StarTalk Radio - The Psychedelic Mind with Rick Doblin

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

Do psychedelics reveal a different objective reality? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice learn about psychedelic drugs, treating PTSD, and other mind-bending research with President of Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) Rick Doblin.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free.Thanks to our Patrons Mark Rosenthal, David Aulwes, Alissa Mc Cormick, Gavin Bamber, Lester Teichner, Chase Kimes, and Cindy Barrick for supporting us this week.Photo Credit: Storyblocks Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Up next on StarTalk, all about psychedelics. How are they being used today to treat PTSD? What is the fallen Mormon study? And when did they become illegal and why? What is the future of research in these fields? All that and more coming up on StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Got with me my co-host Chuck Nice. Chuck. Hey, hey, hey, Neil. All right, Chuck, professional comedian and actor. So Chuck, our topic today is psychedelics. Whoa. Whoa. And so we combed the landscape of psychedelic folk. And we found Rick Doblin. Rick Doblin, welcome to StarTalk. Thank you, Neil. Thank you, Chuck. I'm so glad to be here with you today and that I rose to your combing process.

Oh, yeah, the thresholds. Are you in or are you out of the StarTalk portfolio? So you are the president, so Rick, you were the president and founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, abbreviated MAPS, and you spent a whole career studying

psychedelics. Yeah. Alright, I'll accept the word studying psychedelics for now. Well, you don't have to accept it because I'll say that part of studying it, obviously, is having your own experiences. Okay. Okay. There you go.

We'll get there. We'll see how that played out. Okay. So when I think of psychedelics and other, you know, plus marijuana, things that, you know, I'm old enough to remember the 60s and 70s, where these were just simply illegal. Illegal. And I don't ever remember any coherent argument for why they would be illegal, yet alcohol is just fine, right? And so even as a child, I saw some inconsistencies in the laws and legislations. So I wasn't voting one way or another, voting for it or against it one way or another. I just saw an inconsistency between the two. So are psychedelics, as we define them in your world, still restricted?

And if they're restricted, then how do you work with them legally? Well, first off, I think we need to say that the drug war and prohibition has never really been about reducing drug abuse. It's always been about persecuting minorities. And if you can go throughout history from the 1880s or so, where the first drug laws were against opium, against the Chinese laborers who came to build the railroads. Then we had alcohol prohibition. After that ended disastrously. Shortly after that, we got marijuana prohibition. That was mostly used by Mexicans and African-Americans.

The crackdown against the 1960s, against the hippies. You know, there's a pretty famous quote about John Ehrlichman, who was Nixon's domestic policy advisor, saying that the Nixon White House had two major enemies. One was the civil rights movement. The other was the hippies. And he said, did we exaggerate the risk of drugs? Yes, so that that way we could break up their meetings, arrest their leaders.

And so it's always clear that this drug war has never really been primarily about reducing drug abuse. Interesting. And I didn't put two and two together. Had I had a thread long enough, I might have seen what you just said with the opium going back to the Chinese laborers back when we were building our railroads. Are you saying that white people don't get high?

If white people are in charge, I don't know. They don't get persecuted as much for getting high. Right. No, I got you. I mean, the most obvious thing there is the outrageous differences for a while between penalties for crack cocaine versus puddle cocaine. Absolutely. Yeah. The outcomes, the legal outcomes of that have been staggering.

Staggering. Well, so how do we do our work? It is possible to do medical research with illegal drugs, with FDA approval and DEA approval. So we've been able to do work. Well, basically, very quickly, was that the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which Nixon put into place, criminalized all the psychedelics and also successfully wiped out psychedelic research, both in the United States and around the world for multiple decades. Wow. Massive cultural amnesia. So there was a lot of research in the 60s with LSD and psilocybin for medical applications.

And that was legal. But it kind of escaped to the streets. And then there was a lot of research. Just remind us about psilocybin. That comes from what? What is that? Psilocybin is the main active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms. Mushrooms, got it.

Okay. That means mushrooms. Got it. Okay. Mescaline comes from peyote or from San Pedro. MDMA and LSD do not exactly appear in nature in the same ways that there's precursors that then get chemically. They come from God's laboratory. That's where they come from.

Well, people have a romantic idea, exactly, that if it's from nature, somehow or other, it's good, it's okay. And if it's from the lab, it's not. Not on this show. We're more mature than that. Yeah, we're a little more mature. And people also don't realize that when you're looking at how drugs interact with your brain, what you're really looking at are neurological receptors and connectors. It's not about something being natural. And when we synthesize that, the only thing that we're doing is recreating a substance that does the same thing.

Most of pharmacology is that, to be honest. So I tweeted, not everything natural is good for you, and not everything artificial is bad for you. I tweeted that. I created a fight. Why should, you know, people, I can't, you know. But that's a great thing to say. Not everything that's natural is good for you, you know.

But then we take those natural things and we manipulate them so that they can be. If it weren't for snake venom, you know how much stuff snake venom actually helps us with? There's a lot of poisons that we turn into medicine. Well, actually, one of the most important poisons or venoms comes from the frog, this Sonoran desert frog. And that's 5-MeO-DMT, which is the most powerful psychedelic that we're aware of. Rick, have you been licking frogs lately? Come on now. That's what you do in the laboratory.

I go for the synthetics. For the pill version. See, I want to actually lick the frog. I'm not going to lie. There's version of it. See, I want to actually lick the frog. I'm not going to lie. There's something about it that, you know. So let's get back to the permissions. You have to petition to study it, to obtain it without getting arrested

and then studied in the lab. Yeah, so what happened in the Controlled Substance Act of 1970 and the backlash against the 60s, you know, wiped out a whole field of science for multiple decades. But then in 1992, the FDA had a special advisory committee meeting, and they decided to reopen the door to psychedelic research. And in a way, that was a lot of pressure from the AIDS community because the ACT UP had surrounded the FDA headquarters and said that in the crisis of AIDS,

that the FDA was being too slow to approve drugs or even to permit research because they were over- That's the whole theme of the Dallas Buyers Club. Yeah, yes, exactly. It's an important running theme of that, that the FDA, now as a scientist, you know, we generally try to err on the side of caution, but when people's lives are at stake, you want to at least loosen that up a bit so that

you take a different level risk and in a way that people recognize and understand what you're doing. Very much so. And they were successful. And it was shocking to the FDA people that their whole building was shut down. And so the FDA created what's called the pilot drug evaluation staff, no longer exists, but it was to create new ways to evaluate drugs. And in 1992, they opened the door and they said they would resume research with psychedelics. So 92 would have been the last year of Bush Senior, correct?

Yes. Yeah. So it did happen under Bush Senior. But that really opened the door to psychedelic research. And so we had had MAPS, I started in 1986. And similarly to psychedelics having been medicines before they became party drugs, MDMA was a therapy drug from the middle 70s to the early 80s before it became more widely known as ecstasy and used in a party setting. And so the FDA had never reviewed it, but since it was legal, there was a lot of therapeutic use.

And then in 1985, the DEA criminalized MDMA while we were in the middle of suing them to keep it legal as a medicine. We won the lawsuit, but the DEA ignored that, criminalized it. So from 86 to 92, we had five different protocols from Harvard Medical School, from UC San Francisco with MDMA, all rejected. But 1992 was the key moment

where the FDA opened the door again to psychedelic medicine. So 31 years ago, and now we're in the midst of a renaissance of psychedelic research all over the world where we have four or five times as many studies going on now as at the height of the 1960s. Wow. But even before it was criminalized, yeah. I'm a little confused because you called MDMA a psychedelic. And as a person who has done it, I know that it has psychedelic properties, but I thought it was more pro-social because it's, you know,

methylene deoxy methamphetamine. So I don't think of methamphetamines as psychedelics. Can you help me out? Wait, wait, let me do a preamble to that. So when I think of any kind of drugs that people do, part of why they do it is that it's altering your state of consciousness in some way. So where's the line in the sand between what cannabis would do to your mind and what a psychedelic would do to your mind? If both of them are disrupting your awareness of an objective reality. Do you have to put it like that? No, I'm sorry. You got to put it like it's disrupting your awareness of an objective reality. What is wrong with that sentence?

You got a problem with that sentence? Can it not be enhancing your experience of an objective reality? I mean. We'll get there. We'll get there. All right. All right. Go ahead.

I just want to make sure we have the vocabulary is going the right places here. Yes. Okay. So rather than actually talk about altered states of consciousness, we use the words non-ordinary state of consciousness. And we don't use the word hallucinogen either, which is a pejorative negative kind of

thing. It's a delusion. So psychedelic was invented in the 50s by a man named Humphrey Osmond in communication with Aldous Huxley. And they were trying to come up with word for these LSD and psilocybin. And they didn't like the currently available words psychotomimetic, which means mimic psychosis, because it's more than that. And so psychedelic means mind manifesting. because it's more than that. And so psychedelic means mind manifesting.

And that was, Humphrey Osmond was an early LSD researcher. So I use the broad term mind manifesting to bring out from the unconscious or from things that we haven't been paying attention to into awareness. So that's why psychedelic for me is something that you can have a psychedelic experience with deep breathing, with holotropic breathwork or different kinds of breathwork techniques. You can have it with

MDMA, with psilocybin. But MDMA is not like the classic psychedelics. So there are classic psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, ayahuasca, that dissolve the ego, dissolve the sense of self, and you sort of can connect to a larger sense of reality, deeper, because our brain is a filtering mechanism. And so we filter out a lot of information. And we're also organized on survival of the organism, but we often lose track of how we're part of something much bigger. So psychedelic, for me, encompasses MDMA. Other people say, oh, MDMA should be called an empathogen, like to make empathy. Oh, empathogen.

Interesting. Interesting word. Well, yeah, it engenders these great feelings of deep, you know, emotional connection to people. You feel somewhat euphoric about being around other people, even people that you hate. You're just like, all of a sudden, you're just like, man, I'll have always loved you.

Well, a good example is in octopuses. So there's a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist, Will Dolan. By the way, that's the last sentence I would have ever thought I heard. A good example is from an octopus. Okay, take us there. Go. Love me some octopoids.

Yeah. For those people who have seen my octopus teacher, that documentary, you know that octopuses are solitary creatures. Around 600 million years ago, the human and octopus line diverged. But octopuses still process serotonin. And they have a whole different kind of brain than humans. And so Gould at Hopkins wondered, what happens if you give MDMA to an octopus? And so MAPS was more than happy to send her MDMA to give to her octopus.

What happens is octopuses, under the influence of MDMA, all of a sudden want to hang out with other octopuses. Whereas before, they would kill other octopuses. They don't want to hang out unless it's mating season or the end of their life. So what it means is, though, that the pro-social effects of MDMA are evolutionary conserved and pre-verbal. And so there are- They're very deep in the genetic code, is what you're saying. Yes, very much so. And so there also have been studies that Bull has done in mice with MDMA that shows that

they release oxytocin, which is the hormone of love and nursing mothers and connection. But then the oxytocin stimulates synaptogenesis, meaning new synaptic connections are made in pro-social areas of the brain. So you're rewiring your brain to be more loving and more caring by doing it? Well, in part by doing it, but then also the important thing is the integration and the work afterwards. So the difference between recreational use of drugs and therapeutic use of drugs is recreational drugs, you're just trying to have fun while you're doing it. Therapy, you're really trying to change people's baseline. And so what you're trying to do is help them learn something and then bring it back and practice it in a way, integrate it afterwards. So Rick, you're saying that there are drugs that can build neuro connectors

that remain when you're no longer under the influence of that drug. And therapeutically, that could be in the interest of the patient. Is that? Yes. And not only that, though, that these new neural connections can be more easily created sometimes for weeks after the experience. So this neuroscientist, Gould Dolan at Johns Hopkins, what she's shown is that the length of time that you're in

the psychedelic experience influences how long afterwards that this, she calls them critical periods. We know that children can learn language easier than adults, that they're in this critical period. There's other critical periods for social learning and different things. And so this neuroplasticity of the brain can extend for periods of time, sometimes weeks and weeks after the psychedelic experience. And that's why we focus on two parts in therapy. It's the initial experience that people have, but then it's the integration work that they do to try to take what happened during the experience itself and make it more part of their baseline to improve. If they've worked through depression

or worked through certain kind of traumas, that you can anchor this in new neural connections. So I'd say one of the most amazing things in terms of terminology has been that when we were demonizing MDMA, when it was criminalized in 85, and for up until around early 2000, the whole term was neurotoxicity, that brain change is inherently bad. It's neurotoxicity. Now we've turned that

into neuroplasticity because we see that these outcomes in therapy settings can be profound and they can be durable in some cases. We've done some studies where we've looked at people on average three and a half years after MDMA and some people up to seven years. And on average, the results are durable. So how do we explain that? I think it's in part because the experiences

can be so profound, but also because of this neuroplasticity. And what does MDMA stand for? MDMA stands for methylene dioxide methamphetamine. So I'll just say in 1953, the U.S. Army. So when we just say meth, is that what people refer to? No, no, no. That's a whole nother nother.

Okay. Well, yeah. So let me say, so in 53, the Army Chemical Warfare Service looking for mind control drugs, they tested eight drugs in animals. And on one side was methamphetamine, and the other side was mescaline from peyote or from San Pedro, and in the middle was MDMA. And they're all part of the chemical family called phenethylamines. So of all the classic psychedelics, like LSD, psilocybin, MDMA is closest to mescaline. And so a good way to understand MDMA is that it's like methamphetamine

in the sense that it makes you alert. It takes away your appetite, but it doesn't make you jittery or methamphetamine can make you clean the room five times, stuff like that. But you can do MDMA and be quiet and still, but it's alerting. And it's like mesclun in the sense, but mescaline

does have this ego-dissolving properties and it's a certain warmth, but MDMA does not have the same kind of ego-dissolving properties that you see in the classic psychedelics. So MDMA you could think of as kind of halfway between mescaline and methamphetamine, and it's all from the same chemical family. So you feel alert and you feel good and you feel warm, but you don't want to walk to Canada. Exactly. Like, because that's what meth will do to you. It'll be like, you know what we should do, guys?

We should walk to Canada right now. Let's go. And actually, well, methamphetamine has been used in war. It makes sense because one, you, one, you don't sleep. So, you know, you could just fight on and fight on and fight on. And two, it makes you highly paranoid, which means you're apt to be more violent and to respond to things, you know, in a way that you, you know, without passivity. Right. So in recent years, we've heard progress made, great progress made with psychedelics in the

treatment of PTSD. Can you explain to me what's going on in the brain and what role does the therapist play in this? Presumably that matters at some level. That matters more than anything else. So what we talk about it is MDMA-assisted therapy. So this idea that it's really therapy that the MDMA helps be more effective. You can take MDMA, you can think of it like a tool. You can take MDMA and you could end up being worse off if you're not in a supportive situation. The drug itself is not the agent, it's the therapy. The drug itself is not the agent, it's the therapy. And the drug makes the therapy more effective. So this is, I like this analog where in my field we have telescopes that bring us to the universe and microscopes bring us to cells and other functionings in biology.

And these psychedelics are a way to probe the mind. Well, Stan Grof, who's 92, the world's leading LSD researcher, has said exactly what you just said. Psychedelics are for the study of the mind, what the telescope is for astronomy, and the microscope is for chemistry and medicine. I guess I was just quoting him because I don't claim originality with that. But people are always wondering, because I'm asked all the time, what's more complex,

the human mind or the universe? And I always say the human mind because we understand the universe. You know, I can plunk a rover down in a hundred square meter box on Mars, right? And so to the extent that we have access to the brain, it feels like we're still in our infancy, but these are very important points of progress. Listening to both of you right now, it sounds to me like these substances are like a tilling of the soil for the mind. This is what this neuroplasticity is.

And then the therapy is where you get to go in and create something new. This fertile ground now becomes this platform where you can create something new, where neurons that fire together, wire together. Yeah, but if MDMA helped resolve PTSD, but can't it also trigger feelings of suicide? So I'm worried when two very opposite effects

can come out of some impetus. Well, again, if it's in a therapeutic context, the suicidal feelings that from having people been traumatized or being in despair, you work with them and then they're part of the healing process. So I just want to go back one step to say that a lot of times people do not understand that the telescope was extremely controversial. Galileo died under house arrest.

Father Bruno, that was an advocate, was burned at the stake by the Inquisition. So the tools that bring out information that runs counter to the sort of powers that be of the day, the tools themselves have been criminalized and have become controversial. But now we don't think of the telescope as controversial. So psychedelics are in that same way. They're tools.

They brought out things about our unconscious, about our sense of self that was somewhat challenging to a lot of the dominant powers. And your execution trial is when? We're speaking to you in the basement of your prison cell. Not that you'll care because, you know, you'll be on MDMA. Oh, that blade feels so good. Oh, that blade just feels so nice on my...

No, they burned it. It was a Christian, Catholic thing. So they burned the stake on that. Oh, man. Oh, that's right. I just gave the guillotine. Yeah. Well, it's also, it doesn't...

See, I think that's a good check. That's a good thing. People have this wrong idea. Bunch of our patients have said, I don't know why they call this ecstasy. It's not like you take MDMA and everything's fine. Neil, you asked about the brain. So MDMA reduces activity in the amygdala,

the fear processing part of the brain. MDMA increases activity in the prefrontal cortex where we think logically. One of the things about PTSD is you're triggered by your reminders of these traumas, but you don't have the time or the capacity to think carefully, is that sound really a bomb or is it just a car backfire or something? And then also MDMA increases connectivity between the... Well, we have to explain to everyone under 30 what a car backfire means.

So please explain that. Yes, that's really funny. Yes, definitely. Yeah, something goes wrong with the engine. It just sort of makes a loud noise. Yeah, no, what happens is some fuel gets into the exhaust line that wasn't fully burned in the piston. And if a spark hits it, it's a pop.

And it sounds like a gunshot. And there's a whole set of decades where people could not distinguish a gunshot from a car backfiring. Yeah. So the thing about PTSD is PTSD changes your brain. You have a hyperactive amygdala where you process fear. You have reduction of activity in the prefrontal cortex. So you're not logically thinking and evaluating. And also with the hippocampus,

where we put memories into long-term storage, there's diminished activity. MDMA does the opposite, reduces activity in the amygdala. So the fearful memories are not so overwhelming. Your prefrontal cortex, you're able to think more logically. And then the connectivity between the amygdala and the hippocampus means that we're able to take memories in trauma that seem like they're always happening. The trauma is never really fully in the past. And so MDMA permits these memories to be moved from sort of foreground to background and placed in people's past as part of their story instead of... from the collapse of the towers, that entire morning was continuous police sirens and a fire engine siren, continuous.

And as a New Yorker, these sirens are just normally acoustic wallpaper, right? You don't even notice if a siren goes by, but it was continuous. And plus it's now was associated, for me, with the collapse of the towers, watching people fall from the towers, this sort of thing. Up until eight months afterwards, if I heard a siren anywhere, I would just tense up in my shoulders. It would be brief, and it was not traumatic for me, but it was there.

And it was like an autonomic reaction to it. And it took the better part of a year for it to fade. Now it doesn't happen anymore. And forgive me for even suggesting that's a PTSD. No, that's a PTSD. No, compared with what real military people experience. I have the same reaction to sirens, but it's because I'm a black man.

Oh, that's... So, yeah. I know exactly how you feel. Okay. Well, yeah. But, Neil, what you're talking about is that most people that are traumatized, over time,

they're resilient and they're able to overcome it. But there's a population of people that- Which I count myself in that group, yes. Yes, so you were a sort of acute stress disorder, but it didn't translate to post-traumatic stress disorder, which is chronic and enduring for sometimes decades. post-traumatic stress disorder, which is chronic and enduring for sometimes decades. We actually had someone in our study from Vietnam who had PTSD almost half a century and was still able to get better. An American serviceman. Yes, an American serviceman.

Yeah. So I think that the resilience is something that a lot of people don't have. They live under constant stress. And often there's, we call it the archeology of trauma too. People are often traumatized at multiple stages in their life, particularly those people that have childhood trauma are more vulnerable when adult trauma happens to not being resilient enough to get over it,

but then it becomes chronic. And so that's where the MDMA-assisted therapy can come into play because it does- So in that case, it's like open sores from childhood that would never fully healed. That's a good way to say it. Yes, yes. And so we were able to try to work with people

with severe chronic PTSD in a therapeutic context. So again, you talked about suicidal thoughts. People have taken MDMA in party settings and remembered past trauma and not been able to cope with it because they're out with their friends. They just want to have a party. These difficult experiences come up. They suppress it. They don't want to talk to their friends. Their friends don't want to hear about it, and then they can be worse off for months or years afterward. So again, that's why we say,

and what we're telling the FDA, and basically everybody through this, our discussion and others, is that the drugs are tools. You can have, for example, a telescope that somebody could look through and learn nothing if they don't have the proper context and understanding. So the tools themselves, the fundamental problem with the drug war is that we have invested things with certain kind of properties. They're good things,

they're bad things. And we've lost this idea that it's the relationship that we have with it that determines it. Hi, I'm Chris Cohen from Hallward, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson. So you're going to need an entire college to teach

therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, how to use these drugs. Because I don't think that goes on in medical school or in it goes on in new york city nightclubs baby if there's no you know i i don't remember seeing lsd 101 for therapists you know so how do you how do you turn the laboratory results into action yes well for example there's a two-day conference at Harvard Medical School about psychedelics. Oh, good. Okay. The Yale, Harvard. First time in my life I ever wanted to

go to Harvard. The major schools of psychiatry around the country are realizing that to attract young psychiatric residents, they have to teach about psychedelics. And so I think once MDMA, if it becomes approved by the FDA, which we hope may happen in the middle of 2024, psilocybin, I think, will be approved maybe near the end of 2025, 2026, potentially. Only when these things are really there for psychiatrists and therapists to prescribe will the medical schools and schools of psychology put it into their core curriculum. Oh, I get it. So then it's just like any other medicine. It'll have a list of contraindications, how and when you would use it, what the risks are. Because I presume the FDA for psilocybin, if you're targeting 2025 or 26, it's because they're

right now doing experiments. Yeah. So MAPS is the leading organization in this whole field. If you say so yourself. Well, I... Let us say that. Let us say that. Wait, wait, wait. I got you here. Ready? Yes. Rick, what's the leading... I thought you were going to set them up. Rick, what's the leading?

I thought you were going to set them up like, you know, we hear that you're the leading. I don't want to toot my own horn, but let me say that we, on September 14th of 2023, we published the second of our phase three studies, the results of it in nature medicine. And in May of 2021, we published the first of our phase three studies, the results of it in nature medicine. And in May of 2021, we published the first of our phase three studies and no other organization has published any results from any phase three studies. So that's what I mean. We're the closest to FDA approval

of any psychedelic assisted therapy. And just to remind people, not that I can recite this verbatim, but these different phase studies, as defined by the FDA, relate to how thoroughly investigated the effects are of the newly tested drug, right? So there's animal, they test on animals for non-human animals, and then a size of sample gets bigger and bigger, right? And they look for side effects. Each one is a little more advanced in this. Is that correct?

Yes, yes. So the phase one is generally... So, I mean, have you ever... With that in mind, how come you guys haven't just tapped the millions of young people in this country who are doing the research for you? Because believe me, that research is being done

on a daily basis. That's phase zero. Well, exactly. We have, in some ways, to look at the risk profile. So the FDA will only approve drugs based on data gathered in FDA-approved protocols.

But you can look at the risks by looking at people experimenting on themselves. So the National Institute on Drug Abuse funded, now this was about 15 plus years ago, but this was the critical study. We called it the Fallen Mormon Study. It turns out there was a bunch of people in Salt Lake City that had only done ecstasy.

They had not done alcohol or tobacco or marijuana or anything else, even coffee, but they had done a whole lot of ecstasy. And so one of the concerns has been about the supposed, quote, risks of neurotoxicity has to do with neuropsychological performance. So the National Institute on Drug Abuse funded a $1.8 million. We did a $15,000 pilot study and gathered some data and showed that this group of people, these fallen Mormons really did exist. And then 1.8 million came from NIDA to Harvard

to the McLean Hospital, where they did this exhaustive study on the risks of neurocognitive declines, and they hardly showed any. It was very reassuring. So there is some way where the safety profile is benefited by the illegal use of ecstasy. But that data sort of…

As a foundational database for that, yeah. Yes. There's over 5,000 papers right now in Medline about the scientific peer-reviewed journals about MDMA or ecstasy. over that time that did not decline, there was no other force operating on it because they were not drinking alcohol because Mormon rules prevent that, even caffeine. So that was a pure experiment as experiments go epidemiologically, right?

Yes, the only concern was the drugs that they were taking, was the ecstasy that they were taking really pure. So it may have mixed with other things. But in general, that was, because when we do MDMA in therapy, we're fundamentally different than the pharma companies working with SSRIs or other things. Those are daily medications that people take for months or years or decades.

We're trying to, and they usually cover symptoms, but they often don't get to the root cause. What we're trying to do with psychedelic-assisted with MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD, is to help people get to the root of the problem and work deeply and release the emotions, release the memories like that. And then through this integration process that we talked about during this neuroplasticity, make it so that they don't need MDMA anymore. We're not trying to get people to use MDMA on an extended period of time. We're trying to do a few doses mixed with therapy to make it so that the root causes have been addressed. How does microdosing of psychedelics fit into your whole worldview here?

Yeah. Well, there have been several studies of people microdosing LSD. And the claim has been in Silicon Valley and elsewhere that it can improve focus, improve creativity. There's been an incredible, interesting study with psilocybin called semantic priming. And so what that means is if I say day, you say night. If I say sun, you say moon. We have these normal patterns. But under the influence of psilocybin, when you prime somebody with a word, the word that they come back with is from a wider range of associations. So you say day and I say, there is no God. That would be a good example.

Thank you, Chuck, for that therapeutic example there. Yeah, so I think that there is this thought with microdosing that it can improve the kind of creativity in this way. I would say, unfortunately, the studies that have been done looking at LSD for microdosing for creativity did not distinguish it from placebo. So whether it's something that we can really scientifically demonstrate or not, maybe some of the claims were maybe the measures weren't sensitive enough. But I think there's a small group of people that would microdose for

depression, anxiety, to give them energy. But in general, my view is that we're in favor of macrodosing. We don't want people to be dependent on taking something on a daily basis for depression, anxiety, PTSD, any number of eating disorders. We'd rather do the deep work that gets to the root problem. And that brings us back to the therapy because you have to have the therapy in order to achieve those results. All right, so let's go the other extreme here. So we talked about therapeutic use of drugs, and this is what your whole organization has been doing for 40 years, almost 40 years now. What about just what we read about and hear about? I've never done it, but if you're fully tripping,

and then you're hallucinating, and is there value to that? Or is that totally recreational? Or should that still be outlawed? Well, it definitely should not be outlawed. The drug war is completely counterproductive. It's not helping in any way. And it is a tool of repression.

And so, yes, these things should automatically be legal. I would say that this idea that hallucinating, so this is where words really matter. And so the hallucination is where it is. It's not real. It's false. It's a delusion. There's going to be a paper coming out of Johns Hopkins

and NYU fairly soon. And it took religious leaders from different religious traditions and administered them psilocybin and then had them discuss whether that was something that felt true to them, whether they had sort of mystical religious experiences. And so sometimes under the influence of psychedelics,

people feel that they're in touch with a deeper reality, that it's not a delusion. This whole line of research began in 1962 at Harvard with what's called the Good Friday Experiment. And that was the first study to ever look at, do psychedelics, can they produce what's called a mystical experience? And there was, I don't know if you know, but there's a fellow named Reverend Howard Thurman was the incredible dynamic African-American minister.

He studied with Gandhi and learned about nonviolent resistance. And then he was Martin Luther King's mentor because Martin Luther King got a PhD at Boston University and Howard Thurman was his mentor. And Howard Thurman really helped introduce nonviolence into the U.S. civil rights movement. They said, we want to study whether psilocybin can produce these mystical experiences. Howard Thurman said, sure, I will do that because he was very interested in the political implications of this sense of connection. And he permitted this research to be done on Good Friday in his chapel when he was giving a sermon.

And we have his original sermon, by the way, up on our MAPS website during the Good Friday experiment. It's incredible. And so it doesn't feel to people like, quote, a hallucination, like it's a delusion. It feels that the brain is a reducing valve. Like you talked about how with sirens in New York, you don't hear them anymore normally

because they're always the background. Our brain, Aldous Huxley talked about our brain as a reducing valve to eliminate those things that are extraneous and focus on what we think are the most important needs. And that when you do a psychedelic, a classic psychedelic, this reducing valve is sort of weakened in its ability

and more things are happening. So should these things be legal? Yes. Will there be problems that people have? Yes. But those problems, I think, can be addressed in certain ways. And the problems of drug prohibition are even worse. But I do want to say that this paper coming out of NYU and Johns Hopkins about religious

leaders taking psilocybin from different religious traditions talks about how they see it's ineffable, it's hard to put into words, but it feels to many of these people to be a deeper truth and something then that they want to put into practice. They become a little bit less, how should I put it, literal and more metaphorical.

They become a little bit more ecumenical. So I think these experiences can have profound impacts on people and have for thousands of years. So I am a scientist. I very much care about objective reality. Science did not achieve maturity until we were able to successfully either extend the reach of our senses with tools, with microscopes, telescopes, machines that read,

or just completely replace our senses or invent things that sense the world in ways we don't even have senses to notice. Yes, I do agree. Everything you've said in this conversation either is there to help someone who is in need of some repair in their brain, okay, through anxiety, PTSD, suicidal, okay, or to take a spiritual person and have them feel more spiritual in whatever way that manifests. and have them feel more spiritual in whatever way that manifests. Can we agree then that there's no chemical,

the brain barely works as it is. It barely works. That's, you know, think about optical illusion books, right? Is the light bigger or smaller? I can't tell. It's a simple drawing and your brain can't, is it in the page, out of the page? Okay. So we now stir chemicals into the brain. Do you have any hope or expectation that a day will come where doing so gives me a more acute understanding of objective reality rather than subjective reality.

Because if that's the case, we can give it to everybody, and then everybody's connected to what's going on in this world in ways that never happened before. Yeah, well, I was going to say, though— Chuck, can I ask you the question? Because you're—here's the thing, though. Ask you the question? Because here's the thing, though. If our brains work on a subjective level, which is what you just said, they work on a subjective level.

Yes. Then why would these drugs actually help us to obtain objectivity? It seems like our brains are set up for subjectivity. So really, wouldn't it be, can we better look at the world subjectively? Because we're not going to look at it objectively. We're just not. What you just said there is there are people who've lost some connectivity to the world, and these are helping them get to the baseline of the brain that barely works okay that's what i think you just said in part so rick what so so so talk to me rick yes help me through this okay well i i want to make an offer to you that there are opportunities legally to try psilocybin that you might want to explore at one time of your life to see only if you have evidence that my awareness of objective reality

is better than it was without it if it's going to take me oh by the way by the way i'm not denying that this could trigger a creativity in the artist. Okay. Or, you know, not that it always came out that way. Cause there's some really crappy music written in the sixties that didn't make it out of that decade written completely under the influence. Okay.

Um, so one of my favorite episodes of, of family guy is they were, they were all being hipp again, and they all got high, the whole family. And they performed in the school talent show. And they have, like, flowers in their hair, and they're performing these perfect songs. And then you see the audience's view of them, and they're slurring their speech. There's no, they can't carry the tune. So the self-perception is great.

So I'm not arguing against the creative dimension of this, just the objective dimension. Okay, so let's just go to Cary Mullis for a second. So Cary Mullis won the Nobel Prize for the PCR. And how do you do all of this, the palmaris chain reaction? He said that he got some of his ideas for his invention of that when he was under the influence of LSD and marijuana. So it can promote creativity, but then you have to check it.

So not all the ideas that you get under the influence of psychedelics are good ones or accurate ones, but some of them can indeed. Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan was a daily marijuana smoker, was very much- Let's say he was a pothead. You can say it. Yeah, yeah.

He was a pothead. So I think that there has to be this- You didn't know that? Chuck, big time. Big time. I know I liked him. You didn't know why you liked him so much? I didn't know why I liked him so much, but now I know I liked him. You didn't know why you liked him so much? I didn't know why I liked him so much, but now I know.

I think this idea of can you have an idea under a non-ordinary state of consciousness and have it actually be an advanced to better understanding objective reality. Yes, that's the summarizing what it took me five minutes to say. Yeah, so the answer is yes. Some ideas that you can get under non-ordinary states are insights. So what Kerry Mullis said is he was able to dance on the molecule level to see how things put together. And then he was able to get an inspiration. And then only when you check it out can you decide, is that, quote, objective reality or is that…

Okay, gotcha. So what we've done here is cherry-picked the one person for which this was true. So what you would need to do is get all the Nobel Prize winners and do the experiment, right? Rather than... Well, let's go to Einstein.

It sounds to me what Rick is saying in that instance is that it's turning the chessboard. You know what I mean? That's turning the chessboard. You know what I mean? That's really what's happening. The answers are there. They're still within you.

But when you turn the chessboard, you're like, oh, wait, I didn't see that. Oh, okay. That's interesting. That's what I'm getting from it. A very clean gambit of you there. Okay. Very good. Yes.

But I think that there's also insight into yourself. So, you know, in a sense, that in theory... Yeah, but that's not helpful for the universe. I'm not denying that. I don't need insight to myself to know what the Big Bang was doing, you know, at a millisecond

after the moment. Okay. Let's go to Einstein. One of Einstein's statements was imagination is more important than knowledge. Right? Okay, so this imagination, you could say, testing out hypotheses under the non-ordinary states of consciousness that you can...

There was a study actually at Stanford in the 60s that used mescaline and LSD for people that had objective problems with their business, with science, with different things, and gave them a psychedelic experience to help them try to resolve some of these problems. So Jim Fadiman, who did this research, is also one of the main advocates for and students of microdosing. So I think that there are situations where, yeah, turning the chessboard, looking at things in a different way, being at the molecular level to dance on the molecules to

figure out how to do the PCR. Okay. So I'm saying, you can have ideas on a toilet, in a hot tub, walking in the woods. So if this is just one way that could happen, that's useful. I'm not an early adopter of anything. So I will wait until there are more experiments done with objectively brilliant, creative people, creative in their objectivity of the world. And if you start showing me research papers on it, then I'll consider it.

And I will offer myself. Anytime I've sat next to someone on any kind of chemical influence in their brain, it is the least productive conversations I've ever had about real... They're fun. It's like, you know, can beer laugh? You know, you can have conversations. Laugh, you know, can I, you can have conversations, but. As a scientist, you would be following the scientific traditions to explore, to see whether this seems valuable to you.

I agree. I'm not a first adopter. That's all. I am. I am. I am an early, early adopter. I will show up before the session begins with the utmost enthusiasm. All right, Rick, we got to end it there. This has been a delight, highly informative.

And I feel like we're witnessing the birth of an entire new portal of access into the human mind that can only, when properly shepherded, such as by yourself and your organization, that only good could come of that. So first, congratulations for staying with it and taking civilization to a new place.

Thank you. I just want to add that because of the work with veterans, even though most of the people with PTSD are women, we've been able to get bipartisan support. So we have managed to take psychedelics out of the culture wars. And we are doing a lot of work inside the Veterans Administration and elsewhere. Very important addition, very important fact to add to this conversation because we're living in an era

where everything's partisan. If you can bridge that, I think nothing's in your way. And I would also add that psychedelics have been used for thousands of years. So you're a long way away from being an early adopter. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Okay. Fair enough right there. Okay. So we got to call it quits there. So, Rick, thanks for being on the program. And very good to learn all about your work. Chuck. Always a pleasure.

All right. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.