Julian Dorey Podcast - 🫢 [VIDEO] - Marine Explains How He Fixed His Horrible Post-Iraq PTSD | Jon Lubecky • #114

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

(***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Jon Lubecky is a Marine Corps / Army Veteran and Lobbyist. He recently appeared in Michael Pollen’s 4-Part Netflix Docuseries “How To Change Your Mind.” ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Intro; Jon’s career in The Marines; Enlisting in the army after 01 25:02 - “Mortaritaville” in Iraq; Voting Rights 50:12 - The Fentanyl War 1:03:31 - Coming home from Iraq; Jon’s struggles with PTS & brushes with death 1:37:55 - Jon’s treatment with doctors as discussed in Michael Pollen’s Recent Netflix Documentary “How To Change Your Mind”; The history of the War on Drugs; Why President Biden knows new treatments work; Jon Stewart & The Burn Pits Bill; Mental Injuries and the stigma around them 2:13:42 - How Jon’s study treatment worked 2:38:15 - Legalization vs. Decriminalization debate 3:01:05 - The problems Washington DC partisanship causes with progress; The politicians Jon has worked with across the parties 3:18:32 - The new business alcohol companies are getting into; Why Jon would take less progress over no progress ~ YouTube EPISODES & CLIPS: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0A-v_DL-h76F75xik8h03Q ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “TRENDIFIER”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier PRIVADO VPN FOR $4.99/Month: https://privadovpn.com/trendifier/#a_aid=Julian Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Beat provided by: https://freebeats.io Music Produced by White Hot Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It was when the towers came down. I felt I had an obligation, and I wasn't going to let other people go in my place. When I worked up at the front gate as a designated marksman, we would have people from the local towns walk up and be like, hey, this guy came up to me in the middle of the night and offered me the equivalent of 10,000 cash here in the U.S. to go plan IEDs on this route.

What do you want me to do with the IEDs? And there was one time where I searched a guy, and I lifted his shirt up, and he had a map of the bases on this route. What do you want me to do with the IEDs? And there was one time where I searched a guy and I lifted his shirt up and he had a map of the base drawn on his belly. In Sharpie? Yeah. Like on his... Yes.

It's interesting because a lot of the problems like hypervigilance and all these things are assets when you're over there. Now, part of the problem is we treat mental injuries and physical injuries different. If you have a physical injury, you get a purple heart. You're treated as a hero. Everything.

You have a mental injury, you're just crazy. I knew death would stop it. And I figured if I'm going to go out, I'm going to send a message. What's cooking, everybody? I am joined in the bunker today by John LeBecky. And if you heard that intro snippet right there, yes, John is a veteran who happened to serve both in the Marines as well as in the Army, pre and post 9-11. And you will hear all about that today, his story of his deployments and also his story of what happened when he came back. So John was recently featured in yet another documentary. He's been in several, but the most recent was Michael Pollan's four-part docuseries on Netflix called How to Change Your Mind. It's an excellent series. It's based on a book of the same name that Michael Pollan wrote, and I'd highly recommend it. But John was featured in episode three because he was able to cure his severe PTSD through MDMA therapy,

obviously done in a fully professional study here in the United States, and he's been an advocate for it down in Washington, D.C., working with both parties since. So we talked all about that today. Again, we got through his whole story as well. We had a lot of good conversations in there and little debates about hot button issues too. So this was a very full podcast and I really, really appreciate John doing it. And I hope you guys are going to enjoy. Now, as always, hit that link in my description for the 8 Sleep Pod Pro cover, not just for me and to support the show, but for yourself so that you can sleep better than ever before. The 8 Sleep

Pod Pro cover comes in queen or king sizes it goes right on top of your current mattress and you are going to have a seamless sleep because the eight sleep app is going to work throughout the night and make sure that you get the deepest sleep possible so if you use the code trendifier at checkout that's t-r-e-n-d-i-f-i-e-r you'll get 150 off your own eight sleep pod pro cover today so hit that link and check it out. If you're on YouTube right now, please hit that subscribe button. Please hit that like button on the video. And as always, we'd love to hear from you down in the comments section below.

To everyone who's been sharing around the episodes, thank you. Let's keep that rolling. To everybody who is on Apple or Spotify right now, thank you for checking out the show over there. If you haven't already, be sure to leave a five-star review on either one of those platforms. And I look forward to seeing you guys again for future episodes. That said, you know what it is. I'm Julian Dory, this is Trendafire, and please welcome John LeBecky. Getting passed by two tractor trailers who take 20 miles to pass each other 10 miles below speed limit it just backs everything

up that wouldn't go in jersey and i don't think we'd let that happen around here we're a little crazy driving but when did you like what was your full timeline here because the stuff we're going to end up getting to is the is basically the psychedelic research you were involved in early on where you were a participant as well and now you work in that and have been doing this for years which is really really cool but when in relation to that which i think started in 2014 like when were you deployed when did you go into the army and what was your full background there so i i will say the research has been going on for decades um i became involved in the research in 2014 so i don't want people to think that you know 2014 is when all this started because there's been a lot of

people who've been working for a very long time to get it where it is uh so i grew up in a suburb of cleveland ohio i knew college really wasn't for me when i graduated so i joined the marine corps delayed entry program in my right after my junior year shipped for boot camp nine days after graduated from high school went down to uh not charleston south carolina which which i love and lived in for about a decade but a parasol in south carolina uh four years in the marine corps had a blast um i was a load master on c-130s and c-9s flew around the world lived in japan for a year you know that was my 18 to 22. i didn't go to college and i'm glad that i did that not just

because of the service but traveling the world seeing and interacting with different cultures and and you know you know i lived in japan for a year. I don't speak Japanese. I know what it feels like, you know, to live in a country where you can't speak the language. What's the name of the base out there again? Well, the base I was actually on was Marine Corps Air Station Fatema on Okinawa. But that base has since closed and they moved all the C-130s up to Masawa, somewhere on mainland Japan. What were you doing over there? What was your job?

To load and unload the airplane and fly wherever it went. That's the short version. You do airdrops, which I actually never got to do air drops um but c-130 crew you know it's a back then we were on f and r models which is an older aircraft i never flew on a military aircraft until actually very recently that was actually younger than me um it's not reassuring yeah i mean i the c-130s that were that i flew on in in the late 90s you know were landing at caisson in vietnam and you could see where there were like patches from from different holes and stuff we do have a lot of new shit though too oh so so in nature yeah no no this was 95 to 99 so so in fairness to the marine corps uh they actually got the C-130s first, which was a giant shock to everyone in the Marine C-130 community. So they've all been upgraded to J models.

As a matter of fact, one of the last F models, FNR models, was Fat Albert with the Blue Angels down in Pensacola. They just got delivery of their brand new J model, and they're running it through its paces down there. And I'm pretty sure it'll join the air show circuit here pretty soon uh but that allowed me to do that and you know when you're gone as much as you are as an air crewman being in a relationship doesn't really work too well you know when i was in the divorce rate for for my mos was like 300 percent meaning everybody's on their third or fourth marriage and things like this so i i met a girl um and was stupid and got to take the warnings no no she was really fantastic it's just to be honest when i deployed

she couldn't really handle that so it's hard it is um especially there was a lot of other factors she was actually going through nursing school at the time and a lot of people she was hanging out with were former military spouses and so she thought i was cheating with people back in the united states while i was in iraq which was kind of weird but everybody in her nursing class was like yeah my husband cheated on me when he went to iraq so i've two weeks before i came back from iraq um she left and i came home no one met the airplane watched everyone in my unit go to somebody um actually i'll never forget i walked out into the rain flipped open my cell phone and called sprint at the time and turned my cell phone back on

because it'd been off for a year yeah tried to call her couldn't find her um took a taxi to my house found out my house was empty my dog was was gone, my motorcycle was gone. You didn't even know. No. No idea. Wow. So I came home to a country song, which also didn't help my mental health. I'll bet. But that's kind of going fast forward. So I got out of the Marines, and I worked in logistics.

Really loved it. Kind of had a knack for it. Worked for a utility for a long time and worked for a manufacturing company. And I enjoyed logistics because I like to solve problems. for it uh worked for a utility for a long time and worked for a manufacturing company and i enjoyed logistics because i like to solve problems and so uh four years go by and uh i watch 9-11 as many did i knew entirely on 9-11 i was going back in um because i knew it was going to happen i went and i had a blast for four years and i got to travel the world on the government's dime. They trained me to do a lot of different things.

And that was 95? Yeah, 95 to 99 I was in the Marines. And then so. So now you're working in logistics and 9-11 happens. Right. Now I'm on track. Gotcha. That was a really, really interesting day because I actually, I had started that job two weeks earlier and I was running all

commercial transportation for a major utility company in the southeast oh wow that had you know things like four nuclear power plants yeah and it was interesting because you know I just got you know recently gotten out of the Marine Corps I still and the guy was with was he was a logistics guy just complete civilian he happened to be from Cleveland too uh good guy and you know he comes up and he goes man you gotta come to the conference room and see what's going on like why and he goes plane hit the World Trade Center now me being an aviation guy my brain goes back to during World War II a small fighter hit the Empire State building yes so my thought when he first said that was some sightseeing like Cessna or something like that got lost in the clouds because I'd flown into New York Center uh when I was in the Marine Corps

so like I'd seen the World Trade Center poking up through the clouds and I'm like, okay, sightseeing plane got lost in the clouds and hit the building. That sucks, but I got work to do. Did you still think that when you saw the size of the hole though? Like once you took a good look? So yeah, I'm getting to that. So then he comes back and he's like, no, dude, seriously, you got to see this. I'm like, all right, fine. I figured I'm going to go say go say yeah it's exactly what i thought and won't go back to my desk uh but hey you know back before coven when we had to go to the office there was lots of stuff we would do at the office just because it was easier to go do x than to like argue it i walked in right as the second plane hit oh geez and right then i knew exactly what was going on because i was in aviation i had a very very strong idea of what the reaction was going to be um one of which is they were going to ground every aircraft in the united states um and the only aircraft flying would be military and that is exactly what they did very rapidly um but because of that i'm like i run logistics a lot of our stuff goes on airplanes i have four high security

nuclear plants that have shipments scheduled all day all of this go back to my desk immediately sit down take you know take a second formulate a plan put it into action um i halted all shipments to all the nuclear power plants 100 percent complete lockdown cancel you know had everything held at the docks because people forget that day when that was going on everyone thought something was just going to blow up to their left it was crazy and you're and you're nuclear security and you've got a dude in an old dominion you know ltl truck delivering a skid who sneezes wrong that can go bad yeah for everybody so by removing that pressure it allowed security to focus on what

they needed to and and focus on the people that had to go in because i i called up and i'm like you tell me anything that has to be delivered today or the shit shuts shuts down and they're like nothing i'm like cool done i pulled i was fortunate to be able to pull all the paychecks for florida because this is back before everybody had to deposit um show my age here but and you know you know they And pulled it was able to pull those off Off of FedEx and put them in a cargo van and drove them down to the central to to the corporate on the like Florida corporate on you So that everyone in Florida could get paid Wow because that was a Thursday Friday's a payday

Well, it got hit on a Tuesday or a Tuesday a tuesday yeah it it was like the next day payday was within a day or two now about half of those were just pay stubs because of direct deposit but there were a lot of people who had hard checks yeah um this is 01 for sure and and it's really it's kind of funny people today don't realize like what it was like to not have airline not have any planes flying for like a week yeah was it a full seven days that they grounded yeah it was it was a lengthy amount of time um and everything ground to a halt some of the i guess like faa guys will talk about seeing the the radar just go silent and just sitting there. Like when you see some of these interviews where they're remembering that day and then the days after it and seeing not – like almost like a dead heartbeat monitor.

When they're so used to seeing like spec, spec, spec, spec, spec, spec, spec. And it's just like it really brought it home for them because when it was first happening and they were just getting everyone on the ground. I was like, all right, just get everything on the ground. was like all right just get everything on the ground and then you're like oh my god this yeah air traffic control like if you've ever been in in a tower or you know been fortunate enough to see one of the one of the the centers like new york center those guys they show up they sit down and boom like it's constant chaos to keep all these planes flying keep everything because you've got planes crisscrossing each other and you know a couple thousand feet apart and you got to make sure they don't slam into each other and all these things it's controlled chaos and it's just constant and then to sit there with nothing to do

just sit in and watching that especially when you know if you see a blink problem that that could mean you know another building comes down right that could mean god knows what and you know i i that was an interesting day for america and we can discuss everything that happened after that but that was that was a day we all came together yes um you know I'll never forget seeing the entire House of Representatives sitting on the steps of the Capitol singing God Bless America yeah I doubt that would happen today it's very sad that you say that but I I am closer to agreeing with you than disagreeing with you. I don't think we could know until, God forbid, something like that happened. I hope it doesn't, obviously.

But I also think there's a lot of stories from that day that show our better angels. Yes. Guy I graduated from high school with was in one of the towers, Dan Swingos. He played football in high school, was in one of the towers Dan Swingos he you know played football in high school played football for Princeton and on 9-11 he literally picked up two people and carried him like a football and ran away you know I'm sure you remember the stories of airplanes that they allowed to take off with military escort because of organ transplants wait i haven't heard those stories

oh yeah i always learn something there's always something new yeah there was like there was a flight or two like the day after or the day of and it was it was a situation of this is a heart somebody has tragically died if this doesn't get to this person that person also dies and they made a call now i guarantee you those pilots got looked into they had a military escort yeah you know all these other things but that actual permission came from uh the president because that was the only person who could give that order wow i never knew that but yeah i mean there's things you think about everything we do with planes to say nothing of regular supply chains and day to day. I mean, something bad like that happens.

Okay, it's going to shut down for a few days. We saw what happened with COVID even not with planes, but you know what I mean? But like there are life and death situations that rely on planes all the time that we just don't think about. And I've never heard that. I'm going to look into that after I see those stories up close. That's so cool. So that was my 9-11. And it was interesting because i also uh i

worked in a high-rise uh in downtown raleigh and you know they came across the speakers and they said you know we're in a high-rise you know this is a potential target if you don't feel comfortable go home then i got a tap on my shoulder and they're like you're critical personnel i'm like that's cool uh and it's funny because my dad uh he actually worked for the power company his whole career and he and he was critical personnel because he was one of his jobs along the way was he was the guy who sat there doing dispatch which is making sure that like the electricity goes where it needs to be and there's not too much electricity or not enough so you don't have brownouts or blow transformers so you literally have to have somebody there the whole time they would get bomb threats and he would tell me he'd be sitting there

you know he's and they come up they're like you're critical personnel everyone else evacuates the building you're here to die and like cops come in with bomb sniffing dogs and they're like it's just working well the first place he did say you know in fairness the first place, he did say, you know, in fairness, the first place they always checked was under my desk. I'm like, well, okay, they cleared your area and then went out and did it the rest of the time. But it was kind of funny. And, you know, hurricanes, ice storms, same way. But because of 9-11, I knew I was going back in. So as a loadmaster, I looked at, you know, being a loadmaster for the marines again what part was that so i just want to make sure i understand this though because when it happened you had to think about the your job

first and what you actually had to be responsible for as you described but like at the same moment did you already know that like okay i'm going to take care of this and then i'm going over there and fighting whatever this is or was that later that day when you had a chance to take a breath it was when the towers came down when it wasn't two towers with a giant smoking hole but when both towers collapsed i knew right then because i knew my country was going to war and you know i didn't have kids at the time and you know i had i had a wife but also you know i had been trained i had a lot of fun The government spent probably a million dollars to train me. I felt I had an obligation, and I wasn't going to let other people go in my place.

So I looked at the Marines, and they only have two reserve C-130 units because the work I was doing with the utility and working with access control procedures and things like that was also important work was in Texas and New York. I lived in North Carolina and that's kind of a hike. So I actually started looking at the army and the army national guard because they had a thing called warrant officer pilots where you don't have to go to college, but you still get to go to flight school. And I'd always wanted to do that, which is why I was air crew,

but I couldn't because I had, you know, crappy eyes. Well, then they had this cool thing called laser eye surgery, and the Army started an investigational trial to determine if warren officer pilots could undergo, helicopter pilots specifically, could undergo LASIK eye surgery, in part because most of the issues with LASIK eye surgery in part because most of the issues with LASIK eye surgery and aviation have to do with emergency decompression at a high altitude. What does that mean? Which part?

Emergency decompression at a high altitude. So if you're on an airplane and it's at 36,000 feet and you have an emergency decompression, meaning either something goes wrong with the airplane that causes a giant hole, like a window blows out, or there's also emergency procedures, for example, smoke and fumes, fires,

things like that, where there's a little handle in the cockpit, they pull it and it blows this round thing that decompresses the aircraft immediately. And there's very valid reasons in emergency procedures for this. The issue becomes if you have LASIK eye surgery with a corneal flap cut and there's an emergency decompression, there's a risk that that corneal flap will pop open. And then you have a blind pilot. Not a good thing. Helicopters aren't pressurized.

Therefore, it's not an issue. So, and I actually don't have a corneal flap good. I got LASAK, L-A-S-E-K versus I-K, slightly different procedure. Doesn't have any of those issues. But I qualified and started going, you know, enlisted in the Army and started going through warrant officer selection. And they trained me to be a MLRS fire direction specialist.

Wow. So you were in the Marines and in the Armyines and in the army yes you don't hear that very often no that's because when you threw me off earlier for a second you're like i became a marine i'm like wait you were in the army so i was wondering how that was going to happen but this was all because of the opportunity basically to be able to fly right and so uh learned a lot about artillery did a bunch of cool stuff there, and then, uh, got put on alert to go to Iraq. Um, well, when, here's a question. When did you, when did you officially enlist?

Like how long after September 11th did all this get sorted out? Three days after the initial invasion in Iraq. Okay. So then they put you in, they put you in to get the LASIK. No, no, no. I, so, so part of the deal with the, with the trial was I paid out of my own pocket for the eye surgery. So you did that after September 11th, though?

Yes. And then you went in, trained all this stuff, and then we're in what, like 03-04, and now Iraq's going on? Yeah, so I raised my right hand three days after the initial invasion in Iraq. Not because of the invasion in Iraq, that's just when it was scheduled um and so uh you know initially went to uh mos school down in fort bragg to learn how to do mlrs stuff multiple launch rockets uh you may have seen those on the news they're kind of a big deal over in ukraine right now um and uh you know it was a signing unit you know started doing the physicals and and you know had to take the af unit, you know, started doing the physicals and, and,

you know, had to take the AFQT test and do all the stuff for selection and go to boards. Um, and then I found out right after I got put on alert, which was, uh, like January of 05 is when I, like three days after I get notified that, um, you know, Hey, I'm selected, but I'm on alert.

So I'm like, okay, does this mean I go to Fort Rucker or Iraq? Cause those are two very different things. And they had a shortage of pilots at the time. So I legitimately didn't know, are they going to send me to flight school and then send me to Iraq? Or are they just going to send me to Iraq?

Um, I was kind of hoping for the flight school part, but you know, I don't know are they going to send me to flight school and then send me to iraq or they're just going to send me to iraq um i was kind of hoping for the flight school part but you know hey so uh they're like nah you'll just go to a record when you get back i'm like all right cool so uh we go up to camp adderbury indiana for like three months uh of training um had a head injury there actually how'd you do that um so we're out in in in the fob of it's a ford operating base so it's a field exercise and they were simulating an attack and and i was running to go do what i was supposed to do which was to set up security around a transformer and stuff so it didn't get attacked and yeah i i tripped on a tent wire oh yikes but so you've seen the nvg mounts on the front of the helmets right nv night vision goggles oh yeah yes so it's a mount that just mounts on the helmet and then nvg goggles just, right? So there's this little metal thing that comes down,

goes in, up, and back to hold it against the helmet, the front ridge of the helmet. Well, when you trip and bang your head on the front, those two prongs go right in there. So I got a concussion there. That was my first TBI. Yikes. And then we flew over to Kuwait spent

about a month in Kuwait doing additional training and then went in country Bravo battery fifth and 113th field artillery was my unit we fell under 548th logistics task force with the 10th mountain um and where were you stationed in iraq uh based out of balad balad all right i'll pull up the map uh lsa anaconda uh smack dab in the center of the sunni triangle probably about 45 50 clicks northwest of baghdad if memory serves got it i'm just zooming out right now it'll be in the corner of the screen for people to to look at so it had a fun nickname called mortar Rita Ville oh yeah and if you want to laugh hysterically go on you by the way yeah there there was a if you go on YouTube and just Google or Google or go on

YouTube and do a search for mortar Rita Ville they took this the the jimmy buffett song margaritaville oh no yes oh and they are so funny when you got here here's the thing you know it's really funny because there's a there's a joke that goes around every time a new call of duty comes out that you know this is going to be call of duty true army which means you know you get woken up in the middle of the night to to to play most of the action in the game over 15 minutes and then you spend a month twiddling your thumbs and like burning diesel fuel and shit and things like that um there's a lot of sitting around you get bored you know and and you do you're also in a high stress environment um general order one says you know no sex uh no drugs no alcohol

no porn no sex no nothing uh yes unless you're married and your spouse is deployed with you what this is a thing yeah go read general order one in in iraq and and here's sounds like prison well and here's the crazy part like they wonder why people come back with problems like you take 18 to 22 year old kids which is most of the people i granted i was 29 when i deployed but and you're like hey we're gonna take every vice and every way of blowing off steam away from you and hand you a loaded rifle and go tell tell you to go go kill the bad guys and they wonder why they come back with problems you know there's there's processing that needs to go on and you know you see these these old world war ii movies and you know you the squad gets together oh hey we found a bottle of whiskey you know or we

found a bottle of gin and they all you know have a couple of drinks and they talk and they you know what that's group therapy when done correctly yeah absolutely and and they, you know what? That's group therapy. When done correctly, yeah, absolutely. And it's processing. You know, they're bullshitting, it's their friends, and that's a good thing. But there was nothing like that. I did find it funny because the Aussies were like, hey, we'll be part of your coalition,

but we're going to drink beer and look at porn. So there's an Aussie compound, and they had all the beer and like their computers weren't locked out and things like that um but also that meant the army could just mess with people over stupid things um and this is where you got to see like the good leaders and the bad leaders like hey if they find a dvd because this is again 0 five oh six before like you could whip out a phone you have the portable dvd players oh oh they the uh one of the major issues uh about the uh coming back is everything's bootlegged literally so so i everybody had and it's funny because you can't bring it home so everybody just shares stuff so we had the the entire Hollywood library bootlegged, like somewhere on base.

If you wanted to see a movie, you could probably just go get it. And yeah, it's pretty funny. Was this the good bootleg where they actually had the file, or was it the one where the dude's holding the camera up to the screen in the movie theater and it's shaking? It entirely depends on which one and who did it sometimes yeah it's totally a dude holding up like something in a movie theater and sometimes it's like oh wow they got the actual like digital rip off of this um and it's funny because the the dvds were obviously done in a burner and like they'd have stickers but the label would be just a scan of the original dvd um but like

so you can't bring those back but everybody had all these stacks of dvds and like yeah there there was porn dvds and stuff like that and you know when the commander comes in and he sees that technically he's supposed to bust you and i know people who got in trouble for that um in other units you know my commander realized that like there's bigger fish to fry good for him you know but also like alcohol's an issue like to be honest you know my commander my uh battery commander um you know i i especially as i've gotten older he was in a really tough position and I don't envy it but you know I honestly genuinely don't think he would have cared if anybody had a beer but you know we did have some people who got a hold

of a bottle of alcohol and got drunk and then locked and loaded on people and that's part of the reason some of these problems you know and and there's a lot of crazy stuff that goes on over there because, I mean, it's all high stress. There's a reason my base was called Mortaritaville. How many people were on the base? I don't know if you said that. Roughly, ballpark. Probably, I'd say less than 5,000, but I could be completely wrong.

And how big was the base? So it used to be the former Air Force Academy for Iraq. So do you remember when they found the migs buried in the sand no oh that was like oh four um apparently saddam hussein buried all his things in the sand so he could dig them up when we left we found them um go figure yeah didn't find nuclear weapons but we found the migs he buried uh and so uh but i mean you could probably look at wikipedia part of it is how many people were on that base depends on what year it was and i don't remember but it was it was i mean it was a lot because so you had the theater hospital it was

one of the major installations that wasn't in the green zone oh and the green zone covered baghdad what it was just baghdad and it was actually only certain sections of baghdad and the reason it was called the green zone is because there was also a red zone which is where it wasn't safe right um but no my base got mortared like 6 000 times mortars and rockets and all that stuff and and this is where it gets interesting when you start dealing with ptsd because there's people who I've talked to who worked in finance or supply and literally never left base. But they're getting mortared every day. Yeah, it's literally raining bombs every day.

So what would they – who was dropping the bombs? Like Alistair Caldwell's guys? Yeah, the insurgency. Right. So they're just dropping – I mean, were people dying left and right too is there dropping bombs on it or a lot of injuries um from shrapnel and things like that anywhere from you know a couple of stitches or something like that or just tbis uh to yeah there were there were fatalities and casualties uh can you say you're sitting ducks it well it's mortars and rockets um and it was interesting because for for

part of my time there i worked with local nationals and uh iraqis who would come on base right um you know there is definitely a winning hearts and mind aspect to it were you working with shiites in this case um i never asked actually um whether they were shia or Sunni. I did, you know, we did talk about, you know, various, you know, I asked a lot of questions because I'm a curious person. And I did a personal security detail on a low-ranking Iraqi general. And we were just talking. And it was funny because he said something. He's like, you know, it's funny, you Americans,

you make fun of people in the middle east because we have multiple wives and i'm like okay this will be an interesting conversation and uh no and he goes one we don't all have multiple wives he's like i have a hard enough time with just one and uh he goes but here's the thing we do the same thing it's our wealthy it's our elite they do the same thing as you're wealthy and elite they're just a public about they're just public about it instead of having a girlfriend in an apartment in la while they live in new york with their wife and kids the wife has to approve and every and be okay with it and and all the women have to be treated equally so so if you want to get a second wife you can't knock down you know the standard of living of the first wife

or anything like this he's like it's the same thing it's just a book board and you know i remember that because it kind of reframed how i looked at a lot of things over there i'm really glad i worked with local nationals um they're really good people and they're also really bad people sure you know because there there's one time so part of it is to make sure you know you've got two guys you've got anywhere from 10 to 25 iraqis and they do all sorts of odd jobs you know dig ditches paint buildings pick up trash whatever and they get they got paid in u.s. dollars every week. I forget. It was like $30 a day or something like that. Did you ever accidentally get someone like undercover insurgent in those jobs? No.

Well, it wasn't accidental. I followed procedure. And one of the issues is like Americans would go over there and they're're like oh these i hate doing local national duty they're they're you know these iraqis are all dirty they smell blah blah blah yeah and they're like i don't want to touch them i'm like i i don't literally i don't care because like you've got to search these guys coming in you've got to search these guys going out because you know this was also after the bombing at the uh the the chow hall in Mosul, where a guy walked in with a backpack and a bomb and things like that.

So there's an example. And there was one time where I searched a guy and I lifted his shirt up and he had a map of the base drawn on his belly. Like, like in Sharpie? Yeah. Like on his. Yes. And that would then he, and the entire purpose of that was to

give that information to the insurgents so they knew where to target. Wait, so he was going... Oh, he was on his way out. Yes. Got it. So he'd come on base to work that day and paste things off,

which is also something you're supposed to watch for as an L.N. guard, is watching people who are like taking notes and lifting their shirt up with a sharpie and drawing on it with a sharpie how that got missed I don't know but um but yeah and so yeah he's what'd you do oh no he got he got zip tied and and we made a phone and and we made a phone call and some people came and picked him up. But, you know, when I worked up at the front gate as a designated marksman, you know, we would have people from the local towns walk up and be like, hey, this guy came up to me in the middle of the night and offered me the equivalent of 10,000 cash here in the U.S. to go plan IEDs on this route. What do you want me to do with the ieds this is somebody who was offered would be like somebody coming up to to you know any like amazon

worker and saying hey i'm gonna give you 10 grand all you got to do is go plant three bombs and if you don't i'm going to come back tomorrow and i'm going to kill you and your entire family jesus christ so and they would come to you and your entire family jesus christ so and they would come to you and tell you this though they'd come to the front gate they'd just come to the base it wasn't like they knew me and they were like hey i want to help john it was they thought it was the right thing to do but but that did we protect people like that when they did that to the best of our ability jesus wow hey guys if you're enjoying the show Jesus. Wow. of you who are going to do it now. And, you know, it's definitely interesting. And, you know, I question, you know, living here in America, how many people would do that?

Fair question. And how many people go along to get along? How many people would put not only themselves, a lot of people are very willing to put themselves in jeopardy to do the right thing putting you and your family and your kids your parents it's a question you could ask in all fairness here you could ask this question of anywhere you happen to be in the war zone where these people were forced to face that and you got to see the ones who did it you also Didn't get to see the ones who didn't you know and I think Thinking about this a little more. I think it'd probably be a mixed bag like that You know the people who would do it and you know the people who wouldn't but and realized that this was it happened

But it also wasn't like all day every day people coming up like sure You know it was a once in a blue moon thing, but it always impressed me when people did that You know I had other really great experiences over there like I was there for the first free and fair election That they had ever experienced like oh six yeah, yeah, and so when you're on towers There was two fence lines, and then there was a canal and we were cleared to shoot if anybody crossed the canal and we had people going into the canal to show us their purple finger that they voted which is why so I came back uh October 26 2006. there was a big midterm election november i walked in i wrote in a bunch a bunch of guys i served for every office because i didn't know who who any of these people were i hadn't been able to

yeah like i was always a person who liked politics and you know i my vote mattered a lot to me so i'd do research and figure out who i wanted to vote so what i did was i wrote in everybody people's names and then for issue items i just voted, because no was don't change anything. Status quo. But I still showed up and voted. Right. You know, it's kind of funny how many people go on Twitter and Facebook and gripe and all this stuff, but they don't go to the polls and vote. That's why every election day, you know, I put out a thing about voting. I don't care who you vote for you want to vote green party you want to vote libertarian

you want to vote republican you want to vote democrat cool that's your your choice your vote but you still should show up yeah i think people it depends how they have their voice heard if they are someone who like you wrote in a bunch of people right and you just come back from the military you've seen up close how much people will literally like give their life to want to be able to vote and and have a fair system or what could appear to be a fair system but then there are a lot of people who want their voice heard by not sharing it because you know they look at this country and they see two crazy parties we all do know just like you knew when you wrote in those guys like

they were going to win we do know no third party is going to win the only thing it's going to do is maybe fuck it up for one of the parties whoever it may be that year and there there are people out there who are very very upset with the process and it's something by the way that i struggle with because i can't stand the two parties either and it's like well if i go in there should i just be writing people in and then some poll worker has to you know take two minutes of their time to write out all these people and keep the record of stuff that's that has no chance and you know they're human beings and they're working it's a fair question for some people to ask where i agree with you though is the people who go on there and just fucking complain about every fucking person to come in there left and right over and over and over again and then never actually do anything about it or never stand up or maybe even pick out a third party just to let their voice be heard if they're that passionate about it in that way.

If they're doing that over a long time, I agree. That's probably not the way to go. And this is where I tell everyone who says who says i'm gonna protest by not voting one i really have an issue when people say my protest is not doing something that's a little bit inconvenient um like i would rather somebody show up at the poll and write in somebody's name. I wish, you know, look at the past election. What was it, 65% turnout, something like that, maybe even as high as 70, one of the highest election turnout rates we've ever seen. 30% of people didn't show up. Can you imagine if 30% of people inica walked in and wrote in none of the above

and because they if there was an election you know and they said okay uh you know candidate candidate red won house district three with you know 40% of the vote candidate B candidate blue lost he got 39% of the vote and 21% said none of the above if you put none of the above on the ballot do you know how it'd be interesting how many elections none of the above would win that should be a good movement to start because right now that would never happen people would write someone in or they wouldn't vote or something like that looking at it from a utopitarian type view yeah that would be really powerful but that's and this is my issue too like just talking to you up you gotta show up and do the work and and this is one of the things that frustrates me the most um in politics and working in psychedelics and and all of this is

it's really easy to say something and be seen saying something it's a lot different to actually go do the work. And, and, you know, this is where, you know, the people who rail on Facebook, but don't show up and vote,

even if it's to write somebody in or write in none of the above or what have you. That's not a lot of work though. That's like, you keep calling it work. That's like, no, exactly.

I never thought of it that way. Well, but, but, but okay. You know, in fairness voting, you know,

it's on Tuesday. like if people got to work then they got to figure out like it's not a lot of work you're right but you know you got to go do something and yeah and even that is too much to ask um you know there's a lot of people who all they do is talk and and it's and that's because it's about being seen saying something especially by their friends and their peer group and their tribe and then they let other people go through the hard work and it's it's so funny when i hear people talk you know say oh well i manifested it by tweeting it and then it happened so it happened because i did it no that's not how this works i got you there yeah no it's and and again

like you're seeing it up close and and this is the part that i've had struggles with in the past with the whole voting thing it's like there are other places that would kill to be able to have that vote you know would kill to be able to do it there's no let's let's go with this there are literally places on this planet right now where people are being murdered yeah assassinated yes and wars are being fought simply for the right to have a vote right there's a lot of that and so i do try to balance that with how i look at it you know but whenever i talk with military like i remember talking my grandpa about those who served and stuff i respect that that opinion a lot i voted in every election in my life i did not vote in the 2020 election and that was by choice that was that was a i wrote

it rick doblin for president and chris lottlicher for vice president um we'll talk about rick today but also it's it's kind of interesting i i think a lot of it also has to do with where you live. You know, I know a lot of Democrats, a lot of people on the left who say, I'm not a Democrat, but I am on the left, who lived in California. And they absolutely voted for Joe Biden. Yeah. If Donald Trump won California, he would have won all 50 states because the whole rest of the country would have been that way. They were in a position where they knew California would overwhelmingly, and it did, like 65%, something like that. Yeah.

In D.C., 92% for Biden. So if you didn't like him, you could. It didn't matter. I voted in South Carolina. I knew who was going to win South Carolina. If South Carolina went to Biden, then Biden won all 50 states. So I got to write in, and I didn't have to worry if my vote was going to be the deciding vote between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. I see what you're saying. I see what you're saying.

I see what you're saying. Okay, I wasn't following that. You know, if you're in Ohio or you're in Pennsylvania or you're in Wisconsin or Arizona, one of these swing states, it's a different story. You know? It feels different. I voted in Pennsylvania when I was in college. Like, that vote felt different. Because I'm like, wait, this one really matters. I voted in Pennsylvania when I was in college. That vote felt different.

I'm like, wait, this one really matters. I used to vote in Ohio, and Ohio's always been a swing state. But if I'm not in a swing state, especially, I'm going to do what I want, because that sends a message, too. My thing is, if you want to protest, cast a protest vote. Don't not vote. I see what you're saying. Yeah, I know I'm going to protest, cast a protest vote. Don't not vote. I see what you're saying. Yeah, I know I'm going to be voting in the next election. This one was a little bit of a bridge too far, and I did also look at it like this is going to be a clusterfuck of an election because it's mid-pandemic and everything, and I didn't want to write in people.

Yeah, and let's be honest. How representative are two 80 year olds not at all and that's the other thing it's like just that alone it's like you have an 80 year old billionaire and and you have an 80 year old career politician neither one of them like could probably tell you the price of milk you know let's go ahead and put it like and and this is our representation you know this is it. But also, I'll tell you, it's kind of funny when you actually sit down and you get to meet and talk with these people. And, you know, this is one of the things.

We need to stop this tribalism. And this is one of the things I hope psychedelics will accomplish in the long run is we just need to sit down and talk yeah and not believe that if you disagree with me you are either a inherently stupid or be inherently evil because guess what that's how both sides look at all of this you haven't been on twitter enough no but but it's funny you know i i'm a guy and and right I'll be honest, I'm fairly politically agnostic. When you do the work that I do, and you work with both parties, you see good in both parties there's things where i'm very much to agree with the right and things i very much agree with the left and that's the majority of america yes and and this this fighting over it instead of just sitting down and talking you know you go back to the 50s, and a lot of the politics wasn't, should we do this or should people suffer or not? Should we do – no, it was, this is our problem.

We need to work together to solve it. Now, the different parties had different ideas on how to solve it, and a lot of it was, hey, we should spend $10 million because that's what it's going to cost. And some people were like, well, let's just give it $20 million. You know, things like that. Those are absolutely policy discussions to have. But the other thing you had was, you know, politics ended at the country's shores. Foreign policy was the domain of the president and there was was not a lot you know of dissent shall shall i say you know it wasn't hey the midterms are coming up and we can say

this and yeah it might damage our reputation with a whole bunch of allies and potentially cause world war three but you know there's elections to win huh i never made that i mean i wasn't alive but i you know from what i've seen i never made that distinction but it's a really relevant like little silo to go into because i was listening to a podcast i don't know a few months ago there was an older podcast my friend danny did it with this reporter from the New York Times who broke the whole MKUltra thing back in the day. Yep. And he talked about having a beer with Jimmy Carter after he left office down in South America because he was covering the South American unit for the New York Times at the time. Carter was down there. They knew each other, so they sit down.

And it was a few years after, and he was saying, you you know now that you're removed what what are your thoughts on the whole thing like how much can a president really do like what do you think of the office all that and carter said you know when i got into office i called every living former president and i just invited them in to get advice as he should i thought that was a great idea and he said the one who was the most effective in giving me a realistic view on this was actually nixon and the guy listens like huh okay this is interesting and he goes so nixon comes in and he says all right you got two sides of this whole job you got domestic politics and you got foreign policy domestic politics are all going to fight with each other nothing really matters you get one or two things done who the

fuck cares let them all figure that out here but foreign policy foreign policy you don't have to deal with congress and you can actually do some shit and so thinking about the power that that seat has when you're voting for the president i do look at sometimes like our arguments all coming on very important things but like you know health care and and social politics and taxes and across the spectrum here and then we we're not thinking enough like okay well how's this person gonna deal with saudi arabia how are they gonna deal with russia what's their thoughts on china you know you get one or two hits on that but a lot of it comes back to the whole domestic thing well you know going back to nixon and it's funny how often i i talk about and use nixon given he resigned and watergate and all that but also

like i'm from cleveland and where pollution was so bad and we kept setting our rivers on a river on fire so many times that richard nixon had to found the epa um and most republicans forget that nixon created the epa and it was entirely because cleveland kept setting its river on fire um but also nixon went to china and you look at how that was treated versus say by the media by other politicians etc versus say trump going to north korea or nancy pelosi going to taiwan um you know one of the things in the military that you deal with is there's a thing called a codal um codel congressional delegation um most of the ones i've seen have been in you know very much bipartisan um and in part because that's the congressional oversight on foreign policy like you know they can go talk to germany and be like hey all this stuff we gave you you're actually using it for that and you're

like you know there is a role for Congress and congressional delegations are actually really good. And I think it allows for them to step out of that tribalism. Sadly, you've started seeing over the past six years a lot of non-bipartisan congressional delegations where it's all one party or it's all the other. And it's done for political reasons you know and that's also what allows adversaries or adversaries or people who who have ill will towards the united states can influence what we do how like i agree it's bad but how so given it not being bipartisan versus being just parties, can you explain that for people? Yeah, I can give you a couple of really great examples. Yeah.

So, you know, everybody thinks that Putin's a Republican and all this stuff. No, actually, you know what Putin's in it for? Putin. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know, if you read the Senate report on interference in the 2020 election that he did, he had people, he just sowed discord. Yes. Because splitting apart the United States and sowing discord is in his interest. And we tend to look at our foreign policy and left versus right instead of what's in America's interest and the people that we're negotiating with what's in their interest Russia will always do what's in

Russia's interest sure and if that's helping Democrats they will if that's helping Republicans they will they don't care which party wins as long as Russia wins you also have you know swinging back into drug policy. Fentanyl. We have an epidemic of fentanyl poisonings. All the fentanyl is coming from one location. China. And they're fighting the opium war in reverse.

Because, see, here's the thing. These are fentanyl poisoning. Very few people go out and do fentanyl to do fentanyl most of the time it's adulterated drugs sold on the black market like nobody goes and buys meth or cocaine thinking there's fentanyl in it no there was there was a book a few years ago fentanyl ink that this guy wrote by accident if i remember correctly he was like writing for something else he was a culture reporter i forget his name i want to say it's ben westoff i hope i got that right i'll check it in a minute but he was doing some interview on something totally different and the subject

came up and this is maybe like 2014 2015 and he started asking whoever he was talking to about it he's like holy shit and the dude i mean he was a savage he ended up deciding to go on his own undercover to china to see how easy on like reporting for what would become this book fentanyl ink to see how easy it was to get fentanyl and how cheap it was and some dude basically took him into a lab and he goes all right how much you want he's like uh and nothing happens at that scale without the chinese communist party knowing about it of course they're all over some guys i'm going to have in from vet paul which is a bunch of veterans who are doing amazing work protecting elephants and rhinos over in africa most of the end result

is coming from chinese buyers where publicly the government is saying no more ivory trade or no more whatever trade and then privately they're still they're part of it they're smuggling out on on planes as diplomats but crazy but but realize the chinese communist party which currently has warships surrounding taiwan as we speak yeah um figured out that our war on drugs would allow them to wage war on the u.s with drugs yes they did you know it's interesting when you start looking at fentanyl as a global issue because you can't and here's why eu has about half the population in the united states we had i believe it's 120 000 fentanyl deaths last year in the united states so how many do you think the eu had i don't know 10 000 the UK is a little less than a third the US population how

many do you think they had well less than 10,000 roughly 2000 yeah this is a very uniquely American issue Canada does have an issue with this same thing but that's in my my belief is because Canada's drugs come from the US and so and annex it goes right there they can smuggle it through the cartels and they do but also a lot of the overdoses and deaths uh involving fentanyl in uh the uk actually stemmed from americans bringing it into the uk so but but you have a hundred but but let's compare that to 120 000 in the us that's act that's that's literally an opium war it is it's exactly what the british did to the chinese 120 000 in the US that's act that's that's literally an opium war it is it's

exactly what the British did to the Chinese you know in the 1800s they figured out they can so chaos tie up billions in in resources and and cause chaos in in a superpower by selling cheap fentanyl to the cartels and it's interesting because nobody really you know we talk about fentanyl but we don't usually talk about China if we're talking about fentanyl it's about harm reduction or or getting people who have abuse or addiction issues the help they need um I I absolutely agree with those or it's about the border well if you stop china sending it then fentanyl is no longer an issue and the supply even after covid the supply chain is so much tied through china and everything so it's like there's all there's all these potential outlets they can use to do things like but they also got all the fentanyl and the analogs because we do most of our pharmaceutical manufacturing

in china so so you know it this is where there is real world implications of all of this and this is where you know most people who get addicted to to opium you know opiates and things like that you know it it's a manifestation of trauma, you know, they start taking it because they're legitimately in pain, and they will do anything to make that pain go away for a little bit, well, then it becomes uncontrollable. And this is where, you know, psychedelics, be it MDMA, psilocybin, LSD, Ibogaine, you know, and now there's a whole bunch of stuff that's a bunch of numbers and letters that I can't remember um but you know they they don't heal your trauma psychedelics are a tool and they're a tool that puts the mind body and spirit in the place it needs to be where the therapy can actually work

and this is where there's a difference between just going and doing drugs, or doing psychedelics for a spiritual experience, or have fun, or whatever. And I don't have a problem with that either. But if you're looking at healing trauma, this is where you need to do integration. You need to do the therapy aspect.

Otherwise, it's just going and having fun. And there's nothing wrong with that but you're seeing more and more people I mean damn Bon Gino like three days ago posted on a big long video on Facebook saying he's considering taking psychedelics because he needs him well yeah but but also you know he's a Secret Service um he was in law enforcement his whole career he said he suffers from depression um that doesn't surprise me but you know they can help him they can help lots of people and you know that doesn't necessarily mean that like you're going to become a peacenik hippie if you go do psychedelics. I mean, Tucker Max is a huge proponent of MDMA-assisted therapy.

Tucker Max. I hope they serve beer in hell. I'm not familiar with this. Oh, wow. No. Am I blanking right now? Yeah. He's kind of the guy who started the whole blogging thing.

Tucker Max. Yeah. Maybe, but I don't know no he got he got tons of trouble because he originally like his first book was basically about him going out and shenanigans and hooking up and all this stuff and getting drunk and all this stuff and you know now he you know he's married has like three or four kids, something like that. And he said, and it's true, and I say it as well, I've got a 19-year-old stepson, Joey Monteleone, great kid. And I know how shitty a father I was when I had PTSD. And I know how good a father I am now that I don't um then

you know you you have all these people coming out that you wouldn't expect you know if AOC came out and said hey I think a psychedelics help with mental health that's kind of one of the more AOC things you can say having Dan Crenshaw stand up on the house floor and and give a three-minute floor speech talking about how psychedelics can help veterans and others you know suffering from mental injuries you know that's a game changer and one of the fears I have is we see how tribalistic we are and there are people who want this to stay in the counterculture they want this to be a left-wing thing the problem and it's frustrating because you can't get it done that way no you've got to have both sides it's got to be bipartisan and it's funny because i don't have

to agree with everything they agree with if they agree on this and they'll vote the right way, cool. Because it's still the right decision. It's well said, man. I completely agree. But before we go to where all the legislation stands, which is a very important part of this conversation, I do want to go through your full personal experience, which we've at least hinted at today. So we cut off on some nice tangents there but going back to Iraq which is where immediately

afterwards as you had said at some point you had some PTSD issues when you came back you were on that base for a full year and they were dropping mortars every day and you at least were able to walk away without you know injuries or you know i still have a tbi you still have what traumatic brain injury right is that from practicing on the base or did you also get some more there yeah that was that so so that was from iraq as well as all the joint damage that i have for her herniated discs in my back and easier shot all that now some of that it's just being in the military sure um some of that's being being in iraq but but no i mean i don't have a purple heart i've got a

you know got all my limbs all all of that stuff uh the tbi gets interesting um people think you know brain injury just makes you stupid um it actually affects a whole bunch of weird things sure and this is where not you know tbi and ptsd have a lot of overlapping symptoms and so not having ptsd now i know exactly which ones are tbi and which ones are ptsd so for example actually falling asleep is a tbi issue for me staying asleep is entirely was entirely a ptsd issue um and it has to do with the part of my brain that says hey dummy you're hungry go eat or hey dummy you're tired go to sleep just is broken uh it's one of the various weird parts of my brain that's just weirdly disconnected along with giant gaps in memory um but you know so i i still do have that um but the ptsd is gone and my ptsd became an issue

right after i came home um within two months i had a suicide attempt jesus so when you were there though i'm just trying to put myself and i can't but like doing my best to put myself in in that kind of position i'm just imagining what what did you what did they call it again mortaritaville yeah where you were so all these mortars are falling every day around you it's just like it becomes a part of your of the weather basically outside yeah and it's kind of funny so our first night there um so when we first got there you know one of the first things you do when you arrive is they gotta figure out where you're gonna sleep so we we moved into tent city uh because the unit we were falling in on um hadn't left their their what would what was going to become our permanent housing yet so you know we

had to spend like two weeks in the tents well interestingly enough tent city got a handle on time um so our first night there you know incoming alarms go off the c-rams uh counter rocket and mortar fire which is actually phalanx systems that auto track mortars and rockets and they're really loud light up the whole sky pull up a youtube video there it's kind of fun to watch what's it called uh c ram c c dash r a m and you said it was a phalanx yeah that's what the navy calls it the army calls it c ram let's see I probably can't put this in the corner of the screen. Yeah, it's like a 25-millimeter Gatling gun that fires an insane amount of rounds a second. I just want to know what you're talking about.

So people, if you're listening or watching right now, you can check this on YouTube. I do have a video up. I'll just see it real quick. So you've got mortars landing. Oh, one of these. got a plane now okay you gotcha okay okay um i will also say one of the funniest pictures of a phalanx i ever saw was that they made a giant fabric covering for the radar dome over it that looks like a that looks like a minion so uh yeah actually if you go to like uh cram on google and go through images you'll run into it it's it's the minion cram yes that i can put up oh so uh but those things are going off lighting

up the night sky you know mortars are oh my god are impacting and all this stuff and you know we get put into a we get put into a formation so formation in the middle of a mortar attack so that they can do, you know, an accountability check. I'm like, we're all going to die. An accountability check? So after there's an attack, so every unit has to do accountability to make sure that nobody's injured, hurt, and missing. So because the last thing you want is for everybody to be like, okay, everybody's fine, and not know there's some guy in a ditch somewhere.

So you have to do 100% accountability. So if you're on base and you're not near your unit, and, you know, as soon as the all clear is given, you have to immediately check in with your unit and say, hey, I'm good. So they're doing this accountability in a formation which is you know a giant rectangle in the middle of a mortar attack one mortar we're all gonna die that's the first day and we're all like i you know we're all freaking out like it's insane

it wasn't very long where like it goes off and you get up in the middle of the night you're like damn it i gotta put on flip-flops and go over the bunkers i'm just tired and you it's really weird oh so you did have bunkers like underground for everyone to go to they weren't happening they weren't underground um they were just they were basically concrete used flipped on top of themselves so it's like a little concrete tunnel okay it they they will protect um you you can also like there's also hardened buildings and things like that um you know so they had room for 5 000 people when you were about to be under attack to be able to try to get to well yeah it wasn't one giant bunker it was just like there were bunkers everywhere got it okay um and they were just like honestly like concrete concrete

culverts that were big and you just go sit in them um i don't know how much protection they provide on an absolute direct hit but you know the biggest problem is it lands it explodes it throws shrapnel you know 100 feet or whatever well if you're in there none of that's gonna hurt you so when does fast grocery delivery through instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes.

Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. But it's interesting because a lot of the problems like hypervigilance and all these things are assets when you're over there.

Then you come home and, you know, you can add on top of that the relationship issues and my my ex leaving and all of that um but did that happen from the first deployment or i only have one deployment to iraq yeah because but you had the deployment in japan yeah i was single the whole time okay so when you i missed that so when you were talking about that you weren't talking about that one you were talking about after iraq correct okay so that's the You were talking about after Iraq. Correct. Okay.

So that's the same first wife. Got it. And we'd been married seven years or something like that at that point. But, you know, came home, had an ungodly amount of problems, nightmares every night. You know, it was weird. I wouldn't go upstairs and sleep, but I ended up sleeping on the couch every night drinking at least a bottle of vodka um and I lived close enough to Fort Bragg that I could actually hear impacts when they were doing artillery occasionally but I also knew that I was hearing impacts that weren't there and I'd hear helicopters that weren't there um and so you know Christmas Eve

2006 I I went to a bar that I like to go to before I went to Iraq and uh started drinking had gotten about halfway through my second drink so I wasn't trash or anything like that and uh I heard the church bells from midnight mass i'm like i need to be there not here so i walked over to sacred heart church in raleigh north carolina and was told and on the way there like all this these different things just started hitting me and i was bawling my eyes out by the time i got there and so you know go to go in and there's a dude in front of the door I'm like wow this will be a rowdy sir and he's like we're full like me mean you're full I'm like he's like we're at capacity I'm

like okay I just got back from Iraq I really need to just go in he goes you can come back in the morning so I went and I sat at the War Memorial in downtown Raleigh and was thinking of the best most impactful way to take my life well what me was it that guy was at that moment I like rejection and just put you over the top or was it something you had been maybe not recognizing you were thinking about it was self-hatred thinking i was a bad person um for things that happen overseas that i won't get into um you know the rejection of coming home to nothing

the idea that i got off the plane after serving my country for a year and there was no one there. You know. The in that couple with the rejection, you know, I was raised Catholic, wasn't ever very religious, but like that was the place, you know, that was supposed to be the safe place so then i'm like wait a minute these briefings they keep saying if you think this way go to the hospital so i got my car and i drove to walmart every medical center and i went to the er and i said i'm gonna kill myself so i put me under suicide watch and then uh had a doctor come in talk to me he's like you know it's a holiday like yeah by now it's like 2 a.m. on Christmas morning and he's like do you have guns at home like yeah a lot he's like do you have ammo for those guns a fuck ton he's like when you get home I want you to give those to your neighbor

go wake your neighbor up and give them your guns here's six Xanax don't take them all at the same time because it'll kill you but there's no point in checking you in because nobody will be able to see you until after the holiday anyway so just go home and come back after the holiday so I went home and I drank a bottle of vodka and I loaded a bread a nine millimeter and I put it to my temple and I pulled the trigger and it drank a bottle of vodka and i loaded a bread a nine millimeter and i put it to my temple and i pulled the trigger and it was a squib load meaning there was a manufacturing defect in the in the round meant that there was no gunpowder holy so which also is really weird when you hear a pop and you think you just killed yourself and you're like fuck it's all still here um and because it took a minute it took like a second to realize that like there was a problem and it didn't work that was one of five total since i got back um

one of five total attempts yeah i put a gun to my head twice uh and pulled the trigger the second time was a broken spring i tried to overdose and I've slit my wrist twice. But this was the first one? This was the first one. Christmas morning, 2006. My last one was November 3rd, 2013. So this is over a long period of time. So what, after that, and it didn't work,

what made you not reload the weapon and try again? Because my thought was, I can't even kill myself right. And at that point, I passed out. I had four attempts. And then I had a friend of mine introduce me to a thing called cannabis huh uh so at the age of 33 three years after i got back after four suicide attempts um i tried cannabis for the first time how was that uh it was fantastic um it's it it's a pretty funny story i i was single at the time. It was a longtime friend of mine who I hadn't seen in forever.

They're like, hey, do you want to go back to my place and smoke a bowl and hook up? My mind, I'm like, I want to hook up. And I've never tried weed, so this sounds like a fun day for me. But the thing that was interesting is, so I went and got high as hell and had a lot of fun. And the next day, I didn't think of killing myself for the first time in a while, like three years.

You were thinking about it every day? Every day. Even if I had a great day, it would pop into my head driving home. I should just hit the accelerator and slam into a wall. I mean, you had tried four times at that point, so it's not like you hadn't tried or anything that's a lot but every day for like three years yeah then you do math and you're like man all those days except for four of them you fought it off or like you just didn't do it or you didn't try there were so many times i'd stand on a bridge oh i thought about it i planned it constantly one of the ways i dealt with my

suicidal ideology was i'd plan it for the future i'd say okay july 4th that's my day and i'd plan the whole thing out exactly where how all of it were you thinking about death with it and what that meant or was it just i need to make whatever this is stop and so i want to make an event out of it um i knew death would stop it and i figured i didn't if if i'm gonna go out I'm gonna send a message to The people that come after you who are ignored like you were To the VA to the government right to everybody that this is a problem and people need help But it but it was literally every day. I was thinking of killing myself. Are you working during all this uh started when i first got back trying kept getting fired kept having problems um actually i got fired from a job because i went to the va instead of killing myself and they fired you for that for

not showing up yeah although i called beforehand i said hey i can't come to work today i'm not feeling well i need to go to the va they're like what's wrong i'm like i'm gonna hurt myself and i need to go talk to somebody and they fired you they're like go take care of it and then the doctor called them and said hey he's got a doctor's note he's he's off for two days and they're like okay so after the two days were up they call me up they're like hey that laptop you have we need to do some repair work on it so uh we need you to bring it in i did and that's when they fired me oh my god and part of it was their fear was i would lose my my my shit and hurt them or hurt other employees and that's something that like not every veteran has ptsd it's like i mean it's a high percentage

like 20 but that means 80 don't but there's a lot of employers who think they all do and that they're all going to go postal and so that's how you have a lot of employment issues it's gotta be amongst veterans this gotta be a better way to handle that and and so you know i used cannabis for five years and it was very helpful um it kept me away from actually committing suicide um you're still thinking about it though i was but you know when things got bad i'd go smoke a joint and go to sleep you know i also had a service dog who kept me alive on many occasions there was many many a time where i didn't jump off the bridge because i didn't know who would take care of her because my love for her was greater than my love for myself wow

it's a special dog it is and uh i had her for 14 and a half years and the good thing is she actually got to retire at about 10 years old and no longer be a service dog and just be a family pet and not a lot of service dogs get to do that um and i'll tell you it was hard and a lot of grief when she passed um and she passed in my arms at home it's kind of funny because she waited for for my kid to to go on a trip with my second wife um because we me and me and uh olivia had talked and like we knew it was coming we just didn't know when and you know one of her questions is hey if something happens when you're you know traveling to dc what do you want me to do and you know her her and joey were going on a trip to ohio and they were gone a few hours and she went but also I had

no idea I fully anticipated that I would have to be hospitalized when she passed because even though I went through the MDMA therapy and all of that and things were great I always had her as a crutch she was always in the background and having that um you know go away i i didn't know if it would break me it kept you alive as you said yeah and and you know what was the dog's name becky what kind of dog uh brittany spaniel her name was becky lubecki oh that's awesome and uh i actually uh in may of last year uh because she also passed, like, July of 2020 right now with COVID. So, but last year I got a Boykin Spaniel. And her name is Her Royal Highness Princess Rebecca II of Parker Riverside.

Becca for short um that's awesome because and she's a great dog definitely not a serious dog she just loves everybody awesome dog that works but i i could see a little bit of becky in her and in part because boykins have a little bit of britney spaniel in them but you know and it's really weird because you know becky spent her life taking care of me and now you know i get to just take care of this little pup oh she's awesome awesome man that's such a good way to look at it too and thank god becky was there oh i i wouldn't be alive if if it weren't for her yeah people that don't dogs are just unbelievably special creatures man and like that you know they say man's best friend they don't say that enough it is the truest thing ever and it's like

you know they're here for such a short time in the context of how long we can live but you know whether it's a service dog who they do amazing work seeing eye dog stuff like that or just you know the dog who's the family dog who loves you there's there's nothing quite like that and to see the context of a very full story that you have here years and years and years between first going into the military going into the marines and then eventually even the army and everything getting back being alone you know your wife leaves you, which that whole thing is crazy that that happened right when you were coming back too. And then dealing with all these things and you have an animal there and nothing else. You're losing these jobs because people don't understand.

You're going through all these attempts to kill yourself. You're planning it out, all this stuff, but the dog is the thing that you have such a love for that it still gives it still gave a meaning to the world even if it didn't give meaning to you becky gave a meaning to the world because you were afraid of what would happen if you weren't here yeah and now it's come full circle and we're going to get into everything as to why but like it's come full circle that luckily you do love life and and have a great life now and everything and and that legacy of of your dog is is really one of the driving things it sounds like that that was behind that it's so cool man that and and you know one of the things that i talk

about a lot is there's a lot of people who have ptsd and they use it as an excuse to be a shitty human and i get the underlying psychology on that but also you know if if you have ptsd if you have a problem even even you know when i was contemplating suicide every day i i worked and i tried to get better um you know i tried whatever they wanted me to try they're like this will work and it never did um But were you conscious of how you were with other people or was were? You constantly living outside yourself a little bit. Um It kind of depended on the moment. There were times where like I'd flip my shit and everything seemed rational and later I'm like, oh wow Um, and sometimes like even in the moment I'd

be like oh wow um you know and there was a lot of stuff like if I saw somebody in specifically in traditional Muslim garb with a backpack I would literally cross the street um I would avoid them you know at all costs because I saw them as a threat my body reacted to that person no matter how innocent and and and perfectly wonderful human being I'm sure they were and I knew that in my brain you did while it was happening yes I would literally tell myself that person is perfectly fine and normal there this is not a threat but my body reacted and the only way to make that panic attack go away was to remove myself from that situation and create

distance and you know and it was weird because like be walking down the street with you know wife and kid and we all have to cross the street for you know because i'm freaking out um you know crowds things like that didn't help um and you know the auditory hallucinations were kind of weird where you hear things that really aren't there i'd see smoke that wasn't there which was kind of weird too um but you know i i used that cannabis to help for five years and then i met my second wife um who lived in south carolina so you were single you were single for like a big chunk of that wow yeah because having a relationship is kind of yeah yeah i figured but you were saying you were

talking about the second wife i wasn't sure when that happened so uh and and i moved down to south carolina and the problem was you know she had my now steps on um and she was afraid that if i got caught with weed in south carolina where it's really illegal like they keep getting sued for doing body cavity searches on black people on the side of the road in South Carolina in South Carolina yeah um so it weed is super illegal there um and her still yeah very come on so uh her fear was that if I got caught with cannabis that her ex-husband would try to take her kid away total very reasonable logic very fair yeah you know so i stopped so i stopped smoking cannabis what year is that that would be 2013. uh january 2013 to be specific and i i went back to the va they had me on at 1.42 pills a day 42 what kind of pills i sent you the list like

and it was crazy because they had me on five different pills because I had a quarter-sized herniation in my uh back that they I was awaiting surgery on and they didn't want to prescribe me opiates so they gave me like five weird things as painkillers that interacted with each other. And then they interacted with my mental health meds and et cetera, et cetera, to the point where I would literally just pass out. And,

you know, it was a concern because at one point I was driving and I literally all barely got off the side of the road to off the road to stop before I passed out. And so like that wasn't working and they were cycling me through multiple meds without tapers tapers can you explain that so with a lot of ssris and mental health meds there's a thing called a taper which is you have to build up slowly and you have to come off them slowly uh you know i ssris totally suck i get why people hate them stopping them cold turkey is very

dangerous and that's for people out there that's like prozac yeah prozac zoloft is huge in the va um but that actually caused my brain to go haywire i'm sure and so november 42 pills yeah so within a while within 11 months of stopping to use cannabis i had another suicide attempt and slipped my wrists and this is one of the things about cannabis it is great it is palliative it is not a cure right it's a mask as soon as you know it doesn't deal with any of the underlying issues it only Matt you know it mitigates the symptoms and it is very good at that um but how often were you smoking like how many times a day Oh all day so you were just in a constant state of like solid high nah I wouldn't say that because what I preferred was

like a vape cartridge so i'd self titrate and and not be super stoned all day but yeah i was buzzed all the time um and you know sometimes if things got bad yeah i'd smoke like a whole joint and could you know and i also knew and this is where it was interesting and i always kind of wondered if it if i could have managed things better if it was legal under a medical program because I was in North Carolina where it was also illegal. So, you know, I didn't get to pick strains. I didn't get to pick Indica or Sativa. I got what a dude had in a bag in a parking lot.

So, you know, when I could, Indica knocks me out. Like, Indica in the couch. Completely. Yeah, same, same. And so I would have Indica, and if things got really bad, I'd smoke an Indica joint and literally just go to bed. When you say that's the second time you did that, so what would be the context if things got bad?

Like, were you still, in 2013 what were you still in 2013 were you still constantly having these i see smoke where there's not smoke type hallucinations that was still all going on all that was going on um and actually the cannabis didn't really help with that part um but it did keep it did lower anxiety it helped reduce panic attacks um so it kept you calm when you would see that basically yeah it kept me calm and it kept me like on this side of an actual suicide attempt and when i say things get bad it's i'm gonna jump off a bridge um but is there a specific trigger that would lead to that like if i had to go do something in a giant crowd and there was a lot a lot of it

So another weird thing is black socks Black socks, so somebody wearing black socks in a suit is fine. Somebody wearing black socks and like athletic shorts and a t-shirt I Could think of a few people that did that sure so that is a very like Not American thing people people in Europe people in the middle east do that quite a bit in part because you know we're a pretty wealthy country so we can have all these different colored socks and all this stuff and you know if you live in iraq you may only have three pairs and so the idea of oh i'm changing my i'm going from dress shoes to you know tennis shoes i should change from black socks to white socks or something like that this just doesn't happen um so we were

wearing them like i remember we would wear the high top black like nike socks with basketball shoes like to play basketball so you're talking about like when you would see that i guess um that that was part of it but it was more like just i mean i don't like go play basketball so i didn't really see that um but no like if if if i was at universal studios and there's a guy in line in front of me who had you know dark skin and was wearing black socks and tennis shoes there it would freak me out um you know gunfire, fireworks. I mean, South Carolina on the 4th of July is worse than Mortaritaville. I mean, you have people who make pipe bombs all year.

Just set them off on the 4th of July. And actually, 2013, 4th of July in South Carolina was sitting in a house. Sorry, this was 2014 um was it was the entire neighborhood was was going off with fireworks so much my house was literally shaking um and I was in the walk-in closet in body armor with my service dog thinking i was in a bunker in iraq um i saw you talk about this one and particularly with the psychiatrist during some of the tapes of your sessions so was that like was this literally right before you did that then because you did you started in 2014 right yeah so i took so i, taking one small step back, I came back, I came off orders from Iraq November 22nd of 2006. I took my first dose of MDMA November 22nd, 2014.

So when this July 4th event was happening, did you know you were going to be in that trial at this point? I'm just curious. No, I don't believe so i i mean i it was a possibility but i believe i just had like maybe the intro call with them got it so it's every the point is you're off cannabis everything is in full swing and all these different triggers are happening we probably go it sounds like we go through a lot of them if we oh yeah we wanted to but the bottom line is like things are not good so when did that i would also get triggered and not have any clue why like with what kinds of things i don't know that's the that's the

point i could literally just be walking down the street and lose my shit and not even realize know what triggered it but it wouldn't be like i'm just gonna make something up it wouldn't be something specific that you don't know why. It's like if someone's like cutting an apple and you don't know why that's triggering you, but it would be the same thing every time like someone's cutting an apple. No, these were times where like I would get triggered, but for no discernible reason. Just out of nowhere. Right. Okay.

And I do understand how weird things can be kind of triggering. So, for example, my son actually now has ptsd oh he almost died on a cruise ship jesus and he had to be medevaced by the coast guard on a helicopter what happened uh he had an internal gi bleed and lost 50 of his blood supply in about an hour holy shit yeah i thought he died in my arms where was it it was on a cruise but where uh off the coast of the bahamas what did he get like hit or something like internal bleeding type deal and he didn't know so so so without getting too much into his medical medical history um what happened was uh he has suffered from migraine headaches and uh doctors said hey just give him ibuprofen or Tylenol.

And it literally ate a hole through his stomach. Holy shit. He knows what he's saying and says. Holy shit. That's scary. Yeah. So now he has PTSD. And so one of his big triggers is flying.

Like, not just flying on helicopters, but helicopters but like even on a regular airplane because he's being he remembers i guess the whole well and and it's it's it's kind of funny because you know uh olivia thought who's now my second ex-wife but um uh you know she's like well he's just scared of flying and i'm like it's not that he's scared of flying explaining how planes work isn't gonna solve this this is he's being triggered and it's taking him back to when he when he almost died um and i will say mad props to the coast guard crew um they flew through a storm twice, once to come get Joey and then once to get him to the hospital in Miami. And the Coast Guard, and actually part of the reason the Coast Guard came out is because nobody else would. So I called a politician and they got me a helicopter.

That's amazing. amazing Wow when was that oh that would have been 2019. okay so and you were obviously you said you almost died in your arms you were right there experiencing Alice okay oh I've had a lot of a lot of stuff happen actually since I went through MDMA therapy I had a a gentleman drowned in the lake behind my house dove in pulled him out did CPR on him for like 20 minutes until EMS arrived. There was a shooting on Hanover Street in Charleston. I ran towards that, did CPR on the gunshot victim. Neither of them survived and died in my arms.

Just this past Memorial Day, I saw a guy who was on a pedal bike get hit by an F-250 coming off Folly Beach. Stopped to help him. Fortunately, he made it, at least to my knowledge. Wow. So, yeah, I've had those things happen. And actually, I still don't have PTSD. Also, over the past five months, I've gone to Moldova, Romania, Poland, and Ukraine on humanitarian support missions. You were in Ukraine.

All right. We'll get to that later because I don't want to lose this i'll be on that all day we'll get to ukraine but when did so you've said it you did the first treatment in 2014 when did it come on your radar that this was a possibility that you could treat ptsd with mdma so uh when i was hospitalized um to be released you have to have a suicide prevention plan. And one of the things that I asked for, actually, the only thing I asked for of all the things I asked for, this was the only thing the VA actually did. And that was I said, I need weekly counseling. I need to see someone for an hour at least once a week. You said that?

Yes. Good for you. And they're like okay um and that the my my psychiatrist who was the head of mental health for the charleston va actually did a fantastic job um that's not the same one who ended up no okay got it um you know she and she came i went there for for an appointment appointment sometime in 2014, and something was going on on the inpatient floor. And she comes down, she's like, hey, I got this, something going on, I need to take care of it. If you need meds, you know, you can sit with my intern and I'll put them in and you can pick them up when you leave.

Because you have to be seen for me to renew the prescription. I just want to be clear on timeline, too too so that i understand and everyone out there following you would say you went off cannabis in january 2013 right and then you went you attempted to commit suicide by slit in your ribs in november 2013 correct right okay so that's when you were hospitalized that's what you're talking about and when you went to leave that's when you asked for and asked for weekly therapy and then and then i got and then i got weekly therapy and they're actually really good about it but this one week in early 2014 she came down and she's like hey i gotta take care of this she's like we can either just do next week or i can see if i can schedule you later in the week or you know sit with the intern and in the meds i'm like all right

cool i'll sit with the intern i'll pick my meds up and then you know talk to you next week she's like very cool go sit down with the intern and I'm glad I made that choice you know part of it was at the time and take about an hour and a half to find a parking space in the Charleston VA and I had already invested a lot of time I wasn't just gonna go home but she slid this piece of paper full piece of paper across the desk that was folded in half and said don't open this until you leave because i'm not supposed to tell you about this and i'm like is this a phone number or like what's going on here and i open it up and it says google mdma ptsd wow and so i did and I'm like, well, this is cool. And where did things stand at the time?

Was that a thing yet for veterans, or was it the earliest permutations of the trials? So it was a phase two trial. Okay. And interestingly enough, it was going on in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, just across the bridge. Opened to anybody. So I called them, and I was like, not open to anybody. so this so so i called them and i was like hey not open to anybody there was a clinical trial so that's what i would have thought yeah but and so i called them and i'm like hey i'm kind of crazy and they're like what do you mean and i explain it they're like oh okay

cool you're kind of you're kind of crazy um went in and talked with them and and and you know passed all the interviews did did a full physical I mean it's clinical trials there's a whole bunch of weird FDA stuff did it did a full psyche eval and all that and was accepted as the 26th person in a 25 person study featuring veterans and first responders the reason they expanded it is because two people did not finish and dropped out of the trial because they they felt that they had completely healed after one or two doses and did not need the third second or third dose so there was room for one more and that was me and

the door slammed behind me wow that was some fate right there yeah and this was i'm going to mispronounce her name if i try but it was the husband and wife yeah and michael and annie mithoff okay so that it was really cool because they're recording all this for the study purposes yeah so if you're in a clinical trial 100 of the stuff's recorded on multiple cameras um and and one of the things that's used for is compliance to ensure that they're actually right following the protocol that like there's nothing untoward going on etc etc so they this was all what was featured in michael pollan's new documentary on netflix in episode three called How to Change Your Mind. It is fantastic.

Everyone should watch it. And he wrote a book of the same name. So this was a follow-up to that. take an MDMA, trip and pause, but have an unbelievably revelatory, basically regular sessions with them, except you're on MDMA, talking through all your experience and everything. And then you were great in it, by the way, like going through and explaining things now and what your perspective is. It's like doing therapy while being hugged by everyone who loves you in a bathtub full of puppies licking your face.

You didn't say that in the documentary, so I'm glad we got that here that's great so you get connected with these two they had from what it looks like in the documentary and what they said they had been working on potential treatments or ideas around mdma for a long time right so MDMA was originally invented in the early 1900s by Merck pharmaceutical it was one of the many steps along the way they were trying to get the styptic effect out of mescaline um blood coagulation to stop bleeding but they put it on the shelf right yeah they put it on the shelf because like i mean okay yeah somebody gets injured on the battlefield or something you can't give them mdma to make them stop bleeding there's way better solutions um so it got put on the shelf it got

rediscovered uh by uh sasha shulgin um in the 50s might have been late 40s um and they started using it for therapy and it was used for therapy but like a lot of of things it escaped the lab it escaped the therapist's office and people started doing it at raves and in the early 80s there was a big spate of a bunch of rich white kids who went to raves and died um because they didn't practice proper harm reduction um proper what harm reduction so they didn't hydrate they didn't like take care of themselves yep yep um and they overheated and and and all of that and so uh the dea proposed rescheduling mdma to schedule one and this is right in the heart of like when

they were starting the war on drugs and all that well like 84 85 85 but the war on drugs was started by nixon so in the 70s so so the controlled substances act had already passed marijuana all that was all illegal mdma was added later wait am i totally blanking right here i always thought of the war on drugs and i've talked about on this podcast before so maybe i got this wrong every time i thought the war on drugs was basically started by reagan nixon nixon started it like did he use the words war on drugs uh yeah really well yeah nixon realized he couldn't go arrest hippies and black people who were causing problems so he he made weed and heroin and psychedelics and other things illegal so he could arrest the things that they used

that's why the drug war was started and so it was ramped up by reagan and much more so um by uh h.w bush uh you know who infamously went and bought crack across from the White House. Wait, H.W. Bush bought crack across from the White House? Well, okay, they had an undercover DEA agent go buy crack across the street from the White House, and then he held a press conference. From the Oval Office, he held up a bag of crack.

It's the funniest thing in the world to watch. I do have to watch that. But also, you know... Wait, is there this is a this is bush one you're saying yes george hw bush crack white house press conference that dealer was sitting at home going hit the jackpot and it was like a giant bag too. Oh, it's not there. I typed in HW too. Type in George Bush, Oval Office, Bag of Crack.

Let's see what happens. George HW Bush, Oval Office, Bag of Crack. oval office bag of crack. Oh my god, we got it. Alright, hold on. Stick it on mute for a sec. Let's find the spot. It's a longer video. It's called 1989 Throwback George Bush holds huge bag of crack cocaine.

All right, here we go. Shit. Here we go. It's behind you. Tonight I'll tell you how many Americans are using illegal drugs. I will present to you our national strategy to deal with every aspect of this threat. And I will ask you to get involved in what promises to be a very difficult fight. This, this is crack cocaine seized a few days ago by drug enforcement agents in a park just across the street from the White House.

That's a big bag of crack i never saw that it's i love learning random shit on here that i've never heard of that's amazing but uh but but no so the dea proposed making mdma schedule one and then uh they were sued administrative law judge um came down and said it should be scheduled but it definitely has therapeutic value and and should not be schedule one so schedule two schedule three somewhere around there da said yeah no used emergency scheduling authority and made it illegal anyway on july 1st 1985 in 1986 rick doblin started maps the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies to take mdma through the fda process he's been working on this

like his entire adult life yeah 36 years it's amazing 36 years to get where we are right now which is hopefully a year or two away from fda approval for medicinal use under the supervision of a psychiatrist yes okay now the good thing is he broke down a lot of walls and literally wrote the manual on how to take schedule one narcotics through the FDA model um which is why you see now psilocybin and some of these other drugs going through the same model and they they won't take 36 years those will will be a lot quicker but you know hey you got w holding a giant bag of crack but also let's not forget clinton ramped up the drug war too i mean our the current president joe biden is the author of the rave act you know uh i'm not familiar with that he banned raves and all this because MDMA was such a dangerous drug.

He stood on the Senate floor and talked about how MDMA was so dangerous it should never even be researched. And six days later, he voted to send me to Iraq. You know, and this is where it's frustrating for me because, you know, Hunter Biden. No, no, no. This isn't going to go anywhere where you think it will no no i'm sorry no it's fine oh but hunter biden you know we're all aware of some of his issues yeah um and you know what i have an enormous amount of empathy for hunter because he was in the car when his mother and sister died yeah and was that's everything that we've seen in the

pictures and the addiction issues he has faced um you know that is a manifestation of ptsd and what happened to him as a very young child and i have the utmost empathy and compassion because i know how that happens very personally it's happened to me it's happened to friends of mine and he went down to mexico and he did ibogaine treatment hunter did hunter did when was this 2019. can you explain ibogaine treatment to people out there who don't know what that is i will do the best i can um it's something yeah uh so ibogaine treatment to people out there who don't know what that is? I will do the best I can. It's something. High level. Yeah.

So Ibogaine is a West African root that has a psychedelic effect that is highly effective in helping with PTSD, TBI, and addiction. In particular, it's highly effective with opiate use disorder. And so he went down to Mexico and did Ibogaine therapy as a matter of fact there's an organization of vets veterans exploring treatment solutions that does the same thing would they provide grants to operators and others so Navy SEALs special forces to go to Peru Mexico other places to do Ibogaine therapy the same type of therapy that hunter did, in part because it works. And because we're not doing it here because we still have all these bells and whistles blocking the way.

Exactly. And so, you know, Hunter Biden went down and that's why you haven't, you know, this is why he's painting now. You haven't seen any pictures of him with a crack pipe since 2019. My understanding is he actually has recovered very well from his addiction and no longer has those issues, which means the president of the United States knows it works. And 50,000 veterans committed suicide while Joe Biden was vice president. 22 a day since he's become president. He knows it works he with a stroke of a pen could fix a lot of this but he's an old school drug warrior he he fired one of his first acts as president was firing people for weed really i didn't even know that oh yeah he he so so

they told people to be honest about their weed consumption for their clearances. They were told, look, you can't smoke it anymore, but you got to be honest and you'll be fine. So they did. And Joe Biden was given a choice that either he could change the rules for everyone or he could fire the people the people who admitted it because everyone else fucking smokes it right and so he that was one of his first acts he's already said he won't do anything with cannabis till 2024 why it has total like these these are issues that are not difficult as far as like public polling goes there's republicans who are hardcore behind this now the interesting thing when it comes to on the policy side it's not a left-right thing it's an old young thing and a lot of the people who grew up in the dear generation you know and you know what i get it we now all know why joe biden's been so anti-drug because he saw addiction to destroy his son and and i can understand that but also he's gotta you know he he should also understand that he sent his son to mexico to do ibogaine therapy and it worked and i'm ecstatic for hunter biden

i'm glad he got better i don't want anybody who suffers from addiction issues or has ptsd or is suffering in any way to suffer and if they can find what can help them fantastic yeah i haven't heard anything about this that he got i beginning i gotta look into that well and it's funny there there was a recording that that the right-wing media has been talking about of hunter that is a very accurate recording. And it says along the lines of, you know, my father listens to me.

He does, he does what I say on these things. And they were implying that it had to do with, you know, with business transactions. He was actually referring to addiction, him talking to his father about addiction. If you actually,

how do you know that? I don't know what one you're talking about either um so so everybody would play this short clip if you go and find the source clip that's longer you can hear the whole conversation he's entirely talking about addiction oh that's interesting so so hunter is actually trying to push his father to do more on addiction services and things like that um coming from a place of knowledge the same kind of knowledge that that i have this works i can and i know it works because it worked for me so it can if i'm not that special i mean i'm sure hunter thinks he's special but i'm not that special you know millions of veterans have the same story i do yeah the difference is i did mdma three times and it didn't work yeah and so you know it's not just republicans it's not just nixon and reagan

like clinton did it and and i believe clinton's brother smoked weed on the roof of the white house which i totally don't blame him if i could smoke a joint i mean i don't blame him like i really don't bill clinton's brother i think bill clinton was up there with him and i don't have a pro you know i'll be honest like there's a lot of presidents that have needed some psychedelic therapy there's a lot of presidents who probably would have benefited after a hard day you know going up to the roof or walking out into the rose garden and smoking a bowl you know probably did a lot of them yeah but not all of them but and all of you know when it comes to cannabis any president can legalize it you know it's it's really kind of funny there were

two distinct opportunities uh in the last administration to legalize weed in the united states and they were both entirely blocked by democrats why what what were the two opportunities i didn't know about this so one was uh cory gardner uh out of colorado yeah struck a deal got trump's approval got republican approval got and everything for the states act which would have legalized cannabis in states that choose to legalize it um would have fixed the banking issues would have fixed a whole bunch of stuff so basically south carolina which wants to to still make it illegal can make it illegal if they want just like in I believe it's Alabama still has dry counties and you cannot purchase alcohol um but on the federal level it would have been legalized so that you're saying that would supersede yes so so here's the thing no one would ever be federally prosecuted for anything involving

cannabis from that point forward but there could still be some state prosecutions in states that would make it illegal but like south carolina keeps it illegal and doesn't even have a medical problem or program because their response is well the federal government says it's illegal there's nothing we can do which is funny because south carolina is like the the the og states rights will go to war if the federal government tells us what to do um they've already done it once back in 1860 yeah i forgot about that one so uh which fun fact my alma mater the citadel fired the first shots of the civil war yes the civil war was started by a bunch of college kids go figure wow um that that seems uh but but wow so a lot of states a lot of people would feel more comfortable if it

was federally legal and and it would also fix the problem where we have like what 30 43 states something like that there's only a handful that don't even have medical now and it it would fix a lot of problems why did the democrats block block that? That seems also counterintuitive to what they stand for. What did they say or... Yeah, what did they say or what was the real reason? It didn't go far enough. So therefore, do more or nothing. And the truth is, Democrats have been fighting for cannabis since the 70s.

Yeah. It's their issue and they weren't going to give trump the win it's the same it's the same reason why the vote on the moore act was moved in the house till after the election because there was a fear that if the house passed a legalization bill mitch mcconnell would pass it under trump's orders in october before the election and that was the second one that was the second one and then you saw this recent one that's not cannabis with the burn pits where it's the other way around where suddenly you know it had all the support for a long time and then suddenly they're like no we're not going to do this oh and this is this is the crazy part now it's republicans on democrats yeah republicans did a bunch of stupid you know what happened was

they they had a deal with joe manchin on the chips act and reconciliation and manchin changed his mind on reconciliation for the bill that just passed yesterday um the uh inflation reduction act which is a hilarious name but so they threw a temper tantrum and it could have been any bill but it happened to be the pact act it happened to be about toxic exposure and veterans and it was wrong they shouldn't have done it like if you want to play those kind of games play it on a different bill sure like play it on a tax bill play it on a budget bill play it on something like that not on this um especially if you already voted for it like rand paul he's voted no the whole way okay at least he's consistent yeah but don't vote for it

then vote no then vote for it a couple days later but so dirty man they always throw like these sides always throw something in there you know and that's probably you know there's the ones that are clear political win base like what you're talking about for sure yep and then there's also bills where you know if i'm there's a poison pill yeah if i'm a republican and i'm making one up right now but if i'm a republican and i want harder restrictions on abortions and then i toss it into a bill that's about a tax plan and then they say oh look they voted down the tax plan or whatever you know well that's why they voted it down because something else got put in there and then that's not it's all marketing it's all marketing well and this is the funny thing because like you know we saw john stewart yelling into microphones or protests at the

capitol you know and everybody was was vilifying the republicans and i'll tell you republicans are just plain stupid for fist bumping on the senate floor but i was dumb you know it's funny burn pits aren't a new issue they've been an issue for 22 years can you tell people what burn pits are out there yeah so so when the u.s government decides to invade a country um we can't like use their their trash people to take care of our trash so we create giant burn pits and we put everything, every piece of waste, food products, toilet paper, blown up Humvees, body parts, you name it. Everything goes into the burn pit and it burns 24-7. The one on the base I was on, I believe, was 10 acres. You're breathing that in?

For a year. You know, I was just down in North Carolina uh at that change Command Ceremony and you know it's funny all of us that deployed together we're all standing in a circle you know jaw jacking like we used to and we've all got this dry cough it goes from one to the other and I'm like hey look burn pits but you, it's funny, because those same things to help vets with burn pits were also filibuster for four years. And nobody bat an eye. I didn't see Jon Stewart yelling at anybody. He was out there saying hashtag resist vote

against everything. So nobody bats an eye at that. You know, I give a lot of respect to IVA and Tom Porter, their VP governmental affairs, IVAVA and some of these orgs that have been pushing for toxic burn pits. They've been doing it for 10 years. They don't care who's president. They don't care who controls the Senate. They don't care who controls the house.

It's about this is a problem. We've got solutions. Let's get the solutions to the people who need them. And you constantly see this this this left and right and it's also kind of funny where you know again Jon Stewart got a ton of publicity a bunch of people are probably going to listen to his podcast and all that because of what he did and yeah he was fighting for vets and that's a good thing he has fought like he has fought on these issues though a lot but it's really funny if you look at the

issues that he when he chooses to fight and that when he chooses to fight is when he gets to fight against republicans that's probably right you know how about this burn pit legislation you're right and it's going to help a lot of veterans. 22 veterans a day are killing themselves. MDMA-assisted therapy, phase three trial shows 67% of people no longer have PTSD. An additional 21% have a massive reduction in symptoms. The president of the United States currently knows because his son went and did it. Where's Jon Stewart? Why isn't he calling for this?

Why isn't he on the Capitol steps? Is he aware? Does he have education on it? You want to tell me Jon Stewart doesn't know about for this? Why isn't he on the Capitol steps? Is he aware? Does he have education on it? You want to tell me Jon Stewart doesn't know about psychedelics? Come on. I'm not saying he doesn't know about that, but I'm saying, like, is this an issue that he's looked at? And is there a way that we can – I'll bet if you took this issue to Jon Stewart right now, I'll bet he'd do something about it. I've emailed his people.

All right. Well, let's make that happen. I'd love to. I'd love to talk to him about it. I've emailed his people. All right, well, let's make that happen. I'd love to talk to him about it because here's the thing. You need people like that. You need people to push the issue, and I am more than willing to be proved wrong by Jon Stewart. But there's things that veterans need, and I'm going to tell you one of the biggest issues facing veterans is the PTSDtsd epidemic

and it's and it affects and infests everything um you know it's more than just how much dod spends on treatment it's more than what the va spends on treatment it's more than what va pays in compensation which is in the hundred the 100 billion dollars just for for PTSD, you know, it affects families. Yeah. You know, it's things like most operators get out at 15 years. Why? Because they can't make it to 20. So they don't get their retirement.

They don't get anything. They don't even get health benefits. It is amazing how poorly,'s this has been a theme for a long long time but how poorly we take care of our veterans in this country i don't understand it it is something i would happily if they said hey we're gonna add i don't know i don't even know what it would take five tenths of a percent to your taxes every year and it's going to that fuck yeah sign me up it's not a difficult issue well and and the funny thing is you know after vietnam you had veterans spit on and then they did nothing to help them here we get parades and we get handshakes and we're

thanked for our service and then they do nothing right they just changed the wrapping paper still same shitty gift and you know well it's because that makes them feel better. I got to throw a parade. I got to do this. Oh, wait. I own a small business. That guy, that vet seems a little weird. He might have PTSD.

I'm not going to hire him. And here's another thing, too. That aside, we're putting so much of it on regular joe blows in the private sector to then have to carry the whole responsibility and maybe they're not smart enough to do that maybe they're not thinking enough about the responsibility that is to veterans we don't put enough of our public resources on for example actually making our vas effective you know giving giving veterans resources that are beyond just like hey we'll help you get your first job then go yourself you know like this

it starts at the it starts at the steps back and i it's but here this is not you i hear this from in a different way from every veteran too so i'm i it's not surprising to hear and that makes me sad but but here's the other thing. What is the root cause of all of those issues? So you're so you have in the answer is physical and mental injuries, physical injuries, they do the best they can. And actually, the VA has has a pretty decent record. They're overwhelmed, and have too many people, but some of the it, if it weren't for the VA, we wouldn't have the

advancements in prosthetics that we have and there's a lot of treatments for physical injuries that have come out of the va um and they do good work mental injuries is a different story and they try but some of the best things to help heal mental injuries are still off the table. And that's the problem. And so you know, veteran homelessness, how much do you think mental health is involved in that 1000% addiction issues amongst veterans being able to hold a job, like we can go through almost every issue and it can be tied to one of

those two things physical or mental injuries. Now part of of the problem is we treat mental injuries and physical injuries different if you have a physical injury you get a purple heart you're treated as a hero everything you have a mental injury well you're just crazy and a lot and and i'm glad the military has come a long way since 0506 when it was well you were crazy before you came in it It's not our fault. Do you remember the Ray Rice video in 2014? The elevator? Yep. Where he beat the shit out of his wife? Yep. Do you remember

what happened right before that video came out? I don't. He was suspended for six games. I remember he was suspended for six games. Suspended for six games and people said, well, that's really bad he did it. He was getting judged, but he's going to come back after six games, and people were going to move on.

And by the way, Ray Rice is a guy who, to his credit, has taken full responsibility for that and done a lot of work around that and is married to that woman today, think what you will of that, and had never done anything wrong in his life that we know of before that. So this was an awful incident, and it ruined his life because he never played again and the reason he never played again is because we got a video leak then people were suddenly like i can't believe this he needs to be he needs to be banned forever and no team ever signed him and

i'm not saying that's the wrong thing i'm saying that's what it took for us to do it and it's just one example of many that i could do across our history in this country. Deshaun Watson plays for the Cleveland Browns, my home team. You know, it's funny. And he got a six-game suspension as well. For now. But, you know, if you place a bet on a game you're not even involved in and don't play on, you'll get suspended for a year because that messes with the NFL's money.

Right. And that's why Ray Rice didn't play on you'll get suspended for a year because that messes with the nfl's money right and that's why they they didn't why ray rice didn't play again but now imagine let's use that example too imagine if there were video of these accusations that deshaun watson had done he'd never play again because people would see it and so the point is mental injuries we can't see yep when someone comes home and they have they have two prosthetics and half their face is blown off we can see that yep we can see that and we're like oh wow what do we got to do to help that but someone's you know just walking in a grocery store and in their minds a war but you're just walking down aisle fucking five you can't see that so no one does anything about it how about this you have a guy who has you know has a prosthetic burn face all of that and he walks into grocery

store and and like say he slips and falls okay because of his prosthetic um people are gonna rush over and help him mm-hmm and all of this now let's imagine somebody with ptsd and some a can or something a glass bottle falls from a top shelf makes a huge loud bang and the dude just collapses in a ball of tears how do you think he's going to get treated people are going to be real confused some people would help them but it's not i understand what you're saying it's not the same people a lot of people would make fun of them guarantee you people would probably pull out a camera you know spilling over spilled spaghetti you know what have you and a lot of that is you can't see it yeah and so and one of the other things is you know we have told people for forever that ptsd shell shock, whatever you want to call it,

is a chronic mental health condition that once acquired as your new normal, we can do some things to mitigate symptoms, but this is your life now. And they wonder why people put a bullet in their brain. These are mental injuries. The U.S. government will spend millions of dollars for a soldier who gets shot to heal them and get them as good as they can. You get kicked out if you have PTSD. And this is why, you know, on the I'm really proud of Dan Crenshaw for putting that bill in.

Yeah, as a veteran. He understands these are mental injuries. He's been through a lot, and the federal government has spent a lot to get him where he is. And he's still missing an eye, et cetera. And he still has several issues. But anytime there's an issue, he goes and he can get help. And he wants to make sure that mental injuries are treated the same way. You know, and a lot of it is just realizing that that's what it is.

You know, PTSD is like a gunshot wound. The only difference is instead of going and fixing it and stitching it up and all all of that they just wipe away the blood and they're like it'll be fine you know I don't know any commander who's gonna accuse somebody with a broken leg of malingering and you know there's a lot of bad leadership when it comes to PTSD in the military. But also, you know, the military is where it needs to happen for veterans, because the idea that, hey, you can no longer serve because you have PTSD. And you have to get kicked out at 18 years, two years before your retirement check kicks in. But the VA will take care of you. And then you go to the VA and you do say mdma

assisted therapy and you're perfectly fine why'd you have to get out my ultimate goal would be for everyone to be healed while they're in service and never have to go to mental health at the va because if you're traumatized if you have have PTSD, you should be given an opportunity to heal. And the fact that the United States military is not currently doing that, they're leaving people behind. Something we say we don't do in this country. We do it all the time. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

But you, I mean, eventually, thank God, you know, you were able to get yourself in this opportunity, which you had to do yourself, and you had to get into a clinical trial. But you get in with these two doctors, the husband and wife, who had been working in this for years and years trying to do research. And now I guess they – as psychiatrists, they had – they were given the responsibility of handling, I guess, parts of the study, right? Yeah. The overall study. Okay. So you get in with them in 2014. It was three sessions total, 2013 and 2015? I'm sorry, 2014 and 2015? Correct. So I took my first dose. It was the week of Thanksgiving, which was November 22nd, because I was going to the

Citadel as a Veteran Day student at the time. So I kind of worked my sessions in when I knew I wouldn't have school for a while. And so that was my first one. I did the second one right after the first of the year and the third one in February or March. It was somewhere around there. Okay. So when you got into the study, did you have some pre-meetings and pre-sessions with the two doctors before you did any of this? Well, so there's all the sessions that are like qualifications for the trial and like informed consent and that stuff, which is all FDA stuff. And then there's – you do do therapy sessions beforehand and a lot of that is so they know what's going on and and stuff like that so they better know how to guide you um then you do

an active session and then you do three integration sessions after each active session the active session is when you take it correct the integration is you're saying it's a later one it's a 90 minute regular talk therapy session no mdma or anything right to follow up what you had done and that's the mdma protocol uh psilocybin protocols ketamine and ibogaine are different um i'm more versed in the mdma ones got it okay so we'll we'll go with mdma just to go through like the exacts on some of this stuff then so it's also the one i did right right so and it worked so we we got it well they all work and they all work for different things um and and i think that's going to be one of the more interesting things as research goes on is eventually we're going to have you know a

cornucopia of different things that help some help better than others like i happen to personally think mdma is very is perfectly suited for ptsd in particular because of how it manifests itself um that is exclusively what they use mostly for correct oh well no they they can also use ibogaine i also know people who you right know people who use psilocybin and other things. I was thinking about, I'm sorry, I was thinking about versus psilocybin, but you do know some people who are using psilocybin for PTSD? Yes. I know people who have done psilocybin-assisted therapy with the intention of healing PTSD, and it was highly effective for them. That was also not as part of a clinical trial that was on the underground um they all work to an extent on on on like these different acquired mental injuries um

but some work better than others like for example psilocybin is really great for depression right mdma i mean long term is in while being associated with PTSD, it's effective, but as a standalone, I don't know, because the research hasn't been done. And this is where, you know, we can find out what is the best thing, you know, it, because in the future, I'd love it for people to be able to walk into a clinic and sit down and say, Hey, this is the problem I'm having.

And they're like, well, okay, this is what you need. And that could be, hey, it's psilocybin. Hey, it's Ibogaine. Hey, it's Ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT. Or it's MDMA followed by a psilocybin session. Once we do the research, we'll know the best way to do it. And the truth is different people need different things and different things work differently on different people so for example

the MDMA therapy the maps phase three results uh 12 of people it didn't work on so those people still need help and this is why you know there's a lot of people who are like no it's got to be psilocybin or it's got to be this or it's got to be no you know what i i i know somebody uh who who's doing you know sbg the subganglial blog uh the neck injection thing and uh that's highly effective for them i know somebody else who's doing that in addition to doing ketamine assisted therapy what do they put in the neck injection i have no idea how this works it's something that hits something that turns off ptsd in the brain for a couple of months it's sbg subganglial block wow um gotta look into that yeah and for some people hyperbaric therapy works for some people you know what yoga and tai chi works others you know going to church works this is why we need a cornucopia of solutions mmm and depending on severity and the individual and what they're comfortable with you know they can get the help they need so with

you you were one of 88% where I was effective and you were one of the 67 it was right where it worked so completely interestingly enough uh i still technically had ptsd at the 12-month follow-up um but i've gotten better since then now but it was a lot i was in the 21 that had a massive reduction in symptoms almost to the point of not having it but i still technically did and i do believe there's some factors in that uh one is i was dealing not just with iraq trauma but um also i was abused as a child and so i was dealing with a whole bunch of stuff throughout my whole life and i i even at the time i was like i kind of wish i had a fourth session um so i think that may have been a factor the fact that it took me a very long time to believe it would be permanent is a big factor i heard you talking about that in the live session on the netflix doc you're like i'm just worried that this isn't you know one of my fears is that this this is taking it away now and it's not gonna

last forever and that's hey that's like the first question I have from the outside. Like when I talk with you or I talk and talk with John Questacopolis, like, are you thinking that one, you feel great while it's happening and you're like, well, what happens when this turns off? That's what I'd be thinking. Oh, absolutely. And, and it's, you know, my thoughts before and my thoughts immediately after were very different. Um, I was terrified when I first did it in part because I thought, you know, again, dare era, I was afraid like I'd see dragons and think that the therapists were insurgents and I would hurt them. That was actually a huge fear of mine. Then I did MDMA and realized that was not going to happen. So, but the other thing is because I knew I was better, I pushed my triggers and I purposely triggered myself to find out where they were.

So when they would ask me questions, have you been triggered in the past six weeks? Well, yeah, three times. Why? Because I purposely did. So that was also a factor. Okay. Oh, did you lose the volume right there? Yeah, there we go.

You just got to turn that. Sorry. I'll tuck it in there. Yep. You you lose the volume right there? Yeah, there we go. You just got to turn that. Sorry. I'll tuck it in there. Yep. You good now? All right. There we go. All right, cool.

Sorry about that. No, it's good. I totally lost where I was going. So you were, now I'm trying to remember too, how far you got. Oh, no, I was pushing my triggers. So that was part of the reason but um i i would say probably between that 12 and 18 month mark is when i went completely ptsd free and i've honestly been getting better since and and and again like it's not like my life has been

peaches and roses since i went through in part went through yeah you know stuff happens i have voluntarily gone and done stuff you know you have things like you saw my therapy tapes uh on how to change your mind they a lot of media outlets want access to the my therapy tapes and i typically give it to them but what they do is they then send me time codes and i have to go watch my therapy tapes and that's you know watching watching a home movie about all the worst stuff in your life narrated by you gets interesting um it's something i would prefer not to do um in part because it reminds me of how it used to be and i'm so happy i'm not that way anymore. But you said something really interesting.

I don't know if you realize it, but when you were talking about how a year later, when you did your one-year checkup, you still had some. Yeah. So you were technically in the 21%. Correct. But then you just mentioned somewhere between the 12 and 18 months out, it went away, and it's never come back. Correct.

Did they re-reflect the data to put you in the fully cured no so that could mean that could mean that maybe the 12 percent who it didn't work for perhaps at some point it did well so this is why maps is currently working on uh i believe it uh is working on a long-term follow-up to to actually get that data um and that's rick doblins organization and and when we get the data we get the you know we'll know the answer to those questions um but a lot of people have said they've that they've continued to heal um and it's interesting because you know for some people there's an aha moment you know the two people who dropped out before completing the protocol they had an aha moment you know the two people who dropped out before completing

the protocol they had an aha moment they were like oh i'm better like they they processed what they needed to process and they were good for me in part i think because i had so much different trauma throughout my life um it was more like drano if you've ever had a clogged drain you know you pour pour Drano in it opens up a little bit you pour it in again it opens up more pour it again and it clears it out that was more my experience it got better each time and then I just continued to get better um especially when I got to the point where I was like not only does this work but it's not diminishing in any way like I'm still good and then the universe decided to chuck a bunch of weird stuff my way and I'm still good now that doesn't mean I don't go talk to therapists when

I need to because I absolutely do and you know I don't do MDMA or any of that kind of therapy i just call up and process with a therapist in part because i learned that keeping that shit in it rots your brain and causes ptsd and so i deal with it and it's hard and it's awkward and you know it might it actually would be a lot easier if i did do like mdma but that's also not legal so I've only done MDMA three times in my life and I was part of three sessions just those three sessions and what happens in those sessions can you take me inside the room so like your first one you go in you have the two doctors who again as you said you've already met with you've already had some sessions with talk about this go through

everything to expect all the things that happen in your life as well so they have an understanding but again people can see this on the documentary. It's very compelling stuff, but you go onto a bed, they're seated right next to you. You're in a room at a given clinic place, I guess, where you're doing this. And do you just sit down right away and they give you a pill and then they wait for it to set in? Like how does how does it go um so now some of some of this stuff is in is entirely because it's a clinical trial um so like i showed up they handed me a cup to piss in um because you have to be off all your mental health meds and you can't use cannabis or anything like that um and like specifically being on ssris is bad and they'll work with you so they

had to work with me for a while to get me off meds and things like that. I was going to say that's good. That's a whole process in and of itself. Like a month long process. Wow. So, you know,

everything's good. Go, you know, I brought my own blanket and pillow and stuff. So, um, you know, go in,

then they hooked me up to like a heart monitor and a pulse ox monitor and like all these things that to be honest like there's no reason for a pulse ox monitor other than the fda says so at least i mean there could entirely be a legitimate reason i'm just saying i couldn't figure it out um and there's some of these things that that they have to monitor because the fda says so that probably would not happen in an actual therapy session but yeah they're like are you ready they got this little dish and like i kept hoping it was going to be a red like they give me two choices a red pill and a blue pill like like the matrix one's the placebo one's the real one and you decide um were there any placebos in this study

for other people okay so you didn't know if you were going to get it or not. Correct. Same deal. Okay. Yeah, this is a double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical research trial. So I didn't know. And, you know, the interesting thing is the people is to also, you know, typically you look at a placebo and it doesn't really do anything well in this case it does and there's a reason because you're still doing like 80 hours therapy and you're doing three eight hour therapy sessions

that in and of itself actually has helped a lot of people um upwards of i believe 30 percent had had large reductions in symptoms in the placebo group um and actually believe it or not there was one individual in the placebo group who felt so much better that he went out and was talking about because they hadn't broken the blind and he fully believed that he had taken mdma whoa and so and he was better now one of the everyone who's in the placebo group there's there's what's known as crossover so because uh rick doblan the board and the people at maps believe that it is wrong to allow someone to continue to suffer if the people who got the placebo are given the opportunity to do a full dose. So if they do the placebo and it's determined they did the placebo,

they are given the opportunity to then go through the whole thing again, but using MDMA. That's cool. Yeah, because it was different when I had John Costacopoulos in here, who you know, it was different for his. It was psilocybin in his case and he had three sessions and people who had gotten the placebo in the first session got it again in the second and then they would give them the real thing only in the third so it better work

on one session or it doesn't work yeah so so uh in the fate i i i'm not 100 sure on phase three uh where they break the blind um so i'm not i i won't discuss that but in my case in the phase two study they broke the blind between the second and third session now interestingly enough uh there was three separate dosage levels in my trial so some people got placebo some people got low dose which was I believe 75 or 80 milligrams and then some people got 125 which was the high dose so both me and Michael and Annie the therapists we all thought I got the low dose and then it turns out I got one the 125. why did you guys think that well so I had no frame of reference because I had only done like cannabis so like I'd never done MDMA so I didn't know what good or bad dosage or

anything so like um but they even based on their reaction thought it was low dose um but also on the few times i've taken psilocybin i've had some interesting reactions i've done ayahuasca twice and it did absolutely nothing i'm probably one of the only people that will sit in this chair and ever say those words um she dabbled around a little bit after this well so i i only do psychedelics in a legal sense so mmm the two ayahuasca ceremonies I did I did through a church that has Supreme Court permission to do it here in the United States and then so it sounds complicated it was when they were going through the courts but they they have permission on

and so and then there are places in the United States where psilocybin has been decriminalized. Washington, D.C. being one of them. Really? Initiative 81. Hmm. That's promising. The one with overwhelming support, actually. But it's only plant-based psychedelics.

Did you want to try that because you had done this other stuff and you figure what the fuck kind of yeah all right well so one of the things is um like there's nothing preventing me from doing mdma again other than myself and the fact that like i get asked about addiction a lot like if we give people mdma they're gonna get addicted well no they're not you haven't heard that at all from this oh i yeah and part of this is like if you go do something and go to a rave and meet a girl and have a great night and all this i entirely get why you'd wake up the next morning and be like i totally want to do this again i went through all the worst trauma in my life and was processing it it's not traumatic like say prolonged exposure therapy and some of these other others uh treatments are but it's a lot of

hard work and it's not fun you know one of the funny analogies I use up on Capitol Hill all the time, in part because so many people up there are 9000 years old. I mean, I didn't realize that when we elected Congress for the first time in 1790, that like that was it. That was forever. I don't think the founding's planned it that way either, but I use colonoscopies, actually, because there's actually a really good equivalency there. It's a necessary

procedure to prevent very bad things from happening. You've got specially trained people. They give you very powerful drugs to knock you out. You go through a very uncomfortable procedure and then you know what when you're coming out of it

in the recovery room yeah you might feel a little loopy you might feel some interesting sensations and things like that but you know I don't know anybody who's ever woken up the next day and be like dude that anesthesia was so awesome I totally need to schedule another colonoscopy it's the same thing it's a good way to look at it so like that's why I'm like that that's fine I mean I will one day use it recreationally and and will in part these things will eventually all be legalized and then i'll be able to like have the spiritual stuff but i think we're headed that way for sure with this yeah yeah and it's it's kind of funny because you know rick doblin knew my role of i don't you know i i do use cannabis for for pain control and things like that as well as to help me sleep sometimes but uh

you know he knew my rules and he called me up one day and he's like if you could do ayahuasca legally would you i'm like you'd have to entirely explain to me what you mean by legally and how that works but yes i'm interested um and so he introduced me and i went and i did it twice and they really want me to come back they're like we're gonna give you more next time and see if we can get this to work but and i don't know why i don't know if it's because my body processes things quicker than than others i don't know if it's related to my tbi but you didn't really feel anything i felt nothing. I sat there for four hours watching everybody lose their minds. Well, I won't say lose their minds, but to me, you know, when you're rolling on the floor and puking and shit and stuff like that, like, I mean, ayahuasca ceremonies are not pretty.

And they're very, very helpful. They're just if you're the sober dude in the room. Yeah. People freak out. Like, yes. helpful they're just if you're the sober dude in the room yeah people freak out like yes and you know i'm glad everybody else that i did it with you know got healing and and it benefited them and and that's fantastic i just sat there and i'm like this is weird um and i was like there's something wrong with me this is i'm like for a minute it was kind of funny i was like

what if this is what everyone feels like and everybody made all this shit up like i'm like this is so weird and i felt nothing the second time they gave me a double dose actually and and still the same thing now part of it is i actually think i know why why so one of the things with uh ayahuasca ceremonies is frequently because they're done in a religious context everyone does it and me being kind of a protector warrior like anybody who's been out with me you know i don't get so drunk that i can't react if like somebody in my group or party needs help it's's just the way I am. And so,

so like, for example, for my birthday every year, it asked my, my brother-in-law, uh, John rise to, to,

uh, I'm like, all right, you stay sober. I get shit faces. I want, because I, I don't feel comfortable relinquishing that control unless I know everyone's safe.

And if nobody else is going to take on that mantle, I will. So I think part of the reason I had no effect is because my mind had a hard time letting go because nobody was sober. Everybody was on ayahuasca. Including the people who were administering. Correct. And so, and I actually had a lengthyca including the people who were administering correct and so and i actually had a lengthy conversation with the people about this and i'm like my concern here is it's not that i'm worried about the ayahuasca it's not my worry is hey if somebody gets up because they have to use the bathroom because anybody who's done ayahuasca knows that happens

and they're unsteady on their feet and they fall and crack their head open on a coffee table yeah one of the things is the headline's gonna be woman dies at ayahuasca ceremony not woman trips and falls yeah this sounds really this one sounds really irresponsible if every single person in there is on it and I'm like I would feel better if there was you know a sober safety yes and it was interesting that i got pushback they're like no this isn't how they do it you know in the jungle the jungle you have you have to worry about headlines that that is what people will hear about the one body that drops and they'll they'll design the whole thing around it it's actually one

of the concerns i have with the spread of decrim and the spread of availability is that people don't practice harm reduction. They don't know how to use these things safely and effectively. And the more negative consequences and bad outcomes, that's how MDMA got banned in the first place. Correct. All these things got banned in the first place because of bad outcomes and and improper harm reduction um but I think my brain just wouldn't let go um and I the funny part is I brought it up and I talked about and they're like oh you just need to come down you come down to Peru you know you'll see people do it and then they go chop down trees with axes and i'm like dude if i don't feel comfortable in like a house

doing ayahuasca because someone might trip and fall yeah having people swinging axes is not going to make me feel better yeah that's not possible and and this is another thing there's a lot of people who who claim that they're doing these things um for mental health but if you're not doing the integration you're not doing the work that's not what this is about you're trading one addiction for another and and that's a problem i'm glad i'm very glad to see you use a good foil here that you also have personal experience with with with looking at the situation because it is something i worry about in in these conversations and i have thought about the whole legalize everything argument it's not something i'm like there's a difference between legalize everything and decriminalize everything there's a huge

difference and this is a conversation that i can you define that difference so decriminalization means it's not a crime. Meaning, let's sell it out of the back of trucks on the side of the road like Rutabagas. So for example, lettuce, decriminalized. Literally anybody can grow lettuce and go sell it. Yeah, but that's like lettuce. You eat it. Understand. So legalization, think Sudafed so one of the issues I have with decriminalization is the biggest argument in my opinion for full drug legalization like 100% legal equivalent to

like alcohol yeah is honestly the fact that foreign actors are using the drug war to wage war with drugs fentanyl but wouldn't that if you legalized it wouldn't you also be able to have fda approved industries produce it correct which would mean they would be manufactured under good manufacturing practices just right i don't know anybody who goes to cvs buys advil and thinks it's laced with fentanyl right exactly so if you have a situation let's take heroin where you go to you go to some cvs and you go to the pharmacy and you show your id like you do a pseudofed and you buy a gram of heroin you know uh Hart dr. Carl Hart mm-hmm professor and if I'm downgrading him by calling him a professor I apologize up at Columbia University most people who use drugs don't have a problem there's a lot of

people who can go out and say do cocaine on a Friday night or do heroin on a Friday night and not have an issue. Heroin, heroin. Most people who do heroin, 90% of people who do heroin have no negative outcome. Now that's individual time. They use it.

Right. But when, but when you're saying don't have a problem that takes it much farther than no negative outcome, because negative outcome with heroin is you die Correct, right But the people who are using heroin by and large because like I know Carl Hart's talked about like he before Oxycontin How many opiate overdoses were there a year?

Through roughly 3,000 the deaths are coming from things being adulterated, right? But still hold on. Let's not get off this With heroin, even if it was low on the number of people who were actually like full-blown dying it's such an addictive physically and mentally altering drug that they are there are often people who end up homeless and living in a box somewhere you know for shelter because they're using heroin correct see that's an issue so like people don't know that and i don't disagree that that is an issue i'm fully prepared to deal with that issue and if we don't spend trillions of dollars on a drug war guess what we have to be able to help that i i view addiction you know growing up uh actually my oldest brother started using heroin at about age 12.

Age 12? Yeah. Holy shit. By the way, affluent suburb of Cleveland. He got it from the kid of a doctor who lived up the street. Who had heroin? Yep. The doctor had heroin?

Yep. For what? I don't know but so and actually my oldest brother was one of my abusers so when he was high i i personally witnessed how bad addiction is i also view it as a medical issue because guess what most addiction I know exactly why my brother started using drugs because we were abused as kids and he wanted to make it go away and he and the heroin allowed that I agree it is a medical issue so yeah and if I was arguing against that and that's not what I meant at all no no, no. And here's the thing. Just because I think you should be able to go to CVS and buy 100% tested and 100% pure heroin manufactured to FDA standards.

And I believe this for all the drugs, by the way. Doesn't mean I think people should abuse it. Doesn't mean I don't think people should do harm reduction. I think if we, you know, we sell alcohol and alcohol causes a whole bunch of problems. Right. And we deal with those problems. Like, I don't think you should do heroin and drive. I think driving under the influence should always be illegal.

Oh, okay. Hold on. Hold on, though. With heroin, though, again, because I got in with the Carl Hart guy. I've heard pieces of his arguments i still haven't sat down and listened to a full podcast of it because it's it is actually a little bit of a bridge too far for me i do have to sit down listen the whole goddamn oh it was a very bitter pill for me to swallow but i'll tell you when you have 120 000 americans who die because a foreign government

is injecting fentanyl into the drug supply that's a problem i'm not arguing that but i'm saying when we start to if because again i'm not saying i'm shutting down this argument of like whether you get in i don't want to say the wrong thing but legalization or decriminalization the point is like it's available and you can buy in cvs whatever that is i'm not shutting that down but i'm saying like the difference between snorting heroin and having a couple beers there's no comparison heroin is it is it totally like people abuse the fuck out of alcohol they become alcoholics some people die from it very real I'm with Aaron I guess but I'm saying like a little bit of heroin becomes a major addiction for I don't

know the percentage off the top my head but when you try heroin chances are you're doing it again and you're going to have a big problem with it it's not like having a beer it's these are two very different things so one doing it once and saying you'll that you will do it again doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. If you go have a beer, that doesn't mean you won't go have a beer in a week. Right. If we're talking about abuse and addiction, that is different than use. And I think part of the problem that we have is too many people confuse abuse and addiction with use.

Okay, so here's the question. Yes. Alcohol use. Someone who's not an alcoholic drinks alcohol i drink alcohol i'm an alcohol user in that case correct 100 how many heroin users are in any way functional what percentage it's low it's low define a heroin user are we talking daily or are we talking hey you know know what I'm gonna buy so weak Actually at once a week you'd be surprised But if I'm surprised is it 20%

It's probably like 80 80 you're telling me 80% of people use heroin once a week. They're perfectly fine They're they're not abusing or don't have abuse or addiction All right I need to look into this more off the podcast because I just don't that is what like there's Cocaine totally agree with you cocaine day, but also everyone I know but also here but also here's the other thing. Why do people keep? If you ask most heroin addicts What did they start taking alcohol prescription drugs What did they start taking? Alcohol. Prescription drugs. Prescription opiates. Okay, that makes sense.

And they got hooked because they were told by their doctor, take all these pills 24-7 for months and months on end, and then they get cut off and they turn to heroin. There's a big difference between having the pharmaceutical industry purposely get people addicted, and then they go use heroin. And yes, those people's lives were absolutely destroyed, and I'll say it right here. The Sacklers with Purdue Pharma should be in jail for what they did. Agreed.

But, so let's take that out of the equation for a second. They get addicted, because see see here's the thing go back to the to the alcohol if you were required to do a shot of alcohol every hour or two shots of alcohol every hour that you're awake oh you're fucked for for a year or two years how about this when i got out of the marine corps in 1999 I had a bit of a back issue got way worse in Iraq but I had I had a problem with my back and I went to the VA I said hey I got a problem with my back they're like what happened I'm like well there is this time you know I was lifting a 463 l

pallet with a dude and he dropped it and didn't say he was going to drop it. And so I took the full weight of it, and my back's been kind of fucked up since. I'm like, okay, here's your prescription. You can pick it up at the pharmacy. They gave me three giant bottles of Fikidin. And this is the thing. When we talk about addiction and abuse,

we need to factor these things in. Totally. This argument you're making could not agree with you more. Because see, here's the funny thing. When we're talking opiates, to be honest, it really doesn't matter whether it's heroin, Oxycontin, phycidin, Percocet. They're all opiates.

They all have the same effect. As far as on the body, dosages are different between them, but the same effect. Do you have any idea how many people in this country will pop a Percocet on a Friday night before they go out? It's a lot more than we consciously realize, but it's a lot. And this is where, where like that's literally what

we're talking about when we're talking about heroin you know the interesting thing about heroin addicts and like i'll be honest i didn't know any of this until i started researching it and a lot of this was i was like i i started looking at the opiate epidemic and and i saw what what china was doing and i'm like my brain kept going to damn it we got to legalize it and uh you know i'll tell you howard with an organization called cops um which is like cops against prohibition or something like that he'll love that i'm talking about legalizing heroin um but but we have a drug war the question is like it's kind of funny all the people who have issues with with uh civil liberties because of

the patriot act everything in theot Act was completely legal before that as long as it involved drugs. Drugs have done... The drug war in and of itself has caused so many problems. The problems that drugs lead to can be... Especially because we've gotten better as humanity. We know what addiction is. Right.

We know some places to help i mean part of the problem we have with addiction is the fact that the addiction uh rehab industry is is a pump and dump money making scheme where where they heal people they they get they they sober them up to go out and use again so that they'll come back because health insurance keeps paying for it this is why i'd rather them go to mexico and do ibogaine or you know mdma therapy or anything to heal that underlying trauma that's causing the addiction because guess what people like to feel loopy whether whether it's it's cannabis or alcohol or or what have you and the idea that that something should be illegal because of negative health consequences i'm a smoker man smoking is more addictive than heroin kills half a million people a year

completely legal we have made a conscious decision to allow people to smoke to tax it and and and to you know deal you know try to mitigate consequences and and this is where the argument is and this is why i say like i'm open to that like i'm not someone who shuts down to legalize everything or whatever but decrim i i view decrim as something different because what decrim is is there's nothing about purity there's nothing about quality control there's no mandated harm reduction there's no safe use spaces there's none of this it's just decrim is everything we have now you just don't get arrested for it that's literally right and and and right because of the fact that the drug supply in the United States has been polluted.

Which is a great argument. I don't disagree with that. The way we got into this, though, was talking about the ayahuasca ceremony and your very valid concerns about them fucking it up for everybody else. else i had brought that up as an aside like yeah like as someone who's not like against the idea of talking about like legalization or decrim whatever you want to say well this is where if you have legalization you can say hey if you're going to do a ceremony like this you must have a b c x y z you know we're never my point is we're never going to get there if we are careless with the little inches we get on the board. Yes.

So it's what I was trying to say there 10 minutes ago or whatever it was, was that that is something that you want to make sure of with all this including MDMA and things like that because once we get people that the first person who takes psilocybin and try to treat something on their own and thinks they can fly and dies they're gonna make the headline out of that like I always use this example I remind people the first self-driving direction shaman why is he called that because he talked about doing mushrooms insurrection shaman the dude with the horns and the fur and the painted face no Oh, Jesus Christ. Not that guy.

No, no, no, no. One. So there are two people. One was actually very recently. And the other is Insurrection Shaman. Insurrection Shaman said, and I have no reason to doubt him, that he uses mushrooms all the time. I have no reason to doubt him either. The second one was actually very recently.

Aaron Rodgers came out and said he did ayahuasca yes um and i had everybody and their brother message that to me and and they're like what do you think about this he this is aaron rogers yeah i've been saying since i first did psychedelics that this doesn't make you a hippie peacenik like pacifist and this is where i get frustrated when when people say oh we just need to do some water supply no first off i believe that that giving somebody something without their knowledge or against their will is wrong always yes 100 percent um but also you know like they can help but also if you don't have the proper set and setting, they, they can cause problems. And, and this is where, you know, some of my fears with decriminalization is, you know,

we've talked before on, on here about how it's therapy coupled with a tool called a psychedelic and there's so many people who are so used to the western western model of i take a zoloft it makes me better that they think they can just go take it and they'll be better right and that leads to negative outcomes there's a whole bunch of stuff that like if you have legalization if you have medicalization and you have these things you can prevent a lot of harm the problem is we have none of that and this and and anybody who reaches out for help with because they're having an issue with drugs gets arrested if some problem you know if somebody's having a bad is is is having a hard time on psychedelics you know what we used to call a bad trip i would much rather than call someone

at zendo and get talked through it than have cops show up and shoot them i don't disagree at all i think that this is the this is the part of the argument when people are still talking about like equating drug use with criminal behavior i'm like dude that is such a 1985 argument but it's still crazy there's still people who believe that that the fentanyl epidemic would be solved if people just didn't do drugs that's way too i mean we have 350 million people in this country the idea that people are going to be like you and and don't have interest in things and don't have problems or don't have reasons or whatever is insane i agree with you so it's it's important that we have the conversations especially around people that people can get behind easier like veterans like when veterans speak up about

stuff like this i mean that's why you have some right-wing support for this stuff because they're like wait a second Hold on a minute all the Navy SEALs for example and operators are coming to their constituents where you know They happen they usually lean more right and so they're going to they're they're going to there as constituents They're going to their representatives and saying this is working for me And I have to go to fucking Mexico right now to do it We need to bring it here or they're running for office now or they're running for office like Morgan Latrell yeah yeah so when they do that you know it gives it it gives it a good light and I always want to make sure to give it the best light so I want to make sure I also I wish the point out where we

could go down the long the wrong Lane yeah and and that's a concern of mine and a lot of it's optics you know it's all optics and and one of the one of my favorite questions to ask people who are involved in this is if you could have every single thing change you want in drug policy in five years but you couldn't use any drugs and And if you did, you lost it all permanently. Or you could do drugs and get everything you want, but it'd take 15. Which would you do? And I find it interesting who says 15 and who says 5. Who does?

I'm not going to give names on that. Right, but what types of people? There's people who are in this for the people who need it and the there's people in it for the people who want it and wow the problem i have is when the people who want it are willing to sacrifice the people who need it because i'll be honest i don't know anybody who needs it that is is wanting to sacrifice people who want it. They'd love for everybody, but our system, unfortunately, means we have to use incrementalism. And I've never said, like, and there's certain areas where I do draw lines.

Like, I've never once in a million, and I never will say, this should be reserved only for veterans. No. But what I'm saying is, I see what happened with medical cannabis, because can a veteran get a cannabis prescription from the VA? but what I'm saying is I see what happened with medical cannabis. Cause can a veteran get a cannabis prescription from the VA?

I assume no. The answer is no. A lot of veterans can't even afford it because they just decriminalized it and legalized it, which means, Hey, the people, the, the,

the people who work in government jobs can't do it you know the the lady who's 65 and should retire with her arthritis who cleans buildings in DC you know but it's still working because she's putting her granddaughter through college whose doctor says with your arthritis you should really you know your best bet is is cannabis but you know what she can't afford the 250 a month so she gets a prescription for percocet because it's five dollars and so this is the problem when you say when when you do things the way i see the psychedelic movement going um and how cannabis did it because all the people that they use to get it passed can't get it but you know what all the people that were pushing for it absolutely can and so

you know it you know if you just say okay forget all this fda stuff screw that let's just decriminalize it okay cool no veteran can go to the va and do it you won't be allowed under dod people who don't have the ability to pay for 60 hours of therapy time don't get it but the people who want it guarantee and the funny thing is that the people who want it are still gonna get it because right now you can go out to hollywood you can go out to aspen there's parties with any drug you want absolutely and they get they get it, but a veteran can't. Or the guy who's a veteran who works at the post office knows he'll get fired if he goes and gets healed. And this is why there needs to be a legal route versus decrim because of how the system works.

But we saw it in cannabis. We're still fighting the ndaa that just passed the house includes a bunch of stuff on research for cannabis at the VA because the VA still won't prescribe it they're not even allowed to to sign an authorization which means if a veteran wants to get a cannabis card not only do I have to pay for the cannabis card they also have to go pay for a doctor outside to do the evaluation and then they have to deal with the VA which will no longer prescribe them any schedule 2 narcotics period um so we've got those problems don't get fixed through decriminalization legalization does medicalization does and you know what yeah I don't have any

issues if somebody wants to go to MDMA and on a Yeah, I don't have any issues if somebody wants to go to MDMA on a Friday night. I don't have issues if somebody wants to go do mushrooms. But you know what? Their ability to do that and not worry about getting arrested should not compromise the ability of a veteran to get MDMA-assisted therapy within the VA. Oh, that's really, the whole thing there was well said. That's really well put, though there and the other problem honestly is partisanship over progress well that's always a problem on stuff i'll work with anybody because i believe in progress and you have and i have if i'm not mistaken like you've literally talked to like all these people oh yeah i mean i've talked to joe biden and i talked to donald trump about this issue um i've talked to rand paul and cory

booker i've talked to who actually both just co-sponsored a right to try act involving schedule one narcotics and cancer patients wow um you know both sides of the aisle you know dan crenshaw and aoc both had amendments uh in the ndaa that cleared the house instructing the department of defense to fund um or conduct clinical research trials using active duty and mdma psilocybin ibogaine and or 5mu dmt for ptsd that's how you get it for everyone yes this idea well if you just decriminalize it everyone will get it no the people who want it will get it the people who need it won't and that's a problem and they're also the the examples you're pointing to as it pertains to like the psychedelics they are legalizing it through the medical tracks where it's controlled environments not everywhere how so uh oakland

dc denver have all decriminalized psilocybin or plant-based right right i'm talking about the the bills that you just yes that stuff though when we're talking about democrats and republicans working together they are looking at it like crenshaw for example is looking through all his friends who were in the navy seals with them the marines and everything who have gone to mexico and done these mdma treatments and he's like all right well let's be able to get that here that's great because now like this is where you don't get like the way they did your experience was as far as i can tell as a lay person looking through it incredibly well set up you had sober psychiatrists

on there you had a known controlled dose you had a clear environment that was set up you had three times to go in there you knew what the expectations were you knew the full what the drug is comprised of the drug is not and all of that also makes it a lot easier to talk about that with with people like dan crenshaw yes because you know the other thing that medical cannabis and again i used cannabis i i'm not opposed to medical cannabis i'm very i have my issues with the politics involving cannabis um you know cannabis here's they think that psychedelics for mental health is the same as medical cannabis where they just give you a card and you can do all the psychedelics you want wherever you want however you want and that's not how it works and once they get past that right they start listening um but also if you look at all the movement look at all the movement in the

states to decriminalize you know is that being done you know, to help the people who truly need it? Because I can tell you what happened in Washington, DC, Initiative 81 used veterans to pass it. And as soon as it passed, they were delivering mushrooms through the weed delivery services and all the promises about opening clinics and doing all the these therapy sessions with veterans have never materialized and that that's the frustrating part and and you know it's either partisanship that stops it or it's this idea of this only helps the people who need it and it's not expanding to include the people that i want so this isn't a good thing and that's always going to be a lingering problem so as a realist i look at this and i say okay well what do we need to do to get the most basic

high level things through as fast as possible example of a basic high level thing getting treatment available for m MDMA with psychiatrists for veterans suffering from PTSD it's easy there's three things that that Republicans are pretty down for when it comes to psychedelics funding for research which would include training therapists um reducing barriers to research depending on the barrier and the justification, because they put a whole bunch of really high barriers to some stuff that really don't need to be that big. Like,

do you really need 15 cameras on a safe with one MDMA pill in it? Like, it's kind of weird. And then expediting access to approved therapies. Republicans support that that you know it it's kind of interesting uh last year you had a representative ocasio-cortez um introduce uh an amendment to the labor age bill that would remove the prohibition on spending federal tax dollars on Schedule I legalization efforts.

Okay. There is an exemption in that section to allow medical research, but it was used to prevent research once upon a time, which is no longer currently happening. NIH has actually issued multiple grants for psilocybin research. But she put this amendment in the republicans opposed it she did the same thing in 2019 um and actually the bill was co-sponsored by matt gates uh he co-sponsored a bill with aoc yeah 2019 i think he'll just froze over on psychedelics wow um as a matter of fact the AOC's amendment to the National Offense Authorization Act that that just passed through the house was written by Matt Gates's office Wow he sent it to her to see if she would co-sponsor she never

responded and then filed the bill her name as well so something that's really funny um i may have to send it to you is the video of matt gate of matt gates testifying in the rules committee on his psychedelic bill he actually does a like whatever whatever else he actually in that speech does a really good job talking about psychedelics and then it gets really funny because he starts talking about he's like my bills i think 33 and hers is 337 he's like i don't care which one you vote for as long as it makes it through wow um yeah and so that that was kind of funny but when aoc had this this 507 amendment you in 2019, the Republican response was drugs are bad. In 2021, the answer was, no, you're absolutely correct. Psychedelics do help with mental health.

They should be funded by the government. We just think your amendment isn't the way to do it. That's a sea change. Now, here's the funny part all the reporting was congratulating aoc on her bill not passing because she increased the number of people who voted for it from the previous time and nobody mentioned anything about a three-star marine corps general standing on the house floor saying that psychedelics were a good thing that would have been really important to know. And this is what I mean by partisanship over progress. It's about cheering on your allies and preventing things you truly claim to support

because the wrong party's doing it. When you've been sitting in there, though, with these left and right-wing politicians, and you have meetings with them you've had meetings with the biggest names like trump and biden let's start there do you feel like what you're saying is getting heard or this is just a regular go through the motions so trump and biden um i think it was go through the motions. As a matter of fact, Donald Trump, I wanted to talk about psychedelics. He wanted to talk about my wife's dress.

I mean, a lot of it depends on who we're talking about. So let's compare that to Senator Rand Paul. I met him, you know, two days after i got out of the hospital after splitting my arrests at the citadel he came to give a greater issue speech when i was in the hospital i came up with this idea uh to help people with ptsd and cognitive impairment get some six extra months of gi bills so they could actually finish their degree um so I wrote this whole thing up and I gave it to him then he saw the bandages on my wrist and he and he said oh what happened I since later found out he thought I was gonna say I like cut myself in the kitchen or burn myself on a car or something like that and I'm like I slipped my wrist 10 days

ago he stopped what he was doing uh he took uh his right hand man sergio gore with him and all three of us went behind this heavy curtain and the first words out of rand paul's mouth was forget i'm a senator i'm a doctor and i want to know what's going on right now um i've had a few conversations i've had multiple conversations with senator paul about this issue he absolutely listens now one of his issues is the cost because it's Rand Paul and he doesn't like spend any government money right but also these you know on certain things specifically veterans some you know he he does um and his father's a better you know it all honestly depends some people I can tell they're just going through

the motions you know they had to take a meeting and i'll tell you actually the biggest tell is when i make a meeting with an office who they have me meet with if they have me meet with a legislative correspondent in the hallway they're not taking it seriously if i'm having a conversation with the comms director, legislative directors or the elected representative. They are taking it seriously. Dan Crenshaw takes it seriously. I know that for a fact.

Now, granted, I first talked to Dan Crenshaw about psychedelics in my elevator because he was my neighbor. Really? Yes. When was that? That was about a year and a half, maybe two years ago. About a year and a half maybe two years ago about a year and a half ago

and how did that strike up like that convo he was in the elevator and he's very recognizable yeah he is i knew exactly who he was and so i was like hey sir have you ever heard of using psychedelics to treat ptsd and i started, I gave him my 30-second elevator pitch. And I assume he had been familiar with it at that point. The interesting thing was he was in the elevator because he was coming home after he had talked to a Marine friend of his who had just gotten back from Mexico. Well, from overseas. I don't know if it was actually most Mexico Costa Rica yeah and it well and it's it's funny because last year he publicly supported psychedelics for the first time at race University Health

Innovation Summit in Houston Texas in inside his district um so it was a district constituent event and and he he actually said point blank you know i just got home from talking to this marine who was talking about doing psychedelics and it helped his ptsd and then here's this random neighbor of mine you know who's crazy and you know pulls out the scars on his wrist and starts talking about how he doesn't have ptsd anymore and that was a sign and's like, that's a sign to me that I need to do something about this. And, and actually his, his office has been fantastic. Um, you know, it depends on who it is. You know, some people absolutely do. Um, others, they don't.

What, what is refreshing though, is you, though, is you're having hits. You're having hits and misses on both sides. Yes. That's great. And eventually, you get enough momentum, they're all going to have to come around. I mean, data is data, man. But when you're talking about the work that you do, because what's the name of your company? You consult on this for a bunch of places, right?

Yeah, Lubecki Strategic Direction. Okay. So you consult for several different major outlets, which I believe— All involving psychedelics. And that includes like John Costacopoulos' Apollo Pact, and then MAPS as well, right? Who else? So I'm also currently advising vets veterans exploring treatment solutions and I also do some smaller advising to different veterans groups that are trying to get involved more in the psychedelic space but really don't understand they know it works they just don't know anything else about it. So I do some advising there.

But, you know, it's coming around. You've got to have both sides. And this is why I've never heard anybody on the right say, you know, don't work with Democrats on this. I've never heard them say, you know, this needs to be our thing. I have absolutely heard that with democrats that sucks it does but also can i be honest that's on this issue i we can pick other issues and be exactly reversed um but they're not surprised it just sucks but also there's democrats that i have talked to who have point blanks that i will literally do anything you

want me to do that you can get a Republican to sign off on. Well, that's good. So those are the people that need to run point on this stuff. Yeah. Yeah, politics sucks with that. But I think, you know, it's. But we can fix politics if we can heal trauma in people when it happens because how many people that you know think of somebody who right now in your head and it doesn't matter who this is for the audience at home too think of

somebody who thinks a bad person now ask yourself why are they a bad person not not why do you think they're a bad person but why how do you think they became that person and so imagine if they had been able you know let's say it's because they're abused as a child okay so when they're taken out of that abusive home we can heal them and then they're not traumatized and you know then they grow up and you know they they go to college and they get married i'd say they find out their wife's cheating on them and then they go to some psilocybin and deal with that grief and they go meet somebody else and then they decide to run for office like when people aren't making decisions based on trauma they make better decisions it's a good argument most of our political decisions are entirely emotionally based and that's not hold on a second

that's not even this is this makes the point better that's not even necessarily trauma in that case it's reactionary which you form reactionary opinions that go in whatever direction they do left right or indifferent and that could be based on or is actually almost always based on your own life experiences which could then tie in things that may be traumatic for you so it's like a full circle right there i see what you're saying that's good yeah i mean when donald trump was young his brother died of alcoholism yeah we we've seen how his father treated him and and ignored him and all of this why do you think he always needs people to pay attention to him imagine if that trauma had been fixed earlier he'd probably be a richer person could be financially as well as as as a human um you know and this is the thing

it's funny i think some of of the rights concern is because the counterculture consists consistently says oh all you got to do is just drop lsd and you'll you'll become a hippie peacenik and it'll all be love and rainbows and I'm like that's not how this works no um you know there is an amplifier effect we saw that with an insurrection Shaman like these can have bad outcomes we know this and this is where if everything is on the up and up we can mitigate bad outcomes we can do harm reduction we can do things simple things like one of the reasons that mdma was originally banned was because people died because they didn't drink enough water and they just went out and partied and danced and sweated in a hot environment and all of this so when i did it one of one of the things for harm reduction is

they make sure the therapists one of their jobs is to make sure you drink water or in my case it was great great power aid but controlled controlled medical environment safety at the forefront professionals right there professionals an active part of the process too because you're talking with them and talking through this experience which By the way, well how it was eight hours the full like trip and and session Yeah, how long were the effects available? Like when did they start to taper? So one so it takes about took about 45 minutes to kick in and then two hours in you take a booster dose Which doesn't like I hate using these words, but it doesn't make you higher

it just extends the therapeutic range because one of the goals of MDMA therapy is Like you can't be too wet to record and if there's not enough it doesn't work So there's this therapeutic range that allows the healing to occur um but you know again you can have harm reduction you can have all these things we're talking about in a non-medical environment if everything's above board like how about this how many people you know i hate going back to heroin but how many people die of a heroin overdose because the people they're with are scared to call the police or an ambulance i'm probably a good number i mean and then the

argument there is getting to that point and what leads to that for sure but yes probably a good number but most of the people who are addicted to heroin in the united states were it was started on prescriptions and and i agree that's a huge huge issue the whole like legalized opiate side of it with oxy and all that that's but i got a lot of thoughts yeah and. Yeah, and I mean, that's the thing. Most people don't use drugs that way. They got them addicted, and then they took the pills away, and then they turned to street stuff. Most people who use drugs recreationally don't use them that way. Yeah, I just don't know.

Heroin's the one. I agree with you on the other drugs. I do. You do not have to argue with me on that. Like, I'm with you. Heroin is the one where i literally have never heard that until carl hart was saying like oh yeah huff it like once every night or whatever he says that was the first time i ever heard that anyone i've ever known

who got into heroin it ruined their life or they died i'll be honest. It surprised me. Like I know people, but you know, it didn't surprise me as much when I started seeing people say, Oh, I'm, you know, Hey,

I broke my leg like a year ago. Still got a big old bottle of Percocet and they still have it a year later. Cause Hey, it's new year's. I'm going to take a perk or, you know, Hey, whatever, you know, that's most Year's, I'm going to take a perk. Or, you know, hey, whatever. You know, that's most people's drug use.

It is not all day, every day, like the prescriptions they get you. And that's how the addiction starts. If you use it, you know, once in a while. Like, if you go out every Friday night and have a beer, you're probably never going to get addicted. You know what? If you take an opiate every Friday night, the odds of addiction are very, very, very, very low. I've got to look into that research more.

I mean, addiction happens because you take a lot of it. Yes, and you take it regularly. Right. So there's a higher chance not this by the way there's some addiction problems with alcohol for sure right but there is it seems to be without looking at the numbers in front of me there is a way higher hit ratio of basic usage leading to reliance when it comes to opiates rather than alcohol but one of the big questions becomes who did that research and what was their

purpose because you know there was a study that showed that that MDMA was like taking a melon baller to the brain and that's because they altered the pictures that's a fair question you know very fair question I'll and and this is one of the problems is when the government alters science for policy, people don't trust the government on policy. You know, the other issue you have is when they do these surveys, how many people are honest? Very few. Like what specifically? Like what kinds of surveys? If you do surveys, surveys like do you use

heroin every day like oh right like that's fair you know the people who do it know it's illegal and a felony any amount is a felony mm-hmm and we'll send you to jail for years I don't think that's the answer because I don't think anybody agree answer at all but totally agree but the flip side to this so here's here's the thing you have three options either you can put people in jail bad option you can not put people in jail and make it like lettuce which is decrim okay or you can put it in a structured environment. Like, I'll tell you, Rick Doblin has this idea

that you should be able to go get a license to do drugs. And that, like a driver's license. And you have to take a class that teaches harm reduction, et cetera, et cetera. And if you have problems or cause issues, you can get a ticket. And if you get too many points, you lose your license to do drugs. Now, I think the problem with that is people are still going to do drugs. But also something else to think about.

How many could smoke cigarettes right now? More than they report. Yes, in part because of vaping. But cigarette use is actually very low. You look at cannabis use amongst children in states where it's legal, and it's actually gone down. Now, part of this is because they can't access it. My kid can go buy, you know, a 12-year-old can go get heroin. It was easier for my kid in South Carolina to find weed than cigarettes.

Because they didn't have it in a lot of stores? No, because no store would sell it to them. Oh, right. Because he was underage you're saying right got it okay so when he was in middle school it was easier for him oh yeah yes way easier yes and that's because it's illegal if so so with the so so i understand the negative that you that you keep that you talk about but also the positives and the other things involved far outweigh that and here's the other thing it like one if i'm wrong in time we can entirely pull it back i i think we should explore it i think that part of the problem is the push for decriminalization doesn't have regulation it doesn't do anything to fix the problems that are the justification for legalization

where it's coming from what's in it all yes and i mean we can go bigger i mean the national security implications of the drug war are enormous huge i. Agreed. Think about this. Why do you think the cartels kill people? Because they can't go to court to enforce their territory. Right. If you turn them into pharmaceutical companies... They gotta use court. They stop...

The Sacklers and Pablo Escobar. Yeah, Pablo Escobar, bad dude. Blew up and killed a lot of people. Sacklers are every bit as bad. They just didn Escobar, bad dude. Blew up and killed a lot of people. Sacklers are every bit as bad. They just didn't have the courage to look at it. No, no. The Sacklers didn't have to. Because they had the courts.

And they had the police doing their bidding. So, you know, if it becomes legal, what's the number one source of funding for terrorism? I'm going to guess drugs. I know they were like... Other than state sponsor, it's narcotics trafficking. Yeah. Like, what's it called? Hezbollah, one of the biggest coke dealers in the world.

They send it through like used cars up and around the world through Africa and Mexico and like a cycle to get it to the us contraband black market economies is what supports all the bad things yes so if you take the most lucrative thing out of the black market the funding for that dries up just like how they started by the way though this this is the problem it all comes back to the capitalism buy-off system you notice the weed conversation of getting it massively like legalized decriminalized all that stuff and let's go to like production to get it produced that started when companies like constellation brands and anheuser-busch if i'm getting some

of the companies wrong but like the point being when the alcohol companies started taking their own positions and buying up giant weed fields because now what did they do they sent all their lobbyists who have relationships and bought off all these politicians to dc and said oh by the way now we're in the business so all that shit what do you mean they didn't go to dc they went to the states and changed the laws there's their dc hasn't changed weed laws no no same problem here because now they're working on dc i'm talking about the same thing but the bottom line is all the politics that they bought off they're now brewing it now they're starting to argue for that because now they actually can control that business as opposed

to in the past they loved that weed was illegal because they wanted alcohol to be the thing that you could go and get very easily. Yep. It's money. It's politics. It's power. But here's the other thing.

Nothing about them getting involved says that the other things can't happen. And what I mean by this is, yes, you're right. But you know what? Anastasia Bush is not the only beer you can buy. things can't happen and what i mean by this is yes you're right but you know what anitizer bush is not the only beer you can buy i mean dude walk into like whole foods and there's what like 9 000 different kinds of ipas right but they're not as big of companies that's the point i'm saying the

biggest companies the ones that run it the runs that are at the top of the chain they're the ones who went there they're the ones going in and buying up weed now they're buying up in canada all this stuff and they're like okay well now now we're on it so now it can be legal but but the thing is there's so like when it comes to cannabis i've always said this you're gonna have your swanson's tv dinner bought at walmart and you're gonna have your your you know gmo free organic gluten, organic, gluten-free variety from the farmer's market, just like we have food. But also cannabis versus much drugs

that have much greater potentials for abuse do need to be treated differently. Like, cannabis should entirely be like booze. Like, everywhere. Yeah, agreed. You know, part of the like everyone yeah but agreed you know part of the problem we have is you know and honestly the reason that the states act didn't pass is because the democrats insisted that no it'd be legal in all states or not which is so weird because the answer there is what they're literally saying is we fully believe

that people should continue to be incarcerated for this unless we get what we want i mean it's the same thing when it comes to criminal justice reform i'll take what i can get if i can get 20 of the people who i believe shouldn't be in prison out of prison i will absolutely do it tomorrow i'm not going to say no it's all or nothing because at least that 20 percent gets out and you know what it's a shitty thing that that other 80 percent is there uh but you know i'll take 20 and then i'll fight for another 20. i'll always fight for everything but i'm not going to say no because of partisanship i'm not going to say i i work with dan crenshaw and aoc's offices like literally yeah that's awesome um i was actually one of the people who got matt gates to co-sponsor aoc's bill

wow um and because she called her office called and said we need a republic and i'm like let me see what i can do gates no i'm like let me see what i can do and i have the phone i'm like who the fuck am i gonna get to work with AOC on the right? I'm like, oh, I know who. And part of it's because Matt Gates doesn't care on stuff like this. He'll work with the left. And this was also well before. This is 2019, right?

2019. Yeah, it probably wouldn't be the same today. No, no, no. Yeah, it's entirely different today. But in 2019. But, you know, he was still Matt Gates back then. Yeah. same today no yeah it's entirely different today but in 2019 oh but you know he was still Matt Gaetz back yeah so you know I will lit you know I go talk to Trump I go talk to Biden I will literally go talk to anybody about this

issue because those are the people who have access and and and have the ability to make those changes and you know it it it's also funny because it gets super complex once you get into it because it seems easy it's like this this this helps heal ptsd so that people use it we're done and it gets way more complicated i mean we see like banking and cannabis and all these other things like it gets far more complicated than people think it is but um i just blanked well you i mean you said enough there because the the point is like we need guys like you who are willing to work on both sides and just get it done however it can be done and And also someone like you who has been through it and has seen such a change in their life, tell them their story. I mean, like I said, the documentary feature with Michael Pollan on How to Change Your Mind on Netflix, your segment and all the segments in that episode and really all the episodes I watched were incredibly compelling.

Oh, Laurie, the the woman was fantastic and and there was so many so much so much one of the things I love that she said is I thought that was only for veterans you know PTSD affects everyone and and I have a lot of people who reach out to me because they see me in media and stuff like that and I try to help everyone, every person who contacts me. Sadly, like at some point, I'm going to be able to say, Oh, you'd like MDMA assisted therapy, here's your nearest clinic. Right now. I'm like, got to wait. But I'll set people up with therapists and like all this stuff to try and help them. But um, I had somebody and they were like,

Well, I don't I, they knew knew they had PTSD, but they wouldn't say it. I said, we don't have to call it PTSD. We can call it purple hippo if you want. Like, and the issue was she thought it was just for veterans and that somehow people going into combat experience worse than her. And I've heard, you know know you look at laurie tipton's story and that's the woman in the episode with me on how to change your mind it was episode

three yeah and you know she survived katrina and then she was raped had to have an abortion after the rape and then walked in after her mother killed two people and committed suicide found the whole thing yeah guess what that's way worse yeah she had it there's been a lot of people and this is where like and even she thought no that's just that's just for soldiers and and this is where yes on psychedelics and on a lot of issues involving mental health veterans have taken the charge and taken the lead in part because this is not easy work um it's very emotionally demanding um especially when you have people who are suffering and there's not a lot you can do to help them um or you have people call up and they're they mean this in the absolute best way possible but they're like i wish my brother who committed suicide four years ago had what you had.

And things like that. So it does absolutely take an emotional toll. But part of the reason veterans do it is because our trauma is socially acceptable. unacceptable I get why you know before this we were talking about there's things that that are in my therapy tapes and that I've dealt with in my life that I I have no issues one-on-one talking with you about but I'm not going to put it in media you know more over half I believe of the participants in the map study were sexual assault victims um so you know but i also get why a woman who is raped doesn't want to go on netflix and and you know that in part because people in her life people in her family may not know what if it was a family member but i can i can come on a show and

say hey i was in the army i I served in Iraq. I came back with PTSD and people go, Oh, okay. That makes complete sense. You have somebody like, for example, a rape victim. Okay. Well, let's see. Was she really raped? Yeah. What was she wearing you know there's shame and stigma associated with it both internally and societally and that's why and then you have people who you know may have very severe ptsd because they were in a car accident and they're like i was just in a car accident people get car accidents all the time but are but veterans are trauma socially acceptable and and i believe that that gives us an obligation that obligates veterans to actually speak up wow because we can well you're doing it and and i really i really really enjoyed this day

i learned a lot too i think people out there will as well and where where can people find you online like is twitter your best spot or twitter at john lebecky uh search for sergeant psychedelic on on on instagram or jonathan lebecky or sergeant psychedelic on facebook and then what were those other two documentaries besides how to change your mind by michael pollan that you're also in uh goop labs with gwyneth paltrow there was an uh the healing trip is the name of the episode oh is that on netflix too it should still be on that okay cool uh and then the business of drugs which is still on netflix uh it's an episode called synthetics the last 13 minutes and the reason i say the last 13 minutes is because the first part they start talking about Spice and K2, the synthetic cannabis stuff, which is really kind of weird how they filmed it and all that.

So, yeah, if you go to like the last 13, 14 minutes, you'll see me in uniform at the New York City Veterans Day Parade. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming up here. I really, really appreciate it. And I would love to hear how things are looking a year or two from now. Absolutely. Some of the legislation. Everybody else, you know what it is.

Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.