Stuff You Should Know - Can you treat mental illness with psychedelics?

Episode Date: October 21, 2010

Hallucinogenic drugs are currently illegal, but they were once commonly used in psychological treatment. In this episode, Josh and Chuck discuss the rise and fall of psychedelics in treating mood disorders -- and why they're starting to gain favor again. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Wow, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles Cheech Bryant. Cheech, yeah man. I wanted to start this one out like a 12 year old, so that's what I'm going with. A 12 year old on acid, maybe. Maybe. Which has happened before.

In France, actually. Really? Thanks to our old friends at CIA. Oh, they dosed kids? They dosed a whole town to see what would happen. And one kid came at his grandmother and tried to strangle her. Really? Yeah, I can't remember the name of the town. I can see why you would find that funny. Well, no, people were like showing up at the hospital. A lot of it was funny in that like, you know, all these 1950s Frenchies are losing their stuff for no apparent reason. Right, right. But you know, the suicides that resulted from that, not very funny. Before we get started, I think we should do like an official COA for this one.

I think that is a very good idea. Because what Josh and I are about to talk about are illegal drugs and we are not endorsing the use of these. They are illegal after all. We'll probably say this later on too. Yeah. But we just find it fascinating that they used to be used for certain things and they're starting to be used again in certain scientific research labs for these things. It is extremely fascinating, which is what we're talking about, right? Exactly. I guess this could be a follow-up to our MKUltra cast. It's a follow-up and it's an epilogue and a prologue.

Yes. Yeah, very nice. Because we kind of came into the CIA LSD MKUltra podcast like right in the middle of the history of LSD pretty much. Well, we tore the beginning, but one of the things after 1943 when Albert Hoffman, right? Yes. The chemist who created LSD. LSD 25. Yeah, it was his 25th attempt and tried it on himself intravenously, as I understand it. He injected it. Well, it says first he took it by mistake. Yeah, because it was a blood thinner. And then he took it for real.

Yeah. After that first bike ride home, he was like, gotta do some more of this. Can I read his quote? Please. I became aware of the wonder of creation, the magnificence of nature. Yes. To create Dr. Hoffman. Yeah. And he was just some Swiss guy, some chemist. He was at the first person to come up with a synthetic hallucinogen. Oh, really? 1914, a German chemist who worked for Merck, the pharmaceutical company, came up with MDMA,

better known as Ecstasy. That far back, huh? Yeah. And here's a tip for you, Chuckers. Anytime, according to the Associated Press, you write about a designer drug and use it by its designer name, you capitalize it. So Ecstasy is always capitalized. The word Ecstasy? When you're talking about the drug, yes. Oh, well, sure. Yeah. And not just the euphoric feeling you get from life.

That's different. Yes. That's lowercase. Okay. But it should be all caps. Yeah, sure. So it was 1914, the MDMA was created. That's crazy. Yeah. And it was, I guess it served as a, it's not a catalyst because I think it's changed, but it was to be used in the synthesis of other chemicals. Right.

And it kind of sat on the shelves for a little while until somebody along the way said, I wonder what happens if I take this stuff. Yeah. And they did. And the CIA, again, looked at it, wanted to see what it could do, passed it up. And a guy by the name of Alexander Shulgin, right? Yes. He's a Dow chemist.

And in 1978, at the age of 74, he published a study on the euphoric effects of MDMA. It was the first time anyone had ever published a study. What year? 1978. Wow. But he was 74. And he first noticed the euphoric effects because he liked to take it and go to cocktail parties. Of course he did.

Yeah. So he's like, Hey man, this stuff is the bomb. Yeah. And here's my study on it here, my findings, and let's everybody start taking this. So he starts giving it to his friends, including some psychiatrists. Did he give out pacifiers? Not yet. Okay. That's coming though.

That's very, very close. 1978, pacifiers came about 1988. Okay. So Shulgin gives some to a friend who's a psychiatrist. Right. Psychiatrists, some of the more avant-garde psychiatrists, start giving it to their patients. And it gets called Adam for a little while. So while this is going on, it's being used by established psychiatrists,

a mysterious financier in Dallas, Texas finds out about this stuff and starts taking it, hires an underground chemist, and has it made himself, and then starts selling it at clubs all over Dallas. And so this illicit use of this substance, simultaneous to its emergence on the club scene in about the mid-80s, led to the outlaw of MDMA. We'll get into it more. But the point is to this very long and rambling intro, both of these drugs and others were legal at one time.

Yeah, sure. We're put to good use, beneficial use, and then outlawed possibly unfairly. And then now we're starting to see them come back into use. Hallucinogens being used to treat mental illness and mental harm. In legitimate circles. Very legitimate. Quick question. Was that a Dallas person?

Was that Cowboys owner Jerry Jones? I don't know. I don't think anybody knows who it is still. Got to start, maybe. Yeah, probably. I think he had some dough to begin with. So Josh, you mentioned the CIA. I do want to point out it wasn't just the Americans.

The Canadian government and Britishes, Britishes. It works. Britain's MI6 also experimented with LSD and between 1950 and 65, 40,000 people all over the world had been treated with LSD in treatments. Kerry Grant. Yeah, can we go back to Hollywood in the 1950s? So a couple of guys set up shop. Arthur Chandler, what was the other guy's name?

Oh, Hartman. Hartman, Mortimer Hartman, who was a radiologist, took acid and said, you know, I'm going to get into psychiatry. These guys set up a shop called the Psychiatric Institute of Beverly Hills. Right in the middle of Beverly Hills. And this is back in the day when things were those clean living going on, aside from that rampant alcoholism and cigarettes being smoked. Yeah, adultery.

Probably some marijuana use going on. Here or there, but that was among the hop heads. Yeah, exactly. So he sets up a couple of rooms with a couch and starts booking patients at a rate of like six or eight hours a session, depending on what was going on with the person. And five days a week, there were books solid. 100 bucks a pop. 100, which is a lot of money back then.

Sure. And I guess that included the drugs. The drugs and the time that you were there. Right. So they would sit with you. They would give you some blinders to block out distractions and then you would go into sort of like the more meditative sort of acid trip, essentially. You were tripping hard because you were on pharmaceutical grade LSD produced by the

Sandos Company. Yeah. We're talking about Alice Huxley, novelist. Yeah. And actually he died tripping. Did you know that? Really? Yeah.

He had throat cancer, I think, and the last thing he ever wrote was a note to his wife requesting such and such milligrams of LSD or micrograms of LSD injected intramuscularly. Really? And that was about six hours before he died. So he died tripping. And a Grateful Dead record. That was his last request before the Grateful Dead was around. Bring me.

Trucking. Screenwriter Charles Brackett took it. Director Sidney Lumet. Is it Lumet or Lumet? Lumet, I think. Okay. I always said Lumet, but I think I'm wrong. He took it a few times, went through sessions, called it Wonderful. He re-experienced his own birth, which apparently a few people did.

I've never heard of that. I haven't either. And Claire Booth-Loose was a playwright, married to Time Magazine publisher Henry Loose. She was also an ambassador and possibly an agent for the U.S. government. And they both took acid so much that Henry Loose and Time Magazine said, we need to write about this. This is awesome. Yeah, there's a lot of good press that Time Magazine gave LSD in the 50s as basically a cure-all.

And again, Cary Grant got into it big time. Apparently he had at least 100 trips, I believe. Yeah, let's talk about him for a second. Because he was one of these guys that carefully constructed his persona. He worked very hard at it. Apparently the line he always gave was, a lot of people want to be Cary Grant and I'm one of them. Yeah.

Indicating that this suave Mr. Cool persona was completely fabricated and created by himself. So he could get the fame and everything. But deep down, he suffered. Hey y'all, this is Dr. Joy Horton Bradford, host of the award-winning weekly podcast Therapy for Black Girls. Our incredible community of sisters has been building the Therapy for Black Girls podcast for five years running. And over that time we've published over 250 episodes

and gained over 18 million podcast downloads. During this time we've tackled the stigma surrounding mental health and shared conversations to help us all understand ourselves and others a little better. Hundreds of incredible licensed mental health care professionals and other experts have joined us to share tips on taking better care of ourselves. We flipped through the pages of your favorite romance novels with author Tia Williams, checked in with Grammy award-winning artist Michelle Williams, and discussed the hurdles of balancing competitive sports, motherhood,

and mental health with Olympic athlete Natasha Hastings. Five years down and many more years of work to be done. Join us now by checking out the Therapy for Black Girls podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wall Street to Main Street and from Hollywood to Washington, the news is filled with decisions, turning points, deals, and collisions. I'm Tim O'Brien, the senior executive editor for Bloomberg Opinion, and I'm your host for Crash Course, a weekly podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio.

Every week on Crash Course, I'll bring listeners directly into the arenas where epic upheavals occur, and I'm going to explore the lessons we can learn when creativity and ambition collide with competition and power. Each Tuesday, I'll talk to Bloomberg reporters around the world, as well as experts in big names in the news. Together, we'll explore business, political, and social disruptions, and what we can learn from them. I'm Tim O'Brien, host of Crash Course, a new weekly podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio.

Listen to Crash Course every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. As a human. Until he started taking acid. Right, and then he had, well, he had some pretty interesting revelations, one of which I read, somebody thought to write down the stuff that he, some of the insights he had. Some were kind of deep, others were, like, if I have to look at a man,

he should be required to comb his hair and brush his teeth and wear a clean shirt. That was an acid revelation? Yes, it was. Interesting. So it kind of ran the gamut, but yeah, he became a real devotee of LSD. In his ex-wife too, Betsy. And well, she got him into it, right? I think so.

Who wrote, part of this, we're basing this part on a Vanity Fair article. Yeah, really good article. Yeah, it's called The Carry in the Sky with Diamonds. He was a huge advocate for LSD, he wasn't the only one, but he lived to see it outlawed and public sentiment turned against it, right? Yes. Just like MDMA, psilocybin, magic mushrooms. And part of the, well, really one of the, you could say that Timothy Leary,

almost single-handedly, led to the tremendous suffering of a lot of people who might otherwise have been helped by LSD with his naive bravado of, you know, the establishment just needs to get over its hangups and we should all take acid. Whether or not you agree that that's a good idea, it's a stupid thing to say. Sure. Leary was originally a Harvard psychiatrist, right? Yes.

And he started taking, I think, mushrooms and then he eventually started taking LSD and was fired from Harvard because he turned into a hippie. And that was pretty much the beginning of the end of LSD. Yeah, they may have continued to use LSD as treatment for mental patients, mental illness and depression, if not for Timothy Leary, who was trying to spread the word about acid. That's right. Back to Kerry Grant real quick.

He was so into it, Josh. He had a couple of stories written about him in 1959 in Look Magazine. Yeah. The curious story behind the new Kerry Grant gave a glowing account of LSD. And then this is the best. The following year, the Good Housekeeping Magazine, it got the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval in the 1960 issue, and they called it The Secret of Grant's Second Youth.

I want to get a copy of that magazine. Yeah. How awesome would that be? Yeah, and that's kind of like the theme of this podcast. It's so weird that these things were considered incredibly wonderful and benign. And now they're just viewed as just so, they're evil and they're outlawed simply because they were made illegal and prohibited. Right.

And again, there's kind of a movement toward saying, hey, maybe Timothy Leary did give this a bad name. Maybe that underground chemist in Dallas really kind of put a terrible spin on this, and we should look at these again. Right? Can I tell one more story? Yes. From Hollywood of the 1960s?

Yes. Esther Williams, famous diva actress from the NGM Studio, friend of Kerry Grant's, called Kerry Grant up after these articles and said, hey, can you introduce me to your doctor? Dr. Hartman, he did so. At the time, she was aging, just had gone through a divorce. Her husband left her with huge debt with the IRS, and she was still struggling with the death of her 16-year-old brother.

She goes in the office, she takes acid, does her session, goes home to her parents, still on acid, has dinner with them, and then goes into the bathroom mirror, says good night to her parents, looks in the mirror, and I'm going to read this quote. I was startled by a split image, one half of my face. The right half was me. The other half was the face of a 16-year-old boy. The left side of my upper body was flat and muscular.

I reached up with my boy's hand to touch my right breast and felt my penis stirring. It was a hermaphroditic phantasm, and I understood perfectly in that moment, when my brother died, I took him into my life so completely, he became part of me. That's a pretty huge thing to understand, and a pretty jarring way to come to terms with that, right? Yeah, but that's what they're finding out now, though, is that these people are having these breakthroughs in the throes of their final days of, let's say, cancer, and they have these epiphanies.

Before we get to that, so LSD is outlawed. We're following a timeline here. Yes. LSD is outlawed in, I think, 65, something like that at the latest 1970. Yeah, they shut down the shop in Beverly Hills. Yeah, and Sandos stopped making it, and it was outlawed and pushed underground. MDMA made it until 1985, and MDMA's story is linked very closely to a guy named Dr. George Requarte, who is Johns Hopkins' researcher. This floored me. So in 1985, about the time the DEA is reeling from being caught totally unaware by the crack epidemic, and basically,

a lot of people think, looking for a whipping post, they start considering outlawing MDMA. At that moment, this guy, Dr. George Requarte, publishes a study that he says this drug depletes your serotonin levels permanently, causing brain damage, right? It can kill you. Yeah. Well, that didn't, that came later. Oh, is that later? Yes. So this guy, who is unknown at the time, publishes this study, starts to get National Institute of Drug Abuse funding. So basically, this is his job. He starts a career creating

scientific evidence in favor of banning drugs, leads to the outlaw of MDMA, right? Yes. That wasn't quite enough. They scheduled it. The feds went after MDMA even harder, and in 2002, they came up with this thing called the Rave Act. That's okay. Okay. It's, oh, what does rave stand for? Reducing Americans' vulnerability to ecstasy. I wonder how long they sat around looking at the word rave saying, we got to make it fit. Yeah.

We got to make it fit. Yeah. So the rave act basically said, if you are a club owner and somebody gets caught taking ecstasy or has ecstasy at your club, we're going to shut down your club. Right. It was a huge, huge law, and it was bolstered by another study by Dr. George Rucuarde that found that he tested on 10 monkeys. Yeah. This is the big one. He injected them with MDMA. A bunch of them went psychotic.

Some of them showed early signs of Parkinson's all of a sudden, and two of them died almost immediately after being injected. Yeah. So people started asking questions about this, like, what are you talking about? People have been taking this drug forever, and this has never happened. Right. So they started kind of going after Rucuarde, and they found out that he had actually injected them with methamphetamine, not MDMA.

The first thing that tipped them off was that he injected them because people were like, well, you don't inject ecstasy, so that's kind of a weird way to do it. Right. And then they found out it was methamphetamines, which he blamed on a mislabeling of a drug shipment, which they traced back, and they went, no, the label right here. Yeah. The drug provider was like, don't blame us, pal. It's pretty clear. So by this time, the RAVACT has already passed, and the RAVACT didn't get passed,

but something that included that was passed by that time. The study that Rucuarde produced was published in science, the journal science. Like, that's as high-brow as you get, as far as scientific journals go. Right. And finally, he gets beaten up enough that he prints a full retraction. Yeah, it came clean. Science runs this retraction saying, the whole study that I produced, just forget it ever existed. I bet that didn't happen much. No, it doesn't. That's very unusual.

Yeah. So Rucuarde, I get the impression, is kind of this, well, it just kind of seems like the scientific community views him largely as a shill for the government. I would say so. Yeah. There's a couple of articles that he shows up in on reason. In reason magazines, we're checking out. Yeah. And you know, the other interesting thing about that whole story about the big fake study he did with methamphetamines as ecstasy is that the Parkinson's Foundation,

the people, Parkinson's researchers said, I don't think that that's true. That doesn't make much sense to us, either, that they would show signs of Parkinson's. Right. So they looked into it. People went about reproducing his study and the people who run the Parkinson's Foundation actually issued a statement saying ecstasy does not do this. Yeah. So they basically came out in favor of ecstasy. It's kind of neat to watch from the outside because there's this guy who's, again,

kind of viewed as a shill for the government who's beating up on this drug that a lot of people who are also in the scientific community feel as being unfairly outlawed. And so there's kind of beating up on him in retaliation. It's kind of neat to see eggheads beat up on one another. Yeah, nerd fights. And the NIDA went so far that the NIDA just kind of quietly pulled their fact sheet on ecstasy and was like, let's just take this down off the website. After the retraction in 2003.

We'll rewrite it. I'm sure it's back up now as something else. But it doesn't include immediate death and Parkinson's disease, I would imagine. That's right. So Timothy Leary dies. He gets shot into space. He's out of the picture entirely. Everybody gets sick of hippies generally. Yeah.

George record is that basically the guy who's single-handedly getting ecstasy outlawed. His work comes into great, great question. Yeah. And people start going back and looking at MDMA again. And they start looking at LSD again. And that's where we find ourselves right now. Yeah. Slowly but surely people are starting to run studies on whether or not you can use these

hallucinogens to treat mental illness. And the results are pretty astounding actually. Yeah. And you know where they're leading the charge in Switzerland and Los Angeles? Yeah. All these years later, same place. Yes. Hippy freaks.

So yeah, Josh, they are I think in Switzerland and in solo thern Switzerland. They have been experimenting with LSD, psilocybin, which you might know is magic mushrooms. Yes. Ketamine, you might know is special K. That kind of surprised me that that was in there. Yeah, I hadn't heard much about that one either. And they're getting these studies published in Nature Reviews, Neuroscience and other

leading industry peer reviewed publications. Yeah. It's not all under the table, back room experiments. Oh no, these are very heavily overseen. You have to be a very legitimate researcher to get government approval. They're not funded though still. They say they're still having a hard time with funding. And they're just sort of looking to get some restrictions loosened.

They're not saying make all this stuff legal. Right. They're not battling a legalization on the legalization front at all. No, but the reason why so many people are kind of starting to put their reputations on the line is because the results that they're seeing. So we have antidepressants, right? Yeah.

They take weeks to kick in. Sure. They have all sorts of side effects. Sure. And what we're seeing in these studies now are that the things like ketamine, MDMA, LSD are having like a huge impact right out of the gate. Right. There's one study that came out in July, I believe, and it found,

it was a study of 12 people who were diagnosed with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. Yeah, that's one of the big ones. Yeah, that's huge that they're looking at. That's where you, well, it's what we used to call shell shock. Yeah. You go through traumatic experience and you relive it over and over again. And it's debilitating.

They found that of the 12 people in this study, 10 of them after going through the study, after taking MDMA, no longer met the criteria to be diagnosed with PTSD afterward. 10 of the 12. Yeah. And for my understanding in most of these studies is, it's not like you have to stay on ecstasy your whole life. Like a lot of people have these epiphanies and they quit taking it and they have changed their outlook.

Isn't that right? Yeah, that's the impression I'm getting too. Okay, ketamine apparently is good for depression in the same way. Just a very tiny dose. I can get you over severe clinical depression or that's the results, the early results we should say. Yeah. And everything from quitting smoking to suicidal thoughts.

Yeah, cluster headaches. Yeah, Harvard studying this. Those are migraines for men, right? What they call migraines, I think so. I know they're so debilitating that you consider suicide or you know, not everyone does obviously, but it's just this awful, awful pain. You can't leave your house. You get to sit in a dark room and so it's helping there.

And what I thought was interesting, Johns Hopkins, you might have heard of them. Sure. Little reputable institution. Those are recordies from. Oh, was it? Uh-huh. They did an experiment where they gave psilocybin to

emotionally stable individuals. Like this wasn't even people that were mentally ill, people that had never taken hallucinogens before, which is interesting that you would be, I think they had a 64 year old that signed up for this. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah.

And they said, age is 24 to 64 and they said the experiment, a year later they said the experience is one of the most meaningful and spiritual experiences of their entire lives. Yeah. And those were mentally stable folks. Sure. And this is a year on. Right.

It still had an impact on them. They're also finding that OCD and basically mood disorders are the primary target of hallucinogenic treatment, right? Psychedelics for treatment. Yeah. And the reason being, we think, is because they target serotonin in the brain. This is another reason why they're not addictive.

They don't, they don't employ the reward circuit in the brain, right? Which is how we become addicted to things that are flooded with dopamine. Right. We're flooded with dopamine, remember? It just affects the mood circuits in that, right? Serotonin. And we don't really have a very good grasp on serotonin and exactly how that works, but we do know that there's correlations between high levels of serotonin.

Right. Or low levels of serotonin and depression. Right. Right. And we know that using antidepressants, which block the reuptake of serotonin, um, reduces symptoms of clinical depression in people. So we know that serotonin's in there somewhere. Yes.

We know that the more serotonin you have, the better generally. Or low serotonin's bad. Right, right, right. And then we also know that hallucinogens target this somehow. That's pretty much where the research stands right now. It makes you wonder, where would we be if LSD and MDMA hadn't been in the wilderness for the last few decades? Well, yeah, they may have a pill, like a low dose pill.

Because a lot of these studies, just so you know, back in Kerry Grand State, I mean, it was full, full on acid trips. But a lot of these, like the psilocybin pills that will give you be very low dose. So I don't, I get the feeling that it's not like this huge mushroom trip that a lot of these patients are going through. Yeah. Because it said, I think 80% of the people recognized when they did not have the placebo. So if it wasn't 100%, then it was probably a pretty low dose.

Yes. That would be my guess. Would you, if, if everything was legalized and MDMA came to be prescribed for just happiness. Right. Would you take it? Would you take a happy pill that was legal and didn't have side effects? Not to say MDMA doesn't have side effects. There's a, like basically the three days after a depression that follows

when your serotonin levels are repleting themselves. I don't think I would because there are quote unquote happy pills now. And I mean, it's not like I'm against antidepressants or things like that because people definitely benefit from those who need them. But I just, I don't need that kind of thing. So I would not, I would not serve. You are not alone, Chuck. There is a survey conducted for this BBC series on Britain of British people

that found that 79% of them said that they would not take a happy pill that was legal and had no side effects. That's interesting. Yeah. Because it kind of, I think that for a large segment of the population, there's this, the idea of synthesizing happiness is untoward. Yeah. You know?

Yeah, it's a little weird. I mean, that's not to say I'm a square and I don't like to get down. Hey, y'all, this is Dr. Joy Horton Bradford, host of the award-winning weekly podcast therapy for black girls. Our incredible community of sisters has been building the therapy for black girls podcast for five years running. And over that time, we've published over 250 episodes and gained over 18 million podcast downloads.

During this time, we've tackled the stigma surrounding mental health and shared conversations to help us all understand ourselves and others a little better. Hundreds of incredible licensed mental health care professionals and other experts have joined us to share tips on taking better care of ourselves. We flipped through the pages of your favorite romance novels with author Tia Williams, checked in with Grammy Award-winning artist Michelle Williams, and discussed the hurdles of balancing competitive sports, motherhood, and mental health with Olympic athlete Natasha Hastings.

Tia is down in many more years of work to be done. Join us now by checking out the therapy for black girls podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wall Street to Main Street and from Hollywood to Washington, the news is filled with decisions, turning points, deals, and collisions. I'm Tim O'Brien, the senior executive editor for Bloomberg Opinion, and I'm your host for Crash Course, a weekly podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. Every week on Crash Course, I'll bring listeners directly into the arenas

where epic upheavals occur. And I'm going to explore the lessons we can learn when creativity and ambition collide with competition and power. Each Tuesday, I'll talk to Bloomberg reporters around the world, as well as experts in big names in the news. Together, we'll explore business, political, and social disruptions and what we can learn from them. I'm Tim O'Brien, host of Crash Course, a new weekly podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio.

Listen to Crash Course every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another aspect, Josh, I mean, we're talking right now about literally the effect it has on your brain and your serotonin levels and your moods. They've also found that patients, cancer patients in particular, who consume hallucinogens or people with just traumatic events from earlier in their life, they have the ability to relive some of these memories and events from their past. They can unlock buried traumatic episodes, deal with them, psychologically put them to rest,

and come out the other side with a new understanding free from these demons. Right. You remember in the hypnosis episode where we were talking about how the way it's viewed now is that you're accessing the subconscious easier, more easily. It's like popping open a control panel. That's what they're seeing with MDMA, apparently. You are able to access things from a very empathetic way. I think the term I've heard for it is called a psychotherapeutic catalyst. It kick starts things.

I think one researcher called it, it's psychotherapy sped up. What psychiatrists call that. It's like psychotherapy on acid. LSD specifically hasn't been the greatest friend to everybody who's ever taken it. What's funny in this article that's on the site, can we treat mental illness with hallucinogens, Tom Schieve has to go to the 60s psychedelic rock scene to find examples of people who have had a bad time on acid. Apparently, the conventional wisdom is if you are predisposed to mental illness, LSD can exacerbate that. If you have a bad trip, you're going to have a really bad trip because you're already predisposed to mental illness.

He's Brian Wilson and Sid Barrett as the two examples. Those are stellar examples. They really are. They're also counterintuitive to what we're seeing with PTSD. You are already suffering from a mental illness. Here's some MDMA. Probably LSD would be horrible to give to a PTSD survivor. I would say so. What else, Chuck?

Can we talk about Pamela Secuda? Sure. It's a very interesting story. This was a woman, age 57, at the time of this article, who was in the final stages of colon cancer. She had outlived her prognosis. She was anxious and depressed. She was worried about her family, her husband, and what they were going to do without her. It was not a good life she was living here at the end.

She was prescribed antidepressants, of course. It didn't work. It didn't do a thing for her, so she volunteered for an experiment at UCLA in 2005 and started taking psilocybin, the magic mushroom pill, in pill form. She had a lot of breakthroughs. They brought her husband in at the end of one of the sessions, and he said, there's my Pammy. She was just beaming with light, and I haven't seen her that joyous in so long. She was totally alive and happy, and she continued to take it until she didn't need it anymore. She had these breakthroughs, and then all of a sudden, her husband and Pamela were going to concerts.

They went hiking at the Grand Canyon. They went on vacations. They did all these things that she hadn't been doing in a long time because of these epiphanies she had under the influence of psilocybin. And sadly, she died. Well, she had cancer. Yeah, she died. Yeah, that's what she died from. In 2006, and her husband said she died in his arms, but her husband was very appreciative,

and they actually did a benefit about a week before she died for the institute that was doing this work at UCLA. So, it's pretty interesting. Yeah, definitely one of the applications that they're finding is end-of-life care for using MDMA or LSD or psilocybin. Sure. Or Special K, apparently. What about this Ibogaine? They're finding that Ibogaine works really well. Ibogaine is from a hallucinatory root plant in Africa, I believe.

And they're finding that you go on a 36-hour trip. That's a long time. It is a long time. But they're finding that it's really effective in breaking addiction and serious addictions, too, like heroin. Yeah, cocaine. So, being on this stuff just for 36 hours creates a break in the addiction cycle itself. Sure. But what they're finding that's most notable about it is there's a lack of withdrawal symptoms that you see in every other type of addiction removal.

Yeah. Especially with heroin. Like heroin, you're supposed to have physical withdrawal symptoms, and people who are taking Ibogaine are not experiencing that. They would if they tried to kick the habit without it. It's pretty remarkable. Yeah. It is very remarkable. It's very interesting.

We should probably say, I don't know if we have yet, that this podcast is in no way an endorsement of going out and buying yourself some street drugs and seeing what happens. It's a study of what we find to be very fascinating. The fact that there's been a resurgence in this and these qualified doctors, UCLA, Johns Hopkins, they're saying we should look into this stuff. Yeah. And they definitely are. And they're getting some very interesting results. What about the AA guy? We should mention that really quickly.

That was pretty funny. Oh, yeah. Bill Wilson. Yeah. One of the co-founders of AA. Yeah. He apparently took LSD in the 50s. Was it?

Yeah. And this was after he was long after he was sober from alcohol. Yeah. Because he's been out since the 30s, I think. Oh, had it? Yeah. So he takes LSD in the 50s and is like, this is really helpful. So I think everybody who comes into AA should take LSD.

Exactly. And they were like, you should probably not do that. Yeah. They talked him out of it. But the reason why he found it helpful is that hallucinogens, part of a 12-step program, is to really reflect on past wrongdoings and then elucidate them. Right. To another human being.

And apparently LSD, MDMA, these other drugs help. They serve as a catalyst for that process. You tap into that. So that's why Bill Wilson thought this was really helpful. Because again, psychotherapy sped up. Fascinating. Very fascinating. I will say this though.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say, even though we're not saying, oh, you should go out and do these things. I will say that some chemically created in a lab pill called an antidepressant isn't, I mean, what's the difference? The difference is, I think, in my opinion, from what I've seen, one's marketed and legal and the other is illegal. It's as simple as that. One is made by Merck.

And one is not made by Merck. But Merck used to make this stuff, too, which is ironic. Public sentiment counts for everything. It's the same reason that alcohol, you can go into a bar and get completely wasted out of your mind and get in a car, but you can't walk into a bar and smoke a joint. Or shoot heroin. Or shoot heroin. And we're not lobbying for anything.

It's just interesting that the things that society has deemed acceptable. Alcoholism is just fine. Well, it's not just fine, but it's legal and you can do it. Even though it kills all these people and this is not acceptable. It's just funny how we've evolved to think some things are evil and some things are just great. I wonder what the future holds, Josh. I wonder myself. We'll find out.

Yes, we will. If we live that long. That is about it for this one. You should probably check out, can we treat mental illness with hallucinogens on the site? Be sure to check out Carrie in the Sky with Diamonds, Vanity Fair article. Type in George Ricquarte, R-I-C-U-A-R-T-E in the Reasons website. That'll bring up some cool stuff. There's a killer Time Magazine article from, I think, 2000 or 2001 on ecstasy, on MDMA.

That's really, it's called the happiness in a pill. Something like that. Josh from the future. We are in New York right now, but tonight, Thursday the 21st of October, I know that our producer in Confidant and Denmark, Jerry, will be at a fundraiser for the co-ed cooperative for education. Right. Today.

Yeah, tonight. If you're in Atlanta and you are about to pop another Chef Lonely Hearts frozen dinner for one and drink a bottle of wine for two by yourself and you're looking for love in the Atlanta area, stop what you're doing, grab 20 bucks and go to the Metropolitan Club in Alpharetta. Yes. From 7 to 10 p.m. tonight, Thursday, October 21st, co-ed is holding their fall fiesta ATL fundraiser.

It's going to be awesome, right? The 20 bucks buys you that wine that you're going to drink by yourself. Better wine, probably. Yes, and you get to drink it amongst friends, meet Jerry, there's also going to be food. Better food. Yeah, entertainment and all sorts of chances to win or auction bid, right? That's the proper verb. Yeah, they're auctioning off cool prizes like African safaris and signed sports memorabilia

and stuff like that. Yes, and you never know, you could find love there. We're making zero guarantees whatsoever, but it's worth a shot, isn't it? Yes, and if we weren't out of town right now, we would be there tonight. Yes, we would. So, again, if you don't remember who co-ed is, co-ed is the great nonprofit that took us to Guatemala, and we did a two-part podcast on it, which is awesome, and they pull money together to buy books for schools in Guatemala, which then in turn rent the books, and that

rental fee is put into an escrow account, which after five years is substantial enough to buy all new textbooks. So what they start is a self-sustaining system of ownership of textbooks, and it has a huge effect. It's not just textbooks, they do computer labs, too. So if you want more information on co-ed or the fall fiesta atl tonight, go to their website, www.coeduc.org, right? That's right.

All right, let's do this. So that's it. That's it, man. Nice job, buddy. I guess it's time now for listener mail, right? Yes. I have a listener mail, Josh, from Ria, and this is about Octopus. Or Octopi.

We were corrected that Octopi is not right, but she says it. Octopi is so right. Well, we have all these people saying, actually, the Latin thing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Jerry just laughed at that. Hi, guys. Your podcast on Octopi made my day-to-day. Thank you.

I work as an aquarist at a San Francisco aquarium, and one of my favorite responsibilities is our cephalopod gallery. Nice. I get to do enrichment with giant Pacific octopods, make sure all of our eight-legged friends stay out of trouble, and I'm currently teaching a two-spot octopus how to open a jar to get his favorite food, which is live crabs. I'm right there with you, Mr. Octopus. It was great to hear someone besides myself get a little too excited about these critters.

And, you know, we got great feedback on this. People love the octopus. Mm-hmm, these guys are so freaky. The story about Lucretia McEvil especially cracked me up. I work with a GPO, that's the giant Pacific octopod, that might give her a run for money. For the past few weeks, I've been walking around with what my colleagues call octopus kisses, up the length of my arms, but I'm afraid my husband is getting a little suspicious about the number of hickeys I've been acquiring.

So that's from the little suckers. Right, those little suckers. Clearly. They've been giving to me while I tried to remove the individual from blocking the flow to his tank and stop his flooding of the entire aquarium. It's never a boring day with cephalopods in your life, guys. Thanks for all the great podcasts. If you're ever in San Francisco, one of my favorite places, Josh.

Yeah. Let me know, and I'll see if I can't work out some behind-the-scenes cephalopod goodness. Nice. And that is from Rhea. And she says, and don't worry, by the way, I have trouble pronouncing hectocotolis as well and have taken a calling in the sperm tentacle. Sperm tentacle works. The Spermacle is what she says.

She says it's time to rename that organ. Yes. Well, thanks, Rhea. Right? Yes. Thank you. My dad always said life is better with cephalopods in it. Really?

Yeah. If you have a fantastic saying that your father, mother, grandfather, some old-timey person told you, we want to hear it, wrap it up in an email, spank it on the bottom, and then send it to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Want more HowStuffWorks? Check out our blogs on the HowStuffWorks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry.

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