Duncan Trussell Family Hour - RICK DOBLIN FROM MAPS!

Episode Date: April 2, 2015

Rick Doblin is working to make MDMA an FDA approved medicine.  He founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).   We talk about MDMA assisted psychotherapy and how the world might change if psychedelics were destigmatized.   This episode was brought to you by SQUARESPACE.COM  go to Squarespace.com and use offer code DUNCAN to receive 10% off your first order.

You've been making better decisions for your busy family for years, and now little by little, you're making decisions for yourself, like snacking a little better, going a little further, sleeping a little deeper, and we're here to make that journey easier and even more rewarding with Acme's new Sincerely Health Platform, featuring nutrition plans, prescription reminders, and more. So sign up in the Acme mobile app to earn up to $25 in grocery rewards. Visit acmemarkets.com slash health for more details. Our podcast is brought to you by squarespace.com. Go to squarespace.com and use offer code Duncan to get 10% off a beautiful website. Hello, my dear sweet friends. It is I, Duncan

Trussell, and you're listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast. And if you're like millions and millions of people currently existing on this beautiful planet, floating in space, then you've tried a psychedelic drug before. You've taken LSD, mushrooms, maybe you've smoked some DMT, maybe you've taken MDMA. A lot of people say that's not a psychedelic. I think it is, but you've taken some kind of substance and somewhere in the heightened state of awareness that you were experiencing, somewhere in the midst of having an explosion of an epiphanies or realizing there's certain areas of your life that you need to work on or realizing that you need to maybe call your mom and tell her you're sorry for being such a

jackass for the last 15 years or maybe just in the midst of having a really great picnic with some friends or maybe even while experiencing some of the most incredible sex that you've ever had in your life or maybe somewhere in between bites of some food that you've eaten for your entire life, but you're tasting for the first time right then or maybe somewhere as you're gazing down at the shadows of the trees as they move upon whatever body of water you're sitting in front of and you realize that those shadows almost look like some kind of ancient primordial language and it occurs to you that language itself could be the shadow of God or maybe just as you are enjoying a nice day alone at home in a heightened state of awareness, the terrible thought entered into your consciousness

that the experience that you are having has been criminalized by your government and it probably gave you pause. It sure has given me pause more than a few times as I'm sitting wherever I happen to be sitting or walking wherever I happen to be walking feeling a kind of buoyant state of connection to my entire species and a desire to be kind and to listen and to give more and to help more and the sense of wanting to really make the most of my life. It's occurred to me during those moments that have been brought on by imbibing prohibited substances that this experience is not just an important experience but a vital experience and my own personal growth and that the fact that some government has made this experience illegal seems to be an indication of a terrible mistake

and if not a mistake then something so incredibly sinister that if you think about it too long while under the influence of a psychoactive drug you might actually feel a shadow creeping into your trip you might begin to get a little paranoid or start looking around wondering if there's a police officer nearby who is going to notice that you have a radiant grin on your face and see that as probable cause to look through your stuff and if he happens to find anything in your bag or your pockets that has been deemed illegal by the government then he will have the right to throw handcuffs on you put you in the back of a squad car and take you to the dungeons and if you think about it too long things can get really dark and sinister and I think a lot of

trips have gone from being pretty awesome to being pretty terrible just by that consideration that the incredible experience that these substances provide to us has for illogical or political or nefarious reasons been criminalized as far as I'm concerned this is one of the most absurd aspects of the modern society that we currently exist in but thankfully things have begun to shift they're shifting because of the tireless effort of folks like rick doblin and the people over at maps the multi-disciplinary association for psychedelic studies these are the folks doing the heavy lifting and if you're a psychonaut if you're somebody who recognizes the insanity of our current drug policy then I really hope you'll spend some time over at their website

at maps.org and see if you can figure out a way to help them out and I'm really grateful that Rick took the time to be on this podcast we're going to dive right into it but first some very quick business this episode of the Duncan Trussell family hour podcast is brought to you by those sweet technological gnomes over at squarespace.com squarespace.com if you enter in offer code Duncan you're going to get 10 percent off your first purchase and why wouldn't you want your own website you know I just did a quick perusal of available domain names and I can't believe what great domain names are out there that people haven't scooped up yet grannyfeet.com available I8humanflesh.com available nipplemanager.com available and can you believe this one's available

poopballoon.com is somehow inexplicably still available waiting for you to pick it up to buy it be the owner of poopballoon.com how is that not a mega website how is poopballoon.com not generating millions of dollars how come all of silicon valley has not swarmed to that domain name poopballoon it sounds good it makes sense and it could be yours all you got to do is go to squarespace.com and sign up for a year you will get a free domain name you can own poopballoon.com you can make it a blog you can make it your podcast you could actually have images of balloons filled with poop you could do whatever you want make it an art experiment you could actually make it a super intellectual academic philosophical blog where people go and they don't understand

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dedicated to stories of people who've eaten human flesh it could be recipes for human flesh or it could be warnings about what happens if you eat human flesh this is all there for you it's out there all you got to do is grab it these sweet golden electronic fruit fruits are hanging on the worldwide web tree just waiting for you to pluck them and go to Squarespace you could have poopballoon up and running so fast just by going to squarespace.com where you can build it beautiful you can also start a trial with no credit card required you can start building your website today just to make sure you know how to do it but why not is there has there ever been a better way to prank people is there ever been a better way to create benign chaos in the world no I think

not work your chaos magic throw your sigil up on your new squarespace website but go there and put an offer code dunk and you get 10% off and please support them because they support this podcast I've got a tour coming up my dear darling friends and I hope that you will come you will come I also have some guests that I well I can't say all the guests yet and I think some of the guests the guests in New York I'm thinking about keeping a surprise but we've got a lot of wonderful shows coming up I'm going to be at the improv on the 18th that's the Hollywood improv on the 18th of this month with Danielle Bielelly is my guest and I may have another guest I'm still working on that but for sure Mr. Bielelly the drunken Taoist himself will be there I'm going to be

in Arlington on April 22nd with Abby Martin I highly recommend going back and listening to the podcast I did with her she's an amazing journalist and I'm really looking forward to that conversation I'm going to be in Cambridge Massachusetts with Johnny Pemberton and I'm going to be in Philadelphia with Johnny Pemberton and I'm going to be in Brooklyn with Emil Amos for the 25th and 26th and also it looks like I'm going to be there with Alex and Allison Gray on the 25th and 26th as guests but unfortunately that show is sold out but if God is with me then there's a very exciting announcement that I will have about Brooklyn but I can't make it now I can only tease you about it so anyway grab the tickets they're located at dunkatrustle.com we also have got a shop with

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the place by a disgruntled manager and fisted for weeks and weeks and weeks so many awful things can happen to you I don't know if you heard about that poor kid at that chain store in New Jersey you had his armpits chopped out and replaced with onions that kid is ruined for the rest of his life and all he had to do was go through our portal located at amazon.com why would you risk decapitation emasculation why would you risk having your face sawed off by some jittering angry manager in the last leg of his life just ready to die and before he goes out he's gonna saw off some faces and maybe even set some feet on fire don't do it are you gonna risk your life just so you can buy some deodorant why would you do that when you can go through our portal go to amazon and a sweet dainty perfumed

ups man will come to your door and give you a box with some deodorant in it and if you're lucky he might come inside and make sweet love to you dripping his pheromones all over your chest and back as he thrusts deep into the inner sanctum of your soul go through our portal won't you it's located in the comments section of every episode of this podcast okay great that's it we're gonna get on with this show as you know today's guest is rick doblin you can find out everything you need to know about rick and the multi-disciplinary association of psychedelic studies by going to maps.org i hope you will visit them and if you're feeling particularly generous i hope you will throw them some green energy because they deserve it they're on the front lines and

if anything is going to change this ridiculous war on drugs if anything is going to shift this these archaic tyrannical and stupid drug policies that we currently have it's going to be because of the folks at maps and because of rick doblin and because of their colleagues wherever they may be now everybody please welcome to the duncan trustle family our podcast rick doblin rick doblin thank you so much for coming on the podcast it is a real honor to get to talk with you today thank you duncan i'm so glad to be speaking with you as well and all the people listening to your podcast you are a in the in the world of psychedelics you are a hero and you are and forgive me for i don't mean to dehumanizing dehumanize you by putting you on to a platform

here but you you are something of a saint you have sacrificed your spinal fluid in the pursuit of getting mdma as a prescription therapy so thank you on behalf of every person who stands to benefit for that and all of us who've experienced mdma and have immediately realized that this could do a lot of good for the world well thank you and and not just one spinal tap but two but i figured that the way i actually did it is two parts one is i first off i was sort of daring george rickardy to show that he could find damage in myself and friends who were using mdma but i started realizing that there's a war on drugs and you know in war people are willing to make certain kind of sacrifices and i was fighting on the side of freedom and drugs but the the real way that i was able to do it was

to imagine that i was sort of giving birth to my spinal fluid and that if women can go through the pain of childbirth i felt like it's a relatively small thing to um have a needle go into my spinal column and um so so that's actually how i did it i imagined myself sort of giving birth to the spinal fluid and and it um you know it hurt but it didn't hurt that much for those folks out there who aren't aware of maps uh can you can you talk about the mission of maps sure sure um maps is multi-disciplinary association for psychedelic studies it's a non-profit organization that i started in 1986 after we had won an initial lawsuit against the dea which they started trying in 84 to criminalize mdma they they weren't aware of the therapeutic use of

mdma but they had become aware of the recreational use of ecstasy right and so when they moved against ecstasy we took them by surprise and i went to dc and filed a lawsuit trying to preserve the therapeutic use of mdma and we had a long court case before a dea administrative law judge and won the case it was fantastic and the law judge had recommended to the head of the dea that mdma be illegal for non-medical use but it'd be schedule three meaning it could still be used therapeutically and the head of the dea rejected that recommendation and then we sued in the appeals court and won and the dea came up with a new rationale for keeping it illegal and then we sued again and then we won and then on the third time dea finally wised up and figured out how to

keep it illegal and so i started maps in 86 recognizing that you know this was uh the Reagan era the escalation of the drug war that the only way to bring it back was through the fda and that the pharmaceutical industry the government the big foundations none of them were going to support this kind of controversial research and so i felt like it needed to be non-profit oriented and come from funding from individuals and so that's basically what i've been doing since 86 although um it wasn't until 1999 that the first drug was ever approved by fda through a non-profit organization and that drug turned out to be the abortion pill r u 46 wow and it was funded by the Rockefellers the Pritzker's and the buffets warren buffett

donated over five million dollars to it wow and so i've sort of thought at that time and that was when i was working on my phd at the kennedy school of government at harvard on the regulation of the medical use of psychedelics in marijuana and i i always thought that that was really my dream team if i could get the Rockefellers the Pritzker's and the buffets together again to fund mdma research and so far we've gotten support from richard Rockefeller and some of his family members and then also from nick and susan pritzker and uh i'm just hoping on the buffets that is incredible because something that you i i've learned from uh researching you a little bit is that the people who you might expect to be completely against this kind of research really seem to to support it

or be interested in it i i would never think that the Rockefellers would have any interest in psychedelic research or that uh some of the people in the upper echelons of government would be so open to it is what what's happened what's this change well i i think that it's all too easy to um sort of stereo to play people and so when we think about the Rockefellers you know john d rockefeller the richest person in the world kind of a vulture capitalist in some ways yes but you know down the generations people's attitudes change and richard Rockefeller who tragically died in a plane crash um became about you know about nine months ago a little bit more he became um the ideal partner for me we became close friends and we're working together and

richard was somebody who was very remarkable um you know he felt that even though he had been given so much um freedom and resources and reputation from his family that he needed something that was his own to you know have a sense of pride and he decided that he would become a doctor and he actually was a family physician for a long time and he became the senior the chairman of the board of advisors of doctors without borders wow and as part of that work he became aware of whole populations that were traumatized that were refugees particularly in kosovo and Serbia and he started wondering how do you help whole populations that are traumatized we don't have the resources to do psychotherapy with every individual right psychotherapy doesn't always help

a lot of people and he started looking into mdma as a possible way to deal with multi-generational trauma and he had the connections the inspiration and excuse me he also um you know had the sense of idealism that the rockfellers a lot of the rockfellers are actually quite liberal and you know the rockfeller brothers fund just announced that they were divesting all of their investments from oil yeah i saw that yeah so i think what what really motivated richard was this sense that down the generations when you have trauma like in israel and palestine yes and all sorts of other locations that this kind of trauma is really passed down and just conflicts can go on for hundreds of years thousands of years they seem insoluble and there has to be some way to

break this cycle of multi-generational trauma so once richard started looking into mdma as potential therapy um and we started he read you know we started talking and he knew people that had had profound beneficial experiences with mdma for grieving for ptsd for military service he wanted to know what was the most important way that he could be helpful to us and that we could work together and i said that we had had 25 years of struggle with the department of defense in the veterans administration trying to interest them in mdma for post-traumatic stress disorder in soldiers and veterans and we've been working with lots of doctors and therapists who are close to the people that were suffering that were committing suicide that were desperate but the political level

always blocked it and i said i need help with the department of defense and the va and it turned out that richard's cousin was senator j rockefeller from west virginia who was on the senate veterans affairs committee wow so we started a long project that um took many many years and you know i started realizing that from richard's point of view the fact that it was so hard was actually a good thing because he had so much capacity and he wanted to really do hard things and so we ended up exchanging you know thousands of emails getting to be close friends um and for me you know i talked a little bit about um you know 1984 with da cracking down an mdma and 1986 when i started maps but really for me it started in 1972 when i was a vietnam war draft resistor and i was um

doing a lot of lsd but having difficult time integrating it you know somewhat like your comedy routine i had some very difficult lsd experiences but i had this glimmer that there was something healing about it and i i went to the um a guidance counselor at new college of sarasota florida and um said what can i do and this guidance counselor actually gave me a copy of a book by dr stanislav groff realms of the human unconscious wow and stan was the leading lsd researcher and theoretician and i was just so lucky that this but when i read that it's it all came together for me this idea of um science looking at spirituality and values and you know unit of mystical experiences as well as psychotherapy encased in a healing process but subject to critical

testing through does it actually help people to get better so i felt like at that time that i would devote myself to bringing back psychedelics back to the mainstream and bringing back psychedelic research and because of the um fact that i was a draft resistor and i anticipated going to jail i felt like i couldn't have a normal career and so for me now after all of these years when richard comes along and and i said okay let's try to make peace with the military in a way when it comes to psychedelics yes um he took on that challenge and so i've actually had this remarkable experience of walking into the pentagon with richard rockefeller and dr michael midhofer who was our lead psychiatrist for our work with mdma and you know michael had had a ponytail for about 30 years

that he cut off for the meeting at the pentagon oh wow and it was incredible because i remember abby hoffman and the yippies you know they part of the protests against the vietnam war they surrounded the pentagon and they talked okay we're gonna levitate yeah yeah and you know of course it didn't work and so here we are all these years later walking into the door talking about uh you know bringing psychedelics to the military that is so incredible and it's so and j rockfeller was willing to do it so we've had meetings in the pentagon with the senior people at the department of defense staff from the assistant secretary defense for health affairs and and things have turned around and i think it's because of the dire need of all these vets coming back from

iraq and afghanistan and also the ones from vietnam but somehow that you know the the culture was too resistant during that several decades after the vietnam war but it's only more now with the maturation of the culture the disillusionment with prohibition and mass incarceration the racist nature of the drug war and people are and also the rise of medical marijuana and people's more comfort with marijuana legalization that we're finding a greater willingness among all aspects of the culture to really look at psychedelics and i think there's also this other big aspect of how we're not so much using the same rhetoric of um we've done psychedelics we're enlightened and we're smarter than everybody else and one dose miracle cure and you know timothy leary was was

great as an advocate for individual freedom and individual liberty against the system but he was also portraying psychedelics as somehow or other inherently counter cultural that if you took these drugs you were always going to be against systems and always an enemy of the state and if you look historically through thousands of years most cultures have had an honored place for peoples who um alter their consciousness and it's like even from our own culture the greeks when we look back at the history of western thought the largest the longest running mystery ceremony ever was the elucinian mysteries that ran for almost 2000 years and ended around 396 squashed by the church because they were more of a direct access to spirituality rather than mediated through a

power system but albert hoffman and uh gordon wassen and others carol ruck experts looked at the elucinian mysteries and found that there was a drink that they consumed called kikion and it had ryan barley and when we look more even closely at it when you have sort of moisture and kind of a fungus that air got grows on ryan barley and it contains drugs that are very much like lsd right so it's from our own tradition and other traditions like the native american church use of peyote and the use of mushrooms that go back thousands of years and iowaska that goes back a long time that we're a cultural aberration and there was a reasons for that even to that that are our mind our intellect was squashed by the church by religion by fundamentalism and we see that with

kipernicus and galileo and and there was kind of a truce for four or five hundred years of religion staying out of science and science staying out of religion but now that's even coming together so there's tremendous scientific research at johns hopkins at the university of zurich elsewhere where people are looking at lifelong meditators spiritual leaders at the and giving them psychedelics and looking how that impacts them so we we see i think that in our current time with globalization with religions bumping up against each other that what we really need i think to survive is this sense of what we have in common rather than what we have that's different right and under the influence of psychedelics people can have these unit of mystical experiences that connect us up with

you know billions of years of history and thousands and thousands of years of human evolution and you know and and people can understand how intimately connected we are with nature not separate from it and how really we're much more similar to even the the most different cultural human then we are different rick are you and if we can feel that and and for me this was confirmed in 1984 when i got in touch with a fellow named robert muhler who was the assistant secretary general of the united nations and he'd written this book called new genesis shaping a global spirituality and his basic idea was that we have united nations to mediate disputes between cultures and if you look more carefully a lot of those disputes are religious disputes and we need to

get the mystics together to build this sense of alliance and for people to have a global spirituality which doesn't mean one world religion it just means that we realize that there's you know a whole rainbow of colors and they're all part of the spectrum and they're all ways to try to point to something deeper and we find that you know the religions that are more mystically based are are more tolerant and you know stan groff um wanted to go to israel i just came back from around three weeks in israel with stan where he had talks in jerusalem tell a big even spot sort of the mystical center of israel yes and and his idea is to eventually to have a conference that would focus on the common mystical roots of the abrahamic traditions judaism islam and

christianity as a way to talk about fundamentalism being replaced by mysticism and that mysticism is an antidote to fundamentalism our mysticism is almost the fermentation of fundamentalism it's the after some certain amount of time you get a roomy or you get these mystics who are taking the fundamental hardcore stuff and converting it into something that's more passionate and juicy and beautiful yes exactly exactly and so i i think that's really the larger vision so when we talk about maps as a nonprofit pharmaceutical company that's really what we are that's our strategic approach that's what i've been trained in through the degree at the kennedy school and also through my training with stan groff but really it's about integrating psychedelics

and even more beyond that not just psychedelics but non-ordinary states of consciousness into our culture where i think people can have a deeper sense of meaning a deeper sense of purpose more tolerance uh antidote to prejudice of all sorts and so i think given all the crises that we face as a nation as a culture as a world as a planetary species i think really that psychedelics can play on a major role in grounding people into something deeper and helping us really deal with the ways that we're all bumping up against people who are different than ourselves and see that as a source of pleasure and joy and curiosity rather than as a source of fear and isolationism right yeah that is uh it it's almost like some kind of drought that many cultures are going through which is

a complete lack of access to psychoactive substances that have that seem to have spawned possibly spawned these religions spawned the myths or at least been co-pilots and spawning these ideas uh and it feels like a lot of the problems that you're talking about many of us think that those problems are directly related to removing from the bloodstream of a species chemicals that seem to have been part of the uh growth of that species of the subjective growth or the uh birth of of maybe even the birth of language not to get to Terrence McKenna level hippy on you but well I think he was on to something and and I think you're you're right and I think though you know to sort of talk in a balanced way though you know the irrational is really

scary the beyond rationality so when you look at people leaders like Hitler or leaders like Paul Pott or you know others that are able to commit massive genocide um you know they they play on people's unconscious needs and fears and and so there is some wisdom in a sense of trying to you know focus on rationality but it really it was just a veneer it's not enough we have to refine the unconscious we have to refine the irrational rather than try to turn our backs on it become so if we look at what we've done with our modern culture I mean we have miraculous technology that has been accomplished I mean just the same way that I'm talking to you that you can do this podcast that people can listen from all over the world it's just miraculous and it's the product

of a rational mind but it's not enough we cannot build a world that turns its back on the irrational and turns its back on the spiritual and just tries to persuade people on the basis of logical arguments we need to delve deep into the irrational and help refine it and so that's where one hopes that as time goes by as generations go down the the road here that we'll be able to use these psychedelic tools to bring their irrational up in safe enough supportive contexts so that enough people can become more balanced more grounded and they can be helpful as the species tries to move forward and not destroy ourselves I'm really interested in the safe and supportive setting that you're talking about which seems to be your description of what psychedelic therapy would look

like can you talk a little bit about what a typical session a therapeutic session with MDMA would look like yeah yeah I'd be glad to I think that's a really good thing to focus on as well because again what we're talking about is MDMA assisted psychotherapy it's not the like the traditional pharmaceutical companies say here take this pill it's going to make you better what we're saying is these drugs the psychedelics are used in contexts and those contexts are crucial either therapeutic context or religious context for ayahuasca or peyote or so fun yeah it's just really the context makes more of a difference than the drug itself right and so a traditional MDMA session the first thing is that we are talking about a several month period of psychotherapy

with weekly non-drug psychotherapy for several weeks of our hour and a half sessions for the therapist and the patient to build a therapeutic alliance get comfortable with each other yes and then once a month basically every three to five weeks for three times there's a day-long MDMA session or a day-long LSD or psilocybin session and then the subjects are asked to spend the night in the treatment center that's very important for our approach and then there's integrative psychotherapy the next day then once they go home we contact them on the phone every day for a week for 10 minutes 15 minutes a day just to see how they're doing then we repeat the weekly non-drug psychotherapy for three to five weeks and then repeat that several times so wow the

question is though what happens during the actual MDMA session yes now the first part of what we're doing is that we talk about a two-person therapy team and it's a male female team now some people have said you know maybe you can have um you know a straight guy and a gay guy or you know a straight woman and a gay woman or you know and of course that could work and of course a lot of therapy is fine with just one person but in our current approach we're trying to maximize outcomes we're not trying to minimize costs okay that's why of course we're constantly asking people for donations yes but um but we feel that a male female therapy team particularly a two-person team and ideally male female works really really well because in psychedelic states with MDMA or

LSD or psilocybin people often regress or bring up things that are from their childhood right or even from their birth process or even from you know symbols like um you know past life experiences epigenetics who knows spiritual experiences so we we use a male female team because it's it's kind of it's you know we're trying to sort of show a successful male female partnership and also it's exhausting for an eight-hour session somebody has to go to the bathroom somebody gets something to eat we always want somebody in the room and also we want two eyes two two intuitions kind of listening to what the person is going through what does the room look like can you describe the room like what is the setting because right now my brain is producing

a clinical laboratory room like you know like sterile and flat is what what does the room actually look like well um you know there's art there's flowers there's a bed so the main thing is there's a bed yeah um couch where people can recline they have eye shades and headphones we have music the whole time or not the whole time sometimes people turn off the music and are just talking cool there's an adjacent bathroom so people can privately you know go to the bathroom cool and it's not a long walk there can be um windows skylights but again some of this takes place in hospital settings where we have to do a lot of work to kind of make it a comfortable room right but we've been able to negotiate with FDA DEA institutional review boards where we've been able

to get permission to do research outside of clinical hospital settings in office settings that are more like homes right and that these are very comfortable situations and the setting matters a lot so there'll be fresh flowers they'll also be um fruit juices we tend to prefer um fruit juices things with electrolytes rather than just water people have heard about how mdma you could overheat you have to drink water yes but some people have died from drinking too much water right so you know things with electrolytes um and then there's um chairs where the two therapists are either on the same side of the bed or the different side um we also suggest that for mdma about half the time is spent in dialogue with the therapist but another half the time is spent

with the people's eyes closed going inward and listening to to their own uh their own cells not not having to report back you know the the next day is kind of for review of what happened and integrating it but people are considered to be their own healers so in the sense we don't say that the therapists are the guides we never use the word guides really right the guide is the person's own inner unconscious cool and and the same way the metaphor i think works pretty well is that if you have a scratch on your hand um your body knows how to heal itself we don't know how to do it but somehow or other there's this unconscious there's this cellular knowledge built into our body to heal itself and what we need to do is clean out the wound we need to protect it

from dirt but the body heals itself right and there's something similar going on with the psyche and this is now something that we believe something that we feel has been experimentally validated from even the early work with the lsd and psychedelics in the 50s and 60s and our current work over the last decades and currently so the idea is that there's a self-healing mechanism of the unconscious and that what comes to the surface during this session is something that is really guided by the person's unconscious and there's no one pathway or one sequence so some people under the influence of mdma will start talking about their trauma and what happened and and how it's bothering them some people will will go back to you know pleasant

experiences in their lives and sort of reconnect with love and support and then they go into the painful trauma right there's no one way to do it and so we follow the lead of the the patient or the subject and we support them and we have the feeling that if there's anything that starts to come up that they can best look at it and try to integrate it rather than suppress it and we offer support for them to do it but we also recognize that sometimes things come up and it takes a while maybe they're too painful people put them away and then two hours later it comes back again when they're more prepared for it so we don't press we have an agreement that if something if during this eight hours of session if people don't talk about the trauma we'll bring

it up but we've never had to do that people will always at some point start talking about their trauma because they know that's what they're there for that's what has been bothering them and this trauma is generally this is you're talking about uh ptsd these are veterans who've had experiences it will like awful experiences and that's the trauma is that yes yes although we just got permission to start a new study with mdma for people who have life-threatening illnesses and who are scared of dying right and we also have a study that is with autistic adults with social anxiety yeah these it's so incredible to listen to um how in depth and and how uh hard for lack of a better word how stringent this experience is when compared to the way

so many of us recreationally take mdma which is you'll you or any psychedelic for that matter you you'll take the psychedelic uh if you if you if you plan it outright maybe you'll go on a camping trip or you'll go somewhere away from society with your friends and a lot of it's just laughing and talking you might go dancing uh but this idea of turning inward putting blindfolds on laying down and like doing the work on yourself it really is different i think than the way a lot of people perceive how to take a psychedelic yeah i think so and and even in terms of the music so what we try to do is avoid music with lyrics so we we don't want to sort of guide people into certain kinds of thinking or certain certain kinds of imagery we want it as much as possible

to emerge from themselves so we'll have different kinds of music throughout the eight hours or so but it tends to be without lyrics sometimes there's voices but without words so we try to encourage sort of pure emotional release and it's even more different with lsd or psilocybin where probably it's 80% inner focused and 20% dialogue and we we also then try to say to people that they really need to think about it as a two-day experience not even a one-day experience and that the second day is for rest for reflection that's why we want people to spend the night in the treatment center also quietly reflecting on it we do let people significant others spend the night with them sometimes unless you know their sources of the the conflict or the

problem right but i think when people can think about it as two days the second day is really for rest and reflection and integration so we don't give people supplements with mdma we don't give them five hdp or various things we just say the key is to rest and integrate and then that process continues in their dreams in other ways for weeks at a time and that's how we set the time for the second session is have they done a pretty complete job of integrating what happened in the first session and that's how we set the third session have they done a pretty good job of integrating the second session and so what we're saying to people is that um this is not about distracting yourself right really with pretty pictures and and that also has to do with the

dose so we use pretty strong doses of mdma or lsd when we work with people and we try to say look you don't have to have any responsibilities about your physical bodily survival you don't have to navigate from here to there you don't have to walk you don't have to drive you don't have to get the door you don't have to get the phone all of this is for you to focus inward and you know i i don't know how many people who are listening who've ever done um gone into a flotation tank i've i've done it and it's incredible and i think a lot of people listening probably have or i think some of them are for sure yeah so it's kind of like that we want to take away as much of the outside distractions but we do give supportive music sometimes we'll hold people's hand a bit

and we'll touch their shoulder you know we're there with them and for the therapists it's kind of like a meditation session where you're there you're watching a lot of it is watching nonverbal cues in their breathing and their body language and their musculature or how are they handling it are they and the key aspect is are they opening it up and letting it flow through them or are they resisting and you know as we know like with a light bulb you know what what causes the light is the resistance the electricity hits some resistance and then it heats up and so we found that with psychedelics the less resistance there is the more flow there is the more the less drama there is in a way and the more healing and so we try to encourage people to open up let it go we videotape

and audio tape all the sessions and we give those tapes to people afterwards if they want to look at them and it's another way to say to people you don't have to grab onto something if you have an insight you know you can look at the videotape and bring it back we'll talk to you about it the next day if you say certain things we're writing down notes but that you don't have to grab and hold on to it just flow with it and the longer in my own experiences I've had too I find that when I'm resisting they last longer and when I'm opening to the energy just flowing to me they tend to last shorter and I'm more grounded what techniques do you I'm sorry what techniques do you give people to let go how do you this see this is this problem you're describing is feels like it's a universal

problem yeah how are there any techniques you give people who come into contact with some dark realization or go into the dark place how do you how do you get them to let go in the room well that's a fantastic question and that is the key of the therapeutic process and one way to help them is to say that um you know looking away that that these are things that are influencing you and they have more power over you the more unconscious they are so that as things are coming to the surface and to consciousness even though it's painful and difficult it's it's like they they're there they're not if you don't look it's not like they go away right and so by opening up to them you can make some price so so the first part again is the trust that you create between the

therapist and the subject also the therapists have done their own psychedelic work right so it's kind of a quiet sense of communication that you know if the therapists have never done psychedelics and patient reaches a frightening spot how you kind of have to know from your own experience then when you let things in that you've been suppressing that even though it could disrupt your life and cause you to make major changes that you're you're better off letting it in and trying to integrate it than not so we offer support that the idea of the second day with nothing to do is also really important because a lot of times when people are tripping recreationally yeah they don't budget that much amount of time and so when you're starting to take your psyche apart when

your ego is dissolving if somewhere in the back of your mind you're thinking oh shit you know tomorrow I got a drive to work yes you're going to hold yourself back so we give them the time to really take themselves to let themselves come apart we offer support for the integration process and again here's where it's really difficult different than recreational use because in recreational use people are looking for an experience while they're under the drug that's valuable to them yes and that that's appropriate and that's okay but what we're doing in therapy is looking at not just primarily what you have but what you bring back to your daily non-drug life right and how you can make that different over time so when people are resisting one of the things that

we'll we'll do is just ourselves we're not going to run away from it and we we encourage people to take a look to um to open up and and say that at the same time we try to say we're not making any decisions during this experience oh wow right of course it's really important then yes you know this is exploratory you know it's very important for you to explore but don't feel like any decisions are going to be made here and in fact um once you've integrated in the next days and weeks even be careful about making major changes so that gives people it's like a brainstorming session right we're we're to get people comfortable brainstorming you say don't criticize the ideas just come up with all these ideas and you know leave your critical mind use your

imaginative mind and we'll look at it so i think that's another big part is people are freed from making decisions and if people say you know i've just decided i need to get divorced or i need to quit my job yes you know the thing is like hey we're saying not so fast right you know just you know don't box yourself in you're just exploring right now but so phones are gone for these two days are they gone are there no is there no access to the internet or texting or anything well during the first day yes yes we take people's phones there's no no um um you know we try to keep them there overnight the next day you know they can talk to people they can be grounded but we try to have a um inner focused lifetime which is you know increasingly

rare in our technological culture right you know my daughter just the other day forgot her phone at home for a brief period of time and she was like panicked it's a nightmare oh god that feeling of not having access to all information on the planet at every second is terrible but um i want to talk to you a little bit about technology and if maps or if anybody out there doing this kind of research is considered the merging of this kind of therapy with virtual reality well it's very interesting you mentioned that so um in 2009 there was a conference in israel on uh treating ptsd and one of the speakers there was someone who had been funded by the military to develop virtual reality devices for combat soldiers who had ptsd from you know being in combat

and there there was a woman who has developed one of the leading therapies for post-traumatic stress disorder called prolonged exposure and she was um i think making a little bit of a confusion between mdma and lsd and the classic psychedelics mdma is more gentle it doesn't affect your perceptions in the same way you can negotiate with it whereas with lsd or psilocybin you really have to just surrender to it and so she was not that sympathetic to the idea of mdma assisted psychotherapy for ptsd and and even a little bit frightened about it and so she said you know i don't really think you even need mdma why don't you go consider virtual reality and go talk to these people that are doing the virtual reality research oh man so i said all right that's interesting so i went to

talk to the fella from who's doing the virtual reality stuff and he laughed and laughed and he said you know if you have mdma you don't need virtual reality because what what's actually going on is that virtual reality is trying to bring back similar feelings and experiences to the trauma but in a place where you feel safe right but it's never exactly your experience your experience is stored in your own memory in your own unconscious and so if you can feel safe in a therapeutic setting your own unconscious will bring out the experiences that were exactly the tailored to what happened to you right okay right yeah there can be a role now you know one of the other things that stan groff has done which is so admirable is that in the early 70s when psychedelic research was

squashed all over the world most people who were involved went into looking at the integration process looking at non-drug approaches and most of them turn back turn their backs on psychedelics and and there was a classic example of ramdas you know being attributed to saying hey when you've got the message hang up the phone yeah yeah i thought that was alan watz but i guess those quotes i guess those quotes get dispersed among all the luminaries who knows but yes that's a good point so so yeah that that's if you know probably we can check that out on the internet in minutes and figure out who really said it first but you know but the idea is for me that um first off that the messages keep coming through the rest of your life and different messages at different stages of

your life but what stan did is he developed a way through hyperventilation which he called holotropic breath work moving towards wholeness that can also bring up things similar to psychedelics so your question about how do we help people let go so there's ways where we work with holotropic breath work where people can stop the breathing stop the process more easily than once they've taken drugs how do you and that helps people feel a little bit more comfortable with so you you sort of practice a little bit with holotropic breath work then with the psychedelics the idea is that um it just helps to it doesn't really go away you know virtual reality can be helpful in certain ways because you can always shut off the program and you know but but what we're looking at

is more and more this understanding of theories of memory and in particular what's now called memory reconciliation and so and and this will also explain to people too so it used to be thought that when you have a memory it's like you have a book on the shelf and you go read the book and then you put the book back on the shelf right well what we understand now is that the way memory works is when you pull the book off the shelf you actually have to reprint the book you have to recreate the book and you reconcile validate the memory you recreate the memory and you put it back on the shelf that's nuts yeah and that explains how memories change over time but that's the key to therapy in the sense because when you have a traumatic memory

you are raped you are almost killed in a war you were in a car crash you know natural disaster something happens you're focusing on survival and the memory is encoded with the fear right MDMA reduces activity in the amygdala the fear processing part of the brain and you feel safe in this supportive setting and you trust the therapist we've made sure you've had a lot of meetings in the room and also with the therapist before you do the MDMA so you've developed this therapeutic alliance and so then when you bring back this memory when you're feeling safe when you reconsolidate the memory it doesn't have the tags of fear that it did before that is amazing what you're saying is that MDMA assisted psychotherapy is doing for memories what those

volunteers do for birds after an oil spill it's sort of scrubbing the fear off of the memories and then putting it back and now it doesn't have the same high-powered emotional tone connected to it yes and more importantly even is that under the influence of MDMA we've seen veterans we've seen firefighters that were caught in fires that their memory is actually enhanced that there's parts of the trauma that was so difficult for them that they have basically blotted it out of their memory and under the influence of MDMA the full memories come back and so the important thing is that people learn from their trauma we don't want to obliterate the memory we don't want to make it so you don't recall because there's important lessons in trauma yes and in fact one

of the measures that we use in our study now it's not the measure that will the FDA will say yes you can make this into a medicine but it's called the post traumatic growth inventory and what what is the case is that people who sometimes people who've almost died in a car crash or you know trauma causes you to reevaluate the meaning of your life the purpose of your life your relationships your job and that sometimes when you have a trauma and you can survive it you can actually grow from it and we hear people who have cancer say you know in some ways that was one of the best things that happened to me because now I survived but I really understand the the precious nature of life and I'm not wasting my life on a job that I don't care about

yep so we use this post traumatic growth inventory as a way to evaluate the positive aspects of how people can grow from trauma because life has inherently has trauma life inherently has death death is you know woven into life inextricably and we will lose people we love and we will have accidents people will die and all sorts of sad tragic things will happen and there is no life without trauma and we need to grow from the trauma not run from it and that's one of the ways where um mdma can be very helpful to people to grow from trauma and so people have talked about the cannabinoids and how the cannabinoids can be helpful in ptsd in part because if you administer cannabinoids right at the trauma sometimes people won't remember the trauma and that makes me really

nervous because we want people to realize that there are lessons in trauma if you're in a war we want people to realize how horrible war is if you you know trusted somebody and you were date raped we want you to realize that you have to be more discerning we don't want people to forget right the traumas if people are in a car crash and they were texting or something while they were doing it we don't want people to forget that this isn't some brave new world we're just going to numb you down or take take away this stuff it's more like facing your demons uh and it you know it's a what you're talking about it obviously applies not just to people who've had these severe traumas but every single person living today has had some kind of heartbreak or loss or

pain it will it get to the point where mdma is prescribed not just for these extreme cases but what about just the basic crap all of us have to go through in this dimension well i think that's true and i think you point to something really important which is that what we're talking about while we're talking about research into the medical use of mdma there's a lot of people who are not clinically diagnosed with a psychiatric illness but who can make enormous benefits both in personal growth and spirituality and so what you're pointing to is that we need to have a post prohibition world and somehow or other we need to be able to build a post prohibition world where the fundamental human right of individuals to explore their consciousness is preeminent and it's beyond

just saying i have a medical need yes that it also has to be beyond religious freedom in the sense because religious freedom requires religion and that's both a good thing and a bad thing in the sense that religion is a group process but spirituality can be individual absolutely yes so i think we need to recognize that mdma that we need to build a culture where people have access to tools for personal growth throughout the lifespan whether or not they have a medical diagnosable condition but right now as our culture is evolving from the nightmare of excuse me the nightmare of prohibition to a more open integrated sense of drugs and altered state non-ordinary states of consciousness that the opening wedge you could say the strategic path

of least resistance in our culture we're used to drugs to treat everything drugs for this drugs for that drugs for you know illnesses that weren't even illnesses are you shy here's a medicine for you being shy here's you know so i think our culture if we look at actually what's happened with medical marijuana one of the favorite slides that i used in some of my power points presentations is a slide of public opinion over the last 40 plus years about the legalization of marijuana going back to the early 1970s and only about two years ago did it cross the 50 mark where more 50 percent of the voters are now in favor of marijuana legalization there was a slight increase from the early 70s up until the late 70s but it still wasn't great what happened

in the late 70s was the backlash again the rise of the parents movement the nancy reagan just say no the escalation of the drug war and support stayed pretty flat from around 78 79 up until around 1996 and what happened in 96 was the medical marijuana initiatives passing in california and in arizona and that started spreading to other states and so the rise of the medical marijuana movement paralleled the rise of the change of people's attitudes towards marijuana legalization right and i think what we see there is that people have been given so much misinformation so much propaganda about the dangers of marijuana the dangers of psychedelics and not to say that they don't have their risks but that people don't know what to believe but when people can see

somebody saying i use this for medicine and it helped me and it's somebody that they know so some of the exit polls have shown that the most important predictor of whether somebody is in favor of the legalization of marijuana it's not even do they use marijuana themselves it's they know but it's do they know a medical marijuana patient right you know that is a direct source of information that people can trust and so i think right now the medical use of marijuana has really primed our culture for what looks like a transition well underway towards the legalization of marijuana and i think the medicalization of psychedelics and the work that's being done with the legal freedoms for iowaska for native american churches peyote these are going to be priming our culture

over the next 20 30 years for the eventual legalization of psychedelics which when do you see that happening your question you know people um you know we're all traumatized we're all scared of dying we're all life is tough and everybody can benefit but not here's the the other fundamental thing is that psychedelics are not essential and i think it's really important to say that that you people can access these states of mind without psychedelics it's much more difficult people have to meditate or do any number of things fasting or people transcend through pain like the the sundance that some of the native americans do there there's all different techniques that people have for many of us and certainly for me psychedelics have been the most reliable most useful path

but they're not essential because psychedelics really stand i think set it really well he said lsd is a non-specific amplifier of the unconscious and what that means is that when you take lsd you don't have an lsd experience you have an experience of your own unconscious right yes that's good that's real good so i i think we don't want to say psychedelics are essential people can get to these states in other ways and they're all it's about where they get to not the vehicle and in fact in the work that's being done with understanding spirituality and the the role of psychedelics and mystical experiences starting in 1962 with the good friday experiment that was one of best things that timothy leary ever did and

i did a 25-year follow-up it was an attempt to look at 20 divinity students who went into church on good friday and half got a psilocybin mushroom pill and the other half got a placebo and this was a harvard phd that walter pankey was a minister and a doctor and working on his phd and he spent over a year developing a questionnaire for how you would describe a universal mystical experience and he based it on the work of a religious scholar named wt stase and stase had this theory of causal indifference and what that meant is that you can describe the state and it's independent of the cause so somebody could have it worshiping in a catholic church somebody could have it worshiping in a church synagogue somebody could have it hyping hiking in nature somebody else could have it having

you know beautiful sex and feeling you know transcending into a unit of mystical experience somebody could fast for god days or you know but it's the theory of causal indifference which also means that psychedelics are not essential they're just all parts different ways to open us up to core human experiences right now core human experiences is one word for it and a lot of us have a lot of other words for it that scientists aren't going to use scientists like you or doctors or people from that side of the universe are going to say that whereas people like me say it's god i'm i'm touching god when i take a psychedelic and i do it in the right way and the lessons that come to me from that state uh not only help my life but my whatever my community

happens to be my relationships get better everything gets better from whatever outflow is coming from that core human value place that you're talking about and i think that it's really interesting to me that if you look at Kurzweil's predictions 2045 the birth of some new artificial intelligence that is sentient and alive and i hear you talking about the timeline for psychedelics becoming legal and i or prescribed and i consider the epiphanies that psychedelics tend to produce in people who use them in the right ways it almost seems like the amplification of technology and the end of the prohibition on psychedelics is somehow intertwined and that the end result that they both share a similar end result do you know what i'm saying there yeah i do and i think

there's a lot to that um i think also i want to point out one thing that you said that that connects up with the science in a sense and also that the tradition over thousands of years of spirituality which is that the the ultimate test of a religious experience is called the fruits test so it's not so much how you describe the experience although that's important but it's what are the consequences of that experience and so that's where in in scholars of religion and you know it's like what is the fruit of the tree right and if this experience is really um positive and uplifting and produces more love then that's really what we're looking for and looking at and i again that focuses on the integration now i do think that many of the people

that were involved with the early work with lsd sorry also made a link between uh particularly albert hoffman you know in 1938 he developed lsd they tested it they didn't see much of interest at sandos pharmaceuticals and in 1943 he re synthesized that he had a peculiar pre-sentiment that there was something there to it right and some mysterious way he accidentally dosed himself but he made a link between the technological advance of the human species specifically in terms of the splitting of the atom right and the creation of the destructive power of nuclear weaponry and the opening up of the splitting of the ego through psychedelics so that the development of lsd and the development of the destructive power of the atom or or even

creative power of the atom you could say it's nuclear power if we can ever tame that that there's a parallel so that we have this incredible development of technology without the spiritual and emotional maturity to deal with it properly right and that's where the site and so albert einstein said that our technology has exceeded our humanity and he also said that the splitting of the atom has changed everything except our mode of thinking and hence we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe what shall be required if mankind is to survive as a whole new mode of thinking so i think this technological advance that curse well and others are talking about needs to be balanced by a emotional and spiritual development that i believe

psychedelics can play a major role in creating and that's where i think it's so important for the human species that we integrate psychedelics and stop suppressing it that's right because it's not just that i think that it's not going to just be the a balance that comes from people having more people having access to these psychedelics that though that's a huge and vital aspect of this but it's also going to be the sort of innovations that are going to come from that place because it's it is a place that doesn't just produce healing it produces novelty it produces incredible ideas that you know a lot of people theorize some of you know whether or not it's true it's you know it's been disproved we do know that crick was hanging out with um huxley you know you know

you know about that the dna he looks uh oh for sure and in fact um frances crick never um said it when he was alive some but um a friend of his after he died said that there was um experiments that were being done with low dose lsd right that crick was participating in and it was on a low dose lsd day that he had the vision of the double helix and that's that could be a myth that could that could be a rumor i've i've seen both sides of it it might not be real but we do know that crick was engaged in some way with uh psychedelics and we also know that steve jobs was engaged in this way and we also know that um some of the greatest musicians have been engaged in this way some of the greatest philosophers so it's not just an outflow of healing coming from

this place that opens up but it's an outflow of innovation and and it makes me think that your work will somehow lead to an acceleration in uh technological advancements and not just a balance of the intention but for the for using the technology yeah and we also know carry mollus is one of the best examples he won the nobel prize for chemistry for developing the polymerase chain reaction which is used all the time now for DNA analysis and he attributes his creativity to marijuana and lsd there you go see that's that's crazy to think about that perhaps this prohibition it's not just keeping people from healing it's it's slowed down our progress as a species it has and one of the most things i think that people don't realize is that you know over the course of the last multiple

decades with the drug war there's been an enormous pressure from the government on companies to do drug testing particularly companies that are getting government grants but if you look at the engines of innovation um apple computer microsoft sap oracle on and on at these companies do not do drug testing as a requirement of employment wow so the that the silicon valley innovation that's where we see that people don't do drug testing that there is this relationship and in fact there's a scientist uh named jim fateman who did work in the 60s with lsd and mescaline with people who had problems intellectual problems technical problems that they couldn't solve and that he worked with them with lsd and mescaline to help them

come up with um new solutions so i i think that these drugs in fact are tools of innovation that's where we get people like leary and others saying this is always going to be a challenge to the status quo and these drugs will always be counter cultural they will always be suppressed it's just in their nature but i don't think that's true i think we can value innovation and we can build a healthy culture that sees those people that are innovators as scouts to the future not as enemies of the present wow as scouts to the future and just the same way that we tell people don't make decisions while you're under the influence of psychedelics we could say look these scouts are going out there they're having these ideas but what really matters is what do they bring back

and then what do we test and does it really work and many times it does yeah and i think that's really where we look at our culture at the american competitive advantage is creativity innovation you know creating the new and psychedelics and marijuana are a key part of that i mean look at california is the way that's where you are duncan look at california is the um leading edge in a lot of different ways and that was the state in 1996 that started medical marijuana that's where the grateful dad that's where listen and you know to sum it up for for in addition to leery and the others here in boston one of my friends one of my friends brody stevens has one of my favorite jokes in comedy and forgive me brody for throwing this out there but it's so funny he says uh 90%

of all comedians smoke marijuana the other 10% aren't funny it's such a great gag that's really funny yeah but um and it's not of course it's not complete it's just it's just joking there's sober comics that are hilarious like mark maron but uh the point is that these substances are not just the the stereotype of the recreational drug user getting blasted and forgetting about the world or whatever that is not what's going on here in every single field that comes into contact with these substances there are innovations that happen that i think wouldn't have happened uh minus that the substance entering into the bloodstream and uh and and that is to me one of the uh one of the great tragedies of the prohibition is that we don't know what we've

missed so far we don't know what what potential luminary could have had that spark of intuition in the midst of some mushroom experience or lsd experience and what they could have brought back because so many of these scouts of the future that you're talking about they get thrown into dungeons they're thrown into dungeons for uh for what i would consider to be some of the most important work that uh humans can do which is venturing into the subconscious and bringing back whatever we can into this world it doesn't just heal us psychologically these psychedelics heal society as a whole and that says that healing comes through innovation if you ask me sorry for the rant yeah no for sure and in fact kerry mollus after he won the nobel prize and i had read some of

his statements about attributing his creativity to lsd and uh marijuana you know not not only i mean he had a brilliant mind but but he he sent me a quote that was absolutely fantastic he said i think i might have been stupid in some respects if it weren't for my psychedelic experiences wow that's it so this is from a nobel prize winner and so i i think that what we need though also just to to be a little bit more balanced here again is that these are tools people can be diluted people can be um harmed and one of the big problems of our drug war is that we've tried to invest qualities in the drugs themselves we've got good drugs that are okay pharmaceutical companies sell them we've got bad drugs that are illegal right but we've sort of projected outward

and given these power to these drugs and what we've lost is that it's really about the relationship that we develop with these drugs and that it's the relationship that determines whether it's beneficial whether it's harmful you know the surgeon's knife is the same as the thief's knife or the murderer's knife it's the same knife the lsd can cause somebody to become very disoriented and suicidal or else it can help somebody suicidal in a safe supportive way and and that leads me to one last question rick uh because we only have i think about 15 more minutes or 10 more minutes and it's a very important question so forgive me if i'm slightly cutting you off a little bit but not everybody has access to maps not everybody's going to be able to get into one of your trials

probably most people aren't but personally and i'm sure the people listening hear you talk about this technique for taking a psychedelic and i would love for you to give if you can some advice for people who want to do this therapeutic work on themselves but don't have access to these types of therapists great question thank you duncan so the first thing to say is that because we're doing non-profit drug development we are open about everything that we're doing and sharing it so on the maps website and it's just maps maps dot org if you go to the mdma page we have what's called the treatment manual and that's a written description of how the therapy should be conducted now it's tailored for our actual protocols but there's a lot of information

there about the attitude the approach of the therapists how they should handle things how they should be supportive and so i think if people can look at the treatment manual and we have what's called adherence criteria because i i said before that we have every all of our sessions are videotaped and audio taped and we have raiders to try to help optimize outcomes look at the videotapes and then score the therapists on you know are they being supportive are they being non-directive are they encouraging people to look inside rather than to look away so that people can learn a lot about the therapeutic approach by looking at the treatment manual on our our website the the other thing is there's a couple um projects that we're doing trying to create a context for a

post-progression world so it used to be in the 60s 70s that the crackdown the backlash was about the link between psychedelics and people challenging the status quo right you know i talked about you know the yippies trying to levitate the pentagon or the b-rolls talking about make love not war and you know all you need is love and stop against the vietnam war but now that has faded and i think what's really going on is more about parents being scared about their kids and one of the biggest places is where kids young kids uh you know teens 20s go to these festivals like burning man like boom festival there's all these festivals and then a lot of heavy psychedelic use and it's part because the rituals that we have the rites of passage have been drained of their

power and people are creating them themselves but we've created what we call the zendo project and that's where we bring trains like pietrus therapists volunteers social workers to help people who are having a difficult experience and try to make that a distinction between difficult is not the same as bad and if you can support people when they have difficult experiences sometimes in a very short amount of time you can integrate something and it can transform so if you go to the the maps website and look at the zendo project the psychedelic harm reduction we have a lot of information on how to help people if they're having a difficult psychedelic experience and it's basically the same as how you would conduct psychedelic psychotherapy so there's a lot of information on

the website and in particular there's another book called the secret chief revealed now sasha shulgan was a brilliant brilliant chemist who devoted himself to trying to develop all sorts of different psychedelics he made a big success with dal chemical that gave him his own lab and in the 60s he decided to go off on his own and he and his close associates would have developed hundreds of new psychedelics including he's helped responsible for bringing back mdma to to the world right even though it was invented in 1912 by murk it was just forgotten but then he would find and this group of core group of his wife and around 10 12 other people would take drugs that they found to be particularly useful and then they would give them to therapists who

would be working with them and the lead therapist was a fellow named leo zeff and he was called the secret chief and he's the one that really trained in the the late 70s and on hundreds of psychiatrists and therapists to work with mdma wow and myron stolaroff who also did work with psychedelics and creativity with jim fateman they myron interviewed leo and and we published a book the first book that maps ever published called the secret chief and then years later when it came to republish it we were able to identify who leo was and it's called now the secret chief revealed cool but we have it for free up on the the secret chief uh the book is for free on the maps website and that's pretty succinct description of the different range of psychedelics from

lst to ibogaine to harmaline to ayahuasca to mdma and others and how they were used in therapy and what leo's approach was so i think that is kind of a primer for understanding psychedelic psychotherapy and and i guess i would just say to people who are um listening and thinking about it that it's very important when you approach a psychedelic experience to be open to the full range of things that might come up now it's okay i i believe there's a lot to be said for uh recreational celebratory use of psychedelics group dances group you know grateful dead concerts festivals but i think the key thing is that if you are just trying to have a certain slice of experience i only want to feel love and connection and happiness when something painful or sorrowful

or past drama comes up if you're in the mood to suppress it you're going to end up worse off wow the attitude needs to be i'm going to take this i don't know what's going to happen i'm going to be open to whatever i'm going to try to steer this in certain ways but that if something difficult comes up i think you really need to be open to it that's really the core attitude and also i really think this idea of the second day to rest to give yourself time because psychedelics really are ego dissolvers in many ways and they are growth and agents of growth and if you are open to the new sometimes it takes a while to adjust and if you give yourself that time you can have a soft landing and if you don't um you know you're you're going to cause a lot of stress now

just to say this at burning man we're going to have two sites in our villages um one is um a tea house going to be around the nine o'clock side the other is going to be around a two o'clock side with the zendo and so we're trying to demonstrate that if we could move into a situation where harm reduction was accepted as a principle as a policy and that we were in a post prohibition world that then i believe that we can really have a lot of positive growth of all sorts of kinds very minimize the risks although there always will be risks and and i think if people are actually want to get even deeper into it there's um some of the books of stan groff really if you can understand the um sort of the sweep of the unconscious meaning that one of the things that

emerged from the years and years that stan groff and others spent with people under the influence of lsd um i mean stan talked about lsd as to the study of the unconscious what the microscope is to biology and the telescope is to astronomy wow and so freud basically looked at what happens during your life and he said that children are a tabla rasa you're born a clean slate and then your environment happens and you know but and then most of what's going on with traditional freudian psychoanalysis is talking about early childhood but there's the core process of actually being born that imprints us in multiple different ways and for stan that that's um he's got all sorts of theories about the the stages of the birth process amazing and but many people can

sort of remember or re-experience the core sort of imprinting from the birth process and then that's the doorway to the transpersonal there are all sorts of experiences of spirituality of going beyond the ego states of confrontation with death you know there there's all sorts of kind transpersonal experiences so that if you have a model of the unconscious when you approach these things the sweep of the unconscious that it's not just about your life you can be overwhelmed by sadness let's say and it's just for the pain of the people that are starving to death right now or people being tortured or people in wars it's it's like it's part of the human collective unconscious and that's what yung talked about yes so that i think if you can have a broad sense of

what is possible at the same time you can keep a a sort of skeptical perspective so for example when a lot of people talk about past life experiences yes we have found that in therapeutic settings people can have a past life experience that actually helps them resolve issues in their current life wow well you know with this stuff coming out with epigenetics you know i don't know if it's these past life experiences could just be contact with some kind of memory genetic that's encoded in us because it seems like they're finding out that in some way that that's being recorded inside of us the phobias of our ancestors are theoretically being transferred down generations so maybe that's what it is yeah yeah and so i think again it's like

this theory of causal indifference the idea is that if you can process these experiences you may be able to feel better whether you decide later oh that was a real past life that was my actual life or that was a life i tapped into from the collective unconscious and it's just similar to the issues in my current life or whether it's epigenetics i mean that's where we get back to richard rockefeller where he was very concerned about how do we break these cycles of multi-generational trauma and i feel like it's it's appropriate for people to have an open skeptical mind but still go with the experience feel it out to its depth and see how you can integrate it and how we can all move forward and over time with more and more scientific research

looking into spirituality looking into psychedelics looking at the psychedelic neuroscience i mean we're discovering incredible things with new brain scan stuff about lsd and psilocybin and mdma and how they work and you know but again how are those things going to translate into refining our therapeutic approach or really helping people get better and that's where i feel like so grateful for stan's approach there's something grounding about can people find ways to help those who are suffering and we're all suffering in different ways get better and and i think that we can and i think it's um a tremendous historical time so for people who are listening to this particularly young people i really want to say that if you have had a thought like maybe you

want to become a psychedelic therapist or maybe you want to become a psychedelic neuroscience researcher now for really the first time in about 50 years if you want an above ground legal career in psychedelics anything psychedelic psychotherapy neuroscience you can do it the world is opening up and we need people to help us understand the the magical richness of the human psyche which psychedelics can help reveal and many other things too so now really for you know when when i was in 18 years old in 1972 and all of this was shut down i thought okay i'm going to devote myself to trying to bring this back and what i really want to do is become a psychedelic therapist and also go through my own psychedelic psychotherapy and now more and more it is possible for people to do

that we but we have to do it carefully we want to avoid another backlash we not don't want to get grandiose we don't want to get ahead of ourselves but we have a tremendous hopeful opportunity to really bring about creativity innovation spirituality and you look around at the world and man we need all those things but in the end i'm extremely optimistic and hopeful more so than i've ever been before wow you are an amazing human and we are so lucky to have you with us and this work that you're doing is so beautiful and selfless really thank god you exist you're incredible i hope people listening will check out maps will go to the maps website and if you guys feel like it you want to why not send a little green energy their way because

as you hear as you listen to rick you can see that how necessary this is and how how much work you've put in so much work rick this is your lifetime of work to bring this time period in history into existence it's amazing well but even still you know i have gotten so much joy and love and learning and hard lessons from my use with psychedelics that it feels like you know i'm still trying to pay it back it's it's not like i'm um completely selflessly i've gained so much and i've had so many rich experiences with so many loving people that um you know i i feel like i'm um you know i'm not building up a debt i'm you know sorry to try to pay a debt it's beautiful well uh yeah that's amazing it's so cool yeah thank you so much for taking the time

to be on the show rick i will have links to uh i will have links to to maps on the website and the books that we discussed and uh really uh best of luck to you and and let me know if there's ever anything i could do to help yeah well thanks and dungan when you do put this up let me know because we'll try to um help promote it as well wonderful thank you rick that's it everybody thanks for listening uh subscribe to the podcast on itunes won't you go to maps.org and a big thanks to squarespace.com for supporting this show use offer code duncan you'll get 10 off a great site i love you guys thank you so much for listening i'll see you next time you

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