Factually! with Adam Conover - Could MDMA Be Medicine? with Rachel Nuwer

Episode Date: July 5, 2023

As implausible as it might sound, it's entirely possible that by this time next year, MDMA could be recognized as a medicine eligible for insurance coverage. In a captivating discussion, Adam engages with journalist and author Rachel Nuwer to explore the extraordinary trajectory of MDMA, from its accidental laboratory creation to becoming the quintessential party drug, enduring as the primary target in the War on Drugs, and now potentially heralding a groundbreaking advancement in the field of mental health. Pick up Rachel's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgumSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right. That's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover.

Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert about all the amazing things that they know that I don't know and that you might not know. Both of our minds are gonna get blown together on this show and we're gonna have so much fun doing it. I wanna remind you that if you're listening to this show, go check it out on YouTube.

This episode is available on video. If you're watching on video, subscribe to us in your favorite podcast player. This week, we're talking about drugs. I grew up during America's war on drugs. And for those of you who weren't around at that time during the 90s, it's difficult to express just how intense that war was. And like all wars, it came with a massive propaganda campaign. Illegal drugs were wildly demonized. In my high school health class,

marijuana and psychedelics were portrayed as demonic life destroyers. We were told horror stories about weed being laced with black tar heroin, about ecstasy burning holes in your brain. And I specifically remember being told a spooky story about a kid who did LSD and then thought he turned into an orange and that people kept coming up to him and peeling him. You know, I'm not sure if my health teacher thought that last one through because that story made LSD sound kind of awesome. But the point was drugs are a death sentence. Don't do them. But you know, in the years since we've learned that there are in fact medical benefits to many of the drugs that we declared our national enemies decades ago. We've learned that cannabis can be useful for

people with nausea, insomnia, arthritis, or glaucoma. There's now strong evidence for medical use of psychedelics too. Psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms, is proving useful for treating addiction and depression. I actually have friends who feel their depression was cured because of mushrooms. Actually cured. Even amphetamines can be useful. Hell, when I was in that high school health class, I was taking amphetamines prescribed to me by a doctor to treat my ADD. But there's another drug that's inching its way towards mainstream acceptance. MDMA, otherwise known as molly or ecstasy.

When I was a kid, we were told that this was one of the most dangerous drugs, one that would literally drill holes in your brain while you were dancing and that you would never recover. Now, like any drug, there are limits on how much you can or should do, and MDMA is still very illegal. But what we are starting to learn from medical science is that MDMA is poised to be an incredible and life-changing therapeutic tool. It's been shown to help people recover from serious PTSD, and that might just be the beginning. So how does a drug go from being public enemy number one to a new revolutionary therapy? What is that trajectory and how did it

happen? Well, to answer that question, our guest today is journalist Rachel Neuer. She has a new book out called I Feel Love, MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World. But before we get to that interview, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show, head to patreon.com slash adamconover. Just five bucks a month gets you every episode of the podcast ad-free. You can join our community Discord. We even do a live Zoom book club. We'd love to see you there.

And if you like stand-up comedy, please come see me. I am on tour right now. If you live in St. Louis, Maryland, or Rhode Island, come and see me. You can find tickets at adamconover.net. And now without further ado, let's get to my interview with Rachel Neuer. Rachel, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you so much for having me. So you have a new book out, I Feel Love, about MDMA. What is MDMA, first of all? Aha. That's a great question because so many people have confusion over that.

And it's, you know, in the title of the book, MDMA. MDMA is known as ecstasy or molly on the street. And just newsflash, everybody, ecstasy and molly are indeed the same thing. I remember when literally, so I grew up in health class and everything. They called it ecstasy. Yes. You should be scared of ecstasy. Then when I was in my late 20s, let's say the early 2010s, friends of mine started,

it became more popular again, but people started calling it Molly and they made a distinction. They were like, no, no, no. Molly's not ecstasy. Molly is like, it's cleaner. It doesn't have, it was like a rebranding of the drug. So first of all, you're way cooler than me, because when I decided that I wanted to try ecstasy, it was like 2013, 2014. And I started asking all these people in Brooklyn, hey, do you have any ecstasy? And someone pulled me aside and was like, it's called Molly now. Ecstasy by itself sort of sounds like a made up drug for like a TV drama from the 90s.

Like, have you tried ecstasy? It's got such a weird tone to it. Oh, man. Well, it was invented in the early 80s, if that offers any explanation. Okay. Marketing tool in the early 80s. So, yeah, the name Molly was just a rebranding technique to try to separate MDMA from that ecstasy thing, from all the negative connotations. But they are the same thing.

They are supposed to be the same thing. They technically both refer to MDMA, which is methylene, dioxin, methamphetamine. It's all the chemistry I'm going to give you, hopefully, in this talk. But, you know, you don't really know what your ecstasy or molly contains unless you test it, because, again, it's a street drug. It's legal. Right. That's a drug that I know a lot of people who use it test. It's not a drug I've ever used. It is. You did use it in the course of your research. Yeah. Full disclosure, I have done ecstasy slash molly slash MDMA. Yeah. Good for you. Thank you. I mean, you're you're cool.

Good for you. Thank you. I mean, you're cool. Yes. And I mean, what are the, so look, treat me like a newbie. What are the effects of this drug? Okay. So there's, we have to put it into kind of two different baskets here. The recreational effects or the, you're doing therapy and like working through your trauma

effects because they're totally different. People who are doing MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, for example, are like, oh, why do they call this ecstasy? This is like horrible hard work. But I haven't done therapy with MDMA before, so I can't directly speak to that. What does MDMA feel like? Well, first of all, have you done LSD or mushrooms? I don't know if you want to go there. About every once every year. So I'm like, I got to go to the beach and do some mushrooms and like same clear shit

out. And, you know, and actually I think there's a lot of the evidence, the therapeutic evidence has shown that that kind of usage is like it does have a long lasting effect for the next couple of months. Like that sort of thing. I always felt of like, oh, I feel like I have better perspective and it sort of clears me out and, and helps me. I was come to some sort of epiphany that's useful to me. It's like, that's like now sort of medically proven that that has like, I usually do the same thing, except it's a forest, but that's okay.

Forest is better than beach, but that's, I work with what I have here in Los Angeles. Yeah, exactly. Um, well anyway, I guess I asked that because, you know, how would you describe mushrooms to someone who's never done it? It's like a really hard thing to put words to, but I'll, I'll attempt to do that for MDMA. Um, uh, for me, I guess a metaphor or whatever analogy metaphoric, uh, would be floating in like an ocean. You're kind of like rolling on these warm waves. Everything is calm. Everything is cool. You're part of something that's bigger than yourself, but you're still there. You're still me. In terms of the physical effects, I mean, they call it rolling for a reason and that's why I drew on the ocean analogy. It's these rolling waves of euphoria. It's kind of like

up and down, but it's not like dizzy or like a vomity like alcohol. You just feel really good. And for me, at least it helps to clear my head and make me present in the moment in a way that I'm not usually there in my sober life. Like all my little like neurotic tendencies and anxieties and like, what are I going to do tonight? Like, oh, what about this thing I said to this person? It all just goes away. what am I going to do tonight? Like, oh, what about this thing I said to this person?

It all just goes away. And I can really just be there in the moment, you know, listening to the music, dancing with my friends, feeling this unity. And yeah, it's great. People talk about a feeling of love a lot, right? Is that the case? I was like, wait, yeah.

It sounds familiar. Wait, hold on. A feeling of love. Yeah, okay. It's the name of the book. Excuse me. I was like, that sounds familiar. Yeah, you feel like just this pure sense of love like

you know like i love myself i love my friends i love humanity i love this earth uh i love this moment yeah it's just this great sense of appreciation gratitude and love and just sticking with the sort of phenomenology of it for a second when with my own drug experiences which are limited but sometimes i i distinguish between a drug experience that feels true to me and one that feels imposed by the drug for instance like when i when i get super high when i'm when i'm smoking weed uh you know i'll feel really anxious about myself you know like oh god that thing i said was so weird oh everyone thinks i'm so weird and then when I'm not high, I'm like, oh, that's ridiculous that I felt that way.

That was false. But then when I take mushrooms, I, not always, because sometimes I'll have, I'll have, you know, a delusion that I later realized isn't true. But sometimes I'll experience something where I'm like, oh, that was actually true. I actually accessed, you know,

like the sort of thing I feel on mushrooms is like, oh, I need to spend more time with my friends. And then I'm not I anymore. And I'm like, that's actually true. And I take that with me for the rest of my life. A lot of other people have that experience as well. When you have that sense of euphoria or love or well-being on MDMA, do you feel that it's which category do you put it in if you find that applicable? I definitely do find it applicable. I'm glad you brought that up. I definitely put it more in the mushroom category. It really it's not like, oh, I'm so wasted. I don't have control.

I'm just acting out. You still have really good control, much more so than with alcohol, for example. And, you know, I feel this way and also just sources I've talked to feel this way that it just kind of makes it's not it's like the drug brings an out of you, but the drug is not imposing on you. Like, as you put it so well, like you're speaking your truth, but without these sort of barriers that we put up between each other with ourselves about, you know, am I cool? Like, do I want to say this to this person? Like, how am I being perceived? You can just speak more honestly than you can in sober life, at least for me normally. And what about it pharmacologically causes that? I know that's a difficult thing to explain without really getting into the chemistry and the psychology, which is the brain's fear center. So, you know, you're just turning down the volume on, yeah, stress, fear, hesitation, things like that. And it heightens

activity in information processing centers. So, you know, you're making more connections than you normally would in terms of more chemical stuff. So it really releases this flood of serotonin, which you can think of as this jack of all trades neurotransmitter, which are like chemical messengers in the brain. Yeah. Serotonin does all kinds of things like it regulates mood and behavior or mood and sleep, appetite, even some like blood stuff. But serotonin is that like good feeling, like lovey, like that rolling feeling. There's also oxytocin, you know, also known as the love hormone. So there's there's a ton going on in the brain.

But a lot of these, look, we so often hear these explanations about what's going on in the brain, like serotonin is the X chemical, oxytocin is the Y chemical. And I've done enough stories, you know, in my past TV shows, et cetera, to know that those stories

are often very simplistic. It's sort of like saying, oh, in your computer, like, you know, the electron is the power particle or whatever, you know, like as though, no, there's something more complicated happening underneath. You're talking about software and hardware. And so, like, I've heard some of those explanations before, but they always strike me as a little bit simplistic. Do we like know what's happening at a more granular level or no?

Okay. I'm going to get into it. Okay. Let's do it, please. All right. So I'm now going to talk about this in the therapeutic context. And I want to get into that. Great. Because we know that it's useful for that now. So tell me about it. Yeah. So we're now reframing to what is happening in the brain when you do MDMA-assisted therapy. And this is all based off of studies in mice. So there's the caveat, take it. So MDMA, when it's administered therapeutically in the

set and setting of therapy, so your mind is primed to do this therapeutic work, and you're also in an atmosphere environment where that's conducive. You're not at a rave, for example, you're in a therapist's office or with a mediator. Um, it reopens what's called a critical period in the brain and critical periods are something that I think we all sort of intuitively know, but we just don't know like this fancy neuroscience term for it. It's, um, these finite windows of malleability in the brain when we're primed to learn new skills. And these are the skills that like set us off for success in life. And the reason they exist is because there's an virtually unlimited number of things we can learn as a species. You know, think of all the languages, all the cultures, like we can't be born into the world knowing everything that we need to

know. And it's not just humans that have this, like birds do it, you know, mammals, like pretty much everybody has a critical period for all kinds of things from speaking to seeing to hearing, know. And it's not just humans that have this, like birds do it, mammals, like pretty much everybody has a critical period for all kinds of things from speaking to seeing to hearing to bonding with your parents, you name it. So what MDMA seems to be doing in a therapeutic context is reopening a critical period for social reward learning. And that's just the natural reward that we get from being social, from talking to each other. I mean, think of how awful it felt in COVID, you know, if you were locked down. That was because we weren't getting that social reward. So MDMA is literally opening the brain up this critical period, and it's

allowing you to process your trauma in a way that's actually rewiring neurons, forging new connections in the brain. And so instead of feeling like I'm a monster for doing this, or I can never be whole because of this thing that's done to me, and there's all these habits I've formed around it, like panic attacks or insomnia, all these things that your body's built up as neurologically wired defenses because of that trauma, you can interact with those things with this open critical period state and rewire them and come out different with different habits that are going to set you up for success moving forward.

It sounds like it's sort of creating some new neuroplasticity. I mean, not to misuse that word, hopefully, but. So the woman who led this research, her name's Guldo Lin. but the woman who led this research her name's guldo lynn she's at johns hopkins university and she's like very stringent about the use of the word plasticity okay because like some people now that her research is coming out like um some other researchers are like oh psychedelics are like neuroplastic agents which is not quite true because for example cocaine also induces plasticity in the brain cocaine induces like brainwide plasticity, and that's one of the reasons why people think it can be addictive. What MDMA is doing is opening up plasticity in just a certain part of the brain,

and for a certain period of time, it's more directed. So, Gould-Olin refers to this as the plasticity of plasticity, if you want to wrap your head around that, or meta-plasticity because it's opening up these previous plastic windows. So, yeah, it's like layers of plasticity here. But this is someone at Johns Hopkins. This is clearly someone who really knows their stuff, and this is really well vetted research, I would imagine. And so what is this therapy? Like you sort of described it in a way, oh, it helps you reprocess your trauma. That sounds nice, but sounds a little bit Tik Tok-y, right? You know what I mean? In terms of like, oh, that sounds great. I'd love to process my trauma. In terms of real, like a medical intervention, like what do we think that MDMA therapy is capable of treating? Right. Yeah. So there's been two phase three

clinical trials and, you know, phase three trials are like the last step toward FDA approval of a new drug. The first one was published in 2021. The results were pretty spectacular. Something like 66% of people who were enrolled in the study was around 100 people, came out a month later without a diagnosis of PTSD. And these are people with severe cases. We're talking like the average amount of time they had had PTSD was like 18 years, you know, and they tried like drugs, they tried all kinds of therapy, and it just wasn't working like intractable seeming cases. And the majority of people also had diminished PTSD symptoms, whether they were, you know, quote unquote cured or not. So those results

looked really good. The second phase three trial is now in the peer review process. I've heard that the results are equally good. So pretty much MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD is almost certainly going to be approved by the FDA by this time next year. Wow. Yeah. That's incredible. It's crazy. It's crazy. And I can sort of see the connection between, look, I do not have a psychology degree, but

I can understand the connection between creating some sort of plasticity or some sort of, you know, unearthing old pathways in the brain and creating new ones and ptsd because i can just intuitively ptsd sounds like a you know a groove that was dug in too deeply that like there's a pattern that your brain cannot get out of that every time it experiences x y happens even if you don't want y to happen and so just sort of we're going to uproot that shit and create some new pathways. Seems like that intuitively should work. Is that, I mean, am I off or?

No, I think that's, that works well. I mean, again, not a neuroscientist, but that sounds good to me. Yeah. Yeah. And the applications here are like quite just wide roving. So the same researcher,

Gould Olin is now thinking like, okay, you know, pairing MDMA and therapy can address trauma, but what if we pair MDMA and occupational therapy for people, for example, who had stroke? Can we reopen a critical period for motor learning and then give people back their hand movements or their ability to speak or whatever after the stroke has taken out that part of their brain? So that's a study that they're hoping to get going in the next year uh but you know if you if she's right and mdma can just do critical periods like whatever it's kind of tweaked or

fine-tuned to do based on the setting there's all kinds of applications potentially could you like learn it to use it to learn a language at a later age? Really? Yeah. Cause that's like one of the things I'm like, ah, fuck. I never,

I never finally learned Spanish or whatever. Like I'm not 13 anymore. I'm outside of that critical period for language learning. Like it's so hard. Uh, yeah, exactly. So you could like, I don't know,

like hack your language learning or be like, I always wanted to play the flute. Like let's do that. Maybe we're going to hope the study says that we're not going to go, we're not going to go out on the street and buy some MDMA and then take a Spanish class. Show up to first day of Spanish one-on-one rolling. This is so fun.

Exactly. Oh, wow. But we can hope that one day science might, science might allow us to. Yeah, sure. That's a very important caveat. I mean, that's such incredible potential. And it's so, it's so divergent from

how MDMA or ecstasy was portrayed to me as a kid in health class. Let's go back to the beginning. Okay. How, and sort of talk about how we got here. When was MDMA invented and by who and for what purpose? Okay, great. So just a little side note, the history part of this book was like my favorite part and I'm not a history person, but I was like, this is fascinating. MDMA was actually invented. Well, it was patented on Christmas Eve, 1912 by the German pharmaceutical company Merck. Okay. But they weren't after MDMA.

They were like making this blood clotting agent. And MDMA was just this chemical intermediary on the way to get to that product they wanted. was just this chemical intermediary on the way to get to that product they wanted. And we don't know who was the first person to discover its psychoactive properties. So Merck has like some files showing that their researchers, you know, every few decades

would kind of look at this, but they won't actually, well, they say that nobody ever took it at Merck, but I don't know. They also stopped answering my emails. Nobody believes that. Yeah, no drug taking at Merck. Come on.

Nothing to see here. The guy who invented LSD immediately just dipped his hands in the shit and went nuts. Exactly. I have to imagine at Bayer they were doing heroin, and I have to imagine at Merck they were doing MDMA. Good. I like that. Yeah. That's the world I want to live in.

Yeah. I mean, if you look, if you work at the bank, you get to take free money home. You work at a restaurant, you get to take free food home. I think if you work at Merck, you get to, hey, we got a little extra. That's the world. Ecstasy lying around. That's how these things work. Have a weekend, man.

You know? So, but we don't know when they figured out it's. Well, okay. So let's put Mer put mark aside we've moved beyond them um so in the 1950s the u.s army got involved which is not a good thing um this is like this is the time when the cia was doing like mk ultra stuff um they're trying to do mind control using psychedelics famously. So the CIA was interested in controlling individuals, like making the Soviet whoever their puppet. Yeah. Whereas the army wanted to just spray entire armies or villages or whatever and make them dance around. MKUltra is like, look, I'm normally a guy who debunks conspiracy theories.

Yeah. MKUltra is like the number one most ludicrous sounding conspiracy theory that is actually true that like the government was giving people psychedelics because they wanted to mind control entire populations so crazy yeah unbelievable it's just like so messed up yeah so mdma was swept up in that um you know it had some kind of like code name i i think it was like ea like 1975 or something i'd have to check that but um mdma was on their list of stuff to test and they were testing a related chemical called mda and they accidentally killed someone because they gave him way too much of it and also it was against his will he's like a patient at this mental

hospital in manhattan came in for depression and he's like i don't really like these injections you're giving me like are these doing anything for me and they're like we're gonna just keep doing that and then they killed him military normally kills people on purpose in this case yeah they messed up yeah we didn't we did on accident this time that's not how it's supposed to work exactly exactly they wrote something on his obituary like accidentally had a heart attack by my god you know, but later this was revealed. So anyway, they were like, oh shit, we just killed someone. So let's backtrack and do some animal tests because we probably should have done that to begin with. So we know that they did fund animal tests on MDMA, which that was like the late 50s. We don't know if they actually gave MDMA to a person.

Like I found this PhD student at the University of Michigan who's obsessed with this question. And he's been on this's important to point out that maybe the first person in the U.S. or ever to take MDMA was given it against their will and given it by the army. Wow. Which is really messed up because we're now talking about using this to treat veterans, you know, and cure them of their trauma. It's like dark. Yeah, that's really, that's really dark. We're using it to treat veterans from the trauma that they got from being in the military.

To maybe ameliorate some of the harms. Yeah. And the military maybe gave other people trauma by giving them these drugs. Yeah. And it's causing trauma around the world every day. The layers of irony here are really, really deep. But at some point it must have escaped the military. Okay.

Yeah. So let's move beyond the military now have you heard of this chemist his name is Alexander Sasha Shulgin no but I can't wait to hear him okay great he's such an interesting guy unfortunately he's dead it's like my great regret in life that I never got to meet him but

he has enough writing and enough friends still around that I feel like I got a sense of this incredible guy so he was this psychedelic chemist in the Bay area, obviously, um, synthesized like 200 unique psychoactive drugs. Like he just invented them. And then he would have these drug parties. Well, he'd try them on his himself first. And if they were interesting, he would invite his intellectual friends over and like a Saturday and they'd sit around and try these drugs and like make little notes about what period was this what year oh the 70s okay sounds about sounds about right these are like the later seasons of mad men when they're all doing that

yes love that exactly yep um so anyway he was teaching at UC Berkeley and uh he had this undergraduate named um Carl Resnikoff. And Karl was like a fan boy of Shulgin, like really loved his work, had read all of his scientific papers, and was also like super into drugs. So Karl approached Shulgin, like worked up his nerve and was like, hey, like, would you be my mentor for a summer research project? He's like, you know, sure, my boy. And they went to this lab at UC Berkeley, like in the summer of 1975. And Sh And he's like, sure, my boy. And they went to this lab at UC Berkeley in the summer of 1975. And Shulgin's like, what do you want to do? What do you want your project to be? And Carl was like, hmm, okay, I love this drug MDA, but maybe we could do something with

that. Because Carl knew from personal experience that methamphetamine is more euphoric than amphetamine. And the difference is this N-methyl group that you just stick onto it. It's like a chemical side chain. So Carl's like, what would happen if we put an N-methyl group on MDA to make it, well, MDMA, yes, my acronyms. So they did it and Carl took some of it home. And he is the first person that we know by name, along with his girlfriend, Judith Gipps, who have taken MDMA.

Wow. And they did so on a beautiful afternoon in September 1975. And they took a ferry from San Francisco to Sausalito. The effects started to come on and they just had a great day. They were like, we got to find a DJ. Yeah. We got to. Where's the rave at?

Yeah. Exactly. So. So, yeah, that is the first person we know by name to take mdma but um almost certainly you know he wasn't the first but he gets credit because and they invented it in a sense because they they put the m into mdma yes the second m yeah exactly exactly i mean they they they sort of brought it into invention in the human. Yeah. Yeah. And I assume from there, it just blossomed outward into the drug world or what? Pretty much. So Shulgin tried it himself after that and was like, oh, wow. Yeah, this is good. Of all my 200 drugs I've invented, this is my favorite.

He compared it to a low-calorie martini. He's like, oh, I can have a conversation. I'm chipper and interactive and charming. A low-calorie martini. This really was a 70. That's what they considered healthy then.

It's a light martini. It's a light lunch martini. Leave the olive out. Please go on. Shulgin introduced it to a buddy of his, Leo Zeff. Leo was a therapist. He was literally like packing up his office to retire. You know, older guy. Everyone called him like an ideal grandpa.

And Shulgin came over and was like, hey, Leo, like I have this new drug for you and I really want you to try it. And Leo's like, no, like I'm not doing that. I'm done here. And then a couple of days later, Shulgin's phone rings and it's Leo. And he's like, okay, I'm not retiring. So Leo Zeff just was like the Johnny Apple seed of MDMA and planted it in the therapeutic community first in Northern California and then just the entire country and into Europe. And that's when it caught the eye of the DEA. Got it.

A lot of what you're describing here sounds a little bit similar to what happened with LSD, which I'm a little bit familiar with from Michael Pollan's book, how to change your mind. He tells that history really, really effectively. I really enjoyed that book. And he talks about how,

you know, it was discovered by scientists who were who were sort of researching it in a free way and sort of shared it with each other and had Johnny Appleseed figures such as like Timothy Leary, who was kind of a, you know, Johnny Appleseed figure on steroids or on speed or whatever. Just like really over promoted. Yeah, a little enthusiastic. Yeah. But then it, but then these drugs got so much attention that the government ends up cracking down on them because they basically induced a moral panic about, about the drug in the public by sort of spreading it too fast.

I mean, I don't want to put the blame on those people necessarily. Pollen blames Larry quite a bit, but is it, is it sounds like a similar story with MDMA? Actually, I'm really glad you brought that up. Cause there are like some critical differences in these stories. So the therapists in the MDMA case had seen what happened in LSD's case. Cause it's about 10 years later at this point. Exactly.

They're like, Nope. Like we are not going to have our drug taken away again. We're going to keep really quiet about this. So they were not like publishing about this. They were, were you know everyone was very hush hush about it the problem is though that it escaped from the therapist's couch as people say to the dance floor you know people did find out about it and then there were people who were like oh i can make a lot of money on this yeah and they could make it it wasn't't like, how could it be manufactured? Yeah, it's easier to make than LSD.

You know, like an upper level chemistry student could do it. Cool. Yeah, there was this group in particular that's fascinating. They were called the Texas group and they were really like the proliferators of MDMA on the recreational scene in the early 80s. And a lot of the therapy

people blamed them for the DEA finding out because they were just like pumping it out like they were having like MDMA Tupperware parties you come over get high and then you know go out like yeah sell your MDMA they're salesmen with a product you know yeah exactly yeah so what happens when the DEA starts cracking down yeah so the DEA picked up on this um and we're like okay we're gonna like this they called it the up on this and were like, okay, we're going to like this. They called it the kiddie drug. They were like, all these kids in Dallas are doing this drug.

Meaning probably like 21-year-olds, I would imagine, like folks at raves and stuff. Yeah, which is like a really like narrow way of looking at it because there were all kinds of people doing MDMA, but that's okay. DEA, not good with subtleties and details. So they moved to Schedule MDMA. They wanted to put on Schedule 1, which is the strictly banned, you know, scary drugs like heroin and LSD, things with no, by definition, currently accepted medical use, things with a high potential of abuse. So they went to put it there and they didn't think anything would happen. They just thought, you know, we're going to move this through the process. But this group of therapists, Shulgin among them, and professors, you know, literally people from Harvard and doctors got together and were like, no, no, no,

like we need to fight back on this. So they put together a case. They brought the DEA to court to argue that MDMA should actually be a schedule three drug, which would allow it to be used therapeutically and to be like researched on easily. But also example of a schedule three drug that I would know. Oh my gosh. Okay. I don't mean to put you on the spot. Maybe ketamine. Okay. Yeah. Which is funny because ketamine has more potential for abuse than MDMA. Ketamine is actually addictive. Yeah. But yeah, fact check me on the ketamine, but there's a lot of schedule three drugs. Yeah. Like a drug that's pretty well well guarded but you can get from a doctor

in a certain situation substance you know that but schedule one means you can't even do medical research on it yeah i mean you're supposedly supposed to be able to do medical research on it but there's a reason why it's taken 38 years for us to finally be getting the research done on MDMA because the bureaucratic obstacles are just like incredible. So anyway, they put this case together. They brought it in front of a judge and they actually won their case. The judge was like, yeah, you guys are totally right. And he even had these like profound statements about, you know, I don't want people to look back in 100 years and feel like this was the spanish inquisition wow sounds like they slipped the judge a little bit of yeah well that's what the dea said they were like your judgment is clouded like you're on their side like this is bs look at his pupils man yeah he's having a good time swaying a little bit

to be this much fun exactly well so the judge was like you guys are right dea you're wrong it should be scheduled three but um don't ask me how like this law works but as an administrative law judge his judgment was only like a suggestion and the dea were like right yeah we're not taking that suggestion this wasn't a this wasn't like a federal court this was an administrative law judge who can be overruled. Yeah, those exist all over the federal government in various departments. I'm not a law reporter, so thank you.

So, yeah, they were just like, no, we're going to do this. Then this is really kind of like an interesting side note. It's like a good Jeopardy question. This one of the Harvard professors appealed and for a three-month window that came to be known as the Grinspoon window, because that's his last name, MDMA became legal again. And people literally got out of jail and prison because of this window. And they wrote home these cute thank you notes. And everybody did MDMA legally. And then the window closed and it's been closed since then. Okay.

Yeah. And, but it, despite it being closed, it's been a very popular, it's no, it was known at least when I was a kid, it's a party drug.

Yeah. And it was, it was a big part of like the, the war on drug, you know, messaging around, you know, the dangers of these drugs. Actually, you know what?

Let's talk about that right after we take a quick break. We'll be right back with more Rachel Neuer. Okay, we're back with Rachel Neuer. We're talking about MDMA. I just want to talk quickly about rave culture. Because it was such a important counterculture in, I guess, when you say late 80s, early 90s, still through to today.

How important was MDMA in the creation of that culture before we talk about how it was demonized? Oh, my gosh. MDMA. I mean, there would be no rave culture without MDMA. It was a critical component. It drove. OK, I'll just start the story. Yeah, please. OK, So MDMA, after it was criminalized in the US, it sort of jumped ship. I mean, it was still used in the US, but it moved on to Ibiza, the Spanish Island off, well, yeah, off the coast of Spain as Spanish Islands are want to do. And there it was discovered by, let me try not to pronounce his name wrong, Paul Oakenfold. Yes, the DJ, famous EDM DJ.

He and his mates had come down from the UK and they were there for his birthday party. And they took MDMA and they discovered house music. There was no house music in Britain. It was very like snooty alcohol people, you know, buttoned up. And they brought this culture back with them to London. They were like, we want to recreate this like beautiful Ibiza feeling here in like dreary England. So they opened up, well, they didn't open up clubs,

but they started like DJ nights where they would feature house music and also MDMA. And it just absolutely exploded within a year. It was called like the second summer of love. MDMA was all over the UK. House music was all over the UK. It had spread north, south. But the problem was that clubs in the UK at this time closed at 1 or 2 a.m. And at that time, you're just really starting to roll, which is the colloquial term for the feeling of MDMA. So people wanted to still dance. They still wanted to party. And that's how raves were invented. Raves were just these impromptu parties that would pop up all over the UK.

It could be under an overpass or in an abandoned warehouse or an airport hangar. These parties sounded incredible. And that's how we got raves. They were just a way to keep the party going because everybody was rolling on ecstasy. And how much of the story that was told about this drug in the U.S. media was based on, you know, people being, being frightened of that scene, you know, because I mean, that's, that's often the case, right? Is that, is that adults are like, oh, these kids are wearing blue jeans and smoking marijuana. You know, there's that the case, right? Is that, is that adults are like, Oh, these kids are wearing blue jeans and smoking marijuana. You know,

there's that sort of, Oh, the young people are frightening me. Yes, that's exactly it. So the UK is similar to the U S in that they have this like sort of Puritan culture where like pleasure is bad. It's like, Oh my God.

Yes. Somewhere someone might be having a's like, Oh my God. Somewhere. Yes. Somewhere. Someone might be having a good time. Oh my God. So like, it's kind of like they would give things like heroin a pass. Cause it's like, Oh,

you know, like this poor person, they're addicted. They don't have a, an option here, but with ecstasy, it's literally just like young kids going out to have a good time and to sort of realize their own pleasure. And this really freaked people out. They saw this as a threat

to the fabric of moral culture, of the authority, whatever. So the UK was the first to really respond hard on this. They brought in all this like crazy legislation where they banned outdoor gatherings of like more than a hundred people where music was played. And they even like defined music. They're like a series of repetitive beats. So it was just, yeah, that's definitely part of music. If I had to come up with that, I would, that would be part of my definition. Sure. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, the authorities really tried to stamp rave culture out. From there, it spread, though, to like other places in Europe and also back to the United States. So the U.S. re-imported it through British expats starting in San Francisco.

This is in the early 90s. And then the U.S. started with their own raves, which is what I guess you and I grew up hearing about. Yeah, I was straight edge dare kid. I definitely wasn't going to any raves. I know, I was growing up on Long Island and I remember like I was an internet kid. Oh, nice. Especially in like, you know, around 98, 99.

And I would read a lot of the people publishing things on the internet. They were writing like proto blogs in San Francisco. And two things that were happening in San Francisco and two things that were happening in San Francisco were, you know, the tech, the first wave of the tech industry, which was exciting and new at the time. And then also like rave culture and like early burning man and stuff like that. So I remember reading, you know, just like art, just someone like, oh, I went to burning man and it was cool. And here's what we did or, you know, et cetera.

And got just like a little bit of window into what that scene was like by just by reading these, you know, really computer programmers who were going and having a great time on the weekends. Oh, that's really cool. Yeah, you were cooler than me. I just saw like that. I was not cool. You could have seen me at the time. I was not cool.

I wasn't cool. I was a 17 year old acne troll on my, you know, cable modem, like connection with a big CRT monitor teaching myself HTML. But anyway, yeah. But,

but, but yeah, it was like a, it was a big, it was a cultural moment in the U S as much as it was anywhere else. Absolutely. But it was also like really, really demonized in the press here.

Big time. And the drug itself was one of the most demonized. Like I remember being shown brain scans of if you take MDMA one time. It's funny when something is notorious and you experience it as a kid. Like in health class, they showed us, yeah, the brain image.

And they're like, here's what your brain looks like right before and right after. And there's whole swiss cheese in your brain and i do remember think like that did have an impact on me yeah and it's probably one of the reasons i've never you know of all the drugs that i've uh experienced mdma was always like that's kind of a scary one i think it was partially because they got to you well Well, cause I'm, I like my brain, you know? And so, and honestly, same thing happened with, you know, for instance, LSD, the idea of flashbacks, which was really rammed into us, always sort of wigged me out as a kid because it felt like a permanent brain change.

Whereas like, you know, mushrooms and weed, you don't hear about that kind of story. And so it's funny how much the propaganda worked on me without me realizing it so where i mean i guess i could ask where that propaganda comes from i think we generally know from the drug war but if there's any interesting story i'd love to hear it how true is any of it yeah okay so i'll go into the propaganda first then we'll get to the truth um So after MDMA was scheduled, all the government attention and research money, we're talking millions of dollars, went into, quote unquote, proving that MDMA is neurotoxic. And that just means that it damages the brain. So there's just millions of dollars being pumped into labs to basically prove this, which isn't how science is supposed to work. And no one did any, it sounds a little bit similar to the story

with LSD and mushrooms, where after they become scheduled, then A, there's no money to do research on the potential benefits, and B, it becomes kind of career suicide. You don't want to be one of the people who's, you're a wacko if you want to research potential benefits, even though we've never done the research,

we don't know. Right, yeah. Career suicide is literally, I've never done the research. We don't know. Yeah. Career suicide is literally, I have someone in the book saying that. So exactly. There was those two things. So there was, you know,

certain labs, one at Johns Hopkins, there was one in the UK and they were just like, just hell bent on proving that this drug is going to eat holes in your brain. That's where that notorious image comes from. Obviously it doesn't, by the way, just everybody out there, MDMA does not eat holes in your brain. They found that it does damage the end of nerves that deal with serotonin, back to the chemical we were talking about before.

But mostly, these studies were really flawed in that they were doing tests on MDMA users and they weren't controlling for things like poly drug use. And most people who are using MDMA are also drinking alcohol, they're doing ketamine, cocaine, like whatever. So it's really hard to control for any effects of that. Also like sleep deprivation, you're at an a rave all night like that takes a toll yeah um or if they were doing uh tests in animals they were giving them like five times ten times a hundred times the dross that any like human would ever take of this drug uh the real whopper came though in the early aughts um this lab at johns hop Hopkins published a paper in the prestigious journal Science. And the paper said that basically MDMA was this super dangerous drug that was going to cause Parkinson's

in all these young ravers because it affected dopamine, which was like this strange newsflash because we never hear about dopamine with MDMA. It's always serotonin. It's like, wait, what? It's affecting the dopamine system. And they had given these monkeys a bunch of drugs and several of the animals collapsed and died and others were just spazzing out. And this made huge news. Some people were like, wait a minute, this doesn't seem right. We don't have ravers dropping dead on the floor and coming out with like parkinson's well okay it turned out that they gave the monkeys methamphetamine they mixed up their drugs yeah like how does that happen and there was never an explanation a satisfying explanation for how in the world that happened and this was published in science in science one of the most

prestigious scientific journals in the world. Yes. Yes. No, bad, bad news. And of course, everyone just came down really hard. Like, how could you do this? And, you know, there had been people in the background the whole time being like, guys, maybe you should like double check that data.

This doesn't make sense. Yeah. So they, the research team blamed the chemical manufacturing company. They're like, oh, they like switch their drugs. And the chemical manufacturing company came out're like, oh, they switched their drugs. And the chemical manufacturing company came out with a statement like, no, we didn't. So the working theory on the ground, which we'll probably never know the answer to, is that probably a lab assistant or lab tech was like, oh, yeah, I want this MDMA for me. Or perhaps they were even sabotaging the lab by being like, I'm going to screw over my boss and like switch these drugs out. But we'll never know.

But they were also they also got the result they wanted. Yeah. No, they got the result they wanted. They were trying to find harms of MDMA. Because that's what they were funding was paid. They were like in this rabid craze, though, of like not even being able to spot this flaw in their own data. Like that was a huge red flag that they found this result in a few monkeys with dopamine like like why would that

suddenly happen out of nowhere so anyway after that they really shut up and they were kind of humiliated and sort of stopped publishing on it and the whole neurotoxic thing um so what we know now let's get to the truth part of that question. MDMA does cause acute serotonin depletion. You're dumping like 80% of your serotonin into your brain when you use MDMA. So you need to let that rebuild. If people continue to use MDMA pretty frequently, we're talking like once a week, twice a week, maybe even a couple times a month, you can damage the ends of your serotonin nerves. There's evidence that indicates that they do recover after you stop sort of pounding your brain with MDMA. In terms of actual like real world effects, there's some studies that have

shown like some slight differences in heavy MDMA users and non-users like with recall, like vocabulary, dexterity of your non-dominant hand, things like that. But it's nothing like there's a hole in your brain. Yeah. So I've heard people who use MDMA describe there being a hangover of like, you feel great at the time, but then the day afterward you feel really bad. Is that because of that serotonin? that's real okay so okay this is such an interesting question yeah that's this huge well-known urban i don't want to say myth because i do think there is some truth to that i'm definitely not discounting people their experience

it um what i can say is that it has never been picked up on in the therapeutic studies got it so this is like drug user folklore yeah which is such an interesting category of knowledge because sometimes it's true and sometimes it's false. Like my friends can be both. You know, when I was in college, all my friends told me that they could drive when they were high and it was super safe when they were, when they were smoking weed, they're like, it's totally safe. And I was like, okay.

And then years later I was like, that's not true at all. Like I didn't drive at the time when I finally started driving. I was like, okay. And then years later I was like, that's not true at all. Like I didn't drive at the time when I finally started driving. I was like, no way. That was a lie. But there's other forms of, you know, just sort of stuff like set and setting that is, we now know is real, but came out of sort of drug user culture. Yeah. Well, I won't say that it's like false because we haven't, like scientists haven't really studied it in recreational users. Yeah.

Like recreational users have been like the guinea pigs of MDMA use, but on their own, you know, like nobody ever studies them, but there's so much there to be done. So if any grad students are listening, like there's your project. What you should do is just go to a rave

and just start collecting evidence. Yeah, exactly. Just do the work. Do the work. Do the work. So yeah, that like the suicide Tuesdays as it's called or the midweek blues, you know, you take MDMA and a few days later you just feel horrible and like want to kill yourself. That's never been picked up on in these controlled clinical studies. But people say it and I'm not like oh you guys are lying some people think that maybe it isn't the mdma per se maybe it's because you've been out dancing all night and not eating and just

like abusing your body and probably doing other drugs or drinking as well yeah but i still think that there might be some truth there because for example i have friends who do go raving and they do other drugs and they say they still get that effect when they do MDMA. I personally don't. I feel great after I do MDMA. Like I'm sleepy, but I feel happy because I can look back kind of like you with your mushrooms to that experience and think I feel so good. Even when I take mushrooms the next day, I feel a little bit down. There's just a little bit of a rebound, you know, I mean, Judith Griselle, who wrote this wonderful book, Never Enough, and I've interviewed on the show before about it's about addiction. And she sort of describes how,

you know, your body and your brain is like a homeostasis machine that it always sort of rebounds to its status quo. And so that means that you are always going to have a snap back. Yeah. And that principle makes sense. She also describes in that book, you know, she she had a struggle with addiction, went on to become a neuroscientist, talked about one of her students, maybe a grad student who she worked with a lot, who was very involved in rave culture and how he sort of she saw the negative effects of a lot of MDM, regular, regular MDMA use where he just became less sharp. regular MDMA use where he just became less sharp. And he also felt that at the end of the number of years, he was like, oh my God, I kind of fucked myself up a little bit. And so that is a thing that can happen.

Yeah, definitely. I've talked to psychiatrists and I always ask have you ever had a patient who had MDMA problems? And the thing about MDMA is it doesn't cause a physical addiction because the more you do it, the less good it feels. Because you literally need that serotonin. Yeah.

And if you don't have it, it's just not going to feel good. It's going to feel like really speedy and like jaw-clenchy and like anxiety, jittery. Because you need to replenish. Yeah, exactly. So there are diminishing effects over time if you use it too much. But people can have behavioral addictions. They're seeking something else on the dance floor. They just want to go out all the time and just keep doing it.

So how did we get to understand the therapeutic benefits? Because, you know, it must again, we've had probably 30 years of all of this negative research. It's been massively drug war research that's been funded. What what was the thought that caused us to learn? Hold on a second, because you said so that negative research came out of Johns Hopkins. And now you say currently there's research being done at Johns Hopkins about the positive benefits. So what caused that sea change? If I had to summarize it in a name, it would be a person named Rick Doblin.

it would be a person named Rick Doblin. So Rick was this wide-eyed hippie kid and searching for himself, trying to find himself through a bunch of LSD, really into that. He grew up on tales of the Holocaust around the dinner table. So he always had this fear that people around him could just snap into this genocidal mania at any time

and wanted to find- Sounds like a real relaxed hippie kid who's constantly worried about genocide yeah exactly okay yeah all right he contains multitudes okay yeah there you go it's hilarious uh yeah so he was kind of like searching for his way in the world and like his big purpose but also wanting his purpose to be like to bring good to the world and like uh you know prevent things like genocide and um just before mdma's scheduling he was introduced to it um out at esalen which is this like retreat center in california where uh the last episode of madman actually was when don draper's like oh sure yeah that's he's sitting he's meditating esalen yeah some classic uh west coast exactly exactly um anyway so rick doblan kind of

gets sucked into this dea case and he decides to make mdma like his thing he's like you know what i'm gonna bring mdma back to the light of scientific and medical credibility and the way to do that is to work through the system to like bring it up and to get fda approval of this drug to do all this rigorous science to get FDA approval of this drug to do all this rigorous science to get like serious people like Rick goes to Harvard and gets his PhD so he can be serious and he basically just spends the rest of his life dedicated to this cause and he um he founded a non-profit organization to do this it's the acronym is MAPS so MAPS has been the sponsor of all the trials um for the first the majority of

the time maps existed he did this all with um fundraising i was gonna say who is who's donating money to this just like some billionaires who love their mdma yeah like on both sides of the political aisle um you know people are into drugs they're into they're also into like our soldiers so rick you know in the 90s realized that our early veteran connection yeah he's like you know what because at first he was like oh let's use mdma to treat existential anxiety and people who have terminal cancer but you know we're all gonna die but it's kind of uncomfortable to talk about that yeah whereas you can be like oh we need to heal our veterans. And everyone's like, oh yeah, that's, that's a really good idea and important. But it is weird that we so often use veterans as an excuse

to do something. Like whenever you, whenever there's some company building a new robot and they're worried it's going to freak everybody out, they're like, it's to help veterans, you know, or whatever. It's like, that's just, if you want to get something done, say it's to help a veteran. It makes really using veterans as a prop in a lot of ways. I don't want to go too far. Fortunately, in this case, at least, I think it's good because the veterans are like, yes, we sign on. Like there's all these veteran organizations that are spearheading this work themselves. So like, I think it's cool with the veterans in this case.

In this case. Yeah. All right. So yeah, Rick just like through the force of his like personality and his like will has sort of built this organization, like no matter what happened, kept going. And, you know, 38 years later, he's about to see it happen. And they in the research that they sponsored, bore out, like it actually showed that it would be beneficial. Yeah, I mean, he was like right the entire time,

which obviously, you know, like the judge knew that back in 1985, but, you know, finally we can come around to that. So let's talk about what this therapy actually is. Like if you're a, you know, if you're a veteran or anyone else who's experienced some real trauma, you've got some serious PTSD

and you want this therapy, what does the therapy look like? How does it work? Okay. So MAPS has developed this protocol over the past 20 years. And so you would, let's say the therapy is approved, covered by your insurance or the VA covers it. You go and you meet with your therapist a few times before you do any drugs just to get to know your therapist, talk about your issues, what you want to address. Then the day of the session, you come in, you take a pill. You're going to have two therapists lay back on a couch. You put on some eye shades, put on some headphones with some music. And anytime you want, you can take those out and discuss with your therapist. But that's just to kind of allow you to tap into yourself and go inside.

And you're going to be there all day. This is going to usually like a seven or eight hour session. Wow. Okay. So, you know, you take the first pill. It takes anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour for you to start feeling the effects. Then you're in it. And then you have a choice to take what's called a booster.

It's like a half dose just to kind of give you more bandwidth or yeah runway there on the experience so that's all day um then you come back for what's called integration and that just means talking to your therapists about you know what you learned uh what you took away from the experience and how you're going to actually integrate those lessons into your life. Because, you know, it's great to have those revelations, but unless you actually apply them, then this isn't going to have an effect. But what actually happens when you have the eye shades on? I mean, I read, so Michael Pollan's book, he doesn't talk about MDMA, but he does, I don't think. No, he doesn't. He does LSD therapy. He does mushrooms yeah and so he describes taking like a massive dose of mushrooms and then putting the putting the uh eye the eye shade on there's music playing and then he

just has the most visual trip the most like ego dissolution like he's just in another world uh and you know the the therapist they're talking to him, et cetera. Is it anything close to that? Or what is the act? You said you haven't done it, but what, what, what do people experience and what actually happens during those seven hours? Everybody is different. And MDMA assisted therapy, your reaction is going to be different. Like some people get really chatty, you know, they take off their, their headphones and their eye shades, and they just want to talk to their therapist about their trauma. Some people don't talk at all. They just go into themselves. Some people, when they have

the eye shades on, they see things in their mind. And that could be past memories that you're revisiting. Or it could be something completely made up. One guy, a veteran I talked to from the Vietnam War, he went to this moonscape,, but he realized it like represented his like childhood or something. So I don't want to like do him a disservice. Anyway, so it can be very trippy, but it can also be like just you and I having a conversation, but I'm like way more open and able to tap into my feelings. Yeah. way more open and able to tap into my feelings. But a lot of people say that what they ultimately experience is just, one woman described it as before she was like experiencing her trauma, like a rat in a maze, you know, there were

blackout parts of it. There were things she just couldn't make sense of. And after it was like, she was looking above the maze and she could just see all the little nooks and crannies and the solution for getting through it. Just kind of see things as a whole and in a new perspective that she couldn't before. And what is the therapist role in this? Just to hold space in some cases, you know, make sure you're okay. Check in on you.

You know, they'll come in if you're being really quiet and, you know, ask if you're okay, if there's anything you want to talk about or like for the really chatty people, they're there to do therapy with you and just, you know, what are you feeling? But it's usually not, it's not a guided thing. It's, it's you doing the work. Like you're being empowered to heal yourself basically. How do you know if you're taking it? I know you haven't done this. So maybe it's hard to describe, but if what it's doing is it's uprooting all these pathways and laying down new ones, how do you know that you're going to be able to heal your trauma rather than deepening it or fucking it up in some way?

Like, like I, I would want some guidance there, you know? definitely. I mean, that is what the, like the pre sessions are for to kind of lay the groundwork for that healing

and also the integration sessions, why those are so integral. So one thing that experts compare it to is it sounds really mushy, but you're trying to tap into your inner healing intelligence. I mean, it sounds a little woo-woo, but an ER doctor who's at the helm of these trials, he switched from ER to psychiatry because he's like, I'm seeing people when they're at the end of their trauma, I want to cure the actual trauma before they try to kill themselves or whatever. He compared it to, okay, when someone comes into the ER, I can clean the wound, I can remove the

bullet, I can lay the foundations for their body to heal them, but I can't actually make that healing process happen myself. I'm just facilitating it. And that's kind of what's happening here, or that's what people think is happening. You know, it's your own inner healing intelligence facilitating that mental healing. Yeah, and that's sort of a new frontier in medicine as well, thinking about, you know, the body's ability to heal itself and medicine is facilitating it.

And to the extent that there's research about alternative medicine being effective, it's because alternative medicine can help kickstart the body's ability to heal itself. It's one of those weird areas where, you know, you have real medical doctors who sound a little woo-woo. They sound like they're reading Gwyneth's newsletter, but oh, hold on a second. This is real research, right? And this is, it seems MDMA seems to sort of fall into that same nexus a little bit. Yeah, definitely. And I think it sounds weird to us because we've all just been programmed on like 30 years of this. Like, here's your pill.

Like, you know, every day take this pill and it'll make your depression or whatever go away. And it's really disempowering. You know, it's like, oh, this isn't something I can do anything about. I just have to take this pill the pill heals me yeah um yeah a simple drug for a simple bug they say but that doesn't really work when you're dealing with something as complex as the human psyche yeah uh what do we know about the differences between mdma and some of the other drugs that people i mean we're currently in this flowering of research around psychedelic drugs, mushrooms, ketamine, LSD to a certain extent.

There are similar stories about those drugs. Is this sort of therapy a feature of all psychedelic drugs or is there something special about MDMA that makes it effective at some things more than some of these other drugs? It's such a timely question because back to our friend Gul Dolin at Johns Hopkins, she had a study come out today. Congrats, Gul.

Oh, wow. As we're taping this. Yeah. Yeah. Today. In the journal Nature, which is like the other big journal besides science. And the findings there are that all these drugs open the critical period, just like MDMA. Her MDMA finding was from 2019. Now she's come back with new research and it's showing that LSD, psilocybin, ibogaine, and ketamine all reopen this critical period for healing. The interesting thing is that they do it for different durations of time. Ketamines is quite short, whereas Ibogaine, which is like up to a 36-hour trip, is like a month long. So the implications there are that some psychedelics are more powerful than others for this neurological reprocessing or opening. And also that even once the drug clears your system, you're probably still in this period of openness and impressionability. So that's why the integration sessions after are so important for making sure you don't re-traumatize yourself, that you go

toward a path of healing. And also why you need to be coming into the world gently. You shouldn't just be shoved back into your abusive relationship or whatever social factors put you there to begin with, because then it's just going to be all the more traumatizing. When I hear about this research, it really makes me think about how little we still know about the brain, that what you've described is the mechanisms for how this works, both serotonin, the neurotransmitter piece, and then the more sort of functional psychology piece of it about critical period. I'm like, these sound like those don't sound wrong, but they sound like scraps of the story.

Like it to me still sounds like we're realizing, oh, if we jam this chemical into the brain, it'll do stuff in a way that we find useful and we can learn a technique to combine it with therapy. But in terms of how the brain actually functions, what these traumas actually are, what the drug is actually doing, our knowledge still seems so fuzzy. It is.

And that seems very exciting because we're learning so much new things, but it highlights how little we know. Oh yeah, we don't know anything. Like it's incredible. Yeah. Yeah, it's really, yeah. It's really exciting, but it's also like, let's get there, let's get there, let's get there yeah it's really yeah it's really exciting but it's also like let's get there let's get there let's get there let's help people but um yeah just yeah

the pace of development it's accelerating but um yeah i think we're just beginning and you really think that this is going this therapy mdma therapy is going to be approved by the fda next year yeah i mean there's the data are, so there's no reason why it wouldn't. But I mean, it's just mind blowing as a child of the nineties, you know, to, to go from likewise, seeing those diagrams in health class and MBMA still being a schedule one drug. Is it still? Well, once it's approved by the FDA, the DEA by definition must take it out of schedule

one because it's a currently approved or it's a currently used medicine whatever their lingo is got it um so once the DEA deschedules it to a lesser schedule um then states also have to do their own thing so about half of our states just follow the DEA's lead and does whatever they do, but then half have to like do their own legislation. So MAPS, Rick Doblin's group, has been working with those states, those half to try to get them sort of ahead of the game so that once this therapy is approved, we can all just, yeah, out the gate, start applying it to people who need it.

I mean, yeah, it's incredible. It's crazy, yeah. Well, okay. So what is, we have to wrap it up, I guess. I could talk about this for hours. But if people are listening to this and are like, oh, this sounds like something I might want to try. However, I don't want to get, I don't want to fuck myself up. I don't want to do anything dangerous, right?

I'd like to, what is the responsible course for folks who, you know, like me are saying, okay, this conflicts with what I hear in health class. There's some interesting stuff here. Maybe I want to see if I could find benefits for myself. What is the responsible course to exploring that? Are you a person who wants to just go the medical route and do it therapeutically, like wait a year and do this legally? Are you a person who wants to get your hands on some MDMA and do it like today? Let's say that I'm let's say that I'm somewhere in between.

You know what I mean? I love my here in California. I love my legal weed dispensary. You know what I mean? I love that. I love that. It's drug culture. And it's also and I go in and they tell me that these terpenes will make you less anxious. And

I'm like, that sounds like bullshit, but I like that you're, I like that you're telling me. And I know that everything in here is safe. I'm not having to, um, you know what I'm not a fan of is I'm not a fan of, I have friends who are like, I'm throwing a party and I'm getting all my drugs tested to make sure there's no fentanyl in them. And I'm like, you know what? If there might be fentanyl in something, then that's a turnoff for me. That's a good turnoff to have. I don't love that level of risk. So I, but I like, you know, Hey, we're all agreed that this is pretty safe and this isn't a mind expanding experience to have. And that's, that's sort of where I, i where i am cool uh let's say i'm there okay so yeah okay so i think you have two options in that case you can just wait until hopefully this time next year

and then you can work through your insurance if you have it or pay out of pocket or maps is also it would be incredible if my insurance company a year from now yeah that approving MDMA therapy. They seem into it. You know, it's, yeah. That's, that's, my mind is blown. Okay. So there's that option. You can wait and do it through your insurance or pay out of pocket, or MAPS is trying to come up with these ways for people who don't have insurance or can't afford it to still have access.

That's a whole other thing. Or if you want to be a little more risky, you know, you're going to have to buy your drugs from the street. thing. Or if you want to be a little more risky, you know, you're going to have to buy your drugs from the street. And yes, that's like the problem with prohibition. Those are illegal drugs. You don't know what's in it. You know, fentanyl has not been a thing really with mixing into the MDMA stream, but. See, I, and we don't, I generally don't have this problem with mushrooms because I feel like mushrooms are always. Yeah, you're like, this is a mushroom. It's a, it's literally a mushroom and it is always seems like it's grown just one step

removed. It's just some dude's got a terrarium somewhere. There isn't like a drug cartel, you know, underground chain because mushrooms are not frankly that popular. Yeah. And so it's just like, yeah, I know a guy who's got a room full of mushrooms and you can really pick out your little mushroom. Yeah, exactly.

Uh, yeah, unfortunately that's not the case for MDMA unless you've got your chemist, you know, in your pocket. Yeah. So I would say, you know, figure out someone you trust who's your friend who's done it before who has a guy. Get it from the guy. But then

don't just test your drugs at home, kids. Everyone's like, oh oh yeah i did this like test strip or whatever i actually if you can afford it send your drugs out to a lab there's a lab in spain because spain offers free drug testing for its citizens but wow there's this non-profit there called energy control the government of spain yeah incredible yeah now that's the government working for you yeah the government doing drug tests also the netherlands the netherlands is like top notch like you can just bring your pills in and it's like this beautiful culture joe biden take a note that's what we want run on that in 2024

the people want free legal drug testing and the fentanyl uh uh like by yeah and the massacre by giving us drug testing seriously or just give us drugs but we'll get to that later okay yeah i'm getting crazy now uh anyway you can uh send a sample to spain to energy control give them a little money and they will not only test it for impurities they'll tell you the percentage concentration which is really important because you want to get your dosing right right you know you don't want to take too much because then you're going to have a really bad time or potentially put yourself in danger. Yeah.

And you don't want to take too little because you want to have a good time. This is one of the reasons I like the legal weed dispensary is they've got the THC concentration on all the things. You know what you're getting. This is why legal drug trade is like a positive. Yeah. Yeah. You know what you're getting.

You can follow the instructions. You can get information. And in terms of safe usage, in terms of not having a negative neurological effect, very concerned, what are the general guidelines there? So you need to get your dosing right. Everybody's different. Like heavier people are going to need a little more. But to stay safe, if you've never done it, you know, start small and work your way up.

A good starting dose would be 125 milligrams. So get a scale. Then if you want a booster, you could do like 70 milligrams. If you're a little bit smaller, you could do. If you're, this is the most detailed drug information I've ever gotten on a podcast. But if you're weighing, if you're weighing a pill, is that the weight of the active ingredient? So typically in the US,

you're getting crystals or powder. Oh, OK. In the in. I just showed myself to be a nerd. At least you knew it was called Molly.

I don't even know the form factor. At least you knew it was called Molly. I'm so embarrassed. So do you, how do you take the cocaine pill?

Such a fucking dork. It's a judgment-free zone, everyone. My God, I'm humiliated. Okay, so it's a powder, so it actually is a pure chemical. Usually, well, that's why it's called Molly, because it's like molecule. It's like this cutesy shorthand. But it's not a pure chemical. It's like, it's whatever's in your powder.

Like, there could be whatever in your powder. There's some medium that is. Yeah, exactly. And like, your powder like there could be whatever there's some medium uh yeah exactly and like you know they could be mixing in like meth they could be mixing in caffeine like you don't know what is in that powder until you test it right so you need to test it okay so it would probably be good to find a test it yourself also maybe find a source that you that who knows how to do testing who's going to help you yeah yeah or just go to that website energy control everyone okay yeah uh but it's again it's just so incredible to be talking about this in a way about the therapeutic benefits, the FDA approving and like, uh, in coming from such a prohibitionist space. It's like, it's given me a sense of vertigo in terms of, of what's possible now. Yeah. It's crazy just how quickly things change. I mean, but think about the

legalization of weed that was like, you know, it's still schedule one, which is mind blowing to me, but now it's just normal. And, you know, 20 years ago it would not be normal. But now we've just accepted it's normal. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like gay marriage. That's just normal now. It's accepted. But that was really recent.

Well, we're in the midst of a sustained backlash. Oh, my God. Yeah. Don't even get me started on that. But yeah. The same thing did come to mind for me where another thing when I was in high school was the the extreme paranoia in America around gay people. Yeah. And then for gay marriage to be legalized by the Supreme Court.

Yeah. Just a little over a decade later was mind blowing to me. incredible hateful backlash that we're seeing is is the result of that speed of social change and and some folks needing to get out some uh some bigotry that they were suppressing for a couple of years hopefully we're going to work through that as a society um and also extend you know the same tolerance to trans folks and everybody else that we have but it there is a similar sense of oh we're we're maybe dispelling some of the boogeyman of the, of the nineties that we all were, were sort of taught in school and,

and realizing like this was, this was a weird social fixation that was not serving us. And that there is a, there is a better way out there as you lay out in your book. The really great way of putting it. I wish I could write that down. Well, you've written down so much already.

Thank you so much for being here. The name of the book is I Feel Love. You can get it at our special bookshop at factuallypod.com slash books, where you'll support not just this show, but your local bookstore as well, factuallypod.com slash books. Anywhere else you want to plug, Rachel? Just thank you. Yeah. Thank you. I'm all out of words. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much. Well, thank you so much to Rachel for coming on the show. I hope you loved that interview as much as I did. If you did, once again, you can pick up her book at factuallypod.com slash books. I want to thank everybody who supports this show on Patreon,

especially those who support us at the $15 a month level. I want to read some of those usernames. Well, thank you, Matt Clausen. Thank you, Nicholas Ratterman. Thank you, Sagar Mantra. Thank you, Sagar Mantra. Thank you, Eki, Eki, Eki, Eki, Eki, Patang. And thank you, Joseph Ginsberg. Joseph Ginsberg, work on your username, man.

Eki, Eki, Eki, Eki, Patang. Kind of outshone you a little bit. But we thank you for your support. If you want to join them, head to patreon.com slash adamconover. Five bucks a month gives you every episode of the show ad-free. And for $15 a month, I will read your stupid username

on this very podcast. Thank you so much for doing so. I also want to thank our producers, Sam Rodman and Tony Wilson, everybody here at HeadGum for helping make the show possible. You can find me online at adamconover wherever you get your social media

or at adamconover.net where you can also get my tour dates and tickets. Hope to see you on the road until then. See you next time on Factually. That was a hate gun podcast.