship that the more MDMA you got the more therapy you got the better you got that

that it was and then we would that's how we would deal with the double blind issue and that's how we would do the big phase three studies would be these low doses compared to these you know the highest dose the 125 milligrams so but it turned out the data was really different is that the lower doses were um meet people uncomfortable that that they were open a little but their fear was not reduced enough they were just and and that reduced the effect they still got a little bit better but the people that had the therapy without the MDMA with the placebo did even better it kind of muted the therapy it made them a little uncomfortable but then what totally surprised us was at 75 milligrams compared to 125 the people got even

better right the the medium dose the 75 milligrams often again 37 and a half after one and a half to two and a half hours so it's a it's a good dose those people did the best of all but 125 you're saying is was great for a lot but the 75 people did this milligram people did even better okay and that but not for everybody but but that but that led us to a whole understanding and of what's really going on and the relationship between the mystical experience and therapeutic outcome with MDMA and how that's different with psilocybin that this um there's you people are more grounded when they take these medium doses and what's happening is that their memories are coming back of their trauma but their fear response is muted and they're feeling this deep deep

self-acceptance and they're looking back at the trauma from a perspective now right and they're storing it into longer term memory with enhanced frontal cortex thinking about it and they're able to have this laid out in this kind of emotional tone this difference so the next time they recall this memory the emotional tone so that memory reconciliation non-psychiatrist sorry to cut you off okay very quickly a trauma happens yeah and so whatever it may be whatever it is some awful thing happens to you you see your friend get blown up and so this gets stored in in your brain while you're experiencing massive releases of adrenaline and are you saying that this memory is getting stored in a different part of the brain yeah there's it's kind of a shorter term memory

and it's the and it's constantly re-triggered by the emotional tone yeah like it's so in so that so in between the part of the brain that stores it for long term and the short term it's getting stuck in short term and just sort of bouncing around and and the first thing filter is like this fear reaction filter of you know is that something that that we need to protect ourselves from you know so that this kind of instinct instantaneous fear reaction to a trauma is it keeps it in this you know but then it doesn't it's not relaxed it's not processed it's not processed yeah yeah and that's why you can actually change these things within an instant within a different attitude you know and when your attitude is stuck sometimes you give a drug and your chemistry

changes and in a supportive context you can look at things and it gets stored in a different way that's called memory reconciliation and now there's research being done at Rockefeller University we just sent them we're sending them four grams of MDMA for animals we're being they're looking at mechanisms of action how does this actually work yeah and how does certain fears get extinguished and how does memory shift after in response to a trauma and when these animals are giving MDMA so that's the science is really developing but the FDA doesn't care about that the FDA doesn't care how it works they just show can you show it's safe and can you show it helps somebody and then the theory of how it works people are suffering right now so that's what

I'm saying the difference between knowledge yes and the science of drug development science so that's what we're doing and this movement towards this negotiation with FDA we have this tremendous advantage of the fact that the FDA is really interested in science over politics this branch of the FDA and this branch of the FDA reviews psychedelic research you reviews marijuana research and they've been when did this branch of the FDA come into existence well I did my phd at the Kennedy school government and part of my dissertation was on this this was the pilot drug evaluation staff began in 1999 1989 and 1990 right around that years when it started and then they were looking at a lot of the AIDS people had criticized the FDA for being too slow

to approve drugs too cautious and so they tried to say how do we speed drug development up so this was the pilot drug evaluation staff okay the pilot new drug evaluation ways and they needed real drugs to work with and so they had to they looked around all the other body parts were all captured by different divisions at the FDA all the other drugs were all taken so they had to take some drugs and they took psychedelics and marijuana as weren't being used which had been blocked for decades and then they're like okay you know we can handle the risk of these drugs that's the argument that they made that these are not that different from amphetamines they're not that different from opiates they're not different from tranquilizers that the FDA knows how to

regulate drugs I mean this is like there's politics about you know drug war and stuff but but the FDA is like these are just drugs and we can control and manage it so we want to let research happen and that started well that flies in the face of the kind of like stereotypical like paranoid hippie idea of the FDA is this drooling evil bunch of ogres who want to ruin everything it doesn't that doesn't jive of what I've heard about the FDA right right and that's the fundamental mistake a lot of people make is they think in black and white terms and they deem they make over generalizations and they go by patterns from the past they don't update for the future right that the you you have to look at what are the institutional mission of the different

federal agencies and then also what's the control system politically right and the FDA has been very supportive even against other government agencies telling them to shut stuff down here's what the FDA that NIDA which has the the national institute on drug abuse has the monopoly on the supply of marijuana used in the united states and has since 1968 we're trying to break that monopoly but anyway they mean the supply of marijuana used for studies for studies yeah yeah right yeah so they've had this monopoly and it's been a major obstruction to medical marijuana research we're trying to end it and they're just trying to block it but with psychedelics we have our own independent sources of supply and so the normal way that FDA reviews a protocol is they

review your design and then where the drug comes from they say okay if you've shown us that you've got the drug great if not we put a clinical hold on it but our normal way of reviewing things is to look at the science first and then then you work on the drug so we did that multiple times FDA said yes but NIDA with their monopoly wouldn't sell us the marijuana so NIDA then why they because they want the propaganda of you know marijuana is bad and studies into the beneficial uses but they've changed their mind now NIDA things are changing all around them so so yes they were now they want to get rid of this monopoly and they want the NIDA doesn't want to have the monopoly but because they're getting so much pressure for it and the it costs them so much money

they have so much other stuff to do and they're also they've given up like they we need research everybody agrees we need research on medical use that and foreign imports so now some foreign producers of medical marijuana are going to try to get FDA standards all right so NIDA went to FDA this is before they changed before they're changed right they said the FDA stop approving protocols for maps for marijuana until we say yes or no that we'll sell it to them we don't want Rick to say hey FDA said yes and we won't sell them the marijuana that's bad so they filed for they asked the FDA stop doing that change your procedures and I filed a protest with the FDA ombudsman about this and it went through the channels and it ended up the FDA said tonight to forget it we approve

protocols that was and they had this meeting in 1992 at they were started in 89 90 around that then they approved rick strassman's study with DMT in 1990 and then charlie grove and I were trying to get them to approve a marijuana I mean an MDMA study for cancer patients yeah with anxiety and so they convened this meeting in 92 and said analyzed it and said yes we're going to open up the door to psychedelic research we're going to treat it the same way as other research and therefore that's because of you that's because that's because me and charlie and rick strassman and yeah and others and dave nickles all sorts of people where they are I mean it was like a community effort but there there's like a point of pressure and the point of pressure in this case was charlie grove and my

protocol for MDMA for cancer patients we were saying we want to do something and the same way that we're saying to the government and have since 2001 we want to grow marijuana for our own research we want to break this monopoly so the FDA is got really good people in it and so for for hippies to think the FDA is trying to control my vitamins and you know wipe out everything that's it um you know there there's nothing is monolithic there's like a fiefdoms even inside the FDA because they each control different body parts and they can look at different drugs for different things but look what the FDA just did what is one of the most hot topics in America right now is these anti-abortion bills the right wing yeah trying to eliminate abortion all over America

yes what did FDA just do they made the abortion pill r u46 easier to access more in line with the science even in the face of you know a lot of conservative political opinion not wanting them to do that and the FDA did it and they that's where the FDA has got politicized about women's reproductive rights but it just seems to delay things they come and with psychedelics we don't really have the opposition we're working people are recognizing that the pharmaceutical medications that are available for PTSD for certain anxiety depression things that they they're palliative or they don't work that much they don't like make it so what are the most popular current currently the most popular medications used for PTSD there's two that are approved SSRI

Zoloft and Paxil but if you talk to vets about what they're given by the VA they they have like a cocktail of like a massive number of different drugs that are there's only two drugs approved for PTSD but they try all these other drugs Zoloft and Paxil so what we're trying to do to demonstrate to the FDA and that's what we talked about earlier today and the breakthrough that happened in my mind today about how we're going to be able to do this is that you need to have two large scale phase three studies so we're trying to say that we've done about 105 people so far and we think we're going to have to do about 450 more right but the 450 more are divided into two studies you know 225 and 225 something like that and the first one we're going to get half the people

are going to get the therapy that I described it's around 40 hours of therapy with a male female team takes place over three and a half months and once a month for three months people get this eight-hour session listening to music half the time talking with the therapist and half of those people will get just an inactive placebo and the other half will get on the first dose 75 milligrams of MDMA with this optional supplemental dose then they can decide in conjunction with the therapists do they want to stay at that dose level or go to the higher in which case it would be 125 milligrams and then again with these supplement and then they would have the third dose the third session and they could again refine the dose a little bit right so it's just these three sessions

and then at the and all again videotaped and data is massive data gathering how do we pick these people are they people who have PTSD or they people who have tried MDMA before no these are people that have had PTSD and have failed on currently available medications to get better so they're called chronic treatment resistant PTSD patients does it matter if they've had experience with MDMA well it um we let we do say that people can have had five prior experiences with MDMA right but it may matter somewhat that they know what it is you know if you take it in a recreational setting sometimes and you haven't really felt comfortable to really be openly therapeutic in yourself and be more personal I mean that it's um that there's something about the first

bunch of sessions that that affect people very deeply sometimes for different people different times there's um kind of a slow muting of the effect over but over a long time but so we're we want to you this is called subject enrichment so what we're trying to do is see which population can we show that it's really going to work and getting all the factors lined up so our main thing is we're going to optimize therapeutic outcomes and we're not being that efficient we that's why we have a male female we have a two-person therapy team yes it's really better is it twice as better is it worth but we're doing it in a way where the second person can be a student learning so it's a way to also train the next generation and have a lower cost no no the therapists are the

the patients probably want that a little bit no the patients want to have about half the time when people have taken MDMA their eyes are closed they're inner listening to music they're they're telling themselves different stories um they uh generally it's the therapist we they might bring in one or two of their favorite things but but that's kind of pre-pattern in a way we we want to not have them we want to have them fresh they've had but and supported but but sometimes they can say i don't want to hear you know that music donovan i don't want to hear donovan well first off we try to avoid mostly words we mostly avoid music with words again because the essence of the method is that once you um the person's unconscious is activated by MDMA right and that that's the guide

we're not the guide we don't know best we don't know you know the person that knows that the person the best is themselves and there's this inner wisdom of the order or whatever and so what we what do you mean of the order well of there's a flow of uh experiences so what i mean is that in an eight hour session some people will talk about the trauma early on right some people won't get till till six hours later some people will go to happy mood first or some people will just not even talk about the trauma they'll talk about some other thing that that you were just like again stunned to hear that has some emotional resonance but it's not not this it's like some different thing that happened at school that when they were five or yeah you know but it's just like

something that made a deep impression on them you should get into and then then sometimes they are um able to just go inside and tell themselves just flow with this this these metaphors they it's beautiful they're talking in metaphors and poetry an example um somebody had a gorilla locked in his uh a wild animal locked in a cage inside him they had to keep inside him all the time because if this uh wild animal would get out and this was his uh his military aggression yeah and then he saw and then if that everything would you know but he saw as long as he was keeping this in the cage that it was going to be in range they had to somehow find a way to channel this energy and not just keep letting out this you know and becoming friends with this wild animal yeah you know so

so you've been in a session where someone is saying I feel like there's a wild animal no no this was not a session that I was in this was a session that was yes because this has been a yeah so how does the therapist respond to that if the patient says I have a wild animal inside of me what's the response what does it feel like yeah and so that it's sort of this you know it's your wild animal how do you relate to it what does it mean to you and you got to figure it out but we're here to say that it's something that we believe um there's this self healing mechanism inside you that this MDMA has helped catalyze and that is burdened some symptoms that you've had that that it will be helped if if you um take a dialogue with this wild animal so a self healing mechanism what is that what is

the self healing mechanism well what happens when you scratch your arm yeah it heals it heals where that's it and the mind probably has something like that okay right so somehow MDMA is accelerating that process or when or I guess you'd say it's more like or even dreaming it's I'm saying that like that you're psyche that the dreaming is part of um you know healing um reorganizing the brain it's a healthy process bragging hard drive yeah that there's this um inner well of um deeper feelings and of unconscious of things that are that that emerge amazing under psychedelics do you ever feel do you ever feel like um do you ever feel so you're sitting down with the FDA and I'll tell you what you know what I I briefly what I might think of a psych a psychedelic I

think a psychedelic a good psychedelic experience connects me with God is what I think and there is a an instantaneous healing that happens when you make a connection or you remember that you are connected whatever way you can you describe God a little bit yeah sure he's got a six pack he hates gay people he's a he for sure pissed man he's pissed that's a great question so yeah okay so so with psilocybin with LSD with the classics psychedelics that God experience that

mystical connection that is part of the healing mechanism right and that's what people who are scared of dying who have life-threatening illnesses or have addictions that helps them yes very very much but in the PTSD work that's the distinction is that it's about catharsis okay okay which is why we had the um burning man on the wall in the washington c dc wall that we had it was called catharsis okay and we had the first burn in many many many decades maybe even a hundred years yeah this was the thing that just happened yeah that was sort of my instigation no yeah and it was described that because some people haven't heard of it can you tell everyone what what it was yeah well maybe I'll backtrack and tell a little bit of how it came

about and just that um I've already talked about the government monopoly on marijuana so we're suing yeah NIDA owns this monopoly but DEA is the one that holds the chokehold on the licenses so NIDA is not really the resistance the point of resistance NIDA now says there should be an end of the monopoly but it's the DEA that has this monopoly they won't give other people licenses so we're suing the DEA professor kraker we have big dc law firms helping us in the american civil liberties union and it's about a lot of testimony and I was one of the witnesses and we were actually doing really well and looking like we were persuading this administrative law judge which we eventually did but I was one of the witnesses and at that I testified because it was going to be

marijuana grown for maps and what we're going to do with it and why and why do we need to do it and um the prosecution the sort of the DEA lawyers at the end of the day they tried to discredit my testimony I've made a really um strong impression with the judge with what we presented and then they tried to discredit me personally because that's what they try to do if they can't deal with your arguments and so we had prepared for that and the only way they could try to do that was to talk about did I smoke marijuana was I criminal oh man and so we had all figured it out that um they're probably going to ask that and the lawyers were going to object because I'm not asking for the license it's this professor kraker who's worked at military labs growing stuff to go after

coca plants and you know as top scientists that I wasn't even going to be there it might it was irrelevant so we were prepared for that the lawyers said okay it's irrelevant and then the judge surprised us and she said this was um in a criminal case you complete the fifth and the judge can not draw any negative inferences it's your constitutional right and you just choose to use it and yeah but in a civil case which is this is the judge if you don't answer a question the judge can assume whatever she wants to assume and and the DEA was like I'm an addict and I'm going to steal this government you know this marijuana that I'm spending all these years trying to get marijuana

I'm addicted to marijuana and I'm gonna you know just you know as if yes so so I decided that that I would answer the question and I said yeah I smoke a couple times a week and um and then it was a delicate moment because it wasn't um clear what they would do information but it wasn't enough for a search warrant and and it was it was totally would have the judge they started asking me where do you get your marijuana like this ridiculous then the judge just stopped their line of questioning so they used it against me and I felt like my own use of marijuana my own psychedelic use it sort of hurt the cause kind of right and I felt like I I felt bad and there was this break in the testimony and then there was it was going to come

back again it was four days it was going to come back in again in a couple months and between that break was Burning Man all right so I go to Burning Man and I'm just like my spirit's like I don't you know I want to fight back I want it to be accepted I want you know it shouldn't be used again this right and then I saw that there was this I want to bring my burning man's self myself also to Washington D.C. and not be and be proud of it sure so I thought there's this kind of sacred space at Burning Man between the man and the temple and for a bunch of years the temple was like these kind of spread out horizontal structures and the man is always this vertical structure so the man is like the Washington Monument mapping the sacred space of Burning Man on the sacred space

of America which is the mall and the Capitol and so the Capitol is like the temple and yeah and then okay so then I thought okay god if we could do this that would be like the full expression freedom and Adam Eininger who works with and for David Bronner who helped legalize marijuana in the District of Columbia is an activist and I was in Washington one time this was now about eight years ago maybe ten years ago and it was an SSDP conference and after the conference was a protest on the Washington Mall and it went it had a band it had music they're protesting the Iraq War it was the Thievery Corporation and it was fantastic it went till two in the morning and I thought wow well if we could do this till sunrise if we could really have like this all night cathartic

protest of the drug war you know if we could do this it would be a freedom it would be utterly you know we would be this would be our country we'd be free it sort of and so that's how but it took ten years to try to figure out like how to really do it and and so you can't just have party on the mall it has to be a protest right you have to protest something and there has to be a political expression and what we really wanted to express is the drug war and that's what was all of this was wrapped up into and so when it finally was possible because Adam had had experience working with the National Park Service already yes and that he'd been he had a lot of support for his marijuana legalization efforts and his political activism in DC he had really good

connections and the burner community had evolved to the point where they had a lot of different skills and we're all throughout the the system and and so I finally felt like um how do you do the all night dance though how do you do that and I was like well so just you're you were thinking how do I bring Burning Man to DC yes this is your idea yeah I bring Burning Man to DC to protest the war on drugs well it was just a yes yes that we that that that we're Americans that this Burning Man is this is America this is innovation this is healthy this is society building this is not to an intern on dropout or this is not revolution and we're tear down the system you know this is not the 60s this is different it's about how this can be integrated and energized and that's so

our Burning Man cells should be like right there you know there's Christian fundamentalists you know setting up tents on the Washington mall but telling their stories they they should be able to do that your job is you have this is symbolic my job is like symbolic social change so in a way I'm trying to do um not individual psychotherapy but social psychotherapy for sick policies and to help people get ready for psychedelic experiences but some part of you must feel on a professional level you you have so much riding on these studies that you're currently doing with MDMA and to risk blowing the whole thing with an action like what just happened it's really curious like how do you how do you justify that level of risk because what happens

if some of these feds see you out there and they're like see he just he's this is just a classic hippie you love smoking weed let's we don't you aren't you worried that this will invalidate all of your research that's a fantastic question and and you've sort of put your finger on one of the main divides in the psychedelic research community it's a it's a tremendously important issue but different people see it differently and the way that I see it is that it protects there's a risk in doing it but the the kind of direct confrontation to the war on drugs the kind of we need psychedelic harm reduction we need this is all these things you know should be legal that direct kind of progress on larger drug policy protects the work that we're doing with psychedelics and

makes a backlash less likely rather than more likely and the risk that we had was we got a permit for it I mean this is what we're saying we're trying to do this in the open yes with understanding and that we're going to be responsible yeah and so we were able to say that this was a tremendous experiment by the national park service in democracy and that that this would not be a pot smoking event this was not like this was a burning man burning the temple kind of sacred and in this community and also all night cathartic dancing and then the night before you know symposium and drug war stories people telling the stories of what and that was a total addition I hadn't envisioned that that was just fantastic you know cool and so we were able to have nobody got busted

right no it worked out great it worked out great and the for me the highlight of the whole thing was we had the zendo there we had a whole space set up the zendo project zendo is your psychedelic harm reduction is part of the so you guys go to music festivals with these zendos it formerly known as freak out tents right that's what it is but if someone's having a difficult trip they go to these places and you have people trained to yes yes and it's a little bit of a direct response again to the freak out in a way that that it's not about talking people down one of the principles is is talk through not talk down right so that we give people an opportunity to sort of feel comfortable enough to wrestle with this you know inner monster or

whatever they envision that it is so that they can kind of see that and part of that is that's a risk okay we're dealing with people are doing illegal drugs and we're trying to do stuff with the DEA on the other hand we're reducing the fear of parents of their kids flipping out at these events and we're also doing a service taking these people shouldn't be arrested and we're trying to help with the whole general so can we do something real quickly because I think this is of all the education that maps does to me the most important is teaching people how to deal with their friend when they start having a freak out right and I was wondering can we very quickly I'm gonna act like I'm freaking out yeah yeah yeah yeah give me first okay the wrong way to deal with

it and then the right way to deal with it okay so very quickly we'll pretend I've taken a lot of mushrooms you and I are hanging out and you're the bad friend all right yeah example of the bad way to deal with it all right okay so let's do it really quickly uh Rick Rick I keep hearing I keep hearing cops everywhere man I keep hearing cops everywhere and I feel like I'm having I'm pretty sure I'm having a heart attack yeah just don't pay don't pay attention to that it's not important just try to distract yourself and and you know the more you think about bad stuff the worse it's gonna get so just don't even think don't even don't even think about that no don't even think about that I'm having a heart attack you're doing this to yourself now I want my mom I want my

mom I want my mom I came from her how what are you what have you taken do you know what you've taken did you know it what it's a mushroom do you know around how long ago you've taken them or do you have any idea of time or are your friends where's your friends where where's the rest of the friends okay we've got a space for you you're gonna be fine well you know now you just take care of yourself have you been uh drink do you have any water do you need any fruit juice okay here's some fruit juice we've got a special porta potty right over here if you need to but we have this place to lie down and we have these people trained to talk to you so if you'd like

to come in that's cool okay so then then you start talking about um you want your mother well well your mother died when you were three years old or and or you tell start telling this a story and and it comes from you and then just listen we're listening we'd be supportive and yeah it's beautiful and so many people you know when their friends are flipping out they don't know how to deal with it and it's a really confusing space to be in because quite often you're high when your friends flipping out yeah the most important thing to know is that it's not like once it starts to go bad then you're sunk you know that that that the way out is to go fully into it and that you need so the first thing is you create a safe space you make it so people can have an

interior experience they don't have to pay attention to the outside world and that safe space can take place in the middle of chaos even if you just have a friend or somebody creates a space around you where you can just lie down or you could do it in a crowd but it's better if you find some safe space and then you try to get a sense of just the likely trajectory and part of creating safe spaces okay maybe I'm going to be here for the next eight hours or you know you try this consistent so we have people that have the the shifts in the time to make a long-term commitment to this process right and then that helps people relax too but we also you know sometimes have shift changes and but but people have this stable environment

and then they're encouraged to you know talk through not talk down but we're encouraged to think of ourselves as sitters not guides right so it's like we're not guiding we're the guide thing's kind of old hat right people kind of look at that now is like that's not the way to do it well it's a okay word and people use uh then I think the um it's taken to mean like creating a context for people but it's it's being like around a patronizing friend yeah yeah you see the flower of life go into it surrender to the flower of life okay now now where you're talking about is guided imagery all right so so there's a whole different way of therapy with guided imagery so one time our method is not the it's imagery that um you generate we don't even use words in the music if

if we can but there was one time where um I was sitting with someone who was actually btsd from 9 11 and there was a woman psychiatrist and myself working with this fella in this tb at burning man trying to help him work through this eight years before and it was really how did you make contact with him actually I've been wanting again I'm telling you I do symbolic I had wanted something like that for years and hadn't quite gel and then he was actually camping with David Bronner at burning man one years and so I met him through David Bronner and you say you've been wanting you've been wanting to work on work with someone who had ptsd from 9 11 I thought just I mean because we're oppressed we're trying to tell a

story to we're trying to tell stories to uh frighten public about drugs and psychedelics and yeah yeah so I I sort of had this idea of that would be a good if that would develop and actually um and then people are symbols and they're people there and they're individuals at the same time and and you kind of like keep that straight and yeah sure yeah so while we were doing this work there was um another people who were comfortable with psychedelics but weren't like trained therapists right and they were working with a woman who um had been raped at burning man before wow years before and had kind of overcome it by trying to help other help promote dialogue about about sex at burning man right the bureau of erotic discourse

yeah and that but that there were still issues about um the rape and the trauma from that right so these other people were working with her and they were doing guided imagery just like like we're saying and I was just in the back of my head thinking okay we've got this method we wouldn't do that and but um it you know it worked it worked you know but it's okay because a lot of it is um people are doing their own internal work right you know and what you're saying helps um or helps a lot but um and now it's starting to help integrate this into this MDMA assisted psychotherapy we're working with various therapists trained affiliated with the VA researchers there who've developed new methods for treating PTSD but have

developed non-drug psychotherapies and there's several of them now the the key one is called prolonged exposure where you just repeat the trauma over and over and eventually you get dead into it and then you are cured huh I mean that's one of the main methods there's thousands of therapists trained in prolonged exposure and it can help to some degree some people but there's a lot of people is retraumatizing to sure it sounds brutal it's hard and um and so they want to see blending MDMA with that there's another one the first one that we're going to start um in about a month or so which is fantastic study there's um couples therapy and it's where one member of the couple has PTSD and it affects the relationship and so it's a it's a form of couples

therapy to support the person with PTSD but to acknowledge the way it's affecting the relationship and so the VA National Center for PTSD when we first started thinking about what to blend how they might use MDMA they just thought MDMA love drug hug drug you know just made them think about this couples therapy study and so we have now got permission to give both members of the couple MDMA and couples therapy is something that the way it's structured it's not a disease so we can't make MDMA into a medicine through the FDA for couples therapy because it's not a disease but it's a really important use of MDMA it's it's fantastic it's one of the best uses that's why it became one of the most popular drugs in the world yeah and you know couples therapy relationships

and and so we're sort of backing into it by using um we're studying PTSD but we're helping to blend so we have our method other things can work we're trying the core element is what's called the therapeutic alliance and that's that first part that friends can do for other friends create a safe space it's the alliance between the therapist and the patient about how they're working together there's a trusting safe supportive environment and that in the psychotherapy outcome research has shown to be the most important factor more than the school of psychotherapy that you have this everything that you're talking about is is obviously beautiful but so many of us we do not have a therapeutic alliance we don't even have therapists we have our friends that we like to

trip with right can we create this therapeutic alliance with friends yes totally I see that's the um that's why it's a sense of safety and trust and so when I think the key mistake is that a bunch of friends say we're going to take drugs we're going to go and have a party we're going to go to this event it's going to be fun and that's all we're looking for and then if somebody has something deeper coming up then that's a sign that it's going wrong suppress it here take the tranquilizer you know we're out here to have fun then you end up worse off so I think that that's the thing to avoid is when you take these drugs you sort of should sign on for whatever this emergence is right and not just try to narrow okay only the happy you know whatever and because

the other time it deepens the happiness we even have a measure we use called the post-traumatic growth inventory it's about how people can grow after trauma in response it makes them refine what they want to spend their time on or realize how precious it is to be just kind to somebody or yeah you know that that there's all of these ways in which people can can grow and integrate trauma and so we're just trying to look both at the therapy component the MDMA component and we're trying to go for a cure a durable remission sometimes it will come back we're trying to help people be without drugs to work through these issues and we do find that some people you know life continues to traumatize people sometimes and if you've been traumatized

like that you're more vulnerable so there's a there's some relapse rate and and we actually have gotten permission from FDA to give another MDMA session to people and we're trying to integrate this into America that's what we're talking about and so before though um yeah okay about MDMA though is this search for um you know a cure to help people be without it and they may relapse but and now so the whole work we're doing with marijuana now we have a we have a 2.1 million dollar grant from the state of Colorado to study marijuana for PTSD and 76 veterans cool and this is something we've been trying for six years taken forever to get this study approved and now because um we're doing non-profit drug development we give away our protocol

and there's a for-profit company in Canada that's um Tilray and they want to do some research so they're going to replicate our protocol but using their marijuana and then they're going to have it vaporized we're going to have it smoked and then there's a whole study now in the University of Sydney Australia with the same protocol this grandfather had a granddaughter who had um pediatric epilepsy and nothing helped her and then CBD helped her and he gave like 34 million dollars to the University of Sydney the largest grant in their entire history for cannabis research so now they're going to use the protocol and it'll be um edibles so we'll have the same same kind of thing but the thing about marijuana is that it's more of a palliative treatment that people tend

to use it every day it it doesn't reorder the brain and memory in quite the same way that MDMA does that we've described that the marijuana what about LSD does it reorder the brain in a LSD is is more like the MDMA or psilocybin yeah you can repattern but there's a yes you can yeah definitely a similar effect a similar effect but but there's a more of a challenge to the ego more of a challenge to letting go right more a little bit scarier and also a little bit less biographical more you know what does it mean to just be human and live and die and more general kind of things and we're with MDMA for memory reconciliation it helps to be stuck in or in your biography this takes you kind of out of the other side and then you have these more

mystical experiences that then can also be therapeutic in a different way of making you feel connected unless lonely or more loving or more self accepting and more beyond your narrow ways of thinking and more you know these people that are black people you know they're not really different than me or you know this these islamic people you know well you know the sufis are islamic you know there's these mystical branches of all these religions that are happy to like with each other and pray with each other and it's not like you know but the fundamentalists are really too rigidly holding on and violent and do you do you this is my final question for you because you are you're clearly a pioneer and you're and you're someone who is

you know in a relatively small but very active group of people who are working on getting this stuff into the mainstream if it all works if it works everything that you're trying to accomplish is accomplished right what kind of world what kind of America are we living in 10 years or so if everything works out okay well actually I can tell you like over the next 30 years okay all right so because things will roll out I don't think it's like instantaneous change so I think that in five years from now we believe that we will be able to um present evidence to the FDA about the safety and efficacy of MDMA's psychotherapy for PTSD and that we will have treated maybe um you know 450 people in our studies but then treated maybe

another 1,000 people on a compassionate basis or another 500 people on a compassionate basis and that then once MDMA is approved we're going to set up psychedelic clinics and other people will set up psychedelic clinics we will train therapists only people that have trained in the method by the sponsor can prescribe they don't have to stick with the method they can say their wisdom is to do it this way or that way but they have to get the basic safety from so not all doctors will be able to no this would be like the best way to think about it is hospice centers kidney dialysis centers method own clinics sort of this is a psychedelic clinic okay now we're moving forward with MDMA um usonna hefter is moving forward with psilocybin friend of life so

these will be multi-purpose there's ketamine being used all over for depression so these are going to be psychedelic clinics but ketamine where it's used it's generally not used with psychotherapy it's used just as a pharmacological shock that ketamine helps in people that are refractory depression I think it'd be more effective if they also encased it in this therapeutic a little bit of a therapeutic context with ketamine and the therapy that you've developed for MDMA could it would be the same kind of there yeah ketamine just last an hour it's a whole different thing you're you can't really talk to people as much with ketamine it's different so with psilocybin when it's being used in therapy it's maybe 80 or 90 percent people having their own

nonverbal experiences listening to music and and only 10 or 20 percent of dialogue with the therapists about what's going on it's more people left on their own to have these wordless kind of experiences but with MDMA it's more half and half so um so we have these clinics they start springing up yeah so these clinics eventually now here's a 30-year model which is the first hospice center was in 1974 by 2004 there was over 3,500 of them right so we're going to have all of these we're going to have psychedelic clinics all over and they will grow starting um actually you know five years from now with approval and even before with the researchers and then what we're going to be seeing is medicalization leads to people's changing minds

about criminalization of these drugs right we've seen legalization of marijuana grow as medical marijuana has grown because people can understand they have they see people that use it they trust what they're seeing they get more comfortable so the medicalization helps people understand risk benefit and get more comfortable about legalization and public health approaches to abuse rather than criminal justice and then with MDMA what we're going to and with these psychedelic clinics the legalization of marijuana is going to come first when I don't know my my conservative you know guess let's just say is um somewhere like 2024 on a federal level it may even come before then and what may come is um the the congress passing something that just says states can decide

right like the end of alcohol prohibition but let's just say 2024 rob campy at the marijuana policy project says it could be 2019 you know so I don't want to get we'll just see so then you get these psychedelic clinics that grow starting in 2021 till 2030 and spread and then um then we also have the progression of religious use right so we have religious freedom for ayahuasca in these two different religions the native american church uses peyote it's hard to create new religions where you know this is central these drugs are central I mean I mean that's we already tried the league of spiritual discovery yeah and the sometimes you know marijuana smugglers claim claim to be rastas yeah you know it's it's hard to to do that so so in our

cultural and legal context medicine um is the open door that's it and you can help religious use is great because the religious use of even small groups of ayahuasca users has um what I've seen is that there's a um deepening interest in ayahuasca in people in in america of all different kinds in a kind of reverential you know um but without police interference so that the police guy just like passes right by you know so so that there's this whole in the lot they call the penumbra the like the umbrella the shadow of you know this law but but here we have these legal supreme court cases legitimizing peyote by the name american church and was it legitimizing ayahuasca by the union de vechon and so people are using ayahuasca all over in a more or

less um unhindered way yeah there's just been several people in israel have been arrested by the israeli police for ayahuasca the world community of ayahuasca experts and lawyers is trying to help them make a case but but there can be crackdowns because who is a relic i mean sorry but medicine there's a pathway right science we do it so yes so i think that by 20 35 um we're gonna have clinics everywhere people will have gotten used to the legalization of marijuana people will be in general getting more spiritualized that's what globalization is forcing on all of us anyway and the penalties are going to be going going down for the criminal use of mdma there was just a terrific dr john elbrun did something fantastic um just the other day there was a

he testified in a case the somebody who was busted related to um mdma and similar kind of drugs and what we've been saying is that the sentencing commission that set up the mandatory minimum mandatory guidelines for how much time you get for certain amounts yeah that they did that and i think it was 2001 i testified they ignored all our testimony five-year mandatory minimum for lsd that they're just you know it's it's um it was irrational and it's the same thing they did with crack cocaine and powder cocaine and the disparities there so the testimony in the court case was that the judges in these mdma cases don't need to go by these mandatory minimum guidelines because they were made in a time of irrational hysteria and the science has passed by and they haven't updated

and so the judges don't have to go and that's great they won they won that just happened yeah that just happened just the other day and that's like the third or fourth case like that wow so there's gonna be more um yeah it's it's incredible so that's that's the that's the use again of science that's the other thing okay so now we're taking science we provide with the aclu the aclu is what pioneered this approach yes with our a lot of our evidence that we got from the um mdma studies and that's getting us into the political arena and and i think that makes us safer rather than less safe yeah for sure yeah so that's it so you're saying by 2030 by 2030 we're gonna have clinics you know hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of clinics but i think by 2040 i you know 20

35 or so i think it'll be legal yeah i think it'll be legal all psychedelics will have a culture and what we're gonna have and this may be a good way to you know conclude is that we're gonna have a culture that is more spiritualized and they will be more able to deal with these constant challenges without having to demonize others scapegoat others without indulging the fears and the worst sides of our nature that will be strengthened by the use of these substances in proper supportive ways to be more balanced human beings and we'll be able to move towards transcending these limitations and prejudices and appreciate differences it won't be the end of it's not like a homogeneous soup of one thing it's like everybody's just fine with

who they are and delighted to see whoever else is different they are and that this will be the antidote to war and this einstein said that the you know we need a new mode of thinking or else we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe what the new mode of thinking is this spiritual kind of globalization and it's the shift from fundamentalism to mysticism cool and that's what we'll have if we look at us the other social change movements that have succeeded recently gay rights i mean there's still a lot of struggles but gay marriage what has been instrumental to their success it's been gay people coming out and owning who they are and often people are completely surprised by who's gay they've been hiding it but they've gone to all corners of

our society they've accomplished everything and they've they're just like the rest of us and they need to be accepted and so the coming out part is really important so we've organized for our 30th anniversary the series of global psychedelic dinners and they could go to the maps.org website and read about these dinners and what we're asking people to do is to share with their friends to invite people and have these dialogues about what psychedelics have meant to them or what they hope for or want to learn about psychedelic research and at the same time that they're sort of helping this coming out process and telling their stories then they can get more comfortable telling it to other people and sort of having it be more out in the

open so anyone can do these dinners yeah and right now what we're trying to do as part of our making MDMA into a medicine is we're buying a kilogram of MDMA medical grade MDMA and it's costing us four hundred thousand dollars for a kilogram that's eight thousand doses so it's roughly fifty dollars a dose 125 milligrams wow but it's that's exceedingly more than the normal cost of a dose these days that's yeah because most of it is the documentation the paperwork so this initial batch seventy four thousand dollars is going towards validating the methods that are used to make this okay because we have to make a batch but it also has to be in a way that could scale way up for when it becomes a medicine right and the same company that makes pharmaceutical

medicines for all different companies right and so it's for the paperwork we have to unfortunately spend fifty three thousand dollars to do a stability study a three-year stability study even though the MDMA that we currently use was made in 1985 it's 31 years old as we're in great and we know that it'll make it for three years so anyway the price will go down but we're asking people to go to these dinners tell their stories and if they are motivated to donate towards our purchase of this participate with us in a legal drug deal to purchase MDMA to make it into a medicine that we'll use all over the world and we have our 30th anniversary celebration that's going to take place April 17th free from any kind of police interference with full support of the police

because we're helping trauma with police officers we got a police officer in our PTSD study wow we got veterans firefighters including another one from 9 11 and police officers and so the April 17th Sunday from 5 to 11 Pacific time we're having our 30th anniversary banquet celebration and entertainment it's going to be an incredible event and there are people giving talks and it's going to be live stream at maps.org slash live 30 great and uh android johns and phedra it's it's going to be um ken jordan of crystal methad cool there's going to be uh just an incredible kind of movie by dj spooky music and movie about the creation of the universe in this gorgeous facility created for masonic rituals the scottish rite temple oh nice and we're gonna have a lot of

interesting talks from patients but you must be sold out for tickets for that right no no actually we're not it no we're not yeah we have like 500 more i mean this is a big spot yeah so this is for people that are in the bay area this should be incredible that sounds so fun i wish i was going to be there yeah yeah sunday from 5 to 11 it's live stream all over and um it's just um every once in a while you kind of have to celebrate and yes even though for us i really the shakespeare said something incredible many things but one of the things that really stuck me is he said there's many a slip twix the cup and the lip you know that you think you've got it and it's like almost there and then you spill it on yourself or something so that you know we're just sort of

gathering our um energy and confidence to kind of but not be overconfident as the hardest steps are ahead right to really train hundreds of therapists and go in um 20 different sites to do the research in europe and the united states and elsewhere and so it's a lot of work it's a lot of work and thank god you're the one at the helm it's yours you're you're doing such wonderful things friends listening please definitely go to the links i'll have all the links in the comment section of this um oh one last other thing uh psychedelics because because we are also believing that being involved in the struggles of the day makes us safer rather than less safe so there's a hashtag um psychedelics because it's a whole dialogue about again this coming out

psychedelics um are important to me because right i value them or that's cool and so we're trying to get this really large like discussion going as well great beautiful i'll have all the links at dunkartrussell.com again thank you very much friend thanks for being on the show thanks for listening starting this month you can take advantage of great savings throughout the year check out the monthly parts and service specials in store and online and when you are ready to order shop online with parts connect at rushtruckcenters.com expect more from rush truck centers looking for a particular part then look no further rush truck centers all makes parts catalog features more than 16 thousand of the most popular all makes parts from the top suppliers in the industry and with 164

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